Transcript
Guy Raz (0:00)
Wondery subscribers can listen to How I Built this early and ad free right now. Join Wondery in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. There are people making the same amount as you down to the dollar who aren't stressed about money and you find yourself wondering how do they do it? Where does all of my money go with Ynab? Wherever you tell it to. Ynab spelled Y N A B is a life changing money app that helps you give every dol a job so that you know your hard earned money is going towards things you actually care about. Listeners to How I Built this can claim an exclusive 3 month free trial with no credit card required at www.ynab.com bilt Life is short. Spend it well with Ynab. Audible's best of 2024 picks are here. Discover the year's top audiobooks, podcasts and original all your favorite genres, from memoirs and sci fi to mysteries and thrillers, from romance and well being to fiction. Audible's carefully curated list in every category is the best way to hear 2024's best of the year in audio entertainment. Like an almost unbelievably star studded production of George Orwell's 1984, which both honors and invigorates the terrifying classic, it's one of the best original dramatizations we've ever heard. Or check out romance that hits the SP like Emily Henry's Funny Story. You can also find heartfelt memoirs like Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's Lovely One and listen to the year's best fiction like the Women by Kristin Hannah and Percival Everett's brilliantly subversive James. Right now I'm listening to Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. Audible. There's more to imagine when you listen. Go to audible.com built and discover all the year's best waiting for you. If you've been listening to me for a while, you know that I am really interested in fitness and eating the right foods. And for the past year, the single biggest game changer for me has been a bio wearable called Lingo. Basically, it's a little device that you stick onto the back of your arm to measure your body's glucose levels, to see how your body responds to food and learn what you can do to improve your metabolism. Trilingo it starts at $49 for a two week plan. No prescription needed for a limited time. Save 10% on your first order by visiting hello lingo.com and using the code HIBT at checkout. The lingo glucose system is for users 18 years and older, not on insulin. It is not intended for diagnosis of diseases, including diabetes. For more information, please visit helolingo.com us.
Ju Ru (3:08)
So, yeah, I went down the rabbit hole of launching this. This was probably 2013, 2014. And then in the end, it's a lot of money. It's a lot of work. Do I know that it's going to work out? I don't know. So, yeah, I chickened out, got cold feet.
Guy Raz (3:37)
Welcome to How I Built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Ju Ru was inspired to create the acne treatment Mighty Patches and grew them into a $630 million business in just four, five years. There's a concept in psychology called functional fixedness. Basically, it describes a fixed or limited way of thinking about how to use something. So, for example, if I gave you a shoe, you might try to put it on, but you might not think about using the shoe to hammer a nail into a board. The most famous example of this concept was an experiment where researchers gave people a candle, a matchbox, and thumbtacks, and the participants were then asked to attach the candle to the wall. Now, understandably, many people tried to push the thumbtacks directly into the candle wax to attach it that way, but they soon discovered that wouldn't work. But they tried it anyway because that's what they were asked to do anyway. The point of the study was to see if people would think differently, you know, outside the box. So, for example, maybe they would melt the candles onto the cardboard matchboxes first and then attach the matchboxes to the wall with thumbtacks. The idea here was to figure out if people can overcome functional fixedness with training. And by and large, the answer is yes, because this is a path to creative thinking. So what does this have to do with today's story? Well, actually, a lot, because the product we're talking about, Mighty Patches, by a brand called Hero Cosmetics, were designed for a different purpose. It just took another way of looking at them to figure out that there was a whole other opportunity. Now, if you don't know what I'm talking about. Mighty patches are small, round bandages that cover up zits. You can find them on the faces of thousands of adolescents on TikTok. And how do they work? Well, they basically trap, seal, and absorb moisture from the pimple to help heal up the acne spot faster. And the thing about them, the technology has been around for decades. In fact, you could have gone to the drugstore in the 1980s and picked up a box of something called hydrocolloid bandages. These are bandages used to heal regular wounds. And it turns out that there was a secret tribe of people who for many years, would buy those bandages and cut them up into squares and use them to get rid of zits. But it would take a very observant entrepreneur named Ju Ru to realize that there was a business opportunity here. See, these hydrocolloid patches had been popular in Korea as acne fighters for years. And because Ju is Korean American and spent a lot of time going back and forth as a kid, she had a hunch that these patches could be popular in the US as well. And so after years of working in marketing and dreaming of starting a business, Ju linked up with two brothers, Dwight and Andy Lee, to try and launch Hero Cosmetics. This was in 2017, and they did it with just $50,000 all in. And just five years later, Ju, Dwight, and Andy sold the business for $630 million. It's an incredible, incredible story, and we'll hear from Dwight a little bit later. But first, to Ju. She was born in Korea in the late 70s, and her family moved to Seattle when she was just three years old. Her dad worked as a broker in the logging industry, sending American wood back to Asia for construction projects.