On Water & Energy: Crowdfunding Your Way to the Top
Only two years out of college and already launching a business that raised over $620,000 through a Kickstarter campaign, learn more about how Nadya created the product so many have gone crazy for.
Hidrate is an online community creating a smart water bottle that tracks a user’s hydration levels and syncs with their phone and other fitness devices to help keep them hydrated.
Nadya Nguyen appears to be one of those people who is always in a good mood. From her eagerness to share her learnings to her proactive attitude towards life, there is a lightness in the way Nadya is. Intertwined with this shining optimism is an intense focus she puts to use as co-founder and CEO of Hidrate, a small tech startup that’s developed a smart water bottle able to track users’ hydration levels. She begins to tell me about her journey and I listen in silence, wondering how many people had foolishly thought her bubbly persona was all she had to offer, only to find a girl as tough as nails hiding underneath.
The idea behind Hidrate first formed after Nadya nearly passed out from dehydration while volunteering at an event. To further explore the business potential of her idea, she convinced three of her friends to join the St. Paul Startup Weekend. After receiving positive feedback on their first prototype, the team of four then decided to quit their day jobs in pursuit of their business idea. Since then, the group has launched a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly 18 times their initial financial goal of $35,000. The product is now in its manufacturing stage, and will begin shipping in March.
What or who do you credit most of your success to and why?
I think the biggest one would be my team. I like to think that ideas are actually pretty cheap and it’s really finding a team that can make it happen that’s important. I have an incredible team — they’re actually my close friends from college who went to the University of Minnesota too. We all came from different colleges, but I think it’s an advantage to have a good mix of people. I don’t think I would have gotten nearly as far as I did without them.
What metric do you use to keep track of your progress? How do you know if you’ve had a good day?
I really try to keep a tab on validate learning. Progress is validate learning: so how much have you learned from either your failure or your success? If you’re failing, obviously you need to learn what’s not working so you stop banging your head against the wall and find something new. If you succeed, you need to understand why it happened and how it happened, because it’s hard to replicate or build on top of something if you don’t know how it works. So every day I have to ask myself, what have I learned today?
Whose life do you keep track of in social media, if any? Why?
I’ve been following Marissa Mayer for a while now, back from when she was at Google. I really like this program she started called the Associate Product Manager program that gathers all the product people. They serve as a hub for user voice and they take all the user feedback and product intuition and bring that back to the engineering team to turn into amazing products. Marissa Mayer is a really cool person, because I think she manages to make everything fun. As a founder, going through a lot when you’re starting a company, it’s a great advantage if you’re able to take a challenge and make it fun.
The other person I’ve been following is Kevin Plank, he’s the CEO of Under Armour. I think he has a lot of interesting insight on focus and building the best company with the best culture and caliber possible. They practice this thing called first principle thinking, which I first learned from an interview with Elon Musk. It’s a physics way of looking at the world, because a lot of the time a lot of people, including myself, think by analogy because it’s fast and convenient. But sometimes rather than thinking analogy, it might be more helpful to look at a problem at the core and work from there.
If you could change anything about the way you were raised what would it be, and why?
To be honest, I don’t think I would change anything. I lived in Moscow, Russia. My father found a really special business in Moscow, and he had to work a lot so he didn’t always have a lot of time to spend with us growing up. My mother was a really strong woman and she was a role model for us. And because they worked so much, I think there were opportunities that my brother and I weren’t able to get involved with as kids, but I think in the end it made us tough.
How would a person who doesn’t like you describe you?
I’m hyper energetic. The less I get out of a person, the more energetic I become. And sometimes that can be overwhelming for other people, so that might be something other people don’t like about me. But I think it can be a good thing and a bad thing, and as long as I can find a balance of speaking up and going with the flow, then I think I’ll be okay.
Body Butter & Self-Care ← P R E V I O U S
N E X T → The 3 Must-Haves Rule
Pre-order a Hidrate water bottle now, they ship internationally! If you want more stories featuring entrepreneurs and their quirky, fun and deeper sides, follow The Lemon Scope on Medium. We interview really cool people like Nadya and write about them for you all to see!
