After a failed startup attempt four years ago, Kim LaPaglia went to India to regroup — unaware that she was about to discover her next startup.
She found it in Garcinia indica, a culinary and medicinal fruit indigenous to India’s Western Ghats region. The fruit is now the single product of LaPaglia’s company, Sant — a finalist in the 2014 Chicago Lean Startup Challenge.
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Now she has turned Sant into a Kickstarter project, on which she’s closing in on a $10,000 funding goal.
LaPaglia said she hopes to raise as much as $30,000 on the crowdfunding site. She said she’ll use any money she raises to improve marketing and packaging and to keep the supply coming from her network of 800 small farmers in India.
The product comes in raw, dried form, and it infuses quickly in hot water. The result is a juice that LaPaglia says packs nutrients.
“It has five times the antioxidants of kale,” she said.
LaPaglia said her first social impact startup was called Member Made, which she founded in 2010. She aimed to create a way to bring underprivileged people together with people who were willing and able to help them. It didn’t get far, and she abandoned it after six months. But she’d already quit her job in marketing and sales.
Needing to regroup, LaPaglia said she accepted a one-year fellowship at a startup incubator in Bombay run by Dasra, an Indian philanthropic and social enterprise organization.
She said she began exploring a more healthy nutritional lifestyle, which led her to Garcinia indica. She said she dropped the dried fruit in hot water as a simple way to consume it and found that she enjoyed it.
She said the name Sant comes from a Hindi word meaning balance — a quality she said she discovered while living in India. She said she learned to live with hardships and learned how to shrug off inconveniences.
“More than anything, it taught me how to be an entrepreneur,” she said of her experience. “Nothing works there. You learn not to let the external stuff affect you.”
As her one-year fellowship was wrapping up, she said she thought about the things she would miss.
“I literally thought, ‘This drink is one of the things I’m going to miss the most,”‘ she said.
Instead of returning home, LaPaglia said she set out to learn more about Garcinia indica, also known as kokum. Several months later, in late 2012, she was on her way back to Chicago with two suitcases full of the fruit.
LaPaglia said she initially thought of Sant as a company that would sell bottled juice from the fruit, but she dismissed the idea because of the high startup costs and the environmental effect of plastic juice bottles.
She also considered powder or pill form but settled on the dried fruit. It’s harvested from trees, then laid out in the sun to dry for three days. Once dried, LaPaglia said, it will last for about a year.
As of Monday morning, her Kickstarter project had raised over $8,000 in pledges toward her $10,000 goal, with 36 days left in the campaign.