Founder Story
The small business market represents a $6 trillion opportunity, yet 70% of these businesses fail within their first year. Conventional wisdom blames lack of capital or market demand. But after five years of embedded work with founders and early-stage startups, Lin Su has identified a deeper, systemic issue: operational complexity. While large enterprises can afford to systematize and scale, service-based small businesses are left to cobble together tools that were never designed for them.
This insight emerged in March 2020, when the hospitality startup where Lin worked shut down overnight. Instead of pausing, she turned her attention to her Northeast Los Angeles community, helping local businesses survive the pandemic. With prior experience leading end-to-end patient experience design at Theranos and building targeted advertising systems at Yahoo!, Lin brought a deep background in architecting complex operational interfaces—many of which still shape how we communicate and transact today.
But working directly with dozens of small service businesses—many family-run and deeply rooted in their neighborhoods—revealed a stark reality. These businesses weren’t failing due to irrelevance or poor execution. They were being failed by their tools. Service-based entrepreneurs, whose work is often time-bound and hands-on, couldn’t scale without infrastructure that understood their model. In response, Lin helped transform neighborhood restaurants into micro-supply stores, enabling them to sell staples like flour and eggs alongside prepared meals. These new revenue streams helped keep their doors open—and revealed something powerful: small businesses possess a unique superpower of agility and hyperlocal market intelligence that corporations can’t replicate. What they need is the right operational foundation to unlock it.
What began as crisis response became a five-year validation journey. Lin applied her interface-first approach across diverse contexts:
Supporting dozens of service-based SMBs through operational challenges
Scaling a health tech startup from zero to Series B
Optimizing two Amazon retail businesses
Co-founding a venture with a personal stylist to test a vertical model
Each experience reinforced the same pattern: when businesses are equipped with systems built for their reality—not someone else’s—they thrive. When forced into rigid, over-engineered software, they stall.
Small businesses spend over $400 billion annually on operational software. Yet most of these tools prioritize feature parity with enterprise platforms rather than contextual fit. In the GenAI era, this problem compounds: many AI systems devalue a business’s expertise by forcing users to interact through models trained on generalized inputs, rather than enhancing the user’s unique value.
Lin’s latest venture with stylist Audrey Rumsby puts this theory into practice. After spending over $200,000 on mismatched solutions that led nowhere, Audrey partnered with Lin as co-founder. In just 90 days, they launched a functioning platform, secured first clients, entered an accelerator, raised $400,000, developed proprietary AI recommendation tools, filed a utility patent, and attracted acquisition interest from a major national retailer.
Audrey’s business is now a vertical case study: when interfaces are tailored to real service models, transformation is rapid and sustainable. Every workflow designed, feature released, and customer insight gained now feeds into a broader platform being built from the ground up to serve small business operators.
Lin isn’t building in a vacuum. She’s building through the lived experience of real businesses—ensuring that every solution solves a real problem, not just adds complexity. This isn’t about fast venture-backed scaling. It’s about proving a durable, profitable model that centers the people who keep our local economies alive.
The 70% failure rate is not inevitable. It’s a design flaw. And Lin is building the system to fix it.
