Babylist

“I was absolutely not thinking about raising venture funding. It didn't make sense because the business itself was making money.”

“So, I think there's this opportunity for us to really be a health platform. When you're having a baby, like, health is the thing you care about, like, much more than the stuff. All of the health and wellness aspects to that time period, yeah, that's definitely…”

“And I talk to people, particularly people who are interviewing to be employees here, and they're like, well, I don't have any kids, and I'm like, yeah, neither do our users. Our users don't know what any of this stuff is.”

“Most baby registries were single store registries, and so you could only add items from Babies R Us, and then you'd have a second registry for Amazon.com.”

“And I had a goal in those first couple of months, which is, I want to spend 45 minutes a day on this. If I can spend 45 minutes a day on this, like, that's a really good day.”

“It's so much harder to do than digital. Like, with code you can fix a bug and things work. With actual physical products, you need many trucks and people to move those products. Like, it's actually so difficult to fix when things are going wrong.”

“That was like the very first slide was our revenue. And I'd be like, here's our revenue in that year. It was going to be two hundred fifty million dollars. And they'd be like, oh no, you mean this is your GMV, which is your gross merchandise value, like what y…”

“And the really obvious choice was, like, we should now go into a wedding. We're this tech company. We've created this fantastic baby registry. The technology would apply to wedding registries. Like, that's what we are. We're this tech company. And the other op…”

“We don't share the split, but the largest part of our revenue is absolutely us actually selling the products we sell as an e-commerce retailer.”

“A really important thing happened in 2015, and that's that Pinterest opened up their platform for advertisers. And so they had the Pinterest promoted pins where you could pay them like any other advertising platform, and they would show your pins more often to…”

“In 2019, I was eight years into building the company, and it was the first time I really saw, like, how big this could be. It was the first time I actually thought this could be a billion dollar business.”

“One of them started to rank for best baby registry in SEO, so in Google, and that was also the steady stream of traffic that drove baby list registries for many years, but particularly in that first year, like a couple every day.”

“We do something no one else does, which is when we sell a product and Target sells the product, we're actually going to show Target as a buying option, just like we show BabyList as a buying option.”