Avni Patel Thompson at the Seattle Female Founders Conference

So the first speaker you're gonna hear today is Omnipotent Thompson, the founder of Poppy. Poppy is a site that connects parents with great caregivers for their children. So Omni and her co-founder went through Y Combinator in Winter 2016. She's also an incredible advocate of this Seattle startup community, and Omni is really one of the main reasons we are here today.

So welcome, Avni! It's just so amazing to see you all here today. It is amazing for me to have the FFC up here. For those of you that know me and my story, the Female Founder Conference is an important part of my story. I've just always loved the energy when you get all of these incredible women together with ideas and big, bold visions; just lots of impressive things can happen.

So I'm Omni. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Poppy. Our mission is to build the modern village that every family deserves, and we do this by connecting these talented, vetted caregivers to families when they need childcare. On the caregivers' side, we find amazing folks that have a passion for, and it's health for childcare, and we connect them to families so that they can make some extra income on a flexible schedule. And it's beyond just your average kind of sitters and nannies; these are teachers and stay-at-home moms. They can be dance instructors and camp counselors—really just incredible people that have a passion and experience in childcare, and then we connect them to families as their safety net.

This is pretty exciting to me because I'm a parent. My husband and I have two little girls. Sia is almost six, and Aria is three. We have been there; we have been there where both of us are working, we don't have family in town, and inevitably something goes wrong. Your nanny is sick; a meeting runs long, and when you're stuck without your safety net, it can be a major issue. So I started Poppy not because I've had this lifelong dream of a childcare company. I started Poppy because I had a problem, and it was a problem that I was convinced that technology could help me solve.

But it didn't matter that I have never worked at a software company, let alone build one. It didn't matter that I am NOT a developer and had no way to build an app. And it really didn't matter that at the same time I embarked on this journey was the exact same time I decided to start having kids. All that mattered was that I felt like parenthood was broken in a little bit of a way. You know, parenthood is hard enough, and when you are going through all of these things, I couldn't imagine a future for future parents that felt this broken. For me, it was if somebody was going to be building a future that solved this, it might as well be me.

And so that really was the genesis for Poppy, where I thought I could use technology to be able to solve a really important problem that, in my life, but in other people's lives. And the thing is, I thought that if we could solve this. So today we're about ten people; we are thriving, and we're growing really quickly. If I look back on the journey of the last three years from the first very idea of Poppy all the way through to where we are right now, I think the thing that I reflect on is if I let all those things that sort of stood in my way, all the reasons that why I shouldn't be a founder kind of stopped me from doing it, Poppy wouldn't exist.

And that's sort of a shame. It's more than a shame; it's a big, important idea that has to have its chance. So I guess what I worry about is that how many other people are focused on all the ways, and all the reasons, and all the obstacles that kind of stand in your way instead of figuring out a path to how we can figure out to build these amazing companies. So that's what I want to talk to you about today. It's something that I'm super passionate about. If I think about these last three years, I think there's sort of two big phases: there's the first phase that I like to call kind of "get going" or "live to fight another day," and there's the second phase, which is "get growing" or, you know, just proving that this concept really can scale.

So my hope is that if we can talk about this openly—the stages— even to get to where I am today. There’s so much more that we have left to do, so much exciting stuff for us to do in the future. But if I could get even a hundred, a thousand more companies, more founders to the stage that I am right now, think about all the incredible problems we'll be solving. Think about all the incredible founders we'll have, and so that's what I want to get to. If we can talk about this openly, maybe we make this journey a little less mysterious, a little less lonely, and definitely a lot more accessible.

So that's what I hope to do today and share just a couple of the things that I've found— not necessarily so intuitive— and hopefully, in doing so, we can start a dialogue and start getting more people started and going. So to start, before I get to the idea of Poppy, a quick little background on what brought me there. My background has nothing to do with tech; I actually have a pretty traditional corporate career. I started my career at a company called Procter and Gamble. They make things like Pampers, Tide, and Crest. When I started there, I had the opportunity to be trained in their vision of brand management.

What that means is they taught me how to see consumer problems, not as consumers say them and speak them to us, but as they actually experience them. That's a really important distinction because when you're trying to solve consumer problems, often people can't articulate the real pain—the real friction that's going on in their lives. So I started there. I went on and I did my MBA. I did consulting for a little while. I continued in sort of my big company path—all very traditional—all the way through to my husband and I moving to Seattle, and I was at Starbucks. I was still really engaging in a really great career, but I think at that point for me, my entrepreneurial sort of bug had been— I was bit by the entrepreneurial bug.

At that point, I said, "You know what? I want to start something." It was about 2012, and lots of people are starting lots of interesting things. For me, I thought, I come from a world of retail e-commerce, and I have a great passion for, you know, the world and culture and travel. And now that I had my first daughter, I was really also passionate about passing that culture on to my kids. A friend and I started a company called Papaya and Post. It was a subscription e-commerce company aimed at raising culturally curious kids. Basically, think about a different month, a different culture, done in a really thoughtful, I thought, and engaging kind of way—languages and food and things like that.

And, you know, I did it in all the way that did my research. I did the numbers, did the business plan, did all the things I were supposed to do, built the product that, you know, we would have loved to have for our families, and then we launched it. I spent a lot of money and a lot of time—relatively a lot of time—and as it turns out, it was a beautiful product. People did think it was great, just not enough to buy it on a regular basis. And that's a hard lesson for those of you that have e-commerce companies. You always have to make sure that customer acquisition cost for us that was just too high. We had such a niche market of folks that had the interest and the drive for a second culture to share that with their kids, and then the LTV, or the long-term value, also wasn't there.

And what that means is just how many of those boxes would they buy over their lifetime. So we learned the hard way that that just wasn't in sync—the customer acquisition cost and the LTV, and ultimately we came to the decision to shut that down. And that was a hard process, but I think the right process because you have to be true to what your intent is, and my intent has always been to build a scalable company that disrupts a category. Again, even for in my background in my previous career, it's never been the what I've worked on: footwear, apparel, food and Bev, in healthcare. My connection to that has always been working on really important consumer problems, and in the same way here for me, I really wanted to build a massive company that took a massive swing at something.

So it was really hard because I thought I did everything I was supposed to; I had talked to my husband, and I had talked and basically said we could go a year without you taking a salary. I did use pretty much all of that year up, and I had used pretty much all of the money that I'd set aside for startups—the savings that I'd put into this. That was sort of a tough position to be in. But as I started to talk to parents about why wasn't this the thing that you need it or it didn't solve a problem urgent enough, then what are the problems in your life? And I think it's funny how themes just kind of come up over and over, and the thing that kept on coming up was the topic of childcare.

Not really even, "Oh, I can't find a nanny," or "My sitter just canceled on me." What was underneath was everyone was saying, "I miss my village. I missed that safety net of knowing I could text someone that I trust and know that they'll be there when I need them to be." You know, for so many of us, we move around for our careers, for our education. Communities aren't necessarily what they used to be. Asking a neighbor to take care of your child is a hard thing, and so we don't have those villages, but that function still is necessary for us as parents.

And so as I started to talk to more and more people, I could see the solution. The way that I talk about this is that I have a chemistry undergrad, and I think about it in an equation. If village is a function of someone that you trust, is a match for— is a fit for your family and is available when you need them to be, then that can also be approximated with a vetting mechanism, a matching algorithm, and some sort of scheduler. And so for me, I could already see how I could—I had a hypothesis on how I might approximate village using technology at each of these key kind of pieces.

Which brings me to the point and the idea of Poppy. And so now if we think about that first stage, what is so important of getting going? I had a couple of problems. First of all, I could see how I wanted the solution to happen, but it was a tech and an app solution, and I am NOT a developer. My traditional background didn't have me working with engineers, so I didn't have a co-founder ready and lined up. And more than that, I had run out of basically time and money that I had set aside. Forget about myself, but my agreement with my family and my husband to go and do this.

And so I guess the point is there is that if it was already constrained, I was under lots of more constraints. And so if I think about the first stage, which is about getting going, the whole point here is about validating if your idea matters. And so if I had this many different constraints, how could I still buy myself the time to validate the idea and figure out whether I even needed to worry about co-founders and tech and all that kind of stuff?

And so my mantra was pretty much just solve the thing in front of me. If I could solve the biggest problem in front of me, I'd figure out the next one next. And so in that instance, it was, I needed to buy time to do more things. So I basically—basically to make and give myself some kind of structure— I gave myself the construct of four weeks. Can I buy myself four weeks to be able to show whether people want what I'm making?

And so I approximated the whole flow that I'm talking about using just off-the-shelf things. And that is one of the most exciting things of living in the tech world today is that there are so many off-the-shelf solutions that for very few things— and especially for consumer problems— you can just literally build something off the shelf. And so I did that. For me, what am I trying to do? I am trying to connect vetted, trusted people with families when they have gaps in care. Well, so I found three U-Dub students, vetted them in any way that like is the top-of-the-line background checks, references, in-person interviews.

Then I found 15 families in Madison Park, where I was living, and I said, "Hey, if you need a caregiver this week and you have a gap in care, just text this phone number," because SMS is a great communicator. That day we got our first booking, and that week, we got our first four. So great! I've got a baseline; I've got four bookings, and I just need to grow it next week by 10%, which is five. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it does two things. One, it's discipline. If you hold yourself to 10% growth every single week, I assure you that five grows pretty quickly.

And then the other thing is that having a goal and then hitting it. For me, because this actually struck a nerve of something that people really needed and wanted, we ended up growing faster than the 10% in those early days. So instead of five, we actually ended up at six, and then so on and so forth. That is an incredible confidence booster, especially coming off of a failure when you really don't have any data points to suggest that you should go give it another shot.

And so the four-week test for me did a couple of things. It reduced the risk for me—I'm a pretty risk-averse person—and it made it that I could devote four weeks. I gave it the $200 that I had left in my business bank account, and I said, "I can spend another $200." And by doing that, that sort of time-bound and risk-bound to all of that. And then as we got going, I could quickly see how consumer—both sides—just wanted and loved what we were doing.

Parents would tell other parents; signups would just start coming in. And I can't tell you how different that is versus the first startup, when you're just trying to tell everyone to do something and no one does it, and this one you're not even telling anyone, and they're just signing up, and the things are coming through. It feels incredibly different, and so that was really important in the early days— is that when you're talking about validating your idea, your purpose is learning.

It's not about optimizing for revenue or all of those things in these early days; you just have to pick something and get going. So for me that meant, you know, just starting with some kind of pricing mechanism that we think made sense and just get into market. And so for me, at the end of the four weeks, it literally was something I couldn't shut down. It had just gained a life of its own, which is amazing and felt really great. But also, when it's just you doing all those things in a pretty daily key way, you need to just keep it going.

And so what those four weeks bought me was not only time to keep on going, but I quickly realized what my next problem I had to solve. And that was, I had to find a technical co-founder, and that made that pretty apparent. And so I continued to keep everything going and growing to be able to buy that additional time, but I quickly turned my attention to finding a technical co-founder.

I think I'll pause on this thing because I think there's a lot of, you know, women out there that don't come from technical backgrounds, maybe don't have engineers, and I think there's a lot of options open to us. You can work with a dev shop somewhere, you can work with a contract engineer, you could even have a VP of engineering that reports to you. I'm pretty biased, but I have a strong feeling that if your intention is to build a tech company, you have to have a tech partner alongside you, and that means co-founder level.

That means someone who's at the table constantly pushing each other on ideas. I'm non-technical, so by definition, I cannot see the disruptive ways that technology can solve this problem. For me, even though I had all of these folks that were saying, you know, either dev shops or other types of engineers, I was pretty clear that I wasn't going to pursue those paths.

Even though it would have been a short-term relief, that would have sort of cut the vision and the ambition of this idea off at the knees. I'm not saying that this is easy; this is one of the hardest things. I almost died, and I've said this before, but we almost died through growing too big too quickly without somebody else to build the platform. So it took probably about three or four months and just constantly talking to as many people as I could to find the right person.

Because again, for those of you that have a co-founder, that's awesome because you know how hard it is to find these people that can be in the trenches and be that lifeline for you. There's, of course, division of labor, but beyond that, it's almost the emotional support. There are so many ups and downs on the thing, and so you can be the highest high one day and at noon the lowest low. So you need sort of that partnership to even that out.

It took a couple of months, talked to so many, what feels like hundreds of different candidates, but finally I had the chance to connect with my now co-founder and CTO, Richard, and we ended up clicking just right off the bat. We started talking about ideas. I really loved that, but ultimately it came down to can we work together? And so we just set it up again as a six-week test of like can we work together? Can you build something from a platform perspective, and can we work together?

And let's just see. By doing so, again, not a lot of talking; we just got to the first point of saying, "Are you in?" and just got going. That was really important because by doing that, we both were able to see and assess whether we were good partners, whether we were both engaged in this mission and this is something that we could do together.

I later learned—because this is also one of those most common questions that I'll get—how did you find a technical co-founder? As it turns out, by me focusing on growth that also helped me solve this problem. Because if you can imagine for talented engineers, think about how many people are coming to them and saying, "I've got an idea; you need to build it." That's not awesome.

And so what he was excited about was that I had already started and gotten going. So he wanted to come on and, you know, get onto that rocket ship and get it going even faster and further. That solved my co-founder problem. The next thing was we needed money, and so growth also helps you with that because you can dismiss me, but you can't dismiss my growth.

And so that helped when I applied to YC in the interview. I was able to show the actual growth that people actually wanted what I was making. It also ultimately helped us get our incredible investors. I'm not saying that raising money is ever easy, but certainly this time around because I could focus on what we were building, the actual growth that was happening. This wasn't me talking in ideas; it was really important, and we were able to raise that money.

So this stage one is really about validating your idea, getting to a hundred paying users that love what you're making, and you'll be able to figure out—and just focus on growth—you'll be able to figure out the rest. So stage two is about getting growing and getting to a place where you get to product market fit and you're ready to scale.

A lot of this is about growing up and into a company, and I found that my role as a founder sort of had to shift from putting out fires and just surviving to evening out into the marathon that is a start-up. And so this for us started after we returned from YC. We raised our seed round of a little bit over two million dollars, and now we had the chance and the space and the time to actually build Poppy into what it can be.

So the first thing here is about hiring, about a team. I thought after ten years of having experience with big companies and hiring, I thought I knew how to do this. It took me many months and many tries to realize I didn't. Things like references, things like prior experience or pedigree of what school you went to don't matter that much. What does matter is commitment and resourcefulness, passion for the mission.

One really great example I like to share is about our head of ops, Rebecca. At the time that she emailed me just out of the blue, she was a Poppy parent using Poppy, and she was just intrigued at, you know, how—what we were doing and what we were up to. So she just emailed me out of the blue and said, "We'd love to grab coffee." I was intrigued as well and loved to talk to interesting people who are using our product, so I said why not?

As I talked to her and as we started to, you know, just chat about all the challenges, I realized here’s someone who maybe hasn't done operations or worked at a start-up, but is so engaged on the mission, knows it. Then what could be better than having empathy for the product firsthand and wanting that kind of passion for doing it?

So I think in that I could repeat from so many roles at our company. So hiring becomes less about pedigree or past experiences or things like that, but the people that can prove to you that they have a passion for your mission and your problem and can get in and get going. The next thing is that you need to build a company, and it needs to even out. You need to do things that maybe you had a hypothesis on— different business model things— but now you need to—we have a sustainable business model.

For us, for example, at the beginning, I'd started with a pricing thing where we had a membership. Parents paid us membership, and then they just paid the caregivers that worked. But it didn't work so well for us. We didn't make nearly enough money for us to be a sustainable enterprise. And so we had to take the, it's— it's pricing is always a hard thing, but we had to make the decision that if we were gonna survive, we would have to take some cut of that transaction or the hourly rate. And so we did.

We talked to tons of caregivers and families; we did all the research, and we, you know, built it into the systems, and we put it out. Poppy did a lot of growing up that week, not because it wasn't the right thing to do— it was and it is— but because I think I'd underestimated how much early users feel ownership of your product. And so we had never talked about margin issues; I had never talked about some of the challenges of being in this category.

So people felt blindsided. I think the lesson that I took away that day was those early users are a part of your company, and you need to bring them in and you need to respect them with transparency. There are lots of these types of examples. But in this phase, you are going to need to do hard— how to make hard decisions to make your business sustainable in the interest of having it survive. Just be mindful of the fact that make it as transparent and bring your users along through all of those changes.

The last thing I’ll just touch on is to sort of—it seems like minor things, but one is things like investor updates and the other is mentors. There’s a reason I didn’t talk about advisors and mentors in the first phase: it can be a distraction at that phase. You know what you need to do to validate your idea; there’s no one else that can tell you how to do that. You just need to get there in the trenches and do it.

But the second stage, as you settle into the marathon, you—the founder—need to surround yourself with a couple of people that you trust to be the mirror to you because your job is to always advocate for the mission and everything like that. But you need someone to hold yourself accountable. Having a couple of those folks that don’t necessarily agree with you on your points of view but can push you on those important things—those are really important people to have.

And then my quick point on investor updates; it feels like a little one, but I am always surprised at how few people do it because it feels scary, and it feels like, you know, maybe I'm messing up, and I don’t want everyone to know about it. It's an important discipline to start as early as possible, and to be fair, I didn’t do it until after YC, but it’s important because, again, it holds you accountable, and it's the least that you can do for your investors for the privilege of their money.

So that’s basically what I feel like were the two most important parts for stage one and kind of phase two for my company to get to where it is today. And I guess I feel like if we can get so many more companies and all of you to even that stage, I think that would be an incredible kind of thing to get to.

The last thing I’ll just kind of touch on is a couple of points of how to scale yourself as a founder. I think so many people say being a founder is hard. It is. It is hard for all the reasons that you might expect and in so many that you don't. The most important reasons, I think, is because you need to be really sure you want to be a founder.

What I mean by that is it isn't just the sprint at the very beginning or maybe the couple of years in; you have to be sure you want to do this for the next five, ten years of your life. Maybe it won't take that long, but you know often it does. So do you want to devote your life to that? Great! Answer that question. Next, talk to your family, your spouse— anyone else— and make it very clear about your intention because it's important to create the space to be that founder.

Because it’s going to be brutal, and you need to be able to share. Be sure that you can make that commitment. It's also okay if that answer isn’t maybe yes. There are a lot of us startups that could use amazing smart people to work at our startups for a couple of years until you figure out whether that's the thing for you. It also gives you really amazing experience to then start your startup at an advantage.

The last point I’ll make is you need to take care of yourself. I think for myself, because I'm a parent because I'm a founder, it is too easy to say I don't have time for that. I have learned through doing and making this mistake that that is another way to kill your company. What I mean by that is you need to give yourself the time to take breaks. For me, it’s yoga, and that’s sort of like a three-in-one for me because it gives me a chance to sort of work out, give my mind a break, and just, you know, reassess and rejuvenate.

Because if you as a founder aren't at your peak, you can't provide everyone else what they need. I think the parallel to parenthood is really great there. So many of us parents, you know, just give and give and give, and then you realize you’re just completely burnt out. It’s the same thing with startups; don’t get yourself to that point where you have nothing left to give and you’re burnt out.

If you make that as a part of your practice and you create that space, I think that’s just a really important thing. So YC applications are due on March 24th—that is 50 days, 7 weeks. If you haven't started, that gives you two weeks to plan something, four weeks to do it, and one week to write the application. If you have started, 7 weeks to go, grow, and that application will just write itself in a day.

My point is that we need more people standing on this stage at this phase to even have a shot at all these big, bold problems that we all have. So let's get into that arena; let's build those big, bold companies, and most of all, let's stop focusing on all those hurdles that lie in our way and figure out how to just get started.