In this episode of the My First Million podcast, Sam Parr and a guest explore the business potential of a Curly Girl hair care kit aimed at women with naturally curly hair, particularly Black, mixed‑race, and Indian consumers. The conversation outlines the challenges of caring for curly hair, the sizable multi‑billion‑dollar U.S. market, and the growing natural‑hair movement. They discuss validation tactics such as analyzing the r/curlyhair subreddit (≈37 k members) and leveraging community‑generated content. The guests propose a content‑first model: publish educational PDFs or guides, build a community, then sell a curated hair‑care kit. They reference successful analogues—Kayla Itsines’ Bikini Body Guide turned fitness app, Rihanna’s Fenty hair line, DevaCurl’s acquisition, and Tristan Walker’s Walker Brands—to illustrate how niche content can scale into profitable product businesses. Marketing ideas like before‑after photos, ethnicity‑specific positioning, and leveraging Instagram influence are also covered.
Chapters
Okay, let's start with an idea. Um, curly girl hair. So you guys in Trends did a, uh, post about nat— the natural hair movement.
Yeah, that's a big, big thing. And, um, um, mixed race, mixed race and Black women.
And so talk a little bit about what was in the report, and then I'll tell you, uh, sort of what I've seen separate from that.
It sounds like you're more interested in that. You tell me what—
all right, so, so I'll start with, uh, so my sister-in-law got— has super curly hair.
And, uh, and if you've never seen Sean, he's Indian.
I'm Indian and she's Indian, and she's got super curly hair. And, um, curly hair takes a lot of maintenance, right? Like, gets humid, boom, it's frizzy. And you have like— there's this episode of Friends where Monica's hair is like an afro. Uh, that, that happens. Or it's flat, or you want to straighten it, or whatever. It's a lot of maintenance of curly hair. And so, um, she was telling me, she was like, yeah, I downloaded this, like, I joined this thing, I bought this PDF that's called the Curly Girl, um, Guide or something like that. And, um, it's this method to like taming your hair and getting— because I told her, I was like, your hair looks great nowadays, like, what have you been doing? And I just thought she would say like, oh, I use this other product. She's like, no, there's like a 12-step process I'm doing every night. Anybody with curly hair, black women, anywhere else.
So my wife, if you're Well, I guess they wouldn't be able to see this. My wife's Black. She's half white, half Black.
She's also not here, even if they're watching.
Yeah. She's half white and half Black, and she buys a lot of this stuff as well.
Right. And so like, there's a whole thing of like, you know, when you go to sleep, you need to wrap your hair in a certain way to sort of like, whatever, the oils, blah, blah, blah. And so then, uh, and like some basics that you just don't do. So like, she, you know, she had curly hair her whole life, but didn't know, oh, I'm not supposed to use shampoo in the same way that most people use shampoo. And so she was telling me about some of these differences. Anyways, opportunity. I was like, I like these businesses where you could put out content and information that just helps people and then sort of on the back end sell the kit. That's like, oh, by the way, like if you just want to push a button and get the solution, I have the kit that has all the shit you need because she spent hours researching all the different products that like, what is the best version of this oil I'm supposed to have? What is the best version of the shampoo for me? And so anyways, I think there's an opportunity to do this Curly Girl Hair Kit because there's this huge number of women that have curly hair. The spend is in the multi-billions per year in the US for how this gets treated. And there is this natural hair movement where it's less about doing these really damaging things like permanently straightening your hair or, you know, weaves and whatnot. Like now there's a sort of a natural hair movement. And so people need content like education plus the tools, this sort of the hair care kit to take care of the hair.
Okay, I love that. Henry, can you do me a favor? On a new tab, type in Reddit curly hair. So there's a whole subreddit. One of the ways I like to look at validation and ideas for different companies is I like to look at the engagement and size of a particular subreddit. How many subscribers does this subreddit have? I can't read that from here.
Use that, use that mic you got, Henry. What are you doing? 37,000.
That's pretty good, I think, actually, for curly hair, and particularly because Reddit is mostly men. Right. And this is a woman's-focused curly hair subreddit with—
Exactly, so great way to sort of validate the demand and the community aspect to this, where people are sharing information, recommending products to each other. The other side of this is, it photographs great, so before and after, I believe, is the best ad that you can do. Before, which is a photo, after, which is a better photo. And, um, you don't even need to show your product. You just need to show whatever I took gave me this outcome. I was here, now I'm there.
So my wife loves this subreddit. Okay, so here's further validation. Um, okay, so particularly, so I think that the, the, the angle here is do you have to go ethnicity or race specific?
Yeah.
Uh, so whether it's Indian, I have no idea if Asian women suffer from this, but if they do, go do that. I know from firsthand experience that mixed race women, or whether they're white and black or any other combination, suffer from this as well. And further validation is Fenty. Rihanna has that brand that sold to the Louis Vuitton company, or what's it called?
LVMH.
LVMH. And you could read about the deal. I think it was valued at $800 million. And her— a lot of her thing is towards, yeah, of course, mixed races. And then another idea here, and everyone knows about this woman, but Kayla Itsiniu.
It seems—
it's—
it seems—
what's her thing called? Sweat or something?
Yeah, Sweat's her app.
This is where I sound like your wife does it, my wife does it. Yeah, I sound like an idiot because I'm a guy and I don't pay attention.
Yeah, this whole segment is like bros trying to talk about, you know, products they don't understand, but I'm fascinated, I'm interested, I'm trying, and everyone loves a tryer.
So Kayla's thing, I heard that's a $100 million a year company.
It is. The the fitness app itself, which is like crazy.
And it was just built off her Instagram following. So that's crazy. I'm into that.
So she started with, she started with the same thing. Beach, uh, the Bikini Body Guide, I think was her content that she just put out.
It was just a PDF.
And it was PDF. And then the PDF got circulated everywhere. And basically she allowed the like paid PDF to get bootlegged and just shared everywhere. And what that did was it just gave her tons of awareness, tons of marketing. And, um, and then she launched the app, which you couldn't bootleg and you had to pay for. And then boom.
And the most interesting part about her thing was she, so she's like mainstream popular and typically when things are mainstream popular, maybe sometimes like people who think they're cool can think it's kind of lame. And Sarah's an Ivy League educated New Yorker and she was like, oh, I love this PDF.
Right.
And so she has access to all types of interesting things and she still uses it. And I, and I thought that was amazing that people really respected and liked it.
Yeah. She comes across very well. If you've ever seen her content, she's not like, um, She's not hateable. Like, she doesn't come across as hateable.
I thought that's cool. Um, what— oh, and last thing, DevaCurl. Have you heard of DevaCurl? I have not, no. Uh, another mixed race shampoo. Maybe it's for Black women, but— or maybe it's— I don't know what the— I forget if it's Black women or mixed race women. Uh, that's what we use for shampoo, and, uh, it was acquired for a quarter of a billion.
Nice. And there's some things on the opposite side, like Tristan Walker, who was I think either the co-founder or first employee of Foursquare, left to start his own, uh, African, African-American men's skincare, uh, product company, Walker Brands, Walker Brands, where it was like, you know, shaving stuff because, you know, the hair is different. It's coarse. It's gonna, the traditional shaving gear was causing problems and, uh, didn't work out, went under. And that kind of brings me to, I don't know why it went under exactly. I don't know if it was the fundamentals.
I think why they just raised too much money and Fucked everything up.
