Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in health & wellness but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Armin Faraji, Co-Founder of Sniffly, located in Toronto, ON, Canada.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
Sniffly is a virtual smell therapy program designed to help people recover their sense of smell and taste after contracting COVID-19 or experiencing a head injury. Most of our customers suffer from smell loss associated with post-COVID (also known as long-COVID).
Given that our therapy program improves general neuroplasticity in the olfactory bulb, we also have users leveraging the same smell training exercises to recover their smell/taste loss following a head injury.
Tell us about yourself
My co-founder and I both experienced smell loss for several months following our bouts with COVID-19. After COVID-19 robbed us of our sense of smell, we searched the internet and spoke with our doctors in hopes of a solution.
Since very few resources are available for people who want to recover their sense of smell, we spent months consulting with medical experts. Given that my co-founder was a medical student then, we had access to various medical journals and practitioners.
Our goal is to make smell training and therapy available to people worldwide. We want to give people that are often underdiagnosed and undertreated the opportunity to find relief. That's also why we made the program accessible to anyone on the web for the low price of $10.
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
It's hard to pinpoint my most significant accomplishment. I enjoy tackling challenging problems. I've started three companies – an e-commerce business, an agency, and a venture-backed influencer marketing startup called Node. I get a sense of accomplishment from every interaction I've built in the past and the teams I've led.
What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?
Being an entrepreneur comes with its ups—having the freedom to make your own rules, the feeling of not having a boss, and the autonomy to work on your terms. It also comes with downs—loneliness, failure, and stress. The hardest part of being an entrepreneur isn't making business decisions, as most think it's creating a mental model and habits that can cope with your journey as an entrepreneur. This can mean working on weekends, protecting time, and finding healthy ways to decompress.
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
- Pick a business you're passionate about: You can only expect to succeed if you are genuinely interested in what you do. Making mistakes and failing is inevitable, and the only thing that will get you through the hard times is your passion.
- If you have an idea for a business or startup that you're passionate about, start it and learn from your mistakes. Only some things have to be perfect.
- Business and entrepreneurship are tricky. The ups are high, but the downs can be devastating. One of the biggest things I've learned is to build a community and find like-minded people going through the same things I am. A support system is critical if you're going to start a business. Whether that's friends, family, or the local entrepreneur meetup group — you need people you can vent your frustrations with and get honest feedback.
Where can people find you and your business?
Website: https://sniffly.io/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sniffly.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ArminsWorld
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sniffly/
If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.
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