Taking the Plunge

Before you started Hint, you were running ecommerce for AOL, and before that you were doing sales for companies like Time and CNN. How did you go from that to deciding to take the plunge and start a new company and be an entrepreneur?

I had gained a bunch of weight while I was having lots of kids and also as you mentioned my skin had really developed severe acne that I had never had even as a teenager. And then also, just my energy levels were really low and I thought if I could just get that back in you know in a good place prior to actually finding another role then maybe you know, that would just help me to go start fresh at a new job.

And that's when I really looked at my diet and saw that there were really wasn't any major issues on the food side, but on the drink side, when I started reading labels and saw that there were so many ingredients that I didn't understand and my diet soda, the diet coke in particular, that I really thought that I should change that and try and drink plain water and I remember saying to my husband, "Okay, I'm just gonna stop drinking diet soda." And he said, "You've been drinking diet soda for a long time. Did you really think you could just stop cold turkey?" And I did. I mean they we're probably the worst two weeks of my life because I went through all kinds of withdrawals and not just headaches but also stomach issues, and I sort of felt like I had the worst case of the flu that I had ever had.

But you didn't have any entrepreneurial experience so were you scared? What made you decide to just plunge in like that?

I think I really looked at it from a health perspective -- that if I could actually just go in and do this and really help a lot of other people, that I just thought, "We'll see what will happen."