Hello to Canada’s SaaS Community,
Evolving from a scrappy bootstrapped startup to a VC-funded business requires a lot of change. Kaylee Lieffers, founder of private labelling beauty SaaS platform Blanka, knows this well after raising a $2.7 million Seed round in 2023. Speaking with SAAS NORTH, Kaylee shared three key ways the business has matured since the raise.
Key takeaways:
- The Blanka team segmented buyers based on attributes and designed custom go-to-market plans for each ICP.
- Hiring is crucial at this stage, so the team built a three-step recruiting process to help them assess candidate-company-role fit.
- The hybrid team prioritizes written communication, visual project management, and daily touch bases to ensure no critical information gets lost or forgotten.
Co-Founder/Producer, SAAS NORTH Conference Editor, SAAS NORTH NOW
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After bootstrapping with her co-founders Doug Long and Adam Chuntz, Kaylee Lieffers raised a large Seed round in 2023 for Blanka, a private labelling SaaS solution for anyone looking to launch a beauty brand.
Kaylee got into beauty SaaS because she noticed the pain of building your own supply chain for a new product launch. At the same time, the beauty industry was breaking away from established incumbents and upstart brands were capturing growing market share.
The initial platform was scrappy and worked. But fundraising meant the business had to mature, like any startup going through this crucial phase.
Speaking with SAAS NORTH, Kaylee shared four key shifts that happened at Blanka, giving a view around the corner to any founder raising a Seed round.
1. Go-to-market intention
Kaylee joked that, in the early days, the team would happily take “whatever we can get” in terms of initial users.
This doors-open policy was critical to not just getting customers as a bootstrapped business, but also understanding what types of people might want to launch a beauty line.
Post-raise, the team had to both solidify their core customer segments and redesign their go-to-market function to reach and support those buyers.
For example, Kaylee shared that Blanka customers typically fall into four segments: a new entrepreneur looking to get started, an existing brand (like an apparel company) expanding into beauty products, a beauty entrepreneur (like a MedSpa) wanting to add a makeup line, or an online Creator launching their business.
While all these buyers want the same thing—a private label beauty offering—Blanka had to evolve their GTM function to service these buyers differently and uniquely.
“A Creator is incredible when it comes to understanding their audience and creating content that really speaks to their followers,” said Kaylee. “That being said, they don’t necessarily have experience running a business—sourcing product and setting up a website and plugging in payments might be very challenging for them.”
“Whereas thinking about a med spa, for example; they already have all that infrastructure in place,” Kaylee continued. “They just need support sourcing the products and getting really high quality branded manufacturing done for them.”
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2. Finding candidate-company-role fit
After the raise, Blanka began hiring—they are now nearly 20 people and adding more.
Like any startup, Kaylee needed practitioners who could also be flexible. To find people with that kind of role fit, the team redesigned their hiring process into a few key steps.
→ Prioritizing startup experience: Kaylee said, “somebody who has startup experience is probably a better fit than somebody who’s worked in a big corporate company” because they understand the nuances of startup life.
This doesn’t mean they don’t value corporate experience as they grow! It just depends on the role and the timing.
→ The “Who” interview: This interview, said Kaylee, happens in the final interview stages and takes about an hour.
During the interview, the Blanka team combs through the candidate’s previous three roles, asking questions
- Their core tasks and responsibilities
- What colleagues might say are their positive attributes and room for improvement
- Why they left (or want to leave) the role
→ A team day: Final-stage candidates are invited to spend a half-day with the Blanka team, getting to know every one of their potential colleagues.
This is both a work and non-work setting, which Kaylee said is crucial to “truly get a feel for, ‘Is this a place where they could see themselves working?’”
3. Team management and communication
As a hybrid team, communication is easily lost. Kaylee said the Blanka team uses three initiatives to ensure communication keeps flowing:
- Write it down: The team actively uses written communication so things are automatically documented. If there’s a meeting or call, there’s a debrief message sent out with core points and action items.
- Red, yellow, green: All tasks use a red, yellow, and green flag system to easily highlight when something is going well or amiss. There’s also status commentary to preserve context and help the team identify what’s needed or next.
- Daily standups: Every day, teams talk about their three key priorities as well as challenges or roadblocks.
“There’s so much going on and we have to make sure that the right stakeholders are involved,” said Kaylee. “But at the same time, we have to not information-overload people. We’re not perfect at it, but we’re always improving.”
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An open mind and constant iteration
At its core, Kaylee said all her post-Seed lessons so far boil down to constant iteration.
As a bootstrapper who has now taken on financing, Kaylee isn’t alone in her journey—many successful entrepreneurs followed a similar path.
But every entrepreneur’s journey is unique and based on so many different factors. Even the lessons she shared with SAAS NORTH were more ‘what works right now’ rather than ‘this is the way to do it forever.’
That shouldn’t lead any founders to feel scared, though. Instead, it’s a call to keep an eye on the horizon.
“I’m building a company and I’m an entrepreneur,” said Kaylee. “But at the end of the day, we’re building a platform that’s enabling entrepreneurship. The biggest successes that I’ve seen, both on my side and the brands that we’re working with, comes from constant iteration and adaptability to get to that next level.”