Don’t be Scared – just start.
Looking for the north star in a small world
Nicole had been ready for a change. She had been working in real estate and felt like something was missing. So she packed her bags and headed to Europe. She didn’t quite know what she was looking for, except to broaden her worldview.
A large part of her experience was *going* to Europe. She took a risk, and that very act of taking the risk seemed to open a new part of her that was ready to take more risks.
Secondly, being in a new place, meeting new people, seeing new sights, and exploring new parts of the world caused her perspective to shift. There were challenges along the way. She stayed on a tight budget, ran into language barriers, and didn’t always know what the day would bring. However, it was these experiences that primed her for what was to come next.
Startup Glam Up
After her travels, Nicole moved to San Francisco. She found herself networking and thinking of what she would launch.
A 10-minute call was all it took. Nicole and her co-founder, Aaron Paul, realized that they could create something meaningful. They launched Glam Up, an app focused on providing beauty advice right from your phone.
Upload a picture, and AI scans your face to offer makeup advice on how to make you look your best. Simple and very viable.
It launched just 1 month after that call. But it was barely usable. The co-founding team had done it, they had leaped and put something out in the world. But would it work?
They worked through the bugs and significantly improved the app. Within a few months, they had gone beyond just improving Glam Up.
In fact, Glam Up skyrocketed.
Within 6 months, they secured #3 on the App Store, had 1 million users, and reached the milestone of 150K MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue).
Hard work at play
From the outside, it could just look like Nicole got lucky. She may have just come across the 1 in a million idea.
However, when talking to Nicole, it became apparent that Nicole wasn’t just leaving things up to chance.
She was bootstrapping her business – a constraint that Nicole really appreciates, as it directs you to make strategic decisions while also trying everything possible to get it off the ground. They had a limited budget with an “expiration date” where eventually they would run out of time.
Nicole remembers running 20+ marketing strategies, never tossing something out and hoping for the best. She tested, measured, and iterated. She partnered with 100+ beauty pages on Instagram. She spun up a team of UGC creators to chase repeatable virality. When one path stalled, she tried iterating more. That bias for action—persistence and grit over vibes and wishes—is what carried her and Aaron to real traction.
Then she did it again. With Sprout, an AI job-automation app. Nicole reused the same playbook: fast experiments, ruthless iteration, and a UGC-led growth engine. She ported the Instagram/UGC framework, tightened the feedback loops, and scaled what stuck. The result: Sprout hit $250K MRR in about eight months from launch, powered not by a single lightning-bolt idea, but by a system that manufactures momentum.
Fight fear by doing.
Nicole’s advice for any youth entrepreneur is to overcome your fears and insecurities and take a chance. Do something, then, when it doesn’t work, try something else.
She notes that it is really easy to over-romanticize the idea of entrepreneurship. This is actually quite challenging because the stories that emerge are often a romanticized version of the entrepreneurial journey.
It isn’t some magical journey, though. Nicole found it to be a lonely and challenging path. She says that you really shouldn’t glorify being a founder. It takes incredible courage, risk, and most importantly, hard work. You will find along the journey that there are only a few things that you can do as the founder.
However, once she started, it wasn’t as scary as she thought it would be. It was very intense, but you eventually overcome the fear and enter the grind of doing the hard work of building something meaningful.
She reconfirmed this is not for everyone. There will be people who find that being a founder isn’t the right fit. However, if you truly consider it and know deep down that it is what you would like to do, take a deep breath – then start.
Connect with Nicole Cheung and Aaron Paul on LinkedIn
