From Bootstrapped to Seed - My Journey to $1 Million

As a social entrepreneur from humble beginnings, I always knew I wanted to create something

for my family and community. As a 3x founder, starting businesses is the easy part for me. For most of my entrepreneurial journey, it was simply to have the freedom to raise my children, travel, and create an income stream that could pay the bills. It wasn’t until 2016 that my outlook on being a Founder and what that meant for my family long term. Let me give you the backstory.

In 2012 I started a hobby business, YANY Cosmetics, to make money while finishing law school and wanted to create products that looked good on me and women who looked like me. It was indeed a hobby where I made a few hundred dollars a month, if that. After graduating, I set it aside to start another business that matched my law and business background and made money. But in 2019, that passion for beauty started again. This time I fully embraced it as a business I could pass on to my beautiful daughters, not just a flexible paycheck. In 2020 my daughter Shania and I opened our flagship store YANY Beauty Boutique and relaunched the beauty brand, YANY Beauty.

For the past two years, things have been exciting and challenging; we’ve won tens of thousands in competitive grants to help fuel the business during COVID. We also invested tens of thousands from our savings accounts, nearly depleting them to start and stay in business (transparent moment). But my dedication to creating a family legacy and then using that legacy to pour into other people would not allow me to consider raising investment capital. Instead, I kept thinking of ways to bootstrap the business and not go under. I know you might question the why… so here it is.

I always thought of investors as “sharks” who only want to take over a company. I have heard horror stories about founders being ousted by investors from companies where they put in sweat equity and life savings. Terrible right? And with that, I didn’t want to chance it with my family business (really like one of my babies) or with my social mission. But as I educated myself on the pros and cons of raising capital, how I can create an exit strategy and retain control for my family, and most importantly, the benefits of having real money in the bank to help drive the growth of the business, scale and reinvest into people, I knew that we were ready to raise our seed round of $1 million+. And our success will pour into the achievements of others. We appreciate that an investment in our business does not stop with us, and that’s truly important.

And what will we do with one million, you ask? Our goals are to bring on new team members with specific areas of expertise that complement ours to propel the business forward. We plan to put more clean indie beauty brands on our shelves, increase our marketing efforts, beautify more packaging, open more stores in select markets, and increase our technology presence in stores and online. And, if you’ve gotten this far, you can help us meet our goal by investing via the Wefunder platform. The great thing about it is that you don’t have to be an accredited investor to help us. If you believe in our brand and resonate with our story, I invite you to become one of our investor squad. You can check out our pitch deck and invest


here


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Thanks for reading and we are open to questions and feedback!

All the best!

-Yaminah

Founder at YANY Beauty

www.yanybeauty.co

FB & IG @yanybeauty.co

Direct link to our investment campaign: https://wefunder.com/yanybeauty