Catherine Minshew, founder and CEO of The Muse, discusses the history and lessons learned from her startup. The Muse helps people with career advice and job discovery. They started with a WordPress site and tested job listings, which led to significant user growth. They made the mistake of trying to build a big, polished product, but were advised to launch quickly. They learned the importance of starting somewhere, getting feedback from target users, and testing what is actually important.

- The speaker realized that the number of people watching videos on their site was not a key metric for success.
- They focused on core metrics such as site visitors, job applications, and sharing with friends.
- They found success by targeting like-minded groups and personally reaching out to them for feedback and sharing.
- Making it easy for people to spread word of mouth, such as providing sample tweets, was effective.
- The speaker became their own PR machine by writing guest content for platforms like Huffington Post and Forbes.
- Building an amazing team was crucial, focusing on passion for the mission and helping individuals achieve their goals.
- Lurking and reaching out to people from struggling startups can lead to talented hires.
- The speaker advises not to believe the hype and to focus on providing something users love and need.

Kathryn Minshew, cofounder of The Muse, at Female Founders Conference 2014

So next you're going to meet Catherine Minshew.

Fun fact, when she was a kid, Catherine wanted to be Zorro.

Now Catherine is founder and CEO of The Muse, a career platform and job discovery tool.

Catherine was part of the YC Winter 2012 batch.

As Ellie mentioned, we were actually in the same batch.

So the last time I was up here was also our demo day in March 2012.

We actually kind of messed it up, but things have worked out OK since.

So hopefully this will be much more exciting.

So I want to take you guys through a little bit of Muse history, some of the mistakes we made, a couple of the lessons learned, and a few of the big things that I wish I had known when I got started a couple of years ago.

So for people who don't know the Muse, As Kat mentioned, we help people figure out what they want to do with their lives.

So we give them career advice, we help them see inside companies, understand what's a day in the life, hear from employee evangelists on video about what it means to be a product manager or an engineer or in marketing analytics or community service.

And I think when people come to our site sometimes, clearly we've been working on it for a while.

My co-founder Alex, who's here, likes to describe it as an evolution to awesome, but I prefer to describe it as an evolution from suck to suck less.

Because I think that that's, for me, at the core of a lot of startups, is this idea that by the time you often hear about a lot of the companies that are touted as big technology successes, they've already gone so far past the point of their early, ugly, scrappy MVP roots, that it's sometimes really hard to see where they came from.

And I know when we were getting started with the Muse, I had a lot of anxiety over the fact that we had this product, which was pretty much an ugly duckling and I wasn't really sure if it would ever develop into a swan.

So I want to kind of take you quickly through our history from suck to suck less, starting with where the idea came from, which was very much a personal pain point.

As Kat mentioned, I wanted to be Zorro originally when I was a kid, and then as I grew up, I matured a little bit, and I really wanted to be in the CIA.

It was because I was obsessed with the TV show Alias, And I thought Jennifer Garner was so awesome.

So I remember thinking to myself, and I also like to model UN at school, but I think when you're a kid, I mean, you have all these ideas about what it is like to do different careers.

And it wasn't really until I was a political science major, I got to intern at a US embassy in Cyprus and get chased around by Marines during a training exercise.

I might not actually be cut out for this.

Really interesting experience, but I knew pretty quickly that I don't actually want to be a management consultant.

I moved to Rwanda and Malawi and worked in vaccines.

I was like, holy shit, everything I do is interesting and I'm learning a lot, but it is nothing like what I thought it would be when I started.

So what if there was something online that could solve this problem?

At the same time, I had met my cofounders, Alex and Melissa.

This is when we looked more badass, but at the time at McKinsey we were not badass at all.

And Alex can tell you some crazy stories.

But we did have a lot of kind of ongoing conversations about how there was a real hole we felt in the marketplace for advice and job listings and support that was really about navigating your career, because the way people were thinking about their career had changed substantially.

The problem was initially none of us was technical.

Now, actually, Melissa codes back end, Alex codes front end, I do not code anymore.

But we didn't really have a lot of skills.

We were pretty broke when we were getting started.

So this is actually what we launched with in September of 2011.

I now think it's ugly as shit, but that's okay because we were really proud of it at the time, and it was a WordPress customized theme that provided career advice from different professionals and managers and execs in a pretty easy-to-read format targeted at women in their 20s, which investors were telling us was a very, very small market.

We decided that we would test job listings out through this WordPress, because we didn't have any ability to build something custom.

We convinced them to, I think they paid us like $200 to post a bunch of their general manager job listings when they were still in maybe 2 or 3 cities only.

And you could, I think Alex hacked together like a little form at the bottom.

And what was interesting is that even though there were so many massive holes and we were kind of pitching this big vision that was nothing like the reality, we started seeing incredible user growth.

So we had 20,000 people visit the site in the first month, 26,000 in the second, and 75,000 in the third, which is insane.

And I'll talk in a little bit how we kind of got the word out.

But we ended up being convinced at the very last minute to apply to YC.

I had been with a previous company that Alex and I worked on together, turned down from, I think, like 11 accelerators.

I was like, all right, I'm not wasting my time.

And 1 of our advisors, Rachel Sklar, came to me and she was like, you absolutely have to put your hat in the ring.

And if you don't get in, you don't get in.

And so that weekend, we threw an application together, put it in, and lo and behold, got an interview.

On the day that we interviewed at YC, we blasted loud music, we just came in really pumped up.

We kind of were at this point where we've been turned down by almost every single investor in New York City.

And we're just like, fuck it, we don't even care.

We're building something that we believe users want and that data is showing users want.

But if it doesn't, we're going to keep trying and keep going.

We're very, very determined, despite looking very nice up here.

And then I think we started making some of our biggest early stage mistakes.

Which was that first of all, when we got into YC, we got so excited about the fact this was somebody that actually had, you know, was sort of respected.

And they actually believed in what we were doing.

So we thought, like, now is the time to make the career product of our dreams.

So we hired 2 people off of Hacker News who were very talented but without a lot of culture vetting, and we started dreaming really big.

So this is an actual mock-up that Alex built in January of 2012.

It was 1 of our first big meetings with him.

And we're like, all right, this is what we're building, it's going to have this predictive data, and then you can enter this and it will be personalized and everything will be completely customized, and there's 12 different features, and he just cut us off, I mean, seconds into our big kind of exciting demo, and he was like, that's ridiculous, you will never get that out the door, you need to just fucking launch already.

We realized that this idea that we were kind of polishing in the corner, sort of like Gollum in Lord of the Rings, was very precious, But it wasn't actually something that we, like by the time we actually got it out there and saw how people were reacting to different elements of it, we'd be dead.

We did a kind of 24-hour cycle where Alex pulled an all-nighter and rebuilt the site.

We then started working on it the next morning.

And exactly 13 days later, we launched on TechCrunch with this very first basic version.

And we kind of started iterating and learning from there.

And there were a couple of key things that we learned as we were sort of pushing this mountain, this boulder up the mountain, which I think is what most startups are like.

The first I refer to is you've got to start somewhere.

So it's the idea that startups are kind of like Monopoly.

You can't pass go if you can't get $200 if you don't pass go.

I think it's really tempting sometimes to keep working on something and to keep it very quiet, to wait until you have something beautiful and perfect to put out to the world.

Because it's really difficult to put up a site that people think is ugly.

And it's really difficult to tell someone your idea and have them say, really?

And we got a lot of that in the early days.

But I think if we hadn't been so willing to put ourselves out there when we were, frankly, had something that was laughed at sometimes by people, we wouldn't have gotten so much of the data that let us navigate the right direction.

Another way of saying this is your college roommate's approval does not mean market demand.

So this is something, you know, I hear a lot.

It's often, you know, sometimes young guys that are very excited, they're like, this is going to be amazing, it's going to be big.

And they're like, well, I asked 5 friends and my mom, and everyone thinks it's brilliant.

People who love you are going to tell you that they think your idea is good, because they believe in you for the most part.

Now, they might not always, But I think you've got to kind of put your idea, your baby, right up against the cold, hard light of someone who doesn't give a shit about you and see how it reacts.

And ideally, I'm going to go back to this in a little bit, but someone who is actually a user of your target demographic.

Because lots of people who will never be the ideal users for what you're building, will tell you they don't get it, that it's a terrible idea, that it's ugly.

I think the most important feedback, I like to process all feedback, but the most important feedback is from the people that are in your target demographic.

So this is, again, the first version of the Muse.

If we waited till it looked like this to launch, we would be dead, and we'd probably all be back at much more boring corporate jobs.

So secondly is test everything, but know what's actually important.

I think when we first launched the company profiles and the job listings on the Muse, we got so excited with the fact that we could track all of this data.

So we had mixed panel tracking where people were clicking and we were looking at, you know, crazy egg to see mouse movements and all of these things.

And we noticed that users weren't doing certain things that we wanted them to do.

So, for example, every profile had large videos where employees at different companies could tell people could talk about what it was like to work there and you could watch.

And a bunch of people were watching the videos, but not everyone.

And we started thinking, like, how can we get more people to watch videos?

And we ran tests and we were tracking it and making the play heads bigger or changing the text.

And then finally, we were in some office hours at YC, and 1 of the partners was like, why does it matter if people watch videos?

And we sat back, and we thought for a second.

How many people are coming to the site, whether they're applying to jobs, whether they're sharing it with their friends, there are a couple of core metrics that really define success, but whether they're watching videos is not in and of itself 1 of them.

So if watching more videos leads them to apply or spend longer on the site or share more with their friends, that's great, but changing something like that in and of itself was actually just distracting us from our core.

And this is kind of the field of dreams idea, which is that I think often startup customer acquisition and kind of early stage media has this idea that if you build it, they will come.

And I think the answer that I've seen is no.

And in fact, in some case, you may be able to reach your demographic very early.

They may be naturally kind of viral in a way.

But for most of us, you actually have to go out and kind of scratch and find your audience from among a very, very large pool of potential people who don't necessarily want to share about your product early on.

And the big difference between startup number 1, PYP, which is very dead, and startup number 2, The Muse, which is not dead, is user growth, figuring out how do you get people to know about you in the first place so that if they do like what you're doing, they can tell.

So I've got a couple of things we did to sort of acquire users out of thin air, and we were really broke.

So none of these are things that cost any money.

But what we found that worked for us, 1, was to seek out really like-minded groups.

So since initially when we started the Muse, now we have over a million users a month, from 20 to late 40s, all across the United States, men and women.

But when we were starting, we were targeting women in their 20s, generally in a certain type of professional or educational career or trajectory.

And so we started making lists of groups.

So things like the Stanford Women in Law Group, Baldwin Scholars of Duke.

And we would personally write someone in the group.

I started this company to do XYZ, I'd love to hear your feedback, and if you think it's something that would be interesting, share it with your members.

And then I would actually put something in the email that would basically make it no work for them to share it on.

And a surprising number of people, they liked what they found.

Most people like providing value and information to others, so they would pass it on to the list serves, the groups, a lot of these underground things that we never could have accessed on our own.

The second point is to make it you've got to make it insanely easy for people to give you word of mouth.

So I always think it's really interesting.

A lot of people will email me and they'll say, Catherine, I just started this company, I would love it if you would tweet about it.

If you actually put a tweet in that email, there is like a 5X chance, more high, that I will and that people in general will tweet about it because you've just taken out the work.

Like asking someone to spread the word is, I think, a really great way of getting the word out, but it's very helpful if you can say, you know, here are a couple of sample tweets or sample Facebook posts that people can literally copy-paste.

And we found once we started doing that, that people were more than willing to help.

But if helping meant spending 4 minutes figuring out exactly what to write, they were much, much less likely to do it.

And then finally, become your own PR machine.

So when we started the Muse, obviously, nobody wanted to write about us.

Lots of people start companies every day, and I was emailing reporters and they were like, okay, and you're who?

I was like, no 1, actually, but working on it.

And so I started thinking, look, what could I do to get links about us and word about us out on big platforms?

And 1 of the things is a lot of these platforms do want guest content.

They want people to write and to provide bylines and to provide good content for free so that they can get ads and page views etc.

So I started writing and at the beginning I would write for the Muse, then I got a contact at the Huffington Post.

I wrote something there, I don't think anybody ever read it, but it was on the Huffington Post and it was well written and then I sent that link to other platforms like Forbes.

I mean, I pitched a lot of people that said no at first.

In fact, I blog for the Harvard Business Review now, but I emailed them a couple of times, like over a full year before they finally wrote back to me and said, hey, remember that email from, you know, like 14 months ago?

And so I think no just means wait a little bit and ask me again later, often.

But we started kind of producing content about startups, about careers, about anything that was really relevant to our business, and then getting other sites to publish that.

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

I think a lot of people have talked about it.

So this is part of, not the entire, but part of the Muse team, In fact, 2 people from the Muse team are here today, Meha and Sarah, which is really exciting for me.

And the thing is, none of these people turned down other job opportunities, other things that they could be doing, because we offer the most amazing salary and perks in New York City.

We are still a very scrappy company at core.

We often cannot offer people what they'd be able to command on the market, but I think as a startup, you have to focus on what you can offer them.

And that's often much, much more powerful, especially to the right people.

So we often recruit, first of all, by people who love what it is that we're doing and are kind of deeply passionate about the mission.

But we also focus on what their individual goals are, personally and professionally, and how we can help make that happen.

So during the interview process, we often like to ask people, you know, outside of your core job, what is it you're excited about doing?

And people will tell us, you know, I love the idea of speaking to other women in technology.

I love the idea of, you know, becoming a marketer who knows more code.

Whatever it is, part of our job as founders, I believe, is to connect the people who have taken the risk to be on our team with the things and opportunities that will get them where they want to go.

And I also think that, you know, you have to lead by example.

So to the point about low salaries below, Alex and I make less than almost everybody on this page, sometimes by a factor of 2 or 3, and that's all right, because I think we are building a team that's in it for the long haul, and that's something that I think is 1 of the strongest assets of a start-up, because you're competing against these big people with a lot of resources, but they don't necessarily have the fire that your team has.

And, you know, when you're looking for kind of new hires, obviously, everyone knows kind of the classic big sites, your LinkedIn, your Indeeds, there's a lot of up and comers, Angel List, networks are big, but I also find lurking to be very effective, which I define as figuring out, first of all, you know, spending time on hacker news, on Twitter following people that you think might be interesting employees, figuring out what startups are dying or are close to, and nicely approaching people who work there saying, are you in fact looking for a new job?

Because often it's also really helpful often founders who are going through tough financial situations have to let go people that are incredibly talented.

And so if you can actually be known as and kind of reach out to people, they may actually be really happy to hand you or kind of introduce you to an amazing engineer, salesperson, ops person who they completely believe in but just aren't able to keep on the payroll because the business has changed or because financial situations allowed.

And finally, the last point I want to make is do not believe the hype.

I think we exist in a business in which people are always getting funded by Andreessen and appearing on TechCrunch and hitting 13 million clicks, whatever the fuck that means.

There's a lot of vanity metrics, There's a lot of patting people on the back.

And I think it can be really hard sometimes to exist in that environment, especially when it feels like all you're getting is no.

That's 1 of the reasons I'm such a big believer in focusing on who is your user, where are they, and are you providing them with something they love?

Because I think ultimately, if you're really able to hook into a deep need, you're able to build something that people need and that they love, and you can slowly track that acquisition, then 2 users becomes 20 users, becomes 20,000, 2 million, and you become a lot harder to ignore.

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

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Kathryn Minshew at Female Founders Conference 2014