Concept to Creation, Chapter 2: Finding Our People

After the New Venture Competition, we had a choice to make.

We could take the experience for what it was. Walk away with a good story, a few lessons, and the version of life we had before any of this started. Or we could keep going.

It did not take long. The three of us talked, and the answer was the same from everyone. We were not done. We were just getting started.

That decision is easy to romanticize looking back. But at the time it just felt like the only honest answer. We had something real. Walking away from it would have felt worse than any of the hard parts ahead.

AccelerateRU: Learning How to Build a Company

Saying yes to the idea is one thing. Knowing how to actually build a company is something else entirely.

AccelerateRU gave us the structure we needed to figure that out. It was not just about pitching. It pushed us to answer the questions we had been avoiding, the foundational ones. Who is this for? Why does it matter to them? What does the company actually look like?

We were fortunate to have real mentors guiding us through it. Shawn Hill, a partner at GSVP, was one of them. Getting time with someone who has seen what actually works and what does not, at that stage of building a company, is something you cannot manufacture. We took every bit of it seriously. Amber Theurer helped us think through our original product positioning in ways that genuinely shaped how we talk about +Pouch today. These were not just check-ins. They were the kind of conversations that change how you think.

The hardest question we had to answer was also the most obvious one.

The Problem With Selling to Everyone

Hydration applies to every living person. Literally everyone sweats. Everyone loses electrolytes. On paper, that sounds like a huge opportunity. In practice, it is the fastest way to build something for nobody.

We kept running into the same wall. If your answer to "who is your customer" is "anyone who has a body," you do not have a target market. You have a hope.

So we stopped asking who could use our product and started asking something different. Who needs it most?

The Answer That Mattered

Two groups kept rising to the top.

The first was people like my sister. People who cannot go through a normal day without thinking about their sodium. People for whom an electrolyte is not a performance edge, it is just part of keeping their body functional. They are not looking for a gym bag supplement. They need something they can carry anywhere, reach for in seconds, and actually rely on.

The second was endurance athletes. Runners, cyclists, wrestlers, anyone competing long and hard enough to sweat through their electrolyte reserves and feel it. For them, the problem is different but the gap is the same. Current options are slow, inconvenient, or built for a kitchen counter, not a race course.

These two groups looked nothing alike on the surface. But they shared the same need: something portable, fast, and actually effective. Something designed around how they actually live.

The Most Valuable Thing We Got Was Not the Curriculum

We learned a lot inside AccelerateRU. The frameworks, the mentorship, the reps of pitching and defending your idea in front of people who push back. All of it mattered.

But the most valuable thing we walked away with was the people.

We met Cade Padilla , James Henhaffer, and Connor Dunn through the program. At the time they were just strangers in the same room. We had no idea what they would mean to us a year later.

Cade has become one of our closest friends and one of the most genuine supporters of what we are building. He helped us develop our social media content and made the trip with us to TCU Values and Ventures, one of the bigger moments of our competition run. Jimmy and Connor, who run Thrivvest, have been in our corner on SEO, AI systems, and online marketing. The kind of help that would have cost us a lot to figure out alone.

You sign up for an accelerator for the structure. You stay because of the people. That part nobody really warns you about.

June 23rd

By the end of AccelerateRU, we had been given enough money to actually start building the product. Not just talking about it. Building it.

June 23rd is the date +Pouch was officially conceived. The moment the idea became something we could hold in our hands.

Everything before that was research, conviction, and competition stages. June 23rd was when it became real.

Next chapter: We had the funding to start. Now we had to figure out what we were actually building. Formulation, format, and the science behind why a pouch works when everything else falls short.

Follow along.

~ Braeden