Founder Of Hint Water, Kara Goldin: On Founding America’s Fastest Growing Flavoured Water Brand

Hint Water began in Kara Goldin’s kitchen in 2004, as a quest to find a healthy alternative to sugar-laden soft drinks. It is now a $30 million business, and has taken Goldin on a decade of discovery.

Recognising that if she didn’t create her own solution no one else would, the then AOL executive and her husband Theo (now Hint’s COO) ploughed $50,000 of their personal savings into launching the company.

Learning the ins and outs of the beverage industry, dealing with critics, and working through a particularly turbulent relationship with an external partner, had the potential to cost the mother of four her business.

Instead, Goldin has excelled in the face of adversity and built Hint Water into the $30 million business it is today; stocked in over 20,000 stores across the US and Canada, including Whole Foods Market, Target, and online via Amazon.

Here, Goldin explains how she navigated her way through a new category, while leveraging her existing skillset, and why entrepreneurs should always pay attention to what bugs them.

What was the impetus behind launching Hint?

It started with our own family’s need to find a way to fall in love with water, so that we could give up all of the things that were making us unhealthy. Once we found that way, we wanted to share it with the rest of the world.

We started Hint because I had figured out how to make myself and my family love water and I didn’t understand why any of the beverage companies had found a way to make something taste great without tasting sweet. It turned out that making simple products isn’t always so simple, but if I didn’t ask why, it might never have happened.

How did you cope with transitioning from the corporate world to starting your own company?

It was hard going from a huge company like AOL to a business I was operating out of my kitchen, but I knew I had the right idea and believed there was a solution to all of the challenges it threw up.

In many ways, I approached both careers in the same way. When I first got into tech I did a lot of random reaching out and asking the right questions of the right people – that helped shape my corporate career and it has helped shape Hint and made it the success it is today.

How did you go about launching a product in a field you weren’t familiar with?

My background helped me in many ways that I didn’t realize at the time. In my early days when I was working in direct response at Time Inc., I had no idea how much that experience would help me now. We have a huge opportunity now in direct to consumer, and I had no idea how valuable that past experience would be.

Later, I worked at 2Market, a joint venture of Apple and AOL that was building one of the first computer-based shopping services. I was hired as their only salesperson, introducing retailers to the world of e-commerce. Within a year, we had signed up many well-known retailers and were acquired by AOL. I then worked as Vice President for AOL’s e-commerce and shopping partnerships — commuting across country (and virtually living on United Airlines) between San Francisco and Virginia, where AOL had its headquarters.

All of this experience helped me enormously from a retail and e-commerce perspective. In terms of the specific beverage industry, I knew what questions to ask and I asked them of everyone. I took $50,000 of our savings and plunged it into learning the details of the beverage industry.

My biggest advice to entrepreneurs would be to pay attention to what is around you, what is interesting to you. What bugs you every day? Pay attention to what bothers you, and ask yourself if you can create change?

How did you persuade retailers to believe in Hint?

I went into my local San Francisco Whole Foods and inquired about what it would take to get a drink on the shelf. The Whole Foods Manager told me everything about the coding right through to the shelf life. I went home to my husband and I said ‘I want to create this product’.

Later, we took it to the Fancy Foods Show (a specialty food and beverage trade show) in New York. We probably had the crappiest booth in the whole place in a tiny little corner, but a lot of stores and buyers came to us, including buyers from a lot of different regions of Whole Foods. We also met United Natural Foods Inc., which became one of our distributors.

Retailers believed in the product because they knew we had hit on something new and different that would stand out on their shelves.

What do you consider to have been your ‘big break’?

I’ve had a great career and learnt from some brilliant people. Ironically, though, I think the ‘aha’ moment for me came from someone telling me not to do it.

When we were starting out, I asked a beverage-industry executive for some advice, his response was, ‘Sweetie, Americans love sweet, so this product will fail and you should go and do other things.’

He was probably posturing, positioning and trying to get me not to do this. I tell other entrepreneurs all the time that it was probably the best thing I ever heard at that point because I felt like if I didn’t go and do this, no one else would.

How supportive have your friends and family been, and how has that affected your journey?

The whole concept of Hint came from trying to cut out unhealthy drinks from my family’s diet. So, from the start, it’s been a family business.

We funded Hint ourselves for the first couple of years but friends and family invested in it  just before the economic crisis in 2008, so failure was not an option. Saving the company and our dream of changing health in America took some major personal sacrifices, but we were able to prove that Hint was worth saving, rally support from our friends and carry on through the roughest time of our lives.

We have always been able to secure outside investment but knowing that we had the belief and support from our friends and family was key to our success.

Has your idea of success changed since starting Hint, and if so, how?

I am and always have been motivated by making Hint a commercial success but beyond that, I’ve increasingly found the individual responses of some of our customers the biggest mark of success.

Over and over again and usually when I’m having a difficult day, we get an email or a phone call from a customer who just wants us to know how much Hint means to them, to recognize that discovering Hint was their first step in becoming healthier, losing weight or just feeling better. We don’t change people’s lives, but we’ve been told many times that we’ve made it easier for people to change their own lives. What could possibly be better than that?

What has been your biggest challenge since launching Hint, and how did you overcome that?

In March 2007 we hit a major pain point. Our bottler was reaching maximum capacity and no one else could duplicate the process. Even worse, they had become somewhat unreliable, wasting a lot of materials, but at the same time demanding that we invest in expanding their plant if we wanted to continue working with them.

We had to decide whether to invest in a partner we saw as unreliable and untrustworthy or to risk having to shut down the entire business. It was an easy decision. You can’t build a strong business with a bad partner, so we had to find another way or shut it down.

Knowing that we were going to run out of product before solving the problem, we contacted all of our distributors and key customers and told them that there might be shortages for a couple months but that we would have a solution in place before the ramp up to summer.

We promised to communicate well with them as we worked to meet demand and thanked them for their support. Things were going to get rough and we knew that maintaining the relationships would be our most important asset. Instead of selling, our sales team shifted to customer relations mode and their only instructions were to listen, to be honest, and to ask for the customers’ support while we fairly allocated remaining product and worked towards a solution.

Most customers were surprised by our openness and agreed to do their best to help us if and when we were back on track. But they were not going to hold open shelves for us for very long.

Just as we started to run out of stock, Theo came up with a solution. He realized that a lot of the innovation that we had achieved in the past two years to make our fruit essences purer and better tasting might also have made them more resistant to heat damage. We might now be able to use a more common bottling technique (“hot fill”) that had we had previously rejected because it ruined the flavor of our product. A quick 2 am test in our kitchen confirmed that this would work and six weeks later we had a bottler on each coast packaging Hint Water.

Is there one business decision you’ve made that stands out as something that completely changed the course of your journey or your strategy?

It took about a year to get our first products tasting the way I wanted them and another two years for us to figure out how to make them in a way that would have enough shelf life without using any preservatives. It would have been much easier to just use preservatives and get the products on the shelf much earlier. However, even though it cost us a lot of time and money not to compromise, it was the best decision we made as it would have totally compromised the product and everything we stand for.

It’s an ongoing thing rather than a specific business decision, but sticking to your mission is important. Our mission is to help people move away from sweet – all sweeteners.  A lot of people told us along the way “just add stevia, you will be bigger faster”, but I am so happy that we didn’t listen to them. Instead, we waited for the world to come around to recognizing what I knew – that sweeteners aren’t so great for you.

What are you favourite and least favourites parts of your job, and how do you tackle them?

Nothing is more important than our relationship with our customers, which is why one of us answers most emails from consumers, and that is still my favorite part of the job. But, there is a lot of stress being a CEO of a company. You have to be able to pay the bills and deal with issues… the buck stops here, and a lot of people don’t really want that.

What imprint would you like to leave on the wellness industry?

I’d like to show that you don’t have to sacrifice taste for health.

When I was first experimenting in my kitchen, I got a phone call from a mom who wanted to know where I got that raspberry water her kid had had at our house. She had searched the grocery shelves and bought every raspberry product she could find only to hear from her daughter “no, that’s not it.” I laughed and explained what I had made and she asked me how much sugar I had added and she couldn’t believe it when I told her “none.”

If we can help a generation of kids to actively seek out the healthier option, I would be very happy to leave that imprint.