'There was no blueprint to follow': How 4 founders built businesses without industry experience
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Sarah Vachon was vacationing on the Greek island of Crete when family friends brought out olive oil from their farm to taste. It was grassy and complex—unrecognizable from supermarket varieties back in London.
Vachon learned that these olive farmers, Maria and Dimitris Amargiotakis, sold their surplus to middlemen for commodity blends at prices that didn’t reflect the quality of their product. “It didn’t feel right that something so beautiful could be lost in an anonymous supply chain,” Vachon tells Shopify. So in 2020, she and her husband, Michael, launched Citizens of Soil—with zero olive oil industry experience.
While many founders start in familiar industries, research from venture capital firm NGP Capital suggests outsiders possess key advantages—like spotting market gaps and building unencumbered by industry norms—stating, “44% of founders of disruptive startups attributed their inspiration to insight as frustrated customers.”
Vachon’s newcomer perspective proved invaluable. “Coming in fresh gave me a big advantage,” she says. “I wasn’t weighed down by ‘how it’s always been done.’
Five years later, Citizens of Soil sources from a dozen Mediterranean producers, with products available at hundreds of retailers, and a subscription club with thousands of members. In the spring of 2025, the company secured more than $2.4 million in seed funding for international expansion.
Here, Vachon and other founders who started businesses with minimal industry experience share their hard-won takeaways.
1. Disrupt “how it’s always been done”
A nontraditional angle can help founders see the landscape differently and make moves that their competitors can’t—or won’t. “That outsider’s perspective … helped us see olive oil through the lens of other ‘craft’ movements we’d been a part of in food and drink,” Vachon says. In a category she describes as “inherently opaque and dodgy,” she explains, “we instantly stood out because of this.”
Citizens of Soil makes a point of paying its producers well above commodity prices, for example, while keeping its supply chain transparent and investing in regenerative farming practices. “If I’d been too close to the traditional industry, I don’t think I’d have pushed those ideas so boldly,” Vachon says. “Being new also meant we could build the kind of brand we wanted to see in the world.”
For Lhamour founder Khulan Davaadorj, the experience of breaking into the skin care space was similar. “I wasn’t stuck with the ‘rules’ of the industry,” she explains. That freedom included deciding who she wanted to benefit from her company’s success. “From the beginning, I wanted Lhamour to have an impact that went beyond skin care,” Davaadorj says.
Instead of working with existing industrial suppliers, she prioritized “skin care rooted in people, culture, and land” by sourcing ingredients like yak’s milk, rosehip, and sea buckthorn directly from farmers and nomadic herders in her native Mongolia. “We had to balance tradition with modern standards. Honestly, there was no blueprint to follow. But that balance is what makes Lhamour special,” she says.
2. Think like a customer, not a corporation
Entrepreneurs who start their companies in a new-to-them industry often do so because they see a real problem and want to solve it—for both themselves and others. This perspective can provide a unique advantage to develop a strong product and identify the audience for it. It can also lend your company what’s called a “first-mover advantage” when developing something entirely new and being first to market with it.
Michelle Shemilt, founder and CEO of Numi, says her sweatproof women’s undershirts were inspired by a pain point from her previous career in finance: “I was never wearing my favorite [work] clothes because they were either really expensive to dry clean or they were prone to embarrassing sweat stains,” Shemilt explains on Shopify Masters. That observation eventually turned into a million-dollar business, but it all started with a crowdfunding campaign.
“I think one of the cool things with crowdfunding … is that it enables you to share your journey,” Shemilt says. “Having a personal connection can be your strength as a small business.” Explaining her own experience with the sensitive topic of sweat also helped customers connect emotionally with the brand. “I always start with, ‘Well, I had this problem,’ and then as soon as you say [that],” Shemilt says, “you kind of open the door,” allowing others to share their own experiences and pain points.
“If you are your consumer, then that helps a lot along the way,” Shemilt adds. “You can understand the mindset of your consumer from the get-go.”
Lhamour’s Davaadorj echoes the sentiment. Her business, too, “started with frustration”—persistent eczema that she developed after moving back to Mongolia from the U.S. “Having skin rashes compromised my life, and I had no idea what to do,” she says.
While dermatologists advised her to use mild, natural products, she was unable to find local offerings that fit the bill. “I created products at home suitable for my own skin, and it worked.” When she started giving her products to friends and family, she began to realize just how persistent these kinds of skin problems were—and how little people knew about choosing skin care products.
“My own problem turned into a passion,” Davaadorj adds. “Whatever was best for me was also working for my customers.”
3. Secure funding even if you don’t feel ready
It’s tempting to think that you need to have everything figured out before you start taking concrete steps—but that pursuit of perfection can keep you stuck. “If you’re waiting for everything to be perfect, you’re never going to launch,” Numi’s Shemilt says. “You don’t need to spend three years on your business plan.”
The process of raising capital can also start sooner than you think. “My advice would be to fundraise and pitch earlier than you think you’re ‘ready,’” Citizens of Soil’s Vachon says: “We bootstrapped too long and ended up selling out multiple times because we couldn’t afford to keep up with demand.” Lining up the necessary resources and support earlier, she says, “could have moved us faster.”
Dr. Brent Ridge, founder of the goat-milk skin care brand Beekman 1802, agrees that early access to capital can make your business more agile. He recalls his own bootstrapping days, packing his own boxes on his farm in upstate New York while seeing competitor brands with outside investment explode on social media. “We watched them have this kind of meteoric rise over those first three or four years of Instagram, and we just kind of sat there,” Ridge says, lacking the resources to follow suit. “Even if you don’t take the funding upfront, make sure that you have access to the funding when you need it, so that you can pull the trigger pretty quickly.”
4. Learn by asking, observing, and doing
“Being really scrappy is your superpower,” Shemilt says. She recalls getting a business education while pounding the pavement between finance job interviews in New York. “I did a very in-depth Google search, and I found names of factories,” she says. Shemilt then showed up at their doors, asking what it would take to create a sample of her product. “I got a lot of no’s,” she says—until, that is, she got a yes, finding the partner factory that would eventually execute Numi’s first production run. “The number one thing was asking a lot of questions and not being afraid to say [something like], ‘I don’t know what a prototype is. Can you explain?’”
After founding Citizens of Soil, Vachon completed her olive oil sommelier certification through Spain’s Escuela Superior del Aceite de Oliva. “But more importantly,” she says, “I traveled to groves and mills across the Mediterranean, and learned directly from producers.” Putting yourself out there and acknowledging the holes in your own knowledge can feel vulnerable—but that vulnerability is crucial. “My lack of confidence meant I could ask questions that turned out to be very important ones,” Vachon explains.
Davaadorj also pursued formal training in skin care formulation, but the “endless trial and error,” she says, was the greater teacher. Scaling production proved difficult, at first, as did finding packaging in Mongolia that met Lhamour’s sustainability standards. “Every setback felt discouraging in the moment, but each one pushed us toward innovation,” Davaadorj explains. “Every challenge taught me something I couldn’t have learned from a textbook.”
5. Make connections early and often
Reaching out to other business owners, especially in the early days, can be invaluable in finding your footing in a new-to-you industry. After all, many of them have been in your shoes—and those connections can be a source of community and nonjudgmental guidance. “One-to-ones with other entrepreneurs were a lifeline,” Vachon recalls. “I’d come with a list of questions [on topics] from packaging to logistics, and they’d share their experiences openly.”
In addition to providing much-needed encouragement, these networks can also be invaluable in actually helping you launch and scale your business. “I really built our supply chain through asking questions and getting referrals to other suppliers and slowly building my network,” Shemilt says, noting that she eventually connected with consultants experienced in sourcing and product design. “If I could turn back the hands of time, I would say I would’ve gotten involved in entrepreneurial communities earlier,” she adds.
Even many years in, new connections and partnerships can take you places you’d never expect. Ridge notes that a retail partnership was the genesis for Beekman 1802 expanding beyond goat-milk soap, its original product. When Anthropologie, already a buyer, asked the brand to develop more SKUs, “we also were able to rely on them for consumer data,” Ridge says, enabling them to expand their offering with less risk. “They know their consumer very well, and they can say: ‘Oh, our consumer would like body lotion, our consumer would like lip balm,’” he explains. “So we almost had a guaranteed [purchase order]. It was very minimal risk, and I think that’s so important.”
Beekman 1802 also met new-to-them challenges by leaning on existing partners, like a licensing company that had approached them about bringing their products into hotels. When Beekman 1802 was given the opportunity to feature their products on a small TV shopping network, the team wasn’t sure how to sufficiently scale up their production. The licensing company, Ridge explains, “already had relationships with all the co-manufacturers of skin care and beauty products in the U.S., so we worked with them to launch and scale up to satisfy the TV retail demand.”
6. Your mission is your motivator
When things get hard, tapping into the reason you started can help you push through. Beekman 1802 was born out of its particular circumstances, Ridge explains: He and his husband and cofounder, writer Josh Kilmer-Purcell, had both been laid off in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, not long after moving to their historic New York farmstead.
“A lot of people start a business with the exit already in mind, and I think that that creates a perverse set of incentives,” Ridge says. But one “silver lining” to being a newcomer, he says, was thinking more about the journey and less about the destination. Beekman 1802 began as a way to pay the farm mortgage and connect with neighbors—the term Ridge still uses for his customers. These humble origins helped lay the foundation for a strong business, and “growing neighbor by neighbor by neighbor, and [fighting] for each of those neighbors,” remains core to the company philosophy.
Davaadorj agrees that staying grounded in the reason you got into the business is crucial for combating the impostor syndrome that’s natural for so many newcomers. “I often felt like I was in way over my head and a complete outsider,” she says, recalling “moments of deep doubt” about the project. “What kept me going was the ‘why.’” For her, and many other first-time entrepreneurs, the “why” was as much about others as it was about herself. “Every time a customer told me their skin had healed, or when I saw my young team members growing and thriving, it reminded me that this was bigger than me,” she adds.
Especially for people starting out in an industry that’s new to them, “building a business from scratch is messy and takes boatloads of resilience in the face of constant obstacles and shut doors,” Vachon adds. “The founder world can be intimidating, and you always feel like people are doing better than you.” But, “if you have conviction and stay connected to your ‘why,’ it’s one of the most rewarding things you can do.”
This story was produced by Shopify and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
