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I went from making $250,000 a year to now expecting around $33,000 this year, and I'm so much happier now than I was before. Damn, this is good. How do you take of the matcha matters? The ratios of the matcha powder to water matters. How you whisk the matcha matters. I knew that every little thing would matter for the success. And watch a house. There was like, very little room for error. So the first two months I only trusted myself to whisk every drink. My entire life is worked now and I don't
regret it. My name is Michelle Young. I'm 29 years old and I earn about $33,000 a year living in New York City. I grew up in San Francisco. It was my single mom raising the rest of us, um, in a neighborhood right next to Chinatown. Um, she's an immigrant, and she had to figure out how to make ends meet. My family did a really good job in not making me feel like we were poor, even though I was fully aware we were. For example, I slept in the same bed as my mom throughout my teenage years for as long as I could remember. Financial stability was the ultimate
goal. My older brothers and I are. Mango is always like, we gotta get rich. Like, we gotta get to a point where we don't have to worry about money again. My oldest brother, who is my idol, he told me that software engineering is the next big thing. So I decided to pursue it because I was good enough at it, and I ended up going to college for applied math and ended up a software engineer. Going into my college dorm, it was the first time I had my own space. And thinking back, it was the first time I had my own closet, actually. So it was very like life changing. When I got my first offer as a software engineer.
I was actually sitting on the toilet. Um, and I got the phone call and it was $160,000 and I was actually in shock. I started to realize the freedom I had with that amount of money. I could travel anywhere, anytime I wanted. I could buy almost anything I wanted. If I enjoy something and I feel passionate about it, I'll go all in. And if I start to lose sight of the purpose of it, I'll just dial back and I just will be very demotivated. And that's kind of what started to happen towards the last few years of my career as a software engineer. I realized pretty soon that I was doing it because of the amount of money that I was providing me, and the work itself just felt like it wasn't really doing anything.
It feels like fake work. And I realized the problem wasn't really the workplace itself, because my teams were pretty decent. The culture at the company I worked at was pretty good too, but by then I had already come up with this idea to start something on my own and doing something more physical. Around 2022 2023. I started to realize I needed to switch careers completely, and I wasn't really sure what I was going into, but I was pretty sure that the money part was not always important to me anymore.
I was saving, but I wasn't completely sure what I was going to do next. Around 2024, my friends and I go out to get tea and we try different matcha spots, and we just kind of realized that there wasn't any good matcha places in New York. And I was making matcha at home for like years at that point already. So I was like, why is my own matcha better than the store bought ones? I decided I really wanted to open a store in New York. I felt like New York really needed it. And so I started to do some calculations on my own just to think about if it's feasible for me, I saved up $200,000 cash savings to open up the cafe,
and that's what I felt like I needed. And it's actually a small amount for New York. A lot of places cost a lot more to open, but I thought I could work with that. While I was still at my software engineering job. I worked from around 4:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. until my first meeting at my software engineering job. It was hard, but it was very exciting. I was like, really fun for me. I loved working at Starbucks. It was so fun to like do something physical and like just learn this completely new skill. When I've been sitting behind a computer for the last five years, I think I was on my own
little mission and I had these own little tasks I needed to complete before I'm able to open. And it's just this little training that I set up for myself at Starbucks. We actually struggled to sign a lease on the first three places I like because landlords didn't want to trust a new business owner and also a small business. And then we had issues with our contractors. Some of our counters are still unfinished, but they refuse to take accountability. And we still ended up having to pay them because I was just on a time crunch to open the night before, we were supposed to open our basement and our upstairs
flooded. We were having a friends and family appreciation night. And behind the curtains, there's just like flooding going on and we just had a mop over it. I was too busy for anything except just doing the next thing that had to be done. Nowadays, my expenses are just what's necessary, so I spend most of my time here anyway. So I was really just eating and a place to go home to sleep. I spend $1,750 on rent, $258 on food, $112 on transportation, $38 on utilities, $25 on subscriptions and memberships, $15 on my phone bill, $94 on other things. I had my own place, and it was a decent sized studio in a very convenient location in Manhattan. But I knew I needed to give that kind of luxury up. So I took on a roommate, and now I live in a two
bedroom with a roommate in a location that's a little bit further off. I miss that studio a lot. I loved living alone, but it's just like one of the sacrifices I knew I needed to make. So obviously I was going to stop by and say hi. I know. My friends, I would not have been able to do any of it without my friends. I started it alone. I didn't tell anyone about the idea for like the first 4 or 5 months, and by the time we started getting these issues, I was like, I, I need to actually ask for help. And my friends just came through. And then once it opened, all my friends and friends of friends came through the support and lined up like down the block. I think some of my friends waited two
hours. It was like the heat of the summer. I was just like in awe, like so speechless by the support of my community. I would be working on bar from like 7 a.m. until like 6 p.m. or whatever, like just standing all day. And I didn't take any breaks either because I had to whisk every drink. And my friends would come and bring me food. Following if you're ready. Do you have like vanilla or any like we have our house sugar sirup. Now we've gone to the point where most of my employees can run the shop without me.
My typical day is mostly admin work. I schedule my staff to be able to manage the store most days of the week, and then I'll work on bar on a Saturday usually, and then maybe 1 to 3 other days of the week. I work like just all hours. I'm awake. I guess I'm just always working, um, as long as I can, except Sundays. I try to take one day of like complete rest. Software engineering. I worked Probably less than 40 hours a week. At the end of the day, I just feel happy about what I've done in the day.
I feel happy about the customers I've gotten to interact with and make their days a little bit better. My life is less about like how much money I'm making right now and more about like, what I'm doing every day. When my life was about having a work life balance and being able to do things outside of work, I didn't feel like I was producing anything to the world or making an impact in the world. Even though I was making money out of it, I think now it's less about how much money I make from my work, but what I'm actually doing from the day to day with my work. So seeing the people that I'm impacting, seeing the space I've created for people to build
community here, that gives me so much more meaning and purpose at the end of each day.
