We were honored to have Seth Goldman, founder and TeaEO of Honest Tea, as our guest for a Seller community webinar last week.  Seth shared his experience from starting and growing Honest Tea over the past 11 years to $50mil in sales. Share he did. Seth was candid and inspiring. He provided a slew of lessons and answered several questions from our community.

Joya of joyababy summed it up best ” Seth was very helpful and inspiring! Which for a fellow entrepreneur is fuel to keep going!! I could pick his brain all day, being in “the thick of it” as we speak”.

I will limit this post to highlighting three points that just scratch the surface of his insight:

1. Before raising money, leverage your suppliers -Seth was asked about how to go about raising outside capital. His first reaction was to emphasize partnering with your suppliers. He told the story of negotiating with his bottle supplier for extended terms so he could make it through his slow season. Smart cash management and a lean staff allowed Seth and team to raise only a minimal amount of outside capital.

2. Keep customer interaction in-house – Seth was personally out sampling at retailers in the early days and to this day will leverage his interns enthusiasm versus hiring outsiders. I remember getting the hard sell from grocery stores to use their sampling teams, it is far easier to sign on the dotted line and having their team do it than getting out there yourself. But the Honest Tea team can pitch their product with passion and that interaction is priceless.

3. Packaging sets expectations – Seth recommended the following excercise to determine if your design is having its designated effect. Put the package in front of people and ask them what they expect the product to taste like (obviously without actually sampling it). Brilliant idea. I have personally spent countless days refining packaging and have seen the same debate linger too long at other companies. This is is an intuitive way to get quick feedback.

We will be posting a link to Seth’s talk in each Seller’s dashboard. Thank you again Seth for your time, wisdom and encouragement.

Having raised money for a few companies I know it can be a serious distraction. Helpful investors can be a priceless asset but the process of finding them and working out the deal means time away from selling your product.

Can the web make the process more efficient? I just saw this post on Techcrunch about a new company, Sprowtt, leveraging the web to raise hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars  and have been following Prosper for some time now. I am curious to hear from natural product companies about their fundraising experience, we at Abe’s Market hope at some point to be helpful in the process. The idea is to use our collective experience as a community to help the individual seller.

We are also curious to hear from our sellers who are building their brands without outside capital. Who doesn’t love the “worked from our garage, mortgaged the house, ate PB&J for 9 months” story that ends in a hot product…