This Side Hustle Spotlight Q&A features Lee Mayer, co-founder with her sister Emily Motayed of interior design and home decorating company Havenly. Read more about how the Denver, Colorado-based entrepreneur turned a side project into a successful brand, here. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Havenly. Lee Mayer.
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What was your day job or primary occupation when you started your side hustle?
I was working in consulting, strategy and finance roles — sort of classic post-business-school roles. Often, the roles offered high compensation but were not particularly rewarding for me in other ways.
When did you start your side hustle, and where did you find the inspiration for it?
I’d just moved to Denver, Colorado, from New York City and suddenly found myself in a much larger home compared with my 700-square-foot NYC apartment. I wanted my home to feel like a reflection of me and my tastes, but the combination of working long hours and confronting the often inaccessible nature of traditional interior design really slowed me down. I started wondering why there wasn’t a service that made designing your home more affordable and fun, so we started an online design service that used technology to make it possible to design anyone’s home delightfully and accessibly.
Somewhere along the way, we grew a lot, and we started to buy other online home furnishings businesses, often started by other folks who had also left highly paid jobs to start their own online companies selling furniture to consumers. We now own six consumer-facing furnishings or design brands: Havenly, Interior Define, Burrow, Citizenry, The Inside and St. Frank.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Havenly
What were some of the first steps you took to get your business off the ground?
My sister and I started talking with our friends, family and connections, calibrating our idea based on hundreds of conversations, and conducted a survey that gathered insights from nearly 1,000 people.
If you could go back in your business journey and change one process or approach to save you time, energy, or just a headache, what would it be, and how do you wish you’d done it differently?
In the beginning, you should be moving the needle in huge ways, not incrementally. When you start a business, you may tend to think process first, instead of outcome first. You develop all of these checklist items because those things are knowable or countable, but the big things are often a lot more amorphous.
For example, it’s hard to figure out the exclusive product market fit, so instead, you’ll worry about your legal structure, which is far more “knowable.” It can also be putting in a lot of process for your engineering/customer service or other team without having a single scaled customer. These things are easy to do, particularly because they’re internally controlled, and it’ll eventually become important, but it doesn’t actually move the needle in the big ways you need to when you’re first starting. You’ll end up exhausting yourself with things that don’t ultimately matter at that point.
When it comes to this specific business, what is something you’ve found particularly challenging and/or surprising that people who get into this type of work should be prepared for, but likely aren’t?
I don’t think it’s surprising, but it’s a lot more work than most people think it is, and it’s not always glamorous work either. Sometimes you get lucky and find a business that is an overnight success, but usually it can mean long hours for many years. It requires a lot of intestinal fortitude to do that much work without a certain outcome. To complicate matters, it’s work at all levels. You’re the one answering customer service at 2 a.m. and figuring out insurance for your employees, all while coding the website.
The financial strain can also be real. In many cases, you may be stepping away from a meaningful career in a highly compensated position, and it may be years before you exit or even pay yourself a salary.
What was your approach to funding? Did you use any specific strategies that might help other founders successfully raise?
First, don’t take rejection personally. Some people raise very easily — they start a company in a hot space at the right time (like AI!), they’re extremely well connected, or they get lucky. It’s easy to think that if it doesn’t go that easily for you, there’s something wrong with you. It took about 140 rejections in our first fundraise before receiving that first yes, for what it’s worth. For most successful people, there really aren’t many instances in your life where you get rejected so many times, and it can take a toll on your confidence. But the reality is, the early stages of fundraising can be tough, and are often very affected by exogenous factors. The trick is to try to let rejections be nothing more than what they are, which is just one investor declining, for right now, the opportunity to invest.
Related: Think You’re Ready to Fundraise? Your Business Needs to Meet These 3 Milestones First.
I recently re-entered the world of tennis after not having played for many years. I’ve found that just like fundraising, tennis is a mental game. No matter how the previous point went, you have to brush it off and focus on the current play. Just like in tennis, you have to try to brush the last meeting off, regardless of the outcome, and focus on the current pitch at hand. So, being able to stomach rejection can be a real advantage.
You should also find a friend — find a CEO of a company that completed a similar-sized round within the past 12 months, ideally one that runs a company in an analogous but not competitive space. First, investors are never happier with a company than right after their initial investment, so their investors are a great place to start conversations, and they can connect you easily. Second, they’ll know all of the active investors whom they talked to in their journey, even the ones who didn’t invest, so they can tell you what they look for and help you improve your pitch. Finally, they’re great sources of emotional support.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Havenly
What does growth and revenue look like now?
We’re in the multiple hundreds of millions. We’re growing at a double-digit clip and are excited to continue to expand and serve more and more customers across all of our brands.
What do you enjoy most about running this business?
I’ve had the enormous privilege of working with incredibly talented people, many of whom have become friends over the years, and there’s nothing quite like building towards a shared goal with people you trust and admire.
What is your best piece of specific, actionable business advice?
There’s a lot of noise in your day when you start a business, and it can feel overwhelming knowing the number of things you have to do between starting a business and whatever exit is. It gets worse once you let in other voices: well-meaning mentors who don’t know the reality on the ground, employees who have never scaled a company from 0-1, investors who have never operated a company.
Take feedback, process it a little, but then filter that through your own lens, which hopefully has some tether to data-based reality. Figure out the next most important thing to do, and don’t spend too much time pondering all of the things that you need to do between now and exit, and all of the advice and ideas you get. Basically, just get to work — and keep putting one foot in front of the other in the general right direction. You’d be surprised how far you get.