- Avni Patel-Petomsin is the founder of Poppy, a site that connects parents with caregivers for their children.
- She started Poppy because she had a problem with finding reliable childcare and believed technology could help solve it.
- Poppy connects vetted caregivers, including teachers and stay-at-home moms, with families in need of childcare.
- Avni is passionate about helping more people become founders and build successful companies.
- She previously started a subscription e-commerce company called Papaya in Post, but it did not succeed due to high customer acquisition costs and low long-term value.
- Avni's goal is to build a scalable company that disrupts a category and solves important consumer problems.

- The speaker discusses the need for a modern version of a village community to support parents.
- They propose a solution using technology to connect trusted caregivers with families in need.
- The speaker shares their experience of starting a tech-based solution without prior technical knowledge or a co-founder.
- They emphasize the importance of validating the idea and solving immediate problems to buy time for further development.
- The speaker successfully tests their idea by connecting vetted caregivers with families through SMS.
- They focus on 10% weekly growth and quickly gain traction and confidence in their solution.
- The speaker highlights the importance of learning and not optimizing for revenue in the early stages.
- They eventually realize the need for a technical co-founder and successfully find one after several months of searching.
- Growth and validation help the speaker secure funding and attract investors.
- The first stage is about validating the idea and achieving 100 paying users who love the product.

- Stage 1 is about validating your idea and getting 100 paying users who love your product
- Stage 2 is about growing and reaching product-market fit
- Hiring should focus on finding people passionate about your mission, rather than relying on pedigrees or experience
- Building a sustainable business model may require making hard decisions and being transparent with early users
- Surround yourself with trusted mentors and hold regular investor updates to hold yourself accountable
- Being a founder is a long-term commitment, so make sure you are sure and communicate your intentions with your family
- Take care of yourself and make time for breaks to avoid burnout
- YC applications are due soon, and more people are needed to tackle big problems and build bold companies

Avni Patel-Petomsin founded Poppy, a platform connecting parents with caregivers. She started the company to solve the problem of finding reliable childcare. Poppy connects vetted caregivers with families in need and aims to disrupt the childcare industry. The speaker emphasizes the importance of validating ideas, solving immediate problems, and focusing on growth. They discuss the need for a technical co-founder, securing funding, and building a sustainable business model. The stages of building a successful company are outlined, along with the importance of hiring passionate individuals and surrounding oneself with mentors. Taking care of oneself and communicating intentions with family are also highlighted. Finally, the speaker encourages more people to tackle big problems and build bold companies.

Avni Patel Thompson is the CEO and Founder of Poppy - https://www.meetpoppy.com

Here's her talk from the 2018 Seattle Female Founders Conference.

If you’re curious about applying to YC, Avni recently wrote a great post called “Is Y Combinator for me?” - https://avnipatelthompson.com/2017/09/20/is-y-combinator-for-me/

If you'd like to attend a future Female Founders Conference, you can learn more here: http://www.femalefoundersconference.org/

So the first speaker you're going to hear today is Avni Patel-Petomsin, the founder of Poppy.

Poppy is a site that connects parents with great caregivers for their children.

So Avni and her co-founder went through Y Combinator in winter 2016.

And she's also an incredible advocate of the Seattle startup community and Avni is really 1 of the main reasons we are here today.

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 And I've just always loved the energy when you get all of these incredible women together with ideas and big, bold visions.

It just lots of impressive things can happen.

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.

And on the caregiver side, we find amazing folks that have a passion for and a talent 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.

Sia is almost 6 and Aria is 3, and 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.

And so I started Poppy not because I've had this lifelong dream of starting 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 1.

It didn't matter that I'm 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.

And so 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, not 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 10 people, we are thriving and we're growing really quickly.

And if I look back on the journey of the last 3 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 why I shouldn't be a founder, kind of stop 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.

And 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 today.

It's something that I'm super passionate about.

If I think about this last 3 years, I think there's sort of 2 big phases.

This sort of phase 1 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.

And so my hope is that if we can talk about this openly, the stages even to get to where I am today, and 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 100, 1,000 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, so that 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 & Gamble.

They make things like Pampers and Tide and Crest.

And when I started there, I had the opportunity to be trained in their vision of brand management.

And 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.

And 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.

I went on and I did my MBA, 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 and still really engaging, 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.

And at that point I said, you know what, I wanna go start something.

It was about 2012, lots of people were starting lots of interesting things.

And 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.

And so a friend and I started a company called Papaya in 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.

I did all the things I was supposed to do.

Built the product that, you know, we would have loved to have for our families, and then we launched it.

Spent a lot of money and a lot of time, I mean, 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 so 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.

And again, even in my background, in my previous career, it's never been the what.

I've worked on footwear and apparel, and 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 just took a massive swing at something.

And so it was really hard because I thought I did everything I was supposed to.

I used up, I had talked to, my husband and I had talked and basically said we could go a year without you taking a salary.

And I had used pretty much all of that year up and I'd used pretty much all of the money that I'd set aside for startups, the savings that I'd put into this.

And so 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 needed, 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 child care.

And 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 miss 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.

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 for 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, or 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 so to the point in the idea of Poppy.

And so now, if we think about that first stage, what is so important of get 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.

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 I was, if it was already constrained, it was, I was under lots of more constraint.

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 much, all of these 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 1 next.

And so in that instance, it was I needed to buy time to do more things.

So I basically, basically to give myself some kind of structure, I gave myself the construct of 4 weeks.

Can I buy myself 4 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 1 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.

I am trying to connect vetted, trusted people with families when they have gaps in care.

Well, so I found 3 UW students, vetted them in any way that 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.

I've got 4 bookings, and I just need to grow it next week by 10%, which is 5.

It doesn't sound like a lot, but it does 2 things.

If you hold yourself to 10% growth every single week, I assure you that 5 grows pretty quickly.

And then the other thing is that having a goal and then hitting it.

And 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 5, we actually ended up at 6, and then so on and so forth.

And 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, who's, I'm a pretty risk-averse person.

And it made it, I could devote 4 weeks, and 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 all of that.

And then as we got going, I could quickly see how both sides just wanted and loved what we were doing.

And so parents would tell other parents, sign-ups 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 1 does it.

And this 1, you're not even telling anyone, and they're just signing up, and things are coming through, and 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 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 4 weeks, it literally was something that 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 janky way, you need to just keep it going.

And so what those 4 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 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.

And I think I'll pause on this thing because I think there's a lot of 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.

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.

And so for me, even though I had all of these folks that were saying that, 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 short-term relief that would have sort of cut the vision and the ambition of this idea off at the knees.

And so, and I'm not saying that this is easy.

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.

And so, it took probably about 3 or 4 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's so many ups and downs on the thing.

And so you can be the highest high on 1 day and at noon, the lowest low.

And So you need sort of that partnership to even that out.

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, really loved that, but ultimately it came down to can we work together?

And so we just set it up again as a 6 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.

We just got to the first point of saying, are you in, 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, and because this is also 1 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.

And so what he was excited about was that I had already started and gotten going.

And so he wanted to come on and get onto that rocket ship and get it going even faster and further.

And so growth also helps you with that because you can dismiss me, but you can't dismiss my growth.

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.

It was really important, and we were able to raise that money.

So this stage 1 is really about validate your idea, get to 100 paying users that love what you're making, And you'll be able to figure out and just focus on growth.

So stage 2 is about get growing and get 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 startup.

And so this for us started after we returned from YC, We raised our seed round of a little bit over $2 million.

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.

And I thought After 10 years of having experience with big companies and hiring, I thought I knew how to do this.

And 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.

And 1 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 what we were doing and what we were up to.

And so she just emailed me out of the blue and said, we'd love to grab Poppy.

And I was intrigued as well and loved to talk to interesting people who are using our products.

And as I talked to her and as we started to just chat about all the challenges, I realized here is someone who maybe hasn't done operations or worked at a startup, 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?

And so I think, and that I could repeat for 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 actually have a sustainable business model.

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Avni Patel Thompson at the Seattle Female Founders Conference