The biggest challenge at first was getting people to believe as much as I did in my vision and getting them to invest in my business. As a new entrepreneur, it wasn’t easy to raise money.
1. Tell us more about your company and your journey.
Hint makes amazingly enjoyable healthy products so that consumers don’t have to choose between what’s good for them and what they love. Hint’s original product line is Hint® water, a delicious selection of fruit-infused waters that deliver incredibly true fruit flavors without the sugar or diet sweeteners found in typical water beverages.
Now you can drink all the water you need without even having to think about it. We also make incredible fruit-scented sunscreen, that transforms the experience of applying sunscreen into one that you’ll not only remember to do but will want to do because applying our sunscreen spray is like strolling through a grapefruit or pear orchard at harvest time or stepping into the kitchen when someone is slicing up a juicy ripe pineapple. We’ve also expanded to fruit-scented hand sanitizers and aluminum-free deodorant.
2. How did you come up with this idea and go about executing it?
After struggling with my weight and other health issues for a few years, I discovered that switching from diet soda (to which I was addicted) to plain water made a tremendous difference in my life, but I found plain water so boring that I wasn’t sure I could stick with it.
I started slicing fruit into the water or muddling up a berry and letting it sit in my water overnight and the addition of just a bit of fruit flavor made all the difference in the world. I looked in stores, thinking I would find something that tastes good and is this simple, but everything that they called “flavored water” at the time was filled with the same diet sweeteners I had been drinking in my diet soda.
So I decided that someone needed to come out with simple fruit-infused water that would help people fall in love with water, the healthiest thing you can drink.
3. What has been your biggest challenge that you faced and how did you overcome that?
The biggest challenge at first was getting people to believe as much as I did in my vision and getting them to invest in my business. As a new entrepreneur, it wasn’t easy to raise money.
I realized that we had to do enough work to prove that this idea mattered not just to me and a few friends in Marin County, but to real everyday Americans.
Until we had products in the marketplace and happy customers, it would just be another idea that might or might not make it. So I rolled up my sleeves and with a bit of help from my friends, my husband, and my Amex card, we got our first products into the market. And people loved them.
4. What do you think are the most important qualities of a successful entrepreneur?
Most great entrepreneurs view obstacles as just something you need to go over or around. They are curious. They recognize that there are real barriers to success but they don’t allow themselves to let challenges prevent them from moving forward. When an entrepreneur runs into something they can do, they ask “What can I do?” And they figure out a path.
5. What are some of the most important factors for running a successful business?
Successful businesses:
- are filled with employees who enjoy and believe in what they are doing and feel appreciated by customers, team members, and management.
- don’t allow themselves to run out of money.
- have leaders that provide the vision, but are also willing to dig in and be part of making it happen.
- make products or services that consumers love and feel good about consuming/using.
6. What are your tips for first-time and aspiring entrepreneurs?
- Get comfortable living with uncertainty, or don’t be an entrepreneur.
- Figure out which problems you need to solve now and which ones can wait for later. Too many entrepreneurs spend time working on things that won’t matter unless they get focused on the needs of today.
- Keep track of what you’re going to need to have or take care of in the future, even while focusing on the near-term needs of the business. Tomorrow will come up faster than you think.
- Accept the fact that sometimes we fail and know that we can survive failure and learn from failure.
- If something didn’t work once, try not to do it over and over again.
- If you have some success, take time to figure out which things you are doing actually is part of your success and which things are actually holding you back. Too many entrepreneurs fool themselves into thinking that success means that everything they do is great. That’s almost never true.
7. How can one overcome a hurdle of lack of funds when starting up?
Be scrappy and figure out how to get far enough to raise money.
Kara Goldin
Founder & CEO, hint, Inc.
Interviewed By: Farhana
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