Navigating the Skincare Revolution with Forbes 30 Under 30 and Clear’s CEO Ahana Banerjee

Rui: If you’re looking for stories, strategies, and actionable advice on how entrepreneurial careers start, you’re in the right place. I’m your host, Rui, and this is the Startup Journey podcast, the show where every week I sit down with different entrepreneurs, experts, and top leaders to dig deep into what it takes to get a startup off the ground.

Today, I’m joined by Ahana Banerjee. Ahana’s the founder and CEO of Clear, a social commerce app for skincare that enables you to buy, track and share skincare. I found it Clear at age 21 while she was still studying physics at Imperial college in London. That wasn’t enough. She was also successfully accepted into Y Combinator all before.

Graduating since then Clear has gone on to raise further funding from top Silicon Valley VC firms like Mino Capital and world class angels like Andresa Norwitz. Ahana has also recently been featured in Forbes 30 under 30. It’s such a long list of accomplishments in such a short space of time. It’s undoubtedly deserved.

Ahana, thank you so much for joining me today. How are you?

Ahana: I’m good. Thank you for the very, very kind intro for me. I’m, I’m really excited to share more of the journey with you.

Rui: Amazing. So as you know, our purpose today is to bring your insights and lessons to our community of entrepreneurs so that they can apply this in some way to their own journeys.

So to start off, how did your journey into entrepreneurship begin?

Ahana: That’s a great question. And I think as with almost every entrepreneur, it’s not a straightforward answer. I Didn’t know that I would be an entrepreneur for a long time. In fact, for me, for most of my life thus far, I thought I would be a physicist, uh, which is why I went on to study physics at university.

But I think if I even take one step back from that broadly, what I wanted from my life and my career was to have some kind of impact. And at the time I believed it would be through academia, scientific research, which is why I thought that was the route that I was going to However, once I got to university and I Started to learn more about what a career in academia looked like and also started to better understand My own strengths and weaknesses.

I realized that maybe that wasn’t the best option for me Maybe that wasn’t the best way that I can actually have an impact on society So I took a very proactive step for an 18 year old and applied to whatever internships were were out there And I was very very fortunate to be in London where there are a lot of opportunities And so I started just trying my hand at whatever I could, wherever they would say yes to me, I would, I would jump at the opportunity.

So I did internships in software engineering and investment banking and consulting and hedge funds while I was an undergrad and through sort of just rampantly seeking out opportunities, DMing people on LinkedIn. One day I received a cold message from founder who had very recently come up with a startup idea and they wanted someone with a skillset that mine very closely matched at the time on their team.

And at that point, I really didn’t know anything about startups. I never considered a career as a founder. That said, in my own sort of personal life and the projects I’d worked on, I did love things like events planning and I had done charity fundraising work at university and I liked coding. I liked building tools.

So purely because the job itself sounded fun, I said yes. And at the time for me, my definition of success was still very much, you know, secure a good grad scheme at a Goldman Sachs or a McKinsey and that that’s what I want. But this will be a cool project and I’ll learn some stuff from it. And that was the first job that I did that I fell in love with.

And I think it was because number one, it played to my strengths very selfishly. I felt like I was able to use all of the skills that I had, whether it was writing code to talking to people to developing a strategy to actually actually executing on it. But the other part of it was the impact point. I think it was seeing that these skills that I have have translated into a product that I have built that has helped this person in this, you know, material, tangible way.

And it was kind of like a hit. Like, you know, it was that feeling that I wanted to chase of seeing my actions help someone so directly that at that point it was, it was pivotal in my mindset about actually, I think this is how I want to have my impact on the world. So, so that was really kind of the, the turning point for me, but it wasn’t.

Still, it didn’t seem like a realistic aspiration to start my career as an entrepreneur, just because I didn’t necessarily see myself starting my career in that company with that team. And I had no idea what fundraising for a startup even meant. I didn’t know anyone that had gone through that process at that stage of my life.

And so the only path that I thought was reasonable at that point, uh, while I was at uni was. Get a regular grad job, work for a couple of years, save up some money. And then I thought I would use that to start my own business. It didn’t quite end up going that way, but that was sort of how, how I discovered that that’s, that’s what I wanted for my career.

Rui: Thank you for that. So it’s interesting because, so my company works with entrepreneurs. I spoke with literally hundreds of founders over the last few years, and we know that data shows us that. Entrepreneurs that are in good position to succeed are usually older. They are in their forties and it makes sense because they built a network.

They have some pocket money that they can spare. So there are multiple reasons for them to have also the industry expertise with that said. I would like to get your perspective on what young founders beginning their journeys now should consider if they want to build their own companies, right? Because I still believe that there’s a lot of space for young founders to build companies.

So given your experience, what you, what would you say to young founders starting their businesses now?

Ahana: I think there’s, there’s a lot of advantages to being a young founder. I think the big one is This is a great time of life to try this, purely because your other responsibilities are pretty much as low as they’ll ever be in your adult life.

You know, I don’t have a mortgage, I don’t have kids. Which are two pretty big responsibilities, you know, I’m not used to a really high salary Therefore my own cost of living hasn’t ever been massively inflated because I’ve always you know Had that student budget student mentality kind of way of doing things and I think because of that You know, there’s you learn so much from Choosing a career like this.

And it’s definitely not for everyone. I certainly wouldn’t say every young person should be an entrepreneur, but I think it only gets harder to make that decision later on in life when there’s more at stake and what’s very much related to that is, you know, when it comes to actually working on a company.

You can dedicate your entire life to this, all of your energy, because you don’t have to juggle other responsibilities. And I think that can be really great because frankly, you can simply outwork people with more responsibilities. You can spend more hours working on your company, which I think in many ways is a competitive advantage.

The second thing that I think is really important to mention, and You touched on it yourself as sort of something that’s really helpful for people further on in their careers is industry expertise. But I think it’s important to pause and ask ourselves, well, what’s the industry? And there is no one industry that you need to work on when you’re building a company.

And in fact, somebody like me building the type of company that I am, where the demographic is slightly younger, and I’m building for people like myself and those in a slightly younger generation. I know the trends better than someone who maybe didn’t grow up with it. You know, I am able to spend more time in this community.

I can be more approachable when it comes to doing user interviews, gathering insights, because I myself experience the problem that I’m solving. So, so I think that’s another really important point that. Industry expertise doesn’t have to come from years working. For me, I’m building a solution to people who’ve suffered with skin issues, and I’ve had the pleasure of suffering with skin issues from the age of 12, and hence have gone through that user journey myself, even though I’m still at a relatively young age.

I say, you know, I still have more than 10 years experience of spending every day learning something about the skincare industry. So I think that that’s another really, really important point. And I think the last thing is just on the, the kind of the way that people view their careers, something that I read a study on a couple of months ago was the fact that the younger generation are more driven by impact than money, than profits.

And I think a lot of people find themselves asking, how can they optimize for this? And I think that with a job like this, as I said earlier, you can really see the impact of the work you do, whether it’s on the users, your customers, whether it’s even on the team and the culture that you build. I think it’s a really great way that you can See the impact of your work directly.

And given, you know, the other things that I’ve mentioned about, you know, it’s kind of almost the safest time to try something, something like this. And you can still have a lot of knowledge about a certain field. I think it’s really, really fulfilling and you don’t end up sort of taking a job in another industry as a means to an end.

You really start your career with this passion and maybe naively optimistic view on the world, but. But that said, I think you have to be quite optimistic as a founder. And I think starting one’s career this way keeps your spirit alive because it’s such fulfilling work from day one.

Rui: That was an amazing answer.

So thank you for that. So there was something that we discussed earlier when we were doing the session prep for this call. You mentioned that unfortunately you faced some gender bias as you began your entrepreneurial career. Can you share a bit about that and how you overcame it?

Ahana: Absolutely. It’s a really interesting question and it’s something that my view has changed on in the last sort of two years since starting to build the company.

For context, before this sort of experience, I, I had the view that it’s unhelpful to talk about gender bias. And this came from having done a technical degree where I was one of the few women. It came from all of my interests, hobbies being in fields like gaming and rock music, where again, I was used to being one of the few women and I never felt that being a woman or being young or being brown was any kind of disadvantage.

I just thought that therefore it was unhelpful to point out that, oh, I am different from everyone else. And so I think even when it came to making the decision to start building my company, I didn’t even think about the fact that I was young, brown, whatever it was. I just thought, can I build this company?

Well, and my answer was yes. And so I went for it. But the first experience I had where I noticed that things actually weren’t the same was fundraising. Now, when I started doing my funding round, I just come out of Y Combinator. And although YC was an incredible experience, and they do a fair amount with fundraising, as far as helping you create a narrative and coming up with a fundraising strategy, there’s still a lot to learn.

And it’s on you as a founder, ultimately, to learn those lessons yourself. I’d watched a couple of episodes of Dragon’s Den and I thought, okay, you build a good product, you get good numbers, and then you, you go for it, you pitch people all day. And so prior to my funding round, that’s exactly what I did. I put all of my energy into building the best product I could.

Getting the best numbers. I could fundamentally building the best business that I could. So when it came to the start of the funding round, I was actually feeling very, very optimistic. And I, and I knew what some of the other companies that were also pitching what their numbers were and in such a short time, how much progress we’d made.

So I was actually feeling quite confident going into it. And it got to about halfway through my funding round, which corresponds to about a hundred meetings. And I just paused and I thought, is it just me or All my investors, women, and then I looked at my tracker. So, you know, I’d, I’d write down every investor I met with, I’d write down what firm they were from, how, what their typical check sizes, geographies, sectors, all of that stuff.

And I hadn’t, you know. Thought male or female, it wasn’t relevant to me. I thought, let me just do this as an exercise and go through and say, you know, are they male or female, or if they’re a fund, who’s the person I’m speaking to, um, you know, who’s the decision maker and I went through and of all the investors I spoke to about 75 percent were male investors, which is roughly expected in terms of investors that had actually invested.

So names on my cap table. Over 80 percent were female investors, and in terms of capital amounts, so actual dollars invested, over 90 percent had come from female investors, which means that my success rate with female investors is orders of magnitude higher than with male investors, which was something I didn’t even realize or strategize around at all.

And then the more I learned about how fundraising works, the more I was able to rationalize these numbers and understand some of the drivers for why this Why it is the way that it is. And my big takeaway is that I don’t think investors are racist. I think investors are sexist. What I do think is that investors have to make a big decision with limited information in a short amount of time and basic human biases, unconscious biases come to play.

And the way that the VC ecosystem is, is what makes it unfair and what. Is responsible for the really abysmal numbers for founders like me raising capital. And so I think, you know, that that was sort of like the first time and don’t get me wrong. There were some encounters where it was outright sexism or ageism or racism that I experienced, but those were definitely the minority.

And I think when you do over 200 pitches, you’re bound to meet a couple of strange people here and there. So, so kind of discarding those oddities who, uh, Yeah, I, I don’t really have any way to rationalize in general. I think, you know, most investors are good people and we can all agree that diversity creates more profits.

It’s, we know that we’ve seen time and time again, that it creates great companies and great ideas, but I think it really did hit me that. Someone like me who frankly has been given every opportunity in life. I had a great education. I have the most supportive family in the world. I had the stamp of approval from YC.

If fundraising was this hard for me, it’s no wonder more women don’t raise VC because it is really hard and the bar is not the same for men and women. The questions you get asked is not the same for men and women. And so I think that there’s a lot of work to be done in the ecosystem to make things a little more fair.

Rui: 100%. But this is how we fight it, right? Because it’s by talking about these things. And I truly appreciate the way that you went about it because yes, there’s one or two that will be the, the odd balls in there, right? Where things, and that’s definitely not all right. But most of them, I, I, I agree with you.

I think that it’s mostly ignorance or patterns of behavior that they, they recognize even unconsciously. Right? So. Helping them understand that there are these people that they are young, young women. And even though historically the numbers are not the same as old Caucasian men, right? There are still brilliant people, people like yourself, that have all the ability to build a company, to change lives, to help people.

From all over the world, thousands of people live better lives, and we shouldn’t really misjudge that we shouldn’t do just a surface level analysis, right? So call out to investors here is do your due diligence, right? So look at people with the same lenses, no matter who they are, because now you’re proving every single one of those investors that they were complete.

Idiots not to look at this the right way because it was a massive missed opportunity for them And that’s the language that they all they understand because they’re not idiots because they mistreated you They are idiots because they forfeit they forfeited a massive opportunity of investing in a company that has a lot of room to grow so Having said that I would like to speak a bit about Clear How did the idea for this company came to you already mentioned that this is something that you’ve been paying attention to for over a decade.

Where does this interest come from? What led to the idea to build a company?

Ahana: Yeah. So as I mentioned Clear, well, as you said in the intro, rather Clear as it’s a skincare tech platform. So we help people figure out which products to use. And if their existing products are working for them. I was blessed with bad skin at the age of 12.

Pretty much as soon as I went through puberty, I don’t think my skin has been Clear since then ever in my life. I have always had at least a blemish on my face. And because of that, I’ve tried just about everything. I’ve tried traditional, like, you know, I’ve seen my doctor, my dermatologist gone on different medications.

I’ve tried crazy diets where I’ve had like no sugar, no carbs, like not even fruit, like really, you know, restrictive diets. I’ve tried Indian Ayurvedic medicine. I’ve tried a bunch of different things. But my skin just really is not happy and wants to be problematic. And the other part of it is no one in my immediate family has these issues.

So my mom and dad both have flawless skin. My younger brother has flawless skin. So I never really had the support or knowledge at home where I could go to my parents and be like, what do I do about this? Which meant that from an early age. I felt this responsibility to figure out, well, if I want better skin, I need to find the solution.

And so, from very young, I was on YouTube, I was on Facebook groups, I was on Reddit threads, trying to learn about what I could do to, to help my skin and help the issues that I was having. And I realized that, that I wasn’t alone. Some of these groups have millions of people in them who are all looking for the same thing, a solution to their, their skin issues.

Because with skin, it’s, it’s not an exact science. There are so many factors that affect your skin. And hence, many people like me try lots of things and we, you know, we get confused. Like, what have we tried? How did our skin look at that time? What were all the variables that went into it? And how can we almost scientifically figure out what the root cause of our troubles are and go from there?

And. Because of this, you know, I had a very complicated spreadsheet, which I think speaks quite a bit about my personality. And many other people with similar personalities have these, you know, air tables with like every single thing that they’ve tried. It’s like a lab journal almost. But it’s hard. You have to make this yourself and there are so many things that go into it that I thought, why is there no tech to do this for me?

You know, there are period tracking apps, there are diet tracking apps, there’s exercise tracking apps, there’s sleep tracking apps, but why is there nothing for skincare? And so that was really the first part of it of, okay, I want to build something where I can just keep track of how my skin looks and what I’m trying.

And I can share that data with whoever my professional professional is at that time, whether it’s the doctor, the dermatologist, the nutritionist, have a way of succinctly saying, like, this is what I’m doing. This is how my skin looks and monitoring that progress. The other part of it was the learning about what to use in the first place.

There are millions of products. on the market. And you know, there’s new product releases all the time, new brands popping up. It’s incredibly overwhelming as a consumer to actually know where to start. And what I found through spending many, many years on these social media platforms, learning about skincare was community really drives the decision making process about what people try and whether that’s online community or in person community that has the biggest influence.

both on an initial purchasing decision, so the decision to try a product, but also the decision to keep buying products, you know, if there’s sort of the community hype or spirit around something. But a limitation to the existing platforms is that with skincare, it matters who you’re getting your advice from.

So I can see who you’ve got lovely glowing skin, but your skin type might be completely different to mine. So even if. XYZ products work for you because our skin types are so different. What works for you may not work for me. And if you are ready to use a 300, I have no idea what your skin type is. And that information is important for me to know before I make a decision that I want to buy the products that you use.

And so. The other part of what I wanted to do with Clear was make it easier to find people with skin like me and then learn candidly from their experiences. So that’s exactly what we do. You can find people with the same skin color, skin type, skin concerns in a similar age demographic in a similar location.

So you’ve got similar access to products and see exactly what they have done. And then what we do as a platform is we aggregate the data across the community. And we use that to make recommendations for our users. So kind of doing what dermatologists do. At a large scale because Again, it’s not an exact science and for some some parts of dermatology such as looking at skin cancers balls That’s different.

What we’re talking about is what’s known as like cosmetic skin issues things like acne rosacea psoriasis When it is linked to your health, but it is also considered cosmetic When you visit a doctor and they make a recommendation of you know, try this la roche posay product It is very largely based on their empirical evidence of what they have seen works over time.

So what we’re doing is we’re taking that part and doing it at scale. If an average dermatologist sees a thousand patients in a year, we at this relatively early stage can already sample from tens of thousands of people. So, so that recommendations part is also quite key to what we’re doing.

Rui: Okay, so first of all, because some of our listeners will just get the audio, they won’t see the video, they won’t be able to to tell if you do have bad skin or not and let me tell you that whatever you accomplished with Clear You’re already testament that it works because I couldn’t tell that you will have or had skin issues in in the past actually so I wanted to make that Clear and also as an origin story Sounds great, but I advise you to have a picture of you back when you were 12.

Otherwise, other people won’t believe either that you suffered from this issue. So ,

Ahana: I can testify. It’s the camera doing me favors, and I’m an expert with concealer at this point. It’s been years of practice, so , so

Rui: whatever you’re doing, it, it, it Clearly works. So that was one thing. Then the other is, okay, the, the, it’s one of those things.

And the idea in hindsight looks obvious, right? So why. Wasn’t there a solution for this before? Is, was it really a case that no one else tried to solve this? Or did you have competitors at the get go, but for some reason they were not finding enough traction? How was the market on, on the industry looking like?

Ahana: Yeah, so there were certainly some skincare apps on the market, and I know because I tried all of them before deciding to come up with Clear and Clear wasn’t actually the first startup idea I had. I started working on a B2B problem because I thought I should work on a B2B company in a serious space to To get taken seriously as a founder, but, uh, but no, so that there are apps on the market, but they do different things.

So there are some apps that are just the tracking side of things, but I found limitations to using them. And now having done a lot more analysis on those apps, the teams, et cetera, what I have learned is none of the apps. on the market for skincare, or at least, you know, there are, but at least none of the tracking apps I found were really built by skincare enthusiasts, and you can tell.

You can tell when you use it, and it was simple things like not being able to have a morning and an evening routine, which is Obvious to me as someone who’s used skincare my entire life that you have this or Not being able to drag your products into a certain order Whereas the order of application of your products matters So the fact that you couldn’t track that was annoying to you know Just not having a good enough products database So a lot of the common products that are just popular in the world were not on the platform So it was quite clunky to use So even though I tried a lot of these apps I never stuck with them because the experience Well, my experience with them was just not pleasant.

And then there are apps in other areas as well that do things like ingredient analysis. So you can scan them and they tell you what, what you’re using. There were no apps that were combining the tracking with the social element. And I think having used other platforms like Strava, for example, where I’d seen this sort of notion of you track your run and then you share it with a community.

I had seen these parallels with skin care that, you know, I’d be tracking on my spreadsheet and then I’d send it to Whether it was my doctor or whether it was a friend to say this is what I’m doing And I thought well, none of the platforms are making It’s social and doing it this way. So my honest theory as to why it hasn’t been done before, or at least done well before is there aren’t enough skincare enthusiasts that like writing code and that like building companies, because I think it was an obvious idea as well.

When I talk to people, they’re like, yeah, why, like, why hasn’t this been done before? And I’m like, well, your guess is as good as mine, but here I am. Try the app, you know.

Rui: So, you know, what bothers me is that most likely the reason why was because there were some people previously trying to do it, but they were people similar to you.

And because of that, no money went to them to enable them to do it, which is actually, it’s a shame for them and for the industry as a whole. It was an opportunity that you capitalized and it’s great that you did. Right. And it’s great that this story can. Actually, uh, inspire other people not to stop pursuing their, their goals just because they get a set of investors saying that for some reason they, they shouldn’t be doing it.

So tell me something, how was the process? Because now, yes, the opportunity is Clear. I know this is actually one of the biggest industries in the world. I know for a fact that there are a lot of enthusiasts there and from obviously. I know people that are more prone to this because they use 10, 000 different products.

Myself, I have dry skin and my family and relationships, everyone always tried for me to use some sort of lotion in my skin. I never I actually got the habit, but I know there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of juice behind the, the, this industry. There’s a lot of people, a lot of interest. So how did you go about validating the idea and building the first version of the product?

Did you try to do it yourself? Did you have anyone? with you back in the day. How did that go?

Ahana: Yeah. So I, I ran the initial validation process, like a scientific experiment. And I did that because I briefly mentioned I worked, worked on an idea before Clear, which was in the B2B SaaS space. And it was a meeting minutes app.

And I delved straight into product development without doing a single user interview. And when it came to actually trying to sell the product, I was hopeless because I didn’t know who to sell to. I didn’t really know what they wanted. And if they didn’t like it, I had no idea why. So after, you know, jumping into that really clueless about what to do and reflecting on what went wrong, I realized that talking to users is the most important thing.

And, and, you know, going through YC so early on in my journey with Clear was also great because their mantra is, you know, write code, talk to users. And so, Before writing any code, what I made sure to do was made sure that I understood the landscape. And of course, I’ve got my own personal experience, but I am not skincare.

I’m someone that has my own journey with skincare. And so what I did was build up an initial beta community. We just had a Facebook. group chat together. And I reached out to people that I’d connected with over the years, mainly on these Facebook groups, actually to just say like, Hey, I want to chat about your skin.

I can write some code and I’m thinking of building a product, but I don’t yet know exactly what it is. And, and the way I went about things was I came up with an initial idea, which. Actually isn’t exactly what Clear is today, but it solves the same problem of I don’t know which products to use. I don’t know if they’re working.

And so the initial idea was purely like an AI recommendations app where you scan your face and it just tells you what to use. So what I did is I came up with the idea and then I thought, what are all the assumptions that go into this idea? So an assumption is people are happy to scan their face. People trust AI recommendations.

people don’t know which products to use. And I went through this exercise, um, to think, all right, these are all the things that would need to be true for this business to work. I then went through each of these assumptions and said, how confident am I in each one of these? And how important is each assumption?

So, you know, something like people trust AI recommendations is something that I wasn’t very sure about. And something that is of extreme importance because that’s the whole app. And so I went through this exercise again for every single assumption that I came up with, and then I ranked them sort of on this matrix of assumptions that I’m most unsure about and are highest impact all the way down to things that I’m pretty confident about that are low impact.

After that, I thought, what are some non leading questions I can ask that will give me the answer to this assumption, or validate or invalidate the assumption? So let’s say it’s people trust AI recommendations. I wouldn’t ask someone in a user interview, do you trust AI recommendations? I would ask about their decision making process more broadly in life.

I’d ask about, you know, how they decide which skincare products to buy, but also how they decide to do other things, be it, um, you know, pick which holiday to go on, or if they, I don’t know, use fashion apps, like which outfits to buy, or, you know, there’s so many examples of decision making that are similar to how people make their skincare decisions.

So try to get an understanding if any of those involve a somewhat opaque Here’s what to do, go away and do it. Then through that, I would just do as many interviews as I could. And I did. I had a group of 300 people before I even started writing any code for the app to make sure that I was really confident in the assumptions I had going into building Clear.

So I kept doing this and I kept iterating, you know, if I proved or disproved an assumption, I tweak the idea. And that’s what came back that in fact, it was this AI point initially, where I realized that people don’t opaquely trust. An app, just telling them to use something they want to understand why.

And this is where I realized that the community was the driving factor behind it. Seeing someone with skin like them using something was way more important than just being told what to do, which is why Clear is built the way that it is. So I kept tweaking things and kept repeating this process until I wasn’t learning anything new.

And that took about three months. And it was only at that point that I said, I’m now ready to build. The MVP that took a month and it was pretty shambolic. You know, the products database was nowhere near good enough. There are all sorts of bugs on the app, but because I built such a strong beta community and done such in depth case studies with each and every one of these.

skincare enthusiasts. I was really confident with the initial vision and what I had to do. So then I had one more month of iteration in private. So in total, it was just two months of development work before we launched publicly. So it was still a really new app. Um, still lots of kinks in the, in the first public release, but I’ve also, you know, was always given the advice, especially from YC to like launch early and iterate properly as soon as you can.

So yeah, I was deeply uncomfortable with launching the app in that state. And I think that was an indication. It was the right time to, to launch it.

Rui: As you should, if you’re not embarrassed by it, it’s already too late. Exactly. 100%. And. You would be surprised, maybe not. You may be surprised with the amount of founders that actually build a product and only speak to their potential customers after the release, which is really, really a bad idea.

And I love the fact that you actually took the time to speak with these people, understand who they are, their pain points, what they expect from the, from the journey, right? So you could build it with them, with the market, and I’m sure that you saved. in subsequent iterations after launch. So I can’t stress the importance of this is enough validating your assumptions from the moment you have the ideas, speak with people, try to understand what they’re looking for, why the current.

Things are not working right. The current solutions in the market and then build your solution as a solution for a real problem. So I love that. Now you’re also a Y Combinator alumni, right? And successfully went through the accelerated with Clear. This was while you were still in college and working part time on the app.

I know more than a few YC alumni, right? And most of them tell me that. Some of the things that YC would like to see was full time commitment, some traction already. So how, what happened there? First, what made you apply to YC? And then how did you manage to pull this off? Because it’s, it’s really impressive.

Ahana: Thank you. And it’s a question I ask myself every day that how did I trick them into letting me in? So my, my journey with YC is another really, really interesting one. I mentioned that While I was still a student, you know, I did that first startup job, realized that’s what I wanted to do, but had no idea about how to raise funds.

And so kind of just like parked the startup part of my life and decided I’d pick up on it in a couple of years into my career. But that, so that was all, so that first startup job was after my second year of uni. And after my third year, and I was on a four year integrated master’s course, I’d already secured my grad jobs for the following year after I’d graduate.

So I went into my fourth year, quite relaxed, knowing that I had good options for when university was going to finish. But this was the summer of 2020 when COVID had hit. And as I mentioned earlier, also, I did a lot of charity fundraising work. I had my rock band and all of that suddenly came to a complete halt because of COVID.

Which meant that I had way more free time in my final year. And I just thought to myself, you know, I’m going to be at home for pretty much this whole year. The thought of just doing physics will drive me mad, so I need something to keep me distracted alongside my degree. And I don’t think just League of Legends was a good idea.

So, I thought, let me, let me start working on an idea now. And it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t have to go anywhere. I’ll still take my grad job, work for a couple of years, but this will be some good experience. And it was just a week into working on the, this idea, I decided, okay, like what’s a problem I’ve experienced.

And the thing I hated most about my banking internships was being the note taker. I thought, you know, I’ve, I’ve studied too hard in my life to be a professional note taker. So let me build a tool that solves that. And I’d also sat in some like VCs. I still didn’t, I don’t think I even knew what VC stood for at that time, but Imperial has.

an enterprise lab where it’s sort of like all focused on startups and entrepreneurship. And very broadly, I’d heard that like, it’s easier to sell products B to B. It’s more straightforward to make revenue on like a traditional SaaS model. So, and it’s best to build a solution to a problem you’ve experienced.

So I thought, all right, I Hate taking meeting notes. I can sell this to companies. Great. Let me work on this. And so came up with the idea pretty much like that. I, I just thought that, yeah, like, I don’t see what’s wrong with this. It sounds like a good idea. But as I mentioned earlier, also, I did zero user interviews, like no validation or anything.

And it was a week into coming up with the idea. And at that point I had a name and a logo. and a one liner. I decided to apply to YC, not really knowing what it was. I’ve always been the type of person that just applies to anything and everything, which is partly how I think I got all these internships.

And they were horrified when I did the internship and realized I knew absolutely nothing. But I thought, let me at least apply, you know, like I’ve got nothing to lose from this. So it was truly expecting. nothing from it. I was applying to a bunch of other things as well. And with this idea, and then when I ended up telling my friends that I’d applied to Y Combinator, they laughed at me, especially the ones that knew what it was.

And I, and I didn’t care, you know, I was used to being laughed at by my friend group anyway. And I was like, yeah, like whatever. Yeah. I haven’t heard from them. It doesn’t matter. But I think what’s important is that at that phase of life, I really was, and I still am. The type of person that applies for everything, even if it looks like the shadiest opportunity with like no information about it, I’ll apply and then when I’m in the position to choose if I want to take it or not, then I will do my my due diligence.

So I didn’t, I genuinely didn’t expect anything from YC and at this point. The university term had started again. I hadn’t heard from them. I wasn’t expecting to hear from them, but I had filled out a million applications about like trying to sell myself, trying to sell what I’m doing and make it sound kind of good.

So I think that’s how I initially duped them to give me an interview is that I just wrote a good application. And what is also interesting now as an alumni, I review a lot of applications. And I look at my own application, the one thing that I was good at was communicating Clearly, which surprisingly many people are not good at.

And I think sometimes you get so wrapped up in your own idea and in your industry that you forget how to communicate simply what you’re doing to someone who doesn’t know who you are or what you do. And that was something that was very Clear in the application of what the company is. Why I’m working on it and who I am as a person.

And so two months after applying, I receive an email saying, you’ve got an interview. And then I start some Googling about, okay, what is YC? And like, what are the numbers? Like everyone, what’s the process here? And that was the first point I realized this is a big deal. Like this is a huge opportunity and eat a very small percentage of people even make it to interviews.

So I realized at that point, this is an incredible opportunity. And I was already doing the bare minimum for university at this point I really did the bare minimum for uni so I totally like deprioritized my my uni work and spent all of my time Building the company. And I also tried to speak to as many YC alumni as I could to better understand the program and kind of, you know, about the application process, the interview process.

So to be very candid, I prepared a lot for my interview. Like I certainly didn’t just rock up and like was happy go lucky and charmed them into investing. I, I really try to understand what do they look for in a founder and what can I do to maximize my chances? Because this is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

The fact they’re even

Rui: to

Ahana: give me an interview is a huge deal. And so I prepared a lot and the best preparation you can also do is building a good company. And I knew that getting as much traction as possible was something that they looked for. So, so I did that and had the first interview. The thing that I knew from my research on YC interviews is that you get a call if you’re successful and an email if you’re unsuccessful and you have to be available I think it’s for the six hours following your interview in case they have any follow up questions.

Because this was COVID time everything was done fully remotely and so the interview was at 10 p. m my time in the UK I was in my dingy student basement flat and I knew I had to be up till four the next morning in case of any follow up questions. The interviews are also only 10 minutes and they’re very intense.

There’s no pleasantries, you know, you’ll likely get cut off while speaking and you have to be very succinct in your answers. So at the end of the 10 minutes, I had no idea whether they loved me, hated me, like understood the idea, didn’t understand it. They don’t give away much. But I spent the rest of the night just clutching my phone, praying for a phone call and really praying not to receive any emails.

And then about two hours after the interview, the first email comes in. Great. You know what? I tried like, doesn’t matter. I didn’t think it would work out anyway. The question they asked was something along the lines of like, What is an integrated masters? Like, are you an undergrad? Are you a post grad?

Like, how old are you? Like, who are you? Like, what stage of life are you at? So then I explained. And then another email comes through another hour later saying, how long have you been working on this idea? Are you full time? Are you part time? And then I explained, you know, I’m doing it part time alongside uni, but like, I’m kind of sacking off uni and spending a lot of time on this idea.

And the next question was, how married are you to this idea? And something that I’d heard from the alumni I’d spoken to was, That sometimes they ask this as a trick question to see how committed you are. But I’d also heard, especially from some of the younger alumni that they want to see that you’re coachable and like, we’ll take on feedback.

So if you’re too stubborn, then they also don’t like that. And so I, and so I was like, should I strategize this answer? Like, what do they want me to say? I told them the truth, which was, I think it’s a cool idea. I think that there is no complete market leader in this space, but. If there is a problem that I’m better suited to work on and will, can I’m more effective at building a company in, I will do that.

And then finally at 4am I received the last email of the night, which is essentially said like, here’s the deal. We like you. But we don’t like your idea. We’ve seen it tried before. It’s never really worked out and you’re too early stage for us to know if, if you are the problem or if the idea is the problem.

So we want to talk to you again in a week, come up with something better. And that’s basically what I did. So in the next week, which was also my last week of term before Christmas at university. So I had all of my master’s thesis deadlines. I decided to just. Do what they said and try and come up with something better So I time boxed every single hour of that next week like here’s my brainstorm time.

Here’s my initial user interview time Here is my initial like create a website. Here’s my like get people to sign up to a waitlist time and it was in the brainstorm that I decided I have to come out with an idea at the end of this. And that is really when Clear was conceived. I actually, it was when I went to the toilet for a break and I saw my array of skincare in front of me.

And I had to have a bad habit of, uh, of watching YouTube videos on the toilet as well. So I was there with my like skincare YouTuber with my skincare in front of me. And it really was like a Eureka moment in the bathroom of, Oh my gosh, like I have been training in this topic for the last 10 years of my life.

Like I know so much about this and I’ve. complain so much or like the experience as a consumer sucks in this space. It’s a huge industry with loads of money and comparatively little technical innovation. I can do something here. So that, that was really when Clear was, uh, was conceived. And I think in those four days between the two interviews, I made more progress on Clear than I made in six months of working on Quill, which was the previous idea.

Then I had my second interview with YC. Had no idea what they wanted, what they were expecting, and it ended very abruptly with the interviewer saying, all right, batch starts in two weeks, incorporate a company in the U. S., open a bank account, leave your degree, see you then. Do you have any questions? And I was both, you know, shocked and horrified.

My first question was, are you sure? And the second question was like, so which company, like, do you want me to do the meeting notes thing or the skincare thing? And she was like, It’s your company. Figure it out. And that was my, my journey in. So, so to be Clear, I did, I did leave my masters and I committed full-time to the company once I was in yc.

But you know, it’s, it was an incredible opportunity. And to this day, if it hadn’t have been for that moment, I wouldn’t be here right now building this company.

Rui: So this is what I love about these conversations is that part of what I get from this conversation is you can be working part-time. Not having a lot of traction in the app and actually replying, are you sure when they tell you’re in and you still get to go to the program.

No one would believe if I was going to share this as advice. It’s the actual truth. So before we continue to expand on that, there are two things that I would like to share in the show notes. The first is a YouTube, a link to YouTube video. If that exists from your rock band. So, so if you can share that later after the call, I would highly appreciate it.

That’s one thing. The second is a video that I found where you talk a bit about how to hack the interview at YC. And I wanted to ask you, this, is this still up to date? Is this something that we can share? Because I saw a bit and I found it extremely valuable. Would you be okay with me sharing it?

Ahana: Absolutely. Please do share it. The interview format is the same as it was when I was doing it. So. So yeah, those were a lot of the tips that I learned and I used. And when I still get founders, you know, I do mock interviews with founders every year. And that’s the first thing I share with them.

Rui: So, okay. So thank you.

Thank you for that. Then I really, I’m starting to understand why I see they are smart. They are super smart. And that is more of a recruitment agency than anything else, right? They bring in the right people. They just care about bringing in the right people, regardless of the idea. And your story reminds me Reddit, right?

Because Reddit was not supposed to be that. The original idea that got those guys there was not that, and they were actually heading home in the train when Paul Graham called them or something similar to this, with this idea where they would be responsible for the front page of the internet. So.

Similarities here and your ability to, to execute your, let’s just do it. Attitude obviously is a massive trust builder for, for anyone. So I can Clearly see why they decided to bet on you. So can you just share a bit about the key benefits you gained from Y Combinator? Because I’m sure that through the program, there was a lot that was shared with you that was useful.

Can you expand a bit on that?

Ahana: Yeah, of course. So it’s also worth noting when I did YC, it was the remote batches. I think they’re back to in person now. I gained so much from, from YC and the biggest thing is the community. I think you’re spot on when you, you say that they look for great people. The people I was surrounded by in YC was unlike anything else, not just in terms of accolades.

And, you know, a lot of them are our second, third time founders with, with exited companies. But just so low ego, genuinely helpful people. And I’m sure, you know, we’re all in a million and one WhatsApp groups. The most active WhatsApp group I’m part of is the YC WhatsApp group still. And it’s been, you know, over two years since I, since I did YC, the community is extremely powerful and that, and it’s large enough that somebody has experienced whatever problem you’re going through and will be willing to help you and that’s something you get for life.

So I think first and foremost, that was. It’s just incredible and is incredible. The second thing is that they, they have a structured program and you’ve got group partners assigned to you and your company and they, they know the ins and the outs of what’s going on. And especially for where I was when I did YC, I was, I was an idea stage company.

I had like a prototype of, of Clear in those four days that I’d made. You know, most of the, well, almost all of the work was still to be done. And they go through a lot of the fundamentals. And even if you are a bit later stage, they remind you of the fundamentals of, you know, make sure you’re tracking retention.

Don’t invest too early in expanding the team or growing. don’t have solid fundamentals of your business. And so they, they go through a lot of the basics, which for me, it was the first time I was learning about all of this. And I think because I didn’t have any biases from, you know, having worked in a big company for many, many years, you know, I wasn’t used to operational inefficiency.

So the first thing I learned was how to run things really lean and really efficiently. And I don’t really know any different. And I think also the pace at which you move during YC and the accountability that every week you say what you’re going to do. And then if the next week you haven’t done it, you really reflect on what went wrong and how can you make sure that doesn’t happen again.

And I think because I started my journey building Clear with that kind of a cadence and that kind of an accountability circle, I’ve, it’s a habit at this point and I don’t know another way of working. And that’s incredibly beneficial for, for a mindset to run a company of run things, lean, don’t spend money where you don’t need to make sure you’re focused on the right things.

Don’t index on vanity metrics. And so I think just they, they have seen so many companies go through so much and have. Done a lot of pattern recognition of what generally works for companies and what doesn’t. And so I think just the knowledge and the, the lessons that they teach you is, is really valuable.

And what I really like about YC is that they have startup school, which is available to everyone. It’s not just people within the YC community and they share these learnings with the world. I find myself even now going back to some of the public YC videos, just watching them as a reminder on like, okay.

Here’s how I should run this process, or here’s how I should benchmark my own retention metrics, or here’s how I can, you know, employ the strategies for like viral growth hack. There’s just so much knowledge that they share. And I really think that they want to have a positive impact on the startup ecosystem.

And I think they have, I think they’ve inspired so many people to start companies to build better companies. And I, I just, I, I really, you know, I owe them a lot. They are, they were the first people to take the bet on me that allowed me to build a company at this stage of my career. But it’s just a great group of people who really, I think, want to see impact in this world and are giving so many founders like me the chance to, to do just that.

Rui: Let’s now talk a bit about early adopters because You mentioned that you built a community first and I’m assuming that was paramount for the success of the company at the moment that you were ready to release this into the world, you already had like a waiting list of people to start using it, but can you share the strategy behind acquiring those all important first users?

Ahana: Yeah. So the very first exercise I did was identify the watering holes. So where do Where does my target customer hang out? Whether that’s, you know, in real life or on the internet. And fortunately for me, it’s largely on the internet and the communities that I have spent years and years and years of my life on.

So that was the obvious first place to go of actually posting on these, on these groups, on Facebook groups, on Reddit threads, and although. From what I just said, that sounds like a fairly obvious, easy thing to do. It was not actually that straightforward with most communities like this. You’re not allowed to self promote.

So I can’t, I couldn’t have just been like, Hey, I’m a YC backed founder and I’m building the skin cap. That’s going to like change the game, download it because you instantly get banned and removed from the groups. And I learned the hard way. So. That was, that was rather sad. And so I realized that like, actually it’s not that straightforward to do.

So even with that, there is a whole art to engaging these communities. And as I said, I did user interviews from day one and that helped tremendously because it built the relationships. It’s not a scalable process of deeply interviewing every single customer that you acquire, but it built trust with individuals who were then, who were almost the ambassadors within the groups.

And some of them were the admins of some of the big skincare pages who Well, my first message in them was, was not to sell anything. It was really just, I want to talk to you about your skincare journey. I’m thinking of, of doing something that could help people like us. And they became the ambassador. So when it came to asking for permission to post something, they realized it wasn’t a sales pitch.

I wasn’t asking, and you know, the app is also free. No one has to pay anything for it. They were advocating on our behalf because they believed in the vision because they were there from day one. They saw the, like, earliest worst version of the product and they watched us take on their feedback and, and make things better.

So it was really just nothing short of begging and pleading. Sometimes I joke that my life, my job is that of a professional beggar because it’s on all, you know, all aspects, whether it’s, whether it’s because users, whether it’s brands to partner with us, whether it’s investors at every stage, I’m always asking for things, whether it’s feedback or, you know, to download the app or to invest, but I wasn’t afraid.

to ask people to do it. And I also did the uncomfortable thing of asking every friend and family members, even if there were friends that I hadn’t seen in like 10 years, I knew that every user mattered. And coming back to what I said right at the start about, I knew for my funding round, like the better the numbers were, like the better things would go.

And every single user helps, and every single user they then ask to download the app helps. So I figured that like, this is what I need right now. I have to suck up all my pride and do the uncomfortable thing of sending a Facebook message to someone I haven’t spoken to in 10 years and, and be prepared for the fact that they might say no, the fact they might unfriend me, the fact that like, it might make things incredibly awkward.

And come to peace with that and also realize that in some cases it reignites the friendship and you talk to someone that you haven’t in 10 years and both things happened and it was also a great lesson in like rejection and, and failure and getting comfortable with the uncomfortable, which as a founder, you kind of live in a state of being uncomfortable.

And so if you can be at peace with it, I think it’s a great skill to have and something I developed from, from day one. And so I think in the early days, it’s just get over that mental obstacle of like, this is an uncomfortable thing to do. Nobody likes asking for help. I still, it’s not fun to do. It’s, you know, an incredibly vulnerable thing to do, but you have to.

I think that that is the, there’s nothing glamorous about it. You have to ask. And then from there, you know, we, we thought about other strategies of like, you know, where Okay. Where else do people were interested to hang out in? They watch YouTube videos. Let’s comment on like the comment section in YouTube videos or on Instagram influencers comment section, really scrappy things, but it works.

And so, so that was a large part of it. I think as we’ve progressed, so we still haven’t done any paid marketing or we don’t have a marketing person on the team. Everything’s still zero budget. We have tried everything. So I’ve also tried social media marketing. I’m not a great social media person. I didn’t use much social media before starting the company, but I viewed it as a means to an end.

Even the YouTube channel to an extent was an acquisition channel. So I forced myself onto Twitter. I started posting a lot on LinkedIn, made these YouTube videos, which was incredibly uncomfortable to begin with. I also tried TikTok. I tried Instagram and some worked and some didn’t, you know, the YouTube channel.

Gained good traction. My LinkedIn gained good traction. Twitter gained good traction at the same time, TikTok. Is still horrific. And you can still see, I was posting four videos a day. They were, they were incredibly cringy. Um, and they didn’t do me nothing. They’re like, I didn’t get one download from a month of posting four times a day.

And I was, you know, you got, you got to try everything. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Rui: So a lot of great things in there. So speaking to people, again, it’s really, really important. And, uh, exactly as you said, it’s a numbers game, right? You need to get comfortable with rejection because if you want to have a company that is going to happen with investors, with talent, it’s going to happen with clients, it’s going to happen with the entire ecosystem.

So you just need to get comfortable with it 100%. Then on doing things that don’t scale. That’s also super important as well. If what it takes is going to YouTube and pushing a comment on the comment section, that’s what you need to do. And as founders, we need to, to understand that. Then on the marketing, ouch, because I’m a marketer, right?

So hearing that you don’t have a marketer there is actually, I’m joking because I don’t think you should until you are at a position where it actually is necessary. You’re still figuring a lot of these things out. And I do believe that founders should do these things at the gate and then. Eventually they bring in someone to set up the strategy, build a team and execute the vision.

So what I would love you to see you doing was would be a podcast with micro influencers in this industry because that would work really well leveraging their communities. Anyway, let’s try not to go there in this conversation.

Ahana: We’ve tried that too.

Rui: You did? You did? It didn’t work?

Ahana: So well, I think an issue was we used Twitter spaces as the platform when everyone was talking about like clubhouse Twitter spaces We tried to like capture that trend and invited brand owners micro influencers onto it I think the platform was the problem because now nobody uses them and like and they weren’t even safe The recordings weren’t saved so we can’t repost them to youtube but but that is one of the things that we’re thinking about doing properly like as a podcast when When the time is right and user acquisition is the main priority.

So I’ll have to pick you up on some advice.

Rui: Oh, absolutely. That’s how to get that busted. That’s my day today, actually speaking with investors about early go to market strategies is what I do most of my time. So, and then we can talk about that content engine because you do it for YouTube and then you extract the audio, extract the audio and do the podcast and then snip us for social media.

So it’s a whole content engine on one go. Regarding the road to product market fit. Can you share some key moments from the journey between launching the first version of the product and the moment that. You raised money or that you achieved X amount of users the moment that you that you stopped and and said to yourself Okay, this is I mean to sound I’m on to something

Ahana: Yeah, I think raising money has nothing to do with product market fit for my own business from other people’s businesses People raise on like idea stage companies, so that’s I really think raising money of course is necessary for many businesses, including ours, but we didn’t raise because we had product market fit for sure.

I think that’s much more about the vision and you know, all of the strategies, none of which I did well when I was raising my last round and there’s so much stuff I do differently, but I certainly wouldn’t see anything in the funding round as indicative of a product market fit for us. I think it was.

Honestly, I think it was actually in those first three months of validating the idea that I was surprised at how quickly we iterated to what Clear ended up becoming and how much I realized that like, this is a problem just because of how enthusiastic these people that I’d never met before were, were for me to build this product.

And now again, it’s been two and a half years since I started the company. And I’m friends with some of those people who were once just strangers on a Facebook group because they were so invested in this working out because they so desperately wanted a solution. So I think seeing the desperation from other people in the community for something, the fact they were willing to give up hours of their life to chat with a complete stranger about skincare because they wanted a solution was, I think, the first indication of like, I think there is something here.

I think the second thing was the first time somebody, like a complete stranger, DM’d me on Twitter just to say, like, basically everything that I said that I wanted to achieve with Clear. She said she experienced and I didn’t know who she was because at that point I still thought that I, like every user was someone I had personally begged or pleaded to come onto the platform.

So I was firstly shocked that, wow, like I don’t know this person. I haven’t asked them to join. And they have been able to get the value out of it. They felt it was genuinely a safe space where they could share their own journey. And they actually got a really good recommendation that helped their skin.

And I was like, that’s exactly what I wanted to achieve. And I have. Done it with like, you know, even one person just hearing it directly from them It was such validation and like i’m doing something right Like I i’m having the impact that I wanted to and I think the third thing was Actually on on the partnership side of partnering with brands and and interestingly I didn’t really do any partnerships work until after the funding round and through fundraising a lot of the advice or the Feedback I got from investors who didn’t invest was like, you know, will brands want to be on this?

Like, are brands excited about this? Because you need that for the company to succeed. Um, our monetization also comes from background partners, wanting insights on the consumer product usage habits. And based on the initial research I had done. I was confident in that. A lot of investors were not. A lot of investors said like that for whatever reason it wasn’t going to work out and I think it was, it was last year when we started really focusing on on brand partnerships and we ended up actually winning competition by L’Oreal and their CMO is now one of our advisors where I realized like brands.

are desperate for something like this. And I knew that deep down, but I think I’d heard so many from so many, you know, really established entrepreneurs or VCs that like, this wasn’t going to work knowing that they weren’t the experts in the skincare space, seeing the excitement from the brands about innovation as a whole in the industry made me excited because now I was like, wow, these are people who know what they’re talking about in this industry that are excited about what I’m building.

We have to be onto something here. So I think like from a couple of different angles, there’s been excitement, but I would actually still say that we’re pre PMF. I think, you know, I’m really happy with the external validation, whether it’s from these brands or getting super users that have found us organically and love the app and keep coming back.

But ultimately the way that I track, you know, Product market fit is overall retention metrics. And I think we’re at the stage where we’ve got a couple hundred people that love the product, which is great. That’s the first step that you’re in the right direction, but we still have our challenges with, with overall retention.

The, the, the cohort numbers as a whole aren’t yet where we want them to be. And that’s the whole reason why I don’t spend on marketing yet. I will, as soon as I hit the metrics we want to, but until. As a whole, we addressed some of the, the initial churn, which I think for us, social commerce app is the most important thing and the hardest problem to solve only then does it make sense to focus on other things.

And, you know, every week we release new features, we’re moving in the right direction. The metrics are getting better, but they’re still not at the threshold that I want them to be before. You know, pushing for the next set of milestones, whether that’s growth, whether it’s revenue, whether it’s more partnerships.

So, so I’m feeling optimistic. Things have moved in the right direction, but there’s still, there’s still a lot of work to be done. And I’m still writing code every day and talking to users.

Rui: Those are two things that I don’t hear a lot together. Writing code and talking to users usually is not the same person doing both of those, but we’ll touch on that in a bit.

I agree 100 percent zero sense in dropping more water into a leaky bucket, right? So it makes sense. Fine tune it, understand what works, and then the moment that you have some clarity there, you will be in a better position to do it. Now, that was the perfect segue for the next question, which is the team in the early days.

Right. So you’re writing code, you’re speaking to customers, right? You are the, let’s say the industry expert because you’ve been inside industry for so long. Who else was there with you? Is this something that you did mostly yourself? Did you have someone with you helping write the code or helping speak to people?

What was the team composition?

Ahana: Yeah. So, so, so in the earliest of days, um, I did have a co founder. We’re no longer together, but he was, he is a friend from uni. We hadn’t really worked together before and he’s, he’s a great guy. You know, he is one of the smartest people in our year, you know, studying physics, really, really excellent at that.

Um, and, and he. Is it really interested in startups as well? I think working together, we weren’t necessarily the best match for each other, and it wasn’t Clear what his role would be in the company, which is ultimately why we decided to separate. And, you know, he’s doing great. He went back to finish his degree and I think he’s about to start a new job in a different startup.

So, so things, things ended really well between us. And I think in terms of sort of like the, the day to day execution and, and driving things forward, it was a little bit lonely at the start and there was a lot of responsibility on me. Yeah. So

Rui: you actually built the MVP, the first version you did the, you did the coding.

Ahana: Yes, that’s right. That’s right. Well, I mean, to, to be fair, we’ll say this wasn’t official teammates. But I begged and pleaded everyone I knew to help. So my flatmate, my boyfriend, like they, they have contributed to the code base. Um, I think, uh, coercion is also part of my writing code process of getting help from people better than me.

But, but officially on the team, you know, these people weren’t technically team members. They were just very charitable flatmates and.

Rui: Yeah, it’s people willing to help, you know, I’m always surprised with the amount of people that is willing to help you just for the sake of it, right, that you ask for their help and they do it and this is something that either for the podcast or whatever, whenever I have some question or I would reach out to someone asking for something and the amount of people that are super busy and they’re willing to give me half an hour, one hour like you’re doing today is something that truly humbles me.

So again, yeah. People shouldn’t be afraid to ask, because if someone can’t do it, they will tell you. But if they can, it’s a massive lever. So now I would like to get a peek behind the curtain. Prior to launch, how was a day in your life? How many hours a day were you working? Uh, what, how was the focus split?

Were you doing 40 percent of the time in coding and then speaking to people or whatever? What was the overall motion?

Ahana: It was intense. I think in terms of number of hours worked, it was, it was a lot, there’s no way of sugarcoating it, there were no weekends, it was like very late nights, very early mornings, um, a very, very intense period of work.

And now something that I’m really trying to improve in my life is balance because that I think was the biggest issue for me as a founder. I think I really took the not having any external responsibilities to an extreme of being like, you know, therefore I must work. With every waking hour I have. So days were very, very long.

I think the other part of my mindset there was if I hadn’t have done this, I’d have done my banking job and the hours are pretty brutal with that. And I have complete freedom to do whatever I want this way. So I should work my banking hours doing this job. So you can take from that what you will about how many hours I worked.

In terms of what I did, at every stage I had very Clear priorities. So for the first, for that validation process, it was talking to users. I was not writing any code. It was purely reaching out to people, finding people to talk to, developing questions to ask to them. Like really, like I had this big spreadsheet of all the assumptions, etc.

As I said, I ran it like a sign, like a research process of iterating closer and closer to the truth, if you will. Then after that, um, it became about actually building the product. And I felt like I had enough as far as the assumptions went. And then I didn’t really talk to any users for that period, because this was also my, I never actually built a mobile app before I had used, like I had worked with the languages I’d built in JavaScript before, but never in React Native, which is what we use.

And so, I fully committed to that. And that was all of my time was spent writing code. Then towards the end of YC, when I knew the funding round was coming up, I knew I had to fundraise. And that was something I had also never really done before. So then it completely shifted. And then like, it was pretty much.

I’d say 90 percent on the fundraising strategy and 10 percent was writing code, basically releasing bug fixes for existing users. So we didn’t lose them because that I wanted to make sure we retain that initial community. And since then, it’s, it’s been like that with every different stage, different priorities have taken over.

So fun. Then when I fundraised, it was. Talking to investors all of my time, you know, fulfilling due diligence requests, preparing materials for them. Then once that was done, it was hiring of, you know, how do I expand the team and bring on more people? And I really focused on that. And when that was done for a period last year, it was partnerships.

I was really focused on that. And, you know, it’s, it’s varied with time, but now I’m back in a phase where. The most important thing for me is, is product and retention. So I am back now to writing code, I would say 80 percent of the time. Talking to users 20 percent of the time is how I spend my time now.

And it means other things have sort of fallen a bit. So I’ve been not as good with my YouTube channel, partly because We don’t really need new users. We’ve grown really organically. And as you said, there’s no point putting water into a leaky bucket. So as much as I love doing the YouTube and you know, the fact that it worked well, I just cannot justify the time doing it because is it moving us closer to our biggest priority?

The answer is no. So I can’t, I can’t do it.

Rui: Clear priorities is one of the. Best takeaways that I’m going to take from this conversation because it’s really important. It’s so easy to lose focus. It’s so easy because there are 10, 000 things calling for your attention. And again, I’ve seen too many founders kill their projects simply because they Spend too much time on the business plan, right?

When they don’t even have a Clear value proposition and they have all of those Analyses made and projections and whatever makes zero sense So having Clear priorities speaking to the users building something they want Iterating based on their feedback until you are in a position to scale something is paramount for success So a couple of rapid fire questions.

Can you share one key lesson you learned on product?

Ahana: I would say be rigorous. It is one key lesson. Doing the hard work of interviews and like all of this assumptions testing really paid off more than I expected it to. And I think many companies spend a very long time iterating towards product market fit.

And I’m certainly not saying we’re there or, you know, we achieved it overnight, but I think that doing the work upfront pays dividends down the road.

Rui: 100%. So can you share one key lesson you learn in marketing other than you don’t need a marketing person at the get from the get go?

Ahana: I think. And you know, you’re much more the expert on this than I am.

But from what I’ve learned, it’s trial and error. I couldn’t have predicted that well on LinkedIn and Twitter and YouTube and that TikTok and Instagram wouldn’t have gone well, but I gave everything a real go and then with whatever sticked, sticked, whatever stuck, I just, I, I continued going along with it.

So yeah, I think trial and error was, was really important.

Rui: One key lesson you learned about managing people?

Ahana: To lead with empathy. I think understanding why someone is the way they is, why they’re feeling the way they are, why they want the things that they do is incredibly important for their, for maintaining good.

relationships with your team and also building a company culture that you want in your company. And so, so yeah, I, you know, with our team, we’re fully remote. We’re from different backgrounds, different cultures. No one is in the same country, but having that mutual respect, understanding and curiosity to learn about each other, including the ways that we work and what’s most productive for everyone.

I think has, has created a really nice dynamic and it’s taken time to iterate. You know, I’ve certainly made some hiring mistakes in the past. Now I’m in a state where I’m really, really pleased with the team that we have and the culture that we have.

Rui: So good segue here as well. Key lesson on creating and maintaining a good culture.

Ahana: Openness and transparency, I think. So, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s in the name Clear and I think maybe it’s partly a function of the fact that I, I am a fairly young CEO. I don’t think I’ve yet built up like the ego trip of like, I am above all of you. My first hire was someone who was 60. So, you know, even though there was a big.

Age gap. I think there’s always been a lot of respect I have had for my teammates and I’ve always really valued their skills and acknowledge where their skills are far superior to, to mine. And I think being very open with them about different things. So, you know, I’m open with our team about things like our runway, the developers on our team have no responsibility for that, but I like to make them aware because it helps them understand why I’m making the decisions that I am.

For example, you know, if we’re accruing technical debt. They understand that, uh, you know, how this function is written doesn’t matter if we don’t achieve product market fit. So this is why we’re iterating quickly and not spending time on these issues. And it just creates a strong sense of alignment and, and then avoids conflict or misunderstandings because everyone is on the same page.

Or, you know, we try and avoid direct messaging on our slacks to make sure everything’s in the open and everyone is party to. whatever conversations are happening. And I think that that has worked really, really well for us internally. And that’s something that I’m quite proud of and want to continue cultivating.

Rui: Absolutely. I mean, open communication, transparency. I actually like to have our clients here at Altar, for instance, speaking at our all hands on deck events, right? So that We understand as the company who we’re trying to help and to achieve what it’s more than just a ticket, right? It’s just, it’s more than a line of code.

We’re trying to help someone solve a problem for some, someone else. And I think it’s really important that people never lose sight of the wine because the motivation levels are. through the roof when you know what you’re trying to accomplish much more than when you have a test that you need to execute upon.

Perfect. Now, one resource that was invaluable to your success, and this can be a book, a podcast, a mentor, anything that you feel was a massive advantage for you.

Ahana: So, I’m going to name two, two resources. The first is a book called Disciplined Entrepreneurship, which I used in, on day one of both Quill and Clear, except when I did it with Quill, I just skipped all of the parts where it said to do user interviews, which was my own fault.

But that’s basically a 24 step guide to building a startup. And I think it’s the textbook they use at MIT in their entrepreneurship course. It takes you through all the really helpful exercises to do. In day one, which is the most daunting of, okay, I’ve, I’ve decided I want to build a company. How do I go about it?

And I think it really gets the cogs wearing and the momentum going. I think slightly more philosophically, a book that I’m a big fan of is Outliers. And I have to admit, I read much less than I should. But, but it helped, it helped on the mindset side of things of, you know, realizing that success is, is relative.

There’s many factors that go into it in a startup. You know, having a good idea is not enough. Having a good team is not enough. It’s always a combination of factors. And I’ve embraced that from, from day one. And that’s helped me also regulate like my own emotions. You know, being a founder is not the easiest job in the world.

And there’ve been high highs, there’ve been low lows, but being able to power through, stay resilient. I think all of that. I learned through reading success and failure stories in that book.

Rui: So I’m going to link to that in the show notes as well. Hannah, thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule to sit down with me for all the insights, for all the lessons that you shared.

It was indeed a pleasure to have this conversation with you today.

Ahana: Well, the pleasure is all mine, Rui. Thank you for such an interesting conversation. Really, really enjoyed it.

Rui: To our listeners, I hope you found the conversation useful. I know I certainly picked up some valuable insights from a Hannah story.

Thank you for listening. And I’ll see you again in the next edition of the startup journey podcast.