Meet Minh Diep | Software Engineer & Boba Tea Shop Owner

We had the good fortune of connecting with Minh Diep and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Minh, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
We love boba milk tea. And when the pandemic caused the lockdown, the only place that we could go was the supermarket. We missed boba milk tea very much; thus, we started buying boba and cooked at home. The boba and the tea turned out to be great, so we feel like we have something that we want to start the business with.

A Vietnamese Boba Tea Shop is not popular. Most of the best brands out there are from China or Taiwan. By offering drinks with unique Vietnamese Flavors at our tea shop, we hope that we can create the differences and make our brand/business stand out.

We chose Sawtelle, Japanese Town, Los Angeles because one of us is an UCLA alumni and we always feel a strong connection with UCLA, always wanting to come back to this special location.

We want to bring joy to all people in this community. We think that our drinks are delicious which can really bring happiness to people. We also want to introduce Vietnamese flavor specifically or South East Asia generally to this great local area.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
What I am most proud of:

While working as a software engineer and an accountant, we are able to create this boba shop. It is not easy, and it takes a lot of efforts and patience to actually design and build this boba shop. To overcome these challenges often require us to do a lot of research, with then trial and errors process. These taught us how to be patient and how to approach issues and problems. Task priority/divide and conquer are things that we did learn.

We really want the world to know that we really created our brand/boba tea shop with our whole heart. The pandemic did change a lot of things, caused a lot of pains; however, this tea shop came out from the pandemic. We want the store can bring the happiness to our customers and to our local area. As long as our customers are happy, we are happy.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
We love to go to Venice Beach. Biking and seeing the sunset is lovely. We will either take our friend to lunch or dinner at Ding Tai Fung. Then going back to our store for some boba tea while playing some small games.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
This should be our mother,

She works really hard to create the formula for all of our smoothies and also mentor us how to run our store.

Website: https://www.teamugboba.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/teamugboba/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/teamugboba

Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/tea-mug-boba-los-angeles