# Founder Group Chat: A Big Moment for Female Founders | Inc.

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Inc.
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GSL1bQP0i0

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GSL1bQP0i0) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

And I remember when we were starting, people said, "That's way too sciency. Women aren't going to get that. They're not going to like it. " In the interview, the journalist said to me, "Aren't you going to make women hysterical if you give them this information? " Which is just, "You can't make it up. — We've all been there. Your team's feedback is scattered across emails, chats, and sticky notes. It's a mess. But PDF spaces in Adobe Acrobat gives you one collaborative workspace to streamline every file and comment. Learn more at adobe. com/do that Acrobat. — Welcome to the business model by Inc. I'm Sarah Lynch. Today we have another edition of founder group chat with our panel of female founder honores. Last week you heard the first part of a conversation with Rachel Liverman CEO and founder of GlowBar, Angela Veranic, co-founder and chief product officer of Littlespoon, and Priyanka Jane, co-founder and CEO of Evie. We discussed the challenges of raising money for women led founder groups. In this part of the conversation, we flipped that idea on its head and unpack the unique opportunities women led startups offer investors. Let's get to it. We are back with Priyanka, Angela, and Rachel and really had a great discussion about fundraising. And now I want to dive further into the market of women and women as power consumers. And on that note, I kind of want to bring up a stat from a study from BCG from 2024 that found that women manage 32 trillion in global spending and 3/4 of discretionary spending. But they often say that they're not really satisfied with the products and services that are at their fingertips. So this seems really eye opening because it really indicates that women here are an untapped market in many different ways and that they're looking for products and services that serve them better. So Priyanka, I want to start with you. the fem market as it's been called um is projected to surpass 97 billion by 2030. Um so talk about rich ground and I know that women's health and um health technology is just one aspect of that but I want to ask you to talk about more when you present in your industry. How are you kind of honing in on that market in pitches with investors in reaching consumers and all of that? Well, first of all, I actually think that number is extremely low because if you look at the different areas of women's health, I mean, I think menopause alone is now called a $600 billion market. So, I think the markets in women's health are massive. And part of our job again is educating investors in the world about if you take the number of women who have a problem times the amount of money that women are willing to spend on a solution, the concept of a ghost market, which means like actually there is no solution. So, we're not quantifying the market correctly. we're assuming incorrectly that the market is small because there is not a lot of money being spent today, but actually the market is massive if there would be a solution if that makes sense. And so I actually think that's so interesting. I think for women consumers that is the case in so many areas of our lives where if there was a solution to — fill in the blank million problems we have, I'm sure we would buy them. But those solutions just don't exist. And so people inherently believe there's no market. And so I think part of it is redefining and re-educating people on how large those markets are. I think the other thing we did a lot of was explaining the white space and just to be a little bit more tangible. So I mentioned before how there's no research on women all the things very depressing. Um when you look at even you know funding to women is depressing but then also funding to women's health is depressing in the sense that if you look at all dollars that have gone into digital health I think it's something like 3% has gone to women's health focused solutions and of that 3% almost 70% has gone only to fertility and pregnancy solutions because obviously we are just our ability to have children. Um but then when you look at global kind of R&D spend by from a biioharma level it's something like 1% of global pharma R&D spend goes towards women's health. Um and you look at the US and it's something like 4 to 7% of our NIH budget goes to women's health. Right? So when you start to put together the lack of funding that has gone towards these areas you combine that with the amount of money that women are willing to spend themselves the amount of money that we are spending as a health care system because we don't have good solutions. you start to say, okay, there's clearly opportunity here. People willing to spend money, payers who want to save money, clear lack of solutions, etc. I think pointing to the white space for us specifically, one of the things we thought about a lot was we did not lead with this is the right thing to do. This

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GSL1bQP0i0&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

is moral issue. Of course, it is. Of course, we're all pissed off that we have the experiences that we do, that we're dismissed at the doctor's office, that there are no diagnostics and therapeutics. But what we lead with is look how massive these market sizes is. Look at what the value of this data could be if we gathered it. Um and I think very much grounding in the numbers and the data has allowed us to tell a story that is not just moral but also economic and I think that the reality is most opportunities that have to do with serving women are highly economic opportunities. There's so much money to be made. Um and I think sometimes you just have to focus on that to get things done. Can you talk to Priyanka about the role research plays in those pitches and I know that EIE does a lot of their own research. Kind of talk about how you incorporate that in really showing the business case for the company. — Yeah, absolutely. I mean for EIE so much of the value of our business is in our data, right? I think because most of us are female consumers, we probably all have data sets that have never existed before. And especially today in the age of AI, the value of proprietary data sets is just starting to be realized, right? We don't even know what the business models are yet for the types of data that we're collecting. But I think showing investors and showing even our consumers look at what we can do when we start to gather this data. Our data has actually unlocked some really exciting insights where bacterial vaginosis which is the most common form of vaginitis. Vaginitis is the leading reason that women seek healthcare advice today. Today when we go to the doctor, we are more likely to be misdiagnosed than correctly diagnosed. And we are more likely not to get better than to get better. I think we can all attest to that problem and situation. Using the data that we've gathered, we now serve almost 100,000 patients across the US. We actually discovered that bacterial vaginosis breaks down into over six different subtypes where what we've generically defined as one kind of overgrowth of bacteria is actually tons of different versions, right? Where you're seeing certain versions that tend to be dominated by the classic bacteria that we've associated with BV, but there's actually a lot of different ones. And I think that starting to give women that insight. So we take our research and we not only educate consumers and give them access to data on their own bodies that they've never had, but then also we go to all the clinical conferences and we educate the doctors so that then when someone goes back to their doctor's office, they don't have to have another appointment where their doctor says, "I don't know. " — It's wow. — Super interesting journey. — You're doing the most important work. I'm like in awe. — We have a lot more to do than we have done. Rachel, facials aren't just for women, but obviously a lot of women are coming to GlowBar, like you mentioned, wives of investors, understood the market need almost before the investors themselves. What opportunity did you see in the market that was untapped at that time? Um, and why did you feel like there's a real business case for this to exist? My background is actually in aesthetics. My grandmother pioneered skincare in the United States in the 70s, right after they could get a credit card, which was insane. She was incredible. Katherine Hines was her name. So, I grew up in this field. And so I watched my mom and my grandmother run skincare businesses. And I always knew that taking care of your skin on a monthly basis was important. Your skin is your greatest organ and it exfoliates itself every 28 days and so you should be tending to it with a professional every single month. I found myself at 30 years old never getting a facial. So you can imagine how my family felt at dinner when they would say, "When are you getting your monthly facials? " And I said, "I haven't gotten a facial in 2 years. " And so what I said to myself is if I'm as educated as I am about skin care and skin health and how often my cadence should be for facials and I'm still not getting facials because they are too long, too expensive, and I don't know who to trust, then there must be millions, tens of millions of other women also saying that or not even knowing to do that. And so what we did was we also like did a ton of research before we even launched and even pitched the idea of what is that cadence of female consumer behavior today with consistent facials. And we found that they went zero to one times and it was typically from a gift card when you're on vacation cruises. Very interesting, right? And it was really when they had that 2 hours where someone said, "Mom, go and treat yourself to something. You're busy at home. you deserve this two hours a year to go have a facial. And I knew that that wasn't the cadence that they should be consuming that treatment and service. And so what we did was create what is now the world's largest facial membership so that it made it easy for consumers to go from zero times a year to 12 times a year. And that's what we're really excited about, changing that consumer behavior and making it easy for them to do so. easy on their schedule with just 30 minutes and easy on their wallets with just $65. I really believe in accessibility and democratization of any industry, right? We should all have access equally to anything that we need, especially healthcare, feeding our children. Like, are you kidding me? Like, I think we all can agree to that. But skincare, although it sounds like it

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GSL1bQP0i0&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

is, you know, wellness, it used to be considered kind of this like fluffy, like if you have time for it, it's really part of your healthcare routine now. And that's what's really exciting to me and the female consumer knows it best. But what's even more exciting is that we're seeing over 5% of our clients be men. Men are really starting to take care of theirelves. And like look, we have enough work to do at this table to help women. So I'm not going to say that we should be focusing on men taking care of themselves. But I think that actually like men typically die sooner if they're not married because they don't have a woman encouraging them to go take care of themselves and go to their doctor's appointments and take their medication. And I think that like it's really cool to see that the younger generation of men are actually coming into GlowBar to give themselves that 30inut facial of self-care because when you feel good, you really do good out there. And so um it's exciting to see the consumer behavior shifts that we've been able to create. Super fascinating. Angela, I want to come to you because you had mentioned you know you and your now husband did not have children when you were starting to pitch Little Spoon. How did you identify this market and also why did you feel like we're the ones who can make this happen? — So we were both working in the food space. Um you know this is around 2013 2014. Ben was on the operation side. He had a distribution company. I had started a marketing company for natural and organic food and beverage brands and really just saw this whole shift toward fresh in the natural products industry. Everything that was traditionally shelf stable was being made fresh. Um, there were fresh juices, dips, dressings. There were 10 fresh pet foods, but there was nothing for babies. You know, we're looking around at, you know, all these various categories in the grocery store, and baby food was just this glaring category that had not been disrupted in over a hundred years. Gerber was still the dominant player. And it was just crazy to me that, you know, people who were spending so much money on themselves for, you know, all of these fresh foods, you know, would go to the grocery store and feed their child their very first bites of food, food that was sitting on the shelf, commercially sterile, food that was actually older than the baby that they were feeding it to. And we, you know, took a look at that space and we were like, there's, you know, there has to be a better option here. And really, you know, that's when we got to work on work working on Little Spoon. I started making baby food recipes in my kitchen in San Francisco. You know, really took a couple years to get off the ground because we wanted to utilize a new food technology um to help get bring it to market that no one had used for baby food before. Also, no one was making perishable baby food. And so, you know, it definitely took a lot of um a lot of research to get to that first product. We're going to take a quick break followed by more from my conversation with Angela, Rachel, and Priyanka. But before we do, on April 3rd at 1 p. m. Eastern time, the final episode of our conversation with these three founders will be premiered on YouTube. This means you'll be able to watch along with other Inc. fans and founders, plus honores from this year's female founders list will be in the chat to answer your questions. So, make sure you go to the watch page via the link in the description, click on the notify me button, and mark your calendar. We've all been there. Your team's feedback is scattered across emails, chats, and sticky notes. It's a mess. But PDF spaces in Adobe Acrobat gives you one collaborative workspace to streamline every file and comment. So, if you need six departments to finally agree on a proposal, do that with Acrobat. Need to turn a mountain of feedback into one plan of action? Do that with Acrobat. Want to stop searching for files and finally get everyone on the same page? Do that. Learn more at adobe. com/do that withacrobat. — You know, as we talk about the female consumer, you know, she's not a monolith, you know, and ever evolving. So, I'd love to hear from each of you about how you've kind of adapted or maybe tweaked your business model or how you've better understood the market as you've been building and growing your businesses. Yeah. What's really exciting about the GlowBar business model is that although we have a very specific demographic that is obsessed with us, right? that 30 to 40year-old woman who is just starting to see wrinkles, is frustrated with hormonal acne really and then has the disposable income to start really taking care of themselves and can afford the $65 a month. She's our like super user, right? She's coming twice a month. If she can come four times a month, she is um and we love her. But we see everyone from 14year-olds who get that horrible teenage acne that we all suffered through um to the 70-year-old that never could afford to take care of herself before. We obviously have to focus on our primary like demographic, but what we've tried to do is use all of our channels to really talk to our customer where they are. And so that boils down to like our marketing strategy and thinking about who is our

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GSL1bQP0i0&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

customer. Um at GlowBar, our customer like primary customer is named Lauren. Literally the majority of them are named Lauren. It's wild. It was a very popular name just selected. — Nope. It was literally that the 30 to 40year-old client's name is Lauren. And Lauren we cater to in exactly how we believe she wants to be marketed to, spoken to. Is it SMS? Is it Facebook? Is it Instagram? Is it Tik Tok? etc. And you can imagine the other demographics that we also talked to. But it's been really fun to we're 7 years old in June and it's been really fun to kind of grow with her so we're starting to see that her like spending habits have changed. You know, maybe you're starting at a retinol that is a really accessible price point, but now you've grown in your career. disposable income, you might be moving up and buying a few extra peptides to add to your routine. So, we're always learning and evolving. And as you mentioned, like the data that we're all collecting is so rich. We actually have a proprietary piece of technology in every treatment room where we collect all of that rich data from the client, from their skin, and we're able to cater to them their recommendations for their skincare routine and really learn what type of information, education are they looking for. And we actually just launched our uh product line last year, which was super exciting. I have so much to learn from you cuz I it's a whole new world for us retail. Like being in 1800 Targets, I'm like, "Oh my god, the dream. " Um, so you can teach me all about that hopefully. But um, we launched our own product line and now we get to learn in the treatment room what our clients want from us and what skincare concerns they have and then I get to just go into our computer, learn from that and create on the product development team exactly what they're looking for. So, it's just been so it's full of learning. And I think as like a founder, CEO, whatever, anyone that's at a smaller like company that's scaling, you have to keep learning with your client. It's almost a it's a daily routine. Um I still call clients every single month just to be like, "What did you like? What didn't you like? How could we have showed up better? " And so, it's always a learning experience. — The beauty of, you know, our business model up until we launched in into Target late last year was that we were entirely direct to consumer. We have that onetoone relationship with our customer. So, we're able to gather insights very quickly and make tweaks and iterations to our products to really meet consumer demand. 98% of our customers are women. We call them our Melinda. So, our customers call me. — Yeah. Wait, Melinda was my best friend in college. That makes total sense. — Yeah. Um, and so I think yeah, that really has just allowed us to kind of stay nibble and meet the customer where we are. We also cater to different life stages of children. And so when we launched in 2017, we launched with fresh baby food. But ever since then, we've been creating a whole platform of food. So parents stay on and order more and more from us as their kids get older. So we have transition to table food. We have ready to eat meals. We have smoothies. We have snacks. And so the idea is that they come to us, get baby food at first, but then they're staying on our platform to feed their kid as they age up to age 2, three, four, five. And we see that as they're aging up, parents, you know, what they're looking for is changing. So when you're coming to us, you might be a highly emotional parent feeding your child food for the first time. So how we show up for that parent is going to be different than, you know, the parent of a child who's three or four who's just trying to get them to eat macaroni and cheese and chicken fingers and they don't really, you know, they're not as invested as they were when they were 6 months old. So I think, you know, staying true to, you know, understanding what stage your customer is in and really getting that customer feedback and tailoring your messaging to them is always important. — Makes a lot of sense. meeting people at those different stages of that journey. Um, Brianka, you know, how about you and kind of how you started to understand who your customer was in this untapped market and with women? — It's so interesting. I think that who our customer is has surprised us, our investors. People love to think that, oh, our customer must be a 19, 20, 21 year old girl. Actually, our average age is 38 on EVE. And actually, 30% of our patients are in pmenopause and menopause because guess what? number one symptom of menopause also vaginal symptoms. So they do not leave us for better or for worse throughout. — And does your customer have a name? — We don't have a single name. We actually have so many different names for the different personas that come to us. But we always say Evie was designed to be a painkiller, not a vitamin. You have a problem which is it started with very much you are dealing with vaginal symptoms. You are probably either being dismissed, misdiagnosed, or recurrent at the doctor's office. We are going to give you information on your body that you've just never had before, right? And as someone who's dealt with issues, you just want to know what's going on. Is this normal? Is this going to work? And it was so interesting to me, we spent a lot of time in online communities. I don't know if you guys have done the same on our topics, right? And let me tell you, Reddit is a treasure trove of information of what are your what are the questions your customers are asking today? If it's really a problem, how are they solving it today? And I mean, we can cut this if this is TMI, but women were posting photos of their underwear being like, "What do you think this is? Has anyone seen anything like this

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GSL1bQP0i0&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00)

before? " And what is it? And now what you see if you go into those threads is the first comment is, "Well, what are your EVEY results? " Right? And now they're all in there talking about, "Well, my Evie results said this and I did this thing and it watched, look at my results change. " And it was this amazing moment of when you empower women with data on their own bodies. Like they were the expert always. They should have always been the authority, but they didn't have the data to speak to it. We're not taught the words of what is the difference between an internal vaginal symptom and a vulvver symptom. Like a lot of our patients didn't even know the difference between their vulva and their vagina. And so just all of these moments of okay, if we educate her, if we give her the information, actually she's the best person to figure out how to get better. And so it's been so cool to see kind of the conversation on the internet evolve. We always say that our marketing strategy is just education. And we I think have done an amazing job and huge props to my amazing team. I always joke I am not the cool one at Evie who has made Evie cool. We exist at this interesting intersection of scientific rigor. We're publishing peer-reviewed publications. We're speaking at clinical conferences. But then we're also culturally fluent. We have hundreds of millions of views a year on TikTok. We have an amazing content blog that's helping people actually understand why does it hurt when I have sex or why do I have this symptom? And I think that by treating women like they're smart, answering their questions, not with, you know, buy my product to make you your vagina smell like a flower, but actually here is the medical and scientific information that you've been looking for that you haven't accessed has been so powerful. And I remember when we were starting, people said that's way too sciency. Women aren't going to get that. They're not going to like it. Our launch article in the interview, the journalist said to me, "Aren't you gonna make women hysterical if you give them this information? " which is just you can't make it up. But I think what's actually been so cool is that you give women the information and they want more and they want to dive in. And I think we actually now one of our values from a product standpoint is treat women like they're smart. Like just instead of dumbing it down, treat them like they're smart enough to click on the paper and understand it because they probably are. And all of us who have ever had a health issue, we become the expert on that health issue. The women who come to us, they know the names of the bacteria in the vagina, right? We don't need to baby them. And so I think it's been really cool to kind of show the world that women are smart. They're capable of having this information and they are the experts if we give them the tools. — I like love what you just said about how discerning the consumer is now and treating them as such. They will ask you if they need you to dumb it down. But I think that that's actually something Glowar has also always like stood by which is like the consumer is more discerning than ever. And I think in today's world to get a consumer you can get it pretty easy. You can pay for that consumer all day long on, you know, Meta or Google or wherever. To keep that consumer, you have to do exactly what you promise that consumer because they're more discerning than ever. They're on Reddit. They're talking to everyone. They feel like they can expose you and cancel you if you don't deliver on your promise of a brand. And I think like that's almost the beauty of the world, but it does put the onus on all of us, which is a lot of pressure, right? to like if I'm going to be the best 30-minute facial in the world, I have to do that every single day for every single client. But yeah, I think the consumer is smarter than ever. — Mhm. — I think I'm smarter than ever in medical stuff because also as a woman, we have to advocate for ourselves. Like I'm online searching this stuff just like those Reddit girls. — Totally. But where else are we supposed to go? — Yeah. — I mean, to be fair, it's not like we're taught any of this in school. Frankly, our doctors aren't taught this in school either. I mean, but what's exciting is I think you are seeing women educating each other. Unfortunately or fortunately, the companies are coming in to close the gaps and I think that you're seeing women build companies to solve the problems that women have often funded by women. So, I think it's exciting as we see more women step into the investment side of the table because I think that's how we'll really unlock the women consumer. On that note, you know, what is your message to investors about what they might not be getting when it comes to women as consumers? Women hold all of the buying power in the home for anything consumer related and health related. And I think that is just so unappreciated to a certain extent. And I think it just goes back to like women just not being focused on at in our world in our markets. Most of my even friends, husbands will say, "Well, I'll ask my wife if I can buy that. " Like that is real. And it's funny to me cuz I'm like just buy the stupid thing. Like you guys are so weak. Like men these days I can't. Um but um I think it's just I think we've been totally kind of underestimated in our power. I actually was raised by a dad that told me that women have no idea how powerful they are, which is super cool. I think that's all kind of coming to a head now, I would say. — I agree. I was at um like a networking dinner the other night and I was sitting across from a guy who had two kids. He's married. I was telling him about Little Spoon and while he was sitting there, he was texting his wife and his wife texted

### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GSL1bQP0i0&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 27:00)

him something back that was like, "We have Little Spoon in our fridge, you idiot. " Like our kids eat that every day. And like he had no clue because she's the one making the purchasing decision. And so I think you know investors just need to understand women do hold the power in purchasing decisions. I also think women are kind of like craving you know relationships and education from brands and if that's something that companies can offer. I think that's also you know an important point of consideration as well. — Totally. I just agree with what both of you said. I think there's so much um one I think women are making decisions for their families and their households whether or not that's fair. It's what's occurring. We are I mean what is the stat on the generational wealth transfer that's happening which is like majority I I'm going to butcher the stat maybe you can add it later but it's something around like trillions of dollars are also being given to women in the next 20 years or something like that and I think we're going to see that women are graduating from college at higher rates women are being promoted faster women are staying in the workforce hopefully women are being you know transfer generational wealth I think there's so much momentum in the female consumer and just literally look anywhere and things were not designed for us. One of my least favorite stats is around the seat belt and I'm sure you guys know this that the seat belt was never designed for women. It was designed on like an 170 lb man. And only I think it was November of 2025 was the first time they did a crash test on a pregnant woman ever. And you're just like every single thing in our lives not designed for us, right? And so all of those things are opportunities as women become more often the person making the decision. Thank you so much Priyanka, Angela, Rachel for this conversation, for all of your insights on women as power consumers and where to find them and how you've connected with them. And I'm sure the folks listening will take a lot away from this. So, thank you. That's all for today's episode. Join us next week when I'll talk to Angela, Priyanka, and Rachel about building their brands and community. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Business Model from Inc. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and on Ink's YouTube channel at youtube. com/inc magazine so you don't miss an

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