Jennifer Boulden and Heather Stephenson

www.idealbite.com

Heather Stephenson will be a featured speaker at Ladies Who Launch LIVE in Los Angeles, taking place on May 31. Click for more info.

What if you can’t afford a Prius? Is it better to choose plastic or paper at the grocery store? Ideal Bite co-founders Jennifer Boulden and Heather Stephenson used to field questions like these all the time. They were working for Boulden’s sustainable business consulting firm, and friends looked to them as experts who were trying to be green in their own lives.

Seeing a need for eco expertise that wasn’t dry or holier-than-thou, Boulden and Stephenson used their savings to launch Ideal Bite from their respective home offices in Montana and New York City in 2005. Drawing on their marketing and advertising backgrounds and taking a cue from the sassy (and hugely successful) e-mail newsletter Daily Candy, they began delivering daily eco-tips that drew subscribers by being hip, fun, and honest about the fact that no one’s perfect when it comes to being green.

Ideal Bite now shows all signs of becoming a cultural phenomenon. With 211,000 subscribers, and local editions in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, the company has created a community of “Biters” who are taking on the environmental crisis, one bite at a time.

What we learned from Heather: “Quit your day job. It’s the hardest choice to make, but it’s the most important thing you can do to make your business succeed. It took maybe seven or eight months for both of us to decide to do this 100 percent of the time and we’re going to starve. But it was worth it. If it’s a good enough idea, it deserves and needs all of your attention. It’s really hard. I ran up $100,000 in credit card debt, but it pays off in the end.”

It Is Easy Being Green

Heather: “We started Ideal Bite to give regular, everyday people a very easy way to start to green their life and their lifestyle. So each day we e-mail out a daily tip that gives somebody one little thing that they can choose to do, or not do, that will help green their life.”

Timing Is Everything

Jennifer: “We would probably have been out of business a long time ago had we not been featured in the first Vanity Fair green issue. We got the call that we were going to be in a full page photo in that first green issue, and I really thought someone was playing a cruel joke, because we were so about to go out of business. So we went back to all of the investors that were on the fence and were like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to be in the green issue with Laurie David, so do you want in or out?’ And they all jumped in.”

Borrowing a Recipe for Success

Jennifer: “[Daily Candy has] a very irreverent tone. And we didn’t see anybody in the environmental arena having that same sort of pithy, sassy voice. This does not have to be preachy. Let’s make fun of ourselves and not take this all so seriously. I think that really resonated with people. They’re like, ‘Oh, finally, I can be part of this green thing without feeling bad for not being perfect. I might even get a few chuckles out of it.’”

Howdy Pardner

Jennifer: “Having the right partner has been invaluable; having the wrong partner can just wreak havoc on your life. I bring in the subscribers, and Heather monetizes them. I’m good at the front-end stuff, like marketing and PR. And she is fabulous at sales and editorial. It’s just one of those things where we complement each other so nicely. It was a no-brainer, and we were able to use our inherent skills for the major pieces of the business.”

Virtual Company, Real Challenges

Heather: “We could not have built the company without Instant Messenger. Logging into IM was effectively showing up to work, and logging out of IM was effectively going home at night. That was so key, because it really gives you the sense that you’re working in an office together. That said, don’t have difficult conversations over e-mail or IM. It’s too easy to misconstrue what’s being said.”

Finding Face Time

Heather: “It was really hard. I have to say, in retrospect, I would have put a little bit more money toward trying to make sure we were all in the same place once or twice a year.”

Interns Are Your Friends

Heather: “The majority of the employees that we have in the company, even today, came through our intern program. They get to find out if they like the start-up environment. We get to find out if they thrive in it.”

One Subscription at a Time

Jennifer: “It’s a free subscription to the daily tips, so we certainly can’t pay a whole lot of marketing dollars to acquire subscribers. That’s obvious, so we knew our subscribers had to come from two things. One is awareness-building through PR, and the kind of buzz that happens there. And then there’s word of mouth, so our tips have just got to rock. The other source now, because we’ve got more than 700-something tips, is basically coming up through search engines, and people linking to us, and things like that.”

Magic Numbers

Jennifer: “We knew that we wouldn’t be able to get a valuation that we wanted from, say, a venture capitalist unless we were over 100,000 subscribers. We really wanted to come to the table with some good subscriber numbers and some really good advertisers on board. In terms of our subscriber goals now, we are basically just trying to grow as fast as humanly possible, because the space is getting so cluttered. And the more we can kind of stay out in front, the better.”

Buzz, Buzz, Buzz

Jennifer: “If you’re perplexed by PR, then try to work with some PR freelancers, or a really small, hungry agency. I went to PR freelancers that were willing to work on placement only. There are not a lot of them, but I found a few. So that means we were only paying for results. And then, if you’re getting traction and you realize that the business does have proof of concept, it does make sense to give up a small chunk of equity if you can find a PR agency to act as a partner and not charge you cash because they believe so much in your business. But I’d also caution against people giving away equity too early, because they usually give away a ton, and they don’t realize that it is far too much.”

Smart Money Is More Money

Jennifer: “We took on private equity, which is just a hair different than venture capital. And we took a discounted rate, i.e., what the value of our company would be, by going with this partner, because this partner was strategic. We went with Bob Pittman’s investment group, and Bob Pittman started MTV and Nickelodeon, and also is an investor in Daily Candy, so he knows the e-mail publishing space. That was an interesting decision. Heather and I were like, wow, we can get $4 million in the bank for giving up x percent of equity by going with this group in California, or we can go with Bob and his team and only get $2 million in the bank and still give up the same x percent. But we went with them because of the strategic value, and it really has paid off.”

Some Work and Some Play

Jennifer: “Heather and I both have commitments to our outside hobbies. She is a certified yoga instructor and is often getting re-certifications during the weekends. So where it might be tempting to work the entire week in New York and then fly back on Saturday, a lot of times we can’t do that because we’re involved in other things. I ride horses competitively, so I schedule my travel and everything around my shows. If I didn’t, that time would get gobbled up. You have to almost be very structured about your hobbies.”

Build Your Own Green Business

Heather: “One of the best things that you can do is to instill an attitude about it in your employees. Put a green portion into their benefits package. And some of the things that fit in that green portion would be half a day off a quarter, or a couple of hours a month, that people can take to volunteer for green events, whether it’s a clean-up or something else. We do it at Ideal Bite as a team-building day. We give them a $20 a month commuter fee if they take public transportation, walk to work, drive a hybrid vehicle, or drive a biodiesel vehicle.”

Mostly Green, Most of the Time

Jennifer: “I buy non-eco toilet paper because I’m like, ‘You know what, I’m sitting on my butt like 10 hours a day, working. I’m not using the scratchy stuff until it improves.’”

Heather: “I live in the middle of California wine country, and I love Italian wines, so the wine I choose to drink is shipped 6,000 miles to my neighborhood.”

This Featured Lady was profiled by Sarah Tomlinson, a freelance writer in Los Angeles.