Solo Entrepreneur to $10M+ Niche E-commerce Success: DoggieLawn Founder Natalie Youn (Part 1)

Natalie has done a superb job of positioning a niche product and building a great business starting solo.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Natalie Youn: I’m in LA right now. I’m born and raised in LA. I have never left the nest. I managed to always be drawn into LA. I went to school here for both undergrad and grad. I started my first job in LA. Now I’ve settled down with my family and business. It doesn’t look like I’m leaving anytime soon.

Sramana Mitra: What is the genesis of the company?

Natalie Youn: We have an alternative solution to pee pads. We have real grass that we offer to dog owners for their dogs to go to bathroom on. It’s a subscription service. We were early on in the subscription-based model in 2011. That’s when Dollar Shave Club started. We rode that wave.

Sramana Mitra: How did you come up with this idea?

Natalie Youn: I have dogs. Interviewing a lot of people, you find that their business has something to do with their passion or knowledge base. Mine happened to be love of my dogs. My background was actually in consumer product goods. I worked at Nestle before then and was managing beverage brands like Nescafe. Before that, I worked for some smaller startup brands. Food and beverage was my forte in marketing.

Sramana Mitra: You came up with this idea and you decided to start an e-commerce venture.

Natalie Youn: I was actually going to start something else with a friend. It was really capital-intensive and things didn’t work out. I took the plunge. I left my job. What’s next? My husband, who was my boyfriend at that time, was like, “I know you have a lot of ideas.” Entrepreneurs are like that. We always have a lot of things brewing in our head.

He said, “Why don’t you go and try all of them and see what sticks?” This one got the most traction. This was one of the many ideas I had. This seemed to have the most market fit.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a great story angle that I want to pursue. What was the process that you followed to test and validate?

Natalie Youn: I had worked for bigger companies. I had a short stint in innovation at Nestle. Then I had my MBA. I had these ideologies that if you’re going to launch a new product, it’s going to go like this. There’s this process for it. You’ll do these questions. You go to dog people and ask them questions. Would you use this product? What price range would you pay for it? I did that. My sample size was small.

It’s interesting because if I had just gone with those results, I would have stopped then and there. A lot of my friends were, “I don’t get it.” At that time, no one had been doing grass. It was just pee pads. Pee pads dominated the market. Waste management is ginormous. Dogs are always going to bathrooms. I use my own product.

My product came about when I was like, “I have a pain point. I hate getting this grass. It’s a pain to change it out.” I was a firm believer in it. This solves my pain point. That’s the one thing that I learned from MBA. Business ideas come from a pain point. You’re solving a problem. I launched it.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Solo Entrepreneur to $10M+ Niche E-commerce Success: DoggieLawn Founder Natalie Youn
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