Tired of Building Offers? Validate Your Business Idea First

If you’re building new offers, investing time, and still questioning whether it will actually convert, you don’t have a scaling problem. You have a validation problem.

In this episode, I sit down with Anya Cheng, Founder and CEO of Taelor, an AI-powered menswear rental platform backed by early investors in companies like Nvidia, TikTok, Facebook, Lyft, and Spotify, to unpack how to validate your business idea before you build.

Anya didn’t start with a polished product. She started with a hypothesis, a landing page, and one customer she almost ignored. What followed was a repeatable way to test demand, get first customers without a finished product, and build traction before scaling.

We walk through real examples of MVP validation, how to avoid building offers no one buys, and the exact thinking shift that turns uncertainty into clarity.

If you’re refining an offer, launching something new, or looking to scale without wasted effort, this conversation will recalibrate how you build.

Books Mentioned
- Get to AHA by Andy Cunningham

If you want to experience what Anya is building, visit taelor.style and use code podcast25 for 25% off your first month. You can also reach out directly at Anya@taelor.ai to explore partnerships, insights, or opportunities to connect.

Join Dr. William Attaway on the Catalytic Leadership podcast as he shares transformative insights to help high-performance entrepreneurs and agency owners achieve Clear-Minded Focus, Calm Control, and Confidence.

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Transcript

Meet Anya Chang And Taylor

Dr. William Attaway 0:00

It's an honor today to have Anya Chang on the podcast. Anya is the founder and CEO of Taylor, an AI-powered menswear rental platform backed by early investors in companies like NVIDIA, TikTok, Facebook, Lyft, and Spotify. Before launching Taylor, she led product and e-commerce initiatives at Meta, eBay, Target, and McDonald's, helping to scale digital commerce and AI-driven personalization for millions of users. She's been named one of Girls in Tech's 40 under 40 and has received more than 30 tech and marketing awards. She holds a master's in integrated marketing communications from Northwestern University and an MBA from the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. Anya is also a 500 startups mentor and adjunct lecturer at Northwestern, where she teaches product management, marketing, and entrepreneurship. Anya, I'm so glad you're here. Thanks for being on the show.

Anya Cheng 0:59

This is Anya. I'm founder and CEO of Taylor. We are an AI company. We use AI to pick clothes for busy men. So in the old time, we have celebrity has human stylus, but now with AI, people have AI copywriter, AI accounting, AI lawyer, and now we are offering AI stylus. Before on the company, I was a meta eBay and Target, so I'm excited to share more of those experiences to everyone. Thank you.

Intro 1:28

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive. Here is your host, author, and leadership and executive coach, Dr. William Attaway.

Dr. William Attaway 1:48

How did you get where you are? How did you get to Taylor? What's what does your journey in leadership look like?

Anya Cheng 1:53

Yeah, so while Taylor only offered menswear rental service for busy men, but I actually started a company because of my personal problem. When I was working for Meta in eBay, I was only a few female leaders there, people, women with color, I'm an immigrant from Taiwan. And I always feel a little bit impossible syndrome. I led large a technology team, also marketer and data scientists in training. So I feel like I want to look presentable. At least people won't know that I'm freaking out every day. So I started trying some services like subscription boxes, like stitch fix. But you have to buy from every single shipment. You get a clothes, someone picked for you, great. But then once you receive it, you have to decide: can I buy somewhere cheaper for this type of clothes? How many times can I wear these clothes? How to pay these clothes for swallowers? Just a lot of my spaces come into it. Then I start using rental service. Amor, Rent the Runway, Newly, which make 500 million per year backed by Urban Outfitter. Lots of women's rental companies out there, but they all require me to pick. Hey, here's 100,000 garments, spend three hours picking, picking, picking, and I don't know how to pick. I'm not fashion forward. I don't read G Hua Vogue. I don't know what to pick. So I realize a fashion company has been designing for people who are into fashion. Not for people like me who just want to get ready for the day and be successful. I start doing research. Who else thinks like me? Hey shopping, hate laundry, need to look good, but won't want to spend time chasing after fashion. Turn out that they are all busy men. Single guy, sales guy, executive, pastor, professor, managers. They are busy men who are not into fashion but socially active. And that's why Taylor was born. To help those people look great with AI stylists, with rental, so paying $100 per month, they can wear 10 clothes. They don't have to pay due shopping or laundry anymore.

Dr. William Attaway 3:59

Fascinating. You know, I I use AI for a lot of different things in the businesses that I'm part of. But I've never thought about using it in the way you're describing to help pick fashion style. I have zero fashion style, not fashion for, by any stretch of the imagination. And so to hear you describe this, it just opens up a different world. Like the idea of using AI in this way.

AI Styling Plus Real Stylists

Anya Cheng 4:23

Yeah, so a lot of our customers, they have been wearing the same thing again and again. Last 10 years, they if you open their closet, they have Nike, Lululemon, Banana Republics, and that's about it. And so they have been wearing the same thing every since giving they buy the same thing. And if you open their LinkedIn profile, it's the same jacket as they wear today. So it's not that they want to be all Steve Jobs style. In fact, they do want to try something different, but they don't want to spend those MySpaces. They are not people who want to spend a lot of time learning about fashion trends. By the way, this year, last year's fashion trend is the color of mocha. Light bronze. So if you have brown color stuff, take it out, take it out. It's all trendy now. And the year before is actually the red wine color. So if you have some red wine, like star red color, bring it out. You are trendy. And by the way, shorts, like shorts and shorter, the trendier. If you have the shorts that's like over knees, please throw them away. And skinny jeans is out of style. So that's it. That's all the trendy trend you need to know. Not a lot of trends in men's fashion, but these are just four things that you need to know. But a lot of our customers, they they don't know the trend. They don't want to follow the trend. And our AI help them to figure out how to wear. But they don't want to be prom engineer either. So our AI used by our human stylists, and each customer assigned a real human stylist who will talk to them and then decide, help them to figure out the trilogy on their style. Say they want to impress the day, or they want to look fit in because they are consultants, they want people to tell them the truth, or they want to stand out. They are a new manager, they don't want people to see them as engineers. They want those people see them as people managers now. So understanding their goal and found it, our AI provide amazing tool to help our stylists to style the customers.

MVP Thinking And First Customers

Dr. William Attaway 6:16

Love that. Walk me through what it was like to start this company. Did people just flock to this and day two you had an amazing customer base? Or was this a bit of a hard lift at the beginning?

Anya Cheng 6:30

So I teach product management at Northwestern University. So I also always tell people that to start something and launch your minimum viable product, your MVP. People tend to almost thought it's minimal viable product is the smallest product you can launch. That's not true. It's the smallest product that can validate a hypothesis. For example, when you have Amazon Echo launch, Amazon Echo, the hypothesis was people talk to the machine. So when they started, they have human behind to play the music. As soon as someone said, play music, okay, let me play music. Because if people don't want to talk to the machine, why would you hire an AI engineer to respond to that? It makes no sense. Right? Or rent around with a woman's rental company, the hypothesis is woman rent dress. So they screenshot a whole bunch of dress from Macy's website. They send it to a customer in an email and ask people, would you like to rent dress, going to party? Because if no one responds, say yes, I will rent, why would you buy any of those dresses? For us, the same thing. We start with a Shopify side, $10 per month, and get it live. There was only one box there. Say if you are interested, leave your email to join our wail list. Month after, a guy emailed me, hey, I'm very interested in this service. Please bump me up and I love it so much. And I ignored him. He must be a scam. We are like nobody who would really want the service and email the company, say, please, please give me a service. I thought he's totally a scam. So then a month after, he called me. Somehow he added me on LinkedIn and I accepted, and he saw my number and he called me. And turned out that he's a realtor, so he's used to calling people all day long. So I pick up a call and say, Hey, I'm Michael, I'm from San Diego, I'm a real estate agent here. I really like the blue shorts on your website. And I opened our website. Yeah, there's really a blue shirt, and we don't even have that clothes. It's a stack photo from the the like Pixar. So the real customer is like, I am sorry, I know you guys must be really popular. I wait for two months. No, we have nothing. We're just not ready. So you're like, please bomb me up. Well listen, I'm very interested in the shirt. So then we went to the Macy's and it was right before Christmas. We bought anything that's on sale. We went to Paul's office and put in the clothes into the box and ship it to him. Michael became our first customer. From there, we did the same thing for 100 people. And we learned a lot about what we need for the business. Oh, we need AI. Otherwise, there's not enough style to style them. We need a reverse logistic because they need to return the clothes and we need laundry, so then we wash the clothes and send to other people. Also, we need to partner with fashion brands. So then we don't have like one clothes. It needs to be a variety of a style and brands. So we learn a lot about what's needed. With that, we put together a business plan and go pitch to investor, and that's how we raise $2 million to start.

Dr. William Attaway 9:34

That's remarkable. I love that story about Michael. I think that's so great. Send you an email and you just, that's not real. That's a scam. That's so good. When you talk about this with your students when you're when you're lecturing, when you're talking to other entrepreneurs about this, what is some advice that you can give on the other side of this successful launch?

Persistence That Won Brand Partners

Anya Cheng 9:56

I think people always see that uh success is like, you get this one, and I finally I met this guy, and the guy gave me a million dollars and that's it, right? So we're always looking for someone to save us. That the final moments of succeed. But the reality is most of the time they are non-linear. They are just a lot of things and eventually get there. For example, we okay, now we get Michael, but we know we need partner with fashion brands. Okay, where to find fashion brands? So I thought, hey, if we get on a trade publication for the fashion industry trade publication, then maybe the brands we can use uh news and say, hey, would you like to partner with us? So I went on a tech conference. I waited outside the press room, right? They always have a press room there. I as soon as the reporter came out, I gave him my business card. That's not true. I don't even have a business card. We're startups, it's just a random paper, write down our idea, and then right. So I found actually the WWD, which is a trade publication, in the conference. So after I went home, I follow up with her, follow up with her, follow up with her. Eventually she emailed me back. Nice. She said, I'm not interested in the story, please stop emailing me. Okay. But a month after she emailed me back. Ha ha, I told you so. You changed your mind, right? I told you so. No, she said I'm still thinking the idea is dumb, but my colleagues are very interested in the story, so I will leave you guys to talk. Amazing. I talked to the guy, the guy totally gets it. He loves the idea, he knows circular fashion, he understands 30% of clothes in the war go directly from factory to landfill, generating 10% of carbon emissions, 30% of polluted water. Crazy right? Crazy. 30 billion in the US every year go to landfill directly.

Dr. William Attaway 11:55

Oh my goodness, I did not know that.

Anya Cheng 11:57

So he knows why renting clothes is important, why circular fashion is important. He totally gets it. We are ready to get on the cover homepage tomorrow. Nothing happened. I follow up with him again and again and again, nothing happened. So life goes on. We went on a startup competition. We won the West Coast Championship and ready to compete on the global final. The competition is hosted by the University of Chicago. Nobody's going to care this news. It's just a school, like startup competition. No, that's not true. There's one person who cared about that besides me. In Chicago, there are two amazing schools, Northwestern University and University of Chicago. I am the faculty and alumni from Northwestern University, but also I'm an alumni from University of Chicago NBA. So I went pitch to the Northwestern University newspaper, student newspaper. I say, hey, I'm a Northwestern University faculty. Next week I might win University of Chicago, which is your competitor, you hate them. I might win their startup competition. And that's a news for student newspaper at least. Right? So then they did publish the news. And somehow, maybe there was just no news next day. So next morning, ABC News picked out a story from the student newspaper and they called and asked us to go on a morning show. So we did. We got on ABC News for the morning live show. So after that, I took the news clip. I sent it back to the trade publication, the WLD reporter. I said, hey, we had a great conversation. I believe that you still believe in a story. Probably can you send this news to your manager and then convince them to launch a publish a story. The next day the story came up. We said got the first supplier, which is Canadian brands. They emailed us, they say, I saw your news on W Trade Publications. We want to be your partner. Became the DLA became our first partner. With the first partner in place, the second partner, the third partner. Now we work with 150 brands in the US internationally. And including brands like Braille's, Johnson Murphy, Bonobos, Marine Lair, and Cartz, BYLT, all of the high-quality trendy brands that you name it, as well as amazing international brand that's Naya in the US. The best brand in Italy, best brand in Japan, those brands that are Naya in the US, you can find it on Taylor.

Dr. William Attaway 14:31

Goodness. You know, that story illustrates the power of persistence. You know, that first partner took so long and so much effort to get. But then the momentum began. The flywheel began to turn. And I think there's such a lesson there because so many entrepreneurs, when they face resistance, when they face difficulty and challenge, they try to press through, they try to press through, but so many give up before the breakthrough. And I think your story is so powerful because it illustrates what happens if you don't give up, if you keep pressing.

Anya Cheng 15:04

Yeah, so people didn't tend to think that they want to be, we all want to be the stone in a river that was picked up and then throw it across a river, right? Everyone wants to do that. The reality is that most of us, most of the time, we are to say the river under the water. The water coming, rule one side, and you rule another side and you rule the side. And after a while, you already crossed the river, you're on the other side. So, and looking back, you have walked through a long way and um a long journey and changed a lot. But it's just you don't see it because it's just a lot of small quick iterations versus like one step of silver bullet that actually solves the problem. Like, for example, we I talk about like, hey, we got this 100 customer and then we got a business plan, we got $2 million. How do we get $2 million? In fact, I we talked to a University of Chicago professor because we I started a business with my classmates, who we were classmates 10 years ago. After school, we each go work on our own life, we have different jobs, and then three years ago we started a business. So our professor actually became our investor since we are two students, and a lot of classmates became our investors because they know both of us. So one day we reach out to our professor and say, Hey, can you introduce some investor? And the professor is like, I'm a professor. Like, who do I know? So the professor connects us to a student who was also a founder. So I reached out to the student. In the conversation, I forgot about what I was trying to ask him. I was just genuinely trying to help him. He actually owned a company doing security camera. I used Word for Medi, broad internet to countries that didn't have internet, like Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda. So I knew a lot of bodyguard companies from those times. So I connect him with those companies, and then he actually got the great customer leads. So he reached out to me a week after. He said, hey, thank you so much for those amazing customer leads. How can I be helpful? Why would you reach out to me at the beginning? And I was like, oh my God, yes, I forgot. I was trying to ask you to refer me investor. So he connected us to Belink Capital, which is medalless for medalless lists, which means they are like best performing VC in the US. We think half an hour conversation as to how we get a million dollars from the venture capital.

Dr. William Attaway 17:37

Wow. The relationships matter so much in the entrepreneurial world. You know, here are relationships from school that are bearing fruit. How many years later? Right? It all goes back to those relationships and you invested in those. And I love to see the fruit from that and the connection from the professor to the student to the VC firm. That's so powerful. Have you always been more relational where you were trying to build and network with other people and build ways that you could add value like you did to that student?

Anya Cheng 18:10

Yeah, I think so. I'm an immigrant. So when I came to a US, even today, I besides my husband, I don't have any family. And my husband is also an immigrant. Besides me, he doesn't have any family in the US. So I found that uh has been helpful that throughout the career, that strangers help me and I help other people. Um and I found that it's yeah, I don't know who can help me. And I don't, if you expect people, whoever you help the person and the husband to help you back, you'll just be disappointed because it's just not true. Um, even when I started a company, I reached out to uh I was working for Meta eBay and Target, and a lot of vendors became billionaires because my like endorsements or because my deals and my sign of things, and when I circle back to them, they may or may not talk to me. Uh because you no longer work for meta eBay and Target, right? So and so I realized it's more of like it's a bank. So you every time you help someone, you get something in the bank, and you never know if you help B. I I just believe that if I help A and A will help B, B help C, eventually maybe C will help me. So you may not never ever find out that, but just I try to deposit as much as I can. Whenever I talk to people, I try to ask, like, how can I be helpful? You don't know when you need it, but you just have to believe that if you help someone, eventually one day when you help, when you ask around, someone is going to know someone who knows someone who eventually probably going to help you. So I think that have been kind of becoming um a specialty founder mindset because when you work for a big tech company like me, and people tend to talk to you all the time, like, hey, I want to talk to you because they want to work for Meta, I want to do business with Meta, right? So the the stuff coming from your title from coming from your business car. But being a founder, we realize that we don't always have these shining titles anymore. So the best way to get in network is just to figure out how you can help right away and hoping that someone will remember you when you need it.

Curiosity As A Career Advantage

Dr. William Attaway 20:16

I love that generosity of spirit, you know, because I think you're right. You know, when you are generous with the wisdom, the experience, the insights that you have gained along the way with other people, that does come back around. And I think that's that's so, so true in my experience and and in so many of the people that I've worked with. Let me ask you this: if if you had the ability to go back 20 years and talk to Anya 20 years ago, what would you love to go back and tell her?

Anya Cheng 20:44

Buying a stock from NVIDIA and uh learning the cover meta and then opening AI before they are things.

Dr. William Attaway 20:53

That's excellent.

Anya Cheng 20:54

I I think what I would say is that um I would encourage myself to be a little bit more full with curiosity. I think that different I'm an Asian, I think our education has been always more focused on what. You should be an engineer because this will make you money. You should be an accountant because that's respectful. You should do this and versus that. It's a lot more of what. What's useful, go do it. What's the right thing to do it? What's really it's a lot why it's a lot less of why. But now I'm teaching at Northwestern University, and I found that my best students are not those students that come to class and say, hey, I want to get I want to get AI product management course because I think AI is huge helpful for me. And those people are like, hey, AI is cool, I'm curious, I want to learn more. They don't have a specific agenda. It's not about doing this so that you can do what. It's more of they are full of curiosity, they're really interested in learning something, exporting something. That they are not familiar with. And I found, for example, after I became a founder, I realized that I should be an investor early on. I thought investors are for people who have billionaire. But no, most of a startup take $10,000, $20,000, $50,000 check. And a lot of us can potentially do that. You buy like five, a few iPhones, and that's already the money, right? So in fact, if I would be an investor, I actually would know startup life ecosystem a lot more. And I realized after becoming a founder, that relationship and understanding of the industry inside the information that you cannot Google or find it on ChatGPD is extremely valuable. And I only get it by talking to other founders. And I wish I actually talked to more founders before, but I never did. Why? Because if I, when I was a head of product for eBay, why do I need to talk to founders? There's no specific reason. I'm not investing, I'm not interested in starting my own companies, not useful. So I never do it. But I never know that I will actually use it. But if I will be a little bit more full of curiosity, we are in Silicon Valley, it's plenty of us entrepreneurs. Spend some time, talk to people, and figure it out, and maybe be an Android investor, get involved, understanding a community. Now I will have a lot more resources to spare. So I would say just give up, just not focus on you can continue to do so, but more in addition. Like not just only focus on what's useful. Because when you find it it's useful, it's too late. It was like, oh, it's time to be an AI engineer. Yeah. You should have done this 10 years ago, not right now, right? So, or like 10 years ago, it was like, oh, we should be a data scientist. You should start doing that 15 years ago. Right now, it's like, oh, you should invest in ChatGPT, oh, you should do that 10 years, five years ago. So when we know, it's usually too late. So leave with your curiosity. I think that's what be my advice for myself 10 years ago.

Dr. William Attaway 23:57

That's so good. You're a continual learner, you know, and you've come across this several times in this conversation. Is there a book that has made a big difference in your journey that you would recommend to the listeners?

Positioning That People Remember

Anya Cheng 24:07

I I won't say the impact the journey. I find it helpful. I won't say the impact my career. Like I teach uh marketing at Northwestern University, and one simple book that I always recommend students to read is called Get to our Heart. It's a positioning person behind steep jobs and um roads. So she's a person helping on defining Apple's positioning. So I found it helpful, but I can tell you the key concept there. Just positioning means what it seems like a big word, like positioning and branding. All it says was just you need something for people to remember you and share to you to others. Like when you think about Disney, how would you describe Disney to your friend? Oh, it's a happy place on earth. Right?

Dr. William Attaway 24:51

That's good.

Anya Cheng 24:52

That's how you remember Disney. When you did when people talk about Amazon, oh, they do got good customer service. Right? You go on Walmart, Walmart is a little bit cheaper. When you go on Target, oh Target is easy browse, your mom going to a store and get wants to get lost in the store, they were being inspired in the store, they don't want to come out. They buy stuff they don't need and they're still happy. Like almost there's always something that makes business really good, but also something that people remember you, differentiate you, and share you to others. And I found that pretty helpful because when I talk to startup mentors, they're like, hey, when you see a slide, they say, competitor A can do this, B can do this, C can do this, C D can do this, and the startup can do A, B, C, D, E. You know that's a horrible company to invest because how is that possible? Right? You are compared with my public company and can do everything that they are doing. That's not possible. But in fact, what's really good is that you can do one thing but do better than other people. And it has a lot of features. iPhone is really easy to use. Right? Target is full of inspiring and cheaper, eBay has more swords. So I found the book helpful on thinking too about where to really differentiate and finding the key value prop, and that's how to win.

Dr. William Attaway 26:13

So good. I'm gonna give you the last word here. If you if you could share one piece of advice with the listeners who've tuned into this episode, what would you love to share with them from your journey?

Anya Cheng 26:25

Uh I would say use your strengths. When I went to graduate from Northwestern University, I got my master's degree in marketing in 2008. It was right after Lee McBrother went bankruptcy. So there was no job anywhere. I was way outside of a building for other schools' campus recruiting because I wasn't even able to get on my own campus recruiting event. So I way outside of the engineering school, the chemistry school, the history school, as soon as they all have campus recruiting, right? So as soon as recruiter came out, I would send them my resume. Um, it didn't work. People say like, hey, in the US, looking for a job is about networking. It's about not, it's not about ambush the recruiters. So I went on networking. How? I don't know anybody. How do I network? So I kind of know professor. They don't know me, but I know them, right? So I knock on the door for, again, material science professors, MBA professors. I am a student. They have to open the door. It was before COVID. We're all in the in the office, right? They open the door and say, hi, I'm a student from the knowledge department. I saw you work for PNG before, and I saw you on LinkedIn. No, this person still work in PNG. Can you send them my resume? This you're in your inbox. Because we all know Professor Semiel, right? He's already in your inbox. So one day a person says, I don't know, Drew. I cannot refer you to anyone. But tomorrow I'm hosting a speech event and we have a few speakers. I need 10 more students sitting there in the room. Can you bring 10 students? I said, okay, sounds good. I brought 10 students there. My English was really bad. I didn't really know what the speaker was talking about. But in the end of the conversation, I went there and said, Hey, great job. I love the talk. Here's my resume. Uh the speaker's name is Paggy. She worked for Farmers Magazine. She said, okay, I'll connect you to our recruiter. So I got the interview. I love the company. It's a trade publication for farmers and salon owners, and they are looking for a marketer. I was a reporter before. I have a master's degree in marketing. It's perfect. A few weeks went by, I followed up with the recruiter. Hello. The recruiter says, Stop calling me. I was laid off. The recruiter was laid off from the company. Even the recruiter was the girl. So I said, hey, you have nothing to do. Do you want to grab a coffee? She said, yes. So we got a coffee. She told me everything about the company. She doesn't care. She left the company, right? She told me about who was the decision maker, who is their customer. And she also told me one thing. She said, Have you heard of New York, NLA? They are a bigger city than Chicago in the US. You should go there, bigger city has more jobs. So with that idea in mind, I went on a two-month trip. I went on stay on different friends' couches week over week. And I print out 2,000 notesworth and university alumni. They don't know me, but I kind of know them. They are alumni, right? So I reached out to each one of them and I got a lot of coffee, chat with them. But none of them are hiring. Most of them are looking for a job because it's a lot of layoff. So and people say, hey, if you want media industry, you know, there's some media company in New York, so I decide to bought a newspaper from New Stand. You know, the old time in New York, they are newsstand? The newspaper, the old time, will say publisher name William. If you want advertise, call this number. So I call each one of the publishers. They say, hey, I'm looking for a publisher, William. Eventually I actually met with most of the CEO of those media companies. But nobody was hiring. I thought this worked, but this is just too slow. Things that I should definitely go to conference where there are thousands of people, it will be a lot faster. But conference tickets are very expensive, a few thousand dollars. So I called a magazine company back in Taiwan. I said, hey, do you want to cover this amazing conference for free? They say yes. So I called the conference, hi, I'm a reporter from Taiwan, I want to press ticket, and I got in. So again, I met plenty of people, but nobody was hiring. Eventually I went back to Chicago. I was ready to pack and back to Taiwan. But before I go, I realized that I learned a lot during this process, even though I didn't get a job. So I called the farmer's magazine company again. I say, hey, do you want to know what your competitors are working on? I know the Cienna ESBN, I call those publishers. They say yes. So before I went, I interviewed their readers. I know their readers are salon owners. So I walk into the salon and I interview those owners. I know the advertiser because I opened the magazine. They say, I think this is advertiser. Call this number to buy our blah, blah, blah. So I call advertiser. And of course, I knew their former employee, the recruiter who got laid off. So I interviewed all of them, I put together a business plan. I say, hey, according to my interview with CNN and ESPN, this is what they are working on. If you want to do this, I think this few that you should be doing based on your customers, say, and you need someone who has a marketing degree, who also have a media background, and I happen to know someone who is not very experienced, not very expensive, just out of college. And her name is Anya Chin. And she with that, she told me, Would you like to be a contractor? My English was really bad. I didn't know what contractor means. I said, yes. I went home, I Google contractor. I didn't know why she wants me to be a plumber. Contractor? Plumber. But anyway, I got my first job. But sorry, to answer your question, like what's the advice for people is that throughout the journey I use my strengths. This all sounds crazy, but it wasn't very hard for me because I was a reporter before. So I wait outside a building to ambush recruiter. For people, this is crazy, it's very hard. But I was a reporter, I wait outside all the time and give people my microphone. Right? For covering a news as a reporter to a conference to get a free ticket, it wasn't very hard because I was a reporter before. So I just call my own company and ask them what they want to cover a story. Information interview, I I find a from the newspaper, I call the publisher. It wasn't very hard either because I was a reporter. I call people, I asked them their point of view. You are not going to do the same things I did. And to be honest with you, a lot of what I did was useless. I didn't get any job interview from them. But because I was using my strengths, so I wasn't giving up because I always feel this is not too hard and I can do it. And it's that hope, is that hope that you can do it, you can try again, that carry you continue going, and eventually you are practicing to succeed versus failing. Every time you fail, it's that you are getting one step closer, you learn something new. So use your strengths. Your story was totally different from my story. But you're probably really good in numbers, you're probably really good with friends in DC. You have a lot more connections in the government space. Maybe you are really a people person, people love you. Maybe you are really funny, people laugh with you. Maybe you have very creative eyes, so just use your strengths because when you use it, you are not afraid. And when you are not afraid, you are not going to give up. And that eventually will lead you to succeed.

How To Try Taylor And Save

Dr. William Attaway 33:51

So good. What an incredible journey, Anya. Thank you so much for sharing today from that journey. And telling us about Taylor. I know a lot of people are going to want to check this out. What's the best way for them to do that?

Anya Cheng 34:05

Yeah, if you hate shopping and laundry and want to look good, like busy man, executive, um, check out Taylor. People pay $100 per month. You can wear 10 clothes per month. Your human stylist and AI will pick clothes for you. You get real clothes for you to wear for a couple weeks. And when you travel, you just return a dirty clothes from the hotel lobby, you put into prepaid envelope, and you go home without doing any laundry. And a few days when you're home, you get new clothes arrive. So go on tailor.style. That's t-a-e-l-o-r dot-s-t-y-l-e, tailor.style. Use the code podcast25. Paccast25, get 25% off first months. And then also go on uh use a code podcast gift, podcast gift to give a gift card for people. Birthdays coming, holidays coming, anniversaries coming. The best gift is save them time. The best gift is helping them feel confident and ready for their day.

Dr. William Attaway 35:03

I love that. We'll have that info and those links in the show notes. Anya, thank you for your time today. This has been so great.

Anya Cheng 35:10

For any talent, suppliers, investors, business partner, executive coaching, dating side, schools, just reach out to us. We're happy to partner with you and reach out to me. My email is Anya. That's A N Y A Taylor T A E L O R dot A I. Anya at Taylor.ai. Thank you.