Moving to Silicon Valley Helped Suzanne Xie Sell Weardrobe & Co-Found lollihop

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Jay: So, Suzanne, welcome to the show.

Suzanne: Thanks for having me.

Jay: So why don’t you tell us a little bit more, what is Lollihop, in your own words.

Suzanne: Yeah, absolutely. So, Lollihop is a subscription commerce company focused on healthy eating. Right now, we actually send boxes every single month to our members, where our nutritionist curry every single snack, every single month has a new nutrition theme. We’re really trying to turn the whole concept of healthy eating on auto-pilot. We have a classic healthy box, a vegan healthy box, and we’re going to be rolling out a market place in, about, a month. The idea is really, can we make eating healthy fun and accessible for everyone?

Jay: What was the ‘ah-ha’ moment for you for this?

Suzanne: That’s a good question. We actually started the company with just a large vision of, ‘Can we help people get healthier and how can we do that?’ My co-founder and I actually worked out a multitude of small little projects, I guess we can call them iterations. We are kind of known for pivoting all the time.

At the beginning, when we started Lollihop, we had a mobile app that we built, we had a team weight loss site, we did a ton of things. Really all of these things helped us crystallize what we ultimately ended up building with Lollihop. When someone wants to go through the process of getting healthy, it’s not an easy thing to do, unless you’ve been doing it you’re entire life and you’re really aware, it’s not that easy.

For us we came to two specific realizations: one is; in order to help them do this, it has to be something they can incorporate into their daily life; and the second was; after they do make this change, can they actually sustain it with friends and family and with a support system of engagement.

The ‘ah-ha’ moment actually came when we were in the office working a late night and we were talking about , we were just brain storming, we said this current pivot is just not working. We need to re-think this. We had actually been snacking a crazy load because we were working really late that night. We were looking around at the snacks and we realized, ‘Wow, these snacks are really not healthy.’ A light bulb went off and we thought, ‘Everyone snacks.’ Most of America snacks all the time.

Here’s a small little thing that we can actually make a huge impact on if we can substitute and find people healthy snacks and actually teach them about food via the other snacks. It’s that first step into thinking, ‘Well, I’m not really going to try cooking all the time and eating all this healthy food right away, but, hey, maybe, instead of having a bag of chips, I’ll have something else that a better substitute.’ That’s really kind of where this whole current Lollihop genesis started.

Jay: As you say, you’re curating the healthy snacks and you give them on a monthly basis, you’re sending out the boxes to folks, right?

Suzanne: Exactly, what’s really cool that we really like is that every single month it’s a different theme. Based on that time of year it’s really relevant to the person. November it’s about immunity, because winter is coming and your immune system has to be strong. This January box that we’re going to be announcing in about a day or two, is going to be about getting lean and getting back on the fitness track. Every single month it’s a different focus. You’re getting lean then you should be having protein because you’re working out more, if you’re focusing on your immune system you should have more vitamin C and nutrients. It’s a different thing every single time, and I think people sometimes forget that if you do choose snacks wisely and choose when you have them, and how you have them, they’re actually good for you.

Jay: We’ve read some stuff getting prepared for our interview, and I saw some interviews that you did in the past and one of the things you said was, ‘Focus on your core competency.’ I guess, advice to other founders.

Suzanne: Yeah.

Jay: What do you mean by that?

Suzanne: That’s your question. When I said that I guess I mean different founders have different skill sets and different strengths, right, and at the end of the day, different passions and interests.
It’s rare to find that founder product. As much as I would love to build a Google, I’m not going to be the founder who builds Google because I’m not an engineer.

I think we can learn things, we can pick up things, we can kind of iterate and get advisors and actually build something and learn from it, but there’s actually products that you can build that are so core to who you are as a person and almost how you lived your life for a while, that it almost feels natural. I’ll give you an example.

There are these exercises that people to through when they think about their brand. We actually did it for Lollihop, and it was kind of funny because the questions you get asked are: what car does your brand drive, what TV shows does it watch, what music does your brand listen to? It seems kind of silly, but you’re turning your brand into a person. We went through this brand exercise, and it wasn’t until our current Lollihop iteration that we actually looked at each other and thought, ‘Wow, we would be friends with Lollihop.’ That’s when you kind of know that this person is one of your people. If the company your building and the brand your building is actually someone that you feel kinship towards, that’s not something you can really force.

Jay: The prior company you had was Weardrobe, which was a fashion kind of business, right? Then you sold that to like.com which I guess got acquired by Google?

Suzanne: Yep.

Jay: How do you go from fashion to food? It’s a weird . . .

Suzanne: There’s no smooth transition there, I’ll be honest. The company was starting out because I wanted to start a fashion company. It was started because . . . if you see my bio’s I worked at Goldman Sachs before I started my first company, and I had a really liking towards spreadsheets, and I’m a little bit OCD when it comes to organizing things. I had a spreadsheet of every single item of clothing in my closet because I thought that would help me organize my life and how I wore clothing.

The funny thing is, that spreadsheet became a running joke between me and my friends, it was almost a joke when we said, ‘Oh, let’s build this into an app.” We actually started building Weird Robe as a closet organizational tool. Then it turned into something a lot bigger than that, once we realigned and started showing it to other people. They don’t really want a closet organization tool, but they definitely want something that can help them with their personal style, learn about it. That’s really how Weird Robe got started. It wasn’t like we took a step back and thought, ‘We want the next big fashion tech company.’ It was more, ‘Here’s a really cool app that we can build,’ and from that we expanded our vision.

Jay: Give me one lesson that you learned through your journeys at Weird Robe.

Suzanne: One lesson during Weird Robe would probably be . . . One of the things that we did well was that we constantly talked to our users. Whether it was the right thing to do or not we definitely spent a lot of time building our community, talking to bloggers turning into bloggers ourselves. I actually turned into a fashion blogger while I was doing Weardrobe because it puts you in the mindset of who your user is. A lot of times people say you are either building a product for PLM, people like me, or you’re not. In Weird Robes case, I wasn’t building a product for PLM, but I became that person so that I could learn about it.

I think we did that really well, but I think that is also why Weardrobe was a great first company to start with. It was a quick exit, it was only a year and a half after we stared that we exited to our common. It was because; at least for me personally, it wasn’t necessarily the right product/founder fit right off the bat. It was definitely something that we learned a lot about. We built a community and we did some things right. It wasn’t the kind of company that a lot of founders look to build and hope to stick with for a decade.

Jay: What about revenues? Were you very focused on revenues at the time?

Suzanne: We were not.

Jay: Just product.

Suzanne: Yes, we were not. I think that’s actually the funny thing about starting a company in New York versus in the Valley.

Jay: Yeah.

Suzanne: I’ve noticed that a lot, too, is when we were in New York; we definitely were focused more on building media partnerships. Can we actually make ad revenue? Can we do things with the community, right? Can we sell conference tickets? That was really the focus. But you come out here and it’s like, ‘Eh, money’s not really a big issue.”

Jay: Yeah, you just raise it.

Suzanne: Right, you raise money. If you’re doing things right, you raise money. There’s a good and bad to that, it depends on the type of company you end up wanting to build. If you actually want to build the next big venture backed business into a large company, maybe it makes sense not to focus on revenue right away because there are other key matrix that are more important.

Jay: It’s like social media kind of company, like Twitter; you should be focusing on the user growth.

Suzanne: Exactly.

Jay: The revenue finds itself, it figures itself out.

Suzanne: Right, and then at a certain point you have to put your hand in the air and say, ‘How are we going to make money?’

Jay: One of the things a lot of founders will say is that ‘Luck plays an important role in your success.’ You said that you started a Weird Robe and in a year and half you sold it to like.com, but there was a little story behind that which you feel that luck probably drove a little bit of your success.

Suzanne: Yeah, looking back at Weird Robe and how it played out, I would definitely put a lot of it to luck. I always say it’s fifty/fifty, half luck and half hard work, and as long as you show up for that fifty percent, the rest is really out of your hands. With luck, before we even moved out to the valley, one of my mentors at the time was Adeo Ressey [SP], and he was really good friends with founder of like.com.

Within the first week that we moved up to the valley, we were actually working out of Munjal [SP], and their offices. We didn’t have office space, we didn’t have Wi-fi yet. So we were working out of their office and built a relationship there, and just stayed in touch. It kind of led to that exit a lot more easily, because we already had the relationship built. We were also a part of Facebook Fund, when we were part of the company, and it happened to be that one of the advisers of Facebook Fund was also someone that I went to high school with, and was in the tennis team with. He was one of our advisors for the Weardrobe as well. That connection happened. That happens a lot more you would think it does in the valley. One connection leads to another, and it’s the domino effect.

Jay: It’s all about networking, right?

Suzanne: Yeah, it is.

Jay: That’s why it’s really important for technology companies that are looking for exits and to raise money, it is really important to be in the valley for that reason.

Suzanne: It is, absolutely. I think everyone, especially the really established people out here, everyone kind of has their pack of people that they either invest with or will look at companies with, or will advise with. Sometimes all it takes is that serendipitous one person to
really bring you into the pack and it just gives you a much bigger step up than before.

Jay: Very true. Motivation for you. What ticks you, is it fear of failure? Are you just passionate about what you do? Is the opportunity there you just can’t resist? What’s your inner drive?
What makes you tick?

Suzanne: It’s definitely not fear of failure. I think we embrace failure The motto that we’ve done at the company at Lollihop, is that if we’re not getting no’s or failing every single day, then we are either not running fast enough or we’re not taking enough risks. That’s something I believe in really deeply. I think when it comes to why we started Weardrobe, why I started Lollihop; it really comes down to being able to create your own Utopia.

As lame as that sounds, there’s not many options or situations in life where you get to choose what you work on every single day, who you work with, and what you’re working towards and actually building that group of people together that all are working towards that same goal and vision. It’s pretty rare and I think it’s an amazing thing once you can build it. That’s really the driving factor is, ‘can we do that?’

And once we do that, there’s always more to do. Then with Lollihop, especially, if we can do that well internally, our actual mission as a company will hopeful make an even more positive impact externally. There’s almost a social reason behind why we’re doing it, too.

Jay: What about influences? Who have been the great influences in your life, advisors, or professionally, that is?

Suzanne: I would say ever single step of the way, there’s been at least one or two advisors who have been incredibly pivotal, and whether that’s my company’s success, or just my success and my career. I don’t know if you want me to name them specifically.

Jay: Yeah, definitely, yeah.

Suzanne: Someone that I look up to and respect a lot is one of our current advisors, Gopter Rodgeron [SP], and it’s funny because he’s kind of known as the godfather of AdSense, and is at Facebook, and he’s just incredibly thoughtful about how he actually advises companies and how he helps them. I think he’s never at one point, ever imposed his own ideas, but more so really tries to understand, from a founder’s perspective, exactly the questions you’re asking me, like ‘What are you driving towards and what actually drives you?’ Then based on that, gives advice that is relevant. Where a lot of the time, sometimes you get advisors that give great advice, but advice is not always the best for you.

Jay: Right.

Suzanne: Just having seen him do that, it’s been great. He’s very involved. Another person who, I don’t think he realizes how much of an impact he has, is David Lee of SV Angel

Jay: Say that name again?

Suzanne: David Lee of SV Angel. He invested Ron Conway. He’s one of my favorite people. The funny story with him is he’s actually the very first Angel investor I ever pitched to, in the Valley. I remember that day because it was literally a couple days after I quit Goldman Sachs, never done an Angel pitch in my life. I thought that pitches, back then, were the longer the pitch deck, the better.

Jay: Oh, dear.

Suzanne: Yeah. I actually got a meeting with David Lee, met him in Kupa, which I had never heard of, back then, and pitched the poor guy a forty page slide deck, because I thought that was the right thing to do. He sat through all of it, and then he gave me incredibly candid feedback at the end, which I didn’t expect.

Jay: Let’s cut this down, thirty slides, to ten.

Suzanne: Pretty much. He’ like, ‘You’re really green, aren’t you?’ I was, and I still am. There’s still so much to learn, but it’s been great to kind of touch base with him, even just every few months to kind of update him on how things are going. He’s one of the investors in Lollihop as well. It’s funny I joke with him and I said, ‘This investment has been three years in the making.’ There’s a lot of people, even Adeo when I first started Weardrobe had a huge impact on me, and how I understood . . .

Andrew: Adeo Ressi.

Suzanne: Yeah, Adeo Ressi understood the value, understood how companies approach funding in building businesses. Every single one of them has very different perspectives. I know I’m forgetting people. My co-founders, hands down I would not have been able to do any of this without my earlier co-founder at Weardrobe, my current co-founder at Lollihop. I think having a co-founder is like having . . . They’re your career soul-mate, really.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s really important to build a great team, people that compliment your skills, right?

Suzanne: It is, absolutely.

Jay: Yeah.

Suzanne: I think, with my co-founder at Lollihop, we’re just perfect compliments, because her background is incredibly different from mine, the way she looks at things different from me.
Even the way we kind of process how the company needs tube run. Even though we’re on the same page when it comes to corporate cultures and company values, the operations, the way we manage, is just literally on two sides of the spectrum, which is great.

Jay: One of the things that I like to talk to people about, to talk to the founders about, is a close call that you may have had. Where you’re prior company, Weardrobe, or Lollihop, almost didn’t get funded or almost went out of business, or almost had a big exit, didn’t work out, something that almost happened. Were there any close calls that you can remember?

Suzanne: Yeah, I would actually say there was a funny close call with Weardrobe, I’m sure there’s going to be many with Lollihop. I’m sure my co-founder would not want to hear me say that.with Weardrobe, there was an obvious one because, this was actually right before we got
acquired. We were kind of in the pits. It was really good timing because we had decided we’re going to give this one big ditch effort and we’re going to launch this in-person fashion blogger conference in New York and put it all in Suzanne’s credit card.

Jay: Oh dear. Oh, man.

Suzanne: So, it was my credit card, it was a little bit of the company’s credit card, but there wasn’t much left. We flew in twenty people from around the U.S., put them up in a five star hotel in New York City, Gramercy Park Hotel, and we were going to through a conference around it and then we were going to invite friends like gilt.com and everyone to come. At the time that we actually put everything on our credit cards we hadn’t confirmed anything.

Jay: How much did you have to put on your card?

Suzanne: It was close to 15, 20 thousand. Which was a lot when you’re a founder with no funding?

Jay: That’s right.

Suzanne: When we actually started to pitch the brands to sponsor us for this conference, we were pitching them, saying things like, ‘Hopefully we all accept this price because, if they don’t, we’re going to have a really big credit card bill.’

Jay: You are.

Suzanne: Yes, I was, both my co-founder and I was. That was definitely something that when we. . .

Jay: So, you know, it was like, ‘We’re going to bet on it, that people are going to buy the sponsorships and it’s just a risk you took.

Suzanne: Yeah

Jay: You just look at all these other bloggers are doing conferences, it will probably work out.

Suzanne: Exactly, and the thing is, no one had done a fashion blogger conference at that point, and we had some pretty big names. We thought, ‘OK. At this point, if we fail and we can’t complete sponsors, it’s on us.’ We should have control over the sales process.

Jay: Let me ask you a question. When you did that, did Weardrobe have a lot of traffic on its website? How did you . . .

Suzanne: It did, but it didn’t. It did, but at that point, this was still . . .

Jay: It was early right?

Suzanne: . . . It was still early. This was kind of in 2009 where some people were thinking, ‘Oh, yeah, fashion bloggers are getting bigger,’ right? But it was before Go Try It On and Fashism, and all these companies.

Jay: That’s crazy. I would have thought I would have closed the deals first and then started, ‘Oh, god, I’ve got to run around and figure out where to put these people.’

Suzanne: The funny thing is, that would have been the smarter thing to do, but we were on a really tight timeline, because we actually wanted everything to go together at Fashion Week. So, with that timeline, we just wanted to book everything, and just play it by ear, and make sure that it worked. I think we had a twenty-five percent confidence that we would be able to at least close the majority of the money, we weren’t sure going to make it break even. It actually worked out pretty well.

Jay: It was profitable? Did it end up being profitable?

Suzanne: It ended up being profitable, yes, but not majorly profitable.

Jay: Right, so you covered your costs, made a little bit of money. The idea was the branding aspect of it.

Suzanne: It was the branding aspect, and it was that branding aspect that got us that call from like.com to actually acquire us. They had been talking to us for a while.

Jay: So, you were hustling, yeah.

Suzanne: Yeah, they hunting for a while, and when they actually saw it they thought, ‘OK. Well, there’s already a community around this and people are paying attention.’

Jay: So, from a blogging standpoint, I’m running this as a blog, essentially, that’s a big source of income for bloggers to do the conferences?

Suzanne: It is, depending on how the conferences are structured. I think what most people are used to doing is a conference where everyone is paying for tickets to go and there are thousands of bloggers there, and it’s a really big event.

Jay: Disrupt or something, right.

Suzanne: Right, exactly, and that’s a different type of conference then we were doing more of a smaller community conference, where it was invite only to the twenty girls who were going and the brands and the people who actually wanted to meet them would have to work with us to meet them.

Jay: That’s interesting.

Suzanne: And go with them to events. It was really kind of . . .

Jay: How many people attended in total between sponsors, and the brands?

Suzanne: There were about twenty bloggers, and then there were, about, in terms of sponsors and brands, about . . .

Jay: Did the bloggers have to pay to go? I guess they pay, too.

Suzanne: The bloggers are going for free.

Jay: Oh, they’re going for free.

Suzanne: They pay for dinner, lunch, all food, flights.

Jay: OK. You’re hooking it up for them.

Suzanne: Yeah, and then, for the brands, there are about 20 brands, about 20 people.

Jay: So the brands want to pay to meet the bloggers I guess.

Suzanne: Exactly. It’s kind of funny because it’s very opportunistic in the sense that it’s really something you can pull off earlier on before everything blows up and becomes big. Then these small events seem kind of dinky.

Jay: Right. Then you’re doing TechCrunch disrupt or Ignition. You have got to do something big at this point because it’s got to push the needle, right?

Suzanne: Exactly. It was their first go at it and that made sense but the timing worked out really well. It happened to be that we had come up with this idea and we were about a month and a half before Fashion Week. We pulled everything together in about 5 weeks. It happened to work.

Jay: How many people did you have in your company at that time?

Suzanne: Full time it was just me and my co-founder. We had a community manager who was also a blogger at the time and we had 6 interns from Stanford. So full-time it was just 3 people and then everyone else was just helping out.

Jay: Wow. What kind of traffic did you have?

Suzanne: I think when we sold we were between half a million and a million uniques a month.

Jay: That’s pretty significant for a blog.

Suzanne: Yes. I mean it wasn’t huge but it was . . .that was definitely a number we that we took both to the brands about. But it was also the fact that the bloggers we were working with, they had their own traffic and they were . . .

Jay: You basically kind of aggregated folks that had influence in the space is what you did. You got the influencers and once you had the influencers you went to the brands and said look, this is where it’s at. You have to be here if you want to meet these influencers. That’s smart.

Suzanne: Yes. That’s something we are seeing a lot of other networks starting to do. Even Tumblr started doing that.

Jay: Interestingly, I think the first conference that TechCrunch did they did the same thing. They were working in partnership with Omalic [sp?] and some others and I think ReadWriteWeb and some other guys. I think it is a strategy that other people are doing, right?

Suzanne: Yes. Then once you’ve established that brand that people know you can pull off a high quality conference then you can roll it out to a much bigger crowd.

Jay: Yes. Exactly. So what’s the one piece of advice that you can give other founders?

Suzanne: I would say, and I say this completely wholeheartedly, that the most important piece of advice that I’ve gotten from my advisors, from other founders is just to do it.

Jay: Just go for it.

Suzanne: Go for it and just test it. I think a lot of times people postulate. They’re in their heads and they have these ideas and they think well I can try this. This might work and this might not. You won’t know until you try it. Even just test it in a small way. It’s something I constantly tell myself. Can we test it in a small way? If we are launching a marketplace can we test it in a small way and see how it’s going to work? Instead of getting my engineer to write code, can I test it without him writing code.

Jay: Yes. That’s great. Last question I ask everybody who comes on the show. Why did you choose to be a guest on Foundville?

Suzanne: Yes. It goes back to how many people have helped me along the way. There’s no way I would have gotten to where I am without people helping me and so in a sense I just love what Foundville is doing in the same way. People are being able to watch the videos and almost have a conversation with other people that have gone through similar experiences or experiences they that want to go through. I think it’s great.

Jay: Thank you for spending time with me today out of your busy schedule. Thank you so much, Suzanne. Thank you to everybody who watched.

Suzanne: Absolutely, thank you guys. Bye.

Jay: Take care.