How I Built This with Guy Raz - Meet The HIBT Fellows: Kaitlin McGreyes & Nicole Argüelles

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

As a part of the 2021 How I Built This Summit (At Home) we have selected 10 Fellows, and we'd like to introduce you to each of them. In this episode: Kaitlin McGreyes founded Be Her Village to be a gift registry for expectant families that provides more than just...stuff. And Nicole Argüelles founded Alli to address period poverty and provide easy access to personal care and hygiene products in public spaces.How I Built This Summit - information and tickets at:http://summit.npr.orgSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hello everyone and welcome to How I Built This Fellows Edition. So as a lot of you know, in normal years, we have a how I built this conference and summit. And in recent years, we've been doing it in San Francisco. Well, this year, we're going to, virtual, but one thing that hasn't changed is our How I Built This Fellows program. Every year, we invite a group of entrepreneurs to become How I Built This Fellows. And this year, we selected

10 fellows to participate in a pitch competition where the winner will receive a $50,000 grant. So for the past week, we've been introducing some of these fellows here on the podcast and getting to know them a little bit better. Both of the founders, we're going to me today are working on companies that are focused on women. And first is Caitlin McGraths. She's the founder of Be Her Village. Now, for anyone who has had a baby or knows someone who has had a baby, it may not come as a surprise that Americans spend billions of dollars every year on baby registries. But Caitlin says that expectant families today, they're concerned about more than just cribs and strollers. Parents in the United States and this next generation of parents,

are waking up to the fact that their needs are different from their parents. They don't have or want big houses filled with stuff. They don't want thousands of dollars of baby gear. They want impactful gifts. They want people to take care of them, people to cook meals for them, teach them how to take care of their babies, and make sure that they're whole and healthy and supported as they welcome their baby into their lives.

But right now, the existing gift registries don't address that. They're filled with all kinds of stuff for our babies. So much stuff. And the stuff creates more stress, right? You're already stressed because you have this sweet, adorable, lovely little newborn bundle. But it's hard to take care of a newborn. And it's even harder when you have a house full of things to clean and dust and launder and all of these gifts create more work for parents,

rather than easing their burden. So the idea is instead of a registry where you just get stuff for somebody, a registry where you can pay for a night nurse or somebody to cook you meals after the baby's born or like a doula to be in the delivery room with you, that's basically what the idea is? That's exactly the idea. The bigger idea is that parents need to be cared for to take care of their babies. And so instead of looking at babies as this individual little thing that, needs their own, you know, items, we're looking at babies as needing well-supported parents,

and we're getting gifts to make that happen so that the baby can have a better experience with parents that are fed and cared for and feel good. Caitlin, I know that you're a mom of three. I'm a dad of two. They're older now, 10 and 12, but I intimately remember those. Certainly with my first one, the just coming back from the hospital and being like, what do we do now? And we were alone, my wife and I, because he was born in Boston.

We were living there that year. My family was all, you know, in the West Coast. My wife's family was in Canada. And it was a lot. Tell me how you came up with this idea. I imagine it came from a personal experience. It really did. It happened in so many places.

There are so many seeds that were planted. But I think the one was really in that moment, after birth, after the baby shower, the gifts were all given, I had all the things. After the birth, everyone asked about the baby. And then like you said, you find yourself alone. And a little bit doesn't matter if your family is nearby. You find yourself alone. You find yourself completely out of your element. Your body has gone through something huge, no matter how you've given birth, your body is completely disrupted and needs healing. Your day-to-day routines are completely upended. Everything gets flipped upside down and you find yourself utterly alone in so many ways.

And that's what happened for me. I was three days postpartum with a cesarean section that I didn't plan for and didn't necessarily want. And I was trying to breastfeed my baby and I was trying to get us both to the pediatrician's appointment. I didn't know anything. And I didn't know what I was going to need because at my baby shower, I got diapers and cute baby clothes and baby toys and bibs. And I didn't realize that what I was really going to need was somebody to come into my house and care for me, somebody to say, you're doing a great job. This is going to be okay. This isn't forever. Let me take the baby. Let me show you how to do this. And those services are often only available to people with means, right? You've really hit on something big here,

guy. And this is where we know, we look at these countries that have low maternal mortality rates. We look at countries that have low postpartum mood and anxiety disorder rates, where women are supported and thriving in motherhood. And we see what they have. They have these postpartum supports. They have people walking them through their pregnancy. And everyone has access to the type of care that Beher Village is providing. In our country, only people with resources get that. Only people that have thousands of dollars to spend are able to access that sort of care. And so we have this two-tiered system that's unfair and women in our country are suffering because of it. I want to ask you about the business side of this because this is also a business.

It's a mission and easily something you could probably do as a nonprofit, but this is a business that ultimately will need to become sustainable. So talk to me a little bit about how the business would work. It's funny you mentioned nonprofit. I like to say we're not a non-for-profit, but we're not profitable, right? So that's where we are right now. So because this is so much about increasing access, we couldn't have obstacles for the new parents. So the new parents, every step of their interactions with our communities, with our registry, and with raising funds for these services is absolutely free for them. And it always will be. That will never change. For our gift buyers, there's, There's a small platform fee and that covers, you know, the credit card costs. It's pretty standard across the board whenever you're interacting with a company like this. And then where we're actually going to make our money and by make our money, I mean move this forward, right? So we are organizing the birth workers. And so what we're doing is actually creating this widespread network of micro businesses.

The people that are supporting parents are in the niche. right now. They're not in the mainstream. And so we're bringing them together and we're saying, hey, you're not competing against each other. Let's work together. Everybody come onto this platform, throw in a couple of bucks a month, and then we're going to reach the masses together. It would be a little bit like, I mean, a sort of a like a task rabbit where or some kind of service where people would offer their services, doulas and home care nurses and others. And they would pay us a monthly fee to be on the site to sort of advertise their services? Right. So what's interesting guy, I have to, I have to admit being part of this fellowship,

we've changed. We've changed how we're approaching this. And we're thinking more about building community now rather than the business side of things because the business and the revenue and the profits will come. But the most important thing is going back to what we've been talking about this whole time, which is creating the community for everyone to join. So right now, businesses can sign on for free and there will be upgrades and it's, you know, it's a freemium model, but it will be accessible for them as well. Because the businesses are people like me, guys. They're not people with MBAs. They're not people that are actually going out necessarily for entrepreneurship. The people in this birth worker industry are heartled and they want to be

highly impactful with mothers. So we want to give them that tool and say, hey, you want to go and put your energy into working with mothers and making a change? Great. Plug into this platform, and we can connect you with the families that need your services. Tell me about the team that you have right now. It's you, of course. Anybody else working on the project with you? Once I created Beher Village, I realized this has to happen and this idea is so much bigger than just me. And so it kind of knocked me down a few notches and it forced me to ask people for help and to call people up that I might not have spoken to in a long time and say, hey, I'm building this. I need help with this. Can you help me? What has shocked me and is so beautiful about this process is that people are willing. People are

showing up. I have people on my team that have quit their full-time jobs to come work for me for free because they believe in this and what we're building. So my team, my team, team is made up mostly of people that are smarter than me because that's really what it comes down to. It's this recognition that I have the passion, I have the lived experience, and I have the vision, and I can get people excited about that vision. And part of the people that I'm getting excited about it are people that have the skills that understand how to grow an organization, that know how to run it, that know how to create partnerships, and can get us where we need to be.

Caitlin, we have interviewed the founders of The Knot and of Zola and of other sites that are focused on weddings and wedding registries. I think a lot of people would agree that when you do have a baby, you do need some stuff, right? Like you do need a good stroller and you do need a crib and you do need, you know, a diaper changing table. Not forever, but you do need those things. Is there a world where Be Her Village does both? My truest answer is I don't know, because I don't know what next week holds. So I don't know what the future holds. But I'll say this.

I think there's room for both. I think there's room for traditional baby registries that have all the baby stuff. And I think there's room for Beher Village as well. I know that you attended as part of the fellowship program. One of the sessions you attended was on leadership and, and company culture. It was led by Wai Vaughan Hutchinson and Sadie Lincoln, both awesome friends of how I built this and they'd been to Summets in the past and Sadie was a guest in our show. So was Wyvon. What stood out for you from that session?

So two main things stood out for me. One was when I asked Sadie, how do I instill the company culture? How do I take my values and make sure that it reaches everybody throughout the organization from the top down. She flipped the script on me, and she said, it's more like you were saying, how do I bring those values down? It's actually bring those values out of them, right? That's how it's worked for us.

So everybody, oh, that's what I value. And that's how it links to our mission and our vision and this problem we're solving. For people to have everybody in your organization to have that aha for themselves is really key. The company values come from the bottom up. You hold the meetings with your team. with the community that you're building internally,

and you ask them why they're here. You asked them why they showed up, and those are your company values, and that's what the company embodies. The other thing that stood out for me was why Vaughn talking about her experience as a black woman with pattern matching in her own company. As you all know, as an international human rights lawyer,

I went to Harvard Law School, and then, you know, I started my company. While my second hire was an international development person who went to Harvard Kennedy School, and we got along swimmingly. Our third hire was almost an international development person from Harvard Kennedy School, who we got along with swimmingly. And we kind of had to like recalibrate very early on

because there was a pattern matching thing. I also, and this is just something that I really like to do every now and then I'll hire an agitator on purpose. So like somebody whose orientation is a little bit to shake stuff up, not for the purposes of destabilizing, but somebody who I know is just like not necessarily going to agree with everything I say. They have a different point of view. And if we can work together well, that doesn't always happen. But if we can, like that person can be really additive to your team. So in that moment, I'm looking at my company and we have big visions about addressing black maternal mortality. And then I look at my organization and I've been pattern matching. I've been picking out people that look like me and have the same background as me and talk like me.

And after that meeting, we actually were able to reach out to somebody in the community that we have been talking to and bring her on as a community ambassador. She is a black grandmother doula from, you know, inner city Detroit. And she is helping us in this diversification and breaking from our norms and our patterns. And so it's painful work to do that. It's not easy to say any of this. It's not easy to recognize it, but it also is part of not only the anti-racist work that our company is working on, but the internal work that we have as white women in this industry. Caitlin, if you win the competition and you receive the $50,000 grant, what will you do with it?

We will, first and foremost, continue building our community because that is our task now. That sort of thing takes time. It's not going to happen overnight. We're not going to have Oprah find us and suddenly be bazillionaires. It's really that grassroots work that takes time. And so that money is going to go to buying us that time so that we can do this in a really authentic, organic way from the ground up, from the bottom to the top. That's Caitlin McGraths, founder of Be Her Village. When we come back, we'll hear from another How I Built This Fellow, whose idea stems from her own personal experience.

Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Fellows Edition from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Fellows Edition from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So last year, our next fellow, Nicole Argoias, was looking for an idea that could solve a problem that she had. She wrote down a bunch of them and finally ran them by her friend Jackie Sanchez. And eventually, Nicole realized the problem she might be ready to solve was one that she had a lot of personal experience with.

You know, when you face a problem yourself for so many years, it was shocking that we hadn't had the realization before for something that we'd faced for so long. So as a woman, I think every month when you have your period, you're out in public, you kind of have to hope and pray that you have a solution with you in your purse or in your backpack. And so finally I had written down, I think it was like two or three months in a row I had written, would like to be able to purchase tampons with a credit card. Maybe you step into a restroom and they have, you know, some organizations are really progressive and have these products for free, but most of the time it's not accessible. And so you have to leave the venue that you're at to go try to find the solution somewhere at a local drugstore or grocery store.

And I shared this one with Jackie and, you know, it was at the same time at the pandemic where we were learning about all the things that we were going to be scared to touch in the restrooms. and we started realizing that everything in the restroom had been upgraded. So we had, you know, touchless hand dryers and sinks and automatic toilets, but, you know, this old, clunky, quarter-operated tampon dispenser hadn't been updated. For people who don't know how it works, I mean, most of the time, if they're even available, it's like this old clunky vending machine with a, you put in a quarter and you pull a tab or a knob and then something drops down, right? And it's, and sometimes there's nothing.

in the machine and sometimes the machines are kind of grimy, right? Pretty much. And we'd have both been looking for some type of passion project, some way to impact the world. And we started learning about period of poverty. And while truthfully, we've always been privileged and had the luxury to have these products, we learned that so many girls in our neighborhoods didn't. Right?

It wasn't a problem in a country far away or somewhere that we didn't know it was happening in the United States. And we thought it was our chance to find the solution. So we summarized what we thought were the four key. problems with the traditional dispenser, and that was that you had to touch it, right? So like you said, it was grimy. It seemed like something dirty that was never cleaned. It required cash. So specifically, it was quarter operated and we didn't carry quarters? And then was it reliable? So a lot of times maybe the machine is there, maybe you have a quarter, but it's out of stock or it just doesn't work.

And lastly, what kind of products were inside? So maybe it does work and maybe you were able to get a product, but you can think of it like one plie toilet paper. It's just not nice to use. It doesn't last very long. So one of the first steps we took was we actually surveyed over 1,000 women in our community and across the United States, asking them some of those key points to see if there was a solution that tackled all of those, would they be more interested and more inclined to using it? And the answer was overwhelmingly yes. Now, I know right now you've bootstrapped, right, that the two of you have paid for this yourself so far. That's correct. You had this idea to build a like a vending machine, but that with a digital display and a touchscreen, and you've actually done that.

You've actually built a few of these machines. Yeah, we're super excited. Currently, we have three fully functional dispensers out in shopping malls in the South Florida area. And it's been really great because a lot of the hypothesis that we had initially have actually been disproven or changed over time. So, for example, at first we thought that the most popular product was going to be tampons just based on our personal use among family and friends. And so we would make sure that we always had a majority of tampons in stock in the machine.

But what we learned was that there were two other products that were actually. actually more popular, which was like pads or even disposable masks, which we have in there currently because of the pandemic. And so we've been able to learn about, you know, our consumers and things that they're going to need more often so we can make sure it's always stocked with the right amount for the products that they're looking for. So tell me, how are you able to design the vending machines? Are either of you engineers or how did you figure that out? No, no engineering background between the two of us other than just something that we would like to use or that we thought was fun and modern in an industry that had been really outdated. So it just started with different

sketches and designs and thinking we want it to be curved because right now everything is like pointy and sharp and metallic and so we want it to look different. And we want it to look clean, but not too clean that it's like hospital like or kind of scary or tricky to use. So I think one of the best things that helped us come to life is when we thought about the name and the branding and what we wanted it to represent. So we wanted the machine to be something that was like a friend, someone who was there for you to help you when you needed it. We also wanted it to be be a play on the word ally. So an ally that's there with you when you need it and kind of like your friend, Ali, who's there and has a tampon for you when you're out of one. So kind of thinking

about the brand and the mission and the voice that we wanted to represent along with the look and feel was where we got started. And there was a lot of trial and error. You know, at first we thought we didn't need a screen or we didn't need it to be touchscreen. And we slowly started learning that that was the route we wanted to go. So just chatting with manufacturers and experts in industry is really what helped us to have the knowledge that were we lacked otherwise. Yeah. I mean, I'm trying to figure, like, if I wanted to, because it's a complex product, and I wouldn't even know where to begin. Like, how did you make the machine? How was it made? Well, I think first, the first step is, was to Google what was out already in the market and to do research on, because, you know, there were others tackling the problem in similar ways, but they didn't necessarily all have the exact points that we wanted.

So touchless and cashless and reliable and, you know, be able to withstand millions and millions of people that visit these spaces each month. So, you know, with a quick survey of the market, we realized that it wasn't something that existed. And then it was just, how were we going to find the right manufacturer and the right team to build what we were looking for? So we were lucky, you know, after a few dozen phone calls, we found people who shared our vision. And we were able to get started, you know, we didn't need a huge order quantity, like a lot of times you do with manufacturing. We were able to start with just four. And so we were really thankful to the team that we're working with that they brought our vision to life. So tell me about the business now.

It's just still you and Jackie, right? It is, yeah. Just Jackie and I, and, you know, just to touch on the point earlier, we do have those three machines live currently, and we'll be expanding to a total of 16 machines by the end of next month, by end of June 2021. And those machines are all, I think, in the Miami area, right? The three currently will be,

but we actually will be expanding with these 16 to different cities. So Washington, D.C., San Antonio, Chicago, Atlanta. So lots of different cities will be welcoming an alley dispenser in the coming weeks. And they'll be right now initially in restaurants or bars or where are you putting them? They'll be in shopping malls. So these 16 units will be in shopping malls. And we're hoping to expand to other industries. So airports and stadiums, right, when that starts picking up with sports games and concerts.

And then also working on some type of rental component for festivals and sports games and right tennis matches when all that is back in the world again. And will they be inside of bathrooms or will they be just, you know, sort of any, Our goal is to have it inside the restroom. I think that's a conscious effort that we're making because one of the biggest problems with accessing these products is there's a little bit of shame and embarrassment, although there shouldn't be. We do know from our survey and from chatting with our consumers that it's something that not everyone is comfortable, you know, having the tampon shown in public. So we don't want to make it a barrier for someone to have to exit the restroom to find the product that they need. And so we want to make a conscious effort that they are all within

restrooms so that women can feel safe and comfortable when accessing these products. If you win the fellows competition, how would you use the $50,000 grant? As you know, as an entrepreneur, there's always so many things that are kind of needing your attention and things that you can spend money on. But I think what we would do is make sure that, first of all, we can mobilize a force of, you know, right now we're looking really primarily at high school and college students to be able to refill and restock and really take ownership over these machines. We call them our account managers or campus ambassadors so that they can, of course, be incentivized and make some income while they're in-coctuble. college or in school, but more importantly, just getting more dispensers out into the world. As you can imagine with the hardware business, the upfront costs are a little higher than they would be with software or other type of tech-enabled companies. And so we want to make sure

that I think our biggest route to increasing access is having machines out there. And so with the $50,000, we'd be able to put in so many more machines out into the world and really continue to achieve our goal of increasing access. That's Nicole Arguez, co-founder of Allie. More stories from our How I Built This Fellows will be in your feed on Tuesday. To learn more about the fellows or to get tickets to the How I Built This Summit, you can visit summit.npr.npr.org. And to find out more about NPR's live events, visit nprpresents.org. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Rumpteen Arableu.

Thanks also to Janet Ujong Lee, Jiana Capadona, Bruce Grant, Farah Safari, Liz Metzger, El Manion, Joanna Palovska, John Isabella, Jessica Goldstein, Leva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This Fellows Edition from NPR.