How Lion Pose Got Into Sephora Before Having a Product

0:00The first goal was we wanted to get into Sephora. So we tried to reverse engineer how to get into Sephora. What does that mean? I have no idea. But we started asking people at Sephora, how do we get in? What do you need? What are the requirements? Just so we can start building a spec on how do we build towards Sephora? This is the product that we ended up creating that's on the shelves today. But I hand drew this product. Nisha went and got it 3D printed. and then did a whole photo shoot with like fake product in it. And so we did, she got this whole photo shoot done with models, brand, everything.

0:36And we never, we didn't actually have the product ready. So Sephora loved it. They loved the presentation. And two months, two and a half months after we set that goal, we got into Sephora by contract. Welcome to the DTC Insider Podcast, where online business owners come to find actionable tips and tactics to grow their businesses. Now, here's your host, Brian Roizentl.

1:12Hey, welcome to another episode of the DTC Insider Podcast. I'm Brian Roizentl, your host. And in case it's the first time you join our podcast, well, we have interviewed over 200 founders so far. It's the fifth season. And we typically discuss, you know, business growth, what's working for brands right now, the challenges they have to acquire and retain customers. And of course, to grow a brand in this tough environment. Today, I have a great guest. She has a great story. Her name is Mata Punjabi, and she's a co-founder and CEO of LionPose. Hey, Matto, thanks for being on the shuttle. Yeah, of course.

1:49Thanks for having me, Brian. Yeah, my pleasure. So I know you have an amazing story. No pressure. But I would love for you to tell the audience more about how you started your career far from the skincare space, right? Yeah, yeah. I guess my official career started in 2007 after I graduated undergrad. and I was in finance actually at Google very early. You know, I would say Google was smaller at that time, but not that small. It was 10 ,000 people. And so, but it was like the beginning, I feel like of the second wave of Silicon Valley. And it was really, really exciting. So I started in finance, then I moved into partnerships for Google Shopping.

2:34And then I was a product manager at a small startup called Telepart, which did retargeting ads. and then I went to Pinterest well actually first I went to business school and between my first and second year I really wanted to start my own company um and it was at the time it was called one shop I wanted like one place where you could use one credit card um and shop all your stores so like an Amazon for everything and uh you know this is 2013 so at that time it sounded really new and different but maybe it's not that new and different now um and I pitched it to Pinterest actually and they uh they were like why don't you come and build it here instead of building it on your own I did that over a summer as an intern and then they asked me to stay on while I was at business school and so I basically I was a business school in Boston and I flew back and forth between Boston and Silicon Valley for my last year, which was so intense.

3:36But the same month that I graduated is the same month I launched the shopping product at Pinterest. And it was very exciting. So a couple of years later, I experienced my first iPhone with Pinterest and that gave me the flexibility to finally start my own thing. So that's when I started to become really interested in finding my own company. So that's amazing. And I wanted to ask you more details about that journey because, you know, 2007, you were at Google. Yeah. Right. So I think for a context for everyone in the audience, if I'm not mistaken, they launched YouTube in 2005. Right. Yeah, it must be.

4:19Yeah. It was like, it was super like, we all say, yeah, I mean, Google has been around forever, but not really. I mean, it's been a while. It's been over 20 years, 25 years, more or less. But YouTube, back then when you started working there, it was fairly new. Very new. Very new. And you were building something even newer, which was Google Shopping. Yeah. So what were you doing at your time at Google? Because you came from the finance background. So what were you doing specifically there? If you can, of course, tell. yeah so I got in because I went to Stern undergrad which is like a business school and I came in through the finance there was like a the very first finance rotation program for undergrad so I came in through there I feel like I got really lucky and my first job was uh to they called it APLA it was like Asia Pacific Latin America and it was to kind of do all of the sales compensation for all the sales teams in all these areas, which is like basically the whole world, except for the United States.

5:30So I got really familiar with the sales teams and how we sell ads, how we make money. And then my second rotation in finance was to, it was called, my God, I can't remember the name, but it was doing all the budgeting for everything that was non-search. so maps gmail i mean at that time it was like not that big compared to search search was everything but like everything else was this two-person finance team which is me and my friend jenny and we just like managed all of the budgets for these areas we ended up and then i ended up like honing in on shopping because we had a very very small team on google shopping which at that time was called Frugal.

6:13It was like half of a PM, like when half of a product manager and a couple engineers, it was not that many people. And we were just making a lot of money from it. And so I remember thinking like, wow, we're making money, but we have almost like no one on the team. So I did this presentation to Marissa Meyer and was like, you know, we should really invest in this product. I worked with a couple of other PMs that really wanted to invest in this product. And one of them being Samir Samat, who is now, I mean, he was the head of Android for a very long time. I think he's, maybe still is. And at that time, Samir was really splitting his time between Google Help, which used to be a product, and Google Shopping.

6:56Once we got the okay from Marissa Meyer, that team blew up. And that's when I joined that team. Like we, I mean, it grew from like a couple engineers and a half a PM to dozens of PMs, like hundreds of engineers. Now that team is like huge. Yeah. So, you know, I, I come from, I own a growth marketing agency, but I did there. So I come from a different background too. And what I noticed about like, for me coming from a different background, in my case, computer science gives me, gives me like a different mindset, analytical mindset, strategic mindset, and a different way to look at things. Right.

7:37In your case, with the experience that you had in these huge companies doing these big things you were doing there, how did that shape you to start where you started years later? And we're going to talk about LionPost for the rest of the episode, of course. But what did you learn that served you well for starting LionPost? Wow, no one's asked me this. I mean, I haven't thought that far back to Google, but Google was the foundation for everything for me, especially at that time. I think for me, there was a couple of things that I saw. One was I saw that we were really creating the Internet at that time, right?

8:15It was just like the beginnings of a lot of things. Search had been just created, but everything else, like what you know, Google today, we were working on that. So, for example, you know, you search for weather on Google today. that didn't exist when i worked there if you search for like weather in you know argentina or san francisco you would have to like wait for 10 links to show up and click on you know the weather channel link right today on google you search for it and it immediately shows it to you in fact now you have like people have google home and you just say hey google what's the weather like today and it just tells you right how was that made possible no one even thinks about it But, you know, the team that I was on, which was like product partnerships, we focused at that time on a deal, which I wasn't the one who did the deal, but I know the people who did with the Weather Channel where we could pull their data and surface it on Google.

9:10So Google was actually paying for that data to surface it sooner so that you're not clicking Google. Is that the way it's done on the back end? Like there's a deal between two companies? Oh, I didn't know that. Correct. So a lot of the things that you see just show up without a link, which is a lot. a lot of them were paid for deals because instead of us clicking into it so that they could make money through ads we had to make up for that right so we had to pay for that um other examples i mean at the time was shopping like we would we worked directly with a bunch of retailers to get all of their shopping feeds so that we could surface it before you even click on it and so the goal was to i mean i still remember this but it was like the goal is to organize the world's information and make everything universally accessible, right?

9:56And so I think that type of the fact that we, I still remember that mantra of like, what is the mission of Google? And we really believed in that. We wanted to make search easier. And so I think like when I look back, I think about user experience as being one of the things that's really important. I think it's lost today, to be honest, in Google today, what I hear is just, you know, it's so big now, but in the beginning, we really did care. We cared about what people were doing, how to make their lives easier. And we would do these big deals to make that happen. And you would see it in the amount of time spent on the platform.

10:32So I think it made me see how scrappy you could be and how creative you could be to make things happen. On the outside, you see things that are already built and it can become very intimidating to say, oh my God, how am I going to build the next cursor or something like that. But then I was on the inside and you saw how the sausage is made. So you're like, there are steps and you can break it down. And not all of it is you. Sometimes a lot of it is working with other companies. I think that made me see that you could break any massive behemoth down into its guts and create something. So I think that's why I believed that I could create something because I had just seen the process.

11:16Yeah. And I know Google started using a methodology called OKRs, Objective and Key Results. But I don't know if it was back then. It was back then. Yeah. And how did you do? We all had OKRs. I read, you know, Measure What Matters and the book talking about that and all this stuff. And it's great. But you were there in the first. I was totally, yeah. Yeah. So did that help you? Is it something that you implement these days? Is it easy? Is it hard? Yeah. So OKRs were started before I was there. I think, I mean, the big thing is that OKRs are, and we would always talk about this like stretch. We would always talk about stretch goals.

11:59Google is all about that. And I think the big thing is that everything was measured, right? And so that taught me the importance of data and measurement. That you set something, it may not be the right thing that you set, but like you're always measuring against your performance and against the goal, right? And so I think that today, even constantly just like looking at the numbers, making sure I know what's going on, like that is really important. Do I do it in the same process? No, because quite honestly, it was a very heavy process. I don't think it's fit for like a startup that's trying to move really fast because the process of setting an OKR sometimes would take like weeks to set an OKR.

12:40And we just don't have that bandwidth at a startup. But I think the importance of setting a goal and then just like measuring every single piece towards it, that's what we do. How did you, what was the first time you thought about storing LionPose? Yeah, so it was, it's actually my second company. My first company was, and I didn't mention this, but I also worked at Facebook. And so my first company was after I got pregnant with my first child. And I was, you know, thinking about what to start. I had no idea what to start. I just knew that I wanted to be a founder. So I did the opposite of what most people do.

13:20I was like, I left to be a founder before I knew what I was going to start, which I don't know if I advise that because it's a much harder path to just like go out there with no idea versus going out there with an idea. I don't think I would advise that now, but that's what I did. And I started off just because I knew ads really well. I knew shopping really well. I started off selling in Fit Formula. We grew that business to 10 million sales. I ended up selling it. At the time, I brought on a co-founder investor and we had a falling out. So I didn't want to continue working on a new business with him.

13:53But my first employee, her name was Nisha. Nisha and I went to business school together and she came on to work for me there. And we were like inseparable in this business. So we decided to start another one together. We got into YC initially working on creating our own infant formula, but because it was COVID and supply chains were down, we had to pivot. During that time, it was really tough. We were deciding between many, many different ideas from SaaS companies to consumer companies. At the same time, I was going through my own skin issues. I had my second child and I was breaking out all up and down my cheeks, which I'll send you pictures so you could display it, but really bad.

14:36And then I was also talking to other moms who were also going through that situation. And it turned out that they, you know, a lot of, a lot of women have hormonal issues and breaking out with their skin. So I was like, why don't we try, why don't we try this business? I also just on the flip knew that there was like a lot of M &A activity in that business, that, you know, there was a lot of money in that, in that area. But I didn't know much about it. I just knew that like, it's possible to start a company and get it sold. I was like, okay, let's start that. Um, I, I was very passionate about it.

15:12And the thing is about, I think, you know, this about founding a company, you have to be incredibly passionate about what you're doing because you spend so many hours obsessing over it. And if you're not interested in it, you, you, you'll break. So I was interested in that, which is why I was like, okay, this is like a good match of market need, my interests, I can do this. And that's how it all started. I think, well, first you said that you wanted to be a founder no matter what, right? So I first, before commenting on what you just said, I wanted to ask you why, because while you do it yourself, you know, it's, it's tough to be a founder.

15:52I started working on my own in 20, in 2008, after the big crisis in the US. I was working from here, from Argentina for an American company as a developer and they shut down their doors. And it was like, what do I do now? I kept some clients from the US because they closed the entire company. So I started, you know, working directly with them and then I started my own software factory, blah. But the thing is, first time founders probably getting business and want to be a founder for the wrong reasons. they think it's about freedom in the sense of having more time for yourself and probably have less less freedom yeah you don't have a boss but you do in a way it's either yourself it's your customers it's your clients depending on the business you have you have many so you need to work harder work doesn't end at 5 or 6 p.m and everything is on you and you wear too many hats that seems does this ring the bell yeah I mean the problem is that like I don't think anybody believes it until they actually do it so I was a product manager at Facebook or Meta now it's called and I was there and I remember working like every Saturday that I was there almost every Saturday I would work at least a couple of hours and there was like a point when when I got pregnant when I was like, God, if I'm going to work this hard at a company, then I got to do it for myself.

17:23Right. And I had this illusion of, okay, you know, I'm going to work just as hard, but at least I can control my hours, et cetera. Um, and then now I make like the first few years, made way less than what I need, you know, in that industry, uh, and had way less flexibility, right like I can't call in sick I can't go on vacation and sign off I'm always on all the time I haven't been on a single vacation where I didn't work uh since I started working on my own companies but see this is why I think you have to be so passionate and love what you do because if if you don't you'll just be angry all the time right and I think that that's the truth is that it it becomes you and so if you're not like aligned with it it's very very hard to keep keep continuing So I completely agree.

18:12There's like actually almost no time for yourself. But I will say that there is flexibility in that you can choose when to be at certain meetings because you run the company, but it's not like you can get rid of the meetings or get rid of the client or get, you know what I'm saying? And so sure, if I have like a doctor's appointment in the morning, I could say I'm not going to, I'm going to go to a doctor's appointment, but I still need to figure out when I'm going to do that meeting and maybe I'm doing it at 8 p.m. at night. And so, you know, whereas I could just sign off after 8 p.m. the passion part is important more than people can imagine because yeah it's it's actually simpler than it looks like because these days sure there are many inventions like product invention new products but yeah most brands sell something that somebody else sells too and if you're going to stand out from the crowd because you can say my product is different because Yeah, but they don't know.

19:11They need to educate themselves. You need to do the marketing, be there. And that's when the passion comes into place because you're so passionate that you want to scream that from the rooftop. You want to go and generate content on podcasts like this, on social, everywhere, because it's like brand partnerships, collapse, whatever you want to call them, because it's like, I cannot believe what I have built. It's amazing. I want you to have it because you can make it. well as a client whereas if you're not on the flip side well you're as you well i don't know if you are passionate or not with your first business but if you sell something that let's say you import it and you sell it let's say which is super valid as well probably say well i do it as a side gig and probably yeah not my passion so it will stop there it will be just staying behind the storefront uploading a product to a Shopify store and then probably creating some ads and wait to see if there's some sale yeah and when you're not passionate it'll eat at you like it'll show up in other ways your body will show it to you like other ways and so I think so here's the other thing passion is such a weird thing to talk about right because everybody always says you got to be passionate but in reality when you think about what people are passionate about it's like singing playing the guitar, playing golf, like those things don't make money.

20:36Right. And so, so what is, what is a function that would describe passion, right? Like passion is a function of something. And so I think in business, the thing that I was very confused about is, you know, like everybody says go be passionate, but nobody defines what passion is in a business setting. And I think it's a function of a couple of things. One is a function of flow. Where do you get flow from? right if you were to work on something for a very long time could you could you keep going and that doesn't mean that it has to be like singing like my passion is saying I love to sing and I get into a flow etc but there are other things that I get into a flow sometimes sometimes this is very nerdy but like sometimes I could look at code all like all day just trying to solve it because it's a puzzle that I want to solve right so that's like and I bet there are many people that are like that So that's one, it's flow.

21:27Two is I actually think that here in the business setting, it has to be able to make money. So like you can't have a passion that's not going to make money because at the end of the day, you're going to burn out because you don't have, you can't sustain. So it has to be something in the context of generating income. Now that means that, yeah, if singing like mine is your passion, it's going to be very hard for you to make money. So you have to be okay with that. And so I think that's like, how much can you sustain? What is your lifestyle? like, how much money do you need? Because it doesn't matter how much you love something, you're going to need the gas, right?

22:01And then three is that I think you really need to think about what is it that you can improve upon, right? Like, so you need to see how you can contribute to that. Because I think that that brings joy and satisfaction. So it's not just about flow, as many people get flow and meditation, but can you contribute to the world of meditation? that's a question right and maybe the founder of comms felt like he could right and so like do you have some unique knowledge or insight that you feel like you can contribute because that is how you will continue to be interested in it so for me i think that's how i define passion i'd be curious actually how you define passion because especially in a business context very hard to understand yeah no i totally agree yeah it's something definitely hard to define but um i I think we all get like there needs to be an extra ingredient to just business because otherwise I think that to get through the tough times because there are tough times always, even if they're small.

23:06But there are always tough times in business. And if you don't know how to go through them, because you don't probably, you don't care about the business that much, you're not passionate, probably burnout is going to win and you're going to want to give up. Sometimes it's good because sometimes it's time to give up if you're not really into that business. And sometimes it's because, you know, I don't know, market demands where everything changes, you know, these days with AI, but only that. Yeah, I think it's an interesting topic because I think we were talking about that the other day when we first met.

23:45And it's the fact that these days, at least the brands that I interviewed here in the podcast, the ones I talked to or worked with at the agency, the common thing that I see is that they go beyond the story front. They care about their customers. They build communities. They have strong missions and visions. And they put those into actions. It's not just a mission statement on the website. They put those into action from internal things like hiring team members, firing team members, the company culture, what they build products around. And, of course, what they speak about with their customers, customers they choose to engage with.

24:24And the brand collapse, creator collapse, like everything. Everything is like why people chip them over somebody else selling similar stuff. Right. So that's really important. And that without passion, can it be possible? I don't know, but I think it's an uphill battle, right? Yeah, totally. so i wanted to ask you now more about you know what came next you know you said that you were you know discussing some business ideas with this co-founder because you looked like you were certain that you wanted to be doing something with her regardless of what you did like sass or whatever company type but once you said we're going to build lion pose what came next how did you pursue to make this company a success?

25:13Yeah, so funny. And half of like thinking about it, I did everything in reverse of what I would do today. I, you know, initially like didn't have an idea, but I knew I wanted to be a founder. Then I had a co-founder and we didn't have an idea. Right. And so then we might come up with an idea. And so, you know, I would actually do it. I would do everything the flip now, like come up with the idea, get the co-founder, get, you know, all that stuff gets the funding. But because I did it this way, which is amazing, like I learned so much. Right. And so my co-founder and I are really good friends, which is why we started the company together.

25:50And the other thing that I had like read or learned about a lot is like, you really have to trust your co-founder. And I know that my co-founder and I, like we have been through so many ups and downs. We have been through really, really tough times at my first startup that I was like, this is hands down, this is the person that I know I need to start a company with. And it's true. Like the first few years of starting a company, incredibly hard. It's like, it's like having a child so hard. If you don't have your like spouse, I mean, I like God bless like single parents. It is so, so hard. Right.

26:22And so I think of the same way as like raising the companies, it's like raising a child. So you need a good, a good person to do it with. So my co-founder and I were together. We both aligned on this, on this space, mostly also because she has a skill set in operations and logistics. So this was like something that she could contribute to, right? So this is why I think passion, again, it's like, what does that mean, right? She felt like she could contribute here. I was open because what I could contribute was like growth, ads, and product management, right? And so over here, I saw, okay, I can do this as well, as well as like, you know, I also have a personal issue.

27:01So we started this company together. And the issue is that, well, it was just the two of us in a room. Like, what does it mean to start a company, right? We're just sitting there in a room. I specifically remember like we were in a WeWork and we came up with the name. And that's it, right? That's what a company is. We had no products, no customers, nothing. And so we started with small goals. And this is why when you asked about OKRs, this is where I I feel like this is so important. I don't set like this massive OKR like Google does. It's such a process and overwhelming. But we set like small goals because it's very intimidating to be like, I'm going to build this massive company.

27:39The first goal was we wanted to get into Sephora. So we tried to reverse engineer how to get into Sephora. Why? Yeah. My apologies. I wanted to highlight something in case someone missed that. You know, it's like you wanted to pitch Sephora before having a product or a business, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We were like, we have to get a deal with Sephora. And so it's funny because I didn't think about this until now, but the Google part of me was like, oh yeah, you can do partnerships without a product. Like the partnership started and then we built a product, right? And then the other part of me also was, you know, coming from business school, I did a lot of analysis on companies and I've made it in this space.

28:26And I had noticed a common theme amongst companies like Drunk Elephant, Tatcha, etc., was that they all got into Sephora. So when they went from unprofitable to profitable, the big step change was Sephora. And so I was like, OK, we need Sephora, right? What does that mean? I have no idea. But we started asking people at Sephora, how do we get in? What do you need? What are the requirements? Just so we can start building a spec on how do we build towards Sephora? And so everything we did was like around we were just chanting this. We have to get in. and kudos to my my co-founder i mean she she is like amazing when we set a goal like she does so much to get to that goal and so we had to create a product so this is like uh this is the product that we ended up creating that's on the shelves today but hand drew this product nisha went and got it 3d printed and then did a whole photo shoot with like fake product in it so like you know we had people doing these like hand motions with like pushing this out but it looks like this and we didn't even have product did it because it was a 3d print and so we did she got this whole photo shoot done with models brand everything and um we never we didn't actually have the product ready so sephora loved it they loved the presentation and two months two and a half months after we set that goal we got into sephora by contract so from wow is that normal like for for any founder listening to this because i've spoken with many people you know in sephora and some other you know um retail chains but to set expectations you know what did you did different from other people that they should replicate if they want to get into sephora or Yeah.

30:18So, um, we, you know, we, we just started talking to everybody in the industry. Like that was number one is like, how do you build a roadmap? So this is something that I learned actually from Meta. Meta would launch products really fast. I was on a, I was on the video team and we would launch things so fast. Like, I mean, it would be like from, from concept to launch in two months. Right. I remember sitting with my manager at Leto once and I was just so overwhelmed. My job at the time was to launch a news tab for video. And I was like, well, I don't even know how to do this. Like, what do I do?

30:59They just said, do this. And so she said, I'll never forget this. She said, open up a sheet of like, you know, a Google Doc or at the time, and they didn't use Google, but a Doc and write all the questions you have. All the questions. Like, where do we get news from? How will we display the news? um who will work on this all of those questions right and she's like and then go and talk to everybody at the company that might have the answer so then i just started setting up coffee chats with everybody at meadow that had ever worked on news or new news or engineers that would know how to display the news and slowly slowly just like built this roadmap because i got every question that i had answered so we did the same thing here like well we got to get into Sephora?