Sari Azout is an investor at Level Ventures, author of the Check Your Pulse newsletter, and founder of Startuppy, a community-powered database of startup knowledge. Her work centers on a core idea: What would it look like if technology made us feel more human, rather than less?

“At some point we all became users. But really, we’re all people,” Azout says. “We are so emotional. What does it mean to bring that into a product?”

Azout developed her thesis around humanizing tech through more than a decade of building and advising startups. “I love this idea of spotting teams that are trying to bring more creativity and delight into our lives,” she says.

Here, she shares her playbook for using technology to think deeply, taking time to consider product decisions, and writing effectively. Her answers have been lightly edited and condensed.

What led you to launch Startuppy?

“On one hand, I realized there was an opportunity to offer curation as a service. If you were to Google today, ‘What is the future of food?’ or ‘What is the ownership economy?’ you wouldn’t get really high signal pieces. The best work these days is coming from hidden corners of the Internet, the bloggers and the operators, the people who are not really incentivized to spend a lot of time on SEO or content marketing. So there was an opportunity to surface that content.

Beyond that, I feel we’re lacking in spaces on the Internet that encourage thought and reflection. It’s very easy when you’re following Twitter all day to just search for one hot take after the other, to click share and retweet. You don’t have to give any of these things much thought, it’s so frictionless to amplify things without really thinking about them. I started asking myself, ‘What would it mean to design spaces that encouraged more deep thinking?’ So Startuppy is this sandlot that I’m building to experiment with themes I’m interested in.”

What is your process to research and write your newsletter?

“Part of it comes from not having the pressure to publish something every week. A journalist once described their work by saying, ‘My job is to write faster than I can think.’ Mine isn’t. When you have a writing practice, whether it’s consistent or not, you become a sponge. Everything you look at or think about can be raw material. If you have a way to capture that serendipity or those shower thoughts, that’s helpful. It doesn’t have to be a sophisticated tool. As I have thoughts and ideas, I dump them into a Google doc. When you capture these thoughts but you don’t have the pressure to have an informed opinion on it, you can let these things marinate.

To me, it’s the idea of sitting down with all this raw material and asking, ‘What is this all telling me?’ I don’t think the world needs more content. I think the world needs better content. So I’ve never felt the pressure to hit send. I would rather click send when I feel like I have something worthy of sharing. I think that what a lot of people attribute to genius is actually just the benefit of time. If you gave anyone a few months to think about something, they would come up with something very thoughtful.”

Is that advice useful to CEOs and operators — taking more time on ideas?

“It’s so easy to rush into something because someone else is doing it. Everyone who is rushing to launch a Substack, or this or that, it’s just herd mentality, but it doesn’t have longevity. Instead of trying to follow the herd, if you take some time to really, truly think about what feels authentic to your brand, the outcomes should speak for themselves.”

One topic that comes to mind when you say that is community. It’s a word that is everywhere right now. What does it really mean?

“There are real fundamental reasons we’re seeing a resurgence of community. Our institutions are breaking down. Churches are breaking down. Families are breaking down. The promise of social media has been disappointing. So yes, the fundamentals are there, but does that mean every brand should have a Slack group? Can we be a little bit more creative about what community means?

I think a lot of people would be better served by having a lot of information in front of them, then taking time to process, and then thinking about how it applies to them, instead of moving too quickly. This ‘move fast and break things’ mentality didn’t get us to where we wanted to go. So now it’s about asking, how can we slow down and fix things?”

What advice would you give CEOs or operators who may benefit from slowing down, but are worried about the cost?

“With venture capital, there is a certain expectation that is driven by the business model around speed and growth. And there is a lot of tension there. But I would argue in most cases, if you are growing too fast and not being thoughtful, you are accumulating product debt, technical debt, behavioral debt, mental debt. There are all of these things that will eventually catch up to you.

For example, everyone blames Twitter for being slow at developing new products. But what if they really hit the nail on the head with Super Follow and do a great job at it? In theory they’ve been late for years, but if they do a really good job at it, they still win. I think there’s an argument to be made around better instead of faster.”

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Sari Azout: Slow down and fix things was originally published in Rho MarketFit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

These days, every brand needs a content strategy. As 2PM Founder Web Smith predicted in 2019: “A great product needs an organic and impassioned audience. Captive audiences will need products and services tailored to their tastes. The lines of demarcation between media and commerce are fading.”

Dollar Shave Club operates an independent, editorial magazine. Airbnb does too. Hubspot acquired the Hustle for $27 million, and Mailchimp acquired Courier Media for an undisclosed amount.

Even if your brand isn’t building a media empire, a thoughtful content strategy — a newsletter, a blog, customer case studies, or a series of interviews — can reduce your customer acquisition cost, create a compelling narrative, and increase brand loyalty.

So where do you start?

That’s a question Noah Davis, the co-founder of Three Point Four Media, answers every day. Davis spent 10 years as a journalist and writer, publishing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, and more. Three Point Four Media has worked with dozens of brands on content strategy, from Google and Ford to Haus and Wealthsimple. Here, Davis shares his playbook for creating content that will actually work. His answers have been lightly edited and condensed.

What are the biggest mistakes you see brands make in their content strategies?

“At early stage startups, successful founders live really deeply in the product. They live within the company they are trying to build. That’s great, but it can also mean they’re too close to it. They can lose track of what’s appealing about the company to a general audience, to the people they want to reach. They can lose the broader story.

At large companies, the biggest issue is being too focused on a direct return, a direct ROI. When you’re thinking about content, it’s a much softer touch. Consumers are smart. Customers are smart. They’re going to realize if your newsletter is too focused on marketing a specific product, or your specific service, or your specific company. There’s so much garbage stuff out there, and people have gotten very good at ignoring things that are bad, and ignoring things that are too salesy. If you try to do that too directly, it just won’t work at all. You won’t get any return at all.

You want to get your product in the content somehow, but it’s much better to do something well and to do something that’s interesting and that people will want to read.”

How do you think about that? What’s a smart way to approach content?

“Think about your business like a planet in a universe. You can pull out and say, ‘Okay, what does this universe that we’re in look like? What are some things that someone who is interested in this universe would be interested in? Let’s write about those things rather than our specific planet.’

You have to think about who your customer is and what they’re interested in and write or produce content around that rather than think about what your product is and force it on your customer.

A good example is Tracksmith. Their editorial is something you would see in a running magazine — it just happens that everyone is wearing Tracksmith. It’s not about Tracksmith, it’s about the culture of running.

Another good example is Chompers from Gimlet and Amazon. It’s a short podcast that aims to help parents to get their kids to brush their teeth twice a day, which is a real problem customers may have. The content is useful. The integration with Alexa is light touch, ‘Alexa, play Chompers,’ but it also develops a behavior that benefits the sponsor. It’s a small step from, ‘Alexa, play Chompers,’ to ‘Alexa, I want to purchase toothpaste.’”

Which media formats are the most beneficial?

“There are so many. The simplest one is a newsletter, which is a great way to get in people’s inboxes. The inbox is still valuable space, even as it gets more crowded. There are podcasts. There are whitepapers, where you can use your company’s learnings as a soft-touch way to connect with new customers.

The really important thing is that none of this stuff is worth doing if you’re not going to do it well. For example, people think podcasts are easy since it’s just two people talking. But if you aren’t producing it and editing it, you’re just never going to get traction.

I think it’s also important to do the type of content that works for you and your business.

A lot of CEOs and founders think they should be doing thought leadership. And if you are a CEO with deep thoughts, who wants to engage with those thoughts, thought leadership can be a great avenue to increase your visibility and your company’s visibility. But a lot of leaders don’t have those deep thoughts and that’s fine. You shouldn’t do thought leadership just because other people in your CEO peer group are doing it.”

How should you align a content strategy with your existing marketing funnel?

“It depends what kind of company you are and what stage you’re at, but typically content is good for awareness. The best stuff is that top of funnel content, the stuff that can go viral and take on a life of its own and reach potential customers that would have otherwise never known about you. They see something they think is interesting, and they find your site through that.

The further down in the funnel you go, the more salesy it has to be, by necessity. That’s where you get into direct ROI, those one-to-one relationships. That’s effective web copy, effective ad copy, things like that.

More generally, I think that quality is always better than quantity. There’s so much stuff out there, and it’s so hard to break through. Volume is almost never going to be the thing that allows you to break through. Quality content is thoughtful and considered. I think you can always tell when someone has put time into it. That’s appealing.”

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Three Point Four Media Co-Founder Noah Davis: Your Content Strategy Should Not Be Marketing was originally published in Rho MarketFit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Jordan Nathan launched cookware brand Caraway in 2019 with a simple goal: Replace teflon pans. After his own experience overheating a non-stick pan in the kitchen and becoming sick from the fumes, Nathan set out to design a healthier line of kitchen products. In the year since, Caraway has raised $5.3 million in venture capital, expanded into kitchen linens, and launched partnerships with retailers like Crate & Barrel, West Elm, and Food52.

“All of our products are non-toxic and eco-friendly,” Nathan says. “We don’t use any single-use plastic in our packaging. In tandem with our non-toxic mission, our products are high design. We love color, and we treat our products more as art and home decor than items that you cook with.”

That design-centric focus is a key tenet of Nathan’s strategy to stand out in an increasingly crowded field of e-commerce competitors. Here, Nathan shares his playbook for product design, succeeding on Amazon, and building a distribution strategy. His answers have been lightly edited and condensed.

Caraway recently partnered with Crate & Barrel on an exclusive collection. What is Caraway’s strategy for distribution — both retail and direct-to-consumer?

“Direct-to-consumer is a great launch platform. But if you actually look at the reasons why brands like Harry’s, Casper and Glossier were successful, it’s that they created a distribution advantage. For them, that advantage was direct-to-consumer because no one had really done it before — it was new. But

for Caraway, our goal is to get Teflon off of shelves with our core cookware set. Really, the only way to do that is to physically go replace what’s on shelves today.

Our approach is highly omni-channel across our website and retailers. We’re not at a point where our own brick and mortar makes sense, but at some point I think it certainly could. Within our site, we’re running Facebook ads, we’re on Google search, and we’re doing all the typical digital tactics. But where digital alone falls short is reaching people when they’re buying at big life moments: Shopping for a new home or registering for a wedding.

These are key moments that a lot of the big retailers tap into because they have a range of products and registries. And a lot of our retail partners reach different demographics than what we see on our site. We use these opportunities to reach new demographics that otherwise we would not have tapped into.”

How do you think about differentiating the products you design for retail partners?

“We are a very design-driven brand. Color is a big piece of what we do. The retailers that are great to partner with have aesthetics that are complementary to what we have on our site, but also allow us to differentiate our assortment. For example, many customers go to Crate & Barrel for items with gold hardware, so that was a great partnership to launch a line with gold handles.

As we expand, we don’t want to be a brand that has 20 different shades of blue across 10 different retailers, which many of the large legacy brands do. Instead, we want to have select retailers to launch new assortments that create excitement for customers to go to Crate & Barrel to get something that is different than what is on our website.”

How does Caraway consider product design as a whole?

“The average product development process for most brands is doing a lot of surveys and talking directly to customers. At Caraway, we actually don’t do that as much. We spend a lot more time looking at data across market sizes, online reviews, and using a number of tools to back out into models to find feature sets that people are talking about online. That gives us a good direction of what matters to consumers.

Additionally, what features the consumer wants isn’t always the best choice. I think sometimes it’s good to head in a direction that has never been done before because customers have never seen it before, or solve issues they are having in their kitchen through the product.

For example, when designing our cookware set, we realized storage was a big issue. People didn’t like stacking because it would scratch the pans, or they would lose lids in their cabinets. That was a real pain point for customers, and the idea of them having to go out and buy a separate storage system didn’t make any sense to us.”

You used to manage brands at Mohawk, an e-comm holding company. What are you watching as Amazon Marketplace brands are consolidated?

“I think what Mohawk and Thrasio are doing is an incredible strategy. If you look at the largest CPG companies in the world — Unilever, PNG, Whirlpool, and so on — they’re all cut from the same cloth. They start with one or two brands, and then they start acquiring as they grow. Then they take those new brands and they put them into their platform of retailers. I think in the DTC world, you’ll start seeing more roll-ups and holding companies.

And, I don’t think being a DTC brand versus a marketplace brand is mutually exclusive. I think you can live on both. Amazon in particular is its own beast that is based on search engine optimization. I think we’ll start seeing more direct to consumer brands sell on Amazon, but to really succeed in the Amazon marketplace you have to game the algorithm, and a lot of that is dictated by pricing. So if you’re a brand that is okay with changing your pricing — having it be $12 yesterday and $15 today — it’s a great marketplace to start in. For a lot of the digitally native brands, we’ll start seeing them sell on Amazon once their price points and brands are established.”

What’s your best piece of advice for other CEOs?

“We’ve grown Caraway through partnerships and relationships. A lot of that has just been taking the time to sit down and meet people within different categories and industries. I would highly suggest using 10- 20 percent of your time to network outside of your category because it’s going to be invaluable to the growth of your business.”

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Caraway CEO Jordan Nathan: Create a distribution advantage was originally published in Rho MarketFit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At a warehouse in Houston, Texas, Topper Luciani walks among stacks of discarded clothing on metal racks. Jeans, flannel button ups, windbreakers, sweaters, old college T-shirts, hoodies, and sweatshirts line the walls.

This, he says, is the future of e-commerce.

Luciani is the founder and CEO of Goodfair, an online retailer selling used clothing to fervently eco-friendly young people. Customers order ‘bundles’ — T-shirts, flannels, and jeans sold in a set — like three windbreakers for $20. Shoppers pick the size and type of garment, but the color, style, and personality of the clothes are a surprise until they arrive in the mail.

Goodfair is not Luciani’s first company. He’s been building businesses that sell second-hand clothes for nearly a decade. “Some people who succeed as entrepreneurs are just really smart and hit it out of the park their first time,” Luciani says. “Some people are just really tough. I think I fall in the second category. I’m comfortable living in extreme poverty, I’m comfortable having pretty much no shame. All of these things are really valuable.”

“I just continue to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving forward,” he adds.

Today, that perseverance is paying off: Goodfair’s revenue tripled in 2020, the company raised $3.6 million in venture capital in June, led by Imaginary Ventures, and announced a partnership with Nordstrom in January. The collection sold out in minutes, and Nordstrom tripled its order for next month.

Perhaps more importantly, Goodfair has also saved over 1 million garments from going into a landfill, and prevented 1.1 billion gallons of water from being used to manufacture new clothes.

“Even as a small company, we can make a big impact helping the environment,” Luciani says.

Out of 100 billion garments produced annually, almost 60 percent end up in the trash a few years later. To keep up with the demands of fast fashion, brands themselves even destroy their own clothing: Burberry admitted to burning $37 million worth of merchandise per year in 2018. Replacing those clothes with new items drives more environmental cost: One kilogram of fabric requires creating 23 kilograms of greenhouse gasses.

And that’s what Luciani is out to combat — one sweatshirt at a time. The Goodfair motto is simple, he says: “No new things.”

For Goodfair, the timing is spot on. Demand for secondhand goods is expected to double from $24 billion in 2018 to $51 billion by 2023. Poshmark, one of the biggest online used-goods retailers, went public in January, ThredUp is expected to in later 2021.

But Luciani’s journey to success was a long and bumpy one.

Luciani started his first company in 2004, a fashion brand called Sir Drake. When the financial crisis struck in 2008, the brand went out of business.

“Reflecting upon that failure, my greatest weakness was manufacturing. So it really led me to not want to manufacture anything ever again,” Luciani says. “Back in 2008, it was less about the environmental aspect, and all of the reasons why sustainability is so critical today, but more a function of my own weakness.”

So in his next business, he sold used goods. Luciani started with rare neckties, scouring eBay for deals and reselling them for higher prices. He discovered an entire economy of second hand clothing.

“I started finding all of these textile recycling centers. These are giant warehouses that sort clothing into different categories, and then export them to Africa, South America, and Asia,” Luciani says.

An epiphany struck: “I’ve got to be the person to put these facilities online,” he remembers thinking. “That was 2009. The times since then have been my trials and tribulations of trying to do that, through deep failures, deep reflections, and adjustments.”

Since 2009, Luciani has launched three companies built to sell used clothing — Ronnies Ties, Nifty Thrifty and TagPop — and closed the doors on all three. But those failures provided him the tools to succeed with Goodfair today, Luciani says.

He can tick off a laundry list of lessons learned: “One aspect of it is business fundamentals, another aspect is timing, another aspect is team, another aspect is proximity to the supply chain, another aspect is the right investors and the right mindset of those investors,” Luciani says. “And all of those things were landmines that I have the shrapnel in my legs from.”

Each business was the teacher of a different lesson, he says. Selling ties taught him about the difference between a product and a platform: “Ronnies Ties was really good, it was a successful, profitable business, but I couldn’t scale it.”

Next came the operational complexities of sourcing and selling used garments at scale.

“I started Nifty Thrifty, which was an online vintage store, during the era of Nasty Gal. It was a really cool concept, and I learned a lot about e-commerce. And I had a great mentor and partner through that. But ultimately, I couldn’t get it to work,” he explains. “Then, for TagPop, I finally understood how to sell used clothing at scale, but that was where I learned some really valuable lessons in partnerships, picking the right investors, branding, and operations. With TagPop I did all of those things wrong.”

But the biggest lesson Luciani learned was to invest in his personal growth, and think deeply about his internal mindset.

“Throughout this entrepreneurial journey, in order to develop tools for that, I’ve also had to develop self-help tools,” he explains. “I’ve basically been on this spiritual quest, which has helped me develop the internal tools to deal with the failures, to deal with the rejections, to deal with the days where there is no money in the bank account and no gas in the gas tank, and you just figure out a way to keep going.”

Although he’s read “Principles” by Ray Dalio and “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle multiple times, Luciani says the best teacher is failure itself.

“There are so many lessons that we hear verbally, but until you are out in the field stepping on landmines, it is very hard to pick those lessons up,” Luciani continues. “With Goodfair, I took all of the lessons learned, and reflected deeply.”

His belief that thrift shopping would someday become digital — like every other segment of the retail industry — kept him going, he says: “I believed in the mission so much. I was just really, really early.”

By 2016, climate activism began to rise, fueling new interest in sustainability-driven startups. Up until that point, the focus of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists had centered on buzzy DTC brands.

“Before the sustainability tipping point, used clothing had less than zero social status,” he says. “There were all of these consumer brands that were vying for the same customer — a coastal elite earning over $100,000 — and the rest of America was being underserved.”

In the era of Greta Thunberg, Luciani says the timing for second hand e-commerce is finally right. And the lessons he’s learned over the past 10 years have prepared him to take advantage of the opportunity.

“Aside from the cultural tailwinds of sustainability, we have not even scratched the surface of how big online thrift can be,” he says. “And that’s just in the apparel sector. My vision is not unlike a used Amazon. In the way that Bezos started with books, that’s the way I started with apparel. There are a monumental number of products in the waste stream that can be sold with this method.”

For Luciani, there are treasures to be found among the trash, if you know where to look.

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Goodfair CEO Topper Luciani: The next Amazon will sell used goods was originally published in Rho MarketFit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 2013, Colin Darretta left private equity to start his own company, WellPath, a direct-to-consumer brand of vitamins and supplements. Today, WellPath earns eight figures in revenue annually — and it’s profitable.

Scaling WellPath taught Darretta how to build a successful consumer business from the ground up: Developing products, managing supply chains, and growing marketing funnels. Soon, he and his co-founders began asking, if it could be done once, could it be done twice?

“We came to the conclusion that there were real opportunities to apply the learnings that we’d had at WellPath on a repeatable basis across other brands,” Darretta says.

Darretta is now the CEO of Innovation Department, a holding company that develops wellness-focused CPG brands. Think of it like a modern Proctor & Gamble. In addition to WellPath, Innovation Department’s portfolio also includes Finn, a brand of nutritional supplements for dogs used by the likes of Paris Hilton, and Grummies, an innovative gummies line that launches next month.

Darretta is also an early-stage investor in businesses like Classpass, Saturn, and Daily Harvest. Here, Darretta shares his playbook for operating consumer businesses, leveraging audiences, and developing marketing strategies.

You’ve written that a different approach toward venture capital is necessary for consumer businesses. Can you explain why?

“Unlike with software or even fintech, consumer products are not winner-take-all markets. For social networks like Facebook, you understand why there will only typically end up being one winner to emerge, because the more nodes in the network, the better the overall network ends up being, and the harder it is for anyone else to compete.

Consumer products don’t work like that. If you take a WellPath supplement, that supplement is not inherently a better product by virtue of the fact that five of your friends take it. In fact, whether five of your friends take it or not is inconsequential to the quality of that product. What that means is that there can be a lot of winners on a relatively smaller scale within the same category.

What that also means though, is the economics of those businesses should be very different. Those businesses should pursue profitability at a much, much sooner stage than software company, where it might be viable for a software business to be losing money hand over fist for years and years, predicated under the assumption that eventually they’ll scale out of their fixed costs and get so large that they become enormously profitable enterprises.

For CPG, if a business is getting to $50 million or a $100 million of top line revenue, and you still don’t really have a path to profitable unit economics, you’re just doing something wrong as a business.

In turn, I think there’s a lot of earlier exit opportunities for consumer businesses than there are for software companies, because you might get a consumer business to $30, $40, $50 million of revenue and have it be a really profitable enterprise. And there will be plenty of both strategic as well as financial buyers out there in the market for them.”

How do you implement that thinking across the portfolio at Innovation Department?

“At Innovation Department, we’re creating an environment where we can hit profitability a lot sooner and validate our thesis that unit economics should work mathematically at a really early juncture in the business.

And that’s because we’re sharing resources across most departments of the business and we’re not reinventing the wheel. When it comes to building our websites, the same team that built WellPath’s website built Finn’s website, and is building Grummies’ website. The costs end up being substantially less, because we can do things that go so far as borderline copying and pasting some of the code — just reusing code bases.

That proves true for when we build our supply chain operations and work with 3PLs, it proves true for our design infrastructure, so it’s repeated across so many different levels of the organization.”

What other strategies do you leverage across the portfolio?

“One of our prevailing theses is that audiences are underused assets. In the same way that when Uber was first gaining traction, people quickly realized that cars are a terribly underutilized asset — most people use their car for two hours a day and then the other 22 hours of the day it sits around gathering dust — audiences are the same way.

If you have a big email list and you have 10 products you sell, after you’ve advertised those same 10 products to everyone on your email list several times, there’s less value from you continuing to message them, persistently trying to go after them.

However, if you have multiple brands and they all have their own audience, you can start cross-pollinating those audiences. So WellPath can promote Finn’s products, Finn can promote WellPath’s, and more and more nodes that we build can cross-pollinate within our own network. Then we’re much better able to utilize our audiences effectively.”

How do you think about marketing strategy, whether working with influencers or building an organic social following?

“People fundamentally have a trust in the influencers they closely follow, particularly when it comes to their area of expertise, so when they use your product it makes a difference. And ultimately with wellness brands, you’re trying to build pillars of trust and credibility with your potential consumers. There are different touch points that people will look to when they’re deciding whether they want to trust a brand.

Some people will look to, ‘Hey, have you been mentioned in press that I respect?’ So they’ll look for a New York Times mention, or a Vogue mention. Some people will say, ‘Have you written content that really educates and informs me and substantiates that you know what you’re talking about?’ Still others will look for, ‘Well, do you have the right sort of vets on board?’ or ‘Do you have a big social presence?’ And finally, others will look to, “Is there someone who is really credible in the space attaching their brand to this brand?”

Even though we’re not very aware of it, we all weigh those different aspects to varying degrees. There isn’t one magic button that unlocks it. So we really believe, especially in wellness, it’s super critical that you are figuring out ways to be leaning heavily into all those different factors.”

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Innovation Department CEO Colin Darretta: Consumer businesses are not winner-take-all was originally published in Rho MarketFit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the fall of 2020, Joanna Shan should have been starting her sophomore year as a student at the University of Pennsylvania. Instead, she and four friends took a gap year, moved in together in Portland, and started working on an idea they thought up over the summer: What would a less awkward dating app look like?

They came up with Monet, a dating app where you send a drawing, sketch, or doodle as the first move. No more DMs that just say: “Hey.”

Shan, along with Daniel Huang, Jonathan Xue, and Marc Liu started brainstorming in June, moved in together in September, launched a beta in October, and deployed a full-fledged app in December. Shan shared videos of the team’s milestones on TikTok, racking up hundreds of thousands of views — and thousands of beta testers.

Today, Monet has 20,000 users, a 2,000 member Discord community, and $500,000 in seed funding from investors like Pear VC, an early investor in DoorDash, and Sahil Lavingia, the founder of Gumroad.

Of Monet’s users, 94 percent are between the ages of 18 and 24, a demographic increasingly uncomfortable with the imposed expectations of apps like Bumble, Hinge, or Tinder.

“I think a lot of young people use these platforms just to have fun and to meet new people,” Shan says. “This model of meeting people one-on-one is really valuable, but there are ways it could be less superficial and more meaningful, while still being laid back.”

Here, Shan shares her playbook for building a friendlier dating app, marketing to Gen Z, and inspiring community. Her answers have been lightly edited and condensed.

What have been some of your early learnings since launching the app?

We’ve learned a lot from the users in our Discord community. Our Discord channel is up to 2,000 people. We started it as a place for people to share drawings, initially thinking people would share drawings they received from matches. One thesis behind Monet was that it’s a cool thing to receive a drawing — something made personally for you.

But surprisingly, it’s been mainly people sharing drawings they’ve made themselves. That shows there is actually a lot of joy in your own creativity.

We’re all naturally inclined to create content. A lot of platforms with this aspect of content creation — like Instagram and Snapchat which are really immersive and engaging — allow you to connect with your existing friends, but we haven’t gotten there yet with platforms that introduce you to new people.

What do most brands get wrong about marketing to Gen Z?

I think a lot of people fetishize Gen Z, and I think it’s kind of gross. I’ve seen articles like, “Hacking Gen Z’s Mind,” or “What These Emojis Actually Mean To Gen Z.” I think that’s the wrong way to approach it. You can’t think of Gen Z as a market, or a customer to unlock.

The way to build for Gen Z is not to think about what they buy or consume, but to think about the circumstances that shaped their generation and their behavior. So what we’ve been building for is this idea that Gen Z is really comfortable with digital relationships. They’ve been making digital relationships for their entire lives, they’ve grown up online. Their online friends are just as meaningful as the relationships that they make in person. I have a lot of friends who have made genuine, lifelong friends through gaming, through Neopets, through these online communities that are very common among the younger generation.

I think Gen Z is really about community. Even on TikTok you see this mutual sense of community form: “Hey I made this thing, check it out,” or “Let’s blow this song up, help me get to 100,000 views.” It’s a mutual desire to help each other.

How are you building brand and community at Monet?

With our Discord, people have started to play games on our server. They’re there every night of the week. A genuine community has come out of it. They’ve become actual friends and they’ve connected through this platform. Monet inherently forms relationships. We saw this tweet where a girl who lived in St. Louis and a guy who lived in LA met on Monet and flew to meet each other in person. There’s a lot of joy in relationships and seeing them come to form.

In terms of brand, dating apps can be a pretty weird thing. You don’t want to be caught on Tinder, right? It’s a bit like, “I’m not super proud to be on this app right now.”

But because Monet has been this wholesome place to be, and fun activity to do to meet friends, we’ve seen that a lot of the members of our community feel really proud to rep it and share about it.

I have to ask. Tips for brand marketing on TikTok?

I think a lot of different approaches can work well. For us, we were at the beginning of our journey, so it was one of those, “Let’s just share our story, check it out, help us out,” kind of things.

But honestly, my advice is just to be genuine. Don’t take it too seriously. Things blow up all the time. Things don’t blow up all the time. It’s not a big deal. Just keep trying to until you get something right. And then don’t be too grimy about it, the viewers are not just customers, you’re not just vying for their attention. Create fun content that helps people, or that just gets the word out about your brand.

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Monet Co-Founder Joanna Shan: Gen Z is about community was originally published in Rho MarketFit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When CUUP Co-Founder and CMO Abby Morgan thinks about the future of fashion in 2021, she predicts two trends: First, a paring down of the wardrobe, with consumers choosing to invest in just a few simple, well-constructed basics rather than frills or flair. And second, comfort.

“I think fashion is becoming more minimal,” Morgan, a former marketing executive at Free People says. “People are investing more in their core wardrobe. The smart retailers are seeing that trend instead of offering these more dressy, impulse purchases.”

CUUP’s bras are designed in that trend. Offered in only five minimal styles, CUUP’s bras are available in a range of 40 sizes — from 30A to 38H — emphasizing fit, support, and the individuality of every woman’s body. With a vertically integrated supply chain, CUUP is uniquely able to invest in variations between cup size and band width.

“Bras are the most complicated garments to make,” Morgan says. “30 pieces of material and 15 machines go into the average bra. And if it’s not molded with machines it has to be hand-sewn by trained seamstresses. The sizing is more complex than the sizing for shoes.”

But for Morgan, the selection of just a few hero styles with a wide size range isn’t just a smart strategy to manage inventory costs, but a mission to support women’s inclusivity: “How can we find these empathetic points of connection?” she asks. “How can we celebrate differences?”

CUUP raised an $11 million Series A in February, backed by Forerunner Ventures and Lerer Hippeau, bringing its total funding to $15 million. Since launching in November 2018, CUUP has sold over 200,000 bras, with sales doubling every quarter.

Here, Morgan shares her playbook for managing supply chains, developing brand voice, and rethinking retail in 2021.

What is your biggest learning from working with manufacturers on a complex item like CUUP’s bras?

“My biggest piece of advice on the manufacturing side is to create a partnership. Whether that’s an investment in your business or a stake in your business — do something where the partnership breaks out of the typical ordering parameters you’re given. You need more R&D for samples. You need to be able to fit on more sizes. You need to be able to manipulate what minimums look like. That’s the biggest barrier to entry for manufacturing: Order minimums and the actual R&D to make your product stand out and be superior.

At CUUP, we went to our manufacturer and we created a relationship. They essentially became a partner in our business. With that, we were able to do over 80 fittings for our bra styles. Most companies do about 11 to launch a product.”

How do you think about approaching retail versus direct-to-consumer in 2021?

“Clearly what we’ve learned from 2020 is the future for retail is digital. Everybody has to do that. But, I am intrigued by what the physical retail landscape could look like when we are able to reconnect next year.

What does that feel like? The sense of community, the time and space that we’ll have for others, whether they’re people we’ll have relationships with or even strangers? What does that look like? I think there will be a thirst for that kind of connection. High-street retail as a concept could actually be more interesting than ever. Typically, one of the biggest issues with retail is that it’s difficult to get in: Costs are high, leases are non-negotiable, they’re long term leases. I think that’s changing. Leases might be shorter term, or more negotiable, and brands can look at pop up strategies.

Also, because people have invested in the e-commerce infrastructure, the drop shipment model where the consumer comes into the store not to walk out with a product but for an experience, could be the model too. At CUUP, that might look like a consumer coming in for a fitting rather than to buy a bra. That looks different for square footage, relationships with the experience, the environment, all of it.”

How do you think about building community at Cuup?

When focusing on community — and Bodytalk is our platform for community — I really make sure the platform is free of the constraints of mainstream publishing, but also free of the constraints of being about the bottom line.

In order to actually build community, you’ve got to be really honest and real. And you’ve got to have a serious point of differentiation with the voice you’re putting out there. It’s almost like creating a person’s personality. For CUUP, I think about it like that. CUUP is a living breathing thing, it’s a personality, it’s a human, and how can we be constantly evolving and moving at the pace of culture but also be having this holistic conversation? I think if you do that, you actually start to inspire versus manipulate the consumer.

It feels real because it is real. You’re not sitting there thinking, ‘How can I come up with a content strategy that attaches to a brand to sell something?’ It’s like no, this is actually not trying to sell something, this is to serve an audience and increase loyalty.”

Do apparel brands need to have a strong voice to stand out in 2021?

“Absolutely. In traditional retail or high-street brands, you were limited by attention. Attention was your scarcity. You had to compete to have the attention of people walking by, or in a wholesale environment, you had to have the attention of where you would be placed, so people could see you in the store.

Now, online, you have to attract that attention. You are constantly competing. So in order to be top of mind, other than by manipulating people by sending them tons of ads — which you can’t build a company of scale with just that, especially if you’re trying to get repeat purchasers — you really need to stand for more.

As we’ve gone through a really reflective year, people are questioning more about their lives, their relationships, and also the brands that they build their identity around. Especially in fashion and apparel. They want those brands to stand for something bigger than the product they make and the bottom line. I’ve always been a massive advocate that you have to reflect the values of the people you’re trying to reach, not just project your product. You’ve got to be more than your product. A brand has a responsibility to be a catalyst for change.”

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CUUP Co-Founder Abby Morgan: Be more than your product was originally published in Rho MarketFit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It has been a remarkably difficult year for running a business. Almost 100,000 businesses have permanently closed. But, it has also been a year of ingenuity and resilience.

Over the last 12 months, we’ve asked dozens of founders, operators, and CEOs how they’ve handled big challenges — from halted supply chains to complete brand relaunches. Here are 20 of our favorite pieces of advice from 2020.

1. From Bob’s Red Mill Chairman Bob Moore: Compassion for should always come first. “People are everything. I think you have to put people above money, even though money’s very important and you have to have money to keep your people.”
2. From Lumi CEO Jesse Genet: Never rest on your laurels. “You really need to keep taking new risks.”
3. From Slice CEO Ilir Sela: Hiring the right people should be your №1 priority. “What matters is your team and the people that are in that fight with you. Recruiting and nurturing relationships with your team; there’s nothing more important.”
4. From Burrow CEO Stephen Kuhl: Don’t assume your team can read your mind. “Clearly articulate your strategy to the whole company, and repeat it over, and over again.”
5. From Poolside.FM Founder Marty Bell: Keep things fun at work. “If there’s something stressful going on, try and not bring that to the whole team. Just keep them involved in the fun stuff.”
6. From Fly By Jing Founder Jing Gao: Do not cut corners in product development. Even when it’s hard. “The greatest marketing tool is the product itself. People need to have a reason to talk about it independent of paid ads.”
7. From Peachy CEO Carolyn Treasure: Think about the short term in tandem with the long term. “Zoom in when needed on the micro-details of the five or six things that have to be done to get one small project across the finish line, but then almost in tandem, zoom out and see the big to-dos that need to be done.”
8. From BLCK VC Co-founder Sydney Sykes: Supporting diversity can not be just a line in a deck. “You have to walk it and breathe it and live it every day.”
9. From Sunday CEO Coulter Lewis: Customer service should be core to your product. “The next dimension of e-commerce is expertise, support, and experience.”
10. From Ipsa Provisions Co-founder Joshua Brau: Use this time to get clear about priorities. “Recognize the opportunity to narrow your focus toward doing fewer things, but doing them really, really well.”
11. From Scrub Daddy CEO Aaron Krause: Lead by example. “Every day I put my mask on, I put my gloves on, I go out, and I say hi to everyone. I keep six feet away, but I wave, and they know I’m here. I’m here just like they are.”
12. From Minnidip CEO Emily Vaca: Don’t approach design with a formula. “As trends emerge, brands take that data and try to mimic something that is already working. In order to avoid that, it’s important to find inspiration outside of what you are doing.”
13. From Healthy Roots Dolls CEO Yelitsa Jean Charles: Take action. Get started. Right now. “If you spend forever working on something and never produce it, someone else is going to do it for you.”
14. From Hipmunk Co-Founder Adam Goldstein: Be willing to be flexible. “Holding on too tightly to an idea that isn’t yet proven is really dangerous.”
15. From Táche Founder Roxanna Saidi: Pre-launch pitching is a marathon, not a sprint. “There’s no magic bullet or way to get around it. You have to keep doing what you’re doing, and you have to find investors that align with your mission and vision.”
16. From Sharma Brands CEO Nik Sharma: Remember, angel investors are worth more than their first check. “They might put in $5,000, but they might be able to introduce you to people with $100 million in their bank account who could write you a check for $100,000 pretty easily.”
17. From Scrub Daddy CEO Aaron Krause: When you’re ready to act, act quickly. “Once I get the information that I need, I just make the decision and I do it very quickly. That builds a real sense of trust.”
18. From InDinero CEO Jessica Mah: Invest time in your tax planning strategy. “Taxes are such a great opportunity lever, it can be a strategic advantage for you and your business.”
19. From Feed.FM Co-Founder Lauren Pufpaf: Give your sales teams some room to maneuver. “It’s really important to be flexible around pricing and pricing models. Sometimes you just need something to get unstuck.”
20. From Bob’s Red Mill Chairman Bob Moore: Remember to give back. “Be a part of your community. There are always needs. Give of yourself.”

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20 Pieces of Advice From Running a Business in 2020 was originally published in Rho MarketFit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the earliest days of the pandemic, Jing Gao worried for her business. It had been an uphill battle since the day Gao launched a Kickstarter for her spicy Sichuan Chili Crisp sauce in 2018: Sourcing precious ingredients from the countryside of China — cold-pressed rapa oil, fermented black beans, fried chilies, and rare tribute peppers — was difficult. Convincing her Chengdu manufacturer to use those ingredients rather than that of typical suppliers was even harder. Ingredient approvals were time consuming and costly. Her jars’ labels, printed in Hong Kong, had to be applied by hand. Still, she kept at it.

By 2019, Gao, a former Shanghai-based chef, had launched her direct-to-consumer brand Fly By Jing to rave reviews, growing 60 percent month over month. Customers loved the unique tastes and spices of Sichuan Chili Crisp, even spooning it over ice cream.

Then, the pandemic hit. Global supply chains seized up. Consumer spending dropped.

“Increased tensions rose from xenophobia, trade relations soured, and overtly racist comments started popping up on our social media pages,” Gao wrote of the experience. “Production ground to a halt in China. I braced myself for dark times ahead.”

But as quarantine wore on, Americans’ relationship to food began to change. We had to cook at home. We had to eat what we cooked. Night, after night, after night. In April, New York Times Food Editor Sam Sifton declared: “Your Quarantine Cooking Needs Condiments.” His recommendation? Pick up a jar of Fly By Jing.

“That week, we did more sales than all of last year combined,” Gao says. “The support was overwhelming. As soon as people received their products, you could see them come back on the site and order more. This year we’ll be doing 10x our sales from last year.”

For Gao, the business isn’t just another Shopify store. It’s deeply personal. It’s the story of her reconnection to Chinese cuisine, and the force behind her mission to elevate Chinese food in the minds of everyday consumers — beyond cheap take out.

Here, Gao shares her playbook for building an authentic brand, creating new products, and tackling distribution. Her answers have been lightly condensed and edited.

Sam Sifton said your sauce is “nearly twice as expensive and perhaps three times as good” as the next-best competitor. What is your product development strategy?

“I only want to create something if I know there is a reason for it to exist. To me, the product needs to speak for itself. The greatest marketing tool is the product itself. The product needs to have built in virality. People need to have a reason to talk about it independent of paid ads.

With food, whether you’re a chef in a restaurant or an entrepreneur making food products, the quality of ingredients, what goes into it, and its taste are intertwined. You can’t have one without the other. So it’s a no brainer to me to really, really get that right.

The general wisdom in CPG and the food world is, ‘Get out something that is good enough.’ The reason why I had so many issues with manufacturing the first time around, as I documented in my essay, was because the existing systems ensure that mainstream, mass market food products all taste watered down. When you’re producing at scale, quality of ingredients will suffer for the bottom line. And particularly in Chinese food, but across all packaged food, the expectation is that it has to be cheap. So if it has to be cheap, then where are you going to cut corners? That’s why our pricing is the way that it is ($15 for a 6 oz jar), because I believe that people are willing to pay for quality and quality doesn’t come easy.”

How does your business approach distribution?

“When we launched a few years ago, DTC was the way to launch products. Even though there weren’t that many food products that were DTC, I believed that our products were well suited for that. And, without outside venture capital, DTC was the easiest way to launch. Shopify makes it so easy for you. It was the only thing we could have done, but it was also the best thing we could have done.

We’re now in about 200 stores in the U.S. that are boutique, gourmet, high-end retailers and they are great for us because they are cornerstone places in their communities. They attract that trend-setting crowd, which is good in terms of marketing. We want to be as available to a customer as possible. We’re working with partners to enable two hour shipping in key cities, and we just launched on Amazon. And, people do still shop in grocery stores. We’re in discussion with natural and organic retailers, so that will be the next step before we go into mass market channels. Eventually it would be great to have giant Fly By Jing packs at Costco. It would be great to have Fly By Jing packets at the checkout of a gas station, or on an airplane.

We have a really engaged audience, and that is a result of speaking directly to them through our direct channels. But as we grow, wider distribution is the key. I’m not doing this to have a premium food item out in the world, I’m doing this because I want to change the conversation around Chinese food, and normalize Chinese food being high quality.”

Your brand is, as you say, deeply personal. How do you think about connecting with your customers authentically?

“This wasn’t something I initially planned. As I evolved as a person and as the company evolved as a brand, it became apparent that this was the way to go. At the time I launched, I was considering whether or not I should put myself in front of the brand, and I chose not to. A of people said I should, but so many great food brands aren’t known for the founder — you don’t even know who the founder is. Why should I be the brand? But people kept telling me that in this case, I was doing a disservice to the company by not putting my voice in front of it. I was still a little uncomfortable with it, but this year was a personal journey of stepping into my power and my truth. That gave me the confidence to do that on behalf of the brand.

chapter 1: allow me to re-introduce myself pic.twitter.com/j7HNOprlQ1

There’s a criticism of DTC that everything looks the same. And there’s a playbook; investors invest in certain playbooks. You just do the thing, run the ads, and get acquired, that’s the move. So for our customers, I think it is refreshing to see something that is the opposite of that.

Publishing those videos and the essay felt super vulnerable, it was an excavation of my soul. It was scary. But I realized that if what Fly By Jing is trying to do is celebrate the voices and the diversity of the diaspora then I should also set an example of that. There is something universally relatable in a very specific story. And I’m sharing a very specific story — mine.”

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Fly By Jing Founder Jing Gao: Quality Doesn’t Come Easy was originally published in Rho MarketFit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This week, Roxana Saidi launched Táche, a brand of pistachio milk she first began working on in the kitchen of a studio apartment in 2015. With pistachios sourced from fourth-generation farmers in the middle east, Táche sets itself apart as a more environmentally friendly option than almond milk and a healthier option than oat milk. Earlier this year, Táche raised a $1.1 million pre-seed round with backing from investors like Gary Hirshberg, the co-founder and former CEO of Stonyfield Farm.

But launching a new brand in 2020 is no easy feat.

Here, Saidi shares her playbook for fundraising, navigating a complex supply chain, and launching a CPG brand in the middle of a pandemic. Her answers have been lightly edited and condensed.

How did covid-19 impact your launch plans?

“I have been percolating, learning, and working on this idea for five years. So the vast majority of the strategy was done pre-pandemic. The reason that it took five years to go to market is because this type of product is one where you need to really scale the business before you can launch. To make a shelf stable plant based milk, there are really only a handful of manufacturers available in the U.S. These manufacturers have the luxury of commanding enormous minimum orders on your very first production run, ranging in the hundreds of thousands of units. So I had to first scale the business, raise capital, and have plenty of working capital on hand before I could even sell my very first unit.

But now that so much has changed, relying on a lot of the traditional methods of driving discoverability, and trial, and sampling — a lot is out the window completely.

So we had to pivot how we were going to drive sampling. So far, discoverability has mostly been through our B2B side. Táche is available in more than 40 locations in the New York City area, specialty coffee shops, matcha bars, cafes, and a couple of grocers. We donated a lot of product to these small and medium business owners and said, ‘Hey, use Táche as a way to offer a pistachio milk latte, and use it to your benefit.” We developed a lot of recipes that we’ve also shared. And we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from these small businesses, so we’re really driving trial and discoverability through donating product to these small businesses.”

What influenced that strategy?

“In 2015, when I was making pistachio milk in my kitchen and digging into what it would take to scale a business — there came Oatly. The way they launched in the U.S. was through coffee shops in New York City. I remember distinctly walking around my neighborhood seeing signs in coffee shop windows that said, ‘Do not try to buy Oatly off of us, we’re out of it.’ That really had an impact on me. I wanted to follow in their footsteps. But I also really believed in direct to consumer. When the pandemic hit, we leaned more into the direct to consumer side than we would have. There, we’re focused on PR and social media , email, and SMS marketing.”

How did you find those first 40 buyers?

“I went to every event I could attend over the last five years. I went to the New York City Coffee Fest three times, I went to BevNet, I was constantly putting myself in places where I could learn from people who were already in the industry. I made a lot of early relationships with folks at Bluestone Lane, or Devocion, all of these people who were steeped in coffee, and people who really made it their life. Because that’s what I wanted to do. I was constantly putting myself in positions where I could learn from other people and make introductions.”

What has been the most challenging aspect of developing a supply chain?

“We source pistachios from quality producers across the EMEA. After a great deal of research, we determined that the nuts from overseas had a superior taste and flavor profile.

You would think the pistachios would be the most sensitive to disruption. For us, pistachios were the easiest. What’s been the hardest has been corrugated packaging supplies, and everything at the end of the supply chain. That’s where we’ve seen all of the issues related to the pandemic.”

How did you approach fundraising?

“Bootstrapping went out the window as soon as I was told ‘you must do a minimum order of 75,000 units’ by every manufacturer in North America. Bootstrapping was no longer possible. So initially I started fundraising with friends and family, along with angels. We were able to raise $1.1 million in about seven months.

Pre-launch pitching is a doozy. It’s that chicken and the egg thing, where they say, ‘We love what you’re doing, but we want to see traction.’ There’s no magic bullet or way to get around it. You have to keep doing what you’re doing, and you have to find investors that align with your mission and vision. For us, it was investors that said, ‘I believe in you, your vision that pistachios are a highly underutilized nut in the U.S., and that there’s a huge market in non-dairy milk, and we want to see you in that market.’ You really just have to stay at it. Eventually you’ll find people who believe in that prototype, the strategy and the vision.”

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Táche Founder Roxana Saidi: There’s no magic bullet was originally published in Rho MarketFit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.