The Acid Test — Do it Early

My husband's a New Yorker and he said if we can't launch it in New York successfully then maybe it's not really a brand that's gonna scale -- because maybe it's just a nice little San Francisco brand. But you know, maybe we need to actually see whether or not it will be successful in New York. You know, I look back on that decision, now I've had tons of food and beverage companies talk to me about that and you know, New York is you know it's a very compact area but it's a it's a big area for beverages and very very soon we realized that it was actually the same demand that we saw here in San Francisco. Which was, "Yeah! We would absolutely drink this product if you got it into more stores here." And so we started building up a team there and and it's a lot more up and down the street of getting it into, you know there's a lot of stores in New York, and I still feel like there's lots of space for us to get it in there too.

Huge validation -- and what we saw early on, too, was that... and I share this as well with entrepreneurs... is that if you can actually figure out early on whether or not you could you can spend some money at a market to try and figure out whether or not you can be successful, then I think you can also ultimately figure out whether or not you should go spend to raise money and and actually do things. That was a cheap way for us to actually figure out whether or not this was a brand that could ultimately scale across the U.S.