Kathryn Minshew at Female Founders Conference 2014

So next you're gonna meet Kathryn Minshew. Fun fact, when she was a kid, Kathryn wanted to be Zorro. Now, Kathryn is founder and CEO of The Muse, a career platform and job discovery tool. Kathryn was part of the YC Winter 2012 batch. Please welcome Kathryn Minshew.

"Hey everybody! Thank you guys so much for having me. I'm actually really excited. As Ellie mentioned, we were actually in the same batch. So, the last time I was up here was also our demo day in March 2012. We actually kind of messed it up, but things have worked out okay since, so hopefully this will be much more exciting.

I want to take you guys through a little bit of The Muse's history, some of the mistakes we made, a couple of the lessons learned, and a few of the big things that I wish I had known when I got started a couple of years ago. For people who don't know, The Muse, as I mentioned, helps people figure out what they want to do with their lives. We give them career advice, we help them see inside companies, understand what's a day-in-the-life, you know, hear from employee Vangelis on video about what it means to be a product manager or an engineer or in marketing analytics or community service.

I think when people come to our site, sometimes, you know, there's clearly... we've been working at it for a while. My co-founder Alex, who's here, likes to describe it as an evolution to awesome, but I prefer to describe it as an evolution from suck to suck less, because I think that that's, for me, at the core of a lot of startups. This idea that by the time you often hear about a lot of the companies that are touted as, you know, big kind of technology successes, they've already gone so far past the point of their early ugly, scrappy MVP roots that it's sometimes really hard to see where they came from.

I know when we were getting started with The Muse, I had a lot of anxiety over the fact that we had this product, which was like pretty much an ugly duckling, and I wasn't really sure if it would ever develop into a swan. So, when I kind of take you quickly through our history from suck to suck less, starting with how, you know, where the idea came from, which was very much a personal pain point.

So, as a political science undergrad, as Kathryn mentioned, I wanted to be Zorro originally when I was a kid. Then, as I grew up, I've matured a little bit, and I really wanted to be in the CIA. This actually came from my fascination; I'm not even joking. Why did I want to be in the CIA? It was because I was obsessed with the TV show Alias, and I thought Jennifer Garner was so awesome, and it was a great show. So I remember thinking to myself, "I'm in school, but I think when you're a kid, you have all these ideas about what it is like to do different careers."

It wasn't really until I was a political science major, I got to intern at a U.S. Embassy in Cyprus and got chased around by Marines during a training exercise, that I was like, "You know what, I might not actually be cut out for this." So I went to McKinsey, which was a really interesting experience, but I knew pretty quickly that I didn't actually want to be a management consultant.

I moved to Rwanda and Malawi and worked in vaccines, and I was like, "Holy... everything I do is interesting, and I'm learning a lot, but it is nothing like what I thought it would be when I started." So, you know, what if there was something online that could kind of solve this problem? At the same time, I had met my co-founders Alex and Melissa. This is when we looked more badass, but at the time at McKinsey, we were not badass at all. Alex can tell you some crazy stories.

But we did have, you know, a lot of kind of ongoing conversations about how there was a real hole we felt in the marketplace for advice and job listings and support that was really about navigating your career because the way people were thinking about their careers had changed substantially. It wasn't linear, and we all felt very kind of lost. So we decided to start something. The problem was initially none of us was technical. Now, actually, Melissa goes back in, Alex goes fun, and I do not code anymore, but we didn't really have a lot of skills.

We were pretty broke when we were getting started, and so we thought, "What can we do?" We started with a WordPress site. So this is actually what we launched with in September of 2011. I now think it's ugly as... but that's okay because we were really proud of it at the time, and it was a WordPress customized theme that provided career advice from different kind of professionals and managers and execs in a pretty easy-to-read format targeted at women in their twenties, which investors were telling us was a very, very small market.

We decided, you know, that we would test job listings out through this WordPress site because we didn't have any ability to build something custom. So we went to Cooper, we convinced them to, you know, I think it was like $200 to post a bunch of their General Manager job listings when they were, you know, still in maybe two or three cities only. And you could, you know, I think Alex hacked together like a little form at the bottom.

What was interesting is that even though there were so many massive holes and we were kind of pitching this big vision that was nothing like the reality, we started seeing incredible user growth. So we had 20,000 people visit the site in the first month, 26,000 in the second, and 75,000 in the third, which is insane. I'll talk in a little bit about how we kind of got the word out.

But we ended up being convinced at the very last minute to apply to YC, and it's actually interesting. We were not going to apply at all. I had been with a previous company that Alex and I worked on together, turned down from I think like 11 accelerators. So I was done. I was like, "Alright, I'm not wasting my time." And one of our advisors, Rachel Sklar, came to me and she was like, "You absolutely have to put your hat in the ring. You need to apply, and you know, if you don't get it, you don't get it, but you really ought to go for it."

So that weekend, you know, we threw an application together, put it in, and lo and behold, we got an interview. So this is the three of us on the day that we interviewed at YC. We blasted loud music, you know, we just came in really pumped up. We kind of were at this point where we'd been turned down by almost every single investor in New York City, and we're just like, "F*** it! We don't even care, we're gonna keep going, what a building something that we believe users want and that data is showing users want."

We really, you know, we hoped this works out, but if it doesn't, you know, we're gonna kind of keep trying and keep going. We're very, very determined despite looking very nice up here. So lo and behold, we got in. It was a huge surprise.

Then, I think we started making some of our biggest early-stage mistakes, which was, first of all, when we got into YC, we got so excited about the fact this was somebody that actually had, you know, was sort of respected and they actually believed in what we were doing. So we thought, "Now is the time to make the career product of our dreams."

We hired two people off of HN who were very talented but without a lot of kind of culture fit vetting, and we started dreaming really big. So this is an actual mock-up that Alex built in January of 2012. We went in to talk with PG; it was like one of our first big meetings with him, and we're like, "Alright, this is what we're building. It's gonna have like this predictive data and then you can enter this and it'll be personalized and everything will be completely customized."

He just cut us off, I mean, seconds into, you know, our big kind of exciting demo, and he was like, "That's ridiculous. You will never get that out the door. You need to just watch already." And that hit us pretty hard. We realized that this idea that we were kind of polishing in the corner, sort of like Gollum in Lord of the Rings with a very precious idea, wasn't actually something that we, by the time we actually got it out there and saw how people were reacting to different elements of it, we'd be dead; we'd run out of money.

So we kind of took a step back. We did a kind of 24-hour cycle where Alex pulled an all-nighter and rebuilt the site. We then started working on it the next morning, and exactly 13 days later, we launched on TechCrunch with this very first, you know, basic version, and we kind of started iterating and learning from there. There were a couple of key things that we learned as we were sort of pushing this mountain, this boulder, up the mountain, which I think is what most startups are like.

The first, I referred to, is you've got to start somewhere. It's that idea that startups are kind of like Monopoly; you can't pass go if you can't get $20. If you don't pass go, I think it's really tempting sometimes to keep working on something and to keep it, you know, very quiet, to wait until you have something beautiful and perfect to put out to the world, because it's really difficult to put up a site that people think is ugly.

And it's really difficult to tell someone your idea and have them say, "That's really, you know, really? That's what you're doing?" We got a lot of that in the early days, but I think if we hadn't been so willing to put ourselves out there when we were frankly, you know, had something that was laughed at sometimes by people, we wouldn't have gotten so much of the data that led us kind of navigate the right direction.

Another way of saying this is your college roommate's approval does not mean market demand. This is something, you know, I hear a lot. I'll talk to founders; it's often, you know, sometimes young guys that are very excited that like this is gonna be amazing, it's gonna be big, and I'm like, "How do you know?" They're like, "Well, I asked five friends and my mom and everyone thinks it's brilliant." Like you know what? Those people love you!

People who love you are going to tell you that they think your idea is good because they believe in you, for the most part. Now they might not always, but I think you've got to kind of put your idea, your baby, right up against the cold hard light of someone who doesn't give a f*** about you and see how it reacts.

Ideally, I'm gonna go back to this in a little bit, but someone who is actually a user of your target demographic, because lots of people who will never be the ideal users for what you're building will tell you they don't get it, that it's a terrible idea, that you know, it's ugly. I think the most important feedback... I like to process all feedback, but the most important feedback is from the people that are in your target demographic.

So one more point on this. So this is again the first version of The Muse; this is what it looks like now. If we waited to look like this to launch, we would be dead, and we'd probably all be back at, you know, much more boring corporate jobs.

So secondly, test everything but know what's actually important. I think when we first launched the company profiles and the job listings on The Muse, we got so excited with the fact that we could track all of this data. So we had Mixpanel tracking where people were clicking, and we were looking at, you know, Crazy Egg to see mouse movements and all of these things, and we noticed that users weren't doing certain things that we wanted them to do.

So, for example, every profile had large videos where employees at different companies could tell people what it was like to work there. You could watch, and a bunch of people were watching the videos, but not everyone. And we started thinking, "How can we get more people to watch videos?" We ran tests, and we were tracking it and, you know, making the playheads bigger, changing the text, and then finally we were in some office hours at YC, and one of the partners was like, "Why does it matter if people watch videos? Is that a key metric?"

We sat back and we thought for a second. We were like, "You know what? Like, what will make our company successful? How many people are coming to the site? Whether they're applying to jobs? Whether they're sharing it with their friends?" There are a couple of core metrics that really define success, but whether they're watching videos is not in and of itself one of them. If watching more videos leads them to apply or to spend longer on the site or to share more with their friends, that's great, but changing something like that in and of itself was actually just distracting us from our core.

Now, the third, this leads to the third: create velocity. This is kind of the Field of Dreams idea, which is that I think often startup customer acquisition and kind of early-stage media has this idea that, you know, if you build it, they will come. I think the answer that I've seen is no, unfortunately. I wish that were true.

In fact, in some cases, you know, you may actually be able to reach your demographic very early; they may be naturally kind of viral in a way, and if you get that, you're very fortunate. But for most of us, you actually have to go out and kind of scratch and find your audience from among a very, very large pool of potential people who don't necessarily want to share about your product early on.

As I said, I've done two startups. The big difference between startup number one, QI P, which is very dead, and startup number two, The Muse, which is not dead, is user growth. Figuring out how do you get people to know about you in the first place so that if they do like what you're doing, they can tell.

So I've got a couple of things we did to sort of acquire users out of thin air. We were really broke, so none of these are things that cost any money. But what we found that worked for us: one was to seek out really like-minded groups. So since initially when we started The Muse, now we have, you know, over a million users a month from ages 22, you know, late 40s all across the United States, men and women, but when we were starting, we were targeting women in their 20s, generally in a certain type of kind of professional or educational career trajectory.

So we started making lists of groups, so things like the Stanford Women in Law group, Baldwin Scholars of Duke; like no group was too small. We would personally write someone in the group, and we'd say, "Hi, I'm Kathryn. I, you know, started this company to do XYZ. Would love if you take a look. I'd really love to hear your feedback, you know, and if you think it's something to be interesting, share it with your members."

Then, I would actually put something in the email that would basically make it no work for them to share it on. A surprising number of people, they liked what they found. You know, they like... most people like providing value and information to others, so they would pass it on to the list serves, the groups—a lot of these underground things that we never could have accessed on our own.

The second point is, you know, to make it... you've got to make it insanely easy for people to give you word of mouth. So, I always think it's really interesting a lot of people will email me and they'll say, "Kathryn, I just started this company. Like, I would love it if you will tweet about it." If you actually put a tweet in that email, there is like a 5x chance more high that I will and that people in general will tweet about it, because you've just taken off the work.

Like asking someone to spread the word is, I think, a really great way of getting the word out, but it's very helpful if you can say, you know, "Here are a couple of sample tweets or sample Facebook posts that people can literally copy and paste." We found once we started doing that, people were more than willing to help, but if helping meant spending four minutes figuring out exactly, you know, what to write, they were much, much less likely to do it.

Then finally, become your own PR machine. So when we started The Muse, nobody wanted to write about us. Lots of people start companies every day, and I was emailing reporters and they were like, "Okay, and you're who?" I was like, "Oh, no one actually, but working on it." I started thinking, like, what could I do to get links about us and worried about us out on big platforms?

One of the things is a lot of these platforms do want guest content; they want people to write and to provide bylines and to provide good content for free so that they can get ads and page views, etc. So I started writing, and at the beginning, I would write for The Muse. Then I got a contact at The Huffington Post; I wrote something there. I don't think anybody ever read it, but it was on The Huffington Post, and it was well written. Then I sent that link to other platforms like Forbes. I met... pitched a lot of people that said no at first.

In fact, I blogged for The Harvard Business Review now, but I emailed them a couple of times over a full year before they finally wrote back to me and said, "Hey, remember that email from you know, like 14 months ago? We'd like to have you write now." So, you know, I think no just means wait a little bit and ask me again later often, but we started kind of producing content about startups, about careers, about anything that was really relevant to our business and then getting other sites to publish that.

It was kind of a slow process; it did take a while, but it built a lot of brand recognition early on and also great for SEO.

Number four is build an amazing team. I think a lot of people have talked about... so this is part of not the entire, but part of The Muse team. In fact, two people from The Muse team are here today, Maja and Sarah, which is really exciting for me. The thing is, like none of these people turn down other job opportunities or other things that they could be doing because we offer like the most amazing salary and perks in New York City. In fact, that's wildly untrue. We are still a very scrappy company at our core.

You know, we often cannot offer people what they would be able to command on the market, but I think as a startup, you have to focus on what you can offer them, and that's often much, much more powerful, especially to the right people. So we often recruit, first of all, by people who love what it is that we're doing and are kind of deeply passionate about that.

But we also focus on what their individual goals are, personally and professionally, and how we can help make that happen. So during the interview process, we often like to ask people, "You know, outside of your core job, what is it you're excited about doing?" People will tell us, "You know, I love the idea of speaking to other women in technology. I love the idea of, you know, becoming a marketer who knows more code." Whatever it is, part of our job as founders, I believe, is to connect the people who have taken the risk to be on our team with the things and opportunities that will get them where they want to go.

I also think that, you know, you have to lead by example. So, to the point about low salaries, both Alex and I make less than almost everybody on this page—sometimes by a factor of two or three—and that's alright because I think we are building a team that's in it for the long haul. That's something that, you know, I think is one of the strongest assets of a startup because you're competing against these big companies with a lot of resources, but they don't necessarily have the fire that your team has.

When you're looking for kind of new hires, obviously everyone knows kind of the classic big sites—your LinkedIn's, your Indeed's, there's a lot of up-and-comers: Higher Art, Ellie's, The Muse, AngelList networks are big. But I also find lurking to be very effective, which I define as figuring out, first of all, you know, spending time on Hacker News, on Twitter, following people that you think might be interesting employees, figuring out what startups are dying or are close to it, and nicely approaching people who work there, saying, "Are you in fact looking for a new job?"

Because often, it's also really helpful. Often founders who are going through tough financial situations have to let go of people that are incredibly talented, and so if you can actually be known as—and kind of reach out to people—they may actually be really happy to hand you or kind of introduce you to an amazing engineer, salesperson, ops person who they completely believe in but just aren't able to keep on the payroll because the business has changed, because financial situations allowed. So I think that can be really effective.

Lastly, the last point I want to make is do not believe the hype. I think we exist in a business in which people are always getting funded by Andreessen and appearing on TechCrunch and hitting 13 million clicks—whatever the f*** that means. There's a lot of vanity metrics; there's a lot of patting people on the back.

I think it can be really hard sometimes to exist in that environment, especially when it feels like all you're getting is no. That’s one of the reasons I'm such a big believer in focusing on who is your user, where are they, and are you providing them with something they love? Because I think ultimately, if you're really able to hook into a deep need, you're able to build something that people need and that they love, and you can slowly track that acquisition.

Then, you know, two users becomes 20 users, becomes 20,000, becomes two million, and you become a lot harder to ignore. So, overall, you've got to start somewhere, track everything but know what's important, create your own velocity, don't rely on people to give it to you, build an amazing team, and do not believe the hype. Because all of those people who laugh at you or patronize you or tell you no, ultimately their opinion is often completely irrelevant to your success, and it's gonna feel really good to smile at them when you've done it.

Thank you!"