Morgan DeBaun on Reaching 20M Millennials - With Kat Manalac at the Female Founders Conference

And now I'm really, really excited to introduce you to our next speaker, Morgan DeBon. She's the founder of Blabbetty. So, Blabbetty has, you know, grown into the largest media company and lifestyle brand for Black Millennials. Morgan started Blabbetty in 2014, and since then, they've built a community of over seven million readers and they've raised a million dollars, which they announced last year. So, I'm really excited to introduce her to you and hear more of her story. So, welcome, Morgan!

Hi!

Hello! I moved on to the modular; we could get real. Cohn, I love it! Hi! Okay, so I want to—so for folks who might not know you very well, I like to just kick it off. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, maybe where you're from and what you were doing before you started Blabbetty.

Totally! So, I’m from St. Louis, Missouri. Midway, sino?

Yeah, okay! So, I went to Split Washio in St. Louis, as did my three other co-founders, and actually started off wanting to be a teacher. That’s how I was going to change the world, and particularly like Black youth and giving more access. Then I got in the classrooms and very quickly realized that even the best principals and the best teachers were totally restricted by laws, regulations, etc. And so, I was like, “Cambia politician—no problem!” And so I switched my major because Poli Sci major. I was in student government and then realized that everyone was influenced by money, right? That, you know, we all know that now actually after what’s going on. And so I was like, “Okay, well this is interesting. How do I both help the people that I care about in my community and make enough money so that I can influence other people to make better decisions?” Technology and entrepreneurship is one of the best ways to do that. And so that kind of started my journey.

Then after I graduated from college, I moved to Silicon Valley and to Mountain Dew specifically and worked at Intuit as a product manager. So I went—you know, big culture shock, I think, moving from St. Louis to the Bay, but here we are.

So, what was the original vision? Like at what point did you decide to leave Intuit?

Yeah, and start? So that’s a great question. I think part of it was I've always been tinkering; I've always been kind of making things. Gravity's just the first one you've heard of, right? I've had a bunch of side projects—Honda side projects, websites. And I think when I was—tell us about one random one that didn’t work.

Of course! Okay, um, let’s see… If first, we want the biggest failure that I think is still a really good idea.

Okay, both? Really quite nice!

Okay, the biggest failure was personal finance. So basically, when you graduate, when you're in college, your money, right? Like maybe you have like a couple thousand dollars, but like, you know, you don’t really have any money. Then you graduate and you go work at a Google or Intuit, and you're making fifty thousand dollars plus, like, out of nowhere, right? A lot of people don’t know what the allocation should be for savings or spending on rent, or if you want to buy a car. And so, as a personal finance calculator—know there’s like thousands of those—is like, there’s no differentiation or anything. So, it’s a good idea but like not really a business.

And then the one that I still think is a really good idea—I did in college with two other of my friends. One is now my CTO, and the other one has gone on to raise millions of dollars in manual damn flow—and it was called Quad Connect. And so it was basically you could find free food on campus. So this is the four phases of it: most like really were saying—we were like scraping all these campus calendars and then aggregating it because in the semester you run out of food, you know, meal points. Now you’re trying to find all these free food events. Yeah, no one’s done it! One device obscure! I just let me know this is it. This is like a classic college student problem, and I'm surprised actually nobody solved it yet.

Right?

Yeah, okay, but going back to Gravity—what was the original vision for Gravity that you had, and how has it evolved?

Yeah, so the original vision, which is still actually the same today, is to create products and experiences in which like we’re celebrating Black people. And it’s like—the problem that we saw, the problem that I saw, was a few different things. One, like working at Intuit was really exciting; they’re really great at designing; they're really good at creating experiences. Like, TurboTax is supposed to be really boring, but it’s like not that bad, you know? It’s not that painful. QuickBooks, same thing!

Right? Now that I’m on the other side, I’m like, oh, I love QuickBooks!

Right! But that process of learning how to design for delight, how to be really specific about creating a product for a specific user, and being like ruthless about who you’re creating for—what I realized is that no one was doing that for me. And so there are a thousand problems that Black people have and people of color have and women have that this entire industry ignores.

And so, with Gravity, we wanted to create different products and we wanted to create different experiences to kind of fix that. And then, you know, the thing on the personal side is that my Braun happened when I was working at Intuit, and I was actually at Demand Forces in a startup at Intuit. But it’s like—it’s a great company, but it’s very white and very bro, and it’s a sales company.

And so I was in business development. So, I was kind of like sitting on the floor and I was like, okay, this is interesting. I didn’t really know what to do with me, and my hair was like really big. There’s like, I don’t really know where you came from. I came from like the motherland—I came into it, you know? So it was just like—it was a lot, I think, for people, and I felt that. I kind of carried it with me.

And then when my son happened, and my world was exploding—you know, being from St. Louis and watching things happen on Facebook—and again, you have to remember that this is two, three years ago, so this is before trending topics on Facebook, right? So it’s very difficult to find information. So you had to go to Twitter and Periscope and Vine, and there was a lot of things happening where there was no central, there’s no central way to find out what was happening in a city.

And then things started to explode across the country, right? Things are happening in Baltimore; things are happening in Cleveland; things are happening in St. Louis. And so individual people became our sources of information. Now these people, you know, we know who they are—DeRay, Meta, Shawn, right? But back then they were like just normal people. And so to find them was really difficult, and Sublimity had started; like we had started to tinker a little bit, but that's when I ultimately quit and said we need to do this. Black media is moving too slow; they’re antiquated in terms of magazines and newspapers—they never really made the switch to mobile-first and digital-first.

And then millennial media—they don’t care. Yeah, you know! We know we care a little bit more now, but back then nobody was really paying attention. So that’s the beginning.

Yeah, so, um, since then, you know, so basically maybe going back to that first moment—how did you get your very first users?

Yeah, so we started as an email newsletter. And one of the insights was that Black people and people of color actually over-index in watching television—since about eight hours a day, on average. A lot—the average person watches about five. And at the same time, we’re huge content creators! Like anything on Twitter, the funniest stuff on Twitter probably is by a Black person—the memes like all of that stuff, right?

And so it’s interesting for me that you take both of those things, and yet we don’t really have a place to find that in one place. You kind of have to like be a cool kid and like be able to find it. And so Labadie, what we were doing was curating an email newsletter that was your top ten things you needed to see this week, and they were videos.

And did it start out as just you curating everything?

Oh yeah, there are probably people in the audience where I just scraped your email and put it off a newsletter.

So yeah! And then we went straight to YouTube from the newsletter, and then we spent like, you know, two months building—looked like a really cool website. It had all the algorithms and stuff. And so, inside from the newsletter to YouTube, you went to the website. Again, this was back when like Upworthy was a thing and like Facebook—right? There are all these different things happening—everybody hated it! They did not like going to this other website. They’re like, “No, we’re coming to eat you!”

And so that was our first fail! And you know we kept iterating from there, but yeah, as an email newsletter in the beginning.

So how did you realize that people weren’t into the video aspect of this, and they wanted that text—they wanted to read?

Right, so I thought that it was just because the site was ugly, because you know you always launch things really ugly in the beginning because like, why make it pretty if you don’t know respects what they want? Then I made it prettier, right? I was like, okay fine! We’ll go lighter; we’ll add some call-to-action buttons, like all these things—nobody cared! So then it was like, okay, how do we drive traffic? Maybe people just need to learn how to type in gravity.com—like they’re not used to the brand.

So we started doing content marketing, so we created a blog and then wrote stories about the people actually behind the videos. And I hired bloggers—we didn’t hire anyone because we’re not any money—but I brought on bloggers, and then the blog was getting like a thousand times more traffic than the videos themselves. And the URL was like insane! Right? It’s like blablabbity.com/backslash/blog—it’s like ridiculous!

And so I was looking—I mean, I track everything religiously, like every day, Google Analytics, every hour I’m looking at real-time analytics, and you can see the difference! And I just didn’t ignore it. And so we switched it, so blab decom became the blog and then videos—not blabbing at Khan becomes a video site, and not to cite—a died; it’s just like dead! But the blog—I spent, you know, a weekend making a WordPress site versus another site that we spent two months and hard-coded everything—it’s, you know, so smooth, this big texting—no how do you—yeah!

Like, how do you kill your darlings? Like some—oh man, too much birthing, basically. And then suddenly you realize, you know, it’s not going to work out.

I killed my darlings all the time, right? All the time! I mean, I think failing fast is like part of how you move in this world, particularly in the technology space and especially consumer social media engagement community.

So, yeah, I am agnostic about how we reach people; I just want to make sure that we do.

So you have built this incredibly passionate community! I see people tweeting that laude all the time. And like, how did you—how did you go about growing and nurturing that community and keeping them coming back?

So, the first thing—which is part of our values—is that we don’t make it about us. So, Gravity, we always try to ask ourselves, “How does this help someone else? Is the information that they can use? Is it a video that’s going to make them laugh while they’re sitting at work feeling lonely? Is it information in the morning that they would never get if they were just scrolling through their Twitter feeds unless they followed us, of course?”

And once you remove yourself from what do I think people need versus what is it that will help them because they said that they need this or they indicated through behaviors that they need it, it actually becomes really refreshing and easy because you have to listen!

So in the beginning with Slavit II, what we heard was that creators—like young people who have these amazing products or creations—weren’t getting the press. And we were able to get on stage and do the things that they needed to do to get to the next level and to really ultimately monetize. You know, that’s every creator’s kind of gotta make money, right? And so which—okay, we’re going to be about the culture; like we’re going to promote the artists in Brooklyn; we’re going to promote the EP that just launched at The Fader.

It’s not going to cover—we’re going to give them cameras, we’re going to give them resources, and we’re going to try to train them and give them money even! And that was the beginning. And then what’s interesting is as they’ve grown, we’ve grown, right? So Cuenta B, who’s huge at BuzzFeed—well, three years ago, we put a camera in Quinta’s hand and like go over there! I was a GoPro—we’re like covert around and they’re just showing their life and we’ll make a video out of it, right? And now she’s one of my best friends! And so she’s got literally millions and millions of followers, but back then she maybe had like 50,000, right?

So I think focusing on the community and focusing on building from the ground up as opposed to Mutasa John was really, really about empowering the creators in the community—not about like your editorial vision anymore.

And right, let’s get out of the way—pause! Right? And so we’ve invested a lot of time and money on building out the platform of Labadie—not on WordPress anymore! We’ve built our own website in our own CMS, a content management system so that we can enable user-generated content. About 50% of our content today is actually from the community—transform problems, but in the long run, yeah, it does. It is definitely—right here, puree?

Oh yeah, you know?

Yeah, so but in the long run, it’s way better; it’s scalable; it’s empowering. You can build things, systems, and processes that make it efficient and frictionless for people to share those stories and their ideas.

So, you raised a million dollars—a little bit more actually—long, awesome!

Well, you—yeah!

Yeah, I had to add another round; that hasn’t really been announced. Oh, well, awesome!

Yeah! And so, you know, as we’ve been talking about, it’s particularly difficult for women or people of color to raise. And so did you, you know, feel like there were barriers that you faced? And what would your strategy for getting around them be?

Yeah, absolutely! So I think I made the mistake that a lot of first-time founders make, which is you raise—you go and look at your competitors, right? You go look awesome on Angel; if you look at the Moon Crunch page and like, okay, well, cool, they invested in them; we’re like them. But for us—and so I’m gonna go talk to that; they’re gonna get it though—that’s not true!

They might get it, but they’re like, “Why? I already did that!” Or you're—you're competing; they're going to compare your numbers to their numbers. And so for me, like thinking about Mike or Hello Giggles or Refinery way back in the day, like they had already raised money—some of them even before they launched, right?

So my numbers and their numbers are not going to match up, right? If I'm like, well, can you take on all that money they said on Facebook ads and then compare me, you know, investors to us—that’s too far down. And so in the beginning, I definitely made the mistake of going after—and I’m sharing my mistakes and potentially. So you guys, we all make mistakes, right? It’s part of it!

And then quickly realizing that I wasn’t ready; I didn't have the right story. My story was way off; people couldn’t understand the ecosystem that I was trying to build with Black media. They just saw, “So, you’re a blog on WordPress?”

Mm-hmm.

And you don’t even write like—you aren’t a journalist!

Yeah, right! I’m like, I mean like yes, technically that is what I am today, but the vision is this entire world of products and websites and brands and experiences. And I can’t tell you what those are yet, but because it’s been such an underserved community and because we’re going to work really hard, we’re going to figure it out, and I just need a little bit more time and a little bit more space.

So you hadn’t—you were like, here’s where we’re at today, but you didn’t have that like—and here’s the bigger.

I had some ideas, but then they said, “Oh, you’re doing too many things—you’re not focused!”

Right, I was like, “Well, no! I am focused! You know, okay, I’m here,” but you have to sell it, right? So I didn’t do it well—I mean, it's flat-out—I did not sell the story very well!

And so I went back into my little cave with our team and kept building and built to a place where it was so ridiculous that we had not raised money, where it was like we walked into the room and prefer like those cannot be your numbers!

And like they are!

Right? And so then people have to make a choice: do you want to invest in me or not? Do you believe my numbers or not, right? And do you think that this is a business that's worth over two, three, four hundred million dollars or not?

And there was—there's no ambiguity there! And some people, the answer was no, right? And they're like, “No, I don’t believe it.” Okay, bye, right? Because I believed it!

And I think, you know, now obviously three years later, there are some people who have been like, “Hey!”

Yeah, I’m like, hmm!

Right? No, you don’t get in this deal—absolutely!

Yeah, absolutely not! You made it so good they couldn’t ignore you!

Absolutely! It’s hard, wasn’t it?

Yeah!

How long did you prescribe it—stretch for a year living in San Francisco, which is really hard!

I was on that. Ohio, is your team good?

Um, paid? Yes, unpaid. We had probably around six or seven people—are paid by what I could pay them at the time—$100 a month, $500 a month. I mean, it was very much a community and mission-driven company; you had to really believe in it to be here.

But yeah! And so when I raised our first round, really, what to just pay for all the things that I was already personally paying for and to hire the people who were already working for free, so it didn’t; it would actually go very far. But it was a, you know, it’s a success indicator that I think the market could fit—then say, okay, now we can go give them some more money.

So how has your job changed from the time you were prescribing to now?

Yeah, I mean, I would have never done this when I was rapping; it’s like I’m working days!

Yeah!

I think that now it’s very much about people and hiring and sharing the story of Slavoj because we are so different than a lot of companies; we’re a mix of media and tech—we’re definitely a lot of culture and trends.

And so yeah, I spend a lot of my time just trying to remove barriers for my team, make it easier for them to do their jobs and then story selling and making sure that people know what we’re up to.

So what is—what are the next steps for Blabbetty? Like, what is the big vision?

Yeah, so just to kind of share a little bit more about what we do—so Blabbetty is a media company and lifestyle brand, like you said. We have two conferences, After Attack, which is a tech conference here in San Francisco, and we have EmpowerHer, which is a Women’s Conference, which moves around—I was just in Chicago a few weeks ago!

We have three websites, so we have Laverty.com, 2190, which is a new brand that we just launched for Black women specifically—lifestyle brands—and then the conference ladders up underneath it. And then we actually acquired a third company that we just announced last quarter called Shadow and Act, which is focused on—it’s like a Black Hollywood Reporter.

And so, you know, what Sabre Duvernay doing—what’s the array doing with the trailer that just got released? But also, because of such a huge kind of energy around video creation and Black creators, we can curate, engage with people, web series—all the new web series releases and things like that.

And then we’ve tested a lot of things when eCommerce and others, so that’s kind of the world that we are right now.

And how do you decide what to test out or what to sort of keep and what to kill?

Yeah, it’s very much based off of numbers. It’s very much based off of like speed of traction and then comparing different things at once.

So, well, for example, with our women’s brand, which started off called Gravity Lifestyles, which had a separate Instagram account, because we knew that, you know, if we posted with women and their afros and like all this stuff on our Blabbetty account, all the guys would be like…

Right!

And so we were like, okay cool—we’ll create a separate brand; it deserves its own space; it deserves its own voice. And then that was actually growing faster than Gravity!

So I’m like, oh, of course it is! Right? Women are amazing and very much like, you know, a little intimate—like all these things!

And so then we’re like, okay, well launch a Twitter account, right? And we didn’t have separate websites at all; it’s all going back to Blab eCom, but we had separate voices on social. And then from there, we’re like, okay, well maybe we should start writing content specifically for this demographic, and then that was growing like crazy.

And then we said, okay, well maybe we should just launch a separate brand because some of the things that we want to do really don’t fit under the Blabbetty brand. Like if I want to release a—a make a notebook that’s like a day planner that’s talking about living your best life for women and like put a frozen in the cover or like all their stuff—that’s not going to work on Blabbetty.

It warrants its own brand!

And so we went back to the drawing board and said, okay, what would a company for Black women look like? What would a brand for Black women look like? What’s in the space already?

And then we went back through from scratch and designed it and launched.

Oh yeah! So you have all the trim properties!

And so kind of longer-term, yeah, are just going to keep experimenting and see what works, or is, you know, are you driving towards a specific, you know, one specific goal?

Yeah, so the future of Gravity, like way far away from now, is that Gravity is a brand that when you see it or you feel it or you’re around it, you know exactly what you’re going to get, and it's a positive impression and energy around Black people.

So, and if you’re Black, it’s like, “Oh, this was designed exactly for me.” So, for example, if Labadie throws a party, you know, which you’re probably going to get, right? Everyone, like, we’re going to do a music festival! You know, you’re probably going to get Solange, Chance the Rapper, Donald Glover, right? Like you can kind of say in your mind what we’re going to do or what that might look like—that experience might look like.

If we’re like, “We’re going to do a Netflix show,” right? People look—okay, like maybe if you’re White, people vibe like, you know, there are some things that we can do and expand into as from a brand perspective that will just be an extension of who we are.

On the website side and on the media company side, I certainly think there are plenty of communities that have not been touched on. For example, music! There’s not many music media brands that focus on Black culture, which is ironic considering how much Black musicians run the music industry, right, are the creators of the music industry!

And so that’s certainly an area that we’re thinking about and trying to figure out what is our voice in kind of the indie Black creator space.

For founders who are building brands right now and focusing on that—what do you have specific advice for them?

Yeah, I think be unapologetic about having a big vision! I think in the beginning I felt like the world couldn’t take all of me. They were like, mmm, a little much, right? But if you’re doing a lot—and so I just locked it down so that they could understand me.

And I think I did that too long. Sometimes you might have to do it to get to a certain person, but I think that I like on from the mental perspective, it took me too long to just embrace everything that I wanted us to be.

And now that we have, as a company, I think everyone feels much more empowered to think big and to try things and not be as scared of failure!

There’s a fear that you were going to lose focus without it—like that you edited it down because you were like, I want, you know, maybe investors, right? Do you believe that we are focused on this peculiarly?

Yeah, when you solve for what you think is your biggest pain point and when you act out of fear, I think that you limit yourself and that’s a problem!

Can you get over that fear?

I don’t know—I'm still working on it! I mean, I think that it’s being self-aware and surrounding yourself with people who believe in you!

I mean, I’m lucky to have a very, like, strong tribe of people who are always pushing me and always saying, “Keep going! Go bigger, go harder, go faster!” And I think that’s really important, particularly for women, to have that community because it is tough—it’s very difficult!

So, if you could give advice to female founders, especially Black female founders out there who are just starting out, like, what would you tell them?

I would say, it’s okay! You don’t have to ask for permission! Like, I think sometimes we wait for other people to validate us because we spend a lot of time not being validated and not seeing ourselves in places.

Like, for example, when I said I was gonna quit my job and run a startup, everyone was like, “Name me a Black female founder!” And I was like, “I’m not!”

Like, okay, now name me a Black CEO—a Black female CEO who doesn’t have a law degree or an engineering degree or business degree? And I was like, “Oh!” You know? And so there are all these reasons and all this data that shows we shouldn’t exist, right?

If you look at the numbers, like you literally wouldn’t go outside!

Yeah, so it’s true! So it’s like, you know, so don’t just—like don’t listen to them! Don’t ask for permission, don’t wait for someone to tell you that it’s okay to be great and to do what you want to do.

And so that’s my—that's all!

Right on time! Thank you so much!

Yeah, thanks! Thank you to Morgan!

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