Oddball's Path From Idea to Funding a Nationwide Target Launch

0:02Hannah Dittman:Did you hear that? That's opportunity knocking. We've been building something big. Introducing Opportunity Knocks, a new campaign giving startup CPG brands exclusive direct access to submit to leading retailers, distributors, investors, media, and more. Here's how it works. On Fridays, a new submission window opens exclusively for active Startup CPG email subscribers. Each campaign features a custom form tailored to that partner. Share your brand story, products, distribution, and traction. Startup CPG delivers your applications directly to the partner's team. Some campaigns include a live fireside chat so you can meet the partner and ask questions directly.

0:44Hannah Dittman:To get every drop, subscribe at startupcpg.com slash OK. That's just the letters O and K. Today's drop is live and it's with Hungry Root. Ready? Go. Go subscribe. Go submit. Good luck.

1:20When I first started or when I made this jump, it was very, very scary to me. But I've learned to embrace that fear and go with that direction of where the fear is leading. Because I think a lot of times, as I mentioned, what you fear most is actually what you should do the most. And so I think when it comes to fundraising, it gets easier every round. It gets easier every check. But I still am surprised by how difficult it is still, both from a personal growth perspective of just like your ego takes a hit every time we get a no. And, you know, every day is a roller coaster. And so really learning how to use that pain and see that pain as like, I think, a blessing.

2:02Right. Because if you can't, this game in CPG is grueling.

2:08Hannah Dittman:Hey everybody, I'm Hannah Dittman, operations and finance host of the Startup CPG podcast, and today I'm joined by Sophia Chang, founder and CEO of Oddball, for a founder fundraising journey episode. Oddball is reimagining snacking for the next generation with jiggly fruit snacks made from real fruit, no artificial flavors or colors, and no compromise on fun. Inspired by the fruit-based snacks and desserts Sophia grew up with in Asia, the brand is bringing a fresh perspective to a category that hasn't seen much innovation in decades, creating something nostalgic, playful, and genuinely delicious.

2:43Hannah Dittman:If you haven't given Oddball a try already, you definitely should. In this Founder Fundraising Journey episode, we dive into the story behind Oddball, what it took to bring a new product concept to life, and Sophia's path from strategy and finance into entrepreneurship. We also get into the realities of fundraising in a challenging market, lessons learned throughout the process, and practical advice for founders who are preparing to raise capital themselves. Sophia shares candid insights on conviction, resilience, building before you feel fully ready, and what it looks like to keep moving forward through uncertainty while scaling a fast-growing brand.

3:17Hannah Dittman:It's an honest conversation about the highs, lows, and behind-the-scenes realities of building a consumer company from the ground up. If you're fundraising or simply love hearing the real stories behind breakout consumer brands, this one is packed with valuable lessons. Go grab yourself an Oddball and enjoy.

3:39Hannah Dittman:Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Startup CPG podcast. This is Hannah, and today we're back for an awesome founder fundraising journey episode with Sophia Chang of Oddball. Sophia, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here today. We're so excited that you're here today. We're excited to learn all about the interesting things you've got going on with a company called Oddball. I'm a huge fan, and I'm sure the audience will be after listening to you explain a little bit more about it today, too. I'd love to dive into the conversation, starting with background of your career and journey and the path that led you to Oddball.

4:12Yeah, absolutely. So I always say like I have a little bit of an unconventional path. I grew up in Asia. I grew up in Singapore. I came here for college. I actually had wanted to become an investigative journalist was growing up, but I really only had two paths, right? So because I'm not American, management consulting or finance. And so I went into management consulting for two years. After that, I left and I joined a hedge fund called Bridgewater Associates. It was, or I think it still might be the biggest hedge fund in the world. I worked for the founder Ray Dalio on the private side of things.

4:41And so that was how I got involved and I got exposed to the world of venture and entrepreneurship. After that, I left eventually because I had a terrible commute between Westbrook, Connecticut in New York City. It's four hours.

4:52Hannah Dittman:Oh my gosh, four hours. No. I know. I was just like, you know what? Like the 20 hours on a bus, like not worth it. So yeah, I eventually got recruited back by my old boss who became the global head of strategy and transformation at Estee Lauder Companies and hired me as a strategy director. And so that was really how I got into CPG. I joined at a really interesting time at Estee Lauder where there was so much changes happening in beauty, right? Like I was watching all these like new indie beauty brands and clean beauty really coming into the forefront of the industry and just like watching them like just eat shares away from the big brands, right?

5:27And so yeah, I had a really like amazing time at Estee Lauder and got to see everything at a really high level and also learned really early on that beauty kind of sets the trend in CPG and it was always followed by food a couple of years later and then finally pet, right? So it was a really interesting macro environment to be part of during that time.

5:46Hannah Dittman:Yeah, that's such a poignant insight that you make and one that I've noticed myself too. I could pontificate on why that might be the case. I think it probably has something to do with the level of marketing spend and horsepower that beauty companies put behind things, but definitely have also noticed that trend as well. What an interesting and super accomplished career that you've had. I feel like you've jumped from one really hard thing to another and the founder journey being no less, if not more. I'd love to learn a little bit more about your company, Oddball, and what you've got going over there and explain to the audience all the cool, interesting, innovative stuff that you guys are working on.

6:23Yeah, absolutely. So I started Oddball, honestly, because I'm just someone who likes to eat junk food. I love it all. I love the cheeses. I love the Oreos. You know, like I love the nerd ropes. And I was traveling so much during my career that I was so surrounded by junk food and fast food, like barely in New York. Right. And so I realized at a certain point that I was my body was just cashing up to me. I was like getting cavities in a dog. Never had cavities in a kid. I was like getting stomach ache, acne, like all the good stuff that I don't know if you eat a lot of junk food, you would probably get.

6:50And I realized at some point that I just have to start eating like an adult, right? But that realization to me was pretty interesting because I grew up in Asia. I grew up in Singapore. And the way kids or even babies eat versus adults are exactly the same, right? There's no particular delineation between kids and adult food. But I think here there is that delineation, right? And so I started really thinking about how I ate growing up in Asia, especially when it comes to snacks. Our snacks are always what I say made out of real food that's minimally processed, whereas I would say here is a lot of essentially chemicals in a bag.

7:22Yeah, questionable ingredients. I don't even know how to pronounce it. And so I realized that I was really very much getting catfished by my food, both from a giant strawberry in front of the packaging, but then the ingredient story completely tells a different story. Right. Or if I go to the better for you options, there was just so many of these like joyless, like clinical, like science experiment. Right. So much like bars pretending to be a cookie dough. I get no shade of bars. I eat bars, too. But sometimes, you know, I think that like in Asia, I never had to sacrifice the joy of eating and the cleanliness and the realness of the ingredients.

7:56Right. And so what Oddball really is about fundamentally is we make fruit based snacks that don't sacrifice or don't require to choose between fun and real ingredients. Our first product line is a new type of fruit cup, right? So think of a fun, jiggly, nostalgic texture that we all used to love, kids love, but we're made with real fruit ingredients and real fruit juices and purees instead of the artificial ingredients, just pure realness, right? So currently we're sold exclusively at Target and Target.com. I love your guys's, I don't want to call it Jell-O, but I love the fruit cup.

8:32Hannah Dittman:I think it's such a nostalgic, like you're mentioning, food, but just a totally adult way to eat it. You know, I think even as an adult, when you revisit some of those things you really like as a kid, your palate has changed so much. It's not even your health concerns has changed. They have. But your palate has also changed. Anytime I've gone back to like a favorite candy or something like that in adulthood that I remember from childhood, It just doesn't taste as good as you remember it because you're so used to different things now, hopefully. But I think having that nostalgic kind of form factor and food in a way that's a little bit more palate friendly and health conscious, I think, is so smart.

9:13Hannah Dittman:And I'm a huge fan. And I'd love to better understand the journey and the path of what coming to Oddball really was like, specifically what the journey through fundraising has been like. You know, when did you kind of get the idea? What was the startup story here? And what were the big milestones that led you through the fundraising path as you were on your journey? Yeah, I think that's a big question, right, of like a lot of things converging in my life at the same time. I had a good, cushy corporate job. I had a great career going on at Estee. And so, you know, for me, like as a non-American, like it takes a lot for me to do this and like be able to stay in the U.S.

9:48to do this. Right. And so I would say like I am no different than many other founders out there. Right. Like especially for like female founders, which I believe just have so much more to lose. It required a lot of like courage. Right. Like it's really like any given point. You can try to time it as much as possible. Right. You can try to time it to your next like raise or you're trying to time it to like the next like equity release or like whatever it is or the next promo. But I've learned that there's just no good time ever. Right. how you try to do it, it's going to feel like jumping off of the cliff.

10:15And I was really grateful that I had like a startup community because I had joined these fellowship programs and I had no prior experiences with startups at all, right? That essentially told me like, if you're going to do it, if you have an itch of being an entrepreneur, you just have to do it, right? And so I think that was a huge unlock for me. And I think when it comes to CPG and fundraising, you had to go in eyes wide open because CPG is not like tech, right? And so the returns that like investors expect from you are completely different and you had to be aligned in finding the right investors.

10:44The funding journey was a really challenging journey, right? Because for me, I am first time founder. I am also a minority woman. And just being really frank, right? Like 1 % of VC money goes to women, right? Like despite all of the DI and all of like these like talks about needing to fund more women or like minorities, et cetera, like at the end of the day, money talks, right? And the data talks. And so the difficulty is there, but I would say it's real and it's hard, but it's not a reason to spiral and not do it, right? Just because something is hard doesn't mean that it's not doable. It means that you have to work harder, you have to be sharper.

11:17But I also do believe that's not a source of bitterness either, right? I never took it as a source of bitterness. It's more of like, look, if you had to work harder, you had to be sharper. I believe that the reward is there. It makes your business better. And so I would say it was hard to raise the first round candidly, right? Also because this was during 2023 when the market has changed. It was a really difficult time. It was a fundraising environment. It was after a time when it was post-COVID where there's a lot of tourist investors into CPG where they have a really certain way of viewing CPG.

11:50They saw CPG as a mixed tech. Each CPG company was a D2C tech valuation. And all of that dramatically shifted in 2023. And as a first-time founder, raising your first round is always going to be the most difficult. And you have to rely on your network. And at the end of the day, like your first checks are always a bet on your character and the people who believed and have known you for a while and your character and your personality and like your ideas and all of that, right? Everything else after that is earned. So like all the conversations with angels, with CPG experts or family offices or institutional has to be built and earned from that base.

12:26Hannah Dittman:Yeah, that's so many words of wisdom and great pieces of insights in what you're saying in so many different ways. You know, you're in this comfortable job at Estee. You have this interesting idea that you're thinking about. Did you start it before you started fundraising or did you know to kind of go out and try to get funding before you even started the company? That's a very good question. I actually was doing this on a side when I was at Estee Lauder. And very candidly, it's because I needed my time to find the courage to really like be able to jump because of how much I had to give up. The first principle is that I didn't want to put something out there that no one asked for, right?

13:05Because with CPG, there's such low barrier of entry. We are flooded with products and we're flooded with brands in the world that, in my opinion, no one has ever asked for, right? A lot of it is just pretty packaging with no soul in it, right? It just doesn't earn a right to exist in the world. So for me to do this, also coming from and Estee Lauder where, you know, it's got decades and centuries at this point of brand building, of putting something beautiful out there in the world, I didn't want to put something out there that I wasn't not like confident in, but proud of, right? And so that journey to get there was quite a long one.

13:38And so I was doing it on a side at Estee Lauder where in the beginning, I had just hired a chef to work on this project with me. You know, he was whipping out these cups and I was just chugging this like giant white ice cream everywhere into yours. Because I'm like, look people have forgotten what jello is right like people are like sometimes like you know are like oh gross right like we don't want gelatin right it's associated with bill cosby right like and all those stuff and so i needed to make sure that like the idea that i have is not just serving myself right it needed to be resonant and it needed to create value before i would jump into this so i think it got to a point where i really was like trying to get these validations however i can right whether it's farmer's market events buyers investors whatever it is and it got to a point where I took the product and it's Benchtop form to Sprouts, right?

14:25And to a bunch of reach. And they all said yes. And that's where I realized like looking at the category, looking at the product, looking at who I am as a founder, the business that I want to build. That's when I was like, no, for me to do this, I had to race around properly and to launch the way I want to launch.

14:40Hannah Dittman:Yeah, that's such a great story. So a lot of guts also to approach retailers with a Benchtop formulation and state of where your company is and a huge milestone to reach to get a yes from a retailer and definitely a huge capital need to be able to support the rollout of something like that and kind of taking a company from prototype ideation almost and proof of concept to full-fledged operational business and that's a big transformation that you have to make as a company. If you were kind of looking back on that journey or that beginning phase with the wisdom that you have now and the experience you have now, is there anything that you would have changed about it or any advice that you would give to other founders in a similar situation?

15:24Yeah, I would say like, yes, it takes guts, right? Like, but I think more than anything, it takes you to put down your ego, right? Because if you get a buyer meeting or you don't even need a buyer meeting, right? Like you enter every pitch competition out there, they're all free. What's the harm, right? The only harm that like you get, if you get a slot in a pitch competition or a slot with a buyer, is maybe you might be embarrassed, right? Or if you get bad feedback. But if you're able to put your ego down, you will realize that it's such a valuable data point to help you improve, right? Because at the end of the day, your goal is to put out a product that like you're proud of, that the world wants and the world needs.

16:01And so there's no reason for you to not do that other than your ego. So I think that's one of the most important thing is I think because when it comes to CPG brands and the founder, you're so interconnected with your brand. And so it's so easy to have that ego to your product and be scared of putting it out there. But the reality is like, if you don't put it out there as much as possible, and you wait for it to be perfect, you will never get there. Right. And so that was something that I learned really early on. It's like, you almost sort of chase your fear. So like, whatever you're most afraid of, you have to go after.

16:32Right. And when it comes to fundraising, I think one of the best advice I've received, And one of the biggest realizations that I've also realized in this whole fundraising journey, right, is that the strongest pitch are typically a mirror of the business that you're trying to build. So the pitch that I'm proud of is never about the performance. And you also have to recognize and learn what type of founder, what type of fundraiser you are as well. Because fundraising is one of the hardest things that I've ever had to do. And I've had really challenging careers, paths and whatnot. And so it's grueling.

17:03It's a mirror. It can break you. But the best investors that I've met reflects that mirror back to you and challenge your strategy, challenge your assumptions and challenge like how you think of the business, the market, etc. And so this is also another lesson on like putting your ego down and collecting all that data, be it from the buyer and your product or the investors on your pitch to build a stronger business. Yeah, that's so well said.

17:26Hannah Dittman:I think it takes a lot of thick skin to get through that much rejection and vulnerability. like what you're saying. Yes, it's easy to be embarrassed, especially like a business in its infancy is so personal to you in a lot of ways. And I think being able to kind of distance that emotional tie from your own self-worth to the business's worth is really important to be able to get yourself into a place where you're looking at things objectively and really treating it as business. And I think it's easy for everyone else involved to do that, except for the founder, obviously. And so being able to kind of like match that level of thinking and not getting the like emotional game wrapped up in it is a really big personal battle that I think a lot of founders go through and an important one to overcome.

18:12Hannah Dittman:Outside of that, what do you think the big challenges or unlocks in fundraising are? Like where did you feel things you were doing were helping you become successful or getting you traction? Things that you were saying or things that were resonating? And where do you feel like there was some friction or obstacles that you might have needed to overcome or work your way through to get a successful fundraise process? Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest hurdle is the reality of where I was at, right? Or where I'm at, right? Like as a first time founder, it's always going to be difficult to convince people to make a gamble on you, right?

18:45Especially well established angel or institutional or family offices that are the investors that you want in your cap table that will provide that significant value add to get your business to that next level, right? Because the best investors level up your business, right? Like they're not just passive money, right? They're not just noisy money. I think the biggest shift that I had to learn as a founder during fundraising is a mental shift. And I would say fundraising is not about convincing people to believe in you. It's about finding the people who already do and are aligned to what you do.

19:17And so when I shifted that mentality and when I had that mental shift, like that really helped me in terms of how I pitched because at the end of the day, pitching is selling. Like now I had to also learn the dynamics of fundraising. And I think that's something that a lot of founders like don't do because fundraising at the end of the day is a game, right? Each stakeholder has different incentives. So you as a first-time founder's incentive is very different from an institutional VC. It's very different from an angel investor. It's very different from your friends and family. And so I think general, like really understanding that fundraising is not a touch and go thing.

19:52It's like a structured game you're playing and understanding the incentives and aligning to that and having this mentality, which really helped me of you're looking for the people that already do believe in you, right? You're not trying to increase the friction to find and convince people who don't.

20:07Hannah Dittman:Yeah, no, I think that's really helpful. And what were some of the things that you were or ways you were able to identify that? Like if you were giving practical advice to a founder who was saying, OK, I want to do that? What do I do? What were the ways you were vetting or understanding whether people were already kind of aligned with how you were thinking or were not? Yeah, I think for me, I have a very strong point of view on how a CPG business, especially in our category, should be built, right? Like we're not following a playbook, right? We're called oddball. Like our product is an oddball product.

20:40Our branding is kind of oddball, right? Like the way we approach a strategy, the way we approach our marketing or consumers or how we launch in our go-to-market, everything thing is kind of the oddball way. And so I think for me, it's like I understand what those principles and my own point of view is, and it has to align with the investors that we bring on. So for me, it's really about like winning in retail. It's for us, it's about, you know, winning in retail, like preserving that fun, understanding mass, like going straight to mass and making big, bold strokes. And so those were my filters in when we were looking for investors.