Within a year of launching, Simon Enever and the team at quip had sold 100,000 toothbrushes and in 2016 were named one of TIME Magazine’s top 25 inventions of the year, as well winning GQ’s Grooming Award and garnering inclusion on Oprah’s “O List.” Six years later and quip now has more than six million customers globally.
Here are his insights launching and running a successful business and prioritizing creativity.
Our mission is to make perfect oral health simple and accessible to everyone. The key to doing so is helping people maintain the at-home personal care habits, and in-practice professional care visits that are essential to oral health. The two parts of our mission that I am most passionate about are the “accessibility to everyone” and “personal and professional care connection” aspects.
Accessibility is a key driver and differentiator for us. We are not trying to create a niche brand to help a small population. We are looking to help the mass of the population that currently invest very little in their oral care to do it better by bringing premium guiding features and design to affordable price points.
I am also very passionate about the tie between personal and professional care. You cannot maintain perfect oral health with only one of these two components. No company has tied the two together in the past, and we believe that doing so will have the most significant impact on people’s oral health.
The slow down of the pace of innovation and creativity. As a small company it is much easier to be extremely innovative while being fast paced. Inevitably, however, as a company grows there are more people — employees, stakeholders, board members, shareholders and investors — and layers of complexity with management, legal and corporate teams involved. This makes maintaining the pace of innovation through lots of fast-moving decision making and open creativity harder to sustain.
At quip, we believe speed to innovation and creativity are our differentiators. So working out how to maintain this as we scale is definitely something that keeps me up at night. The team has so many great ideas, such ambition, such an exciting roadmap and an incredible opportunity to own all of the areas we are looking to enter, but execution is about concept, quality, speed and timing and the latter two get harder as you grow.
Our concept from the beginning was to create a service that helped people with every aspect of their oral health. From brushing your teeth to chewing mouth-healthy gum to visiting the dentist every 6 months, we wanted to help in a variety of ways.
We were planning to launch, however, at first with just a toothbrush. Not long before then an investor gave us an insight: they had seen from a portfolio company that this approach could pigeonhole the brand, meaning we would be perceived as “just a toothbrush,” rather than the oral care brand we were envisioning and building.
The suggestion was made to delay launch until we had, at least, toothpaste ready to accompany our toothbrush to create more of an oral care “family” feel from day one. We took this advice and it was as effective as we hoped — in hindsight proving to be a pivotal, ah-ha decision. Not only were we instantly seen as an “oral care brand” but we also were able to prove out one of the most important questions investors would go on to ask as we scaled and fundraised: could we successfully help our members with more than just their toothbrush? We had real-life attach rates to both of our products from day one, which was even more beneficial given both created recurring subscription revenue.
When you’re a business owner, you don’t always know what you don’t know. From the start, my focus was on first proving that we had product market fit and working to adapt from there. What ended up being key for us was bringing in consultants to help with areas such as marketing and finances. We worked with various consultants to build a growth plan and to better understand our finances, among other things. This helped us to see how or if we would be able to spend against our plan, ensuring we were getting the timing right and appropriately allocating resources.
One thing I think is important is to try to keep the team right sized for where you are right now (or are soon about to be), rather than getting too far ahead of yourself. We all hope things will go according to plan, but as COVID showed us last year, oftentimes they don’t, with COVID being an extreme example.
This can be difficult, has its own challenges, and takes discipline. The upside, however, is that in difficult times you will be able to maintain the most important part of your business — your team — and not have to make difficult decisions due to a slow down or some other external factor.
I take my work extremely seriously: from the smallest task to the biggest one, but I try not to take myself too seriously.
I like to also think that the culture we have imparted at quip is a similar one. One of detail-orientation where no task is too small and we’re all striving for excellence. At the same time, that’s coupled with a lack of ego, humility, teamwork and shared responsibility.
Often you can find people and teams that have one of those two types of qualities, but getting that sweet spot in the middle is what I try to live by and try to have the company do as well.
I find there are two modes of creativity.
There’s the “heads down” solo time where you just need to block everything out, find the mental space to get out of the daily grind and “to-do list” type work. This allows the space for creativity.
Then, there’s the collaborative kind — the kind you picture with a room full of people brainstorming around a whiteboard.
You need both.
With COVID for a lot of us there has been more time and literal space to create solo creativity time. Unfortunately, the collaborative type of creativity has become more difficult. There literally have been no groups of people brainstorming together in a room, and trying to replicate that environment through laptop screens has proven really difficult due to the distractions that are innate in being on a laptop as well as the lack of human interaction or physical tools like a whiteboard.
I look forward to being able to bring back some version of that collective creative work because it was so impactful to us in the past and allowed for far faster and more collective innovation to happen.
A common one – that “perfection is a curse and innovation is messy.” This was especially important as someone that is a designer by education and background where the natural tendency is to strive for something “perfect” down to every last detail.
You very quickly learn that doing so is a road to nowhere and you need to launch, test and learn things to improve them.
There are thousands of articles out there on entrepreneurship and business, so I can’t guarantee this hasn’t been said before, but the thing I always say to people about when I started quip is that it is very easy for some people to be intimidated by the category giants and industry experts. It’s easy to assume, “they must have thought of this before” and think that you can’t possibly be more of an expert than them.
But when you step back and think about your category, it’s worth remembering that many of those people, those experts leading those giants are often bogged down in “to-do” list type work, and perhaps aren’t making time for creativity. So maybe you did just stumble upon or dream up an idea that they hadn’t come up with. Maybe you looked at the problem from an angle they hadn’t, or maybe they simply can’t pursue an idea like yours for business or brand reasons at this time.
The key is to learn everything you can about your area, have confidence and conviction, test your idea, then adapt and grow. You’ll never know if you don’t try.
A business that helps solve a problem for people in a fair and equitable way, that you enjoy running every day.
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