Turning Customer Feedback Into Startup Growth

Intro  0:06

Welcome to the Growth + Exit podcast where owners of privately held middle market companies talk about founding, scaling and exiting their businesses successfully. Learn how to maximize and monetize your business on your own terms. Let’s get started.

Susan Kearney  0:30

Hi. I’m Susan Kearney, your host for the Growth + Exit podcast where middle market owners and CEOs talk about founding, scaling and exiting their businesses. This episode today is brought to you by Newport LLC, a cadre of founders, business owners and seasoned C suite executives who help owners of privately held companies build more valuable businesses and exit them on their own terms. For example, we help the owner of a professional services company polish the business up and then exit at a 13x EBITDA multiple changed his life and the lives of his team. It was a great experience. We’re proud to be among the select List of Inc. Magazine power partners this year, and you can learn more about us at Newportllc.com, but enough about that. Today I’m talking with Catherine Connelly. Catherine’s an entrepreneur and author and speaker. She co founded this social network myYearbook at the age of 15, and grew it into The Meet Group, a NASDAQ listed company, reaching millions of users and leading to a $500 million acquisition. Catherine is the author, also of Designing Success, and writes the newsletter Grow Up Startup, where she reflects on lessons from her journey that she’s going to explain to us today. So good morning. Welcome Catherine.

Catherine Connelly  1:46

Good morning. Thank you so much for having me.

Susan Kearney  1:49

It’s a pleasure. It’s a pleasure. Catherine, what I want to do today is I want to start by talking a little bit about your professional journey. I don’t know many teenagers who start a company that turns into a powerhouse like you did at the age of 15, and are successful at it. So tell me how you came to start that company, myYearbook at that tender age.

Catherine Connelly  2:13

So I answer that question honestly. I think I have to, you know, rewind it even a little bit further back to say I had such an incredibly lucky experience to be exposed to entrepreneurship very young. So my oldest brother, Jeff is he’s 11 years older than me, and he started his first company while also attending college. So he start, you know, dorm room startup. And you know, I was seven when he was starting that company. So I grew up seeing that path, and my parents used to send my other brother, Dave and I out to visit him in the summers. Were to his they were looking in Palm Springs, California, you know, you got the beautiful pool, and everything’s nice. And you’re when we were tweens, you know, 11 and 12. Jeffs in his office. He’s working, and we can tell it’s stressful. We can tell it’s a lot of work, but there’s also fun. There’s a foosball table, way better than bring your parents to work day. And he would put us to work, so we would be visiting him, and he’d have us stuff packets or whatever needed to be done, and he pay us in toys and DVDs. And so we had that initial exposure to entrepreneurship, which made it so that we always wanted to be entrepreneurs, Dave and I, and so when we were new in our high school and we’re having trouble making new friends, we’re like, well, can’t we build something that would make this easier? And so one day, you know, we’re just flipping through a normal high school yearbook, and that’s where the idea for myYearbook came from, and it was one of those things where we knew it was something we could do, because we had seen it done before, we had watched a stuff started his first company, so we knew, Okay, this is something that when you have an idea, you can pursue it, you can start building it. And I think that that was why, you know, we started at 15 and 16, because why not the opportunity? You know, what was the opportunity cost? We would otherwise get a job, you know, bagging groceries at ShopRite, or, you know, doing something similar to that. So why not try for this? And we figured, you know, even if it fails, it’s going to be a pretty good college admissions essay. So we’re there’s really no downsides. Now, of course, there was the naivety of, like, I don’t think you know when we’re starting. We could realize even what 1 million users looks like. And we ended up hitting that within the first year. So it was very much happened fast, and all of a sudden it’s like, Oh, okay. The stakes were really low before. Now they’re high. Now we need this thing to succeed,

Susan Kearney  4:40

yeah. And so you started the business with your brother. Tell us about that, because a lot of folks who listen to this podcast, their husbands and wives, their siblings, their cousins, they’re working with their family, and that can be both a wonderful thing and an awful thing. Tell me about how it worked for you and your brother.

Catherine Connelly  4:57

So it worked for us. So I you know the initial. Idea I had with Dave. And then Jeff actually left the company that he had sold his first company to and joined us early on. So it was, it was the three of us and his girlfriend at the time. Now, wife was also, you know, also joined us. And so it was, I don’t know, I love working with my brothers. I think part of so much of having a co founder is you need to trust them, and you need to believe that not only you know you might disagree on something related to the business itself, you’re going to have difference of opinion. That’s always going to happen. But I what I think was good about starting a company with siblings is you already know how to work out your differences in opinion, because you’ve been doing that your whole life. You’ve always had differences and opinions playing together. You had to figure it out. And so you kind of take that into the startup ecosystem, because you’re like, Okay, well, we disagree about on this, but you know, we still trust each other. We still trust each other that that we know that their other person, even we disagree, we know they’re still doing the best for the company, doing the best that they see for us. And you know, we would find ways to work out those disagreements. And I think that that is just an important skill with no matter if you’re related to your co founder or not knowing how you’re going to work out those class, those clashes as they come up, because they’re always are going to come up. And so I was incredibly lucky that, of course, my brothers and I get along. We have similar senses of humor that makes it needed a lot of fun, especially during the sleepless nights as we’re building this thing and and it just made it so much more enjoyable to be working on it with people I enjoy. But with that said, I think there was some backlash to our surrounding family members that maybe didn’t always want to talk about myYearbook or meet me or The Meet Group, because we change your names every five years. I think that that’s I remember at my it was right before our first exit, so we will get into it, but it was $100 million deal to that’s what brought us public. And we were talking about it constantly. And I remember it was my niece’s birthday party, and she here her older sister, so the four year old son, she’s like, Could you stop talking about the deal? And it was always adorable. And also we’re like, noted, we will table this for now. And so I think that there is, there is still the drawback of when you are starting something with someone, whether it be a sibling, it does bleed into basically all of your interactions, and so you have to be a bit more proactive about setting those boundaries and say, Okay, maybe my niece’s birthday party is not the time to talk about this and realizing, okay, let’s, let’s take a break from work. And I think that it is important to have that space away from what you’re building, because you can come back with more clarity. But when you’re building with people that you’re very, very close to, in your all of your connections, you have to find ways to create that space. Yeah,

Susan Kearney  8:12

yeah. It’s sometimes hard to put work in the back of the closet rather than have it in the middle of a dining room table, right? Exactly,

Catherine Connelly  8:18

because it’s because it’s in your head, and it’s always going to be in your head. And then you have to, like, purposely, like, purposely, like those blinders in,

Susan Kearney  8:24

yeah. So you learned that at a young age. Tell me a little bit about the arc of that business and the lessons that you learned as you went through that journey,

Catherine Connelly  8:35

yeah. So starting it was, I mean, already a big lesson as we were building it was, how do we, you know, MySpace was already out. MySpace launched in 2004 so it was already like out and big. And so we wanted to make sure that, you know, we’re an early social network. Want to be different than MySpace. And we had to figure out, okay, how do we separate ourselves from MySpace? How do we differentiate also from Facebook, which for the most part, high schoolers didn’t really know about, because it was only in colleges, yeah, but we knew, you know, eventually it was going to come in. And early on, the concept of myYearbook was basically Facebook for high school. And we thought, okay, we’re going to grow the same way Facebook did do it school to school. And so that worked really well in our school. So we launched, we got our first members to join by wearing fun T shirts to school every day. Said things like answering the questions that matter most, who are your friend’s friends? Are they hot? You know, things that attract high schoolers. And we were able to get 400 people to sign up in the first week. So we knew we had something. And in those very early days, we started learning this is fantastic. We’re like in the proving grounds of our of our market. And of course, we weren’t using words like that because we were 15 and 16, but, but we were getting feedback from our friends. Were, you know, on the track in the high school cafeteria? People are coming up. They’re saying, I like this feature. This feature. Or stinks. How can you change this? And Dave and I would come home from school, we’d iterate. We’d say, Okay, let’s, let’s, let’s change this up. Let’s go. Let’s get, let’s get it live in a different way. And so the product already was morphing, and we realized that even though, when we started and we we said, we outsource the original code to developers in Mumbai. So we were sending them hundreds of pages of specification sheets and pen on paper wireframes. You know, they detailed every aspect of the site and how it operate. And, you know, then you launch and you see how things actually do, and you’re like, Oh, these, this 100 pages didn’t have to be done. It wasn’t really so much as of an MVP as, let’s see what sticks. Let’s see what works. You know, a lot of it was like, relatively simple features that ended up not being used, like a blog and stuff, because blogging was already accounted for. We didn’t really need that feature. But we started, you know, learning basically, okay, this is how you take user feedback, because user feedback. Because user feedback doesn’t usually come in the sense of, like, build this feature. It comes in the form of this feature stinks. How can you and then it’s up to you as the founder to figure out, okay, how do we make it not stink? And one of the first examples of that was we had this early feature called superlative so again, coming off the yearbook theme. Now in our high school, Dave and I were winning every single superlative because people were just voting for the founders, and so I was winning like, you know, prettiest eyes best. But there’s all sorts of the categories were, of course, we’re more fun than your typical high school yearbook. And the feedback on that was somewhat a little bit mean, because there’s some other girls in my class that were say, oh, Catherine couldn’t possibly be winning that. I mean, she’s not, you know, good looking, and everyone know whatever like and then saying that, okay, we’re set. We’re fixing the results. But we weren’t. People were voting for us because, like, you’re just voting for the founders, like, that’s the thing. But we did realize, okay, these results are very stale, and that does make it not fun. So put it, setting aside the kind of mean things they were saying. I was like, Okay, what if it’s a one on one contest, and that way it’s and so we renamed it battles, and it became one of our biggest features. And even 20 years later, there’s still a with a current live streaming feature that’s big on the apps. Now, I exited the company, so I’m not there anymore, but it was one of the things that we launched while was there, is battles is still alive in some form. And it’s because it we found a way to make it competitive in a fun way, that’s in a a good way. So if you’re having a, you know, funniest picture battle, like you’re not up against everyone in your whole school or your whole network, and you see that the other main, sorry, the other main thing that we learned was that we were not going to grow school by school. So our entire first concept of how the company was going to grow was next. We did well in our school. We couldn’t figure out how to launch in other schools, and we turned to the data and saw, you know what? It doesn’t actually matter how big your school network is, it just matters how many people you have near you, and that’s how the company morphed within the first few few months, to be about meeting people nearby, not just about meeting people in your school. And that’s what ushered in our growth, so that then we could expand. It’s like, okay, well, if we don’t have to be confined to a school, then what can we do? And we ended up creating a feature that became very viral as a viral quiz feature, people would share their quiz results on their aim profiles. MySpace profiles were taking advantage of what was already viral, was already popular, and that’s what led us to getting our first million users in the first year.

Susan Kearney  13:52

Wow, that’s huge, and I’m thinking back on my own experience and others of getting that MVP in market and trying desperately to get feedback. And for you folks, you had a bit of luck skill as well, of course, obviously, but that you swam every day in the ocean with the things you wanted to catch,

Catherine Connelly  14:13

100% like that was that was our feedback, and it’s so important. And it became something that we did just as a company, too, because, you know, after high school, we’re no longer surrounded by our users. And eventually we became 18 and 18 and up. We kind of aged up as Dave and I aged up, and we were always needing that feedback. So we would just make sure we built in ways. We would have user surveys and do market research, bring talk talk to users, because if you’re not talking to whoever your customer is, then you’re never going to understand what they need to be built. Because we became more of like a dating app. And you know, I was 23 when I met my husband, so for the bulk of the company, I did not was not needing a dating app. And so the only reason I would know. What dating app to be successful needs is because one, I was still a member of hundreds of them. And then also, you know, I’m talking to members, I’m seeing like, Okay, what’s working for you here, what’s not working for you? And, of course, doing, you know, more quantifiable surveys and things, but it’s so important, just always have your ear to the customer.

Susan Kearney  15:21

Yeah, thanks for that. Being outside in is the way I think of that, instead of inside out, right? Yeah, I’m making the decisions in the conference room. That’s terrific. So tell me a little bit about then how you, how you think about scaling that company, or any company, because you did age out of high school and the startup phase, which then leads to that scaling, that high growth phase. And so how did you guys go about that?

Catherine Connelly  15:47

So after we got our first million members, it was really, at that point at that scale, what we needed to build. That’s when we started pursuing venture capital. And we so we raised a $4.1 million round in November of Oh, six. So it was like shortly before we shortly after, sorry, we opened our first office. So we opened our first office in the small town of New Hope, Pennsylvania, which is not your typical startup environment. It’s like antiquing, and it’s this beautiful town on the Delaware River. But we liked it because we figured anyone that’s commuting to New York, could also commute to New Hope, or, you know, or from Philadelphia. It’s well located, and it’s, you know, it’s a nice place to be for for community. But as we thought about scaling it, we realized that New Hope actually became important to our culture in different ways because we weren’t located in San Francisco or New York, we were able to be really focused on what made us special, because we weren’t being pulled by whatever the Silicon Valley fad was. We can control how much Silicon Valley, basically we got, and we would be out there frequently. We would keep up our relationships with companies out west. But it’s not the same of being constantly there and feeling like, oh, I need to chase this next shiny thing. We could focus on building what we wanted to because in New Hope, you know, we weren’t as we weren’t constantly pulled in different directions. I think, allowed us to focus a lot better than if we were located in a major city or something like that early on. And so as we were doing that initial scales, okay, how do we be the next the best place to meet new people? We were able to basically hone in on that, hone in on what that means to because we would break out. You know, I think anytime when you have a North Star, you need to break down what that means into, you know, measurable targets. Otherwise, it’s just, you know, a platitude like, what are you gonna do with that? And so for us being being the best place to meet new people meant that we needed daily active users or DAU and we needed those people to come back, so we needed to focus on retention. And so every feature we would launch, every product, would be focused on, how do we improve those two metrics? And if it wasn’t going to improve those metrics, then you know, it was something that got pushed to the backlog, but by doing that, it really helped us focus on what we needed to build in order to scale

Susan Kearney  18:10

focus. That’s one of my favorite words, and a lot of entrepreneurs don’t have it.

Catherine Connelly  18:14

I think, honestly, it’s harder even now than it had been, because, you know. And I love AI. It’s a fantastic tool. And I will say, like, when Dave and I were starting out, you know, for us, you know, Google was our age equalizer, because, you know, we didn’t know how to do anything. We just Googling lots of this. Like, how do you buy a domain name? How do you find developers? And that’s how kind of it went into, you know, how we would build the company? You know, now, any family, you can vibe code things. My six year old actually started vibe coding his first game with my, you know, with my help, because I knew how to read better, but so it’s so easy to kind of get that MVP out, and it’s almost, I don’t want to say it’s too easy, because I think execution, if you can get it out fast, and that’s then. That’s great, but you can’t think at the speed of AI. You can’t direct strategy at that speed. You need to have that space I like to call, I call drawer space coming from being, you know, coming from being author. That’s literally, when you take your manuscript, you stick in a drawer and you say, Okay, gonna give it a month and then I’ll return to it for revisions. And if you kind of do the same with your company, it doesn’t have to be a month, but a month, but it’s so easy to do things faster, to think, oh, I need to do things super fast, but you need clarity first, because you can build something super fast in the completely wrong direction, and you’re almost in a worse spot than if you had slowed it down from the beginning.

Susan Kearney  19:39

Yeah, that’s great. I love that insight. Thank you for that. Most companies like yours have some near death experiences. I’m wondering if you folks had any near death experiences as you grew your company and prepared it for the multiple times that you sold it. And if so, can you share some of those stories? Or one of those stories with me?

Catherine Connelly  20:01

Yeah. So we, we have a few, one of the early on ones, and so it’s kind of, I’m not sure if it’s a full near death, but certainly would have been a different trajectory. So we raised our series B as a $12.8 million round in July, of 2008 and if it was a few months later, who knows what could have happened? Yeah, especially because early on. So so the partners that ended up, where we ended up working on that was enormous Venture Partners, with participation from us, VP and First Round Capital, which is our Series A, but when we first approached in the series B, we were so close to a term sheet with Lehman ventures, like we thought, we thought it was basically it was going to happen, and then all of a sudden they, you know, it was a lot of confusion, and all of a sudden they walked away. And we’re like, now we have no idea. I’ve had anything to do with the upcoming financial crisis, but it was kind of like, okay, this is it was incredibly lucky, obviously, that our, you know, when our deal happens, happens, you know, a few months before, because who knows? You never know. Now, of course, it’s still not a great experience for your series B partners to come onto the basically that in at what’s considered like the height of the market. That’s another relationship to manage. But it was, you know, very good, obviously, that we were able to get that in ahead of time. Now it would have been near death. I don’t know we were doing well. We had been always because of our location. Again, new hope. Love, new hope. We had always been focused on, how do we, you know, drive revenue, how do we grow profitability? And honestly, that wasn’t the mood at the time. The mood at the time was, you know, just keep spending money and hope you got something. We didn’t have easy access to capital because of our location. I think that’s a little different now, but we were very much focused on, we can’t count on the next round, but that we got the next round was important to our growth. So another near death experience, though, was as as we’re building, you know, be you have to maintain great relationships with the people on your boards is, you know, you have some large companies that have incredibly friendly boards. It’s not that we had an unfriendly board, but it wasn’t like where everyone on your board is your like, you know, lifelong best friend, or something like you see at other companies, where, you know, you have to manage those relationships. And I’ve always liked how my brother, who reads a lot of a rookie, has described it as you have to fight rationally. And so what that really means is you have to always bring you know. You have to leave your emotion at the door, and so you can argue with someone. And this is true with your co founders. It’s true with basically anyone who basically anyone in your company like you can argue, you can disagree, but you know that you’re going to be in this relationship for a while, and you need to act like that. You need to you need to always fight fair. You need to do the things that you said, that you’re going to do. You need to be trustworthy, you need to have integrity, and all of those factors, you know, help you maintain those relationships so that you can get to the point where you can have that 100 million, $500 million exit. Because if you don’t have those good relationships with others in your industry, then your reputation is everything. And it doesn’t really matter how big you think your your industry is, you know the world is small, and your actions leave awake. And so I think that being able to get to all the points we did in our journey was because we did have such strong relationships within our space. Now, another near death experience that just occurred to me too. We actually almost had a different acquisition prior to $500 million on diet, maybe a year or two before it, and it was looking like it was going to happen, but then a decision by CFIUS, the the government, or the CFIUS is part of the government basically blocked a grinder deal that was similar, but not exactly, but it made it clear that there was absolutely no way the acquisition was going to happen and there was nothing you could do about it. This is like, Oh, okay. Well, that all the work we just put into that, you know, months and months of work that doesn’t matter anymore. Sophia says can’t happen to this grinder. It’s not going to happen for us and we and so I know that’s obviously demoralizing. It doesn’t it’s not a death knell in any any sense of the imagination, but it’s very demoralizing. And at the time we were. Dealing with activist investors, we were dealing with short sellers that were running smear campaigns, and those were so hard just to deal with, because, you know, you have people that are just posting awful things about either you personally or the company, and more so the shorts than the than the activists. But you know, all of those things are a distraction, and can take over if you let them. And so we would have to just focus on, like, how do you block and tackle? How do you work on what’s best for the users? And, you know, be prepared to defend on these other situations, but at the same time, keep moving the company forward.

Susan Kearney  25:39

Yeah, that’s that attitude of putting your head down and just getting the work done. Is an important one. And it is difficult. It is difficult. Even if you know the things that are being said about you are not true, you know. And particularly young age, you have to somehow find that tough skin, that thick skin, to keep moving on.

Catherine Connelly  25:58

Yeah. And the way I like to, you know, I like to think about, you know, within any decision you have to make, you have to find the perspective there. And a lot of decisions that you face as a founder don’t matter six months from the time, like so much stuff doesn’t actually matter, but it feels like life or death when you’re in the middle of that decision, and so being able to say, You know what? This really realizing you so, no, I have to change my perspective. This isn’t, this isn’t a life or death thing. This doesn’t affect the health of my family. This doesn’t affect my health. If this doesn’t work, it just doesn’t work. And you figure out something else, I think. You know, I was at the company for 18 years, and the only way we survived for 18 years is because we were constantly pivoting, constantly adapting. We’re constantly changing and figuring, okay, let’s, let’s find the next path. Because if you allow every decision to feel like it’s going to be like, and even if it’s a good decision, like you might still put, you might put all your eggs and masks is like, oh my goodness, I got say this interview in this magazine, and now it’s going to explode. And that’s still putting that’s probably not going to happen. It’s still going to be like, even the things that you think might be game changing aren’t going to be game changing in the way that you want them to. And so it’s still finding ways to say, Okay, let’s keep pushing forward. And I think that that determination is really what, what allowed us to, you know, keep growing over, you know, time when our main competitor changed every few years, because, for the most part, the main competitor was no longer a main competitor after about few years. And when we had you know, we might not have ever been the biggest in the space or like the gorilla, But we persisted.

Susan Kearney  27:46

Yeah, yeah. So I want to talk just for a second about leadership, because you started at a very young age on this journey. All leaders of companies have to evolve their leadership as the company evolves and the needs of the business evolve. And I’m wondering how the combination of being pretty young and maybe not even understanding your leadership style at the beginning or even thinking about it kind of how did you grow as a leader and evolve as a leader? What are the lessons you learned through that arc to when you exited the business

Catherine Connelly  28:20

so and I think my age definitely played a factor in just the openness to that. I think something that it’s important that all leaders do is they have the humility to ask for help and to realize that they don’t have all the answers and that they do need the support of others around them, the support of their team. And because of my age, I, you know, I wouldn’t say I have no problem asking for help, but, you know, I had to learn that needed to do it very early on. And I remember even my first semester at Georgetown hour, where I went to undergrad. The I was actually, at the time, kind of keeping myYearbook as this almost secret double life, because I unfortunately did have some negative experiences in high school with my peers, and so I thought going into college is like, oh, let’s, let’s maybe keep that separate. Let’s keep my student life separate from who I am as an entrepreneur. And that quickly became obvious, oh, that you can’t do that, because in my very first my very first class, it was an international business class, and it was one of the super serious professors, where they call everyone by their so my I was Ms Cook, you know, my maiden name. And as as he was going over the syllabus, I realized, oh, I have a major conflict. Since he was making this big deal, he’s like, You cannot make up the midterm or the final, if you need to, if you can’t be there on for whatever reason, you should drop the class now. And, you know, I so, you know, Tim is like, up to him after class. I’m like, I’m sorry, Professor Moore, I have, I’m scheduled to a talk at the in South Korea, at the World Knowledge Forum that day. Would, and I asked, Would it be possible take the midterm early? Okay, because I’ve thought, Okay, if you take it early, then that’s and that’s showing willingness, so you’re not just trying to put it off. And you know, I was really nervous, like, how will this be perceived? And you know, he was absolutely delighted. He was so excited for me. He was like, Oh yeah, of course, you take the midterm whenever you want, basically. And but it was it just made it so clear that when you open up to peers and for me and professors, that Georgetown became enormously supportive. And so I took that with me for basically the rest of my career, where I’m like, okay, when I’m having challenges that you can’t keep those to yourself. As a leader, you need to share like, this is what’s going on. And be able to, you know, ask for help, ask other companies I’ve done something similar, be like, Oh, well, what was something that you wish you knew? And, you know, have kind of those. Paul Millerd author of The Pathless Path calls that path expert conversations. You talk to someone that’s just a few years ahead of you in the journey, and it can really help you figure out how to navigate it, because what research shows us is that we’re incredibly poor at predicting our own happiness or how things will go just by imagining the future like it doesn’t matter how good your models are, we’re just bad at it. We’re not going to make the right, the the right assumptions, but we’re very good at talking to others and learning from others and figuring out well, they said, from their experience that this happened. That’s the more likely scenario for me as well. And so you realize that you know it’s not going to help you make you know the best. It’s not going to necessarily make the decision for you, but it’s going to help you make much more grounded predictions that will hone in your ability as a leader, to lead, because you’re not just assuming you know all the answers. You know that you have to turn to others and bring people along on the journey.

Susan Kearney  31:56

Yeah, great. Let’s turn and talk a little bit about you personally around just for a few minutes, tell me about where and how you were raised and what your parents did when you were growing up.

Catherine Connelly  32:08

Yeah, so my, so I was born in, well, sorry, that’s born south, so this sounds weird, all right,

Susan Kearney  32:18

okay, we’ll start over again.

Catherine Connelly  32:20

I’m from Central Jersey, and my parents are actually both engineers. My dad does something with tariffs. I’m still not exactly sure exactly what my mom is an electrical engineer, though, and growing up, I will say that my mom always is like, you know, definitely she was always very both my parents were supportive the whole of being an entrepreneur. But my mom is especially like, you know, don’t ever work for someone else. Like, just, just do your own thing, and, and, but I think especially having my mom being, you know, electrical engineer was important because, well, like, she would tell me she was the only woman in most of her classes. Like, that’s just how it was. And she didn’t, you know, stumble into engineering early. She had my she had Jeff first. She had him at she got married at 19, had him at, like, 23 and then went back to college after, you know, having a few different jobs. And, you know, she was always very smart, and always is like, Okay, well, now I’m gonna go back to college. And become an engineer, and you knew what she wanted to do, and wasn’t slowed down at all by how, you know, like I said, all of her classes were not only men, but men without families and without all these other responsibilities that you know she had as a young mom. And you know, I think that just having that example matters a lot, because, yeah, tech is incredibly male dominated. I think I won some Well, I was a finalist in a major student entrepreneur competition when I was in college, and as one of the top finalists, you know, I take the stage announce the names they’re giving the awards, and the awards included a man’s watch and a bottle of Cologne. It’s like 2010 119, 50. It was 2010 and so but that’s kind of shows just how male dominated that industry is, and I think that that’s also what made me so like, crave the support and company of women’s so much, I think that that’s something that when you think about mentorship, when you think about people who you can open up to having other you know, I went to Wharton for I did my executive MBA there. And so all you know, I am so blessed and privileged to be surrounded by so many amazing women. And of course, you know, it’s not just, of course, the women from from that program, but all the women that I found that I’ve worked with professionally have been so amazingly supportive. And I think that that is kind of part of the magic that, you know, makes it work, especially in a male dominated space, because you. You need to have the people that are a bit more like you that have had some of those similar experiences, because those experiences can hurt. I was 21 getting objectified by Yahoo message board discussing Yahoo message board to people, there’s bad experiences, but having women I can turn to helps so much, and it helped me so much to navigate that path.

Susan Kearney  35:28

Yeah, so life as an entrepreneur is chaos, and particularly when you add in family and other things that you do. Are there any life hacks or any daily rituals that you’ve developed to help you stay on track and be successful.

Catherine Connelly  35:44

So, you know, it’s funny. So I am a huge runner, so that’s one of my deliveries. I need to exercise. I’ve worked lifting into because my doctor said that I need to, apparently, have muscle I don’t know. So I do both. But, you know, so that’s an important ritual, but something that I’ve really learned over the last like, it doesn’t merely matter what the ritual is, it can make changes. So, like, one, I’ll give this kind of a weird example, but I started washing my face. That’s weird, because, like, probably should have started that. And, like, I don’t know, like, middle school or whatever, but it was just was not something I did. And, like, you know, before bed or whatever. And I was like, No, I want to start washing my face. And then I was like, Okay, but what was the shocking thing was, about two weeks after I started this, like, new ritual of actually washing my face, which, again, it’s a little embarrassing to admit I was now a face washer. And face washers, oh, they eat better, too, and they exercise more, and they procrastinate less. And so you start to see how there’s can be little identity shifts. It doesn’t really matter what the habit is there. It’s, I’m a huge believer in BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits, great book. But it shifts your it shifts your identity too. So even just taking that one little thing, can you can find your motivation to kind of have that chain of habits that connects to it. And so whenever I’m kind of in a rut, or I feel like, oh, this something’s not going right, leaning back on one of those, like, Okay, well, what’s something small, I can change, because it doesn’t have to be directly related to whatever the habit is, like washing my face has nothing to do with my productivity. It just doesn’t. But it does, because when I follow through on something little, it makes me realize, oh, I can follow through on the other things too. And I think that kind of taking that it’s a hack in the way that it’s like, okay, these small things can have huge changes. And so sometimes you see like these people, and they’re touting, they’re like, you wake up at 5am and you take a cold shower, and you do all these things, and you’re, you might be hearing, I mean, like, well, I can’t do any of those things. Or, you know what? Actually, my kids also wake up at 5am yeah, it, but you find the thing that, you know, it’s such a small thing, but find something that you can take that as a win, and then those and then you can find another win, and those wins will stack. And so that’s something I’ve kind of always done throughout my career, is finding, like, the little thing you can do, but then, like, I also mentioned running for me, and exercise in general movement, I find it meditative. Helps clear my head. I think it’s such an important hack of just being able to think clearly and get that stress out.

Susan Kearney  38:35

Yeah, and how do you stay current and relevant in your field? What? What are the sources of information for you that keep you on top of your game?

Catherine Connelly  38:45

So one of my favorite newsletters, I like Lenny’s newsletter. That’s just a great source of just, you know, I like staying close to the product world, seeing what’s out there, but really just exposing myself to different podcasts, different people’s stories. I think that that’s what you need, what you need, what you need to be doing. And sometimes that can also be kind of the switch that flips and is like, No, I’ve been focusing on too much of my own stuff. Right now. I need to turn out and say, Okay, let me get some outside perspectives. Let me read some more. Let me get those other things in. And that allows you to, you know, make connections and find that clarity that you might need in your own job, just from listening to other people’s stories and from reading what other things work like, even in our early days. And wasn’t that early, but one of our features that ended up doing well on like a manifestation perspective, was that it was like a spotlight feature. And the idea for that com that that feature actually came from Zillow, which, you know, was not in the social dating space, but it really, oh, that works for real estate. Could that work for people? And so I think always being willing to turn your attention to other industries and other you. You know, other geographies as our main feature that led your half billion dollar exit was a live streaming feature that we were introduced to from seeing how live streaming worked in in East Asian apps, and say, oh, there’s nothing like this in the West. Can we adapt this and make it something that could work in it, that could work in the US, and the answer was yes, but I think, you know, finding basically what the industry beats are, but you know, don’t get too. I think you have to be careful not to get too, you know, pigeonhole in your own industry, because innovation and those really creative ideas are going to come from exposing yourself to all sorts of

Susan Kearney  40:41

things. Yeah, I think that’s right. I think the more you have your head above the water line and you’re looking at, you know, left, right and center, the more innovative you’re able to be. So let’s circle back again quickly before we close to talk about the last leg of your journey and your exit to your 5 million, 100, million dollar exit. Tell me about your experience with that exit prepper, preparing for it, going through their process. What was it like

Catherine Connelly  41:05

for you? Ave is stressful. It’s definitely like because it’s your baby, and you know when you’re having this and, oh, not only is it your baby, but I was also on maternity leave for the bulk of the like two processes. I recently had my son. Remember that to the first meeting in the States, where the we’re acquirers for the parent company, the harmony, they’re coming in from Germany, and they’re asked, and, you know, we’re going through the, you know, basically the last steps of this deal. And I mentioned in my introduction, it’s like, and I had a baby about three months ago, or something, you know, like, just to be like, Oh, by the way, I want maternity leave right now. And I remember they were, like, all shocked, as you know, they all have, you know, German maternity leaves over there. But, but it was a so, you know, it’s stressful from that standpoint, but it’s more just like, there’s the, you know, should I should? Should I not? Like, is there some going to be something? Is there going to be something different? Is there going you know, what’s going to happen? You never really know. You could only make your decision based on what you know at the time, what is your thing? So what we knew at the time, you did change. So changed significantly shortly after, after signing. So right as the we announced our deal, and then it was, it’s March 2020, and then the world basically shut down. And it’s not knowing like, oh, well, let’s is, is this, is this still a good deal? Is it still not, you know, what was the answer anyway? And I think that you know, because we would be asked, Oh, well, you know, live stream is your thing? Could you have sold for more? Could that have been, you know, something different. But you know, you make, you know, we don’t speculate. You know, instead, we choose to feel lucky, because, you know, at the time of the deal, the price was 30 to 43% premium to our average price, and the highest valuation that we had seen in years. And so, you know, could we have more? You know, maybe. But could we have gotten less, definitely, and, you know, and that’s the thing about looking back, you know, you can spin a million versions of how things could have played out. But you know, we weren’t making that decision in hindsight. We were making it with the best information available. And that’s all you can ever do when making big decisions, you know. And I think you know, that was a decision that the outcome was great. And, you know, we were very happy with it, but at the same time, like it is, like the sister was like, Oh, well, you never know, but you can choose to feel lucky. And so that’s and I think, and I think that we were lucky, but that is one of the things that’s like, Oh, if you continue to dwell on, it is going to steal your joy. And so I think that, you know, you be make the deal, you keep moving, you keep building. And we did keep growing. You know, we left it left about three years after the acquisition. And you know, I am so proud of what we built. And, you know, and the members that we that, that, you know, that we changed their lives for, you know, we had many people that met their spouse or through a live streaming feature completely, you know, made a million dollars in like, one year, like, in, you see, like, just the effect that we had on our customers and our members, and that makes the whole journey, you know, just amazing.

Susan Kearney  44:44

Yeah, it’s great to change people’s lives.

Catherine Connelly  44:46

Yeah, and yeah, of course, you know is, you know, like the journey around, sure, there’s there’s high highs, low lows, and certainly more lows than highs. But when we would get an email with the top. Testimonial, or a wedding photo or wedding invite, or a baby announcement, all of those things, it would just change your entire day, because it’s like you could be having an awful day from work these things, a feature could not be working, and you don’t know why, but seeing that user, that those users that you brought together, that that’s why we’re building what we were building. We wanted to connect people.

Susan Kearney  45:26

Yeah, that’s great. That’s awesome. And so you have left the business, and what are you working on now?

Catherine Connelly  45:33

So I the first thing I did when I left the business, I wrote a book, design and success, and I am a professional speaker and coach, and so one of the things that I work on is I speak to organizations about how they can have their teams thrive, both personally and professionally, make better sound, more sound decisions, and improve their support system. So I really enjoy that that work. Additionally, I write the newsletter growing up startup, and I’m going to provide a link for the for the show notes with where listeners can get a free virtual copy of my book, design and success, and hopefully connect

Susan Kearney  46:16

with me. That’s great. That’s great. So last question, what advice would you give other founders, other entrepreneurs, so that they can avoid maybe some of the potholes or zigs and zags that you and your team went through,

Catherine Connelly  46:30

I think the best advice is just really to listen, continue to listening to the user, continue to follow what your North Star is for your specific business, and make decisions to execute against that. Because, like I said, you can never necessarily control the outcome, but you can control the decisions and the inputs that go into it, and so that’s where your focus needs to be

Susan Kearney  46:53

perfect. I love that. That’s a great way to close out, where can people learn more about you and your work?

Catherine Connelly  47:00

Yeah, you can learn more about me at my website. CatherineConnelly.com,

Susan Kearney  47:04

Catherineconnelly.com you want to spell that? Connelly, Could you spell those different names?

Catherine Connelly  47:08

Yes, it’s also the president of Ireland, and she spells it differently. So Catherine Connelly

Susan Kearney  47:19

thanks. That’s great, everyone. We’ve been talking with Catherine, Connelly, Catherine, with a C this morning, about her journey starting at age 15 to build a company to a half a billion dollar exit. It’s inspiring. And I think you know, to me, the lesson is attitude is a lot of what brings happiness in life and success in life, and you have a great attitude. So thanks so much for being on the show, and I hope to talk to you again soon.

Catherine Connelly  47:44

Thank you so much for having me.

Outro 47:51

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