Moiz Ali, CEO of Native, credits the deodorant brand's early multimillion-dollar success to obsessive customer listening, including a viral YouTube video that drove sales spikes. He hired employees who were fanatics about the product and paid attention to social media comments about sustainability concerns, turning them into a competitive advantage.
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If you were in my shoes, what's a question that I should have asked you that I have not asked you?
Great question.
I think that's it.
Right there is the question that you should ask me that you have not asked me. What is that question? I think it would be, you know, like, I think they're like, what were the keys to Native's early success?
Like, how did we build a business early on that made it really successful?
And I think the answer to that is a few things. One is we really listen to our consumers. Like, for instance, there was one of our earliest customers like, hey, I want to do a YouTube video about Native deodorant.
Is that okay with you? And I was like, you don't even need to ask us. Why would you tell us about this?
Yeah.
And she did it and got us like 40 sales when we were probably doing like 5 a day.
And I was like, what is going on on YouTube that we should be like paying attention to?
Because this one woman posted a video and and got us a ton of sales. And I think like paying attention to where traffic is coming from and what customers are talking about. Like I saw this insane evolution on Facebook from what we were talking about on Facebook ads a long time ago, which was efficacy and product and it like sustainability. We never got one question about how much plastic does Native waste a year until like 2017. And by 2019, it was the most, like the most comment.
the, like, the theme of the most comment or like the most commented Facebook was how much like, is this a sustainable brand?
What are you doing towards sustainability? Right.
When are you, when are you guys gonna get rid of plastic? And what's crazy is I like when I was doing Facebook ads, I'd be monitoring all of the comments.
And at one point I was like, I need somebody else to monitor the comments 'cause there's just hundreds a day. And I asked this person on our team to do it and she's like, this is such low-level work. Can I do something better?
And I was like, look, first, I'm the CEO of the company and I'm doing it, so it's not that low level.
And second, The amount of things that you will learn from these comments can drastically change the trajectory of our business and the direction of our business if you pay close enough attention and have good judgment.
And so I think we did that really well early on.
And then the other thing that we did well really early on was like hire fanatical employees. Like the employees that we hired were like lived and died by the brand, constantly talking about it, loved wearing Native clothing. Love talking about the fact that they work there. Like when people were asking me when I'd go to a dinner party, what do you do? And I'm like, God, I'm gonna have to talk about deodorant all night now.
They would love to talk, they would love to do that, you know? And like when I was like, hey, I wanna do this thing that like sort of skirts a corner and makes my life a little bit easier. They're like, how could you do that?
The brand doesn't stand for this. And they'd yell at me and I'm like, okay, you're right. We, the brand doesn't stand for this and we have to do the right thing here. And that type of like, you know, temperature check was really fantastic. and made me or made the brand much stronger. And so I think hiring or like hiring employees that really love the brand and evangelize the brand is so incredibly important early on.
How did you find those people?
There was no magic to it. Like they— I think it was like in part that was their nature.
Like, you know, we advertised on LinkedIn, like actually probably Craigslist and like AngelList early on.
But like they understood that they would be like The person who ran customer or who runs customer service at Native, she started out as a customer service agent and she's just like, there's a huge vacuum. No one is like, Moiz, you're doing half the customer service. There's no rules to customer service. There's no templates or like framework. I'm going to create all of this. And she just kept taking like usurping power week after week until everyone was like, obviously she's the head of customer service. Like she's— there was a vacuum there and she's taken up the space of that vacuum.
Like, we found people like that who just did it and like didn't ask questions and didn't wait for authority and seized it. And that was really phenomenal.
I don't need love today. I don't need love today. I don't need love today. I don't need love today. I don't need love today.
