The Entrepreneurs
Ellen Xu and Raj Shah discuss their experiences as student entrepreneurs, breaking into the skincare industry, and next steps for their company, Dew
Ellen Xu and Raj Shah are the co-founders of Dew, an online platform for skincare products and trends. They are both full time university students while leading their company. We had the unique opportunity to speak with them about their experiences and Dew.
Ellen Xu is the co-founder and business and design lead at Dew. She is a junior at Binghamton University studying Business Administration and Graphic Design. She is involved in the research, business development, marketing, and design aspects of Dew. She grew up in Shanghai and New York.
Raj Shah is the co-founder and technical lead at Dew. He is a junior at Binghamton University in New York and pursuing his bachelor’s degree in Finance and Management Information Systems. He is originally from Bombay, India and moved to New York 2 years ago.
What led you to the path of founding a company?
Raj: I grew up in a business community where most of my friends hailed from families with their own businesses. I feel like that definitely played a major role in influencing my mindset and molding it into an entrepreneurial one. That being said, I feel like my community has helped me understand that entrepreneurship is all about dedication and patience and not about flashy things and instant money, that entrepreneurship is about building products that solve problems, building things that matter! I initially wanted to be an investment banker but through my experiences and activities I realized entrepreneurship was what I really wanted to do. And it actually made sense because I come from a business family. My dad and granddad were both entrepreneurs and as a kid I always loved the stories they’d tell me about their experience with business.
Ellen: Growing up in two culturally-diverse cities: Shanghai and New York, I was able to witness different ways to live life to the fullest, from being an anonymous worker, patiently transforming years into a masterpiece, to the passionate speaker in front of the spotlight, whose years of passion and experience crescendo into the height of a sublime moment. Before going into creating my own business, I wanted to pursue Marketing & Strategy in a tech company. I was really intrigued by how technology has brought so many changes to the beauty industry especially in the product development aspect and always wanted to be a part of an innovation. While searching for internships, I realized the limitations on what kind of work you will be doing as a junior employee. And I’m never a person that settles. Therefore, I decided to create my own opportunity to learn from building a product from scratch.
Tell us the story behind Dew.
Both of us have experienced fatigue from the over-saturation and the shallowness of content on mainstream social media networks. As every product on the market becomes more and more personalized, we believe that the future is drilling down into niche and highly-engaged online communities.
For an area such as skincare that requires invested research, personalized content, and even medical knowledge, we realize that the skincare information provided by the mainstream media is merely enough for skincare beginners. In fact, we see hundreds of self-organized skincare communities across multiple major social media platforms meant to solve different skin issues and share product experience or tips. These consumers usually face limited resources and poorly-designed interfaces for their specific needs.
Skincare is as important as healthcare. With the skincare industry being valued at approximately 200 Billion US Dollars by 2025 and more than 20 million invested skinthusiasts across the US, we see an opportunity to create a dedicated platform that unifies consumers, industry experts, and influencers under one roof to form a safe space to discuss skincare problems, trends, products, and routines.
What stage are you at with Dew?
We are currently building our web app and will be officially launching at the end of this year. Dew is designed to harness the power of crowdsourcing to solve problems. Therefore, we envision Dew to grow as one of the go-to skincare platforms in the next year. Our product team will be working very hard towards the vetting process of personalized content recommendation and pushing out innovative features such as posting templates and interactive product reviews in the upcoming years as well.
Our mission is to bring the right people and the right information together. In ten years, we expect Dew to be the intersection between the beauty, science, and technology innovations and become not only the participant but also the driving force to the beauty community.
Were there any mentors or role models you had when building Dew? What obstacles did you face when creating Dew?
Eva Chen, Head of Fashion Partnerships at Instagram, is a true inspiration of mine. Before going into social media marketing, I was in doubt of the actual power of networking on Instagram until I finished watching all the interviews I could find online about Eva. Her positive outlook on the power of social media networking and creative advice really convinced me. Since adopting the first social strategy on Instagram, I had truly seen the impact of Instagram networking. We are able to discover and have conversations with hundreds of influencers and professionals just with our personal accounts.
Mara Lecocq, my boss at Fishbowl, also had the biggest impact on my professional life. Through my summer internship, I was able to learn both rigor and creativity from her. I imagined hundreds of scenarios of my work life: going on a coffee run, being criticized on my work, taking notes for meetings, but never had I thought I would meet such an amazing and resourceful boss lady that offers me the opportunity to work on projects with much bigger scope and creativity. It was an honor to be working with her.
Alicia Yoon and Renee Chou transform skincare from a passion to ritual for me. They inspired me to truly explore the science behind skincare products and discover the most innovative skincare solutions in the world. Their eye for emerging opportunities and quality content is something I always admire and want to learn.
In terms of obstacles, working around the team schedule might be the hardest so far. All 17 of our team members are full-time students or full-time employees who are located in different parts of the U.S., so we are working with 17 different schedules that are constantly changing. Staying up at 12am or waking at 5am for a meeting is very common, but we were able to figure out and keep the progress moving.
What is the most rewarding part about being a startup founder?
The most rewarding part of being a startup founder is meeting new people. Ever since we started Dew, we have come in touch with so many talented individuals. It has been an amazing journey getting to know them, their ideas, their insights, and their perspectives without the boundaries of age, area, and background. Being co-founders and interacting with these people on a daily basis gives us a lot to learn, to think, and to adapt. We also get to self-reflect on our personality and management skills frequently since we are making so many decisions.
How has your culture and identity played a role in shaping your experiences and perspective?
Raj: My culture has definitely shaped the way that I think and act and it’s phenomenal how it has helped through this journey. As someone who hails from a culture that not only believes in working hard but also working smart I believe that it has enabled me to try and be more efficient in my choices and activities. This has led to a tremendous amount of time saved which I have used towards other aspects of the projects. Additionally, my experiences of working at my dad’s office as an “employee” rather than “the boss’s kid” has definitely ingrained attributes like humility, respect, dedication and diligence, values that are a must in any work environment.
Ellen: Coming from an Asian background, I’ve always been taught to have a strong work ethic and be humble. These two qualities together helped me develop a network of reliable and diligent people to join our core team. As an ENFJ, I’m very intrigued by people with different opinions or backgrounds and enjoy genuine conversations. So I tried to have an open mind and see every meeting as a learning opportunity to broaden my horizon.
What’s your advice to young aspiring startup founders?
Approach people, even when they are more experienced than you are, older than you are, or have a conflict in values. There is always a way to find common ground and develop a conversation. The key is to capture what they wanted to hear.
Since experts are a huge part of our user composition, we had to find a way to establish conversations with them and find out how we can improve our product. After multiple attempts of cold calling, emailing, and even just DMing on Instagram, we decided to try something called “The Fan Girl Strategy”. Since these professionals’ inboxes are always flooded with PR and other business emails, we decided to start with complimenting them and start a genuine conversation. This differentiated us from the rest of the crowd, and we were able to get more than 50 professional responses within a week compared to the 0 responses during the first week.
