Follow up to Show HN: I’m a pregnant hacker. Here is my side project

[natgordon]

Hi HN! In February 2011 I launched a side project on Hacker News. The HN post was #1 for about a day and was titled: “I’m a pregnant hacker. Here is my side project” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2175757

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.)

[Lyubas]

I applied for a marketing data analyst role a week ago that I was quite excited to interview for as I’ve followed the company and used the site on several occasions. The first call was a no show and after following up I received a message apologizing that it was missed but it was due to an emergency. No problem. I agreed to reschedule. It was rescheduled twice without any input for my schedule. I still went ahead and joined the call only to again be left on hold with no one arriving. I followed up again and heard nothing until today when the same person claimed to have sent me a new invite (one I didn’t receive until 5m past the scheduled time) to which I did not respond so he scheduled it for tomorrow at 5pm EDT then changed again to 5pm Friday. Not sure what is happening but this is the worst interview experience I’ve ever had and it’s turned me off a bit to the way the company functions if this is how talent is handled.

[natgordon]

I apologize and I’ll look into this. This sounds like a disaster.

[tothrowaway]

It sounds like your project could have been an ideal "lifestyle" business. Going from 0 to 1 employee must have been a big step. How did you decide to hire your first employee (and what did early employees do)?

And congratulations on the achievement!

[natgordon]

Great question. I really struggled with that decision. For me it was really whether to raise a seed round or not. I went back and forth about what kind of business I wanted to run.

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.

[eftychis]

Thank you for that perspective and congratulations!

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!

[natgordon]

Over the entire 10 years it's always felt like we have been too slow to hire and needed a person in a role 3-6 months earlier.

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.

[eftychis]

Thank you! (In my past IC/employee experience I had noticed the same.)

[dhduso]

I'm a huge admirer of what you've built over at Babylist and point to your content marketing a lot as being particularly amazing. Can you talk about why you're so strong in this area and what the journey was like getting to the excellent place you're at with content marketing?

[natgordon]

I have a lot of thoughts about this! A lot of effort over many years has gone into our content. It's very good and I'm very proud of it. We have an in-house editorial team (including video) that currently reports into marketing but for years reported directly to me as peers to marketing. A couple of lessons over the years that has made this successful:

- 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.

[ezekg]

My wife and I used Babylist for our current pregnancy, due in a few weeks. It made things a lot easier than it was with my first daughter, where we kind of just registered wherever if we remembered. It really is a great product, great job and congrats.

[tinktank]

No feedback but a heartfelt congratulations. This is amazing and the revenue targets you've achieved are incredibly impressive. Well done, you're an inspiration to me.

[natgordon]

Thank you!