Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / How to build and sell a successful tech startup, with Lauren (Silvers) Warwick, Founder of Glamazon

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How to build and sell a successful tech startup, with Lauren (Silvers) Warwick, Founder of Glamazon · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is episode 22 with Lauren Silvers Warwick.
• 0:13
  Hi guys, we're back today with another episode of Female Startup Club. Today I'm chatting to one half of the Glamazon duo, Lauren Warwick. Lauren Warwick and Lisa Marie are the founders behind the on-demand beauty startup, Glamazon, that launched from Lauren's bedroom floor more than seven years ago. Together they've built Australia's first and leading tech platform that provides real-time bookings for freelance hair and makeup artists and connects them to clients through an app.
• 0:43
  From a merger in 2016 to raising capital, a successful appearance on Shark Tank, plenty of ups and downs, and their recent exit in January, this is the story of what a startup is really like. And remember to keep listening to the six quick questions at the very end, where Lauren shares how she wins the day and where she hangs out to get smarter. This is Lauren for Female Startup Club.
• 1:07
  Alrighty, well, let's get started. Can you tell us all about the Glamazon origin story and why you decided to start this tech startup in the first place? Sure. Okay, so Glamazon started in 2013.
• 1:24
  I was a publicist at Baker Brand Communications in Sydney. And at the time, we were looking after a lot of fashion clients at Westfield in their luxury center precinct. And so we would host parties pretty much twice a week on average, sometimes three times a week. And so the need to look polished now.
• 1:47
  all the time was just, it was such a priority for myself and for my boss. And I was making, you know, a lot of beauty appointments every single week calling different salons. So the process would be, I would Google a salon that was nearby and whatever suburb we were in, depending on the event or the meeting we were at.
• 2:06
  and I would basically be put on hold or I would ask them whether they had availability and you'd liaise back and forth. It was this really frustrating process. When you do that enough times over and over, you just wish that you could see at one glance where all of the available appointments are nearby just so that you can click a button when you're in a meeting and just book and pay for it. But I had this thought before Uber had come around and I think that
• 2:35
  When Uber launched in Sydney, that finally validated not only to myself, but to the salons that I was trying to get on board. It validated to them that there is this new type of business model, which we now know is a marketplace or a gig economy. This double-sided marketplace where you're
• 2:55
  helping an individual, either business or merchant or freelancer, connect with a customer who needs their services. And it's all aggregated through a tech platform. So yeah, I was just wishing that that existed. I researched and it didn't exist.
• 3:12
  And so I registered the business name Glamazon in February of 2013. And I was still working in PR and just in the background starting to gather information like how do I build an app. And while I was working, I met this guy through a friend of my mom, actually. And he had been in startups and he said, go to Glamazon.
• 3:36
  as many meetups as you can to learn about startups. And truthfully, I thought startups was just like an abbreviation of like, I'm starting up a business. I didn't realize it was an organizational structure or a new type of business model. And so I started to go to these meetups and I started to learn that you needed to validate your idea. You needed to build this thing called an MVP, like all of the really...
• 4:00
  green basic things that you learn when you just get into the startup scene. That's what I started to learn while I was still working at my PR job. And I came to understand that the more I spoke about Glamazon, the idea, because at first it was a secret, I didn't want to tell anyone out of fear that someone would steal my idea. But then I learned the more that I shared that idea, the more connections I would get. Someone would...
• 4:22
  connect me to an app developer they knew or a contact that they knew. And that's how I met Rob, who became a mentor. And he said, you need to validate your idea. Like this is something you may want, but how do you know that other customers will want the same thing? So yeah, went down that journey. And I mean, that's a story in itself, but that's basically the origins of Glamazon.
• 4:46
  I love it. And I know that at that time or around about that time, you basically moved back in with your parents and started working on this full time, put all of your money towards it. What was that early phase like of building the MVP, minimum viable product for anyone who doesn't know what that is?
• 5:07
  Yeah. So when I learned from Rob that I needed to validate this idea, I basically, I called 10 salons that I knew and I said, you know, I'd love for you to come on board this platform, but I hadn't built anything yet. And I was still living out of home with my boyfriend at the time working in PR. And, um, in my mind I was like, okay, well, an app,
• 5:30
  cost $50,000 at the time. That's roughly what they cost to just build. And, um, and so I need to like raise money to somehow to build that. And that's, I think how a lot of people think when they start a business, they keep thinking, Oh, if only I could just have that money to build that product, then it will become successful. But fortunately I had Rob in my corner as a
• 5:56
  hustle your way to getting your first customers. And so what I did is I called every afternoon, I would call these 10 salons and ask them what their available appointments were like for the following day. And they would tell me and I would enter their available appointments into just a simple Google sheet. And that Google sheet acted as the back end of a really basic website that I had built with 10 shop fronts of all the salons that I had on board. And
• 6:23
  And one collective screen called calendar. And it basically consolidated all of the available appointments into a calendar. And when a customer clicked book, a form would pop up where they filled in their name, number, email address. And they clicked book. And they thought that that was going through to the salon. But it was actually an email coming through to me. And I would manually book in the customer.
• 6:45
  And so after two and a half weeks of doing that, I locked in, you know, 49 appointments. I generated $3,000 for these salons. And that is the moment that I went to my parents and I said, I want to move back home. I really want to put everything into this business. I quit my job. I remember the 4th of October, 2013 was my last day there.
• 7:08
  And, um, and I just, yeah, I moved back home. I sold my car. Um, I had a whole wardrobe filled with, you know, Australian designer clothes because I was 23 and I had just gone through the 21st birthday phase. So I sold like every Sass and Biden Zimmerman dress I had on eBay. And I had a decent pool of money after that. After you sell your car and you sell your wardrobe,
• 7:32
  you stop paying rent, you move back in with your parents, you have food in the fridge, like your costs are pretty much nothing. I had a decent amount of money to start the business and I had validated the business model. I had customers. So yeah, that was the process in the beginning.
• 7:49
  And then what happens after that? You obviously have to build an app. You have to be like, okay, where does it go from here? I have to become a tech entrepreneur. Yeah. What happens next? You Google, how do I build an app? Yeah, that's what I did. Google became a good friend of mine. I made so many mistakes.
• 8:09
  Looking back, it's quite devastating to think how I wasted that precious funding that I had saved for myself. I pretty much invested a lot of that into design. So there was a company called Appstar at the time when you Google build an app, like they were the first ones that came up in Sydney.
• 8:29
  And yeah, you just go through this process of handing over like $10,000 to a company and then $5,000 to another designer. And then you realize that you've built this app based on the assumptions that you've made of how people want to interact with an app. And when you don't know things like UX or what the user experience or the user journey is supposed to be like because you're not in the tech world...
• 8:54
  you really miss the mark on how the flow should be in an app. But you don't know these things. You're just like kind of learning it as you go along. And so this phase of business is like probably what my dad would call an expensive lesson. Like when you spend all your money and make the biggest mistakes ever.
• 9:13
  But it kind of gets you from like point A to point B, from point B to point C. And every single step that you take a mistake that you make, like it does move the needle. So by the time I had this basic app, despite the fact that I'd built it really badly from a user experience perspective without knowing...
• 9:32
  I still had enough of a product to make transactions. And so what I had been doing while the app was being built, so I finished my job in October 2013. I launched the app on the App Store on the 2nd of July 2014. And,
• 9:48
  So it was quite a while. So that whole phase of building, and that was pretty much handing over my drawings of an app to a tech team who was handling that for me. I went into PR mode and I just called and emailed every journalist that I knew from my PR days. I set up a fake PR app.
• 10:08
  like head of marketing and PR email address. So it was jasmine at glamazonapp.com. And I wrote press releases and basically got Glamazon or the launch of this Glamazon app into vogue in Harper's Bazaar and Mashable before it even launched. But I was able to build enough hype around it that we had a decent amount of customers waiting to use it.
• 10:32
  Um, and then I would use that to get more salons on board. So I would be like, I have 5,000 customers on the waiting list in the Eastern suburbs, and then that would help me get salons. And my approach with the salons was start at the top. So I went to Joe Bailey. I went to Edwards and co went to like the top tier salons because I knew if they said yes, it would be really easy to win the lower tier salons, um, which is exactly what happened. So we launched with 30 salons in the Eastern suburbs
• 11:02
  yeah that's pretty much how we started. And you obviously pivot at some point and you realize well you don't pivot but you introduce the idea of beauty at home having stylists come to you come to do your hair your nails and different things at what point did you think that was the idea to take it down and what happened with that?
• 11:25
  So I would actually call this a pivot. So this was 2015, like October 2015. I started to realize that I was booking Deliveroo. I was using the app Deliveroo a lot. And Hey You, which was not services to you, but it was definitely, there were all of these apps that were starting to use individual professionals in a new kind of way. And I started to think of the peer-to-peer,
• 11:55
  opportunity and did it exist in Australia? And I thought, oh, this is going to take a lot of education. The culture in Australia is we go to a salon. We don't have beauty services in our home. How can you, is it safe to send people to your home? And then Uber X became more popular than regular Uber, which originally was taxis and then black cars. And then it was just random strangers, like, you know, Uber drivers. And
• 12:19
  So I started to think about this as an opportunity, but I was in too deep. I was like at this stage, 300 salons across the east coast of Australia, you know, about
• 12:34
  probably 10 or 15,000 customers. And I felt as though, even though my heart was telling me it was a great opportunity, I had no funding to rebuild. I didn't want to let down the salons, but I also knew in my gut, and it was so obvious, like by the data, the salons weren't working anyway, because they were,
• 13:00
  The managers at the salons or the salon receptionists didn't care about the incoming booking requests. And they're the ones managing the incoming booking requests. So they're accepting the appointments. They're getting paid a wage week in, week out, no matter what their salary or their wage stays the same. So they're not invested in the tools or the booking platform that I've built for them to use.
• 13:23
  The staff turnover is also really high, so I'm building new relationships with new salon managers pretty much every six weeks, it felt. Maybe it was every two, three months. The salon owners were very concerned about the continuation of the commission we were taking for every booking period.
• 13:42
  And they were basically of the mentality that we were a lead gen platform. And once someone booked in with them, that was now their customer and they should be able to keep them and text them on the side. So circumvention was huge. So even though on the customer side, I could see that there was a real need for a platform like this on the supply side and new salons weren't the way to go. And I could see peer to peer as a huge opportunity, but I basically just didn't have the ability
• 14:12
  scratch. And I came close to closing the business on many occasions because the only funding we had was at that point was every dollar we were making, we were reinvesting. Fortunately, we had no overheads. I was working from my bedroom. I had built the app. And so any bug that was happening, that was coming up in the platform, we weren't fixing. We were just
• 14:35
  it was there and when it worked, it worked. And when it didn't, it was like bad luck. It was just a customer service problem that I would try to put out a fire. Um, but we pretty much had no overheads. I was doing all the PR and marketing myself. Um, I had no staff, so we were taking 20% off every booking. And so that was the revenue we were making, but it wasn't enough to start the platform from scratch. Um,
• 14:58
  And that was when I started to look at other opportunities in the market. Was someone already doing this? And someone cottoned on to this idea already? And that's pretty much how I met Lisa. Yeah. And I want to talk about you meeting Lisa, her business, you guys deciding to merge and raise money together and build Glamazon as a team. So do you want to tell us about that situation? Yeah, sure. So, um,
• 15:26
  Lisa had started Glam Crew in 2015, just having the same idea as me, but for freelancers. So freelance beauty professionals to your home. She had so many amazing contacts in the beauty space because she had a very successful fashion label called Lisa Marie. It's a swimwear label available on Net-A-Porter and Shopbop and just high-end online boutiques.
• 15:50
  And so she would always do these photo shoots and she would need hair and makeup artists. So she pretty much had a Rolodex of just all of these contacts. And she basically called them all up and said, come join my platform and built this really basic, an Indian development company built this basic app. And after three months, she was making a lot of money. Actually, the revenue was similar to that of Glamazon's because she was,
• 16:14
  she wasn't experiencing churn like I was. I was experiencing salon churn. So my role had pretty much become like just constant BDM, like sales on the road, building my salon clientele. Like I needed to continue to build supply because the rate that I was losing it, I was always replenishing the supply. But yeah, Lisa was just able to build strengthens.
• 16:38
  strong recurring revenue with repeat clients. And then the freelancers weren't circumventing the platform because they're so committed to their own livelihoods. And this app was bringing them bookings and jobs and it was taking care of their payments and everything.
• 16:54
  Um, yeah, Lisa and I live two streets away from each other unknowingly. Um, and an investor connected us. It's so funny. She contacted the investor said, I think this couldn't go really well. I would like some investment to grow this. He said, cool. Let me think about it. I'll do some research and come back to you. He basically Googled what was going on in the market, found Glamazon, um, found me on LinkedIn. He called me up. He's like, I've got this other girl that
• 17:19
  He's doing something similar with freelancers. I think you should connect. And if you two merge, I'll invest in your business. And that's basically the really short version of how we connected. But after our first meeting, like Lisa and I turned up to the meeting in the same outfit.
• 17:35
  And we had coffee and we shook on a deal like then and there. It was crazy. It was just the stars were aligned. We had the same vision for what we wanted out of the company. Even though I had invested a lot more time, she had so many skills and assets that
• 17:52
  available as well, that it was truly mutually beneficial. We had different skill sets. So that was really great. We could divide and conquer. And so we merged our businesses in 2016. And then we went on Shark Tank together. And that's how the whole thing evolved. And actually, when we first merged, we were offering salons and freelancers to you.
• 18:14
  we realized really quickly that that was quite a conflicting message to customers and to salons. Salons felt like we were poaching their professionals and it was just conflicting. So we eventually removed the salons and then kept pressed ahead with a peer-to-peer platform.
• 18:31
  And I want to talk about the Shark Tank episode because that was obviously a really big moment for you guys in getting sort of mass media and mass attention around the country. And it was at Steve Baxter that made a deal with you guys for 25% equity in the company. And then you guys went on to raise, I think I read it was like $1.6 million or something like that to start building this, the tech side of it. Or had you already built the tech side of it at that point?
• 19:00
  So by that stage, we had already built the tech side because we had, Sean, who was the investor who connected us, had already invested $300,000 prior to us going on Shark Tank. So we had the ability to rebuild the platform in a much better way. And instead of doing it with an offshore team, we were able to have more of,
• 19:21
  a local team that we could have bug fixes and all the things that you dream of when you're first starting out. We had like, you know, the creme de la creme of app developers. So we'd rebuilt the platform already and we went on Shark Tank as an exposure opportunity and also...
• 19:43
  Also as an investment opportunity, like we were in cap raising mode anyway. So we were like, why not? It's very easy to quickly spend $300,000 as well. So we knew that that wasn't going to last us forever. So while we had momentum, we were on a roll. We were like, let's just keep going. So, yeah, Steve offered...
• 20:01
  $250,000 for 25%, I think it was, which was a lower valuation than what we had already agreed to with Sean. And we didn't want to create a down round. So we essentially accepted the deal on air, but unbeknownst to...
• 20:18
  most people, we didn't accept Steve's money. Afterwards, you have a number of weeks worth of due diligence that you enter into and either party is able to pull out if they choose. And so, we pulled out. And the good thing was that that exposure
• 20:34
  led us to other investors who jumped on board and agreed to our new valuation. So we were able to then raise an additional $600,000, I think at a $1.8 million valuation. And then finally, our valuation, you know, a couple of years later, was it, you know, at $5 million, we raised more money. So yeah, that's just how we kept growing.
• 20:59
  And I want to talk about how you guys in more recent years were approaching your marketing and acquiring new customers. Once you'd really sort of stepped into the new tech platform that you'd built and you were really thriving, what were the sort of things that you were doing to acquire new people and market the business?
• 21:18
  Shark Tank was the catalyst to our success and off the back of Shark Tank, fortunately, Endemol Shine, who is the production company, they're the whole company behind the show Shark Tank. They sort of take you along for the ride and offer you up to other Channel 10, Network 10 TV shows. So, you know, I was getting...
• 21:41
  emails asking me to be on Survivor as, you know, they needed a female entrepreneur. And then we went on like Studio 10 and you go do the rounds of all the news shows. And that was amazing because it was free publicity. And we didn't realize how many people tuned into Shark Tank. It is the most popular show in winter in Australia. There were 1.7 million
• 22:06
  viewers of our show the night it aired and then it reran three times over three weeks. And also we were the feature of the ads. So it was like these two young girls, it was like this cliffhanger kind of ad that was being shown. And so we had a really, really high volume of like the viewership was really high for our episode and they saved us for the end because the...
• 22:33
  soundbite that the ads were showing was Steve Baxter saying, this is the best pitch we've ever seen on Shark Tank. So I think anyone who was loving the show was like waiting for our episode to air. And it just got us a lot of attention. And then off the back of that, you know, journalists start reaching out to you, you get Mumbrella, you get...
• 22:53
  BNT, you get newspapers, Daily Telegraph, The Australian, The Fin Review, like everyone knows who you are. And then also in the startup community, you're solidified. It's like, wow, okay, this is a growing tech startup in Sydney. And so we...
• 23:08
  It truthfully, we didn't do anything. It was all reactive PR. We tried a little bit of Facebook marketing for a little while and I can't remember how much we spent. It wouldn't have been more than $1,500 a month.
• 23:23
  Um, but we were very much just like a brand awareness, um, word of mouth kind of company. And we decided to focus solely on quality, bringing on quality vetted professionals, because we knew that if you had an amazing experience on Glamazon, you'd
• 23:41
  You would tell your friends and, you know, then more and more people would book. We'd get this great word of mouth, great reviews. And that's pretty much what happened. And so we were able to, instead of investing in marketing, we were able to invest more in building a stronger tech platform. And what we did was we built mini websites for each of the beauty professionals that came on board.
• 24:04
  so that you could book them. So they would change their Instagram bio to their own URL, which was technically a Glamazon booking platform, but it was just a website for them. You could see their services, you could connect it to their calendars and you just booked in, but we owned that booking. And that was a really clever thing for us to have built. And we were proud to have invested our capital into that because then also our beauty professionals became like our sales force. Their Instagrams became...
• 24:32
  you know, a connection into our booking platform. And that's sort of how we took the market on. But, yeah, as a publicist, I was really just PR was like our best channel and that's what we kept pushing for years to come and as well as emails, like emailing our subscribers and our database with, you know, a VIP discount code here and there was also great.
• 24:54
  was also really great. And something else that I'm just remembering is we had partnerships with like Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia. So we were doing hair and makeup behind the scenes there. And that's how we started doing corporate jobs. So I guess the more exposure we had to high profile events and in publications, the more seen we were, um, that in conjunction with a high quality service meant that we were able to scale quite quickly. Yeah.
• 25:22
  And when you kind of grew this business to this point and you and Lisa were really thriving, at what point did you guys say, okay, maybe we're interested in selling the business and moving on to the next thing? Because this is obviously such huge, exciting news for you. You released that information. Was it the start of this year that you announced it? Yeah, in February.
• 25:43
  that you had sold the business, you guys were changing paths. That's such a big deal. When did that come about that you guys had that conversation? We'd been having that conversation since we met. That was our aligned vision. We knew that we wanted to build something of value to sell to a larger company to be able to continue to grow that. Yeah.
• 26:09
  we were both of the opinion that collaboration is key and that competition is actually an opportunity to collaborate. So just like Lisa and I were direct competitors that merged our business and overnight we doubled or maybe even tripled the size of our business just through that merger.
• 26:25
  we saw opportunities globally for the same thing. So by 2016 and 2017, we were flying all around the world to meet with our biggest competitors from Poland to New York, San Francisco, LA, around Asia. We were just really keeping in touch with people
• 26:43
  similar apps and tech platforms. We were very well aware of the venture capital scene in Australia not being as strong and supportive and that potentially hindering our ability to grow. We were also very aware of our limitations when it came to hiring prestigious technical talent that were going to be able to help us build a world-class product because
• 27:08
  any amazing technical talent in Australia were already working for the likes of Atlassian or Google, or, you know, they were being poached to work for companies in San Francisco or Texas. I mean, they were, you couldn't even keep anyone in Australia and 95% of developers are male and selling them like a beauty tech platform was just not working. So we had our own challenges, um, just
• 27:37
  by fundamentally being a beauty app and by just being Australian. And so we recognised that early on and identified the need to exit in order to be able to continue our mission to help beauty freelancers all around the world.
• 27:54
  It wasn't that we were hard on ourselves and we were being downers that we were like, oh, we can't do this. Like, why can't we just take on the world? We were just very realistic with our limitations in Australia. And we were feeling the brunt of, I guess,
• 28:10
  female entrepreneurship not being as progressive or advanced in Australia as it was in other countries. When we went to San Francisco a few times, there were female entrepreneurs being really celebrated. But in Australia, we were noticing our male counterparts receiving more funding, faster funding. We would have to go through more hurdles to get heard. So we were just really realistic, I suppose. So
• 28:36
  always kept in touch with competitors. And then it got to a point where we could either raise another round or we could look at selling the business. And that's what we started to do. We kind of started to do it both at the same time. We were like,
• 28:54
  At this stage, we were really interested in bringing on a subscription model into our platform, which would require another round of developers to hire. So we knew we needed to raise a significant amount of money. So we started to do that, but then simultaneously put our feelers out for sale opportunities. And that was in late 2019, August 2019, actually.
• 29:19
  And so what do you do in that moment? Do you just go on LinkedIn and be like, hey, my business is for sale. What's the process? How do you sell a business? Yeah. So that, I mean, I've just learned how to do that. It's pretty crazy at first. And everything that I've done is like winging it as you go along. No one teaches you like how to sell a business. No one teaches you that you need like to show someone's,
• 29:44
  what your liquidity ratio is or like show you, you know, all these like finance and accounting questions as well. Like you have to remember when you're trying to sell a business, you also need to have enough capital to like hire the right lawyers and accountants and people to support the process. So you don't want to be in a position where you're,
• 30:04
  on the down selling because then that's going to be a fire sale. We wanted to be on the, we were on the up and we were like, okay, this is a really cool opportunity. We're either going to raise a heap of money or we're going to, um, yeah, sell it to someone and keep living the dream. Um, and hopefully like work for that company.
• 30:22
  And there were a few personal things that were coming up in both of our lives as well. Lisa wanted to move back to the US, which is where her fashion label was based, and to be with her partner there. And I was getting married. So there was a lot of things in our personal lives that were sort of leaning towards let's sell. And so we were really aligned on that. But yeah, the process was basically we're raising money. Yeah.
• 30:48
  And that was to get to talk to the right people. It was either an opportunity to merge, be a joint venture, or to raise capital. So you'd go to your competitors and sort of offer that, and the conversations would be steered towards like, well, would you guys consider selling? Because you're starting to talk about how you can work together, and the bigger one of the two is usually the one to say, well, you know, like why would they partner with a smaller company when they can just...
• 31:16
  acquire that smaller company. And, um, despite the fact that we were the largest real-time marketplace for beauty services in Australia, we were still a drop in the ocean by comparison to our competitors globally, purely based on market size. Um, I think like we, you know, the same amount of people, I think it's a amount of population in Australia as there is in California. And so, um,
• 31:43
  Yeah, I mean, we were still very small compared to everyone in Asia and the US. So we would start these conversations around collaboration of some sorts, and then that would turn into sale conversations. And then when we finally decided that we were going to sell the business, not go down the route of raising capital, we put together what's called an asset flyer, and it's essentially like...
• 32:10
  a poster for everything that's great with your business, the really important numbers. So it was like a six page document of what we had built pretty much. And if they wanted to know more, they could find out more. And that's when they would, you know, we would sign some documents, like an NDA was like the first part of it before you got the asset flyer. But then after that, it was signing the appropriate documentation to start the due diligence process.
• 32:38
  which is starting a formal sale process. And that happened in, you know, phase one, you'll get this information. Phase two, you can request further information. Phase three is this. And you get like the banks involved and your accountants. And it's really hectic. It's very heavy. And you're dealing with overseas companies. The hours that you're working are really crazy because you're dealing with time differences. So I'd say it was the most crazy, stressful time.
• 33:08
  want played that card. Like once the card is played of yet we're selling, they already know your motive is to sell.
• 33:17
  Whereas before, when we were going in with the card of like, we're just raising capital and the conversations were being steered towards selling, we had the leverage of, no, that's actually not what we want to do. And they could kind of win us over. And I think the hardest part for me as someone who's like a terrible liar and a terrible, like I'm terrible at acting. I'm not a very good game player. I'm not,
• 33:43
  like really good from a strategic game playing perspective. And you need to have those skills. So we actually had the help of a broker. And I learned so much from that process. And so Urban Company acquired you and you now work for them. And you've basically brought it to a much larger audience. I assume you have much larger budgets. You're able to do all these
• 34:13
  transitioning to actually working for someone because it's been seven years of glamour zone of you being the boss you doing all these really hard decisions you going through all the ups and downs and now you're kind of in this whole other phase of being like reporting to someone and you know checking in with other people every day what's it been like
• 34:34
  Totally. It's so funny. Yeah. Seven years of running your own business and then, yeah, just like the biggest change ever. One thing that I will say is, which is pretty much
• 34:47
  how we decided to even go with Urban Company, whoever you're going to sell a startup to, your startup to, if that is what your goal is, the vision absolutely needs to be aligned and the mission needs to be aligned and you need to really like the people and you both need to walk away happy. And that's what a good deal is all about. And that's how I knew that this was the perfect fit because the vision and mission of Urban Company and just the
• 35:15
  the ambition from the founders as well and their passionate goal to just genuinely help all freelancers become entrepreneurs and to, to really, really help them. Like in India, they're three X and four X incomes and it's pretty special what they're doing. Um, that was at the core of the deal. It was that we both had that in mind. So working for a company that has the exact same goal as you, um,
• 35:44
  is easy because you, you both just want to win, like winning in your minds is the exact same thing. So that, first of all, that makes it really easy to work for them. Like I don't really feel like I work for them in the sense that I've joined this, you know, corporate organization.
• 36:03
  position. There's so much autonomy within my role. And there's a reason why they've acquired Glamazon and they've hired me to, to help with the market entry in Australia. They see value there. And so I'm given a lot of freedom and flexibility and autonomy to, to help make that happen in whatever way, shape or form that I think that that should be in as well as like everyone else on the team. They're really, the culture is pretty special and incredible at Urban Company.
• 36:31
  So I think the transition was made easier by those things. But just generally, I guess the main challenges for me were getting used to
• 36:45
  working with a team based on somebody else's clock. Like when it was Glamazon, it was 24-7. I took Glamazon to the shower with me. I took it to the beach. I took it to my parents' house. I took it to a party on the weekend. Like it's always with you 24-7 in a much more spread out way in that if I'm having a freak out or just like –
• 37:11
  I can't take it anymore. I'll like have a break and go to the beach or like for a walk or I'll go for a swim and I'll, you know, decompress. Whereas you can't do that when you're working with a team collectively day in, day out, you have set working hours. Like you've just got to show up and be there. Um,
• 37:30
  And so that was a big challenge to transition, but I'm loving it. I'm absolutely loving it. And I love working with the team, you know, Monday to Friday. Obviously, the weekends, we're still like on Slack and communicating, but I really do feel like I switch off on the weekends and I allow myself to have tech-free time and to spend time with the ones that I really love.
• 37:52
  want to spend time with and my loved ones because that is a big sacrifice that I did make and you do make when you have a startup is that it becomes your heart and soul and your baby and you lose friends and inevitably because you just don't have time there aren't enough hours in the day to devote yourself to
• 38:11
  to everything that you want. So I remember even in the early days of Glamazon being asked to come to this Christmas party or to that birthday and just saying no, A, because I didn't have the money. But B, I just didn't feel like I had the time and I couldn't afford to have a hangover because I needed to be up at 6am for customer service on a Saturday because I was pretending to be Phoebe from customer service. And, you know, I needed to have my, be on my A game. So yeah, there are so many sacrifices you make. Um,
• 38:40
  But no, I'm so privileged to be working with Urban Company and for Urban Company because they truly have nailed the business model. They are exceptional leaders. The company itself, like the systems and processes are flawless and I'm learning so much. And that is something I really miss.
• 39:04
  is that when I was building Glamazon, I was winging it every day and learning through making mistakes. And now I'm in an environment where I'm learning by being taught how to build certain systems and processes around the things that I'm doing, how to structure certain marketing plans and things like that. And that feels really fulfilling right now for me.
• 39:29
  I'm just so happy for you. So, so happy. That is so cool. Thank you. What advice do you have for women who are wanting to launch their own business? So first of all, tell as many people and friends as you can. Collect really good feedback that's honest. Don't just ask your mum. Like, ask me.
• 39:56
  friends who will give you an honest opinion and also because they can connect you to the right people. The second thing would be get a mentor because someone who's been down the same road that you're about to embark on
• 40:12
  before you is going to steer you in the right direction. It will save you a lot of time and energy and money and stress. And one of my most common questions is how do you get a mentor? But the only way you get a mentor is by putting yourself out there, going to every meetup. If you're really going to commit to starting a startup, get onto meetups.com, get onto any kind of Facebook startup group, community,
• 40:37
  join like-minded bitches drinking wine, like show up, be there, go to every seminar, buy a ticket to every talk because you're going to be surrounded by like-minded people. And one conversation will lead to another conversation, which will lead to an introduction, which will lead to a mentor. So, yeah, I would say they're, they're two huge pieces of advice. As a woman specifically, um,
• 41:01
  I've learned that there is a huge advantage and benefit to being the only woman in a room full of men and how you can command a space and a room and attention in a way that a man can't when you're the only woman doing it. I think also because maybe it feels a little bit unexpected still. So we can leverage the fact that whilst society has grown in terms of
• 41:28
  women having more power and rights, there's still a long way to go. And we're in this sort of golden opportunity where you can still in a way leverage that and just
• 41:41
  do it. Like, don't be afraid, put yourself out there, record yourself on Instagram and put it up. Like don't, I think fear squashes so many dreams. And I think just, this is very cliche to say, but we regret the things that we don't do. So if you don't put up that video on Instagram, if you don't put up that post on Facebook, if you don't put yourself out there, how are you ever going to know? Like if you never try, you'll never know.
• 42:11
  That's really cool. That's going to be one of my quotes that I use on social media. I also just really quickly wanted to ask you, you mentioned about the industry in Australia for investors supporting female founded businesses. How do you imagine that can change? What can everyone do to change that?
• 42:33
  I think it is changing just as everywhere else is changing. It's just that females tend to build businesses that relate to problems that they experience in their day-to-day life, i.e. around beauty, fashion, parenting, a lot of mummy kind of platforms. And that inevitably doesn't connect with women.
• 42:58
  a male investor instantly. You have to really explain it to them. The penny doesn't drop until like maybe the second or third meeting. And you're really lucky to even be able to get a seat at that second or third meeting. So unlike a guy who might start a car startup or something that's very male oriented,
• 43:18
  it's easy to connect or communicate the value proposition instantly. And so I think that's where the real challenge is. I don't think it's a misogyny issue or I don't think it's that we're not progressing as fast as the rest of the world. I just think inherently women solve women problems. So I'm seeing like fertility kind of startups or like subscription
• 43:47
  female hygiene product startups. I'm seeing, yeah, like tampons startups coming up. Like that's a really hard thing to sell to a male investor. And majority of the investors are male in the scene in Australia, but my advice would be,
• 44:05
  try to get a female mentor, try to talk to female investment groups. There are so many that are popping up now and just surround yourself with like-minded females to be able to have a female at that meeting so that they can connect with the problem that you're trying to solve.
• 44:25
  So good. I really love this episode. This was amazing. I have the six quick questions that I want to ask you. Number one is what's your why? My why in general is to...
• 44:44
  have a fulfilling life. I always, I consider success to be waking up every day, feeling challenged and making that, uh, and that would make me feel fulfilled because I'm learning every day. I never want to stop.
• 45:02
  learning. My why for what I'm doing right now specifically is to genuinely move the industry to help beauty professionals become entrepreneurs, to change the way the salon industry is, and to liberate these beauty professionals from a low earning salon wage. So that's my mission. But my general life mission is just to live a fulfilled life. I don't want to be on my death bed and wish that I did something or have any regrets. I just want to go
• 45:30
  go for everything. So I'm a big dreamer and I just go after every, every dream that I have pretty much. And if it fails, that's fine. Cause I always learn from it. You absolutely do. Number two is what's the one marketing thing that made your business pop? And I'm sure I already know the answer.
• 45:52
  Yeah, with Star Tank for sure. So any kind of free TV exposure that you can get is fantastic or free radio exposure. I think that that absolutely was but also as a little tip, something that really worked for us was signing up to Social Diary
• 46:12
  So Social Diary is basically an online platform that has a lot of journalists and media people who are searching for stories or they're searching for products for certain like sponsorships at events. And a newsletter will go out every day at midday and you find out what these journalists are looking for, what media people are looking for, what publicists are looking for.
• 46:36
  And you can fit your brand into one of those boxes. And we got so much press that way. And it's like $1,000 a year. And that is way cheaper than any PR agency. So I would say that's like a big hack as well. Yeah, that's a great tip. Number three is where do you hang out to get smarter?
• 46:58
  Well, I have like a little group of like entrepreneur friends. I mean, you're the same doing, you surround yourself. It's funny, you just like wake up and you're 30 and it's like your closest friends are all entrepreneurs because naturally entrepreneurs gravitate towards each other and I think you are the company you keep. And so over the years, I've definitely created a small group of friends that are all, they're either leaders in whatever industry
• 47:26
  industry they're in, whether they work for, you know, Airbnb, you know, one of my best friends is, as you know, him as well as the head of marketing for Australia at Airbnb, or they're just running their own businesses. They've started their own businesses. And that's how I get smarter. On top of which podcasts are incredible, obviously such incredible information, learning from
• 47:49
  interviews with people who've done it all before and books, although I'm not into physical books as much anymore, audio books, just from a time-saving perspective. I think it's great to be able to go for a walk or be in the shower and be consuming information without having to set aside that, you know, hour or two hours to sit down and read a book.
• 48:10
  Yeah, the book thing is really tough. I've been using that app Blinkist where it gives you the 15 minute kind of recap of the top line points and I bloody love it. It's so good. Yeah, it is so good. It can, it's like a rabbit hole though. Like you get a bit addicted and it's good. It probably is good to still read that. I'm just very much in love with the podcast medium and audio book medium. I think it's, I consume information and I retain it really
• 48:40
  Yeah. Question number four is how do you win the day? And it's around your AM and PM rituals that set you up for success and productivity and happiness. Winning the day is 100% about waking up early, like 5.30. If you can set your alarm for 5.30 and wake up, do exercise in the morning.
• 49:05
  and then come home and make your bed and make sure your room is clean, that sets me up for success. It sounds so silly, but everything comes down to waking up early. I think being able to watch the sunrise as well. There's something about the metaphor almost of the sun coming up and that being a new beginning and a new day for you to attack the day, attack whatever's going to
• 49:30
  challenge is going to hit you that day. Yeah. Doing exercise in the morning because endorphins are great and it just sets you up and just making your bed and having a clean space makes you feel super organized and starts me off on a productive road for the day. So that's how I win the day. And I go to bed early. I just, I get eight hours sleep minimum every night. So I'm always in bed. Like I'm in bed at nine, nine 30 and like dead asleep by 10.
• 49:59
  Oh my gosh, it's nearly your bedtime. It's going to be quarter to seven. Still a few hours to go. Question number five is if you only had $1,000 left in your business bank account, where would you have spent it?
• 50:16
  I mean, this is a tough question because it depends where, what stage of the business you're at and how great the product is. If your product is working, I just invested in marketing because the more you invest, the more customers you get back. Like that's an easy one. The challenge with startups is while that sounds really easy to just build a product and then market it, the product is never right anymore.
• 50:43
  when you're building supply and demand, there's always churn. There's always, you know, so many other overheads to think about. Um, but I think if the product was in a really great position and supply wasn't an issue, um, yeah, I'd invested in, in probably Facebook ads. Yeah. And last question is how do you deal with failure? Um, yeah.
• 51:08
  I don't know why I've never, it's never phased me at all. I don't know where that comes from. I probably need like a therapy session over like why something in my upbringing has made me quite resilient to failure. Like, of course I have my off days and I think it's removing the ego. I think if you don't, if you're not attached to something that,
• 51:34
  there's no way for you to let it get to you that badly that it can ruin your life or even your day. I think there's been a lot of disappointing moments. There's been so many tears that come out of frustration because you're putting in so much energy and maybe that doesn't get the ROI that you want for that particular day or that particular task or project. But in terms of failure, as long as you're quickly failing and just moving on,
• 52:01
  Failure is actually amazing because every time you fail, you're just one step closer to solving the problem. So I've genuinely never been that phased by failure. And I actually, if I had one wish, it would be to probably change the word failure to like lesson or yeah, failure should be called lesson. It's not even failure. It's just learning something, learning that something didn't quite work and that you should pivot towards something that does and try again.
• 52:30
  Thank you so much for being on the podcast. This was the best. I loved it. Loved it. Where can people find you? They can find me on Insta at Lauren double underscore Warwick. New last name. New last name. Yeah, that's exciting. They can find Urban Company at Urban Company, sorry, at Beauty underscore Urban Company.
• 52:58
  And then we do at home beauty services all around Sydney, but we also do at home cleaning services. That's like pretty much getting a hotel cleaner to come to your house. And it's just epic. So that's at urban company underscore Australia. Amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dune.
• 53:24
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 53:49
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 54:11
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that. Thank you.
• 54:28
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 54:52
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 55:15
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that. Thank you.