Balancing the Grind with Elaine Yang, Founder of askbella

Elaine Yang is the founder of askbella, an online beauty recommendation platform that uses AI to digitally ‘prescribe’ a complete skincare regime based on your skin.

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To kick things off, could you tell us a little about your career background and current role?

My background is in digital marketing where I recently worked for one of the world’s leading beauty and healthcare ecommerce companies.

This experience led me to understand the importance of personalisation and tailoring offers to meet unique individual needs. In the world of beauty, there is no one-size-fits all solution and this became clear to me when I came up with the idea of askbella. 

I’m a big believer in the importance of great skincare and spent years trialling skincare and beauty products that were popular. However, once I finally found a good product, I found it even more difficult to match products to create the perfect skincare routine. Growing tired of the research, trial and error, I realised there had to be a better way, which prompted me to create askbella. 

Askbella is an Australian online beauty platform that harnesses artificial intelligence to digitally ‘prescribe’ a skincare regime based on the user’s skin type. This technology is called ‘Skinalyser’, askbella’s online skin analysis tool that has the ability to find a customer’s perfect-match skincare products based on their skin type. 

Customers can purchase these skincare product recommendations through askbella’s retailer partners, giving them a highly effective skincare regime that has been tailored to what their skin truly needs. My current role involves running the day-to-day aspects of askbella, which often means I am wearing lots of different hats on any given day. 

What does a day in your life look like for you? Can you take us through a recent workday?

A day in the life for me really varies from day-to-day because we are still in our start up phase. A recent workday involved working with our tech team to continue evolving our AI functionalities, curating our social media strategy for 2023 and working on askbella’s marketing. 

However, I am also very hands on with any customer queries and enjoy working closely with our graphic designer, whether that be on the next campaign or marketing collateral. 

What does work-life balance mean to you and how do you work to achieve that goal?

For me, work-life balance means trying to find some ‘me time’ each and every day, however I feel like I am in a never-ending pursuit of this! Sometimes work does take priority but when I notice this happening a little too much, I do make an effort to get some ‘me time’ back. 

However, in saying that, when you’re working on your passion this often happens – some days don’t feel like work so I’m happy to spend extra time doing what I love. Most days I do try to find time to exercise because it is really important to me – not only to spark creativity but to feel good physically and mentally.

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In the past 12 months, have you started or stopped any routines or habits to change your life?

James Clear mentioned in Atomic Habits that the purposes of habits are to solve the problems of life with as little energy and effort as possible. To me personally, habits/routines should increase long-term energy and endurance by reducing the energy required to complete tasks. 

The new habits that have helped me feel more energetic and productive are: 

• Set my bedroom as a phone-free zone
• Write down 3-5 things I’m grateful for to end each day with gratitude.
• Embrace social media JOMO
• 18-20 hours of intermittent fasting
• Say “no” to things I don’t see the value

Do you have any favourite books, podcasts or newsletters that you’d like to recommend?

So many recommendations, but I will keep it short. 

Books: 

• Start With Why – Simon Sinek
• The Surrender Experiment – Michael A. Singer
• The Inner Game of Tennis – W Timothy Gallwey
• Untamed – Glennon Doyle
• Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters – Richard Rumelt

Podcasts: 

• The Startup Podcast by Yaniv Bernstein & Chris Saad
• WorkLife by Adam Grant
• Oprah’s Super Soul

Newsletter: 

• Lenny’s Newsletter
• 5 Bullet Friday by Tim Ferris 
• James Clear 
• Wait But Why

If you could read an interview about work-life balance by anyone, who would that be?

I don’t have a specific person in mind. Although reading other entrepreneur interviews on Balance the Grid gives me a lot of inspiration, finding the habit fits me in different stages of life and adapting it effortlessly needs a lot of self-awareness and deliberate practice. 

Do you have any last thoughts on work, life or balance that you’d like to share with our readers?

Taking care of yourself physically and mentally should always be the first priority. Figuring out what makes you happy and being honest with yourself is usually the first and the most important step in finding the balance. 

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