Your Retail Therapist

For months now I've been procrastinating on what I know my company most needs: using content to make me, the solo founder, a visible domain expert. I have lists and lists of the blogs I should write, the panels I want to lead, the podcast episodes that need recording, and the vlogs that need filming.

Then I realized that a considerable amount of this procrastination was simply paralysis of choice: it's not that I'm afraid of creating content, I just don't know which platform is best, or which type of content could best contribute to solid growth of my brand and audience. But then I got bored of hearing myself make excuses.

So I made some coffee, put my iPhone on a pile of books, and in one solid take filmed myself trying out a face wash. Then I posted the video. That's it. No overthinking, no over-production, just me doing what I (and my company!) do best: reading ingredient lists of personal care products, and talking about them.

It also helped that I came up with a rationalization: I'm not a video producer, so how could I create high quality videos? I'm not a beauty trend blogger, so how could I put this product in the context of the Kardashians? I just can't. Once I realized what I'm not, I got over the fear of showing the world what I am: a spunky chemist who likes to talk about chemicals. Turns out, being a YouTube vlogger is nbd.

Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoAQk_AKi9k

Will report back how the second video goes.

(Fun fact: I filmed the whole thing, then realized I hadn't filmed horizontal. Oops. But turns out to have been a happy mistake: YouTube recently started a push for vertical, and now I can reuse clips on insta stories and in tiktok!)

I built Beaker's Retail Therapist MVP as a favor to friends who kept asking me which chemicals are doing what in skincare products. The link got passed around organically. Turns out I accidentally made a great (free!) lead generator.

(I had turned on the Glide feature to require email log-in. Great decision that I thought arbitrary, even annoying, at the time--this was supposed to be only for trusted friends.)

Tbh, I was embarrassed to put out a simple directory app; to me it was hardly innovative compared to what already exists in the Beauty Tech & Information space.

But I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this freemium app is now the best producing source of email sign-ups, and sends to my site the users with the longest session duration time and most pages visited.

A great lesson in "giving the people what they want!" (And then getting a captive audience with which you can test more innovative ideas and products.)

My friends always text me helpless and confused from drugstore and Sephora aisles. With a database of skincare ingredient information already in place, it was no trouble to quickly sketch up a simple directory wireframe, making ingredient searchable by name, function, or product type.

Without code know-how I didn't know how exactly to deploy this database, short of giving my friends a collaborator log-in to my AirTable. So I turned to Glide Apps. In less than a day I shipped a simple directory app.

Now, you can look for chemical information ingredient or ingredient, or look at all the ingredients (and what they do!) product by product.

More significantly, spending a few hours on build has already saved me hours in replying to friends' texts about skincare products :) jk, I still text my friends, they're the best inspo for product build and development I have.