I recently went one on one with Raz Romanescu. Raz is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Underlining Beauty, which owns & operates brands such as TatBrow®, Nailboo® & Hide™, in addition to a number of other ventures, including Gamelancer, 10PM Curfew, and Memes.com.

Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?

Raz: I started my entrepreneurial journey right around the time social media platforms started really taking off. I was 20 years old when I started building Twitter community pages to millions of followers and then moved on to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok etc. Eventually founding some of the biggest social communities in the memes, beauty, fashion, gaming spaces. 

Growing up, I spent a lot of time playing MMORPG games. Networking online and navigating these environments was something I had done since I was 10 years old. Naturally, when social media came around, I felt prepared.

After proving to be very effective at building communities online around certain niches, the natural progression was to release products and technology that our followers can use and enjoy.

Some of the experiences, failures and setbacks all point back towards the founder of  the company believing 100% in the vision and have a team that is willing to do anything to get the job done. There are no rules! Here is a funny notable example.

Early in my career, like many companies in the digital space, we heavily depended on Facebook to gain access to our audience. We knew Facebook was the future, and we were quickly moving into a world where we could natively monetize on their platform. But, just as we had started gaining traction within the Facebook ecosystem back in 2014, our accounts were spontaneously shut down. Lacking an explanation and with nobody to call at Facebook, me and my Co-Founder took the first flight out of LAX and headed to Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, CA. The thing about Facebook is, if you don’t have an appointment…they really don’t want you on their campus. Even after building audiences of millions and spending an 8-figure number on Facebook advertising, we were unable to reach a single person at Facebook.

Desperate for answers, with no luck on the ground, and for lack of any better ideas, we thought we could get the attention of Facebook staffers by plane. So, with the help of three pilots, we hovered over Facebook headquarters for nearly two hours, with the planes dragging three banners that read: 

Plane 1: “Our company needs your help immediately!”

Plane 2: “FB PLEASE REACH OUT!!!”

Plane 3: “My personal cell phone number: XXX-XXX-XXXX”

For the next two hours, I received many, many phone calls. Fortunately for us, one of them was Facebook.

Adam: How did you come up with your business ideas? What advice do you have for others on how to come up with great ideas?

Raz: My criteria for starting a business is fairly simple. We go after markets that are large, and lead with products and solutions that clearly already have product market fit. 

Leveraging our talents and skills, we execute on these products with much more detail to product, creative and distribution.

My advice is not to reinvent the wheel and just dive in as quickly as possible. The rest will figure itself out.

Adam: How did you know your business ideas were worth pursuing? What advice do you have on how to best test a business idea?

Raz: Since we’ve successfully built large audiences, it allows us to test our own business theories internally with significant data sets.  We own our distribution and use our audiences to gauge demand before pressing on the gas. Once we identify something that has the potential to be huge, we move fast and double down.

I would start small and go after audiences that have a high probability of converting into customers. It is always best to see a business that has already proven successful and try to do it better.

Adam: What are the key steps you have taken to grow your businesses? What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?

Raz: The answer to this question, in my opinion, is universally the same for most businesses in this day and age.

Focus on four things:

1. Product: Product-market fit (without the right product-market fit, you’re working too hard).

2. Content: If you have the right product, your content should be able to sell this to almost anyone.

3. Distribution: Effective and scalable marketing that brings a return. Heavily dependent on 1 & 2.

4. Talent: The right team is 100% essential to reaching significant scale/unicorn status.

Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?

Raz: My best sales and marketing tips tie closely to the four points I made above. All of the hard work in building a scalable business is done on the front end. 

Make sure you have a product that people want and amazing creatives to demonstrate why someone should be a customer.

If you don’t have those first two things, you are working too hard. The same amount of effort should return 100x higher results than trying to sell the wrong product with bad creative.

Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?

Raz: Leaders have to be the steady hand in an organization and stick to the plan no matter what. Their vision and passion needs to be shared and felt by the entire team, so they can fully get behind it 100%.

Leaders should be giving clear instructions about what everyone's role is and how others depend on them internally to succeed, like a professional sports team.

It’s also important to be able to identify what someone’s true strengths are and start guiding them towards doing more of that internally. Also, being able to identify some self-imposed limitations/weaknesses some may not be aware of and helping them grow past those.

Leaders should always focus on their own self-improvement and be reflective in order to grow.

Credit should be given to all team members when they are doing an amazing job. Everyone should be treated with the same level of respect and held to the same standards. If someone is clearly underperforming, it is important to dig to the bottom of it without being judgemental.

Clear communication on a regular basis to build team spirit and culture is very important.

Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading and managing teams?

Raz: Finding the right talent is probably one of the most difficult things in the world. 

Usually finding people who are clearly aligned with the role and hungry with the same long term vision results are the best team members.

Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives and civic leaders? 

1. Take ALOT of calculated risk. It’s how you gather data and move things forward.

2. Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Sounds simple, but numbers don’t lie.

3. Be open to change and move fast. The only constant is change and you should embrace it or be left behind.

Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?

Raz: The train only leaves the station a few times in life - don’t miss it.


Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.

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