How I Burned Out Trying to Build the Next Big Thing

Or, the art of burning out so you can build something better.

It started with a glass jar, a dropper, and some oils.

Actual photo of melting the Hydra Highlighter on my stove in my Silverlake bungalow kitchen

I began NOTO Botanics in my kitchen. No investors, no blueprint—just instinct, ritual, and the urge to make something clean, queer, with great design, and deeply intentional. I mapped it all out at the local coffee shop during my off days and mixed potions at home, using my friends and makeup clients as test dummy’s. It wasn’t about “scaling.” It was about creating. About seeing a missing space in the industry that truly felt needed some attention.

Yes, it’s me seemingly sniffing very raw carrots in on of our first shoots for NOTO

And for a while, that’s exactly what it was. Small, scrappy, soulful. Not just a brand, but a practice. A little bit rebellious. A little bit magical. Mine.

The first iteration of the bottle design in 2014/15

Then, it took off. 2015, the year of the wild wild west on social media. Where businesses got cheap and big access to new audiences and prospective new customers and there was no algorithm trying to make life as hard for you as possible.

Image from our FIRST photoshoot in 2015 - I was clearly the graphic designer…

And with that came an entirely different set of rules. Something I thought I wanted because I was meant to believe that this is what I had to do to be successful. That this was the only way. Growth became a language I had to learn fast: wholesale, projections, salaries, systems, data, ROI’s, meetings, more meetings, more more meetings, audience retention, PR expectations, and a deep weight of a sense that I was constantly behind.