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Eva Chan: Helping Founders Realize Their Ambitious Dreams

Eva Chan: Helping Founders Realize Their Ambitious Dreams

Hello friends, my name is Spiffy, I’m an interplanetary journalist. Today I’m in Santa Monica, California to talk to Eva Chan co-founder of Launch Pop. Eva is an exquisite entrepreneur herself who has discovered a recipe for success that she is now sharing with other new founders. Let’s see how she’s doing it!

Spiffy: Hi Eva, it’s wonderful to meet you. Let’s jump right in! Can you tell me about the challenges you are addressing in your work with Launch Pop?

Eva: I'd love to, Spiffy. At Launch Pop, we have a deep passion to help founders realize their ideas and transform them into stellar founders. We do this by embedding our team with theirs so it feels like you have an in-house CMO (chief marketing officer) but with five to seven team members who have built and launched multiple direct-to-consumer (DTC) companies. Our most impactful work is in our proprietary research methodology called Signal Testing. Founders come to us with an idea or ingredient to create a new product or disrupt a category. We take this as the base to help them figure out the opportunity in the market, how to build the brand, and go-to-market. The results of this method have generated a lot of amazing case studies at Launch Pop such as Morning Recovery Drink, Liquid IV, Hydrant, GEM, Rael, and Topicals.

Spiffy: Tell me more! What motivated you to support founders like this?

Eva: One of our friends at the time had an idea to start a hangover drink company. He was at Tesla as a project manager at the time and had no idea how to do branding or marketing. My girlfriend and I filled that gap perfectly. So we decided that every night from 5:00 pm to 1:00 am we would work on this company.  In less than six months, we launched the Morning Recover Drink on Indiegogo. In less than an hour, we raised over $150,000. We were trending globally and the founder was able to get two investors on board. Everyone started to wonder who was involved in building this company? Emails were coming in asking us now to help them. I suddenly realized my purpose: to help high potential founders realize their ambitious dreams

Spiffy: What a story—and epiphany! How have you taken that forward to create a more equitable world? 

Eva: Well, Spiffy, we're choosing to help women, people of color, and other minorities kick start their ideas and raise funding. We also work at educating our founders on how to be more gender and body-inclusive when making day-to-day decisions with their brand, partnerships, talent, and more. 

Spiffy: Have you reached any milestones that you’re super proud of? What kind of impact do you think it will have?

Eva: We've provided over $20 million in value to founders up to date.  This is a huge milestone for us! What this is means: Founders with big ideas are shifting culture, building a better world, giving capital access, and driving sales so they can continue to grow their companies and hire amazing talent.

Spiffy: Can you tell me about a startup or project you’ve worked with that exemplifies the impact you’re striving to make?

Eva: The founder of GEM wanted to create a functional food snack with the ingredient spirulina, a carbon-negative food. She believes that if we can do more with this ingredient, we can help the environment and at the same time provide amazing nutrition to women. With our research, we helped the founder identify an opportunity in the vitamin space. We were able to create a nutrient-dense food bite that is delicious—allowing women to ditch the pills! Since launch, she has raised over $10 million in funding.

Spiffy: Before we sign off, is there anything else you would love to tell our audience? 

Eva: Here’s a fun fact, Spiff! I put my apartment room on Airbnb in the early days to make some money for food and rent. When someone was occupying the room, I'd sleep in the same room with my co-founder. It was a move to survive but it was also fun to meet travelers from around the world!

Spiffy: Well, thanks for hosting me today, Eva, and thanks for sharing your story and your infectious enthusiasm for entrepreneurship! It’s been an honor.

 

Eva Chan, the co-founder of Launch Pop, is a Forbes 30 under 30 entrepreneur and has helped launch many companies in the past seven years. She has developed a playbook that is now shared with founders so they can launch their company through better decision-making and efficiency. Eva’s unique background as an expert in brand building, research, design, marketing, and operations allows her to build a bridge between branding and growth. (Nominated by Creation Crate. First published on the Ladderworks website on December 8, 2021.)

 

© 2021 Ladderworks LLC. Edited by Jill Landis Jha. Spiffy’s illustration by Shreyas Navare. Follow Spiffy’s interviews of founders building a more equitable world here.