Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #22 - Morgan DeBaun on Reaching 20M Millennials - With Kat Manalac at the Female Founders Conference

Episode Date: August 2, 2017

Morgan DeBaun is the founder and CEO of Blavity.Kat Manalac is a Partner at YC.

Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. Today's episode is with Morgan DeBahn, the founder of Blavity, and Katman Yalick, who's a partner at YC. This conversation was recorded at our fourth annual female founders conference, which took place here in San Francisco this June. All right, here we go. Now I'm really, really excited to introduce you to our next speaker, Morgan DeBon. She's the founder of Blavity. So Blavity has, you know, grown into the largest media company and lifestyle brand, for black millennials.

So Morgan started Blavity in 2014, and since then, they've built a community of over 7 million readers, and they've raised a million dollars, which they announced last year. So I'm really excited to introduce her to you and hear more of her story. So welcome Morgan. Hi.

Hello. I moved on to this couch so we could get real cozy. I love it. Hi. Hi. Okay, so I want to, so for folks who might not know you very well, I'd like to just kick it off. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Yeah. Maybe where you're from and what you were doing before you started Blavity. Totally. So I'm from St. Louis, Missouri. Any St. Louis out there? No? Yeah. Oh, some. Okay. So I went to school at Washu in St. Louis, as did my three other co-founders. And I actually started off wanting to be a teacher.

That's how I was going to change the world, and particularly, like, black youth and giving more access. And then I got in the classrooms and very quickly realized that even the best of, principles and the best teachers were totally restricted by laws, regulations, etc. And so I was like, I'll be a politician, no problem. And so I switched my major. I became a polyside major. I was in student government. And then realized that everyone was influenced by money, right? That that, you know, we all know that now, especially after what's going on. But, and so I was like, okay, well, this is interesting. How do I both help the people that I care about in my community, make enough money so I can influence other people and make better decisions.

And technology and entrepreneurship is one of the best ways to do that. And so that kind of started my journey. And then after I graduated from college, moved to Silicon Valley and to Mountain View specifically and worked into it as a product manager. So I went, you know, big culture shock, I think moving from St. Louis to the bed. But here we are. So what was the original? vision, like at what point did you decide to leave into it and start?

So that's a great question. I think part of it was I've always been tinkering, I've always been kind of making things. Blavity is just the first one you've heard of, right? So you had a bunch of side projects? Tons of side projects, websites. And I think when I was... And you tell us about one random one that didn't work? Of course. Okay. Let's see. Do we want the biggest failure? Yes. I think is still a really good idea. Okay, good. Can we do both? Really quick. Okay, the biggest failure was, so personal finance. So basically, when you graduate, when you're in college, you have no money, right? Like, maybe you have like a couple thousand dollars, but like, you know, you don't really have any money. Then you graduate and you go work at a Google or an intuette and you're making $50,000 plus, like out of nowhere, right? And a lot of people don't know what the allocation should be for savings or spending on rent or if you want to buy a car. And so it was a personal finance calculator. No, there's like thousands of those.

There's like there's no differentiation or anything. So it was a good idea, but like not really a business. And then the one that I still think is a really good idea I did in college with two other of my friends. One is now my CTO and the other one has gone on to raise millions of dollars in manual Banfo. And it was called QuadConnect. And so it was basically you could find full. free food on campus. So this was before Facebook events, like, really were things. So we were, like, scraping all these campus calendars and then aggregating it. And because at the end of the semester,

you run out of food, you know, meal points. And so you're trying to find all these free food events. Yeah. No one's done it. So if someone decides to do it, just let me know. This is like a classic college student problem. I'm surprised actually no one has solved it yet. Right? Yeah. Okay. But going back to Blavity, what was the original vision for Blavity that you had? And how has it evolved? Yeah. So the original vision, which is still actually the same today, is to create products and experiences in which we're celebrating black people.

And it's like the problem that we saw and the problem that I saw was a few different things. One, like working at Intuit, what was really exciting was they're really great at designing. They're really good at creating experiences. Like Turbotex is supposed to be really boring, but it's like not that bad, you know? It's not that painful. QuickBooks, same thing, right? Now that I'm on the other side, I'm like, oh, I love QuickBooks, right? But that process of learning, like, how to design for delight, how to be really specific about creating a product for a specific user and being, like, ruthless about who you're creating for. What I realized was that no one was doing that for me. And so there's a thousand problems that black people have and people of color have and women have that this entire industry ignores.

And so with Blavity, we wanted to create different products, and we wanted to create different experiences to kind of fix that. And then, you know, the thing on the personal side is that Mike Brown happened when I was working at Intuit, and I was actually at Demandforce, it was a startup that Intuit had bought. And it's like, it's a great company, but it's very white and very bro, and it's a sales company. And so I was in business development, so I was kind of like sitting on the floor, and I was like, okay, this is interesting.

They didn't really know what to do with me. My hair was like really big. There's like, I don't really know where you came from. I came from like the motherland because I came from into it. You know, so it was just like, it was a lot, I think, for people. And I felt that. And I kind of carried it with me. And then when Mike Brown happened and my world was exploding, you know,

being from St. Louis and watching things happen on Facebook. And again, you have to remember that this was two, three years ago. So this was before trending topics on Facebook. Right? So it was very difficult to find information. So you had to go to Twitter and Periscope. in Vine, and there was a lot of things happening where there was no central, there was no central way to find out what was happening in a city, and then things started to explode across the country,

right? Things were happening in Baltimore, things were happening in Cleveland, things were happening in St. Louis, and so individual people became our sources of information. Now these people, you know, we know who they are, D. Ray, Netta, Sean, right? But back then, they were like just normal people. And so to find them was really difficult. And so Blamity had started, like we had started to tinker a little bit. But that's when I ultimately quit and said, we need to do this. Black media is moving too slow because they're antiquated in terms of magazines and newspapers. They never really made the switch to mobile first and digital first.

And then millennial media, they don't care. Yeah. You know, we care a little bit more now, but back then nobody was really paying attention. So that's the beginning. Yeah. So since then, you know, so basically, Maybe going back to that first moment, how did you get your very first users? Yeah, so we started as an email newsletter.

And one of the insights was that black people and people of color actually over indexed and watching television. So it's about eight hours a day on average. It's a lot. The average person watches about five. And at the same time, we're huge content creators. Like anything on Twitter, the funniest stuff on Twitter, probably the black person. The memes, like all of that stuff, right?

And so it was interesting to me that you take both of those things, and yet we don't really have a place to find that in one place. You kind of have to be a cool kid and be able to find it. And so Blavity, what we were doing was curating an email newsletter that was your top ten things you needed to see this week, and they were videos. And did it start out as just you curating everything? Oh, yeah. And there's probably some people in the audience where I just scraped your email and put it on the newsletter. So, yeah, and then we went straight to YouTube from the newsletter, and then we spent, like, you know, two months building this, like, really cool website. It had all the algorithms and stuff, and so instead of from the newsletter to YouTube, you went to the website.

Again, this is back when, like, Upworthy was a thing, and, like, you know, Facebook, right? There's all these different things happening. Everybody hated it. They did not like going to this other website. They were like, no, we're just going to go to YouTube. and so that was our first fail. And, you know, we kept iterating from there. But, yeah, it was an email newsletter in the beginning.

So how did you realize that people weren't into the video aspect of this and really wanted that text? They wanted to read. Right. So I thought that it was just because the site was ugly because it was. You know, you always launch things really ugly in the beginning because, like, why make it pretty if you don't know if that's what they want? So then I made it prettier, right?

I was like, okay, fine, we'll go lighter, we'll add some call-to-action buttons, like all these things. Nobody cared. So then it was like, okay, how do we drive traffic? Maybe people just need to learn how to type in Blavity.com, like they're not used to the brand. So we started doing content marketing. So we created a blog and then wrote stories about the people actually behind the videos. And I hired bloggers. We didn't hire, I didn't pay them because we didn't have any money.

But I brought on bloggers. And then the bloggers. was getting like a thousand times more traffic than the videos themselves and the URL was like insane right it was like blog dot blabity.com backslash blog like it was ridiculous um and so i was looking i mean i track everything religiously like every day google analytics every hour looking at real-time analytics and you can see the difference and i just didn't ignore it and so we switched it so blavity dot com became the blog and then videos dot blabby.com became the video site and that just died It's just like dead.

But the blog, I spent, you know, a weekend making a WordPress site versus another site that we spent two months and hard-coded everything. It was, you know, supposed to be this big tech thing. So how do you, that's like, how do you kill your darlings? Like something that's like two months birthing, basically. And then suddenly you realize, you know, it's not going to work out. I kill my darlings all the time. Left and right, all the time. I mean, I think failing fast is like part of how you move in this work.

particularly in technology space and especially consumer social media engagement community. So, yeah, I am agnostic about how we reach people. I just want to make sure that we do. So you have built this incredibly passionate community. I see people tweeting about Laude all the time. And like how did you go about growing and nurturing that community and keeping them coming back? So the first thing, which is part of our values, is that we don't make it about us. So Blavity, we always try to ask ourselves, how does this help someone else?

Is it information that they can use? Is it a video that's going to make them laugh while they're sitting at work feeling lonely? Is it information in the morning that they would never get if they were just scrolling through their Twitter feeds, unless they followed us, of course? And once you remove yourself from what do I think people need versus what is it that will help them, because they've said that they need this or they've indicated through behaviors that they need it, then it actually becomes really, like, refreshing and easy because you just have to listen. So in the beginning with Flavity, what we heard was that creators, like young people who have these amazing products or creations, weren't getting the press and weren't able to get on stage and do the things that they needed to do

to get to the next level and to really ultimately monetize. You know, that's every creator kind of kind of make money, right? And so we said, okay, we're going to be about the culture. Like, we're going to promote the artist in Brooklyn. We're going to promote the EP that just launched that the fader is not going to cover. We're going to give them cameras. We're going to give them resources. And we're going to train them and give them money even.

And that was the beginning. And then what's interesting is, as they've grown, we've grown. So Quinta B, who's huge at BuzzFeed, well, three years ago we put a camera in Quintas hand and we're like, go run around. It was a GoPro. We're like, go run around and just show us your life. And then we'll make a video out of it. And now she's one of my best friends.

So she's got literally millions and millions of followers. But back then, she maybe had like $50,000. So I think focusing on the community and focusing on the building from the ground up as opposed to the tops down was really important. So it's really about empowering the creators and the community. And it's not about like your editorial vision anymore. Right. Let's get out of the way. Huh.

Right? And so we've invested a lot of time and money on building out the platform of Blabity. We're not on WordPress anymore. We've built our own website and our own CMS, a content management. management system so that we can enable user-generated content. About 50% of our content today is actually from the community, which has its own problems. But in the long run, you know, it does. All communities, definitely. I hear you. You're raining. Oh, yeah, you know. So, but in the long run, it's way better. It's scalable. It's empowering. You can build things, systems and processes that make it efficient

frictionless for people to share their stories and their ideas. So you raised a million dollars. A little bit more, actually. Oh, awesome. Well, you raised more than a million dollars, yeah? Yeah, I had another round that hasn't really been announced. Oh, well, awesome. Congrats. And so, you know, as we've been talking about, it's particularly difficult for women or people of color to raise.

And so did you feel like there were barriers that you faced? And what was your strategy for getting around them? Yeah, absolutely. So I think I made the mistake that a lot of first-time founders make, which is you raise, you go and look at your competitors, right? You go look at some on Angel's, you look at them on crunch base, and you're like, okay, well, who invested in them? We're like them, but for us, and so I'm going to go talk to them.

They're going to get it. No, that's not true. They might get it, but they're like, well, I already did that, or they're going to compare your numbers to their numbers. And so for me, like thinking about Mike or Hello Giggles or refinery way back in the day, like they had already raised money, some of them even before they launched, right?

So my numbers and their numbers not going to match up, right? So I'm like, well, can you take out all that money they spend on Facebook ads and then compare me? You know, no, investors, that's too far down. And so in the beginning, I definitely made the mistake of going after, and I'm sharing my mistakes intentionally

so that we all make mistakes, right? It's just part of it. and then quickly realized that I wasn't ready. I didn't have the right story. My story was way off. People couldn't understand the ecosystem that I was trying to build with Blabity. They just saw, so you're a blog on WordPress. And you don't even write.

Like, you aren't a journalist. Right? And I'm like, I mean, like, yes, technically that is what I am today. But the vision is this entire world of products and websites and brands. and experiences, and I can't tell you what those are yet, but because it's in such an underserved community, and because we're going to work really hard, we're going to figure it out. And I just needs a little bit more time and a little bit more space. So you hadn't, you were like, here's where we're out today, but you didn't have that, like, and here's the bigger. I had some

ideas, but then they said, oh, you're doing too many things. You're not focused, right? I was like, well, no, I am focused, you know, like, I'm here, but you have to sell it, right? And so I didn't do it well. I mean, flat out, I did not sell the story very well. And so I went back into my little cave with our team and kept building and built to a place where it was so ridiculous that we had not raised money. Where it was like, we walk into the room and people were like that those cannot be your numbers. And I'm like, they are. Right.

And so then people had to make a choice. Do you want to invest to me or not? Do you believe my numbers or not? Right? And do you think that this is a business that's worth over two, three, four hundred, million dollars or not. And there was no ambiguity there. And some people, the answer was no. Right? And they're like, no, I don't believe it. Okay, bye. Right. Because I believed it. And I think, you know, now, obviously, three years later, there's some people who have been like, hey. Yeah. And I'm like,

hmm, right? No, you don't get in this deal. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. It's true. So you made it so good, they couldn't ignore you. Absolutely. Which is hard. When you're bootstrapping, it's expensive, right? And so how long did you bootstrap? Bootstrapped for a year. Living in San Francisco, which is really hard.

I was on that O'Neill. And how big was your team then? Paid? Zero. Unpaid, we had probably around six or seven people. Or paid via what I could pay them at the time, $100 a month, $500 a month. I mean, it was very much a community and mission-driven company.

you had to really believe in it to be here. But, yeah, and so when I raised our first round, it really went to just pay for all the things that I was already personally paying for, and to hire the people that were already working for free. So it didn't actually go very far. But it was a success indicator that I think the market could then say, okay, now we can go give them some more money.

So how has your job changed from the time you were bootstrapping to now? Yeah. I mean, I would have never done this when I was bootstrapping. I'm working. I can't be on stage. Yeah, I think that now it's very much about people and hiring and sharing the story of Blavity because we are so different than a lot of companies. We're a mix of media. We're a mix of tech. We're definitely a lot of culture and trends. And so, yeah, I spend a lot of my time just trying to remove barriers from my team, make it easier for them to do their jobs, and then storytelling and making sure that people know what we're up to.

What are the next steps for Blavity? Like, what is the big vision? Yeah. So just to kind of share a little bit more about what we do. So Blavity is a media company and lifestyle brand, like you said. We have two conferences, AfroTech, which is a tech conference here in San Francisco. And we have Empower Her, which is a women's conference, which moves around. It was just in Chicago a few weeks ago.

We have three websites. So we have Blavity.com, 2190, which is a new brand that we just launched for Black Women specifically. lifestyle brand and then the conference ladders up underneath it. And then we actually acquired a third company that we just announced last quarter called Shadow and Act, which is focused on, it's like a black Hollywood reporter. So, you know, what's Avery Duvernay doing? What's Issa Rae doing? What's the trailer that just got released? But also because of such a huge kind of energy around video creation and black creators, we can curate, engage with people

with web series, all the new web series releases and things like that. And then we tested a lot of things like e-commerce and others. So that's kind of the world that we are right now. How do you decide what to test out or what to sort of keep and what to kill? Yeah, it's very much based off of numbers. It's very much based off of like speed of traction and then comparing different things at once. So what, for example, with our women's brand, which started off called Blabity lifestyle. So it was just a separate Instagram account because we knew that, you know, if we posted women and their afros and like all this stuff on our Blavity account, all the guys would be like, right? And so we're like, okay, cool, we'll create a separate brand. It deserves its own space.

It deserves its own voice. And then that was actually growing faster than Blavity. So, and we're like, of course it is, right? Women are amazing. And we're very much like, you know, and I'm a woman, right, like all these things. And so then we're like, okay, we'll launch a Twitter account, right? And we didn't have separate websites at all. It was all going back to blabity.com, but we had separate voices

on social, and then from there, we're like, okay, well, maybe we should start writing content specifically for this demographic. And then that was growing like crazy. And then we said, okay, well, maybe we should just launch a separate brand because some of the things that we want to do really don't fit under the

Blavity brand. Like if I want to release make a notebook that's like a day planner that's talking about living your best life for women and like put afros in the cover and like all this stuff like that's not going to work on blabity it warrants its own brand and so we went back to the drawing board and said okay what would a company for black women look like what would a brand for black women look like what are what's in the space already and then we went back from the from the scratch and designed it and launched yeah so you have all these from properties, and so kind of longer term, are you just going to keep

experimenting and see what works, or is, you know, are you driving towards a specific, you know, one specific goal? Yeah, so the future of Blavity, like, way far away from now is that Blavity is a brand that when you see it or you feel it or you're around it, you know exactly what you're going to get, and it's a positive impression and energy around black people. And if you're black, it's like, oh, this was designed exactly for me. So, for example, if Blavity throws a party, you know what you're probably going to get, right? If we're like, we're going to do a music festival. You know you're probably going to get salon, chance the rapper, Donald Glover, right?

Like you can kind of say in your mind what we're going to do or what that might look like, what that experience might look like. If we're like, we're going to do a Netflix show, right? People would be like, okay, like maybe a dear white people vibe. like, you know, there's some things that we can do and expand into from a brand perspective that will just be an extension of who we are. On the website side and on the media company side, I certainly think there's plenty of communities that have not been touched.

So, for example, music. There's not many music media brands that focus on black culture, which is ironic considering how much black musicians run the music industry, right? are the creators of the music industry. And so that's certainly an area that we're thinking about and trying to figure out what is our voice in kind of the indie black creator space. For founders who are building brands right now

and focusing on that, what do you have specific advice for them? Yeah, I think be unapologetic about having a big vision. I think in the beginning I felt like the world couldn't take all of me. They were like, hmm, it's a little much, right? Like, you're doing a lot. And so I sliced it down so that they could understand me. And I think I did that too long.

Sometimes you might have to do it to get to a certain person, but I think that I, like from a mental perspective, it took me too long to just embrace everything that I wanted us to be. And now that we have as a company, that I think everyone feels much more empowered to think big and to try things and not be as scared of failure. Was there a fear that you were going to lose focus? Is that it, like, that you edit it down because you were like, I want, you know, maybe investors

to believe that we are focused on this particularly. Yeah, I mean, you solve for what you think is your biggest pain point. And when you act out of fear, I think that you limit yourself. And that's a problem. How do you get over that fear? I don't know. I'm still working on it. I mean, I think that it's being self-aware and surrounding yourself with people who believe

in you. You know, I'm lucky to have a very, like, strong tribe of people who are all. always pushing me and always saying, keep going, go bigger, go harder, go faster. And I think that's really important, particularly for women, to have that community because it is tough. It's very difficult. So if you could give advice to female founders, especially black female founders out there who are just starting out, like, what would you tell them? I would say, um, it's a, you don't have to ask for permission. Like, I think sometimes we wait for other people to validate us because we've spent a lot of time not being validated

and not seeing ourselves in places. Like, for example, when I said I was going to quit my job and run a startup, everyone was like, name me a black female founder. And I was like, hmm. And they're like, okay, now name me a black CEO, a black female CEO who doesn't have a law degree or an engineering degree or a business degree.

and I was like, oh, you know. And so there's all these reasons and all this data that shows that we shouldn't exist, right? If you look at the numbers, like, you literally wouldn't go outside. Yeah. So it's true. So it's like, you know, so don't. Just like, don't listen to them. Don't ask for permission.

Don't wait for someone to tell you that it's okay to be great and to do what you want to do. So that's my advice. That's awesome. Right on time. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you to Morgan. Okay, thanks for listening. So if you want to read the transcript or watch the video, you can check out blog.combinator.com. And as always, please remember to subscribe and rate the show. All right, see you next time.