Lauren Wang: CEO and Founder of The Flex Company

24:06Lauren Wang:And they're like, Lauren, you're totally capable of doing this. Okay. So tell me what your original business idea was. The original business idea was to make a better designed menstrual cup, like a reusable menstrual cup and have it be a buy one, give one model where we would donate to... A Warby model. Yes. Our Tom's is really hot at the time. Warby was just getting started. It was like Tom's for menstrual cups, basically. Got it. And then from having that idea to actually coming up with a product, how long did that take? That would have been about two and a half to three years. So in that time period, what's going on?

24:49I assume that you're still working full time or did you quit?

24:51Lauren Wang:I quit maybe a year and a half into the research at the point that I realized I was not giving this thing its fair shake because it was only taking up half of my brain. And I know how intense I am about work when I'm at work, like I'm 100 % all in it. And I felt like it was just not a priority. It was like a side project. And I literally wrote down every single thing that I didn't know how to do. FDA registration and quality assurance? How do I build a quality system? What does a manufacturing line look like for a consumer product? I'd only seen it for buses. What are the marketing terms? All the finance stuff and all the investor stuff.

25:37Lauren Wang:And I don't know any investors. And I knew nothing, Hillary, absolutely nothing. It was really overwhelming. And so I would just spend the weekends going through my list and doing as much research as I can. I created this email list of everyone that I had ever met in my entire life. And I would send out these like email blasts and I would say, hey, this is what I'm doing. This is what I'm looking for. Here's the update. And I would be really, really specific. Like I remember when I sent out, I need an expert in manufacturing and supply chain because I need to figure out how much it's going to cost to make my product so I can figure out how much I'm going to charge for my product to figure out if I even have a business at all.

26:21Lauren Wang:And it was being that specific that got this recruiter who I had met when I was 20 years old. It was like, my next door neighbor just got a job at Nike running global manufacturing supply chain operations. He said he's willing to talk to you. Do you want to chat? I love that you basically had like a Kickstarter update for your own product. For people that did not subscribe. Right. I don't know. People liked that email. Who's not interested in watching someone build something? And also I do think the specificity is interesting. So anyway, so you got connected to this person who you needed. Mm-hmm.

27:00Lauren Wang:And it was a collecting of people. And not all first connections were helpful. And a lot of connections would lead to a second or third or fourth or fifth or whatever. So that was happening on the business side. On the customer side, I knew I wanted to make a better designed menstrual cup because in this time of research, I tried a name brand cup and it got stuck and my partner had to get it out. And that was really traumatic. So I thought if we make one that removes more easily and doesn't get stuck, which many years later we did, I thought that was going to be the business. But when I would give people a menstrual cup at the time, like awareness for menstrual cups is pretty much zero.

27:42Lauren Wang:When I would tell people about the products, features, and benefits, everyone was excited. And then I would give them the product, not my product, someone else's product, not in packaging, with instructions. And I would follow up with them and nobody was using it after the first month. And I was like, okay, this idea is dead in the water. People tell me they want something more sustainable. They're telling me they want to use something that's 100 % reusable. However, when push comes to shove, they want to feel like they're doing better, but they don't want the hassle of rinsing and reusing something.

28:12Lauren Wang:And so I thought, okay, we need to make something that is disposable, you know, have these other benefits. So I found this product designer who was a woman who worked at a sex toy company and together we like concepted this product design and I took it to a manufacturer and he basically just laughed at me. He's like, that's really cute. You have a little prototype, but if you try making that at scale, it's going to break. So at that point, I had kind of shelved the idea. Fast forward, I had met a designer from Apple who told me to go back and look at things that had already been made before. I went back, looked at patents, came across one from the 90s from a female triathlete and a team of doctors.

28:57Lauren Wang:And I'm reading through the patent. It had all the features and functionality I wanted in my own product. So instead of starting my own company, I'm like, I'm just going to go work for them. Great. And? I managed to get a meeting with their leadership team. I did a whole presentation on my idea. I'm like, look, you have this thing you're calling a disposable cup. It doesn't work. It's not a cup. It's flat. It looks like a disc. By the way, there's this thing called direct-to - consumer. Facebook advertising had just gotten started. Warby was printing money. all these brands were coming up and I want to market this to millennials and I want to talk about these features and benefits in a different way.

29:40Lauren Wang:I want to sell your product. And they laughed in my face. Oh no. And they said, you have a Gmail, like you're working in tech. Like, what are you talking about? We're a retail brand. So I designed around their patent, applied to Y Combinator, which is a startup accelerator, interviewed with Sam Altman, who went on to start OpenAI and ChatGPT. And it was a tech accelerator, but he said yes to me. Why do you think that is? I asked him why specifically, and he said, we believe in founders first, and you have a really novel way of solving this problem. Okay, so at this point, have you quit your job?

30:15Lauren Wang:Oh yeah, I had to quit my job before joining YC. That's a prerequisite. And I had quit it in May 2015. I incorporated the company in September 2015. And then I did YC summer 2016. So I had been almost a full year before getting into YC and also almost completely out of money. I cashed out my 401k, which I do not recommend, like zero out of 10. The woman at Vanguard was like, Lauren, don't do it. But I've been saving all that money since I was 19 years old at IBM. And at this point I was 29. And I was like, I have to pay these contractors. I have to find a way to live. But if I hadn't raised money at the time I raised money, Flex never would have come to life because I was personally out of money.

31:01Fair. Okay. So do you have a business plan of this is how much I need to raise? This is what the business plan is. This is how I'm going to sell it. Obviously the marketing piece feels like that was more organic for you.

31:12Lauren Wang:Yeah. YZ has a standard application and I actually posted our application so that anybody online can see how I got in. But a lot of the elements of a business plan are in there, at least as far as you need to be while you're trying to validate your idea before you get to product market fit. So I wouldn't say that things were fully fleshed out, but we had made key decisions like what the business model is and had run enough tests in marketing to figure out the cost of acquisition. We had a rough idea of what our cogs would be. And we had a quote from a manufacturer for a manufacturing line. So we knew how much money we needed to raise to start producing the product.

31:54What happened when you decided, okay, we now know all of this. Now it's time to make product. And did you have a team around you at that point?

32:02Lauren Wang:I had my now husband and co-founder and one other person. We knew it was time to manufacture because we had sold$80 ,000 worth of pre-orders in three months. Whoa. Yeah. Based on your marketing. Yeah. So we had a long list of people who were waiting to get their product. And so it was really a matter of like lining up all the regulatory stuff. But I had done so much of the legwork in advance to make sure that once we were ready to pull the trigger, that like everything else was kind of done and dusted. So you have all of these orders placed. What did launch day look like? We started shipping out orders from our fulfillment center.

32:45Lauren Wang:Things never go as smoothly as you want them to go through. And remember, I didn't even know what a 3PL was maybe like a couple years prior. There definitely was a lot of celebration in anticipation. I would say Shopify had just launched. And so it was like the first time you could build your own website without knowing HTML, which I did not code my first website. But the really sad thing is that we went mega viral and the website had been supposed to be up like two weeks before and it wasn't up. And we went viral and all we had was a landing page with an email sign up. How did you go mega viral?

33:30Lauren Wang:There was a reporter in a pitch that I did with a bunch of investors and I didn't know he was in the room. And this is so embarrassing. In the early days, I got no from, I don't know, in the life of the company, it's probably been over 200 investors. It's been a lot of people. And in the early days in particular, I can only think of one woman, Jessie Draper, who I had pitched and she invested. But for guys, I had a really hard time getting them to like connect emotionally to the problem. Oh, did they do the thing where they say, oh, let me ask my girlfriend. Let me ask my wife. Let me ask my secretary.

34:05It's almost like I've raised many men before. Almost. Yeah. So there's definitely that.

34:10Lauren Wang:And even in the ones where their daughters use the product, it still wasn't enough. Putting that aside, early, early on, I would go in and be like, there hasn't been innovation in period care in over a hundred years. We're using your great, great, great, great, great grandmother's period product. I showed a picture of tampons from 1921 and tampons today. And you can see that they haven't change that here's a 43 billion dollar tam like nothing would get them so I was hitting a wall and like in sales there's this thing which I know that you know and it's you got to get the person nodding when you walk into the room right so you could say something ridiculous like oh sure it's nice day today yeah right so if I go in and I'm like hey I'm here to talk about period products first of all they already know that I'm there to talk about period products and they probably didn't want to take the meeting but I probably was introduced from someone who's like you just have to meet this person.

35:04Lauren Wang:And so they're there like begrudgingly. And so I would say, do you enjoy having sex with women? Yes. Has she ever said no because she was on her period? Feels terrible, doesn't it? Well, I have a product for you. This is Flex, a new product for mess-free period sex. And then I would like weave everything else in. So this reporter who's sitting in the audience, like takes basically what I'm saying verbatim. And he's the editor in chief at Tech Crunch at the time. And he puts it on the front page as the feature article on Tech Crunch for like 48 hours. And the reason it was up for so long was this thing was pumping.

35:46Lauren Wang:And we got media coverage from all over the world. When I say mega viral, like mega, mega, mega. We didn't have a website. We just had a landing page like with an email. It's like sign up to get notified when we launch. Oh my God. That was my launch. Did you get emails? Got 200 ,000 emails. God, that's crazy. Okay. So you have your mega viral moment. You have the product, you have all the folks who had already signed up or had already purchased and wanted to be a part of it from the beginning. How did you know that you had a hit on your hands? How did you know this company is working? What were some of the early signs of life?

36:26Lauren Wang:I would say that the customer feedback that we would get was really the most critical thing. So the 1-800 number on the website went to my cell phone and obviously I wouldn't answer it as, hi, this is Lauren, the CEO. I did it because I wanted to hear the people that were the most upset and I wanted to understand what the problems were so that we could start tackling them one by one. So improve the instructions or fix a bug on the website or speed up the delivery time or change the pack size or lower the price. But the feedback that we actually got on the product was, this is life-changing. I can never go back.

37:05Lauren Wang:I can't believe this has never existed before. I forgot I was on my period. We would get stories from people with like rare bleeding disorders who are totally normal and healthy otherwise, but they have their period like basically every day of the month. And they're like, I can finally play soccer. I can finally play with my children. And so it was those love letters and phone calls that I would get. And I still did a rotation for many years on the customer support team on our website chat and found it very thrilling to be that close to customers. And I still do customer interviews today. That's amazing.

37:40Okay. So how did business scale that first year, what was the demand like? And I feel like generally speaking, it's one skill set to like identify a thing and build a thing and get something going. It's a different beast to scale it, let alone to do that all at once. So what was that trajectory like for you? What was hard and what came more easily?

38:02Lauren Wang:Going from zero to one, I just gave like a 10 year talk to my team at our company offsite last week. And I kept talking about going from zero to one because in many ways we're 10 years in, but I feel like we're going from zero to one again because it's one thing to scale and it's another thing to scale again and then another thing to scale again. So we are having a zero to one moment now. At that moment, when you go from zero to one, from an idea to product actually shipping and having those customers, that was really thrilling and amazing. We got to$3 million in revenue our first year. So our investors were super happy.

38:39Lauren Wang:I was super happy. But we grew the subsequent years by year. Don't quote me on this, three or four, we were at$20 million in revenue. So it was like pretty rocket ship growth. But what happened between three and 20, however, that couple year period was, was I couldn't find anyone that knew how to do advertising. And all the people that were really good at it were gobbled up by the bigger companies. And I was a tiny company, so I couldn't find a growth marketer to save my life. It took me a few years to find somebody and I did. And then, you know, that person ended up working at the company, I think for like eight and a half years, which is pretty amazing.

39:17Lauren Wang:So I think for me, it was not just knowing the right marketing channel, but being able to find and attract and retain talent was a really important lesson. Talk to me about how product offering has evolved over time. We started out with, I think, three discs for$20 was our pre-order, something like that. And the reason why was we weren't sure actually how much it was going to make to cost. So we didn't know what the cogs were going to be. We had some estimates and we didn't want to charge something that was too low and not have enough money and set that floor with the consumer early on and then disappoint them by raising the price.

40:01Lauren Wang:So I thought it was better to start high and lower. So we started for three for 20. Then we ended up sending people eight for 20. So they're getting more than what they had originally paid for. And then that was like the new price. And then as time went on and we were manufacturing more at scale, we could lower the prices. And so we would like lower the prices and send a big announcement to our existing and new customers like, hey, you're getting a bunch of money back now. Prices are lower. That's incredible. Thanks. When you think through product development too, like how do you know when it's time to be like, oh, you know, this thing is working, but I think we could tweak this.

40:37Or, you know, there's this new material on the market that we want to work with or whatever it may be. How do you think about it from that product development standpoint?

40:44Lauren Wang:We have customer insights. And for a company, we only have 25 employees, which is very different than tech because I tell my tech CEO friends, they're like, how many employees do you have? and like, how big is your company? I'm like, well, it's different in CPG. You have very few people for much bigger demands of the business. So for a team of 25 people, having a customer insights person, I think demonstrates like how serious I am about caring about and listening to customers to have like a full-time headcount dedicated all day, every day. That's all she's doing is customer research, customer insights, and then delivering that information into the product development team or to the leadership team or to our board of directors.

41:27Lauren Wang:And that informs what it is that we're going to change in our existing product line or new products that we might come out with. And we haven't always gotten it right. Like we've had some failures. And I think from those lessons, it's really interesting because I was talking about one of them with the team this past week. I was like, you know, we saw in Customer Insights that people really wanted this thing and we made it. And all the people that said that they were going to buy it, Like maybe, I don't know, 10 % of them ended up buying it, even though the price was right, even though the product was good, even though, even though, even though.

42:00Lauren Wang:And so what I learned was like our ability to sell things in different categories, even if they're adjacent categories, is a lot more limited than focusing on the problem at hand. And the problem at hand is reducing the friction between when someone hears about a menstrual disc or a menstrual cup and they actually put it in their body and they actually have the confidence and they have a successful first leak-free period, you know, using one of our products and they have that like moment of belief. Like that reducing the friction problem is what we spend most of our time on and where we should be focused and where we focus our product development.

42:41Lauren Wang:But knowing when to do that, it comes from insights. So according to your website, your mission is to help people with periods thrive. Menstrual products are just the beginning. We believe in a world where vagina isn't a bad word, where all menstruators are part of the conversation and where nobody is turned away from essential period care. Talk to me about the brand ethos and how it's evolved and where you think it's going. When I started and I wasn't sure if Flex would succeed. I didn't know if we were ever going to have a product. It was just an idea in my brain. Thinking back to my childhood and sometimes being food insecure and getting that work ethic at such a young age to try to help my family, I was really terrified of the fact that most startups don't succeed.

43:30Lauren Wang:And knowing that I didn't know all of these things and most startups fail, I knew that the failure rate would probably be my fate. And what I did to get through that was I really believed in the idea of sparking conversations between people because periods have been so stigmatized for so long. It opens up a deeper trust between those folks. And so I decided early on that no matter what the work was that we did on the physical product side to change women's lives, of equal importance was this idea of sparking conversations and educating people in a very nonjudgmental, open way where there is no stupid question.

44:13Lauren Wang:because most people don't learn about these things in school or from their parents. And so how are we just supposed to know? And it's not like the average person is like, I don't know, asking Claude about menstruation unless you have a problem. And nobody wants to say that they don't know how it works. I'm so happy about the cycle tracking and cycle syncing trend right now, because it means that women are empowering themselves with information. But the brand ethos, that is still very much a part of what we do today. But now that we are selling to millions of women, it's become about helping women know to continue trusting themselves, because I think that we do inherently trust ourselves.

44:56Lauren Wang:And when something is wrong with our bodies and we don't trust ourselves with that information, we can often ignore it. And our bodies are trying to tell us something. And I think outside of just period care, helping women to have information that they need in the time that they need it is really important to us. And making sure that our products deliver on that promise is also really important to us. So what does your day-to-day look like now, not as a CMO, but as a CEO? And is it what you thought it would be? I remember riding my bike after we got our first office and I was in Venice, California.

45:32Lauren Wang:And I was like, am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing? I was just commuting to work, But I was like, what does a CEO do? What am I supposed to do? How do I play the role of CEO? This is it? I was like, is there something I'm missing? And I would read all the books. But in many ways, my job hasn't changed that much. I think every founder CEO has their own kind of area of expertise that they were good at. If you're a technical CEO, maybe that's product or engineering. For me, it's marketing. So I spend a lot of time with the sales and marketing teams. I'm flying out next week to meet with our manufacturer.

46:08Lauren Wang:I'm actually bringing my almost six-year-old daughter with me, which is really exciting. She's never been. And then I'm flying to have a meeting with Walmart. So those types of relationships. And it's also just the day-to-day of being with the team, working with the team, working alongside the team. I might film some commercials. I might do a podcast interview. I spend a lot of time with finance and with our customer insights team and product development team, thinking about what's new and what's next for the brand. So thank you for teeing me up so well. What's next for the brand? Like, what are you thinking of?

46:42Like, what's the next iteration? And also, what are you personally working on?

46:47Lauren Wang:Next iteration is just more international expansion. We've quietly launched internationally in a few different places, and it's been really exciting to see that business growing. Is that super complicated because of being a, was it class two medical device? It can be. Thankfully, we have a great regulatory team. Great. What's next for me personally is, I've never shared this before, but I'm working on a book. That's very exciting. Can you tell me more about it? Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like this interview. It's an autobiography about my life because Flex is a big part of my life. There is stuff about Flex, but it isn't like a business lessons book.

47:31Lauren Wang:It's truly an autobiography. Why did you want to work on it now? And how are you enjoying that process? Or I should say, how are you experiencing that process? Slower than I would like. I'm an entrepreneur, so I'm always impatient. I decided to do it. Honestly, Walmart had asked me to come and give a talk to a large group of their female employees, which was such an honor and privilege. and the types of feedback I got from that particular talk, it made me realize that even if I think that my story is pretty ordinary, that there's some people that would feel inspired by hearing it. And so my goal in talking is always to help other people see themselves in a little something and to be able to take that kernel and grow from it themselves.

48:19Lauren Wang:I wished so badly that there had been female role models for me when I was coming up in 2015. I could think of like two. And why now? I turned 40. Congratulations. Thank you. And I'm like, not getting any younger. Maybe I'm getting a little hotter. I don't know. That's my husband. This book isn't going to write itself, Hillary. Fair, fair. And also, like, I just feel very strongly that women's stories deserve to be told. More women need to see women succeed. I love that. So I'm very glad to hear that you're doing it because all sorts of boring men write memoirs and autobiographies and talk about their businesses.

49:06So why not have an interesting woman do it? Balance it all out.

49:10Lauren Wang:I mean, you've been such an inspiration to me, honestly. And the fact that you've dedicated so much of your life to telling women's stories in such a beautiful, thoughtful, journalistic way is very unique and special. So thank you. It is truly my pleasure. All right. So we always end this podcast by asking our guests the same three questions. And the first one is about mistakes. And I think it's really important to talk about mistakes. I think women need to hear stories about other women messing up and coming back from it because we put so much pressure on ourselves to never take a misstep. And yet we all do make mistakes.

49:53And so I'm hoping that you can tell me about a mistake that you've made at any point in your career and what you've learned from it.

50:01Lauren Wang:I have made a mistake to sometimes trust my team a little bit too much in areas that I should have verified better. Trust, but verify would be my advice to my prior self. And it's happened in a couple of different flavors, but in particular in finance, which is not my strongest suit. Now it's much stronger than it was when I started, but having the right team in finance and the right set of controls will make or break your company. And there are certain mistakes that people on your team can make that can't be undone. And there's certain mistakes that people make that you can end your employer-employee relationship, but you as the founder CEO are still the one holding the bag.

50:50Lauren Wang:And I am the one that it's accountable. It's my fault. It's not anyone else's fault. It's 100 % my fault and I should have known better. But I think being really honest with myself about those failures, about those moments or those choices or those things, that I should have verified more adeptly, I learned to be really honest with my team and to own up to my failures and to be really transparent with them. And I think that's built a tremendous amount of trust through the years. So a lot of the folks who listen to this podcast are in their first lives and they know that they want to make some sort of pivot in their career.

51:29Maybe it's a small one and staying in their same industry. Maybe they want to change industries altogether, but they're nervous about it. As someone who has made pivots, what advice would you give someone who's standing there thinking about doing the next thing, but just hasn't made the leap quite yet?

51:49Lauren Wang:One of my biggest regrets is not starting sooner. And I'm not a person with very many regrets. I think about how much happier and more fulfilled that I am in my life as a result of doing this work as a result of being my own boss. Even if you're thinking of switching from, you know, accounting to becoming a grade school teacher, because that's what you always wanted to do. And you're afraid of that pay cut. Your quality of life is going to be so much better when you're doing the work that really matters most to you. And as scary as it feels, there's nothing worse than standing on the other side of your life, feeling deep regret for not having done the thing that your heart really desired the most.

52:32Lauren Wang:True. My last question, also my favorite, if you could take a time machine and go back in time and give your younger self some advice, what would you say? I would tell her to believe in herself and to ignore everybody else. It's so beautiful and also so heartbreaking to me that 400 episodes into this podcast, or more. And that is the most common piece of advice that women say. I don't really hear men say that, but women say that a lot. Just makes me realize we have a lot of work to do for our daughters. Absolutely. That's why I told you I was telling my five-year-old, if you say that you can't or you don't think that you can, you probably never will.

53:21Lauren Wang:The first step is saying, I think I can. Well, Lauren, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with me. Congratulations on all that you have built. I think that your story is phenomenal. And I'm really honored that we get to share it with our audience. So thank you. It means the world to me, truly. I'm honored too. This was an absolute blast. Such a privilege to be on your podcast. Such a big fan.

54:00That was CEO and founder of The Flex Company, Lauren Wong. For more inspiring interviews with women like Lauren, head on over to secondlifepod.com where we have so many more for you to peruse. If you like today's show, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to rate and review us. We love seeing you spread the word on social and now you can tag us in your posts. We are at Second Life Pod on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. We always want to know who you're interested in hearing from on the show. So send in your requests to hello at secondlifepod.com or you can DM us on Instagram.

54:40I'm at Hillary Kerr. The show is at Second Life Pod. Our DMs are always open. I'm Hillary Kerr, and you've been listening to Second Life. This episode was produced by Hilary Kerr, Summer Hammeris, and Natalie Thurman. Our production assistant is Grace Ingram. Our audio engineers are at Treehouse Recording in Los Angeles, California, and our music is by Jonathan Leahy.