WTF is Gay Water?

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Welcome to The Business Gay podcast, where we talk about all things business, marketing, and entrepreneurship. I’m your host, Calan Breckon, and on today’s episode, I have the founder and SEO of Gay Water, Spencer Hoddeson. Now, if you don’t know what gay water is, it is what the gays have been calling a vodka soda for pretty much generations. Why? Because us vain queens like to get drunk, but we want zero of the calories of doing it. So, our trusted go to has always been the good old gay water. Now, today’s guest had the idea to literally can it and then sell it to the gays. Personally, I think it’s genius marketing. Give the gays what they want, right? Spencer is responsible for managing the company’s overall operations, including product development, production, distribution, marketing, sales, PR, and more. Damn. That is what I call a busy gay. Founded in January 2022, Gay Water is a mission driven business with a goal to create representation for the LGBTQ+ community on shelves. I absolutely love this. And I’m so excited to jump in today with Spencer. So, let’s get to it.

[00:01:53] Calan Breckon: Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Spencer, how are you doing?

[00:01:58] Spencer Hoddeson: I’m great. I’m great. How are you?

[00:02:01] Calan Breckon: I’m doing fantastic. It is a bit of a cloudy, rainy day here in Toronto, but other than that, pretty magical. Pretty magical. So we’re going to be talking all about okay, let me just start here. I can’t believe somebody hadn’t already bottled this, but the fact that you took such a decades long thing and bottled it, I’m just genuinely shocked nobody else had taken it. What work did you do to find out if anybody else had tried to do this before?

[00:02:34] Spencer Hoddeson: That’s a good question. I did trademark search. Of course. That’s always the first place to go if you’re trying to start a business. Can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard of that have come up with a name and then gone and done some of the work and then realized, oh, shit, someone trademarked this already. So that was the first place. There were actually a couple. I think there were two trademarks for Gay Water that were dead and then one that was actually live.

So kind of a quick backstory on it. I actually didn’t have a trademark. I ended up reaching out to the person, or actually the person who had the trademark actually reached out to me and ended up purchasing it from him.

It turns out he was actually a straight guy who was planning on doing a bottled water, bottled, like electrolyte water, called gay water. One word had nothing to do with the colloquialism and was going to be selling water. And I think his plan was to give, like, half of the proceeds to a nonprofit.

I don’t remember which one. I don’t remember if he had decided which one. He ended up abandoning the idea throughout COVID and was just kind of sitting on the trademark. But, yeah, that was the first place that I went early on to see if someone had thought of it, if this was even a feasible idea.

[00:04:09] Calan Breckon: That’s wild. And the fact that of course it was a straight guy, and then of course, he was just like, oh, no, that was just the name. Like, why would you pick that name and then just do absolutely nothing with it?

[00:04:20] Spencer Hoddeson: Yeah, listen, kudos to him. He was a good person.

He ended up basically giving it to me at cost, recognizing that what I was trying to do was something for the community.

I wasn’t trying to sit on it and hold it ransom.

[00:04:44] Calan Breckon: That’s good. That makes me happy. So tell me, what was the AHA moment where you’re like, oh, I need to can this?

[00:04:53] Spencer Hoddeson: I would say the AHA moment was actually, I was with a friend, and I had kind of thought of the idea before this moment, but I had ordered a vodka soda. I was with a straight friend, and I turned to her and I was like, hey, have you ever heard of the term gay water? And she was like, I don’t know whether it’s because my family members are part of the community or I went to NYU and all of my friends are, but I know exactly what this is. And to me, that was understanding that it wasn’t just like, what’s just like niche term that some members of the community use and that there was some element of this has more recognition than I thought.

That, I think, sort of propelled me a little bit to be like, light bulb. Maybe I should start socializing this. Maybe I should start gathering research data, insights, and seeing if the term is recognized, if it’s something that people would understand inherently. And, yeah, that was kind of where the seed was planted. Not necessarily the light bulb, but that was the moment.

[00:06:11] Calan Breckon: The moment where you’re like, okay, let’s start doing a little bit of research on this and to see if this is even something feasible that I can do.

[00:06:19] Spencer Hoddeson: Yeah, 100%.

I mean, I had no beverage experience as well. SEO. Part of that research was like really digging into the nuance of the beverage space and understanding how can beverages have done in the past how the market was looking, really understanding what the queer community looks like in the beverage space.

So the research was not just sitting on that name and being like, maybe this is a good idea, but really understanding holistically what the space looks like. And if a product like this for this community could operate in the space which spoilers It was kind of one of those things where no matter how much research I did, because there isn’t a product like this out in market, there was really no way of knowing.

It was a lot of looking at sort of macro trends and hopefully not too much on the opposite side like the cognitive dissidents between what’s believed and how people actually act. Because you can read so much research, but people say things that they don’t necessarily then action on even in that.

[00:07:42] Calan Breckon: Yeah, we all know the gay community can be very fickle.

Had you ever brought a product to market like this before? Like, did you have experience in that or this was your first product to market?

[00:07:56] Spencer Hoddeson: First product to market.

Unless you considered the lemonade stand that I’m sure many people had when they were younger. That was my first unique product.

I will never divulge that lemon to water to sugar ratio.

[00:08:13] Calan Breckon: Okay. All Right. I was going to say, okay.

[00:08:15] Spencer Hoddeson: That was my first beverage foray hilarious.

[00:08:19] Calan Breckon: So you have four flavors. You decided to go all in. You created everything. You have four flavors. Did you have any major challenges that you faced when you were originally bringing this product to market? What was the biggest kind of things that you were like, oh, shit, I don’t know about this or that. You’re just like, oh, I didn’t expect this.

[00:08:39] Spencer Hoddeson: It’s a good question. I would say it’s less I don’t know or didn’t expect, but the manufacturing process in the beverage space is crazy.

If there was an issue, I ran into it. Which was expected, right? Like first time founder, first time in Beverage.

I was expecting this to feel or I was expecting there to be hurdles and challenges. I think the biggest challenge that I kind of faced was not being able to control the things you can’t control. Right.

It doesn’t matter how detail oriented, organized on top of people you are. At the end of the day, part of this process is out of your hands.

And it’s in the hands of the vendors that you work with.

So definitely ran into a ton of challenge on that side.

I’m trying to think of the biggest, kind of I didn’t know challenge that I ran into.

I would say the one thing that a lot of founders don’t talk about, especially like Solopreneurs, is kind of the unsexy of it all. The idea that the work itself, of course, is challenging and demanding.

But there’s this whole emotional component that I feel like people don’t really talk about. That I didn’t prepare myself as much for, which is like, the constant state of anxiety, the impostor syndrome, the sort of sleepless nights. I’ve historically been like an eight, nine hour sleeper, and now I wake up at like 637 with just, like just from my anxiety, and my head is spinning and working, and I’m not even awake yet. I’m in just this state of almost subconscious half sleep, half worry.

So I think that was for sure sort of an unexpected challenge that kind of had to basically go up against every day.

[00:11:05] Calan Breckon: Yeah, and that’s very fair. I actually recently just had Cason Crane on the podcast who, you know, and we talked about this in our episode, how mental health was a big factor of it that he hadn’t really thought about before. And then you get into this world and you’re like, oh, okay, right, okay. I also need to hire a therapist as well as all these other things.

[00:11:32] Spencer Hoddeson: Yes, particularly for Solopreneurs, I would say you don’t have a co founder to balance out some of that anxiety, to take on some of the brunt of it, especially early on when if you’re not a well funded startup and you can’t immediately hire a team, you’re just putting all of that stress and anxiety on yourself.

[00:12:06] Calan Breckon: Definitely a big one. And I can only imagine, like, trolls on the Internet add to the stress, especially with a brand like Gay Water. How has the trolling been?

[00:12:20] Spencer Hoddeson: It’s been interesting, for sure.

I, prior to this, had a little bit of my own thing in the social media space. So I had I had gotten I had learned very quickly to have thick skin and not worry about what the trolls say, because I think maybe you commented this on my post the other day when I had posted about kind of getting some trolling.

But it very much echoes true. The way that I approach trolling is if people are commenting on the post, that means they’re engaging with the post. That means the algorithm then continues to prioritize that post and show it to people who are like minded to them, potentially, which then perpetuates more trolling.

And at the end of the day, I mean, it’s an old adage, but all press is good press, right? When we launched, we had probably just as much conservative press that was pretty negative as we did more mainstream and liberal press that was more positive.

But at the end of the day, the Benny Johnsons of the world who made he is like a million subscribers on YouTube and made a nine minute video about Gay Water, I guarantee you, out of those million followers, not everyone who is conservative and following him necessarily has the same views on the community as he does. So I’m sure there’s conservative people that are part of the community that were following him that may have purchased the product. So in my eyes, I mean, all press is good press. Right.

The negative perpetuates it even further.

And even if Lady Gaga, there’s 99 people in the room, if there’s 99 conservatives in the room, there’s maybe one that would buy the product.

It’s good that it’s reaching them as well.

[00:14:30] Calan Breckon: You know what? Sometimes money is money. And sometimes, especially in that world, those communities, they might have all the things they say outwardly, but in the background they’re like potential for making millions and millions of dollars.

That’s not how I run business, but I can see it and that happens.

[00:14:49] Spencer Hoddeson: Yeah.

[00:14:50] Calan Breckon: You never know who’s in the room.

[00:14:52] Spencer Hoddeson: Yeah. It’s less even from a fiscal perspective and more from just like I’m sure there’s a silent minority of folks in that political mindset that are part of the community and see the product and feel represented and feel that the product speaks to them and end up purchasing the product or quietly following the brand.

So I think it’s important to be said that trolling is not necessarily a bad thing as long as the folks involved in the business themselves aren’t being necessarily threatened or put in the line of fire.

[00:15:46] Calan Breckon: Yeah, like no personal acts and stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. So I can only imagine that kind of stuff does add to the stress and not having a big team, not having people to depend on and rely on. Are there any mentors that have helped kind of guide you? Especially since Solopreneurship, we talked about how that’s a bit of a lonely road. You surely have to have had some sort of mentors that have helped you through this and be like, ignore the haters or go in this direction or what’s that?

[00:16:15] Spencer Hoddeson: Yeah, I’ve had a couple of advisors.

One who’s more of like a part time CFO financial advisor who’s been great.

One who’s like a beverage rock star. She’s very well known in the beverage space, who has been guiding, I would say, on the comms and social side. Not really. I come from a brand marketing background, a social background, so I have a lot of folks in my network who I do go to for sort of individual feedback or support or ideas. But yeah, not necessarily like on the trolling, like I said, because I personally had a background of kind of putting myself out on the Internet. I definitely developed a thick skin very quickly and sort of figured out some of those ways to qualify the hate. Like I just said, when you think about it objectively, the more hate you get, the further your video goes. Right.

Those types of sort of qualifiers, I think, have helped me just honestly ignore it.

None of it’s personal. Right. Like, at the end of the day, I don’t know these people. They don’t know me.

I wouldn’t put weight into anyone’s opinion when I don’t know them on a human level.

[00:17:49] Calan Breckon: Yeah, but then there’s also the good parts where it’s like, then you’re like secret warriors come and come back at them at the comments, and you’re just like, oh, the people.

[00:18:01] Spencer Hoddeson: That is my favorite thing in the world, is watching two people go at it in the comments and just go back and forth.

Because to me, it’s a validator that I’ve put something out there that is a conversation starter. Right? It is something that is ruffling some feathers and it’s creating discourse. And I think that’s part of the reason of creating a brand called Gay Water. Right? It’s meant for folks to see it in an aisle and have discourse. And hopefully, the more conversation that’s had, the closer to acceptance, to representation, to tolerance that we can get for the community.

[00:18:49] Calan Breckon: Right. It’s a conversational piece, especially like, even if you just had it on your table and people came over, they’re like, Wait, what? What is this? You know, every gay at any party that had never seen it before, if they see one, can we’ll be like, Hold the phone. Somebody actually canned this.

It’s definitely a conversational piece, and it’s a new brand. And so you started not that long ago. Let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about some of the successes that you’ve had. So from launch till now, what are some of the amazing successes that you’ve had that you’re really proud about?

[00:19:19] Spencer Hoddeson: Yeah, like so many it’s been such a short period of time, and it’s very exciting that the brand has had so much momentum.

I would say some of the successes.

We were the biggest first launch of any brand that works. That our sort of third party online vendor has worked with. So we use a vendor that enables us and helps us to ship our product across the country so we’re able to ship to 47 states. We were their biggest first brand launch, and they represent a good amount of brands. So that was really great.

Our launch garnered over 800 million press impressions.

We had a big CNN Business article that sort of anchored a lot of our press. And we were even trending on CNN.com for the day that we launched, which was I mean, I had a minor freak out, but good freak out.

Within, like, a week or so, we had gotten accepted into Total Wine, which is one of the biggest liquor chains in the country.

So that was a huge win.

After two weeks, I kind of, on a whim, applied for Walmart’s Open Call program with two weeks worth of revenue and a dream, and they accepted us. And I flew to Bentonville a couple of weeks ago and pitched Walmart and Sam’s Club. So that was a wild experience.

What other crazy wins have we had?

Yeah, just like, a lot of great momentum.

We were what, a little almost actually, yesterday was four months since our launch. We launched july 20.

Our community has grown to over 130,000 members. Between social media followers email lists, folks who we have a platform that helps us crowdsource like store requests. So those folks as well, which is pretty crazy just given that there’s so many other notable brands out there. And weird to say that we have more social followers than a brand that’s been around for eight years, but it is such a young brand with more of a two way dialogue with the consumer than I think, a lot of other brands that are out there.

This isn’t the early to mid 2000s or 2010s anymore where a brand will just treat social media like it’s a one way street and it’s almost like they’re sending it’s on an email. You’re not talking at me like it’s social media, you’re talking with me. So it’s been really rewarding to see that we’ve been able to kind of connect with so many folks and be able to kind of have a dialogue with them.

[00:22:31] Calan Breckon: I was going to say, do you think that that has come from your experience in being in social media before you started the brand? So you carried that into the brand.

[00:22:40] Spencer Hoddeson: With you a bit, I think understand my own knowledge, just like understanding how the platforms work, how audiences are sort of different based on the platform or based on the different social platforms that definitely set the groundwork to it. But I think the brand itself being able to have much more of an unleaded approach to it and an untethered rather we’ll go places that other brands won’t.

Folks will comment like really negative things and we’ll just clap back. The other day we had someone being like, I’m sure these taste awful. And I was like, unfortunately, they don’t taste like ass those types of things because we’re able to be a little bit more unhinged and more topical, more part of the we have an audience and we have a community and we can talk like them, we can talk with them.

I think it’s very different than some of these brands that launch with a traditional marketing agency, that they create a brand identity and they create a tone guide.

Trust me. I used to work at one of the biggest brands in the world on the brand team.

We worked with huge branding agencies and it’s always, how do we operationalize? And I think that’s where brands go wrong is when you operationalize, you immediately defer back to brands of the older days where it’s like there’s a style guide, there’s a tone of voice, there’s stringent brand identity guidelines, and you kind of lose the fun, playful personality of the brand.

So I think that’s something that’s really worked in our favor is using social media to be able to be that frontline mouthpiece for the brand and be able to speak on social in a way that’s not linear or expected. Honestly, we don’t have canned responses that we answer people with. Everything is individualized for as long as we have the resources and are able to be individualized. Right.

But it all comes from a person. It’s not like a chat GPT response to everyone.

[00:25:35] Calan Breckon: Do you think that coming from more of like a very solo entrepreneur bootstrappy vibes has given you the freedom in order to be able to do that? And do you think that small businesses have more of that capability because they don’t have to answer to the big power ups that be?

[00:25:53] Spencer Hoddeson: Absolutely.

Having come from a few big corporate jobs, I know firsthand how much red tape and how bureaucratic it can be, how many approvals things need if it needs to go through a legal team, who’s going to give you wait a week and then give you feedback? One is that we can be nimble and move a lot quicker. We don’t have time delays in those approvals and feedbacks.

But also the idea of just being quicker yeah, that’s probably the only one, is just being able to be quicker and make decisions faster because there’s less folks involved.

[00:26:47] Calan Breckon: Okay. Looking at all that and looking back on everything that you’ve done, is there anything if you were going to give advice to somebody listening to this, who’s looking to start something or maybe a physical product or whatever, looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?

[00:27:02] Spencer Hoddeson: Oh, a million things. But I think at the end of the day, I come from the school of thought that everything is a learning experience. Right.

I think if I had made if I, if someone had if someone had given me all of the answers that I needed early on, I would have made different mistakes. I think that there’s no perfect path to anything. You’re always going to look back on something and wish you changed something.

I personally, the best advice I can give someone starting any product, any business, is don’t look back. Genuinely. Of course, you can gather some learnings on how to move forward based on what your past.

But I think that the best thing you can do is course correct and continue to move forward and solve, especially as a sole opener where you don’t have the time and you don’t have the resources to look back and see how you did something wrong necessarily and dwell on the past. You have to move forward.

I would say keep moving forward and trial and error is like your best friend. I think we’re entering a time where I think TikTok kind of pioneered it.

Unless you’re working on medication or something, that truly is life threat can affect people’s lives.

Everything feels not everything is so serious. Right. Don’t scrutinize marketing copy to make it the most perfect iteration of something when 90% of the time a consumer is just going to breeze by it and they’ll look at the picture and not read the copy or they’ll see one big word and move on. I think the more you try to make your business perfect, the longer it’s going to take for you to get to it actually being in a place where you’re happy.

[00:29:18] Calan Breckon: I fully agree. I think so much of it is the journey and the revamping. Revising growing. Like, that growth part of that journey informs SEO much of what’s happening, that it’s like, you have to make those learning mistakes in order to learn and grow from them, to make things better and evolve and grow. And you can’t do that without getting customer feedback, without going through the journey. It can’t be perfect to start off with, because then you have nowhere to grow, too. So just baking that into your business, you know, okay, this is where I’m happy to start here and know that it’s going to change and evolve and grow and be okay with that. A lot of people don’t have that mentality.

[00:29:56] Spencer Hoddeson: Yeah.

I think that sometimes it’s hard to just relinquish. Right.

You never want to put something out that isn’t 100% exactly what you wanted.

And I had to learn that really early on, that if I didn’t put something out there that was like a 92 or a 93%, I probably wouldn’t have a product at market today. I would still be working on it. I would still be fine tuning.

And at the end of the day, it’s like when you were in grade school and high school and you took a test, you didn’t always get 100%.

You came to terms with the fact that, oh, a B plus was good or an A minus was good, and you moved forward and you tried to do better on the next test. And I think we all want to strive for perfection, but at the end of the day, perfection isn’t sort perfection isn’t the best possible outcome.

Because I think once you, like, everyone experiences this, once you’ve completely closed the door on a project, you have a little bit of a high, and then immediately the next day, you’re just, like, at this low, and you’re like, what do I do now? And I think that’s why I’ve kind of strived to continue climbing and learning and growing. And you have your dips, but then you come back up and you continue to grow rather than, like, you create one goal, and you hit that goal, and then you have the drop off, and then there’s another goal.

[00:31:41] Calan Breckon: Yeah, I much prefer to think about, like, yes, there are goals and outcomes, but I don’t focus on those goals and outcomes. I know that those are a byproduct of the work and the journey. And so I’m constantly just focusing on next step, next step, next step, because I know that those things are going to come along with that. And if people spent more time on actually just enjoying the journey and enjoying the work that goes into it, that is your life. That’s what your life is.

[00:32:09] Spencer Hoddeson: 100%.

[00:32:10] Calan Breckon: Yeah, you’re going to have more on life.

[00:32:12] Spencer Hoddeson: Truly.

I’ve started taking Monday mornings where I take a pause when I wake up in the morning because normally it would be start of the week. I would have so much anxiety and getting ready for the week. And my new sort of routine is that I take an hour and a half, 2 hours in the morning and I just write down all of the things that happened in the last week that I’m grateful for and what I’m looking forward to. And it’s really helped ground me and it’s also helped recognize and take gratitude for how far I’ve come along at each step. Because I think if I didn’t do that like we were just saying, I would just keep going and I would just keep moving forward without experiencing and taking gratitude for the sort of journey.

[00:33:11] Calan Breckon: Yeah, it’s the constant seeking of the next thing instead of just sitting in the moment of what you actually did. I do Gratitude journal every night before I go to bed and I just kind of write down a couple of things of what happened that day and sometimes it’s like, oh yeah, I totally forgot that this amazing thing happened today. And just remind yourself of that good stuff that happened.

[00:33:30] Spencer Hoddeson: Yeah, I feel like we need more of that.

Less social media distraction, more Brene brown.

[00:33:40] Calan Breckon: More brene brown.

[00:33:43] Spencer Hoddeson: Honestly, I don’t need to be real. I need be journaling.

[00:33:50] Calan Breckon: Yeah, right.

[00:33:51] Spencer Hoddeson: A reminder once a day to write one sentence down. That would be better than taking a picture.

[00:33:56] Calan Breckon: Exactly. It should be in your calendar to do write something down that I’m grateful for today.

Absolutely. So where can everybody find out more about gay water? Or where can they get gay water on the shelves.

[00:34:10] Spencer Hoddeson: So right now I mentioned a little earlier we ship to 47 states. So we’ll ship directly to folks homes.

That I would say is an interesting approach because most people don’t buy alcohol online. Right. You go to your liquor store.

We found it very important to have direct consumer shipping just for folks who live in parts of the country because it’s only available in the US right now where they might not have access to queer communities. So really important that we’ve democratized access to this product so that folks can have it in their home and create queer spaces in their home.

So we ship to 47 states. We’re available in New York, new Jersey? Very soon. California. We’re in all the Total Wines in New York and New Jersey as well as a bunch of other independent retailers, liquor stores and a couple of bars. We’re working on building out those sales channels and then like I said, soon to be California.

We’ll be in, I think, three Total wines in La. One in the San Diego area, and just really focusing on for the next couple of months on those markets and building community in those. Areas working on really engaging with customers on the ground before we kind of dominate the world. Awesome dominations. Next.

[00:35:45] Calan Breckon: Where can people find that? Is there a website that they can go to?

[00:35:48] Spencer Hoddeson: Yes, Gay Water.com. We have a looking tab, and that is where all of our retail locations are listed. We have a map there as well as a request form, which is really important.

I think I mentioned earlier, we used a platform called WeStock, which connects us, which allows for consumers to sort of crowdsource where they want to see the product. It’s great for us because it allows us to sort of visualize like, okay, here are the markets that we need to be in. Here are the specific areas that we need to target. We’re able to let customers know when we do stock those stores and have product in their area.

So definitely, if there isn’t product in your area, if you don’t want to pay for shipping, totally get it. But request as many stores as possible and we’ll do our best to get there.

[00:36:46] Calan Breckon: Fantastic. And I’m very excited for eventually when you do make it into the Canadian market, I will be one of the first people in Toronto, and next time I’m down the states, either in California or in New York, I’m definitely going to have to pick up a box. Thank you so much for being on the show. This is fantastic, and I want to wish you well on your journey. I think this is a great product, great marketing, great look, all of it’s. It’s fantastic.

[00:37:11] Spencer Hoddeson: Thank you so much. Yeah. Hopefully we’ll be in Canada soon.

There might be some news about that coming in the next couple of months.

But yeah, absolutely.

I’ll have to send you some because I can send it to you.

Hopefully there’s no one in law enforcement listening to this, but yes, we have to get you some to try.

[00:37:37] Calan Breckon: Magical. Awesome. Thanks so much, spencer.

[00:37:40] Calan Breckon: All right, so if you want to get yourself a case of Gay water, make sure you go and you look that up you go. If you’re living in New York, go find yourself a case of it. Support our LGBTQ+ businesses. It is so important. Thank you for tuning in today. It has been a magical episode, and I love that you tuned in for them. Don’t forget to hit that like and subscribe button. If you enjoyed today’s episode, I would love a star rating from you if. You know, you don’t have to.

The Business Gay podcast is written, produced and edited by me, Calan Breckon. And if you are looking for some free SEO audit advice, you can head on over to CalanBreckon.com/Audit and set one up with me. Or just click the link in the show notes. That’s it for today.

Peace. Love. Rainbows.