This Water Bottle Wants To
Change Your Life
As a go-getter from an
early age, it wasn't surprising that Nadya Nguyen was only 23 when she created
the Hidrate Spark water
bottle. What's more surprising is that she's already expanded the company from
one person to 20 - in less than four years.
The Spark 2.0 - the
current iteration of Nguyen's product - is a Bluetooth-integrated water
bottle that determines a user's optimal amount of water intake and subtly glows
when it’s time to drink more. Spark’s custom app uses
information like user height, weight, location and activity levels to recommend
how much users should be drinking and combines that with a sensor on the bottle
to monitor how much water has been consumed. If it’s too little, the bottle
both lights up and sends a reminder to the user’s phone or integrated
wearable to remind them to stay hydrated. The idea is to encourage healthier
life choices for long-term better health, starting with drinking more water.
Nguyen admits that she didn’t have much professional experience
when she had the idea for what she calls a piece of “unique habit-forming
technology.” The idea came to Ngu=yen, a practitioner of healthy eating and
living, while exhausted and dehydrated - so much so that she almost passed out
on a city bus. “If someone as health conscious as me managed to get
dehydrated,” she says, “then I knew it must be a problem.” Soon after that
incident, she convinced her friends and fellow recent graduates to join her at
a TechStars Weekend Startup event, where teams introduce new digital startups
and apps to audience members who can then vote for their favorite projects.
She created her prototype out of a plastic sport bottle and hair
ties, which she now says “looked like a Frankenstein thing, very ugly and
scary.” Despite the rough appearance, they had measurable interest and
finished as a top audience favorite. From there, she was able to get accepted
into a very competitive start-up incubator program, where she leaned on
relationships and recommendations to source the skills and materials to make
the Spark water bottle a reality.
Nguyen kept one idea on her mind
during the early stages: making sure she created a product that solved a
problem, not a product that created one. For both the
bottle design and app interface, her team started with user experience at the
forefront of all their decisions and intentionally moved slowly through the
design and development processes. She adopted a “first things first” mentality,
and spent time interviewing nearly 500 women to ensure the product was useful
and wanted before thinking about production. Though she had interest from
producers and potential partners almost immediately after presenting the
concept at the TechStars weekend, she realized she was jumping the gun in
talking about production in her first year and stuck to her commitment to slow,
thoughtful development. She ultimately passed
on investor funding and opted to crowdsource on Kickstarter, raising more than
$600,000 in one month through 17,000 pre-orders. To her, it solved
a problem other than financial stability; it showed her that
consumers wanted her product enough to spend their money on it.
The Spark
1.0 shipped in 2016 to fulfill those orders, and soon after, work started on
the Spark 2.0, based on user feedback from the buyers of the 1.0. Changes to
the product included better Bluetooth connectivity and switching to colored LED
lights. Nguyen heard from buyers that while the white LED lights may have been
visible in initial tests, they were difficult to see in real-world
applications, like in bright sunlight. Since then, Nguyen has continued to
keep her ear to the ground. She still spends more than three hours a week
personally contacting Hidrate's customers, making sure they’re satisfied with
the products and chatting with them to source direct user feedback.
And her patience is paying off; she's generated more than $10
million in sales since 2015. Spark 2.0 has recently moved into
mainstream stores like Target and Bed, Bath and Beyond, and Hidrate will
continue their successful social media influencer relationships. Nguyen is a
bit mum on what products are next for her team but says that continued
user feedback is always giving her ideas for future expansion. “We are working
on future product launches and more partnerships - so stay tuned!”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/suziedundas/2018/06/08/this-water-bottle-wants-to-change-your-life/#1eff58ed6d1f
https://www.forbes.com/sites/suziedundas/2018/06/08/this-water-bottle-wants-to-change-your-life/#1eff58ed6d1f
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