The Cat Cafe: a San Diego cat café at $40K a month, and why it started charging admission

The Cat Cafe sells coffee, pastries, cat-room admission, original cat art and merchandise to locals and tourists in downtown San Diego, and its founder reported $40K a month in September 2024.

How it started

The business opened in January 2015 in downtown San Diego. In a Starter Story founder interview dated 2024-09-17, general manager Tony Wang said the new café attracted more business than the team was prepared to handle. The opening burst eventually faded, and Wang said rebuilding after it took years. The sequence matters because publicity created awareness faster than the café had prepared its operating capacity.

What it sells and how it charges

According to the official website, fetched 2026-09-30, the menu features espresso and coffee from Café Virtuoso, pastries from Bread & Cie, and cookies from The Cravory. The site also presents cat-room admission, reservations, memberships, events, gift cards, original cat art and merchandise. Its cats are available for adoption and come from The Rescue House, a nonprofit focused on helping homeless cats find loving homes.

The website snapshot does not state an admission price. Wang supplies the business explanation: in the 2024-09-17 interview, he called not charging admission from the beginning “the biggest mistake” because the café was trying to please even customers who were not profitable. After it added admission and changed how it served the customers it wanted, Wang said the business improved. The interview provides no fee amount, and this case does not establish that every cat café should charge the same way.

How it got its first customers—and what kept growth going

Wang said local NBC, Fox and CW affiliates, along with a local newspaper, covered the opening, while social media built awareness for the launch. Tourists made up most of the business, so the café placed print advertising in a local tourist guide distributed to places where visitors were staying or likely to go, including hotels and the Convention Center.

Facebook and Instagram produced the strongest response in Wang’s account. The café used both organic engagement and paid advertising. During Covid, when conventions and tourism were absent for about two years, it shifted toward local residents with personalized Facebook and Instagram ads centered on animal welfare and coffee. Wang also said the café closed for two and a half months. When tourism weakened, the café changed both its target audience and its advertising message rather than continuing with the same launch approach.

Wang also said the business name helped it appear in search results for “cat cafe.” If he could do it again, he said, he would use the same publicity methods but have the reservations system and business model in place before the launch rush. Tourist guides supplied place-based reach, while social advertising allowed the café to target particular audiences rather than rely only on walk-in interest.

The numbers

The following figures are founder-reported in the Starter Story interview dated 2024-09-17. They describe that point in the business, not its current financials.

Measure	Founder-reported figure	Source and date
Monthly revenue	$40K to $50K a month, depending on the season and large conventions	Founder report in Starter Story, 2024-09-17
First-year revenue	Less than $200K	Founder report in Starter Story, 2024-09-17
Expected revenue	Should exceed $500K in the interview year	Founder report in Starter Story, 2024-09-17
Revenue mix	Most revenue came from cat-room admissions; ancillary food, drink and merchandise accounted for about 25%	Founder report in Starter Story, 2024-09-17
Team at the interview	One founder and two employees	Founder report in Starter Story, 2024-09-17

In the 2024-09-17 interview, Wang said July’s Comic-Con was always the café’s biggest month and felt like an extra week of revenue in an already busy month. He described the business as profitable and said its margins were around the industry average, but he did not provide a margin percentage.

How it compares

According to 1M.chat’s analysis of founder-reported cases in Starter Story interviews from 2015–2026, the underlying dataset contains 1,997 businesses. It is a self-selected sample of founders who chose to be interviewed, not a random sample of all businesses.

The comparison category is Local & brick-and-mortar businesses. Within that category, 77 businesses had founder-reported revenue.

Category measure	1M.chat result	Analysis basis
Median monthly revenue	$50K	77 category businesses with founder-reported revenue, 2015–2026 analysis
Share at $1M a year or more	43%	Same-category founder-reported cases, 2015–2026 analysis
Median employee count	3	Same-category analysis, 2015–2026
Share started by one founder	68%	Same-category analysis, 2015–2026

The business-level comparison places The Cat Cafe below the category’s $50K monthly median. That classification sits alongside Wang’s reported range of $40K to $50K a month in the 2024-09-17 interview; it does not mean every reported month was below the median.

At the interview, The Cat Cafe had one founder and two employees. Its reported founder count matched the category pattern reflected in the 68% one-founder share, while its employee count was below the category median of three.

Channel information was available for 50 category businesses. According to 1M.chat’s analysis from 2015–2026, SEO and organic search appeared in 68% of those businesses, word of mouth and referrals in 56%, organic social media in 48%, and paid ads in 28%. The Cat Cafe founder explicitly discussed local news, tourist-guide print advertising, organic social engagement and paid social advertising. He also said the business name helped with search visibility, although he did not describe a formal SEO program. The category percentages describe the sample; they do not prove which channel caused The Cat Cafe’s growth.

What a founder can take from it

You can plan publicity and operating capacity together. Wang said the opening rush arrived before the new business could handle it. A launch plan should cover reservations, customer flow and service capacity as well as attention.
You can examine whether admission supports the economics of the main experience. This case improved after The Cat Cafe stopped trying to accommodate visitors who were not profitable, but it does not supply a universal fee or pricing formula.
You can match the audience to the message. The café used tourist guides, hotels and the Convention Center to reach visitors, then used Facebook and Instagram ads focused on animal welfare and coffee to reach local residents when tourism weakened.
You can use several channels while watching which ones produce a response. Wang specifically identified Facebook and Instagram as the strongest-performing social channels, alongside print advertising and local media coverage.
You can keep reported revenue tied to its date and basis. The $40K headline and $40K to $50K monthly range were founder-reported in September 2024; neither figure should be treated as a current run rate, forecast or promised outcome for another business.

Sources

Revenue, team and start-cost figures are what the founder reported at the interview date, not current figures and not a prediction of what you will earn. Product and pricing facts come from the business's own website as checked on 30 September 2026. Method & sources · Disclosure