Startup Spotlight: Savvyist — Q&A; with Founder, Frances Yun

Newly launched startup, Savvyist brings together all the information used by women to figure out which beauty products to purchase, while learning about their preferences in order to make personalized product recommendations.

The site is all about personalized beauty with the goal of empowering consumers to instantly find the best makeup recommendations for their own unique skin tone and features. Founder, Frances Yun and her team have set out to make it easier for you to learn what works best for you, whether you’re an experienced makeup artist or a beginner.

I caught up with Yun, who has bootstrapped the startup thus far, to learn more about the beauty product startup that offers easy and free step-by-step makeup tutorials, looks, and lipsticks for you.

VF: Let’s hear it from you — what is Savvyist?

FY: Savvyist empowers everyone to master their makeup.

For too long, getting started with makeup has been overwhelming, time consuming, and expensive, requiring people to start with a brand and navigate through their tens and hundreds of shades.

Savvyist (www.savvyist.com) is a free, personalized makeup destination. It’s like having your own personal makeup artist who understands your skintone and features, is available 24/7, and costs nothing. The site contains step-by-step tutorials, tools to find your personal beauty guru and perfect lipstick shade, real-life looks from people similar to you, candid reviews of quality products, from drugstore to high-end, and more.

VF: Can you provide our readers with the story / some background of how this all came about and what made you jump into entrepreneurship and take this on?

FY: I am a Harvard alum with experience designing consumer mobile applications at Nokia. Tired of the bureaucracy and long product development cycles, I quit my job to co-found a MIT Media Lab backed educational startup with Drew Harry, a Media Lab graduate. A year later, when trying to find a new makeup product, I became aware of how difficult it was to find products that would look good on my unique features. I determined the problem was widespread and decided to build a solution from the ground-up. With Drew leaving to California to begin a “real” job, I taught myself Ruby on Rails, HTML/CSS, and backend technologies through free online resources. I found my team members online: Bethany through Levo League, a career site for women, and Nicole through LinkedIn.

VF: How did you fund the company? Have you raised funding or are you bootstrapped?

FY: Savvyist is completely bootstrapped. We’re solidifying our business plan and user base before going for funding. Boston has much less of a consumer software startup environment than Silicon Valley, but we like it here!

VF: Can you give a bit more insight or specifics around the problem you and your team are solving?

FY: The $55 billion dollar makeup industry has yet to solve one of its most fundamental consumer problems: how do I find products that work for me? A recurring problem is buying a product only to realize the shade looks bad on you. With the overwhelming number of shades and products, trying to do your own makeup can quickly become expensive and discouraging.

With Savvyist, makeup becomes easy, fun, and cost-effective. Because of the personal nature of makeup, the site (www.savvyist.com) is customized for each individual’s skintone and features, instantly displaying free step-by-step tutorials and shades that work best for them. In addition, the Savvyist community shares candid reviews and photos of every makeup product, from drugstore to high-end, so you can find high-quality vetted products, no matter the price point. Every piece of content on Savvyist is tagged with rich metadata, allowing us to surface content that’s personally relevant.

VF: Savvyist is newly launched. What has the early response and traction been like?

FY: Savvyist just launched a couple of weeks ago, in early May, but has been in beta for several months to test user behavior. We have had great traction despite not focusing on marketing. In our last month, we had 50k pageviews and 12k unique visitors; cumulatively, we have over 2,000 user generated images, over 1,000 registered members, and coverage of over 15k makeup products.

VF: What can we expect from Savvyist moving forward?

FY: Mobile usage has been surprisingly high (49%), so you can expect a mobile app, which we’re learning how to develop now. Other than that, we’re working on improving our personalization algorithms so they’re more specific. We’re agile and responsive to user requests, so you can expect us to evolve based on user feedback. If you have any feedback, please email us at hello@savvyist.com, we’d love to hear it!

Josh Boyle is Director of Marketing & Community, VentureFizz. You can follow him on Twitter @jb_sid and keep up with his latest posts by signing up for the VentureFizz Weekly Email!