Welcome to Unfair Advantage!!
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Now, I believe that being a solo founder especially in the early stages is an incredible advantage! And this series is the case for it, one founder at a time. For each article, I sit down with a solo founder from backgrounds as far apart as I can find, and we dig for the edge each of them built on. What did they do to get to where they are?
Somewhere in these stories is a founder who started exactly where you are. And I am hoping their story hands you the courage to start yours! 🩷
Let’s goooo!
The manufacturer was locked in, the scent approved, the website rebuilt, and some money already spent, when Alisha decided not to launch the perfume.
Months of her life had gone into it and she still decided to walk away.
Why??
I’ll tell you.
But first, let me tell you how Beauty in Balance started.
Making Room For The Thing She Loved
Alisha graduated a semester early. That handed her something most people never get, nine months before her job started. Nine months with nothing claimed.
So she chose to finally give her passion some real time. The thing she’d loved since before she can remember and the thing her career had been quietly squeezing out for years without asking. For her, that meant dance. She got on a plane to teach workshops across the country, ten workshops with two hundred people over four months.
“And I think that was, this first realization that there is a whole career in the arts.” - Alisha
We all live by a simple, unspoken script. Study hard. Find a good job. Work till you’re sixty. Retire. Our passions get a worse fate than side characters in a horror movie.
On the tour, she kept meeting people trapped in that exact script. A real craft on one side, a career that paid the rent on the other, and an unspoken rule that you should focus on one.
She started calling it The Land Of The Or.
“You are a dance teacher or you are a consultant. But never both.” - Alisha
Feeling the strong desire to prove that people can be both, Alisha started to post on Instagram. What was supposed to be a place to share her own passion soon became a platform for other creatives. Beauty In Balance is now at 1,500 members online, with 2,000 people reached in person, and averaging around 700,000 impressions a month.
And it’s just over a year old.
Listening Before Building
Her first members came from the dance tour itself. She went back to everyone who’d taken her classes to see if they were following their passion full-time.
Most weren’t. But what surprised her was how many of them looked shocked to learn she wasn’t either.
A room full of people who’d built real skill in something they’d been told to keep as a hobby, all assuming the woman running the workshop had already made it her job. And soon she saw a pattern.
Nobody in that room lacked the skill to go full time.
What they lacked was a way to get paid for it that didn’t feel like busking.
People pay to learn dance. People pay to watch a good performance. So demand was never the problem. What was missing was the infrastructure to make a creative skill pay the way a corporate skill does. Or even remotely close to the way a corporate skill does.
Beauty in Balance became a creative collective built around what she now calls the infrastructure that never existed. The Power of AND, a real curriculum, sold to the institutions who wanted access to creatives with real followings.
NYU Stern. UC Berkeley Haas. Brands like NUDESTIX and TikTok. Conferences all the way to SXSW.
She could have kept pursuing dance on the side. She could have found a group that practiced on weekends.
Instead, she listened. She listened hard, to what people like her wanted but couldn’t say out loud, and built the thing nobody had built yet.
The Discipline To Question
Somewhere along the way, Alisha thought her community needed a product line, starting with a signature scent.
But building a community is really about selling a point of view, and when taste is the product, founders can sometimes ship things only they want.
So she stopped and asked herself:
“Is this the right time to launch a perfume? Am I rushing into this decision?” - Alisha
And she realized she was about to take something that existed only in her own head and push it onto her community.
She killed the perfume because she didn’t want to do that. She wanted to take the time to find out what these people actually wanted and needed first.
Every founder eventually finds out how easy it is to build one more feature, offer one more thing, launch one more SKU. The only real constraint is your imagination. So the actual question comes down to necessity. Whether the new thing does your existing customer any good, or whether it’s just something you wanted to make.
And I’ve made the same mistake.
One time I thought it would be really cool if I could tell my users the exact chemicals in their clothing. Nobody had asked for that feature. But I thought my users would really like it.
So I spent a whole week down a research rabbit hole trying to build that database.
That is how most of us are. We build in a bubble, on top of a stack of assumptions we never bothered to question.
But we need to interrogate our thinking. We need to ask ourselves… Does this feel rushed? Is this actually needed right now? Do I have enough information to be making this call at all?
That is the habit worth building. Not the discipline to ship. The discipline to question.
Niche Is Never A Problem
The Chicago Fashion Coalition sent her a message out of nowhere. They wanted Beauty in Balance to host a South Asian fashion show.
Beauty in Balance isn’t a South Asian collective. It just happens to have a large South Asian membership, and Alisha didn’t want to restrict the membership to South Asians.
But she knew that in the entire history of Chicago Fashion Week, there had never been a South Asian fashion show. This would be the first.
She took the harder call and leaned into the niche instead of running from it.
The concept she built was called The Second Shift, for people whose first shift is their job and second shift is their art.
Six designers. Countless dancers, singers, and models sharing the runway. A sound producer scoring the walks.
Three acts which were structured more like a story instead of a simple fashion show.
Designers who had never shown before stood next to people who had never modeled before and it was ELECTRIC!
WHAT A SHOW!!! Every designer DELIVERED! Every model OWNED that runway like they'd done it a hundred times before.
And this year, The Second Shift is hosting an even bigger show in New York! (Something you wouldn’t want to miss!!)
Understanding Her Advantage
Building has never been this accessible, and everyone with a laptop calls themselves a founder now. So in a crowd that crowded, you need every advantage you can find, wherever it comes from. That’s exactly what I wanted to know about Alisha.
So I asked her the question this series exists to ask. What was her unfair advantage? She said, without any hesitation, “My parents.”
Her father has sold four companies. Her mother recently launched a company.
“During our dinner conversations, we'd pull ideas out of the blue, and discuss what would we do to solve this problem? From a very young age I was surrounded by this type of conversation. So when it came to having an idea, I knew exactly how to act on it.” - Alisha
I come from an entrepreneurial family too, so I know what it actually hands you, and it’s not money or contacts. It is a mindset.
It teaches you that failure isn’t a bad thing, because you’ve watched adults fail and discuss what they learned at the same dinner table. It teaches you to see problems instead of complaints. And it teaches you that the risky bet is worth taking more often, because you’ve watched enough of them to know the cost of never acting is worse.
It’s easy to hear “my parents” and file this whole thing under privilege. But privilege that never gets used is just a story you tell at parties, and plenty of people with the exact same starting point never build anything with it.
Entrepreneurial parents. A decade in supply chain. The internship you got when you were 18. The year off you took to travel.
Every. Angle. Counts.
We just need to learn how to use whatever we have got.
So what do you do if you don’t have this particular one? You go and build it. You find the right table where failures get celebrated, solutions get discussed, and risks get normalized. That table doesn’t have to be the one you were born at. It just has to exist somewhere you can reach it.
Now What
Alisha started this by accident, and now a lot of us are doing some version of it. Everyone is building a personal brand. Everyone is trying to carve out time off, trying to actually enjoy their life instead of just surviving it.
In a world where people are quietly clawing their way back to whatever they used to be passionate about, Alisha built one of the few places that’ll actually help you do it, and get paid while you’re at it. If you are a creative or an athlete figuring out how to do the one thing you are actually passionate about, that is the room to be in.
If you're a creative reading this, trust me, Beauty In Balance is your place!
Check out Beauty in Balance's website and follow their Substack.
And get The Power of AND. It's a curriculum written for YOU, someone with a real craft and a real job who has been told to pick one.
Alisha is giving Table for One readers a discount with the code EARLYBIB.
This was the story of how Alisha built Beauty In Balance. Below this, in the paid section, is a playbook I pulled out of the interview. A playbook that you should follow if you want to build a mission-oriented community!
Thank you for reading all the way here.
If you are a solo founder who is craving a space where you can share your thoughts, learn from others, and build amazing things, Table for One is that place for you!
And if this piece hit something in you, tell me your story.
This is such an informative and helpful article. Thank you for this Durva