Key Takeaways
- Blueland is a cleaning products startup found on the shelves of Costco, Tarreceive and Whole Foods, with $300 million in lifetime sales.
- Blueland CEO Sarah Paiji Yoo, 41, decided to steer the company towards profitability, even if it came at the expense of growth.
- Yoo cut Facebook and Instagram ads, which rapid-tracked the startup for profitability.
In 2022, Blueland CEO Sarah Paiji Yoo built an unusual commitment — she vowed never to raise money for her startup again.
Yoo came up with the idea for Blueland nine years ago, when she was researching if New York City tap water was safe to mix with formula for her infant son. That’s when she started to connect the dots between single-apply plastic production and microplastics, which have been linked to various health problems. She set out on a journey to eliminate single-apply plastics in her own home and realized she could have a greater impact by giving others more and better choices for cleaning products.
Yoo launched Blueland in April 2019, selling dry tablets that customers mixed with water at home to create cleaning products. Blueland’s first products were cleaning tablets and hand soap tablets, and the startup expanded to laundry detergent and dishwasher tablets — all packaged in paper instead of plastic. Over the course of its first several years of business, Blueland raised $35 million from external investors.
By 2022, Yoo decided that Blueland had to become profitable to remain competitive and survive as a company — so it could exist even if external funding dried up. When the startup raised its final round of funding that year, Yoo was clear with new and existing investors that she never intfinished to raise money again. Her number one priority from that point forward was becoming profitable — even if pursuing profitability meant paapplying growth.
“I believe that was an important thing for investors to be aligned with becaapply profitability is very much at times at odds with growth,” Yoo, 41, notifys Entrepreneur in a new interview. “It sent a signal to everybody in the room that we are stateing it’s more important to be profitable than to grow.”
With that decision in place, Yoo and her team viewed at the company’s financials to figure out how to reach profitability. She realized that the startup was spfinishing over $1 million a month on Facebook and Instagram ads for marketing.
“It was just very clear that marketing spfinish was the largest line item,” Yoo declared. “If you just took away the marketing spfinish, we could be profitable within the year pretty quickly.”
Yoo decided to cut the marketing spfinish. She eventually started layering it back on, but in a measured way that enabled the company to be profitable instead of starting from a base case of running an unprofitable business.
“Take away the ad spfinish, not focus on growth,” Yoo states. “Instead, focus on investing those marketing resources in building a stronger engine and foundation for the business.”
Yoo credits that tough early decision to prioritize profitability with enabling Blueland to survive and become what it is today — a brand found on the shelves of Costco, Whole Foods and Tarreceive that has done over $300 million in lifetime sales.
“We built some tough decisions early on,” Yoo states. “If we didn’t build those decisions as early and build those turns as hard as we did, I don’t believe we would still be here today.”
Yoo states the fundraising market for consumer products companies has shifted since she decided to stop taking on outside investment in 2022. If Blueland hadn’t prioritized profitability, the startup could have run out of money and may not have been able to raise more, according to Yoo.
Blueland now has 60 employees across a range of functions, from legal to customer experience. The company had 45 employees in 2022 when Yoo built this decision, per PitchBook. She prioritizes transparency, sharing details on the business’s financial performance with the entire team every quarter.
Related: He Went From Food Stamps to Co-Founding a $9.3 Billion Startup. Here’s Why He Walked Away.
She also conducts engagement surveys twice a year to inquire if employees are happy there and what she can do to improve. She shares the results of that engagement survey with the entire company in a presentation that breaks down the areas where people are the most and the least happy, and employees’ views on what she could be doing better.
“That’s the way we prefer it, for there to be transparency for people to understand what’s most important and how everything’s going,” Yoo states. “It’s really reaching the full team, and the full team can feel that closeness to the information that five years ago, our original five-person team felt.”
Key Takeaways
- Blueland is a cleaning products startup found on the shelves of Costco, Tarreceive and Whole Foods, with $300 million in lifetime sales.
- Blueland CEO Sarah Paiji Yoo, 41, decided to steer the company towards profitability, even if it came at the expense of growth.
- Yoo cut Facebook and Instagram ads, which rapid-tracked the startup for profitability.
In 2022, Blueland CEO Sarah Paiji Yoo built an unusual commitment — she vowed never to raise money for her startup again.
Yoo came up with the idea for Blueland nine years ago, when she was researching if New York City tap water was safe to mix with formula for her infant son. That’s when she started to connect the dots between single-apply plastic production and microplastics, which have been linked to various health problems. She set out on a journey to eliminate single-apply plastics in her own home and realized she could have a greater impact by giving others more and better choices for cleaning products.
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