- Avni, the co-founder and CEO of Poppy, started the company to address the anxiety and uncertainty she felt about finding reliable childcare for her daughters.
- Poppy connects vetted caregivers to families in need of childcare, creating a modern village.
- Avni initially faced challenges with her first startup and almost gave up on her entrepreneurial dreams.
- After attending the 2015 FFC and being inspired by other successful women, Avni decided to give it another shot and set a goal to speak at the conference.
- Avni's first startup failed due to high customer acquisition costs and a lack of market need.
- She learned from her mistakes and studied Paul Graham's essays and YC's advice on starting a startup.
- Avni started talking to parents and discovered that childcare was a major pain point for many families.
- She realized that what was missing was not just a sitter, but a sense of community and support.
- Avni used her chemistry background to break down the concept of a village into trust, fit, and availability, and sought to recreate this through vetting, matching algorithms, and scheduling mechanisms.

- The speaker had an idea for an app that would connect parents with trusted babysitters
- They didn't know how to build it without a programmer and had limited funds
- They used SMS and existing tools like Squarespace, Typeform, Stripe, Google Calendar, and Excel to create their app
- They found University of Washington students to vet and connect with families in need of childcare
- They experienced rapid growth and applied to YC, but were initially rejected
- They focused on the positive feedback and continued to grow their company
- They eventually found a technical partner and hired their first employee
- They faced financial challenges but reapplied to YC and had a successful interview

- The speaker faced challenges and uncertainty but was determined to keep going.
- They pitched their idea to partners and received funding from YC and a seed VC firm in Seattle.
- The speaker emphasized the importance of time, experiments, and focusing on solving a problem.
- They shared five lessons learned: passion, talking to users, focusing on problem-solving, viewing funding as valuable time, and focusing on growth.
- The speaker encouraged founders to start and keep going, finding their people and building their own support network.
- The speaker emphasized the need for more female founders and shared their own journey as proof that anyone can become a founder.

- Poppy, a childcare platform, was founded by Avni to address the challenges of finding reliable childcare.
- Avni learned from her previous startup failure and studied advice on starting a startup.
- She discovered that childcare was a major pain point for many families and sought to create a sense of community and support.
- Using existing tools and resources, she built the app and found students to vet and connect with families.
- Despite initial rejection, Poppy experienced rapid growth and eventually received funding from YC and a seed VC firm.
- The speaker emphasized the importance of passion, talking to users, problem-solving, funding, and growth.
- They encouraged founders to start and keep going, building their own support network.
- The speaker highlighted the need for more female founders and shared their journey as proof that anyone can become a founder.

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

At the 2017 Female Founders Conference she shared how she struggled with her first startup but eventually discovered a problem many people had that was unsolved. 

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/

My name is Avni, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Poppy.

We're building the modern village by connecting vetted caregivers to families when they need childcare.

I started Poppy not because I'm an expert in the field or because I have a deep passion for childcare.

The older is my daughter, Saya, and the younger is my daughter, Aria.

I was so tired of feeling panicked and anxious every time I wasn't a thousand percent sure of who was taking care of my girls.

And I couldn't believe that so many of us are dealing with this every single week.

And then I couldn't believe that all the people, all the amazing people that are taking care of our kids, they need more recognition and opportunities.

We're serving thousands of families in Seattle right now, and it's an incredible thing to be a part of, especially because Poppy almost didn't exist.

1 of the reasons I'm so excited to be here today is because 2 years ago, I sat in your seats.

At the 2015 FFC, I sat there and I listened to all these incredible women telling their stories about bold visions and amazing companies, and I desperately wanted to be like them.

Only in that moment, nothing seemed further from reality.

I was in the middle of shutting down my first startup, after spending years working on it and sinking thousands of my own personal dollars into it.

I was so ready to give up and just head back to my successful career in brand management.

Only this afternoon just inspired me so much, and I headed back.

But not only that, I set a goal, and this is a little bit crazy, but this is my journal from that night.

And I said, crazily, in 2017, I want to be on that stage giving the talk instead of sitting in the audience.

So, when Kat sent me this email, asking me to be 1 of the speakers, you'll notice the date and it says April 30th.

I was so honored, obviously, because this was a goal, and it was just 1 of the biggest parts of my story to actually try again.

But the other crazy kind of ironic part was that she had sent me a different kind of email 2 years earlier.

And This 1 was when she told me, and she crushed my dreams, and she told me that YC wasn't gonna be funding Poppy.

And so this is the story I wanna tell you a little bit about today.

What happened between my first failed startup and Poppy, which is funded and growing today, and what happened between Kat's first email and then me standing in front of you today.

My hope is that maybe you'll learn a little bit from my mistakes, but I hope that in hearing my journey, you'll be able to connect it to yours and figure out a way to start and then just keep going.

So my startup journey starts about 5 years ago.

I had my first daughter, and I was struggling to figure out a way how to pass on my rich Indian heritage and the traditions on to my girls.

A friend and I started talking and we thought, well, we could figure out a solution to this.

It was the time, it was about 2012, so subscription boxes were all the rage.

And so we thought, well, if we just curate something, you know, it could do with culture and it would have the language and food and all these amazing things, why couldn't we do that?

We worked on the side while we still kept our jobs and we built business plans and financial models for 2 years we worked on it on the side.

Then finally in March 2014 we both decided we were going to quit our jobs and work on this full-time.

It felt incredible But at the beginning it was what are we gonna focus on?

Well I'd heard all of these things about MVPs and working on product and getting it out and so we worked on the product and we thought about what we would want to have in this box and we figured it out in 3 months.

We were able to put this beautiful curated box together of things that we thought were gonna solve the problem because that's what we wanted and we thought that was exactly what you're supposed to do.

So in June we launched and it felt incredible.

We had friends and family, everyone texting us and emailing us and saying, oh wow, this looks amazing.

A few weeks go on and the orders start to trickle, a little bit they slow, And we're like, I mean, it's a little bit concerning, but we think, you know, that's probably just because we don't have enough products, so let's work on more products and get them into the shop.

Now it's the fall, and we're quickly running out of money.

We had both invested about $20,000 of our own savings and we had figured if we launched, then we'll just be able to raise money then and it'll all be wonderful.

And so we were quickly running out of money.

We decided to try everything we possibly could.

We did Facebook campaigns, we did Google AdWord campaigns, We even went and partnered with some of the best brands out there, like the tea collection, just trying to figure out how we could kickstart growth and get people to buy this amazing box that we had done.

After the holidays, it became clear that it wasn't working.

The cost of acquiring these niche customers was just way too high, and it didn't make sense for the 1 or 2 boxes that they were buying.

So we made the hard but right decision to shut it down.

I don't think we talk about this enough, but this was some of the hardest times of my life.

I felt like I let everyone down, including myself.

And I had lost money that our family could use for the mortgage and the nanny and college funds.

The worst part was that I didn't know why I failed.

I think it's 1 thing to make a wrong decision or a wrong turn, but I think it's another thing to not learn from it.

And so where do you go when you need to figure something out?

I started reading everything I could about how to start a startup or how do successful startups do this?

And I came across a whole slew of Paul Graham's essays and how to start a startup from YC.

And I started to realize just some of the ways that I might have been thinking about this in a little bit of the wrong way.

Instead of following your passion, you know, this whole concept of living in the future and building what's missing.

This whole idea of talking to your users instead of other folks, and just building using that to build your product.

And then I loved this 1, but just finding the 100 people that really loved what you were doing versus focusing on everybody else that were out there.

And then the simplest but hardest 1, I think, was just grow 10%, every single week, just grow.

Based on this, I thought, you know what, this is the blueprint that I've been missing the whole time and I wanted to try again.

By this time, I'd come to the Female Founder Conference and I was so inspired and I decided I needed to try again.

So I started talking to parents, parents that had bought some of our boxes, parents that were just in the neighborhood.

I talked to them and I asked them, if papaya in post, if this box is not what you need and it's not solving a big problem, then what are some of the big problems in your life?

I think you'll find if you've ever worked on a product that people just don't really need, you start, you have this real intense drive to then work on something that everybody needs.

And so the topic just kept on coming back to childcare.

And I couldn't believe it because I mean, I lived that with 2 careers and 2 kids and no family in town.

Like my husband and I would just wake up every morning and hope we didn't have to do the calendar shuffle.

You know the thing where your nanny texts at 7 a.m.

Says I'm sick and then you and your husband pull out your phones and say okay, if I can move this meeting, I'll take the morning and you can cancel that and I'll take the afternoon?

And the fact that so many of us were doing this, for me it just caught my curiosity.

And I wanted to figure out what would it take to fix it?

And sure, this is 1 of the most crowded categories you can find out there.

And so I had a lot of people saying, are you sure this is what you want to be looking into?

But for me, it was that if it was solved, if all these people were doing it, then we wouldn't have such pain over here.

And as I started talking to different people, I realized that the thing that they didn't need was a parent connecting to a sitter.

The thing that wasn't being said was that we were all missing our village.

Everyone says it takes a village to raise a child.

But with all of us moving around for our careers and our jobs, we're all missing our village.

And so I thought, well, how do you recreate something so human and so emotional as village with something so rational as data and code?

Well, I found my undergraduate degree in chemistry coming back to me and I broke it down into a tidy equation.

I thought, if Village is a function of trust, someone you trust, is a fit for your family, and is available when you need them to be, then could I approximate it with something that provides vetting, a matching algorithm of some sort, and then a scheduling mechanism.

It started to come all together in my head and I could see how this could be a beautiful app.

I wasn't then and I'm not now a programmer.

I tried to figure out how can I build this without a programmer?

I'd spent the $20,000 that I had devoted to startups and I had about $200 left in my business bank account.

Not enough, by the way, to pay a programmer to build you an app.

And so I was about to give up because, I mean, what are you supposed to do?

And in the dark of putting my 5 month old to sleep, you know, it takes a long time, there's a lot of time to think.

Because parents and sitters are already using texting, and so why couldn't I use that to approximate the experience?

So I sat down, and I wrote out the whole flow.

And I tried to figure out if I could somehow approximate the experience using already available tools and tools that were either free or had free 4 week trial periods so I could stretch my $200 for just a four-week test to see if I was onto something.

I had a landing page on Squarespace, sign-ups and feedbacks and forms were done through Typeform, Stripe handled the payments, I did scheduling via Google Calendar, communication with SMS, and my database was Excel.

So I could see how all of this was gonna come together.

I got to work finding and vetting 3 University of Washington students.

And I found 15 families in my local neighborhood on a posting board that was just posted about needing child care.

I sent them an email and I just said, hey I know you need child care.

If you need someone this week, just text this phone number.

And I gave them my personal phone number.

That day I got my first booking and that week I got my first 4.

Every single week I just set the goal to see if I just could just grow 10 or 20 percent.

Well that next week instead of just 5 I hit 6.

I was blowing past these 10, 20% a week goals.

And I can't tell you how different that felt versus my first startup and the whole time I was trying to push this boulder up the hill and this 1 it was just parents were telling other parents and it wasn't easy by any stretch of the imagination but it just felt different.

The end of the 4 weeks as luck would have it YC was accepting applications for their summer 15 batch.

And so I thought, what the hell, I'm gonna apply.

I knew I didn't have a co-founder and a team, but I also knew that I was building something that people wanted.

And truth be told, I didn't put a lot of hope into it.

Because I'd applied for my first startup, I'd spent weeks writing the perfect application, I didn't even get an interview.

I'd also heard that YC was the place for that 23-year-old white programmer, which clearly I'm not.

But still, I applied because I believed in the truths that I'd read in some of those essays.

So imagine my shock when I got invited down for an interview.

I excitedly got all ready, and went down for my 10-minute chance, and I sold my heart out to Kat, Kevin, and Aaron.

Nonetheless, at the end of the day, I had this email waiting for me in my inbox.

And I'd be lying if I didn't say I was disappointed.

But the next day I woke up, and I decided to focus on that last paragraph.

The 1 that said, we would love to see you reapply next batch.

1, they thought I was onto something, and that if I just showed more growth and brought a team on, that I could reapply.

And the second thing was, Regardless of what YC thought or said, I had a growing company and I had customers to serve.

And I set myself the goal to just grow by 10 to 20% every single week for that whole summer.

Parents would text my phone number and ask me, you know, hey, is someone available tomorrow from noon to 4?

I would consult my high-tech day planner and I'd see who's available and I'd text the sitter and then I'd text the parent back.

And if you want to know what my first product looked like, I'm almost embarrassed to show this, but if you can see in the left hand margin, the Numbers that are circled, that was my goal.

So every single time I hit the goal, and in the boxes were all the bookings.

I don't remember what the color coding was now.

But this was all I needed to get this up and off the ground.

And then I started to outgrow the day planner.

Again, it was super simple and it was just enough to get the job done.

By now I knew that we were continuing to grow and I knew that I had to find that technical partner to help me build this.

But it's not as easy as it might sound and I'm sure there's some of you out there that are struggling with the same thing about how to find that perfect co-founder.

There's a reason that YC says not to start working with someone that you've just met.

You're trying to find someone that is a good complement for you and is a good fit with your personality.

Somebody has the right experience and can have a passion for the mission.

And then finally can be a partner in the trenches through the ups and downs.

I asked for every single intro to any engineer.

I talked to tens, hundreds of people, and still nothing.

By now it was about August, and I was exceeding my ability to just do all this on my own.

And the crazy ironic thing was, I was about to grow my company to death.

And so I doubled down, and I kept on asking people for more intros.

Finally, through a friend of a friend of a friend, I finally met Richard.

And when I met him, what struck me was that our backgrounds were really different.

But the thing that connected us was that we had both spent our career in pursuing the things that made us curious.

He'd done really interesting but different things.

He'd worked on a social media company, a dating app, and a Bitcoin gambling company.

Which, I know what you're thinking, is the perfect match for my wholesome family company.

But when I started talking to him, there was just a fit.

We would just connect on what the vision was and how this could all be built.

And it wasn't until later that I actually realized his experience was just perfect.

And there's a matching algorithm involved and we're definitely taking payments.

But in those early days, it was really just a leap of faith and all of this is just a leap of faith.

So we decided to just work together for 6 weeks, just like a project, and see how it would go.

He built the first version of our platform in a way that was just more nuanced and more sophisticated than I could have even imagined.

And in that, I found a partner to be able to build Poppy.

In October, we decided to make it official.

She actually comes from the childcare industry.

And so she was tasked with the most important part of our company, which is finding those really amazing caregivers, where they are, what kind of experience they have, what kind of vetting needs to be done.

I'd always thought of Hoppy as sort of a 3 part thing.

There's a parent side, there's a sitter side, and then there's the tech that connects it between it.

Finally I felt like we were getting some momentum.

We had the team, we had the ability to build the platform.

I couldn't believe I was in this position again.

This time we had payroll and we had just the regular expenses of a growing company and we needed cash.

As luck would have it, YC's winter 16 application was just open and so we reapplied.

And this time the application basically wrote itself.

I mean we had done everything that YC had asked us to do.

And more than that, we had just pretended as if we had done YC.

And we just continued to grow, we had even more users that loved what we were doing.

So we were so excited when we again got the chance to interview.

Richard and I practiced all the questions and we made our way down to Mountain View.

I knew that the hardest part of our application was the fact that we had only worked together for 3 months.

What I wasn't prepared for though was that as we were walking in to register for the interviews, in behind us walked the founders of our key competition.

I walked into the restroom to just gather myself, and I thought we had just come too far to just quit.

And I thought if I was gonna go down, I was gonna go down swinging.

So we got in there and we just told the partners about Poppy, about what we were building, about what we saw, about our growth, about how our users just loved what we were building and needed it.

And then about our team and how we were the perfect people to build this.

We walked out and I didn't know how it was gonna go, but I knew that we had given it our all.

I hopped on a plane because I had to get back And I checked my email like a lunatic, just waiting for that inevitable rejection email.

By the time I got home, it was just gotten time for bedtime, and I figured, you know what, what will be will be.

And I got ready to just get my kids ready and with our pajamas.

I didn't really hear the rest, but it was a stay of execution.

I knew that we had bought the time to be able to figure out the next thing.

And as luck and hard work would have it, a seed VC firm in Seattle also decided to fund us.

So The week before heading into YC, that was the bank balance in my business banking account.

And my brother, over the holidays, asked me, why weren't you more happy, excited, celebratory?

And it didn't hit me then that the money is not something to be celebrating.

It was more relief, because the money buys us time, and time to run those valuable kind of experiments, and to be able to figure out the next thing.

So we started YC, And even when you find reprieves, they're only temporary.

So we just focused on putting our heads down and just continuing to grow.

I talked to the users and parents, and Sarah just kept the great caregivers coming, and Richard just built the product.

By demo day, sure we had the really nice growth curve, but more importantly, woven into our company's DNA, we had this really nice 2 week drum beat of building and then hitting a goal, building and then hitting a goal.

We still use that loop, that two-week loop of building and advancing.

We closed our seed round shortly after demo day, a little bit over $2 million.

And we came back to Seattle in May, and we moved into our first official offices.

And I remember being just so grateful that after all of that, we now had this incredible team, and we had the money, and most importantly, we had the time to be able to just work on Poppy and prove what it could be.

Every day, our job is to build something that people want, as measured by our growth.

Every day, we're working on just growing the company and putting our heads down.

Even now, there's things that we're working on that I can't see how it's gonna all work out.

But I know that if we return to our roots of talking to our users and starting with just something really small and then iterating our way forward, we're going to figure it out.

So I wanted to leave you with the 5 lessons that I've learned between my first startup and my second.

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Building a Startup is About Solving a Problem - Avni Patel Thompson of Poppy