She Said Yes

I was born in Vermont and lived on several communes before my parents deposited a few thousand dollars to mortgage a dilapidated 10-acre farm. My earliest memories include hand milking a goat while she bleated and stomped in her roughhewn stockade, rushing my father to the ER with a nail driven clear through his boot from cleaning out the old pig pen, wandering through a seemingly forest-high garden and picking peas from towering vines, and splashing about to scare away the crayfish in the spring-fed pond. In the winter I trudged and tunneled through oceans of snow in a full-body snowsuit. In the summer, I was almost always naked — it seemed like everyone was pretty much always naked.

My parents were refugees of sorts, escaping political turmoil and suffocating families in New York to find themselves and start a new life — a new family — in the rural north. They were hippies, but not just of the pot smoking, longhaired, health food store, counter-culture genre. They were political. Their friends were the Chicago Seven, they had not just attended but led the takeover of Columbia University, and in the first year of their time in Vermont my father was on trial for inciting a riot (which apparently he didn't do and he was eventually acquitted). One of my mother's earlier boyfriends served life in prison for his role in the Nyack Brinks robbery.

While being raised in this environment undoubtedly influenced me in countless subliminal ways, I did not grow to adopt many of the political or even cultural mores of my parents and their friends. The main residual influences I can identify are 1) a love of the outdoors and wilderness and 2) a deep distrust of governments, businesses, institutions of pretty much any kind. I also became very comfortable on my own — wandering off to walk the farm at first and later, once we moved to the town of Montpelier, disappearing on my bike to explore for hours.

The punchline to this backstory is this: while many entrepreneurs crave money as their inspiration, I am the type of entrepreneur who seeks independence and self-reliance. This has been both a blessing and a curse and is foundational to my journey.

When my wife, Erica, and I stepped down from day-to-day operations at Hairstory, we found ourselves in an awkward financial position. For the first time in our lives we had healthy savings, yet it felt far from financial stability. We had started Hairstory with the goal of funding our lives, not making a fortune, and for the prior seven years it had worked. Yes, there was a year early on when we had halved our salaries to preserve cash, but after an initial investment by friends and family, we had bootstrapped the business to profitability. When the board suddenly stopped my salary, reneging on the agreement that had been part of me transitioning to Chairman, it felt very destabilizing. We had not planned on raiding our savings to fund our lives and, in a very rational response to the circumstances, Erica wanted me to get a job.

I had other plans. I have only held three normal jobs in my life — once after my first startup failed, once after my second startup failed and once after taking several years off from work to care for my family after we learned our son had cerebral palsy from a stroke in utero. I had come to the conclusion that I'm not particularly well cut out for the normal hierarchy of corporate work and could not envision a return to that life. Instead, I had envisioned pivoting to work on other projects that had occupied my mind on long runs for the prior decade — all of which were non-profit and none of which were likely to fund our lives. With the new urgency to generate income, my mind shifted to more profit-oriented ideas.

Hairstory's main product, New Wash, is an oil-based hair cleanser that cleans without detergent — no foam, no stripping, just genuinely healthy hair. I didn't invent it; I recognized it. And its remarkably strong repeat purchase rates are the reason Hairstory succeeded. But I'll save that story for another time.

It has always seemed strange to me that, after cleaning my head with this innovative new technology, I would use traditional soap on my body. I wondered if the same benefits New Wash brings to your scalp would apply to the rest of your skin — no more stripping, plenty of hydration and moisture, less stress and better health — but the company's name is Hairstory and it didn't seem on-brand to explore other parts of the body. Now that I was no longer managing Hairstory, however, I felt free to let my mind wander. Could there be another business that would leverage the same core philosophy and insights? I started my research...

I discovered an exciting statistic: 71% of people self-report as having sensitive skin. As a devout evolutionist, this datapoint is impossible to explain in the absence of external factors. I'm pretty sure the culprit is soap. Further research confirmed this belief: our skin was not designed to be stripped daily, and neither was our microbiome.

Next, I scoured Amazon and the broader internet in search of soapless cleansers. While there were plenty of non-foaming, oil-based facial cleansers, every "soapless" or "soap-free" product I tested for the body actually foamed. More gentle than traditional soap, but still soap. As far as I could tell, the category of soap-free cleansers for hands and body was completely and entirely unpopulated. Immediately, I bought soapless.me (soapless.com was taken — more on that story later!) as a placeholder.

Finally, I modeled out the business in Excel. While it would cut aggressively into our savings at the outset, the model revealed that with very modest traction — building a business 1/10th the size of Hairstory — we should be able to generate enough cash to replace our lost income. Rather than invest in the stock market or in government bonds, we would invest in ourselves.

By the time I decided to start Hairstory in 2015, I had learned enough about myself to know I would fail without a trusted, detail-oriented partner to offset my weaknesses. I conscripted my wife, Erica. Erica ran our finance, HR and customer service functions — all of the shit work, in her words — but as a co-founder she projected a powerful voice to influence all other areas of the business as well. When we stepped away from day-to-day at Hairstory, both of us were surprised how much she missed it. In hindsight, we shouldn't have been. While building Hairstory had been challenging, demanding and often tedious, it had been incredibly rewarding and flat out fun to work together as a team. What makes us strong life partners translated into successful business partners as well. It had also been the perfect work for parents, enabling unparalleled flexibility.

Erica is my main sounding board for every idea that excites me, and she had been evaluating the soapless idea as it developed. But it wasn't until I returned from the ski trip to our house in Quebec that I made the final pitch:

We would take what we learned at Hairstory and apply it to other parts of the body. We would work together again, instead of taking a "real" job. We would bootstrap the business, keeping the threshold for success far lower than typical. It would be scary, it would be risky, it would be challenging — but we would be investing in ourselves.

And if it worked, it would carry us into the next chapter. Empty nesters with something to build.

She said yes.