We connected virtually with Melis Aydoğan, founder of the Turkish coffee brand, Rüya – “bold coffee for the immigrant dream.” In fact, Rüya means “dream” in Turkish. It’s aptly named as Melis does more than make a tasty source of caffeine. She creates community connections, pushes herself and others to dream big, and is a strong voice for immigrant families, such as her own.

There is no single definition of an entrepreneur or the obstacles they face. As part of our year-long series sponsored by Main Street Ventures, our community chose 12 of the biggest obstacles female-identifying entrepreneurs face, and we found 12 women who spend their days conquering them. Explore the whole series here.

Interview by Michaela Rawsthorn. Photography by Chelsie Walter.

What’s your elevator pitch?

I am Melis Aydoğan, founder of Rüya, a platform to be a positive voice for immigrants in America. Currently, that platform is coffee and chocolate, but dreaming that one day, maybe in a post-coronavirus world, we’ll expand that platform to other vehicles. But, yeah, that’s me. I am a positive voice for immigrants in America.

What inspired you to create Rüya and be that voice?

I feel like it was a seed that was planted in me at a very young age. My full name is Melissa Melis. My parents gave me an American name and a Turkish name, but I did not start going by my Turkish name until college when people started choosing who they wanted to be.

The first time I remember feeling like “the other” is when 9/11 happened. After that, my dad told me never to say I’m Turkish and never to say I’m Muslim. Then, when I got my first job, I’d mention that I’m going back to Turkey for the summer, and people would ask questions – “Are you going to come back alive? Are you sure it is a good time to go there?” They lump Turkey in with the rest of the Middle East and the unrest in other countries.

But what really inspired me was my family. They are the most welcoming, warm people that I have met – both my family here in America and my family in Turkey. The food, the culture, everything is so amazing. My experience with them did not match up with what I was reading and how I was being treated when I said I was Turkish.

I wanted to change people's perceptions. The only way I knew how to do that was by allowing people to experience what I experienced daily in my own home. I did that through Rüya. With the People's Liberty grant’s help, I created the Turkish coffee house that was intended to be a home within a home. I designed it after my grandma's living room. I wanted to share the Turkish coffee tradition that was passed down through my grandma, to my mom, and my mom to me.

Two years later, we’re still going. I never thought it would last this long. I never thought people would turn it into something bigger than it was. But people kept asking for it, kept supporting, and kept cheering us on, that is enough for me to keep going.

Do you still have a physical coffee house in addition to the online store?

No. We had a storefront in Findlay Market, but that was only part of the grant project, which was only three months. When we closed, people kept going back to the storefront. They’d email, direct message, or call us, saying, "Where’d you guys go?”

I was like, “That was not a permanent storefront, but I am glad you thought it was!”

In my mind, it was so makeshift. I used old IKEA shelves to make my coffee bar. I rented furniture. I just used things around the house to decorate the space. It was nothing official, but you wing it and you make it. You do not need to go all out to make things work.

So much of success is about having good energy around you and making sure that you are hopeful and optimistic.

I don’t have the physical storefront in Findlay Market anymore, but somehow, I’ve still kept Rüya alive for the past year through pop-ups. I would just go to any place that invited me to serve Turkish coffee and read fortunes (the Turkish coffee tradition). I’d go places like different coffee shops, a brewery, and even private parties. People loved it. And then, when COVID-19 hit, we had to transition to online.

Now we do online sales, we also want to do online fortune-telling. We haven’t broadcast that yet because we are still trying to figure out the best way to keep it intimate. But you will see that probably through Calendly invites on our website soon, since people have still been direct messaging and emailing us about the fortune-telling aspect. So, more to come on that front. Maybe an app one day. Who knows?

What was the experience scraping together that storefront like?

It was just about learning simple things no college education teaches you. If you want to do something, you just have to get your hands dirty and do it.

I had a $15,000 grant and a storefront from People's Liberty. I still had to have my day job at Procter & Gamble because I was supporting my family. I did not put a penny of my own into Rüya because I did not have a penny of my own. Honestly, I didn’t even think I was going to win the grant. I submitted the proposal probably two hours before the deadline. When I found out, I thought, “Okay, how am I going to do this?” So, I rallied my best friends together to help.

I remember going to IKEA with my best friends. We needed a coffee bar for cheap, so we looked at all of the pre-made coffee bars, but all of them were out of budget. Everything was out of budget. Everything! I didn't see that coming when I put together my budget forecast. I kept wondering how I was going to make all this work. Nothing went as planned.

We were about to give up and leave, but by the exit there is the returned or the broken stuff. We were like, “Oh, broken stuff? Whatever! It’s super cheap.”

We found long bookshelves that we turned to the side and put super-thin boards on top of it to widen the counter space. We just got our hands dirty nailing and painting.

Honestly, I don’t think I would have seen that opportunity on my own. I would have just walked out through the exit, but I had people surrounding me who wanted me to succeed. They kept pushing me towards it. So much of success is about having good energy around you and making sure that you are hopeful and optimistic.

Even the night before the opening, the day before we introduced Rüya into the world, there was a huge thunderstorm. We had everything set up. Everything was perfect. Then, it flooded, and everything was messed up. We moved all the furniture and stayed up all night, using paper towels and random mops that we found in the building. So yeah, nothing ever goes as planned. If something can go wrong, it’s going to go wrong. You just have to have good people around you to help support you.

Tell us a little bit about how you made your move to an online store.

I used 2019 as an experiment year. The whole year was testing grounds to figure out what people actually want. I invested so much time in the pop-ups, but we weren’t getting a ton of money from them. It was more for me just to test and learn, to understand if I were to grow this and scale it, what people were willing to buy. I didn’t really start trying to turn this into a real business until I got accepted into the Union Hall accelerator in July 2019. That was when I really started thinking about it from a business standpoint.

I had invested so much time in it, but there is a point where you are like, “Okay, this is a passion, am I doing this for real?"

I had all these plans to get people to love the brand and the product. I was working on how to get the coffee on the shelf. I also did a big event at the Contemporary Art Center. I wanted to do more of that. So much of the story about Rüya is around gathering and connecting, especially with the fortune-telling, but a lot of those plans were scrapped because of COVID-19.

Luckily, I had already started working on a website. I just hadn’t put too much time into it. Then when COVID-19 happened, I switched to putting all attention towards the website and continuing to tell the story on my online platform through Facebook and Instagram, and people loved it.

One thing that is always super surprising to me is people see it is bigger than just coffee. People will direct message to ask what Rüya has to say about the Black Lives Matter movement. Or they ask, “What are you doing to help support the immigrant dream?”

I love that kind of criticism. I love that people are challenging and pushing me, holding me accountable for what is happening in the community, and trying to get me to be a positive force. I think all businesses and brands should use their platforms to be a positive force for change.

All brands and businesses have to pivot during this time. I am still trying to learn how to continue to bring the warmth that was part of the in-person experience online. Virtual fortune-telling is a great way, I hope, but there were so many times where we had people crying together during in-person sessions. How do you create that type of connection virtually? That is what I am still trying to figure out. We will see.

What is the connection between fortune-telling and Turkish coffee?

It is a 500-year-old tradition. Turkish coffee was the first coffee brewing method ever. It is made the same way today as the sultans and the sultanas drank their coffee in the Ottoman Empire. It’s unfiltered, so the grounds are left in the cup. They settle to the bottom and create a sludge. Once you finish the liquid, you turn the cup over onto a saucer. The grounds run down the side of the cup, creating lines on the side of the cup, and those are the lines in which your fortune is told. This tradition has been passed down through generations in my family. And so, like my grandma taught my mom, my mom taught me. After big family meals, we would have these fortune-telling sessions where we would drink our coffee and talk.

I wanted to change people's perceptions.

When you start thinking about the future, you begin to ask questions about what you want to resolve in your life. What are you looking forward to down the road? What do you want out of life in general? Those types of conversations with my family set me on the path to being where I am today.

Fortune-telling really translates to dreaming. You are dreaming up something big. Everyone has a dream and can connect over that one thing. Whether your dreams are the same or not, it doesn’t matter. It is the fact that we are coming together and talking about a better future as a community.

What are you most excited about for the future of Rüya?

We have the beer launch and a gelato launch coming up. These are all things that will be announced on social media.

If I am dreaming big, though, I am super interested in becoming an expert in understanding human behavior and how I can, either through technology or through a large collaboration, help others achieve their dreams. It could be through the brand name of Rüya or it could be through something else. But something this whole experience has taught me is that I am interested in understanding why people do what they do and how some people achieve great things, and why others might not. I want to figure out how I can help those with super high potential, but just need a little bit of a push.

There are so many people I can thank for where I am today. I just want to be able to give more people, specifically immigrants, that type of opportunity. Well, anyone who shares the immigrant dream. We’re all immigrants technically, right?

Who is an inspirational woman in your life, and why?

Oh, without a doubt, my mom. She is just so positive. I mean, look at her story. She came to this country when she was pregnant with my older brother. She was 23 or 24. She did not have much. She was pregnant, she did not have a plan, and she did not have money. Now we have so much.

I cannot believe the things that she has gone through, yet she has been so happy. She has the best laugh ever and is just so positive. I honestly think she is one of the main reasons that Rüya is what it is today. She was in the shop every day that I was telling fortunes and she was at every pop-up. People call her Mama Rüya. She is a dream mom. I cannot ask for anyone better.

There is no single definition of an entrepreneur. Check out our year-long series, "This Is Entrepreneurship." Sponsored by Main Street Ventures.

This Is Entrepreneurship: Melis Aydoğan on Turning Passion into a Business