Not many people trade in both a successful finance career and the chance to get a Harvard diploma for the opportunity to launch a business. But that’s what Sarah Paiji Yoo did. And when she found success and sold her first company, she knew that she could never satisfy that entrepreneurial itch by doing anything but building another company. Sarah went on to co-found a start-up studio and helped launch a number of other companies, including M.Gemi and Rockets of Awesome, but she craved more. Ultimately, she wanted to dig into something that served a deeper purpose. 

Today, Sarah is a co-founder of Blueland, a consumer products company on a mission to eliminate single-use plastic packaging. The way Sarah and her team are accomplishing that mission has started with creating a new way to develop and use cleaning products and has included a stop along the way in the Shark Tank, where Mr. Wonderful himself, Kevin O’Leary, bought into the company. 

On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Sarah sheds light on common mistakes that young entrepreneurs make when they are starting out, as well as shares the secrets for avoiding those mistakes. Plus, she explains what the holy grail metric is for judging the health of your company. 

3 Takeaways:

• In the early days when you only have one or two products that consumers buy, it’s easy to keep track of how people get funneled through. As you begin to expand your product offerings, measuring acquisition behavior and retention becomes more important in being able to judge the health of the company and the new products brought to market. 
• The importance of focusing on product-market fit can’t be overstated. Often, young companies and their founders get caught in the trap of trying to please investors or race to profitability through clever marketing or other shortcuts. The only way to achieve meaningful, sustained success is to know you have product-market fit from the get-go, and then optimizing your strategy from there.  
• You can still do something even if you don’t have all the pieces to the puzzle. Even though an idea seems simple, there are always going to be complications to work through. Being tenacious and having grit are the keys to being able to see you vision through to completion.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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Transcript:

Stephanie:

Hey, everyone. This is Stephanie Postles, your host of Up Next in Commerce. Today we have Sarah Paiji Yoo on the show, the co-founder and CEO at Blueland. Sarah, how are you?

Sarah:

I'm great, how are you, Stephanie?

Stephanie:

Doing well. And you're calling in from New York, right?

Sarah:

Yeah. Good, old New York City.

Stephanie:

Yeah, how's New York life right now?

Sarah:

New York life, it certainly feels ... It's funny, because I feel like in the beginning, we definitely were the hotspot of coronavirus. But now it feels like one of the safer places to be, given the high immunity. So, it's good. I think it's a little unfortunate that summer now, it's my favorite season in New York, so, it's unfortunate that we're still, for the most part, having to stay at home. But I think we got in our groove and it has definitely given at least my family the opportunity to force ourselves to find other ways to explore nature right outside New York City.

Stephanie:

So, I'd love to dive a bit into your background before we get into Blueland. Because I read some interesting things about you about having some Ecommerce companies in the past and dropping out of Harvard MBA program and I'd love to hear a bit about your journey of how you got to where you are today.

Sarah:

Yeah, absolutely. So, I guess if I were to start way back, I started my career actually pretty traditionally in finance and consulting. Certainly early in my career I actually had no aspirations to be an entrepreneur. I always consider myself relatively risk-averve so it is interesting to see how life unfolds. But yeah, I started my career very traditionally after those stints in consulting and finance, which I actually wouldn't trade for the world. I really appreciate the experiences and the skillsets that I picked up and the frameworks it gave me to really think about the world and business.

Sarah:

But after those stints I decided to go back to Harvard for business school, to really, most of all to be able to have the time to step back and reflect on what it was that I wanted to do next. Because I think my early experiences, if anything, taught me that I wasn't a lifer in terms of professional services, I really wanted to be more in the driver's seat and wanted to be at a company versus advising the company. And so, yeah, I made the decision to go to business school. And when I got to business school it was a really interesting time because there had been, right before I came, a series of female founders that had started very impressive companies, GuildCrew, Birchbox, Rent the Runway, LearnVest, Katrina who started Stitch Fix with just one year ahead of me in business school.

Sarah:

And that was extremely inspiring for me just to see a set of women who were young and had a very similar background or set of experience as myself and see them so quote, unquote, early in their career, setting out to build their own business. And I decided that given business school ... You can make what you want of business school but it doesn't have to be particularly rigorous. And so, I had more time on my hands than I did previously what I was working in, so I decided to really use that time and try to start a business while I was in business school. And a few months in I ended up starting work on my first startup, which was Snapette, which was a mobile shopping app that helps consumers find products and stores around them.

Sarah:

I was really excited about everything that I was seeing around smartphones and the mobile space. And this was still pretty early on. So, this was almost 10 years ago, pre Instagram days, if you can imagine a world before Instagram.

Stephanie:

Tough world to start in.

Sarah:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, that's the first business I decided to start while in school. I ended up raising a round of venture capital that summer between my first and what was supposed to be my second year of business school. And so made ... it was actually a very easy decision, to drop out of Harvard and continue to just work on Snapette. And I ended up scaling that business for the next about three and a half years to a small team, about 20 people. And then we ended up selling that business to one of the world's largest stock search engines at the time, called PriceGrabber. Again, almost four years in. And-

Stephanie:

That's amazing. What was the process like, selling the company? Did you actively go about selling your company or were you approached? Or how did that look? I heard a good quote the other day that companies don't just get acquired, you actually need to actively go and sell your company if you want it to be sold sometimes.

Sarah:

It's interesting because I've also heard the opposite.

Stephanie:

Oh, interesting.

Sarah:

Which I can related to both [inaudible 00:05:48]. I was actually worried with the phrase, but we were lucky in terms of we received an inbound.

Stephanie:

Oh, nice.

Sarah:

That tipped us off to, "Oh, this might actually be a good time to sell. And the context of that period was, I started Snapette at a time when Mary Meeker and a lot of these industry experts were saying, "Oh, mobile's going to be the future. People are going to spend more time on their phones than on their desktop," and that seemed inconceivable, the early days as she was saying that. And when we sold, that's when we were seeing about 30% of site traffic, to many of the major sites coming from mobile instead of desktop. So, it still hadn't flipped yet.

Sarah:

But it definitely felt like it was coming. And so, yeah, we had an inbound from a traditional, online, non-mobile player. And that kick started me to reach out to a few more folks in the space that had a similar profile, because if we were going to engage in these conversations I thought, "Let's run a robust process," because obviously competition can always help drive a better outcome. And so that's what I did. And ended up not really engaging a bank or anything. That's where my former finance experience definitely did come in handy because I did have experience buying and selling companies and so I understood ad a high level what that process looked like. And so, yeah, we were able to quarter back that process in-house and get a few offers and ultimately find an acquirer for our business.

Stephanie:

That's amazing. So, at that point you got the itch to start another company? You're like, "This is great. I'm going for round two."

Sarah:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. So, initially we had ... Not initially. We had a one year lockup with the parent company. And so our whole team moved over. And it was interesting, I think initially I was extremely