Natalie Gordon (Babylist) - How she combined content and commerce to better serve expecting parents, her approach to raising capital and creative product partnerships

Our guest today is Natalie Gordon, founder and CEO of Babylist. Babylist is a baby registry and ecommerce platform, combining content, commerce and data to serve millions of expecting and new parents. We focus on why Natalie decided to start Babylist when she just became a new mother, how reading The Lean Startup impacted her decision making to solving the chicken and the egg problem of marketplaces, finding product-market fit and a unique approach to partnerships.

Here are some of the questions I ask Natalie:

1. What was the insight that led to the founding of Babylist?

1. 11 years ago - creating your own baby registry
2. There must be a better way!!!!
3. Worked on another startup in the language learning space
4. If you can work on it for
5. Small aspirations day by day
6. Lean startup
7. Inflection point on Pinterest
   1. Did you always want to become an entrepreneur?
   2. What were some lessons learned during your time at Amazon that were helpful in your journey?
   3. What were some of the first steps that you had to take to validate your idea?
   4. How do you think about using content to lead to curation to purchase?
   5. What are the requirements to sell on Babylist?
   6. When you have a marketplace, you have a chicken and the egg problem. What were the first steps you took to solve for it? Was it tougher getting supply going vs. demand or vise versa?
8. Did you keep inventory?
   1. How did you approach demand / customer acquititon channels in the early days?
   2. How did you approach raising capital?
   3. What were some of the moments that as you look back were actually huge unlocks for your business?
   4. How did you make the business more sustainable for you
   5. You’ve now started selling your own products and aren’t just a marketplace. How do you think about what products to launch? What has been the reaction?
   6. How do you think about trying and testing out products for parents online and in brick and mortar?
   7. What has been the result during the pandemic when it comes to purchase behavior?
   8. What’s one thing you would change about venture capital?
   9. What’s one book that inspired you personally and one book that inspired you professionally?
9. Professionally: No rules rules by Reid Hastings
10. Personally: Dear Sugar - online advice column
    1. What’s one piece of advice that you have for founders?
11. Long game
12. Relationships are long