Five people told her on a national show that her business was a waste of time. She proceeded to build it anyway.
Her regret wasn't from the no.
It was 2015, season six of Shark Tank. Melissa Butler had left a Barclays analyst role in New York to start making vegan lipstick in her kitchen since she couldn't find lipstick shades she liked.
All five sharks went no. One said the business was practically not a business, the probability was almost zero. Another said there's nothing to build in the lipstick space.
She went home and watched it.
She cold emailed a buyer at Target. No response. She emailed again, months later. Got one.
For the first three years of Lip Bar, every single product that was shipped out left her hands. Fulfillment. Product dev. Customer service. Branding. All her own.
Then Melissa broke the formula:
🚀 Launched on Target's site in 2016, in stores February 2018 💰 Raised her 1st outside investment from the NVFund that same year 🏪 Opened a flagship store in downtown Detroit 2019 🛍️ Deployed to hundreds of Target stores, then Walmart, Meijer 👉 Launched her second brand, Thread Beauty, 2021
Years later, asked what she'd do differently, she didn't name the pitch, she named the sharks:
"If I would've known that it was okay to not know, I would've allowed myself to be a little bit more vulnerable to ask the questions that would have allowed me to scale faster."
Read that again. The public no didn't cost her a year. The private one did.
She made it through five people telling her out loud that her time was up. What held her back was the question she didn't ask because asking it would've made her look like she didn't already know the answer.
Most of us have that backwards. We save time for the no and the pitch. Then we spend the next two years quietly figuring something out that someone in our network could've told us the answer to in 20 minutes.
Ask the question that makes you look like you don't know yet. That's almost always the one that buys you back a year.