The Weekly Bev - 12th Edition

🔦 Creator Spotlight

We’ve featured some incredible creators in our Spotlight section including Duncan Heger and Sam Snowden. This week, we’re adding to this legendary list and featuring someone who has never been in a vlog before…Caitlin Campbell aka CC_Unsilenced! She has built an incredible community, runs a very impressive business in Street Brew Coffee, and it was so great to catch up with her.

J: Tell me briefly about how your journey as a creator started.

C: One of the most difficult things about starting a new business is the lack of awareness for your brand. It’s really hard for people to buy in and then recommend your product if they don’t have any relation to you as a business. I remember being so frustrated that no one knew who Street Brew Coffee was. Ultimately, I decided that I would start making videos to put my company on the map.

J: When you started on TikTok, did you always mix personal and business content?

C: When I first started on TikTok it was solely for business related content. However I noticed that If I tried to only promote my product people lost interest. So I focused on teaching people how to make coffee and said several times that I didn’t necessarily care if people bought my coffee.

Late last year I got a little burnt out on coffee content (there’s only so many grinders one can recommend). So I started pushing myself to step outside of solely making coffee content and I actually saw your daily vlogs and thought to myself “That looks like fun!” I then started daily vlogging my life as a small business owner on IG and it’s been really great.

J: Do you always want to focus on the coffee trailer? Or is the goal to go hard into e-commerce? Or retail?

C: This is something I debate a lot. I launched Street Brew Coffee originally in October 2019 and we focused on selling DTC at events around Toronto. It was a great launch pad for us, we were booked to sell at 56 shows in 2020, but we quickly had to pivot away from that model when the pandemic cancelled every single one of those shows.

I think a brick and motor store is the wrong move for us right now. It’s a LOT of commitment and I love the freedom of having a mobile trailer with limited overhead and an e-commerce site.

J: How has the growth of your social pages impacted the business?

C: Social media absolutely saved my small business. It’s opened so many doors and connected me to so many new customers. In hindsight, starting a new business in 2019 was very bad timing. When the pandemic broke out, we lost 98% of our sales overnight and social media has helped us recover from that and much more.

J: Do you want to continue making vlogs and documenting your entrepreneurial experience?

C: Absolutely - I don’t think I’ll ever stop making content because I’ve wanted to be a content creator forever. I love storytelling and being able to bring the audience along for my journey.

cc_unsilenced

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J: What’s your favorite part of running Street Brew?

C: I get to do what I love with the people I love. Both of my parents are involved in the business. I’m making memories that will last forever and building a business with my two best friends.

J: Out of all the large scale coffee chains out there, which serves the best espresso in your opinion?

C: This is always such a tough thing for me…I’ll go with my dad’s expertise on this one and he would always choose McDonalds before we started our own company.

J: I’m going to be launching a business of mine own in the near future. Do you have any advice for me?

C: My best advice for you or any other entrepreneur is to try to understand the incredible value of consistency. It is so vital to show up every single day, even on the days you don’t feel like doing it. Those who win are the ones who stick with it, show up everyday and refuse to quit. Some of the BEST moments in my small business have happened on days where I truly did not want to show up, the days where I would have rather stayed in bed than showed up to a pop-up or meeting.

Second is having the ability to pivot and adapt to change. Having a plan that you can follow is great but what happens when everything goes to crap and the entire world shuts down? You have to be willing to move on from plans that are anchors that will sink your business for other opportunities. Always try new things and be willing to adapt/pivot as quickly as you can.

❓️ Mystery Links

Ato, akat

⏰ Full-time Creator

I started the vlog out of sheer frustration with my freelance career. I had no clear trajectory, bouncing from one gig to another as a plug-and-play type guy, and felt this gap in my career that I was not building anything. I needed a switch, so I asked myself what I truly loved about filmmaking. I knew I needed to answer that question and then start creating content that resonated with that passion.

After a lot of thought and reflection, I arrived at my answer. Back in my high school days, making YouTube videos with my friends was what made me initially fall in love with filmmaking. The fun, lighthearted videos we would make felt like an extension of myself, but I started to lose that feeling when I was only producing content for others. Freelancing work was rewarding in that it allowed me to both monetize and practice my craft, but creatively I was just taking orders from someone else. I wasn’t actually embedding my voice and my perspective into the end product. These feelings eventually came to a boiling point, and with some nudging from Mallory, daily vlogging seemed like a great way to scratch this itch.

Vlogging gave me the daily pressure to stay consistent, which was a structure I desperately needed in the early days. For the first 200 days, I vlogged with an audience of basically zero. It wasn’t about the views; it was more like therapy. I was still doing freelance jobs for the bulk of the day, but I would capture content throughout the day and then come home at night to create something entirely in my own voice. It was extremely liberating. No one was able to dictate what my work should look like, and I relished in that artistic freedom.

By creating with my own voice through the vlog, I didn’t need my cup to be filled by freelance gigs anymore and the feeling of frustration I had with freelancing subsided relatively quickly. Over time, I got lucky with events like Coachella and F1, which helped me build a larger viewership base for the vlog and ultimately generate some revenue. This eventually compounded and slowly shifted my priorities from freelancing to vlogging.

For my fellow filmmakers, my advice is to identify the part of filmmaking you love the most. Is it the business side, editing, shooting, or writing? Whatever your answer, pursue that without any expectation of income. Do it day after day. I promise - it’s impossible to fail if you never stop. As Caitlin says, “Those who win are the ones who stick with it, show up everyday and refuse to quit.”