Something Ventured: Repeat Aims To Be Intentional While Scaling

Editor’s note: This profile is part of Something Ventured, an ongoing series by Crunchbase News examining diversity and access to capital in the venture-backed startup ecosystem. As part of this project, we’re following seven seed-stage entrepreneurs over the course of several months as they build their businesses. Read our previous profiles of Kim Stiefel, Sarah Wissel and Repeat here, here, here and here, and access the full project here.

Scaling a company is never easy. But scaling a company in a totally remote world is even harder.

That’s what many startups these days, including Los Angeles-based Repeat, are going through. The company, which provides a SaaS platform for consumer packaged goods companies to turn one-time buyers into repeat customers, aims to double its headcount this year after raising a $6 million Series A last year. 

“The biggest challenge with growing a remote team is that it’s harder to collaborate and build camaraderie with teams that don’t regularly interact in meetings or see one another in person,” CEO Kim Stiefel wrote in an email. “We are forced to be really intentional about everything we do, which is actually a good thing.”

“We are intentional,” is one of Repeat’s core values. Growing remotely is tough, Stiefel said, but it also forces the company to think more critically about its processes and ultimately do things better.

The company, which was co-founded by Stiefel and Vice President of Product Sarah Wissel,  started 2021 with three employees. It now has a team of 27 people and plans to double its headcount this year. The company is hiring across product, sales, marketing, customer success, engineering and operations, Stiefel said. 

Much of the existing team is also still onboarding, so Repeat is continuing to build out processes to support them, and the company recently hired an internal recruiter to help support its growth plans.

Repeat is backed by investors including Harlem Capital, Act One Ventures, and Battery Ventures.

Besides growing the team and scaling Repeat’s product, the company is focused this year on “becoming the default reordering experience,” Stiefel said. 

Repeat’s technology analyzes single-buyer behavior along with household behavior to know when to remind customers to repurchase a product—think items like toilet paper, toothpaste, or face wash. The idea behind the product is that people need to reorder those kinds of consumer packaged goods products, but a subscription isn’t necessarily the best fit.

The company measures its progress toward becoming the default for reordering by finding product-market fit with the end customer—the person who’s buying deodorant or body wash from a CPG brand that uses Repeat’s technology.

“We want to offer the best, most delightful, most efficient reordering experience for everyday products,” Stiefel wrote. “And everything we do is centered around achieving that.”

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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