The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 13 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
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.”
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…”
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 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 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…”
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.”
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…”
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: 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.”
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.”