Hey everyone, we're super excited to announce the launch of our Slack community for D two C pod. This is a space exclusively for D two C founders and operators to connect, share ideas, ask questions and support each other. You'll be able to engage with the best minds and operators and consumer and currently we're on a waitlist and it will open up the community once we reach 150 members. So apply using the link in the description and we hope to see you on slack. So before we kick off today's review recording, ive got one more for you. Keeping up your momentum this year starts with the right selling tools and if youre looking to increase revenue, grow faster, build more pipeline and close more deals, check out the all new sales hub from HubSpot. Youll be able to manage your whole sales process. Plus my favorite part, the reporting, its super intuitive, powerful and customizable.

Plus the whole thing is powered by AI so your teams can spend less time on tedious, time consuming stuff and more time on developing relationships. Also, no one likes a clunky platform that takes months to onboard onto. But getting set up on saleshub is really quick and easy. It's free to get started. The pricing will scale with your business, and with more than 1300 integrations and add ons you can tune it to your exact needs. Visit HubSpot.com sales to start selling with sales hub what is going on? DTC pod today we have the pleasure being joined by Chris Hunter, who is the co founder and CEO of Koya. But before that, you might be familiar with Chris because he was also one of the founders of popular drink for Loco. So, Chris, I'll let you kick us off.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background in the consumer products space, how you got involved, how you started for a loco, and then maybe we can move over into Koya and what you guys are building there.

Yeah, sounds great. Thanks for having me. Appreciate you inviting me on. Let's see, I guess. I guess my journey started. I grew up in Ohio and in Youngstown, Ohio, if you know anything about that. It's a blue collar steel mill town. And so I grew up in a lower middle class family.

No one was really entrepreneurs. I had one uncle who owned a company, so it was kind of cool to see him kind of pave his own way. But I always realized I wanted to do my own thing. Whether I was just like a look, I was a good kid, but whether I was rebellious and I didn't like being told what to do. So I was like, I'm just always going to start, start my own thing. Plus, I wanted to have the biggest opportunity to create the most money possible, you know? But I didn't know what that meant. And so I went to Ohio State. After college, I moved to Chicago.

I had no job. I didn't know what I was going to do was racking up debt, and I took whatever job I could find. I started working in a hail damage, like, storm chasing company, and it paid the bills. I realized that wasn't going to be long in that career because I was afraid of heights. So it didn't work out that well. But during that time, I just started contacting everybody I could think of, and, and I was like, what job do I want to do? Like, what would I, what would my skills be good at, right? I'm a pretty social guy. I'm pretty outgoing. I did promotions for nightclubs and bars in college and around the country around that time.

And so I had met somebody in the alcohol industry, and I just bugged the hell out of them until they let me stop, start working for them. And so that's how I cut my teeth in alcohol and in beverage. And it wasn't really by design. It was just like, this is the opportunity. And I realized I was good at it and I liked it, and there were a lot of social benefits to working in that industry. And so after two years, I was just trying to think of what I wanted to do, and I had this inspiration. I was selling this cherry flavored vodka that was often mixed with Red Bull and cherry bombs. I was 24 at the time, you know, very made sense to me.

Right. I was the Courtney. And so I was driving around. Well, like, part of my job was I would drive around to bars and basically pitch them this vodka. And then there was this, like, Red Bull knockoff product that I had as well. And I was kind of showing them how to make a cherry bomb. And it just dawned on me. I was like, why don't we have a premixed alcoholic energy drink? And so that's what sparked the idea.

I caught up my two partners separately and asked them if they were interested, and they said, yeah, why not? And we gave it a shot. And, and that was the birth of what became four Loko. It didn't start. As for loco, through some iterations and failures, we, we innovated and created for Loko. But, um, look, it was a lot of fun. It was a rocket ship ride. We clearly learned a lot about crisis management during that process. And, and looking back I mean it was the best, you know, learning, growth experience I could ever have.