Poppy

“That day, I got my first booking, and that week, I got my first four. Every single week, I just set the goal to see if I could just grow 10 or 20%. Well, that next week, instead of just five, I hit six. The week after seven, the week after 10, I was blowing pa…”

“We're serving thousands of families in Seattle right now, and it's an incredible thing to be a part of, especially because Poppy almost didn't exist.”

“We closed our seed round shortly after demo day, a little bit over two million dollars, and we came back to Seattle in May.”

“I had a landing page on Squarespace, signups and feedback forms were done through Typeform, Stripe handled the payments, I did scheduling via Google Calendar, communication with SMS, and my database was Excel.”

“And as I started talking to different people, I realized that the thing that they didn't need was a parent connecting to a sitter. The thing that wasn't being said was that we were all missing our village.”

“The money is not something to be celebrating. It was more relief because the money buys us time and time to run those valuable kind of experiments and to be able to figure out the next thing.”

“I wasn't then, and I'm not now, a programmer.”

“As I started to hear that, I realized that what people weren't talking about was just needing a sitter or nanny. What they were missing was this idea of their village. And so everyone says it takes a village to raise a child, but you know, all of us are moving…”

“And so if you use the construct of a four week test inside of four weeks, you can know whether you have something or if you don't.”

“One is you have to be very specific about boundaries. And what that means for me is there's certain days that I'm on and I have to be a hundred percent founder. I can't think about, you know, it sounds sort of harsh, but I can't think about my kids and like al…”

“Typeform, like Squarespace, I can do a four week trial, Typeform do signups and things like that. I can use Excel as a database. I can use a Google Calendar as a scheduler and SMS trying to connect it all.”

“So literally sent an email to the 15 parents and just said, Hey, I've got these three amazing people. If you need them, just text this phone number. And I gave them a phone number as my phone number. And that day got our first booking and that week I got four.”

“And so for me, it was that if a village is a function of, you know, someone that you trust is a fit for your family from like a values standpoint and is there when you need them to be could you break it down from technology, from a vetting mechanism, a matchin…”

“The Uber model only works because there's a whole bunch of basically replaceable people with a common skill. Well, it turns out the people who've got the skills to watch infants and make parents comfortable with that tend to have nanny jobs where they work lot…”

“I was able to then take the little bit over two million that we raised. And have that last over, I think, like three years.”

“At a bigger scale, it turns into yet another kind of gig economy job, which isn't good or bad, but it just, you know, has an implication when we're looking at, is that what that labor pool wants to do is yet another kind of gig job. And so that just changed th…”

“Throughout, you know, the growth of poppy, we've always been solid. Like we've always been solid and growing. But to the point of like maybe five to 10%, and that's not bad. I mean, in fact, like for some of these kind of marketplaces, that's really good. It w…”

“There was also an option to say, let's just make this a nice high-end tech-enabled agency, and folks were like, why didn't you just raise prices and do all that? I could have, I hundred percent could have, and turned it into a nice kind of like side business o…”

“I think the truth of the matter is, is if we had wanted to pivot, we probably should have done that, you know, six months prior. If I was going to cut the team and leave a good chunk of money in the in the bank to be able to do that I probably needed more time…”

“If you know the category that I'm working within is child care it's already an inherently margin-challenged kind of category. So what I mean by that is, like, what parents are willing and able to pay for this kind of work, and then what caregivers need to make…”

“Every month that you continue to kind of persist, you're burning money, right? And for me, it didn't feel responsible to continue to do that. Instead, could I repurpose that and say, Hey, we're going to call it as quickly as possible, conserve a little bit of …”

“Recently decided that looking at all of the things the economics and everything that it wasn't a viable, scalable proposition. And so made the hard decision to shut it down in December”

“Even towards the end, our investor update went to everybody. From the most junior folks to my COO I believe in transparency. I believe in educating people on what do the numbers mean. So, Even that very last investor update, every single person saw exactly how…”

“I think you could take a look and say Poppy was a failure. I think in some lenses, like that's the narrative, but I sort of pushed back on that because I don't think Poppy was a failure. Poppy set out to do and did the thing. Especially for thousands of parent…”