# Sub Club Podcast: Unlocking Higher Prosumer Subscription Retention — Colette Nataf

Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyKqV7FnlhY
Duration: 49 min
Language: English
Words: 9496
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/gyKqV7FnlhY

---

[0:00] [Music] [Applause] hey you're listening to the sub club podcast a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing subscription app businesses we'll share insider secrets from the top subscription apps on the app stores let's get into the show hello i'm your host david barnard and with me as always revenue cat ceo jacob heidi our guest today is colette nataf head of growth at mile iq and co-founder of lightning ai from founding multiple startups to spending more than a hundred million dollars on marketing and growth roles at several great companies colette has spent her career using data science to grow businesses on the podcast we talked with colette

[0:44] about selling mile iq to microsoft then buying it back experimenting with an unlimited marketing budget and unlocking higher retention with a focus on prosumers hey colette thank you so much for being on the podcast today i wanted to dive right in so we're going to talk about mile iq and super excited to talk to you about that but before we get there i wanted to start with your company lightning ai tell us a little bit about the impetus from starting that company and and um and what the what lightning ai is absolutely well thank you first of all thank you so much for having me here um

[1:20] i love talking about mile iq but also love talking about lightning ai so it's a great first question um so i i will say that these things actually go hand in hand so i used to work for mileiq way back when like seven years ago and uh while i was there one of the biggest problems that we faced is that we needed to optimize two events down the funnel uh but we didn't have enough data to send through quickly enough to facebook so it would take like whatever 30 days for users to upgrade but we needed information on day one and day seven uh to be able to

[1:58] make the the right decisions so um i ended up writing a whole bunch of code and learning what an api was and also learning how to write in python in order to try and answer this question and really figure out what what are those metrics on day one and day seven how do they end up rolling into our day 30 cac numbers uh and then being able to optimize and set bids accordingly this was also seven years ago so all of facebook has has really changed now um but i at the time it was like this is kind of hard i wonder if other people are facing

[2:35] the same problems and if they need help in similar ways so um i left my laq and went to another company intercom where i ran demand generation and what i found was exactly the same issue so people needed to have a cac estimate on day one and day seven for attribution windows but we weren't getting our full funnel metrics until way later so i left intercom and started lightning ai really with the goal of how do we fix these problems about data um needing to be early and as early as possible and how do we use data science in order to do that so that was where we started i think

[3:17] like all startups we pivoted probably a million times in between um was the original goal and what we ended up doing uh and i think a lot of that had to do with like changes in facebook but also changes in what people needed um and so what we found is that as facebook evolved and as their data science improved we didn't need really so much of a bidding algorithm but what we did need was a way of targeting users in a really effective manner and being able to switch those targeting options and kind of go through them really rapidly so just like with creative testing and

[3:51] creative fatigue we found that there's also audience fatigue and this is a tm audience audience fatigue coined by lightning ai so what we do now is we generate interest groups and create ad sets within a campaign to automatically test those interest groups so that we can do as rapid of testing as possible and try and find arbitrage opportunities between small audiences and the right prices to pay very cool um i'm curious like how has that evolved in the past year it's kind of the question on everybody's mind still in 2022 is that without tracking transparency and other privacy initiatives like feels like the ground is still shaking beneath us so i'm

[4:38] curious like what has changed in the last year for lightning yeah it's a great question um and the answer is not so interesting which is really that nothing has changed uh so when we started thinking about interest targeting um we did the math and there were i think like 84 quadrillion different options for targeting like something just like enormous um and you know facebook says like oh we're deprecating a hundred thousand it's like it's not a big deal there's still trillions left in the world so i mean yes you can't you know target by race anymore but like maybe you shouldn't have been doing that anyway

[5:19] so so i think it's just better overall but the smaller interest groups and um really like any like large interest group as well um those are all still around and i don't see them going anywhere yeah that's fascinating and i do want to ask too because i always always find it interesting to ask about um failures about lessons learned through failure because we always talk about like oh what succeeded i'm just curious you know with all the different you know pivots that you've gone through at lightning lightning ai and and you know anticipating att and working through that and all this other stuff that's going on

[5:55] um any kind of hard-won lessons uh off the top of your mind if you're not a salesperson don't pretend like you are and don't make a product for enterprise sales did you learn because uh what was your like you were you were essentially offering this like probably is like a sas powered semi-services oriented sale and and yeah try it and it was a lot like i'm guessing really long sales cycles which it was like it was so frustrating it's just like it's not a fun experience doing enterprise sales and we were like going to events which i mean now thank goodness we pivoted away from that

[6:35] because like we wouldn't be a business if that was our only acquisition strategy but it was a lot of like events we had like dinners we would do like co-marketing things and it was like such a drain um like psychologically and emotionally for me it was just like not my jam um and so we actually purposefully moved down market which not many companies say um but it was a really good experience for for us and it loud it allowed us to work with um companies who were much less demanding uh and also really provide a lot more value to their businesses it means a lot more to somebody who

[7:18] has kind of no other options um versus you know being able to just like hire more people and kind of throw more marketing managers with the problem of figuring out facebook and we're able to work with a lot of companies that can't really afford to hire an agency but kind of need something more than just like an individual um or even one of the founders like running facebook ads and it's been really nice it's been a really nice niche that we fell into yeah i'll uh jump in and share it as well that i was really grateful nice to see jacob robert founder grateful for the pandemic

[7:51] but uh i i went to one basically one conference or two conferences before the pandemic as an enterprise you know basically we didn't think of it as enterprise at the time but i i have to agree like i get after two or three days of like standing at a booth and like you know whatever i i'm not it's like i'm it's for the birds i come from the same world i come from i come from like mass user acquisition b2c and like one day i was like oh let's make a let's make a subscription infrastructure thing and then i yeah i woke up like oh now i'm running an

[8:22] enterprise sales company it's fine it's good it's good challenges but i feel constantly like uh yeah constantly ill-fitted for for this role but uh you know we learn we try to figure it out so i'm speaking a conference um in june in vegas and first of all i'm flying down and back in the same day but i'm also just like so excited to not have to like around with all these people and be like let me listen to your story i'm so interested you know and i'm just like really excited anybody who's been to a revenue cap booth yeah i'll stop you to remember your crap

[8:56] booth absolutely if you're there i do not think that when when you come to a booth yeah but yeah no it's hard i mean i guess i mean it's worth kind of transitioning into the a bit of your story and we were we were uh discussing before we recorded that i believe we met back in probably 2015 when you were at mileiq initially just to set the stage i was working at this company called elevate which i probably say on every other podcast but just to tell people again um which was you know we were a mobile subscription service and we were trying to figure out

[9:30] user acquisition and we really had no idea what we were doing at all and i don't remember how we got connected with mile iq maybe it was through one of our investors or something but i we knew that mine like you was one of these companies that kind of had figured it out or at least like kind of early um and i believe you and one of your your colleagues came in and talked to us about it um and and with some of this stuff that that you were kind of mentioning at lightning ai as well i don't think i don't think it necessarily uh stuck because we didn't really get user

[9:59] acquisition figured out i think until after i left which maybe i was the problem but uh but but yeah i found i found i found it interesting so so so yeah maybe tell us a little bit i guess about how you ended up or your time at mile iq like what you were doing there and um because i think when i think of mileiq they were one of these very early companies that proved out the i don't know if you would call personal subscription service or consumer sas but it was like one of these first like semi prosumer subscribe on the app store at scale um so yeah tell tell us a little bit

[10:37] about uh about your time there and how and how you got back you know what's crazy is maya like you we started 10 years ago and like so much has changed in the app store it's totally different but 10 years ago you know you could kind of like stumble your way through and find a new app um and that was like a real strategy on the app store was just like being you know new and like being top ranking for the day in the finance category because people would find us that way and so so much is is interesting to kind of see like what what happened and what did we

[11:15] build out because it was 10 years ago versus like what are the things that we can do now um so i mean i appreciate your your kind words about us figuring it out but at the same time like we were a 60 a year app and no one knew if people were gonna pay that and i remember our investors would come in at my like you all the time and they were like you need a 99 plan and it can be the worst plan in the world but you need one because you're losing out on market share and i actually don't know that that's true i

[11:43] mean we're you know now i'm like oh let's do testing and figure it out but i don't really know that that was a thing but it was a big deal that we made an app for 60 and we were able to acquire users and you know make money from that um it's also super interesting because at the time like all of our users came from from paid i mean we had no like no one was searching for mile iq no one had heard of mile like you and it's not really like an easy name to stumble into so um so much of our so much of our growth

[12:18] was really through paid advertising which was really um the the way that we figured out how to do it and it was one of the reasons ultimately why microsoft wanted to acquire us and i won't tell you specifics about how much they were paying or how much we were paying per install but i will say that they were paying 10 times what we were paying um and so it was like very interesting that we made uh this app that people were paying kind of a lot of money for um back before people were paying for apps really at all except maybe like a you know one dollar game

[12:53] yeah i mean that was the i think what we were trying to we we have very similar story in that sense like we had working on this language learning app that was didn't have subscriptions it was kind of a low price point and yeah we found there was challenges there right and um yeah i remember that being our interest in my like you to begin with i think because you know nobody had proven that anybody would pay anything significant for apps right there were a few like niche pro tools that were maybe 30 dollars right one time um but then also like no there just wasn't a lot of examples out there of of

[13:27] prosumer for lack of a better term or like apps that were actually useful and part of somebody's day-to-day job right which mile tracking was was one of them right um and and then also i think perfect timing right yeah i'm pretty sure it was like us and invoice to go yeah and it was which like yes yeah and then also like i think at that time too and i'm curious like how you solved you know to go back to what it was like to build a subscription app before revenue cat because i don't know how anybody does it but uh we but we were doing it like did you run into a

[13:59] lot of issues there i mean that was really wild west like early days like there wasn't tools like revenue count or anything else um did you have to figure that all out in-house did you have a lot of stumblings there or was it was it a lot of investment well i mean we were just using you know we only had like apple google pay options there wasn't anything else and there wasn't really any other options right um so i i mean in terms of like there were just challenges that don't exist anymore like we couldn't do promo codes in the app and so then we had to figure out

[14:33] okay well like how do we get promo codes and how does that get integrated and like we want to run a pricing test we have to like list that in the app store and then other people see it and they're like why is you know like why is there a three dollar option when i only see a six dollar option um but i think the biggest change uh is really that now you can force people to do a free trial and at the time you couldn't uh so that was like a big thing and then the second thing was like also 10 years ago you had to have a free version of

[15:09] the app and it couldn't be like a free trial it had to be indefinitely forever you had to be able to provide value for free for your users i forgot about that i have not we're still a little haunted by it crazy times yeah yeah yeah i forgot how incremental um the evolution to the market we have now which is like subscription's everything yeah very like laissez-faire as far as like what you do and what kind of software you sell and and i remember when we were transitioning or elevate the subscriptions having to like kind of make some changes and arguments to like yeah oh we have to have content and it's

[15:47] released quarterly and like all these things before apple finally like you know i think they started to taste how good that service's revenue is and they were just like okay let it go but yeah i mean it was it was it was certainly a different time in there you know i mean a lot of credit to the mileiq team for kind of just figuring it out uh because you know now it's it's it's easy enough to hire people and copy what others are doing and there's a million apps out there that are doing user acquisition and it's kind of now a science and an industry but i don't think in 20 you

[16:17] know even in 2015 especially on the subscription side like i don't think i don't think it was uh yeah nearly the same as it is now yeah well funny that you brought it up about the copying because like one of the most of the questions that i had coming into this now was do we have the right price and so i'm like looking at our competitors you know what prices do they have and they have the same prices that my like q had and i'm like oh you guys like one come on and two like is this the right price like did anybody run a pricing test and figure it out or

[16:51] are we just like all flying blind from mile iq 10 years ago so i feel like we have to be kind of the drivers of the industry again and really figure out like what is the right price because we don't know yeah and speaking of being uh the drivers of the industry again um i didn't notice it because i don't think really any kind of tech sites picked it up or news sites picked it up but microsoft sold mile iq back to the founders and that's part of you rejoining in the fall so tell us a little bit about um that how that transpired as much as you

[17:25] can obviously and um about you rejoining mile iq yeah crazy is a crazy story um so i would say that no one expected it but it's been a fun and exciting like cool byproduct of this um so uh we were required in 2015 and microsoft spent a lot of money on marketing like a lot of there was a lot of money i mean i remember i was doing the projections and it went from like what if we spent 10 million dollars a year to what if we had all the money that you ever wanted um and that was a cool ques that was like a cool question that we

[18:06] got to do and got to be a part of at microsoft um but i think ultimately what ended up happening is that uh microsoft was like i don't think this is going to be a billion dollar line item on our revenue sheet and they're a trillion dollar company now and if you're not a billion dollar company you kind of like don't make the mark um so even though we are a profitable business uh and we have a lot of users we catch we're gonna catch our 100 billionth mile driven this year which is pretty crazy um so we have all of these like amazing things but uh for microsoft it just

[18:46] they didn't see it as something that was gonna move the needle um so they reached back out to our founders dan and chuck and said you know hey i think that this is a really good business for someone it's kind of like not the right fit for us right now um and so they sold it back so um thank you microsoft for allowing that to happen uh they are still investors in the company and they get our uh weekly investor updates i assume so you know keep in touch i'll uh i'll interject here and just say that like you've seen this is a pattern i've seen

[19:26] i've seen a few times and it often is can be really helpful for the company right because it's like you know a big corporation like that it's easy to get lost in the strategy and if you don't have the right people in charge like really taking it's hard to make something grow unless it's like so far and away already ahead and it's just a machine and they can just pump cash into it and it's going to grow but like that's not i don't know mobile apps that are like that like mobile is fickle and the industry has changed in five years like nobody's would have been able to

[19:54] keep up with it inside of embedded in a big company um so i'm really glad to hear that there's a lot of ways that can go they could have just shuttered it right they could have sold it to private equity which isn't always a bad thing but i i think getting it back into founders hands and not to be like biased here but i always think that the person that especially if you have a five year break where like you think about all the things that you wish you could have done and now you might know that you actually have that chance that's really that's really kind of exciting i mean look at

[20:19] this reddit's a great example of where this happened like reddit was bought by conde nast like very early um and it kind of did okay but not great under conde nast and then the founders came back in and now they're they've seen a renaissance and they're they're going to ipo soon so yeah it's not actually a terrible path to take right and it's a second chance right for a company to to you know i don't know what the goals are and now with with foundership in mind and stuff but uh yeah i think it's it's exciting when uh especially when you think of the way these companies like mileiq like

[20:51] a lot of our customer companies are structured it's like you enter in these long-term relationships with customers right you're saying like hey put especially for something like mile tracking like people have years and years of data in there now right you you want that protected and you want somebody really focused on being the the caretaker of that data and that experience so yeah making sure the asset ended up in the hands of somebody who's going to keep investing that's that's yeah to feel good it's a feel-good story i wanted to dig into that a little bit and ask more about that long-term lifetime value um and i don't know if you've had

[21:26] a chance to dig into the data or you know how you think about this in marketing but you know i would imagine at this point you do have at least a small cohort of users who've been subscribed continuously for 10 years um so what does that look like just from a you know really understanding what a lifetime value is but then also you know how how does that play into kind of return on ad spend and how you think about marketing a customer acquisition when you do have proof that some of these people are gonna stay subscribed for for over a decade yeah absolutely so what's great about it is we basically

[22:00] have like four subscription types right so we have monthly annual on android and ios and what's great is that we know the real lifetime value like we can say how much are we going to make in one year three years in five years and we can pick what we want for our payback period and we can determine right away from that like what is our max um that we're willing to afford and having that amount of data is is pretty crazy i will say that there's like some interesting you know caveats so we're always thinking like what is the right year to look back for like the historical

[22:35] that's gonna match this year so we've been like well we need the right like ad spend you know like not covered when no one was driving and we need the right kind of ratio between paid and organic so we've earmarked a few that are like our sample years but we have five years of data from them so we know we know the real lifetime value um and it's a luxury that we definitely didn't didn't have before so there's a lot less estimation uh and there's a lot more reality it almost feels kind of like e-commerce buying uh where you can actually say like i want this specific row as um versus

[23:12] typical subscriptions where you're saying like i want my payback period to be xyz and you're you know kind of like well i've been around for two years and i want a three-year payback so great job yeah and then do you uh specifically look at different cohorts within that to like do you separate out kind of more business enterprise focus versus maybe like small businesses that kind of come and go is there kind of different churn patterns and different uh retention among the these different cohorts so while we were at microsoft we developed an enterprise product and one of the biggest attractions for microsoft for this enterprise product was that our

[23:55] churn was much lower than traditional microsoft office and so we actually started giving away mile iq for free as a way of increasing uh their their retention and i don't know many apps can say that uh so that was um that was a really cool kind of side unexpected results of of what happened with my laq and microsoft um so i would say that our enterprise product isn't old enough that we really have true data on that side um and honestly like we're a consumer first company um our biggest segment of users are solopreneurs freelancers um and it's gonna stay that way um i guess at least until we're

[24:43] proven otherwise um but those those people tend to have a profession where they drive for work and so they're sticking around because they're not going to change unless they change their job like if you're a real estate agent you're going to drive for work today you're going to drive work tomorrow you're going to drive for work until you retire um and so that's not really changing i think it'll be interesting as we get more exposure into this enterprise product kind of what that means uh and i think one of the biggest questions for for us as a company right now and kind of for the next probably like year or so is it's

[25:16] kind of like who are we gonna focus on um i would say we're very much in the mindset of like back to basics right now but we have all these enterprise users from microsoft and so we're also building a product that's going to suit their needs as well and i think be a lot more user friendly so we do have the two the two sides to to this marketplace um and we're just gonna see what ends up happening it will also say it's like super interesting to see um what happens with people from certain companies that clearly allow their employees to expense mile iq because we'll have like

[25:52] from a large like contracting company we'll have you know like 100 different emails and like 20 of them are still are still um reliable and other 80 bounce uh and so you know you can kind of see this trajectory and the data of like what's happening with these companies over time with their employees over time um and and also kind of who's driving for work but you also see the virality of it so it's really cool to be able to say like okay we got this person coming in today from xyz company and then like they signed up five of their co-workers um and to me

[26:29] that's like the interesting part of the enterprise model is not so much like how do we do this enterprise thing and i think i'm over it like we're all over it right but um i i think it's a really interesting question to think about like if we if we think about this enterprise product kind of like a referral mechanism how does that change our acquisition strategy and are we able to tap into these people who are maybe like you know super referrers at their at their company um and see what we're able to do with that i am i think the this profile it's fascinating because like we talk to a

[27:04] lot of different apps and i'm excited across all of the segments that we serve but i have to admit that like this solo solo worker solo entrepreneur or like individual there's a lot of really interesting themes here with mobile sas and this particularly this profile because i've seen in other companies that serve via app store play store are serving this kind of like work use case there's a lot of what one i say retention tends to be a lot higher you know stickiness like cac goes down and tension of the users go up it's much clearer what you're trying to sell um there's a value because you know

[27:39] people are using it to make money they're using it to do their jobs like a lot of things go easier than if not to say that there isn't like you can't build good consumer businesses that are more for entertainment or like uh other other purposes but seems to hey like if you take that that going up market but you don't go all the way to enterprise where it gets crazy and painful but you stop in the middle where it's like okay like we're building something for your business and then you get this really sweet spot just like prosumer sweet spot and then you end up with cool stuff too

[28:04] like like what you're mentioning with with you know somebody signs up with a work account but you know when they leave they're probably gonna continue as long as they can keep using that software they'll take it to their next company right and you see this a little bit with like real enterprise sas tools like if somebody uses some you know like looker for example i'll say like you know when i left elevate i brought looker there i liked it a lot i came to my new company i brought it i brought it to revenue cat because it's a great it's a tool i like to use right that's not a big scale

[28:32] that's a six-figure outlet to like get that but you can think of these little tools in the same way it's like okay this is my personal work stack it's like mile iq it's like whatever and they bring it into a new place but that's an interesting like i guess like promo codes referrals and things like that but it's an interesting uh kind of motion to try to market towards i would say compared to just like trying to like bang get people on the app store and get their you know get them the first time they're searching like you know mileage tracker or whatever there's also this like how

[29:01] do i how do i like increase referrals and stuff like this um which have have you mentioned promo codes like did you in the past or or are you now like experiencing with anything along those lines of of trying to yeah incent virality amongst the like long tail well what's really interesting is that um one of the biggest questions that i've been seeing recently from our users and especially our our tax preparers is um basically something like i want to force all my clients to use mile iq because i ask them every year for their mileage log and they look at the ceiling and they're like oh i don't know where it is

[29:40] like that's a great question um so uh i think that's gonna be something that we really start looking into um this year this year more as well and then we do have like promo codes we do like tax day promo we ran like a black friday promo and we don't do a lot of them but uh every once in a while you can get a pretty good deal i'm curious you know having worked on lightning ai for a few years and from my understanding you kind of started more as an agency and then transitioned into ad tech i mean like you know kind of a product you could sell more directly

[30:17] um but i'm really curious and and now that you're back at male iq kind of you're thinking having seen all different sides of this what does it look like in 2022 to build a growth team you know like if if you're a small app you you know have some funding or you see some product market fit you know from your view having seen it all what are those kind of steps you know what's the balance between hiring an outside agency versus hiring your first growth employee and how do you manage that build up yes great question uh so the way that we are organized is my team is called try

[30:53] and buy and so we are responsible for onboarding users into the product and then all subscription management and pricing tests we are a team of engineers full-time uh we have one designer coming on board i shouldn't jinx that we have one designer coming on board hopefully and uh then there's me um and things i've outsourced are um i have a i have a contractor who does engagement i have a contractor who is product marketing and i shamelessly use lightning ai to manage to manage our ad spend um so i would say that like kind of the more traditional marketing elements i've chosen to outsource uh and i think that that's partly

[31:42] um you know kind of like my my choice and experience on what i feel comfortable allowing someone else to take over um but i think it's also because a lot of what we're doing right now is just figuring out like what does it mean to build an app in 2022 and the answers to a lot of those questions are well we need different software we need different tools like there's you know new ways to run a b test in the app and we don't need to build our own feature flag software in order to run this anymore and so um there's a lot of just like cleanup that has to happen uh

[32:17] our whole there's a lot of screens that are in react native and you know people don't do that so much anymore so um that needs to switch out uh there's like old microsoft code and i don't know what language but no one else knows it either we've got we've got a lot of end work to catch up on and um i think i would say that that's like definitely our primary well growth is always our primary focus but like we need to fix a bunch of stuff in the in the app to make it look like something from 2022 um and so that tends to be just the focus of of my

[32:54] team right now i would say you know in general if i'm talking to other growth teams like engineering tends to be the thing that you can't outsource um so it's not surprising to me that we would have kind of fallen into that same bucket but i will say like it's fun kind of becoming like a product owner product manager and uh getting to you know run run all of this and really figure it out and i don't think there's a lot of growth teams that are as engineering focused as as mine is becoming uh and it's cool to be able to really see like here's my hypothesis

[33:30] here's what we're gonna test and like know from end to end like why is this taking an extra four days and they're like well we had to redo the entire code base because blah blah and also i found this sdk from like your old general manager's uh company that he's on the board of and like do we need it anymore and i'm like good question this is something we're running into now like i'm as we're transitioning into a more a more systematic growth program at revenue cat as well like everybody i talk to has grow as engineering resources dedicated to growth i think especially in something where you have this many users

[34:11] where it's very programmatic where you can't just like have conversation you know you're not a pure enterprise thing where you can just show up at a conference now and again which can be challenging because i think you're in a nice place because you know like mile iq the product works like you have product marketplace like tracks mileage right like yeah uh so there's not maybe as much pull to like uh monopolize those engineering resources on like new features and stuff like that but i think you know we walked right into this one and we should have done it earlier which is to like make sure you take off like

[34:43] some percentage of engineering resources um you know when i think about remedy guest story like we should have taken like okay this amount of engineering resources for infrastructure this amount is for growth and then the rest is for like new product and development um you don't realize ratios are different for every company but i think this is one thing that you know growth you just have to know like everything takes growth engineering now it's not it's not something that yeah especially at the customer sizes that milo iq operates at like your everything's like a system right so i don't know how that translates david into your initial question about what

[35:19] found you know what the first hire and stuff like that's a little bit challenging if you don't have the resources of you know a company that's raised or is profitable or reached scale um but it's worth thinking about um because like growth is not a afterthought right for any of these companies right like it's it's got to be kind of part of it because even if you're even if your goal is only sustainability you still need a growth aspect because you're going to be constantly churning right you're going to be constantly like losing market share to just the tides of the the market and all these things so i

[35:49] think it's a it's a good thing to plant founders and team builders heads like early well hey i wanted to wrap up on a bit of a personal note uh we haven't really talked about this much on the podcast but you wrote this really lovely post about planning for your maternity leave with your first child and so i just wanted to ask um you know people will link to the blog post in the uh in the show notes uh so people can read the post itself but if you would just give us a quick summary of the post and kind of how you thought about taking time off

[36:22] and then and then i'd love to actually hear how it actually went and you know with kobe with like business building like jacob had uh his first child a year after starting revenue i had four kids while writing my ad business like we're all humans it's a huge topic right like it's it's a big part of it like this is not a you know especially for folks later in their careers potentially like fitting this in and making it work is it's hugely important so yeah yeah i will say one of the questions that was top of mind for me when i was at microsoft was like should i stay here and take my six

[36:52] months maternity paid leave and like keep it in my pocket you know that's like a real question and um to the sense that like women need to lean in in the same way that men do is like no this isn't something that i'm gonna like stick around for for three four five years however long it takes like that's not what we should be doing so i mean i'll say this like with my first son you don't know what you don't know and i never held a newborn baby before i'd never never diaper i never made a bottle like i was like brand new and people kept telling

[37:27] me you know you need eight weeks like you really have to like be there and um i think that you know ultimately like there's different things that women versus men can do with babies and that's just like the truth of our bodies and uh so with my first kid i was like oh my god i'm gonna have to take off eight weeks and we were like in a high growth velocity phase and i was like this is gonna like kill me like what are we gonna do blah blah blah okay so that was what i had going into it so there was like definitely a lot of nervousness and

[37:55] i brought in a contractor and i was like i think you can handle all of this you know good luck see you soon and uh so that was like what i what i felt like going into it um i had an emergency c-section when i first and so there's also like you know there was like a lot of nervousness about that too um i ended up having a super awesome recovery um but then there were like all these issues with breastfeeding and you know just like as a first-time parent there's so much that's placed on women and like breastfeeding is just this thing that everyone tells you is like so critically

[38:33] important my hospital is baby friendly which effectively means that like they don't even let you use formula until day three after your kid's born and so my son was like underweight he was two weeks early his glucose levels were low whatever whatever and i'm like can't i just give him formula like didn't we invent her for this reason um anyway the answer was no to interrupt but it's kind of like growth advice right like everybody's got their advice which is the right thing to do and because they did the science and whatever and you're like listen you're not in my shoes just like let me like

[39:08] figure this out you know yep um so long story short it turns out that if you are not breastfeeding and like exclusively uh your partner can really help you a lot more so we figured that out really early on um and i was like you know maybe i'd like to sleep uh and my husband um works part-time and his goal in life was to be a stay-at-home dad and i was like why am i killing myself and like killing my body trying to figure this stuff out and like doing all of these things and meanwhile you're like not really working all the time like you take nights yeah

[39:45] um so that was how it turned out uh and i was back to work um like four weeks and i was like what's everybody up to and they were like dude jim you need some money great job us like nothing broke and i was like we did it high fives all around um so i had my second son uh just this past september and that was interesting because one he was four weeks early and two i started at mile iq again in august and i was basically like i'm gonna see you guys for like eight weeks and then i'm gonna be gone like is that cool

[40:20] and it was so that was great um but like knowing you know what i knew this time around i was like okay well we're gonna do combination feeding we're gonna do bottle feeding at night and like husband you know good luck and i was also like nanny is starting as soon as i have this child yeah so um those are the things and the pieces of advice that i give people all the time because like if you think about if you think about yourself not as like i am mother and i need to you know do all of these things because it's required of me and move to i am a

[40:56] human and i have a partner and both of us can share this job like a lot more equally um it becomes it becomes a lot more manageable so i was back to work like a little bit at four weeks and then like part time kind of through eight weeks uh but i would say that there was like a lot of stuff that was happening between four and eight weeks and definitely everybody was like oh my god we need you all the time and it was so funny to me this time because like i think my uh employees at lightning ai like actually handled it a lot better

[41:27] but you know it all worked out and now i have two wonderful coped babies uh and i took my toddler to swim class this weekend and he was like way overwhelmed by the number of people which was like 10 and you know we're all we're all making our way through it um but i'm actually in a vc backed mom's group on slack and if there are any listeners out here who are um part of that group and would like to join the slack group i really really recommend it and the number one piece of advice people give is like don't get hung up on breastfeeding yeah like

[42:02] breastfeeding is like more than a full-time job and women who do it like you're incredible you're amazing good for you it was not me i will also say that like pumping is not something that is easy or fun uh i've been party to the act i've been you know part of the educational process but i have very no first-hand experience but i believe you know just the fact that you have to be like sitting and you have to sit and hold something with your two hands and then you're like well what's this kid it's just like not a thing so i will also say like i mean there are a few like products

[42:42] that i always really recommend to people who are like i don't have you know leave and i'm like gonna be kind of on call while i'm having a baby uh and one is the snoo which i call my night nurse uh and the other one is a hands-free um breast pump it really makes like a lifetime of difference and it just like allows you to be a regular person and then the third is the nanny who i will really who i will readily recommend i will also say my mom did a great job helping out with our toddler um but in general nanny first priority like parents yeah

[43:20] yeah just professionals are good you know no knocks on our parents but you know i'll second i'll just add the the point you made about the partnership and stuff and not the plug revenue cats like parental policy or whatever but i think this was a mistake that i made early and uh or when i did my parental leave was thinking that you're taking yeah kind of a uh misogynistic or i don't know like like mother centered or like primarily parent-centered view of paternity or parental leave and i was like three days off i'm back i was at a conference like a week later it's like superhero like taking the whole thing

[43:56] like a big dummy uh and like one of the biggest regrets obviously the time i missed with my my kid in those early days and i got a lot of support and i wasn't there full time and all that i was trying but i was trying to do all the things but the the amount of stress i was adding to the family right the amount of stress i was adding by not just being fully focused and there and being like oh yeah i know this kid's important but i also have this fancy business that's so important or whatever which can be true but i like don't have to express it by

[44:25] being so rushing to get back and and and the other thing is like you mentioned i mean i think it's a great time for your company to grow like it's a great time like dropping folks out it's why like our parents will leave we have key people going out all the time and it's it's good it's good for the company it forces it shows us where our weak points are like where we need to hire more if somebody goes on leave and it totally breaks the company like okay like that's something we need to focus on because like should break the company a little bit right like there's this mix right it

[44:52] doesn't bring the company at all it's a problem but but if it totally cripples the company then like we we also have a problem right so it's a good there's a there's a thing in machine learning for like neural nets called dropout where they like take out nodes in the graph and and retrain it and it makes the network better and i think there's the same way similar thing with parental leave it's like when you drop out parts of the network the company gets stronger and better and you learn where your weaknesses are and things like this so yeah that's my two cents obviously i don't have uh uh a full 360 view it's

[45:22] like i think my parental contributions are admittedly probably much easier but yeah no i think it's hard it's founders founders and parental leave is like a constant conversation and yeah you know i think no matter if your company's big and venture-backed and scaling or small and like but if you're you know or or even if you're an employee right like if if you're a critical person on a team at a company that's scaling and stuff like this like it's it's not always easy but i think yeah i think the i love the advice too of learning on your own and make your own choices and don't feel so like you have

[45:55] to follow somebody else's like yeah idea of what you know i'm out here like dispensing advice too like when people tell me they want to take a short leave i'm like yeah if that's if that's what feels right to you like here's what my experience was but like everybody's is different and everybody's situation is different and coming back part-time was a really important thing for me because i was like i know that i can get a lot done part-time if like that part-time isn't spent you know in a million meetings no sorry i can't take this uh i can't take this weekly whatever sync because uh yeah sorry i'm still i'm

[46:28] still on leave sorry i can't take meetings that's really good it was actually great because what ended up happening so we're fully remote we have a team like globally we're never on any of the same time zones and it actually forced us because i wasn't there to say like how do we run meetings asynchronously uh and so we're able to like get rid of a bunch of meetings so not only did i not have to go but like now no one has to go to like these meetings what's that what's the one sentence uh what's the one sentence hack how did you figure out how to run meetings asynchronously um so

[46:57] we write reports beforehand like kind of amazon style but not six pages like a half a page is probably fine um and then people have to read it and if there's comments we talk about the comments and if there's no comments you don't need a meeting it's brilliant love it new policy at revenue cat nice well with that we do need to wrap it up but is your is there anything else that you wanted to share with mile iq hiring or lightning ai or anything else you want to share with the audience as we wrap up uh in terms of hiring i'm pretty sure that we're hiring

[47:33] another product designer um i am so desperately looking for a full stack web developer if you are a person who is like i'd like to learn about mobile apps but oops all i know is web please come and work for me i promise i won't make you sit in meetings all day and uh if you are listening and you're a mile iq user and you're like why are you guys still using bing maps i promise it's getting solved i like hear all of you loud and clear your messages come straight to my inbox and i read every one of them and like we're working on it we're fixing it

[48:11] we're gonna make it better it's gonna go back to the way it was but also better than that and uh i promise that you are heard and loved so thank you for being a part of being a part of my like you and therefore being a part of my life all right thank you so much colette for being on the show and um yeah talk to you soon bye thanks to make sure you never miss an episode subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player thanks so much for listening until next time [Music] you

---

About this transcript
Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com).
ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts.
Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools
How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt