Three Founders With Zero Experience Take On Billion-Dollar Incumbents

Three founders with zero industry experience walk into a salon. No, this isn't the setup to a joke—it's how Mangomint began their journey to challenge billion-dollar incumbents in the beauty and wellness software space.

Daniel Lang and his co-founders at Mangomint didn't just enter a crowded market—they deliberately chose one. While most entrepreneurs avoid competition, they saw the existence of multiple profitable players as validation that the market was worth pursuing. Their contrarian approach: start small, stay focused, and resist the temptation to say yes to everything.

In this conversation, Daniel shares the unconventional strategies that helped a three-person team compete against companies with thousands of employees, why he believes product intuition trumps rigid systems, and the painful nos that shaped their path to success.

Daniel: So I grew up in Austria, which is a, for those of you who don't know, a very peaceful, quiet, small country in the heart of Europe. Now sometimes you hear these stories of entrepreneurs that had to overcome all of these obstacles and challenges in their childhood. I really can't say that that was the case for me. But what I will say is that my dad had like a small business. It wasn't so much what he was doing, it was more so the fact that he ran his own business. And that that was a possibility that I think opened my eyes to that being something that you could in fact do.

And then at the age of 12, I just fell in love with programming, started my first real business with employees at the age of 19, but at the same time, being in Austria, it always felt somewhat limiting because Austria and Europe for the most part is not a place that is conducive to entrepreneurialism, taking risks and all of that stuff. So the first time I came here to America, it felt like, wow, this is a totally different world. I mean, just like in Austria, failure is something that has a big stigma attached to it. Whereas here it's almost like embraced. It's not that people enjoy failing, like failing still sucks. But it's something where if you fail as an entrepreneur and you give it your everything, nobody is going to judge you for that, right? In fact, they might high five you. So I was like immediately struck by that, knew that this was the place that I wanted to start my business.

Daniel: One of the things that was really important to us when we started Mangomint is to find something that we could truly be passionate about for 10, 15, 20 years for like the length of the journey. You know, we spent about a year just looking for different things and staying open minded. During that time, my wife and I, we went on this road trip, I think we visited 32 different states, basically visiting all of these different places.

The one thing that I noticed is that every town in America, no matter how big or small, tends to have a lot of these like small businesses, local businesses that are literally everywhere. And at the time, this is 2016, coming from LA, I was already used to using Uber and you know, Uber Eats and all of that modern technology. And yet when it came to booking a hair appointment or booking a wellness treatment, it felt like, you know, it was back in the 1990s where you had to call at a certain time and they had to get back to you. So we started to notice that there might be an opportunity.

Daniel: So one of the challenges that we identified early on was that none of us founders had any industry experience. So none of us had worked in a salon or a spa before. I mean, everyone's a client in the salon or spa at some point in their life, but we didn't really know how these businesses worked. In order to build a great product for them, we had to go way deeper than what we could learn in like a one hour conversation with an owner.

To solve the problem, we decided to use a Trojan horse approach, where essentially we offered free marketing service. We were literally just like walk into salons and say, hey, we have nothing to sell, but we have a background in marketing and tech and would love to just, you know, hang around here and in exchange, we'll build you a new website, we'll do your email marketing. Honestly, in the beginning, it was actually hard to convince people because they thought we were scamming them in this way. But you keep trying and we found our first 10, 20, eventually 30 customers that way. Two years later, in fact, we had a software product that somebody would actually be like a normal person would pay for without being friends with us.

Daniel: I'm still thinking that every day. No, the space that we're in took us about 2 years to build the first version of the product and that version was very incomplete, as I mentioned, it probably took another at least 2 years, maybe even longer to have a product that I would consider competitive. And so that's a very long time. And you know, in the early days, we didn't raise funding at the very beginning. So it meant that as founders, we had to basically put in money ourselves, not only not getting paid, we put in money for several years.

I think that is why you really need to focus on alignment with your co-founders as well and making sure that they also understand the length of how long this takes. There's so much, in my opinion, bad advice out there for founders, you know, there's stories that sound really good whereas like oh, we met on a weekend hackathon and like you know 3 weeks later, we had shipped the first version and 3 months later, as Sequoia invested or whatnot, right, like, yeah, sure. That happens once every 20 years maybe, but like the reality for most founders is different, right? Like the reality is like in the early days, you put in everything you can and a lot of times, you know, the initial idea is not the one that works out and so you have to stay nimble and many cases pivot.

We were fortunate in the sense that our thesis didn't actually change, but there are definitely moments where you kind of have to convince yourself to just keep going.

Daniel: Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, having started other businesses before and been around founders, you make a choice early on, like what kind of risk you want to take and a lot of founders take market risk where they have some great technology, to have an idea, but it's unclear whether there would be a market for it. We did not want to take that risk. We intentionally chose a market that had a lot of incumbents already. We saw that as a positive characteristic about the market rather than a negative one.

A lot of times, you know, when you talk to folks and you tell them the idea, they're like, wait, but doesn't this already exist? Like, yes, that's the point. It exists and they're doing well and there's many companies that are making lots of money. That's a good thing. Because then it allows you to focus on strategy and differentiation and how you can carve out initially like a wedge and then over time grow that wedge into a real competitive strength.

I think it would be foolish to believe that if you're competing against companies with thousands of employees and hundreds of millions and billions in revenue, that you can just show up with like a 3 person founder team and after like 1 year of work, you're just better, right? That's just not how it works, right? So you have to really be smart about, OK, better for who, right? And like you know, probably start with a very small group. That's what we did.

And so you start out by not having very much of a competitive advantage other than you, the founders, and what you can bring to bear with a product for a very small specific niche. And so then over time. It wasn't actually like a niche in terms of like segmentation of the market. It was a niche more so around what people wanted from it. And so, for example, when we launched, we did not have payment processing, we did not have reporting, we did not have a Shopify integration. So if any of those things were important to you, we would not be a good solution for you. But what we did have was a calendar that beautifully designed, fast interfaces, intuitive.

I feel like a lot of people who don't have a plan, don't have a strategy, make the mistake that they say yes to everything, and it dilutes them so much that you can't really tell after a while what they're actually good for. And so I feel like, you know, one of the things that we've always done well is being very clear who is our ICP, who are we for, who are we not for? What are we willing to say yes to and what are we willing to say no to. And it's actually hard because when you have somebody knock on your door and wave a lot of money in front of your face and say, hey, I need this thing, can you please build it for me? It's very tempting, especially when you don't have a lot of revenue yet and you know, also don't have funding, but it's those moments when I think it really matters to be clear about what your strategy is so that you have the permission to say no in those moments.

Daniel: Oh man, usually the ones where somebody shows up and says, hey, I got the new locations, we love your product. We've already used it. We've already done the trial and we just need this one little extra button or this one little extra report or something. Can you, can you please build it and we'll be a customer. Those are the moments where it's really difficult to say no, but so far we've managed to do that, but certainly not with without like you know, feeling, wow, like, oh man, that would have been nice actually. Right, right.

Daniel: I love the question because intuition is such a thing that is underappreciated in traditional product management. For those of you who don't know, product management is a lot of like, a lot about prioritization, which features do you build, how do you weigh them, there's all kinds of systems that you can use, you can assign points and impact scores and whatnot, right? And what ends up happening is you end up with unremarkable products because when you apply such a rigid system to the way you build product, you end up optimizing for a lot of boring stuff.

I think the most exciting products, the ones that really like inspire people, make people truly feel love for a product, are the ones that have intuition in them where somebody had a feeling that something was a good idea and went with that gut instinct, that intuition if you call it. So now the question becomes, what does it take to have intuition. And I think it's with many things in life where to develop intuition for anything, you just got to put in the reps. You just got to see a lot, right? So if you want to be a product leader, you have to try a lot of products, you have to be in the products, you have to be willing to try every product and analyze it and form an opinion.

What do you like about it? What do you not like about it? Why is it good? Why does the product make you angry? Why does the product make you excited? What are those like you know things that are going on and a lot of times it's not stuff that you can perfectly capture in like spreadsheets, like it's like the little things, right? And that's what I mean with intuition, right, like you need to see a lot of products, try smell, taste products to be able to tell when a product is good, and then also be able to judge whether an idea or a feature is good. And I'd much rather make an opinionated decision and be wrong about it than crowdsourcing these decisions and then always making the safe decision. So I believe like you know, being opinionated. Having a philosophy with what your product should be is very important to building a product that people will really love at the end of the day.

Daniel: Very much so. Do you feel like you have to stay involved there for a while, or is there a point where you think the system has to be set up such that the PMs or product leaders have the empowerment to make their own decisions? Short answer is yes, I think it will always have to be involved. I think it's actually crazy to think that CEO should not be involved in product. I mean, product is literally what you're selling and it's in some ways the most important thing about your business. So how could you not be intimately involved as a CEO? That's the way I see it.

Now, that being said, you don't want to create an environment where you micromanage everything, of course, right? So you want to put in place people who are able to act with conviction themselves, right? But I think that's different from letting them completely decide what is getting built and not being aware of it. I think it is very important to stay plugged in to have that sort of cohesive vision for where the product is going and keep doing that.

I also believe that the way software is built in many companies is not conducive to great product outcomes. And what I mean by that is a lot of times, you know, a PM product manager comes up with a feature, they spec it out, they work with design to create like a UI design, and then they hand it off to engineering, and then engineering builds something. It comes back, there's some Q&A, maybe some back and forth, but then it gets shipped, right? We fundamentally believe that this is not a good approach to building great, great products. I think you can actually build really decent products with it. But if you truly aspire to build the world's best software, you have to do it differently.

You have to bring the engineers, the ones that are building the codes, the ones that are living in the code base into the mix, and they have to understand why it is they're building what they're building. They have to understand the customer and so many times when they make decisions to little things, they will spot opportunities that a product manager could never identify. So it's really important that you bring them on board and some companies call it product engineers. I think that's just like a title thing, but at the end of the day, it means that the product manager is not the owner of the product. They're not dictating what gets built and how and all the specs. They're more like a research function that is there to assist the product development, which happens with engineers. Designers and the product manager informs that by providing insights and perspective from talking to customers and the market and competitors and all of that stuff, but they are not like the mini CEO as they're sometimes called for a feature or a product, they're more in like this research and assistance role.

Daniel: I think it was always obvious for us from the beginning that the vision was so big that at some point along the journey, we would have to bring in some outside capital to, you know, just like make the necessary investments to hire the team, build the product and do all of that stuff. So it wasn't so much that we were trying to figure out, should we raise or not, it was more like, OK, when do we feel like, you know, there's enough there that we feel comfortable taking someone else's money. It's a big responsibility, you know, if you take someone else's money and in the beginning, it's like, you know, they say family, friends and fools, right, for a reason. Uh, a lot of times they lose the money, right? And we just wanted to make sure that we felt really good about it before we did that and did not lose the money, frankly.

Daniel: I mean, it sucks, right? Like, you know, fundraising as an early stage, it's funny because in the beginning, when you start out doing your pre-seed, your seed round, man, it's such a grind, right? Like as a founder, unless you have some prior background, unless you already are super connected and know everybody in the industry, if that's not you, then chances are it's not going to be a fun experience. It's just not how it goes, right? Even like, you know, getting into a meeting is difficult in the beginning, then later, once the business starts to take off a little bit, there's this interesting moment where it completely shifts. Like all of a sudden, like, you know, the VCs and the investors are the ones that are trying to get a meeting with you and now you are in the position where there's like way too many emails coming in, and you're trying to figure out like how to spend your time, so you actually start to appreciate what it was like for the investors.

Daniel: You know, for the Series A, which we did 2022. We actually ran a very, very short process. I think it took us like two weeks from first meeting until we had term sheets and then like another week to actually sign a term sheet for seed and Series A rounds. At least in my experience, it's all about like, you know, do you have traction and is the investor excited about the idea and usually, you know, pretty early, right? Like 20 minutes into a conversation, the person who ended up doing our Series A, Sanji from Open View, he literally like, 20 minutes into our first conversation, stopped me and said, all right, what does it take to win this deal? Like, I don't need to hear anymore, like I've heard enough, like what does it take to win this deal, right? And I feel like it's almost obvious when you have that meeting and you know, oh, wow, like, you know, this could be some something that could work out.

I guess later on, like, you know, for where we are now, it shifts a little bit, right, because now it's no longer the question of, are you going to get funded, yes or no, but more like, OK, who is the best partner to help us fulfill our vision. And make this like a really big meaningful company for the long term, right? So even like, you know, with Altos, you know, the long term focus that you guys have, that was really important to us, right, and getting to know you better and the team here and how everybody thought like that was a much bigger consideration than when we raised our seed round several years ago, for example.

Daniel: I would say the thing that I did not appreciate at the very beginning of the journey is how incredibly long it would take to get to a place where it really, you can really see the future. You know, everyone understands it intellectually when you say, oh, it takes like 7 to 10 years for any company to be successful, right? But when you're in it, when you're like in year 3, year 4, it can feel really long and it's almost like this thing where for the longest time, you're just trying to survive and then it hits you finally where it's like, hey, I think we're no longer fighting to to survive. I think, you know, now I can actually shift around how big could this be.

But before you hit that moment, it's a real grind and I would say if I could go back and talk to me at the very beginning, I would just like really emphasize, hey, make sure that you embrace it. It's like part of the journey, don't get discouraged. I mean, we didn't, but still like it would have been nice to hear that and and and to know that this is what it takes.