It’s hard to start your own business when it’s something no one has done yet. But by pursuing it, you are actually creating your own opportunities. This is what Kara Goldin did. Kara is the Founder and CEO of Hint, Inc. and she didn’t even start in the beverage industry. She had a good job, so why did she quit to start a beverage company? Kara joins Elliot Begoun in this episode to share how she started Hint and her mission to help people stay healthy. She also talks about her book called Undaunted. Listen in to discover what made her take the leap and how you can do it, too.

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Creating Your Own Opportunities To Achieve Success With Kara Goldin

I’m excited about our guest and the conversation we’re about to have. Just a quick founder shout-out, I want to talk about Riff. It is a cold brewed brand that started up in the Pacific Northwest and then recognized that they had an opportunity or maybe even an obligation. As part of the coffee trade, there was a by waste product of the coffee fruit going unused and creating quite a challenge ecologically and also limiting the opportunities for growers. They wanted to solve that problem.

They introduced their line of energy plus, which takes the coffee fruit, the unused portion of coffee and converts it into a cascara energy drink, an all-natural drink. It’s a cool approach to solve these three things, clean energy, a product that is part of the circular economy and is taking care of its waste stream, a product that is good for you, simple and accessible. Check them out at RiffColdBrewed.com. If you want to learn more, send me a message and I’ll connect you with the team.

Let’s get started. I have an amazing founder, a mentor to many and somebody who is everything that’s emblematic of what we talk about. A founder who has proven to be nimble, capital-efficient, resilient. Kara Goldin is with me from Hint. Also, we’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about her newest book Undaunted, which landed at the most opportune time. Life is challenging in this limbo between post-pandemic, still in the throes of the pandemic and all of the shit that’s hit the fan over the past months. The message is critical. This conversation hopefully will solve some concerns and open some eyes. Kara, thanks so much for taking the time out of your extraordinarily busy schedule. For the one person who’s reading, they may not know who the hell you are. Why don’t you share a little bit about you and your background?

Thanks for the introduction. I started Hint many years ago, which is crazy to think. Time flies when you’re having fun but I did not come from the beverage industry. I came from the tech industry. I started my career working in traditional media at Time Magazine and then worked for a late-stage startup called CNN back in the days where Ted Turner was still running around the office with this idea that everyone had to have 24-hour news. I went on to work for a tech startup in Silicon Valley that was a spinout of Apple, a little-known Steve Jobs idea that was doing CD-ROM shopping and what would be termed as the early days of the internet in the mid-’90s. It ended up getting acquired shortly after I was there by another startup called America Online. I was tasked with building this thing that was never supposed to happen or at least not for a long time, eCommerce and shopping, which ended up after seven years under my reign as a $1 billion company inside of AOL.

That’s when I decided to take a break, stop getting to know the United Airlines pilots since I was on the plane every week, flying all over the place with AOL and spend some time with my family. That was the point when I decided after taking a couple of years off before looking for another job in tech since I thought that’s where my experience was and phone calls were coming in from to recruit me. I cared about my health, my family’s health, my kids’ health. I wouldn’t even term it that back then but I had a terrible addiction to Diet Coke. I could not live through a day without Diet Coke. I was a very horrible person without my Diet Coke.

I was drinking depending on the day, anywhere from 7 to 12 a day. Since I was 14, 15 years old in Arizona growing up as a gymnast, it was at that point that I decided I want to get rid of it, try and drink plain water but I realized that I was never a water drinker. That’s why I didn’t drink it. I knew that I was supposed to drink eight-plus glasses of water a day but I instead was using Diet Coke as my vice for trying to drink that water.

That’s when I did a test. I made to switch to plain water and realized that it changed my health. I had not only lost a bunch of weight when I made that change. Pretty quickly in two and a half weeks, I lost over 20 pounds, 24 pounds in two and a half weeks. The skin cleared up and some other health issues. That’s when I started to look at ingredients and started to realize what I term as so many products that are healthy perception versus healthy reality.

I wanted to drink water that tasted better without sweeteners in it. I thought maybe I wasn’t shopping at the right stores. I couldn’t believe that a product with fruit in it was not out there. That’s when I went to my local whole foods. I didn’t have a job so I was craving adult interactions. I went to whole foods and started talking to the guy stocking the shelves in my local whole foods. I said, “How do I get a product on the market?”

My husband was a little concerned after a while when I kept coming home. I said, “I was talking to the guy at whole foods.” That was the early days of Hint. As I was saying to a group, I never freaked myself out by saying, “I’m going to go start my own company. I’m going to go be an entrepreneur.” For me, it was this idea that I had for solving a problem that I believed that a lot of other people had and that may be a lot of people didn’t get yet. I decided that if I launched this product, I could not only help people enjoy the water but also, I could help people get healthy.

If nothing good came out of the pandemic, it’s that people care about their health. They don’t want to get sick. They’re paying more and more attention. We talked about health and wellness, how that is the hottest thing that any Wall Street executive will tell you that. More than anything, for me, I saw that I had this mission and this purpose that frankly, I didn’t even know that I was launching. I knew I was launching a product and a company. I didn’t know I was launching an entirely new category.

That is a whole other topic that we can talk about when you think you’ve got this gold of an idea and this gem. You think, “No one else is doing it. I’m going to go do it.” The challenge with that is that not only you’re probably ahead of the consumer and maybe the buyers as well that are making the decisions to get you on the shelf but also it may take longer. Competition is something that’s not a bad thing because it helps you to validate that the concept and the idea that you have is worthy.

Being a category creator is hard.

It takes a long time, whether you’re in the food and beverage or any other industry. It certainly helped that I had either directly or indirectly worked for other entrepreneurs and tech in particular, as well as in media because I saw the challenges of a visionary entrepreneur. As Steve Jobs used to say, “The dots eventually connect.” It was my journey and my purpose to go and do these things knowing that I would launch my company but it had some roads along the way, twists and turns, bumps, however, you want to describe it that was challenging for sure.

What was the impetus for writing this book? Why take the time out of an already busy, crazy schedule to put pen to paper?

It was my exact reaction. I was doing a ton of public speaking over the past few years. It was years ago when I decided that I was being hired to come inside of companies, speak about my journey, how I did it and also at conferences. I thought there are lots of things. It’s always that Q&A at the end when people are asking you questions that sometimes there are some questions that stump you and you start to pick up things that maybe you didn’t think about when you were sitting inside or sitting up on the stage thinking about the answer.

I started jotting down ideas instead of watching television when I got back in my hotel room. That turned into a journal that I carried around with me. I was constantly journaling on my plane flights, as well as inside the hotel room at night. After a few years, that ended up to be almost 600 pages of a journal that I was talking about all these stories that would come to mind. As we always joke around at Hint that we should have started running videos and had a reality show. We would have made way more money doing that because there was a lot of stuff along the way that was not only challenging and weren’t so funny at the time but also some of them were pretty funny.

I came back one day from a trip. I asked a friend of mine who was an author. I said, “How do I bind my journal? I feel like there are lots of entrepreneurs out there or want to be entrepreneurs out there that would benefit from some of the challenges that I’ve had, hearing my story on how I got through.” She said, “Do you mean write a book?” I said, “No. I’m a CEO of a company. I don’t have time to write a book.” She said, “Give me the journal. You have at least one book, possibly two books in here. You should get this out there.” That was it.

Going back to the purpose of Hint, I didn’t start Hint to start a beverage company. I started Hint to help a lot of people. This was exactly the same purpose. I wouldn’t have written a book just to tell people my story. I wrote the book because I felt like through my own story, I could help people to realize that it’s not so clear cut exactly how things need to be done, important things like fly the airplane as you’re building it, things I’ve named my chapters along the way that hopefully will help people to make the right decisions and starting their own company or running their own company.

First of all, it’s like an encapsulation of so many founders’ journeys in terms of the high-level lessons here. I want to dive into some of the chapter headings because I thought those were great and there are a few that I want to make sure that we touch upon, even the title Undaunted: Overcoming Doubts and Doubters. We talk about this a lot. There are two constant companions that every founder has with them on the journey. On one shoulder is fear and on the other shoulder is doubt. Those are two constant things that chirp in your ear that you’re telling yourself and others are happy to tell you too. As you wrote this book, why did you choose Undaunted?

I did not have the name of the book. We had tossed around a bunch of different names. I turned in my manuscript at the end of January 2020, which was the beginning of the pandemic. Many people didn’t realize, including me that we were headed into that but I still didn’t have a title. It was in mid-March of 2020 when I was getting pressure to come up with this title. Also, the world was changing. I’m not only running a company that is responsible for 200 people in the company and figuring out exactly do we close offices down. All of these issues are going on but in addition to that, we’re an FDA-regulated essential product, which has its own challenges with it.

For me, it seemed so obvious. A few people have thrown out the name, not for the book but had said, “How are you so calm during this whole time knowing that you have to continue moving forward?” I said, “That’s what I’m focusing on.” If you live undaunted, you figure it out. You figure out exactly how you do continue moving forward. The biggest challenge that so many people have is that they build up these walls and they freeze.

Many companies did that during the pandemic that probably shouldn’t have. They probably should have figured out how to move forward. There are situations where you need to figure out, maybe not to stop but you slow down. You figure it out so that you don’t make some bad decisions. The best entrepreneurs are the ones that do have those two things sitting on their shoulders. A little bit of fear, a little bit of doubt but also has this curiosity and this ability to wrap their brain around, figuring out how to move forward.

Curiosity is an interesting way to phrase it, asking questions, looking for answers and being the student. Listening to you, the other thing that goes hand-in-hand with being undaunted is you’re right. I agree with you. The most successful founders are the ones that wear those two things on each of their shoulders proudly but still persevere and still move forward. That’s the definition of courage. It’s continuing to move forward, even with fear and doubt. Not letting it paralyze you.

It’s funny that you call it courage. Sometimes courage is easier to see from the rearview mirror. There are many people who call what is termed as courage as crazy. I worked for those people. They’re called visionary entrepreneurs. They’re called courageous but until people get it, they can’t call you courageous. They think it’s stupid. Who needs it? When you’ve got this doubt sitting on one shoulder, you also have these doubters feeding into it. Your family and friends are the worst. They don’t intend to be but they’re the worst. “What are you doing? You were the youngest vice president in America Online. You’re one of the few females at that level. You’ve made it in tech. Why are you jumping off the train, going and starting a beverage company?”

When I had the opportunity to sit down with people, talk about my purpose and if I could change health in the world and get people off of not only sugar but also diet sweeteners, it would be a great world. I would feel that would be something that I would feel proud about that I contributed in some way to that effort. Yet there were many people that didn’t think that was necessary or needed. It’s changed now but not years ago.

I still think people would think you’re crazy for doing what you’re doing. The reality is that’s the difference between an entrepreneur and the average person. I believe that there’s something innate about true entrepreneurs. The difference is I hear this all the time. Entrepreneurs are risk-takers. I don’t believe that to be true. There is risk taking entrepreneurs and less risky entrepreneurs. It’s more so where they view the risk.

Most people view the risk in taking action. Entrepreneurs view the risk as not taking action. They feel like, “If I don’t do this, if I’m not the one to solve this problem, if I’m not the one to fill this need, I’m always going to regret it or somebody else is going to do it.” Not taking action is the bigger risk. They’re just as frightened, fearful and worried about how they’re going to pay their mortgage or do all of the things as anybody else but they see the risk in inaction versus action.

It’s interesting even coming into the food and beverage industry. The people that are in tech, in general, are maybe a little more used to it and believing that there’s testing. You go out and try something and then you can shift and change. When you think about the beverage industry, I’ll pick on Coca-Cola for a minute, while they’ve quietly reformulated over the years, the idea is, “Let’s go launch a product and it either succeeds or it fails.” It’s like entrepreneurism. It’s usually not that black and white. The people inside of the big soda companies might disagree with me. They might say, “It didn’t sell.”

What was the reason behind it? Is it just about the taste? Is it about lots of other components? Certainly, health. If you were to launch a full-sugar soda, it’s probably not the right time to do that. There’s this idea of, “Let’s go out, try it, see what happens and also make adjustments that exist inside of tech that doesn’t necessarily exist in other industries.” That’s what I saw so clearly that I was walking into.

As my dad used to say to me all the time when I was weighing heavy decisions, “What’s the worst that can happen?” He would make me think about that. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up. We’re a middle-class family. I was the last of five kids. My dad would look at what it was going to cost me to do this in the early day as him. That was how he evaluated risk. For me, I’ve always thought about that when I come to this place where I have this wall sitting in front of me and sitting in front of our company. I think, “What is the risk? What is the worst that can happen?”

Our youngest son is starting law school. He’s been suffering the pains of the week, all jokingly adulting. That has been my mantra to them. “What’s the worst that can happen? Let’s talk it through.” I feel very old because that’s such a dad thing to do. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about some of the chapters in particular that resonated with me but I also feel like any of the founders that we spend time with, these are the things that are so top of mind for them. Maybe talk a little bit about each of these topics. We won’t hit all twelve. One that is so critical is to create your own opportunities. Can you take 1 moment or 2 and talk about that?

I was always creating my own opportunities. I have poor parents. I was the last of five kids. My parents didn’t have me until they were 40. Let’s say they were a little tired by the time I rolled around. I’m creating my own opportunities and figuring things out that I was going to go and do. There were times that it didn’t work out the way that I wanted to but generally, I had pretty good luck if I kept moving forward, the same kind of lessons throughout life.

Ultimately, when I was graduating from college, I was a journalism major with a minor in finance. I learned about finance through not only my classes at school but also through two publications, Fortune Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal, to me, was a lot of text and very dry. Fortune had pictures. It was very visual. It was simplified with a lot of big concepts. That’s when I made the decision.

My friends that I went to school with still laugh about it because they said, “What are you going to do after graduation?” I said, “I’m buying a plane ticket and going to New York. I’m going to go work for Fortune Magazine.” They said, “How are you going to do that?” They believed that I was going to do it because when I set my mind to something, I would do it. I said, “I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out yet but I need to get the address. I’m going to walk in there and I’m going to tell them why they need to hire me.”

It was scary. The fear and the doubt were there but I decided this is what’s going to happen. First, I thought maybe I’ll write a letter to the guy in the masthead that was the managing editor, Marshall Loeb and see what he says. He wrote me this very nice letter back saying, “If you’re ever in the New York area, let us know. You sound enthusiastic.” I took that as gold. I wasn’t going to ask for permission to come and meet with them, instead, I showed up in the HR office and created my opportunity.

Unfortunately, they wouldn’t see me. They didn’t have any entry-level positions at Fortune but while I was there, I figured what’s the worst that can happen. I said, “Do you have other publications in the building? Are there any other jobs?” The head of HR didn’t know what to do with me. I said, “I’m leaving tomorrow. If there’s anything, I’ll clear my afternoon for you. I’ll stay here.” She said, “There is one at Time.” I got an interview and I got the job. It was crazy. It wasn’t some fancy job. I was an executive assistant. It was an entry-level job. I kept thinking in my head eventually, I’ll get to Fortune Magazine, which I never did but I met a ton of people.

Frankly, that job I still think about. I tell a lot of people who are just starting out that I never thought that was what was even occurring while I was there but I was working on subscriptions. A lot of the learning and elements of direct to consumer, I learned in circulation at time in those early days. How do you price things? What are the words that are used in order to get people to buy? What is the difference between a loyal consumer and a new consumer? All of those things. That was my first job and that wouldn’t have happened if I wouldn’t have created my own opportunity.

I was having a conversation with somebody. They were fairly new in their career. They were lamenting the fact like, “I don’t feel like I’m working my purpose. I’m not doing that yet.” I do remember that being in my 20s, even 30s, thinking about that. In my mid-50s, I look back and I think I was. You have to recognize that early in your career, opportunities that may seem menial or unimportant are often the seeds of so many of your lessons, so many of your skills, so much of your network, so many of the opportunities that you will leverage and use later. They are building blocks. They are giving you the opportunity to, in fact, live your purpose. Let me jump to chapter six, which is so important as well and that is to figure it out. Let’s talk about that.

There are so many stories that frankly were even cut from the book because it’s a matter of looking at what can be done. It’s a secondary point to figure it out. Often, we think, “We have to freeze. We have to stop,” instead of try and move a step forward, try and figure out what can be done. The challenge that so many people have is that they think that because something hasn’t been done before and experienced is the worst. They’ll say, “It can’t be done.” They assume that it can’t be done. Especially if they worked inside of large companies, that’s what they’re taught.

They’ve been spending too much time thinking that something can’t be done when maybe it can. You have to figure out, “How do I go test these things? How do I take it a little step forward?” For example, when we launched Hint, I wanted a product that didn’t have sweeteners in it, didn’t have coloring in it but also didn’t have preservatives in it. I kept trying to find a way to do our product without preservatives. I went around to a bunch of different co-packers and said, “I want to do a product with no preservatives.” Nobody would run the product because they were like, “There’s real stuff in here. We don’t want to be liable for a product that’s going to make people sick or worse.”

I said, “Why does something need preservatives? I know that it needs some sort of preservatives or something for shelf life but is there another way to do it?” Many of these co-packers kept saying, “There’s no way to do it.” I’d say, “Why?” Many of them were annoyed because they knew that I was this dumb tech executive who was asking, “Why?” A couple of them even said, “I don’t know the answer to that.” When I started to hear that they didn’t know the answer and they had been co-packing for many years, I’d say, “When I find out that answer, I’ll come back to you.” I did.

That’s when you start to engage people and get people to not only innovate and figure out but ultimately, we figured out how to create a product using real stuff and not use preservatives. We were the first product outside of fresh juice and some of the others were using pasteurization, which ultimately that’s what we ended up doing but nobody was doing it in the water category or in the soda category. Many still aren’t doing it. Frankly, if nothing else, that’s our gift to the beverage industry. We were able to figure out a way to do that using heat. No one had done that prior to Hint coming on the scene.

Part of it is figuring it out. Part of it hand-in-hand is being undaunted and persevere. Test the market. We talk a lot about having a growth hack mindset. A risk for a lot of entrepreneurs is that they start with conclusions or a set of beliefs. With that, they are fundamentally convinced that they’re right. They aren’t looking for signals that they’re not. What I try to encourage is to go out with more of that mad scientist growth hack mindset where you’re going to test everything, question everything, look for validation but embrace when it comes back as invalid because it signals its learning. Talk a little bit about test the market.

To your point, they are about entrepreneurs. It’s hard because you have to, depending on how you look at it. Fake it until you make it. Especially in the early days, you need to be confident to show people that they should support you or follow you in this, whether it’s a buyer, early employees or investors. I don’t fault people for trying to move forward in that way. It goes back to a little bit of fear and doubt. That’s always sitting. I can spot these entrepreneurs. I know them so well because I’ve been there but I also believe that they have to be able to try, figure out, be over-aware of where there are forks in the road and reset direction along the way as well.

What you’re speaking about too is a lot of the execution that I always share with entrepreneurs that an idea is a dime dozen. Unless you can execute on that idea and not only figure out how to move forward but also build a team that can help you move forward, raise money and all of that kind of stuff, the idea will go nowhere. There’s this balance and it’s exhausting to many people as well. When you are moving forward and suddenly you see, “I was going right but maybe I should go left.” There are so many entrepreneurs that say, “No. We told everyone we’re going right and so we’re going right.” That is not necessarily the way.

Another example is, “We said we were going to hit this number and so we’ve got to go and hit this number.” Maybe the only way you’re going to hit the number is to screw up your bottom line and take money from the wrong people. There’s this crazy balance that goes on that frankly, we’ve weathered pretty well along the way but there are many people that don’t get that until they’re in it. That’s what our experience has been.

I’m bummed because I’m purposely not asking a ton of the questions from the audience because we could hit all this but I wanted to make sure to get this last one and that is it is an attitude here a lot in entrepreneurship. Build the airplane while you’re flying it. Talk a bit about the ethos of that. Why that’s so important? Why it’s such a fundamental part of what you try to encourage others to do? Why has it’s been a fundamental part of your entrepreneurial journey?

You are not going to have all the answers. You have to figure out how to get that plane flying but you have to also have the ability. Touching on what I spoke about a little bit, you have to have the ability to readjust and understand, not only the EQ of what’s going on in the world as well too to make sure that you’re doing the right thing. I think of it so much of the time. This always is a struggle when you’re not picking the right investors because they think, “You got to hit this number.” They make these decisions that don’t make the company long-term all that viable.

Know that you’re going to have a 2.0 if you do it right. You’re going to be able to readjust and upgrade. I go back to the tech industry. You think about all the things that happen in tech. It’s so applicable for building any business. As I was mentioning to somebody, there are Apple phones sitting safe inside of Apple headquarters that are a few versions ahead. They’re watching exactly what’s going on with how the consumer is engaging. They’re looking at other technology, probably in other industries and other products that are out there that they’ll bring into those but they’re building the plane while they’re flying it.

That concept of look at what’s going on, see on a number of different factors how we can improve and then move forward. Don’t stop and not innovate. That’s something that so many entrepreneurs lose focus of and don’t pay attention to. There are so many examples from our experience, everything from the clear labels, the lighting in the stores, that even focus groups will have a hard time telling you. It’s pretty easy to trick the consumer in those focus groups. I’ve done many in my lifetime prior to Hint that I always tell people, “Figure out a way to get it on the shelf and to the consumer as cheaply as possible and see exactly what happens.” That’s a super important lesson.

It comes back to that concept of imperfect action and growth hacking. If you set out with questions versus conclusions, you put things out into the market, you iterate, adjust, change, embrace that and look at that as beneficial, not as a negative. There are two things I see. One is they get paralyzed because they don’t want to make mistakes or they’re waiting for perfection and that doesn’t work or they feel like, “My product is killing it. Things are going well. I’m done.” They get complacent. Consumers are amazingly fickle. They change, demands, wants and expectations change.

If you’re not trying to think 3 or 4 steps ahead in what’s next, what you need to do to get better and what you need to do to be different, your moment of optimization is going to be short-lived. I would love to spend more time. I’m going to have to have you back because there are lots more to talk about. How do people learn more? Where do they find the book? How would somebody get ahold of you?

The book is called Undaunted: Overcoming Doubts and Doubters. I would love it if everybody picked up a copy or download it on Audible. It’s on Amazon and other fine book stores as well. I’m all over social @KaraGoldin. Let me know if there’s anything that I can do to help along the way. I want people to learn from my own journey. You and I quickly talked about the pandemic. It’s been challenging for everybody. I’m a big believer that there are some readjustments that are happening that will ultimately benefit a lot of people, particularly around health. More than anything, just be aware and look at this as maybe a direction that you were headed in that maybe you need to adjust if things aren’t exactly going the way that you want. I write a lot about that on LinkedIn and other platforms that are out there.

If you’re not following Kara on social, you need to. To have a voice that is reminding us that, “This is hard but you can do it,” is a voice that needs to be heard for many of you. That’s so true to this book. I’m so appreciative that you put it out there and also appreciate that you have to take the time to chat with us. We will be reaching out. I’d love to have you back maybe in either as another show or maybe in some type of founder roundtable to have some conversations. You have a lot of wisdom to share and I appreciate it. Thanks, Kara for joining. Thanks, everybody for being part of this episode of the show. We’ll see us soon. Take care.

Thank you.

Important Links

• RiffColdBrewed.com

• Undaunted

• Hint

• Audible – Undaunted: Overcoming Doubts and Doubters with Kara Goldin

• Amazon – Undaunted: Overcoming Doubts and Doubters Hardcover

• @KaraGoldin – Instagram

About Kara Goldin

Kara Goldin is the Founder and CEO of Hint, Inc., best known for its award-winning Hint® water, the leading unsweetened flavored water. She has been named one of InStyle’s Badass 50, Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business, Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs, Fortune’s Most Innovative Women in Food & Drink and EY Entrepreneur of the Year for Northern California.

The Huffington Post listed her as one of six disruptors in business, alongside Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. Kara has successfully navigated the world of large companies and startups in many industries including media, tech and consumer products. In addition, she understands retail and direct to consumer well.

She is an active speaker & writer and hosts the podcast The Kara Goldin Show where she interviews founders, entrepreneurs and other disruptors across various industries. Kara’s first book, Undaunted, published by Harper Leadership, was released in October 2020. She lives in the Bay Area. Follow Kara on all social handles @KaraGoldin

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