Students to Entrepreneurs: Our CPG Startup Journey Creating CoTea

Starting a business has taken time, patience, and the ability to persevere when things get tough - and we haven't even reached the hardest and most stressful parts yet. Regardless, as business students entering our senior year, we've decided to pursue and continue our entrepreneurial journey. We wanted to push ourselves beyond the classroom and test whether we could turn our ideas into a real, functioning business. This blog shares our journey as we dive into the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) space, balancing schoolwork with the ups and downs of launching a startup. Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur or simply curious about what it takes, we hope our story offers useful insights and lessons. As an introduction to CoTea and our blog, this first post will cover a broad overview of CoTea and some of the challenges we've faced so far.

Why We're Starting CoTea Now

Senior year of college often feels like a race to finish strong, but for us, it became an opportunity to take a risk. We decided it was now or never: this was the only time in our lives we would have this amount of time, connections, and resources to pursue entrepreneurship. We wanted to have fun and enjoy our final year as college students, which for us meant pursuing our dream of creating a startup.

The CPG space attracted us because we felt it was a space we could connect to and understand. It combines creativity with tangible products that we would want to use ourselves. We both love coffee and tea, so this was a space we could be passionate about and truly enjoy the journey.

Early Challenges and What We Learned

Already, we've encountered many challenges and have had to pivot a few times. So far, here are some of these barriers and lessons we've learned:

• Time Management

Matthew and I are both working several part-time jobs, attending school and clubs, all while trying to create CoTea. We've both always been very driven and organized people, but making sure we find and prioritize time working on the business has been tough. Burnout has been a common occurrence, and we are definitely ready for school to be finished up, so we can focus fully on our venture. Successfully managing our commitments so we don't stretch ourselves too thin is something we're both still figuring out, and will continue to do so as we finish up school and start our full-time jobs.

• Limited Resources

One of the main struggles entrepreneurs, and especially broke college students, face is a lack of money and resources. With no budget for expensive marketing, product development, or the ability to hire external help, we're forced to be creative, negotiate, and learn through our own constant trial and error. That's one of the reasons, outside of passion, we've started this blog. We want real input and advice from our community, a way to spread the word about CoTea, and to help others in a similar situation who are also pursuing their entrepreneurial dreams. We want to be a resource to other people; one we wish we'd had from the beginning.

• Being Forced to Pivot

Originally, we started with a business idea related to AI and the travel industry. Now, this was right before large travel booking websites began integrating AI tools into their websites. We thought we had a great idea, and even held multiple target consumer interviews that proved there was desire in the market. Fortunately, before sinking a lot of time and resources, we found that other companies had started showing signs of integrating a similar concept. After that, we started pursuing a different idea, still in the travel space, surrounding suitcases. However, logistically, we found there was no way our idea would work or that we'd be able to compete with large players (again). Discouraged but not deterred, we started brainstorming again. That's when we came up with the concept of CoTea. The moral of the story here is that despite lacking ideas with proper market timing, viability, and feasibility, we never stopped, so something (inevitably) eventually stuck.

• Branding

Branding is something we're still working on mastering, despite several conversations with various mentors, designers, and entrepreneurs. As a startup, especially in the CPG industry, branding is the difference between success and failure. You can't, and should never, try to please everyone with your branding or product - it rarely, if ever, works. Currently, we're trying to nail down what our brand story and personality are. Knowing this will make it substantially easier to have cohesive and effective marketing, packaging, messaging, etc. This is where we will definitely be looking to you and others in our CoTea community for help. We plan to have a lot of polls and asking for a lot of input so we can deliver exactly what you want to see from us. At the end of the day, we want this to be a fun and inclusive experience, and have CoTea not just be our company, but an entire community's.

What's Next in Our Journey

Moving forward, we have years of hard work, failures, and successes ahead of us. Our next steps include the following:

• Continuing product formulation

• Meet with more mentors and entrepreneurs to learn and receive advice

• Spread the word about CoTea

• Raise money through Kickstarter

• Gauge demand through newsletter and email sign-ups

• Set up our social media

• Publish more blog posts

These next steps are just some of the many things we need to get done if we want CoTea to be a success. Statistically, we are very likely to fail. However, the only way we have a chance of succeeding is by trying, remaining persistent, and being delusional optimists. Push comes to shove, we learned a lot, met talented and kind people, and followed our passions.

We hope that you will stick around for the bumpy ride ahead and will consider supporting our journey. It would be most appreciated if you share our blog, sign up for our newsletter/email, or donate to our Kickstarter campaign. Participating in any or all three of those is more than appreciated. We hope we can be a resource of entertainment and education with our blog, and soon, smooth energy with CoTea.