On Building A SaaS That Provides Ingredient Transparency For The Beauty Industry [1400+ Brands]

Sabrina Noorani

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Published: July 5th, 2022

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Sabrina Noorani

Founder, ClearForMe

$325K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

ClearForMe

clearforme.com

from New York, NY, USA

started August 2017

$325,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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My name is Sabrina Noorani, I’m the founder and CEO of ClearForMe. We are a b2b Ingredient SaaS solution.

ClearForMe is like Google for ingredients, allowing brands and retailers to provide ingredient clarity on their e-commerce sites. This is not only for their customers but also their store and online sales associates, customer service, merchandising, and compliance teams.

ClearForMe maps each ingredient across all of their countless synonyms with fact-based, neutral, objective information ultimately powering the popular Clickable Ingredients API solution. ClearForMe is my answer to clearing up ingredient confusion for the beauty industry and providing user-friendly education and personalized product choices. With ClearForMe, I hope to help consumers feel empowered to shop confidently.

Today, ClearForMe’s database has over 1.6 million ingredients. We have 350+ partners (brands and retailers) and have over 1,400 brands worth of products directly managed on our platform.

Our partners include; Ulta, Credo Beauty, Kylie Skin, Mario Badescu, First Aid Beauty, Olapex, Pley, Rhode, and Drunk Elephant - to name a few.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I was born and raised in East Africa and moved to Miami, FL with my family when I was eight years old. I graduated from The New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business with a Bachelor of Science in Finance and Information Systems, and a minor in Mathematics.

I was one of a few female derivatives traders at the NYSE, the only specialist who ran the index options trading pit during the height of the financial crisis, and later, on the founding team building the institutional desk at the now illustrious Citadel hedge fund.

During my time at Citadel, my lips started to puff up, and itch and the skin started to peel so much that I started getting staph infections every other week. I found out I needed to avoid fragrance, and then learned that there are 32 different synonyms used in ingredient labels.

There is no standardization in ingredient labels which makes it hard for consumers like you and me to find what we want and understand an ingredient list. This is the case for all ingredients, top to bottom. For example, Vitamin C has 35 synonyms and Salicylic Acid has 12. I needed to build ClearForMe to help make it easier and personalized to find what we’re looking for. Ultimately, it helps consumers make confident product choices.

To act on the idea - for me, came in baby steps. I was playing with the idea in my head and then tiptoed into an accelerator program with this idea. A few months later, I had a corporate structure set up and enough practice pitching the concept every week, which gave me the confidence to build the product in the real world.

Share your problems (don’t hide them). Without fail, every time I share what my roadblocks and current problems are, something shifts, and answers come. Maybe not in a linear way, but the answers I didn't even think I was looking for fall into my lap.

What let me know I was on the right track was after I landed a meeting with Annie (co-founder at Credo Beauty ) and Dawn (then CEO of Credo Beauty) and right after the pitch, they said ‘let's do this'. I was in a state of disbelief, I knew I was solving something meaningful, and to have these 2 strong women immediately understand how ClearForMe was solving a big need in the industry, was a WOW moment for me.

Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.

To be honest, the idea started with just an “exclude” feature. Being able to avoid things was why I needed to start ClearForMe. We quickly learned that while people need to search by ingredients they want to avoid, it’s just as important that they can find products by ingredients they want to include. Ingredients are the common denominator for any product recommendation. For example, if you have dry skin, it's valuable if you can not only avoid ingredients that are drying but also if you can find ingredients in your recommendations that help hydrate and moisturize your skin.

The prototype was a clickable app demo (picture below). I found a UX/UI designer at a tech meet-up, shared my idea, and she worked with me to design a prototype. I used that prototype to run a focus group with a group of friends, who I paid with a glass of wine and cheese in my one-bedroom apartment in the East Village.

The event was great because it made it clear that I did not want to build an app. I just didn’t see the viability of that model, from a usability standpoint and as a viable business model. That night asking my friends to use it for what they needed, made me realize that everyone shops at different places and have different needs. ClearForMe would be more useful if it lived where they shopped, whether it was CVS, Target, Sephora, or Ulta.

Describe the process of launching the business.

Once I decided that ClearForMe’s solution needed to live where customers shop, a b2b business model made the most sense. It’s easy to want to leave your options open but if you do that as an entrepreneur you are more prone to casting too wide of a net. This can lead to being stretched too thin, losing sight of your value proposition, and vague messaging in your pitch.

Staying focused isn't only applicable when your business is getting off the ground, it continues to be the most rewarding and challenging task as you grow. I decided to focus on retail partners and made a wish list of 10 retailers I wanted to work with. The 10 names had specific reasons all connected to my mission of making ingredients easy to understand and shop so consumers can make personalized choices based on what matters most to them.

If you solve a real need for customers, you will retain them. We talk to our customers all the time, exploring what is going on, what their obstacles are, and what opportunities they see across their entire business

I didn’t come from the beauty industry so I thought I had no connections. My advisor Mike Davis, a co-founder of MPower and serial entrepreneur, shared something with me that you might think was basic but was truly an “aha-moment”. He said to look up the 10 retailers on Linkedin and see if any connections pop up. It doesn’t matter if they were 2nd or 3rd connections, note them down. Having people in your corner to challenge you to think differently is crucial and Mike is one of those people for me.

That exercise gave me a few leads and started my journey to getting introductions. After a few responses that said they don’t have a “strong” connection, one person wrote back and agreed to a call with me to learn more. I hadn’t talked to or seen this person in years but in our call, I learned Imran Karim, my friend, founded an amazing at-home dermabrasion product line.

This line solved the need for women and allowed them to be able to do the service at home, at a much cheaper cost. He soon offered to make an introduction to the retailer on my list, Truth In Aging. Marta Worhle took the meeting and throughout a few conversations agreed to beta test the experience on her site.

I told her I would pay for the build and we created a % of revenue deal once the product recommendation tool was live on her site. It cost me $10k to build what we scoped out. I paid for all of this with my savings:

$500 to pay an intern for data entry
$1500 was to design the prototype
$7000 to pay for the development
$1000 for the server cost and fees

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

If you solve a real need for customers, you will retain them. We talk to our customers all the time, exploring what is going on, what their obstacles are, and what opportunities they see across their entire business. Taking the time to do that makes it much easier to focus on what we should deliver and invest in building our roadmap.

Our biggest revenue driver is our customers. We focused on building partnerships with industry leaders who are fearless about delivering education and clarity. When I started, I envisioned a partner with authentic characteristics and vision. Credo Beauty emerged at the top of the list. I knew that to further prove market validation, Credo buy-in would be the ultimate goal. Instead of putting it off for down the road, I chose to diligently tackle them first.

I cold emailed key stakeholders in their business, several times. After no response, I created a case study showing the gaps that were currently in place on their website and how our solution could resolve them. That is what got me in the door.

After the meeting, the communication fizzled out so I decided to attend a conference I knew the co-founder was speaking at and waited to talk to her to share my vision. That led to a formal meeting which led to a follow-up meeting with their executive team. There I shared not only my vision but a prototype that is specific to Credo Beauty (screenshot below). Showing how we align was what led to a ‘yes’.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

In the last three years, we’ve grown to have partnerships with more than 350+ brands and retailers. Our margins are high and to date, we’ve spent close to zero in marketing, all of that growth has happened organically.

We are a SaaS business, where we have recurring revenue from our b2b partnerships who pay us a licensing fee to use our data and services to deliver ingredient clarity.

We have the largest ingredient database actively managed and maintained by our partners, which means none of our information is scraped. It comes directly from the source of truth which are brands and retailers who make products directly for end customers.

With more than 1.6m+ ingredients and product data for more than 1400+ brands’, our goal is to ensure accurate, clear, and searchable product information is delivered across all channels that a customer wants to discover and make a product purchase. Customers must trust the information they get and can answer the questions they have about a brand’s product and ingredients.

Because our data lives everywhere customers shop, end customers can experience a frictionless, consistent, and seamless way to explore and choose the best product for their needs.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Approaches, mantras, and habits that are important to me:

Trust the universe has my back, things work as they are meant to.
Embrace the uncertainty.
When you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Goals that aren’t measurable stay out on the horizon. Define the goal, how it will be measured, and by when you want to accomplish it.
Take a few minutes at the end of the day to take stock of what went right, why, and the next steps for it.
Every Monday, our team gets together and shares a positive focus from the week before. It grounds and connects us. On Thursdays we have Thankful Thursdays where we acknowledge one thing we appreciate about our work that week, giving shoutouts to team members who have made an impact positively.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

No need to reinvent the wheel, we love the tools that are proven to help startups:

Slack: For communication and building community
Hubspot: A source of truth for CRM processes both internal and external.
Jira: Provides an agile methodology to develop our product.
Google for business: A tried and true email system for us as well as a file-sharing system to create, organize, and share documents between our team.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

Podcast:

Tim Ferris: Interview with Jim Dethmer, who wrote the book, '15 Commitments To Conscious Leadership'. It reframed what leadership means, highlighting that life happens through me and not to me which is powerful to be mindful of as I build a company and grow my team. Plus it applies to all aspects of life.

The podcast led me to the book itself, ‘15 Commitments To Conscious Leadership’. This book is simple, yet mind-blowing when you approach this consciously and intentionally. My main takeaways are: own your actions, commit to sharing the truth, refuse to gossip, even in subtle ways, focus on what you are best at, and my favorite - play. Choose to see the ease and playfulness of life and what we can create with that mindset as a leader.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

No one has it all figured out. I recently talked to a mentor of mine who just hit Unicorn status. I figured they would feel like they are on top of the world but even being at different places, we connected on the fact that we don’t have it all figured out. It’s just a given for everyone, so let go of the idea that you need to know it all.

Share your problems (don’t hide them). Without fail, every time I share what my roadblocks and current problems are, something shifts, and answers come. Maybe not in a linear way, but the answers I didn't even think I was looking for fall into my lap.

Build habits to nurture your confidence. I end my day listing three positive things I did that day, why they are positive, their impact, and the next steps. It helps me close my day with a positive focus which builds my confidence. Lift others up. Invest in your teams’ development and success. It’s the most gratifying part of being a leader. Filling up their buckets fills yours up the same plus more.

Be kind to yourself and others and help as many people as you can along the way. Measure goals and what you’ve done so you can bank the wins.