- Catherine Minshew, CEO and founder of The Muse, discusses the perception issue in the startup world.
- She shares her experience of failure and the lessons learned in building her company.
- The Muse started as a career content platform and grew through word of mouth, reaching 70,000 users in its third month.
- Minshew faced challenges in fundraising and overcoming stereotypes about her target audience.
- Y Combinator was the first investor to give The Muse a definitive yes.

- The speaker and her team applied to Y Combinator (YC) after facing multiple rejections from other investors.
- They had a confident and determined attitude in their YC application, stating that they would succeed regardless of funding.
- They received a call from YC while watching a movie and were ecstatic to be accepted into the program.
- Initially, they had grand and complicated ideas for their startup, but were advised by a YC partner to simplify and launch quickly.
- They redesigned their profiles, found clients, and launched on Tech Crunch within 14 days.
- Since then, their startup, The Muse, has grown significantly, reaching millions of people and working with 200 brands.
- The speaker shares several lessons learned, including the importance of honoring agreements, starting imperfectly, being persistent and polite, finding people who share values, and creating velocity in reaching the right audience.

- Importance of identifying the right users and finding ways to incentivize them to become evangelists for your product
- Building an amazing team by understanding what motivates individuals beyond money and helping them achieve their professional goals
- Ways to find people for your startup, such as posting job listings on LinkedIn or networking and speaking at events
- Not believing the hype in the industry and focusing on understanding your users and their motivations for using your product
- The satisfaction of proving doubters wrong and achieving success.

- Catherine Minshew, CEO and founder of The Muse, shares her experience in the startup world and the lessons she learned.
- The Muse started as a career content platform and quickly gained a large user base through word of mouth.
- Minshew faced challenges in fundraising and overcoming stereotypes about her target audience.
- Y Combinator was the first investor to support The Muse after multiple rejections from others.
- The team simplified their startup idea and launched quickly, leading to significant growth.
- Lessons learned include honoring agreements, starting imperfectly, being persistent and polite, finding like-minded individuals, and reaching the right audience.
- Importance of identifying and incentivizing the right users, building a motivated team, and finding people through job listings and networking.
- Focusing on understanding user motivations and proving doubters wrong brings satisfaction.

Kathryn Minshew speaks at Startup School NY 2014

Next, you're going to hear from Catherine Minshew.

Catherine is the CEO and founder of The Muse.

So The Muse is a job discovery tool that's helping 1000000 people a month find careers at awesome companies.

So Catherine has heard me say this before, but 1 of my favorite fun facts about her is that when she was a kid, she wanted to be Zorro when she grew up.

But, you know, she's not Zorro today, but she didn't do too shabbily.

Before she started the Muse, Catherine worked with the Clinton Health Initiative focusing on vaccine access in Africa.

And before that, she was at McKinsey and Company.

So I'm, I'm really happy to have her here today.

I'm very, very excited to be here with you a little bit today.

I'm the founder and CEO of a company called The Muse.

And we help people figure out, essentially, what do they want to do with their lives and how do they get there.

So career advice, free classes, job opportunities, and behind-the-scenes profiles into what it's actually like to work at places like Facebook, Uber, Gucci.

But what I want to talk to you all about today is a perception issue that I think exists in the startup world, and that it's very easy to look at companies that are 2 or 3 years down the line, sometimes companies that are quite a bit farther than that, see everything they've built.

You can see all of the different photo, video, a lot of design we've spent time on.

And it's easy to look at things like that and say, wow, people must have these brilliant ideas that sort of hit them like a flash of lightning.

It's much, much easier to show the successful growth than to talk about what often comes before, which as Zach said, is a lot of failure.

And I don't often talk about the first because it looked like this.

And in case you can't see it, that's nearly flat growth at around 3,000 users a month over 8 or 9 months.

So it was repetitive and consistent failure.

And I think consistently, when you look at startups, it's much easier to pretend that you're crushing it all the time than to show the work in progress.

In fact, I like to say they're an evolution from suck to suck less.

So I want to take you through the early suck of the muse and walk you through some of the lessons we learned, a couple of the like, oh, God, why did we do that mistakes, and a few things that hopefully will be helpful for you all as you go around starting businesses or building companies.

So the Muses' origin story starts with me as a three-year-old wanting to be a firefighter.

And as Kat said, I also desperately wanted to be Zorro, not realizing that that was perhaps not a viable career path.

But my grandfather was a firefighter, and I had a pretty clear idea of what it meant to do that.

And then as I got older, I thought to myself, well, for a while I wanted to be a CIA agent or international woman of mystery.

For a long time as well, I thought that maybe I would be a Broadway actress.

And so actually, it's quite fun to be back here on this sort of stage.

But when I started my first job, which was a management consulting job at McKinsey, I knew that that wasn't it.

That wasn't what I wanted to be doing in 2345 years.

And so I set out to figure out, well, what do I want to be doing with my life?

A lot of them were in relatively traditional careers, banking, law.

And then I went to job boards, which is where a lot of people end up.

These are the sorts of things I was seeing on a daily basis, including 1 search on Monster, I think it was for business strategy jobs, that told me I should be an assistant manager at a 7-Eleven in Secaucus, New Jersey.

1 of them said I should be a merchant mariner, I think because I like to travel and I enjoy the outdoors.

But ultimately, there was really nothing that gave me any sense of what it actually meant to do different jobs.

And around the same time, I met my co-founders.

1 of them, Alex, is here today, and we started talking about some of these issues around the fact that the way people think about their career individually has changed so much.

People are no longer kind of looking for a transactional, I show up at 9, I leave at 5, you give me a paycheck.

They're much more concerned with questions like, well, what is the culture of the company?

How will I play a part in the company's growth?

And you can't get that through a lot of platforms.

And I wish I could say that the idea for the muse hit us like a bolt of lightning or like Athena springing fully formed out of the head of Zeus.

But in reality, it was much, much more slow.

And in fact, this is our first website that we launched with on September 6, 2011.

And honestly, it's kind of a piece of crap.

And given that we were basically subsisting on ramen and hopes and dreams, it was, I think, a very good effort.

In fact, we attracted 20,000 people in the first month, 26,000 in the second month, 70,000 people in the third.

So clearly we had hit some sort of chord, even though obviously there was a lot to be desired.

We started out with career content because when you create a marketplace where you have buyers and sellers, in this case candidates and companies that want to hire them, it's a lot easier if you can get 1 side of the marketplace started first.

And so we thought, well, if we don't want to have a whole bunch of jobs on there first, or if we can't get companies to work with us, what's 1 way to solve that problem?

We also started testing the appetite for jobs.

And 1 of the things I think is funny is the very first company that we ever worked with was Uber, when they had maybe 50 employees.

They were active in 2 cities, and they were trying to launch Chicago.

And it was really interesting, because what it proved was people said, this is a little bit hard to use.

What was it actually like to work at Uber before they applied?

And it was a pretty big success on both sides.

So then we really set about building word of mouth.

Our original concept was actually geared at professional women.

And so we thought to ourselves, all right, what are the ways to get users with no money, with absolutely no, we had no reputations, we had no connections, the 4 things we found to be super effective, 1 was just asking for word of mouth.

So when we launched the Muse, I scraped my Gmail for everyone that I had emailed with over the past 3 years.

I took out things like do not reply at PayPal.

I took out things that were clearly you know someone that was either a bot or that I hadn't communicated with and for everyone else I sent you know a really nice short email that said I want to let you know we're launching Muse.

I said, if you want to share on social, here is a tweet.

So people could literally copy, paste a post.

Because if you ask people to tweet and you don't tell them what to tweet, a lot of people won't bother.

And I sent it to so many people that Google actually shut down my account because they thought I was a spammer.

I think that happens, FYI, at about 1,200 emails in 1 day.

So I don't actually recommend doing that.

We also reached out to like-minded groups.

So since we were doing a women's career site, I reached out to probably 600, 700 groups individually, small professional organizations, massive industry groups.

And I said, this is what I'm doing, and I'd love your feedback.

Because if you just ask people to share, often it's almost like you're asking for something from them, instead of saying, I would love your opinion.

And we did get a lot of great opinions, and obviously a lot of people shared it.

Like, content can become your best friend.

Again, when we were trying to get an audience and get awareness around what it was we were doing, 1 of the most effective things for us was creating great content on career issues.

Because if I posted a site right now and I said, I'm looking for people who want jobs in New York and San Francisco.

That'd be a relatively small percentage of people in this room or in the general population.

But if I say, I have a really great article on how to be more effective at answering email, or how to master the informational interview, there's a much wider population of people that that draws.

And it was 1 of the reasons, I think, that as we grew, we were able to create our own PR and our own buzz.

And then, despite the fact that we were growing, we entered the fundraising trough of sorrow.

And we had this baby site off the ground.

We were seeing about 70,000 people a month coming to visit it in our third month alive.

And yet, we were kind of running into the same issues over and over and over again.

In fact, I pitched 148 people, sorry, 150 people in New York City.

I like to joke that I've pitched every single investor in New York City at least once.

And 2 said maybe, come back to us, I like what you're doing.

And it was interesting, I mean, content was very, very unsexy in 2011.

So I think there's a lot of ways that the themes of the investment market can affect how people are interested in what you're doing.

Job search was also not particularly sexy.

And we were also running up against some really interesting long-held stereotypes.

So since at the time we were targeting professional women.

I had a lot of people say things to me like, well, aren't those women going to lose interest in your site once they turn 30 and have babies?

I was like, no, it doesn't actually work that way anymore.

We had a lot of really interesting, really, really interesting feedback.

I also had, you know, yeah, people said things like, well, I'm sure women in New York really care about their careers, but once you get outside of that, you know.

So we had to also do a little bit of kind of telling a lot of the investors we were speaking, that we weren't building necessarily a product for people like them.

We were building a product for someone who's 27 years old, living in Chicago or St.

Louis or Boston, who wants to do something different than what they're doing right now, but doesn't necessarily have their personal network to get there.

And what was interesting is the first people who gave us a 100% definitive yes was Y Combinator.

We were also a little bit though, I think we were a little bit, I don't know if raw is the right word, but by the time we did our YC application, I felt like I had been turned down by so many people, I didn't really give a fuck if anyone else turned us down.

And I think I actually put in our application, which is online, If you Google the Muse YC application, you can probably find it.

And I think they actually wrote a line in there, which was like, even if you don't fund us, and we hope you fund us, but even if you don't fund us, we're going to do exactly this, and we're going to take over the world.

And I basically told them, like, take it or leave it.

And I think that sort of attitude that we were going to make this work, come hell or high water or anything, really resonated.

And you know, we were watching that really terrible, I think it was a George Clooney Mooney movie, The Ides of March.

I don't remember any of it, but we were sitting there and my phone was on the seat between Alex and I, and it lit up with the number from YC.

And you know if they call you, you've gotten in.

And I just went tearing out of the theater with Alex and Melissa following me, and I put it on speaker, and of course, when PG said, you know, we want to invite you to be in the next class, Melissa started screaming, and I'm like, shut up, shut up, shut up, you know, and put it back on mute.

But it was really exciting, and we felt like we have arrived, we have been funded by YC, our troubles are over.

I don't think it's ever possible to say, like, we're here, our troubles are completely over.

In fact, as soon as we got accepted to YC, we started thinking really big.

Because our first ideas were insanely complicated.

This is a mock that we made of what we wanted the muse to look like in, what is it, January of 2012, right when we started YC, and it has a ton going on.

It was going to, you know, pull in from all your different social networks and be optimized for your personality and a million other things.

And I remember going into a meeting with PG and a couple other partners, and we were so proud, and we started to kind of explain and put it on the whiteboard, and within seconds, he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

And that was, I mean, that was a big moment for us.

He basically said, this will never get off the ground.

You will never be able to test which of these 7 things people are excited.

Pick 1, strip it down, and launch, and start to test demand.

And so within the next 14 days, we redesigned the profiles, found 5 companies to be clients, sent photographers from our network into their offices and launched On Tech Crunch, February 22nd.

Now, it has obviously been a pretty crazy road since then.

We were reaching about 100,000 people a month when we launched.

We're seeing about a million and a half a month now.

We work with 200 brands, which never would have happened if we had not, obviously, upgraded and iterated the design.

But there's basically a couple of key things that I feel like we learned, some the hard way, some luckily less so, that I want to run through in my last couple minutes.

So the first is honoring your word and not just contracts.

And I was actually thinking about this in the context of, you know, the startup community, people say it's often very, very small.

And so I think it's very common sometimes for people to have handshake agreements.

On 1 hand, I have been the victim of handshake agreements gone terribly wrong.

So I like to tell people when you're doing an agreement, especially if it's founding a company, working for a company, to make sure you get things in writing.

But even if you are the 1 in the position of power, if you are the 1 with the company, I think it is incredibly important to be known as someone who will honor your word and not just the contract, especially because there's always unexpected bumps.

So 1 of the examples is our first hire ever was an awesome woman named Adrienne, who's I think also in the audience tonight.

And we really wanted to hire her early on, but we were dead broke.

We didn't have the money to pay our own rent.

I think we were bartering for everything that we got.

And so Adrienne and I talked, and I was like, look, we can pay you this little bit amount of money consistently.

And then in 3 or 4 months, once we've raised, we'll pay you a little bit more.

But I was like, I'll get you that money, the second pit, by November 1, 2011.

And October 2011, I started having stress ulcers.

Because we are not yet in Y Combinator, we definitely do not have money.

And we were seeing the numbers go in the right way.

I knew that the business had something at its core that could be successful.

And so I had to go to her and say, this is exactly what's going on.

If you want, I will honor the agreement and we can essentially kind of, I'll figure out a way to get you the money by November 1st.

Or if you're all right with it, I think we'll have money by mid-December.

We raised after when we got into YC, we got a little bit of capital.

We were able to sort of make everything right.

But I think having that reputation and making it be very core is something that I think can take you a far, long way, especially when, I mean, shit just sometimes doesn't go according to plan.

The second, Zach also covered, but it's this idea that done is better than perfect, and that you have to start somewhere.

And it's so easy, especially when you have an idea and you know that some people are going to say, that idea is stupid, that will never work, like what are you thinking about, why do you just go back and get a nice job.

I think it's really easy to sort of sit in the corner and polish your idea and say, well, someday, someday.

But ultimately, I think the best ideas, they need to be out in the world so they can survive the test of real customers.

Because another thing that happens, I think, quite frequently, is someone will have an idea and they'll only tell a few people close to them.

If you tell your mom, I'm going to start a company aimed at, I don't know, being Zappos for dogs, Your mom probably thinks it's an awesome idea.

It may be a great idea, but I don't think you can know that until you have real strangers who don't care about you, who don't know anything about you, look at it and use it.

And obviously, it's about finding the people that are the use case.

Because if you find people who are cat lovers who hate dogs, they may not get your idea.

And the final thing is, this is the muse now.

Nobody looks at this site and thinks, wow, that's going to be a world-changing, billion-dollar company.

And we got just far enough to get to the next step, to get to the next step, and to get to a point where obviously we're still really far from being where I'd like us to go, but the path gets a little bit clearer every time you move down it.

The next thing is to be insanely persistent, but also very, very polite.

Most things in a startup you will not get by asking once.

In fact, for a lot of the partnerships that we've gotten, the deals that have made a massive success for our business, it was never the first time we asked for them, or very, very rarely was that first time someone said, oh, why, yes, of course I'll give you massive amounts of traffic from my media publication.

It's often about figuring out what it is that you have, even if you don't have much, that the other party is excited about.

When we first launched, 1 of the ways that we got a lot of early traffic to the Muse was that I noticed that Forbes had a contributor program where they would publish content from outside sources.

And so I went to Forbes and I said, I want to give you career content that we're going to write from the Muse.

And in exchange, I want you to put at the bottom, this content was originally published on the Muse, link, link, link.

And the first person I talked to or that I asked didn't answer my email.

And the second person that I asked about a week or 2 later didn't answer my email.

The third, the fourth time, we found the right person.

And again, in our first month, Forbes sent around 5,000 people to the muse.

And a lot of those people stuck around because they had come for something that was very on brand and then essentially been sucked into our ecosystem.

Similarly with investing, I think We certainly, more than anyone else, have felt like sometimes the best way is, obviously, it's not always about being persistent with the same people, but understanding that you just have to figure out what is it about what you're doing or what you're asking for, or what you're offering, that is gonna be most of interest to the other party, and then find the right person.

And be very polite, but very, very persistent until you make it happen.

This 1 I've touched on a little bit, but it is find people who share your values.

My first company was not only a failure because we had flat growth and a relatively uninspired product, but it was also a failure because we had essentially a business dispute between founders that cost people a lot of money, that led to my life savings and those of some other people being kind of sucked away.

And it was ultimately relatively foreseeable, because there were a couple of red flags around values issues, how you treat people, that the people saw and that people overlooked.

And I absolutely did this, because when you're so focused on the product, you're so focused on the vision, it's really easy to say, oh, like, you know, yeah, we don't really maybe share values, but it'll all work out.

And I can absolutely say, I think 1 of the smartest things that I've ever done is make sure that I'm very, very focused on working with people, both externally and internally.

We've turned down money from people who had very clear, different value systems.

We had to let people go for ethics lapses.

But I think it keeps your core very strong, and it attracts people to you who also value that in others.

We talked a little bit about this before.

But a lot of people, I think, think of startups kind of like the field of dreams, which is, you know, if you build it, they will come.

But actually, that is in fact not how a lot of startups work.

You can have an amazing product, you can put it out there, and if 20 people see it, unless those are the exact 20 people that are going to be excited about what you're offering, that are going to be the core users, and they tell us, and they tell others, you may have something that's amazing, but you won't be able to get it in front of the right people.

And so I think thinking not only about what you're going to create, how it'll be built, what its growth plan is, but also who is it exactly?

How do you find the people that are going to become evangelists for your product?

And how do you incentivize them to talk about it in front of other people?

It's the difference ultimately between being dead and not being dead, in my opinion.

So I love this picture because this in front is Doug.

On his first day of work was April 1st of this past year, April Fool's Day.

And so we decided it'd be really fun to all dress up in formal wear for his first day in the office, see how long it took him to notice.

Of course, the first 5 people are in suits and button downs.

Finally, I think somebody walked in in a full suit and bright blue sneakers.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Kathryn Minshew at Startup School NY 2014