These guys put a whole new meaning to the phrase “sending love”!
I’ve just interviewed Rob, Adam, and Jeremy, the founders of PijonBox, a subscription service for parents who want to send monthly care packages to their kids in college.
PijonBox delivers a variety of products catered to the needs of college students, including snacks, beauty products, and other useful items. Pretty brilliant if you ask me. Parents are always keen to show their love for their kids and want to keep connecting who have already flown out of the nest. While college kids are always happy to receive a care package, not all parents are in tune with what they really need or what is cool and trendy. Pijon box’s mission is to answer these needs, and they have been successfully delivering love from parent to students all over the country.
For $29 a month students can receive a box of cool and delicious surprises from their parents, all care of PijonBox!
It’s a pretty basic yet overlooked idea in starting a sidehustle - If you see a need, and you are able to match it with your skills, jump at the opportunity. Care boxes may be a simple idea to start with, but when these three tech savvy guys responded to the call of college students (who have had one embarrassing sweatshirt too many) and the need of parents to stay connected to their now independent kids, they didn’t know they would create a great business down the line!
Read on to learn more about their sidehustle’s journey!
How did your journey in founding Pijon begin?
Rob: Jeremy and I met in college where we were both Resident Advisors, and actually roommates for a while. While in school together, we developed roommate matching software and a mailroom and residence management system for our school. My experience in these projects fueled my interest in business strategy consulting, where I spent some time after school.
Jeremy: After college we founded a startup called SpaceSplitter, which helped roommates (in college and out) manage their household, supplies, and finances, and we were mentioned by Forbes as one of the four disruptive technologies to watch in 2013. We found that many young roommates were still dependent on their parents for some portion of their living expenses and supplies. It was also during our SpaceSplitter time that we started working with Adam.
Adam: I met Rob at a Lean Startup Machine workshop, soon after leaving my life as a creative director for a financial startup that had grown, IPO’d and sold in the time I was there. Previously, I worked at a strategic marketing agency. I love the energy in creative people, and Rob brought me in to work on SpaceSplitter with himself and Jeremy. We launched Pijon together in about mid2013.
What about your work would you consider that most gratifying or fulfilling?
Jeremy: I love solving problems with technology. Pijon might not seem like a technology company, but underneath, we’ve built a tremendous amount of tech to make our service feel natural for our members.
Adam: I think we’d all say that we love how Pijon helps connect families and their kids while they’re away during those first difficult years.
Rob: Definitely. And I would add that building a business that also does good, through our partnership with Project Night Night, is extremely important to all of us and a big driver of how we think about our business.
What would you say is the most important milestone of your company so far?
Rob: Getting through the first school year! I think we’d all agree that we learned a LOT about college and students and their families since September. So having that experience under our belt and now being able to proceed into the new school year with that awareness is really valuable.
Jeremy: As in all business, just doing it, to test our assumptions, having the experience, and understanding the result will help us ultimately continue to build an amazing company.
What was the toughest part about growing a company like yours and how would you advise others to overcome an obstacle like this?
Jeremy: Pijon is a very logistics heavy business. We have to build relationships that lead to great products we curate every month, get those items delivered to our third party logistics company, then package it all up and get them out for delivery every month.
Adam: We’re always against the clock, every month, to ensure the curation is amazing, the products actually show up at the warehouse—you’d be surprised how often partners back out for one reason or another—and get it out as a high quality experience our members will love.
Rob: Curating and sending great monthly packages is a lot of fun, but there’s also a lot of organization and coordination that goes into it. Anybody starting a company should do their best to walk through, in their mind, every process and piece that needs to fit together in order to build a solid company. At the same time, you can’t let that paralyze your entrepreneurship. Like Jeremy said before, just do it and test your assumptions—which is far better than putting a ton of effort into something that nobody wants.
How do you keep it all together? Do you have a routine or trick to maintain a balance between your work and personal life?
Rob: Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on one’s preferences) starting a business is a 24houraday, 7daysaweek job. There is no end to the stuff that needs to get done, and you’re always behind on your work. I think we all just try to make sure that the things we do for Pijon are the high estimpact activities, so that when we do decide to grab a drink with friends or sleep a few hours, we’ve at least been highly effective during our work time.
PijonBox Founders Adam, Rob, and Jeremy
What motivates and inspires you?
Rob: These guys, Jeremy & Adam, Michael our biz dev guy and Katie our amazing community people person. My family and friends. Personal connections who believe in me and want to see us make Pijon a success. Our members who are the lifeblood of our business and cornerstone of this company’s inspiration. I definitely don’t want to let anyone down.
Adam: Definitely this team, all of the above.
Jeremy: Indeed.
Who is your role model? Famous or not?
Rob: Ben Horowitz is relatively famous for candidly highlighting the incredibly grueling process or starting a company, and how to navigate your way through the trials and tribulations. I appreciate this reality based perspective, and use it as a reminder to keep pushing forward with tenacity, regardless of the situation.
Jeremy: No role model here. Who has time to watch other people anyway?
Adam: I’m always inspired by anyone who has developed amazing skills so well that they make it look completely
Do you have a personal mantra or motto you live by?
Rob: ELAMF Execute Like a MotherF*cker and JFDI Just F*cking Do It
Jeremy: Do what makes you happy.
Adam: Be curious, explore. Don’t hold yourself to typical accepted standards.
Let’s talk about your first job after college. Was it what you expected?
Jeremy: Well this is my first job! I’ve consulted a bit before as a developer, but the businesses Rob and I have started were my first “jobs.” As for what I expected? I can’t imagine what I ever could have expected of a startup I cofounded! I think I never expected, given the job market, that I would be handed any opportunity. Maybe that’s why the entrepreneur route seems not so scary to me.
Rob: My time as a Strategy Consultant at Booz Allen showed me how a real business is operated professionally. I also learned how I did NOT want to run my own company.
Adam: I took a job as a junior designer after leaving school. I too have always enjoyed the creation of new things, and working at an agency taught me so much about how to work with clients, manage direct reports, present and collaborate. I think without some kind of experience in the corporate world, we can easily lose some of the very positive aspects of a professional business. Obviously, with entrepreneurship on the rise, we will see the loss of positive and negative aspects of corporate culture, but it would be great to find a way to preserve the positive ones for new grads who may never work in a traditional “corporate” environment.
On top of this, PijonBox partners with Project Night Night, a nonprofit organization that donates care packages (consisting of a blanket, a children’s book, and a stuffed animal) to homeless and underprivileged children. While sending and receiving love you are also able to do some good!
What particular advice would you give to someone who wants to start work in your field?
Rob: Learn from everyone, follow no one. Absorb as much knowledge as you possibly can. Always be inquisitive. Treat everyone with respect, as if they were your family, because people are wildly capable of doing things that no one else believes in them to do. Empower other people. Be a helper. Do something you love.
What career advice would you give to men and women who are just starting out after university?
Adam: Don’t wait for opportunities to come to you. There’s always someone more persistent than you, so you have to keep trying, pushing.
Jeremy: And like Rob just said, in different words… you create a network of people around you, and sometimes you will be their safety net, and sometimes they will be yours. So do what you can to be a part of a big net.
How did you know this was the path for you?
Rob: After I worked at several large financial institutions and the amount of value I was positioned to create was dramatically limited. I knew I was capable of creating disproportionately large amounts of value and impact through my efforts, and I knew entrepreneurship was the only path that would allow me to actualize this.
Jeremy: There’s no such thing as a “right” or “wrong” path. Every path that I take is my own and it’s not about the beginning or the end. It’s all about the path you make for yourself and the adventure you experience along the way.
Adam: This fulfills my emotional and material needs in a way that makes me happy. I’m a big believer in “you know you’re in the right place when you get there.”
