Brand Architects: Amy Chiu of Dear Brightly

It started with a comment about her skin during an engineering meeting.

Join Bora Celik as he chats with Amy Chiu, Founder/CEO of Dear Brightly.

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"I was just so distraught," Amy Chiu recalls. "I sunk in my chair and I was just like, wow. This does not feel good."

For someone who had enjoyed great skin her entire life, the sudden appearance of pigmentation and acne in her mid-twenties was jarring enough. Having it pointed out by a colleague was the tipping point.

This uncomfortable moment would eventually lead Amy to create Dear Brightly, a telehealth company focused on prescription-grade retinoids. But the path from that meeting to launching her company wasn't straightforward.

The Painful First Steps

After that workplace incident, Amy booked her first-ever dermatologist appointment. Like many first-time patients, she had to wait months for an opening.

"I had never had any serious skin conditions, never thought to go to a dermatologist," she explains. "I didn't have a great experience."

The dermatologist prescribed tretinoin, a potent retinoid that's 20 times stronger than over-the-counter retinol. But without proper guidance, Amy's experience quickly turned disastrous.

"I used it incorrectly. Used it in the morning versus at night. I had a terrible reaction, redness, irritation, major skin peeling and I stopped it immediately."

Months later, Amy tried again with a different dermatologist who prescribed the same medication—but with one crucial difference. "The difference was she wrote out very clear instructions on how to use it. And my skin changed from night and day."

The results were transformative. "My skin cleared up. I had glowing, naturally glowing skin. I was like, what is this? This is amazing."

That's when the idea started forming: "Why isn't this more accessible to other people?"

Nights and Weekends: The Birth of Dear Brightly

What began as a side project soon became something more. Amy and her co-founder started building Dear Brightly during weekends and late nights while maintaining their day jobs.

"We were just working on manual spreadsheets at the time and then also building the site in parallel," Amy says. Even with just a handful of early paying customers, they saw a need for easier access to prescription retinoids.

"It was so fun in the early days because we didn't really know what we were doing. And that's kind of the beauty of building something, right? Like everything is from scratch. It's overwhelming. It's so overwhelming, but looking back to where we are now versus then. It was really fun then being scrappy like that."

Their goal wasn't just to sell a product. They wanted to fix the friction points Amy had personally experienced: the inconvenience of doctor visits, the wait times, the cost (which had jumped to a few hundred dollars without insurance), and most importantly, the lack of guidance on proper use.

The Unexpected Call That Changed Everything

While building Dear Brightly as a side project, Amy and her co-founder applied to Y Combinator—not necessarily expecting to get in, but for the learning experience.

"We'll apply to YC just for fun," Amy remembers thinking. "They have really great application process that makes us question our business and understand our business better."

When they got an interview, they were surprised but still didn't have high expectations. "We know we're probably not going to get in this round. We know how hard it is to get in and we don't really have real, like we don't have like a website or anything right now."

Then came the call from Y Combinator partner Adora.

"I just remember thinking on the phone, I think my whole life has changed. My life is about to change and it did."

At the time of their YC interview, Dear Brightly had just seven paying customers. "When people ask me if they should apply for YC and they should be like a hyper growth company, like, absolutely not. You don't have to be. Absolutely not. You can have probably like one paying customer."

Building a Business That People Want To Use Again and Again

After the whirlwind of Y Combinator in 2018, Amy and her team discovered what would become their business model: subscription.

"The first year we weren't even subscription, which was a huge, I mean, the fact that we weren't subscription from the get-go, we learned that that is what makes our business."

The change came directly from listening to customers who found it "annoying to have to get the product again, but I want to use the product again."

This shift made all the difference. "That's when things really took off for us because we realized that people wanted usability in that. That's the whole reason why we created Dear Brightly is to make it really easy to get retinoids."

Today, Dear Brightly's strong retention metrics prove their product is working. "To this day, we have really strong retention and that's how you know the product is that good."

Amy offers this advice to other founders: "Be really make sure in your business, like one of the most important metrics that we look at is our cohort retention and how strong that is. I see a dip in it or I see like a change in like the patterns that we're seeing in our numbers. I'm like, okay, something is definitely wrong here."

More Than Just Retinoids: The "Aging is Living" Philosophy

One thing you won't find in Dear Brightly's marketing? Anti-aging messaging.

"We have a whole list of words that we do not use, that we've banned. We don't use anti-aging. Nowhere in our copy or marketing messaging do we use language like that," Amy says with conviction.

"I don't want to contribute to that type of language for our customers. We don't want to talk to them and make them feel like they're not enough."

Instead, Dear Brightly has trademarked the term "Aging is Living" to reflect their philosophy.

"Just like a 20 year old is aging. So is a five year old. So am I at 36, we're aging every single day, every second of the day and you cannot stop it. You can't," Amy explains. "So why are we saying that we need to be otherwise than the age that we're at? Really, like, I really want to promote pro-aging, honestly."

For Amy, skincare isn't about turning back time: "Just like you exercise to feel strong, just like you eat well to feel healthy. Your skin is your largest organ, so we're taking care of our largest organ, our skin, and I want to feel good at the age I'm at right now."

Bridging Healthcare and Beauty

Dear Brightly sits at an unusual intersection between telehealth and beauty—a position that comes with unique challenges.

"With telehealth, people go to telehealth from my experience when they feel like they have a real, real skin concern, like severe acne, for example, whereas like beauty, it's more of like, it feels like more of an experience, right? It's more cosmetic."

This creates a delicate balance in how they communicate with customers. "When you bridge the two, you have to figure out how to talk to a customer and also like the way it looks too, right? Do you look more medicinal or do you look more like a beauty brand and how do you bridge the two?"

For Dear Brightly, this means creating products that not only work (the telehealth side) but also feel good to use (the beauty side).

"If it doesn't feel good to put on, people are not going to put it on," Amy explains. "Thinking about like when you're putting that eye serum on or that face serum on, it doesn't feel like Elmer's glue. It feels like a primer that goes on and it glides on and it glides on very well versus just it's hard to like move around."

What's Next for Dear Brightly

After years of development, Dear Brightly is launching an RX eye serum that customers have been requesting for years.

"Our derms came up with the formula and it's incredible because not only does it have their knowledge incorporated into it, which they designed and developed. But then also it has the feedback of our community who like sampled it, tested it."

This thoughtful approach to product development reflects Dear Brightly's commitment to their customers—something that has kept people coming back for years.

"Our customers are amazing. Some of them have stuck with us for such years, years, which is a true testament that we're doing something right."

As for the challenges ahead? Amy mentions two key issues: "Acquisition is tough in the sense where cost-efficient acquisition is tough now" and "building fast enough" while dealing with technical debt.

But her excitement about the future is clear. With new products in development that have been "years in the making," Amy believes Dear Brightly's customers will "really be happy about it."

From that embarrassing moment in an engineering meeting to building a company that's changing how people think about skincare, Amy's journey with Dear Brightly continues to evolve—just like the skin she's helping people care for.

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