With creators like Sarah’s Day and Quade Cooper investing real money, electrolyte brand Hyro has grown into a business where every ambassador has skin in the game.
Taylor Chapman — a creator with 30,000 Instagram followers — was still wearing her hospital wristband, newborn in the capsule, when she got the email: the manufacturer for her and husband Steve’s startup electrolyte brand, Hyro, had just gone into voluntary administration.
The Chapmans had not been planning to get pregnant nor start a brand. They had been planning a long overseas holiday after Steve left nootropic drinks brand Shine+ which he’d cofounded at age 24, with Zambreros’ founder and billionaire Sam Prince, for whom he’d already served time as an “apprentice”.
But when the Chapmans found out Taylor was pregnant, they put the holiday on hold. “I was like, if we’re going to build a family here and stick around, then I might as well build a brand,” Steve Chapman tells Forbes Australia.
The plan was to launch the brand before launching the baby. But at that point they hadn’t even decided what the product would be.
They spotted a gap in the hydration market — a space between sports drinks and medicinal rehydration. “Most people associate electrolytes with athletes or illness,” says Taylor. “But 80% of Australians are dehydrated and they don’t even know it.”
They saw companies in the US getting in the space between Gatorade and Hydralyte with products like LMNT, a powdered sugar-free electrolyte, but not in Australia.
Steve had cut his teeth as CEO of Shine+ trying to figure out the complexities of a drinks business delivering to service stations and supermarkets. “It’s very hard with co-packing and selling into Coles and Woolies to make an honest dollar,” he says. “So I wanted to avoid something that had low margin. I’ve always wanted to build a direct-to-consumer brand. You get more connected to your customers. There’s less startup capital. I love the business model of e-commerce. I also think subscription is a massively underserved thing in Australia.”
He was inspired by Athletic Greens’ AG1, a New Zealand product that sold into the US from the start and got backing of key influencers like Andrew Huberman and Joe Rogan.
Chapman got advice from Heaps Normal co-founder Peter Brennan who’d done the seemingly impossible… making non-alcoholic beer cool. “He came up with the branding to be not too scientific or athlete focused, to be a bit more playful, a bit more mainstream.”
They got a sports dietician involved and looked at the market. “In Australia, most didn’t have enough electrolytes in them. In the US, they had a lot more salts and electrolytes and most of the science says we need more salt not less.”
They got the business started in November 2023, organising a manufacturer and testing the product runs.
They aimed to launch before the baby, but the production date landed on the same day as Taylor’s due date. “She couldn’t even come to the trial,” Steve says. “It was too far from the hospital.”
The birth went smoothly, with Taylor sipping constantly on the new product to get her through, she says. She checked her emails on the way home. “There was one from our manufacturer, saying ‘on Monday we’re going into VA [voluntary administration]’. We’re literally driving home in the car,” says Taylor.
But he helped them find a new manufacturer. “That was a fun startup journey. We ended up pretty much chucking magnesium in the back of the car and getting everything set up and shipped over to the new manufacturer. We got going a couple weeks later.”
Taylor, with 30,000 followers on Instagram, but also with experience in sales and account management, handled the social media strategy.
“We started thinking, ‘Who can we send Hyro to to get behind it and start posting it to get awareness of the brand?’ Obviously, we funded that at the beginning, but then Steve was raising money because that’s a very good skill that he has. We were thinking about who were strategic influencers, ambassadors that we’d want on board?
“The angle we took is that we see that influencer marketing these days is quite saturated and transient. We didn’t want an influencer program that was transactional.
“We wanted them to have actually skin in the game because we think that consumers just see straight through people pushing a product because so many people do it.
“But if they invest their own money, then the consumer sees real alignment and that they actually believe in it.
They offered equity to creators they believed in: Sarah’s Day, rugby star Quade Cooper and rugby league star Daly Cherry-Evans, ironman Kendrick Louis, MasterChef’s Dan Churchill and former Wim Hof lieutenant Johannes Egberts.
“Having them put their own money in changes the way that they show up and get behind the product. She’s never invested in a brand before but she’s been a part of campaign strategies and she’s helped develop a flavor and she’s been really involved.
Johannes Egberts. He used to be the right hand for Wim Hof, so he invested as well.
Then they had their scrappier marketing ploys. Steve ran the Gold Coast marathon in a Hyro mascot suit. “It’s just grassroots stuff. You know, like we’ll take Harvey down to a hot yoga class at 6 a.m. and I’ll stand out the front and hand out some samples while Taylor does the class inside. Whatever it takes.”
They raised $1 million in a first round, with a quarter from influencers. Another $1 million round is underway to fund expansion into the US.
“One of our investors, Maura Rampolla, sold Zico Coconut Water to Coca-Cola. Another sold their beverage brand to Dr Pepper for US$1.7 billion. We’ve also got Remedy Kombucha co-owner Gary Cobbledick and Charlie Gearside from Eucalyptus on board.”
“It was quite strategic, where we wanted a mix of ambassadors and some epic founders. And for me, success is doing things you love with people you love.”
