Follow up to Show HN: I’m a pregnant hacker. Here is my side project
Babylist has grown since that launch day into a $250M/year revenue business. We announced our first significant funding round yesterday: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyaklich/2021/11/04/babylist-raises-40-million-expects-to-hit-250-million-in-annual-revenue/
I wanted to say thank you. Our very earliest adopters came from that post. We’ve hired amazing team members through HN Who’s Hiring over the years.
I wrote that post on Feb 3 2011 and had my son two weeks later. Being home with a newborn was difficult for me -- in reality it was isolating and boring. Being able to work on Babylist for 45 minutes a day used my brain in a needed way. Through that first year Babylist scaled to about $3,000/month with an affiliate business model. Babylist was then what it is now: A better baby registry that works across retailers.
Over the years we’ve made our experience and offering better and better. We’ve launched amazing products, we’re both a vertical marketplace and e-commerce company, we have the best content to make product decisions and most recently are creating amazing product recommendations via our data and machine learning. Years ago we made an explicit decision that we weren’t a registry company, we were all about this monumental life stage and serve a baby’s entire community.
The journey from engineer to CEO of a growing 100+ person organization has been challenging and amazing. I stopped coding many years ago and bite my tongue when I have technical suggestions. I have given our Engineering Culture interview to almost every hire we’ve made until very recently.
I’m happy to talk about any part of this journey with y’all. I’m very grateful to this community. I would love to read your feedback or answer questions. (We’re also hiring remote engineers and happy to answer any questions about that.)
12 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 36.0 ms ] threadAnd congratulations on the achievement!
I finally made the decision to raise the seed round and grow a team because I felt that I would learn the most. I optimized for my own learning and growth.
Are you facing a similar decision? It's a steep and long learning curve to actually lead a team, but now it's the part of my job that I love the most.
If I may ask a similar question: did you feel, once you signed up the first employee, that there was a point early on that staff growth was too slow or too fast?
Congratulations again!
We were a team of 5 when we hired our first full-time customer service agent. Until that hire, we would each take a day of customer support which eventually meant that our iOS engineer was answering user emails for ~6 hours a week.
- Our editorial team has some content marketing goals, but their primary goal is long-term audience development. (We want you to keep opening our newsletter over years.)
- There is a lot of operational work to keep this content up to date. (Our content is primarily about product recommendations. This gets stale over time.)
- I believe in good, better and best content and that this can be qualitatively evaluated. Content development hasn't gone as well when we looked to the data to tell us is content was good or not.
- An intern wrote the first version of our guides. She sent out a survey to users about their favorite products and used that as the editorial basis for our "best product" guides. We tracked that they were making it to the front page of Google and decided to fund an in-house team.