How a female wellness brand hit 7 figures ARR in one year

In one line, what do you do and what is your most significant achievement?

We are a platform that educates women about period care & female wellness as well as provides Indonesian women with the opportunity to use safer organic period pads at a much more affordable price.

Some of our achievements — We reached 50k+ users, 7-figures USD ARR, with topline sales growing 620% within 1st year of launch.

Who are you and what business did you start?

I did a 1-year stint doing Sales and marketing at P&G after graduating from Columbia University, then shifted my career into finance & investment banking at CIMB then established and grew the M&A practice for KPMG Indonesia. Most of my years working in finance was advising more large mature corporations in the old economy. I wanted to learn more about the new economy (digital/tech arenas) so I moved to an investment role at a local VC in Indonesia.

During my tenure here, I had the opportunity to meet 2000+ companies a year that pitched to me for funding. My takeaway after having spent 2 years being a VC is that it's very important to solve a problem and scale faster using technology. More importantly, the company has to solve this problem at a profit, making it challenging for most of the startups I met who were not even able to monetize their business and had to shut down later.

What's your backstory?

After my VC role, I felt more convinced to start my own business. This is because being an investor is as if I just sit in the back seat of the car and have someone else driving it, whilst being a founder I get to be a driver sitting in the front of my business and taking it to new heights every day.

So when I wanted to do something on my own, I knew my business had to be 1. Be able to solve a problem at a profit, and 2. Be able to scale using technology. Thus I set up our business to be in the D2C arena because it is very possible for us to solve a problem at a profit and given the nature of our product, we can have a monthly recurring income. These theses are proven to be correct, as we have had solid traction since our launch.

What should be the first steps to take to enter your industry?

Do adequate market research on whether or not there's meaningful demand for the product/service that we're going to launch. Try to test the market with a demo product and see if you can get 10-100 paying customers. Then once you feel there's validation, execute it fast.

How did you spend your First 100 Days of launching your business?

We did our own market research by surveying almost 100 random respondents from the entire Indonesia and discovered that there's actually a real problem to be solved. Thus we spent the next 6 months doing product R&D and securing licences from the regulators.

The R&D part was challenging as our contract manufacturers were overseas and it was during the pandemic when all cross-country travels were closed. So we spent our first 100 days finding these suppliers online and having them send us their samples (based on our IP design) to get to know which manufacturing partners are the best for us to work with.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain partnerships/customers?

Our business is proven to have a strong product-market fit, as it's well received by our consumers. We received 5-star feedback from our users shown by our strong marketplaces-ratings.

We attributed this success to our product quality, strong customer service to retain users (our retention rate is 89%!), and corporate culture. We emphasise the importance of treating everyone in our company just like our own family, and this culture has transferred to our customers & consumers as well. Not only do we have an unusually high consumer-retention rate but also our employees turnover rate is one of the, if not the, lowest in the industry.

What has taken you from 0 to 100?

I'd say moment and opportunity, where during the pandemic people shop online most of the time and we created a user-friendly site for our users to order conveniently from, making us a true D2C champion for this category. Also during the pandemic, people spend quite a bit of their household expenses on healthy and wellness products. Now, post-pandemic, people's health awareness has increased so they continue to shop for health/wellness products.

What is one underrated thing in your industry that business owners should start doing/using?

I think the most underrated thing is SEO, as it is the cheapest way to build awareness in the early days, especially if you're a newcomer that's underfunded. Obviously, with a limited budget, we can't afford to splurge on offline and online ads, thus we strategically invested our limited resources in SEO. Our monthly unique visitors to our website have been increasing by double digits every month since launch.

What was one failure you had to go through that others in your industry should look out for?

If you're out to fundraise, the challenging part is to find the right investor-partner that has mutual interest as yourselves as founders. We failed to identify that early, when there was a bit of interest coming from investors to invest in our company, whom we thought were genuinely interested in making an impact in improving humanity, only to find out later that their intentions were more predatory towards us and fairly one-sided to serving their personal agendas. We wasted time and resources dealing with such investors, and despite all the effort we invested in working on a deal, we parted ways.

Nevertheless, we took it as a good learning experience and kept good relationships with all of them, because people change over time and once we stand out more as we grow, we hope investors who want to get a piece of action from Yoona will have a more understanding of what values and principles we stand for as a business and company.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

We're on google workspace for our daily working platform. We use jurnal.id as our accounting software. We use several SEO saas tools like SEM Rush. For our warehouse Saas we use jubelio. Social medias tiktok, facebook, instagram, linkedin, twitter.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

We just closed our seed round, with CyberAgent Capital, a Japanese VC as the lead investor. CyberAgent Capital is most notably known for its seed-round investments in other super unicorn companies in the regions like Tokopedia, Coda Payment, KakaoTalk, and many others. We selected them from over a bunch of other VCs as we feel there's a match in our vision and we believe there's much synergy we can do together given their experience in growing companies and taking them public.

Our long-term plan since the beginning has been to touch as many lives as possible via our business. In the short term, we will expand more product verticals and horizontals that can significantly improve female wellness. In the longer term (hopefully not too distant future) we plan to take our company public and beyond.