We were lucky to catch up with Sisun Lee recently and have shared our conversation below.

Sisun, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So, let’s imagine that you were advising someone who wanted to start something similar to you and they asked you what you would do differently in the startup-process knowing what you know now. How would you respond?

I would have bootstrapped instead of raising venture capital. Not every business needs to be venture-scale. We raised over $20 million in equity financing to grow the business quickly. In hindsight, More Labs would have been better served as a lifestyle business with large profit margins, even if it meant slower growth. Ultimately there’s multiple paths to the same outcome, and we’re in a great position as a company having taken the path that we did. The downside is that we diluted ownership probably more than we should have.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I graduated Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada. I started my career as a product manager in Silicon Valley – first at Facebook, Uber, then Tesla. I’ve been an entrepreneur since then – starting businesses including More Labs, Ramper, and Argo.

The idea behind More Labs was to combat my own daily struggles of productivity. I was often too tired to stay productive, and started experimenting with nootropics. The goal with More Labs was to provide safe and science-backed nootropics designed to optimize our biological system so that we could maximize every moment and get more out of life.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

It took me a while to learn that no one actually knew what they were doing (including myself). Those who claim to know are faking it, delusional, or not pushing themselves far enough into the realm of the unknown. You achieve great results not by knowing how to do it all along, but by having the resilience to try, fail, and iterate in pursuit of a mission.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

We benefited significantly from Facebook in the early days through our unique paid ad campaigns.

Our ads always appeared as viral organic Facebook posts instead of traditional paid ads. Here’s how we achieved this:

1. Created Third-Party Facebook Pages:
– We made posts through a third-party Facebook page that we created.
2. Collaborated with Low-Audience Media Companies (pay to post but cost effective):
– We worked with a handful of low-audience media companies to get coverage on our product/company.
3. Linked Media Coverage in Facebook Posts:
– We linked these media coverages in our Facebook posts and then paid to increase their reach.

As a result, we created placements in the Facebook feed that looked like viral posts about media coverage of our product/company. This approach dramatically reduced our customer acquisition cost. In the first three months of our company, we spent roughly $300K a month on Facebook ads, acquiring customers for under $10 each. Our first order average order value (AOV) was well over $50.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://morelabs.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/morelabs/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sisunlee/
• Twitter: https://x.com/SisunLee

Image Credits

More Labs