In this episode of The Orita Podcast, Aaron Schwartz sits down with Paul Voge, Co-Founder & Former CEO at Aura Bora. Paul started Aura Bora because he drank 10 to 12 cans of sparkling water a day and thought lavender cucumber sounded good. Six and a half years later he sold the company, hiked a lot, and relearned how to read fiction.

• How Paul went store by store across the country in a rental car, calling buyers on his cell phone, to get into 4,000 independent natural stores before ever touching a major chain

• Why sparkling water is about as bad a DTC product as you could design in a lab, and the one reason Aura Bora built a Shopify store anyway

• What actually happened to consumer CPG fundraising after 2021, why the goalpost moved so fast, and what that meant for brands at 10 to 50 million in sales

• The honest account of what a 90-day acquisition process looks like when your board decides it is time to sell and the market has already shifted under you

• Why Paul spent five months doing almost nothing after the exit, and what that taught him about what he had been sacrificing without realizing it

• His one word to the wise for every founder running hard right now: find one day a week where you do nothing for work, and do not let AI just become another tool to help you output more

👥 Meet the guest

Paul Voge, Co-Founder & Former CEO at Aura Bora

🎙 Hosted by

Aaron Schwartz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Orita.ai

🎧 Chapters

[00:00:00] Before Sparkling Water: Buying Boring Businesses in Colorado

[00:01:33] The Kitchen Experiment That Became a National Brand

[00:03:44] What the Sparkling Water Market Actually Looks Like

[00:05:17] Craft Sparkling Water: The Differentiation Thesis

[00:07:42] Pricing at 2x the Competition and Why It Worked

[00:09:26] What Aura Bora Nailed Early and What Did Not Translate

[00:11:29] 4000 Independent Stores: The Smiling and Dialing Playbook

[00:14:04] Why Long-Term Relationships Run CPG Whether You Like It or Not

[00:16:35] Selling Sparkling Water Online Is a Terrible Idea (With One Exception)

[00:20:47] Raising 23 Million Dollars and What the Capital Markets Look Like Now

[00:24:37] Where Founders Actually Get Money for Consumer Products Today

[00:27:50] The Series B That Became an Acquisition and Why the Timing Was Not the Plan

[00:32:50] What Happens After You Hand Over the Keys

[00:36:15] What Paul Does Now and Why He Loves Game Shows

[00:39:25] The Four Burners Problem: What Paul Would Do Differently

🌐 Check out Orita.ai for more episodes of The Orita Podcast, where we sit down with the most interesting operators, marketers, and founders in e-commerce to talk about what’s working right now. Hosted by the Orita team. Orita uses machine learning to help brands send smarter, more profitable marketing, by figuring out who actually wants to hear from you and when.

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