Meet FoundersDoor Alumni, Emilia from The Good Hair Co.
FoundersDoor is a six-week pre-accelerator for early-stage tech founders from underrepresented backgrounds in London. The programme is delivered by YSYS in partnership with One Tech as part of the Mayor of London’s Digital Talent initiative.
We’re now four cohorts in and we couldn’t be more proud of what all our cohorts have achieved. With that said, it felt right to catch up with one of the OGs from Cohort 1.0, Emilia, founder of The Good Hair Co.
The Good Hair Co. is an informative hair discovery platform for kinky, curly, and wavy-haired consumers. Not only will you learn how best to maintain your hair but they are redefining your shopping experience by offering a personalised platform to help discover, learn about, and purchase the best products, for your hair type.
Since graduating from FoundersDoor what have you been up to?
I’ve been working! We [Lydia and I] finished FoundersDoor on such a high — I can’t describe it, it was life-changing. I immediately quit my job and moved into a job within the DTC Beauty space so I could get a better understanding of how successful companies cater to their audience.
The Good Hair Co. is coming along nicely — we’ve just finished up our research phase with some really great advice on our next steps on how to be more present for our audience and now it’s a matter of acting on those findings — but I’m really excited for us!
I’ve also started my own hair care line, it’s called Love, Mellie. Its hand-poured vegan hair products — this has been my ultimate dream so it’s crazy to think that I’m actually doing it, we’re opening for pre-orders at the end of October!
What task is currently taking up most of your time?
Right now it’s figuring out how to best execute our ideas — we want to make sure we’re creating new exciting content that is engaging and on platforms and formats our community resonates with and this takes time!
With more and more people are taking an interest in Natural Hair, we want to make sure that not only is the information we’re putting out to our community is correct, but stands out.
How do you think being on the FoundersDoor accelerator has helped you since graduating?
FoundersDoor gave me the confidence to believe in myself, I use to think that tech founders were anything but me — that they had to be White Men in suits and use big data and specialist machine but FoundersDoor taught me that the route into tech isn’t what it use to be and that I am surprised every step of the way,
How have you implemented your learnings from the programme? The FoundersDoor accelerator covers customer discovery, validation, and prototyping.
Everything is an assumption until proved otherwise; this I had to learn the hard way because I thought that every idea I’ve had was great and something we had to do and it would be amazing for the business; this isn’t the case, sometimes far from it and can cost you a lot of time and money — when thinking about how your business serves others, one of the best ways to find out is simply asking your community, do your research, find out what is missing or what needs to be updated and keep working around the data your findings provide.
We’re harnessing industry knowledge and your personal experience to educate, identify and provide unbiased, bespoke hair care regimen to suit your needs, budget and lifestyle.
Our system ensures that wherever your body, mind and budget is in the journey, we’re there to help you find the support you need to make it as smooth, easy and effective as possible. This means you can reach your hair goals without wasting time or money on products and services that don’t work for you.
What is on your roadmap for your current project?
We’ve got findings from our research phase and are now in the process of forming all of the elements needed to get to our end goals, , so that’s looking into tech components and apps readily available for us to create our MVP -very vague I know, but what I can confirm is, we’ve got all of the moving parts!
Have you had any challenges in your founder’s journey?
Being able to accept that sometimes an idea or specific route might not work, no matter how much I love it and can see its potential. I’m here to serve my audience, not myself so I need to think about their best interests — otherwise, I’m the only ‘customer’.
What are you most proud of on your founder’s journey so far?
Being able to get on a stage and tell you about my business — if you had seen me on the FoundersDoor weekender you wouldn’t believe it was the same person you know now, long story short — there were a lot of tears, haha! I’m an emotional person and tend to put a LOT into everything I do (a blessing and a curse) so the thought of things not going the ‘right’ way or as expected gets me worked up, but I’m learning how to deal with the unexpected and think fast!
How can people follow your journey and business?
You can follow my personal accounts on Twitter and Instagram @EmiliaServane — I tend to share a lot of BTS for both The Good Hair Co and Love, Mellie.
But you can also follow us on Instagram at @thegoodhair.co and Twitter at @thegdhairco
