843 Brian Keller: Co-Founder & CEO of Rorra

0:00Kara Goldin:I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. This message is a paid partnership with Dell Technologies.

0:45Kara Goldin:Hey everyone, Kara here, and I've got something I've just got to share. Dell PCs with Intel Insight are built for the moments that matter. for the moments you plan and the moments you don't. Built for the busy days that turn into all-night study sessions. The moment you're working from a cafe and realize every outlet is taken, the times you're deep in your flow and the absolute last thing you need is an auto-update throwing off your momentum. That's why Dell builds tech that adapts to the way you actually work. Built with long-lasting batteries so you're not scrambling for the closest outlet. and built-in intelligence that makes updates around your schedule, not in the middle of it.

1:32Kara Goldin:They don't build tech for tech's sake. They build it for you. Find technology built for the way you work at dell.com slash dellpcs. Built for you.

1:47Kara Goldin:This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Hi, Kara here. For small businesses, every hire matters, but so does your time. I felt that pressure firsthand. You know, a bad hire isn't just frustrating, it's expensive in time, money, and team morale. And yet hiring the right person can feel like a full-time job on top of everything else you're already doing. Sifting through applications, trying to spot the real standouts, second-guessing decisions, it can get overwhelming fast. That's why having a way to save time without sacrificing quality isn't just nice to have, it's critical.

2:32Kara Goldin:Luckily, LinkedIn Hiring Pro is built for that reality. It's your hiring partner designed to help you hire with confidence by surfacing only the right candidates without turning hiring into another full-time job. Posting a job isn't always the hard part. It's finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Their updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language, no recruiter jargon needed. Nearly 60 % of hires find a candidate to interview within a week.

3:14Kara Goldin:With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden. Terms and conditions apply. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Kara Golden Show. Today, I'm joined by Brian Keller, who is the co-founder and CEO of an incredible brand called Rora. And it's a brand on a mission to completely rethink how we think about water, health, and what's actually coming out of our taps. So Brian's journey started in a deeply personal way. After struggling to find answers for his daughter's severe eczema, he discovered something most of us never question, the water in our homes.

4:07Kara Goldin:So I cannot wait to hear more about how a problem that he saw for somebody that he cared about, how that turned into a company. And what I love also about Brian's story is how he's taken a mission-driven business, challenging an entire category that, frankly, has been somewhat stagnant for decades and bringing transparency and innovation and trust back into water filtration. So without further ado, Brian, welcome to the show. Very, very excited to meet you and to hear more about what you're doing with Rora. Thanks so much. It's great to be here. Absolutely. So for listeners who may not know about Rora yet or have maybe heard about it, but don't really understand the brand, How would you describe it?

5:02I would say Rora is like the Dyson of water filtration. We're creating premium water filtration products to help people live healthier lives.

5:12Kara Goldin:This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Hi, Kara here. For small businesses, every hire matters, but so does your time. I felt that pressure firsthand. You know, a bad hire isn't just frustrating, it's expensive. in time, money, and team morale. And yet hiring the right person can feel like a full-time job on top of everything else you're already doing. Sifting through applications, trying to spot the real standouts, second-guessing decisions, it can get overwhelming fast. That's why having a way to save time without sacrificing quality isn't just nice to have, it's critical.

5:56Kara Goldin:Luckily, LinkedIn HiringPro is built for that reality. It's your hiring partner designed to help you hire with confidence by surfacing only the right candidates without turning hiring into another full-time job. Posting a job isn't always the hard part. It's finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates. HiringPro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Their updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language, no recruiter jargon needed. Nearly 60 % of hires find a candidate to interview within a week.

6:39Kara Goldin:With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden. Terms and conditions apply. This message is a paid partnership with Dell Technologies. Hey everyone, Kara here, and I've got something I've just got to share. Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments that matter, for the moments you plan and the moments you don't. Built for the busy days that turn into all night study sessions. The moment you're working from a cafe and realize every outlet is taken, the times you're deep in your flow and the absolute last thing you need is an auto update throwing off your momentum.

7:32Kara Goldin:That's why Dell builds tech that adapts to the way you actually work. Built with long lasting batteries so you're not scrambling for the closest outlet. and built-in intelligence that makes updates around your schedule, not in the middle of it. They don't build tech for tech's sake. They build it for you. Find technology built for the way you work at dell.com slash dellpcs. Built for you.

8:03Kara Goldin:I love it. And you developed, I guess the company started in 2024. Can you take us through the story? I touched on it a bit, but how did this all get started? Yeah, you know, my co-founder and I have been working together for the better part of the last decade. And we had previously run a company together. And after selling that at the tail end of 2021, we were both working for the parent company in different facets. And I had a daughter, she had really bad eczema, and we were trying to figure out what the issue is. And as a father, when your daughter's going through something like that and you have no solution for it, it's definitely a pretty frustrating experience.

8:45So we took her to the doctor. They said, make sure you bathe her every single day. Here's a bunch of steroid cream you can put on it. And I didn't really want to put steroid cream on my daughter every day. And there's a lot of different aspects that might be harmful to the body with that. And so we were trying a lot of different things. But it always seemed like the more we bathe her, the worse it got. And so I finally got a filtered showerhead and within a couple of days of bathing within that water, her skin was perfectly clear. And so I was like, okay, if this is affecting her skin this much, what about the water that we're, you know, mixing with her formulas?

9:19That's the only thing she's consuming. And so I started looking online for a good water filter and just couldn't really find anything that met my expectations. And it seemed like one plastic product after the next. And there was a lot of big marketing claims being made without a lot of data or science to back them up. And so I was talking about this with my now co-founder. And we realized that there was a pretty big white space and opportunity for somebody to build something new in the water filtration category that really focused on using the best materials possible, developing better filtration technology, and just a really beautiful and clean, easy-to-use product.

9:58And so we started working with an engineering design firm out in New York. My co-founder got on the phone with the 40 best filter manufacturers all over the world. And we spent about three years engineering, designing, refining, and testing until we had built the product that we wanted for our own families on our own countertops. and then launched in November of 2024 and have been continuing to grow and scale from there.

10:23Kara Goldin:This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Hi, Kara here. For small businesses, every hire matters, but so does your time. I felt that pressure firsthand. You know, a bad hire isn't just frustrating, it's expensive in time, money, and team morale. And yet hiring the right person can feel like a full-time job on top of everything else you're already doing. Sifting through applications, trying to spot the real standouts, second-guessing decisions, it can get overwhelming fast. That's why having a way to save time without sacrificing quality isn't just nice to have, it's critical.

11:07Kara Goldin:Luckily, LinkedIn Hiring Pro is built for that reality. It's your hiring partner designed to help you hire with confidence by surfacing only the right candidates without turning hiring into another full-time job. Posting a job isn't always the hard part. It's finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Their updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language, no recruiter jargon needed. Nearly 60 % of hires find a candidate to interview within a week.

11:49Kara Goldin:With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden. Terms and conditions apply. This message is a paid partnership with Dell Technologies. Hey everyone, Kara here, and I've got something I've just got to share. Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments that matter. For the moments you plan and the moments you don't. Built for the busy days that turn into all-night study sessions. The moment you're working from a cafe and realize every outlet is taken, the times you're deep in your flow and the absolute last thing you need is an auto-update throwing off your momentum.

12:43Kara Goldin:That's why Dell builds tech that adapts to the way you actually work. Built with long-lasting batteries so you're not scrambling for the closest outlet. and built-in intelligence that makes updates around your schedule, not in the middle of it. They don't build tech for tech's sake. They build it for you. Find technology built for the way you work at dell.com slash dellpcs. Built for you.

13:14Kara Goldin:I've heard you say that most people don't realize what's actually in their water. I agree. And I've seen founding and running Hint for years. We had plants all over the place and we had to deal with state rights in order to bottle a product and make sure that we were removing all kinds of things in order to add real fruit to the product. And so I've seen it. I've been preaching it for years. But when you actually look at what's in the home, I think so many people just believe that it is, you know, it's got to be safe. Otherwise, it wouldn't be running through my home. But what would you say to that?

13:57Yeah, you know, when you look at when the tap water infrastructure was laid, right, as they were building across the United States, Chicago, for example, when they were building that city, it was mandatory to use lead pipes, because that was the most durable material that they had. And so as you continue to build across the United States, you know, there's still 9.2 million miles of lead service lines throughout the United States. We lose 6 billion gallons of treated water every single day due to water main breaks. Only about 10 % of all water treatment plants use any form of modern filtration.

14:31And so as our water continues to get worse with all of the agricultural runoff, different companies and products and things that are contributing to the contamination of our water sources, we have to continually add more chlorine and chloramine into the water in order to, you know, get the different bacteria, viruses, and things like that out. And so with that also comes a lot of disinfectant byproducts that come from that. And, you know, those can have a large impact on our overall health in different ways from, you know from immune disruption to you know hormone imbalances and a lot of different behavioral behavioral things as well as overall health and longevity with our internal organs and so you know from just something as small as the inspiration that started with you know with my daughter you know really kind of digging into it and realizing how all these different contaminants can affect our health it really led us to try to you know figure out how we can get the major key ones, which from our perspective, lead, forever chemicals, microplastics, really have large detrimental effects on our overall health.

15:46And we really wanted to build something that people could use that was simple and easy that would give them peace of mind, knowing that we could get all those different contaminants out of their water.

15:56Kara Goldin:This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Hi, Kara here. For small businesses, every hire matters, but so does your time. I felt that pressure firsthand. You know, a bad hire isn't just frustrating, it's expensive in time, money, and team morale. And yet hiring the right person can feel like a full-time job on top of everything else you're already doing. Sifting through applications, trying to spot the real standouts, second-guessing decisions, it can get overwhelming fast. That's why having a way to save time without sacrificing quality isn't just nice to have, it's critical.

16:40Kara Goldin:Luckily, LinkedIn Hiring Pro is built for that reality. It's your hiring partner designed to help you hire with confidence by surfacing only the right candidates without turning hiring into another full-time job. Posting a job isn't always the hard part. It's finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Their updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language, no recruiter jargon needed. Nearly 60 % of hires find a candidate to interview within a week.

17:23Kara Goldin:With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden. Terms and conditions apply. This message is a paid partnership with Dell Technologies. Hey everyone, Kara here, and I've got something I've just got to share. Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments that matter, for the moments you plan and the moments you don't, built for the busy days that turn into all-night study sessions, the moment you're working from a cafe and realize every outlet is taken, the times you're deep in your flow, and the absolute last thing you need is an auto-update throwing off your momentum.

18:16Kara Goldin:That's why Dell builds tech that adapts to the way you actually work. Built with long-lasting batteries so you're not scrambling for the closest outlet. And built-in intelligence that makes updates around your schedule. Not in the middle of it. They don't build tech for tech's sake. They build it for you. Find technology built for the way you work at dell.com slash dellpcs. Built for you.

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20:23Kara Goldin:So legacy brands have been doing this for years. They're still on the market. People say, oh yeah, I have a filter on my shower or my tap, but what are they getting wrong when it comes to not only the products, but also the messaging that's out there? What did you feel like was just not being focused on? I think that a lot of times different products will sacrifice in one area or another, whether that's performance or whether that's the usability and overall look and design of the product. And we really wanted to build something from scratch, from the ground up, that looked completely different from other products in the market, really fit well within the user's everyday life.

21:11And also from a drinking water perspective, retained those healthy minerals in the water. And so, you know, though we're able to get out the lead microplastics, forever chemicals, and over 50 other different contaminants, we're able to retain those beneficial minerals like calcium, sodium, magnesium, potassium, that are really essential for our overall health. Where we really focused on was A, the filtration technology and bringing something in that's different, but also building something that was super easy and functional and that you didn't have to bring in a plumber or didn't take a really long time to set up in order to get extremely great, high quality filtered water.

21:55Kara Goldin:The first product that you started with, can you talk about that? And I know you've got the Infinity filter on it, if you want to speak to that as well a little bit. Yeah, our initial product was the countertop system. So it's two and a half gallons, stainless steel water filtration system. You just put it right on your counter, put water into the top, let it do the work. It'll filter a gallon of water in about 20 minutes. and inside of it is a electrokinetic nanofiber filter, which effectively it has a positive static charge. So there's a couple of different things, but effectively the pore size on it is extremely small.

22:34So its pore size is one micron. Typically other filters can range from like three to five microns in terms of size, but then we have two layers of material. So we're able to get contaminants out that are sub-micron. And then any contaminants that are even smaller than that, as contaminants get smaller and smaller, their density of electrons is larger. And so they're more attractive to stay under the side of the filter. And the way that we're able to have such a small pore size with still the flow rate that we get through the filter is because of the pleated design of that as well. And we bind it all with wooden cellulose instead of melted plastic.

23:15So a lot of the different carbon block filters on the market, the way that you're able to hold a carbon block together is with, they fuse it together with melted plastic. And so we really wanted to make sure that as we're trying to get microplastics out of the water, we're not also shedding them back in throughout the filtration process.

23:35Kara Goldin:Yeah, definitely. And it's such a great system. I mean, it's incredible. You launched in 2024 and scaled incredibly quickly, I read, in eight figures. What do you think drove that kind of early traction? I know you've also gotten huge attention from voices like Dr. Andrew Huberman and others, but what exactly drove that traction so early for you? Yeah, I think there's a really large emphasis we put on bringing awareness to the overall problem. And so, you know, we spent a lot of time on the user experience and design on our website to allow people to just to find out what's in their water, but really go a step deeper and show them how all those different contaminants could be affecting their overall health.

24:24And so we started that very early on, really just raising overall awareness and getting those people into the email cycle because it's a hard problem for someone to digest who may not be aware that their tap water is contaminated to go all the way from, okay, my tap water is contaminated to why is it contaminated? How is this legal? What should I be doing about it? Why is this product solve that? What are the benefits of this? Like to really go in that full scope can take time. And people typically will do more research and things like that before they're ready to make a buying decision. And so we really wanted to start that cycle early.

25:11And then over a period of time, you know, throughout different emails over a couple weeks really introduce the problem and solution to them in a way that is digestible. And so we built up a really strong email list and initial following, just using some of those kind of find out what's in your water, different type advertisements. And then the day we launched, we had a significant amount of sales and volume that we were able to then take and keep extending that momentum from there.

25:44Kara Goldin:I love it because you're dealing with the topic that is obviously health and of interest to so many, but it's also one where people have the option to kind of turn it off, right? And especially, you know, oh, I don't know, my water is safe enough and my kids don't have eczema or whatever. Like it's a problem, but it's not today's problem kind of. But you all have done it in a way that is educational, that is simple, that is not, it's not a burden, I guess. So you've done a great job in getting that message out there and across. You are a serial entrepreneur. So as you mentioned, you had been in the other company.

26:31Kara Goldin:What was that other company? Was it in this space or anything close to this? Or what were you doing before this? Yeah, it was quite different. It was a company called Love Your Melon. We sold beanies and apparel, giving 50 % of our profits to help children battling cancer, as well as a hat to every child battling cancer in America. so it was i mean a very different business model but we you know ran bootstrap that scaled that for 10 years and ultimately sold it and at the tail end of 2021 but i think you know it's a very different business but ultimately in business you're trying to solve problems in the most efficient way and i think we learned a lot of different you know a lot of different aspects within that that were carried forward whether that's on the marketing side of the product development or how to build great vendor relationships and really bring a lot of authenticity throughout the entire business.