Title:Alumni Spotlight: Sarah Stellwag (C’18), CEO & Co-Founder of Lulo

Meet Sarah Stellwag (C’18), CEO and Co-Founder of Lulo– an organization that aims to assist families in navigating their Women Infants and Children (WIC) benefits. 

Sarah’s career is rooted in a deep passion for the intersection of technology and social enterprise. Read on to discover how her time at Georgetown helped spark this interest and how she has since turned that passion into meaningful impact.

Please introduce yourself.

My name is Sarah Stellwag. I graduated from the College in 2017. I was class of 2018, but graduated a semester early. I had a double major in government and economics. Outside of class at Georgetown, I spent a lot of time at MUG (I was a general manager there) and also volunteered at the Student Advocacy Office. I spent a lot of time off campus as well, interning at civic technology organizations throughout DC. 

I’ve always been really passionate about making civic technology systems easier to navigate. After I graduated, I spent a year in Malaysia on a Fulbright scholarship. After that, I joined my first tech startup called Propel. They help 40 million Americans who use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) manage their benefits. I’m deeply interested in how we can apply tech to society’s most pressing problems, and how we can use it to serve the most vulnerable among us. Today, I am the CEO and co-founder of a social enterprise startup called Lulo. Lulo empowers families to maximize their Women Infants and Children (WIC) benefits and navigate the very convoluted program rules. 

Was there any specific aspect of your time at Georgetown that influenced you to pursue entrepreneurship?

From my perspective, entrepreneurship is about proactively solving problems and building the world that we all want to live in. I’ve always been heavily influenced by the Jesuit philosophy of cura personalis, which instills that we have a profound responsibility to care for one another. My time at Georgetown taught me how to be curious, learn, and develop as a citizen of the world. That deeply influenced my philosophy on entrepreneurship and how it can be used to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

I think a little bit more tactically, being a general manager at MUG gave me a taste of what the daily operations of a business really look like. One time I accidentally ordered a thousand empanadas to the store and I was like, “Okay. It’s empanada day!” That taught me how to get through things and deal with uncertainty.

There was also a course that I took called the India Innovation Studio that was taught by Professor Irfan Nooruddin. That really taught me how to develop and validate different ideas, with a specific focus on how innovation can be used to improve people’s lives.

What inspired you to create Lulo?

Lulo was born at a social impact innovation lab called Blue Ridge Labs, which is based in Brooklyn. Our team formed there. Blue Ridge brings together an engineer, a product designer, experts, and product managers to solve problems for low to moderate income Americans. We spent months criss-crossing around New York City talking to different families both about their lives and also specifically their experience with the WIC program. We consistently, over and over again, heard and saw the same frustration: having items that they think are approved for WIC getting denied at checkout, and how navigating the program’s convoluted rules was really draining parents that are already so stretched thin. That core insight of being at the register and finding out that an item was denied really became our north star for Lulo and how we make sure that no one ever experiences that again. We built Lulo in close partnership with hundreds of different WIC families as well as WIC staff to streamline an outdated and broken shopping experience. Our mobile app helps families save time, reduce stress, and get the food that their kids need.

 How has Lulo grown and what is next?

We launched our very first minimum viable product, or MVP, at a Mother’s Day event at a WIC office in New York, and we had our first 100 families sign up at the event and start to use the app. From there, we have now reached over 50,000 families in 22 states. We’ve also onboarded our first business partners – both a leading consumer packaged goods brand as well as a national telecoms provider. We’re helping them reach and unlock a new customer base. What’s next is we’re focused on expanding to new states and trying to meet the organic demand of thousands of families that are trying to use Lulo where they live. Every day we get messages from moms asking when we’ll be launching in Mississippi or California, and we’re trying as fast as we can.

What does a day in your life look like?

I imagine every person says “there is no single day that’s alike.” The very first thing I try to do when I wake up is to get outside and go for a walk. From there, I check our weekly performance metrics, like user growth. After that, I choose one major task or issue area to tackle. This includes things like, on the product management side, trying to scope out new features and troubleshoot some bugs; or it might look like investing deeply in sales conversations and preparing for sales calls; or like user interviews talking to different families about what kinds of other challenges they are facing and how can we improve the product. Then I work on the general company operations of payroll, finance, legal, and all of those different aspects as well.

What is the hardest part of your job?

The hardest part about entrepreneurship and operating in a startup is that it’s difficult to identify the most impactful work that you can be doing at any given point in time because you’re operating under so much uncertainty. Startups are a mix of effort, execution, strategy, and honestly a little bit of luck. So many startups and companies have captured lighting in a bottle in a moment in time and that is what enables their success. I think it’s challenging to decipher what could be increasing your surface area for luck and what’s an experiment that’s not actually moving the needle. That’s really part of the rapid iteration and experimentation process of trying to identify what activities and things will actually further you along.

What is the most fulfilling part of your job?

We do a ton of user interviews. In the best ones, we’ll be talking to a mom and she’ll come out and show us a new cereal box or a new fruit that they discovered they could purchase with their WIC benefits – that they found out from Lulo. Knowing that you helped a kid discover a new food that they love, or helping families put more food on the table – and save them time in that process – has been incredibly fulfilling.

Is there anything you wish more people knew about your industry?

I wish there was more awareness overall about the WIC program and the way people use the social safety net in the U.S. Almost half of all infants that are born in the U.S. are eligible for WIC benefits. There’s over 50 years of the program running as the leading “food-is-medicine” program and it has so many proven health outcomes. At the same time, it also has one of the lowest participation rates among benefits programs at about 53% nationwide. I’m constantly trying to get the word out that we have this proven solution that seems to be working well, but how do we ensure that more families can access this benefit and make it easier to navigate?

How does Georgetown continue to support you as an alumna?

My biggest connection point to Georgetown is through the friends I made there and the community along the way and in my peer group. So many of my friends at Georgetown, when we were starting on Lulo, had really become technology leaders or entrepreneurs building their own things. They were the first to want to provide feedback and guidance, and make connections for you and just say “I see what you’re doing, I see what you’re building, I want to live in that world alongside you – how can I help?”

Finally, what is one piece of advice you would give to any Georgetown student who might be interested in entrepreneurship?

Embracing a growth mindset. On the first day at the first startup I worked at, Propel, the CEO Jimmy Chen instilled the idea that anyone can teach themselves anything. He pointed to the engineers across the room and said, “They weren’t born knowing how to code, that’s something they were able to learn and taught themselves.” He encouraged us all to take that mentality into our own roles. That mentality from day one helped me to go from an entry level sales job to a senior product manager in three years. Carrying that hunger for new skills, and the true belief that you can learn them, has been the most impactful advice of my career.

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