We quit our jobs in TV to start a coffee shop. When we decided to do it on a boat, we had no idea what we were in for.

• Joanna and Victor Gould, both 35, quit their jobs to open a coffee shop on a boat.
• They faced a lot of challenges along the way, but the payoff was worth it.
• They have been documenting their journey on YouTube, where they have a devoted audience.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with husband and wife Joanna and Victor Gould, both 35, who are running a coffee shop from their boat based in Macclesfield in the UK. It has been edited for length and clarity.

We always thought about owning a cafe. It felt like a totally romantic, but absurd idea. We both had fond memories of working in cafes and bars when we were younger before we'd met each other — chatting to people all day, making their coffee, and drinking coffee. I guess we thought of those as our "stress-free" years.

We'd been living on a boat together for a couple of years when we decided it could be a good place to run a cafe from. We loved living on the boat, and we thought it would be a fun project.

Ever since then, we've been earning a living selling coffee and cake in our cafe — lemon drizzle cake is our best seller — and sharing our journey on our YouTube channel with our 53,000 subscribers.

It's a lot of work, and we're still sometimes shocked that we've managed to make a living doing this, but it's the best decision we could have made.

We faced a lot of challenges opening our boat cafe

In 2018, we were feeling exhausted from our jobs as freelance television editors. It was stressful and the hours were long. We both needed time off, and we were looking for an alternative that would allow us to take at least a year off and spend some time floating about on boats.

It feels like everyone in the television industry has some kind of alternative lifestyle they'd like to do when they quit. People are like, "Oh, I'm going to quit this and become a goat herder or a cheese maker." For us, the dream was owning a floating coffee shop. So that's what we decided to do.

We'd both been living together on a narrowboat cruising the canals in England since 2016, and we loved the lifestyle and the freedom it gave us. We thought it would be fun to combine it with our dream of owning a coffee shop by buying a boat that we could turn into a cafe.

We spent some time looking around for a suitable boat.

After a lot of searching, we found a boat that had a lot of open space and windows — it looked perfect for a cafe. We bought her and decided to name her "Holly the Cafe Boat."

Actually turning the boat into a cafe took a lot of work. When we started on the renovations, we quickly realized we had no idea what we were doing. It took a long time. It was also difficult not having a boss. It was easy to wonder, "What on earth are we doing?"

While things got a little easier once the renovations were over, the challenges continued when we opened the cafe. We didn't realize how difficult it would be to get deliveries. At the beginning, we had this vision of only using local dairy suppliers. Then we realized that lots of places aren't going to walk down a canal towpath for 10 minutes to deliver lots of heavy milk to us. So that really restricted the kind of businesses we could order from.

We don't have a car, but we do have a canoe that we sometimes use to transport heavy deliveries back to the cafe. People can't believe it when we meet them with our canoe. They think it's hilarious.

Starting a YouTube channel was a gamechanger

We began uploading videos to YouTube in 2019 while we were still renovating our cafe boat. We had no idea how to renovate a boat, but we did know how to make videos, so we felt like we were stepping back into our comfort zone.

Despite our editing experience, actually being on camera felt unnerving. We almost decided not to upload the first video we made because we didn't think it was good enough. But we decided to go for it anyway, and we're really glad we did.

We didn't think anyone would watch our videos. We thought they'd just get lost on the internet. But the narrowboat community was very interested, and we quickly developed a devoted audience. People seemed to enjoy following our journey.

Filming videos and posting them regularly can sometimes feel like a lot of work on top of running the cafe. We never know how the videos are going to perform. It's easy to feel like you're only as good as your last video.

Our online presence has become really important to us. If we'd set up the cafe without it, I think things would be very different. Most of our customers have found us through our YouTube videos. We use what3words, a navigation and maps app, to let people know where we are so they can visit our cafe, as we move around every couple of weeks.

Today, we rely primarily on our cafe and our YouTube channel for our income. We've also released a cookbook, sold merchandise, and created a Patreon account. It feels like we've created a career out of nothing, which is very rewarding.

We're planning to continue sharing our journey on YouTube, and we also want to grow our local customer base

In October, we sold our houseboat and moved into a house on land. Our son is 2 years old, and managing two boats felt like a lot of work.

Boat life comes with lots of challenges that people don't think about. Both our cafe boat and the boat we lived on had a continuous cruiser license, which meant we had to move them both every couple of weeks. We had to plan when we were going to move depending on when we'd need water, and it took up a lot of time.

But now that we're living in a house instead of a boat, we have more time to focus on the cafe. For the past three years we've only opened in spring and summer because it's a lot of work, but now we're hoping to open it more often and be more consistent. We'd also like to be able to stay in the same place for a while so we can have local customers. We're currently working out how to do that.

We started doing this without any expectations. We just wanted to have a year out from our careers. But we've been enjoying it so much, and we're excited for the future. Over the next few years, we hope to continue to grow our cafe and our online presence.

Overall we probably earn less than we did when we worked in TV, but we are very happy.