How Melody McCloskey Built a Salon-Booking Empire that Did $1.6B in Transactions Last Year
How Melody McCloskey Built a Salon-Booking Empire that Did $1.6B in Transactions Last YearHow Melody McCloskey Built a Salon-Booking Empire that Did $1.6B in Transactions Last Year
more
Currently Playing
Hey everyone, today I share the mic withMelody McCloskey, CEO of StyleSeat, the largest marketplace for beauty services.
Tune it to hear Melody share how she encountered a problem in the marketplace and then set out to solve it, how someone with no background in tech built a booking company for stylists that did $1.6 billion in transactions last year, how StyleSeat acquired 10K clients with essentially no marketing, and why she chose an equity-based model for her employees.
01:17 – Melody’s company, StyleSeat, made $1.7 billion in bookings last year
01:40 – StyleSeat is Melody’s first company
01:50 – She is the daughter of a police officer
02:02 – She is a French major and International Relations major
02:12 – She planned on going back to France after college but realized she wanted to work on her own business while in San Francisco
02:53 – Melody just recently moved to San Francisco and wanted to get her hair done but she had a hard time booking an appointment
03:12 – She found out that the tools that were available were poor and awful
03:32 – When she did her research, she found that part of the problem was that professionals in the industry did not have a good way to market themselves
04:11 – Melody thought she could bring value to the business owners by helping them with their web presence, customer acquisition, and CRM
04:26 – Last year, they made $1.6 billion in bookings, powered about $3.5 billion since the launch, and 70 million appointments across the platform
05:04 – In the beginning, Melody was overwhelmed by the idea of starting a company as she did not have a background in tech
05:12 – Melody mapped out all the things she needed to and then placed it into phases
05:26 – Every day, Melody would attack one or two things from the phase she was in
05:50 – Breaking it into small projects made the goal doable for Melody
06:28 – Melody did not know a lot of stylists so she asked her friends to send her the emails of their hair stylists
06:45 – Melody got 30 names and sent an email saying she wanted to change the beauty industry and that she wanted to meet them
07:02 – Melody met the 30 at her friend’s salon and gave a presentation
07:27 – The beauty professionals were excited about the mission and were willing to help Melody
07:40 – When the first version was launched, the beauty professionals gave Melody feedback every single day
08:10 – A year and a half later, they had about 10,000 businesses using them on a regular basis
08:17 – It’s 100% organic and until now, they have done essentially no marketing and have grown through word of mouth
08:58 – Melody loves that she is working on a combination of awesome software, product development and building a community
09:41 – It was hard for Melody to be social but she got over it and loved hearing the feedback of people
10:32 – In the early stages, it was about how good you can pitch your company, your vision, and being able to constantly sell
10:46 – When people are buying, you now have to build your team
11:06 – Melody had to be good at identifying talent and supporting them to do what they needed to succeed
11:50 – The unifying theme for Melody is having a curious mind and eagerness to learn, change, and evolve
12:07 – Melody assumes she knows nothing every single day
12:21 – All she does at meetings now is ask questions and then makes decisions
12:45 – Eric recommends the audiobook Multipliers – the premise is to ask questions, not give directives
13:07 – Melody says it is about teaching people how to think
13:52 – It is teaching your team to have ownership and accountability and to drive the solutions themselves
14:47 – Melody says the market has been a little bit crazy
14:57 – Melody was hiring a candidate and the candidate wanted a guarantee that she would earn $40 million in the next two years
16:06 – Melody has been good at setting expectations
16:30 – Melody believes in an equity motivated business rather than a high salary motivated business
17:15 – Customer acquisition is done organically
17:46 – From being free, they shifted to a paid product
18:11 – Customers either left or those who paid had higher expectations
18:52 – They dramatically improved the product
19:07 – The experience galvanized the team and motivated them to fix the problem
19:35 – The challenge of being a free product is that you get a ton of customers
19:56 – When they were free, it was less clear who the real valuable customers were
20:37 – Melody says advisers are everything
20:42 – Find an amazing adviser who has done it before and can give you their time
21:13 – Melody’s advisers change over time depending on the need
22:32 – Melody found her first developer on Craigslist and she gave him equity from the beginning
23:15 – The equity is diluted down as the company grows
24:23 – Melody says the hardest part is the ups and downs
24:56 – You have to be really good at all the things that are thrown at you daily
25:20 – You have to lean into the pain and chaos and get good at solving problems
25:55 – What’s one big change you’ve made in the last year that has either impacted you or your business? – Melody brought on a new executive team
26:26 – Melody is also more into fitness
27:11 – What’s one tool you’ve added in the last year, like Evernote? – Evernote and Sworkit
28:28 – What’s one must read book you’d recommend to everyone? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
28:52 – Tenacity and resiliency are the two most important traits needed as a founder
29:10 – Follow Melody on Instagram and Twitter
29:47 – End of today’s episode
3 Key Points:
Teach people how to think by asking questions and letting them come up with their own answers—this will empower them to find solutions themselves.
Find yourself an adviser who has walked this road before you and learn from them.
Tenacity and resiliency are the two most important factors to becoming a successful founder.
How Canva Grew From 1K to 10M Users Without Paid Advertising
How Canva Grew From 1K to 10M Users Without Paid AdvertisingHow Canva Grew From 1K to 10M Users Without Paid Advertising
more
Currently Playing
Hey everyone, in today’s episode I share the mic with Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva, an app that makes design simple for everyone.
Listen as Melanie shares how she grew Canva to 10 million users in 3 years with just word of mouth marketing, why being rejected by so many investors was a good thing, how taking up kite surfing (one of the most dangerous sports in the world) allowed Melanie to raise capital for Canva, and how she found the members of her awesome tech team.
01:56 – Melanie was in university and wanted to make designing simple and easy
02:31 – Her boyfriend became her business partner
02:49 – Canva expanded very quickly
03:06 – Melanie wanted to set out for a bigger market BUT it didn’t turn out easy
03:20 – She spent a long time in San Francisco sleeping on her brother’s apartment floor
03:28 – She tried pitching investors and technical co-founders
03:33 – After a year, they finally raised an investment which was 3 years from the initial Canva investment
03:45 – It took another year of preparation to finally launch Canva
04:11 – Melanie’s first company was bootstrapped
06:21 – Melanie shares how she learned how to kiteboard to chase investors
07:01 – The kiteboarding conference opened a door to meet a lot of entrepreneurs
07:35 – “Keep on planting seeds”
08:24 – Why potential investors didn’t opt-in
09:44 – Some investors took a leap of faith and joined them
10:57 – The most important thing for any company is to solve an important problem
11:34 – In Canva’s early days, they worked mostly with social media marketers to help spread the word
12:03 – Until today, Canva’s traffic comes from word of mouth
13:13 – The most effective customer acquisition for Canva is by recommendation
14:07 – Canva was launched in 20 languages this year
14:34 – An iPhone and iPad app has recently launched and an android app is coming soon
15:24 – What Canva’s content marketing and SEO look like
16:34 – Melanie studied Communications Psychology in Commerce in university
16:56 – Melanie shares how she found the members of her tech team
19:31 – Be selective about what conferences you’re going to
20:30 – Working with your significant other
21:26 – What’s one big struggle you faced while growing the business? “Struggles that we have now is we’re growing really rapidly in every single front”
24:08 – What’s one big change you’ve made that impacted your business in the last year? “One of the big things we did was move into small teams”
26:32 – There are small teams that are constant and other teams that spin out for new initiatives
27:10 – Canva has 156 employees
27:24 – What kind of project management tool do you use? “We use spreadsheets in uncanny amounts, Gmail, Slack, and Canva”
27:49 – What’s one must-read book do you recommend? Designing the Obvious
28:30 – Find Melanie on Twitter
3 key points:
To be successful, make sure your business solves an important problem for a large audience.
Plant a lot of seeds and eventually some of those seeds will sprout.
Rapid growth can be quite difficult if your company is not ready for it.
How Lloyed Lobo Got—and Kept—10,000 Users in Speakeasy’s Pre-Launch
How Lloyed Lobo Got—and Kept—10,000 Users in Speakeasy’s Pre-LaunchHow Lloyed Lobo Got—and Kept—10,000 Users in Speakeasy’s Pre-Launch
more
Currently Playing
Hi everyone, today we have Lloyed Lobo, head of growth at Speakeasy, a tool that provides superior conference calling, screen sharing, and collaboration to close more business, faster, as well as the co-founder of Traction Conference.
In today’s interview we’ll be talking about how Lloyed Lobo got—and kept—10,000 users in Speakeasy’s beta launch, why the conference calling business is inherently viral, and how startups in particular need to focus on one channel first rather than going after 6 or 7 at once.
Episode highlights:
[4:44] – “The other thing to keep in mind is a solution like conference calling has some inherent virality…. I think like 20 or 30 percent of our new users come as a result of being on a call with somebody else.”
[7:25] – On what makes Speakeasy different from the competition: “You don’t want your clients entering long PINs and downloading stuff. First thing, other solutions on the market have long PIN numbers, you’ve got to download software, etc. So, with us, you don’t have that. PINless number, custom URL. You just join.”
[13:07] – “But it’s really important to stay focused… I think what drives focus or what can drive focus and improve that is having targets. So if you have a set target … I need to hit this revenue goal or this MRO goal or this user goal, then you’re not going to try dumb things. You might, but you’re going to focus on things that will get you there.”
[24:11] – “It’s easy to get 5-600 people to attend your conference…. What worked best for us was building an email list, building a community, direct emails. I’m a big believer in email marketing to your community. That worked.”
Hey everyone, in today’s episode I share the mic with Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva, an app that makes design simple for everyone.
