April 22, 2022
Kara Goldin, CEO, Hint Inc
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I’m a big believer that some of the best business ideas are simple, and driven by personal convictions. On the heels of being removed by her board, I sat down with, Kara Goldin, the remarkable of Founder, Hint Inc.,and author of Undaunted, Overcoming Doubts and Doubters, which details how she faced up to endless naysayers with Hint Water, which she scaled into a couple hundred million dollar company.
What is Hint? Water with fruit essence. No sugar, no artificial flavors or sweeteners. It was one of the big successes of the Covid beverages-by-mail era. Like me, she was a Diet Coke addict who wanted to be healthier and looked at what was right in front of her: a big cup of water that she made more palatable by adding fruit slices, and she created a product out of it. This was not her first go round in startup land, she had worked at a dot com that was sold to AOL, but the first time she ever entered the consumer products space and wow, she did with a bang, or kiwi, strawberry or coconut.
Kara’s journey to Hnt started with the wakeup call that is having kids and thinking about nutrition in a new way. “Like a lot of parents are, especially in the early days, I thought about what I was putting into my kids bodies. I looked down at my Diet Coke in particular, and saw the ingredients and I thought I would never give this to my kids. Why am I okay, giving it to myself? And that’s when I thought maybe I should stop. Maybe I should just stop drinking it and see what would happen.” After she broke her addiction she ended up realizing that fruit was a way of making water delicious and drinking something healthy ended up healthy with weight and clearing up her skin.
Kara faced a lot of pushback about the product as investors typically want you to have experience in the product category you are launching. As Kara says, “I didn’t intentionally switch industries. I didn’t feel like, ‘okay, I’m done with tech. I never want to be here anymore.’ But I saw this problem. And I saw something that I was so curious about that I had an idea for that. I thought ‘I’m gonna go do it.’”
And while many consumer products companies struggled during Covid to shift some of their marketing and distribution to online, Kara has a plan. “People weren’t really selling beverages online, “ she says. “It was a very small business and a radical departure from most beverage companies. When COVID hit and we had about 15% of our business in offices like Google and Facebook and many others, that business all shut down when everybody was staying at home and sheltering in place. We just really threw the gas on to the direct to consumer business. We already had a list of over a million people who had purchased online so we were able to retarget and go back and get people to buy.”
Kara’s product development journey didn’t stop with water. A skin cancer scare lead her to search for products without oxybenzone that were not white pasty and nasty smelling. She then launched Hint Sunscreen. For more of Kara’s entrepreneurial journey, please listen to our podcast.
