New Yorker quit during a meeting, now earns twice as much in dream job

Pooja Tripathi might not have become a successful comedian if she hadn’t quit her corporate marketing job in the middle of a meeting in 2018.

By then, Tripathi had spent five years working in the fashion industry, but felt defeated after dealing with a toxic boss, she says. One morning, in a last-minute meeting, her boss started personally insulting Tripathi in front of her manager. She’d watched her coworkers experience similar bullying in the past — and decided to quit the job, where she earned a mid-five figure salary, on the spot, she says.

“Having a job everyone thinks sounds cool … [then] feeling like you can’t reach any goals day-to-day is not easy,” Tripathi, 32, says. “You feel like a lie.”

The second act of Tripathi’s career is more authentic, fulfilling and twice as lucrative, she says. With a friend, she started writing and acting for a YouTube series, and over time, became a successful content creator, she says.

Tripathi started her most popular project, Brooklyn Coffee Shop, in June 2023. In the short videos posted to TikTok and Instagram, she plays a dry, uninterested barista who interacts with and often rejects a cast of stereotypical Brooklyn customers — a Pilates instructor, a guy who loves crypto — who try to order drinks like an unsweetened collagen lattes with unpasteurized goat’s milk.

Some episodes of the series are viewed over 3 million times.

The success of the series has helped land Tripathi personal social media brand deals, she says. She now earns more than twice what she used to earn as a fashion marketer, enough to quit her part-time jobs and focus on social media full-time in December 2024, she says.

The series is also starting to take on its own brand deals, she adds.

Tripathi had to take risks to get this far, she says. She had no experience writing comedies or acting before she left her fashion marketing job. She took on a roommate in her one-bedroom New York apartment to save money and worked part-time marketing jobs to cover the bills while she built a social media following in her spare time, she says.

“I had a very strong North Star, which was I needed another paycheck,” she says. “My mom would call me and remind me I wouldn’t have health-insurance [once I turned 26] … I think there’s a fear in the core of all Americans that if we don’t perform, if we don’t make money, we can’t go to the doctor.”

Juggling multiple jobs while trying to succeed in an uncertain career path was mentally exhausting — but coming up with Brooklyn Coffee Shop felt natural, Tripathi says. In 2023, she spent 30 minutes discussing alternative dairy products, like water buffalo milk, with a friend and barista in a café.

She went home, set up her iPhone on a tripod and filmed herself acting out the conversation — playing both the barista and customer — in front of a makeshift greenscreen in her apartment, she says. That first installment of the series got over 1 million views, she says.

The production of the series looks much different now. Tripathi splits the production workload with her boyfriend, Sagi Shahar, who helps with sound design, and her friends like Nitay Dagan and Eyal Cohen, the series’ director and cinematographer, respectively. Another friend adds in special effects, like kiosk screens that prompt fictional customers to tip over 200%.

Comedians like Kyle Gordon, Grace Reiter and Gianmarco Soresi now guest star as customers, too.

“We can only do [what we do] because everybody is so technically savvy,” Tripathi says. “Working with the guests [and crew] has been probably the single most rewarding thing about my entire career so far.”

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