Scentbird CEO’s journey to building a multimillion dollar company

2019 and last year only two percent of companies that got funding from venture capitalists were female founded two percent while i was in new york i had the chance to stop by one of these companies and learn about how they did it maria nurismalova is the ceo and co-founder of scentbird a company that started in 2014 and has since grown to over 100 employees and 250 000 subscribers of the product but in general this kind of like right starts straight into the working area can you tell where fragrance company has a bunch of fragrances and if you follow me i'll show you the boardroom i got bitten by the entrepreneurial bug pretty early in the game i think i might have been about 10 years old and my girlfriend and i decided that we would make little toys and we would make them with beads just like different color beads and we could make like little crocodiles and like lizards with little beads and then when i was about 12 i learned about a company called avon and it's makeup right and it's beauty products so that was like totally my passion so i tried to convince my mom to allow me to become a representative at 12. wow it's illegal you can't so i went to my best friend's mom and i'm like my mom wouldn't sign for me she wouldn't let me do it could you like become the representative but i'll sell and she said yes and so i convinced my best friend's mom to sign on and become a representative and i would just you know sell makeup to people and it worked many years later maria would come up with the idea for her current venture center if you're an avid youtube viewer you've probably already heard of it but if not it is a monthly subscription that lets you try a new perfume each month i was just hoping and dreaming one day somebody would build a website that would allow me to discover new fragrances from the comfort of my couch in my pjs that was like the vision in the early days the website was really really simple so it was just basically somebody coming onto the site typing in um three to five fragrances they absolutely loved the algorithm then would go to the keywords for each of these favorite fragrances of a particular person and then they would be like okay let's find some other things for them to try the recommender worked but they had a problem they couldn't monetize a recommender we hit a pain point of consumers then we had to turn it into a business and that was a really really tricky thing to do so we went through three business models the first was to send the customer five fragrance samples and then allow them to upgrade on the scentbird website while people did enjoy the five little samples nobody ever upgraded to a full-size bottle you know what kind of started just being in our heads a lot because i was such a user of the category i thought i had all the answers but as a founder you don't always have the answers sometimes you just have the right questions after one business model would fail they'd quickly try another you're thinking okay well maybe they're not upgrading because it's too early still should i give them a little bit more time i don't want to bug them per se and then it takes you a little bit of the time to realize they're just not really coming back every day you see how less money you have in your bank account your friends and parents ask about hey how what do you think about your future once you start pursuing your you know your heart's desire you're playing high stakes like poker game because you're all in all the time and and if it fails you really you really feel it it got to the point where they considered ditching the idea of fragrance altogether but eventually they landed on a model that really worked the ceo of white combinator told us that like we spent a year working on fragrance market nobody knows this market better than you you should keep trying and he gave us this idea that people want fragrances but in smaller sizes what if they wanted a new fragrance every month and then it hit me and i'm like what if they indeed wanted a new one every month and then it was a matter of figuring out what is that right vehicle right because if you're changing your fragrances all the time you don't really need a large bottle per se all the time once we launched this business model we started getting very stable traffic so we started getting sales without having a marketing budget day one the first day we got like 30 sales the next day 40 then 50 100. my experience before has been if you build something you have to like beg your family your friends to be you're that first pioneer and like try it out we didn't have to say anything they just purchased and i'm like huh what is it and we're getting organic sales all of a sudden after a year of misery we had around 200 subscribers and here after launching this product in the months we had 300 subscribers it was success 300 subscribers was a good start but they would have to raise money to really get this going describe the process of raising money for scentbird and how you got into your first accelerator and where you went from there i i knew one of the founders of the accelerator every time i would have a new venture or an idea i would kind of tell him we would have you know catch ups or meet at events and so when i told him that i was building this fragrance business he's like you should totally apply i'm like uh okay sure that forty thousand dollars was not terribly complicated but if forty thousand dollars only lasts you so long we needed to buy inventory and you know boxes and bubble mailers and uh it was it takes cash we got all this orders 300 orders even before we got the packaging from china and then the packaging arrived and then we're like oh now what should we do we don't have labor we don't have people to fill all these orders so we have to fill all these orders by our own during the night hours like between nine and uh i don't know 5 a.m repackaging perfumes and sending them to our customers to keep scentbird going maria needed to raise a hundred thousand dollars i went through a lot of no's i never really calculated how many it was definitely like many dozens like back to back to back to back she was able to raise the money from their first investor john in part by telling him they'd be accepted into one of the most competitive startup incubators y combinator john listened to that and gave us a check he wrote us a check or what were you thinking also were you like okay i'm pretty sure we'll get in i was so sure we're gonna get in because i i knew my combinator was smart i thought we had something of value they just had one slight problem they actually ended up getting rejected from y combinator it was a shock to me it was such a disappointment but looking back and like now i understand why then we had a hundred thousand dollars and we were in business and then the business was growing still and even more so and we're getting amazing feedback from users so i went back to john i was like uh yeah john we did not get into y combinator however look sunbird is growing here's another growth graph and six months later they ended up getting accepted into white combinator marie is definitely the person i want to be when i grow up and i'm already an adult it's one of those things that she is a true leader i mean sometimes we're here and it's like after nine o'clock where you can come to her with any problem or any topic and she's very quick to like be knowledgeable and like answer anything and her number one quality is that she's very trustworthy i don't think there was anything particularly at school that allowed me to prepare for this journey it was all a little bit theoretical you have a lot of questions and no answers initially and then i knew that one day this big dream of mine of building a beauty company is going to come true but it felt like it felt like such a big dream that i kept postponing it and i said well you know what when i'm like wise enough when i'm old enough when i'm like when i have experience under my belt i realize that i might never get there yeah i might never get to a point where i feel smart enough or i just feel enough to do it and so i just said you know what this is now's a good time as ever and i'll just learn by doing to aspiring entrepreneurs i would say start small don't postpone your dream like if you don't think you can go all in and you know make this a full-time thing do something that would get you closer to the goal but also never giving up on your dream yeah just keep going you know stand up if the world bits you down because there is always light at the end of the tunnel whether you see it or not okay i hope you guys enjoyed this video i really enjoyed making it and i want to make this a series but i don't know what to call it so if you guys have any suggestions comment down below also if you guys have suggestions of anyone you want me to make a video like this about comment that down below i have kind of a running list thank you so much maria for letting me follow you around for a day it's definitely like this video wasn't sponsored or anything like that i just thought it would be a cool video to make i could just tell following maria around she's someone that doesn't let a no stop her she doesn't give up and i think that's awesome and something that everyone should try and be more like so hopefully this inspired you guys if you want to see more of a behind the scenes and some of the extra footage that didn't make it into this video i will put that up on my vlog channel soon so go subscribe to that channel down below and that is it i will see you guys in my next video [Music] bye

Channel: Shelby Church

Views: 1,110,496

Keywords: multi million dollar company, ceo, Entrepreneur, day in the life of an entrepreneur, how to, how to build a company, female founder, 5 Women Entrepreneurs Share Their Secrets To Success, ceo morning routine, ceo night routine, founder, Day in the Life of a Young Female Entrepreneur

Id: CnJT0fMmcWU

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 14 2019