Next week is National Small Business Week, and we’re excited to celebrate the millions of inspiring small businesses we work with globally. To celebrate this important week, we’re sitting down with several small businesses to find out what inspired them to start their businesses, what challenges they have faced and overcome, and what advice they have for other aspiring business owners.
Today we sat down with Andrea Sreshta, the co-founder of
LuminAID.
Q: What inspired you to start your business?
A: My co-founder Anna Stork and I were graduate students at Columbia University when the 2010 earthquake in Haiti occurred. Our class was tasked with designing a product for disaster relief. Anna and I focused on lighting. We knew that rechargeable solar light could really benefit the locals and aid workers in Haiti because they would have access to light without needing electricity or batteries. We started thinking about how we could make lights that were easy to ship and distribute globally -- that’s when we came up with the idea to make flat, rechargeable solar lights. You don’t need batteries; you just need the sun. And it’s a safer alternative to using candles or kerosene lamps.
Once we came up with the idea, we started prototyping. A year later, in March 2011, Anna and I went on another school trip -- this time to Tokyo, Japan. While in Tokyo, the earthquake and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster occurred. When that earthquake struck -- our lights once again were really useful to the impacted community. It was then that we realized there was a real business need for our lights. That year, in the Spring of 2011, we incorporated LuminAID.
How did you get your business off the ground financially?We first soft launched our lights on Indigogo to raise money via crowd funding. This went really well and customers pre-ordered our products from across 25 countries. Not surprisingly, most of our customers paid with
PayPal. We sold the first version of our lights in 2011, and since then, we’ve been growing at about 3X year-over-year. In May 2012, we sold our first light on our own ecommerce platform. Again, not surprisingly, our first purchase was made via PayPal. Today, nearly 30 percent of our overall sales are processed by PayPal.
We’ve worked with several ecommerce platforms in the past, but each time have integrated with PayPal. PayPal has opened up a lot of opportunities for us because of all the ways it seamlessly integrates with other platforms and partners. Today, we’ve integrated PayPal with Shopify, our wholesale order processing system, and our bookkeeping and invoicing system. From a business perspective, PayPal has the best rates and I don’t have to manage more than one account – it’s simple. And our customers trust PayPal because they know their payment will be secure.
Do you only sell your products online?
No, we also sell our products at trade shows. When we’re selling in person, it’s really easy to sell and accept payments with
PayPal Here, it’s basically an on-the-spot point of sale. And people tend to spend more when they know they can pay with a card instead of cash, which helps to increase sales.
Did any great opportunities come your way that helped boost your business?
Yes, we had a lot of amazing opportunities along the way – most notably Shark Tank. We filmed Shark Tank in 2014 and it aired 2015. It was really like an eight-minute commercial for us. We managed to get offers from all five Sharks, but ultimately took funding from Mark Cuban.
So you must have already had some revenues coming in if you were on Shark Tank and Mark Cuban wanted to invest.
Yes, when we were on Shark Tank, we had already done $1 million in revenues. We filmed an update for Shark Tank in 2015 and we shared at that time that in the first nine months of the year we did $2 million in revenues. And in terms of our customers, we have buyers around the world, from the U.S. and Canada to Australia, France and Germany.
A key part of your business is giving back to causes. Why is this important to you and who do the proceeds benefit?
We have a program called
Give Light, Get Light, where when you buy a light we will donate one to charity. Giving back is really important to us, especially knowing that more than 1 billion people in the world live without access to electricity and many more live with unreliable access to electricity. As part of our Give Light, Get Light program, more than 25,000 lights have been distributed to charities in more than 60 countries. And several great aid organizations -- from Doctors Without Borders to Shelter Box – buy and use our lights as well. We're very lucky to have a business where we actually can do some good after a natural disaster.
What advice do you have for entrepreneurs looking to start their business?
To always be forward thinking and willing to learn. As a business owner, you can -- and likely will -- make a lot of mistakes. All you can do is learn and move forward. It’s important to also take calculated risks – it can be scary – but it’s part of being a business owner. Finally, don’t sweat the small stuff. Things will happen that are out of your control, but learn and move forward and take things one step at a time.