A woman walks into a beauty salon.
She lies back, closes her eyes, and spends the next two hours having someone glue tiny hairs onto her eyelashes.
At first blush, this probably doesn’t sound like a winning investment opportunity.
But sometimes, the biggest opportunities don’t start with a giant market…
Sometimes, they start by capturing a beachhead.
Start Small, Think Huge
Consider a startup called Luum. Luum built a robot that applies eyelash extensions. Yes, you read that correctly — a robot for eyelashes.
It’s easy to dismiss this as a novelty. But look closer, and it gets more and more interesting.
First of all, consider Luum’s founder, Nathan Harding. Harding began his career at Carnegie Mellon’s Field Robotics Center in 1989 and went on to co-found Ekso Bionics, a pioneer in wearable robotic exoskeletons. He has an M.S. from UC Berkeley, and holds over 25 patents.
Given has background, Harding quickly realized that applying individual lash extensions is an unusually difficult job for humans. It’s tedious, repetitive, and requires extraordinary precision.
It’s also expensive. A human lash artist can spend two hours doing a full set. Luum says its robot can do both eyes in about an hour — with the goal of cutting that down to 30 minutes.
And that’s where the investment thesis gets interesting. Because Luum doesn’t necessarily want to be the world’s biggest eyelash company. Instead, lashes are its beachhead...
The Beachhead Is the Point
In startup investing, a beachhead is a small, defensible market that gives a company a foothold from which it can expand.
Think about Amazon. Jeff Bezos didn’t launch Amazon by saying, “Let’s become the everything store.” He started with books. Why?
Because books were an unusually good fit for the Internet. There were millions of titles, while even the biggest physical bookstores could carry only a fraction of them.
Amazon could use technology to offer customers something traditional bookstores simply couldn’t: vastly more selection, available 24/7.
Books were the beachhead.
Once Amazon had customers, tech, logistics and a trusted brand, it could expand into music, electronics, clothing, groceries — and eventually just about everything else.
That’s the power of a good beachhead. You don’t have to conquer the whole market on Day One. You just need a small market where your tech gives you an unfair advantage.
Now Look at Luum Differently
Luum has raised $36 million to date, and its robots are already operating inside locations including Nordstrom and Ulta.
But the company isn’t stopping at eyelashes. The company’s CEO describes the bigger opportunity as “intelligent beauty services.” Think eyebrow threading and shaping, microneedling, and other highly precise, repetitive beauty treatments.
In other words, Luum is using one difficult problem — automating eyelash extensions — as the training ground for an entire category of robotic beauty services.
And that category could be enormous. McKinsey estimates the core global beauty market — skincare, cosmetics, hair care, and fragrance — could reach roughly $590 billion by 2030.
Add adjacent categories like spa services, injectables, shaving, sun care and supplements, and you’re talking about a market measured in the trillions.
That’s a very different opportunity than “robot eyelashes.”
Look for the Technology Wedge
This is one of the things I look for when evaluating startups.
I don’t just ask, “How big is this company’s market today?” Instead, I ask, “What happens if this company wins?”
Because a startup entering an obscure market might have a good reason to do so:
Maybe that market has an unusually painful problem. Maybe customers are already spending heavily on a solution. Maybe incumbents are stuck using outdated technology.
Or maybe — as with Luum — the initial product is a proving ground for technology that could eventually be applied to a market that’s much bigger.
That’s the difference between a small market and a small beachhead. One is a limitation. The other is a launchpad.
And when a startup has a genuine technological advantage, that launchpad can become incredibly valuable.
That’s Where the Big Returns Start
Of course, Luum still has plenty to prove.
Its robots have to work reliably. Customers have to like the results. The economics have to make sense. And meanwhile, human beauty professionals have legitimate concerns about personalization, safety, and aesthetics.
Those are real risks.
But that’s precisely why early-stage investing can be so interesting. You’re not buying a mature company after everyone already agrees on its potential. You’re evaluating the possibility that a seemingly small foothold could become something much, much bigger.
Amazon started with books. Luum started with lashes.
The next billion-dollar startup you encounter might be starting somewhere equally unexpected.
These are the types of startups we’re vetting every week at Crowdability — so you can invest in them at their earliest stages, when shares are still cheap, and the upside is still vast.
Happy Investing
