Steve Chapman (Hyro) - Influencers as Investors, Selling Out 9x, and Moving to the US to Go All In
On this episode, Hyro CEO and co-founder Steve Chapman joins us to unpack:
- Why Steve turned down a safe corporate job with a baby on the way and put his long service payout into Hyro, a bet he now calls "extremely irrational"
- Why Hyro skipped paid posts and put ten of Australia's top creators on the cap table, and the three questions Steve asked each one before they got in
- The "cold start" problem every founder faces, and why Steve says ownership beat a $100K paycheck for the influencers who backed Hyro
- Why selling out nine times is a nightmare, not a win, and the growth math that leaves a brand at 30% month over month "four times behind" within a few months
- What it felt like to lose $100,000 on a first startup, then get a cease and desist from Facebook right after it deleted the integration the whole business ran on
- Why Steve walked away from the nootropic brand he built to 7,000 stores and $60M in sales rather than sign a 3-5 year earn-out
- Why Steve would run 12 to 18 months of hard DTC before launching in retail, and the 120-day cash conversion cycle that makes retail so brutal for a fast-growing brand
- How Steve uses AI agents to run 80-90% of Hyro, and the "Hyro AGI" that sits in the middle of the company reading everything
- Why Steve moved a seven-month-old and a two-and-a-half-year-old across the world, and why he says you can't run the US as a side hustle
- The story behind Steve running a marathon in a giant Hyro mascot suit, and the moment 7K in when he called his wife to say a sub-three was off the table
Learn more about Hyro at https://drinkhyro.com/
