KG:All right, welcome to the #WeGotGoals podcast, live edition from SweatWorkingWeek. My name is Kristen Geil. I am sitting here with Julia and Lauren from Stylisted. Hi Guys. Thanks for being here.

JC, LK: Hello, thanks for having us.

KG: We're excited to hear everything that you have to say. So let's start from the beginning. The story of how you guys came to be is more than just, you saw a problem and you worked to create a solution. It's also about the two of you coming together with your unique strengths to make an idea into a reality. Can you guys share your origin story with us?

JC: Sure. It’s Lauren's brainchild, so I'll let her tell the tale for us.

LK: Stylisted was very much born from a personal pain point. We were inspired by a professor who told us to start what we know. We had both just moved to Chicago to attend business school and we were both entrepreneurial.

We had always wanted to start a business and we had kicked around a bunch of ideas, but this start what you know concept, which seems so obvious to us now, was kind of a novel idea. We had these ideas that had nothing to do with our experience or expertise. And after many failed attempts to get my makeup done before friend's wedding, all coming to a head at a wedding that I had in Atlanta. I called Julia and I said, why is it so difficult to find out who's good and who's available when it comes to event prep? I want to get my makeup done or my hair done, but I don't know who's in my area, who can do a great job. And she completely commiserated, shared her own failed attempts and also kind of educated me on this call and told me about the life of the freelance makeup artist.

She had worked directly with makeup artists in her time at NARS cosmetics before business school and understood their pain points that they work at some salon or cosmetic counter only to be told how much, how many hours that can work and when and to give 50 percent to the salon owner. And they want to freelance more to supplement their income, but they can't find clients. So Julia's experience in my experience really came together. It was the perfect marriage and we decided to build a solution.

KG: So how did Stylisted start? I know you didn't come up with the app right off the bat.

JC: No, it was incredibly manual. We took a Powerpoint Deck and I reached out to makeup artists and hairstylists that I knew from my previous position. I told them about the idea. We got validation that they wanted what we were proposing to build and got them to send little bios, photos of their work and we created this pdf deck and started sending it to all of our friends who are getting married, who had business school formals, interviews, things like that. Anything you could think of where you'd want a blowout or you know, full-on makeup for you and your friends and people were being very receptive to it and they liked the idea. They started asking to book people and the stylists were getting excited about it. So that was our absolutely free way of starting the business and beginning to test it out.

KG: And then you saw that there was a demand for these services and you moved forward with creating an app from there.

JC:A website, your website first we scraped together our pennies and decided to hire someone. Actually it was like a godsend. Lauren met our CTO, advisor, our technical advisor at an internship and he recommended this guy to us who needed to diversify his portfolio. He had been doing political websites in DC and we're like, we have a doozy for you. We're going to have you build this beauty website.

LK:Here’s something different.

JC:And he did it for a few thousand dollars and a lot of hours and sweat and we spent our Christmas vacation our second year of business school just working on the website and iterating. And then we launched essentially when we graduated.

KG:Wow. That's a lot to accomplish while you're still in business school and dealing with all of that course load.

JC:Yes it is. But we at Chicago Booth, we did the new venture challenge, which essentially was a class that allowed us to grow and cultivate this business and test it out and get feedback. So I would argue that it's easier to do it in business school then it would be for someone with a full time job family, things like that. We were very much in a position to take the risk and spend the time.

KG:And because you guys were in this together from the start, you had that advantage of having someone to lean on when things got tough, sleepless nights. I'm sure countless hours spent trying to accomplish just one thing. We've all heard about accountability is the strategy for going after your goals, but you take it to a new level when you're talking about starting a company with a partner and a co-founder. So how do you think that partnership has impacted your business and how you guys approach goals as a team?

LK: I mean the, the partnership is our business. It was the very beginning and it is to this day. You know, for us, and I've said this before, it almost felt like the game of chicken at the beginning where we would bounce an idea or something we're going to do off the other person and say like, I'm going to email so and so like five women's groups this week and see what they say.

And once you say it out loud and you commit to that person, you're going to do that. Then they also feel like they have to do something and you're kind of like, OK, and then after awhile you're like, we're doing this like we are building towards beginning of business. So that was kind of the origin and um, you know, to this day we keep ourselves accountable and it's, it's been almost five years, very much like a marriage. You hope that you grow together. And thankfully we have. But I think in terms of goals, I think we think about goals in terms of short-term and long-term. And I think it's really important on to make sure that you have the same long-term goals or vision, but to spend most of your time and your energy on those short-term goals to make this feel digestible and something that you can actually accomplish.

So instead of saying, I'm going to sell this business in five years, and that be your primary objective, say, OK, we're going to have a thousand customers by January, or we're gonna, you know, what are the smaller chunks of short term goals that you can actually accomplish? It's like saying, if you want to start going to the gym, you're not going to say, I want to look like a babe by summer. We're going to say, OK, no, I'm going to start going to the gym every three months. Or you know, start drinking more water. Like what are those really small, shorter term goals that you can actually achieve?

KG: Speaking of goals, on the podcast, we ask everyone who comes on to main questions. So let's get into the first one. What is one big goal that you've accomplished with Stylisted? Why was it important? How did you get there? And it can be the same or different for both of you.

JC:I want to say just existing to this day has been the goal. I think from the beginning there were a few things you want to accomplish. You want to solve a problem, you want to help people. In our case, the women like us, the clients with this pain point and the stylist who now we have men and women who’ve doubled their income by working on Stylisted and it's amazing to send out the W-9s. Holy Cow, she made this much that year? And Lauren is so much more in those weeds that when I get to see it, I'm like, Whoa, that's so great.

LK: And people applying for apartments are emailing us, asking them how much did I make this year? And then we're like, oh wow, you made $30,000 last year. That's pretty good.

JC:Yeah, that's, that's amazing. So yeah, there are a lot of different goals that we had when we started it and you know, we're kind of checking them off and obviously we won't sit here and say that a lucrative exit wouldn't be the absolute, you know, wonderful end goal or what we've always said is the company, you know, outgrowing the two of us and how can we work with some larger to continue to grow Stylisted and make it the best it can be. Yeah, I mean we're here four and a half years later and I'm just so proud of.

I mean, that's not a great answer. Sorry. That's not a great answer.

KG: That's a great answer. Lauren, would you agree or do you have anything else?

LK:My answer is similar. I like that I created a job for myself that actually now has a paycheck and insurance, health insurance and that we've created that for other people, jobs that they really like, that you know, they're excited to show up to work every day for and that's really a huge. That was a huge goal for us at the onset and we accomplished that.

KG: Yeah. You can tell that you've really made a tangible impact on these peoples lives. The freelancers that you employ through Stylisted. Has that sort of affected how you look towards the future knowing that you're to thank and sort of responsible for these people and how their lives proceed from here?

JC:Absolutely. It's a lot of pressure, but in a way I think it helps keep us motivated towards those goals because we are a small internal team, but we have, you know, nearly 300 stylists who depend on us for their supplemental income and it's very much a symbiotic relationship. We work really hard for them every single day so that when they go to a client they want to work really hard for us, for the brand and I think so far that's working out.

KGI read an interview that you guys did. I'm not sure when it was from, but I think you said something about the importance of having a short term memory when it comes to achieving goals. Can you sort of share what you meant by that with the group and how it goes into, you know, accomplishing one thing and then moving on to the next.

LK:One thing that we've tried to do is celebrate really small wins but then not allow ourselves to get too hung up because you need to move on to the next small when there are so many setbacks when you're starting a business and running a business and you can't really let yourself get in too much of a funk about anything negative, you have to move forward and celebrate the small wins as they come, even if they feel really small because that kind of thing will just allow you to feel your progress and allow you to wake up the next morning and do it again.

KG: What kind of small wins for examples that you guys celebrated back in the early days or even still today?

JC:Oh, like a celebrity booking us. That’s always fun. I mean hitting a new number, like a weekend where we have, you know, dozens and dozens of weddings like, wow, I can't believe we're doing this. Things like that. They're just special for me or those moments where you do see how it's impacting the freelancers and when they send a little note of gratitude or something like that, it's so small, but that's like the coolest stuff that we love. Even seeing a five star review from a client, we look at that stuff all the time and it means so much when we know that they're getting great service and we're really proud of the brand that we built and what we're putting out there.

KG:Does it get a little bit sweeter? Being able to celebrate those, hitting those small goals with a partner and a friend?

JC:Absolutely.

LK:Absolutely, and it works both ways. The good bad to have somebody to share that with is just necessary.

KG:Yeah, takes a little bit of the burden off you.

LK:Yes.

KG:I know that with a startup, setting realistic goals can be tricky because on the one hand you want to reach for the stars and change the world or change people's lives, but on the other you don't always have a full picture of the data that you're working with or your customer base. Especially early on when you're still sort of experimenting and navigating the new platform that you're creating. How was your goal setting at Stylisted impacted by those unknown factors and how were you able to overcome that?

LKYeah, this kind of goes back to something I touched on earlier, but just starting small setting really small digestible goals for yourself, you don't have to know everything to take what you know and try to act accordingly so your goal can be super small. Like I'm going to email five media outlets today or this week and I'm going to aim to get a response from at least one of them, to have at least one brand placement. You know, you don't have to have all the answers to do something like that. And I think it's important to never use not having the answers as an excuse to not act.

JC:Yeah. I would also say find the data somewhere you can. And we, I mean coming from Booth that was necessary, like, well we would tell all of these teachers and advisors, excuse me, professors, you know there, this doesn't exist, so how are we going to tell you how big the market is? And simply they wouldn't take that for an answer. You'd go out there, look into to the beauty market. Tell us what the salon industry size is, whittle that down to what you think the, you know, how many women who go to the salon would want to take it in home, how many women are going to a makeup counter, things like that, and then start with an MVP and see what actually happens and get that small sample pool and use that and that's kind of what we had to do and that's I think what every entrepreneur has to do because you're going to be convincing a lot of people that your idea is something that you have something here with nothing to fall back on, especially without a track record, especially as women and we needed numbers to back us up and not just two women saying we have a lot of events and we really want this and we think all our friends do so like get on board.

LK:This is gonna be huge!

JC: It wasn't enough, so you find that you figure out a way to find it.

KG:I did an interview with someone who works with entrepreneurs recently and he said the two biggest qualities he tended to see over and over again in successful entrepreneurs was tenacity and being comfortable with the unknown in working with that every day, and it sounds like that's something you guys have navigated really well over the past five years.

JC:Thank you. We've tried.

LK:We’re kind of chipping away at the unknown and in a way you're helped by having it limited resources. In our case, no money because I feel that when some people have unlimited funding, they go right to the solution and they spend thousands or millions of dollars on building what they believe to be the right solution instead of really focusing initially on the problem and figuring out what the right solution is. So we've iterated and our platform has changed and our processes have changed. Our infrastructure has changed. All of that has changed because we couldn't just jump at building that million dollar platform right off the gate.

KG:At aSweatLife, one of our favorite sayings is everything is better with friends and I was really struck by your all's partnership because you weren't afraid to ask for help from each other or from outside people and I think that's something that we struggle with a lot because you don't want to appear weak or like you don't know what you're doing. What advice would you give to women who have big goals for this year, for the future and want to enlist their friend's talents and support in trying to achieve those?

JC:I think people want to help is the first thing we have asked for so much help for the past four or five years and everyone is eager to, in a way, you know, show off what they're good at and help you out. When you ask for someone's advice, they're flattered. It's a good thing to be asked for help. So definitely don't be afraid of that. And at the same time, you know, be careful who you align yourself with. You want someone who truly is there to support you. You don't want someone who's going to knock down your ideas or you know, be in competition with you. It's hard to. It's hard to find what we have. I feel very, very lucky and I think that everyone can do it, but you really have to be careful in picking that counterpart and so many times in the beginning we had people say, why are you doing this with your friend? It’s not going to end well, and here we are. We're still going.

LK:Totally.

JC: I’m Lauren's maid of honor in April.

LK:She is.

KG:Congratulations you guys are going to look beautiful I’m. You guys are going to have the best hair and makeup and the business that day.

JC:Exactly, that’s the hope.

KG:What was an example of a time where you remember having to ask for help either from each other or from an outside source?

LK: I mean, your ability to ask for help and leave your shame at the door is all you have in the first, I would say two years. You don't have money. You don't have any experience and you just have to continually put yourself out there and ask people for help and admit when you don't know something and empower people that do know that thing that you don't k