1. Intro
You know that lip balm has been a staple of our lives. You have probably used it, and you may even still have some in your pocket. But do you know what farmacy lip balm is good for?
Well, it’s the closest thing to a miracle product we’ve come across in years. It’s made with all natural ingredients, has no artificial colours or preservatives, it’s cruelty free and free from gluten.
So what are its benefits? Well, look at these:
It is also great for lips – which are prone to chapping and cracking as well as chapped lips caused by the weather. The formula is nourishing and moisturizing; it keeps them hydrated so they feel soft and supple. And the lip balm heals chapped lips that aren’t getting enough moisture from your skin.
It can be used on its own or mixed with lotions or oils to give your hands a touch of hydration (it helps when you think they are going dry). It can also be rubbed into dry patches on the body to help heal wounds or prevent them from becoming infected (this is especially important if you have wounds in sensitive places like your neck).
We use this product every day at work – both of us use it on our hands when we get sweaty, so it keeps them protected and protected against bacteria. And it works beautifully on cuts and scrapes too!
So whether you are buying this product because you want the benefits of using one of our products OR because you want one of us using one of our products, we hope you find this information useful!
2. Company History
As I have said in the past, it is important to understand the history of your company. This is not an exercise in “wisdom”, but rather an attempt to provide context and help you understand where you are coming from and what actions you can take. If you are a young startup with less than 5 years of history, this may seem like a lot of work, but setting out to learn about your company’s history will help you make sense of where your company is going.
Even if you still have plenty to learn (and I hope that doesn’t happen), it will be useful for two reasons: 1) because understanding how your company got here makes it easier for the entire team to reflect on their experiences and 2) because understanding how your company got here will better inform the way in which you structure your organization and decisions about who should be in charge or what decisions should be made on behalf of whom.
So let’s start with some basic information about where we came from:
I started Farmacy as a seed investment fund for early stage startups back in 2010. We were there for less than 3 months before we sold our seed portfolio over to another fund (a smart decision!) but we did find time during that short period of time to develop a list of investments we wanted to do more research on. One such investment was called “Glide Technology” which was based on one of Farmacy’s own internal holdings (we had invested heavily in biotech at one point). We had heard good things about Glide Technology and went ahead and bought into it when they came up with their first product (which was an FDA approved digital thermometer). I remember being very excited by the idea that there could be something new coming along out there as well as not having any idea what that something might be. With most startups, however, the product isn’t developed until later — meaning that most products are based around patents or other intellectual property that takes years to develop even if all goes well and the patent is valid — so rather than developing Glide Technology ourselves, we pitched it to another VC fund instead.
This investment went pretty well for us (the VC fund invested $1M rather than $2M as our original deal suggested), so we decided to spend a couple weeks talking with Glide Technology founder Jonathan Chua about his vision for his company and its potential role in medicine — which was encouraging! Unfortunately
3. Social Media Marketing
It’s an interesting paradox. On the one hand, social media is a great way to discover new products and experience new ways of marketing them. On the other hand, it’s also an on-going challenge: we are faced with so many products and companies around us that we have to constantly filter what we see to make sure we don’t get sucked into the noise and head down the path that leads to mass market saturation.
That of course isn’t to say that social media is useless in itself — far from it — but it must be used with some care. For example, if you want a product to really stand out from the crowd (in terms of image or brand), you need to be careful about how much information you provide on your site or Twitter feed.
The best way to use social media is not a recipe for disaster: it’s a way of having fun while learning as well as being creative with what you do know. The goal is not just growing your audience, but growing your business in all dimensions; and nothing seems more important than that. As such, I would say that there is no right or wrong way to use social media: it just depends on your goals and vision for your business.
4. Organizational Structure
This may seem like a strange topic, but I have a feeling that at least some of you will have heard of it — the farmacy lip balm. If not, it probably isn’t something you use because it looks weird and you think it is “too fancy” for your taste. What is it? Like most of us, I grew up with a lip balm my mother would give me when I went to bed. In fact, I still keep one in my wallet and open it on a daily basis. She used to always carry one in her pocket as well — which is where the idea for farmacy lip balm came from:
“Farmacy® Lip Balm™ – The First & Only Lip Balm That Has The Power To Heal, Protect & Revitalize Your Skin”
I have been using the product ever since I was a child (note: As an adult, I tried the product but found its texture too sticky). It has gone through many incarnations throughout the years (the original flavor was watermelon mint; now there are peach and raspberry flavors), but its marketing has never changed:
Farmacy® Lip Balm – The First & Only Lip Balm That Has The Power To Heal, Protect & Revitalize Your Skin
While that might sound like something straight out of an infomercial (the world would be a better place if everyone thought like us), this is actually true:
Lip Balms are still one of the most popular products sold worldwide* — 7 billion are sold each year –– and closely tied to our love for lip balms.
Yet despite the fact that we still love them so much, they are underused by everyone from babies to adults: Adults use less than half as much as children do. And studies show that lip balms can actually help prevent oral diseases such as diabetes and oral cancer** — so why aren’t we using them more? Two words: farms…
To understand why we don’t use them more (and why they should become more popular), let’s take a look at their history: Like lip balms everywhere else in society (and we probably spend more money on our hair products than any other category), farmers began making their own handmade lip balms centuries ago! Unlike today though, these were used primarily by women on their lips rather than men or children; there was little need for any marketing or branding
5. References
The issues surrounding references are often quite complex. They may be other people’s references, or they may be your own references. Either way, you need to make sure that the information is reliable and verifiable. You should also make sure that the references you get about your product are coming from people who actually know what they’re talking about. No one likes to pay for a product that doesn’t live up to its claims, but we can’t just stop there and claim ignorance of everything all the time.
A good idea is to use Google Scholar to find all the top 50 scholarly articles on your topic, then use these as your reference sources when making decisions around product features, design and so on. It’s worth noting that Google Scholar is not a full reference system; things like bibliographies (a kind of list of names of people who have published in a particular field) are missing from it (and will require some additional work).