Deep Dive: Brilliantly and the riches to be found in niches

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Deep Dive into Brilliantly and the riches to be found in niches

I was on the phone with Kristen Carbone the other day. She’s the founder and CEO of Brilliantly (and a graduate of our first ever Day One Fellowship cohort way back in 2020). As Kristen and I were chatting and diving deep into Brilliantly for this newsletter, she highlighted something that really put what she’s building into perspective.

She said it so simply - women are living uncomfortably, and doing uncomfortable things, all the time. It’s baked into their daily lives, from waxing and plucking and push up bras (her words not mine), to being cold in environments that don’t take into account that women’s metabolism is 30% lower than men’s (not to mention women’s dress codes don’t offer as many layers as men’s). Once you start to think about it, the list gets really long.

I absolutely loved that she framed Brilliantly’s mission, and the huge problem that she’s tackling, that way. At the most fundamental and visionary level, Kristen is solving for women’s comfort. And that’s a big deal (we’ll dive into how big a deal below). But she’s getting started in an awesomely focused way, by helping women who have undergone mastectomies and reconstructions be and stay warm, with the world’s first discrete, safe, and mobile heater that fits inside women’s clothes.

Kristen’s experience with discomfort and cold was even more acute than what most women face. Kristen lost her mother to breast cancer. Her mom was in her 40’s, so Kristen decided to have a preventative mastectomy and breast reconstruction. Because her procedure was preventative, she never felt like she fit in with the communities of women who underwent these procedures due to breast cancer. And so she went through the first years of this journey mostly on her own.

One side effect that Kristen felt was always being cold. And not just a little cold. Cold in her core. Cold to the point of distraction and real discomfort. But for 5 years, she wasn’t in the communities to hear anyone else talking about this and felt like she was the only one.

So Kristen created a workaround solution - she put those hot hand glove warmers in her bra, and kept doing it even though she burned herself! That’s how bad the problem was and how badly she wanted it solved. For all the founders out there, whenever someone is willing to go out of their way to create a workaround solution to a problem, you have the seeds for a promising business. And if someone is leveraging a work around that is causing them physical injury, but deeming the risk worth it - then that is a real problem and one that should have a solution!

So with the seeds of an insight and an idea, Kristen went out to the breast cancer survivor community, and lo and behold, 75% of women who had undergone breast reconstruction had the same challenge of feeling cold. And some even had the same experience of burning themselves! As she explored further, she found that some women who had cosmetic breast reconstruction had the same problem. And as she put her first products into market, she found that women loved using her products just to feel warm - no medical condition needed - or when cramping to safely and discretely heat up their lower back or abdomen on the go.

So this is a story of a founder taking a personal challenge, deciding to do something about it, and taking the insights that she earned from exploring and building to found a growing and important startup. And like so many founders, by solving for herself and her niche, she realized this problem is far from niche and that by solving a problem for an underserved population, she was ushering in an innovation that would serve women (and really everyone) in so many ways.

These are my favorite kind of founder stories. And the riches that Kristen is finding in her niche aren’t just limited to building a growing and successful business, but to really helping people who haven’t had solutions designed or built for them.

What Kristen is doing also puts a spotlight on the importance, and the opportunity, founders have to build startups that solve problems for women. The fact that so many women face so many challenges - from health and wellness to work and careers - that remain unsolved is itself an issue. And the fact that so little capital flows into women-led startups means the founders who have these problems and have innovative ideas about these solutions aren’t getting the same opportunities to solve them.

So I want to do three things in this deep dive. I want to tell you the story of Kristen and Brilliantly and highlight how she’s navigated the early stages of bringing a hardware startup to life. I want to highlight how finding and staying in your niche is hugely important for a founder. And I want to touch on the woeful state of tech and startups that serve women and drive home the importance and the opportunity of building startups for women.

Building in hardware is hard

Brilliantly is a startup that has created a discrete, safe and effective warming solution called Brilliantly Warm, that fits within women’s clothes. The device is battery powered, works for a long time, is comfortable and fits within clothes. And it won’t burn you. It’s been developed in consultation with doctors and leading scientists and engineers and has patents pending.

It works, and the women who have used it absolutely love it.

Kristen took all the right steps to start Brilliantly (steps I see many many founders skip). Before deciding to really start the business, she talked to hundreds of women. This was how she started pulling the string - first women who had undergone mastectomies, then women who had any kind of breast augmentation or reconstruction, then lots of women in general who felt cold for all kinds of reasons.

I’ve started to tell founders a blanket piece of advice - you need to have 100 conversations with customers when starting out. And yes, these conversations need to be structured like interviews and you need to avoid leading your customer or letting them just tell you what you want to hear. The first 10-25 conversations will probably be friendlies, so you’ll have to take them with a grain of salt. But you’ll also start to get a real sense for where to take your questioning and what things are really like from your customer’s POV.

Then the next 25 are where you’ll start to gather your first real insights. You’ll disprove some of your original hypotheses. You’ll get some exciting new ideas. But you can’t stop here. These insights and ideas are important, but you probably haven’t nailed down who exactly is the white hot center of your ideal target market. But this where most founders stop, or put customer conversations on the back burner. Don’t do this.

If you push on to the second 50 conversations, you’re insights will go from exciting to real, and you’ll go from people telling you directionally helpful things to people actually telling you “I want and will pay for that”. You’ll also find your first 10 customers as you push toward 100 conversations. This is one of the ways I can tell if a founder is serious and going to make it, or not.

Kristen is one of the few founders I meet who had these conversations. She also didn’t rush in. As much as this problem personally affected her, she’s playing the long game, something even more necessary when building a hardware business.

Because hardware is hard. Everything you need to do as an early stage founder, from iterating quickly to conserving resources, is harder (read more expensive and slower) with physical products. This is probably where a bit of irrationality plays an important role, because to solve this problem, Kristen couldn’t just create an app or service or even a novel business model, she had to create hardware to solve her challenge.

But because Kristen did things properly (honestly she had way more than 100 conversations as she was bringing the idea for Brilliantly to life), she had more than enough alpha and beta testers as she built her first prototypes and had women test the product and give her feedback. This is the benefit of doing the first things first.

She also did what most hardware founders should do and pre-fund an initial production run with pre orders. Kristen pre-funded an initial production run of 50 units in the summer of 2021 (she sold out in 48 hours), and then pre-funded her second run of 500 units in 2022.

That kind of response tells me you’re onto something. But hardware is hard. To make product iterations, Kristen needs to get feedback from customers (easy enough when you’ve done the work to build community and connect authentically with even your newest customers) and then work with engineers and manufacturers to create new iterations - which is both costly and time consuming. And as a startup who can’t do both R&D, production and sales all at once, these cycles aren’t as continuous as a software or service oriented product. But really this is the timeline it takes to build something new in the world of hardware.

Brilliantly is now taking pre-orders for the latest iteration and model of Brilliantly Warm. This slow and steady pace of product development and building a customer base is setting Kristen up for growth. In reality this is how all startups operate:

1. You have an idea and you validate the problem, the market, and get as much confidence as you can in your proposed solution (by having 100 conversations like Kristen did)

2. You build the most minimal thing you can (in Kristen’s case, that first minimal thing was a pre production prototype) and get it in customers hands. At this point, you know you don’t have it perfect, but real feedback is the only way to get there, so you ship it.

3. You take that feedback, incorporate it into the product, and then take the next step to start charging customers and begin marketing for real. Kristen did that with her first kickstarter.

4. From there, you work in iterations of gathering feedback, making changes to the product, getting it in the hands of new customers… then getting more feedback, making more iterations, until the product is right.

5. Now we know you can’t just have a great product, so concurrently you need to iterate on your sales and marketing approach. If you can tie these iterations into your product development cycle, then you’ll learn not only what your customer wants in your product, but how to sell to them.

6. When you know both of these, you then continually invest in marketing that leads to sales, sales leads to profit, profit leads to investment in more marketing… and you’re off.

So this is the path every startup takes - Kristen is somewhere between steps 5 and 6, and is tightening the flywheel, building toward takeoff.

When can we retire the word “femtech”

Soak in the fact that we live in a world where we have to designate tech as “for women”. Because most tech isn’t designed for women.

This obviously came up as I was deep diving with Kristen. She’s building a startup in the heart of “femtech” - and let me tell you, it’s not easy.

For now, the word is a useful shorthand to indicate that founders are building products for a “niche” that includes 50% of the population, who are largely in control of household budgets, and who make many of the decisions around parenting, education, travel, diet, healthcare and so much more.

Femtech is most often used to describe health and wellness startups - and for good reason. Kristen and I have a mutual friend, Alessandra Henderson, who’s building Elektra, a startup that is tackling challenges in and around menopause (and smashing the menopause taboo while she’s at it). Alessandra made a post recently that pointed out that it wasn’t until 1995 that healthcare studies (you know, the things that determine if drugs are safe for people to take and what side effect might happen) required women to be in them. Like, what were we testing before!

The reality is that building for women and solving women’s challenges is a huge opportunity. But that hasn’t done much to change the woeful statistics around funding that women receive (for those who don’t know, women receive about 2% of all venture funding).

What that means is that ideas that women have - the kind that solve problems for half the population in ways that many in the other half couldn’t or wouldn’t think about - are much less likely to actually be built. And female founders are much less likely to be put into business, so there are fewer around to support each other, fewer who win, and who then use those wins to give back or invest in the next wave.

So if you’re in search of a macro thesis you can invest or build in, consider building for women. Yes you’ll face many of the same funding challenges, but there are also huge opportunities to solve huge challenges. You’ll end up doing well by doing a lot of good.

Riches in niches

You’ve probably heard this phrase before. If you haven’t, the wisdom is that to build a successful business, you need to start narrow (and in all likelihood, stay narrow). There are two drivers of this.

First, if you’re not narrow enough (that is, focused on a distinct and tightly-defined target customer) you’re probably not going to build something that’s distinctly better for them than the competition.

Second, if you’re not narrow enough, you’re not going to be able to communicate specifically how you’re better in a way that your customer understands or break through the noise and reach your customer.

So it’s about both marketing and product. You might say that being niche is how you find your first bit of product-market fit.

Kristen’s story building Brilliantly exemplifies this. She started with her very specific problem - a niche within a niche within a niche. That’s good. She realized that she probably didn’t need to stay so niche, and also that almost all women need her product.

This is where I find most founders. A big part of why they get excited early on is that they see multiple types of customers needing their product. I’d say all things equal, that’s good, and is probably most useful for storytelling when pitching investors or building a brand. But in reality, it’s a double edged sword, because the temptation to build for multiple groups is strong.

If I could take the wheel and guide early stage founders, I would force them to only serve one niche - a niche that feels way too small (I would also ensure they have a source of income so they don’t have to quit too early). If you do this (and both these things), you will be set up for so much more success.

This is one of the dualities of building a startup that a founder must wrestle with - the fact that getting to their goal (whether that’s scale, or a profitable business) requires staying focused and small. It’s also against the nature of most founders, who are probably people who think big or see many opportunities. But it’s so so necessary.

The result of staying focused into a niche is a clear roadmap of what to build that will be properly valuable to that customer. If the customer segment is too broad, you’ll essentially be building by committee. Or you’ll create too many features that the core customer doesn’t know what to tap into (a very real problem). So you need to stay focused to know what to build. And then you need to stay focused to know how to market and reach this customer.

Here’s how it plays out. By staying narrow, you actually get onto first base with customer traction. You start to get great reviews, to the point where that customer might even tell their friends. And if the niche is tight enough, they definitely have friends who are also customers.

You also start to understand really well how and why your product works and is awesome for your customer. You can then use this to market and sell to others. So you start to close more sales. You also now have strategies that work to hack your growth - you can find leaders of these communities and work with them. You can work with influencers, or advertise in niche newsletters.

And in reality, there are way more people in the world and on the internet than you think and owning a niche that feels small will probably be plenty big for you and your business. But even if not, these first steps are the necessary steps toward either 1) funding that will help you scale or 2) the foundation of a customer and product base that is scalable.

To see this all in action, this thread by Nathan Barry, the founder of ConvertKit, is probably one of the best examples of going deeper to unlock growth. Give it a read.

You can also see the beginnings of this story with Brilliantly. Kristen’s niche is women who have undergone mastectomies and breast reconstruction, whether they did it preventatively or as part of treatment. The product is designed for these women. The reviews speak to the value that these women receive and can be used to sell the next cohort of customers. The customer is already engaged in community that Kristen can authentically tap into.

My prediction is that Brialliantly takes off serving this core customer. The opportunity to serve more customers is always there, and at some point Kristen will likely take the leap (with branding and marketing and probably even new products) much like ConvertKit has. But the journey for Brilliantly to become a household name starts with a niche.

Wrapping up

I hope you’re a bit inspired or motivated by what Kristen is building with Brillaintly. Your founding story doesn’t have to match up with hers - everyone starts on their founder journey in their own way. Most of us probably fall into it. Regardless of how you got started, take away two key lessons from how Kristen has gone about starting up:

1. Play the long, patient game. If you’re building hardware, make sure you double the time and investment needed to get started.

2. Stay niche, for as long as possible, and build and iterate around your core customer.

And lastly - don’t overlook the challenges and opportunities that exist in serving women. The number and diversity of niche customers to serve and challenges to solve are tremendous - and they all ladder up to a huge market.