The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan

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261: How Raegan Moya-Jones Built a $100M Baby Blanket Business Using Common Sense and Hard Work Jul 29, 2019

Show notes

Against the Odds How Raegan Moya-Jones built a $100 million business from the ground up—no fancy MBA required.

Raegan Moya-Jones was an Aussie in New York City, pregnant with her first daughter, and she couldn’t find the right baby blanket.

Every Australian mother from time immemorial had swaddled her baby in a cotton muslin blanket, and Moya-Jones wanted to do the same. But no matter where she looked, she couldn’t find one.

Rather than simply becoming frustrated by the futile search, she had an idea.

“I figured that all Aussie parents couldn’t have it wrong, and if I introduced it to American parents, they’d feel the same way,” she says. “Luckily for me, my hunch was right!”

Moya-Jones went on to found the successful baby product company aden + anais (partly named for her first daughter), publish a book about her journey, and launch a second business all while raising four daughters.

Even when success turned sour, as it so often can in the entrepreneurial world, she didn’t let that stop her. Moya-Jones has weathered the heartbreaking end of a partnership and gut-wrenching business betrayals, becoming stronger, wiser, and more successful for it.

A Rocky Start

In 1997, Moya-Jones moved from Australia to New York, after her Chilean boyfriend landed a new job. She was partway through an MBA, but put it on hold to be with the man who is now her husband.

Without a visa, she struggled to find work, but eventually managed to land a position at the Australian consulate. Through connections she built there, she moved into a job at a conference company and then into a position as a sales executive with The Economist, where she worked for over a decade.

It was when she learned she was expecting her first child in 2003 that she began that fateful search for the perfect swaddle.

For three years, she toyed with the idea of starting that business. As a first-time entrepreneur, she had to learn everything from product design to manufacturing, but in 2006, she set out to launch her brand.

While she may not have had a completed MBA under her belt, she had years of experience in sales, a degree of common sense she felt she could truly rely on and, above all else, the drive to work as hard as it took.

“I really am a huge believer that common sense and work ethic are the two keys to building a successful business. They’re the two most important things,” she says. “At the end of the day, it’s how much work you’re prepared to put in to be successful. I could never, ever have estimated how much work had to go into building a business from scratch.”

For the next three years, Moya-Jones would work her day job, then return home to spend quality time with her family (which now included three daughters). But once the bedtime rituals were complete, she burned the midnight oil building her business, from 8:30 p.m. until 3:30 a.m.

“It was pretty brutal,” she says.

But the odd hours she kept weren't the only tough part from the early stages of aden + anais.

Moya-Jones launched her business with her friend Claudia Schwartz, and for the first few years, they worked together flawlessly. They initially invested $15,000 each into the company to build a basic Yahoo website, design a logo, and make their first manufacturing order. They anticipated the investment would last them six to 12 months.

The money ran out after eight weeks.

They each invested another $30,000, but at this point, Moya-Jones had run through her savings. Timing is everything, and it wasn’t on their side.

“We were starting out during the worst recession since the Great Depression, so it wasn’t really good timing in terms of having access to capital and people wanting to loan us money,” she says.

So Claudia made an additional investment that Moya-Jones was unable to match, and once they asked Claudia’s father-in-law to grant them a $200,000 loan, Moya-Jones says she noticed a bubble of resentment growing.

“I think the disparity in what I could contribute financially to what Claudia could was one of the biggest catalysts for the partnership dissolving,” she says.

Moya-Jones says she found three other women to buy out Claudia’s 49% share in the business, and in 2008, the partnership ended.

Off Like a Rocket

Although Moya-Jones was struggling through the personal blow of saying goodbye to a friend, aden + anais was steadily growing into a healthy, flourishing business.

“It was a rocketship in the early stages, for sure,” she says.

The muslin blankets were an instant hit, and thanks to 20 years of sales experience, she was well equipped to get the products to those who wanted them most. Moya-Jones loaded up taxis with samples of her product and went door to door sharing it with every store that might be interested.

“That’s where definitely my sales experience came in handy because I was extremely comfortable with that part of the business,” she says.

In the early 2000s, brick-and-mortar stores still reigned supreme, so she wasn't yet focused on the ecommerce side of the business. She also chose to build relationships with existing retailers, rather than launching into fraught competition with them.

“We didn’t want to piss off the retailers by competing against them with our own website and sales and everything,” she says. “Then, Amazon entered the picture, and of course, all bets were off at that point.”

Meanwhile, Moya-Jones was still balancing her company with her day job. She didn’t want to cause financial strain on her family, which would eventually grow to four daughters, and she didn’t want to put added pressure on her business to perform.

“It was my conscious decision to choose sleep deprivation over any kind of financial pressure on my family and on the business in the early stages,” she says. But the years of toil took their toll.

“There were definitely times when my hair was falling out,” she admits.

She still believed in her business, though, so she powered through the strain, set a goal for when she would leave her day job, and waited for the right moment to arrive.

“Statistically, only 2% of all women-owned businesses ever break a million dollars in revenue,” she says. “I knew it was a pretty stretch goal, and so I sort of said, ‘Well, if I can get to a million in revenue, then I’m prepared to dive fully into aden + anais and quit my day job and give it a really good go,’ which is what I did.”

In 2009, Moya-Jones went full time with the company.

But even though her business was a success, she still needed additional investments to keep the business alive. She borrowed money from just about anyone who would lend it to her for nearly a year and a half after the dissolution of her partnership.

“Initially, it was friends and family, and then it was friends of friends, and then once we got to the point where it was just obvious that we were never going to be able to scale doing it that way, that’s when I went out and looked for investment money,” she says.

Although the business had traction, Moya-Jones says that she struggled to find investors. But in 2010, her first investor came aboard. That investment led to aden + anais’ first year of $10 million in revenue.

A Dark Day and a New Dawn

With the acquisition of another business in 2016, aden + anais pushed past the $100 million mark. But even as Moya-Jones’ success continued to blossom, disaster loomed on the horizon.

In 2013, the first investors in the business departed, and their parting piece of advice to Moya-Jones was to bring in another private equity firm to share the load. They could never have known what this would mean for the company’s future. The new firm bought the majority share of aden + anais, which would lead to an internal struggle for the future of the business.

“That’s when the whole thing started to go downhill for me,” she says. “We did not agree on the way forward. I don’t think they really understood me. This is the whole Stanford, Harvard, Yale backgrounds coming up against the crazy, opinionated Australian girl who has no education on a piece of paper to show. We just didn’t see eye-to-eye on very much at all. It was sort of the beginning of the end to tell you the truth.”

Outspoken about her disagreements as she saw her beloved company moving in a direction she didn’t support, Moya-Jones was informed in 2016 that she was being moved from the position of CEO.

“My story is actually way more common than I think people realize,” she says.

After a string of failed replacements, a new CEO finally stuck, and in 2018, Moya-Jones was fired from her own company.

“It was a pretty awful time,” she says.

But the new firm had the controlling interest in the company, so they were well within their rights to show her the door. And it wasn’t as though Moya-Jones had planned to run the company forever. The luster of serving as CEO of a massive business had already started to fade for her, and she missed the rush of innovation.

“Once you get up to the $60, $70, $80 million dollar mark, you just become the person that all you’re dealing with is shit every day,” she says. “The fun stuff everybody else is handling. The only time you’re really needed is when it’s too hard for somebody else or they don’t want to make the decision and deal with it.”

But she still wishes she would never have sold the majority share, at least until she was prepared to exit on her own terms instead of being forced out as CEO.

“I’m grateful in that I ended up making a very nice amount of money from aden + anais, but it’s definitely bittersweet. If I could do it all over again, I would do it differently.”

To this day, she is still the single largest individual shareowner in aden + anais.

But her story wasn’t over. In fact, a publisher soon approached Moya-Jones and asked her to share, well, what it takes.

While she was initially hesitant because, as she says, until the business reached about $50 million in revenue, she was operating largely on common sense, she decided to move forward with the book when the publisher said they didn’t want a conventional outline of what it took to become successful. They just wanted her story.

“To say I’m the antithesis of the MBA-educated business mind is an understatement,” she says.

And in her book, What It Takes: How I Built a $100 Million Business Against the Odds, she shares just how she did it and hopes she inspires others to do the same. She believes that anyone could follow in her footsteps without any kind of training or prior experience, as long as they are willing to put in the work.

And being asked to leave aden + anais didn’t keep the tenacious Moya-Jones down for long. Today, she is elbow-deep in a brand new business that has taken her “from babies to booze.” In June 2018, she co-founded the moonshine company Saint Luna Spirits.

“We wanted to create a high-end moonshine that was served in five-star restaurants and the best cocktail bars out there,” she says.

The business has already won gold and silver medals at spirit competitions, and after only a few weeks on the market, the label already appears in renowned establishments across New York, such as Jean-Georges and Employees Only.

“It’s super fun to be back in the trenches building something and creating,” Moya-Jones says.

And no matter what she does or where she goes next, by weathering the storms of her first business, Moya-Jones has proven unequivocally that she has what it takes.

Raegan Moya-Jones Tips for Entrepreneurs

Through successes and trials, Raegan Moya-Jones has build up an extensive bank of knowledge when it comes to launching and shepherding businesses, and these are some of the tips she shares with every entrepreneur she meets.

Use Common Sense

“Not all people have common sense, but what I’m trying to say is you don’t need to be an expert in really anything, I believe, to start and build a successful business.”

Think Twice Before Selling

“Never, ever sell the controlling interest of your company if you’re still passionately involved in it and dedicated to it.” Unless you are looking to exit a company for good, Moya-Jones recommends that founders think twice before relinquishing control, even for a nice payout.

Stay True to Yourself

“Everyone’s going to have an opinion. There will always be the people who want to come in once you’re successful to change the way you do things.” Moya-Jones reminds founders to trust their instincts and remain true to the things that help them launch and grow their business, even if others disagree.

Interview by Nathan Chan, feature article reprinted from Foundr Magazine, by Erica Comitalo

Key Takeaways

How Moya-Jones’ first child inspired the idea for aden + anais
A peek into her journey from Australia to the US, and the struggle to find a job
An entrepreneur’s juggling act with a full-time job, family, and building a business
Why Moya-Jones was committed to staying at her full-time job until she broke $1 million in revenue
How finances eventually turned a partnership sour
Moya-Jones’ philosophy of running a business on common sense and work ethic
How she got aden + anais off the ground by using old-school sales tactics
The journey to $100 million in revenue
The one business decision Moya-Jones regrets to this day, and how it led to her being forced out of her company
What motivated Moya-Jones to write What It Takes: How I Built a $100 Million Business Against the Odds
How Moya-Jones made the transition from babies to booze and is now finding success with moonshine company St. Luna Spirits

260: How Nimble’s Jon Ferrara Used Partnerships and Relationships to Strike Gold in CRM Jul 22, 2019

Show notes

Back in the Game How Nimble’s Jon Ferrara returned to the startup world to revolutionize customer relationships for a second time, all while maintaining a life he loves.

Jon Ferrara was frustrated.

As a young computer software salesman and son of an entrepreneur, he firmly believed that one of the most vital aspects of business was relationship building. But in the 1980s, managing those relationships was a giant pain. He was stuck fumbling with paper leads, appointment calendars, spreadsheet forecasts, and no great way to keep or share records. He wanted to fix the problem, and thought he might just be able to.

Of course, he could have stayed content where he was and raked in a sweet $200,000 a year, while waiting for someone else to solve the problem. But surrounded by aging coworkers who regularly lamented the shots they didn’t take, Ferrara didn’t want to be just another guy with a good idea who didn’t chase his dream.

So at 28, he quit his job to see what he could create.

Three decades and two successful companies later, Ferrara changed the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) game—and then changed it again! Through his work in founding GoldMine and Nimble, Ferrara strives to boost the R in CRM by improving the way salespeople relate to each other and to their customers, first by integrating email, contacts, and calendar, and then by drawing in social media.

“As I went into my career and struggled to sell in the technology arena, I found it hard to scale connections and relationships and pipeline and marketing, and I looked for a tool to do it,” he says. “I couldn’t find it, so I built it. And it turned into a gold mine for me.”

The path Ferrara has traveled has not been a straight line. But thanks to a willingness to pivot, seek partnerships with high-profile businesses, and put relationships before profit, he has built businesses, and a life, he is very proud of.

Striking Gold

With no Windows, Outlook, or Salesforce, the life of a salesperson in the 1980s was an endless wilderness of loose scraps of paper.

The salesperson was handed a lead that they would cold call, making notes on the piece of paper and scheduling further meetings in a separate-but-also-paper appointment calendar.

If the paper was lost, so were the notes. Forget about other team members sharing information to build well-rounded relationships with a client. And the bigger the company got, so grew the problem.

This was the root of Ferrara’s frustration.

“What I wanted was a tool that integrated contacts and email and calendar with sales and marketing automation, not just for me, but for the whole team,” he says.

No matter how hard he looked, he could only find pieces of the tool he sought. A marketing tool here. A calendar there. A pipeline tool way over there. But nothing that brought it all together. So, he set out to create it himself.

Ferrara sketched out the idea for GoldMine, and Elan Susser, a friend from college, made it into a reality. Using the money in their savings accounts, Ferrara and Susser created a CRM that integrated every tool a sales team would need and designed it to be accessible across a network.

They had created something revolutionary, and that filled a prevalent need, but they had no money to advertise and no real connections to reach out to.

“There we were, two kids in an apartment with $5,000 in the bank with basically Outlook and Salesforce before either existed,” he says. “So, how do you sell that?”

They say our struggles become our greatest strengths. And it’s in his past sales struggles that Ferrara found the key to GoldMine’s success. During his two-year stint as a software salesman with Banyan, Ferrara was often beaten to the punch by the local resellers of a competing company, Novell.

“The Novell resellers used to kick my butt as the enterprise Banyan sales rep because I had to sell at the top level, the enterprise, all the way down to everybody in the company, and that took months if not years,” he says. “Whereas the Novell guys sold into work groups.”

Rather than focusing on the top dogs at well established companies, Ferrara’s competitors got to know the small groups in coffee shops that would one day form successful startups and eventually large corporations.

With their bottom-up approach, Novell representatives were becoming the trusted go-to software salespeople of small workgroups, allowing them to spread more quickly and eventually become the corporate standard in a fraction of the time it took for top-level executives to make decisions.

So when Ferrara wanted to spread the word about GoldMine, he sought out his former competition. He called top Novell sellers and showed them what a difference GoldMine would make in their own businesses.

As they fell in love with the software, the trusted, local reps recommended it to their customers. Ferrara says that this proto-influencer marketing tactic was the secret sauce that allowed them to reach their first $100,000 in sales.

But as the business grew, so did the needs of the GoldMine customers. While Ferrara’s company initially targeted solopreneurs and small teams, they were rapidly being asked to cater to the needs of organizations with as many as 5,500 people. They needed a more scalable model.

So, when Microsoft approached Ferrara with a deal, he knew it would be mutually beneficial.

“They said, ‘Well, we just built NT Server, SQL Server and Exchange Server, and we want an independent software vendor to help us drive adoption because nobody’s going to buy SQL Server without a business application that calls for it and makes it sticky,’” he says.

As Microsoft created new servers, the company needed to find a way to sell them to business owners who were reluctant to leave the comfortable. By partnering with up and coming business applications that would run only using their newest servers, they drove sales of both products.

Ferrara decided to create a new version of GoldMine that supported the needs of larger corporations by relying on the tools provided by the Microsoft servers. In turn, Microsoft pushed GoldMine to its customers.

“We became corporate standard at 50 of the Fortune 500 companies, and that’s what propelled us to $100 million a year in revenue,” Ferrara says.

But as he stood on the mountaintop of success and looked down at what he had built, he began to question whether he wanted to keep climbing or if it might be time to take another path.

Stepping Back

The life of an entrepreneur can be tough. Building a company, particularly a large one, requires high levels of dedication, brainpower, and time.

“Ten years of scaling a company to $100 million in revenue took everything I had,” Ferrara says, “and it cost me time and moments with everyone around me.”

He started searching for his exit.

It was 2000, the stock market was soaring, and Ferrara suspected it wouldn’t last, so when he was offered $125 million in cash to sell GoldMine, he took the deal.

Four months later, Ferrara says, the dotcom bubble burst, sending stocks plummeting. But even as he sighed with the relief of a bullet dodged and settled into the stay-at-home husband and father life, another much more insidious threat was already growing. One year after Ferrara sold GoldMine, doctors found a tumor in his brain.

“Life is going to hand you blessings, and it’s also going to smack you, and you can’t control that,” he says. “The only thing you can control is how you react to it.”

Ferrara chose to react in the way he knew best: through research and relationships. He visited a variety of doctors while also learning about Eastern medicine, and through a combination of these treatments, he says he healed his body while also taking a deeper look at his soul.

“I came to a simple conclusion about my purpose in life,” he says. “I think we are on this planet to grow our souls by helping other people grow theirs. Rinse and repeat. That’s it.”

Even though he had only planned to be away from the business world for a short period, his brush with mortality caused him to reevaluate where he invested his limited time.

“They don’t write on your grave, ‘kickass entrepreneur,’” Ferrara says with a laugh. “They say, 'beloved father, friend, husband.' So I decided to dedicate time to being a present father, husband, and contributor to my community…and to be able to do that at 40 years old was priceless. It was precious.”

So for nearly a decade, Ferrara was almost entirely absent from the world of technology. Then in 2009, as his 50th birthday approached, the rise of a new technological power caught his attention: social media.

Still with an eye for relationship building, Ferrara recognized that social media was about to reshape the way people related to one another and also how consumers related to businesses. He also knew that the current CRM options weren’t built to integrate with social media.

With contacts spread across CRM software, company software, and every kind of social media platform imaginable, salespeople were once again as overwhelmed trying to manage contacts as they were in the days of pen and paper.

“So I said to myself, ‘Imagine if you could build a CRM that worked for you by building itself from the disparate data you already have in your business—the email, contacts, and calendars that you have in GSuite, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn,’ and I built it,” he says.

In 2010, Ferrara built an exploratory team. In 2011, he launched a beta test. In 2013, the paywall went up, and so Ferrara returned to the entrepreneurial world with the creation of the social CRM, Nimble.

Back in the Game

It was like déjà vu. Once again, Ferrara felt he had a valuable piece of software, and once again, he had no easy avenue to market it.

“I’d been out of technology for 10 years,” he says. “Most people in technology have only been in technology for 10 years, let alone out of it.”

No one remembered who he was, or even what GoldMine had done. But while he may have lost name recognition and connections during his absence, there is one thing that had only continued to flourish in his time away: his ability to build relationships.

So, Ferrara dove into social media, sharing and commenting on the posts of thought leaders in the entrepreneurial space.

“Rather than me having to go out and write my own content, I shared content that resonated with me in and around the value that my product provided, which generated eyeballs to my brand,” he says.

Over time, this led to moments of interaction with the influencers whose content he shared. But he avoided diving right into a pitch for Nimble. Instead, he would hop on a call with them and ask them questions based on research about their lives and businesses.

“If you let somebody talk, you’ll learn what you need to learn to add value, and they’ll love you because people love to be heard,” he says.

As the connections grew, he would offer them meaningful introductions or even business ideas. Only when he was asked would he share his current venture, Nimble. And as he shared, some of those he spoke with decided to give it a try. Then those happy customers shared their experiences with their followings.

And while this approach to marketing took time, Ferrara believes you can’t put a price on authenticity.

“Real, solid relationships are one to one,” he says. “They’re heart to heart. They’re relevant and authentic. And when you blast, people feel it.”

His patient methodology led to over 100,000 Nimble subscribers and such high-profile investors as Mark Cuban and Google Ventures, all without a single cent spent on marketing. And, after partnering with Microsoft once again, Ferrara sees explosive growth in Nimble’s future.

With the rise of cloud computing, he has his eye on which businesses are finding the most success in that arena. And Ferrara points out that, according to the numbers, it’s undoubtedly Microsoft. He says that while G Suite has about 7 million users, Office 365 has 175 million.

“Essentially it’s really game over in the cloud productivity wars, and Microsoft dominates and will grow from here. “Most businesses that use Microsoft products rely on their local reseller to facilitate their adoption and implementation. Microsoft has hundreds of thousands of them around the world, and nobody has that.”

With Nimble’s status as the simple CRM for Office 365, Ferrara says they’ve signed up 30 of the 50 top Microsoft distributors and over 1,000 Microsoft resellers in just the last six months. And it’s only onward and upward from there.

But even though lightning has struck not once but twice in Ferrara’s journey as a tech entrepreneur, he feels that his greatest achievements are those he has made as a husband, father, and member of his community.

“Life isn’t about money,” he says. “It’s really more about the moments that create the memories. All you leave are the moments you’ve been truly present with the universe around you—with other human beings—and the ripples that you leave behind.”

Interview by Nathan Chan, feature article reprinted from Foundr Magazine, by Erica Comitalo

Key Takeaways

Why Ferrara believes in valuing relationships over everything else
How Ferrara pioneered the world of CRM with his first company GoldMine
Why you should avoid the “shoulda, coulda, woulda” mindset
The 10-year journey to scaling GoldMine and selling it for $125 million in cash
How a serious illness shifted Ferrara’s perspective and led to his current life’s mission
The transition from 10 years out of the tech game to building leading social CRM platform Nimble
How Ferrara rebuilt his personal brand and Nimble’s brand
His best advice when it comes to building strategic, high-level partnerships
Why Ferrara recommends focusing on moments, not money

259: Taking on Google, with Gabriel Weinberg, Founder of Privacy Browser DuckDuckGo Jul 18, 2019

Show notes

Taking on Google Gabriel Weinberg has made it his mission to protect internet privacy, and his scrappy Google competitor DuckDuckGo is leading the charge.

Everything we do online is tracked. Searching, browsing, shopping, even navigating.

Most of us have grown accustomed to this. Although we may acknowledge now and then that it makes us uncomfortable, we haven’t changed our habits. Maybe we’ve become too reliant on our preferred online services for basic day-to-day tasks. Or maybe we don’t even know how we’d change our ways in the first place.

This is a problem that Gabriel Weinberg has been helping people solve since 2008, when he first created privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo. While the company has been charging ahead ever since, Weinberg’s mission is on everyone’s mind these days. Concerns about internet privacy and data protection are at an all time high, following recurring scandals around tech companies leaving their users vulnerable.

While still far smaller than industry leader you-know-who, DuckDuckGo’s popularity is surging, thanks to its commitments to never collecting personal information or tracking your activity to sell to advertisers. The search engine offers other services like informing the user of what tracking is being blocked, and now has a mobile privacy browser and desktop plugins. Since incorporating in 2008, DuckDuckGo has grown to a global company of 63 employees.

As internet privacy has taken the spotlight, Weinberg’s been busy, writing and advocating for federal “do not track” legislation, and speaking up in the New York Times opinion page and other platforms. He’s also got a new book out that explores the power of mental models he’s relied upon during his career.

But Weinberg’s core mission remains: to make it a lot easier for you to use the internet without being creeped on.

The Start of DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is a search engine, but it’s also an internet privacy company that’s out to help you protect yourself online.

“We like to say the internet shouldn't feel so creepy, and protecting your information should be as easy as closing the blinds,” Weinberg says.

DuckDuckGo offers a variety of tools to help consumers achieve this privacy—and feel confident about it. The company started as a search engine and has since expanded to offer a browser for iOS and Android, along with extensions for desktop browsers.

The company is 10 years in the making, but it wasn’t Weinberg’s first internet startup. After graduating from MIT in 2003, he created educational software that supported student achievement by using the internet to connect parents and teachers. Unfortunately, the software was developed about 15 years too early, and it fell flat.

Next, Weinberg started a pre-Facebook social network that helped people find old friends and classmates. That fell apart in 2006, and DuckDuckGo followed soon after in 2007. The company incorporated in 2008 and officially launched at the end of that year.

So, how has DuckDuckGo competed with giants like Google for over 10 years and lived to tell the tale? It’s a modern day David and Goliath story, although in this case David is growing bigger and stronger every day.

Weinberg attributes a lot of DuckDuckGo’s success to his team. As he often tells other entrepreneurs, “If you're going to succeed, you're going to need an amazing team around you. Work on crafting the values and mission to attract a team... to reach your ambition.”

The Power of Mental Models

Weinberg also credits much of his success to years of dedicated research on mental models, which he’s recently turned into a book with his wife Lauren McCann, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models.

“Mental models are concepts ... be a better strategic thinker,” Weinberg says.

He encourages people to think of mental models like this: When you first learn arithmetic, you learn addition, then multiplication based on addition. If you didn’t advance to multiplication, you could still combine quantities using addition, but it would take you much, much longer.

Mental models operate the same way. “Once you know something, you can think in a higher-order way really quickly,” Weinberg says. On the other hand, if you didn’t have a mental model, you’d have to start from scratch, every time. It’d be more difficult and time-consuming to make good decisions, repeatedly.

When he started training the DuckDuckGo executive team, Weinberg realized a significant knowledge gap: His team didn’t recognize more than half the mental models he’d instructed them to learn and use.

That’s how Weinberg and McCann, a statistician, came up with Super Thinking—when he realized his current training method was inefficient and no other resource would suffice. Through their research, they also realized that many of the mental models were related.

Almost all 300 mental models in the book are existing concepts. Super Thinking simply collects and organizes them into main themes—nine, to be exact. The last two themes are called “Unlocking People's Potential” and “Flex Your Market Power,” and the mental models in these chapters apply to leadership, management, and other business best practices.

“People are really different, and if you want to manage effectively, every person requires different characteristics,” he says. That’s why effective managers take the time to understand personality types and strengths, using questionnaires like Myers-Briggs and DiSC.

One notable mental model is called Joy’s Law, which tells us that all of the smartest people already work for someone else. “This means that you can’t corral smart people,” Weinberg says. “Instead, if you arrange people in just the right way and give them jobs that fit , they can reach extraordinary success both as teams and individuals.”

In their book, Weinberg and McCann explain that Joy’s Law also overlaps with mental models like 10x Teams and Resonant Frequency, the latter coming from physics. “A lot of mental models come from different disciplines,” Weinberg says. “The idea of mental models is to take a multidisciplinary approach—to take the best ideas from all different disciplines and combine them to use them for general strategic thinking.”

To understand Resonant Frequency at work, imagine an opera singer breaking a glass by hitting just the right note. “The same happens with people; hitting the right frequency and absorbing energy from the right role and jobs,” Weinberg says.

But just as a singer can’t break glass with every note they sing (it’s actually quite rare), a team can't operate at a resonant frequency at all times. So, how do you know when you’ve reached it with your team? You constantly shift around your team and test to see which combination produces the best output.

That’s what Weinberg does at DuckDuckGo, where he doesn’t have a traditional management hierarchy. Instead, they’ve divided management responsibilities between positions and operate based on objectives and projects, and the team doesn’t hesitate to shuffle around when needed.

”We are constantly moving people around to fit what they're most interested in and best suited for... to achieve these 10X Teams,” Weinberg said.

Gaining Traction for Growth

Weinberg previously authored Traction, which serves as a scientific experimentation approach to marketing. In it, he systematically lists 19 different channels that companies can use to gain traction with their audiences.

“My advice is to not leave anything out,” Weinberg says. “It’s often one of the unusual things might be the thing that actually works.”

Over the last 10 years, DuckDuckGo has found that different stages of growth have required different marketing channels. In the early stages of growth, the team used social media, content marketing, and PR, but these channels eventually saw diminishing returns. Since then, the team has transitioned to organic, viral growth and offline word-of-mouth marketing.

In the last nine months,DuckDuckGo has succeeded at brand marketing that has also raised market share. “I wrote some long-form articles on Quora on topics like why to use DuckDuckGo vs. Google, how tracking works, how to avoid it, and more,” Weinberg says. “These got such high engagement, more than anything else.”

Since publishing the posts, Weinberg and his team have been working to promote that content on platforms like Quora and Reddit. As one of the first native advertisers on Quora, their posts have been promoted to over 150 million people per month.

“It’s all about finding bigger audiences and putting content in front of them that's compelling and native to the platform,” Weinberg says. The team has made just seven Quora answers and has been promoting them to 100 million people. It’s not cheap, but it’s working, he says.

What is DuckDuckGo’s traction like at this point? Since the DuckDuckGo engine doesn’t track unique users, they can only report on total searches, which is currently at over 1 billion each month. For a company competing in a search engine space that’s dominated by one player, that’s pretty astounding.

A top 100 website, the engine is ranked #4 in most countries and #3 in Australia. “Some third party estimates say we’re at 50 million users per month, which would be about 40 million searches per day.”

What’s Next for DuckDuckGo?

How does a search engine that doesn’t track customer data make money?

“Search is unique because Google still makes money off search without having to track much ,” Weinberg says. Instead, Google conducts contextual advertising, which displays ads based on what a user is searching (versus behavioral advertising which uses customer data to display ads).

DuckDuckGo can do the same contextual advertising without having to track any data. Calculating customer lifetime value (LTV) isn’t as simple, though. “It’s is even more difficult because of the lack of tracking,” Weinberg says.

Instead of relying on customer data, the company measures factors like brand awareness and market share. Through national surveys, DuckDuckGo asks users if they're familiar with the brand, how they heard about it, and if they associate it with privacy.

Feedback is an important tool at DuckDuckGo. As they’ve expanded their product line, the team conducted primary research on privacy and people who are interested in privacy.

“We ran different methodologies, national surveys, user tests, and diary studies,” Weinberg says.

DuckDuckGo’s diary studies involved a small group of 12 to 15 people who adopted the product and kept a diary for a period of two weeks. The team would then check during those two weeks to see how the subjects were using, navigating, and feeling about the product.

“We found that would use DuckDuckGo but then click off to other websites that can track,” Weinberg says. “They felt unprotected, and we realized search was only part of the solution.”

This inspired the company’s latest release, DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser, including extensions for desktop that help block trackers and enforce greater encryption across the internet.

“It’s all about encryption and education,” Weinberg says. “We’re trying to simplify privacy.”

Interview by Nathan Chan, feature article reprinted from Foundr Magazine, by Allie Decker

Key Takeaways

A history of Weinberg’s early startups and side projects
The birth of DuckDuckGo and its mission to make the internet less creepy
Why Weinberg decided to write a book on mental models, and how he uses them on his own team to build better leaders
Why DuckDuckGo eschews traditional management hierarchy
The marketing strategies Weinberg used to help DuckDuckGo achieve viral, organic growth
An overview of DuckDuckGo’s monetization strategies
How DuckDuckGo used diary studies as a methodology to gather insights
What’s on the horizon for DuckDuckGo
Weinberg’s advice for entrepreneurs who are competing against behemoths in their market

258: The Story Behind Game-Changing Travel Brand Away, With Founder Steph Korey Jul 09, 2019

Show notes

Selling Luggage and a Lifestyle How Steph Korey and Jen Rubio co-founded a luggage company for the modern adventurer that is taking the world by storm.

Jen Rubio called her friend Steph Korey to vent about an irritating, expensive problem that just about any frequent flyer has endured at some point. She had a busted carry-on.

Rubio was suffering from suitcase-demolition blues, and Korey wasn’t sure what brands to recommend. So Rubio texted a dozen of their trendiest, travel-savvy friends—the kind of people who would know all the best hotels in Bangkok—but they had no clue where to direct her to buy the perfect suitcase. They were quick to tell her which brands to avoid—sharing similarly frustrating stories of failure—but no one had the answer she was searching for.

The search seemed hopeless.

A single, action-packed year later, Korey and Rubio shipped the very first piece of Away carry-on luggage.

Today, the luggage company that is so much more than a luggage company has sold over a million bags to customers across the world and captured the imagination of a generation known for its desire to chase down experiences instead of possessions.

“This business isn’t really about luggage or suitcases at all,” Korey says. “What we’re really creating is a travel brand, and travel has the ability to really impact someone’s life.”

With an eye on revolutionizing the luggage industry while leaving the world better than they’d found it, Korey and Rubio designed a bag that is durable, practical, and looks dang good in an Instagram photo.

And that was only the beginning.

Charting the Course

In the beginning, Korey wasn’t sure she even wanted to start a business. She just wanted to learn more about the way other people traveled.

She and Rubio had become friends while working together at Warby Parker, the online store that home delivers hip eyeglasses at affordable prices, so they knew firsthand the challenges that come with life at a startup.

Rather than cannonballing into the deep end, the pair chose to start small and simply follow their curiosity. They decided to create a survey and send it to 50 people in a vast array of demographics, including male and female students, young professionals, established professionals, and retirees, who lived both in the US and abroad.

After sharing information about how they traveled, how they packed, and what travel products they used, each person taking the survey was asked to forward it to five of their friends who also came from varied backgrounds.

When the survey finished making its rounds, Korey and Rubio had over 800 responses to sift through. The pair was quickly able to start noticing themes, particularly when it came to how the existing luggage industry wasn’t meeting travelers’ needs.

The survey results showed that travelers wanted a light piece of carry-on luggage that maximized packing space and still fit in the overhead compartments of airplanes. They also dreamed of a bag that could take a baggage handler’s beating if they decided to check it, including wheels and zippers that wouldn’t fail.

Respondents also expressed the need for a place to put dirty, sweaty laundry after trips to the gym, summer walking tours through cities, or perilous mountain climbs. Oh, and they hated traveling with dead cell phones.

With these results in mind, Korey and Rubio moved into the next stage of development.

Korey says they were still unsure whether they wanted to start a business when they sat down with a group of designers from the fashion, luggage, and industrial design industries. They weren’t even sure when they decided to partner with two industrial designers to transform their findings into a product design.

The team had plans for their new carry-on bag in one hand, and plane tickets to Asia—where they planned to meet with dozens of luggage manufacturers—in the other, but were still unsure where this journey would land them.

It was only when a family in the manufacturing business told them their radical design could be actualized that it all clicked together. And just like that, the family agreed to manufacture the first 3,000 Away carry-on bags.

Well, not quite.

“I’m glamorizing this story a little bit,” Korey says. “It’s, in reality, probably a little more along the lines of we begged them to work with us.”

Korey and Rubio spent days with the family, attempting to convince them to manufacture the bags. With every new pitch she used to convince the family—that they were about to revolutionize the luggage industry, and their business model was totally unique, and this was a chance to get in on day one with a company that was going to be huge one day—she felt herself becoming more convinced that this was it. It was finally time to start this business.

Their manufacturers came around, too.

“I’m entirely certain that they didn’t believe any of that,” she says. “Actually, they’ve told us that they didn’t believe any of that, but that we were so sincere and passionate about what we were doing that they just couldn’t turn us down.”

Now that the ball was officially rolling, and Away was on the verge of becoming a reality, they had to jump a final, daunting hurdle. They had to find the money.

Gathering Supplies

“Raising any kind of capital is difficult, but raising seed capital is particularly difficult, because you can’t really tell the story of your business metrics at all, because they don’t exist,” Korey says. “You just have to tell the story of your vision and what you’re trying to create, and it really takes a leap of faith from investors.”

But she adds that the knowledge she had gathered from her time leading the supply chain at Warby Parker, and Rubio’s experience in the marketing team there, gave them a definite advantage.

“That is for sure the only reason that we were able to convince investors to take that leap of faith,” she says. “We knew what we were doing, and we would create something that resonated and that was successful.”

In fact, she recommends that all aspiring entrepreneurs invest some time working at a startup.

“I think it’s essential that you spend at least a couple years working at a startup first, for two reasons,” she says. “One, find out if you like it! Some people don’t like that chaos. … And then the second reason is it really gives you a sense of context of all the different pieces that go into creating something from nothing.”

In the summer of 2015, Korey and Rubio were ready to create something, so they met with more than 20 different investors across the United States over the course of a week.

After many failed pitches, and several uncomfortable red-eye flights, the pair met with Forerunner Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that invests primarily in early-stage ecommerce brands.

While most of the firms they met with simply didn’t understand what they were trying to do with Away, Korey says that Forerunner was captivated by their vision.

“We’re really creating a broader brand and business around inspiring people to live a life of new experiences, and equipping them with all the products they need to make those travel experiences more seamless,” she recalls saying in her pitch.

Within the first meeting, Forerunner was on board as a partner. With over $2.5 million raised, it was finally time to make some suitcases.

Excited by the prospect of holiday sales, Korey says they set their launch date for November 2015. But as the date drew closer and the production of the first 3,000 suitcases was delayed until February of the following year, they had to get creative.

Instead of selling the suitcases during the holiday season, they published a coffee table book called, The Places We Return To and paired it with a gift card for the February release of the first round of suitcases.

“It was really one of the first moves we did as a brand really establishing ourselves as first and foremost about travel and not about travel products,” Korey says.

In the book, they featured stories and photos of successful chefs, writers, photographers, and other talented professionals. Each person was asked about their favorite place in the entire world, why they loved it, and what they did during their visits.

“We ended up with this collection of short stories that were very intimate because it was about people who were so knowledgeable about their favorite place in the world,” Korey says.

Those featured in the book helped spread the word about the exciting new travel company, its mission, and the revolutionary new suitcase that was on the way. And the word traveled like a millennial with a break between jobs.

Korey says they prepared 2,000 books and gift cards. By Christmas, every one had sold.

Embarking on the Journey

In February 2016, the first ever Away customer (his name is Adam) received his carry-on bag. Three years later, over a million bags in a variety of colors, shapes, and sizes have made it across the world in shipping boxes, overhead bins, and car trunks.

The ribbed, hard-shelled luggage is becoming more recognizable by the day. By offering their luggage at direct-to-consumer prices, what was once reserved for only the chicest of travelers could now make it to the general public.

They take their social impact seriously, as well. Away works with manufacturing companies that have, as they say on their website, “exemplary and thoughtful work environments we would want for our own employees.” The company has also partnered with several charitable organizations, including Peace Direct, Charity: Water, and Kode with Klossy.

So what’s next for Away?

Korey says the company is currently working to expand across Europe, Asia, Australia and other parts of North America. Taking a page from Warby Parker and other disruptive ecommerce startups, they’ve also launched a brick-and-mortar component to their business with six American storefronts and one in London.

And as Away continues to expand, they’ll continue to release new products that support the modern traveler.

Korey is excited to see where the company goes next, not merely because she wants the business to flourish, but because she genuinely cares about the needs of Away customers. From the moment Korey and Rubio sent their first survey, they knew that the “why” behind their brand lay directly at the feet of their customers.

“You should never start a business because you want to start a business. It’s a terrible reason to do it. It’s going to be a long slog if you’re not really focused on a particular insight or a problem that you’re trying to solve,” she says. “Whether you’re just getting started and you don’t know where to start, or you’ve already gotten started, and you’re trying to figure out the next step, it really starts with deeply understanding the customer.”

It starts the way Away did: with a need, an idea, and a customer survey.

Interview by Nathan Chan, feature article reprinted from Foundr Magazine, by Erica Comitalo

Key Takeaways

How one phone conversation between Korey and Rubio inspired the idea for Away
The role data played in cementing the need for better luggage
How the data insights were transformed into a product design
Why one investor and one manufacturer decided to take a chance on Away
How Korey and Rubio made the best of a worst-case scenario during their launch
The journey from producing an initial batch of 3,000 units to selling millions
Why Korey believes every entrepreneur should work for a startup first
What the future expansion of Away looks like
Korey’s words of wisdom for aspiring entrepreneurs

257: How Ryan Hoover Grew Product Hunt From Humble Email List to Tech Trendsetter Jul 02, 2019

Show notes

Hunting for the Next Big Thing: How Ryan Hoover established an online home for tech geeks that changed the way makers get inspired, recruit, and launch their products.

When he wasn’t overseeing the gumball machines at his parents’ video game store as a kid or pushing carts at a home improvement store as a teen, Ryan Hoover was tinkering with tech.

As personal technology advanced, and new programs and applications exploded, Hoover and his friends were fairly obsessed with whatever was emerging from the Silicon Valley pipeline next. Over the years, however, he found that there was no single outlet that satisfied his cravings to learn about the very latest products and developments.

Sure, he avidly scrolled tech Twitter and Reddit threads. But what if, he wondered, there was some kind of a reliable destination where those in the tech field, or otherwise infatuated with its latest offerings, could show up regularly to talk shop—to share and learn about all the latest and greatest in tech?

“The initial inspiration was just the desire to explore new technology,” Hoover says.

So began a side project that, in just over five years, has become the wildly popular hub for the tech community, Product Hunt. In 2018, more than 1 million registered users and many more unregistered visitors stopped by Hoover’s creation, and over 20,000 products launched on the site. More than just a news site or message board, Product Hunt has evolved into the definitive place for makers to introduce their new projects and learn about what their peers are up to.

But this great, big community all began with a simple email list.

Building a Home for the Tech Community

Hoover had been working in a product management position at growing startup PlayHaven, where he was employee #10. He values his time spent at the company, especially lessons learned about management. But at the time, he had only been out of college a couple of years, and was eager to try hs hand at something new, so Hoover moved into a part-time role to explore new projects.

Going part-time gave him the space in his schedule that he needed to pursue something of his own. He’d been mulling over the idea of Product Hunt, and the time had finally come to make it a reality.

It began as a simple email newsletter between friends sharing the latest tech product releases and mind-blowing apps they stumbled across. But soon, friends of friends and friends twice removed were added to the list.

Before long, Hoover was managing an email list that included far more strangers than friends from all around the globe. He decided to bring his friend Nathan Bashaw on board to build a website, giving Product Hunt a home online, and the community continued to flourish.

“We sort of filled this hole I think, in the market that no one really observed or noticed,” he says. “We do have Twitter, and we have subreddits around technology, and we have blogs and publications talking about new tech, but there is really no home for the tech community to talk about the latest products.”

With a brand new website, Hoover planned to turn it into that home.

But in order to host meaningful conversation, he knew he had to engage users with something other social platforms weren’t offering. Hoover says he intentionally focused on positive community building from day one by sending personalized welcome emails to each new user who joined Product Hunt.

“As proud as I am of what we’ve built on the product and technical side, that’s not what’s going to make us successful or make us special and unique,” he says. “It’s really the people and the brand that we’ve built.”

But the site membership ballooned rapidly, not only exceeding his ability to email each new visitor, but also evolving into much more than just a side project or an email list.

Product Hunt grew to fill an important hole, helping entrepreneurs face a daunting task that so many in the tech space must take on at some point: product launch.

Reinventing Launch Day

Hoover noticed that traditional media outlets were the primary way that creators would get the word out about new products, but even tech publications weren’t particularly suited to support a launch. It’s also hard work to land coverage.

“Historically, to get your first users, to get the word out, a lot of people would go to the press to do so,” he says. “They would have to have a relationship in many ways or get lucky cold emailing reporters and hoping that they’d get somebody to write about their company.”

And when launch day is imminent, few creators even have the time to dedicate to those pitches.

On Product Hunt, tech creators can share their new products in detail, build a following before launch day, and advertise to groups of people who are most interested. Makers, founders, and startups soon flocked to the website, eager to share their newest releases, and the community responded with upvotes galore.

Even visitors to the site who had not yet built products of their own could find incredible value on Product Hunt, Hoover says. He points out that the site is full of inspiration for future makers, and is just a great way to pass an afternoon.

“I like to think that it’s like a productive procrastination,” he says. “Instead of looking at maybe cat photos or memes on the internet, at least you’re spending time exploring what people are building.”

And maybe gathering ideas for “the next big thing.”

Comparing it to an afternoon in a museum for an artist or a visit to a music venue for a songwriter, Hoover says that a scroll through Product Hunt can trigger fresh ideas and show up-and-comers new ways to approach tech.

“I think if you’re someone who’s excited to build a company in the future or if you’re a product manager, or whatever your role is, I think there’s a lot of value in searching for inspiration,” he says.

As traction grew, so did their reach, and before long, San Francisco-based Hoover noticed that over 50 percent of Product Hunt’s audience was international.

“It’s cool in that sense because it’s not just a reflection of Silicon Valley technology,” he says. “It’s a reflection of the world and the technology that’s being created all over the place.”

Hoover had a successful brand on his hands. All he had to do was figure out what’s next.

Planning for the Future

In 2016, three years after Product Hunt launched, Hoover and his team mulled over whether they should begin another round of funding or pursue acquisition. Unsure which way to go, they decide to take the first steps down both paths, and then go with the one that had a more natural fit.

Because community was such an important aspect of the business, both internally and externally, Hoover wanted to ensure that, if they did pursue acquisition, the companies would have complementary cultures.

“That’s where a lot of acquisitions can go sour,” he says. “There can be a wildly different culture or vision for the company, and if that’s not aligned then it’s probably not going to work out long term.”

During the company’s first two rounds of funding two years earlier, Naval Ravikant, the CEO and co-founder of AngelList, had invested in the company. He already understood what Product Hunt was all about and appreciated the work they were doing, so when he approached Hoover with an acquisition proposal, Hoover realized that this was the natural fit he had been waiting for.

While he acknowledges that the AngelList culture isn’t a clone of the culture that exists within Product Hunt, he feels that they weave together into a perfect fit.

“It’s sort of like when you hire a teammate,” he says. “You don’t want them to be just like you. Ideally, they have a similar belief and mission as yourself but also have different skills and different areas of focus. That’s kind of how I think of AngelList and Product Hunt.”

Both companies have similar passions for tech and supporting founders, while AngelList focuses on engineering and Product Hunt approaches those passions from the angle of community building, Hoover says.

Nearly three years have passed since the acquisition, and Hoover feels things are going well. Product Hunt continues to operate mostly independently, and has employees across 10 countries, all communicating via Slack. And the platform has continued to evolve.

Today, creators in the tech space can advertise jobs, promote events, and launch new products with ease. They can also promote an upcoming product launch through the tool Ship, a three-in-one toolkit where makers can create landing pages, build email lists, and send out surveys without bouncing between platforms.

As the world of tech continues to expand, Hoover sees a future of continued growth and ever-increasing user engagement for Product Hunt, particularly this year, as they direct their primary focus toward increasing users and community contributions.

No doubt, as technology continues to advance far beyond anything we can imagine, Product Hunt will be there, ever inviting users to discover their next favorite thing.

Interview by Nathan Chan, feature article reprinted from Foundr Magazine, by Erica Comitalo

Key Takeaways

How Hoover’s insatiable curiosity about new products planted the seed for Product Hunt
The evolution of Product Hunt from small email list to flourishing online community
Why Hoover focused on building its brand and community from day one
How Product Hunt reinvented “launch day” for entrepreneurs
What Hoover believes is the most important thing to look for during an acquisition
What inspired the Product Hunt team to build tools for its community members
The three KPIs Product Hunt is focused on in the near future
Hoover’s most valuable advice to entrepreneurs who are thinking of building a product

256: How The Meet Group CEO Geoff Cook Built An Empire Based on Human Connections Jun 25, 2019

Show notes

A Digital Meet Cute How Geoff Cook linked up dating apps and live-streamed video to form a happy and profitable relationship.

Geoff Cook has built a small empire of successful meeting and dating apps—beginning long before anyone ever swiped right on Tinder—by following a philosophy of fearlessly trying new things.

“Ten years from now, what will I have regretted—losing half a million dollars or not having done the thing that I wanted?”

Of course, the fact that he has a half a million dollars to lose in the first place should be some indication that a lot of those risks have paid off. Thanks to a series of auspicious business decisions, starting with a profitable essay and resume editing business he launched as a sophomore at Harvard, Cook is living proof that experimentation lies at the heart of a successful startup career.

While his fellow Harvard-attendee Mark Zuckerberg was busy refining Facebook, Cook launched his own spin on a social media platform. Rather than focusing on adding friends that users already knew in real life, his platform would be geared toward meeting entirely new people. So myYearbook was born.

Today, myYearbook has evolved, changed hands, and expanded to encompass a whole collection of meeting and dating apps, all housed under The Meet Group, where Cook serves as CEO.

“I tend to be a tinkerer,” he says. “I’ll push forward an idea even if it seems strange, just because it’s an itch and just keep moving the ball forward. Sometimes, opportunities fall out of that, and sometimes you just lose a lot of money. But it’s an itch I had to scratch.”

In this instance, Cook’s itch proved to be so much more.

Extracurricular Activities

Cook started his first business in 1997 when, while still writing college essays of his own, he decided to put his economics classes to work and start a small side hustle editing his classmates’ papers and resumes.

But in astoundingly short order, EssayEdge and ResumeEdge had scaled to millions in revenue, and the Thomson Corporation was knocking at his door with an acquisition offer.

So Cook sold his first business in 2002, and just like that, he had the seed money to begin his first post-grad venture. But it wasn’t until he was in his mid-20s, when the social media era had just begun, that the light bulb flicked on.

“The thought was that there needs to be a place to connect to people you don’t know,” he says. “It seemed both MySpace and Facebook were heavy into connecting to your real life friends.”

Teaming up with his brother and sister, who were both still in high school, he created a social network designed to introduce rather than deepen existing friendships. Using games and his search algorithm, making new connections was simple.

All they needed now were users. Luckily, the Cooks had the perfect in.

At Montgomery High School in Skillman, NJ, where both of the younger co-founders were still in school, myYearbook rolled out in 2005. In the first two weeks, there were hundreds of users. Within nine months, there were over a million.

But the road to a million required some clever maneuvering.

“I think we built a pretty good mousetrap in the beginning, but we had nobody in it,” he says, laughing. “What really helped it take off was…we were able to create this great quiz app that ended up getting millions of users every month.”

Reminiscent of today’s Buzzfeed quizzes, users would take a quiz to determine what Seinfeld character they were most similar to. They would then share their results on their MySpace profile, and when a friend—intrigued to learn whether they were an Elaine or a Kramer—clicked on the link, it whisked them away to myYearbook where they were invited to register.

“Quizzes are a very high-uniques business,” Cook says. “You get a lot of uniques, but you get very few page views per unique, because you only basically need to see the quiz and the quiz result. So we turned that business from two page views per user to closer to two or three hundred, because we brought them into a very social experience.”

Once the former MySpace users began chatting with the new people they met through myYearbook, the platform blossomed.

“That was when we were basically off to the races,” Cook says.

But unfortunately, “the races” had an expensive entry fee.

‘The Servers Were Melting’

“We had to raise some money,” Cook says. “The servers were melting. The traffic was growing. The expenses were going up.”

So, in 2006, to keep their rapidly growing platform afloat, Cook and crew decided to begin their first round of funding. The success of this venture round left them with enough money to put a team and an office together.

The social media website continued to flourish, and in 2008, they began a Series B round of funding that enabled them to raise $12.8 million just before the financial crisis laid waste to the economic landscape.

Grateful for their luck, but tired of raising capital, they vowed that this second round of funding would be their last, which meant only one thing: it was time to monetize. Luckily, Cook had a rapt audience at his disposal.

“I’m of the belief that if you can amass a big enough audience…you can monetize it,” he says, “especially if it’s an engaged audience that’s spending 10 or 20 or 30 minutes a day with you.”

In 2011, revenue was up to around $25 million to $30 million, and Cook was thinking long term. What was next for his company?

When he was introduced to Quepasa—a company similar to myYearbook but for South America, and the first publicly traded social network—he knew he’d found a fit. The two companies merged, transforming myYearbook into a publicly traded company, and Cook thought the time had come to rename the company, as well.

“We were always a social network for meeting new people, but the name [myYearbook] to people who didn’t know that made people think of Classmates.com,” he says. “It was not really what we were about, so we changed the name to Meet Me.”

As part of the merger, Cook stepped into the role of COO with the intention that he would soon move back into the CEO role. In 2013, he made his return as CEO of the company, a position he has held since.

When asked how the job of CEO at a private, venture capital-funded company differed from that of a publicly traded company, he says that the two roles are far more similar than they are different.

In a privately owned, venture-backed company, he says, the CEO answers to several large investors who are knowledgeable about the industry and who demand growth. It’s the same for a CEO whose company goes public, he says. There are just a whole lot more investors to keep happy.

Cook says it can be difficult to know when the time has come to take a company public, but he did offer some insight for founders.

“I think the best time to be public would be when you have a lot of insight into your future revenues and profits,” he says. “One of the key differences of a public versus private company is that…you offer some guidance for the year—or even long-term guidance—on how the business is going to go, and then you’re measured to a quarterly yardstick on that.”

Without a degree of foresight, he says that going public would be an extremely difficult task.

“If you don’t have enough insight into your business to know your revenues except within a very wide range, or to know your profits except within a very wide range, that’s probably not the best candidate to be public,” he says. “You’re just setting yourself up to have some very bad quarters.

In other words, the key is predictability. But he reminds business owners that even the most predictable companies can present a challenge.

“You’re never gonna know everything, and there’ll always be some surprises, because things happen,” he says.

But despite the added pressures and challenges, Cook insists that there are many advantages to being publicly traded.

“There’s definitely pros and cons of being public,” he says, “but I would say we’ve had more pro than con.”

And the primary advantage of going public for Cook was a clear path toward acquiring other companies.

Forming the Group

Not long after myYearbook became Meet Me, the business was renamed The Meet Group, the moniker it’s known by today. Because the business encompassed more than a single app, the name change was apt, and it only became more appropriate as the years passed.

In late 2016, The Meet Group acquired Skout, a meet-up app that was approaching its 10th birthday. Then in 2017, they acquired Tagged, the San Francisco-based meeting app with high engagement in the African-American community, and Lovoo, a European dating app. And this year, The Meet Group also acquired GROWLr, a dating app geared toward the gay community.

But Cook says all of these acquisitions stemmed from a strategy inspired by one popular Chinese dating app. The company decided to start building a live-streaming video product after seeing its success at a Chinese dating platform called Momo.

Cook felt the app was somewhat similar to Meet Me, and when Momo added live streaming, he says that about 90 percent of Momo’s revenue was a result of that service. The Meet Group wanted to give it a try.

“We were also kind of clear-eyed enough to know that building a live-streaming business is a big commitment,” Cook says. “It’s essentially kind of an all-in sort of company bet.”

It was the kind of bet Cook was comfortable making. So they dove in headfirst and got to work building up the infrastructure, talent, and moderation capabilities they would need to execute their plan. And it paid off in tens of millions. Cook says that their annualized live video revenue grew from $0 to $82 million in just 16 months. This became the inspiration behind their acquisition of meeting and dating apps—to integrate video and watch as revenues skyrocketed.

“If we believed in our story enough to make that bet, well, then we could make that bet again and again,” he says. “There’s no reason not to double down, triple down, quadruple down on it.”

As they acquired social apps and fitted live-streamed video into them, they noticed that the engagement on those apps markedly increased.

“In meeting- and dating- and chat-oriented communities, there’s often periods of time where you just don’t have any inbound chats,” he says. “So, it’s kind of boring.”

But rather than exiting the app, the users of the video-fitted apps can simply hop into the tab labeled “Live” during those gaps.

“Our users are coming to us for human connection,” he says. “Meeting new people is kind of all about that. Interactive live video is actually human connection, right?”

Cook says that around 20 percent of their users visit the live streaming sections of the apps each day and that those users, on average, spend 20 minutes more a day on the app. Users can watch popular streamers, send them comments and witness their reactions. They can also buy and send digital gifts to the streamer.

“They do this because they want the attention of the streamer,” he says. “It’s almost like buying someone a drink at the bar. You don’t have to, but if you want a better shot, you maybe should.”

Cook is pleased with the success The Meet Group has found by incorporating live streaming into the apps—but he still has his eyes on Momo. Thirty percent of the Chinese app’s users visit the live section daily, a goal that Cook wants to push toward.

He also wants to continue pushing the boundaries of live video and sees one-on-one live video and various video dating experiences in the company’s future.

As the social media landscape continues to coalesce around a select few apps, this self-proclaimed tinkerer believes that the unique nature of his business will allow it to keep flourishing.

After all, as long as there are people searching for connection, there will always be a need to meet someone new.

Interview by Nathan Chan, feature article reprinted from Foundr Magazine, by Erica Comitalo

Key Takeaways

How Cook’s resume editing side hustle at Harvard eventually led to an acquisition offer
Why Cook decided to take a different route from MySpace and Facebook
The surprising tactic that led to myYearbook surpassing a million users in nine months
How Cook approached the funding and monetization of myYearbook
The road to becoming a publicly traded company and the lessons learned
How The Meet Group was born
Why an investment in the live-streaming business changed the game
What Cook has his eyes on for the future of The Meet Group

255: How Jim’s Group CEO Jim Penman Went From Mowing Lawns to Being a Household Name in Australia Jun 18, 2019

Show notes

Great service is hard to come by. This eternal problem is what Jim Penman set out to solve when he started his part-time lawn-mowing business—and even though his business has since grown into a multimillion-dollar enterprise known as Jim’s Group, it’s still the core focus.

Jim’s Group was an unintentional empire, started by an aspiring academic back in the 1980s. Today, Penman’s company has almost 4,000 franchisees that provide over 50 services around the world. As a result, Jim’s Group has become a household name in Australia for all things home services.

Here’s how Penman grew his business from a humble mowing service to the largest franchise in Australia.

The Unintentional Founding of Jim’s Group

In the 1970s, Jim Penman was pursuing his Ph.D. in history at Latrobe University in hopes of joining academia. His plans changed, however, when he graduated in 1982 and realized he had little to no chance of working in academia: “My ideas were far too wild.”

At the time, Penman also happened to be operating a part-time lawnmowing business, as he made his way through the grueling grad school years. This turned into a full-time gig upon graduation. “It was something to do until my real business came along.”

Or so he thought. While he waited for his real life to kick in, Penman was excelling at his temporary one. He had a passion for making customers happy, which made it easy for him to attract and keep regular clients. “It was the biggest thing I had going for me,” he says. He also found success building and selling ramps (for transporting mowing equipment onto raised beds or platforms) to his customers.

As his business grew, he tried employing subcontractors, but he couldn’t find people who matched his quality of service. Then in 1986, necessity forced him to evolve.

Major competitor V.I.P. Home Services came to town. This was a turning point for Penman. “I simply franchised in self-defense,” he says. “Otherwise, they’d swallow me whole.”

For those unfamiliar, franchising allows other entities to use your company’s name, trademark, business strategies, and so on in order to share essentially the same products and/or services offered by the franchisor. Franchisees typically pay a licensing fee and a percentage of sales revenue to their franchisors. It’s an effective way to quickly expand a business without massive financial investment.

Penman started with about a dozen franchisees, most of whom were previous customers. But even as Penman expanded his business, his focus still remained on the short term. He truly had no idea his business would grow to where it is today.

“When people asked me how I thought might go, I said, ‘If it's really successful, one day I could have as many as 100 franchisees,’” Penman says, laughing. “That was my reach goal. Now, I have just under 4,000.”

Franchising Jim’s Group to 4,000 Strong

When Penman was a contractor, he had one simple idea: He wanted to make customers into raving fans. “I wanted customers to be so delighted that they’d recommend me and use me forever.”

That was the core concept of Penman’s business, and when he franchised, he had the same concept for his franchisees.

With that in mind, he developed a contract that would catch the eye of any prospective franchisee. His goal was to make it so enticing that potential owners would be “mad not to join the system.” Penman even got ahold of a competitor’s contract to better understand how he could make his more favorable.

For example, he promised his franchisees that he wouldn’t take regular clients from his franchisees without their consent (unless a customer complained). He promised territory rights—meaning he couldn’t give any client in their area to anyone else, but they could take work wherever they wanted. Penman also promised an automatic right to renew.

“This was all really strange stuff,” Penman says. “One reason it took nine months to get the contract done was because the lawyers kept arguing with me.”

They thought he was being way too nice and that the contract was unreasonable and extreme. They encouraged him to “soften it down,” but over time, he actually provided his franchisees more rights. These included the right to move to another regional franchisor, to walk away from the franchise for a small exit fee, and to vote out their franchisor.

At every stage, Penman put his franchisees first. In his opinion, the secret to looking after your customers is having a great staff. The same thing applies to great franchisees—you make them the actual first priority.

“There’s nothing particularly clever about what has done,” he says. “It’s more how we do it that matters. The way we treat our franchisees, how we maintain quality, how we make sure they're looked after, that they're happy…that's the innovative part of the system.”

As you can imagine, Penman’s franchisee selection process is quite rigorous. With such a favorable franchising package, many people apply, but few are chosen.

“We are very selective,” he said. “Unless I’m convinced they’ll succeed, I don’t accept them.”

When interviewing franchisees, Penman looks for a handful of key attributes: Good character, a concern for customers, reliability, and basic decency. He takes each interviewee on test drives to watch them perform their service. He also never accepts anyone who is not putting up their investment money themselves.

“To run a successful cleaning or mowing, you don't have to be a genius,” Penman said. “You have to be somebody with good character.”

Expanding the Jim’s Group Services

In the first few years of his business, Penman didn’t just expand through franchising. He also began adding different service divisions.

With a successful mowing system in place, Penman considered how he might apply his approach to other services, such as cleaning. He created a separate cleaning brand called SunLite and sold a couple of franchises. That avenue failed completely.

Penman liked the idea of expanding under the Jim’s Group name, but he didn’t think it’d be successful, because the brand image was so vastly different. Who’d hire a cleaning service with a brand image of gardening and mowing?

Well, a lot of people did. Penman added a cleaning division to Jim’s Group and found that the familiar brand name actually helped grow his new business.

Penman continued expanding under the Jim’s Group brand to include services such as dog washing, computer services, bookkeeping, and roof repair. Today’s Jim’s Group has 52 divisions, and the company cross-sells through a client newsletter with about 500,000 recipients.

“The brand just works far beyond what you think it would,” Penman says.

When asked about how he manages such a wide variety of services, he says, “There’s no real difference between mowing and cleaning and dog washing. The basic issue is the same: Follow up on a lead, respond quickly, turn up on time, provide a reasonable quote, and satisfy the customer.”

To Penman, it doesn’t matter what the service is. His goal is getting everyone to do provide consistent, high-quality service.

Still, Penman is always making tweaks to Jim’s Group to constantly improve that service. For example, Jim’s initially offered a flat rate fee system to its franchisees. Over time, Penman learned that franchisees weren’t always following up on leads. In fact, a survey found that 25 percent of client leads never received a follow up. Penman changed the fee system to reflect a lower base fee and a separate charge per lead. After that, the number of leads not being followed up on dropped to just 3 percent.

Penman also made recent changes to the Jim’s Group complaint system. In the pre-franchise days, Penman would see approximately 100 complaints for every 100 leads. After franchising, that number dropped to about five complaints.

However, Penman wasn’t satisfied with 5 percent. To fix the issue, he went to his regional franchisors, who manually receive these complaints. The team decided that every time a complaint comes in, the franchisor would alert Penman and the respective franchisee. Then, the franchisor would call the franchisee to better understand what happened and how to solve it.

Today, Jim’s Group has an automated complaint system. If a franchisee gets six complaints within six months, they receive a warning letter. Another six, and the franchisee has to attend retraining. They’re now down to just 1 percent, and working to cut that at least in half.

In a world full of new ideas, how does Penman stay focused on Jim’s Group? “You might think we do 50 different things, but as a national franchisor, I do one thing: I provide a service. Jim’s Group is a very focused and limited company.”

With almost 4,000 franchisees, it’s even easier to provide global services. Today, the company also benefits from a much more sophisticated software and a wide variety of resources for franchisees.

Beyond Jim’s Group

While Penman continues to expand Jim’s Group, he never forgot his original passion: research. The only difference now is that he can afford to really pursue it.

Until his academic career stalled, Penman never considered becoming wealthy. “I've never been that interested in money,” he laughed. “I'm notoriously stingy. I go around the house and office turning lights off.”

But now he’s able to use the success of his company as a vehicle for funding, so he can dedicate more time and resources into continuing his research on the epigenetics of social behavior. He believes this could help in the treatment of mental illness and addictive disorders.

Valuable Advice to Franchisors

In Penman’s opinion, many people have a misleading idea of business. They think they must have a breakthrough or a big idea to be successful.

“It's not the brilliant ideas,” he said. “It's thousands of little ideas. Every day I say, ‘How can I do this better?’”

Penman encourages anyone who wants to grow to focus on yourself before considering franchising. “If you don't do it well, there’s no point in franchising, because you don't have anything to teach anyone else.”

He encourages entrepreneurs to build a brilliant business, then, master a working model that you constantly change to make better.

Penman also believes in a people-first mindset, instead of money first. He encourages people to ask themselves: What's the long-term interest of the people I'm dealing with? How can I make my customers and franchisees into raving fans?

“Every day, I’m asking myself the same question,” Penman says.

Finally, he recommends keeping in touch with the grassroots. Every single franchisee has Penman’s personal number and email. “I get multiple contacts a day,” he says. “I’m always listening to what's going on. I also read through most complaints.”

After all, it's the thousands of little things that count.

Key Takeaways

Penman’s journey from being an aspiring academic to unintentionally starting Jim’s Group
Why the arrival of a competitor pushed Penman to franchise his brand
The importance of running a customer-centric business
Why lawyers were not fans of Jim’s Group’s franchisee contract
The reason Jim’s Group started to expand to different service divisions
How Penman’s success as an entrepreneur helped him circle back to his original passion
Penman’s most valuable advice to aspiring franchisors

254: A Behind-The-Scenes Look at How Foundr CEO Nathan Chan Built A Global Brand Jun 12, 2019

Show notes

Success doesn’t happen overnight.

This is something Foundr CEO Nathan Chan knows all too well. Before he started his business, Nathan was in a common predicament: he hated his job and he had no idea what career path to take. It took many steps to plant the seed that eventually became Foundr.

Even then, it wasn’t an easy path forward. He stayed in his job long after starting Foundr, and at one point, Nathan even launched a webinar from his parents’ basement. There was no magic involved—only hard work, strategic decisions, and many lessons learned.

In this video interview, Dave Hobson, our Head of Growth and Marketing and one of the first to join the Foundr team, has a raw conversation with Nathan about his journey to building a global brand. Nathan opens up about what it took to get Foundr off the ground, shares the key takeaways he picked up along the way, and reveals the nitty gritty details around how he turned a webinar presentation he hacked together into a multimillion-dollar product.

This episode is chock-full of sage advice, life lessons, and even an embarrassing story or two from our CEO’s humble beginnings that you’ll definitely want to hear.

Key Takeaways

How Nathan went from working at an IT job he hated to launching a digital magazine
The steps Nathan followed to turn a webinar presentation to a multimillion-dollar digital product
How falling into the trap of seeking perfection will prevent you from reaching your goals
The difference between “painkiller” and “vitamin” products
Why it’s so critical to build an audience and test your ideas first
How to use concepts like “a thousand true fans” and the “Oprah strategy” to create a successful business

253: How Refinery29 Defied Critics and Became a Digital Media Pioneer, With Co-Founders Christene Barberich and Piera Gelardi Jun 04, 2019

Show notes

“I think about how little we knew, but how—I believe—how courageous we were,” says Christene Barberich, reflecting on the early days of Refinery29.

Before she and co-founder Piera Gelardi were the women at the helm of one of the fastest-growing digital media companies in the world, they were new entrepreneurs working tirelessly on a vision (first sketched on a napkin) that outsiders failed to understand.

The Refinery29 founding team formed in 2004, and in those early days (before Twitter had even launched), people struggled to grasp even the concept of digital media. The co-founders’ pitches were met with skepticism.

“We would go talk to people, and they would act like we were trying to sell them a carpet or something,” Gelardi says. “They thought it was a scam.”

Potential advertisers and brand partners also didn’t think customers would ever want to buy something online. “I just remember thinking, like, ‘I don’t think that’s true,’” Barberich says.

That skepticism gave them an advantage, though: It gave Refinery29 the freedom to operate and experiment without the pressure of competition.

Today, Refinery29 has an international audience of 550 million and has earned multiple distinctions, including Webby awards and Inc. 500 list mentions.

Key Takeaways

How the two met and influenced each other’s decision to go all in on Refinery29
The early days at Refinery29 when wireframes were hand-drawn
The freedom of operating under the radar when digital media was still the Wild West
The critics who doubted the business model and thought it was a scam
What they lose sleep over
How they approach content creation
What they look for when hiring
The advice they would give to entrepreneurs who want to use content to grow their businesses
How they define quality content

252: The Refinery29 Story—From Bar Napkin Sketch to Media Empire, with Philippe von Borries and Justin Stefano May 29, 2019

Show notes

Media, Refined How four founders turned a sketch on a cocktail napkin into an iconic digital media brand. One night in 2004, in a bar in New York City, three ambitious entrepreneurs huddled around a cocktail napkin and sketched out a vision. They essentially wanted to translate the concept of the mall for the internet, only instead of catering to big name brands and retailers, it would connect visitors to all of the amazing independent brands and makers that were flourishing at the time. That initial sketch—it started as a picture of a virtual mall—has evolved a lot since that night, and the team solidified around four dedicated co-founders. But 15 years later, the dream of Justin Stefano, Philippe von Borries, Christene Barberich, and Piera Gelardi has become a reality, and so much more, in the form of now-iconic digital media company Refinery29. “One of my biggest regrets to date is that we didn’t save the napkin,” Stefano says. Since they set out on that journey, the team has created an online space where media targeted toward women is distilled, removing the impurities of stereotypes, taboos, and shame. Initially focused on fashion and style, Refinery29 has since expanded to a staggering breadth of content. Covering almost every topic imaginable—from skin care to the latest in immigration legislation—Refinery29 is a comprehensive digital media company dedicated to elevating women’s voices. It’s built an international audience of more than 550 million across all its platforms, which include all major social media, a YouTube channel with nearly 2 million subscribers, an award-winning podcast in its fourth season, a short film series, an app, and more. But Stefano and von Borries, the two who initially had the idea for Refinery29, didn’t come from a background in publishing or fashion. In fact, as you may have noticed, they aren’t even women. But they saw a need, set out to meet it, and connected with the right partners to realize their vision and help it evolve. Refiners Assemble In the early 2000s, Stefano and von Borries were just a couple of friends from high school, who had recently graduated from NYU and Columbia, respectively, and were embarking on their first post-grad endeavors. Von Borries headed off to Washington, D.C., to work for a political startup called The Globalist, and Stefano took a position with the Civilian Complaint Review Board in New York City, where he investigated complaints against the NYPD. Despite the distance, the duo stayed close, and maintained a group of friends who were mostly in the creative space. They began to notice a frequently recurring topic of conversation among the group: dissatisfaction with media coverage, especially when it came to fashion. “Most of the media companies that existed, most of the magazine businesses, were fairly mainstream,” Stefano says. “They would write about big designers that bought pages in their magazines. That’s how the model worked.” Stefano and von Borries found that many of their friends still read these magazines, but not because they felt particularly connected to the content. “They didn’t think it was good. They didn’t think it was interesting,” Stefano says. “It was just what they were forced to read, because that’s what you could buy at a newsstand.” Their friends hungered for something with a more independent edge and authenticity, but couldn’t find it anywhere. So the pair had the spark of an idea: What if they created something that appealed to young New Yorkers by focusing on serving their audience rather than on serving big companies and brands. But with no experience in publishing or fashion, they knew they needed to call in reinforcements. At the time, Piera Gelardi was dating von Borries (they went on to get married), who worked as the photo director at CITY Magazine. When von Borries shared their idea and asked for her advice, she encouraged him to reach out to her former boss and mentor at CITY, Christene Barberich. Her knowledge of fashion and brands, as well as the world of publishing, would prove invaluable to the pair. Barberich says that she was already paying close attention to the transformation happening in the media landscape. She noticed that with the rise of the internet, the one-way nature of traditional publications, with outlets talking at their audiences instead of with them, was slowly being set aside in favor of platforms offering more conversational approaches. So when von Borries and Stefano shared their idea, she had a gut feeling that they were on to something big. She immediately reached out to Gelardi and told her that she didn’t just want to consult. She wanted to become a partner in the endeavor. Barberich’s infectious excitement for the project then made Gelardi reevaluate her own position as a consultant. “Because she wanted to sign up, it showed me that bigger vision and also reminded me to think about my own value in the equation,” Gelardi says. “Now we have four co-founders.” Building the Brand With the team assembled, the quartet was anxious to get their vision off the ground as quickly as possible. But all four of them still had day jobs, so much to learn, and very little money to put toward the project. They met in a coffee shop every night after work and on every weekend as they powered toward their goal. “It just became an obsession until we got it live,” Stefano says. They called in all kinds of favors with friends who were programmers, engineers, and graphic designers, and built the first iteration of Refinery29 over a period of six months. “It felt like forever,” Stefano says. “That six-month period, I think it felt years of work went into that.” But in June 2005, the wait was finally over, and the team celebrated the launch of Refinery29 at a bar called Union Pool over pizza and beers. Looking back at nearly a decade and a half and several waves of changes since, the founders are still proud of the original website they launched that day. “When you look back at the first iteration of Refinery29, it just really, deeply warms my heart, because I think it’s still beautiful,” Barberich says. While the website received some fanfare on launch day, growth was a slow, gradual process, and they struggled to be taken seriously, especially by traditional media outlets. “Most of the traditional publishers saw digital as a phase,” Gelardi says. “It’s so laughable now, but truly we would go talk to people, and they would act like we were trying to sell them a carpet or something. They thought it was a scam.” Challenges aside, the untested nature of their business model was also a blessing in disguise. “I think we were able to really pioneer this new space because it was, you know, an open road,” Gelardi says. Barberich agrees. “When you start out and you really are at the beginning of something, you have so much freedom to just test things,” she says. “I do credit that period—the first two years when we were essentially flying under the radar—as this really important testing ground for us.” They gradually tried out new content, such as a segment called “Neighborhood Watch,” in which local creatives shared fun activities and events they loved, and “Spotlight,” a section featuring products by homegrown, independent makers. “The products that we would feature would sell out overnight,” von Borries says. “That was the first time that something we had created had really been validated. So we started to look into commerce.” In early 2006, they decided to raise capital for the first time to fund a marketplace on their website, and in 2006, it launched, taking Refinery29 into its next phase. “We didn’t engineer this thing at all to be what it is today,” von Borries says. “In fact, I think the journey for us has been sort of going down the river and hitting different moments of momentum in the business and seeing the world shift.” And as the world shifted, so did they. Experiments and Expansions Before long, von Borries had quit his D.C. job and returned to New York City to work full time for Refinery29, and not long afterward the other three joined the work full time, too. Stefano says that, over the first five years, they sold ads, hosted live events, held sample sales (retail events that involve selling extra prototypes, often from big names in fashion or design) and did everything they could to drive slow-but-consistent growth that took them to $1.7 million by their fifth year. They then decided to raise capital to grow their branded content and native advertising. This resulted in a single-year leap to $8.9 million in revenue. “It was not a fast journey,” Stefano says. “I think that a lot of people have this belief that you’ll launch a business and within, you know, 18 months, you’re going to be on fire, but it often takes far longer. And I would say it took us probably 10 years before we felt like we had a business that was here to stay.” As von Borries and Stefano toiled away on the technical and management side, Barberich and Gelardi dove into the content and creative aspects of the business. “Our desire has always been to elevate underrepresented voices, to really bring these new ideas to the surface and challenge sort of what is in the mainstream, and how the media speaks to and about women,” Gelardi says. While the focus was initially centered on fashion and style, the pair slowly experimented with content expansions that appealed to the women who visited the site. Barberich was interested in topics surrounding health and wellness, so she tested the waters and found the audience receptive. Gelardi noticed that most mainstream editorial content on sex for women was “not focused on women’s pleasure or bodily autonomy,” so she looked to offer something better. As they grew, they found an almost endless hunger for content on just about every topic imaginable, and with each new addition, a new wave of readers joined the ranks. Soon, stories on politics, finances, and entertainment appeared on the website, continuing to meet the interests of modern women. They were also able to quickly learn from mistakes and make changes, thanks to the instant feedback provided by comments, shares, and analytics. “We really were focused on experimentation,” Gelardi says. “We were so invigorated by having access to the knowledge of our audience in real time.” With the kinds of data that traditional media outlets simply didn’t have at their fingertips yet, they were able to make informed decisions and pursue avenues that seemed utterly foolproof. But, Barberich says, information in this space can be both a blessing and a curse. “I think in some ways you lose that spontaneity,” she says. “Just having an idea to do something and being able to pursue it and not worry so much about what the outcome was going to be or worry that it was going to hit a certain traffic benchmark.” So while they take advantage of the analytics available to them, Gelardi says she always wants to leave room for risks. “I think influence also comes down to risk-taking,” she says. “It’s the art and the science; it’s not just about volume. Quality can be subjective, as well, but I think it is about risk-taking and knowing that core of who you are and staying true to it.” Barberich and Gelardi say that they see their roles as a balancing act between the numbers and creative spontaneity. “I think that that’s really what motivates people,” Barberich says. “When they feel like they’re making content that they deeply love, but that’s also touching a person’s life. The greatest success is to know that something struck a chord that is universally felt.” Scaling With Heart As the company continued to grow, all four founders felt an overwhelming pressure to keep the train on the tracks. “I think that a lot of people lose sleep in this company because they care so much,” Barberich says. “In laying that foundation, we want to make sure that people feel really fulfilled by it and it doesn’t lose its path.” They knew they had to stay true to the heart of their mission and remain in sync with their audience, all while rapidly expanding far beyond what they had imagined possible. “The audience has been the single most important focus—and staying committed to that audience—and clearly everything that’s happened in the world at large has sort of snowballed our commitment to serving women amazing content,” von Borries says. “Our belief is that, in this moment, to really build a long term, sustainable brand in this space, you really have to mean something to your audience.” And Barberich believes the key to scaling while staying true to the heart of the business lies in a single, but incredibly vital, part of the business. “Honestly, if I’ve learned anything in the near-14 years that we’ve been doing this it’s that it all comes down to the people that you hire,” she says, “because scale is all about the people that you’re trusting to handle the scale.” And she says they have been fortunate at Refinery29 to find and hire people who care deeply about the mission of their brand. “When you bring people on board that really, automatically love the brand, when things get har, and they will inevitably get hard, it actually helps those people to deal with the issues that arise and recover quickly.” Gelardi also believes that hiring new staff members who have that entrepreneurial spark inside them helps the brand thrive. “The industry that we’re in is ever shifting. The work that we do is ever shifting,” Gelardi says. “I think it requires that level of entrepreneurial creativity in order to really be able to roll with things and to find the solutions.” Establishing a Legacy Much has changed in the 15 years since the four founders first tossed around the idea for Refinery29. Especially on the internet. What once felt like a wide open space, now feels more like an overstuffed room pumped full of noise. Because of this, von Borries believes people have begun seeking more intimate, offline experiences, something Refinery29 is working to supply. “We were always doing events,” he says. “Back 15 years ago when we launched Refinery, we would host local events at stores and boutiques and would bring people together. We’ve always been thinking about the real world, and when you do something in digital, the real world is very validating.” One such example of Refinery29 IRL is 29Rooms, an art exhibition that features 29 collaborative spaces touching on topics meaningful to readers, such as virtual reality, body positivity and music. At the end of the day, all four founders are focused on building a legacy they can be proud of. “You can’t have a media company, I don’t think, without having a really true understanding of what it is you want to leave behind someday,” Barberich says. And she believes that today’s world, with its renewed focus on social justice, women’s rights, and political activism, is the perfect place for a platform like Refinery29 to thrive. Now more than ever, people are seeing unmet needs, especially in areas of representation and diversity, and feeling driven to meet those needs. “I think the motivation to start a business is fairly universal,” Barberich says. “You feel that there is something missing. You feel that there is something missing and usually, you’re not the only person.” She encourages those who feel that tug not to ignore it, but to step out boldly. “When that happens, you have to really face the facts that this is going to be scary. It’s going to be a ton of work. You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to need the help of a lot of people, and a lot of times you’re going to need their help for free, and you have to be able to ask for that help, so great relationships really make a difference.” When looking at Refinery29, that was certainly the case. If one thing made Refinery29 what it is today, it’s relationships. The relationship built between two high school friends. The relationship between a mentor and her intern. The relations…

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