Hi HN! In February 2011 I launched a side project on Hacker News. The HN post was #1 for about a day and was titled: “I’m a pregnant hacker. Here is my side project” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2175757<p>Babylist has grown since that launch day into a $250M/year revenue business. We announced our first significant funding round yesterday: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyaklich/2021/11/04/babylist-raises-40-million-expects-to-hit-250-million-in-annual-revenue/<p>I wanted to say thank you. Our very earliest adopters came from that post. We’ve hired amazing team members through HN Who’s Hiring over the years.<p>I wrote that post on Feb 3 2011 and had my son two weeks later. Being home with a newborn was difficult for me -- in reality it was isolating and boring. Being able to work on Babylist for 45 minutes a day used my brain in a needed way. Through that first year Babylist scaled to about $3,000/month with an affiliate business model. Babylist was then what it is now: A better baby registry that works across retailers.<p>Over the years we’ve made our experience and offering better and better. We’ve launched amazing products, we’re both a vertical marketplace and e-commerce company, we have the best content to make product decisions and most recently are creating amazing product recommendations via our data and machine learning. Years ago we made an explicit decision that we weren’t a registry company, we were all about this monumental life stage and serve a baby’s entire community.<p>The journey from engineer to CEO of a growing 100+ person organization has been challenging and amazing. I stopped coding many years ago and bite my tongue when I have technical suggestions. I have given our Engineering Culture interview to almost every hire we’ve made until very recently.<p>I’m happy to talk about any part of this journey with y’all. I’m very grateful to this community. I would love to read your feedback or answer questions. (We’re also hiring remote engineers and happy to answer any questions about that.)
I applied for a marketing data analyst role a week ago that I was quite excited to interview for as I’ve followed the company and used the site on several occasions. The first call was a no show and after following up I received a message apologizing that it was missed but it was due to an emergency. No problem. I agreed to reschedule. It was rescheduled twice without any input for my schedule. I still went ahead and joined the call only to again be left on hold with no one arriving. I followed up again and heard nothing until today when the same person claimed to have sent me a new invite (one I didn’t receive until 5m past the scheduled time) to which I did not respond so he scheduled it for tomorrow at 5pm EDT then changed again to 5pm Friday. Not sure what is happening but this is the worst interview experience I’ve ever had and it’s turned me off a bit to the way the company functions if this is how talent is handled.
It sounds like your project could have been an ideal "lifestyle" business. Going from 0 to 1 employee must have been a big step. How did you decide to hire your first employee (and what did early employees do)?<p>And congratulations on the achievement!
I'm a huge admirer of what you've built over at Babylist and point to your content marketing a lot as being particularly amazing. Can you talk about why you're so strong in this area and what the journey was like getting to the excellent place you're at with content marketing?
My wife and I used Babylist for our current pregnancy, due in a few weeks. It made things a lot easier than it was with my first daughter, where we kind of just registered wherever if we remembered. It really is a great product, great job and congrats.
No feedback but a heartfelt congratulations. This is amazing and the revenue targets you've achieved are incredibly impressive. Well done, you're an inspiration to me.