The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - First Time Founders with Ed Elson – Why Caroline Spiegel Built an Audio Erotica App

Episode Date: February 4, 2024

Ed speaks with Caroline Spiegel, founder and CEO of Quinn, an app for listening to audio erotica. They discuss what differentiates her company from existing adult content sites like Pornhub and OnlyFans, what it's like to raise money for a company that VCs might not take seriously, and how to get over embarrassment as a founder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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NMLS 1617539. Scott, what's the most embarrassed you felt in your career? I think when I was kicked off of the board of the company I started at Red Envelope, that was pretty humiliating. I've also had businesses fail pretty quickly. That was pretty embarrassing. How did you deal with that feeling of embarrassment? I took a half a million dollars and ran a full-scale proxy fight to sweep out the entire board. Do you think that was the right move? Oh, 100% no. No. I lost. Something like 90% of the shareholders voted against me.

So at that point, it was like, okay, you're not only got kicked off the board, but all the shareholders think it was the right thing to do. I eventually ended up going back and accomplishing that on the second board meeting. And then the company went chapter 11, four years later. Oh God, I start to sweat just thinking about it. The lesson there is that I then ended up getting contacted by some hedge funds who wanted to back me to be a tip of the spear and an activist at other companies because they thought that I was crazy, but I was the right kind of crazy. So even in failure, you don't recognize that may be, in fact, a door opening that you don't realize. What would your advice be to founders who feel embarrassed when things fail or when things don't quite go the way they wanted to? You're the mite on a plum on a planet circling an unremarkable star that's one of 10 billion stars at the outskirts of a galaxy

of one of 10 billion. You are insignificant. And then in 100 years, nobody you know will be alive nor care about your successes or your failures. No one's thinking about your successes or your failures as much as you. To let failure get in the way of taking risks or being open with your emotions and living your life vigorously and loving others with reckless abandon is to not recognize how insignificant you are. Welcome to First Time Founders. In 2019, a Stanford undergrad set out to answer an eternal question. What do women want?

So she started an audio company, specifically an audio erotica company. Her app featured short form audio pieces with titles such as Yes Chef, Against the Window, and I Forgot My Sleeping Bag, and investors were skeptical. Is this a tech-enabled, sex-positive podcast company, or is it just a porn site? Many wrote it off as the latter. Fast forward five years, and the company has more than $3 million in funding and 300,000 subscribers, a quarter of whom open the app every single day. Porn or not porn, there is no doubt, this company is a success. This is my conversation with Caroline Spiegel, founder and CEO of Quinn. What's up, Caroline?

Hi, Ed. How are you? I'm well. It's 7 a.m. there, which is nice of you to do this so early. Well, yesterday we had a fire alarm test every 15 minutes for the entire day. Yeah, that's crazy. But I was shocked when you were like, oh, can we do this in the morning? Can we do it really early? And you're like, yeah, 7 a.m. works for me. Brilliant.

Would you say you're a morning person? Do you have like a crazy like morning routine tech founder thing going on or what? Well, I heard a funny Jeff Bezos like video about it, but puttering, like morning puttering is like sacred to me. Like just kind of walking around, getting coffee catching up on stuff doing a little word game like amazing yeah I agree with that I can never I can never get up in time to like actually start doing that though um I mean what do you do when you puss are you like reading the news or what are you doing well you have to have like a coffee thing that you're obsessed with that's like step one and then you have to have like some sort of just

something to get your brain moving like you could read don't try to do anything like aggressive or like that wouldn't feel good in the morning i don't understand people that are doing like like going to the gym or ice baths ice baths or whatever if you get crazy yeah you're not you're not down for the ice bath no no no So we met at Code Conference a couple years ago, and you were a speaker at the conference with Kara Swisher, and it was the first I'd heard of you, but you had this kind of crazy, awesome idea, and we talked a little bit about it,

and you met our team. but the idea was for an an audio erotica app called quinn can you just tell us what is quinn i started actually in 2019 but when we met in 2021 we had just launched our app so there were two years of kind of trying to figure it out getting it wrong a lot, and happy to kind of dive into that more. But we had just launched our app, and since then we've grown 400% year over year. A little bit about Quinn is it's a place to listen to erotic stories, and they're short. So it's not like an audiobook romance novel. They're designed to really turn the user on and help the listener reach orgasm. And it's something kind of in between, right, like this sort of romance novel that takes hours and hours to consume

and sort of graphic visual pornography that doesn't appeal to women and doesn't really suit the modern consumer. Is it for women? So it's made by women for the world, but a lot of our content is geared towards women and a lot of our users, the majority of our users are women. That said, we're really like expanding our offerings for men and a lot of users report bringing it, you know, to their partner, listening with their partner and it really helping their interpersonal relationships. so it's definitely not only for women for someone who's listening to this right now they're probably

thinking like why is why is there a porn app and why is there a porn app founder on this podcast um which is probably worth like kind of explaining like why why did you do this and why is Quinn in your view a good thing considering that I think most people would a lot of people would say you know porn is bad porn is a bad thing so what is what's good about Quinn what is it doing for the world so Quinn was started when I was a senior at Stanford and I had just recovered from an eating disorder and one of the side effects, unexpected side effects was something called female sexual dysfunction. And there are actually over 40 drugs on the market for male sexual dysfunction and zero for women.

So I started looking into why that was and what offerings were out there for women and it's kind of just this barren landscape where you either have romance novels that take hours and hours like I mentioned to consume or sort of this like off-putting overwhelming overly graphic video content on tube sites and there was no in between and I think from like just a like a very basic level i didn't like the products that were out there and i wanted there to be a better product i thought the products that were out there were ugly not easy to use the existing porn products yeah and i mean existing sexual wellness products too it's like porn for example it's like constant you're constantly bombarded by ads i don't want to see like sperm vitamin gummies like when I'm, you know, trying to have a

sexual experience. There's all these things that are just you wouldn't you wouldn't tolerate them if they were a part of any other product experience. If you weren't like listening to a meditation app and all of a sudden there were like these pop up ads and the aesthetic was terrible and, you know, it was very like jarring and scary you wouldn't want that product so I just thought that there might be room for a product that was different and I found audio erotica on tumblr and reddit and there are already these massive user-generated communities creating and consuming audio erotica. So, and then I listened to it and I was like, holy shit, this should be the mainstream way we consume

erotic content. Like this should be it. This works really well. It's immersive. Use your imagination, but it's not like you're starting from scratch. It's like it gives you a little, it takes the legwork out of using your imagination. But the reason why Quinn is important is because sex is actually a really good, beautiful, happy thing in life. It's how we all got here. And we shouldn't live with such kind of deep shame about it. And Quinn gives you an opportunity to interact with aspirational erotic content and something you can share, something you're excited about, something that could really work in your life. Yeah, all these porn sites are known to be exploitative and extremely shady and dangerous and scammy and all of these things because of

the nature of the content on there. But you're sort of rebranding that and making it cleaner and safer. And what I find especially interesting is that actually that is a better sexual experience for people who are consuming erotic content online. That's exactly right. Yeah. Like safety is sort of a prerequisite to arousal for women and I think also for a lot of men. And so when you like, it's kind of crazy that the only like erotic content, the only porn people are consuming are on these platforms that are like kind of feel scammy and dangerous, like you said. Do you think that that women are turning to porn slash erotic content in greater numbers these days than in the past? love all this stuff you guys talk about about young men um and i actually think like quinn is an interesting topic as it like applies to young men who are having sex less who are you know

online more and stuff like that and i actually find just anecdotally that there are a lot of women who you know they're making more money than they ever have that than in history women ever have they're single later in life. They're, you know, super well-educated. They have great jobs, etc. And so Quinn is sort of this, in the same way that all these sites and, you know, cam girls, strippers for years and years have been for men. Now it's time for there to be a sexual product for women. It's like the counterpart for women. So I think it's interesting as women get more and more financial freedom, where are these sexual products that cater to them? And it's like with workwear, right? Like

Zara or these other brands that made workwear for women didn't exist because women weren't going to the office. And then eventually they did. So these industries kind of appear as we reach, you know, as we get further and further into equality among the sexes. Yeah. But, you know, a lot of people would view this as a bad thing. So, I mean, you mentioned like the stuff that we talk about, young, lonely, sexless men. I mean, let's just, the numbers which I have pulled up ready to go one in three american men aged 18 to 30 have had no sex in the past year that number has tripled in the past decade um here's one i just when i was doing research for this episode 46 of men aged 18 to 30 watch porn on a weekly basis among women it's%. And then one in 10 men say that they have

a porn addiction. Um, and for women, that number is 3%. So, I mean, I think a lot of people would argue like this, why, why create a counterpart for this thing that is resulting in, it would appear that porn and porn addiction is resulting in men not going out and meeting women and having sex and building relationships and establishing connections. And so why do the same thing for women? I think a big important part of it is it's not prescriptive. So when you're watching visual porn, you're seeing specific acts and specific types of bodies. And then you're going into the real world and you might have thoughts like, well, why doesn't my sex life look like that? And why am I not able to do that or whatever? And I mean, I hear this even with women where

they'll watch visual porn and they'll just feel really shitty about their body, right? Like, I don't look like the women in these videos. Does that mean I'm not hot? Does that mean I'm not, you know your partner, you and Draco Malfoy, whoever it is that you want to put into the scenario in your mind and have the two, you know, let's just look at Pornhub, for example. Biggest porn company in the world. It's owned by this company called MindGeek, which was recently acquired by this private equity firm, which is called Ethical Capital Partners. Yeah, do we know if that's real? Now, we don't know what the acquisition price was. And there's basically no financial data on on mind geek or any of its assets right so but what we do know is that in 2018 um mind geek generated half a billion dollars in revenue with 50 profit margin the other side of the adult content coin is only fans um and estimates say it did around two and a half billion billion in revenue in 2021.

30 million users, 100,000 creators. Does the future of erotic content look more like Pornhub or more like OnlyFans? Or do you consider Quinn to be developing a new category? What's so striking about Pornhub is how much traffic they receive and how hard it has been for them to monetize that traffic. I actually hear like the number you're saying of half a billion dollars in revenue. Is that what you said? I think.

Yeah. As like kind of quite low for the amount of traffic that Pornhub receives or that, you know. And what happens is they basically send the traffic around to different proper, like these different digital properties they own and some very small percentage of the users convert to buying like a premium chat site or a premium something. And that's where that revenue comes from their ads, like to buy an ad on Pornhub is incredibly cheap. So their ads business, because who wants to advertise on Pornhub, right?

Touching on the stigma, the stigma point we talked about, you know, Walmart is not buying ad space on Pornhub. And so actually the things that like, the advertisers on Pornhub are other MindGeek properties. So it's this whole kind of incestuous thing. It's very difficult for them to make money. OnlyFans, I think is the most exciting interesting you know just incredible business that's you know that

has entered the adult space in recent memory um i feel like quinn is much closer to the only fans model that we have all these creators right quinn is very good creator driven platform that's how we grow creators bring their audiences onto quinn but i don't feel that quinn is taking market share from either company i think we're creating our own market and i think like you know on only fans nearly all of the paying customers on only fans are men and on quinn nearly all the paying customers are women that's the main and most important difference. That's a good point. Yeah. Well, let's just think about like long-term prospects for the company.

So it's a subscription model. What's the growth opportunity? I mean, when I was discussing with my team, we were thinking about like, you know, one thing you're addressing is female sexual dysfunction and also potentially loneliness. I mean, there's this potential side that you're improving relationships, improving sexual relationships. I'm sure that's where you would want to view it. Where's the growth? Or is audio stories designed to get the listener to orgasm, I do think that's the future of the adult content space as we know it. So I think that's honestly where the growth is. I see us as sort of the first company to bring adult content into the mainstream, into the tech conversation, into the consumer, you know, the true mainstream consumer space. I mean, you have a porn company on the Prof G pod right now. It's pretty,

it's pretty new. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. No, no. And, and just sort of like, I mean, honestly, like when Apple first started, right? Like computers were just for computer geeks like no one had a computer it was like weird they were like these black machines that no one understood they were clunky and terrible and hard to use no one knew how to talk about them yeah they were for nerds and like steve jobs thought oh what if this was something beautiful that was like totally a part of everyone's lives i see the value in this like category. And obviously I'm not saying that we're Apple or anything like that,

but I think that's like a powerful like thing to think about. Like what are these categories that are shunned or just for so-and-so and just for this part of life, right? Like porn is just for under the cover, slam your laptop shut, taboo. No one's talking about it. And what if it was actually this beautiful, healthy, amazing part of life? That's the kind of thing we're betting on. We'll be right back. We're back with First Time Founders.

Was it difficult to raise money? I mean, that was a pretty good pitch, but I mean, I can imagine. Yeah, how do tech people respond to you when you ask them for their money? You know, I have a lot of advantages in terms of raising money. Like I feel like I went to Stanford, I'm white. Like, I don't know, I was a CS major. My brother is Evan. Like there's a lot of like things that were working my favor. So I'm, I'm hesitant to be like, it was impossible. Yeah. It was so hard for me when like everyone it's hard for everyone, but I would say like founders

listening, like just know that, like, know that it's like, it's really, truly hard for everyone and keep going because there's no one who like i remember like racing and being like is this like so much easier for everyone else and i'm the like i'm a fool and like i'm just the only one that's getting turned down but no every company that's ever been successful was turned down over and over and over again it's a really important thing to keep in mind yeah you mentioned your brother is evan that is evan spiegel's uh founder of snapchat um i feel like that's often like something that people mention in like press about you it's like caroline spiegel parentheses like sister evan spiegel like and it's a it's kind of one of the main things that like frames you um at least when people are talking about you in in media

which i could imagine is pretty annoying but um i just what is it what has that experience been like well i mean it kind of just like humbles you a little bit in the sense that like the most interesting thing about me and probably still like the press views it this way is that i'm evan's sister like not not actually to me in my life but i'm just saying like that that's like that's the headline right rather than like the work that we're doing at quinn yeah and so it's a motivator which by the way i don't think is is true is way less true these days i want to say like i'm just thinking about like the really early no no no totally and it was but i think that's that's almost it's like motivating because it's like the more work we do the bigger Quinn is the less that becomes the headline um and so it's like that's kind of

the and I think it was frustrating especially in the beginning again don't feel sorry for me obviously but it was a little frustrating in the beginning because I was like oh my god all these people are watching and it's like I don't I don't know what I'm doing I'm 22 like Quinn is not we haven't found product market fit this is embarrassing yeah would you say that that's kind of like one of the main barriers to to success in terms of being an entrepreneur is like just constant embarrassment like do you feel like embarrassment is kind of the main emotion that you're feeling yes actually I honestly do like it's very and like humbling and just like oh my god like and I see it you know I see all my friends or a lot of friends from Stanford who are the smartest people I know and they're consultants and bankers and whatever. And I'm like, I know

what's holding them back. It's that they don't want to be like super cringe and super embarrassed, like just falling on their face in public. It's humiliating. Like, um, but honestly, no one's thinking about you as much as you think they are. And the cringe passes, you just get better at building a company and it goes away. You're also, by the way, the first female founder on this program, first-time founders program. And just some stats, female founders received 2% of VC investment in 2023. In 2022, that number was 2%. In 2021, that number was 2%.

In 2020, the number was 2%. It has not risen above 2% like ever. Why is that number so low? I have several very controversial thoughts about this. One is that, well, one thing is when I was first raising, people would say to me, oh, go to, you know, that female GP, go to that female venture capitalist, right? And a lot of female VCs, there are actually very few female VCs. So if you think about it from the female VC perspective, they're trying to minimize their reputational risk. They're trying to be a great VC and in doing so,

like minimize their reputational risk. So they're not going to take a chance, most likely on a female founder, especially a female founder in like a taboo space or in say fertility or, or, you know, sexual wellness or or whatever they would rather be in like the hot deals with you know it's like a a bro-y sass company or something like that um because again they're trying to like make their career as a female vc i i tell now when i'm talking to female founders who are raising i say go to the old white men who have made their career. They're, they're good. Like they do not need, they're not proving anything and they're evaluating your idea for what it is rather than trying to preserve their reputation or rather than like make, even make their reputation. So that's just like a big thing

to keep in mind is like, what are the incentives of the person you're asking for money and most of the time they will be they want to be in the deals that are like in their view most safe which is kind of messed up considering that vc is like the only asset class where like taking big risk is like the most important thing that's a really good answer i mean the one thing i would say is like what's so risky about a female founder? I mean, you mentioned like they're getting into like sexual wellness category. I can understand how that's risky and different, but you know, why not? Why not a female founder? That's, I mean, our female founders starting bro-y SaaS companies. Well, I mean, when we look at like college majors,

right? I mean, isn't this like a whole thing that like engineering majors have less women than, you know, English majors, for example. So is it a surprise that like women gravitate towards like consumer companies rather than these like hard tech or enterprise SaaS companies? Like, yeah, but it's all signal. It's just like, what is like a serious like company, right? And so I guess like a tactical piece of advice to women would be to start more of these like serious bro-y companies. Where does Quinn lie on the serious to unserious company? What do you know, you would think of Quinn as an unserious thing at the beginning, but then, I don't know, you've grown, would you say 400% a year? Year over year for two years, yeah.

Year over year for two years, and what is that, users or revenue? Revenue. I mean, there you go. how do other female founders do it I think back to the early days of raising and now it's a much different ball game like we're talking about like now that we have real revenue and real users um but those early days it's like that's when it's really really tough because you have this unserious idea and they ask, you know, what do you have backing up? And you're like, uh, I'm 23 and nothing. So I don't know. Um, and so I guess, you know, at that point, it's just about minimizing your burn, really getting some

traction and just, you know, taking what you can get, you know, doing what you can with what you can get, like going to people in your network, going to professors that liked you in college and asking them for interest. You know what I mean? It's like really just scrappy and trying to get 10K here, 20K here, you know, and putting something together where you can get something going. What was that moment when you were like, oh, fuck, I actually have something legit here? I think it was when we... So we released, like, our second Celebrity Voiced series in March of 2023, I think.

And it, like, blew up and it was going... It just, like, went much better than I expected. Our revenue was higher than I expected or revenue was higher than I ever expected it would be. And I think that was the moment where I was like, like my, I, on a different episode of this podcast, I think you said something about like the field of like delusion that you need to have as a founder. And it was like the first time that like reality was like kind of coming up to like the level of delusion that I had about Quinn for many years. Do you feel like it has done anything in terms of like

your identity as a founder? Because I can imagine that starting out, this is something I experienced in conversations with other founders, it's like they don't really believe in themselves necessarily. And they're pushing this idea to people and trying to convince other people, but also at the same time, trying to convince themselves that like they're legit and that this thing makes sense. And yes, I'm an entrepreneur and yes, I can, I can go in and convince people. But, you know, after a certain number of failures, you start to question whether you, your own personal belief in your identity as like a founder. And I guess I'm wondering like,

if you feel you've achieved that. In an interesting way, like, challenges or low lows served as a way for me to reaffirm to myself who I am. And I think sometimes success or like when things are going well, it can be frictionless in a problematic way. Like I'm thinking about all the times like when we had literally no money, like for that point, and like things were really bad and it was just not a good scene like that was when I really had to be like who am I like am I gonna keep going or am I gonna quit and it's sort of empowering to

make the decision to keep going um and I wonder sometimes like when things are going well like can you is it maybe easier then to lose sight of that strength and that like grit so but and and I was talking to someone and they were like when there's not a problem that's when I start freaking out as a founder because that's what it kind of feels like it's like your job as a founder is to like deal with problems and so when things start going well you're like wait what like this doesn't feel this isn't in line with my identity um so there's a weird way in which like problems and low lows and setbacks help you form confidence in yourself and belief in yourself so where did your mind go to when like you had no money and everything was going terribly when like you had no money and

everything was going terribly and then you had that urge to quit and then you decided to not quit like why not um it's such a good question i think i think it has to do with well two parts one is like really truly believing in quinn and mission. And I think a lot of people say this, but it's true. Like if you don't have a good wife or why your company should exist and it's easier to give up. And then the second thing was just, I was like, F all these people that are like saying, I can't do this. It's like the chip on your shoulder. Right. And it's like, they think I'm, I'm going to quit. I'm not going to. Um, I know the Beehive guy who was on this podcast said a similar thing. And I honestly have never met a successful founder who didn't have a chip on their shoulder. It's kind of something you need to just have someone that you're proving wrong with the whole endeavor.

Why do you think you have like a chip on your shoulder about stuff? I'm sure part of it is like you're like evan's sister of it all um and another part is everyone saying how unserious quinn seemed at the beginning would you say that's the main thing that's motivating you right now it's like i'm gonna turn this into like a massive i mean do you want to go public one day like what are you yes i do yeah now i'm now i'm saying this out loud it's really gonna happen now I just quit yeah I do and I think Quinn is like a category definer and you know if it's not right now it will be in

the future and we're just going to keep at it so So as long as I'm here, Quinn will be here and we're going to keep grinding. Okay, I'm just going to do a rapid fire round of questions. So first question, what's the biggest personal challenge that you faced since this idea began? Okay, here's a good one. This is like related to the resilience thing that we've been talking about. So like you definitely have to like in those low lows, you have to find that fire inside of you and like keep going. Right. But I think another important thing is when you get those rejections, like having a semi porous wall between you and the rejection so that you let in some feedback.

And I think a lot of founders have a tendency to be very defensive. And I certainly was like this, especially early on in my journey. But if you have this sort of thing of like, okay, I was rejected, like, F them, I still have my fire, I still have that like chip on my shoulder. But at the same time, like they had a few valid points that I should incorporate those into my, you know, into the company. And it's really hard to do that, especially when you're like, just like being like, rejected all the time and it's really hard to do that especially when you're like just like being like rejected all the time it's really hard to let in feedback what was like the the most down rejection moment for you um i'm sure it was probably oh this one's great we got a and i'm like i'm not trying to call out anyone like for real i know

that vc's jobs are hard so like no shade to anyone we got a term sheet from someone then after receiving the term sheet and negotiating like several terms in the term sheet they called and said they had they realized they had an lp in the fund who had a vice clause they hadn't heard of, they weren't aware of, and that that LP was going to pull out of the fund if they invested in Quinn. And so typically that would be something that you would find out in the first meeting with a fund about a vice clause. And so we had said no to multiple other term sheets for this term sheet. Oh, wow. We had said no to multiple other term sheets for this term sheet. Oh, wow. So it was like this whole debacle. That's some real tea, Ed. That's some real tea.

Yeah, that is some real tea. So the vice clause is, oh, we don't want to invest in any sort of sexual content kind of thing. Yeah, a vice clause is like guns, drugs, sex, whatever. And we're not going to find out who the VC was. was what now you have to figure it out yeah well i mean but again it's not even about them like it was just like the whole thing was just so it was like life was just like spinning in your face you know like because these guys were like well-meaning like they didn't they wanted to invest in quinn it was just this horrible administrative lp disaster so the semi-porous wall that I was talking about, you might say, okay, I need to get really clear on the vice-closet situation with investors at the first meeting going forward. I need to ask them about every single one of their LPs. I need to really dig into that. So that's a learning you can take away from that and it's really hard in the moment when that happens to be like oh yeah let me just collect some learnings but it really is like a good thing

to do collect some learnings you once said the thing that has been humbling for you in this experience was earning the respect of women that like women i guess more so than men are like harder to please um pun kind of intended um yeah well there's this joke that we make at quentin that i'm like that i like boys but that i made millions of women come and like it's like it's so true like it's like really like my job like i'm constantly thinking about what turns women on like what do they want and so i empathize with men because it's like men are you know are constantly bemoaning how they don't know what women want and now i get it right it's like really it's really hard to figure out and by the way i was

referring to just like marketing materials but yeah i guess also literally from a sexual yeah i know yeah but it's both right and it's kind of related um and i think from like a marketing perspective and from like a business perspective women are you know they have like the most like purchasing power in our in our society they're making all the household decisions they're constantly getting bombarded with marketing and products and they're buying stuff for the kitchen. They're buying clothes, they're buying skincare, they're buying makeup, they're buying health products, they're buying everything. And they are shrewd. They know when you're lying to them, they know what's what, they know the materials, you know, I mean,

they just like know everything. So you got to be smart. Don't bullshit women. Like that's seriously something I've learned. Like anytime we try to like gloss over something they're like what what do you mean by that you know so we now we're just like now we just tell them everything straight up we explain everything yeah well what's what's an example of when you've like sort of glossed over or bullshitted them yeah i mean okay yeah i wouldn't say it was on anything serious like we always try to you know be honest like we have this like portal system for creators where they submit audios and a lot of users would ask about like the timing of audios and what was happening and like the logistics of how audio audios got posted on quinn

and we would kind of try to yada yada it we would be like oh there's like an internal system like you know things happen blah blah it's like they're like what do you mean like what do you mean there's like a system for it and we're like okay fine you want us like want us to really explain to you like exactly how everything works they're like yes and so it actually turned out they were very understanding that like we had a review process and we had to listen in case there was god forbid like a cat meowing in the background and then someone says there's an animal and a queen audio right so it's like we have this whole like internal process of improving audios and our listeners our users were actually very open and interested in that and like understood it as soon as we explained it

so i would just say like, take your users seriously, especially if they're women and treat them like the smart, you know, capable, interested people that they are. Is there anything specific that you do to like hype yourself up and be nicer to yourself and make yourself feel better about things? Well, it actually ties back to like our puttering conversation at the beginning of this. I don't do like founder, ice plunge, listen to intense,

motivational, whatever. I do what feels good to me. I like walking my dog, having my coffee, and puttering. I'm not trying to crush myself into productivity. So I would recommend doing what works for you and what sounds appealing to you and that there's no right way to be a founder and that's a way of like hyping yourself up of like affirming your individuality and your style that's something my brother says which I think is some of the best advice is like be you and like do it your way and be like add and add your own flavor. I could imagine that it's actually difficult to be you in that position because you're trying to please people.

You're trying to please the customers. You're also trying to please the investors. You're trying to do all these things and trying to imagine what is the version of myself that would be most appealing to this investor and want to like give me money how do you stop yourself from doing that i guess like how do you how are you supposed to be you when you're walking into like a pitch meeting and you have to get the money otherwise

you're fucked i mean i feel like what you're describing is kind of like shape-shifting you're like oh you're like thinking like oh what does this person want me to be like? And I'll just be like that, right? Or like, what do I need to act like in order to get them to do X, Y, or Z? So that's like such a common trap, I think. And I think in order to not do that, you have to believe that what the most attractive and effective thing is to be yourself. And I think in leadership, that's really important too, like internally, like just don't, don't lead in the way that you think someone is supposed, like a real professional, like CEO is supposed to act or a real tech person is supposed to act, like be, you know, lead from a place of like, from your heart and from who you are. you know lead from a place of like from your heart and from who you are and do you have any examples of like your you being expressed through your leadership like any like ways that you write emails or like hold meetings or anything like

that yeah i love that i'm one thing about me is i love writing and so a lot of stuff with Quinn is just writing like I'll write you know an email to everyone about an idea I've had or a project we're working on and I mean that's just something for me where it's like affirming of myself to just write my ideas and so that's maybe a small one I also think like humor is a big part of our culture like pranking each other i love pranks so like i mean it's just like little things like that that are just and that almost sounds a little too like sticky but i i think it's like yeah the question would be like oh well why what's the point why would you prank someone at work but i guess the answer is kind of like because it inspires a level of energy that will actually lead to creativity.

There's no good reason to prank someone. Everybody's going to go prank their employees this week. This is why it's productive. You've heard it from Caroline Spiegel. Okay, I just thought of another another one which is a little better that's like by the way i actually kind of believe that but go ahead no well like product product intuition yeah yeah like like it would be like if i was constantly thinking when i was looking at marketing materials for quinn or something if I was constantly thinking like, what would a good consumer company look like? Like that would be a terrible strategy,

right? So it's like, instead of thinking like, what do I want this to feel like? Do I like this? Like, I think a really good thing is to imagine yourself like literally as the customer completely honestly, and be like, what do you think of this? Don't think what would a good consumer company, what would a good company do? Yeah. Cause that's so like alienating to the consumer. It be like, what do you think of this? Don't think, what would a good consumer company, what would a good company do? Yeah, because that's so alienating to the consumer. Just like, what do you think? This is what the average 23-year-old

woman wants. It's like, yeah, okay. Yeah, and trust your own taste. Yeah, taste is so important. Yeah. And like trust your own taste. Yeah. Like taste is so important. Yeah. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our executive producers are Jason Stavis and Catherine Dillon. And our associate producer is Jennifer Sanchez.

Thank you for listening to First Time Founders from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Tune in tomorrow for Profiteer Markets.