How to build a cult-like brand | Laura Modi (Bobbie)

Podcast: Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
Source: whisper-tiny
URL: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/113964811/2a252bd73d2c03da92e061532851bda2.mp3
Fetched: 2026-03-05 00:25:22

So our head of growth, who, I mean, this girl is just fabulous, she was watching our inventory levels very carefully and also watching how quickly we were growing. And I'll never forget that moment. I can like visualize the city and a meeting and she pulls up her screen because here's the dilemma we are depleting inventory far quicker than our ability to replenish and the customers keep coming. You know, you sit there in your first reaction. This is, I mean, this is great. We're growing. She's like, it's not that great actually because here's what's going to happen. We are going to run out of product for the babies that are on Bobby today. We have about six days before we get to a place where we won't be able to serve those who've already made a commitment to Bobby. So we need to turn off our site and stop growing the business. Welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experience as building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Laura Modi. Laura and I actually work together at Airbnb for many years, where she was director of hospitality, leading all of the work around strengthening the host community and also improving marketplace quality. After leaving Airbnb, she went on to found a company called Bobby, the only female founded and mom-let organic infant formula company in the US, which basically every mom I know uses. I rarely have CEOs or founders on this podcast and when I do, it's because I'm confident that product leaders and growth teams and other founders can learn a lot from this person. Laura is a great example of this and I've been incredibly impressed with watching Laura execute and build this company. In our conversation, we talk about how to build and maintain momentum within your organization, how sometimes slowing growth down is the best way to grow long-term, why the most innovative ideas often come from people with no experience in the problem space, how to lead through tough times, why manufacturing fake deadlines is so powerful and effective, and so much more, Laura is such a great leader and such a great human and I'm really excited for you to learn from her. With that, I bring you Laura Modi after a short word for my sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Vanta, helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth. Thousands of fast growing companies like Gusto, Com, Cora, and Modern Treasury trust Vanta to help build, scale, manage, and demonstrate their security compliance programs and get ready for audits in weeks, not months. By offering the most in-demand security and privacy frameworks such as SOC2, ISO 27,0001, GDPR, GIPAA and many more, Vanta helps companies obtain the reports they need to accelerate growth, build efficient compliance processes, mitigate risks to their businesses and build trust with external stakeholders. Over 5,000 fast growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC2 and these other frameworks. For a limited time, Lenny's podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to Vanta.com slash Lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com slash Lenny. To learn more and to clean your discounts, get the started today. Today's episode is brought to you by Element. I just recently discovered the stuff actually from another podcast, and it is such sweet, salty goodness. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with a science-back electrolyte ratio, and unlike most electrolyte drinks, there's no sugar, coloring, artificial ingredients, gluten, or any other BS. Getting enough electrolytes helps prevent in eliminating headaches, muscle cramps fatigue, sleeplessness, and other common symptoms of electrolyte deficiency. Element is the exclusive hydration partner to team USA, weightlifting, and many other limited athletes. Also dozens of NBA NFL teams and players rely on Element to stay hydrated, along with Navy SEAL teams at the I sniper teams and Marines. You can try Element totally risk free. If you don't like it, you can share it with a salty friend, and they'll give you your money back to no question to ask. To give it a shot, go to drink, LN-N-T.com slash Lenny, and you'll get a free sample pack to any purchase, which includes one packet of every flavor. My favorite is Watermelon Salt. You won't find this offer publicly available, so you have to head to drink LN-T.com slash Lenny to take advantage of this offer. Stay salty. Laura, welcome to the podcast. I'm so happy to be here. It's a Friday, Lenny. This is amazing. Oh, I got it. I already started strong. I was looking forward to this chat for a few weeks already and you that we booked it a couple weeks ago. Just a context. We work together at Airbnb for a while and not something I expected, but you went on to now become a magnet in the baby formula industry, which I'm excited to dig into. And so thank you again for being here. Thank you. This can be exciting. I hope you don't mind. I'm going to have a little bit of wine as we go through this. It's highly encouraged. Maybe I need to start drinking more on the show. That might be high-wing approves. We'll see. We'll see how it ends up. It'll be good. We're a retrospective. So I thought it'd be fun to start with just your time at Airbnb where we got to work together. You spent five and a half years there. Everyone that spends that amount of time at Airbnb. And let me know if you agree. Always ends up being this transformative time in their life in their career. Yeah. I can't imagine where I would be with that Airbnb. Yeah, I feel the same way. And so I want to spend a little time at what you learned from that experience and what you took away there. But just to start, can you share briefly what you worked on while you're at Airbnb? I mean, what didn't we work on? I just chose like I reflect back. And it's one of those experiences where it probably was transformative because you do get an opportunity to work on so many different things. So I remember joining. And I was just put in charge of leading and growing parts of customer service. Vendor management. I mean, we were scaling the teams so fast on that side. Equally shifted into taking me to Europe where I led our consolidation of our European offices in Dublin. I'm so funny. I remember the time being asked to go do it and thinking, why being asked shortly because I'm just the only Irish person in the company right now. But it was one of the biggest operational changes that we went through there. And then for the last few years, I was the director of hospitality, leading global host community and host operations. I think you're underselling the last part. Can you just share a little bit more of what that actually means? Our product really wasn't our technology. It wasn't, you know, the physical part wasn't the technology that we were building. Although for a few years, we all thought it was. And then it got to a place where we realized Airbnb is nothing without its hosts. Nothing. If anything, Airbnb's product was its hosts. So there was a moment and I can't remember it was like two or three years in where that nourishing was building up more and more. And we realized that there was a need to have a central team, which we called hospitality, dedicated to equipping and recognizing and holding this product of our hosts accountable to their job. Yeah, I think that's a really, like we could go down that. Maybe let me ask one question there because I think that's really interesting for a company where the product, as you said, in market places in general, the product you're selling is the supply, in our case Airbnb hosts. Is there something maybe you learned from that experience? I don't know, working at a software company about how to think about the supply as the product and how that may be informed. I don't know. I put your building today or just something in general. I mean, I think it maybe just starts internally where you have to be able to like create a culture first to all understand that. Because otherwise you're going to be in a position where you're focused on optimizing the technology efficiency growth, looking at tools for tool sake versus tools for user sake. And I mean, I remember a very pivotal shift when we started realizing that we really needed to understand our hosts far more than we had leading up to that. And I think growth just follows I mean, we certainly saw that at Airbnb, if we put the hosts first, do we we thought about building tools for them versus what do we need just to drive more bookings? It, it, you know, growth, I mean, users, but gets users, not exactly what we saw. What are some lasting lessons from your time at Airbnb that you bring to which you're working on now? The most obvious kind of key shade one is culture. It is bread and butter to everything you do from the people you hired to how you build the right mindset to just keeping the energy. I mean, like energy at Airbnb was currency. You know, it was like, unless you didn't have that energy, nothing was happening. And I, I think about that every day, how do you keep energy going? And my God, they did that for a decade. Shops keeping it going. I think the other big takeaway is if you can get people excited behind a story telling, it, again, kind of carries through that cross-functional work, I now reflect back on just how powerful our storytelling was at Airbnb to get people pumped up. I mean, even for some of the smallest features that we would build, any, they would kick off with like the most powerful storytelling. We were changing lives. And again, it makes you wake up every day going, fuck yeah, like I want to work on this. And you're not just going into fix something. You actually feel like you're having very large impact. And that has to be felt the whole way down the org. I love that you're already getting into like the specifics of what culture actually how manifest and how to build a culture. And so I want to maybe ask another question there. So you talked about keeping the energy up as a big part of creating the culture. You want to create strong storytelling. Either in one of those buckets or another example, what do you do at Bobbi, which we're going to talk about to build a strong culture. What else do you do to actually do that? Because, you know, people hear about building a strong culture. And like, what do I do? How do I do that? So I look here, anything you actually done there. I think one of the biggest ones I would say is that you need to get to know people personally as much as you do professionally. And that was maybe something I also maybe took a little bit for granted at Airbnb. We had built a culture with people really personally loved each other. They loved working together. Now, fast forward to today and you're building a company that's completely remote. How do you build a personal relationship? So, you know, for example, we make sure that we take time to have personal and professional check-ins. And like cross-functional people in the org who maybe have no idea as someone else has a kid or what they're doing in their lives. Because those personal connections and then again, like it's your second family you're waking up every day to then time with them. I think those personal connections are some of the biggest. It's interesting because there's also this movement away from your work mates or your family. Airbnb I think is very like everyone called theirself's air fam. But that becomes challenging when you have to work people go and there's challenging times. So is that is your perspective stick like that's where you find value to kind of stay close to that. I think you need a hybrid. I think I think looking at work for transactions, sake, you know, are your colleagues purely as the people who are just there to get the job done with you? I'm not spiring. No. Do I think that there's a balance and maybe some of the things they get introduced in a culture probably don't need to go that far? Yeah. But no matter was, I do believe building personal connections and actually caring about the people you work for is imperative for building a lasting business. What's the story of going for maybe in B2 building a baby farm hook? Oh my god, you mean like leaving one of the fastest growing companies to start powdered milk? I don't know. I remember telling my dad and he was like hold on a second Laura. I don't understand. He's like your lactose intolerant. What? Why are you starting a milk company? He just couldn't fathom why I would, I mean in many ways leave and established business that had established, you know, parental leave, benefits, everything that in many ways is you grow through your career, become more and more what you need and you need the stability. So that shift, I suppose, just socializing is just probably one of the hardest and it's it's a big thing to take a risk because you're taking 10 steps backwards in hopes of making major leaps forward. And I think that's just always going to be in an hours of mostly in my career, which is I don't believe there's such a thing is taking a big leap without first taking a major risk. And that was, I mean it was a very big risk obviously. But then also keep in mind even before I joined Airbnb, I had a good job of Google and Airbnb at the time I think just had one of its most major crises. It's back, you know, 2011 CJ or EJ. EJ, EJ incidents. It was all kind of over the papers. It was a small company. I wasn't really given a title. I don't know, never forget as well, exactly the same narrative. My parents going hold on a second, you're leaving Google to go start a B and B. Like, no, I'm not really starting a B and B. I really believe this company's going somewhere. So anyway, the model of the story is like the move into starting my own business. It was, it was a big risk and it was one that I felt so confident on that was needed. It was worth it. Some people do what you did there where you take a big risk and kind of maybe stick backwards and it doesn't work out. And in your case, it's worked out many times. Is there a thread across the decisions you made that you think people maybe should look for or you think is important and taking a big risk or do you think it was a lot of super luck? I mean, I have a folder of businesses and product ideas that prior to Bobby, I had dreamt of and we can always get into that again in the future. Some of them, I still dream of doing one day. But a big reason for not taking the risk is because I didn't feel the conviction. So I, yes, while I think it's luck, you know, I think I put a lot of the intention into researching the marketplace, understanding the business, determining how much of a risk I'm really able to take even financially, sitting with my husband and determining like how long I may need to be in this position before raising capital and is a possible. It certainly isn't what sometimes it can appear on the surface, which is, oh, she had an idea and she left. There's a lot of work that goes into determining, is this actually going to be something that's viable? And like that lesson, like it's like it may seem like Laura went to her to Airbnb and it was just like, oh, I'll lucky she picked her being you know, all the companies, but what you're saying is you spent the time researching, saying what the company started. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about Bobby just over broadly. Can you just talk about what is Bobby? And then what is the scale Bobby these days? What stats can you share to kind of give people a sense of how large this has gotten? So Bobby is a patterned male company. We are an infant formula and prior to, you know, infant formula, you know, the formula gase of 2022, which everyone is now familiar with, the short of it is is that this is an industry that is owned by a duopoly. It's one of the last remaining industries in the CPG space that has seen any disruption or change in probably 40 years. And my desire was to create a formula. The parents could feel proud of an infant formula that felt modern and meant where science is today because the frankly none of the informers of the market really had caught up to where science was evolved to. Now, obviously, I only experienced this as becoming a mother myself. I knew nothing about this at all. And then I pick up a kind of formula and I read the back of the kind and there's ingredients in there. I would never feed myself. I think the thing that really hit me and this was more of the business investor side of me, I just hated the product. And I couldn't understand why as something that is used by so many 83% of parents. Why is it that I'm embarrassed about it? I feel guilty feeding my child is and is also ugly. Like, it's hitting on my counter every day. And this isn't what I want to see. I feel like I'm giving her never saying to my husband. I was like, I feel like we have failed to breastfeed. And the alternative is that I need to give her a medical solution to survive, which it's milk. I mean, I should feel like I'm giving her food. But for whatever reason society has set this up to make formula feel like you have failed. And that was the impetus. I know you asked me what is Bobby, so we are better for you, infant formula without the guilt. Oh, I like that. Okay, that was a good summary at the end. How about about the scale, Bobby? What kind of numbers can you share? Just give people sense of a larger space. Yeah. Oh my god. So I remember launching in. It was 100% direct to consumer. So the top of 2021. And the moment you're about to launch the first in, in question, all investors ask is, what do you believe your growth is going to be? First question. You know, it's the same question you get after you're married. You know, what are you going to have a baby? I'm like, I have no clue what my thought is going to be. I've been on the market for a hot minute. No, everything, completely like four million, five million in our first year. So the growth is paying fabulous. And beyond our wildest dreams in what we had expected. Amazing. There's a bunch of questions I'm going to ask about how you grew, Bobby. But you mentioned the COVID kind of a baby shortage crisis. And there's a couple of stories I wanted to get into. That was one of them. Can you just talk about what you went through in that period? Because I imagine it was both a blessing and a curse. Also, it reminds me, I have a friend who uses Bobby. And she just told me a story about how someone she couldn't find any Bobby during COVID and supply chain issues and all that. And an employee of a Bobby came to her house and brought her formula just to make sure she had enough. And obviously, it created forever brand loyalty. And we'll talk a little bit by brand. But I love to hear about just that period of journey and what you learned from it. There is nothing like a crisis that gives you more of like an appreciation for what opportunity lies ahead. And I would thank my blessings every day. The only way to look at this positively was to be in a position of gratitude that like I have an opportunity that most startups would wait a whole lifetime for. So what happened was I woke up one day and the president of the United States was talking about there being an informative shortage. And again, like it's just being in the right place at the right time. Like a topic that never has really been brought up. Unfortunately, one of the large companies, one of the Duacolis, had a recall. And that recall basically left the nation without product. And we were not able to feed babies in the U.S. Being one of the smallest companies here, we ended up seeing our customer count double the first week that that shortage happened. All of that would seem great. Almost like a dream for any startup to be in that you're going to see your product grow now because they're moving from one customer to another. From one product to another. But here's what happens. Infant formulas one of those products that you can't run out of. It's not cool to be out of infant formulas. It's not like a piece of furniture in your, you know, at capacity for a certain amount of time. So our head of growth, who, I mean, this girl is just fabulous. She was watching our inventory levels very carefully and also watching how quickly we were growing. And I'll never forget that moment. I can like visualize a sitting in a meeting. And she pulls up her screen because here's the dilemma. We are depleting inventory far quicker than our ability to replenish and the customers keep coming. You know, you sit there in your first reaction. This is, I mean, this is great. We're growing. She's like, it's not that great, actually. Because here's what's going to happen. We are going to run out of product for the babies that are on Bobby today. That's a problem. So in my kind of absorption of everything that's happening. And again, being a company that only being on the market for 14 months, saying to rule out, Shrine, what do we do next? And she's like, we have about six days before we get to a place where we won't be able to serve those who've already made a commitment to Bobby. So we need to turn off our site and stop growing the business. That's a big decision to make when you're like, okay, so I'm going to turn to all of our investors and say we're turning off our site. We're closing down to ensure that we keep enough product. But honestly, in hindsight, it was a no-brainer. We were not going to run out of product and our current subscribers. And we had no idea how long the crisis is going to last. So even though we didn't know how long we'd be off, I gave the thumbs up, Sally fourth, turn it off, and we went into hibernation mode. And in many ways, we switched immediately into our customers come first. We now have 70,000 subscribers who are in a place of panic because they hear the news every day that there's formula running out in our job is to give them confidence and clarity that we have the products for them and we're never going to run out. And we did for six months, six months, we kept our website off and we didn't grow the business last year and we continued to serve our current subscribers. And in the end, we became the only formula company that was able to reliably serve its current customers never run out. That's an amazing story. I haven't heard that before. You throughout this term at some point when were you milling earlier of a slow, you called the slow slow, slow, slow, growth, they think, yeah. Is that how you're at us? That was part of like also how do you change the culture internally, right? I had 60 people on the team who were all in a position of driving growth. And in many of them, we're probably only hired weeks before the shortage with the position of growth. You know, email growth paid acquisition. And all of a sudden, you're telling someone who just left to cushy job to join a startup that were no longer growing. And in fact, your job now is to completely flip what you thought you were going to do on a TED. So we named the entire growth team, the slow, the team. And I mean, they got creative. At some point, we were emailing subscribers to nudge them to cancel. We were looking for a way to ensure that we could keep product. And my God, it was a mind boggling moment. What it else did you learn from that period that is either stuck with you in this time and or is there something maybe you think you would have done differently if you could go back? Well, I personally believe of never looking back and and regretting our changing things, whether we're definitely some learnings. And I would say I'm like the positive end. Some of the biggest learnings were just the power of storytelling and bringing the impact of what we were doing back into the company. I'm in a fortunate position as the CEO where whether I'm speaking to advisors or on panels or engaging the outside world a lot more, I was able to truly feel, I mean, this really feel the impact that we were having by doing this. I'll never forget I was I was speaking at Davos on this topic and I had a customer, I'm like, I'll let you this moment. I was standing outside of this events area and this woman comes running up to me and she's bawling, crying. And this is at like a global leader's conference and she's crying and she goes, she just helped my hands and she's like, oh my God, you saved my life over the last year. So you have no idea the impact that Bobby played in our lives by making the decision and giving me confidence that you weren't going to run out of product on us. And that like emotional connection of just wow. Yes, we may have grown the business faster, we may have gotten product back. But at the end of the day, the 70,000 voices that are out there in the stories that they have and bring in those back to the company and it's undeniable the impact by making that decision we've had and I think the rest of the company feels it too. This connects with something we've brought up a couple times now, which is just brand and brand building. Clearly it's something that you've spent a lot of energy on and something you've done incredibly well. I think every mom I know knows of Bobby. By the way, let me just throw this out there. I don't know if I've told you this, but I'm having a kid and we're going to get some Bobby whoops. Yep. Oh my god, Lenny's going to see what that is so exciting. Oh man, let's go on a new direction. I've got, I've got your milk if you need it, of course. If Michelle's in a position and she wants it, we're here for you. Okay, I appreciate that. We're going to get a deal. Oh my god, I'm so excited for you. Thank you, Laura. I feel like we need some formula just in case right. It doesn't have to try it as well. Oh, okay. We're making for a try. You need to give it a shot. Okay. Okay. I'll get ready for that. I like that rule. I like that rule. Okay. So many things that you're used to. We'll talk again. Okay, so going back to my question about brand, basically I just want to understand what have you learned about building a brand and when do you think it is important to invest there? You know, it depends on what your product is. But the first thing I've learned about about it is you have to build a brand that connects with what your customers are going through in the experience. I once had someone say to me, think about who your customer is and that one customer, the exact person is going to wake up tomorrow morning and there's going to be three things that are just playing on them in the back their mind, the things that keep them up at night. And if you're not solving for one of those, then you're going to be finding a way to like build a brand and to get in the way of that, get in the way of their mindset. Have them remember who you are, what you're about. And it was very clear to us that everything from who our brand was, what it stood for, the positioning needed to be something that parents were really finding as a struggle in that first year in feeding. So you see it in our messaging, you see it in our creative. I have no desire to bombard people with something that isn't part of those top three things that they're experiencing. Otherwise, we will have companies out there and browns out there being loud for no reason. And I think that's also that's continued to help us in every time we have to reframe or relaunch something, to keep remembering what do they care about, let's build a brand for them. And really like that, that is such a good reminder of just, you're not going to convince someone they have a problem unless you're just like spending endless money, hammering to their head. There's a new problem. If you connect to something they already know is a problem and just make it clear. This is a solution to a problem. Life gets a lot easier. That's right. Although I know that you also have to kind of fight this like breastfeeding, just like breastfeeding is the best kind of thing. So in a sense, you also have to convince people, this isn't what you get as. Yeah. And then I, you know, what's the, the same like if you're explaining you're losing. And I think there's a part of this where there's going to be a large group of people that are always going to be in the mindset that breast is the only way to do it. And anyone who does otherwise is doing second best. And I'm not there to try and convince them. I think a part of this is amplifying those that are in need of our products that are the 83 percent using formula, make sure that they feel heard. But that has been learning. I mean, that's been a huge brand learning. Like, how do you not lean into our amplified the voices that shouldn't be heard? And in many ways, just get distracted by it. That's really interesting. And I don't know how much you want to talk about this. But I know initially, like the brand strategy was basically like breast is not best formula is just as good. And what I'm hearing is you kind of realize, you're not going to convince people that. And it's more lean into people that are ready to understand. Yeah. And I think another like major belief I have is no brand. And I do fundamentally believe there's no brand should ever be in a position of pointing fingers to something that's better or worse. Our only job, I wish politics would also do this. Our only job is to talk about what we do. And why we exist and why we believe our product is good. And I would say the flip is the same formula. If a mother out there has access to another brand of formula that is more accessible, maybe more affordable. And it suits their baby, then good for them. And I should never be a company in a position pointing to a competitor or another way of feeding saying that it's worse off ever. Today's episode is brought to you by Assembly AI. If you're looking to build AI powered features in your audio and video products, then you need to know about Assembly AI, which makes it easy to transcribe and understand speech at scale. But I love about Assembly AI, as you can use their simply API to access the latest AI breakthroughs from top tier research labs. Producting that's startups and enterprises are using Assembly AI to automatically transcribe and summarize phone calls and virtual meetings, detect topics in podcasts, pinpoint when sensitive content is spoken and lots more. All of Assembly AI's models which are accessed through their API are production ready. So many PMs I know are considering or already building with AI. And Assembly AI is the fastest way to build with AI for audio use cases. Now's the time to check out Assembly AI, which makes it easy to bring the highest accuracy transcription, plus valuable insights to your customers, just like Spotify, CalRail, and Writer, due for theirs. Visit Assembly AI.com slash Lenny to try their API for free and start testing their models with their no code playground. That's Assembly AI.com slash Lenny. Something else I heard about in the way you operate as you, speaking of brand, is you brand internal? Things, can you just talk about what that's all about? Oh my god, this is like, I feel like a secret sauce of just like how to like get you don't have the time. And I do. This is I really, really do believe the power of branding the mundane is so successful. I mean, we brand it to be fair. I actually feel like this was a page out of the Airbnb book. Do you remember going back early days when we were doing like a customer service deep dives? Like what were the issues that customers were having? And we branded a program called AirDives. Do you remember AirDives? Yeah. And this program just became this thing where everyone wanted to know on a Friday. What was the latest AirDive? And really what an AirDive was was an analysis of customer service tickets and customer service pain points. But how much better is AirDive than a customer service analysis? So I think a lot of learnings on just the power of branding and storytelling, your workflows and your frameworks and what it means to do your job often keeps people motivated too. And it creates memory, you know, recall a lot better too. So when you look at our Slack channels, they're all like, you know, I don't even want to name them because I'm going to get you know, it was going to ask. No, I'd love some examples. And I know they're going to sound ridiculous to an outsider. But what are some examples of things you can do? You can say like Bobby Blink or like what's your naming convention? Oh my god, project Shamrock. I'm not going to tell you what that's about project lumberjack. Oh, God be 2022. It's your foot. I can give you so much insight into what these are. And you know, I'll give you, you know, an example of it. It's, we have like legal approvals that need to get made and these legal approvals on content claims have to happen. And I was like, okay, well, how do we make sure everyone sticks to the quality SOP that legal one set for all of the claims we have to have in place? So we created a program called the Secret Shopping Program and our regulatory legal team go out and they do their own secret shopping once a month. And then they report back on any misleading claims or ones that aren't fully understood, the Bobby needs to go back and update. But having a secret shopping meeting is very different to potentially coming in and listening to legal report out in your claims misapps. Speaking of legal misapps and copy nuances, one of my favorite memories of you is I was in in San Francisco and to visit Darro outside I think the mill. And you were just like running by heading somewhere and we started chatting you were heading I believe to the warehouse that you're manufacturing been early versions of Bobby. Early the FDA showed up and shut you down because of some misleading communication in the news as you're launching said, I love to hear that story because they are. By the way, how you just transitioned from one example I just gave to that was absolutely exceptional speaking of content misapps. I appreciate that. This is why you're such good podcast host. Let me. Thank you very much. Oh my god, that moment I do remember bumping into you. I was in an identity crisis. Yeah, early days I think the one big learning I've had is that when you're in an industry where you are disrupting, I mean truly disrupting the status quo, you're going to be met with some reactions people or in our case government agencies who aren't happy about what you're doing. It was early days we just launched a pilot and the FDA showed up at our warehouse and they didn't like the way that we were labeling the product. We had to pull all of our products from the market. We had to relabel everything and we had to work with the agency for another year before we could bring our products back. For startup worlds, that was a huge, I wouldn't even say it was a pivot. It was a patient pause thinking sure that we could get back on track and build intentions with the FDA again. Another example of slowth, maybe. Another example of slowth, yes. How did you personally state motivated and keep morale up within the company during that period? Well, I found out I was pregnant with my third child right after, you're free. But it's not, there's something about also growing your personal life while professionally is happening. There's a little bit of give and take as well, right? So sometimes in moment of professional slowth, you might find that there's personal growth. That's exactly what I found. So I mean, yeah, during this journey, I went on from being inspired by my first kid where I wasn't able to breastfeed and then had two more along the journey. And I don't know, I've actually never spoken about this, but I do think there's a beautiful marriage in that personal and professional growth that you can have. You kind of need to find moments where you lean into one and maybe the other. And then there's moments like, I kind of feel like I'm going through right now where both of them are just on fire and you can slow them down. Might be a good time to chat about that. So you have this fast growing business. You have three kids. Your partner is also a founder, also very busy. How do you manage all of these things? You know, that question is actually probably the most common question I get from new founders. Those that are aspiring entrepreneurs on just like, how do you do it all? I mean, a lot of it's your infrastructure. It's your super actually. Hold on a second, I'm going to do some it. I don't think you've done the podcast before. Hold on, this is my EA. I'm going to pull this woman in. Everyone just needs to say how to Kendra. This woman. I'm introducing her because the power of a support system to be able to do what you do. I mean, you are an extension, my leverage, my everything, and never leave. I'm going anywhere. I'd be so screws. Well, and everyone should like not only know the power and leverage of their person, but like the level of appreciation and celebration you need to have for them is just huge. I always feel celebrated. So thank you. I appreciate it. How do people find a Kendra of their own? That's, that's the beginning to be a big question. That could be a big run on like the poetry podcast, right? It was Lauren. Yes, that's right. There's no last names here. How do you find your Kendra? I will say, I mean, it took multiple interviews, and it's all about chemistry. I think it's about chemistry and finding somebody that you genuinely care about. Like I genuinely care about you, your heart, your kids, your family, and I think like finding that connection is really important. You know, it's also funny, too. I think like there's this feeling and I would hear this from folks, you know, how do you do it all? And I think we also just need to be very transparent. It takes a lot of work to do it all. I, as an operator, a very proud of the infrastructure I have built. I mean, we have calendars on our walls. We have calendars for our kids. We have, you know, back in fourth birthday planning. It's additional help in the house. My nanny is the other extension in our house. I mean, I don't know what we would do without Clifford. He is at everything for us. And I also have to see him as an extension to our parenting. But that is, I think the only way to get through the chaos and the only way to embrace the all is you actually need to put in the work to build the infrastructure, the systems, the frameworks. And then every month are sometimes in our case on a weekly basis. I have, I mean, my husband, we have a meeting every Sunday. It's walking through the agendas. You know, who's going to what Taikwondo classes this week or who's trading off on birthday parties or parent teacher meetings? Because you're right, a dual CEO found your household in three kids. It will age you fast if you don't have it. It also makes me think a little bit about what you were talking about earlier, where when things slow down a little bit in the business, there's an opportunity to lean into that part of life and then kind of get ahead on some stuff in theory, totally, totally. In terms of the business, I imagine you never started a D to C business before this. Also, you mentioned you've never formulated a baby formula prior to this. Clearly, it's working out. What's a lesson there, just like doing something you've never done, is that something you imagined is a good idea, maybe looking back like maybe it doesn't matter. What do you learn about just this idea of doing something totally new and different? I think one of the biggest beliefs is that an ounce of naivety will be your biggest like secret to success. And I think the word even naivety sometimes gets like a bad rap. But naivety is the definition of creativity and innovation and canvas and white space and opportunity. And I definitely went into starting this company with the level of naivety to how regulated it was to the stigma associated with it, to how hard it would be, but that has allowed me to continue to look at the status quo differently. I don't, because I don't fully understand it. And I have applied those same principles, even into how I hire people, because I do think, no, no, I'm wondering who's going to like watch this on my team. Because obviously, we have some specialists, but this is a generalist who make the world go round. I think sometimes putting the most unlikely people who have an ounce of naivety to what it takes to win and succeed are the ones that are going to drive the biggest impact. I love that. And it makes me think of a couple of things that I'll just share real quick. One is I was listening to an interview Mr. Beast, who is like the number one YouTube creator on TikTok. I think he's got the biggest TikTok viral. And he talked about how he's got this business he's building, which is like a new way of creating content. And anytime he hired someone from a traditional Hollywood movie-making established kind of background, he's like, oh, they, like, they know what they're doing. They're going to help me legitimize this thing, make a scale. He's like, every time they never work out, they just don't see what we're doing here. They don't understand how this is different. And they just let everything go. And he finds just finding really young, hungry, hardworking people that can learn and understand what he's done and to working a lot better. Always. The other interesting insight is I'm doing a series right now on B2B businesses and how the biggest B2B companies started. And so far, I'm fighting 70% of the founders had no specific background or skill in the area. They went into, to say it's security or sales or something like that. So there's a lot of a lot of examples of this. I give you one example of someone who's in C, who's just an absolute rock star. Our girl who leads marketing is an Emmy award news anchor. She's not your traditional marketer. She came in asking me to, you know, she was like, what does cat come in? You know, do we need to look at this LTV number? And the reason I wanted her in C was because she was the complete and piscestest to what we would normally define as a good performance marketer. I wanted someone in C, who got media, who got brand and storytelling. And she operates like a news anchor. And in many ways, I would look to the team that she's built and think that we may be have more of a media company than we do a marketing team. And that has been the fuel for the brand that you see today. A hundred percent. And then you hire unlike people in those positions and especially senior positions, they're going to exactly the same throughout the business as well. That is really interesting. Makes me think of being a bit also the browser company. We had the founder that company on here. And they have a storytelling team at the end within their company. They're jobless. Oh, the story. I love that. So you talked about how you're hiring people that aren't necessarily deep in a specific skill that you need them to do. What is it that you look for instead that you think is important for them to figure out what they need to doing? Curiosity. A lot of curiosity and just like openness to what's out there, I definitely look for people who have the ability to make decisions new fast and not get worried about the outcome. That is like the biggest learning in a startup. The secret is momentum, just keeping momentum. And if we try and perfect everything, like you just miss the boat. And I believe that, yeah, I mean, it's what's the common saying. Perfect is the enemy of good or something. And it really is. So I look for people who just want to do it, just get it done. Again, part of that is just like rolling up your sleeves and not questioning your job. When I find like in interviews and people are really questioning the lanes they're going to be in and the job they're going to do or I don't do that. That's saying I don't do that. Huge flag. You do do it. If you're joining this company, if you're within a certain work stream or a certain department and you're behind what the company is working on. In many ways, we need people who do do that. So I look for just optimistic doers. I love that. That's such a cool phrase of how to simplify what you want to hire. Just do our optimistic doers. There's so many people that just want that a big idea is right in pontificate strategy and you just need people doing the thing. 100% I call it intellectual ejaculation. If that's not allowed of the pod, give us you a half and totally why. That's allowed. I'll allow it. Thank you. Okay. So you're talking about momentum. Yeah. I want to talk about growth. A lot of this podcast is about growth strategy. How companies grow. Yeah. You're building a D to C company. D to C is a really hard. There's been so many attempts. Most fail. Most people can't figure out how to do it scalably. So many challenges. What have you learned about growing? A D to C company. What's worked well for you? That's narrative of like D to C isn't working. Our D to C is over. D to C is dead. Hills me because or being way too reductionists do not like message. D to C is in dead. Just the approach for how people did D to C is a bit dated. We should not be paying for every customer. And we should be very careful that people aren't getting hooked on the drug that is paid marketing and performance marketing. And that I think that drug. And then obviously as we start to see changes on the way certain performance works, it just becomes more expensive. And people are resetting how they do performance marketing. The short of it is D to C is not dead. How you drive people to D to C. How you acquire customers. How you build sustainable businesses. That needs to change. And what is it that you've done that allows you to do that. I mentioned a lot of it is worth a mouth, which you know everyone always wants. We need how do you more want. Yeah. So what is what's worked? How do you do that? And well, I mean, the three major pieces of it is that the focus on kind of commerce, content and community commerce. So commerce, content and community. But most D to C businesses have put commerce at the top of their list. We flipped it. It's now content, community and commerce. And building good content that is really smart SEO that has, you know, the ability to drive people back to your site to be able to build you as a salt leader. That's really hard. It takes a lot of work. As an example, five years ago, we started a platform called Milk Drunk. Separate to Bobby, Milk Drunk blog. And the reason why we started it is because we realized that there was a dirt of education in the world of formula out there. And what people were really looking for was good recommendations, usability charts, how to make formula, how long does formula last. So we wanted to become the content leaders in that with the hypothesis, and it's holding true five years later, with the hypothesis that if we win on content and as a thought leader, that will drive back to Bobby. And today, I'm going to give you a totally random example. If you do like a cursory Google search for something like, how long does formula last? Milk Drunk is showing up between the CDC and the bump on the first page of Google. That SEO work in that content building and Paul leadership and credibility does take a lot of work. And in the meantime, I've had to like swap away requests to put another 100,000 and another 300,000 every month into paid marketing. Because the moment that drug starts, it's very easy to keep it going. Yeah, I think every music area to great example that during COVID, they shut down paid growth. And I think they've turned it on, but it's a tiny component, which is really unusual and really rare. Where you have paid growth, you're sending tons of money, Facebook, and then you stop. And so hard to stop because growth slows and no one ever wants to do that. And it's interesting coming back to using a crisis and opportunity or being used that as an opportunity to get off that drug. That's right. Yeah. If you think about the pie chart of what helps Bobby grow, how much of it would you say is just like, make it awesome product that people talk about with other moms and it spreads like that versus SEO and content and paid. 60% of it is your is your product and the package around the product, which is your brand, right? So even if you did nothing to market your brand, your product and brand is 60% of it. And then the last 40% is how do you get the word out there? How do you ensure kind of the word of mouth, mom, the gets mom? That has to happen. That fly will will only happen if they're able to look at a product that they fully believe in and a brand that speaks to them. And without those, you're going to be a fast fashion company, which is also my worst nightmare, the fear that people get distracted by the 40% and the 60% actually is just mediocre. Something I wasn't planning to ask, but I thought it'd be interesting and we can cut this up. It's not interesting as Emily Auster. She is one of the, I think, pioneers of breastfeeding is not as great as people say necessarily. As I've been really important to Bobby and this industry, what do you think of Emily Auster? I'm a heat fan. So I hope you're also big fan. We are massive fans of Emily and Emily is a massive fan of Bobby. She is my idol. She is, she's the one who got me through my first year of pregnancy and then beyond. And she is being a really, really important voice. And actually, she has set the stage for the power of data to bust myths. And just like you said, like she's come out and said, like there is no study, no study at all out there that you can point to that can qualify why breastfeeding is better. And to have an economist, a professor come out and to be able to underscore that and point to where that is the case. So why it is the case? I mean, it's so much better than a company to be fair. Companies are brands coming out trying to say that. So I am acutely aware that as a business as an as a brand, sometimes we need to bring in other credible voices. My god, Emily, is one of those. I love it. Okay, great. I'm glad you love her. I've been reading all our books. I think I was just writing a section. I love it. You're not a dodgy. And you're like all of them. Family for the first, the first two, the first two. Crochet, I'll start, I think. And I was actually just reading the breastfeeding section. And it's only one of the only remaining benefits of breastfeeding is less cowl farts and creating methane. And unlike unrelated to your child, it's a cowl component. We do want to cut down on the part of you. I do. Not what I thought of when I thought of why should I go with formula or not? Maybe just zooming out a little bit and taking a close. Are there any other lessons that you've learned along this journey about building a company, hiring, team building, anything along those lines, creating urgency, creating momentum? Yeah. I mean momentum, momentum really is it. You know, we, we did this a good bit at Airbnb too. I think as a founder of the CEO or for any leader out there, your job is not just to like keep people going in momentum. Your job is to make momentum. And sometimes that momentum has to be manufacturers. And that has been one of my biggest lessons on just like how as leaders and people starting companies, how do you force yourself and sometimes when it's early on, you're actually just doing it to yourself, creating manufacture deadlines and launch dates. The amount of times people say to me, why are we launching this May 1st? And I'm like, just because we said it, we don't do it now. We may never do it. It was something we were talking about the last day on just how important it is to look at like the fuel that keeps you going and how you have to kind of force those milestones to get you there. Yeah, I would say manufacture yourself, some momentum. I so agree with that. One of my favorite things and one of our former colleagues Vanessa taught me this, which is just like, let's all set an arbitrary deadline right now. And just make it clear. This is just arbitrary, but it's useful. It's so true. Well, with that Laura, we've reached our very exciting lighting round. I don't know if I told you this was coming, but it is, we've got six questions for you. Are you ready for exciting lighting round? I think I am. Let's do it. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? One recently, great by choice. The author of from good to great, amazing. Awesome. Really, really good frameworks. Yes, that's right. Really good frameworks in there. Metabolical, very specific into the world of health, health care. Actually, very specifically the take away Metabolical is we don't have a health care crisis in this country. We have a health crisis. And it really makes you think about the source, food, and how we live our lives. It's amazing. And then I think you're really a good traditional one going back to just like brand and for people who are really just looking for a good foundation. I love purple cow. I think I have it in my back. You do. There it is. Tiny little book. So good. That is so good. Yeah. Also, we could mention Emily Alster's book, where I had it expecting better. I didn't shit. Expecting better is, is a good classic. You're a list of reminding me of a new book by Peter Tia that I don't know if you've seen called Outlive. I think it's called to be a longevity not a live longer and all the way to science and have a little longer life. But anyway, that's my answer. I'm asking you a question. So let's move on to the next question. Favorite, recent movie or TV show. Bad sisters. Bad sisters? No. About a group of Irish sisters getting up to trouble. Highly recommend it. Amazing. What's a favorite interview question that you like to ask when you're hiring people? Teach me something. I should just talk about that today. And teach me something. Yeah. I love getting someone to not related to work, not related to their job. Something in your life. Something you find interesting. Just teach me about it. What is it that you look for in their answer that gives you a sense that they're someone that you want to hear? Creative, but also just their ability to explain something. And it is a huge indicator. I mean, I'll never forget one guy teaching me how to cook the perfect steak. And now, every time I cook a steak, I go back to the craft you described it to someone being able to teach me the foundation of Latin. But if someone's unable to take one thing that they find is core to who they are, what they've done, or what they understand, and their inability to explain that to you, they may struggle. I want to learn how to cook a perfect steak. I'm going to have to interview at some point and ask you about that. What's a favorite product you recently discovered that you love? And especially if it's a baby product, that'll be a promise. I mean, yeah, I think free to baby the amazing. Oh. The no sucker? Okay, great. And actually no sorry, the no sucker. That's terrible. It's the snotsucker. Okay, great. You really are really, really, really need this, Lenny. Your poor little boy is going to get blocked up. And you're going to want to get out that sucker and suck on it, get it out. I can see you quickly looking for the next question. You need to run away from the snotsucker. So I'll leave you with that. Perfect. We'll just say, we'll call the episode that's not sucker. So many options. Okay. Next question. What's something relatively minor that you've changed in the way that you build ship product that was minor, but had a tremendous impact on your team's ability to execute and ship? More recently, a sink work, moving away from meeting culture and being able to be at a position where we can like work, a sink, whether it's one hour sprint over Slack, make decisions and go back and forth 20 people. And then everyone's made a decision by the end of the hour and we're moving forward. Is there a tool that helps you do that? Or is it just in Slack? Here's the question I'm trying to answer. I want every so often we try and introduce tools. And then it's like we've over processed the entire thing. What we really just need to do is all just like get our head into the moment we're in and browned it and get it done. So even though I think we've introduced some tools, I know we use them in some video ones as well. And a little bit removed sometimes from everyone working through these tools, but I'm in the Slack world for most. Final question. What is your best advice for us? Soon to be parent aka me. Higher, a sitter who you love that you want to have on board every Thursday night and keep your date night with Michelle. Whatever your date night is and just don't worry about the price because the date is worth it, but just lock it in and do it. We actually have a date night currently with another couple who has two kids. And so we could just maintain that. How early do you hire sitter to do that in their age? Second week. Second week, okay. Great. No first three. Okay, maybe maybe second month. Told you he depends on how you guys are. No, okay. I don't know how she's feeling. But I would say some of his just need to rip the band aid. You need to go for it. Even if it means the two were just going out for a quick meal and you're coming back. Keep your date night. Laura, this was as fun and insightful as I expected. I'm going to go try some bobby. I'm going to go buy snotsuckers. Thank you so much for spending time here. Two final questions where I can focus on you online if they want to reach out. Learn more. Learn more about bobby potentially and how can listeners be useful to you? Okay. Well, the first thing I'm going to say how listeners can be useful. I am hiring a growth product manager right now. And we are really focused on optimization. So now I'm moving away from everything I just said. And I want to specialists who truly grow good at growth optimization and how folks can find us our website is Hi, Bobby, H. I, Bobby, B. O. B. B. I. E. .com. And if folks just want to reach out to me, I would highly recommend just sending me an email. Laura at hi, bobby.com. And for the hiring position, how do they go apply for that and learn more about it? Great question. I'm assuming it's on our careers page on the website. We'll make sure it's there before this. All goes out. Laura, this is amazing. Thank you so much for being here. It's not too pleasure. Let me, this is so fun. It's my pleasure and goodbye, bro. Bye. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.