Do Good While Doing Well

Censored. That is the word Colette Courtion used to describe what was happening to her company. Joylux started with a product to help solve the issue of female incontinence. They now have a variety of products to help improve women’s pelvic floor health and sexual function. The road to getting these very needed women’s health products to market has been a rocky one. Rockier than what most entrepreneurs usually must go through.

As a female founder, Colette was already at a disadvantage due to unconscious bias, which we covered in the last chapter. Now add into the mix a topic not just about women’s health but about women’s sexual health. Colette has struggled to get funding for Joylux because many of the investors she pitched to, at least in the beginning, were men. She faced the same challenges as Sarah (described in the previous chapter): male investors told Colette that they didn’t believe this was an actual problem women faced because their wives didn’t have these problems, and they didn’t want to discuss “vaginas” at their Monday morning meetings, so they would pass. Colette anticipated and was ready to handle these struggles. What she wasn’t expecting was the censorship within social media and selling on the Amazon platform.

Joylux ran into issues related to their product portrayal on Facebook and Amazon, which mistakenly classified their product as pornographic. This led to their expulsion from Facebook ads and the removal of their Amazon store, which had previously generated millions of dollars in revenue. The loss of their Amazon store also meant that numerous positive product reviews vanished. Colette and her team worked frantically to try to reestablish the Amazon store and get their ads running again. Two things happened to help move this in the right direction. First, Colette was speaking at an event where, by coincidence, a lawyer for Meta was in the audience, a female lawyer; we’ll call her Lori. During her talk, Colette explained the issues she was having with the ads, especially how the algorithms were written by men who generalize terminology, creating confusion about what is health-related, what is not, and what is just wrong. Lori was outraged. She then took it upon herself to help Joylux.

The second glimmer of hope came from an investor. Every time Colette has a new investor join the Joylux family, she makes a point to get to know them. She then can leverage the skills and strengths of her investor network when needed. Colette is also very good at keeping investors updated quarterly on everything happening within the company, both the good and the bad.