How Hard Could It Be?

Brandon Hoang thought it would be easy.

"How hard could this be?" he remembers thinking. He'd watched other people build drink brands: the Nectar guys, out doing their guerrilla marketing, seltzers everywhere. "I'm like, damn, I could do something too. It wouldn't be that bad, would it?"

It would be that bad. "And then it was horrendous," he says. "It was so bad."

But that's getting ahead of it. To understand how a college kid ended up nine months deep in a fight to make a drink the experts had all but priced out of existence, you have to start where he did: scrolling.

A cool cup and a sticker

The idea arrived the way most modern ideas do: uninvited, on a feed. "I saw some kind of alcoholic boba at a bar," Brandon says. "Huh, that would taste pretty good." He scrolled past. Two weeks later, it was back. Then again a month after that. "It kept popping up on my page. And I was like, what if I do this?"

He did not, by his own account, overthink it. "I did some research on Alibaba. A cool cup and a sticker, and that's all I need to start the business." He ordered 300 containers and 300 stickers, and handed the branding to a friend with an unusual qualification: "He was really into making fake IDs, so he was really good with graphic art."

Then he forgot about it. "I ordered it, forgot about it, and then it came. Oh shit, that's right, I was gonna make it." His first-ever product was a boba he'd bought at Sharetea with a shot of whiskey stirred in. "Yeah," he decided. "This is pretty good."

The Gatorade cooler days

What followed was less a business than a very committed hobby. It ran on Costco runs ("Hey, we gotta go to Costco") for Jameson and a Costco-brand Irish cream, plus powdered black milk tea and taro. The production line was a stock pot "the kind you'd cook a ton of beef broth in," a Gatorade cooler, and no recipe whatsoever.

"We'd pour a little out, taste test, pour a little out, taste test," he says. "And by the time we were like 'this is perfect,' we'd all be kind of drunk, because we'd been tasting it so much." The quality control had a catch: sober the next morning, the drink was somehow far too strong. By the end of a night of tasting, they'd simply lost the ability to detect alcohol at all.

The batches took over their lives, and their fridge. "Our entire fridge would just be full of boba," Brandon says. "We didn't have anywhere to put our meat, our vegetables, whatever else we needed to eat." One early version got mixed with a wooden spoon too short to reach the bottom of the pot, so the bottom of every batch came out stronger than the top.

He sold it at parties, twelve dollars a flask, while DJing. And that's where he saw the thing every founder is desperate to see.

A whole group of friends would buy one bottle. One person takes a sip, "oh shit, this is really good, this is dangerous," and it passes around the whole circle till it's gone. Then they'd come back and buy four more.

The same people, all night, coming back. Selling out. "That's when I thought, okay, there's actually a market for this."

The $300,000 wall

So he tried to make it real. That's when the fun ended.

The problem is chemistry. Milk, tea, and alcohol in one bottle is, it turns out, a nightmare to keep from spoiling. Brandon's first move was a $1,000 canning machine: seal it up, ship it. "But it turns out milk has bacteria in it. It goes bad. I opened my first can, and it smelled like shit."

The science only got harder. "There's a pH range where things spoil, and my product landed right in the middle of it." He tracked down a company that could make it shelf-stable the industrial way. The quote came back: $300,000, and that was just the minimum order.

He couldn't afford it. He'd made his money the unglamorous way ("since 2019 I've been a real estate broker," riding the post-COVID housing rush to his first $100,000 by age 21), and the first batch alone had already cost him $20,000. "That $20,000 ended up being almost everything I had."

Nine months in, staring at a number he couldn't pay, he hit the wall every founder eventually meets. "At that point I was lost," he says. "Is this even possible? Should I just give up?"

The way through

He didn't. He just kept dialing, working through anyone who might have solved it before, until someone finally had the answer the expensive route had been hiding: he didn't need the $300,000 machine at all. The alcohol already in the bottle could do the preserving itself. Cheaper, and, as it turned out, better-tasting than the industrial process would have been.

"Nine months into it, I'm like, finally, this is possible," he says. "That was the moment I said: let's go all in."

The breakthrough wasn't a stroke of genius. It was a refusal to stop calling.

The first real batch poured out of the box the color of "yellowish milk," thick as ketchup. It took several more rounds to get right. But the thing the experts had priced at $300,000 now existed: in his hands, made his way.

How is it making it?

Here's the part that still gets him. Before he'd manufactured a single bottle, Brandon already had a distribution contract, won by pitching a multi-million-dollar distributor with a glass bottle and labels he'd printed at a sticker shop. "I kind of felt like a kid," he says. "But looking back, I must have been pretty cool."

Then came Dabin. Brandon had heard the DJ at raves, on Spotify; his friends played him constantly. When a sponsorship came up, he braced for a number he couldn't cover. "I was expecting like 20, 30 thousand dollars. But he said, okay, $2,000." (At the same event, an actor named Jack Falahee posted the drink to a million followers. "I had no idea who he was," Brandon admits. The new followers poured in anyway.)

At the end of the night, Dabin walked over to the booth, took a picture with the bottle, and asked Brandon how he'd made it.

"I still remember when I was struggling to even get a product out," Brandon says. "And here we are, one of the most famous DJs in the world, and he's taken an interest in me."

For all the chemistry and the calls and the $20,000, what he'd built was simple. It's what the label calls "boba, all grown up": the creamy corner-shop milk tea of childhood, poured now for the people who grew up on it.

Today, Boba After Hours has a distributor, it's been on shelves, and it's launching nationwide. Not bad for a drink that started in a stock pot.

So, how hard could it be?

"It was horrendous," Brandon says. "It was so bad."

He built it anyway.