Hey there, welcome to Side-Asel School. Welcome as well to a brand new month. We've got a lot of things coming up over the next few weeks. I'm excited to share with you.

Beginning with today's failure Friday segment, I always enjoy working on this one. Failure Friday is a collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course failure. All the things that go wrong, all the things that are difficult, from which hopefully we emerge victorious at some point, having learned some sort of lesson, but of course the process of going through that is not always pleasant.

So we like to look at these stories in depth and just hear from somebody about what it was like. One of our featured case studies often, some other small business owner entrepreneur out there, and these stories have varied quite a bit, but often we kind of look at idea to reality and then processing that reality.

Right, you had an idea, something else happened, what did you learn or take away from it?

In today's short story features, Alisa Paspacoba from Los Angeles. She is the founder of Kindroot, herbal supplements known as hard candy gone good, plant powered, lasanges, for mind and body wellness.

Now the business is up and running now, it's going strong, it's in lots of retailers, but it wasn't going so strong when it was getting started. In fact, she had a hard time getting it going.

So let's hear the story from Alisa about that and then I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap up.

My name is Alisa and I'm the founder of Kindroot. We make herbal and vitamin and pues supplement lasanges. I created this product after struggling with my own immunity issues and having felt amazing,

and I had the benefits of taking herbs and supplements. I really wanted to tell everybody about them, but when I would tell my friends very often I would hear that they hated the taste of different textures and powders, so I decided to create a new kind of supplement.

That one that would be delicious and beneficial and one that people would actually look forward to taking.

It wasn't really anything on the market like this product, so I knew that it would take a bit to find a manufacturer to partner with, but I really didn't anticipate the extent of difficulties that was about to face.

I spent close to six months calling different factories and trying to get in touch with people to convince them to partner with me.

It was almost impossible to get them on the phone. Some of them right away would tell me that they don't work with startups and end the conversation there. Others would listen to my page, but would tell me at the end that there's no way it could be successful with this type of product.

And why did I think this would work? I was getting pretty desperate and discouraged and I finally found one factory that was interested, but after almost three months of conversations with them, multiple meetings, samples.

It showed me last minute that they wanted to change my ingredients for us to kind of move forward. And this change was pretty significant and something that would have jeopardized the vision integrity of my product.

At this point, I also had spend money on flights, meetings, sample ingredients, and after six months, I really didn't have much to show for it. And this was particularly difficult because I was using my own savings to finance this. So every delay just meant that I was that much further away from being able to launch something.

And also, I really didn't have unlimited funds to be able to iterate and fly around and meet with more manufacturers. Quite honestly, there was a point when I contemplated not moving forward with my idea because I just didn't see that anyone could make or formulate it.

But before shutting it all down, I just gave myself, you know, another few weeks and I decided to sleep on it and see if perhaps I could solve it another way.

Having walked away from this really strict and rigid idea that somebody else had to make my product, that it had to be made in the factory, that it had to be somebody professional.

I just thought about, hey, what if I make it myself? I came up with this idea, so why not just take matters into my own hands. And so I decided to learn. And I found an amazing candy scientist who was excited about developing something this unique.

So together over the next few months, we figured out the blends with tested 30 different formulas and ingredients and finally settled on four of them.

We also figured out a manual process for manufacturing and I found a local commercial kitchen work that stopped manufacturing myself.

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