Scentbird CEO’s journey to building a multimillion dollar company

2019 and last year only two percent of companies that raised funding from venture capitalists were founded by women. Two Percent While I was in New York I had the opportunity to stop by one of these companies and learn how they did it Maria Nurismalova is the CEO and co-founder of aromabird, a

company

that started in 2014 and has since grown to have more of 100 employees and 250,000 product subscribers, but generally these kinds of similar things start right in the workplace. Can you tell where the fragrance

company

has a lot of fragrances and if you follow me I will show you the board room.

I got bit by the entrepreneurial bug pretty early in the game. I think I was about 10 and my girlfriend and I decided that we would make little toys and make them with beads like different colored beads and we could make little crocodiles and lizards with little beads and then when I was 12 I found out about a company called Avon and their makeup and beauty products, so it was totally me. passion, so I tried to convince my mom to let me become a representative at 12. Wow, it's illegal, you can't, so I went to my best friend's mom and I thought my mom wouldn't sign for me.

Let me do it. Could you become a representative? But I will sell it. She said yes, so I convinced my best friend's mother to sign up and become a representative. I would just sell makeup to people and it worked many years later. Maria would come up with the idea of ​​her current risk center. If you're an avid YouTube viewer, you've probably already heard of it, but if not, it's a monthly subscription that lets you try a new perfume every month. I dreamed that one day someone would create a website that would allow me to discover new fragrances from the comfort of my couch in my pajamas.

That was the vision of the early days, the website was actually very simple, so basically someone came to the site. by writing three to five fragrances, they loved the algorithm, then they would go to the keywords for each of these favorite fragrances of a particular person and then they would say: okay, let's find other things for you to try, the recommender worked, but they had done it. one problem: they couldn't monetize a recommender, we hit a consumer pain point, then we had to turn it into a business and that was a really complicated thing to do, so we went through three business models, the first was sending the customer five fragrance samples and then allowing them to update them on the Scentbird website, while people were enjoying the five little samples, no one upgraded them to a full size bottle, you know, that started to be on our heads a lot because I was a big category user I thought I had all the answers, but as a founder you don't always have the answers, sometimes you just have the right questions, after one business model fails they quickly try another one, you're thinking, well maybe I'm not updating because it's still too early.

Should I give them a little more time? I don't want to bother them per se and then it takes you a little while to realize that they don't actually come back every day. how much less money you have in your bank account your friends and parents ask hey, what do you think about your future once you start pursuing you know your heart's desire? you're playing high stakes like poker because you're everything at all times and if it fails you, you're really sorry, it got to the point where they considered ditching the fragrance idea altogether, but they finally came up with a model that actually worked.

The CEO of White Combinator told us we spent a year. working in the fragrance market, no one knows this market better than you, you should keep trying and he gave us the idea that people want fragrances but in smaller sizes, what if they wanted a new fragrance every month? Then it hit me and I thought: what if? in fact they wanted a new one every month and then it was a matter of figuring out what the right vehicle is because if you're changing your fragrances all the time you really don't need a big bottle per se all the time once we launched this business model and started getting very stable traffic, so we started to get sales without having a marketing budget.

The first day, the first day, we got like 30 sales, the next day we got 40, and then 50,100. My past experience has been that if you build something, you have to build it. like begging your family, your friends, to be, you're the first pioneer and try it, we didn't have to say anything about what they just bought and I'm like, what is it? And suddenly we're getting organic sales. After a year of misery we had around 200 subscribers and here, after launching this product in the months when we had 300 subscribers, it was a success. 300 subscribers was a good start, but they would have to raise money to really make this work.

Describe the process of raising money. for aromabird and how you got into your first accelerator and where you went from there. I knew one of the founders of the accelerator. Every time I had a new company or an idea, I told him we'd let him know to catch up or we'd meet at events, so when I told him I was

building

this fragrance business, he said you should totally apply. I'm like, okay, sure forty thousand

dollar

s wasn't terribly complicated, but forty thousand

dollar

s only lasted as long as we needed it. buy inventory and you know, boxes and bubble mailers and, uh, it takes cash, we got all these orders, 300 orders before we even got the packaging from China and then the packaging arrived and then we were like, oh, now what should we do?

We don't have manpower, we don't have people to fill all these orders, so we have to fill all these orders ourselves during the night hours, like between nine and, I don't know, five in the morning, repackaging perfumes and sending them to our clients. To keep Aromabird in business, Maria needed to raise one hundred thousand dollars. I went through many no's. I never really calculated how many there were, definitely, like many dozens, back to back, she was able to raise the money from her first investor. John, in part, telling him that they would be accepted into one of the most competitive startup incubators and combiner John heard that and gave us a check, wrote us a check or what were you thinking?

You liked him too. Okay, I'm pretty sure. we will enter I was so sure we would get in because I knew my combiner was smart. I thought we had some value. They just had one small problem. In fact, they ended up being rejected by the combiner. It was a shock to me. It was a big disappointment, but looking back, I now understand why then we had a hundred thousand dollars and we were in business and then the business kept growing and even more and we were getting amazing feedback from users, so I came back. to john i said uh yeah john we didn't get into the combinator and yet look sunbird is growing here's another growth chart and six months later they ended up being accepted into the white combinator marie is definitely the person I want to be when I grow up and I'm already an adult, it's one of those things that she's a real leader, I mean, sometimes we're here and it's like after nine, where you can go to her with any problem or any issue and She likes it very quickly. being knowledgeable and responsive to anything and her number one quality about her is that she is very trustworthy.

I don't think there was anything in particular at school that would allow me to prepare for this trip. It was all a bit theoretical. You have many questions and no. answers initially and then I knew that one day this big dream of mine of

building

a beauty company would come true, but I felt like it was such a big dream that I kept putting it off and was like, well, you know what? I'm wise enough when I'm old enough when I have experience under my belt I realize that I may never get there, yeah I may never get to a point where I feel smart enough or just feel smart enough to do it. so I just said: you know what it is, now is a good time as always and I will learn by doing it with aspiring entrepreneurs.

I would say start small, don't postpone your dream, like you don't think you can go all the way. come in and you know, make this a full time thing, do something that gets you closer to the goal, but also never give up on your dream, yeah, just keep going, you know, get up if the world bites you because there's always light in the At the end of the tunnel, whether you see it or not, it's okay, I hope you enjoyed this video. I really enjoyed doing it and I want to make this a series, but I don't know what to call it, so if you have any suggestions, please comment.

Also below, if you have suggestions for someone you want to make a video like this, comment because I have an updated list below. Thank you very much Maria for letting me follow you for a day. It's definitely like this video is. It's not sponsored or anything like that. I thought it would be a cool video. I realized that following Maria is someone who doesn't let no stop her, she doesn't give up and I think that's amazing and something that everyone should try to be more like, so I hope this has inspired you. If you want to see more behind the scenes and some of the additional footage that didn't make it into this video, I'll be posting it soon on my vlog channel.

Subscribe to that channel below and that's it, I'll see you in my next video, bye.