AMA: Isabella Lee, founder of Let's Fearlessly Grow

Isabella Lee shares how Let’s Fearlessly Grow was founded to help companies reach customers and scale with impact.

Drawing on her experience building purpose-driven startups, she discusses the challenges of startup growth, and the importance of a strong team, and throws in a few fundraising tips too.

Hi Isabella! Could you share the story behind your company, including the problem you set out to solve and the inspiration that led to its creation?

Let’s Fearlessly Grow was born from wanting to have a positive impact on the world, and helping companies reach their customers.

Having founded and built venture-backed, mission-focussed startups that really made a big impact (my previous startup helped people understand their mental health problems and guide them to solutions).

I know that growth has a huge impact not only for startups but also the users who find them.

Understanding how to get new users and customers is tough as a startup; it's constant trial and error, it's unpredictable, and the data is confusing.

Whilst building my previous company, I got the chance to spend a lot of time picking the brains of the Head of Venture at Meta, who then moved to Google.

This was revolutionary for my understanding of how these industry giants approach growth for the startups they were funding internally.

It showed me how to get brand-new, impact-oriented users in a scalable and predictable way, within budget, that helped them to hit the metrics they needed to.

Understanding this larger industry problem, that startups find it hard to discover and acquire new customers in a predictable way that hits metrics within budget, I made it my mission to ensure that companies making the world a better place will be the ones to thrive.

I want them to win customers and fearlessly grow, for the users they serve and their investors.

What were the initial challenges you faced when launching your business, and how did you overcome them?

The initial challenge was finding the right team. What we do requires a high level of expertise in paid media, conversion rate optimisation, and the digital growth ecosystem.

It took us a lot of time to find and hire an ‘A-team’ to work together as a high-performing unit and ‘plugin’ to purpose-driven startups and scaleups looking for the next level of growth, without the headache or cost of hiring five experts in-house.

We overcame this with trial and error and built a much better idea of what a high-performing team member looks like.

Could you tell me a bit more about your team, and how you've grown the business?

Sure, our team is myself, our head of paid media, our head of conversion rate optimisation, our conversion rate optimisation specialist, our developer, and our growth lead.

We have grown the business primarily through referrals to start with, and now we use scalable, predictable methods such as those we use for our clients. Some of these include the expected growth channels like Google Ads, and others are more unexpected growth “hacky” channels.

Our North Star Metric is the amount of consumers we can positively impact, as a result of scaling the value-led clients we work with.

That could be working with a venture-backed startup like Motion, helping them to get new users which in turn increases the productivity of lots of busy humans.

Or working with e-commerce scaleups like Grind Coffee to convert traditional coffee pod consumers to their sustainable products, resulting in them removing two coffee pods' worth of plastic from the ocean for each compostable product they sell.

Funding is a crucial aspect of company growth. Can you talk about your fundraising journey, the lessons you've learned, and any advice for other founders seeking investment?

Sure. I raised over $3m in my first two startups.

The lesson I learned was that although fundraising is hard, once you’ve got the money, that’s where the really hard bit starts.

I’ll use the analogy of a Formula One car. The difference between how fast a Fiat 500, and a Formula One car go is not how much fuel is in the engine, but how well every part of the car is optimised for speed and tweaked to perform at a high level.

In the same way, just because you have some cash to put in an ad platform does not mean you’ll get scalable predictable customers.

That comes as a result of optimising the full growth process to make your startup more like an F1 car, than a Fiat 500, optimising everything from the conversion rate on your landing page to high-quality traffic, and understanding the ideal customer profile deeply.

That's a great analogy. How do you manage your equity currently, and what’s the importance of managing it correctly?

Me, myself and I, plus an employee share pool. Manage it badly, and your team won’t be incentivised and you won’t be in control of the company.

You're spot on. So what does your share scheme do for your company?

It aligns our team with the goals of our business and ensures that we can attract and retain A-team players who have skin in the game.

Fantastic! Can you share a unique tradition, celebration, or inside joke that's become a part of your company's culture?

There is a direct correlation between how lively a team lunch is at Soho House and the number of founders we end up chatting to and working with by accident.

If your company were a character in a fictional universe, who or what would it be, and why?

An astronaut, because they’re driven by going to the moon, they’re extremely data-driven and calculated in their risks, and they know how to get to the next place in a predictable and scalable way.

They have a fearless energy, say, “LFG” - Let’s F**king Go - and get planning how when someone suggests flying to a new universe.

If you could magically add one skill or quality to every person in your organisation overnight, what would it be?

The ability to read the founder's mind. It would help us to understand what metrics for success are most important and what the founder is truly working towards.

Often we hear “as many new customers as possible”, but being able to understand what’s going on in their brain would save us lots of time workshopping!

Can we steal that answer? Thanks for sharing your insights with us today, Isabella. We wish you all the best!