Noah Krinick, co-founder of the organic beverage company Bombilla & Gourd, got his big break when Whole Foods decided to stock his products. Krinick, who with friends Ariel Nelson and Tom Wollmann started the company in 2006, has advice for other entrepreneurs.
Where should entrepreneurs invest the most time, money and resources?
Experience. Starting a new company, especially your first one, can be very scary. Being a young entrepreneur, money has always been very tight so I am extra sensitive to costly mistakes. Bringing on employees and management with experience has helped us avoid many rookie problems. Although experienced management costs more, I believe it was well worth it.
How did you get financing?
The original seed capital came from my two partners and me. We all felt that it was important to put our own skin in the game if we were to ever go out to the traditional investment community. Our money fueled the product development and first production run. Once distribution was secured and we had a good degree of confidence in the viability of the company, we opened up our first round of financing.
What are some common mistakes?
One of the worst is identifying a problem and trying to solve it by throwing more and more money at it rather than addressing the issue at hand. There are many things that can go wrong in any industry -- bad taste, poor design, bad management -- and somehow people try to fix them by allocating more dollars to marketing. Dollars then get spent in more areas of marketing, pushing a flawed product and not resulting in any increase in sales.
Describe your marketing tactics.
When it comes to food and beverage products, the most important thing is to get the product in a potential consumers' hands and allow them to try it. If you go in to any store, there are 20 or so products on the shelf. By far the best way to cut through the clutter is have an in-store sampling team allow the customers to taste the product. If they enjoy it, chances are they'll purchase it then or sometime in the future.
What are some cost-effective procedures?
When we started the company, it was just Tom Wollmann, Ariel Nelson and me. We used to do everything together -- meetings, calls, presentations. As more people came on, there were three things that made us more efficient. We clearly delineated everyone's specific roles, created an effective reporting system to assist the flow of information and developed an extremely detailed budget. This combination has allowed us to move forward with the greatest efficiency.
Dawn House
