How Soona Built a Same-Day Photo Studio for E-Commerce | Liz Giorgi

Welcome back to From Start to Scale with Alex Newman, where founders, CEOs, sales leaders, investors, and the best of the best share their strategies and tactics, how they scaled their business and broke through the next level. Hear what worked and what didn't so you can avoid critical mistakes and scale your business. Now let's get into it. Welcome to the show. Today's guest is Liz Georgie, co-founder and CEO of Suna. Suna is a same-day photo and video studio designed to help brands get professional content for less than the price of stock. They've raised over $50 million in funding. They have over 190 employees, thousands of customers. And before this, she founded Mightier, which Standard acquired in October 2020. She is an all-around badass. Excited to have you on the show. This is going to be a lot of fun. I'm glad you invited me. Thank you, Alex. So Liz, where I would love to start is really, like, help me understand, like, why this company and, like, how do we... set some context in the stage for the audience and not only why, but like, how did you get the product market fit? And then we can go from there. Sure. Well, this really started for me in 2018 when my co-founder Haley and I were on a painting retreat in Palm Springs, California. We were at a watercolor retreat. and we were talking a lot about how much our shopping behavior had changed in the past when we'd go on a vacation or we'd go somewhere you know we'd want to go to different stores but on this particular trip we were sharing you know different e-commerce stores that we were shopping at places that we had recommendations for each other and and we were commenting on how a lot of our friends were also you know starting shopify stores or selling on etsy for the first time and it really just brought up for us this really critical question of wow our behavior of buying things is really changing and what's something that all these stores have in common what's something that they all are doing that you know is getting our attention and the thing that stuck out to us was They're all having incredible storefront experiences, these incredible visual experiences, getting us on Instagram, showing us beautiful ads. And so we started saying, well, what if you're starting a new store? What would you do to actually get this content? And we had this realization that there really wasn't a solution that helped a store do the process of the creative generation experience the way that some of the other tools in the stack were used. You know, you think about starting a store. There's some essential tools that you need to get started. You're going to need a storefront. You're going to need email. You're going to need shipping. And you go down that list and you quickly realize, well, what's the thing, though, that inspires purchases? It's visuals. It's the photos that get people inspired to buy. And so we said, well, could we take an approach of applying our backgrounds? We both had creative backgrounds. and see if we could apply that to technology in such a way that we can actually scale the creative process and that was really the the germ of the idea behind suno we then spent 18 months building the very first version of the virtual photo shoot experience and finally went public with a beta in late 2019 went more broad to the market in 2020. And I think product market fit really came actually from that beta experience. I always encourage founders to try running a beta before actually going to market with their core product. The reason being is that you get really critical feedback, I think, from a beta customer that you wouldn't necessarily get from a customer that's walking off the street. There's something psychologically interesting about someone saying like, oh, I'm trying this out. The company is still in their trying phase. They're still in this exploration. phase and so they're almost more generous with the feedback more generous with their points of view and so if you can build in that time to run a beta and really ask customers again and again what would you make better what did you like what didn't you like that feedback actually helps you structure a public launch that i think is a little bit more solid and then when we finally did publicly launch there were a couple things that i felt were really clear indicators that that things were going right the first one was just every single day that i would see you know new customers who i didn't know anyone associated with the company i hadn't interacted with them on twitter i hadn't messaged up on linkedin you know complete strangers finding the platform and signing up was a really big indicator of product market fit But then the second gigantic indicator for me was actually when people started repeating all on their own, using the product again and again because of their own needs, because they were really excited about the product and had a good experience. And so all those things kind of added up to a really incredible 2020 for us. We did, you know, I think I've told this story before, but for your listeners, our first year we did a million in revenue and a lot of people, you know. think that it's just about the money and it's not just about the money, but I will tell you when it comes to product market fit, nothing proves it more quickly than the money. I can see that when you, when, when you first started doing this, this beta, how did you really get the word out? Did you reach out? I mean, to people that you were friends with in, in the industry that you've worked with, did you have, you know, like, Hey, go on LinkedIn and find a specific profile and just start saying, Hey, go check this out. Let me know what you guys think. Like, how did you get the, even the initial traction? Yeah, one of the things that we did early on that I think was really great was we started a YouTube channel where we would post our entire experience of going through Techstars and our entire experience of building the platform and the product. So for about nine months, we had a YouTube channel where we'd post a vlog every single week about what we were working on, and then we would ask people to subscribe to the email newsletter. We got about 1200 subscribers to our email newsletter from that process so that when we launched, we could ask for those beta users. And that was a really awesome way to do that. Another thing we did early on that I can't recommend enough is we actually queried people in our network, like basically saying. do you know anyone who has an e-commerce store and we ended up with a list of about 2 000 folks who we knew had e-commerce stores and we just sent them a survey with two questions you know i really have to tell you simple surveys don't send like a 10 question survey it's got to be something that people can answer like open it and answer it in a minute because then it's a no-brainer right if they open it and they see that it's long it's not a no-brainer anymore and so the short survey was a really big big get for us and then by the time we were ready to launch the beta we had about 2200 people on our email list and 200 of them said sure we'll we'll be beta users for you and those first 200 people i will be grateful to them forever And so when you were, the survey piece is spot on. It has to be simple. Even if it's like perceptionally too long, they'll be like, no, thank you. When you are transitioning from beta into kind of public access, like how did you do that to, I mean, I see so many times it's like, oh, we're in a beta, we're in a beta. And it's great because, you know, you're essentially saying, hey, we're going to make some mistakes and we're going to screw some things up and maybe it's a little buggy. And then you move into this public kind of way of doing things. What was your go-to-market strategy to make sure that that was so successful? Well, the first thing we did that really worked was we created a loop inside of our product where if a customer tagged Suna on social media and said, you know, this photo was created at Suna, we would give them another free photo. right so it was just a way for them to kind of get immediate value from us and it also was really obvious to us especially in the early days that merchants look at each other's businesses to find great solutions there's a lot of really deep camaraderie in the e-commerce space merchants talk to each other they're very collaborative and so we knew that if a merchant tagged suna other merchants would likely be looking at that content for inspiration and if they liked what they saw they were more likely to give us a shot. So for us, that $39 customer acquisition cost, we would take that all day, right? So that was an easy victory. The second thing that we did that I think was really successful is we invested really deeply in Slack communities of e-commerce merchants and Facebook communities of e-commerce merchants. So I joined these communities. Anytime someone would be posting about their problems with their visuals, I'd give them free feedback. I'd give them free advice. I would share free tools and resources. And then, you know, after kind of going through all the free stuff they could do, I'd say, and if you're absolutely desperate, you can actually use my name, Liz, as a coupon code to get your first photo free from Suna, right? And so it was sort of a way to say, like, I'm a person, I'm a person who started this company. I want to help this community. I can help in certain ways. But, you know, if you really can't use this free advice, then here's a free photo that you can try my product and see what you think. And that, again, not a super scalable solution, but did really work. I think there is, to date, there was like about 300 merchants that have just come from using my coupon code, Liz, at checkout, you know, to try out the product. And then the final thing that I think really worked for us in the beginning was I was really active on Twitter talking about every single thing we were going through. Every time we launched something new, I would post a ton of updates about it. uh every single time that we had a big customer win i would share testimonials about from the customers i was very public especially in that first year and that really added up for us in terms of just building a community around the product and it's funny because a lot of people say like you should do things that scale but a lot of these things are not scalable you know these were things that were deeply unscalable but what i think it gave me now is it's really opened the door to a ton of merchants i have know more than 100 merchants that are on the suno platform that have my cell phone number and will text me and tell me when things are going wrong or tell me when things are going right and that just to me kind of gives me a constant pulse too and how we're doing and you know areas of opportunity for us that that that's amazing so you were specifically going into all these slack communities one by one and just responding is that something that you have have scaled is that something that the rest of the team has kind of taken on and you push people the funny thing is is it never worked as well as when it was me which is interesting i think you know founder energy is real people like talking to founders people like feeling like they have access to founders and so i don't think it has worked as well i think what has worked well is actually though when we like partner with other power customers and sort of use them as activators of our brand right so when we see somebody talking about suna for example like in a reddit thread asking another Soon a customer to go respond and tell their authentic experience works really well. If somebody posts about, you know, an issue that they're having, you know, me responding publicly when I can, I think has been really positive. And I think the other thing we've tried to do is we've tried to find ways in which that I can scale myself a little bit more, right? So now I do webinars pretty frequently. I try to do, I try to do TikTok videos about things you can do with your e-commerce visuals to make them more successful. So some of those things scale a little bit more easily than the one-to-one, but listen, in the early days, like. every single customer counts every single customer matters and i think you should do things that aren't scalable so that you can get to the place where you know you have that tipping point of velocity because every single person it adds to that momentum and momentum really is the entirety of the point of startups in my opinion it's interesting one of the things that you actually have not mentioned is ads I feel like so often startups kind of around, you know, the space that you guys are in as far as getting awareness, getting publicity, are like, oh, we need money, we need ads, that's how it's going to work. But you guys, you're not saying any of that. Has ads... No, we did not have an ad strategy until after my Series A. I mean, think about how outrageous that is, like, talking about it out loud. But to me, ads are just... ads are a really fast way to get people to click on your website it isn't really a learning tool in my opinion and what you want to get when you're learning early on is what makes your product stick what what actually attracts a brand to try you what are the things they love and they don't love you know and then when you put money into your ads you will have a lot faster i think success when you truly understand the value proposition when you truly understand what is you know attracting people organically to your business and that evolves over time like definitely the paid ads we did after our series a are very different from 2021 to today but i think we have found that you know really understanding our value proposition deeply meant that we spent money really strategically and i can tell you like today you know i've definitely talked to a lot of startups where paid ads are sort of like the entirety of the customer strategy i will tell you now like we spend less than 10 percent of revenues on on paid ads every single month and so there's just a kind of an undercurrent of really diligent customer acquisition strategies that you can build if you don't become overly reliant on paid media to begin with, if that makes sense. That makes sense. How long did it take you from start to series A? Like how long was that? I was about two years from like business incorporating. building kind of the the list of you know beta customers to our series a so we got into techstars in january 2019 went through the program finished our first product launched that beta after we graduated raised the pre-seed right right at the beginning of our beta and then raised the seed in 2020 which you know i often joke it was like before the crazy times of 2020. We raised the seed in February of 2020. A little bit of luck is always nice. And then we raised the Series A in April of 21. Okay. No, it's interesting to see just how long, I feel like I talked to so many companies where it's like, oh, we need to raise, we need to get ads. And it's a very expensive way to learn. And to your point, it can be challenging to kind of cipher through. Like, how much are you learning and how much are you just kind of seeing things happen? But there's not as much intent, there's not as much stickiness. When you're kind of going through this process, you're engaging in Slack communities, you are, you know, you're giving away, obviously, codes. Like, how much are you talking to the customers and tweaking your product? Like, what did that kind of feedback loop really look like? Is that you? Is that people on the team? Is that surveys? Like, how are you able to do that? in order to iterate so quickly yeah well the first thing is i really believe that ceos especially at a startup especially when you're in your early stages but to some extent even in your growth stages you need to make it a huge part of your job to listen to customers because customers have all the data that you need about how to be successful the way that i describe it is customers have the google maps directions to the destination you're trying to arrive at don't try to not use google maps like you know use the map if you have it and so i talk to customers i try to talk to customers at least two times a week in some capacity whether that's on social media yeah or you know i will even hop on to virtual shoots and just say like hey ceo founder of suni here hope you're having a great shoot Please, here's my email. If you have any feedback for us today, I would love to hear it directly. I invite that, right? Because I think if I even sometimes like in the customer support Slack channel, we'll see that we have an unhappy customer and I'll email them and say, you know, what can we do differently? What can we do to make you happy? Because I think you can't a lot. I think for a lot of founders, there's this fear of like your business is your baby and you don't want anyone to say your baby is ugly. And when the truth is, is like. No, your business is just always a work in progress and you want to learn what you can do to make that work in progress even better. The other thing is, you know, I think over time, what I've tried to really do inside my business is elevate people who have the most information about what customers are experiencing, right? So our customer support team. they directly work with our product team on our product strategy right and give feedback and information a lot of companies customer support is sort of just this like hourly job that isn't elevated or made very important we've tried to make it very important at the company right to collect that feedback and then another thing that i think we've really done a good job of is you know we have these really strong records of every single photo shoot experience and so we track maniacally satisfaction after a photo shoot we track maniacally the sell-through rate we track maniacally you know what the average order value is and we really try to understand you know what that data is telling us i think pick like those key data points that like show customer satisfaction for your business and and track those with really great intention and all that kind of comes together in this very the customer first sort of mindset and the last thing i'll say is you know a lot of people will say to me well you know liz nobody asked for the iphone and and apple still made the iphone and and nobody would have given henry ford a survey saying they want a car they would have said they want a faster course and i always say the intention of listening to customers isn't for them to give you answers it's just like i said with the map it's to tell you directionally what direction would they like you to go how you go about driving the car is totally up to you right that's your decision but you want to directionally go where they are hoping you'll go and so you know directionally customers want to go faster instead of giving them a faster horse They got a car, right? That's the kind of thinking you need to have as an organization. No, I love that. It's the, I love the faster horse example because every single time you do that, people throw that in your face and you just turn around and go, you're missing the boat there. Let's pause at the Series A timeframe for a minute and kind of look from there kind of backwards, especially in these times where really a Series A is one of the hardest things to raise today. When you look back on some of the like, if I could change what I did or I made a bet that didn't work out or maybe a mishire or a learning moment, can you point to one or two things that, you know, really were like good bets, but also maybe one or two things you're like, you know what, I wish I could do those differently or not, you know, I would have changed them in some form or fashion. One of the good bets we made very early on was we brought in a head of customer loyalty that oversaw customer service and also a lot of our direct customer support functions because we just felt a tremendous amount of conviction that if you had somebody whose job it was to be responsible for happy customers. That person can really become an advocate across the organization for that strategy. And that paid off in a huge way. And that person, her name is Laura Oxler. She's just an absolute rock star in every sense of the word and has been pivotal to our organization. So I think, you know, as you're thinking about those key hires, it's really easy to focus on a salesperson at that stage. But I actually think focusing on someone who's about stickiness is just as important as somebody who's just focused on net new sales. So putting a tremendous amount of effort there, I think, is pretty critical. Another thing though, that I think I did wrong and I, you know, if I could go backwards in time and think about it differently is, you know, there was definitely a couple hires we made where we hired like the super flashy startup person for a role and kind of had like the perfect LinkedIn account, if you will. I think I learned very quickly that, you know, resumes aren't everything. It's really more about. how you do things than what you've done, you know, and how you go about the work and how you collaborate. And that has really shown me to be true at all stages of the organization. I remember really contemplating whether or not we were gonna hire an outside person for our head of engineering, or if we were gonna, you know, promote someone from within the organization. right around after our series a and after making a few miss hires of like bringing in the very pedigree person i was like i am not going to make that mistake a third time so you know finally made that decision then to elevate someone inside the organization to that position and he has now absolutely crushed it in every sense of the word and the reason i think he has is because he really thinks about how he goes about things how he builds the team there's a tremendous amount of intention around the culture of our engineering org and He has that investment in it because he was part of the engineering work at one point, right? And so that was a huge mistake. It can work out, you know, a different example. On the other side of it, our COO Day was the CEO of Vimeo for six years, took them to 80 million in ARR from 100K, you know, just like an absolute. beast of an executor somebody who had been in the ceo seat i think a lot of folks were looking at me like liz what are you doing like you're going to try trying to replace yourself i was like no i want somebody who's done this job who can give me real feedback who can tell me what i'm doing right can tell me what i'm doing wrong and that has worked out beautifully for us in part because day mellencamp which is her name you know she she and i spent a lot of time really hashing out the details and this is the other thing i will tell you the one thing i would do differently about all my executive hires now looking back is something that i did with day which is don't just have like a zoom meeting don't just go have coffee go have dinner go have dinner have a glass of wine let that dinner play out over the course of several hours see how that person engages with wait staff in the world and you will very quickly realize if that is the kind of person that you want to spend every day with and with day it was just like so obvious to me after we broke bread several times it was like this is a person that i could you know go to the trenches with if i had to and now i recommend it all the time go break bread with people you'll you'll be surprised how much it tells you about someone It's interesting how much your hiring strategy starts to change after you swing and miss a couple of times. 100%. The dinner, the meal with someone and just seeing how they are, because so often I'm a big proponent of hiring scorecards. And yes, of course, you want to look for skill if they know how to do the job, that type of thing, or can they figure it out. i think so much of what i look for are some of the that those attributes like coaching and coachability and curiosity and respectfulness and eq and those iq those types of things give you a really good sense as far as like what you're getting into because the job is never exactly what the job is it always tends to you know shape shift and morph and and that type of thing and you got to be able to adapt to it and you know you want to be able to fight that fight with people who have the right personality for, you know, your company. And I think so many people just sort of throw out this term culture fit, like, oh, we're looking for someone who's a culture fit. But very few organizations actually can define culture fit, you know, and so your scorecard is a perfect example, right? Do you have a true barometer of whether or not someone is a culture fit? And how would you define that? Because i can honestly tell you that there were many people who i hired early on in the company who ended up not being a culture fit but it was because i would think very generically about it i wasn't specific about it and the more specific i got about i'll give you an example a very specific component to being a culture fit at suna is you must be comfortable on our production floor and in a zoom meeting with a prospective customer if you do not feel comfortable getting in there seeing what's going on touching and feeling the experience touching and feeling the product if you feel uncomfortable about that in any way you are not going to be a culture fit because we have such a high value on collaboration we have such a high value on being able to learn by doing right and i could not have articulated that until i saw oh gosh this executive has never actually experienced our product has never actually gone down to the production floor and asked a photographer what they're doing today No wonder they're saying all these things that don't make any sense. They don't understand what's going on in the business. And so you have to have these very specific grounded examples sometimes to teach you what it actually means when you say culture fit. So how has that changed your kind of your whether it's your interviewing and hiring or your onboarding? Is that do you do you kind of force people or part of the onboarding process interview process to get involved? Like how do you how do you test that comfortable? comfort comfortability if i can get the word out yeah like one of the first things i do is i ask people if they've tried the product right like it's with our product you can create an account for free so you know the fact that they can create account for free the only thing that's standing in their way is just the decision to do it right and so i think that that curiosity is a really important part of the job and so if they start an account you can pretty much tell that they haven't done it or they have. Another one for me that's like a really big question that I ask is I always say, especially leaders, when I'm hiring leaders, I'll say, if I was to ask your direct reports what the best part of working for you is and the worst part of working for you is, what would they say? What would they characterize it as? And when people are kind of unwilling to articulate you know what the worst part of working for them is or they say things like oh well you know they'll say that the worst part is that they you know had to work really hard it's like well that's just not even an answer you know i'm looking for something real i'm looking for somebody who has the self-awareness to say you know at times i can be really short or i have struggled historically with having really strong you know interpersonal relationships with people or i you know when someone can actually say something real it actually helps me understand how well they're evaluating themselves and evaluating their performance and then the final thing that i'll do is you know we do something here at suna called a crew interview and a crew interview is quite literally no matter what you know level of the org we're hiring you into we will have a cross-functional group of people do an interview that's a more culture fit interview and the reason being is you know the idea is to really understand do you fit in a room of your peers both up and down do you have the ability to sort of really hold space for all kinds of people and that review process has really garnered some interesting insights and we have decided you know interviews that were maybe home runs before that crew interview crew interview feedback comes back and we go great good to know that person you know was very uncomfortable talking to a customer support person and that that really matters in the end yeah i bet it also gives a lot of confidence to each of those people involved as well to say that their their voice really matters to hear them say hey you know what i i actually say no and the ceo of the company who was potentially a definitive yes goes you know what i'm going to listen to you and no we're not going to hire that person i bet that's very empowering yeah i think over time it really helps you to realize that we are all in this together to some extent you need that buy-in right and when a leader then does come in the organization and people are very excited about it there's a collective sort of feeling of we're going to help this person succeed together right and make sure they have all the information make sure we're we're slacking them on day two and saying how's it going can i answer any questions for you I think especially in this remote culture, what I have noticed is people come into ORCs and they have a huge chasm of information that they cannot fill no matter how many onboarding flows, no matter how many one-pagers or presentations you build. So you need kind of that informal welcoming committee who is prepared and excited to help that person succeed in order for them to actually succeed. 100% agree. I look at it and go, it's a make or break on that first week, those first two weeks with new hires, regardless of level, on both sides, on the candidate level or the new hire level, and then also everybody else in the company, because it's a first impression or the first week's impression. And if people are wondering what to do, if people are wondering, hey, what does that person actually bring to the table, then it seems to go downhill from there. 100%. Makes a lot of sense. Let's change to one of my favorite topics, sales. So when we start talking about kind of this push on selling, what does sales look like? Because this is not, are you reaching out to companies specifically and saying, hey, you should use our product? Right. It's very much of a bring them in, kind of a product-led sales type model. When you say, hey, we got to dial up sales, how do you actually do that? Oh, it's such a good question because this year has been kind of trying a lot of things. So, you know, one of the things that we are doing and I think is something that you should continue to do even at our scale is you've got to do rapid experiments to understand, you know, what is actually driving more chatter about your business? What is driving more discussion and inbound leads? And so. one of the ways that we've really succeeded at inbound so our strategy almost isn't almost entirely inbound okay and that is very much driven by product interest driven by new features in the product but also driven in new strategies that we bring to the table around partnerships so one of the ways that we've driven really strong partnership success is actually working with the e-commerce platforms to build an inbound network when folks for example try creating a wix account realize they don't have enough images to successfully use a template where do they go how do you get them sort of connected to suna so that's a perfect example of working really hard to think about the places where our business becomes essential to success with a partner and any business can replicate this right this isn't necessarily a soon a specific playbook strategy you can definitely steal this from us picasso said great artists steal and i'm a really big believer in that like It's not so much that you need to reinvent the wheel all the time, like find things that other companies have done really successfully and then steal that from them and do it yourself. You know, for us, it's really about working with all the different e-commerce platforms really closely to do things like, for example, we do events every single quarter at Shopify's makerspaces. Free events where we let people come in, we let them try the product, meet a Suna photographer, understand about our business. That's an amazing inbound lead gen tool for us. We work with platforms. like Squarespace to co-launch products that are designed specifically for their platform. So we have a Squarespace photo shoot pack that is designed specifically for Squarespace sellers. And so it's really about thinking through how can you be a really great partner to this other platform? Because in all likelihood, you're going to have mutual success if that really works, right? So that's one way that we really grow the base. another way that we've found some success is actually really thinking through how can we offer something that no one else can offer so right now for example we just had a really successful amazon webinar that we like webinars are so old school but it's really funny because one of the things i say is webinars are so bad at this point that if you can rethink the webinar in any way like quite literally just do it even somewhat differently you're going to be in a great position and so we try to reinvent what webinars right think through how do we do them in ways that feel like really exciting really fresh really different we just did one for amazon a plus sellers which is you know very large amazon sellers to help them predict new trends that are coming out of out of their upcoming shopping experiences and consumer experiences and then people kind of you know talk about wow that webinar is really different they tell someone else about our next webinar right and so it's just really thinking through how can you add value in a way that's really non-traditional or unconventional and then the last thing i'll say is you know internally we have a motto which is even though we're a b2b business we truly believe most b2b marketing is boring to boring and everybody is just trying to play it safe and be as as non-controversial as they can humanly be we try to embrace controversy We try to embrace being different, being colorful, having fun, not necessarily doing things that everybody expects us to do. And I think that has just paid off really big dividends in terms of just embracing internally sort of a lot of permission for people to try things, even if it's going to fail, because you got to try a lot of stuff and you got to fail a lot in order to find that kind of handful of things that are going to in fact work. Yeah, no, that's. what a breakdown now that makes complete sense when you think about in the earlier days to versus like today like you you guys are a much bigger name you have you know partners behind you you've done you have plenty of data you have the customers to back it up like you have you have more of that right when you think about the earlier days You're going after the Wix's and the Squarespace's and the Amazon's and the Shopify's. And they're like, who the hell are you? Like, we don't know anything about you. Like, how do you like how how did how did you even get the initial partners to begin with? Well, that's part of being a great founder, in my opinion. Really great founders don't ask once. They don't ask twice. They don't ask three times. They keep asking until they get a yes. and you know you ask different people and you ask from different angles and you ask at different times and you ask in different ways and eventually you get the meeting and you get you you keep working till you get a yes and i think yeah listen nobody at shopify gave a hoot about who we were at the beginning and certainly that's something that I saw as my job was to keep finding different angles until I could get to yes. And I remember very distinctly after many unanswered tweets, after many unanswered LinkedIn messages, after many unanswered invitations to various things, I finally was able to get in touch with someone at Shopify, you know, from I think an Instagram DM, you know, like just continually trying different things until you get a yes. And then, and then you know not my grandfather was a was a wonderful human being for a bunch of reasons but one of my most important ones is you know he was he was so formative for me in terms of one of my most important business philosophies which is you don't get anything you don't ask for and so i was very very clear in all of my conversations you know you finally get that pitch meeting you don't go in and sort of wiffle waffle about what might we be able to do together or how can we partner if you make it hard for a bigger partner to figure out what the opportunity is they're going to take the easy out right you can't make it hard for them don't make them think so for me what i did is i would go into these meetings and i would say i happen to know that it is you know about one in five shopify stores that don't convert to a paid program because they don't have great quality photos and they get let down by the image change from a template to their own store and i i know this from just anecdotal data from these various you know facebook groups that i'm in And so I want to propose something that could be a solution to that business problem for you. And here's how we're going to solve it. And here's how we can do it together. Now, no big partner is going to go all in on day one. You know, they're going to walk before they run, but you make it easy for them to say yes. And then once they say yes, you make it easy to take the next step and you make it easy. Right. And so just continually make it as easy as you can. and then you know i always i even say this when i'm like hiring i i use this principle of my grandfathers in every conversation i have a really important hire that i need to recruit to the company at the end of that meeting i'll say you know i want to make sure you've heard me loud and clear i would like you to work with us i would like you to come work for this organization and i'm really hoping that you will say yes i end every pitch meeting that way i end every fundraising meeting that way right like you you have to show people that vulnerable underbelly and oddly a lot of people are still going to say no but i think you actually do increase the likelihood that they will say yes yep now it's Go after what you want. I think there's something really, really, really important there. I mean, one is obviously the never give up, keep going. But I think one of the big things, and this is whether it's direct sales, whether it's partnerships, whatever it is, is you come to the table with the idea. And so it's, hey, this is how we can partner. This is my idea. It's not, hey, I want to see what your thoughts are after I pitch you on my product and what you came up with. That's putting all the work on them. What you're just saying is you do all the work and to say, hey, I did my research. I know that one in five don't convert. This is how I think we're gonna solve that is this problem a top-of-mind problem to you saying hey You are not making money because of this four out of five You don't make money and all of a sudden it starts to see that all right. She's not messing around She understands what we're doing. She's researched our company She's not just like hey, we have a cool product like we should do this and we have no idea how to do it Because so many partnerships as you are very well aware of They will say, cool, let's sign on the dotted line. But if there's no, if both sides don't really care and both sides aren't going to actively engage, it's just going to be a piece of paper that's been signed and nothing actually happened. That's right. And I think one of the things you have to do is figure out how to activate that inside your organization, too. I was on a recap call with my leadership team the other day, and my head of engineering is talking about how he pitched a potential partner on a solution. And he's, you know, he did the work to figure it out, too. Right. And so. It's just about having a mindset inside your organization of like, we are going to make it so easy for people to say yes. I call it the obvious yes. How can soon be the obvious yes? And that saying no just makes you feel silly, you know? And if you can get to that place, you would be surprised how much the world will move in your favor, how much people want to help your company. The last thing I'll say is never underestimate the power of just being a really positive and optimistic person. I think one of. things that has really been a game changer for asuna specifically during the pandemic was like we were one of the only vendors that was walking into every meeting with color and joy and positivity and happiness and saying hey here's all the ways that we can solve your problems and make your life easier just happiness actually believe it and positivity is it's powerful stuff that's awesome Yeah, I think now it's needed more than ever before, and it definitely makes a difference. When you think about numbers, I want to talk a little bit about the actual numbers, because I know that you're very metrics driven. You are maniacal in the numbers. how did you where like where did you start and how did you set like your initial kpis and how has it grown to where you guys are today because obviously you're much more sophisticated today you can afford better tools you have people who are dedicated to this type of thing but in the early days a lot of it's like you know like where do you even start like how do i make sure that how accurate they are that type of thing yeah data validation is a real thing knowing that the data that you're looking at is actually the data is it has been it has been an interesting learning curve I think for me, it started with being a bootstrap founder for seven years. You get really clear on what are the one or two things I have time to look at that actually give me a true sense of the health of the business. And if you can get really diligent about those one or two things and always keeping your eye on those one or two things, you kind of get into the pattern. I remember for me in my bootstrap business it was our cash flow statement right it was so it was so critical now it's changed quite dramatically where you know i'm pretty much looking at two things all the time which is net new customers and then existing repeat rate of existing so i i've got like my eye on those two things all the time with aov kind of thrown in there for good measure on depending on the time of the month and so it's really one i think about focusing on what are the core metrics that actually do drive your business and not kind of getting obsessed with vanity metrics it'd be really really easy to just sort of like get into the startup speak of okrs and be like oh what's a fancy okr that i can track that's sort of like yeah it's too much like pick something basic pick something that's easy pick something that you can very quickly check the second thing i would say is like if it's too complex to be tracked in a spreadsheet then it's probably not a good data point right like you've got to be able to do it in a way that is like easy to do and even now it's so funny because you know we do have a lot more tools we have looker we can do you know all this stuff with optimizely and all these other tools but the thing that i find is that even as even as we scale like nothing gives me a better sense on the pulse of the business than like what is our repeat rate right now what is the aov look like right now and so i i find that i like become more bullish about those simple simple data points as the company has scale and then really empowering you know there's this framework called one metric that matters it's the oh it's called omtm and i really like that framework for my department heads and saying okay the company globally me the ceo i'm looking at this set of these set of data points but you know what is like the one metric that matters for your department if your department had to give us a report card on how they added to the business or how they were a detriment to the business what's the one metric that would show me that And I think really working with my department heads to say, you know, what is that one metric that matters for you has actually been pretty clarifying exercise because you kind of go from department to department and you realize like everybody's kind of obsessing too much about the same metrics. It's like, no, I think your department has the single largest impact on this one. So let's try to focus your energy there. And I find that that's actually been a pretty good framework for folks. That's interesting. It's a, it certainly makes you disciplined. It certainly makes you look at it and say, Hey, this is, this is what we're going to focus on. Oh, and it takes away the sometimes, like sometimes when people come from like very corporate backgrounds, they feel this need to editorialize the data and, you know, provide you with a very polished PowerPoint presentation with all this crap about methodology and inputs and outputs and blood. It's like, no, no, no brass tacks. how are you doing on that one metric that matters you do not have time at a series even a series b startup to be worrying about the editorializing of your story of your data if are you are you contributing or you're not contributing why why not let's let's be honest about that so that we can either make it better or you know learn and go from here so that that's helpful No, that makes a lot of sense. And, and I, and I know you're a super, super metrics driven person. And so I'm interested as far as kind of like, when you, when you, you're getting traction in the early days, you kind of find product market fit, you see the repeat orders come in, some partnerships are starting to happen. You're, you're really leading a lot of this. And obviously you have a fantastic co-founder who takes on a bulk of this stuff too. But like, how do you kind of transition out of this? this founder led founder leading every type of department i mean obviously it took you a couple of swings to get your coo like how are you getting to the point of being able to make that obviously trust is a big thing but like what are some of those things that you went through to be able to like make the actual transition because you obviously today don't run every single department all at the same time otherwise you'd have so true you'd have multiple brains next to each other yeah you know one of the things that i did and that i still do is you know when somebody makes a recommendation to me of like someone who they think is just what i would call a 10xer inside an org you know this person worked at i remember when someone introduced me to my vp of strategy i did not have a vp of strategy role at the company i wasn't even planning on hiring that position but I got an introduction to this woman, Martine Reid, who had been in charge of commercialization at Canada Goose. And, you know, the reference came in as this person's a 10Xer. She's looking for her next thing. Do you want to meet her? And I was like, yeah, I'll meet her. And so one of my first things for founders is like. create jobs for 10xers when you meet somebody who is just exceptional who has a ton of energy who is looking to make their mark in their next role or who is ready to jump into that next stage of growth and and has the kind of motivation to step into that next stage of growth create positions for those people give them mandates and so the way that i you know structured this with martine is a very specific example as i said i'm very specifically looking to understand what our expansion strategy is going to be and how we're going to expand the business traditionally i probably would have given this to like a head of ops but i'm going to give it to you instead and see what you can do with it and of course she absolutely nailed it crushed it and then you know it became really obvious where other parts of the business could become part of her domain and purview and now it's sort of like how did we do anything before you know like that is was a game-changing hire and so i don't you know don't fall into this trap of being like Oh, I've got to hire this position because I'm a Series A company now. Think more about what are you trying to accomplish? Who am I meeting that's really interesting, really excited to take a swing? And can they apply those skills to what I'm trying to accomplish in the business next? And so that's the first. The second is, you know, definitely look inside your organization for people who have kind of that innate ability to do more than you expected. Right. So when somebody shows up with a project completed and they've done 40 percent more than you thought it was going to be, those are great, great potential people to elevate inside your organization and always kind of keep your eye open for that. You know, don't just go, wow, you really impressed me. Try to really quantify it. Like, what more did they do that I didn't expect? How can I use that in other ways in the business? And then the last thing that I think, you know. be really humble about like where you're actually adding a ton of value and where you are uniquely suited as a founder to continue to add value i knew pretty much like at a certain point that there was going to be a limit to how much of our marketing that we could do you know in the early days hayley and i designed every single piece of collateral designed the website wrote every word of copy on everything And there came a point where the website just got too big where the, there was just not enough capacity. And so as soon as you find yourself saying like, I'm the blocker here, I'm the thing that's standing in the way of progress time to get out the way, you know, and, and be really brutally honest and humble about that because, you know, as soon as the founder becomes a blocker, the business is no longer able to scale. Yep. That makes, that makes a lot of sense. Those are great tips. You are a walk and talking tip machine over here. You are just dropping them. You know, hard earned wins and losses. Yeah, living through them. I love it. When you think about kind of where you were in the Series A up to today, what would you say, can you point to like one or two just bets that you made that you just absolutely nailed? One or two bets that we made that absolutely nailed? Well, the first was our initial a lot of people don't realize this our initial price in 2019 in our beta our beta program was you had to commit to 10 images it was 390 and you had to commit to 10 images and the beta customers didn't like that because they're like 10 is arbitrary we don't know if we need 10 do we need two do we need 100 like 10 just feels like this arbitrary number we really really listened and then we really went back to the drawing board and we said okay the point of a startup is to take swings the part point of what we're doing here is to believe that creativity matters that that visuals matter and so if we really believe that visuals matter then why are we sort of arbitrarily setting this you know 10 photo aov we should be honest about the fact that we believe we're going to sell you on as many as you're excited about and want so let's just make them buy one to create a photo shoot and then let them buy as many as they want and i'll tell you today our aov is well over 700 and so i think like one thing we really nailed in the early early days was saying we are going to bet big on our core hypothesis instead of being cautious about the core hypothesis and i really recommend that to founders now because it's sort of like you're in the business of starting this company to believe in something in a really big way either believe in it a hundred percent or don't do it you know what i mean like so that was a big one i think from the early days i think another thing that you know we really did right was we've said customer feedback is everyone's job you know you don't get to sort of opt out of hearing what customers like and don't like about our product and so we're very open about what customers are liking and not liking and we have a monthly meeting called the customer look back look ahead where we share with the whole company what have customers said what do they like what are they not like what are we doing about it and i think it's just put a really critical framing on the conversation here that just says We're not just like some tech startup who thinks we're too good for ourselves, you know, like tech companies can kind of get high on their own supply. And I think, you know, being conscious of that has been pretty critical. And one mistake that I've made that I will never make again is, you know, I went through like three finance leaders. Like, you just gotta, you gotta. hire a finance person who works with you as the ceo as a partner you've got to get to a place where you're excited about the numbers where you're excited about meeting with your finance person work to get that higher right because if you don't know your numbers you don't know your business And you've got to have a good partner in that work. And I mess it up so many times. It's not even funny. Yeah. Are you are you pro kind of the fractional CFO type type finance person? No, I think fractional CFOs are like a really convenient way to say numbers are a dist have a distance from my business. You got to hire a finance person early. You've got to have them integrated in the business. You have to have them understand what's going on in the business. A good finance person is the kind of person who can unlock really important insights in your company and who can help you strategize around everything from fundraising to what rate of pay you're going to give people to, you know, how much equity do you actually need to give out? Like you fractional CFO is oddly. You need like a really diligent finance person. Find somebody who's like super hungry coming out of one of the big four finance firms who wants to learn, who wants to get practical, who wants to stop talking about the theory of a business and wants to actually do business. I found that that was like the right prototype for me and for a lot of the other companies that, you know, I've either angel invested in, or I've, I've mentored. It's been a. much more successful match than sort of this fractional position who can keep an arm's length from the company at all times. When you say hire early, what are you thinking? How do you define early? My finance person was my fourth hire. Oh, wow. Okay. So like very, very early. Very early. Yes. Okay. How is the team kind of without getting into the exact numbers, but how is the team kind of org today? Are you pretty balanced between kind of like product and marketing and engineering, or are you really heavy into one place versus another at this stage of the company? Yeah, I think if you look at our company, it's probably not all that different from a lot of other tech companies, right? Product and engineering is one of the largest orgs. Sales and marketing is probably the second largest org. But then the thing that I think always surprises people is just how big our operations work is, because actually delivering great photo shoots is a huge part of the job here at Suna. And so, you know, it's actually about product mark product engineering and marketing is half the company and then ops is the other half of the company. And it's, it's really even split between the two. That makes sense. That's awesome. It has been an absolute blast to have you on. I feel like we could probably talk for the next three hours and just keep digging and digging and digging. I want to make sure that we leave the audience with a few things. Do you have a favorite book or a favorite resource that you recommend for people who are kind of either entering or being already on this journey of kind of scaling and transitioning out of founder-led? Yeah, absolutely. One book I love that I think is just so helpful is Creativity Inc. an exceptional book for so many reasons the biggest one is that it chronicles the early days of pixar and you know talks about how they set up things like the culture of the business giving feedback you know even all the feelings that the team had leading up to the release of toy story such a powerful encapsulation of all those emotions and all those experiences so creativity inc is a go-to for me of just a really powerful story about business All right. I'm going to have to get that one. That's one I have not read. Any last wisdom, any last tips that you recommend for founders along this journey? A lot of founders are scared to dig into their numbers or scared to get to know financial documents. The thing that I always tell founders is if you do not know your numbers backwards and forwards, you do not know your business. You can talk about your product all day long, but if you don't know how you make money, why you make money and what goes into you continuing to make money, you don't actually understand the simple math of how you're going to continue to grow a great business. And so get. get real with those numbers spend time learning it and honestly the only reason numbers are scary is because you haven't gotten to know them and so you can you can do it get those numbers in your mind that's awesome great tip last question how does the audience get more of you where can they find more of you Yeah, well, if you want to learn more about Suna, you can go to Suna.co. It's just S-O-O-N-A dot C-O. If you want to learn more about me or just follow me in general, I'm a big Twitter person. So you can follow me on Twitter at Liz Georgie. And if you want to join me on TikTok as I make a fool of myself and talk about all things startup, you can follow me at CEO Lady. Love it. Liz, you are awesome. Thank you so much. I cannot see the next future steps of Suna. We're going to have to have you on again and hear the rest of the story. Well, we're going to keep on keeping on. So happy to come back as we continue to grow this business. I love it. Thank you so much. And we'll see you again. We'll see you again soon. Thanks, Alex. Bye. I'm Alex Newman. See you next time.

Liz Giorgi co-founded Soona to solve a problem every e-commerce brand knows: getting professional photos and video without the weeks-long wait and massive price tag. She built a same-day studio model, raised a Series A, and scaled it into a platform powering thousands of storefronts.

We cover how the idea came together during a painting retreat, why they spent 18 months in beta before going broad, and what early signals actually told them they had product-market fit. We also get into the go-to-market playbook: building an email list through one-minute surveys, a social media referral loop that generated free content, and why she didn't touch paid ads until after the Series A.

We also dig into the hiring and culture side: how she runs executive interviews over dinner, why customer support is a strategic function at Soona, and the case for hiring a full-time finance partner as your fourth hire instead of leaning on fractional.

Good episode if you're pre-Series A, figuring out how to grow without paying for it, or building a product-led sales motion with platform partnerships.

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