 This is Starved to Storefront. Past decade has seen a meteoric rise in the popularity of sparkling water. The convenience of at-home soda streams gave way to LaCroix, which in term gave way to White Claw. Carbonated water isn't exactly new. In fact, it's much older than you'd likely guess. It was first invented in 1767 by suspending a bowl of water above a beer vat. The beverage has come a long way since then, highlighted by both small tweaks and huge leaps forward. Our guest today is Paul Vogie, co-founder of Aura Bora. In today's consumer market, there are staples like laze chips, skippy peanut butter, or LaCroix sparkling water. Before long, a new brand comes along with the intent to disrupt the market, like kettle chips or Justin's peanut butter. Paul created Aura Bora to be that sparkling water category disruptor. Since creating it, he's gained some notable fans, including Robert Herjavek, who closed the deal with Aura Bora on Shark Tank early last year. So listen in as we cover everything from how Paul told a white lie to get on the shelves of Whole Foods, why the Shark Tank audience is a perfect representation of the country, and why you should never drink essential oils. Now, on to the episode. Welcome to the podcast. On today's show, we're talking to Paul from Aura Bora. Thanks for joining. Thank you to you both. Happy to be here. Also, this is a shameful plug, but I'm such a fan of this product. So they had sent us a box of, I think, 12 of these, and my wife and I finished them in two days. And Nick got zero. Nick got zero. I got zero. Okay. They were sent to our house. Thank you for sending them. Usually we send everything here, but they were gone in two days, and I was like, we were just debating which one do we like the best. Yes. Like there was the kind of problem of there was too many good flavors, all of which reminded me of being on a beach. Good. So thank you for doing that. Of course. In a non-alcoholic fashion. Yeah. What made you want to start the company? Yeah. So first off, thanks for the compliment. The hope is that you and your wife debate over which was your favorite. Yes. And we've actually found, just I'll jump into data quickly. Our hope was, okay, you buy the Variety Pack. That's going to be our most popular product. Which is all good, by the way. Yes. There isn't a single bad one in the Variety Pack. Okay, good. This is good data. Yes. The hope though, I think with anyone in the Variety Pack, because you're hoping to like track repeat purchases and see, okay, to start with the Variety Pack, then they went to I'm drinking peppermint watermelon, again, shameful plug. And we can kind of see like where people's favorites are. Unfortunately, the most popular product to buy after you return is the Variety Pack. And then the third most popular product on your third return is still the Variety Pack. The fourth product, then we start to get split from flavors. What do you see there, lemongrass coconut? Give it to me. Was that your favorite? Maybe. I'm glad you said that. Lemongrass coconut is my favorite. It's my favorite. And it is the least popular. That's what's up. Both in retail and online. Not to us. Yeah. Not to us. We know. So two of the three people in this room right now. Yeah. And the third and he just doesn't know. I actually asked him. I was like, hey, did you bring in the Ouroboros? He's like, oh, sorry. Yeah, no. Well, I should have brought some today. I'm going to call that on me. Not on Diego. Because we made a good product. It's my fault. That he consumed fast. It's definitely my fault. Yeah. It's my fault when someone says their favorite is lemongrass now. I'm just like, oh, you must just have great taste then. Yeah. Because that's my favorite. Obviously. And most consumers just must not. That's the explanation. So the story, you asked how you started. Yeah. What made you want to start the company? Sure. Big sparkling water fan. Yes, I am. I grew up in a home that didn't have soda. So I grew up with a very health conscious mom. No Diet Coke. No Coca-Cola. No Mountain Dew. Okay. Almost never. Yeah. Birthday parties were so special because you'd like go to Chuck E. Cheese or whatever. And you knew like there was going to be that person that has. You just drank milk and water. Sparkling water. Water. Sparkling water. Yeah, yeah. When were you born? What year were you born? 1984. So my mom. Eighties, nineties drinking sparkling water. Yes. My mom was winning. She was ahead of the curve. She was for sure ahead of the curve. We were hooked on sparkling water. And my wife actually grew up in a very close by like 10 minutes away but in a very similar home with another kind of health conscious mom. So both of us were just addicted to sparkling water throw in people debate this. I'll call it like the summer of 2011 through 15. It felt like La Croix was everywhere. Everywhere. And everyone was wondering what is in this thing? Right. What is it? Keeps us wanting more. Exactly. It was annoying. And it was so addictive. And I was, you know, you're drinking so many of these cans. So the quick story is I was working at one of those offices with a fully stocked pantry. Same by the way. Okay. Where we had, we had kettle potato chips and Jenny's ice cream and Justin's peanut butter. And we had La Croix sparkling water. And it was a great office. And it felt like, okay, the thing that's definitely consumed the most both by me and by my coworkers is La Croix sparkling water. And it is by far the thing enjoyed the least. So we're all drinking the most conventional sparkling water. And none of us are remarking on it. But when I grabbed that kind of like one bag of chips per day, I'm like, oh, this is like great. Right. This is interesting. This is the premier brand that you listed. Yes. Yes. So those brands I list on purpose because the idea was, okay, could we make a craft sparkling water? And by that I mean those three bands that I just listed, Jenny's, Justin's, Kettle, was can we introduce flavors that you haven't seen in this category before? Ingredients, ideally more natural ingredients that you haven't seen in this category before. And finally, like a brand in a commodity category. Like there were times when ice cream and with potato chips and peanut butter were all commodities. And now they're very much not. And we all have our top five brands. So that was the idea. No one's doing this artistically. Topo Chico was doing it at the time, but with no flavors. And I wanted something different than like grapefruit and lime. The two flavors I was drinking the most from La Croix. That was 2019. So that was the beginning. That's how we got off. The way I think about this is if I'm going down this avenue, the alcohol, right, is also like going nuts, right? So maybe you're thinking, oh, I can maybe put some alcohol in this and have like a spike seltzer. Was that ever a decision? Or did you know this is what I want to do? I'm just going to go non-alcoholic. Yeah. I'm just, I guess I'm naturally a selfish person. So I was not drinking a lot of spike seltzer. Okay. And I still don't like, I'm not a good judge of this because I don't drink that much period. And when I do, it's generally not spike seltzer. But yeah, probably the, like the summer, as long as we're just branding summers with brands, I think white cloth summer was like 2016 in my mind. It's on a white cloth. I went from never seen it in my life too. It's everywhere. And so this is 2019 was when we started developing these flavors. So the idea was, yes, there is definitely more of an interest in sparkling water. I'm seeing the category explode and kind of push in other ways. So if you go into like whole foods today, you'll see category lines blurring. You have sparkling water and juice, sparkling water and CBD, sparkling water and neutropics, sparkling water and alcohol. And a lot of what I'll call like hybrid seltzers that seem to have consumers like dropping their category of entities. So we thought, okay, what if we do one that's like, specifically if I ask you your favorite juice, favorite sparkling water, you have an answer. And I would love to be able to say, Hey, if I ask you your favorite craft sparkling water with an herbal element, hopefully that's Aurobora. So that was the thought and the flavor profiles are hopefully things you've tried in other mediums, but you haven't really tried in sparkling water. Like how did you go about just the flavoring of it? Right? Like what is that process like food scientists? What is that like a bunch of extracts you're trying? Exactly. So we had a soda stream in our kitchen. My wife's name is Maddie. So at the time we were living in Denver, Colorado. And to be honest, it wasn't like we started this saying like, great, and we're going to get in a bunch of stores. It was truly like, Hey, we're actually buying a lot of this and just mowing through it. It's like drink eight cans at work, drink three cans all working in the evening. And we had a soda stream and just felt like, OK, let's see if we can do similar flavors that we have at work. And then we thought, oh, why don't we just have like wild flavors that we don't have at our office, like not grapefruit, not lime, et cetera. So we had a bunch of at the time of their essential oils, which later we found out like you shouldn't drink those. So if you're listening to this, like don't drink essential oils. But it was our way of getting like some way of flavoring it. And it was such a tiny, tiny amount. Like those are such potent ingredients. So that's how we started. I want to say once we had like 12 or 13 recipes, someone suggested like, hey, you should probably talk to a food scientist, which I was like, great. What's a food scientist? Sounds like a fake job. You're like, I'm so sick from just chugging. Exactly. I was like, oh, should I talk to a food scientist or a real scientist? Because the whining of my esophagus is done. So at the time I'll mention we were in Colorado. I was so foolish to this industry, like living outside of Boulder, Colorado and being in natural products. It is a great place. It's like it's be like living here in West Hollywood and wanting to be an actor. Like it's so weird. Everyone I run do is a producer or a showrunner or an actor or agent. A lot of beer makers, master brewers. Yes. So I was outside Boulder trying to figure out, hey, what's a food scientist? Where do we find aluminum cans? What's a co-packer? And it felt like everyone I ran into was so helpful. And at the time I just thought, man, like entrepreneurship is easy. Everyone's connected to this industry. Now I know. No, we were just living right next to the hub of natural products. Yes, the epicenter. So the next step was getting a food scientist, figuring out which of these 12 flavors could we make in a huge capacity in a big tank and then doing what everyone does, like forcing your friends and family to drink hopefully decreasingly disgusting things until they get increasingly delicious things. So probably 30 iterations of that until we felt like, OK, we have five flavors that are really ready to go. And did you know right away to put them in a variety pack? No. No. In fact, the online thing came later. Yeah, I was going to say, mentally, I would think the opposite. You want to go with your banger product, your number one, your hero. Yeah, and you and a number of business school classes agree with you. Right. And they'd be wrong. Don't go to business school, everyone. They could be wrong. No, we started. So at the end of 2019, we went to a trade show. This was in Boulder. And I had 1,000 cans of Oroborra in the world that I had canned that morning with this tiny, like, can spinning machine. And I was like, trying to keep the carbonation from one spot to the next spot. But I had, like, the can in one corner and the carbonator in the other corner. Anyway, we finally had 1,000 of them. So 1,000 were in the world. And I kind of thought, OK, if this trade show goes well, let's swipe our credit card and do a first production run. And it goes poorly. I'll just drink these 1,000 cans over the course of the next, like, 50 days. And no big deal. Luckily, at that trade show, there was a buyer from Whole Foods who they don't identify themselves. Like, buyers from Whole Foods are notorious for, they'll go to the trade shows, they'll get the name tag, and they'll, like, put it in their sweatshirt and then wear a sweatshirt. We're not wearing the name tag at all. Why is that? They just don't want to be harassed by people like me. Got it. And people like me harass them. This is their ticket. They don't want to, yeah. Exactly. Yes. And people like me that are desperate in trying to validate their idea and they know this is their validation. So I didn't talk to the buyer from Whole Foods, or at least I didn't see them. But I thought I saw someone in the gymnasium that this trade show was occurring in that looked like a buyer from Whole Foods. What do they look like? She looked to be, like, kind of avoiding people. OK. She had her name tag. OK. She was a little bit tattooed. So the lack of name tag is the indicator. Lack of name tag, lack of talking to people. Got it. And, like, seemed to be, like, a little epicurious, like, in a good way. Like, interested in the mushroom jerky, interested in the alternative meats. So I drove the next day to, like, their office in Denver. I said, hey, I was at this trade show. The buyer was actually there and she asked me to drop off samples, which is a bit, a little bit of a white lie in that she did not ask me to drop off samples. Wow. She was there. But you didn't talk to her. No. And the person behind it. This is amazing, by the way. The person behind the desk said, oh, do you mean blank? And said her name. Yeah. And I was like, yes. That's blank. That's exactly right. And she said, yeah, was she tattooed and her hair color was this? And that was the woman I was referring to. I was like, yes. That's exactly right. She goes, oh, great. Her office is second door on the right. So you just call them. Oh, my God. Go to the office. Luckily she's not there because she would be like, we definitely did not meet yesterday. Right. Dropped off the box on her desk with a little note. And then I emailed the alias because I figured these trade shows are crazy. She probably met two or three people yesterday. Yeah. I could just fade into the background. Who knows who I was. So I sent an email saying, hey, thanks so much for letting me drop off the samples. They're on your desk. Would love to know what you think. And she replied within a minute, like, so great meeting you too, et cetera. And I was like, OK, great. Your hunch was right. Yes. So that was our first kind of major stamp of approval. Good for you. Yeah. Holy shit. Thanks. So OK, so then did she follow up and go, this product is it? She did. As with anything, you like, I'm always balancing the line of how soon is too soon to follow up, to harass people. Yeah. Again, this is why they don't wear the name tag. But you're from New York. So you're good. Yeah. Yeah, so for me, like 48 hours. So like a couple days later, maybe a week later, I sent her an email and she said, the whole office loves them. We'd love to move quickly. Let's get them on the shelf. This was like end of 2019. But she's not asking distribution questions. She's not asking how big your outfit is. No. She doesn't know it's just Paul and co. She has no idea. No idea. Thankfully. Which Whole Foods is a first mover. It looks like this. It mostly looked like this. It was in a sleeved can. Okay. Got it. But essentially the same look. Professional. Yes. Got it. Convey the message. Okay. No, it wasn't in a brown paper bag, although there are Whole Foods buyers that have said yes to products. Sure. Taste alone. Yeah. Yes. But you know, change your packaging. The negative was we wanted to launch on April 1st of 2020 in Whole Foods. Unfortunately, COVID was two weeks prior to that. So then they delayed it, delayed it, delayed it. Eventually hit the shelves in July. Which gives you time though. It did. So it was time to do production runs to sell elsewhere. Right. Like gather data, figure out which was going to be our best. So are you scrambling to get more space? More like capacity? Yeah. So at that point, I think that trade show is in November. This is the best story ever. I think that trade show is end of November. We did our very first like 40,000 can production run beginning of January. And like. It's a fire drill. Yeah. It was a fire drill. Absolutely. And if you're listening to this and you have a food or beverage product like that first. That's insane. Those first couple of production runs will be a fire drill. And like. Yeah. Oh, that's actually a good side story. I had a, I had a buyer ask is a buyer for a distributor. You know, you start with like these local regional distributors. They're like, yeah, just, you know, send over your pallet formation. Yeah. And so of course I was like, of course I'll send over our pallet formation. And that is like a thing you should get from a box company. And they should tell you like what is the proper dimensions of the box to fit on a standard pallet to go in a standard truck to not crush the product, et cetera. Okay. I know all that now. We've since done that a bunch of times. I just like found a pallet behind a target and had a bunch of boxes. Yeah. Exactly. And was like, okay, I think like 20 or so would fit. That's so. As you can imagine, we sent them like 10 different pallets. They were stacked 10 different ways. Because the whole point is they want to quickly be like 10 pallets times 156 cases. Great. Yeah. So I got reamed by that guy on the phone. Like, you know, what are you an idiot? And I was like, yes, that's exactly what I am. We nailed it. Anyway, I jumped in the deep end there, but that was the beginning. No, that's amazing. Okay. So then Whole Foods, are you in Whole Foods in July? Whole Foods in July. At that point, we were probably in like 250 other stores as well, just from driving around my Subaru and delivering samples and harassing managers and getting to know buyers in independent stores. And everyone's giving you the same feedback. The velocity off the shelf is going. People love it. Same thing. Yeah. And are you doing in-store tasting? Or you can't because of COVID? We did for the first, you know, three months. January, February, half of March. Okay. I did as many of those as possible. Mostly in the Bay Area. Smart. Which is a great audience to sample from. There's a lot of offices with food cabinets. I had a tech company. For sure. We were in San Francisco. That's the story. Did you have people like us walk in and sample too? All the time. Yeah. Great. But it was also, we just had LaCroix nonstop. I'm sure. Yeah. I remember that moment in time. That was like 2015, I believe. And so then you're 250 stores. And are you raising capital? Did you raise capital? Are you bootstrapping? So at that point, we had raised, I'd raised $200,000 from family and friends. Okay. And maybe a couple of those family and friends had invested in other food and beverages. Like I'd say maybe 20% of the group. Sure. But they just believed in you. I think so. Or like I similarly to the buyer stores just called them enough times. Yeah. That was the beginning. And then once we had Whole Foods and we had some data from like not just independent stores, but also a really well-known national chain. Yeah. Then we raised about a year later in the middle of 2020, we raised a like formal convertible note round. Okay. We've since raised a couple more times. It's like a feed round. Yep. Okay. So we had to move to Los Angeles. Not to Los Angeles. No, I moved to San Francisco. Okay, sorry. So I should have said that. Yeah. So we were outside of Boulder, started the product there. We had our first manufacturer there. I was kind of going back and forth. My wife Maddie, who's a creative director for a tech company, got recruited to move to San Francisco, which there's some humor there of I thought, hey, worst case scenario, this water thing doesn't work. And we live in Denver and we can live off one salary. And it's like relatively cheap to live here compared. And maybe two weeks after we had that conversation, like I quit my job, I'm starting to sell this water. And I was like, okay, well, we better sell a lot of water. Yeah. Yeah. How were you pricing at the beginning? Like, how did you figure that out? Are you just like, let's just aim here. Yeah. Like here's what our competitors are at. Exactly. Yeah, there's this delicate balance. Some of it is like, what is the competition? Some of it is I didn't know the margins of each store. And now I know that is like a very uncomfortable question to ask. 100%. Like I joke. It's like asking like, oh, how much do you weigh? And if you don't know that's a sensitive question. Like when you're a child, you'll ask that it's just a number. Right. So I would ask stores that because at first we didn't have a distributor. So I'm going to each store and I want the price to be roughly the same. But some of these stores are bodegas or convenience stores that take a 42 point margin. Some of these are more supermarket. I take a 35 point margin. Some of them are in the middle. They're like, I think everyone's 45. I think right. Everyone is. Yes. Definitely close to 50. So I was trying to figure that out so I could get the price accordingly. Now the stores. They don't care about price parity. They want the best possible price. Right. So for a number of weeks, I was going to stores like great, great, you want it awesome. Hey, what's your margin so I can figure out what to sell to you for. Oh, wow. And again, they're like, are you like, are you dumb? And I was like, yes, I am. I'm here. I'm just like the dumb guy with water. So good. Now we understand. And there's some price disparity. But yeah. Still. Yes. But then you can just run a fun sale. You could be like, look, we're going to give you a sale. That's right. Have some creativity with it. And generally, you know, independent stores have higher prices not because they know their consumers will pay more. They just have worse deals with the distributors. So you sell to one distributor on their Whole Foods than they do with, say, you know, John's groceries on the corner. Are you in every state now? Yeah. We are still mostly West Coast. Yeah. We're in probably just shy of 3,000 stores. I just wonder what I think about like the sparkling water market. I wonder where it's like more heavily concentrated. I think we can say in California. Yeah. Warmer climate is probably maybe deduce. There is. We get to do some of that. Yes. There's a lot of, I didn't know the seasonality of the product. Are you in Indiana is the question. We are. We're in Lavender, Cucumber. Just two. Just two. We're working on the others. Some stores, especially, I think there is a reputation amongst stores in the Midwest of this is just another California brand. Let's see if it really resonates with our audience. So we're in that phase right now. It's fresh time. So you talked about the seasonality of the product. Yeah. Is that just the product as a whole? Or have you noticed it for specific flavors as well? No. Good question. So for sparkling water in general, there's just some seasonality to it of when it's warm out, you might drink too. What we've noticed the most actually, this is probably an interesting one of Cactus Rose is our best seller in the state of California by far. I wouldn't have guessed that. I wouldn't have guessed it either. In fact, I was guessing, of course, that all my favorites would be the favorite. Yeah. And I was just so wrong. You were right. I mean, I was right that it's the favorite. I was wrong and that consumers wouldn't agree. Cactus Rose is our best seller within California, which is still where half our stores are. Outside of California, it drops like two or three. So some of that is just like we're surrounded by cacti. Prickly pear tastes like from a margarita or maybe you've had rose elsewhere in the Midwest and East Coast where they like don't have prickly pear in alcoholic drinks. Peppermint watermelon is a good universal one. We're all familiar with those varieties. So anyway, all that to say, there's some seasonality, most just due to temperature and then some geographic bias based on flavor. And then the move to Shard Tank. Yes. Did they recruit you? Did you? Yeah. It was a wild turn of events that I assumed started with a lie. So like the quick story there is I got an email on April 10th, 2020 for a production company. Yeah. With a weird long email address claiming to be a casting person at Shark Tank, which obviously I just assumed was a friend newly working from home during the pandemic with too much time on their hands. And they're kind of thought, oh, you know, Paul slinging the seltzer out of his trunk. Let me see if I can pull his leg and say I'm a producer from Shark Tank. And like went back and forth for a little bit till finally I felt like, I think this guy's real jumped on the phone. And that started this weird process where he asked for an application. We gave him an application. He asked for a video clip. He gave him a video clip. He asked for probably two or three more video clips. And there was a time where he thought if this doesn't work, this is like the biggest waste of our entire life. Oh, it's a huge time. Huge time suck. Yes. But then end of July 2020, we got a call. Hey, can you come to Las Vegas? We're filming next week. In Vegas this time. Yeah. It was in Vegas for COVID. Okay. Interesting. So you get to Vegas. We get to Vegas. We then quarantine for nine days. Yeah. Yeah. So you get a call, right? You're not... Or did they already give you a call time? No. So we know. Okay. So you knew. Hey, you're going to go out at 7 a.m. Okay. Nine days from now. Okay. We're going to bring you food and leave it on the ground and knock on the door and walk away. And like I think three times in those nine days we got tested for COVID. So myself, my wife, Maddie, funny enough, she's like just lying to her whole team. Yeah. They notice on Zoom the background change. Like it looks like you're in a hotel. They say great. If those days of isolation didn't totally ruin your social ability, we'd love for you to come talk to some billionaires and have them yell at you. Perfect. And before that, did you do some research around who you wanted? Very much so. Okay. Yes, yes, yes. You knew the deal. We watched every episode of Shark Tank. Took extra note of any food or beverage deals because they get us... There's like a specific set of questions that food and beverage deals get because they're so cash intensive. We didn't know who the guest shark would be, but we knew it would be someone in food and they were asking director reached out. So that episode... Yes. And did you raise your valuation a little to offset the... Fair cut they're trying to give you? No, thank... I wish I had. Okay. There probably was some room there. Yeah. The very first that $500,000 round where we raised from mostly like CPG angels, it was right after we were like invited on Shark Tank and we raised it so fast. And I... Again, I'm like, I'll keep self-deprecating here. I thought, man, raise it in two and a half weeks. That's great. That is pretty good. And only a few days later, I was like, wait, it probably should have taken longer. Like there probably was something good. Like there's something was too good for the other side, but all that to say. Which is good. Yeah, exactly. That's great for the investors. Exactly. I have no regrets about that. They'll love you forever. I hope so. Yeah. They'll have fans for life. So anyway, nine days, get on the show, do the Shark Tank thing. It's like a total blur if you've talked to people that have been on the show. Tons of people. But it was 48 minutes of filming. And I remember walking out thinking, oh gosh, that was probably fewer than 10. Right. We probably didn't give them enough to edit. To even put something out. OK. So some sort of time vortex happens when you're in there. So you said an interesting line earlier where you said they came to you at the end of the nine days and said, if you haven't lost all of your social ability, we'd like to put you in front of this studio audience. Yes. That's such a unique situation for you to be in versus every other season of Shark Tank, where there was no quarantine restrictions. They're also far apart, right? They're like super far, which is kind of awkward in the room. I'd love to talk about that. There's two. So one, the commitment in other years is, hey, we're going to fly you out to LA. We're going to send you to Disneyland the day before and you're going to pitch. And if you don't make the show, because they usually film like two times the number of people that they need. If you don't make the show, you got a free trip to Los Angeles and a free trip to Disneyland. In our case, it was like one, we drove because otherwise we'd have to quarantine for like 14 days. So we drove and if this doesn't work, like we just lost 10 days in August during what that point was probably like the busiest I'd ever been in my whole life. So we definitely felt the pressure of like, we are getting a deal. We are getting on this show because you have way higher odds of getting on if you get the deal done. So absolutely, the stakes were definitely higher than in prior seasons. And the format was different. Totally. I'll say this. So awkward. Yes, so awkward. So compared to what you're normally used to visually, it's like, what is happening? Because you have to change your eye line much more dramatically. You over there? I'm so curious. Exactly that. Where they were each 12 feet apart. And I think in normal seasons, like if Diego's saying something and then you interrupt him, I know you interrupted him. Right. Okay. Now like Kevin's saying something and Mark interrupts him. And I just know like a male voice over here. Yeah. Interrupted. And I actually know who. So I was so worried that when they edited it that you just see a lot of just like tennis. Like trying to figure out like I know someone said something. Lori was the only woman on the panel. So like anytime Lori said something, I was like, I don't know. Anyway, that part I was not ready for of just I'm going to be so confused. They're all yelling. They're farther apart. And as a result, they put speakers below their chairs. So I could just bear. Oh, what? Maddie and myself could both barely hear ourselves. Oh yeah. It was bad. It was bad. Well, it's interesting. Like again, you said like, you know, someone would say something over here and you have no idea what they said. Yep. That actually plays into how the episode ended with. It did. I'm glad you watched. Yeah. Yes. Robert. Robert. He said, what was it? 500 or 250 for 15% and you thought he said 12. I think he said 12, which was our original number. Right. Right. Yes. And like you were running over to close the deal and like all the other sharks are like, no, no, no, he said 15. Did you hear 15? Like let's make sure that you exactly. Which like, by the way, I'll just say that now gets brought up on like a lot of retailer calls. Like we don't we don't really advertise Shark Tank all that much. You're not allowed to hopefully their attorneys aren't listening to this. Probably once a week, a retailer will be like, and are you sure you heard me go? I'm like, yes, I heard you right. Like we got the pricing. The joke taken. And we just smile. Of course. It's a great, great thing. There are worse reputations to have than to have misheard Robert Hirschovic. But yes, I did mishear him. And the sharks actually the reason they all jump in in the episode is because that wasn't the first time they jumped in. Like Matty and I were consistently so confused for the 40 minutes we're out there because we weren't sure what who said what. And I've since talked to a number of other people that filmed that same week. Exact same thing. So I think the editors probably knew like we're going to be editing out a lot of like confused audio issues. And did the deal close afterwards? The due diligence round? We did due diligence. We did due diligence. I'd signed a bunch of things saying we couldn't say what happened at the deal. OK. So all I'm allowed to say is like, watch the show. It happened the way it did in the show. He's in LA. Robert, are you going to see him? I can't say that either. I wish I could. But yes, it's a fun show. I am listening to this and you're thinking it would change your business. It totally would. Yeah. What did you see from a sales perspective? You talked to a number of companies. There's always the bump. You had a heads up. And so to some extent you knew a little bit. You had some time. For sure. Versus when I think the normal setting they don't have as much time. Yep. Huge bump. So I will say more valuable than any like dollars on the night of. We're just people knowing about us as one. Yes. Like collecting email addresses and starting the digital marketing effort of hey, you've bought a ShamWow. You've bought a scrub toy. I can't remember the name of it. Those are like the two ones. Like now you're going to buy some craft sparkling water, which obviously, yeah, our product is not perfectly suited for the Shark Tank audience. But that shows awesome in that it is almost a perfect representation of the country. Like it is age diverse, geographically diverse, racially diverse. Like the audience is like a little microcosm of the United States, which to be honest, part of the most valuable thing we've gotten is investors see our product and often they're like, okay, this probably works in Arawan, but does it work in Kroger? And I say, well, great. We're actually on this online program with millions of viewers that were like about 1% of the country was watching this smart, smart angle. And look at their repeat purchase rate. I think it's fair to say, even though, yes, peppermint watermelon is a little different than lime LaCroix, it resonates in Kansas just as much as it does in California. Yeah. If I'm putting my investor head on and I'm asking you like, do you expand? Do you expand the line? Do you move into other products? Or do you just say, no, this is the niche that we're crushing this. The market is so big. We're just getting started. We're already on that right now. I will say like velocity above all. That's your goal. Yes. Just smart, honestly. That's everything. Yeah. And once it's like, there's someone who has like an advisor of ours always uses like war analogies, which I try to stay away from. But that's scary. Yeah. Yeah. I'll say. You're sniping right now. You're sniping. Exactly. I'll say that it's certainly better to be doing really well in a few places than like really thin in a lot of places. So trying to make sure in the stores we're in, first and foremost, we keep rising that velocity month over month. And then as we add more stores, can we add stores that we know are similar to the stores we're already successful in? And I keep, I've mentioned Arawan twice because you guys are like six minutes from Arawan. We're here, yeah. But Whole Foods is actually right here too. Okay. So Arawan and Whole Foods are two great examples. They give you great data, et cetera. You can then take that data and if Arawan and Whole Foods on the West Coast is really valuable on the East Coast, you know, Wegmans and Stu Lennards are similar stores that are used to West Coast brands showing up at that data and saying, hey, we're going to do well here. So that's the goal. Get great velocity in these stores. That way it's an easier sell to the new stores. That makes a lot of sense. And then are you raising more capital? We are. Yes. There's a joke amongst beverage founders like you're just always raising capital now. Yeah. I mean, if the velocity is there, you might as well. Right. And so we just considered like an A or a B round or you passed that. We have not. No, we haven't raised a Series A yet. We likely will this spring. Oh, nice. Can I get your deck? Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is like the asymmetrical. Sorry, Robert. I got it. This is shark tank. Yeah. A little bit. It's a little nicer. Yeah. But I love the story. Anything that you learn from maybe moving. So like I know when you're moving that fast, a lot of things are missed. And so I don't know if it was a team thing. Maybe you didn't put as much effort into marketing and how you're doing that. What was the thing that you were like, oh, neglected. Let's fix this immediately. Yeah. Great question. Could be nothing. Maybe you're doing exactly not. So for too many months, it was just me. And that was a mistake. And I was doing it because I was like being, this is a crazy sentence. Crazy phrase to say like, I was being kind of cash conscious of like, hey, I'm not paying myself anything. We have like zero dollars in payroll. Let's see how long I can keep doing that for. So we sold that first can in November of 2019. And we didn't hire anyone until the spring of 2021. Oh, wow. So for like 16 months, it was just me. And then I had a couple of contractors that would help out and, you know, a bookkeeper to help with books and some of the help with sales, but just on a part-time basis. And I thought at the time, like, isn't this great? You know, we're going to, the disparity between the revenue we're going to do and the payroll we have is really going to impress investors and hopefully give us more cash to support stores. Can I ask you why you thought that? I was just a fool. No, my real, my real reasoning was I didn't know anything about this industry at all. Besides, you know, I was a, I'll say like a fan. It's a hard question. I don't mean it that way. I just mean like, entrepreneurs specifically that might be listening, they think they can do everything and they try and in that they don't break into their profit margin, the future cost of employees, of two or three, of distribution, of marketing, because they don't value it at the moment, but it's also like, things are moving too fast sometimes. And so it's almost like no one's looking in the rear view mirror when you're going really fast. That's exactly right. And I also just didn't know what I didn't know. So like, I've said this a bunch and it will, it's another sentence that will make me look foolish, but I thought, oh, you know, when I finally hire people, like they're probably going to be two or three times better at that task. So when I finally hire a director of sales, he's going to be two or three times better than me at selling this beverage. When I finally hire someone for ops, they're going to be two or three times better than me for ops. I'll use those two examples. They're not two or three times better than you. They should be like 40 to 50 times better than you. And that was totally the case. And in that instance, Anthony is our director of sales. Like within a month after hiring Anthony, I was like, that's a great analogy. Yeah. It's really like when you hire the pro, it's like watching LeBron play basketball. And if you don't have that feeling, you've hired the wrong person. That's exactly right. Yes. And so the quick answer to your question is like, why did I go 16? I probably should have hired someone at eight months, like eight months prior to when I hired someone. That's when I should have hired them. I think one, I was really nervous about raising capital. Like, gosh, this is, you know, there's probably 99 beverage companies in a dumpster for every one you see that so I thought, okay, by conserving our cash, we're going to increase our odds of success. The sad truth of beverages, that's actually not really the case. Like if you are growing velocities on shelf. The velocity is everything. Yeah. Yes. There's almost no cost at which you should, you shouldn't try to save any cost if you're raising velocities. And I just didn't think like that. It's a demand issue. Yes. And if you've solved it, you're fine. Exactly. Yeah. How'd you come up with the name? Yeah. So the name is I had be remiss if I didn't say trademark lawyers. So we knew we had these hippie ingredients. Like, okay, we're using these herbal ingredients. They have a little bit of a hippie connotation. What's like a word that kind of fits that? And I love the word aura for that. And it kind of like, you know, it's a feeling. It's also a noun. Like in a nice way, you talk about like someone's aura when they leave the room. Of course we couldn't trademark aura. And I was really disappointed about that. At the time I was reading a book on marketing. I don't remember which one it was. It was about the power of rhyming in general. So we had all of these rhymes with the word aura. And we love that there was kind of a tongue-in-cheek aspect of, okay, this is a water company that almost sounds like an island like with Bora Bora. We like that Aurora Borealis is already a word most people know. So it seems like a real thing when you see it. Like an abbreviation. Yes. Exactly. And my wife Maddie is a designer. So she loved that it was like a nice two four letter words that you could lock up in a square with the name. The hope was, don't forget that fun rhyming word. Yeah. Is your wife still working at the tongue company? Yeah. She actually just put in her notice last week. So she'll finally join full time. Congrats Maddie. Congrats Maddie. That's amazing. Good for her. Congrats Maddie. And congrats to our whole team that has been like leaning on her in her off hours to help us out. We like finally have a full creative director role ready to go. How big is your team now? Yeah. Ten. So we went from not hiring anybody to hiring someone in the spring of 2021 to now in January or February of 2022. So kind of hired one person every month. You learned quickly. Yes. I tried to, I joked like, I wanted to over correct. Like, okay, I made a mistake the first 16 months. I'll do the opposite. Yeah. I always tell people, you know, it's at least in the entrepreneurial journey, it's very classic that that's the case where you think you can do everything. And I almost wish there should, there'd be more content around hiring people is required. If you want to get there, whatever there is in your life, you have to use other people. You have to leverage the strengths of other skills. You know, it's like LeBron doesn't play one verse five for a reason. And there's a whole, there's like more coaches than players sometimes, right? And so it's like, notice, notice what's really happening here. Totally. There's a system besides the people you see performing. Totally. There's trainers, coaches, staff, marketing, GM's. I mean, it's a whole building full of people. And you're just watching the 12 people on the bench, this was, I started asking that of other beverage, like friends I made, like, hey, how many people do you have in your team? And I started was like, okay, if I really admire that beverage entrepreneur and they have 20 employees and their business does X dollars of sales, those are probably connected. Like it might be time for us to do some hiring. Yeah. Yeah. What is the big push this year for your company? So the first one, like the thing I think about every morning is getting above a certain ACV, which is just a, it's called all commodity value. It's a metric to determine how much of a specific sales channel are you in. So as of today, we're in 25% of the natural channel in the US. So Whole Foods, Erawan, Sprouts, those would all be stores in the natural channel, where we know we immediately resonate with consumers. So our goal is to end this year in 70% of the natural channel. So first and foremost, get to 70% of the natural channel. Second, there are some key chains that we would love to get into with our existing products. And then finally, I'm sure you guys have Omnichannel. Can we have consumers ping-pong between online and retail and have a differentiated product mix between the two? That's hard. It is hard. Yes. So as of today, actually we just launched the first one of this year, our first limited time offering online. So it's a hibiscus passion fruit flavor. The idea is, okay, we're going to, we made 30 days worth of inventory. Can we sell it to our existing online email list? Hopefully the same people that are increasingly buying it in stores because we're getting into more and more information. But they can't find this flavor in the store. But I think about your brand, you know, it's so interesting because when I drink it, I'm like, oh, this could be, at least for me personally, it could be like an alcohol substitute on like the weekdays. And so then my brain goes, but the flavors are really unique. So then my brain goes to, you know, we build breweries and stuff. And so every brewery that's successful, winery has a wine club, a beer club. And whenever there's a new release, the only place you can get it is either it being shipped to you or you coming to the brewery. It's producing. One in the same. But it's only like members only, you know what I mean? You get like first rights on any new product. You get to try new things. You get some free swag every once in a while. Love that. But that community that it builds is like super strong. Totally. And then during the pandemic, it's everything because that means you're going right to the consumer. Right. When maybe they feel weird about going to the grocery store. Is there a subscription option that you're thinking about? There is. That was that was the point of this podcast. I was just trying to get one subscriber. Just trying to hook. And eventually you can share some with Nick. I might have two subscribers. No. If I'm lucky. Yeah, if you're lucky. Yes. So the you're absolutely right with the pandemic. So that that led to a starting direct to consumer. Like you don't think, oh, this 10 pound box of water is going to like really be great for direct to consumer. The pandemic was this odd event where yeah, everyone started buying everything online. So we were ready for it. Right. You said like this really strong community. I have this investor slash advisor named James that loves to just say like bottom of funnel, bottom of funnel, bottom of his name is James Cole. And he Yeah, it's constantly kind of harping on me. Like, hey, it's it's a fun, sexy kind of tech crunch ish thing to talk about your top of funnel. You know, how many dollars are you putting into ads? How many consumers that come to your website, et cetera. Far better to just say how many subscribers do you have? How many people have ordered your limited edition flavors? How many emails and social media posts? And that's the group that would be much better to have a thousand people that love you than 10,000 that like you. I'll say this much with the brewery and winery crowd. During the pandemic, when they were closed, they were able to sustain somewhere, but depending on the brewery or winery, 60 to 80 percent of the revenues just from their membership. Oh my gosh. And that is amazing. Some people will like attribute that to people are drinking more. Right. But that wasn't it. It was more of like a loyalty, a real desire to help the community. You weren't thinking Anheiser Bush or Miller in March of 2020. Correct. You were thinking of the brewery you know, the winery you know. That's great. And it was really sticky. It was really interesting. Good. So we were building a brewery. That's why I was doing all this data on like how are companies sustaining during this time? And that's what we found out if they don't have membership clubs are going to die. Right. If they were just selling one beer to one person and then they went on their merry way, they're going to die. But if they sold 100 beers to that one person a year, they're ready to go. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Are you manufacturing in New York? Had to. Right. Yeah. Had to. So it's really heavy. So freight is one of our most expensive. Not just, you know, shipping UPS FedEx, but freight loading a truck and driving it to New York. So fine. We started last year with one warehouse and one manufacturing facility here in Los Angeles. And this year, about a year later, we have three manufacturing facilities, one in the Midwest, one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, and then four warehouses around the country. So eventually the idea is can we keep chipping away at freight? And to be honest, like there's a piece of us knowing like, okay, we purposely picked a recyclable aluminum can. We're a 1% for the planet company. And there's one kind of like critique from the peanut gallery of, aren't you driving water all over the place? Yeah. And like fumes are... As soon as beer, by the way. Absolutely. So as soon as possible, we'd love to be able to say like, no, you know, every can you're drinking is made within a few hundred miles of where you are. This is my last investor level question because I just find this fascinating. So we had someone on the podcast that was working with Anheuser Bush to make their beer a concentrate. And so what that would mean is they would basically just set up all these shops. Sure. Same thing. They're shipping water. Brewers right now are just rolling over like, no, tell me not. Like that's horrible. It's hard to do because the water is so different depending on where you are. And so they ended up building pilot plants across the country in America because I think the freight, it was some $300 million figure maybe. Right. And at the end of the day you're just shipping water. And so it became a really interesting idea to concentrate, make a concentrate and then you add water wherever you're distributing. Like literally at the warehouse. And did it work or did it not work? So where they are today is they got the taste to fit and now it's all about rolling it out. Okay. Because you're still building plants but they're much smaller. Right. Way more efficient and it's a warehouse space versus a whole distribution. Totally. It's not a warehouse plus distribution. It's just all in one. So there's a great book. You need to read it. I'm trying to write the name of it. It's about the Bush family that started, you know, one of the country's now. Like Anheuser-Busch. Not George W. No, yes. Sorry. Yes. Bush with a C in the middle. Right. Or Bush Gardens if you've been. And you're running for president. Yeah. And I don't remember which family member but when they first did that and they were expanding around they would do a test with this brother and they could line up four beers, exact same brew and he'd drink and he'd say, St. Louis, Portland, Oregon, Florida. And he knew just the difference of the water because they're using municipal water. So, you know, the water in Tallahassee might have slightly more magnesium than the water in St. Louis or slightly less calcium. The worst is that municipal water and obviously now I know a lot about water. I didn't think I would. Municipal water changes throughout the season, you know, as groundwater changes. So generally cities have like public available filters. So you can see every month they're testing their water which is great. And if you have a Brita filter you don't have to worry about this because you're just drinking the same stuff. But if you're making beer and each of the slightly tiny, you know, a thousandth degree magnesium change and a huge impact in your tank. It was a fascinating book for that reason. So I'll be curious to watch if the concentrate thing works. I know one small brewery that does do that. I think here in California, same idea of we can stop shipping water. Any plans of that? You think? I know it's hard. I'm sure it's like five years from now, but I just, to me it's an interesting, I don't know who's going to solve that problem because I think with beer it's to your point it's way, it's too meticulous. The level of nano, and maybe with your product that's different, I don't know. So we, without getting into two specifics of manufacturing process we do have a way of like, I have had gallons of water shipped to me from manufacturers and like, great, I can't tell the difference. We can't tell the difference in our formulas, etc. And some of that is just a matter of hey, has that facility invested in XYZ technology to standardize their water? But I didn't know that. So at one point we were going from that very small co-packing facility to our now very large facility and I was pulling my hair out thinking it tastes different. Like, am I going crazy? Did I burn my tongue this morning? Maybe I drank too much coffee in the last week. And eventually I talked to that same food scientist who was like, no, like it's just different. Here, look, I pulled up the two water sources. They're just different. You need to take your water through this specific kind of filter and then tweak the recipes. So we have since done that and now it makes a ton of sense. But at the time I just didn't think that slight difference would make a huge impact, but it totally does with beer, coffee, I love it. Do you ever think about doing retail? Kind of like a pop-up stop? Like our own store? Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or at least like a tasting stuff? I don't know. I know it's a little weird. Yeah, we've done that at events. We'll sometimes show up with a cart or right now we're designing this little bike that it's like off the front of the bike where you probably see in West LA. Yeah, yeah. The stroller, like sometimes two kids will be in front of the bike. You got a cooler or something like that. Yeah. So we are trying particularly in West Coast grocery store. How are we going to jump off the shelf? So that's... Have you ever paired it with Espresso? I have once only because I actually share an office. I'll give him a shout out here with Tyka, the coffee company. Okay. Hi, Tyka. Yeah, okay. Hello, Tyka. So I have paired it only because they're always making Espresso, but generally no. Was it good? There are a couple sparkling coffees. The quick answer is no. I don't think it was good. Okay. I'm like a coffee strictly as a drug person. Okay. Like just drinking caffeine. Okay. They do it here. I like it. Okay. I'm a big fan of the Espresso tonic, but I'll have to try it with one of these. It would need a citrus flavor. So I'm glad you just said that. We have a grapefruit elderflower flavor. Oh, nice. We tested online just for a month. This was like our first one last spring or last summer. And it'll actually roll out nationally at Sprouts in April. So we have a kind of... Grapefruit's the most popular sparkling water flavor. That's great. It made sense. We wanted our own twist on grapefruit. So we added elderflower. Yeah. And it's like the best in the industry business, like someone that is the easiest to work with. Because I always wonder because a lot of them... I mean, we have a lot of CPG companies on. And it's just like all of them have their little strains, but it's really relationship driven still, which for me being a tech person, I go, ugh, like that's friction. Not scary. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. And so it's like people, you know, the West Coast seems easy to work with, apparently. But yeah, is there one that's just like tech forward and... I'll say, so no to tech forward. Yeah. I feel like I wrestled with that exact question you just said. Like where is the scalability? Yeah. Like it feels like every single day we're just getting into new stores, but it's not like it's getting any easier. Right. We're just doing more of them. Right. And... It's more emails. Yeah. Just more emails that I'm desperately trying to drive across down to reply to. Yeah. I have talked to probably 30 or 40 like perspective CPG entrepreneurs. A lot of them are coming from tech. And they've asked that question of like, hey, what, you know, kind of what's the bio because it just makes it sound like I'm kind of wagging my finger at them. I'm like, there is no hack. This is just a not scalable thing. And you just need to tackle door by door by door to get in. So that's the quick tech answer. The answer in my favorite grocery store relationship actually, I'm wearing a seaside market hat. This is in Cardiff, California in San Diego. One, if you're a grocery store that sells our product and you sell merch, I own your merch. 100%. I'll wear the hat. I'll wear the sweatshirt. I'll wear the shirt, etc. I'll even buy the egregious arrow on $100 sweatshirt just to say that I did. So this local market is awesome. They do an absurd amount of volume of Aura Bora and elsewhere. I'll shout out our first grocery store ever was like two blocks from our old house in Denver. It's called Lever's Locavor. It's probably like a Colorado equivalent of Arawan. People are in there not just shopping, hanging out on their laptop, eating lunch, etc. And they are still month after month, top 10 most of volume, which is awesome. When we were in Shark Tank, they built a display for us. It was just like a, there was a family aspect of they came. I was showing up with like silver cans with no branding, making them try it way back in 2019. And at the time they were opening up their grocery store. So it was a win-win. They were looking at new products. We had a new product. And on the very first day their grocery store opened, we were sampling. Since the pride and ownership, these guys came with us through the community. Yes. Lever's Locavor. Denver. What are you raising out right now? I won't say that. I'll say we're raising a traditional series A in food and beverage is like between $6 and $9 million. So we're raising that amount starting this spring. We're hoping to close this spring. Awesome. Yeah. Tell everyone where they can find you online. We mentioned a bunch of stores. April Sprouts. Yes. So we'll be Sprouts national in April. So probably that's not all the country, but mostly the Sun Belt. And slowly they're working the way up the northeast. We're in Whole Foods in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington. We're on Thrive Market. If you're a Thrive Market subscriber and of course you can check out our store locator or buy from our website or abora.com. And Roots and Only Maryland. And Roots. Yes. And Roots Market and Only Maryland, which is Nick's local grocery store. Yeah. Next time I'm home. I love that. Appreciate it, man. Thank you. Of course. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. The Startup Storefront team consists of Diego Torres Palma, Natalia Capolini, Lexie Jameson, Owen Capolini, and me, Nick Conrad. Our music is composed by Double Touch. I think it's safe to assume that if you've made it this far, you've enjoyed the show. So consider subscribing if you're not already, or better yet, leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's one of the best and easiest ways you can support us. Our handle for all of the social media platforms is at Startup Storefront. You can always go back and listen to any of our other episodes available wherever you get your podcasts and on our website at startupstorefront.com. Thank you all for listening. We'll see you next time.