Female Startup Club From her kitchen to a $360M acquisition, SmartSweets Founder Tara Bosch shares her inspiring story (part 1)
Today on the show we’re joined by Tara Bosch, founder of the wildly successful candy brand, SmartSweets.
Since launching in July 2016, SmartSweets' mission to innovate delicious, low-sugar candy you can feel good about has remained the same – Kick Sugar, Keep Candy™. Envisioned as "the future of candy," SmartSweets aims to be a global leader in the sugar reduction movement by tackling one of the largest and most concerning ingredients in our everyday food – sugar.
In this episode, we cover Tara’s inspiring journey from starting this business in her kitchen right through to selling a major stake in the business for $360m. It’s a wild ride and I know you’re going to learn so much from Tara!
I couldn't believe how she only raised $3M to then go on to proceed with a $360M acquisition. Some seriously impressive stuff. Tara believes there to be so much stigma and idealization around raising as if that almost becomes the celebration. Realistically this can distract from the fact that the money is so you can grow your business, and those are the milestones that you should be celebrating. If you can raise no money that’s amazing, it’s much more beneficial for everyone.
There are some real nuggets of wisdom here that I know will benefit a lot of you. For example, how it may look like entrepreneurs with a certain level of success have it all figured out but that's very rarely the case. Tara thought that when you got to a certain level of success you just have this unwavering confidence that you know what you're doing and you've got it all figured out. That as you scale, this feeling comes automatically. But this just isn't the case. The feeling changes, but you rarely feel like you've got it all figured out. That's just part of the entrepreneurial ride, what keeps you going in some ways, and also something that's good to accept. There’s not one event that is the silver bullet to success, just accumulation that keeps that momentum going, and the snowball getting bigger and bigger. But you still have to push that snowball.
Stick around for the last part where Tara dives into her key piece of advice for entrepreneurs entering the candy space. For her, having a radical value proposition is one of the reasons at the heart of why SmartSweets scaled so quickly, and why they're continuing to be the market leader. To have a massively successful product and simultaneously better the world you have to take something that exists and create so much radical value that for people it’s reinventing the wheel in a very meaningful way, that sparks the emotional response of someone to your product. Make sure you have that radical value proposition.
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LINKS WE MENTION
Smartsweets Instagram
Female Startup Club's Instagram
Doone's Instagram
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Tim Ferriss' Blog
Peter Thiel's Zero to One
Felix Dennis' How To Get Rich
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