Sramana Mitra: The real issue is, can you find a niche that is not overcrowded? Every niche is so crowded. Doing advertising is not easy because keywords cost so much money. Maybe you were getting traffic from pee pads and potty training. Even that traffic, by now, is super expensive.

What’s intriguing is that you were introducing a new solution to that problem. Your organic traffic was discovering a new solution to a known problem.

Natalie Youn: Right.

Sramana Mitra: You were selling one-offs and not a subscription at this point?

Natalie Youn: I would say, for the first week, it was a one-off product. It was my husband who said that I got to do a subscription. This is when Dollar Shave Club first launched. He’s in the tech world. This product made sense to do subscription because it needs to be refreshed. We argued a lot about it, but I did it. It was the best move for us.

Sramana Mitra: Amazon Marketplace didn’t do subscription at this time.

Natalie Youn: Subscription was just on our dot-com. On Amazon, I had this buy two packs offer. The way we did it was people saw us on Amazon. It was like an upper funnel.

Sramana Mitra: Then they came to subscribe on your website?

Natalie Youn: Right.

Sramana Mitra: In 2011, you got some validation. Subscription was picking up. What were the next strategic moves?

Natalie Youn: First, it was, let’s go local. It was a hybrid business. We hadn’t even thought about going nationwide. It was just a local business. That was phase one. I remember talking to my husband. He said, “Is this scalable?” I did some projections and thought we could do a hundred thousand.

Sramana Mitra: How much were you charging?

Natalie Youn: $20.

Sramana Mitra: With subscription?

Natalie Youn: $120. Now we’re an eight-figure business. I recall that conversation. I said, “I could probably grow to $200,000.” Now we’ve grown into so much more. Going back to your question, I didn’t’ have it like, “This is our phase one, phase two, phase three.” I get what you’re talking about with the product launches in my other companies. We would have a timeline.

Sramana Mitra: I’m asking for what happened. What were the strategic moves that you made that produced?

Natalie Youn: It was delivering locally. Then somehow a lady in Florida called me and wanted to ship to Florida. She was my first beta. It came out fine. We migrated from just LA-local to nationwide. For Amazon, it was always nationwide. Right now, Amazon is a much smaller portion of our business.

Sramana Mitra: How did that switch happen? At what point did that happen?

Natalie Youn: Early on. Around year one.

Sramana Mitra: Was it all organic still?

Natalie Youn: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you continue with the organic?

Natalie Youn: Probably around year two was when we started dabbling in advertising. It was Google. I hadn’t done Facebook until much later. I want to say until 2015. We were just doing Google until then.