Hello, and thank you for joining. I'm Melissa Travers, Director of Community here at BevNET Inosh, and I am pleased to welcome you to The Nombase Podcast.
Don't forget to check out nombase.com, BevNET's platform built for the CPG community, and it's where you can find episodes of this podcast, and so much more.
One of the biggest challenges in CPG is having enough capital to support growth, which is why I'm especially excited to welcome Katie Tucker and Lisette Howard to the Nombase Podcast.
Katie and Lisette are co-founders of Sunnie, a better-for-you snack brand focused on convenience that's rapidly scaling across the country.
Today, we are going to hear how Sunnie navigated early manufacturing challenges and went on to successfully raise funding, including a recent million-dollar round all while expanding into major retailers like Whole Foods Market and Target.
We will dig into what worked and what didn't during their fundraising journey, how they found the right investors, and what other founders should know before raising capital. Well, Lisette and Katie, thank you so much for joining us today.
Kat, thanks for having us. Thanks for having us.
I'm excited to dig into the fundraising. But first, let's set the stage a little bit with Sunnie.
For any of the folks out there in the audience who may not be intimately familiar, tell us a little bit about how you got Sunnie started and then maybe even how the product has evolved over the years.
So Katie and I actually have known each other for 12 years. We met in a baby group when our eldest were two months old. And now, funny enough, we each have three kids a piece all under the age of 12.
I have three boys and Katie has three girls. And we became best friends. But for us, we really started Sunnie because as we started sending our kids to elementary, going to the grocery store, we realized that baby food was developing.
You could find fresh salads and sushi for ourselves. There's a lot of stuff that was happening in the fridge except for our kids. We were still left with the same thing that's been around for the last 30 years.
And then that expanded into what we call really like the lunchbox problem, where it was like on the go, right? Like picking up our kids from sports practices, going on road trips, being at the airport.
Every time we were on the go, we realized that we were sacrificing nutrition for convenience.
And we wanted to create a product that stood for the whole family, that anybody in the household could grab and feel good about, whether they were at the airport or where they're at Starbucks, where they can grab something, look at the back of it and
be like, well, I can actually eat this and I'm not going to feel guilty about it. So that's kind of how Sunny evolved. We wanted to, we really found a white space in the market where we were like, this doesn't exist and it should.
And the way that we wanted to do that was create something that was fun, felt nostalgic, but felt better for you. And that's really the ethos of Sunny.
And Katie, I don't know if you want to chime in and share a little bit about the backstory of how that got started.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, we started Sunny in 2020. So it was a COVID business. And with that, we really couldn't go into grocery at that time.
But it was almost this awesome blessing in disguise because we launched a online business that serviced customers on the West Coast. And then we started shipping nationwide.
And during that time, we got to learn so much about what our customers wanted out of our products. And that was interesting in terms of how we developed them. And we became gluten free during that time.
And we have always been seed oil free, but really learned she wanted that. And also what types of sweeteners we used, refined sugar free and using maple and coconut and all these alternative sweetening methods with our products.
So we learned so much during that period. But as we started to scale, realized very quickly that scaling a fresh, basically shipping a mini fridge across the country was very expensive. So we needed to scale through grocery to kind of get that done.
So we started up into grocery in 21 and launched into grocery like Airwon, Gelsons, Bristol Farms, and really started to kind of take a very targeted approach to who our customer was, what she wanted, and we wanted to be where she shopped.
And so that was step one. But as we continue to grow, and all of those direct consumer customers all over the country were like, but wait a minute, I don't live in Southern California and I want to find you in my grocery store.
And so we have this kind of silly joke in the company that we have two different customers. One that's Sally in Wisconsin, who's like our everyday mom, who buys Lunchables for her household, wishes there was a better product, but can't find it.
And maybe she bought Sunny online all those years. And then there's like Barbara in like Brentwood, she shops at Whole Foods and Erawan, and she's fancy, but she would never buy Lunchables ever.
And so she, but she sees Sunny as like the prepackaged snack her kids get to take to school or camp, and that's fun. And so we stand for both.
We stand for both Barbara, who, you know, she's our typical incremental customer, and then Sally, who is our everyday shopper, and we're scaling for the Sally's of the world, right?
Like we want to grow into conventional grocery slowly, we'll get there, but that's really kind of our ethos, is that we are building for these two very different customer demographics that have different needs.
Being able to segment your customers like that, I'm sure is infinitely helpful in every area of your business. And it sounds like that was made possible by your initial D2C strategy, being able to collect information.
How did you fund the business from the beginning? Was it a mixture of friends and family, money you had already? What was the fuel for your initial fire?
We first initially both put, we self-funded initially.
That was what got us off the ground. It helped us with putting together what the brand looked like, all of the nuts and bolts of the company.
And then we did a family, friends and family raise, and we did a few of those throughout the years until we got into our last two raises. But that's initially how we funded a lot of self-funding, a lot of sweat, a lot of sweat equity, we'll call it.
For some of the emerging founders out there, do you have any recommendations or thoughts around how much money you might need for that first year and a half to two years or so?
And of course, I know it can vary so widely depending on what you're doing or in how you're doing it.
I feel like you're talking to the wrong business, Melissa. I like to joke, Lisette and I joke a lot about this because running a fresh business is expensive. It's not a typical thing.
You could ship it out of your garage and it would be cool. No, we never did that. We always had to have professional management of our products because it's fresh and perishable.
So it's a very tricky business to get into. And looking back on it, while we were overachievers, but yeah, it took quite a bit of money to get it going, I'll just say.
Yeah, I can certainly-
Always more than you think you need. How about that?
That is fair enough. And especially for the perishable and frozen founders out there, my heart goes out to you.
Yeah, but I did want to make a note because I feel like this is such a, I think, a fun part of our story. And I'm going to actually toss it back to Lisette because this was her idea. But during our second raise, we had a friends and family round.
They raised through mostly friends, family of ours, and like we depleted that group quickly. And then we're like, we need to raise more. And it was like 23-ish.
We were launching in target and we were like, oh, this is getting hard. What are we going to do? And Lisette had the interesting idea of pulsing our customers.
And so basically doing versus going on to like a crowdfunding platform, which we did explore, we decided like, hey, we have our own groups that buy from us and are supporters of us. So why don't we just ask them?
So Lisette, I let you take it from here.
Yeah, I mean, we, to Katie's point, didn't have the time to set up a crowdfunding campaign and sent out a heartfelt email just from us to our customers.
And surprisingly, we got a handful of customers that I think we, I think it was around maybe $100,000 or more.
More than that, I think it was like 200-ish.
Yeah. And it was great. There's still, you know, customers to this day.
And it was just a nice way to like find people that already love your product and you never know who's purchasing from you and who wants to support you.
So in the moment where, you know, Katie and I up until now, I mean, we've, I feel like the fundraising role that we've been in has been tricky, right? Like we launched in COVID.
We literally launched a business in COVID and we tried to fundraise after that time. And it was always, you know, I don't know, this is a tricky time for people. So like we always had to find unique ways to do it.
That was one of the ways that we did it was with customers. And the other way wasn't fundraising, but Katie and I were just talking about this. Like it was another point where we were having a hard time raising money.
And we're like, well, our customers really keep asking us about our crackers and their shelf stable. Like maybe we launched that as a product.
And that really supported us in the business and helping margins and kind of just scale what we needed to survive a little bit longer.
Very innovative ideas around how to raise money. And when did you launch the crackers?
That was around 23 as well.
Katie, when I was talking to you as we were preparing for this conversation, we were talking about your Notch Live Pitch Slam win in 2022. I mean, you guys did such a great job and you took home the prize.
But behind the scenes, things weren't as picture perfect as they were on stage. What was going on?
Yeah, I mean, at the end of, that was 22, at the end of 22, Lisette and I were, we could not raise capital. We could not raise it. We were, we were scared.
We were worried. We were like, we don't know what we're going to do because we were like, should we close up this business? Should we try to like sell it off to some?
Like we didn't know. We knew we had a great product and we had a great concept, but we just did not have the capital to get it going.
And so when we got invited to go pitch at PitchSlam, Lisette and I were like, this is a sign that we should go and just attend.
And I remember getting to that, to that conference for the first time and thinking, whoa, like this is what this industry is all about.
I've been in a kitchen for three years, like, you know, like making crackers in the oven, but like, oh, this is what this industry is like. So it was the first time that we both were like, wow, there's a brave new world out there.
I'm like, we could actually like do something here. So then to get on stage and get so much validation from the audience and the judges, and to your point, to win that was so helpful for us at that time.
We thought, oh no, we're not gonna, we're gonna keep going. We're gonna do what we have to do to get this business. And literally in March, so that was December.
In March, our products were getting set up at Target. We got the email that our products were potentially going into Target and then that kind of started to change things for Sunny from that point forward.
But it was that end of 22 into early 23 that we really had to like dig deep to figure it out.
And was one of the major challenges distribution or were there other things? What were the main things that were holding you back or setting you back?
I mean, it was kind of everything.
I mean, we were self manufacturing, right? We were making everything by hand. We didn't have the right equipment to really scale the business and extend the shelf life of our products.
We were dealing with short shelf lives, hand making everything. There was just a lot of things happening in order to be able to scale to the right point. We needed the funding and the backing to support it.
So you got the yes from Target.
And then how did you get from self manufacturing and having a lot of challenges to moving forward with the Target launch and that setting you on a more positive trajectory?
There was something in that moment, I guess, back to like the Nosh Pitchlaim and then the Target that we're like, we're just we're going for it. We're doing it. And that gave us conviction to do a few different things.
Before we started, when we were still self manufacturing, we're like, all right, we got to we got to figure out how we're going to manufacture in a better way. We invested in equipment to do that.
We had found a partner to help us scale on the cracker side. So we found a cracker manufacturer that we could just bring crackers in and then pack.
So that that piece of equipment actually was like one of the first kind of like stepping stones for us to be able to scale.
And it was probably one of the best investments that we've made because we've been able to own our destiny a little bit more as we've gone into co-packing officially. Like we're not reliant on their equipment and their tooling.
We have our own piece of equipment. So in case things don't work out, we're able to grab that and move it somewhere else.
Which is exactly what you did. Isn't that right when you decided to move to a co-manufacturer that was centrally located? Wasn't that a big part of the way that you got out of a difficult situation?
So we ended up moving to the Midwest.
We wanted to be able to scale efficiently, and we moved our equipment out there. And we thought it was going to be great for the business.
And then we quickly realized over a course of a few months that quality just started to deteriorate a bit on our product. It wasn't showing up to the grocery stores as we would expect it to be.
And we knew that we needed to make a decision quickly and move it. And for us moving that back home, we call it back home, right, back to LA, where I could go visit it every day.
We made that decision quickly and we moved out of there within the course of what Katie, like four months. And if we had invested in the manufacturer's own equipment, we would have been stuck there a lot longer.
But given that we had owned that piece of equipment, we were able to go out there quickly and be able to kind of turn the business around and quality and all of that pretty fast.
I've certainly had the experience of loving and emerging brands products and then all of a sudden they just don't taste the same.
And unfortunately, I think sometimes you wind up losing consumers because they don't know the behind the scenes and that it's going to change. Did you find that you got any customer feedback on the product that was coming out of the Midwest at all?
Was there any indication that it was affecting your business negatively?
Yeah, so for Katie and I, we've always wanted to be very transparent and we just knew it. We could see it ourselves when we were going in the grocery store.
There was a short period of time where Katie and I didn't want to go into a grocery store, but we knew in order to keep our consumers that we had to be honest and we had to say something and so we took to Instagram, I think it was a few months after
it happened and just kind of shared a real moment of, we know that our product hasn't been perfect and it was really heartwarming because we had a lot of consumers respond with, yeah, I noticed that but I was just hoping it was a glitch and like,
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Well, like pretty much every other founder out there, you certainly have had your challenges, but it didn't get in the way of the raise that you put together in 2024.
It sounds like at first it was challenging to get the investors and raise the money, but then after you sort of broke through and were able to make it happen, can you walk us through that 2024 6 plus figure raise?
It was Fulcrum Collective out of Bentonville and SWAT Equity, which is a venture firm. What were the initial challenges you were have with raising money? And then how did you finally break through?
One of the challenges when you were our size, so at the time we were sub a million in revenue.
And that always seems to be like the first hurdle, is that investors are like, oh, you're sub a million and oh, you're just getting that placement at Sprouts or at Target or what have you.
Call me back when you know what your velocities are looking like. Call me back, share an update with me. And it was a lot of that like, you're too early, I like what you're building, it's too soon.
And if you're a founder listening to this, just know that that's what we all hear. And I think I shared with you on a prior call that Lisette and I have a spreadsheet that we keep to track our investor conversations.
And it took us 150 calls to get that done. I bring it up because somebody told us this years ago. Lisette and I had talked to other founders.
And when they told that to us, I thought, that is wild to me. That's impossible. That's crazy.
But now that we're on the other side of the, I call this the for now because this is just a for now moment. So we're in the moment of yes, we raised. Yes, that's great.
But we will likely raise, we will be raising again next year. But I think I share this in the moment that you do all that work, all those conversations, all of that. And you think every time like, oh, this is the one.
This is the match. Like, it's all feels energetically like it's connecting. And then maybe they never write you back.
Maybe they don't return your calls. Maybe weeks go by and they said they'd send a term sheet and they don't. So it's just one of those things that it's a game that you play.
It's a mind game, you know?
And the more as a founder that you can kind of get comfortable with, like hearing the nose and let it just roll off your back and move to the next and know that it's not, that has nothing to do with the business that you are building.
It has nothing to do with anything you've done wrong. And it's everything to do with that investor's perspective, their hypothesis, their thesis, what they want to invest in.
And you just have to run your own race because so many founders are comparing. They did it. They got the yes.
Oh, you know, Lisette and I would go round and round about this. And at the end, now that we're kind of on the other side of this particular moment, we're like, wow, how much learning happened?
Like, we thought it was this Prince Charming, but no, it was this one. You know, you never quite know. So anyway, that's just a perspective from just the journey.
So you are saying that when you were getting the no's and come back when you have velocity and you're at a certain revenue number, come talk to us.
What is that revenue number that unlocks some of those conversations?
I mean, some would say it's over a million, but then you call them back and sometimes, let me know when you're doing like four to five, you know.
But typically, like it seems to me, Lisette, I don't know if you agree, but like seems like the magic number we heard was over a million.
Yes, I think it's changing. It used to be like there was some where it was like, you know, let us know when you're over a million. And then we get back to them and like, are you still a little too early?
Let us know when you're two to three million. So I think it depends. I think at the end of the day, though, what we experienced was yes, sometimes those investors were very strict to their like kind of philosophies.
And the other times it was just like, did it work for them or not? Or did they like the brand enough? And so I think there's always variables, right?
Like, yes, they have their standards of what they're looking for. But if they really believe in what the brand is doing and the founders and the whole pie of it, I think there's flexibility there.
So to us, it was like, okay, we got to keep dating because that's not the right person.
And, you know, as we're talking about dating, it certainly feels like that. Katie, you mentioned that you had to talk to so many Prince Charmings until you found the right match.
In retrospect, are there any indicators in conversations that are actually going to move forward that you weren't able to see when you were in the middle of it?
But now looking back, you realize, you know, oh, those questions were specific in this way that did mean we were moving forward.
Are there any indicators that, you know, you can sort of see in retrospect that would help you understand that it was a very potential match?
I think the primary indicator that I think I observed was just the diligence process, right? So I think, you know, you go into due diligence and it's a lot of work and it's a lot.
It takes tons of time and it takes you off of your business for a while, but it's good work. You're learning something too while you do it.
But when they want to go deep and like double click into stuff, that you're like, huh, all right, they're really curious about this subject. Like that's to me is a good indicator. Like, all right, they really care.
But the other thing I would say is, at least what we noticed with Santa Tara in particular, during this most recent raise is that it all just felt, I don't know how else to sell it, but like easy, like they asked for information. We gave it to them.
They responded, oh, this is great. Thank you so much. And we'll come back to you.
And then they always come back to you with, okay, this is the next question. And it was just more of this, not like we're trying to chase them down. It was like, oh no, they're pursuing us as well.
And I think that that's important to kind of see in the process, whereas like, if you're keep hunting down an investor for, you know, feedback for their perspective on a report you shared, what have you, they're probably not that into it.
It definitely sounds like dating.
It is, yeah. I'll echo Katie and say, yes, the back and forth like mutual interest is what we realized when like, okay, this could be the one, right?
There would be moments also just like dating where you would go back and forth, and they were very responsive, and then all of a sudden, they're not.
And they have a lot of stuff going on at that time, but like, you know, we realized, okay, we're no longer as interesting to them. So that mutual kind of communication was a good sign for us.
And for 2024, how were you introduced to Fulcrum Collective and SWOT Equity? How did you get in touch with them?
Let's see, so it started with SWOT, and shout out to Sarah Foley, because she was like the first believer in Sunny.
But we got connected to Sarah through a friend of mine that I had known for, I don't know, 15 years, who happened to be, we were both in fashion together, and then he moved into CPG like I did, and so stayed in touch. And he made an intro to Sarah.
And again, with Sarah, it was one of those where the minute Lisette and I met with her on the phone, we were like, oh, this feels different.
And it's true, from day one, she's been a supporter and believer in what we've been building and has helped us make a lot of connections. And she connected us with the fulcrum team to co-invest in Sunny in our 24 raise.
How did you decide how much money to raise both for the 2024 raise and the one that you just recently closed?
It was a mix of how far can this take us to our next valuation. So we wanted to be really mindful and still being mindful of every time you raise money, you lose equity.
And so we've never wanted to be in a position where we've over raised at a moment where the valuation didn't make sense for the company.
And so we've looked at it in segments and said, okay, if we raise this amount of money, it will get us this far and it will then get us to a valuation that we feel good about for the next raise. And that's really how we've done it.
We've tried to be strategic in that. So we have certain milestones that we've been hitting.
What are some of those milestones?
Well, milestones have been like new doors and velocities, right? So like this most recent raise has not only been getting into new doors and being able to support that, it's also been new head counts that will then support future growth.
So that was probably the biggest one for us this year was raising money to be able to extend the team beyond the two of us to be able to support future growth.
I'm sure that is a huge relief after everything the two of you have done on your own. Let's talk a little bit about the 2025 raise. So this most recent raise, as we mentioned, was a million dollars with Santa Terra.
And Santa Terra, for folks out there who may not know, has also invested in brands like Tealupita, HIO, Little Sesame.
They also have a network of CPG leaders like Chosen Foods, who may be able to find some benefits on ingredients for saying that kind of thing. Tell us a little bit about Santa Terra and how you became connected to them.
They came to our booth at Expo West and just met one of their investment associates. And it was a very quick conversation. He seemed like he knew what he was planning.
Like he was definitely looking for brands and that we happen to be one of them. And so we traded cards and quickly connected after the show.
And one of the things I think that attracted Santa Terra to the opportunity was because we have this approach with the crackers alongside the Fresh.
And they had after the acquisition of Simple Mills, I think that there's a lot of interest in the cracker space and what the cracker space can do. And also shows the market kind of appetite for better for you crackers and which we agree with.
And so that was one attraction.
And then their board at Santa Terra was very, very interested and continues to be interested in the family snacking kind of space that Sunnie is building out and they really feel in terms of their investment thesis, that this will be a growing
category. And we just happen to be the first to market with this product. And so that's what they wanted to invest in.
Sunnie's original packaging calls out dippers, and it seems a little, it seemed a little bit more geared towards kids.
You had a fairly recent brand refresh, which positions it more towards family snacking, so that anybody in the family would be interested.
Do you feel like that brand refresh helped position you in a way that made you more appealing to Santa Tara, and that you were a family snacking brand versus just something that's more geared towards kids?
Yeah, I feel like that re-brand has gone a long way. As we mentioned, we started this for our kids, right? This was intended to be a kid's product.
And as we learned over time over the last few years, we have a lot of busy snacking adults eating the product. And they kept saying, there would be parents being like, I'm eating this or dad's eating this. Everybody in the family was eating it.
And it was this moment for us that we kind of just decided like, this needs to be for the whole family. It's not just for kids. And I think the reason that that's interesting also from the investor perspective is our pool got a lot larger, right?
Like we weren't just focused on one segment. We were focused on many people in the household. So, they're not just buying it for the two kids in their house, they're buying it for all five.
And it could be that your kids decided this week, they don't like pizza anymore, they only like jam and you only had pizza left, now dad's eating it, right? Like so everybody in the household is gravitating towards the snacks.
And that's really supported the business in numerous ways.
I know it's hard to look in the rear view mirror and imagine how things might have been if you've done things differently.
But do you feel like positioning the product towards kids at the beginning gave you a way to go to grow a core audience that then rippled out more?
Yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean, well, Lisette and I always like went around and around about this because we had, we had had so when we were first starting to raise capital, this is more like in the friends and family years.
What attracted investors to our conversation was people wanted the kids snack problem solved by someone. Like that was something that people said to us, like you're attacking this problem.
This is an issue is that there's junk in the market for kids and somebody's got to fix it. And I feel like you might be the brand to fix it. So we kind of leaned into that for a while.
We're like, we agree. We might be the brand to come and help shape the narrative around kids snacking, but it was really in which was helpful.
But really, as you get into the market, you can't deny the fact that it is for a household, people, and to Lisette's point, kids' flavor preferences change on the weekly.
Like you buy a Costco size thing of chips that you think they love, and they don't eat them, and you're stuck with them. And so we were trying to kind of really like as parents ourselves, build for what we needed.
And that's kind of how we shifted into this different mindset. But to your point, people are like, yes, people really do want the kids' snack problem fixed. It's just a very tough market to crack.
Well, you both seem to have cracked it very well.
How long did the Santa Terra conversation take until you got to a deal? So Expo West, you met them for the first time. What were the conversations like up until the point when you closed the raise?
Was it three months?
I think it was three months. Yeah, because things closed officially in June, but we heard from them they want to invest in May. So it was a three-month process between initial conversations and multiple diligence rounds.
In your mind, when you think back to those conversations, were there any pieces of information you shared about either yourselves or about the business or about the product where you just saw the person's eyes light up and they had this aha moment
I think for me, Katie, maybe you have a different moment, but there is a conversation where one of the partners had come on to the call and just started talking about the kids and family space and how things needed to change and they were really
focusing on the family. And that's kind of like what triggered me because there was a lot of similarities in the way that Katie and I speak about the company and what we're trying to do to change what's on the shelf for busy families that they
reciprocated in a very, in a very natural way. And that for me was kind of an indicator of like, okay, we're on, like they see what the future is. They're not looking at us as like what we are today. They see the future of what Sunnie can be.
And it was just very aligned in multiple ways.
Yeah, I totally agree with that, Lisette.
The only other thing I would add is, because we want to be not just a grocery business company, food service is a very important channel to us because we believe that busy families need to find our products at the airport, at the hospital, at their
office, what have you. They also saw that as like, I mean, we've started to kind of like angle into food service, but there's really exponential growth in that channel that Sunnie really does provide.
And I think that that was another like very aligned conversation we had with them.
Are there any things that you learned during the diligence process or, you know, maybe the terms negotiation that will help you through future raises, you know, maybe things that you want to have buttoned up before you go into those processes or
Yeah, I'll say that before we went into this raise, and it was feedback that we had received actually from Sarah was, you got to get a model in, and a real like a good model that like you can show to perspective investors, and Katie and I had already
put one together, but like an official model that you can plan on, lean on. So we spent a few months doing that with a finance group that we brought on, and that really prepared us for a lot of the diligence that we were getting.
And so that was probably the, I don't know, the best advice that we had gotten to prepare. But I think one of the other things is like everybody asked for different items. You never know what you need to prepare for.
Yeah.
And in terms of learning, I would just say that the learning of working with a really professional group to help us create that model, and then actually using the model in our day-to-day business operations, and looking at accounts and how they'll
onboard and velocity expectations, and running a pro forma that we know how every account should perform, was really good. Just learning how to run our business more efficiently.
I would say that because on the sales side of things, I was running and gunning a lot, like, oh yeah, we'll do this, we'll do that. You can do all this and that, but if you can't afford it, you don't make money on it.
So that was good for me learning.
What were some of the ways that you've been able to streamline?
Our process?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, now we have like a very strict trade spend calculator that we're using to bet every single opportunity that crosses our desk, it's does it pass the test? Are we gonna end up making money on this account, yes or no?
And that's been really important for us from just being smarter. We really wanna work smarter and get to profitability faster.
You know, it seems like every fund raise is almost like a stress test for your business. How was your mindset different going into this latest raise with Santa Terra than it was in 2024?
You know, there was, it's been a lot of learnings, I think, over the years of trying to raise money.
I think when we were really young in the business, and we're still really young in the business, but there's more of like a scarcity mindset of like, Oh my God, are we going to be able to do this? Can we raise the money?
And now with like Santa Terra and even when we had SWOT, it was like, okay, like we need to find the right partner. And like, we, we felt convicted that we were going to find the money to continue pushing the business forward.
We have a lot of great momentum.
We continue to have a lot of great momentum, but it shifted from like, let's just find investors to like, let's find the right partners that are going to support us, not only financially, but strategically and align with the vision that we want.
So it was a big mind shift, at least for me, I think for Katie too, of like, how we find the right partners. And, you know, you can have money and that's great, but if you don't have the right partners to support you, it's not going to go that far.
It's advice you hear all the time, but the reality is sometimes you need the capital when you need it.
So I give you both so much credit for, you know, making things work until you did find the right partners, which has set you up for so much of the success, I would think, that you have today.
My last question for you is, how has fundraising changed the way that you see yourselves as founders?
You know, we were talking a little bit about how fundraising itself is like, you know, it's a stress test for your business and you change things and you streamline things, but how has it changed the way that, you know, again, you see yourselves as
I mean, Lisette, I won't speak for you, but I think for me it helps me feel more confident in what we're doing, and that we have not only the financial support, but the actual like belief in us as founders.
I don't know, it did help. I think it did help and it helped, you know, when you're kind of like building in a silo, which I think for the first few years of building a company, you're doing that because you have to.
You're like, just get it done, get it done, get it done. And now we're kind of like building in public with people.
And so when you're building with people alongside you that believe in you, it makes you build a stronger structure and you feel better about what you do every day. And that has been really helpful for our collective like mojo.
I like that. Yeah, I mean, just to add on it to it, I think like how the fundraising journey has like changed me is just, you know, being okay with people not agreeing with our vision or understanding it.
Or, you know, there are a lot of people out there and not everybody's going to agree or, you know, like what you're doing, like the product, but just knowing that we felt, you know, we feel confident in what we're building and there's people out
there to support us. And it's okay that not everybody agrees.
Well, Katie Tucker and Lisette Howard, co-founders of Sunnie, thank you so much for being so transparent about your fundraising journey and the business itself.
It's always something that I've, and we all of us here at Notch have appreciated so much that you're so generous with your information and really taking people behind the scenes.
So thank you so much for having this conversation today and being so generous with your advice and information. It's been such a pleasure to have you on the Nombase Podcast. For everybody else, thank you so much for joining.
Make sure you go to nombase.com for other episodes of this podcast and so much more. And we will see you next time.
