We had the opportunity to interview Kailu Guan, Co-Founder and CCO of HelloAva, the AI smart platform that provides custom skincare products.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and HelloAva?   

A: My name is Kailu Guan and I am the Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of HelloAva. Before starting HelloAva, I was a multidisciplinary designer and my area of concentration included human-centred design, fashion design, augmented reality (AR), and wearable technology. Companies and projects that I have worked on include IDEO, Intel and Hermes. My work has exhibited at SXSW, TechCrunch, Le Révélateur D’innovation Paris and MIT Media Lab. Vogue Italia, WWD, Dezeen, Fashionista, Viewpoint, and Computer Arts are among the publications that have covered my work. I graduated from Parsons and Central Saint Martins College of Arts.

HelloAva is the first tech-enabled personalization platform that helps individuals discover personalized skincare products and regimen by leveraging smart learning, AI and dermatologist expertise. It was launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NY as a Battlefield finalist and was recently awarded the winner of L’Oreal’s (LRLCY)Women in Digital. Since launch, HelloAva has seen a double-digit customer growth MoM and now has a customer base of over 100,000 users.

The user starts off by finishing a skin quiz and submitting a photo to establish a skin profile. Then HelloAva will match the user to a skincare expert who is a licensed aesthetician to go through consultation via text. Then our skin advisor will double-check the product recommendations that are generated by the algorithm to make sure they match the users' preferences. Then users will be able to purchase the products on the platform seamlessly. It doesn't only end here. Our skin advisor will also check in with the user in a few weeks. And this also helps us to improve the accuracy of our algorithms. 

Q:  Is the software free for users to use? 

A: It’s free for users to take the quiz and get the skin diagnosis. We ask users to commit to a $10 consultation fee prior to connecting them to a skin advisor, which will be credited towards their purchase. So essentially, the service is free to use.

Q: When did you launch?  

A: We launched at Techcrunch Disrupt NY at the end of 2017. 

Q: Sometimes, due to lighting and other issues, skin coloring can vary greatly from the actual skin color in images.How does your system handle these differences to ensure proper recommendations? 

The reason why HelloAva is different from other competitors on the market is because the combination of AI and human expertise. Our system will generate an initial set of product recommendations based on users’ skin profile and image diagnosis of their skin, but our skin advisors, who are licensed aestheticians, will make sure they meet our users’ preferences and needs based on the skin consultation. 

Q: Is any part of your AI or software patented?

A: We have proprietary machine learning algorithms and we are in the process of patenting them. 

Q: How did you get the idea for HelloAva?

A: We started Helloava because finding the right skincare product had been truly a struggle for both me and Siqi, who is my co-founder. We both suffered from acne as teenagers and realized that friends' recommendations don't necessarily work for us because everyone's skin is so different. Even though our life trajectories were very different. She used to be in finance and I was trained as a designer. We realized what we share here is so much more than a problem that both of us experienced. So we decided to do something about it. During the time when Siqi was at Stanford MBA, she first started to explore the idea and later on we did several pivots to land on what HelloAva is today. 

Q: What is the significance of the name? How did you come up with it?

A: It was inspired by the movie Ex Machina. Ava is the protagonist of the movie who is an artificial intelligence. 

Q: How do you find your skin care experts?

A: All of our skin experts are licensed aestheticians who have gone through rigorous training and are extremely knowledgeable about skin health and skincare. Our co-founder Lian, who’s a dermatologist, interviews each of them before they join the team.

Q: What is the main benefit that your company provides to the skincare world?

A: HelloAva brings together both the smart learning and human expertise to help users to the best skincare and haircare products. What we realize is that skincare is an aspirational purchase with a problem-solving goal. So it's very important for us to capture both the accuracy of how well the products will work and also the preference of our customers. The goal is never to have AI completely replace humans but rather, to empower the decision-making process. AI works a lot better in leading customers to the right sets of products and it’s much more accurate and efficient than human recommendations. It takes out all the trail and error and can solve the problem of “not knowing what fits me”. We then couple this with the human expertise to make the experience both scientifically accurate and emotionally nourishing so that customers feel supported, understood and cared for. When we started, we are around 50/50 (50% AI and 50% human), and now we’ve improved to automation to close to 80%.

Q: Did you hit any roadblocks that almost caused you to throw in the towel?

I would say one of the biggest challenges we've faced is dealing with a lot of growing pains. I remember distinctly that Snapchat featured us on one of the public accounts and it brought us over 12k users overnight, which completely broke our system. And we had to take out the "Get Started" button to make sure our website functioned. But what was surprising to see, was that people start to message us, email us or even call us and try to get skincare help. A lot of these users were teenagers who suffered from acne but yet to find a solution. When we see that these users are writing in and saying "can you help me with acne, I have been trying everything". It really touches us on a personal level and we feel that we were on a mission to make the experience 10 x better, and emergencies like these happen all the time at start-ups, so it has been a really great learning process to how to solve problems efficiently but also see things like these as a gift as messages that our users are trying to tell us. 

Q: For users that aren't familiar with Snapchat, can you elaborate on what happened with Snapchat?

A: Snapchat featured us on one of the public accounts and it brought us over 12k users overnight, which completely broke our system. We had to take out the "Get Started" button to make sure our website functioned. What was surprising to see was that users started to message us, email us or even call us and try to get skincare help. A lot of these users were teenagers who suffered from acne but yet to find a solution. When we see that these users are writing in and saying "can you help me with acne, I have been trying everything". It really touches us on a personal level and we feel that we are on a mission to make the current skincare discovery experience 10 times better. 

Q: If you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of business/financial advice, what would it be?

A: Don’t panic if anything happens! Things will always be better than you imagine!

Q: Are you looking for additional funding or have a crowdfunding campaign? If so, what are you looking for in a potential investor, and how can interested readers get in touch/learn more?

A: Yes, we are running a crowdfunding campaign on Republic. You can find it here: https://republic.co/helloava/

Q: Where do you see the company in 5 years and how do you plan to get there?

A: I would say personalization has been, and continues to be a trend in the beauty industry. So AI is the key technology that will drive this process. But at the same time, we also see a big wave of next-level smart skincare tools that have smart algorithms built in, which I personally think is super interesting and also something HelloAva cares a lot about.

Q: Is there any advice you'd give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?

A: There are many variants that can drive the success of a business. Some of these factors are identifying a big market, figuring out if it’s a real demand vs artificial demand, if the demand recurring enough, how suitable it is for e-commerce, etc. If a founder can identify and possess both the passion to solve a personal problem as well as tackle a big market with a valid business model, then he/she is probably going to do something great. 

Q: Is there anything else you want to share with our audience?

A: We also worked on a collaboration with Unilever (UL) to bring the HelloAva skin experience into the hair world. We launched a brand new hair analyzer on both Unilever's hair content site Allthingshair.com as well as our own site. This will allow both of us to provide our customers with more insight into their specific hair needs and match them with the appropriate product. And we are hoping to take this internationally to different regions and potentially bring it to other categories as well.