- +1-910-939-3205
- Cary, North Carolina 27518, United States
- hello@fafabiotic.com
Greetings, skin microbiome enthusiasts!
I want to tell you about one of the biggest things I got wrong when I started Fafabiotic. Not a formulation mistake. Not a marketing tactic. Something much more fundamental: I was wrong about who my customers would be.
And I don’t mean a little wrong. I mean wrong in the most complete, humbling way.
Let me start with a caveat, because I care about being honest with you. I don’t know all of our customers. I never will, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But I’ve gotten to know quite a few of them, through conversations, through emails, through the notes people send me. And the ones I’ve come to know have turned out to be a remarkably good window into the rest. So this is what I’ve learned, offered with that humility.
When I launched, my logic seemed airtight. Our product is premium. It’s a serious, science-first probiotic skincare that isn’t cheap. So, I reasoned, I need to focus on high-income households. Find people with money to spend, show them the quality, and they’ll invest in a simple, well-made product.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
I could not have been more wrong if I tried.
It’s not that income has nothing to do with it. It’s part of the picture. But it turned out to be the least interesting part, and nowhere near the thing that actually connects our customers to each other.
Here is what I found instead, and it surprised me.
Our customers, first and foremost, are confident.
Not loud. Not flashy. Quietly, deeply confident in themselves. And that one trait explains almost everything about them.
They don’t buy skincare because a neighbor told them to. They don’t chase a product because it’s trending, or because someone on social media said it’s the thing this season. They aren’t doing this so people will notice they’ve done something, or notice that they spent money on a certain brand. That whole external engine, the one so much of the beauty industry runs on, simply doesn’t drive them.
They’re confident in their own skin. No pun intended.
What they actually want is quieter and, I think, wiser: a simple way to take care of their skin for the long term. They’re banking on their future selves. They want to feel good when it’s just them and the mirror, in private, with no audience. Not because a neighbor validated them. Not because an app told them they looked good that day. Just for themselves.
Here’s what struck me most. That core trait, that self-possessed confidence, is something no advertisement, no dataset, and no marketing budget can teach you about your customers. You can’t purchase that insight. You have to earn it, slowly, by actually paying attention to the people who choose you.
And it’s genuinely hard to act on, too. Think about how digital advertising works. When you set up a campaign, you’re handed a menu of demographic attributes to select: age, income, location, interests, life events. You pick your targets from a list.
“Confident people” is not on that list.
It’s not an attribute you can hone in on. There’s no checkbox for “self-assured individuals who take care of their skin for themselves and not for anyone else’s approval.” I can’t advertise only to them, as much as I’d love to.
But here’s the interesting part. Even though I can’t target that trait directly, the way we talk, the way we communicate, the philosophy we lead with, tends to attract exactly those people anyway. The message finds them. “Less is more.” “Respect your skin.” Quiet confidence calls to quiet confidence. You draw the people who resonate with how you actually speak.
So here’s my point, and it’s bigger than skincare.
When you have a product or a service, a lot of people will pressure you to define your customer in a single tidy sentence. Some will charge you a great deal of money to hand you that definition, a persona, a segment, a target profile wrapped up in a slide deck.
But the truth is simpler, and cheaper, and slower. Getting to know your customer is mostly a matter of time and attention. It’s looking honestly at your data, yes, but more than that, it’s actually looking at your customers, the real ones, and asking what they truly have in common underneath the surface.
For me, the surface answer was “high income.” The real answer, the one that took time and conversations to see, was “confident, future-minded people who do this for themselves.”
No one could have sold me that insight. I had to meet my customers to find it.
And honestly? I’m so glad I was wrong. Because the people I got instead are exactly the people I’d have hoped for, if I’d been wise enough to hope for them in the first place.
Until next blog, cheers!
