Nov 3, 2025 · 1h 7m · how-i-built-this
Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business.
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of How I Built This, host Guy Raz interviews Babylist founder Natalie Gordon, who shares how she turned her frustration with traditional baby registries into an industry-leading universal registry, direct e-commerce retailer, and health services platform driving over half a billion dollars in sales.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Guy holds 33.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Guy as informed peer 3.1 Guest teaching 2.3 Guest disagreement 1.1 Guy pushing back 1.2
speaking balance: gold is Guy, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 48:01 Gordon firmly rejects wedding registry expansion
Gordon pushes back against conventional tech startup scaling logic, refusing the obvious move to expand into weddings in order to double down strictly on parents.
Hardest push from Guy ▶ 54:16 Raz challenges the pivot to physical inventoryRaz directly challenges Gordon on why she chose to take on heavy logistics, physical inventory, and warehouse risks instead of staying asset-light.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 19:00 Gordon corrects Raz on the customer archetypeWhen Raz assumes the primary site users are gift givers, Gordon promptly educates him that the actual user is the overwhelmed expecting parent.
Guy holds their own ▶ 3:18 Raz details Amazon's historical market perceptionRaz displays deep historical industry knowledge, accurately detailing how Amazon was perceived as a secondary upstart relative to Microsoft in the mid-2000s.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Guy as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Guy pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Working at Amazon and Traveling Latin America | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Raz provides historical business context regarding Amazon's stature in the mid-2000s compared to Microsoft. Gordon agrees and explains her motivations for leaving to travel Latin America. | |
| Developing Languajero: The First Startup Experiment | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Raz explores the business mechanics and monetisation of Gordon's first startup project, Languajero. Gordon clarifies that it had virtually no business model and only made forty dollars in its best month. | |
| Pregnancy, Disillusionment, and The Lean Startup | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Gordon discusses the misery of spamming social APIs and the revelation of reading The Lean Startup. Raz connects her mindset to the transformative shift of expecting a first child. | |
| The Overwhelming Scan Gun at Babies "R" Us | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Gordon describes the stressful experience of visiting Babies 'R' Us with a scan gun, which motivated her to build a universal registry supporting practical gifts like dog walking and diaper funds. | |
| Defining the Problem and Unmet Parent Needs | 3 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Raz mistakenly suggests that Babylist users are primarily gift buyers. Gordon quickly corrects the premise, explaining that the core user is the bewildered expecting parent. | |
| Building the MVP and Launching Babylist | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Gordon outlines building the MVP in one month, crowdsourcing design support, and pitching mom bloggers to secure initial traffic and affiliate revenue. | |
| Building a Business During Baby Max's Naptime | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Gordon discusses working during her baby's naptime in 45-minute bursts. Raz notes that earning $140 would discourage most founders, but Gordon explains why it proved traction to her. | |
| Moving to San Francisco and Full-Time Commitment | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Raz presses Gordon on her decision to treat $3,000 a month as the threshold for going full time. Gordon explains it served as a psychological validation rather than a calculated financial model. | |
| 500 Startups and Raising the Seed Round | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Gordon reflects on being an isolated solo founder in 500 Startups and the emotional hurdle of raising a $600k seed round. | |
| Early Management Struggles and Leadership Coaching | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Gordon candidly shares her early management blunders, including crying in a stairwell after an offer rejection and relying on an executive coach's 360-degree review to learn leadership. | |
| Cracking Paid Growth on Pinterest and Brand Focus | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | Gordon explains unlocking paid acquisition on Pinterest in 2015 and deliberately rejecting expansion into wedding registries to maintain laser focus on new parents. | |
| Expanding into Editorial Content and Direct E-Commerce | 4 | 3 | 1 | 3 | Raz challenges Gordon on the immense risks of pivoting from high-margin affiliate links to direct e-commerce inventory. Gordon recounts the CFO's initial warnings and explains the need to control their destiny. | |
| Thriving Through COVID-19 and the Norwest Fundraise | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Gordon describes the initial COVID panic followed by an e-commerce surge, leading to a $40M fundraise where venture capitalists mistook Babylist's actual revenue for GMV. | |
| Babylist Health and Reflections on Luck and Grit | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Raz asks the signature luck versus grit question. Gordon attributes founding timing to luck, but credits pure grit for evolving from an engineer into a scaling CEO. | |
| Episode Outro and Show Production Credits | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Episode credits and a sponsored small business profile featuring Peter Mann of Aransi. |
Statements from this episode (16)
Gordon: Standard Amazon Orders Had Two Items Versus 100 for Amazon Fresh
“It was like the normal Amazon order had two items, and Amazon Fresh had a hundred items because it was groceries.”
Gordon: Working at Microsoft Was More Prestigious than Amazon in Mid-2000s
“Like, truthfully, getting a job at Microsoft was much more prestigious than getting a job at Amazon at that time in Seattle.”
Gordon: Software engineers mistakenly assume building new features solves startup problems
“He really describes also, like, a software engineer's mindset and how they get it wrong, where the solution is to build new features, where he really is introducing this, like, new way to build something”
Gordon: Most baby registries in 2010 were single-store platforms
“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.”
Babylist hires lack parenting experience because expecting users are clueless too
“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.”
Gordon: Early blogger SEO ranking drove Babylist signups for years
“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.”
Gordon built Babylist working just 45 minutes daily as a new mother
“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.”
Gordon: Babylist avoided venture capital early because it was making money
“I was absolutely not thinking about raising venture funding. It didn't make sense because the business itself was making money.”
Pinterest promoted pins drove Babylist's 2015 hockey-stick growth
“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…”
Gordon: Babylist rejected expanding into weddings to focus on new parents
“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…”
Gordon: Physical product logistics is far harder to operate and fix than software
“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.”
Babylist uniquely lists direct competitors like Target alongside its own retail store
“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.”
Babylist CEO: Direct retail sales generate the largest share of company revenue
“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.”
Babylist generated $250M in actual retail revenue, not GMV, in 2021
“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…”
Gordon: In 2019, Babylist First Looked Like a Billion-Dollar Business
“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.”
Babylist is expanding from a retail registry into a maternal health platform
“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…”