When Nicole Liu was just 24, a doctor told her two things. One was that she had PCOS, and the other was that she was infertile. Neither was actually true.

“I wasn't planning on having children for a while”, Nicole says, “so I didn't actually think it would shock me as much as it did, but having the option taken away from you is really, really scary. I couldn't really talk about it to anyone, I was even scared to tell my parents.” Like most of us would, Nicole turned to Dr Google (“not a good idea!”), who didn’t provide much in the way of either comfort or information. But if there’s one thing that rings true in Nicole’s story, it’s the power of community. “Eventually I started talking to all my friends about it. I'd hear that they had either gone through similar things, or they had also had experiences, whether it was a miscarriage, or endometriosis, and we had just never talked about it.”

Those conversations were eye-opening. “I think it made me realise how much there's a stigma around this, and it proves there's just such poor information when it comes to women's reproductive health in particular. And so, when we started Kin, it was very much, ‘Let's just start with education and information.’” Kin started with content first – blog posts shared via an Instagram profile linked to their website – a place to have frank and factual discussions, before products or services were even on their radar. “I was curious to get the answers”, Nicole says, “but I wanted to figure out whether anyone else actually cared about this. And it turned out that they did.”

And that’s an understatement. In Kin’s first year of operation, over 40,000 members signed up. They were hungry for information, “they just weren't able to find a very trusted source. That’s the genesis of how we started Kin.” Products and services, including a subscription Pill service, online fertility consultations, and prenatal vitamins, followed. As did a million dollar investment from venture capital incubator firm Eucalyptus.

For former management consultant Nicole, being a startup founder is the best of times and the worst of times. She feels the responsibility keenly (“I don’t want to be the next Theronos!” she laughs), but equally, revels in the privilege of creating something that is driving change for women in such a meaningful and powerful way.

Here, we speak to the incredible Nicole about building community, quitting her job, and why SEED ticks all her boxes in the style department…

You left a role in management consulting without a job to go to, or necessarily a plan for what you were going to do next. Have you always had an appetite for risk?

I think I've always wanted to build something of my own. I grew up in an immigrant family and my parents, in order to make a living, they really had to build all these small businesses up from scratch. They had a pizza shop at one point, a curtain shop. I was surrounded by that, and I always wanted to do that for myself. But because that was their way of living and it was quite volatile and they did that out of necessity rather than actually wanting to do that, they never actually wanted that for me. And, because my parents said they didn't want me to do it, I obviously gravitated towards it! When the time felt right, I wanted to give it a go and find out whether it was for me or not.

In 2019, there were over a thousand studies about erectile dysfunction, but for female infertility, there were less than 200 studies. In your first year alone, over 40,000 members signed up to Kin. What did that tell you about the need for this business?

For the longest time, women just haven't felt heard in this space. Whether it's talking to their doctors or people around contraception or fertility, they're either not feeling heard, or when they go through an experience around their reproductive health, they're feeling quite isolated, and no one's really having the conversation about it. They’re going through these experiences feeling quite alone, when in reality, a lot of these things are very normal and we should have a support system around it. [It’s about] unlocking, one, the support that people have, and the support that people can have, around our community. And two, being able to access the services, the education and the products that will support them and give back a little bit more control around their reproductive health, and their body, and I think that was very, very much needed.

You went on to raise over a million dollars in investment. You personally have a venture capital background, which I'm sure would've come in very handy, but how did you prepare for pitches and what was that experience like?

Initially, when Kin started, it was very much like we were trying to validate the problem, and we hadn't really decided exactly what the solution looked like. And so, our entire pitch was centered around that. It was defining the problems a lot more deeply, and then just showing all the proof points. We connected quite early with a venture capital incubator firm called Eucalyptus. They specialise in healthcare startups, and help to build it, scale it and grow it from the beginning. So, ever since then, we've been part of the Eucalyptus group.

So often startups and small business owners hear the advice that you should do absolutely everything you can yourself in that initial phase. You should do your own branding, social media, whatever you can. Are you glad that you went the other way and got experts in from the very beginning?

I'm personally really glad, because I came from a background of commerce and business and, to a certain extent, finance, that I was able to use that. But I didn't have a healthcare background. I just knew there was a problem. I felt it myself and I talked to enough people, that I got angry enough, I guess, that I wanted to solve it. And so, I was passionate enough about the problem, but I knew I wasn't going to be the single best person to solve everything around it. I don't know technology, I don't know engineering, I definitely don't have a medical degree. And so, it was really important to me to surround myself with the right people to help me build this, because I just knew I wasn't going to get there myself. When it comes to healthcare, it's especially important, because it's a real privilege to have someone trust you with their health. And, it's not something you can build a scrappy MBC on and hope that it works and experiment on people. You've got to get it right the first time. And so, it was incredibly important to me to make sure I was surrounded by the right people to not screw that up.

Why was it important to you to be a part of our Seeds of Change campaign?

Firstly, International Women's Day is a really great opportunity to celebrate all the leaps that we've made over the past year as a society of women. And the Seeds of Change campaign is such a pivotal way of celebrating that, showing that as women, we've made such big leaps forward in terms of where we are in society now, but also cementing the fact that we've also got a ways to go. But I do think it's really important to celebrate where we are already.

And how would you describe your signature personal style?

I think my style's very minimalist, very classic. I want to be comfortable, I want to feel very free in the clothes that I wear. And SEED really have those two factors covered really well, in a heritage, classic style that I love.

Going from the corporate sphere to working as an entrepreneur, what do you love about being your own boss, and has anything surprised you?

The main thing that you end up falling in love with, and you love and hate it almost, is you have complete autonomy over your time and the decisions you make. You're starting with a complete blank slate, which means that all the decisions are on you, and you get to dream what you want to, and it's basically all on you to make it happen. That, obviously, comes with the responsibility. It means the highs are very high and the lows are very low, but ultimately you have ownership. And I think, having ownership and being able to start fresh and really dream about what is possible, rather than being constrained by the rules and policies that are already in place, that was the dream for me. In terms of learnings, you stop getting the validation that you get used to in the corporate setting. You get feedback, but there’s no one to tell you that, ‘this is the bar and this is the standard, and you are meeting it or you're not.’ At the beginning it was very much, learning to back yourself, learning to validate yourself, setting your own goals and keeping yourself accountable. And, that was a very, very challenging shift.

What kind of company culture are you hoping to build at Kin?

It's very much the culture I'm trying to build as a brand as well. We want to make people feel empowered. The one thing I've really always wanted for myself, and therefore want for everyone that I work with, is to feel they actually want to come to work, and feel empowered in their roles. And feel they know what the goals are and have the freedom to choose how they want to get there. Feeling free to take the risks, to experiment and do things that are a little bit different to achieve the same end goal. To feel they want to work for a company that has a really great purpose, and that everyone is on that same path. Feeling really comfortable to speak up and challenge the status quo, or challenge everyone. Because, if we challenge everyone, then we have better discussion, better problem solving and better answers at the end of the day. And so, really creating a culture that can empower people, and people feel really comfortable being who they are, and also speaking their mind.

There are quite a few similar services cropping up in the market now. I can imagine on a personal level, it's probably really hard to put everything you have into this new business idea, and then see copycats popping up. Do you feel protective over the concept, or what's your approach to competitors?

It's a really good question. One response I have is, as long as the end goal is we're helping women, and there are more of these people to be able to help and service women, then we're raising the bar already. And then the second mindset I have around it is, ultimately, we want to keep pushing. This one part of our service isn't all that we're doing, we're starting to push new offerings, new products, new technologies out. As we evolve, we start helping people throughout the whole fertility journey. And I think that's also going to be really hard for other competitors to do. And so, from that standpoint, I'm very much just focused on, ‘What is the next thing for us, and how can we continue to make change and improve the standards of women's reproductive health?’

How responsive are you to your community, in terms of where the business goes next?

The context here is, I'm 27, I've never tried to conceive, never been pregnant, never had a child. I've never been through everyone's journey that we're trying to solve. And also, everyone has such a different journey, and so there's no way for me to be the singular person that goes through all of it. And so, it's really important to us that we listen to our community in a really deep way, because there's going to be nuances that we don't understand ourselves, not necessarily being in each part of those journeys. So we're very responsive in that way. One of my favourite things sometimes, is just to jump on our Instagram DMs, and speak to our customers. It's really grounding when you can see what impact you're actually having. Or, if you do have negative feedback, being able to take that constructively and build the next thing, or improve it. That's really important to us because, ultimately, we're nothing without our community.