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Key Takeaways Josh Kim documented the messy, unfiltered reality of opening Softies Burger, from construction delays to emotional stress.
By sharing the journey on social media, the story itself became part of the brand, attracting new opportunities.
The bigger things get, the easier it is to lose the plot. Stay close to why you started.
Josh Kim never planned to open a restaurant.
Softies Burger started as what Josh Kim later described as a joke. A side project. A way to make a little extra cash for what his business partner Sam Hong described as “diaper money.”
The two met while working in restaurant tech. Kim was at OpenTable, Hong had spent years opening coffee shops before moving into tech. Both loved hospitality, but both had chosen the safer path of steady salaries. Softies was supposed to be a low-risk outlet. A pop-up outside coffee shops and breweries around Orange County, California. Nothing serious.
“We dropped a few thousand dollars on a credit card to buy a couple of griddles,” Kim said. “It was always supposed to be a very low-risk, low-reward pop-up for friends and family.”
Their expectations were modest. For the first event, they planned to serve about 50 burgers — maybe a hundred if things went well. Thirty minutes before service, they noticed something strange: A line was forming.
“We saw a queue of like twenty or thirty people, none of whom we knew,” Kim said. “We thought they were at the wrong event.”
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