It Doesn’t Get Fixed If You Don’t Talk About It: An Interview with Kliit’s CEO and Co-founder, Crystal Euvelocha
Kliit is a digital health platform dedicated to enabling multicultural women to talk to trusted sexual and reproductive health experts about their health, including OBGYN’s, Nurse Practitioners, Nurse Midwives, Sex therapists, and other women’s health clinicians. For more information, visit https://www.kliit.com/.
Kliit recently won the Audience Choice Award at the Black New Venture Competition. Learn more about the BNVC here.
Crystal Euvelocha is the CEO and Co-founder of Kliit.
HBS Entrepreneurship Club: Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur?
Crystal Euvelocha: I’ve always been an entrepreneur. I don’t think I’ve ever really fit into a typical work setting…I was always good at things I did outside the office. I moved to the US from Nigeria for college in 2010, and I had some trouble finding on-campus jobs. As an international student, all of those were super competitive. I thought, how do I make some extra money? I started doing braids and weaves on campus, doing people’s nails, making clothes. My first company, Benóla Crystale, was actually an e-commerce company that made men’s accessories: ties, bowties, things like that, with African fabric.
HE: So you had these early experiences, then you started working a corporate job. A lot of people hesitate to start their own businesses when they’re in a stable job, for various reasons. What made you finally decide to “take the leap” and start Kliit?
CE: I think the main fear comes from going into the unknown. They say you kinda have to be crazy to become an entrepreneur, that you have to be willing to bear huge amounts of risk, and that’s the scariest part. For me, I was doing significantly well in a corporate setting. However, as a woman and a woman of color, I realized over time that I was not being appreciated, I felt like I was not getting as much as I should or deserved. I realized I could work twice as hard, but still only get half of what everyone else was getting.
I knew I was a product manager, a team builder, I was good at speaking to investors — I thought, this is what you do. This is your skillset. And you can create your own thing from this. But going into it was scary still, because it’s different when you’re no longer getting a paycheck. All the work you do is dependent on you. One of the scariest parts of entrepreneurship is being in control of your day, and your finances, 100%. So it was really important for me to make sure that I was financially secure for at least a year, enough to keep paying my rent. And that wouldn’t be sustainable by itself, so I needed to find other ways to make money as I was starting Kliit Health. I took freelance gigs on Upwork, and some additional business strategy consulting work. I did freelance client work in the daytime, and in the afternoon I worked on Kliit Health up until late at night. It helped me manage my schedule and made my day more wholesome.
HE: As a non-technical person, how did you find your co-founder?
CE: My background is in business and law. I didn’t know a lot about medicine or tech. So coming into this with the non-technical founder standpoint, you can imagine all the different struggles that go with that. One thing I did was I went to USC to attend this founder speed dating event. I didn’t find my co-founder there, but I met a ton of technical folks, who got me thinking about what I should be looking for in a technical co-founder.
I attended a Universal Design Symposium, and the first person I talked to turned out to be facilitating the event. I listened to her give a talk that day. After that, I just knew I had to get her onboard. Because she spoke about universal and inclusive design, which involved designing products for people with disabilities — be it visual, mental, anything that might hinder a person from using a product or app. I said to myself I’m thinking about diversity and inclusiveness, building products for anyone who is underserved or whom most businesses overlook. And I decided this is my person. My now co-founder and Chief Product Officer Cassy Gibson is a UI/UX designer, so the first thing she did for me was actually design a mock of our app. Since then we’ve been tied at the hip.
HE: Some people might find it intimidating to go into the healthcare space, given all the regulation. How do you think about that, and what’s your approach to partnering with healthcare professionals?
CE: The goal of any CEO is to put together a great team of experts in various fields relevant to the business. Healthcare is very sensitive, very regulated, so it’s really important to have a good legal team. We have a fantastic attorney who is also a healthcare expert. When looking for your legal expert, you want someone who works with startups specifically, and who is a subject matter expert in your field.
I also started looking to different clinicians to talk to. I talked to ob-gyns, nurse midwives, nurse practitioners — I talked to everyone I could, over a hundred, in the women’s health field. From that process, I met our Chief Medical Officer who is an OB/GYN. Her name is Dr. Candice Fraser. We did a pilot with her, and then based on that relationship being built, we moved forward. It was important to have folks like her on board. She helps us think through things from the medical standpoint, she hires and vets all the clinicians on our platform, and she also works hand-in-hand with our attorney on all the regulatory pieces. They help us stay up to date with all the changes in the healthcare field, because it does change rapidly.
HE: Tactically, how did you go about “talking to people” in your industry? Did you start out with cold outreach?
CE: Starting out, I didn’t know much about the healthcare space, but I knew who I wanted to talk to. I love LinkedIn — it’s my favorite social platform. I messaged over a hundred clinicians. Of these, maybe twenty would respond, and five would actually follow through. I met one of my mentors, Dr. Ruth Shaber of the Tara Health Foundation, that way. I didn’t know her prior to our LinkedIn connection but she responded positively and introduced me to other people, or she would suggest people for me to talk to. I started building those relationships with the one, two, three people who responded, and then it became ten, twenty people, and so forth. You gain some level of credibility from those relationships.
HE: What advice would you give if you were mentoring someone who is starting their entrepreneurial journey?
CE: I would tell them to leverage their network and connections in any space. In college I wanted to be an attorney, actually, so my path went very legal. I did a paralegal certification, and I started building my network around that. I didn’t reach out to many people outside of that. You only know what you know or are exposed to — your network really is your “net worth.”
I wish I spent some time understanding things outside of law. I didn’t know much about fundraising, or the tech world, or even the VC world. What I did do was pay attention to people around me who were in tech, when I wanted to branch into tech. I became like an apprentice, really. I attended conferences, I followed people. Being teachable is so important, especially when you’re branching into something new. Follow people and build networks around that thing that you want to do, and ask others to teach you.
Also, talk to as many people as possible about the thing you want to learn or the thing you’re working on. I think some people have issues speaking about what they’re working on, maybe because of fear of failure or their idea being stolen…but I really think no one else is going to build your product as well as you. No one is going to be as passionate as you to do it. Your story is what’s really going to resonate with people and drive the message home — so talk to everyone and get loads of feedback!
As a woman of color, there are many challenges. We’re minority minorities. So thinking about how do I connect with other women like me, or folks who are interested in building up folks like me — what I’ve done is, I started looking at different pitch competitions for women, or for minority groups, specifically. You connect to people who look like you. Through these, I’ve been able to grow a community of multicultural women. And it’s such a strong thing, to have that. When you rally those people around you, who understand your struggle, it’s still a struggle, but it gets easier with community. So find those — be on the lookout for and ask…where are the people who look like me?
HE: How did you come up with Kliit’s name?
CE: So you probably guessed it! Kliit is a play on the word clitoris! I come from a very conservative society, and when I had serious female reproductive health concerns, I didn’t feel comfortable discussing it with anyone. I went to Google and found information that ended up being wrong, which led to a major health event. So I was thinking through that, about the main reasons why this happened. There was a lack of access to good healthcare professionals, a lack of knowledge, of not even knowing which resources were available — and shame. The cost of it was another thing. As an international student, I didn’t have good health insurance. Those things led to poor decisions.
So when I thought of creating a company that solved this problem — I thought of a lot of names, femme-this, lady-that, but they didn’t really resonate with me. I had to find a name that meant inclusiveness, that meant destigmatizing that conversation around sexual and reproductive health, and also meant freedom of expression for people who look like me that need access. So I thought of “Kliit” — I thought, let’s make it fun. We want to make it normal to say “Kliit.” We want people to say Kliit Health.
The clitoris, women’s bodies, have been so sexualized, so taboo — but we don’t want that to be the case. We want to be that company that sparks your curiosity when you first hear about us, and resonates deeply when you hear about the work we’re doing, we want it to really sink in. It doesn’t get fixed if you don’t talk about it. We want to be at the forefront of making this something women are proud to talk about and in turn proudly seek professional medical advice.
This article was written by Isabel Yap from the Harvard Business School Entrepreneurship Club. Special thanks to Tyler Simpson of the Harvard Business School African-American Student Union for her help in preparing the article.
