What Most DTC Founders Get Wrong About Entering a Crowded Category | Greta Meyer

Greta Meyer started Sequel in a college classroom. She and her co-founder identified a physics flaw in the tampon that nobody had fixed in almost 100 years, and spent years navigating FDA clearance, manufacturing partnerships, and a medical device regulatory process most founders would have quit on. They launched DTC, spent almost nothing on ads, and built their brand through partnerships instead. Yankee Stadium reached out to them. So did the Indiana Fever.

The thing that makes Sequel work is also the thing that makes it hard to copy: radical focus. They're not trying to reinvent the whole menstrual experience. They fixed one fluid mechanics problem and built everything around that.

In this episode of Unfinished Business, Alex and Lee sit down with Greta to talk about what it actually takes to break into a commoditized, legacy-dominated category when you can't out-spend the incumbents and the product itself is invisible to the consumer.

In this episode:

- Why "we're not trying to solve everything for everyone" is the strategy, not just a line

- How Sequel redesigned a class two medical device on a retrofit of existing machinery, and why that constraint was actually the unlock

- Building brand in a taboo category without making it feel taboo

- Why Yankee Stadium and the Indiana Fever came to them, and what that taught Greta about how to find partners worth having

- The zero-ad growth playbook: organic social, affiliates, and stadium-as-acquisition-channel

- Why going DTC first, before retail, gives you the customer data and the brand credibility you need to walk into a retailer from a position of strength

- What she'd tell a founder who's about to do outreach to a partner they want: wait

- The team structure behind a 6-person operation running a medical device startup

- How Sequel is thinking about Amazon, and why TikTok Shop was the right test before it

Greta is the kind of founder who knows exactly what she's building and exactly what she isn't. If you're entering a crowded market and wondering whether you need a huge ad budget to compete, this one will reframe that question entirely.