How Jenna Ryan Built Uqora | Founder Story, Growth, and What Most People Don’t Know

Full Episode Transcript: Jenna Ryan on Building Uqora, Conscious Capitalism, and Mission-Driven Growth

Jet Bunditwong: Welcome to The Personal Side of Business podcast, where every business has a story. Today we welcome Jenna Ryan, the co-founder of Uqora, which is changing the urinary health landscape with UTI education, innovative products, and building a community to support each other. Welcome, Jenna. I’m excited to have you. So tell us more about what Uqora does.

Jenna Ryan: Thanks, Jet.

Jenna Ryan: Yeah, well, you summarized it well. Uqora is sort of end-to-end urinary tract healthcare. So that can be from the moment you feel a UTI coming on and are trying to get symptom management, all the way through to that next stage where you're trying to bolster your urinary health and not be in that position again. So the main products are urinary health supplements that help you flush bacteria out of the urinary tract and break down something called biofilm, which is often why you're getting recurrent UTIs.

Jet Bunditwong: Awesome. Now tell us about the story of how this all came about. So I know roughly around 2017, 2019, what was it?

Jenna Ryan: Yeah, we officially launched the business in 2017. And what had been happening for years before that is that I was getting way too many UTIs. If you've had a UTI, one is too many UTIs, but I was at a different position in 2014. I had eight UTIs. So I found myself having conversations with doctors where I was trying to figure out what I could do preventatively. And I was doing all of the basic stuff already. And beyond that, the answer was often prophylactic antibiotics, so using antibiotics regularly for prevention, not just treatment, which is a scary proposition because it throws your body out of whack. That’s sort of the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is you could become antibiotic resistant.

Jenna Ryan: So I found myself in that position, knew that I was frustrated by my options, but didn’t know what good company I was in. UTIs are actually the second most common infection in the U.S., second only to the common cold. So that’s an astounding fact when you think about how infrequently they’re talked about relative to how common they are. So once I had started to learn, alongside my now husband—back then we were together but we weren’t married—when we started to learn just how common my experience was, that really motivated us to try to figure out this solution, not just for myself, but for all of the people struggling with recurring UTIs and looking for solutions.

Jet Bunditwong: When you brought that up to your husband, was the business in mind for you guys to start this, or were you guys just like, let’s just try to figure out something for me, and then the business became sort of this offspring of everything you guys were doing?

Jenna Ryan: Yeah, my husband definitely gets the credit for all the product formulation and the tinkering behind the scenes on that. So he was the one that was starting to dive into research. His background’s in molecular biology. My background’s in e-commerce and a lot of UTIs. But he was the one who was starting to figure out that there really was good research coming out of universities and hospitals, but it was pretty disparate and wasn’t really being applied commercially.

Jenna Ryan: In the commercial space, it was cranberry that was dominating the scene. And that’s controversial. Some people really stand by cranberry. From my years of firsthand experience, it didn’t work. And from what we’ve learned through our experience with Uqora, deep into the research, there just aren’t enough active ingredients in most cranberry products for it to be worth your time at all. But there was promising research, and my husband Spencer started to tinker and give me different combinations that he was working with in those early days. So obviously an N of 1 isn’t enough to believe, but from there we did develop more research over time and tons and tons of qualitative experience through our customers as well that got us to where Uqora is today.

Jet Bunditwong: And how long was that beginning research time to when you finally launched Uqora?

Jenna Ryan: We started developing the products in 2015 and then sort of moonlighted, did what we would consider a beta launch with just one product, but I was still working full time at my previous job. I worked at DocuSign in the tech sector, and my husband was working on a different startup, so it was kind of just a back-burner project for almost two years. And what really got us to the point where we wanted to throw ourselves into it full time is we found that people were finding that product that we had developed, which is the drink mix—very similar to its current formulation today, which is still kind of the flagship product at Uqora—people were finding that product on their own and they were repeat-buying. And we were doing almost nothing to build brand or communicate with our customers or anything like that. Definitely no paid marketing or anything to that tune. So that was what eventually gave me the confidence that this is a product that should exist. People want it. They’re finding that they can’t be without it, even without us doing any encouragement of that.

Jet Bunditwong: So it was the demand that was just driving the business. It was just like, you have to have this over and over again for people that were dealing with the same things you were.

Jenna Ryan: Yes. Yeah. And demand, I would use that word carefully because we’re talking a small amount of customers. The customer acquisition in that first chunk all came from one lucky news article. So it was maybe a hundred customers total in that beta launch over the course of two years. Just that of that group, they kept coming back.

Jet Bunditwong: A really loyal customer. You’re the only one on the market that I think can help me. And when you guys started building the business up, what was Spencer’s thoughts to you? Was he like, yeah, I’m on board? Or was it like, let’s just see where this goes? Or I’m going to let you handle this and then see what happens? What was the conversation?

Jenna Ryan: Yeah, in the moonlight phase, we took different turns of who was sort of at the helm and who had more energy or time for it. And then by the time we decided to go full on in 2017, I started working on it full time before he did, but it didn’t take long for us to realize we both wanted to be full time on it. And we sort of divided and conquered in different ways. We were both ultimately generalists, but Spencer has great talent in product development and science and research. So he was always doing everything related to that side of the house. Otherwise he would kind of generally do operations, supply chain, finance. I was on the customer acquisition, brand marketing, HR, did all the hiring. So that was sort of how we divided the house.

Jet Bunditwong: Yeah, and how long did the growth take from it just being the two of you to thinking, okay, now we need more help, and then it started getting to like, we actually need someone to start taking care of shipping out the products? Could you walk us through some of those steps?

Jenna Ryan: Yes. So we always had a mind for scale. It was always important to us to do things that would allow someone else to plug in, like an acquirer, for instance. So for that reason, we were never shipping the product directly ourselves and always felt like, to stay lean, we needed to save our time for the things that were harder to outsource so that we could stay strategically minded.

Jenna Ryan: And that’s, I think, a tough call in the early days because every dollar matters. I think you can kind of fall into the trap of doing a lot of that side of operations because it saves money. But my feeling was always that our best asset was our strategic thinking. So saving money at the expense of your bandwidth to think through problems has a hidden cost. We had a 3PL—the person to do the shipping for us—and we had a co-manufacturer from the start. So that meant it cost more to land our product on our customer’s doorstep. But we just accepted that and figured it would be made up for by being able to grow.

Jenna Ryan: And in that first year, we were really just figuring out who our customers were, how they were talking, and we didn’t do anything exceptional in terms of growth in 2017. I think it’s helpful to actually just talk numbers. I can just share that I think we did $70,000 in 2017. And by our second year in business, we had passed a million.

Jet Bunditwong: I mean, that’s dramatic.

Jenna Ryan: Yes, yes. And a few things started working for us. And just to finish that arc, really, from there it took off. After that second year, we then 5X’d the business, then 3X’d the business, and stayed at a clip like that until we were acquired. So we were able to really lean into that growth to enable a lot of the different things that we were able to do with the business.

Jet Bunditwong: And in that growth, the financial growth, what was the customer base growth looking like as that was happening? Was there a correlation you could see in, for every $50,000 or something, we were seeing X amount of customers come in and use us? Was there something you were seeing that was happening?

Jenna Ryan: Yes, we were maniacal about our customer acquisition equation. So we knew exactly how much we had to spend to acquire a customer and what our payback would look like for them over what time horizon. So we call that the CAC to LTV ratio. And in the early days, our LTV wasn’t as high because we hadn’t figured out exactly our messaging. We hadn’t expanded our product line to be the full circuit of what people now take. And those are using very business terms for that. I think it’s also really important to say that in human terms: we just hadn’t provided the full value to our customers yet.

Jenna Ryan: And as we got better at understanding what our customers wanted and developing products that really did do the full wraparound for urinary health for people, naturally our LTV increased. And I feel like it’s really important to acknowledge that there was no silver bullet to that. That’s actually just developing a company that has compassion, has a great customer service team, and above all, has products that work. And so as we continued to dial that in, we got to a point where our customer acquisition cost could scale as media got more expensive because we knew that the value of our customer had grown in such a way that we could handle it.

Jet Bunditwong: Yeah, and I think one of the unique things about Uqora is the ecosystem. When you go on the website, it’s informational, it’s supportive, and it offers so many products that you’re like, okay, this is a place where you want to be. This is everything in there. And I think when you look at the e-commerce space in the United States, the world, whatever it is, they’re so competitive. And now you’re in what I would think is a really niche market of how can we help people who need help with UTIs. Doing my research, I just went on there and started looking, and a lot of products start to blend into different websites. But I think it’s the assistance to be like, you’re not alone and we can help you, that makes Uqora stand out. When does that all get designed? Was that just organic growth, or you guys kind of knew from the beginning, okay, we need to start building this place where people can just stay here and get help?

Jenna Ryan: That’s an awesome observation and really reflects how we talked about it internally. I think there’s a big impulse once you’ve developed a foothold in a certain area, especially as an e-commerce business that came up in the time we came up, that the next natural thing would be to expand your products horizontally. A lot of our peers that launched at the same time in women’s health—and even more specifically vaginal health—I observed them landing one indication and then continually expanding outward. That’s logical. You’ve acquired a customer and it’s expensive to acquire them, so the rationale is let me see what else they might be interested in buying and try to increase my LTV that way.

Jenna Ryan: That’s one way to grow a business. But I found that that didn’t apply well to UTIs because I was a patient before I was a founder, and through my experience I found that I’m not interested in a generalist’s opinion on this. You are often going to your general practitioner if you’re someone who’s struggling with recurrent UTIs. There’s not really a home for you. They aren’t super specialized in what you’re going through. And so it’s sort of just following the script of writing you a prescription for antibiotics. By the time you’re at a urologist, you’re usually ready for surgery of some sort and have gotten to a very extreme position with recurrent UTIs. So there’s this whole dearth of options for you in between those two experiences in the medical field.

Jenna Ryan: It felt really important that we created a home for those people who were adrift in their experience. So we stayed really focused on UTIs, not only because we felt like there was a big enough market to do it, but because as a patient we knew that’s what would feel credible, supportive, and in some cases like an emotional release for people. We had people who would talk to our customer support team who would tell us that it was the first time they’d ever had the chance to share their experience about recurring UTIs. And it can become a really emotional place for people. So we always felt great about the fact that our products are exceptional. They really are solving a problem in a new way.

Jenna Ryan: If you don’t want to try the products, or for whatever reason the products don’t work for you, it was always our goal to leave you better than we found you anyway, whether that’s through education, an empathetic conversation, our Facebook community where you could talk to people about your UTIs for the first time, or another resource we developed called the Good Doc Club, which is kind of a cheeky name for it because it’s implying some docs aren’t good. Not everyone loved that, but it is something that resonates if you’ve gone through this experience and have had enough conversations with doctors where they ask you how you’re wiping and make you feel like you’re doing something wrong, when really that’s not the situation.

Jet Bunditwong: And I noticed that when I went to the website, the education part was the thing that really allowed me to see Uqora in a different light because I haven’t dealt with a lot of medical issues myself, but I would think one of the main things that people kind of get lost in is just thinking there’s this one way to cure something or one way to deal with something, and then you’re like, well, maybe this is something I need to change, right? The balance of this or do this differently. Even as I’m getting older, like now I’m having this weird thing where I eat too much chocolate and started having acid reflux, and I was like, why is that happening? That never happened before. And now I’m starting to do research into it.

Jet Bunditwong: But I think there’ve got to be people who are super busy and can’t—you don’t have time just like, I’m just going to go see a doctor, they’re going to give me pills, and then hopefully that cures it. When really it could probably be some sort of adjustment or three things I’m doing in my life that are different than they were a year ago. When you guys were building this out, what was it that in this space that is so competitive with e-commerce—were you thinking our passion just started driving us and we can help people and the e-commerce business just happens to be a byproduct of this? Or was there a certain point where it goes, okay, now we have to start to focus on the e-commerce side of it and just try to carry this sort of medical side with it?

Jenna Ryan: We never really thought of ourselves as an e-commerce business. It just turned out to be the case that that was our channel of delivery. And I think we thought of ourselves as a brand first, as a solution to your needs. And if there was a driver between what you’re describing of e-commerce versus medical, I wouldn’t actually put those things on the continuum of attention. I’d say the driver was customers.

Jenna Ryan: So we were super focused on getting feedback from our customers. Where I think your question started was sort of like the education—was the education the tail that wagged the dog? And I think that we got so focused on that because through conversations with customers, there would be major unlocks when we were talking to them and when they were learning about how our products worked. For example, the second product we developed, second to the drink mix, was a product that used to be called Control, now it’s called Defend, and it helps break down biofilm.

Jenna Ryan: Without getting too deep into it, kind of the headline here is a bunch of people found that UTIs were coming out of nowhere for them. And that feels contrary to popular wisdom because UTIs are always talked about as a sex issue mostly. So people were finding, I don’t know when to drink this drink mix, which you’re saying I should drink after sex, because that just doesn’t seem to be when my UTIs come. They come out of the blue. And we came to realize that’s because there can be bacteria from an old infection that stays hidden in the urinary tract and then is released opportunistically. So when you’re stressed, when you’re dehydrated, when you’re traveling for work, from all these kind of vague hard-to-pinpoint things that wouldn’t necessarily cause you to drink a drink, because so often we don’t even know we’re stressed usually. It just gets you later.

Jenna Ryan: And so that realization came from a bunch of conversations with customers that were seeking advice on how to take the product, which led us deeper and deeper down the research rabbit hole to realize, aha, this is actually the perfect complement to the drink mix because it can handle both the acute cause and the ongoing risk. And that led back into this feedback loop where now we are going to tell people about this mechanism who have experienced the endpoint of it without understanding the cause. And people are so relieved to understand the cause. It’s this feeling of, man, I’m not crazy. And some people don’t care. There’s a certain kind of buyer that’s like, just tell me what to take, I don’t care. But there’s a lot of people who really, really feel seen in the experience of understanding why they can’t eat chocolate in the way they used to. You’re looking for an answer, you know?

Jet Bunditwong: And I think service, products, whatever it is, the ones that seem to really do well over time are the ones with that connection to humans and emotions. And I think this is the type of business that you have that really does that, because the way you say it, it’s not really just about the UTI for a lot of people. I think it’s about this silence of suffering over time. And you’re like, how long does this go on for—the rest of my life? And then you finally have this community and real help. I’ve just appreciated from going to the website how incredible that is.

Jet Bunditwong: So okay, let’s shift gears a little bit. Now I’m always curious about when couples work together, how does that all play out? So can you go through some of the journeys, maybe something really tough that you guys had to overcome together as a couple in terms of the business, and then something that was like, this is why we do it? Could you share maybe a good and bad moment that you guys had to overcome?

Jenna Ryan: Yeah. To be balanced, I have to preface by saying 99% felt good to me. So to share an anecdote of each side puts this weighting on it in a way that doesn’t feel representative to me because we had so much fun.

Jet Bunditwong: Or a business challenge that you guys had that was stressful and you’re like, no, we’re cool, we don’t have to yell at each other or go at anything. Is there a memory of that?

Jenna Ryan: Yeah, I would say the hard parts in being a couple in business were the times where we were both stressed. And magically, that rarely happened. Usually, if one of us was starting to fall apart, the other person just by necessity wouldn’t. They’d be like, we got this, and kind of be the anchor. So it was a rare moment where both of us were suddenly Chicken Little. But I’d say the hardest period of time was probably after the business was acquired. And interestingly, it’s because we started working less closely.

Jenna Ryan: So we ended up in a position where I was running the Uqora brand fully and Spencer had spun out to do sort of intrapreneurship within the women’s health brand under the acquiring company. And so that I feel like is actually more difficult when you aren’t overlapping as much as you used to and you’re still trying to figure out how do we relate to each other, what do you need to know, meanwhile you’re just kind of drifting. So I’d say those were periods that were hard.

Jenna Ryan: And then the good periods were just getting to share all the growth together. I think one of the biggest advantages—it was interesting in investor conversations—there’s a type of investor that is categorically like, I don’t invest in couples. This is so risky. And I understand that, but I’ve come to feel like it’s so much more risky to invest in Joe Schmo and Jill whoever who—you have no idea what their relationship foundation is, where everyone agrees that that co-founder relationship is one of the biggest risks of a business. If you’re at least in a relationship, there’s a level of compatibility that you’ve decided on. So that always kind of made me laugh.

Jenna Ryan: And I think the upside is that we talked about this business 100% of our time. If there weren’t other people around, we were talking about Uqora on every hike, on every date night, on every vacation, constantly.

Jet Bunditwong: Like your whole life.

Jenna Ryan: I think we did a good job of not talking about it around other people. But if it was just us, we were talking about it all the time. So to any investor out there being like, I think I shouldn’t invest in couples in business, just think about all the extra hours you get out of these people.

Jet Bunditwong: I always think there’s this emotional thing that either has happened or hasn’t happened yet with couples in business. And usually if there’s tension already from the relationship being kind of rocky and then somehow they get in business, that starts to spill in. But I think in my experience in meeting couples in business, when things are going well, it just kind of flows. Like okay, now we’re going to be supportive of each other. Did you guys set up any rules in terms of how to deal with each other, deal with the business, so it wouldn’t affect the relationship?

Jenna Ryan: You know, I think we at one point kind of had a code word thing going where I’m a morning person and Spencer’s a night person. So I’d be trying to talk to him about a business thing right when he woke up, and that wasn’t chill.

Jet Bunditwong: There you go. So the UTI thing…

Jenna Ryan: Exactly. I’d be patiently waiting for him to wake up. So a little bit of respecting those boundaries. And then I think the hardest environments were—for example, I was on point for all of our fundraising, and there’d be environments you would go into where the room you’re in just might not feel like that could possibly be right. So questions would get directed to Spencer that should be directed to me. And so if there was actually a thing that felt hardest to me about being a couple in business, it was the gender politics and having to constantly sidebar with Spencer and be like, just have to popcorn it back to me, even when you know the answer. And that, I think, was hard for both of us in different ways at times.

Jet Bunditwong: And when you would introduce yourselves, was it always just business people, just to not have that cloud over you?

Jenna Ryan: No, no. I mean, we were totally open about being a couple in business. It’s kind of the core of our founding story. So there was really no way to obscure that. And it ended up being a big brand advantage and sort of part of the identity.

Jet Bunditwong: I think it’s the connection. I’ve talked with a lot of different businesses where for some reason they don’t want to share their story. And I think that’s the one thing that’s the most unique, right? There’s no other you and there’s no other story, so why not share it? When you decided to kind of build this brand off of your experiences, was there any hesitation at any point where you were like, I don’t know if I want to share everything I’ve been through? Or was that like, I have to share this because that’s how we’re going to connect to the customers?

Jenna Ryan: It felt important to share it because a big part of our mission was to destigmatize UTIs. So part of doing that authentically was leading with my experience as the founder. Reviews were so important to us at Uqora over time. They’re amazing, the stories that are on the website. I mean, I haven’t been involved in the business for two years and I still go to the website pretty regularly just to flip through the stories because they’re so heartening.

Jenna Ryan: And there was a little bit of a feeling of you can’t expect people to pour out their heart about their experience if you aren’t also doing that and setting that example. So it always felt important for that to be part of the narrative. But I did have boundaries around it. I think this is probably less common now, but in 2017, 2018 it was common for founders to build their following on Instagram as a way to get brand exposure. And I always felt like I wasn’t—I didn’t want to be a personality. I was okay with sharing my story as it relates to the brand, but I am a private person and didn’t feel like mixing those waters was something I was interested in. But it came up a lot as we were talking about different growth avenues and possibilities. So that was one I kind of clung to, but didn’t really feel like in the end the brand needed that to feel grounded in authenticity.

Jet Bunditwong: Has that pulled you out of your comfort zone a little bit over time, where you’re like, I think I need to develop a little bit more into this personality in order to get this brand out? Did that ever pop into your head?

Jenna Ryan: Not really because I always felt like what we were doing felt like an extension of what I believed. That was kind of the gut check. Was I contorting myself here? If so, then it’s not authentic. And it felt important to stay to that. Not to say that I pictured that we would be on Monday Night Football talking about my UTIs. That was not something that I thought would happen when we started sharing my story on the website and in customer emails.

Jet Bunditwong: Was that the proposal? What did that—how did that happen? They were like, hey, by the way, we’re going to put this really public on a national level, and then you’re like, okay, let me just think about this for a second.

Jenna Ryan: It was pretty organic. Our customer acquisition experience was that offline media worked really well for us. So that year I referenced where we went from $70K to over a million was built on radio. And the radio ad that was winning was the founder spot. So it was my voice recorded in our home office, and my husband likes to make music, so it was his singing microphone. That ended up opening the door for us to do other offline media. So TV quickly became a really important part of our growth. And that was all—I mean, at that point we were a five-person team, six-person team, where we started to really up our budget on TV. So it was always my choice and it was very much like, of course we’re going to do this. We want to help people with their UTIs and this is what’s working, so we’re going to keep doing it.

Jenna Ryan: But it is funny now that I’m not involved in the business where I get text messages from someone I went on a date with 13 years ago being like, saw you talking about your UTIs on whatever channel. I mean, yes, the answer is yes.

Jet Bunditwong: Is this what you’re doing with your life now? You’re public talking about UTIs?

Jet Bunditwong: Now what are your next goals business-wise from here on out?

Jenna Ryan: The thread I want to carry forward from Uqora is conscious capitalism. We weren’t philanthropic or a nonprofit, but every decision we were making with the business was, is this right by people? Is this right by our customers and right by our team? And I felt so value-aligned throughout that whole experience because I always felt like I could answer yes, and that felt really impactful. So I don’t think I will be in the same industry. I could say pretty definitively I don’t think I’ll be in that industry again. But when I think about what happens next, I want to make sure it feels like I’m doing something that’s helping people. And I think capitalism can be a vehicle for that. It feels kind of silly to say that in this moment.

Jet Bunditwong: And you don’t have to get into details, but I’m curious—was there ever a moment since the inception to when you let go of it that there were moments where something was offered that didn’t align, but it would have changed the business in a good way? Were there any moments like that, but still you were like, we’re going to stick to what I believe in?

Jenna Ryan: Yeah. I think that saying no as a founder is the hardest thing and sometimes the most meaningful thing you can do for growth. So we had a lot of growth opportunities that didn’t make sense for us based on our mission to support our customers the best we could. Staying e-commerce for as long as we did was one of those decisions. We had retailers that wanted to carry our product. We actually went off of Amazon because we found that on Amazon we couldn’t have the full money-back guarantee we wanted. We couldn’t give people the discounts on subscriptions that we thought were important. If you reached out to us and we said you couldn’t pay for the products, we had a name-your-price policy. We gave away over $25,000 worth of product during COVID to people who had lost their jobs.

Jenna Ryan: All these things weren’t possible through Amazon or through retailers. And so to us, having a direct community line with our customers and a direct relationship enabled us to be the brand we wanted to be, both in all those ways that helped us treat our customers right, but also in a way that allowed us to build the subscription business that we found ultimately was how people were having the most success. You should take the products regularly to experience the benefits, and Uqora’s revenue—80% of it—was coming from people who were subscribing. And so that ended up being the best vehicle to both build the business and help our customers have the health breakthroughs that they needed. So I think that’s one example of that.

Jet Bunditwong: I mean, that’s great. And I feel like a lot of times when capital money gets infused into the conversation, things can change really quickly. People are like, I had this dream, but what’s also better is just tons of money that I don’t need to work again. And I think for you to stay in that vision, it’s admirable, but it’s also really tough for businesses to do. When you guys go through stuff like that, do you and Spencer—were you guys always on the same page? Was Spencer always, you know, I’m trying to think of it from his perspective, did he ever go, yeah, but this could be this and let’s just have this discussion? Or were you always the driving force because you were emotionally involved and it was your experience?

Jenna Ryan: Yeah, it does make sense. Of course there were things we disagreed on, but ultimately the big strategic decisions, we always believed that the win-wins were the right strategic choice and that if our customers were winning, the business was winning. And that was important. That just proved to be true for us in every step of the way. That also is really important to our employees. We didn’t have a huge team, but by the time I left it was 40 people, and the majority of people who were working on the business really cared about customer outcomes and treating our customers right. And so it kind of became this self-fulfilling culture where that was propelling us. To then make decisions that were counter to that culture that was built, it wasn’t really even an option. And we didn’t need to because when our customers were winning, we were too.

Jet Bunditwong: What are you guys—what do you and Spencer do from here? What are your next business goals or what do you want to achieve?

Jenna Ryan: Yeah. Well, it’s a long life. So we’ve taken a transition chapter, which has been really special. We went traveling for a while and had my daughter last year, and it’s been really nice to get to move at baby speed. We are doing a different form of entrepreneurship now. We’re opening a restaurant, coffee shop, bar near where we live, which is all related to wanting that place to exist in our neighborhood. So that’ll be a fun kind of true north on it, to build a real community spot.

Jenna Ryan: And that ties into something else I do. You might know I’m on the board of Akitso.

Jet Bunditwong: Yes.

Jenna Ryan: And Akitso is a nonprofit that is focused on helping immigrant-owned restaurants succeed, which is through accessing different resources available, addressing institutional barriers, and often doing that through a lens of marketing and design, which is unique. And I’ve loved being part of that ecosystem here in San Diego too. And it’s fun to be in a totally different version of the entrepreneurship world, but staying in that entrepreneurship world.

Jet Bunditwong: What do you think carries over so far that you’ve seen from what you’ve done with Uqora into a nonprofit world?

Jenna Ryan: A lot of intentions, for sure. I think staying true to whatever your mission is and always doing a gut check on whether the decision you’re facing services that true north is true in every organization, whether it’s for profit or nonprofit. But my true answer is that I’ve been surprised at how different it feels in a lot of ways. So I’m still sort of feeling out the difference of environments.

Jet Bunditwong: Yeah, I always feel like if I were to compare a for-profit and nonprofit world, it feels like the for-profit is you get a ship with a motor, and in the nonprofit you just get oars. The goal is to get to the other side, but you’re like, whoa, I have to really work like five times as hard to do it and get the word out. And I think purpose matters so much more in the nonprofit world. When I’ve seen people open them up and there’s a lack of that center purpose, I feel like that’s where the nonprofit starts to kind of disappear, right? Because the community has to be in it, people have to support it, you have to get all these advocates. What is it that you think is the key so far in your eyes to a nonprofit possibly succeeding? Is there something that you’ve thought about and go, this is probably what needs to happen in order for someone like Akitso to be able to go further?

Jenna Ryan: It might not so much be an answer as much as the challenge that I’ve honed in on as something that surprised me in the nonprofit world. And it’s the realization that it’s not a covenant between you and your customer in the same way it is for a for-profit world. It’s a covenant between you, funders, and your customers. And it creates, I think, maybe that oar feeling you’re describing because you have to figure out then the best way to take the funders along for the ride, regardless of whether this is definitely a solution that customers need.

Jenna Ryan: So it’s kind of almost like a double-sided marketplace, if you’re going to put it into business terms. In a business sense, you usually need capital and you need investors, but you don’t always. And you don’t need many, and you don’t need them year after year if you have a product that has fundamentals that can then fund the business after some threshold. And so I feel like that’s a challenging one. And I imagine that the nonprofits that end up succeeding the most are the ones that are able to speak the same language to the funders and the customers and just have that resonate, because I think the dance of trying to figure out what funders care about as separate from your customers probably can create that misalignment that then makes it hard to stay true to your vision.

Jet Bunditwong: Yeah, I’ve seen that quite a bit where every organization, profit or nonprofit, has to have capital in order to move forward, to exist, because eventually you end up having office space and overhead and things like that. And I think people kind of forget that the heart opens a nonprofit and then the business side has to come in and be able to handle that. And I think it would be great if over time there were more opportunities for people who are starting or getting involved in nonprofits heavily to be able to see a business side first and then come back and go, hey, now we’re going to sort of run this a little bit more like a business to be able to get funding, get things in, and organize it so it moves forward.

Jet Bunditwong: So I think that’s going to be one of the great things, especially hearing your story of how you can bring that over, transition over, right? Because what you’ve experienced is probably such a small percentage of the business world to get to that place and go, okay, I can—I always think it’s like you’re the light now at the front of the boat. And you’re like, I’ve seen how we can get there. But now we have oars. We don’t have an engine anymore.

Jenna Ryan: That’s really flattering imagery there. Thank you.

Jet Bunditwong: You’re ahead of the boat right now. Okay, to wrap this up, if you can give advice to someone who is starting their business with a really wholehearted purpose, what advice would you give to that person?

Jenna Ryan: That you don’t have to do it all at once related to the mission. And an example of this is that we want Uqora to be accessible to everyone eventually. And it’s on its way. And I think we can thank our parent company, the company that acquired Uqora, for a lot of now how things are going. It’ll get more accessible over time. The price will drop over time, and scale, all that’s going to happen. But we couldn’t start the business at a price that was the eventual price we hope to see it at so that everyone could access it, because we never would have been able to grow at that price point.

Jenna Ryan: And so I think there are these minute decisions that you have to face where, when you look at it initially, you think maybe that isn’t value-aligned then. But if you zoom out and think about how you can get to the finish line, you can sometimes only get there if you are making decisions in the short term that are going to allow you to grow. And so I think it’s about figuring out the scale at which to always apply that mission. And as long as you can zoom out and see that it’s still there and you’re marching toward it, that can be the gut check you need.

Jet Bunditwong: Thank you so much. Thank you, Jenna, for coming on the podcast. Is there anything you want to plug, any websites that you want people to check you out on?

Jenna Ryan: Man, I’m pretty low profile right now. Monday Night Football, UTIs.

Jet Bunditwong: baby.com if she’s just hanging out.

Jet Bunditwong: All right. Thank you so much, and thank you for listening.

Jenna Ryan: Great chat.