- Feather is a furniture subscription service founded by Jay Reno
- The idea behind Feather is that people don't want to own things anymore
- Jay Reno came to this conclusion after moving multiple times and realizing that furniture needs change with each move
- There is also a problem of furniture waste in the US, with people buying disposable furniture that doesn't fit in their next space
- Feather aims to solve these problems by offering a rental service for furniture
- The cultural shift towards valuing freedom and flexibility also contributes to the demand for furniture subscription services
- The prototype for Feather was a simple web shop created using Shopify, with a selection of furniture items available for rent
- The MVP was tested with friends and friends of friends, and initial orders gave confidence that people were interested in the service.

- The founder of the company used an MVP approach to test the hypothesis by selecting enough items to accurately test customer interest.
- The founder initially purchased and delivered the furniture themselves, without building in any margin in the first year.
- The founder realized the importance of getting feedback from both consumers and industry professionals.
- The furniture rental market already existed, but was not addressing the needs of the target demographic.
- The company evolved from a rental model to a subscription model, allowing customers to defer the choice of ownership.
- Customer interviews and in-person interactions helped the founder understand the preferences and needs of customers.
- The furniture is seen as an expression of personal style, but the color and shape are not as important as the overall aesthetic and comfort.
- The company has scaled by respecting logistics and building a software-driven backend to effectively deliver furniture.
- The software created by the company helps with inventory management and the complex reverse logistics process.

- The company initially had negative margins and lacked optimization in routes and revenue tracking.
- The company built its own software stack as off-the-shelf options did not meet their needs.
- The company operates in three markets: New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
- The decision to expand to San Francisco was driven by the opportunity to test and learn in a new market with low overhead.
- The company has focused on honing its operations and developing a playbook for growth.
- Hiring employees depends on individual strengths and needs, with a focus on balancing skill sets.
- The founder's role involves both leading and providing vision, but it may be necessary to pass on certain responsibilities as the company scales.
- The founder has enjoyed the journey of building the company and is now focused on process and improvements.
- In the early days, it is important to be focused on a goal while also seeding multiple opportunities for growth.

- The speaker emphasizes the importance of seeding opportunities in the early stages of a startup
- They give an example of how they cold emailed the CEO of West Elm and ended up partnering with them
- They highlight the need to focus on high-risk, high-reward opportunities and not half-ass multiple things
- The speaker mentions that they received positive feedback from industry professionals and customers
- They mention that they were not concerned about big companies copying them due to the complexity of their business
- The speaker advises founders to continue setting goals and staying focused after raising money
- They acknowledge the transition from Y Combinator to the real world and suggest taking time to reflect and reset strategy.

- Feather is a furniture subscription service founded by Jay Reno that offers a rental service for furniture.
- The company aims to solve the problem of furniture waste and cater to the cultural shift towards valuing freedom and flexibility.
- Feather started as a simple web shop prototype and tested the market with friends and initial orders.
- The company evolved from a rental model to a subscription model, allowing customers to defer the choice of ownership.
- The company has scaled by focusing on logistics and building a software-driven backend.
- Feather operates in three markets: New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
- The founder's role involves leading and providing vision, with a focus on process and improvements.
- Seeding multiple opportunities for growth and focusing on high-risk, high-reward opportunities is important in the early stages of a startup.
- The speaker advises founders to set goals, stay focused, and reflect on strategy after raising money.

Jay Reno is the CEO and founder of Feather. Feather is a furniture subscription service. They were in the Summer 2017 batch of YC.

https://twitter.com/jayjreno

You can check out their furniture at LiveFeather.com and if you live in LA, SF, or New York you can try out the service.

https://www.livefeather.com/

The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

https://www.livefeather.com/

Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.

Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

***

Topics

00:00 - Intro

00:20 - Opting out of owning furniture

6:00 - Feather's prototype

8:50 - How much did he make from his MVP?

9:30 - How many products did they have?

11:45 - Legacy competitors 

13:35 - Changing branding from RentFeather.com to LiveFeather.com

15:30 - Customer interviews and learnings

18:00 - Scaling a company with physical products

21:00 - Why expand to other markets vs focus on one?

23:30 - Who to hire and when in a logistics-heavy business

25:40 - Unexpected learnings from scaling Feather

27:25 - Feeling his role change over time

29:15 - Counterintuitive advice

34:50 - Advice for YC founders after Demo Day

So you are the founder and CEO of Feather, which was in the summer 17 batch, and Feather is a furniture subscription service.

So at the core of it is this idea that people don't wanna own things anymore.

How did you come to that conclusion and why does it motivate your business?

High level, I think I saw 3 things happening in my life.

The first was I had moved 7 times in the 9 years I've lived in New York City.

And each time I've moved, I've had a completely different life situation.

So I've lived with roommates, I've lived with a significant other, I then moved back in with 1 roommate, then I lived with 2 roommates, then by myself, then with a significant other, and then by myself.

And at each phase of my life, I've had completely different needs in my apartment.

So, you know, the space changes, the layout of the space changes place to place.

The needs of the furniture needs in that space change dramatically.

So For example, 1 roommate might have had the sofa we needed, but not a coffee table.

He didn't have a bed for me, so I had to bring my own bed and mattress, et cetera.

Then when I moved to the next place, that stuff might not have fit physically or stylistically in the next space.

So it might've been like a modern apartment in the first time, then I moved into a pre-war building in Brooklyn.

And at each phase, you have completely different needs.

And so 1, I realized that moving is a pain.

It's just, you know, we've all experienced this so many different times.

And 2, the stuff that you have doesn't necessarily fit physically or stylistically in your next space for all of the given reasons.

Couple that with basically there being a massive problem of furniture waste in the U.S.

So what people are doing to solve this problem today is buying, you know, Ikea, Wayfair, what you might consider disposable furniture that can be assembled once and set up once in someone's home and doesn't really transport very well.

It's not meant to be disassembled or moved.

And so all of that stuff might not fit in your next space.

So you have to throw it out and then go buy new things.

Then you move and you throw those things out and go buy new things to fit your space and your life.

So I got my master's degree in climate and environmental science, cared deeply about some of these big world problems, especially as they relate to the environment, the built world, and realized that I think there's a big opportunity to solve a couple massive problems.

The third piece that's kind of interesting is there's a cultural shift happening, like you mentioned, away from ownership of stuff.

And high level where you see that going is and we see that taking shape is in the American dream changing so Sounds like such a big lofty thing.

and then maybe it is but our parents generation cared about getting a house and cars and having a white picket fence with things in their life settling down and our generation cares about totally different things.

We actually aspire to have something very different, which is freedom and flexibility.

And freedom and flexibility allows you to experience the world.

It allows you to maybe be bi-coastal or just lean into whatever feels right for you at a given time.

Maybe that's a job, maybe that's a hobby, or where you live, what you're doing.

And yeah, we value something totally different.

So that shift happening, Culminating with all these other problems.

Would you attribute that to just the dollar not going as far and people being like, you know what, maybe I can't buy a house ever or maybe, you know, I'm going to push it back from like age 30 to age 45 or something.

Like what drew that change out in the world?

Yeah, I don't think that's a main factor.

I think that's a secondary factor and you're seeing that happen.

People are unable to buy and own lots of things, maybe because they're not as careful with their money or they're not saving, etc.

Or in the front end, you may not have been given much money by

So Feather does give people access to items that they may not otherwise would have purchased and instead would have maybe purchased something disposable that's cheaper.

But the reality is most people are using Feather and companies like us, whether it's Rent the Runway or Uber or Lyft or Spotify, et cetera, because they don't necessarily wanna own things and have things tying them to a physical space.

Yeah, I found that really interesting because I was listening to a podcast with you that you'd done a couple years ago and you were talking about the fundraising process and you were basically, you were talking to people at VC funds who definitely have the means to buy something from not crazy expensive, but like West Elm, and they were still buying Ikea garbage.

And so what did the prototype look like for Feather?

Like how did you ultimately figure out that this was the product?

Yeah, you know we started as a rental business.

So the prototype was, hey ownership is the problem.

Today everyone buys their furniture and owns it and that creates a lot of waste because they have to be fully responsible for their thing.

So they end up buying things and throwing them out and on the cheap end that's I guess kind of what you end up doing.

Someone like, using VCs as an example, they've got even analysts, associates, principals, they've got pretty decent salaries, and like you said, they'll still choose to purchase the disposable thing.

And the reason is, is because it's flexible, and it's convenient.

And so the prototype that we created was, okay, let's get, let's create a simple solve, an MVP, that allows us to say, would people prefer to subscribe to or rent things?

Rather than buying them up front and owning them and throwing them out.

So I built that, yeah, by myself, just at my apartment and just tested it, yeah, through friends.

Okay, so walk me through what it actually is, because people are so curious.

They ask us about this all the time, like, what can my MVP look like?

Yeah, for this to work, you kind of need to have a little bit of merchandising.

You need to have a little bit of a visual aesthetic and appeal to see what furniture is, what the price is, etc.

Thought maybe a spreadsheet would work and that just not.

But there are templates that exist to create web shops.

There are a few, if not many companies that do this.

You know, I was paying $89 a month, I think it was, for what was then like a premium plan.

So not that much money on the face of it.

And ended up, I have a bit of a background as a product manager, so I found a very inexpensive engineer who was living in India, and she was being paid maybe $16 or $18 an hour, all in to just build the MVP.

I decided that I felt comfortable investing up to like 2 or $3,000, I can't remember what it was, of my own personal money.

So I said, great, you know, this could go nowhere.

I'm just gonna build that myself in the confines of my home.

And that's how much it took to create it.

How much money did you make off of that MVP?

I had it running as a side project while I was working my full-time job and just sent out a blast to friends on Facebook to see if anyone gave a shit.

The third order was a friend of a friend.

The fourth order was a friend of a friend, and I was like, interesting.

Okay, that sample size of 4 doesn't give me all of the confidence, but certainly gives me some confidence that people who I have no idea about, I don't know, are actually using this thing.

Maybe we had 4 or 5 items per product category on the website.

So as an MVP as well, the best way to test this hypothesis was to have the right selection of enough items, so it's not just 1 bed, 1 chair, 1 mattress, et cetera, but to have just enough so that you can actually, accurately test whether people care, because that's ultimately what it needs to look like.

And what I did was I put items on the site from a retailer who could ship me things just in time, effectively.

So when a customer would go on our site, they would place an order for an item or multiple items for their home and I would then in turn say, okay, great, they're committing to this furniture for 12 months or whatever it was.

I'm going to go buy it myself and deliver it myself.

And they're going to, I'm going to own all this furniture up front.

And I felt comfortable doing that rather than stockpiling everything up front and assuming that it was all gonna go well.

Okay, and so your model was based around the furniture earning itself out after 1 year?

Was there any margin you built in in the first year?

It was, I mean, you know, I wasn't paying myself, so there was no delivery expense or assembly expense, but I went and Had 1 other person go with me who I'd usually find on TaskRabbit who would have the truck Yeah, I also didn't have the truck.

So I'm gonna lift a couch upstairs with you Yeah, lift a couch upstairs and also deliver it for me, with me, I'll be your helper.

So I did that for the first number of orders.

It was at that time that I realized it's important to kind of get feedback from the industry as well, not just consumers, as to whether the industry, who's by definition been in the industry, thinks this is a good idea or not.

Well, yeah, because to be clear, I wasn't aware of this, but listening to podcasts with you, furniture rental is not new.

Yeah, so furniture rental companies are not new.

You have a few legacy companies that exist and have been around for 40 years, like Cort, for example, they're in all 50 states.

You can get furniture rented and delivered to your home.

1, the furniture is not for our demographic, for people between going to college and buying a home in urban environments.

It's meant more for corporate relocation.

Meaning like really high end or just like not the aesthetic or all of the above?

They have a range of prices, but yeah, the aesthetic is not appealing.

The brand is just not appealing to the demographic at all.

But we came out and said, they're not addressing the massive opportunity, which are people who are currently buying furniture, thinking they want to buy furniture.

But in fact, what they actually want is the flexibility to be able to subscribe to furniture.

And subscription sits somewhere between rental, which is implying short-term rental and implying you're gonna return it, and purchasing the items, which is full commitment.

You own it, it's yours, and It's your responsibility.

Yeah, we should talk about that nuance, which is super interesting, because when you went through YC, it was rentfeather.com.

So it's like, from the outside, somewhat subtle, but can you like go through that thought process and then how it actually affected your bottom line as a company.

So we were rent feather at the beginning because we assumed that rental was the correct solution.

That ownership was the biggest problem, which in fact is true, that people don't necessarily want to commit up front.

But it's not that they should never own something, it's that you shouldn't commit up front.

You shouldn't commit to ownership today because you don't know what's gonna happen and you're constantly changing life.

I mean, I am knocking on wood that that goes quite well for you.

And you might think that this apartment is perfect for you guys for the next year, 2 years, 5 years.

You might hate the neighborhood though and move to a different neighborhood because you like this new neighborhood.

So point being, committing to ownership of things up front is what we're really addressing.

We're saying, instead of committing, just pay monthly, have access to it.

Your monthly payments on your furniture go towards owning the items.

You never pay more than the retail price of that item.

But if you don't want to own it, you can return it at any point.

So the evolution of the company went from rental, definitely don't own, it's wrong to own, to, hey, why don't you just make the choice later?

And so we evolved the way we communicate that to people from a rental company to a subscription.

Right, so you kind of just defer the choice.

And so How did that become obvious to you down the line?

Yeah, I mean, you have to talk to people.

It's not enough typically to just do user interviews over the phone.

You can meet people in person or like I did do the deliveries and see the people who are using your products, see the living situation they're in, and see the furniture that they're choosing.

You get a lot more, And so that, just going there, asking a couple of questions, them not necessarily knowing that I was the founder of the company was quite valuable.

Yeah, because I always figured it was, I mean, because I met you right before you did your interview, right?

And I always figured that furniture was an expression of self and it doesn't seem to be for a lot of you.

I mean Some elements are but like can you just walk me through how you realize that because I figured yeah That was like core to someone's apartment in their life.

You might think that and to some degree the style of the thing is, but not necessarily the color.

So, furniture, the overall majority of people purchase furniture and the overall majority of people purchase colors that will go well with the pops of color that they have in their art, and their rugs, and their pillows, and the things that they got on their trip to Africa, or wherever they traveled and got a really cool thing, or from the store down the street.

And so the furniture is like it's an expression of you.

It needs to be comfortable first and foremost.

It needs to fit whatever the aesthetic is of your of your place and of your own personality.

So some people like you know modern and some people like mid-century modern and they're quite different in aesthetic And it says a little bit about a person but aside from that you don't actually really need to have so many different colors and shapes and textures Where that comes through is in the other items.

The little accessories and all that kind of, yeah, it was just really surprising to me because I've, you know, I browsed your site like 2 years ago and then I browsed it this morning, it's like, oh, this is very different.

But also not, like it's not like infinite choice.

And so it's not all that different from your like MVP, just a much more legit backend.

That we've been building over the last 2 years.

Yeah, so that's like something I wanna talk about too.

So you're in multiple markets and you're also dealing with physical products.

What is it, what have been the key takeaways scaling something where you're delivering real things to people?

I think there's 2 important points to mention.

First is you have to respect logistics and respect operationally intensive businesses.

And I think there've been a lot of venture-backed companies that have very high demand that should exist today, but they maybe ran too quickly and didn't necessarily respect the logistics or the complexity of building an operationally intensive business.

And in order to do this effectively, you just, you just need to step back and respect it.

I think the other, the other point is, For a, For a business that relies on software, on people, on unique inventory management systems, on a complex reverse logistics process, you have to heavily rely on software.

It's fundamentally a data problem that we're solving on the backend.

And the software that we've created over the last few years allows us to effectively deliver furniture to people's homes.

I think from the outside, you can look at a company like us and say, hey, well, I mean, in the early days, didn't you and your task rabbit just throw the furniture in the back of a truck and deliver it to people's houses?

But those were probably negative margins.

We weren't optimizing our routes efficiently.

We didn't know how much revenue each product had generated.

We didn't know which product categories were doing well or not doing well.

We didn't have the ability to have route optimization, which I said already, actually.

There's just so much that you need to build on the back end

And so how much of your stack at this point, like several years in, is yours versus third parties?

Yeah, it doesn't, the software that our business needs doesn't exist off the shelf.

Like Shopify did as the front end template.

Like this furniture company did to help me get the thing off the ground.

Like for instance, like warehouse yours, trucks yours, all the way down.

Employees, full-time employees delivering furniture.

We, I flew out to San Francisco, we hired our first employee who stayed in New York.

I'm in San Francisco, there's a big opportunity to service a lot of the people who are NYC.

And there'll be a very good use case for us to test and learn that is just there right off the bat.

So why not effectively open that market with very low overhead?

You know, it was a, I think it was a good move.

Ultimately, we learned a whole lot and it's a market that does very well for us.

So just try, well, because like with an operations heavy business, I think you could make an argument for the other side quite easily, right?

Like we scale too fast, we want to own the whole stack, we fucked up and like went to San Francisco and it was a total mistake.

So in terms of learnings for you guys, how similar are these markets?

So this was 2 years ago that I flew to San Francisco with my suitcase to go to YC and had nobody on the ground there and decided to open that market effectively with no 1 on the ground there.

Fast forward to today, 2 years later, we've only launched 1 more market.

To your point, there's 1, plenty of room to scale within the markets that we're in.

2, it's a logistically complex business and we wanted to make sure that we had that honed in,

And we also felt it was really important for us to launch a new market so that we could effectively have a new market playbook that we had been testing and iterating over time and then launching.

And so now that we're in 3 markets, we launched LA back in May.

We have a very healthy playbook for growth.

Okay, so now you've raised a bunch of money, you've scaled the company to a pretty substantial size.

For other founders who are doing an operations heavy business, how would you order the employees that you hire?

Depends on who you are and what you're good at,

think is really the first place to start.

So for me, I know I'm good at selling, I'm good at operations, I'm good at building, I'm good at understanding the customer, and I'm good at product.

Early on, we brought on someone onto our team who was a very good balance to me, didn't know it at the time, but then this person sprouted into becoming the CEO of the company quite quickly after bringing them on in a very different role.

And knowing that this person was just incredible to things that I was less incredible at, it was a very important place for me to put this person.

So I wasn't able to, you know, create the perfect founding team with, you know, the best, like, you know, all the all the things that I don't have.

Now, I brought on some amazing and talented people in the early days, our now CTO who joined me out in San Francisco for the summer, I needed somebody to help build and iterate on the product that I had very terribly put together with my engineer overseas.

But arguably that's not the most important part of your business, especially in the early days.

Yeah, but all of the backend infrastructure to power the company was incredibly important.

As you start getting to even a moderate level of scale and complexity in this business, which gets more complex every single month, you need very critical pieces of software in place to make all that happen.

So what else has been, I don't know how else, but like unexpected as you've scaled this company?

Like you said you really like product, but now you're managing all these people.

I think there's a balance of having to continue to learn on the job all the things that you were not necessarily good at or things you didn't even know at all to get better at those things, while also leaning into the places that you are most comfortable and do the best work.

So my role now has, is still somewhat like difficult to understand.

A lot of what I do is I'm sort of like the snow plow out in front of a line of cars, getting all the snow off the road and saying, okay, cool, this is a good path, let's go down this path.

While also having to look back and be like, all right, Let me work with all of our team leads, department leads, to help answer questions and provide vision based on what I've seen out in front.

But you either have to lean into both of them and get really good at both of them and continue doing both of them, or at some point, pass the baton onto somebody who can do 1 or the other more effectively because you just have an infinite, or sorry, a finite number of hours in the day.

But how is that, I guess what I'm most curious about is how does that make you feel as a founder?

You know, who's someone who's like, you've worked on startups before, before Feather, like you've been on small teams, like hacking stuff together, obviously you hacked the beginnings of Feather together.

Like, you know, what does it feel like to have, you know, this thing that you wanted to exist, like you will it into the world, and then it completely changes in terms of what you actually do day to day.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Jay Reno of Feather, a Furniture Subscription Startup