People often ask how I started Lexie's. The honest answer is: I was hungry and the snacks I had weren't cutting it.

I was working a corporate job, training in the mornings, and trying to eat better without going full "wellness influencer" on my own kitchen. The snacks I kept finding were either tasteless cardboard marketed as healthy, or full-on candy bars with a vaguely healthy-sounding ingredient thrown in for marketing.

Nothing tasted good AND was actually good for me. Nothing. I tried everything in every aisle of every store.

The first batch

One Sunday, I made protein balls in my apartment kitchen. Not because I wanted to start a company. Because I wanted a snack that didn't make me feel bad. I rolled a few, threw them in the freezer, and ate them all week.

My roommate tried one. Then her friend tried one. Then that friend brought some to her CrossFit class. By the end of the month, I had strangers asking where to buy them.

That's when it hit me: this isn't a personal problem. This is a real gap in the market.

What "entrepreneur" really meant

People romanticize being an entrepreneur. The Instagram version is a founder in a clean white kitchen, raising a Series A, jetting off to Natural Products Expo West.

The reality, for me, was: working a 9-5, rolling protein balls on my kitchen counter at 10pm, packing them into bags with a heat sealer I bought on Amazon, and delivering them myself to local stores in my Honda Civic. That's the unsexy version. That's also the version that built the company.

There was no "aha" moment. There was a slow realization that I was spending all my free time making these, talking about these, and thinking about these, and at some point I had to make a choice: keep doing it as a hobby, or commit to it as the work.

Why I built it for women

I want to be careful here because not every woman entrepreneur wants to be defined by their gender. But the reality is that the CPG industry — particularly the snack and supplement space — is still mostly run by men, with mostly male investors, with mostly male-coded marketing.

That doesn't mean the products are bad. It means the products are designed for a different default user. They're designed for a 35-year-old guy who wants to hit his protein macros after lifting. They're not designed for a 30-year-old woman who wants a snack that tastes good, doesn't have weird ingredients, fits in her work bag, and doesn't make her feel guilty for eating it.

That second customer is most of my customer base. I built Flex Bites for her.

What I want for the next 5 years

I want to keep doing this. I want to keep rolling protein balls, keep working with retailers I respect, keep shipping to customers who care about what's in their food. I want to hire more people who care about the same things. I want to expand the product line carefully. I want to stay small enough that I still know the names of everyone who works here.

I don't want to be a unicorn. I want to be a really good small business that makes a really good product. That's the whole plan.