Jordan Smyth: Inside the Strategy to Scale Skincare Startups Through Customer Obsession and Natural Alternatives

Startups have such a glamorous reputation. Companies like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Uber, and Airbnb once started as scrappy startups with huge dreams and huge obstacles.

Yet we of course know that most startups don’t end up as success stories. What does a founder or a founding team need to know to create a highly successful startup?

In this series, called “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup” we are talking to experienced and successful founders and business leaders who can share stories from their experience about what it takes to create a highly successful startup. I had the pleasure of interviewing Jordan Smyth.

Jordan Smyth is an indie entrepreneur and skincare advocate from Christchurch, New Zealand. He founded several self-funded businesses, including a dropshipping venture that generated over $8M within 14 months. Since then, he launched a 9Round gym in New Zealand (focuses on kickboxing-themed fitness training), and Gleamin, (a natural skincare start-up that uses powerful superfoods to fight common skin concerns).

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

Thank you! And of course. Excited to share! I’m an indie entrepreneur, and grew up in Christchurch, New Zealand. Currently living abroad with plans to move to the United States. Am very grateful to have had a great childhood within NZ, thanks to my incredible parents (Cathy & Tony).

Saying that, growing up there were a few things I struggled with. One was accepting things for how they are, I’ll get into that soon, another was my rosacea. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this consistent redness throughout my nose & cheeks, this was from the dilation of small blood vessels on the surface of my skin. I didn’t really think much of it until I got to high school — where I was being called out, almost bullied for this continuous blush/flush on the face. Of course, when people would notice and call it out, it got extremely worse. I would think about it more and this meant an increase in heart rate, which then caused my face to appear even redder.

Skincare is a personal mission for me, as I’ve battled rosacea since childhood. I understand how skin issues have an impact on a deep, personal level.

And how did I start Gleamin? I’ve always been entrepreneurial. Since the age of 16, I’ve been building start-ups and generating income online in a variety of ways including Dropshipping, Amazon FBA, Amazon Kindle Publishing, and more.

Combining my search for total independence with my personal skincare journey, I’ve arrived at where I am today — building Gleamin. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

What was the “Aha Moment” that led to the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?

Sure! My main focus was developing something that could help people in a similar way I’ve been able to help myself. A product that would solve a current skin concern, a common enough one that I personally don’t feel has been tackled in the right way. I noticed hundreds of people on YouTube uploading video tutorials on how to make your own turmeric & aloe vera mask. However, with that, you run the risk of adding too much turmeric within the formula, causing skin staining. This coupled with the trending product type of a clay mask, I knew I was onto something. People want to fade their dark spots, reduce the inflammation they’re currently battling, but not everyone has the time to research, source the ingredients, and develop their own DIY mask, let alone doing it right without harming or staining their skin in the process.

Was there somebody in your life who inspired or helped you to start your journey with your business? Can you share a story with us?

I would say it was a mix of people. Mentor figures throughout my life whether that be my father showing me that if I want something in life — I need to work for it or the many individuals who helped me on my dropshipping journey, that took the time to chat online with me, providing advice, tips, and tricks, etc.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Our product formulas, and Customer Success. As I’m going through this interview, our Customer Success team is measuring an average first-response time to email tickets of 9 minutes, yes 9 MINUTES! That’s incredible and significantly faster than any of our competitors. Speaking about our formulas, we really go against the grain where we source and utilize natural ingredient alternatives to replace typically synthetic solutions. As well as that, we have an extensive ingredient blacklist. Each one of these ingredients runs the risk of creating allergic reactions, or skin irritation — so we stay away.

Gleamin ingredient blacklist — alcohol, aluminum salts, artificial fragrance, gluten, mineral oil, parabens, peg compounds, petrolatum, phthalates, propylene glycol, sulfates: sls & sles, talc, formaldehydes, formaldehyde releasing agents, retinyl palmitate, oxybenzone, coal tar, hydroquinone, triclocarban, ethanol, ethyl alcohol, denat. alcohol, methanol, n-butyl alcohol, isopropyl alcohol, sd alcohol, synthetic colorants/dyes, soy, nanoparticles, acrylates, styrene, phenoxyethanol

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

Yes! With our Gleamin Pledge. We’re all about empowering people. While that starts with skincare, we see no reason to stop there. Now, more than ever, we recognize our responsibility to go beyond superfood beauty, and so, we want to help people and organizations that need support to live life on their own terms. We’re a huge supporter of KIVA. Supporter of Kiva. This international non-profit is re-imagining charity, focusing on expanding financial access to underserved communities to help them flourish independently. In a shared vision of providing resources to empower and motivate individuals, we Pledge in 2021 by contributing 1% of profits to KIVA projects, with a minimum amount set to $20,000. As well as this, we donate 10,000 meals annually to nourish the local community with good, wholesome food.

As we grow, so does the Gleamin Pledge and the size of our impact.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Positivity when faced with adversity — No matter what you’re building, there is going to be a time that things start to head downward. It’s natural, happens to everyone but as the leader of the company, you still need to show positivity and motivate your team even in these times of hardship. You will be the person they look to for this, every time. Saying that it’s important also to hire superstars (a reference from the book Radical Candor) where these team members can also show that positivity and lift up the rest of the team, so it’s not ALL on you. I don’t want to go into detail, but there was a time last year when things weren’t looking so good. It was up to me to pull ourselves out of the rut we were in and ensure the team was still confident in our mission.

Humility — Every leader should convey a personable demeanor, and one way to achieve this is by remaining humble and modest about achievements or qualifications. At the same time, be honest and open with your team when you make mistakes, you’re human too and it’s important to show you aren’t afraid of making mistakes. We’ve built this culture well at Gleamin, where it’s okay for people to screw up — all it is is an opportunity to learn and continue to grow.

Resilience & Drive — Goes without saying, however as the leader you can’t get complacent or lazy. To be best-in-class you must always be looking towards the future, setting ambitious goals, and sometimes you’ll have to rely on your intuition. I’m currently battling a conflict of timezones between my personal & direct-reports location, however, that can’t stop things moving forward. 3 nights out of the week, I’m up till midnight on meetings, sometimes longer. As the leader, you’ve just gotta do what it takes and more, that’s it.

Often leaders are asked to share the best advice they received. But let’s reverse the question. Can you share a story about advice you’ve received that you now wish you never followed?

I can’t honestly say. Every piece of advice, every action even if it turned out bad, it’s a learning experience. Everything is a small stepping stone towards the ultimate goal.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?

The Supply Chain has been a battle since day dot. This was an error on my part, not putting enough attention towards Operations within the early days of Gleamin but for sure Supply Chain. Within our first year, we had sold out 10+ times, by our second, 14+ times. It’s what people call — A good problem to have. Thankfully now, despite COVID, we’ve gotten on top of the Supply Chain but it’s been a rough time getting here.

Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard? What strategies or techniques did you use to help overcome those challenges?

Looking at the big picture. Yes, things might be hard, but as long as you can see what you’re working towards and envision where you’ll be in 12ish months’ time, it makes it a lot easier to handle these times of difficulty. A personal technique for me is walking. Stepping away from my desk, and getting into nature. Works every time.

The journey of an entrepreneur is never easy and is filled with challenges, failures, setbacks, as well as joys, thrills and celebrations. Can you share a few ideas or stories from your experience about how to successfully ride the emotional highs & lows of being a founder”?

This is a very similar answer to the above question. Whether you’re on a high, or a low — look at the big picture and understand that even if things are good or bad today, tomorrow is a new day. I do remember when I was around 17 years old, both myself and my brother Harley were starting our drop-shipping businesses. When one of us would be crushing it, and the other not so much there would be this emotional tension between us. Looking back at it now, it was definitely beneficial — we were competing against each other. If I knew Harley was up late working, I would do the same. Eventually, we weren’t so emotionally affected by the highs and lows and started sharing tactics with each other. Now, if one of us is winning, both of us are. It’s the Smyth brothers vs the world.

Let’s imagine that a young founder comes to you and asks for your advice about whether venture capital or bootstrapping is best for them? What would you advise them? Can you kindly share a few things a founder should look at to determine if fundraising or bootstrapping is the right choice?

Sure! Great question too and very relevant. First of all, Gleamin is 100% bootstrapped, and only now are we considering any investment. From my personal experience, I would advise starting completely bootstrapped, start a business that is focused around cash flow that its sole purpose is to generate profit eg. Drop-shipping. Once you have some learnings under your belt + profits from a cash flow-focused business, only then would I even consider taking on investment or building a longer-term focused business like a brand.

I highly advise reading the book: 10 Pillars of Wealth by Alex Becker. It changed my mind completely about how I think about building companies and generating wealth.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Many startups are not successful, and some are very successful. From your experience or perspective, what are the main factors that distinguish successful startups from unsuccessful ones? What are your “Five Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Startup”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.

1. Identifying your unique hero product — I see this often. A startup, releasing multiple products, all quite general without key USPs (unique selling points) or one hero. It’s important to develop and understand what your leading hero product is going to be, what are the USP around this, why it is better than alternatives out there, and how you’re doing to market it. Focus on 1 product, 1 offer, and put all of your attention towards getting that right. Once that is done, begin to expand your catalog or marketing focus towards additional offers/products. At Gleamin, our hero product is our Vitamin C Clay Mask but this year we’re releasing multiple supporting products around the mask that yes, have their own USPs too but are only being released based on the success of our sell-out face mask.
2. System optimization — OPTIMIZE, OPTIMIZE & OPTIMIZE! One key reason we’ve been able to grow quickly without too much breaking is our ability to build systems and optimize efficiency within current business functions. For example, we’ve recently built a new ad copy approval process within ClickUp (our project management software). This is to avoid the long-threaded Slack messages approving copy descriptions for upcoming ads. In around an hour, we constructed this automated system where due dates and assignees will be added automatically depending on the status update made by either our Senior Media Buyer or the review team. Just this small change will save 3 of us an hour or so a week, now we can focus on other systems to optimize!
3. Content creation — If you’re not putting attention towards continuous content creation, either in-house or externally (user-generated) you’re losing. Each month, we’re constructing around 15–20 fresh new creatives to test within ads. The content within these ads comes from the multiple video reviews we receive each month, all generated by our User Generated Content Creation system which has been optimized for efficiency throughout the last two years (a note on number 2!!)
4. Customer Success — I spoke about this before, but I’ll say it again. Your attention NEEDS to be on Customer Success. Currently, our Customer Success team is measuring an average first-response time to email tickets of 9 minutes, yes 9 MINUTES! As I said, that’s significantly faster than any of our competitors. As well as this, you need to ensure the product you’re delivering is exceeding customer expectations and satisfaction. Doing both of these things well, will ultimately increase your Returning Customer Rate and enable you to scale further on the front end acquiring more and more first-time customers.
5. Being afraid to pivot — Not many people know this, but Gleamin was first launched into the world under the name Seed&Sour in Australia. After pushing the mask for a couple of months without gaining significant traction, we decided to give it a run in the big leagues — the USA. It was only then, we really found traction with product-market fit. Don’t be afraid to pivot, think about Instagram. Many don’t know its origins. Instagram began as Burbn, a check-in app that included gaming elements from Mafia Wars, and a photo element as well. The creators worried Burbn had too much clutter and potential actions, and would never gain traction. So they took a risk and stripped all the features but one: photos. They rebuilt a version of the app that focused solely on photography — it was clean and simple, and clearly, it paid off.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a business? What can be done to avoid those errors?

I want to emphasize what I said before regarding Identifying your unique hero product — It’s important to develop and understand what your leading hero product is going to be, what are the USP around this, why is it better than alternatives out there, and how you’re doing to market it. Focus on 1 product, 1 offer, and put all of your attention towards getting that right, first.

Another would be setting high expectations too early on. Building something great takes time, believe in yourself, the process, and your mission. Just don’t give up.

Startup founders often work extremely long hours and it’s easy to burn the candle at both ends. What would you recommend to founders about how to best take care of their physical and mental wellness when starting a company?

Ensure you’re taking at least one day a week off. Never lose focus on the other pillars of your life. Physical & Mental Health, Relationships, Spirituality. The goal should always be balance.

The easiest piece of advice is to avoid letting one pillar of your life slip for another. We don’t need to sacrifice our personal health or wellbeing to achieve something great. I don’t know about you, but it wouldn’t matter how much my net worth is if I don’t feel good internally every day waking up.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

It would be focused on supporting people to live life on their own terms. Exactly the same as what we’re working on with the Gleamin Pledge. I am forever grateful for growing up where I did and being given the opportunity and resources I needed to try to achieve what I wanted to achieve. However, that’s not the case for everyone. Not everyone in the world has the ability to even attempt what they want to work on — my movement would focus on that. Providing financial access to underserved communities in the world, with the sole purpose of creating some sort of platform they could flourish on.

We are blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Sure! First of all gleamin.com of course. Personally — @jordansmyth on Instagram.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success and good health!