Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Get a Signed Copy of Your Hype Girl! + Tea Drops Founder Sashee Chandran's Key Takeaway "Failed Concepts Can Lead to Bigger Things"
Transcript
- 0:00Hello, this is Dune here, your host and hype girl.
- 0:08Wow. Launch week has gone by so much quicker than expected. Oh my freaking God. I hope you have been enjoying being part of this huge, huge milestone for Female Startup Club. If you missed the memo yesterday, I am doing a 48-hour only signed copy initiative. So if you hop onto Amazon, buy the Kindle, it's 99 cents, and leave me an epic review, it's
- 0:38Just send me through a screenshot of it on email and I will send you a signed copy of the book. Yay! Okay, so today's reflection is on Sashi Chandran. It's on her chapter in the book, which is chapter 48. I'm going to open up the book now. Love this part. Okay, so it's chapter 48 and it's called To a T.
- 1:08Sashi is the founder and CEO of Tea Drops. Founded in 2015, Tea Drops is a super innovative, planet-conscious tea company with a simple philosophy to make drinking tea more fun and also environmentally friendly.
- 1:25By making an assortment of bagless organic leaf teas, their products shed 20% less waste than traditional tea bags, and they've become a favorite among new and experienced tea drinkers alike, including Michelle Obama and Tory Burch.
- 1:42Sashi told me about what her startup story was like, what it took to get off the ground and how you can go from having no network, zero network when it comes to angel or institutional investors to having a thriving community of people ready to invest their money in you. We also chatted about what it means to have controlled luck and what you can do to bring it to life in your own business today.
- 2:08Also worth mentioning that the tea bags are little love hearts, little flowers, and they are just so, so cute. Love that for us tea drinkers. Sashi came from an entrepreneurial family and was inspired by her parents who both always had side hustles in addition to their nine to fives. In terms of tea drinking, she also has the ultimate heritage. Her mom is Chinese and her dad is Sri Lankan.
- 2:36So following her parents' example, she started working from a young age with her own side hustles. At 13, she had babysitting jobs and worked at the gym. And throughout her teens, she had various side gigs at school selling jewelry and other bits and bobs. And the takeaway from this chapter is this. Failed concepts can lead to bigger things.
- 3:03Let me say it again, just so it can sink in. Failed concepts can lead to bigger things. Sashi's entrepreneurial spirit continued after high school, and she tried her hand at several businesses before coming across her tea concept. Many startup entrepreneurs, with myself included, will agree that on the journey to finding the business that is the one, it's so important to try out many, many other ideas.
- 3:33because statistically, most business ideas will fail quickly. And this is actually where the invaluable lessons are learned. In addition to that, one business can open a door of opportunity for another, sometimes in the most unlikely way. Sashi always had this hope that she would be an entrepreneur in a way, but she didn't recognize it like that at the time.
- 3:59Prior to Tea Drops, which has now had so much success, she had a lot of other failed concepts, like this one, the cookie concept. She would go to artisan shows and the whole concept was baking a custom cookie on the spot. So basically you have your cookie dough, you would come up, choose your mixes, you know, walnuts, chocolate chips, M&Ms, et cetera. And she had a basic convection travel oven.
- 4:26She tested out that concept and it went well. It was okay. Except one day she was invited to this fair at the height of summer and it was going to be over a hundred degrees. And she was thinking to herself, like, there is no way people want freshly baked hot cookies on a summer day.
- 4:46Anyway, in the meantime, on the side of that, she was already working on these prototypes for tea drops, and she probably had about 40 to 50 already made. So she brought the prototypes to the show just to try and sell in case she couldn't sell the cookies. And what ended up happening is that the tea drops totally sold out, and she sold very few cookies. So in this moment, she kind of used that as her validation to quit the cookie thing and focus on the tea drops.
- 5:15And I don't know about you, but this resonates with me like so much. Failed concepts can lead to bigger things is the story of my life. Probably similar to a lot of you listening to the show as well, I'm someone who's always had a bank of a kajillion ideas in my mind. And on top of that, there's the stuff I actually have tried and failed at as well.
- 5:40I've made candles under the name Candle Chick Maker. Still have that URL, by the way, which I think is so cute and so lol, if anyone wants it. I also went down a fragrance path at some point and was experimenting in that side of things. I built the content agency arm of my husband's tech business. Then there was the D2C jewelry business, where I was both ordering and hand-making pieces. Then there was the non-alcoholic wine business for a hot second last year.
- 6:08And all of this stuff could technically be filed under failures, sure, especially the jewelry biz and the non-alcoholic wine. But this has just all been leading me here to this moment, to this point with Female Startup Club and Your Hype Girl. If I didn't work on my husband's business, I'd have to do it.
- 6:32I might not have ever started the DTC jewelry business. And I never would have started having these conversations with my girlfriends about what they were doing to grow their business. And that's what's brought me here to Female Startup Club. So yeah, it really resonates with me. Failed concepts truly can lead to bigger things. And as I always like to say on the show, where you start isn't where you finish.
- 6:59Alrighty, that is my two cents for today. This is the last episode of launch week content. If you enjoyed this mini episode, you are going to love my book, Your Hype Girl. And like I mentioned at the start of this episode, just for yesterday and today, if you bought the Kindle version on Amazon yesterday or today,
- 7:21and you leave the book the best review ever on Amazon, you can send me a screenshot and I will send you a signed copy of the book. And remember, it finishes today. So my inbox is open. I'm waiting to hear from you. Please drop into my inbox. It's hello at femalestartupclub.com. That's all for this week. Back to normal programming from Monday. See you soon. Bye.
- 8:03Hey, 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.
- 8:28And 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.
- 8:50As 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.