money meets emotions #1: Kiki Couchman, founder of Beny Yogurt

Table of Contents

• background: who is Kiki Couchman and what is Beny …

  • Why yogurt? It’s personal.

• money x emotions meets kiki x beny yogurt

  • Kiki’s relationship with money

  • Risk averse or risk-seeking?

  • How co-founders talk about the hard sh!t like mone …

• closing thoughts

hi lil bees!!! long time no see 🙂 

Introducing money meets emotions, a series where I chat with dope woman building cool sh!t and ask them about their relationships with money.

Why? First of all, they’re bada$$. Also, I want to understand how people take the leap of faith to do something of their own, and how money influences their decisions. Because it’s apart of our lives whether we like it or not, and it’s not talked about enough without stigma.

So, drumroll please!!! 🥁 🥁 🥁 

Money meets emotions #1 features Kiki Couchman, co-founder of Beny Yogurt. You might also know her as couchwoman@ on socials or the girl who quit her job in private equity to start a yogurt company. So, let’s get into it.

want to watch snippets? watch here 🙂 

background: who is Kiki Couchman and what is Beny Yogurt?

Kiki is the co-founder of Beny Yogurt, yogurt made for the gut with only the good stuff. But who is she?

She’s originally from Northern California, growing up around agriculture. Her dad actually grew up on a dairy farm 🐄, so she knows a thing or two about lactose tolerance. She studied human biology at Stanford, graduating in 2020 before going into private equity. Until now, when she decided to co-found a yogurt company called Beny Yogurt with her best friend Elan Halpern.

Why yogurt? It’s personal.

Both Kiki and Elan have had their own health journeys but Elan is the mastermind behind the yogurt when she realized that her microbiome was the critical driver of her body.

Here’s why. All yogurts are made with live and active cultures. But, not all yogurts have probiotics with specific health benefits. It’s like how a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square. They're both bacteria that's alive, but probiotics have been proven to have a meaningful impact on your gut.

What happens with big yogurt brands is that they pasteurize before and after it’s cultured. Culturing means you take that good and live bacteria. You put it in the milk, you grow it, and the milk turns into yogurt.

Pasteurizing is when they heat it up really high, a high temperature, yeah, to kill bacteria. And so they pasteurize it before they make it into yogurt, and after. tl;dr lots of, if not all of the good bacteria, is killed.

So they wanted to make a yogurt with only the good stuff.

But no experience goes to waste. Her degree in biology is now coming full circle, and her experience in private equity helped her gain a broad understanding of different industries and leadership dynamics.

money x emotions meets kiki x beny yogurt

Now for the spice. Kiki meets Beny Yogurt meets money and emotions.

Kiki’s relationship with money

Money is something she thinks about all the time, yet not at all.

Her mom is an immigrant, born in China and moved to San Francisco which has completely influenced her way of viewing money, specifically the value of money and working hard. Even if that doesn't translate necessarily into a big amount of dollars. Her dad was also a founder, which only influenced this mindset even more.

There was never a pressure to make a ton of money. But there was definitely a pressure to be ambitious, which indirectly meant making a lot of money. She’s lived a lot of her life in that flywheel: be top of her class, go to Stanford, work in a successful field.

But then enter the inevitable quarter-life crisis. What do those metrics even mean? No one's out here measuring how much she’s making, or how successful she is, or her promotion track. Like, actually, no one gives a sh!t. It's only just for herself.

So what is the life that she actually wants to live? What's the amount of money that will allow her to live that life? How does she want to spend her days and hours? That’s her measure of success, which definitely took a bit of rejiggering in her mind.

Risk averse or risk-seeking?

She considers herself risk averse, but is willing to take calculated risks. Especially at this stage in her life where she has the unique opportunity to fully immerse herself in Beny Yogurt for the next five years.

Here are some calculated risks they took:

1. Leave her full-time job at the end of the year to get her bonus.

Building a CPG brand, or any company, is not cheap. Because they’re bootstrapping this company (i.e. not taking outside capital), they want to try and build this and create as much value on their own, giving them the autonomy to build on their own terms. Which also means they need to be able to support themselves as individuals and put money into the company.

2. 5-9 after the 9-5. Aka creating content and brand awareness before they leave their jobs.

Kiki created a popping TikTok and Instagram page, starting as a normal human being. She didn’t have a background in marketing or sales, but she knew media was crucial.

Beny is a perishable good, and they knew they needed to outpace demand before they’re on any shelf. They’ve got shelf life, and can’t just hangout on a cupboard for 10 years.

And for the founder community, and specifically CPG, and being new to the space, she’s received incredible inbound of support of people in this network who want to help out, who want to connect her with people. It’s really helped them hit the ground running. It’s a huge engine that she wants to keep driving and growing and learning. And there's a lot to learn.

How co-founders talk about the hard sh!t like money

Kiki doesn’t feel like she even has to really navigate talking about money. Because she and Elan are best friends first. Which makes it easy to be honest about the hard sh!t.

That being said, they’ve made sure to talk about the importance of maintaining their relationship as best friends beyond being co-founders. For example, what happens when this goes away?

They want to make sure that their friendship remains beyond the company. It's really easy to be completely absorbed, and that's the only thing we talk about. A co-founder relationship is like a marriage. They plan to have date night every other week and have dinner and hang out with other friends, with no Beny talk. Like putting your phone away at the dinner table.

But right now, the momentum has kicked in! They feel lucky that they get to build this company together, like coparents.

How they’re funding Beny Yogurt

Kiki & Elan decided to bootstrap Beny initially, using savings and bonuses to fund their first production run. And they plan to continue to do so for as long as possible to maintain autonomy and avoid diluting their shares.

They’re open to fundraising in the future, but view it more as a tool to grow their company as a metric of success, something we think is not talked about enough.

Their metric of success is making their yogurt accessible and mainstream, focusing on gut health and creating positive impact on consumers rather than achieving large multiples of return.

closing thoughts

I got to try some Beny, and YUM. It really did taste like just the good stuff.

Be sure to follow couchwoman@ & eatbeny@ to show some love and hear more about when Beny yogurt is coming out to stores near you 😀 

Also, this was my first formal interview with the whole video & mic setup. And it was SO FUN! Few things:

• I had no formal setup for recording an interview besides a tripod I borrowed from my roommate and mics I bought on Amazon for $20. You don’t need to have some fancy setup to just get started.

• It just reaffirmed to me how much joy it brings me to ask people about their relationships with money.

• Money impacts each and every one of us. It’s pervasive, emotional, and personal.

So cheers to talking more about money, and more interviews to come 🙂 Let me know your thoughts/feedback/cool women I can interview 👀 

P.S. how do we like this new email newsletter styling?

until the next 🐝  and with 💛 ,

Sneha