From tech executive, to founder of the largest privately held beverage company in the world, Kara Goldin takes us on her journey and shows us that anyone can take their challenge and turn it into a scalable business.
My Guest:
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 received numerous accolades, including being named EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2017 Northern California and one of InStyle’s 2019 Badass 50. Previously, Kara was VP of Shopping Partnerships at America Online. She hosts the podcast The Kara Goldin Show. Her first book, Undaunted: Overcoming Doubts and Doubters, was released October 2020 and is now a WSJ and Amazon Best Seller. Kara lives in the Bay Area with her family.
Pivotal Moments
· Kara founded her company hint 15 years ago. Kara was identified as a “disrupter”.
· Kara aspired to be a water drinker but wasn’t one, because it was boring. She wanted to come up with a way to make water sweet without any sweeteners or sugar.
· Kara was a tech executive. She had no experience in the product market.
· She saw the whole in the market and found it like a game trying and testing.
· It was Kara’s own reasons that she wanted to create this product she was trying to fix her own issues.
· This product was great for people with Type 2 diabetes.
· Kara found that her product was for the consumers that have been drinking healthy perception products.
· Kara’s product landed in the shelves of whole foods. The way she did this was she went into the shop and started talking to the shelf stocker. And moved forward from there.
· Kara still had days when she was doubtful that it would work.
· Kara wrote a book too.
Advice
For those who are thinking of changing career, when in your career and you get bumped up the ladder of becoming managers it can be very daunting to then go back down to the bottom of the ladder. But don’t worry, that is the only way to grow.
Quote:
Sometimes you don’t realize until later that the dots actually do connect.
Resources & Links:
Part 1 of this episode where you hear more go to estierand.com/111-1
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