What is up everyone? This is Alex Lieberman co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.

Welcome back to Founder's Journal, my personal audio diary where I give you the business builder the tools you need to think better in order to build better,

whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product.

And today I am back with a guest journal where I hand the keys of Founder's Journal to another incredible founder.

I am so excited to introduce Cara Golden, the founder and CEO of Hint Water.

Cara has been building Hint for the last 16 years as a consumer brand that creates products that help people live healthier lives.

Cara is also a published author, a frequent podcaster, and an all around incredible storyteller.

So let's kick this thing off.

Hi, I'm Cara Golden. I'm the founder and CEO of Hint. We are best known for our unsweetened flavored water, but we do a lot of other things as well to just help consumers stay healthy.

Cara, as a builder, what has been critical to your success?

Maybe I always did it a little bit, but I think it's so critical to business is thinking about the question, what can we do at every fork along the way.

So even when you are killing it, you don't stop and get complacent by thinking, okay, we're killing it. Let's just sit there and like let it go.

But also how do you continue if you ask yourself that question, like what else can we do, then you start to dream and have goals and all of those things.

But on the flip side, when things like a pandemic come along or in our case, when Starbucks, we went into Starbucks, a few years back, and that was an exciting day.

We were told that we were going into 11,000 locations with our Blackberry Hint and big news were killing it. We're going to be all over the US.

I remember thinking, okay, I'm going to make sure that I understand the goal of what will they be happy with. So I specifically asked the buyer, I said, so what is success?

They said, a bottle and a half per store per day, and we will be happy. And I said, okay, so we roll out, takes me six months to get to a bottle and a half per store per day.

I was looking at the reports every single day after six months, it started going beyond that by the time a year and a half rolled out, we were at almost three bottles per store per day.

We're killing it and so, so happy. And suddenly I get the email from the new buyer wants to introduce herself and thinking, okay, just say hi, it's all good.

And she said, I have some very bad news for you. And I said, well, it can't be that bad. We're doing three bottles per store per day.

And she said, unfortunately, we've changed strategy. This comes from the top. Basically, we're going to add food to the case.

And I'm thinking, well, you need water, you need hint water with your food. And she said, you know, it's a decision around the margins are better, the ring is higher, all made total sense.

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