Key Takeaways Litt and Gillman co-founded Hiya Health in 2019 to bring a “smarter” kids’ multivitamin to market.
Here’s how they took their self-funded business to a $205 million acquisition and over $134 million in annual sales.
When Darren Litt’s daughters were little, he asked their pediatrician for tips to keep them healthy. The doctor recommended a daily multivitamin, but when Litt ordered the brand on Amazon, the product that arrived gave him pause: The gummy vitamins were stuck together in their plastic tub with a layer of sugar on the bottom.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Hiya Health. Darren Litt.
“ I thought, If I won’t give this to my own kids, why would anybody?” Litt recalls. “So I asked friends, ‘Is this what you give your kids?’ And almost everyone said the same thing: ‘Yeah, kids like the taste, but we’re not sure it’s good for them.'”
One of those friends was Litt’s former co-worker Adam Gillman; he had the same impression, and a light bulb went off: What if they built a “smarter version” of the type of multivitamin they wanted for their own children? “ No sugar, no gummy junk, just what kids actually need,” Litt says.
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It was 2019 and the beginning of Hiya Health, the children’s health and wellness brand that USANA acquired in a $205 million cash deal last year.
We applied a Silicon Valley discipline to children’s health.
Both co-founders had a professional background in technology, which came in handy during Hiya’s product-development phase, Litt notes. Litt and Gillman had to ship, test and improve constantly, closely listening to feedback from other parents — their first formula changed three times in year one.
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