The Underdog

About two months ago, The Generalist started stocking Crunchy Hydration. We'd crossed paths with the brand before, at CreatorCon, but I hadn't actually tried it myself yet. So I picked up a can, and I think you, the reader, know the feeling I'm talking about. That flicker of excitement when you try a new drink, followed by the letdown of the first sip when it just misses the mark, and the can ends up sitting half full on your desk for the rest of the day. Crunchy Hydration doesn't do that.

I genuinely think this is one of the best health-centered drinks on the market right now. There was no weird aftertaste, no chemical sweetness sitting on the back of my tongue. The flavor and the benefits are both there, and honestly, it's hard to find a drink that pulls off both at once. That's exactly why I was so excited to sit down with the genius behind it and hear her story, and what the rest of us can learn from her.

A lot of the best products on a shelf started the same way. Somebody got desperate enough to make the thing themselves, after trying a million different options that didn't work. Megan Riggs, the founder behind Crunchy Hydration, is a perfect example. Her drink wasn't made in a product lab, and it wasn't built for some target audience she didn't actually relate to. It was made in her kitchen, while she was trying to keep herself alive.

It's part of a pattern we keep seeing here at FoundersForge: people walking away from a picture-perfect corporate resume to go build something that's actually theirs. Kevin Sommers did it. So did the team behind Mama's Grocery. So did Kylie Wade. Megan's version of that story starts in Los Angeles.

Megan studied psychology at the University of Virginia. Shortly after, she took a marketing job in Los Angeles, and by every outside measure was doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing. She was helping a company expand its West Coast operations, working with huge clients in the corporate training world, checking every single box. But like a lot of high performers in that industry, she developed anxiety and depression severe enough to bring on panic attacks and days where she couldn't get out of bed. Conventional treatment didn't resonate with her the way she needed it to, so she went looking for something else entirely. She hit a low point and knew she had to do something drastic to keep herself on this earth.

She Quit Everything and Bought a Plane Ticket

So she quit. She gave away almost everything she owned and bought a one-way ticket to Thailand with a backpack and not much else.

"It's just so cool when you're stripped of everything and you go back to the basics. Simplicity, holistic healing, just eating whole foods." — Megan Riggs, Founder, Crunchy Hydration

She spent her days teaching English, and on the way to work she'd pass a small juice and smoothie shop. She started stopping in every day and fell in love with cold-pressed juice, and with the idea that food could be part of how you heal.

Built on a Pattern, Not a Phone Call

Calling her sister and saying "this is what I'm doing" makes for a good story, but the real starting point was everything that came next: renting kitchen space, showing up every day, and listening closely enough to what her customers kept asking that she couldn't ignore where it was pointing her.

She moved back to Virginia Beach and started her first beverage business, Crunchy Carrot, a cold-pressed juice line. She rented commercial kitchen space from Leaping Lizard Cafe, a farm-to-table restaurant in town, using the bakery side of the building they weren't using, and started working with local farmers.

Running that business is where the real founding moment happened. Customers kept asking her the same questions, over and over: what do you take for anxiety, for energy, for gut health? Her answer was almost always the same. L-theanine, an amino acid naturally found in tea leaves, plus lemon balm and ashwagandha.

"I was on repeat talking about L-theanine and how it saved my life." — Megan Riggs, Founder, Crunchy Hydration

At the same time, you can't really wholesale cold-press juice. Not without high-pressure pasteurization, which to her "kind of killed the beauty of local, fresh, organic juice."

The Pivot: Put It in a Water

So she took everything she'd been taking for her own anxiety and put it into a water instead of a juice, before partnering with a local brewery to actually produce it.

"Mad scientist formulated it in my kitchen." — Megan Riggs, Founder, Crunchy Hydration

And so the first version of Crunchy Hydration was born: a functional beverage built around the same ingredients she'd been talking about with customers for months. As it scaled, she licensed the Crunchy Carrot name back to Leaping Lizard Cafe, so the juice line she started it all with could keep going without her running it day to day. It felt less like walking away and more like closing a loop.

Seven Chakras, One Big Rebrand

One of my favorite questions to ask founders during interviews is what their biggest mistake was. Megan's answer came without hesitation.

"Doing too much to start." — Megan Riggs, Founder, Crunchy Hydration

The first version of Crunchy Hydration launched with seven different SKUs, each one built around a different chakra, and some of them contained CBD. It was a beautiful idea on paper. In practice, it was too many ingredients and too many suppliers for a small brand to manage, and CBD regulations were shifting month to month. She eventually pulled it out of every product entirely.

The branding went through its own version of that same simplification. The first logo tried to combine all seven chakras into one image, and ended up as a skull with tree roots growing out of it. The next attempt folded all seven elements into a single brain graphic. Neither one stuck. In January of 2025, Crunchy Hydration finally launched the rebrand you see on shelves today, after bringing on a creative and marketing director who took it across the finish line.

"Being able to pivot is one of the most important lessons I've learned. You have to be able to take feedback in real time and make adjustments... you just have to not be attached." — Megan Riggs, Founder, Crunchy Hydration

That willingness to change course extended to the shelf itself. Megan describes walking the floor at Expo West, the industry's biggest CPG trade show, and not being able to find a single drink that actually felt hydrating.

"Everything was so sweet, and the can didn't represent what was inside." — Megan Riggs, Founder, Crunchy Hydration

I agree with her on that one. So Crunchy Hydration became one of the first sparkling wellness waters with zero sugar, zero calories, and no sugar substitutes at all. No stevia, no monk fruit, no erythritol. Before it ever launched into Whole Foods, Megan put the can on a real shelf herself, took photos, and asked one question on repeat: does this stand out, or does it disappear? That process is also how the brand ended up with sturdier wooden display racks instead of the standard cardboard, plus window clings and shelf callouts to help it get noticed in a category where new drinks show up every week.

Money, Mentors, and Knowing When to Hire

Megan doesn't have a background in finance or private equity, and her psychology degree didn't exactly prepare her for cap tables either.

"I know a lot of founders don't have a background in finance or private equity. I feel like I'm still learning today." — Megan Riggs, Founder, Crunchy Hydration

Her advice for founders in the same position is to find the free resources in your own backyard before paying for outside help. She went through 757 Collab, a startup studio and accelerator, and connected with a Norfolk-based angel investor group that provided mentors who explained fundraising from the ground up.

Crunchy Hydration started with a $225,000 friends and family round just to get the product made. In 2024, the company raised a $1 million convertible note, with a $5 million valuation cap and a 20% discount, ahead of a raise now valuing the company around $10 million. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, as Megan explained it: a convertible note is essentially a loan that's designed to convert into equity later, once the company raises a priced round, rather than assigning an exact valuation up front. It's different from a straight priced round (invest $100k, get 10%) or a SAFE, which is another common early-stage fundraising document.

"Raise more money than you think you need, and raise sooner than you would like to." — Megan Riggs, Founder, Crunchy Hydration

Hiring followed the same disciplined logic. A full-time creative and marketing director is an expensive hire, and Megan waited a long time before bringing that role in-house. Her recommendation to other founders: use contractors for as long as it makes sense, and keep your burn rate as low as possible. It wasn't until the convertible note closed that hiring that role in-house actually made sense.

"Bootstrap until you don't, you know, until you can't anymore." — Megan Riggs, Founder, Crunchy Hydration

Megan Riggs quit a job that looked perfect on paper, got on a plane with nothing but a backpack, and came home with a business now raising at a roughly $10 million valuation. She didn't get there by getting everything right the first time. She got there by being willing to throw out the chakras, the CBD, and half her original lineup the moment they stopped working.

Trying a new drink is a lot like a box of chocolates. You never really know what you're going to get. But with Crunchy Hydration, you can rest easy knowing it's going to be good.

Every year, hosting the Startup Mountain Summit, we notice the same thing. A lot of the best speakers we bring in don't actually have a background in business.

There's something to be said for both kinds of founders. Some people start a business because they went through something themselves and saw that other people needed the same solution. Others are business-minded from the start, they spot an opportunity to make money and they build it and run it well. Both can be equally good. It's just a trend we've noticed, people like Katie Trauth Taylor, who has a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition, and Anthony Pierri, who planned on being an English teacher and spent 11 years as a pastor before any of this.

This year, Peter Kazanjy fits the same pattern.

If you've spent any time in the startup sales world, you've probably run into his name already. He's the guy who coined "founder-led sales." He wrote the book on it, literally, and we'll have 300 copies to give away at the Summit. And the reason his advice holds up isn't that he was a natural at any of this. It's that he wasn't, and he had to figure it out anyway.

An English Major Walks Into a Startup

Peter Kazanjy went to Stanford for a BA and then an MA in English, with a focus on ethics, moral philosophy, and literature. He landed in product marketing at VMware after school, which at least got him in the building. Selling was nowhere on the plan.

Some people are wired for sales. It's not work for them, it's a game they enjoy playing. Other people are wired for systems, or for building the product, or for the kind of creative work that turns into the next thing everyone in marketing can't stop talking about, like Gap's "Better in Denim" campaign with Katseye, which is still living in my head rent free from last year. None of that is a character flaw. But when you're the founder, you don't get to only do the part you're good at.

The Job Nobody Wanted

In 2011, Peter and his co-founder Jason Heidema started TalentBin, a recruiting search engine, after an earlier idea of theirs didn't pan out. Jason had studied symbolic systems at Stanford and spent time as a professional poker player before eBay. Peter had the English degree and the product marketing resume. Neither one of them had ever closed an enterprise deal.

Somebody had to sell the product, though, and Peter was the one not currently buried in it. So he became the first salesperson. Then the first sales manager. Then the first VP of Sales, still learning the job while the company's survival depended on him getting better at it fast.

"I was totally a fish out of water going from being a product marketing geek to a salesperson. I was lost in the wilderness. I made terrible mistakes." — Peter Kazanjy, Co-Founder, TalentBin

TalentBin sold to Monster Worldwide in early 2014, and by then Peter had gone from someone who'd never pitched a customer to someone leading new product sales across 600-plus reps. You end up being the person you need, whether or not you signed up to be that person, at least until you can afford to hire someone better at it than you.

Writing Down Every Mistake

Peter didn't just move on once TalentBin sold. He went back through everything he'd fumbled and turned it into something other founders could actually use.

That's Modern Sales Pros, now one of the largest sales operations and leadership communities in the country, and Founding Sales, his book written specifically for founders and first-time sellers who never planned on this being part of the job. In one interview, he talked about his own parents, and said he got his ability to "get shit done" from his mom, and his problem-solving instincts from his dad.

He's currently co-founder of Atrium, a sales performance analysis company, and he still teaches founder-led selling at Y Combinator, South Park Commons, and Harvard Business School. Three companies in, and he's still writing down what he's learning.

What Sales Actually Looks Like

He calls his session at the Summit a tour of what high-tech sales actually is, why founders avoid it for as long as they possibly can, and why you end up being your own first seller whether that was ever the plan.

We can't wait to hear him get into it live, the cold outreach nobody wants to make, the pricing conversation you'd rather avoid, closing your first customer because the company needs you to and there's genuinely no one else standing in line to do it instead.

Peter spent almost twenty years figuring that out the hard way, one company at a time. This October, he's finally telling founders in Johnson City how he did it.