Jhalesa Seymour became a millionaire at 25 selling soap. She started with just $67 in her pocket

In a street interview with The School of Hard Knocks, Seymour reflected on the money habits that helped her turn that small start into a seven-figure business, including one rule she says kept her from spending like a millionaire.

“A money lesson I lived by is your business money is not your lifestyle money,” Seymour said, explaining that people can be quick to upgrade their lifestyle as soon as they start earning more.

She took the opposite approach.

“I was a multimillionaire driving a Nissan Altima and living in a 700 square foot apartment,” she said.

The journey

Seymour launched Salt.xo in 2018 while she was still a student at the University of Central Florida. The idea grew out of a problem she had experienced herself: struggling to find feminine-care products that she felt wouldn’t disrupt her pH balance.

She repeatedly came across products made with irritating ingredients, and eventually decided to create an alternative of her own.

But Seymour wasn’t starting with much of a financial cushion. She grew up in a household with five children, where her mother earned about $30,000 a year, and has said she had just $67 when she started the company.

Many entrepreneurs rely on their own money to get a business off the ground, but Seymour was working with far less than most. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, 80% of employer businesses use personal savings as startup capital, and nearly half start with more than $25,000.

And finding the money to launch is only part of the challenge. Keeping a young business alive can be even harder. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 57.3% of business establishments launched in 2018 — the same year as Salt.xo — were still operating five years later.

The key to her success

Over the next eight years, Seymour says she turned Salt.xo into an eight-figure business. But she didn’t get there by pouring money into advertising.

“So a lot of businesses rely heavily on paid marketing, but I think what set us apart was that my organic marketing was fire,” she said in the TikTok video. “Word of mouth is what really sold the brand.”

Instead, Seymour focused on getting people talking about the products and building a customer base willing to spread the word themselves. That approach appears to have paid off quickly.

“In 2018, I made $154,000 making soaps out of my apartment,” Seymour told Business Insider. “The next year, we made $1 million in profits. Since then, we’ve had more than $16 million in sales.”

What you can take from Seymour’s money approach

Seymour’s story may be unusual, but one of the biggest lessons behind her success is fairly simple: earning more doesn’t have to mean spending more.

Today, she pays herself a salary from Salt.xo and reinvests the rest of the company’s profits into the business instead of treating everything it earns as money she can spend personally.