Exploring the Journey of a Startup Founder

Our conversation with re-mint’s founder Jeevika explores her journey with the startup world and how she founded her own.

Jeevika Makani is the founder of re-mint, a fashion startup focussing on the resale of pre-loved items. After studying economics and history at the University of Melbourne, Jeevika embarked on an adventure to look for her dream career eventually landed in the world of startups.

Out of all the second-hand marketplaces like Facebook Marketplace and Poshmark Carousel, which one do you utilise the most when it comes to online shopping?

It depends on where I am. So, here in Australia, I love the buy-and-sell groups on Facebook. I find really good quality supply in the brand-specific buy-and-sell groups. And when I was in the U.S. earlier this year, I became a convert to Rent the Runway. I certainly don’t have the budget as a founder to wear designer clothes, so it’s fun to pay a monthly fee and pretend I have a more lux wardrobe than I really do.

What are you working on at the moment?

Re-mint originally started as an eCommerce storefront for some of the buy-and-sell groups I’ve mentioned. A few months ago, we pivoted to start working with brands directly. We’ve been doing a few pilot partnerships with brands and ensuring that the pipes work, and it’s just been really exciting that customers are using the platform and payments are going through, and people are shipping their clothes and things like that. Our current focus is onboarding more brands.

To backtrack, you studied economics and history at the University of Melbourne. What was that time like for you?

I loved it. I’m a big proponent of arts degrees; you learn how to think. I picked up more vocational skills on the job and later did an MBA when I had a better idea of where my career was going.

But Melbourne Uni was a time to take esoteric subjects like Modernist Avant-Garde Art and Global Justice and Human Rights, read literature and go to protests. I took the time to examine my worldview and who I wanted to be as a person. It was a fun time in my life, and I think it just set me up to be a more all-rounded person. I never had a plan. I was never like, oh, this is definitely going to be my career. I wasn’t very structured about it; I was following what I was passionate about and what I was actually curious about. And that’s an attitude that still holds me in good stead now as a founder.

Now, could you walk us through your career journey after university so far?

As I’ve said, I was never structured around the this is going to be my plan mentality. From a young age, it has always been very important for me to have a career that has an impact. I say that with air quotations because that’s a vague concept. I’ve had to do a lot of work over the years to figure out where I can best contribute and what impact really means. It’s been trial and error. So in the early days, I thought I would be working in non-profits and doing development work overseas. But studying development studies at uni left me a bit disillusioned. There was a lot of focus on the fact that many problems existed, but I didn’t feel like I understood why they were happening or what could be done to fix them. So, I thought I’d become a development economist because I thought that would help me understand why there was poverty and perhaps the skills to alleviate poverty.

I was very inspired by the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. However, I got the advice that I should learn to be a good economist first and then get into development economics, so I put my head down and worked as an economic analyst at the ACCC for a few years.

For non-career reasons, I decided to live in Africa for a while. I thought maybe this would be the time to transition into development economics. But unfortunately, no one would hire me as a development economist. But I landed on my feet somehow and got hired at a fintech instead, even though I didn’t know much about finance or technology! I guess they respected that I could think and analyse rigorously given my economics training….and that’s how I fell into the world of startups, and I haven’t looked back since. Once I started working in startups, I realised this is my people, my world. I love experimenting, identifying problems and fixing them or, at least, dying from trying.

How did your time in corporate compare to your time at a startup?

The only large organisation I’ve worked for is the ACCC, and I went through a structured graduate program, whereas in the startups I worked for, I was dropped into all kinds of challenges and situations without much guidance. There is no right or wrong, it just suits different personalities. How you learn is fundamentally different in a corporate environment versus a startup. Larger organisations probably suit people who want to be trained, have a mentor, ask questions and get feedback. But in startups, not even the founder knows all the answers. You’re inherently in very uncertain territory, and you’re all working together to do something innovative and new. So, I think it suits people who learn on the go.

Out of all the startups you’ve worked for, do you have a preference for which one you’ve enjoyed?

Probably Lendable over in Nairobi. I was the first employee there, and it was a really exciting and chaotic time, and I learnt so, so much. They hadn’t even done their first deal when I joined them. They had just raised a bunch of capital and were focused on deploying it. I was doing due diligence for them, and B.D. At some point, we realised that we had lent out millions of dollars, and it was time to create more structure around portfolio management. Until then, we had been doing these weekly check-in calls on live deals and getting involved on an ad-hoc basis. Now my boss felt we needed a more formal risk management function and asked me if I wanted to lead it. I didn’t know what risk management actually was, and I literally had to Google it. Eventually, I read up on the theory and spoke to various risk practitioners to create our risk management function from scratch.

How did the idea of Re-mint come about, and why the circular economy?

It was an extension of my previous work at Fat Llama, which is a peer-to-peer rental marketplace. I really saw the potential and how much further we had to go in moving to a circular economy. I just thought it was super exciting to see how people were making different decisions if they could access good-quality items for cheaper. We had a lot of people, like students trying to get into filmmaking, who could finally access a cool lens for their project.

I really love this idea of democratising access to these goods. Otherwise, those products are only available if you are rich enough to afford them. What I really love about the circular economy is the hack to have access to good quality things without having to produce more and more stuff and endlessly spending money. I believe in the circular economy, and there is still room for rentals in the overall circular economy toolkit. However, I personally felt that there were a couple of challenges in the rental business. One is the logistics. You’re trying to get an item from customers A to B and back again quickly because customer C is waiting.

The second thing is more practical with the overall business model. Your take rate in a rental business is a percentage of the rental price, which is a fraction of the item value. Versus buying and selling something in quick succession, you’d actually be more profitable. It was quite analytical, and I asked myself: what are the trends in the circular economy? There was a lot of demand for resale, especially fashion resale, which was exploding when I could start my own company. Then, I questioned what are the gaps in fashion resale and stumbled across the buy-sell groups on Facebook.

I recognised how there’s something in this idea as the customers are choosing to self-organise around brands. They were also doing it in a way that was quite painful because Facebook community groups are not optimised for commerce. So you had sold listings coming to the top because someone commented, while the unsold listings were at the bottom because no one commented on them. I thought to myself, that can’t be right. Buying second-hand items could feel risky; you don’t know what you’re going to get, and you can’t return or exchange them. So, I think consumers like me end up defaulting to brands they are familiar with because they know the sizes and fits and can imagine how the item could look on them. With Re-mint, I’m trying to give a more boutique experience in resale because I believe although people are more open to buying second-hand, the shopping experience is still inferior to purchasing new, and I think that’s what we really need to change to unlock the circular economy.

You mentioned in your latest blog that you have this tension between growth and sustainability that continues to harm our meaningful buying from brands that are moving from a linear to a circular economy. Would you be able to speak to that friction and how we can mitigate those risks?

I see a lot of brands these days that are interested in the circular economy. It’s definitely a buzzword. However, there are a lot of greenwashing initiatives to trick us into buying new things. And I think it’s such a shame. I deeply believe in the sustainability angle of what we are doing, but I’m also practical enough to realise that unless we can help brands make more money from the circular economy in a meaningful way, we can’t expect brands to change their behaviours. There’s no incentive for them to do so.

Second-hand fashion is expected to be an 86-billion-dollar market by 2026. There is value here. It’s just accruing to third parties like marketplaces and individual sellers. At Re-mint, we think about how we can help businesses and brands change their business models so they actually accrue some of that value, and it becomes their incentive to adopt the more sustainable business model. That’s why at Re-mint, we help with technology and operations, and a lot of it almost has a consulting piece to it.

We actively consider how brands can benefit from circularity. For example, instead of turning a customer away who is outside the returns window, could customer support offer resale as an alternative to returns? Perhaps encourage VIP customers to resell on the official resale site and get store credit so they return to the brand to buy something new instead of shopping from a competitor brand. Unless we change the economic incentives for brands that currently push them to keep producing more, I worry brands will continue greenwashing.

With the current market with Gen Z in particular, there’s greater awareness and a conscious effort to purchase second-hand goods. But what barriers have you witnessed with targeting other age groups or demographics?

Surprisingly resale is now mainstream enough to appeal to different generations. Certainly, we’d think buying behaviour is different across age groups, but it’s not the case. Our hypothesis was that resale was driven by millennials and Gen Z, who care more about sustainability and affordability, but as we worked with these Facebook groups, we realised that it was not the case. Facebook is a platform that skews a little older. What we found with older audiences is they’ve got the money, and they’re a lot more discerning about what they’re going to buy. It’s a lot more driven by trying to hunt down a piece from last season they couldn’t buy. So there really is appeal across all ages, and we’re really interested in understanding those resale segments and building an experience that suits their specific needs. To me, it’s no longer just about sustainability. It’s much more multifaceted and nuanced.

Regarding the recent pivot you mentioned, is it specifically the Facebook marketplace groups you are targeting? Were you targeting other platforms as well?

Originally, it was working with these Facebook buy-sell groups, and now we’re working with brands directly, and we always knew it was going to be a part of our journey. It just happened a lot faster than we expected. Part of that is getting into Y Combinator. Our YC group partners really encouraged us to work on the core vision from day 1. They told us that if we believed our company’s future was to partner with brands, we should do it right away. Sam, my co-founder, and I thought brands wouldn’t trust us, but YC made us realise how much we could offer even as a young startup. We are innovative, and although with a much smaller tech team, we could still outperform larger companies. So they gave us the confidence to start working with brands directly.

What are the brands you are currently working with?

With the ones that are public, there’s Longway California in the U.S., and here in Australia, we are working with the direct-to-consumer brand called Noël the Label.

You got accepted into Y Combinator and is Winter 2022 batch, and now, you’ve relocated to the U.S. Why is that? What has that journey been like?

It’s been wild. Y Combinator is for a specific type of startup that is deeply ambitious, wants to solve big problems in the world and moves very fast. I used to listen to their podcasts for advice, which is very consistent with what they tell us internally, teaching people how to launch quickly and let things break and listen to customer feedback. I think the process of holding us up to that standard has been transformative for our company.

How was the process of applying to Y Combinator? Was it competitive?

We thought it was such a long shot, so we didn’t spend too much time on the application. But I would say even the act of putting in the application was very helpful. They asked good questions and got you to distil what’s important in the company. We applied in the early round, forgot about it and were very surprised when we got the invitation to interview many months later. I guess I’ll never know exactly why we got picked, but I’m grateful that we did.

You brought up earlier that you also worked for Fat Llama. Did the experience of working there give you a leg up in becoming a founder?

I’ve always thought I’d been a hard worker, but I didn’t actually know how fast something can move until I worked at Fat Llama. You’d get to work, blink, and it’s the end of the day. The pace at which startups need to move if they want to be competitive is insane. Being in that environment and being around founders who were deeply ambitious gave me a playbook of the level I need to work to be competitive.

Let’s unpack the benefits of getting involved in such a prestigious accelerated program that is YCombinator compared to other accelerated programs based in Australia and South East Asia.

In startups, there are so many people trying to give you advice. I think a big job as a founder is figuring out who to take advice from. The good thing about Y Combinator is that they have seen so many startups and have thus had a good rate of predicting winners and break-out successes. Y Combinator’s ability to pattern match is based on so much hard-won wisdom because they’ve had a front-row seat to so many startup failures and successes. If they tell us to do X and not Y, we won’t just dive in and do it, but we will listen twice and appreciate their advice. I value their experience and industry knowledge.

Additionally, since the pandemic, Y Combinator has become hybrid, so I think it just opened up the doors for more international startups to get involved, which is fantastic.

Let’s dive into your journey to relocate to the U.S. What led to that decision?

I went to San Francisco for the batch, and I’m in the process of getting my U.S. visa. A lot of people believe in working remotely, but I feel as a founder, I should be close to my customers. With Re-mint, we believe our primary market is going to be the U.S., as their resale market is much more mature. I think brands there are more ready to make that jump as compared to Australia.

Let’s talk about the challenges of becoming a startup founder, particularly coming from a nontechnical background. What has that journey been like?

I couldn’t do it without my technical co-founder Sam. I think if you’re doing a technology startup, you’ll need a technical co-founder. That’s absolutely non-negotiable. The reason is that with a tech co-founder as a part of the founding team, you’ll be able to iterate quickly and cheaply to find your product market fit. You can’t expect investors to give you money before you’ve shown traction. It’s going to be very difficult to stay alive long enough to find product market fit if every time you’re trying to test or iterate on something, you have to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on dev costs. There have been times at Re-mint when payment hasn’t gone through, or someone didn’t have Facebook to create an account, and we hacked together an alternative payment method or login method in hours to get a transaction across the line, and you just can’t do that if people’s incentives aren’t aligned the way co-founders are.

How did you meet your co-founder?

When I had the idea for Re-mint, it was one of the gating things. If I couldn’t find someone to be the technical co-founder with me, this is just dead in the water. I came to Australia after the MBA, and it was during the start of the pandemic. I didn’t have much of a startup network in Sydney, but I was lucky in the sense that the Sydney tech scene is still relatively small. I met Sam socially, and our mutual mentor told me that his previous startup had just folded and suggested that I reach out.

What does your day-to-day look like as a founder?

It’s so varied. I like to joke that my role is everything that’s not coding. So, I do strategy, finance, operations, sales, and developing new product features. Being an early-stage founder means leaving your ego at the door and doing absolutely everything.

Part of my job I dislike the most is company admin and dealing with lawyers, and the part I love most is spending time with our clients and the people using our site.

How big is your team at the moment?

It’s two of us. One of the biggest learnings we’ve got at Y Combinator was that you can go really far with a small team and that you should be really careful about how you hire. That’s something we have taken to heart.

What key qualities will you be looking for with your next hire?

Being the first hire at an early company is a really unique opportunity. It’s a lot of responsibility and autonomy but less risk. As co-founders, we live or die by this company, and it’s like our baby. I think we’ll need someone who shares our vision for a more sustainable future and is willing to be an all-rounder. I think in early teams, just like the co-founding team, you don’t have the luxury of being very specialised in the work because the work changes on a daily basis.

If you weren’t working on Re-mint, what other problem would you be solving?

I became a founder pretty opportunistically. I was doing my MBA at INSEAD in Singapore, and the reason I picked INSEAD is that I wanted to work in Southeast Asia and the growing tech scene over there. I think that’s what I would’ve done if I didn’t do this. I’m still very passionate about emerging markets, and I really love how technology solves the core problems in emerging markets. You never have to doubt yourself if you’re trying to help customers or if you’re addressing a core need.

Circling back to your experience of obtaining an MBA. What was that like?

I was ready to learn about business in my career at that time. I think my eighteen-year-old self would have been incredibly bored by accounting. But I enjoyed learning business after I had some real-world context and getting to be in the classroom to learn from my peers. The other thing I learnt is this meta-skill of being ruthlessly efficient. INSEAD MBA is quite compressed for an MBA. It’s one year long, and the joke is that you can sleep, study or socialise — you can pick two of the three. So, it was good training to be a founder because you learn that if it’s not essential, don’t do it. If you don’t have time to go to that talk that kind of interests you, don’t go. You do things on an essential basis, and you can get a lot of things done if you are willing to be ruthlessly efficient in prioritising your time.

Do you have any books, podcasts or advice that have really shaped the way you think?

One inspiration that has held me in good stead is Muhammad Yunus, who started Grameen Bank and defined microfinance, which was a groundbreaking new concept at that time. He showed that you could really engage people with lower incomes in the financial sector and do so in a way that’s scalable.

Conventionally, people with lower incomes were seen as a bigger risk, and no one was willing to expand the finance industry to that market even though that belief wasn’t empirically proven. However, Muhammad really flipped that on its head. I love that way of thinking.

The other thing he really helped me with was defining what social businesses are. It wasn’t like we were going to set up a bake stall and collect money for charity; we could have a social business that runs in a financially self-standing way. It just happens that instead of having profit-making as a goal, we strive to achieve a social objective, but with the same rigour as for-profit companies. It was a new business model for me to learn about, and I found it to be very exciting. He helped me cut through that dichotomy of either you work for a non-profit or you work for a dirty kind of business and that there’s no in-between. I am thankful for his work in informing how I think about business today.

What advice and resources have you taken to optimise growth with these businesses that are in the middle of being not-for-profit and for-profit?

My big piece of advice is that it’s so important for companies to have a clear metric for what success looks like. I think that if you are forever oscillating internally about whether you should be making money or not, grappling with that every day is going to be very difficult. In our case, we have a high-level belief that the circular economy is a good thing, but we are clear that we are a for-profit business, and our one key metric is revenue growth. If you internally can’t figure out your one metric, it’s just never going to work. Pick one north star metric that measures progress towards one clear goal and stick to it.

Our last question is, what advice would you give to an aspiring founder or your younger self five years ago?

Believe that you are enough as a founder. You don’t need to prove anything to investors. They come as a lag, not as a lead. So especially if you’re a young founder, you don’t need to have experience. You need to be willing to learn and think from the first principles. Suppose you don’t know how to code, learn how to code. Don’t worry too much about investors and invested money. That will follow if you get a little bit of traction. A quote from Michael Seibel at Y Combinator that really resonates with me is: “Always remember investors don’t build the future. Founders do.” And those are words I live by as a founder.

Do you think that has really helped you reshape any setbacks?

Yes, absolutely. The markets are tanking right now. There’s the prediction of a recession happening in the United States, and we’re at the end of a golden era. For Sam and I, we know we’re good. We can build in-house, and we know the main people we need to care about are our customers and clients. We feel quite confident.

The more you’re reliant on external funding, the less in control of your future you are, and that’s a very scary position to be in as a founder. The most that you can realise is that you are enough as a co-founding team. I think investing money is fantastic for accelerating growth, particularly at later stages. But in the earlier days, you can actually control a lot more of your destiny than you often realise.

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