I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs pitch ideas that never turn into anything. I’ve also seen a few ignore all the reasons something shouldn’t work and build a business that changes everything.
That’s what Jaclyn Fu did.
Jaclyn is the cofounder of Pepper, an intimate apparel company for small-chested women. AA to B cups. It started in her Denver apartment with a half-baked prototype, a personal pain point, and a Kickstarter campaign she accidentally set to run for 13 days instead of 30.
It raised 470 percent of its goal.
She hit $10K in ten hours, left her job at Conversocial three weeks later, and never looked back. No big VC rounds. No industry background. Just joy, conviction, and a relentless focus on serving women who had been ignored by the market.
I had her on the podcast to talk about that moment and everything that came after. But this post isn’t about the podcast. It’s about what we can all learn from how she built it.
Conviction is a requirement, not a luxury.
Jaclyn wasn’t testing an idea. She knew it needed to exist. Not because of data or market size or a slide in a pitch deck. Because it solved her own problem. Because she had talked to hundreds of women who felt the same. And because she couldn’t imagine a world where this product didn’t exist.
That’s clarity.
And when the VCs said no, too small, too niche, too hard to understand, she didn’t shift her story. She found angels who believed. She built the business to be profitable. And she kept going.
Niche is a feature, not a flaw.
The whole world was chasing scale. She chased specificity. She didn’t say “this is for everyone.” She said “this is for you.” That’s why it worked.
Brands often try to look inclusive by expanding their audience. Jaclyn made her brand feel inclusive by narrowing in on the people most ignored. The ones who couldn’t find a bra that fit but were always told they should be grateful one existed.
She didn’t build Pepper to change people. She built it to celebrate them.
Joy is the engine.
This is part of what makes Jaclyn awesome. When she’s stuck or scared or in her head, she doesn’t go back to strategy decks. She goes back to joy.
The joy of talking to her customers. The joy of solving a problem that matters. The joy of writing ideas in a notebook and pitching her family on a six-hour car ride.
She told me, “Sometimes, the joy is all you have. But it’s always where the answers come from.”
Starting a company is hard. You’ll hear a lot of reasons why something might not work. You’ll feel a lot of pressure to prove your worth with funding announcements, logos, and scale. But maybe the thing that actually matters is whether you believe it needs to exist.
Because when you know, you know.
And that’s perfectly enough.
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