This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, welcome to Side Hustle 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? And today's short story features Elisa Paspakova from Los Angeles. She is the founder of Kindroot, herbal supplements, known as hard candy gone good, plant powered lozenges 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 Elisa about that, and then I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap up. [Music]
My name is Elisa and I'm the founder of Kindroot. We make herbal and vitamin infused supplement lozenges. I created this product after struggling with my own immunity issues and having felt amazing health 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. There 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. First, 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 pitch, 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, they told me last minute that they wanted to change my ingredients for us to kind of move forward.
And this change was pretty significant. It's something that would have jeopardized division integrity of my product. At this point, I also had spent 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 another few weeks and I decided to sleep on it and see if perhaps I could solve it another way. So 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 a 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, we 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 worker start manufacturing myself. This actually in the long run ended up working out better for me because I could slowly ramp up my production and I didn't have to invest a ton of money into placing a very large order with a product manufacturer.
I also over the next year was evolving my product and changing some ingredients and reformulations I was hearing from my customers and I could kind of do it on a batch to batch basis because I was essentially producing every single week. And I think the other biggest learning for me was just realizing that I'm capable of solutions beyond what is standard and that there's always a different and perhaps a scrappy way of starting out. You don't need somebody established to show you the way. You can create it yourself and manufacturing with my own hands allow me to learn the ins and outs of production and my products. So now I really believe that I'm an expert in what I do.
And then later, as I was already getting into stores and I was manufacturing my product, I actually was able to find a wonderful manufacturing partner that is currently producing the product for me. And I think that I am just such a better partner for them too because I have this appreciation for how difficult production is. And so I really looked to partner with them on everything that we do together. Looking back, I still think that the experience of hearing rejection was important because it made me realize just how much I wanted to launch my product and how determined I was to make it happen. But I probably could have saved myself a lot of anxiety and sleepless nights if I had just caught the search earlier and focused on self manufacturing which would have allowed me to come to market earlier and probably gather learnings earlier on too and save some money.
But at the end of the day, I do believe that everything happens for a reason. And ultimately, Today Kind Root can be found on target.com we're in Thrive Market and Amazon and many other places. So I truly believe that we're going at the right pace to the right place. [Music]
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. That is the theme of Failure Friday.
Thanks so much, Alisa. I really appreciate that story. I love what she said about how she's capable of solutions beyond what is standard. You too listeners, you are capable of solutions beyond what is standard. Let that sink in.
I also like what she said about how she needed to hear that rejection. She needed to have that rejection to get to the next point in her story. Listeners, check out her website kindroot.com just like it sounds, Kind Root. Or follow her on TikTok at Kind Root Gems. You can also look for her products at Target or Thrive Market as mentioned.
And if you have a question or an update for us about your hustle, let me know as well, sidehustleschool.com/questions. This has been episode 2008. Thank you for tuning in today. I hope you'll come back tomorrow. New episode every day.
I'm so excited to bring you these stories. I hope you enjoy them as well. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
