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New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.

As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.

So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.

Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.

We launched with, I mean, must be at least like a thousand demos.

You would go and demo, okay, what would you do?

So you have like a table, and you put down as much as you can to make it look nice and warm and fuzzy.

And I'm standing there with a happy baby T-shirt on, and you're trying to get people to sample these like yummy foods that I'm thinking, I'm so proud of this.

This has taken years to make this, you know, and you're standing there waiting for someone to come, and then barely anybody comes.

And on the third time that I did a demo, I realized that this wasn't going to work.

From NPR is how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Raaz, and on the show today, how Shazzy Visherum decided to take on the big baby food companies and build happy family, one of the best selling organic baby food brands in America.

One of the trickiest things about building a business around software or a product that you have to engineer and machine is that the barrier to entry is pretty high.

You usually need lots of money just to come up with a minimally viable product. It's why Toby Lutka had to raise money just to build an early version of Shopify, and why John Foley needed to find hundreds of thousands of dollars just to make a prototype of what would become the Peloton bike.

But when it comes to food, much of that prototyping can be done without ever raising a dime. For example, Lara Merican just chopped up dates and nuts and shaped them into bars which eventually became Lara bars.

Kathleen King of Tates Bake Shop baked her crispy chocolate chip cookies at home long before she launched a bakery and a brand that would go on to sell to Mondalees for half a billion dollars.

It's a similar story with baby food. It's not that hard to make. You puree some veggies or mashups and fruit and there you have it.

Baby's dinner. And this is essentially what Shazie Visherum did back in 2004 in her apartment in New York, except Shazie was experimenting with a potential business idea, an idea that started with pureed peas and mint.

And eventually a bunch of home recipes that she turned into happy family organics, a brand that now sells around 200 million dollars of baby food a year.

But getting that brand off the ground took a long time and many moments when it could have collapsed. For starters, her original idea was to make frozen cubes of baby food, except that idea never gained traction.

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