Why Good Instincts rejected the “move fast” startup mentality

Building a sunscreen brand sounds simple, until you try to do it without shortcuts—these founders never imagined it would take six years.

Before they built Good Instincts, Carylyne Chan and Emily Hurd worked together at a cryptocurrency information startup. Chan, a software engineer based in Singapore, and Hurd, a senior revenue officer in New York, were living on opposite sides of the world when they were introduced. The two crossed paths in real life during after-work park hangs in New York and a company retreat in Hawaii, where, because of the sunny conditions outside, conversations drifted toward sunscreen.

Chan had already developed a strong personal focus on sun protection, urging friends to adopt stricter daily routines.

“All the people around me have been terrorized into proper sun habits at this point,” Chan said. “That was one of the founding things for me—a personal passion for it.”

Hurd’s interest deepened later, after pregnancy made mineral sunscreen less of a preference and more of a nonnegotiable. The two compared brands and tips. What frustrated them both was the difficulty of finding a mineral sunscreen that felt both trustworthy and wearable.

“I want it to be an enjoyable experience for my family and for everyone, really,” said Hurd. If it’s pasty and goopy, people don’t want to wear it.”

Chan initially approached sunscreen the way many tech founders approach products: move quickly, iterate fast, fix problems later. But she quickly realized that mindset didn’t translate to consumer health products.

“It really took us 100+ iterations, over 10,000 population hours for us to get here,” Chan said.

Over a conversation and email responses with Founder Brew, Chan and Hurd reflected on Good Instincts’s six-year journey shaped by failed formulations, manufacturing setbacks, and the slow realization that consumer health products don’t move at software speed.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Was there a moment where you realized “move fast and break things” simply doesn’t work when you’re dealing with biology and human health?

Carylyne Chan: A software person is always just like, “Okay, let’s just go really fast”... That just doesn’t work in this case. It took us close to four years before we got to a formulation where we were like, “Okay, this is the one”...There is a reason why there are not that many good mineral sunscreens on the market because it’s really difficult to formulate.

For software it’s very easy—if it doesn’t work, we roll back. But for this, you have to keep balancing, and that’s just on the formulation side. We can’t be reckless about it. It’s really important that the end product works super effectively and is super safe, so we can’t “move fast and break things.”

What did you learn about yourselves, going through different iterations of the product?

Emily Hurd: We learned a lot about our partnership, and we would come back together and say, “Well, what are we really here for? What is the reason that we’re doing this?” and if it’s about sharing good sunscreen with the people we love, we can still accomplish that and that’s still worth pursuing…There’s a lot of mutual trust and respect and wanting to support each other that has kept me going.

Chan: One of the initial manufacturers that we worked with actually closed down during Covid, and we were out around $80k, so that was very significant for us early on.

Every single iteration took one or two weeks, so for a software person it feels like forever. It was about being super patient, remembering why we’re here, and leaning on the partnership to keep each other motivated.

How did you navigate that setback emotionally and financially?

Chan: The hardest part was how abrupt it was. There was no warning—one day our manufacturing partner was operational, and the next it was basically “we’re closed,” no preamble. That’s a jarring way to lose around $80k and a production timeline in one go.

We let ourselves be upset for about a minute, and then we got practical. We started reaching out to our network the same day, asking friends and contacts for leads on other partners. I’ve found the fastest way through that kind of shock is to channel it into the actual problem in front of you rather than dwelling on the loss. Financially it hurt, but we treated it as a cost of operating in a genuinely unprecedented moment during Covid, not a verdict on the business.

What did that experience teach you about building a physical product company?

Chan: That physical product is hard in ways software simply isn’t, and a lot of that difficulty lives in the supply chain. You can have a great product and a great brand and still be completely exposed if one partner goes dark overnight. The concrete lesson was to do more due diligence on partners up front and always keep backup options—never let a critical part of your operation rest on a single point of failure.

The subtler lesson was about not overindexing on things outside your control. Covid was a genuinely unusual moment, and a lot of what happened wasn’t anything we could have prevented. Part of building resilience is knowing the difference between a mistake to learn from and a circumstance you couldn’t have avoided—and not beating yourself up over the second kind.

What part of the founder journey do you think people overglamorize?

Hurd: People probably think that the independence, the autonomy is really glamorous or awesome, and there are really great things about it—in terms of flexibility, not necessarily going into an office or reporting to a boss. But at the end of the day, when you own a business, at least in my experience, it’s always with you. You’re always thinking about it, and it’s hard. It’s really hard to take a vacation from it.

Chan: They think that the idea of being a founder is sexy or glamorous. But when you’re handling manufacturing issues while not taking a salary for years, it really comes down to whether you can stomach the grit that’s required to keep building toward this vision. If you don’t have that conviction, it’s not going to work.