Passion is Primary

So as you were recruiting people, what were the qualities you looked for in the founding team?

I think, you know, early on when you just have an idea and a couple of nice people with no beverage experience too... you know, I share this with entrepreneurs as well... that basically you hire people who have a passion and a belief for your brand. You don't have a lot of money to pay people. We certainly didn't have tons of money to pay people.

Did you look for passion over experience?

Passion. One-hundred percent. Yeah, passion. We did hire some people with experience early on but what we found was that it seemed like hiring people with beverage experience were actually the people that would ultimately help us get to get to the next level. It was then that we really took a step back and thought, "We're not really... well we're a beverage company certainly. (but) We're a company with a mission to actually help people get healthier and so if you can actually go in and really story-tell -- not just to consumers but also to buyers -- about why you're doing this and, you know my Diet Coke story of trying to get off of Diet Coke and drink water, and finding water boring? I mean that story was a lot for people to hear.

So early on you hired some people you thought, "beverage industry experience would come in handy," but it turned out passion was more what you needed. Did your hiring decisions change as well over time? Did you find yourself looking for different types of people?

They did and they didn't. I think passion still when I look at overall the people that have worked out best with Hint is is really people who do have that passion and really can speak to why they want to be here ultimately. But then you know when I look back on like our head of sales for example, he had always been in marketing prior to actually being in sales. He had been a founder of a beverage company, actually a small beverage company that sort of grew up inside of a large beverage company. But I remember when I was interviewing him for this role of head of sales he you know came to me and said, "I've never been a head of sales before, but I love your product and I've been in marketing," and where we were at that stage was we had gotten ourselves into lots of stores at this point but we were looking to go really from a foot and a half to two feet of space to four to six feet of space, and we needed somebody who could really look at the data. The spins data in particular, and really story-tell around how you ultimately, what these buyers are missing around growing the product.