Strive

How I Built A $1M Men's Skincare Brand

April 25th, 2025

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About
Business

Angel Olavarria

Founder, Strive

$115K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Strive

striveskin.com

from New York

started February 2024

$115,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Who are you and what business did you start?

Hi, I’m Angel Olavarria, founder and chemist of Strive, a men’s skincare brand built on simplicity and good science. Our primary customers are men aged 24-54 in the top 25%

What makes Strive unique is that we don’t chase trends—we follow the research. Most all men's brands toss in 'buzzword' ingredients at tiny, ineffective amounts just to market them on the label. We do the opposite. Every ingredient we use is included at the dosage shown to work in quality clinical studies. If it’s not backed by solid research or doesn’t make a meaningful impact, it doesn’t go in. Simple as that.

How do you come up with the idea for Strive?

In my early 20's I wanted to improve every part of my life - career, dating, confidence. I learned about the halo effect- how appearance can give you an edge in everything.

I always got negative comments on my dark undereye cirlces, so I tackled those amongst other things and after figuring everything out, I got great results. I felt insanely confident and I noticed I was more well received than I used to be. It felt like a cheat code most guys didn't know about. Most guys didn't know about it because most men's products are poorly made and confusing. So I became a chemist and worked on product formula for years to build Strive.

I didn't have any proper background in the space, but at this point I have 10 years formulating experience and I am a Society of Cosmetic chemists affiliated chemist.

I ran some small test groups, but I hardly did proper validation because I knew businesses existed in this group and I wanted to run a men's skincare business. I read all the startup books that say do otherwise, but I wanted to start a men's skincare business and not anything else. I would figure out how to make it work and create the blueprint.

How did you launch Strive and get initial traction?

Initially was sort of a stealth launch and we of course hardly sold much outside our first week where we made around $1,500. Then 6 months in we launched on Amazon and started running ads and this got us traction.

We opened to great reviews and it was amazing to get reviews and purchases from people I wasn't connected with. Thankfully, it turns out I did a thorough enough job with creating our formulas and testing them, so there wasn't too much that needed to be changed there based on the reviews.

I had always heard that you shouldn't launch with too many skus and I thought 4 qualified as not being "too many". If I could redo it all, I would've launched with 1 product. That would've saved me hundreds of hours in development time, massive packaging/storage/manufacturing costs and it would've made it so we had more time to put into concise messaging. Then launching a 2nd product would mean we already have an audience for the launch to go well.

What was the growth strategy for Strive and how did you scale?

One of the biggest things that worked for us (it has since been deleted) was a gigantic reddit reference guide teaching men about skincare with several product recommendations. I disclosed my brand in that post, but never pushed it and I offered several alternatives. This ended up going to the top of Google for months and that got us tons of traffic. All good things must come to an end and at some point the subreddit moderator changed and the new one decided he didn't like the post and deleted it. Killing a lot of our organic traffic. In my head I knew to diversify our revenue streams and think proactively about things like losing traffic sources, but I didn't prioritize it enough. So when this stream was removed, it was a big painful lesson.

Then outside of that the biggest thing for us has been Amazon with ads. The key with that was making sure everything was very quality looking. This took a lot of learning because I have done everything myself for the brand. Photography, videos, website, formulation, manufacturing, fulfillment. I just found that I could do everything better than anyone who isn't elite at what they do and those are the people who tend to be out of our price range.

For anyone looking to grow their business, I would say it's helpful to really evaluate your space, look at your competitors and think what you can do better than them. I know that I am more knowledgeable than any of my competitors and none of them can communicate directly with their customers like I can. So I look at ways to do that through reddit and now we are working on video via short form content.

What were the biggest lessons learned from building Strive?

I already covered some of these, but here's the biggest lessons broken down.

Launch with less SKUS (unless you have $$$ to outsource really well) - Saves massive time, money and improves your messaging.

Diversify the revenue streams early. Don't just plan to do it, actually do it and make it a priority.

Agencies will burn your money. Those are better for if you already have solid revenue and traction. I have regretted the two I have used.

I never cared about being an entrepreneur, I had zero background in my industry until I started learning 10 years ago at age 25, I don't have money, I don't have connections, and I am stuck living in expensive New York. I have a long way to go, but with all that we have been able to become a very profitable 6-figure business in just a year and we cruised past a quarter million easily until that reddit fiasco. Most anyone can do it if they put in the effort while having some level of awareness.

Oh and don't think that every piece of advice you hear on a podcast, youtube video or read in a book applies directly to you. Really think through why a certain strategy might work for one business and how that strategy may work for your business if you did it. What works for big brands probably isn't what you should be doing at launch, but maybe it is, think it through. Really.

Strive Acquisition: How much did Strive sell for and what was the acquisition price?

I have a hard time seeing myself wanting to leave this business because I am incredibly passionate about it. If we got larger than 50 employees (which is massive for this type of work), then I think I might start thinking about selling, just because I don't want to deal with 50 employees. I love my work and can't imagine wanting to do anything else for at least the next 10 years.

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