Rising Above Category Disruption and Short-term Fads

In this episode of Launch Hour, we chat with John Sherwin from Hydrant. Hyrdant's mission is to empower people to live healthier by creating and promoting the most effective, science-driven hydration possible. We discuss the journey of the brand, from its early stages to where it is today.

John reflects on the highlights of the past few years, including the addition of a Co-Founder, Jay, and the growth of the team. We also discuss the importance of building a solid network and the challenges of being a solo founder. John shares his thoughts on the departure of Jay and how it affected the business dynamics.

Despite the ups and downs, John remains motivated by his sense of duty to his team and investors. He believes there is still work to be done and envisions a future where he can focus on his strengths while others handle different aspects of the business.

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*There is explicit language and content in this podcast episode. It is not meant to encourage or promote the use of explicit language or other materials. It is meant to help in telling an entirely authentic, truthful story.* 

Transcript

Eva: 0:16

On this episode of Launch Hour. We're so happy to catch up with an OG here. John from Hydrant. Welcome John.

John: 0:28

All right. Thanks for having me.

Eva: 0:30

Yeah. You're such an og. It really doesn't need a introduction. More than that. Everyone knows Hydrant.

John: 0:38

Tell us. Yeah, we, I mean we spent a lot of money growing the brand for better or worse. And I was trying to think before we hopped on how long ago it was when we worked together, it would've been. Like the year of, I think it was 2017, like the back half of 2017 was really when we worked together. So an age ago. Suddenly in e-commerce world, I think that counts as a whole different, like iteration of E-com brands. But we're still alive. Still going? Yes. Yes. Yeah. That's the main thing.

Eva: 1:10

Okay. It's been many years and. I still remember when you first started, you were a one man team, crushing all departments from the products to figuring out like the brand, the design, your values to the efficacy of the product. I still remember, shipping out the product for sampling and. Literally someone rejecting it because it's like this white powder. Yeah. You're like, I'm not going to take this sketchy looking

John: 1:43

powder. Yeah. And little Ziploc bag. I don't blame them. Looking back, I'm like, wow. Can't believe people have ever tried that.

Eva: 1:52

Tell us about your journey. What's been some of the highlights from the past few years?

John: 1:58

Oh man, highlights. Okay. So it feels like an incredibly long journey. It's basically, eclipsed every other part of my career. I've been doing this since the beginning of 2017 and it's now 2023, so it's a number of years and gosh, it's so hard. There's obviously lots of highs and lows on the journey and. I think something a lot of founders do badly, and I would include myself in that, is celebrating the wins along the way. You end up just focusing on the down periods and just you're so focused on getting through them or on hitting bigger and better goals that when the good things happen, they just like wash past. So I would say highlights along the journey. Obviously I started solo I had a co-founder join in. 2018, Jay. And that was definitely a highlight. I think the journey is so much more fun when you have another person building with you. I'm sure you guys can attest to that with your partnership. I, so that was definitely a highlight.

Eva: 3:00

All of the Instagram stories exploded when he joined the company.

John: 3:07

Yeah. He changed his Instagram handle as well to hydrant j that has since been changed back. Actually no longer is at hydrant. But we had a really good run and it was super fun. So that was definitely a highlight, just having someone else along for the journey in a co-founder role. Obviously we've had lots of team members over the years who've been great additions. But it's not quite the same, having co-founder who you can go get lunch with and vent, whether it's investor related or co-packer related or whatever

Jane: 3:32

it is. How did you know that Jay was like a good fit for a co-founder? What kind of process did you

John: 3:37

guys run? Gosh it's hard to go back to that moment in time cuz obviously so much has passed and we, have a real relationship now. So he cold outreached me first. On LinkedIn, I ignored it. Then, if I remember correctly, he got you to intro him via email to me. Yeah. Then I replied, like at first I'm not big on cold inbound. So then I replied and we got on the phone and I think the calculus was, firstly we did a bunch of references on each other. So he spoke to people who knew me. I spoke to people that knew him. In hindsight, like it wasn't good reference checking. It wasn't the smart kind where you find the references yourself. It was like, oh, here's five people you can call. It's definitely not the right way of going about it, but luckily it all worked out, so it's fine. How did I know it was a good fit? Jay brought a ton of energy to the table at a time when I'd been working on the business already for a year and a half, and yeah. I didn't have experience fundraising specifically, so the path forward was a little unclear for the brand without someone like Jay. And Jay came to the table as someone who had a Rolodex of people who wanted to back him. And someone who had experience in this fundraising world with a background in finance. And so that plus his energy. Like for the category for the brand meant that it was just like a kind of a no-brainer, I think to bring someone like him into the business. And we structured it in a way that made us both happy. And yeah, that like day one he updates his LinkedIn and I'm like, wow, this feels weird. There's a guy on LinkedIn, It says co-founder of Hydrant. I've been doing this for a year and a half with hydrant on mine and I had to change mine to co-founder and That was like a, huh, I guess we're doing this. And then everything started happening very quickly. Jay, with his fundraising acumen raised a ton of money and I learned a lot. From him in that process to the point where now I'm like, if I were doing another business I wouldn't necessarily need a fundraising person. I still think it's great to have someone else along for the journey. It's just more fun for sure.

Eva: 5:46

Yeah. That's really humbling of you to know exactly where your strengths were and where his were, and just accept that. This is a formula that you're creating because he's a really different person from you.

John: 6:03

Totally. Yeah. But he's

Eva: 6:05

totally different.

John: 6:05

Yeah. I think, we actually, when we were in those investor meetings, that was like part of the pitch point. It was, listen, we don't really overlap. And that's actually not true. As time passed, it became clear that we did overlap on a lot of things specifically around strategy and around. Big decisions that you have to make in the business. But when it came down to like the nuts and bolts, he would run certain areas of the business completely independently of me. And so as a co-founding partnership, it's really powerful because you can just cover so much more ground, so much faster. People seem to like that.

Jane: 6:40

That also speaks to the. Immense loneliness of the startup journey, right? I think not a lot of people talk about it, how that actually can really get to you at some points in the journey. Why did Jay leave and what's he doing now?

John: 6:53

I think he's raising a private equity fund now. It's on his LinkedIn. I don't know how public he's being about everything. The business went through a difficult period, bit of an inflection point. And he had some personal stuff go down that made it make sense. He just, he decided to step away. And I think timing wise, he did it a moment when it was good for the business. For him to do it. Like it, it was the best possible moment he could have done it, I think. And he went on to pursue some other stuff and so yeah he's on a different journey now, but very much we're still in touch. And he is still a customer of hydrant. Of course.

Eva: 7:29

Yeah. I remember. He is like a strong believer of hydration, electrolytes. For overall wellbeing. Yeah, still is. And I really believe like the co-founding relationship is so deep and interconnected that it's like beyond a marriage, like you, you're very vulnerable to each other. How did you feel? You guys like left each other. So how are you feeling?

John: 7:51

Definitely different, right? It's on the one hand I started this thing on my own and I'm back to being a solo sort of leader. Now I still have team members from when Jay was still at the business. And they're great and we have that continuity How do I feel? It's probably a little bit less fun, to be honest. It's just so nice to have someone who is in those moments with you. You can share the ups and downs in a different sort of way. And again, I still have my team that I can share those moments with, but it's not quite the same versus someone who has had continuity with you through the whole cycle of the business. So definitely, on the loneliness side, I'd say. It's there. That said, one thing I have leaned into more where previously I think because Hydrant had a Jay on the team who was, super well networked would attend all these events and meet all these great people, I was eh, I don't really need to do that. And that was a mistake. In hindsight, I should have been plugging myself into the kind of New York founder scene way earlier, if only because it, if you don't have a co-founder, it's the next best thing is having a network of other people who are going through similar stuff to you. And so I've definitely spent a lot more time kind of building that network for myself in New York and outside of New York as well to a point where, there's a support group, if you like, of folks where if it's an issue with an investor or a copack or whatever it may be there's always a good group of folks to hash it out with basically. So I think that's been one thing that has really helped through the period of changing back to a solo founder type role. But yeah, certainly, miss having him around for sure.

Jane: 9:33

And I guess one question for you is what keeps you going? Cuz you've been working on this business for eight years now, what, 5, 6, 7 years? And I know you love hydration, but do you like, love it like that much? And so just what keeps you going through the

John: 9:53

hard times? It's a hard question to it's the right question. But it's not something that's easy to just give you like a soundbite on. I think there's a lot of layers to it. I'd be lying if I said the kind of further to build the business is the same as it was in like year one. Having been through Sure. Some different ups and downs and it's difficult to kinda describe where the motivation comes from now. I think certainly in the darkest moments when things have been like really felt close to the wire And that's always internal. No one outside knows that. It's always like an internal thing. So as far as everyone else is concerned, everything's great. But when things have been really close to the wire I think it's really a sense of duty to my team and my investors. Basically the people who've helped and believed in the brand and me and Jay along the journey, I don't wanna let them down. I think that's really where the motivation comes from and, is hydration my life's work? Probably not. I hope there's gonna be some other chapters that are like just as exciting and I'm really excited to eventually find those. But I don't feel like the work is quite done yet with this brand. I think there's a lot of work still to go. We've got, nationwide retail distribution we're on Amazon, we've been doing that for a while and we're still tinkering and still pulling different Vivas. At some point in the future, it might make sense to let someone else take the reins of the brand and move more into a role where I can provide the value that plays to my strengths rather than covering more areas of the brand. Kinda like you referred to earlier, it's if I know my strength is on the science and product side and maybe a little bit of brand, maybe I could get someone else to work on some of the other parts of the business. But that's very much not in the super near term. It's something that has been discussed but is not a major priority.

Jane: 11:49

Yeah. I only ask that because we're starting with in chronological order of who we launched. So like we literally just interviewed Sisun Yeah. For morning recovery, and then now we're interviewing you. Yeah. And like you guys are in the journey the longest, and I would say like arguably in the DTC space as wellness starts getting, Bigger and bigger. You guys are the OGs of this, health and wellness space. And for him, he stepped down as ceo. And he put in his head of sales as a C E O. And we were talking just about if you really wanna create a brand, it's gonna be a tenure commitment. And it, yeah, has to be something that you truly are passionate about as fluffy as that sounds in terms of the actual like product and the vision for it. Or else it gets hard to like, keep going. A lot of people when they launch their brand, it's The celebration, but then no one really hears about the story at the six year mark at the eight year mark when it gets exhausting.

John: 12:45

Yeah. It I think yeah you're nailing it that it is, it does get exhausting. I think what I would build on that by saying, for me, the reason I've been able to keep going is we're probably on like version seven of the product, and I can still stand behind the product as being. the best it can be the best in the market. And and again, this is all from a functional standpoint because as soon as you get into taste something I've had to learn and skill up on, everything's subjective. You can never please everyone. And what I like to taste is probably not what the majority of America likes. And we've certainly made some upgrades there over time. But what's kept me in it is when it comes to the function of our products, if I was a consumer and I had nothing to this brand, this is the brand I'd buy. And so that absolutely has kept me motivated throughout. Is it enough? In the long run when you get to, like you said, year six, year seven, year eight, it's okay, it's definitely a slog. I think the other piece of that, that you can't detach is the fundraising approach that's been taken. Because I think now looking at the brand I think for hydrant we raised money. It was a very exciting time for. The category as a whole, the electrolyte powder's just blowing up. We raised a lot of money very quickly. I think it was the right move. I wouldn't go back and change that. But I think if you're gonna be running a brand for 10 years, 10 plus years, the bootstrapped approach where you retain control and ownership, really the control is the piece that matters more. So ownership, so that you are the master of your own destiny. That it starts to be where it makes a little bit more sense. Otherwise you get to, the eight year mark and if you've taken on a ton of money over time there's been different, like layers of controls and layers of ownership added and the stakeholders are just constantly changing. I'll go to some of these founder events in New York and I'll meet. The new crop of ecomm people who are coming up, we're the OGs from seven years ago. I'm meeting folks who were me seven years ago and I'm jealous of them cuz they're all building these like profitable bootstrapped brands. And I'm just like, wow. If we had figured that out back then I would enjoy where I'm at today more because I'd have complete control of okay, like we're gonna make this product, or, okay, we're gonna make this decision and go. Again. I have a great relationship with my board. It's just, it's a very different model to being a 100% owner or like close to that. So I think in terms of the journey as a whole, one thing I might do differently on the next one would be considering do I want. Want to take a venture back route, or do I want to do something that's a little bit more self-sustaining?

Eva: 15:26

Yeah, that's such a huge conflicting matter though, right? There's the ego at play here. There's like this culture of how we define success, right? You either raise money, go fast. Or do you, do, this bootstrap route and do this lifestyle business, but it's a marathon. And at different stages you feel

John: 15:47

differently. Yeah. Yeah. The grass is always greener. I totally get that. And I'll say it to those same people who I meet you, I'm like, wow, I'm so jealous. They're like, eh, it's not always, it's not cracked up to be for sure. But having experienced the PR headlines, we've been in. We got TechCrunch at one point. We were in, definitely in Forbes. We were in a bunch of other stuff. It was cool. And it definitely made it validated. The brand, it validated what we were building. Did it drive sales? Not really. Was it therefore mostly just an ego thing? Absolutely, yes. It it may have opened some retail doors for us, I think. I don't wanna downplay that, but you're right. It's an ego thing like that. That's the framing I've looked at. I worked in the Bay Area in 20 14, 20 15 timeframe, and lifestyle business was like a dirty word back then. Everyone was like, oh, it's not scalable. Ugh, gross. And I was drinking the Kool-Aid. I was the same. And now I'm like, Wait, hang on. That's actually a pretty good deal. Like that could be a nice way to live and how silly of all of us to be down, just being negative about that approach. It is different, but if you think that you can handle not fueling the ego with the headlines and the, oh, we raised this much money and all that, then I think the bootstrap root is definitely worth considering.

Eva: 17:09

Thank you for highlighting how those. Headlines performed. That's very vulnerable of you. And it's like really real, right? Like all the OGs know. But the younger Oh, totally. Founders out there don't know that yet, right? Yeah.

John: 17:25

I think there are some networks where if you like, angle it correctly, you can make it perform. But I also think that playbook has changed. So like you talked about csun, I remember Jay and I used to look at the. He had one article, I forget now if it was Forbes or something, business Insider, something else. Maybe it was Business Insider Business Inside. That was it. That was it. Yeah. He had a business insider and it was like the perfect, it was basically like a pitch of his business and they were running ads to that because it was better than a aligning pitch. And that was the hack. And we were like, how do we get that? I don't know that same playbook exists anymore. I don't think you can quite crush it the way that did. Yeah, things

Jane: 18:07

have changed so much since you launched your business. And you mentioned like talking to these like new crop of e-commerce brands. What kind of advice would you give someone right now who wants to start a consumer brand?

John: 18:22

It's a really long journey. I think like just letting them know if you're in it for a quick win. That's like probably the wrong mindset to come at it with. You need to expect that this is gonna be at least a 10 year commitment. And if it's less and that's what you want, great. I can't give marketing advice because it's all changed so much. And we're still figuring it out. We're certainly not a marketing powerhouse at hydrant. I think at one point we were doing pretty well on the paid social side, and now we're still figuring out we're a fully omnichannel business. We have, thousands of doors across America and running Facebook ads doesn't really touch those. So we have to look at other ways that we can drive velocity across those channels. I think if I could go back in time and change some of the things about our business, That would hold true still for this new crop. It would just be simplifying, removing complex flows, removing complex processes. We used to do some stuff around like new product development and launches around bundling, around just every layer of the business. We did not account for how much the sort of the drag of adding complexity. Built in the business and now we've gone through like a tough time. Our team is much smaller than it was, and my job as CEO is ruthlessly simplifying. And so we're achieving a lot with a small team It feels pretty freeing when you figure out oh wait, this doesn't have to be complicated. If I can make it work simply, then the company runs better and smoother and now I can like free up brain space to work on other stuff that can then bring in more revenue and we can keep growing. I think the simplicity piece was lost on us at one point in time and. We have a lot of money cuz we raised a lot of money from VCs. And so we built in this complexity, which seemed very smart at the time, but now looking back, I'm like, ugh, that was the wrong move. It was

Jane: 20:19

almost like you maturing and growing as a human and as a founder and c e o helped realize that all these egotistical things like. Pr hiring a bunch of people office and having this bloat and then going through like your own personal transformation helped you just skim everything down to what really works and matters to

John: 20:42

you. Totally. Yeah. I think going in, if you'd think back to when we worked together, And if you'd asked me then what are you trying to get outta this? I don't think I would've had a, an answer for you that included like big team having an office. I don't think I knew really back then. It was like I wanted to solve this hydration problem for myself and making the product and turning it into a business seemed to be the right move. And that was the approach that I took. And then, yeah, you're right, like on the journey we got all these things and I was like, oh, that didn't. Change how I feel that didn't make my life any easier or better. It probably did briefly fuel ego, but then also the internal stuff, the pressures building and you are having to manage upwards with VCs and yeah, no one sees that side of the coin. And that definitely was more challenging. Again, wouldn't trade it. I've leveled up in a big way and learned a ton through the process, but yeah, I think realizing that a lot of those things solely exist to fuel your ego rather than actually help make a better business has been helpful. But that said, even now, I'll read a headline like, raised a bunch of money. I'm like, damn, good for them. That sounds pretty good,

Eva: 21:57

yeah, for sure. Really happy to hear that like you've gone through such a, self discovery and your journey has, been reflected into the way you've built hydrant. I wanna turn back the time a little bit of when we were working together. That was a very vulnerable time if I, could say so. Let's like talk about some of the moments that I guess was very memorable for you.

John: 22:26

The most memorable was flying out to LA to an apartment that you guys had just rented. So it wasn't fully furnished yet. And we were gonna do a photo shoot in it and I was sleeping on the floor in it. Which was like, now thinking of. What I would do with our vendor partners, like the idea of sleeping on the floor of someone's apartment ahead of a photo shoot is just eh, that's probably not gonna fly. So yeah we I think our journeys were similarly aligned at that point. Where, you were willing to do some crazy stuff, as was I to just make some, make something happen and look what we've both done. We've built cool things. And that's really rewarding. So that was definitely. I still have pictures of being in California, cuz even just being in California is like novel on some level for an East Coast slash English guy. And then I think also just working with super young photographer. I think he was 19, the guy sure. Who I'm guessing he's probably, yeah, maybe he's an influencer or something. Now I'm not in touch with him, but I just remember being like, wow, like there's this whole thing going on out here that it's alien to me. But the outcome was really great and the work that we put in definitely made hydrant seem way more legit than it was. I think it helped that I'd worked on the brand a little bit first. Then we added, a layer of legit legitimacy over the top. And that led to, people just being like, wow, this is cool. What is this thing? So that stands out to me. I also remember coming to Toronto to shoot our video. I didn't realize how much work. Shooting long videos was now I know, and we still actually are running an ad that has one clip from that original Indiegogo video on Facebook. That's amazing. And it's one of the better performers. Yes. It's the one, if you remember with the graphs above my head. Yes. And it's take a look at this. And that still performs, so we still run it. I hate it cuz I still don't really like being the The face, but unfortunately I have to do that stuff. The science guy.

Eva: 24:33

The 20 takes were worth it.

John: 24:35

Indeed. There was a lot of takes under a thing that was hotter than two suns maybe it was just a daylight lamp. It was the size of the room. Yeah. If I remember correctly. Yeah. That Joel had used. Anyway. It was, that was a fun trip as well. I think just for me, I don't travel as much now for hydrant because post covid, everything is pretty much remote. So it was an exciting time just being like, okay, I'm flying to Toronto for this business that I'm working on at that time. Calling it a business was being really generous. It was, I had a trademark, I had incorporated not a dime of revenue, and I'd put in a little bit of cash to float it. So yeah, it was like a, it was the wild West back then. And if I was doing things again you can't recapture that. It's never gonna be like that again, because now I've done it once. I feel a lot more oh, okay. I know exactly what moves I'd make on the board and like how I'd allocate capital and. Yeah, the experience really goes a long way.

Jane: 25:31

What's in the future for you personally and also for the company? What's some exciting

John: 25:37

stuff you're working on? We always have new products in the works at Hydrant. We've probably gone through a long period of no new products. Partly because we got to this point where it was really complicated. We had loads of flavors which customers liked, but you could clearly see this waterfall where sort of 20% of the products did 80% of the revenue and we just had to cut them down. That was hard to do. We have subscribers who've been around since 2018 who love, let's say the grapefruit flavor or the lime flavor, which was the original. We'd cut both of them. And so that was hard because people got upset. So now we've done a full reformulation of all the products, but we've also cut some of the originals and left them cut, could bring them back one day, but for now, it doesn't make sense to just add that complexity back into the business unless it's a net new product that doesn't overlap as much with the existing ones. So there's that there's figuring out retail in a bigger way. I think, you can't ignore the fact that the two biggest players in the space are now owned by two multinational corporations. So you've got Liquid IV owned by Unilever. You've got noon owned by Nestle. Those are. The incumbents now, and we are making some decisions strategically around the sort of changed landscape. It's been changed for a while, but I think it's pretty clear what we need to do. So that's really my goal with hydrant is to figure out how we can angle ourselves in a market that now has a lot of players where back when we were working together, there were maybe like. Four, five that we could name. Now there's loads. Yeah. So it's just a very different landscape. And for me, I don't know, we'll see. I'm trying to mold it to this slightly new direction. And in the long run, I really am interested in getting into this sustainability world. But that's the long run I've got work to do here first.

Eva: 27:27

Yay. You got this. Yeah.

Jane: 27:30

Thank you so much, Josh. Thank your time.

John: 27:34

Yeah, thanks having guys.