Have you ever wondered what it takes to turn a personal experience into a thriving business? In this inspiring episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, we dive into the incredible entrepreneurial journey of Jasmine Jones, a remarkable founder and CEO who channeled her life's experiences and challenges into creating a groundbreaking company. This episode offers invaluable insights for anyone interested in the power of resilience, innovation, and purpose-driven entrepreneurship. Jasmine Jones, the dynamic founder, and CEO of Myya, joins host Marcia Dawood to share her unique journey. From witnessing her father’s real estate investments to selling diamonds at Tiffany’s, Jasmine’s path to entrepreneurship is anything but conventional. A former beauty pageant winner and Miss DC USA, Jasmine leveraged her varied background and life experiences to create Myya, a company dedicated to providing customizable and insurance-billable breast prosthetics for breast cancer survivors. Jasmine's inspiring story was also featured in the documentary Show Her the Money, showcasing her entrepreneurial journey to a global audience. This episode is a treasure trove of wisdom and inspiration. Jasmine discusses the evolution of Myya, from its humble beginnings as a boutique store to its current status as a scalable telehealth platform serving patients nationwide. Hear firsthand how Jasmine navigated the complexities of fundraising, securing over $2.25 million in venture capital, and why the COVID-19 pandemic was a surprising catalyst for her business growth. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a seasoned business owner, or an angel investor, Jasmine's compelling story offers invaluable lessons on persistence, adaptability, and the importance of aligning business with purpose. This is a must-listen episode for anyone looking to make a meaningful impact through entrepreneurship.
Have you ever wondered what it takes to turn a personal experience into a thriving business? In this inspiring episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, we dive into the incredible entrepreneurial journey of Jasmine Jones, a remarkable founder and CEO who channeled her life's experiences and challenges into creating a groundbreaking company. This episode offers invaluable insights for anyone interested in the power of resilience, innovation, and purpose-driven entrepreneurship.
Jasmine Jones, the dynamic founder, and CEO of Myya, joins host Marcia Dawood to share her unique journey. From witnessing her father’s real estate investments to selling diamonds at Tiffany’s, Jasmine’s path to entrepreneurship is anything but conventional. A former beauty pageant winner and Miss DC USA, Jasmine leveraged her varied background and life experiences to create Myya, a company dedicated to providing customizable and insurance-billable breast prosthetics for breast cancer survivors. Jasmine's inspiring story was also featured in the documentary Show Her the Money, showcasing her entrepreneurial journey to a global audience.
This episode is a treasure trove of wisdom and inspiration. Jasmine discusses the evolution of Myya, from its humble beginnings as a boutique store to its current status as a scalable telehealth platform serving patients nationwide. Hear firsthand how Jasmine navigated the complexities of fundraising, securing over $2.25 million in venture capital, and why the COVID-19 pandemic was a surprising catalyst for her business growth. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a seasoned business owner, or an angel investor, Jasmine's compelling story offers invaluable lessons on persistence, adaptability, and the importance of aligning business with purpose. This is a must-listen episode for anyone looking to make a meaningful impact through entrepreneurship.
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Marcia Dawood
Well, Jasmine, hi. Welcome to the show.
Jasmine Jones
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here.
Marcia Dawood
Well, I am excited to talk to you. You are a star and show her the money. And we've talked about that a lot on the podcast before. So maybe start out, tell us a little bit about your background, and then tell us about your amazing company.
Jasmine Jones
Yes. Hi, everyone. My name is Jasmine Jones. I'm founder and CEO of Maya. We offer for breast cancer survivors completely customizable and fully insurance billable breast prosthetics with a state of the art experience. My background is a bit unconventional. I always knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I didn't necessarily know in what way that would manifest itself into my life. I imagined at one point that I was going to own a vintage boutique in the heart of Georgetown.
Jasmine Jones
That was my dream as a little girl. When I grew up, I actually witnessed my dad start a real estate investment company, and I admired, like, the flexibility and the lifestyle that he had. So I said, okay, I'm going to go into real estate development. I studied entrepreneurship in college. I got a business degree, and I came out and worked in real estate development for two years or so. And I was like, this is not, for me, the temperament of these people. This is really bad. Everyone's stressed.
Jasmine Jones
No one ever gets to go to sleep. Like, it's. It was just so. It was really an unhealthy environment. The one that I was in, I said, okay, so this line of entrepreneurship will probably not be for me, but there. There has to be something else. I ended up working in luxury retail for a while. Right out of college, I sold diamonds for Tiffany.
Jasmine Jones
I was the youngest manager at my Nordstrom with nine employees at 22 years old.
Marcia Dawood
Wow.
Jasmine Jones
And I. Yeah. But I loved it. I was bringing big brands into our store for the first time. I brought Tori Birch in, I believe theory. There was a lot of big brands that we were introducing for the first time, and I got to really wrap my arms around that, and I said, okay, this is a better world for me. Very long story short, I had a terrible breakup, and I said I wanted to start my life over and do something different. I said, maybe I'll go get my MBA.
Jasmine Jones
And I started studying for GMAT, and I became obsessed with the process. And I said, you know what? I'm going to go to Harvard, and I'm going to write a really great applicant letter. And the basis is going to be about my experience competing in a pageant. And if I win the pageant, that'll be a great ending to it. But if I don't, then I'll write about all the things I learned in this journey of starting my life over and trying. And I ended up being crowned Miss DC USA. And thank you. At an appearance, I met a breast surgeon, and that breast surgeon and I were walking and talking, and she was telling me about this experience that her patients were having and buying mastectomy bras.
Jasmine Jones
And it brought me through the experiences that I had in luxury retail and about customer experience, but even deeper through the experience that I watched my grandmother have when I was a child of suffering through purchasing her mastectomy bras and prosthetics in a medical supply store. And all those experiences, like, they just were so perfectly aligned in that moment. And we decided we were going to start the business together. So I used all those skills leading up or along the way to build the first of its kind, fully inclusive lingerie boutique that catered to breast cancer survivors as well. We began accepting health insurance. We added a tech component of custom prosthetics, and then we've never looked back. So that's a very long story, super short, but it's a testament of all of these different stages in our lives build up and become something for us and can help us in unearthing our passions.
Marcia Dawood
Oh, my gosh, that is. That's so good. So in the movie, you actually talk about how in the beginning it was, like you say, one boutique store, but then you evolved it into so much more that could be scalable so you could help more people. So tell us about that.
Jasmine Jones
Yeah. So the best part about our business is that these items are covered by health insurance plans. So everything that we sell insurance will pay for the patient just. Yeah, the patient just pays her coinsurance and she receives a prescription from her doctor to come and shop with us. Well, we were serving patients, and it was difficult in the beginning getting the word out, and then we recognized we needed to go directly to physicians. And after serving about 20,000 patients, we recognized that we were seeing a lot of people for the second, 3rd, 4th, 5th time, and we were paying a really expensive brick and mortar lease, and we were paying all those expenses that go into running a brick and mortar store, the team and insurance and so many things. And we said, what if I. We pick up what we have and take it across the USA, right? So instead of us seeing 20,000 patients, the same patients over and over again, if we're able to offer this as a pop up model, then that could be really engaging for our patients.
Jasmine Jones
And then Covid happened, and we had to turn it completely into a telehealth model with a pop up arm. And once we did that is when our business really took off. So we were able to not just serve people in person at one experience, but across the USA.
Marcia Dawood
Wow. And we've heard so many stories about companies that had some very serious challenges during COVID and were not able to make it. And you were able to pivot in the opposite direction, and now it really helped your business grow, right?
Jasmine Jones
Yes. Covid was actually really beneficial to our business because it made me think, what would I do if I can never physically touch a patient again? If, because many of our patients are immunocompromised. So not only was Covid a scary thing for a typical person, but it's even more difficult for a person who their life could be on the line if they're venturing out, but at the same time, they need prosthesis, they need post mastectomy bras. So I said, well, what if we create a telehealth platform that just made it easier for patients to connect with certified mastectomy fitters from the comfort of home. And once we got that off the ground, the game changed.
Marcia Dawood
Right. And that's when Pocketsun and Sogal ventures got interested. More interested. I think they were already pretty interested, but even more interested. So tell us a little bit about your fundraising journey.
Jasmine Jones
Oh, yes. I was so new to venture capital, I definitely hearing my background. I guess the more I say it, I feel like I came from a bit of an outsider space. And it probably led me to just being ridiculously optimistic about the possibilities, because I just knew that if I use the speaking skills that I learned in pageantry and presentation skills, and I paired that with the business that was doing well, and I worked hard and I was resilient that money would come. And it really began with pitching and learning how to deliver an effective pitch to investors, how to communicate on stage very clearly. I ended up winning second place at the Sogao Global pitch competition. So there were 60 companies from across the world that came out to Silicon Valley, and I won a hundred thousand dollar check. And wow.
Jasmine Jones
Yeah, it was a huge, giant checks. But it was momentous for our business because it was saying to the world that this was something that could work. And not only did it come with the check, it came with the introduction to Techstars. And my managing director at Techstars, as fate would had it, her daughter was diagnosed with breast cancer. So she understood what was happening in this world and knew that we needed a voice. And going through the tech stars experience, by the time our 13 weeks were over, I'd raised over a million dollars. So.
Marcia Dawood
Wow.
Jasmine Jones
Yes. And that changed the game. Unfortunately, there are so few women of color who've raised over a million dollars in venture capital. In 2021, it was less than 93 women, and I was one of those 93. And being, yeah, it's sad. It was. So few of us were able to just be on a email thread together, like a group chat. Wow.
Jasmine Jones
It's pretty sad, but we stick together. And from that, we were able to really leverage relationships to pitch in front of other investors, and we ended up closing over $2.25 million. And I think it's important for investors to know that when they tap into women and women of color, that means they're also tapping into networks of customer bases that perhaps no one else is looking at. And when you think about that, and you're solving problems for customer bases that are often overlooked, there's money there. We recognize huge white spaces, and we fill them, and we're often early adapters. So that was something that was just super monumental. Becoming connected with that community and then raising venture capital allowed our business to become a success.
Marcia Dawood
Wow. So for our listeners, because we've talked a little bit about accelerators in the past, but I don't know that we've given people a real picture of what techstars is like. Can you just tell us a little bit about what the experience was like and what you learned there?
Jasmine Jones
Yes, I did it during the wildest time in the world. I did it during COVID and I participated in the Kansas city, Texas class in 2020 during lockdown. And at the time, I lived two blocks away from the White House, there were protests constantly outside. Because of what was happening with George Floyd, the world was shut down. It was just such a weird time, but it was a time that I was able to just sit and focus, and that's so important for accelerators. So we had a very small cohort. There was a small group of us, maybe nine companies, and we learned how to build successful and venture backable businesses over the course of a few weeks. And it took all of our effort and concentration, but they said, pretty much, when you come out, we want you to be ready for the real world and for.
Jasmine Jones
For what the possibilities could lead you to once you have this funding. And I. I took it very seriously. And even though we were locked down and we were at home, it was just really difficult to focus. Being so close to so many protests, and it was just so much going on. I booked a flight to Florida. I got a Airbnb that overlooked the ocean. And I said, you know what? Every day I'm going to go for a walk.
Jasmine Jones
But it was intense. It was pretty much 12 hours a day of just focus on building your business and then pitching to investors at the end of the program. And fortunately, at the end of the program, I pitched to 90 investors and I walked away with a little over a million dollars.
Marcia Dawood
Wow, 90 investors. So was, were these all like venture capital funds, individual investors?
Jasmine Jones
They were mainly funds, a few angels, but mainly funds. And it was like a speed round. So we had, I think, twelve minutes on a call with them, and it was over the course of two weeks. And I was just book solid for in twelve minute increments. It was wild. And that sounds crazy. It was really crazy. But I learned how to pitch and how to tell the story and how getting a rejection, one rejection doesn't mean that the next conversation you're going to have, they don't say absolutely, yes.
Jasmine Jones
So learning how to bounce back very quickly, it was a huge blessing to me and incredible moment for our business to be able to go through techstars. So that experience was amazing. But of course, there's other accelerators that do really well, too. I hear great feedback from others. I've participated in a Macy's accelerator to prepare us for retail. That was really good. I learned a lot there. And then I did the Tory Burch fellowship.
Jasmine Jones
So I'm a Tory Burch fellow, and that was an accelerator, too. And all of that, I think, has positioned us really well as a business.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, I've heard amazing things about the Tory Burch fellowship. That's great. And how many people were in that group?
Jasmine Jones
Your cohort was Tory Burch? 50. There were 50 companies selected in my year.
Marcia Dawood
Nice. So tell us a little more about where Maya is today. You talked a lot about, like, how you grew it. A lot of it was during COVID which is amazing, and you had to pivot. And so where are you today?
Jasmine Jones
We're on the cusp of a lot of really great things. I would say probably the most difficult thing we did was sunset, our brick and mortar aspect of our business. But probably the best long term investment we've made was in sunset, the brick and mortar of our business. Because after which, after that, it's almost like building a completely separate aspect of your business that has to sustain itself. When we had a brick and mortar, we could almost guarantee daily sales, by walk in traffic, by patient referrals, by staying on the phones and giving them calls. Well, now that we're a telehealth business, we have to make sure we're top of mind for them, even if they're not driving by our space. So that has been really an interesting pivot for us, but one that I don't take lightly. But what we've done is actually worked in partnership now with local hospital centers and women health centers in the area.
Jasmine Jones
And we do pop ups physically in their spaces, removing the clinical aspect, and then instead engaging patients immediately post operation. So at their two week post op surgery, they come downstairs into our office, and they're able to be fit for post mastectomy bras and prosthetics. And we build a customer for life from that moment. So that's where we are. In a few weeks, I'll be pitching on a television show, which I'm really excited about. Yeah, thank you. I can't say which one, but I'm excited about the opportunity to be able to put our business in front of a great panel of investors for potential investment. We're scaling into a major department store.
Jasmine Jones
Our intention is to have a brick and mortar presence using a department store as our anchor, because they need patients and customers, and they have space. And we have patients and customers, and we need space. Right, so. Right. So we're working through those conversations now and then. Partnerships also with large, very large national cancer nonprofit organizations, so that they're informing their patients as to the work that we do. And then we have two sort of top secret projects that we're working on, too. So before the end of the year, you can expect to see those as rollout extensions of our brand.
Marcia Dawood
Wow, that's incredible. You're doing such amazing work, and I'm all about doing good and doing well, and I think you're like the epitome of the do good while doing well philosophy. So just love what you're working on. So you have taken lots of different types of checks. I'm imagining you have venture capital funds who have LP's and who they have to report to their LP's about things. I'm sure you've had individual angels come into your onto your cap table. What would you say? Is some of your lessons learned? Or what would you maybe give as advice to an inspiring angel out there?
Jasmine Jones
Oh, I always recommend for founders to really choose angels and investors wisely. So if I were to give the advice to the angel or the investor, I would say to make sure you're a really great fit with that founder, and that you can help them more than monetarily, but monetarily when it matters, and I would say for angels also to invest in companies that are fulfilling a purpose that is important to you, that way, you can really be helpful in the ways that are necessary. Our best angels have provided for us connections and that you can't put a dollar amount to. And when they're tied to our success, we can feel it, and we know that they believe in us. And having those conversations with them when things are going well or when things are challenging and knowing that they have your back is really important. And it's easier for me to know that they have my back when I know that they're purpose driven, just like me. And that it's more than just did you make your sales goal for the month? It's did you hit the impact and the reach that we know you're capable of? And I think that's really super, super important. So those are my three pieces of advice.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, that's great. And I like that you're trying to do more than just show your effect with sales numbers, because sometimes I think we get really caught up in what's your revenue? When are you going to be cash flow positive? All those good things, but just being able to say, these are the amount of people that we've affected, these are the families that we've helped, that that really hits the heartstrings more.
Jasmine Jones
Yeah. And it's about the journey for the founder and for the angel, so. And we need each other, so we need to have each other's back.
Marcia Dawood
That's awesome. Well, Jasmine, thank you so much for joining us today. And we will make sure that we put in the show notes, all the places to go to find all of your information about Maya and everything you're working on.
Jasmine Jones
Thank you very much for having me.