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Maybe you’re about to start your first job or you’d like to finally launch that side hustle you’ve been thinking about. With this series, our Squarespace YouTube creators share their own stories and tell you how to get started. It’s time to embrace this next chapter and run with it.
After more than a decade of racking up views for his independent music videos and short films on YouTube, founding member of Wong Fu Productions Philip Wang was ready to expand his professional efforts to a new challenge: opening a cafe. “We had zero food experience,” explains his business partner, Eric Wang, but they were passionate about making their hospitality vision real. Phil says he found himself “looking at other cafes or restaurants and literally thinking, I could do this, or, I could do this better than other places.” The project was three years in the making, and of the experience, the pair says believing in themselves, and each other, was what carried them through. They named their spot Bopomofo Cafe. “‘Bopomofo’ is actually the first four symbols of the Mandarin phonetic alphabet. It's basically like saying ‘ABCD’ in Chinese.”
Eric and Phil knew they wanted to do something really different. “The San Gabriel Valley has been saturated with a lot of boba establishments. To stand out among all of them we wanted to do a fresh take.” That meant fresh toppings, fresh fruit, fresh juices, and no artificial sweeteners or powdered creamers—and educating customers about what made their drinks different (and more expensive). They also spent serious time getting their menu right: “We had different preferences on spice level, different preferences on texture.” So even before Bopomofo’s soft open, they hosted friends and family for test kitchens. “It was really cool to see people follow our journey of building the shop from the ground up. Due to the hype that we had with social media and such, there was a lot of pressure on our backs. we knew we had to just get the product down.” Bopomofo now offers seasonal menu items alongside their classic Taiwanese fried chicken sandwich, popcorn chicken, tater tots with tofu and toppings, and the MOFO Club which includes both peanut butter and mayonnaise.
Initially, Phil and Eric weren’t sure they needed a website, given the following they had across Wong Fu Productions’ social media channels. But ultimately, they decided “that there's actually something really, really special about having an official site…. We were actually debating between bopomofoLA.com & bopomofocafe.com. We eventually went with ‘cafe’ because, who knows, maybe there won't just be one in LA!”
The website, Phil says, is like a flagship store. Social media puts a business’s most immediate activity front and center, but with a website “the most important information is all aggregated well laid out beautiful and well designed...with our web page what's most important to me is that it captures our aesthetic and clearly and concisely presents our mission and most important messages.” And launching the site can feel like a grand opening of its own, with the attendant anxiety. “We’re basically pronouncing to the world, ‘we are here, this is official, this is actually happening.’ We can’t turn around and go backwards now... As we hopefully grow and expand within this industry this website is what people going to be looking for and it's going to be our first impression to future partners and customers.”
To hear more about Eric and Phil’s journey opening Bopomofo, watch the video above, and check out the full menu at bopomofocafe.com. Ready to launch your own passion project? Visit squarespace.com to get started.
Looking to level up your restaurant’s website? Add reservations, takeout, events and more with Tock.