Family Dinner Recap: Kevin Tao

Kevin Tao swore to Residents at Family Dinner on Tuesday that he’s the “worst business person you’ll ever meet.”

Yet, by utilizing free website tools, a witty ad strategy, and zero venture capital, Tao co-founded NeuEve, which now helps tens of thousands of women with menopause-related health concerns.

“There’s products that you want to be associated with, products that you want to build – the cool, sexy products,” Tao told Residents. “But then there’s vast quantities of people out there that you’ve never met, or you’ve met them but they’re not going to tell you what their real problems are, because it’s just really embarrassing or hard to talk about.”

Now, NeuEve’s website is overflowing with 5-star positive reviews on their myriad of products, ranging from menopausal multivitamins to salves for dryness or painful intercourse.

“We saw that pain,” Tao said. “Our first product was terrible. The packaging was terrible. Everything about it sucked, but because we were the only ones actually helping all these people, we got so many bites at the apple."

For Tao and his co-founder, his mother and gynecologist Dr. Renjie Chang, soliciting feedback on early iterations of their products did not come easily.

Selling NeuEve seemed to be not just about creating the product, but about getting people to acknowledge the problem in the first place without shame.

“My family’s community is a bunch of Asian women and Asian men who are older. We tried giving it to them. They were so embarrassed about it that they would just take our products for free and then never say anything, never give us feedback, never try to buy it,” Tao said. “It’s like a black hole of information. How do you succeed?”

However, other customers eventually began speaking up, including one woman who offered the NeuEve team double what their asking price was for their product.

“She says, ‘Let me give you 50 bucks, because I need you guys to succeed. Your product is really helping me, and if your product is gone, then my marriage is gone,’” Tao said.

Where money is concerned, Tao had two key pieces of advice for Residents. Firstly, he and his family built up NeuEve without raising outside funding, and he advises founders to bootstrap whenever possible.

“I want to inspire you guys to know that you don’t need to raise money. You don’t need to do the whole VC song and dance,” Tao said. “I don’t think it costs that much money to do a lot of things, if you are smart about things and puzzle a lot.”

Specific tools Tao shared with Residents include the website ImportYeti.com to find any company’s suppliers and Ahrefs.com to look through Google Search engine demand.

In the realm of business, Tao emphasized the importance of choosing a trustworthy co-founder, sharing a cautionary tale of a friend of his whose business was stolen overnight by a partner.

“This is advice that I’ve learned the very hard way, which is when money is very far away, everyone’s nice, everyone’s kind, everyone’s an angel,” Tao said. “But when money gets close, people start behaving very weirdly.”

After recognizing the widespread need for solutions to overlooked health issues, Tao offered Residents some advice of his own for finding product-market fit.

He told them to go where there is high demand and low supply, but more specifically, to dig deep into the sadness of others who don’t often get mainstream attention.

“Go to a bar, find the person who’s in the most pain there, and say ‘Let me buy you a beer. Tell me about your life,’” Tao said. “They’re going to have really sad stories for you, right? But their sadness is demand for a solution.”