841 Fran Meier:

Melinda Wittstock (00:06):

Fran, welcome to Wings.

Fran Meier (00:08):

Thanks so much for having me, Melinda.

Melinda Wittstock (00:10):

Your accomplishments are so many and we all know how hard it is to be a female founder and a CEO, but especially to do it on the scale that you have is truly breathtaking. Let’s start at the beginning though. What was it that made you want to be an entrepreneur to begin with?

Fran Meier (00:32):

I went to Stanford undergrad at Stanford Business School, and I wanted to be a marketing person. And after business school I went to work at Clorox company in the brand management, which was really terrific. Terrific fundamental skill building. It was like my postgraduate degree in marketing, and this is about 1993. I was living in Oakland, but in the Bay Area. I started to hear about the internet, but in late ’93 or ’94, I joined AAA, the Automobile Club for California and Nevada at the time.

(01:11):

I was the product marketer for membership. And that was really an interesting job because they never had had a marketing department before. In any case, while I was at AAA, I first saw AOL and I first saw, what we called then and we don’t call it now the worldwide web. I guess we type “www.” As I was thinking about it and looking at this, I knew it would change everything. I just knew it. And I went back to my business school reunion in summer of ’94, met a friend of mine, Gary Kremen, who was starting a company called Electric Classifieds, which was going to reinvent classified advertising for the internet. And the first proof of concept was going to be Match.com, an online dating site.

(02:08):

Actually back then, we called it personal. One of my contributions was, “No, let’s call it online dating.” Personals had a bad name back then. Maybe you remember, you might be too young, but you’d call a 900 number and you’d pay by the minute. They’re pretty scuzzy. And really, from the time I spoke to Gary, I was like, “I’ve got to be part of this.” And Gary wants somebody with a good marketing experience, and I certainly had that. After I went by the basement startup hut and brought pizza one night and Chinese food another night I got an offer to leave my very, very stable job at AAA to join a startup in San Francisco.

(02:58):

And I jumped on it. I just knew it was going to change everything. And at that point, I was part of the co-founding team. There was maybe five of us. I was in charge of Match.com from the beginning. It grew very rapidly. We did a lot of good work that reflected my that marketing background, such as really thinking through who the customer is and what is she like. One of the things that we did at Match was really make sure we targeted women with the idea that if we target women, the men will follow. Because women, even back then, were somewhat less active on the internet than men. And none of the online dating sites that existed then really had a strategy. And I think having a strategy of targeting women really made a difference. I’ll tell you a couple of contributions that I’d like to take credit for. Have you ever done any online dating, Melinda?

Melinda Wittstock (03:56):

Oh, many years ago actually tried Match. I ended up meeting my guy in an entrepreneur group.

Fran Meier (04:12):

Yeah. Well, did you ever have to put down your weight in pounds?

Melinda Wittstock (04:17):

Oh, I don’t remember having-

Fran Meier (04:19):

No, you never did. And that’s because of me. Because as we were thinking about targeting women, I knew there were a lot of things that we had to steer clear of, and one of those was how much do you weigh. And that body type. And remember back in ’94, we didn’t have photos. Most people didn’t even really have digital cameras until about 1999. The other thing that we did, and this reflected my experience at AAA, is that we came out with a membership model. That turned out to be a much more powerful model than, for example, charging women 10 cents or men 10 cents per connection. It made it seem more exclusive and it’s a more sustainable business model.

Melinda Wittstock (05:09):

What’s interesting though, hearing you talk about this, is had Match.com not had a woman, and specifically you, but a woman on its founding team, there’s no way it would’ve succeeded.

Fran Meier (05:24):

I definitely think it succeeded very much because of me, which is all the more disappointing that in 1998, the board of directors of Electric Classifieds, which owed Match… And by the way, by 1998, we were far and away the number one online dating site. But this is before we understood the meaning of brand on the internet or social networks or even viral marketing. I had to prove that all my advertising paid out, which you would never do at the beginning of any sort of social network. We were so early, Melinda, we didn’t know how good we had it. And the board of directors decided to sell Match.com to fund the Electric Classified business. And this was before there was eBay or even Craigslist. That ended up going nowhere. Match got sold for less than $8 million to Sendent, and then the next year it got sold for about $70 million to what would become IAC. And out of all of that, I got a couple hundred thousand dollars, which was certainly was nice, but-

Melinda Wittstock (06:36):

I feel so much pain.

Fran Meier (06:40):

Match is a unicorn. And I made a mistake, and I know you like to hear mistakes. They were going to move Match from San Francisco to Texas, and I decided I didn’t want to go to Texas. And maybe I should have gone to Texas, I don’t know. In any case, it hurt. On the other hand, nobody can take away that experience and my contributions. And I meet people all the time who met on Match or online dating in general, and sometimes I get messages from people about, very rarely, “Look what you did. You ruined things.” [inaudible 00:07:26]

Melinda Wittstock (07:28):

I think of what a pioneer you were and continue to be. And pioneering, being first to market, is an interesting one. When can you be too early and too late?

Fran Meier (07:43):

Yeah. No, I know. Absolutely.

Melinda Wittstock (07:46):

With any disruptive company, I mean, this is one of the biggest things that luck of the timing…

Fran Meier (07:52):

Getting timing right is so important in almost anything. And I think with BabyQuip we have the timing right. I feel very excited about that.

Melinda Wittstock (08:04):

What makes the timing right for BabyQuip?

Fran Meier (08:06):

Well, so BabyQuip, we deliver baby gear to traveling families, everything from strollers, car seats, cribs, toys, so much more. And to families on vacation, whether or not they’re staying at a vacation rental or hotel or maybe Grandma’s house. And we’re powered by independent contractors, who are mostly moms, gig economy. Right now, if you look at millennial parents, they’re really looking for experiences. Travel is no longer nice to have, it’s a must have. They’re looking for those Instagram moments. They very often have a side hustle themselves and trust that side hustles can work. And so I think the time is…

(09:01):

And a lot of people are looking for a side hustle. They really like it. I know side hustles or gig economy gets a bad name, but not all of them are like that. And the quality providers we have in our community and network, most of them are moms and they could do this with their kids. I think the time was right to introduce this and take advantage of the millennial parents’ propensity to travel, their trust of gig economy or shared peer-to-peer networks. But they don’t want to go to Craigslist for baby gear. They want to make sure things are clean and safe and somebody’s accountable for the whole order.

Melinda Wittstock (09:52):

Did the pandemic help you? This big travel thing, and also gig econ… There’s a bunch of different things. Post-pandemic, everyone wants to travel. You’ve got this thing where people don’t have to be in the office anymore, so you have people working from all over the place, lots of virtual companies. Just the inherent flexibility, I guess, in the economy.

Fran Meier (10:13):

Yes, I think so. The pandemic was interesting for us. I luckily had raised some money that closed basically January and February of 2020. We were on Shark Tank, get the date, March 6th, 2020.

Melinda Wittstock (10:30):

Oh, no kidding.

Fran Meier (10:32):

And we were expecting all these orders to come and we had a very good episode. It was my son and I. My son Joe’s our CTO. And a fun episode. I didn’t take their money, their offer was too low. But it was great. And then California shut down that week. So we really had to slow the spend, rollback salaries, rollback marketing spending, especially. But it also gave us some time to focus on our insurance and our trust and safety program. And by February of 2021, we saw a big uptick. 2021 was double 2019, almost four times 2020, and ’22 was double ’21, and this year we’re up about 40%. Again, I think the revenge travel might be over, but travel as a must have is definitely still going.

Melinda Wittstock (11:34):

Younger generations, particularly people who are having babies now, there’s all this study that shows that they value experiences more than things.

Fran Meier (11:45):

Exactly, yeah.

Melinda Wittstock (11:46):

[inaudible 00:11:48]

Fran Meier (11:48):

[inaudible 00:11:48] We’re right into that. And many of them, and I think many of our customers, our parents were both people are working and when they want a vacation, they don’t want to have to worry about every little thing. And they don’t want to buy and dump. I bought and dumped. That was a bad thing to do.

Melinda Wittstock (12:08):

Yeah, I remember when I was having my kids, getting sucked into Buy Buy Baby.

Fran Meier (12:15):

Those were those really nice toys, was it?

Melinda Wittstock (12:18):

Oh no, they had everything. It was the Olympics of shopping. It made you feel, especially as a new mom to be, that you had to have everything.

Fran Meier (12:27):

Oh, the Buy Buy Baby stores. Yes, of course.

Melinda Wittstock (12:29):

Oh my God. Wasted lots of money there, actually. Things I really didn’t need. I’m just going to back up here for a second, Fran. There’s so many challenges that female entrepreneurs have to go through. Not least of which, let’s pick the one at the top, fundraising. Raising money from venture capital. What’s your experience been with that? What’s made you succeed at that or where have you had troubles with that? How have you overcome that to get where it is?

Fran Meier (13:14):

In general, we’ve done all right. Up until the current raise that we have right now, I’ve raised $8.5 million. I would say though that had I not had the level of experience that I had and connections with friends who are venture capitalists and people who knew me from my other entrepreneurial endeavors… After Match, I did Women.com and then Bluelight.com and then spent 10-plus years at TRUSTe, now called TrustArc. There’s no way I think a woman could do this without having that level of network and…

Melinda Wittstock (13:55):

And most don’t.

Fran Meier (13:56):

And most don’t. Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock (13:58):

It’s really hard. That’s always been my cross to bear because how do you build that network, especially if you don’t live in the Bay Area or don’t… It’s hard to be part of that club. And so what do you put your success… Did you actually consciously invest in, “I need relationships with all these folks,” or did it just sort of happen in the sense-

Fran Meier (14:18):

No. By the time I started BabyQuip… Let me just go back. In 2012, I left TrustArc. I was still on the board for a bit. And post-divorce moved to San Francisco, up the street from Airbnb, and I bought a three-story skinny house that you’d expect San Francisco. More of a Spanish style. And I had two bedrooms upstairs I started renting six months after I bought the house. And that got me thinking about this new way people are traveling and I’d have parents with a kid come over and I wouldn’t have anything for the child. I didn’t want to invest in all that gear.

(15:04):

My youngest son is almost 30. A lot has changed in parenting in that many years. And I was thinking about what are the businesses that are going to emerge from this new way people are traveling and also this new way people are working, because I was making very nice money. And actually that money allowed me to be a consultant with a early-stage female founder accelerator called Women’s Startup Lab. And I met a gal from here, Santa Fe, which is my hometown, who had started a baby gear rental business based on the idea of sharing economy. And the light went on. I’m like, “Okay, this makes sense.” And nobody was doing it at any sort of scale. Lot of mom and pops, some regional players, nobody making trust and safety front and center. It reminded me a lot of early stage Match, but this time I think we had the timing right.

Melinda Wittstock (16:11):

What would you say to a woman who has a great business idea, and not just an idea but has actually progressed, it qualifies for venture capital money. It could be a billion dollar plus business. The team has the right expertise, it has everything going for it, but she doesn’t have connections in the fundraising community, which is like nine times out of 10 or even more. That’s the case with a lot of female founders. What would you suggest they do?

Fran Meier (16:41):

Even though, at this point, I had four other startups under my belt, I actually joined a couple of accelerators. One was StartX, which was especially then, I think it’s broadened out now, was focused on Stanford alumni. But a lot of schools have these kind of programs. I did that one. And then when my son joined, we did Quake, which is another accelerator, at least at the time. And I didn’t do it because I needed to learn how to do startups. I did it because it would probably help me polish my pitch and get me exposure and get me pre-qualified to talk to a lot of investors. Now, there’s a lot of accelerators out there, Y Combinator, Techstars, and some of those are really well worth it. Some of them are less so, but I think it’s a path that that can help you get there. Other than that, I think you just got to network and try and get some champions, maybe people to be on your advisory board. And hit up friends and family. Tried and true.

Melinda Wittstock (17:56):

It’s been quite a difficult environment of late too, just because of the rising interest rates. Everybody has no memory of [inaudible 00:18:06] so a lot of capital dried up. And also the nature of venture has become… I’m just going to say it, it’s been a little bit more risk-adverse in the sense of, especially for first time founders or founders who haven’t had an exit yet or don’t have those relationships.

Fran Meier (18:25):

The other thing I should add, there’s a lot of funds focused on female founders and there’s an even seed stage. Those can be worth your time, if you need it. And I’ve had some good fundraising. How Women Invest pretty much led my last round. But I know what all the investors now are looking for is growth, a path to profitability, a large, large market, and that you are solving a problem in a really unique way. One of the things I’m most proud about our business is we have a 95 Net Promoter score, which is world-class and really shows that we found product market fit. That being said, and the fact that last year we had almost three and a half million in revenue, we served over 60,000 families last year, probably going to closer to 80, 90,000 this year. It’s still hard to raise money.

Melinda Wittstock (19:24):

Yes. I’m laughing because this is so much my story, as well.

Fran Meier (19:30):

It’s so hard. But one thing that I have put in my toolbox, and I recommend, I don’t recommend it for everybody, but it’s crowdfunding. Equity crowdfunding. We have a round going on right now with StartEngine. I can’t really talk about the details, but anybody could go see it. I did two prior rounds on SeedInvest and subsequently SeedInvest was bought by StartEngine, so it made sense. It makes sense if you have a brand and if you have passionate customers. And for us, we also have a passionate community of our quality providers. And the minimum investment is low, and you don’t have to be accredited to make the investment. I think it’s an important thing in your toolbox because you’re not completely 100% dependent upon the venture capital markets.

Melinda Wittstock (20:29):

There’s a beauty to that, but it necessitates, I think I’m hearing you say, you need to build that community first and loyal people. Because they love the product, so it makes sense for them to invest in something that they already love and they don’t need to be accredited.

Fran Meier (20:49):

And it’s a lot of work. You’ll be better off if you have a marketing team that could devote some time to this. It’s not insubstantial in terms of effort, but it gives you some leverage. You and apparently women-run companies get more money from crowdfunding, proportionately, than men.

Melinda Wittstock (21:14):

That’s really interesting. I wonder what the reason for that could be. I can think of a few is that we tend to create businesses that are more inclusive or have a community aspect.

Fran Meier (21:29):

I think it’s because the decision makers are not VCs. The decision makers are people who are interested in business, who could be your customers, could be your suppliers, could be other people who don’t necessarily bring in the bias from venture capital.

Melinda Wittstock (21:48):

That bias, oh my goodness, the fact that it still exists and in such a profound way.

Fran Meier (21:56):

Let’s say the numbers are wrong by a hundred percent. 4%. There’s nothing to explain it other than bias.

Melinda Wittstock (22:05):

And it’s crazy, too, because there’s so much research now that bears out that women-founded companies, or companies that have a woman on the founding team, outperform by any metric. In fact, they 90% of them stay alive relative to companies that are founded only by a male team. NASDAQ-

Fran Meier (22:28):

That’s because we have to work harder.

Melinda Wittstock (22:30):

I think that’s true. We do. I think that that’s a really big part of it. But you think a VC is going to be looking at the numbers, so even if you go and pitch them on, “These are our numbers, this is what we’re doing.” Even then. Do you find that when you’re fundraising in a VC context you get asked different questions, say, than a man would be asked?

Fran Meier (22:56):

Less so now, but one question… And when I started BabyQuip, I was in my fifties, I’m now 61, I would get this question that really bothered me. More than once they’d say, “I hope this doesn’t offend you.” They would do that lead in. And then the question was, “Why are you doing this now?” Now, I’ve done well. What are they asking me? [inaudible 00:23:28] I have enough money? I don’t know. It’s really-

Melinda Wittstock (23:33):

Yeah. It’s strange. There was a big study, I forget whether it was Harvard or MIT that did it sometime back. They sat in on thousands of pitch meetings and found that female founders tended to be asked questions that were more defensive by nature, like, “What are you going to do to mitigate risk?” Whereas the men were asked, “How are you going to maximize growth?” There was a bias inherent in the question, and I remember reading that and just my own answers, you got to get very adept at turning it into that. But I’ve pitched, “This is the most incredible thing happened to me.” The guy was like, “I don’t know. I should talk to my wife.” I was like, “What does your wife have to do with your…” What?

Fran Meier (24:27):

Oh yeah, you get that all the time. Early on, also, I talked to one investor who said that they’d put in 500,000 if I could get two other investors or raise about 500,000. And I got a marketplace investor from New York City and I got a Midas touch investor from San Francisco, female woman. And I said, “Here’s the two, and they’re great.” He goes, “She doesn’t count. She’s your friend.”

Melinda Wittstock (24:55):

Oh my goodness.

Fran Meier (24:58):

Since when? I mean, really?

Melinda Wittstock (25:02):

Wow. How do we change this? I mean, this is a big issue because there are so many women doing amazing things, but when we look at the numbers, women’s seed rounds tend to be much smaller-

Fran Meier (25:16):

And they give up more equity.

Melinda Wittstock (25:20):

And then you’re judged to the same standards. It is not even just about access to it, but it’s just the rounds are smaller and then you have to do more with less, but then you’re judged… It’s crazy. How do we change this?

Fran Meier (25:33):

We need a lot more rich women.

Melinda Wittstock (25:35):

We do. Speaking of rich women though, have you ever had this experience where there are a lot of very wealthy women, but they sometimes will say… And when I was in New York, doing a startup in New York, I would get, “My husband makes the investment decisions. I do all the charity stuff.” And I had a business that had a social impact mission. It’s like, “Yes, but you’ll have more of a social impact doing this and you’ll make my…” Why would you not? But it was this really weird bifurcated thing with really wealthy women. But that said though, they weren’t entrepreneurial women, they hadn’t done this. Is the answer that as more women succeed and get exits, we really need to commit to investing in each other?

Fran Meier (26:26):

Yeah. And there’s a lot of efforts that are happening. In fact, How Women Invest has initiative, called something like Come to the Table, to try and get more women. If you could get more women just to put $10,000 in. A lot of professional women, doctors, lawyers, corporate executives and so on, they might even spend $10,000 on a purse. Why not put it towards supporting a business that you care about and helping another woman succeed? Honestly, having some proportion of your financial assets, not all of them. I’m way too not diverse. Almost all my assets are either in real estate and startups, including this one. But for other people who are not entrepreneurs and don’t live this crazy lifestyle, five to 10% of your assets maybe go into some of these high-value female networks of entrepreneurs.

Melinda Wittstock (27:32):

I really think that’s a huge, huge part of the answer. It also is a mindset question though, too. Because I think women, historically speaking, so relatively, to men, new to all of this. I think sometimes we can get really trapped in a scarcity mentality. Much more mindful of… I don’t know, it’s just the way women talk about money as opposed to the way men talk about money. Just all these different things.

Fran Meier (27:59):

We’ve got to change this. There’s so many things. Women don’t negotiate as much. Women don’t support other women as much. Women have a higher risk profile. I could tell you a lot of the female-oriented funds, they are really also risk-averse because they don’t have millions and millions of dollars or even billions to back them up. So we’ve got to change the cycle, but it’s really tough. It’s been very pervasive, as they say.

Melinda Wittstock (28:30):

Yeah, very, very true. What have been some of the other challenges? You told me the story of Match and then there was TRUSTe and BabyQuip. Along the way, apart from fundraising or whatever, what have been some of the biggest challenges in growing and scaling your businesses?

Fran Meier (28:53):

Any marketplace depends on both having supply and demand. And honestly, I thought it was going to be harder than it was. It seemed like as soon as we put our quality providers in a given market, there was latent demand. People wanted the service. Now that we’re growing and we’re in over 1200 markets, we’re in about 15 different countries, we really are now pivoting to fine tune the model. How many people do we have in a market? How does the market change when we have really good quality providers who are really working it, versus some others who are a little bit more passive in their approach to the business? How do travel trends change?

(29:39):

We’re doing a lot of orders, but when I look at a market like Orlando or Anaheim or New York City, there’s a lot more we should be getting. And trying to scale up to that with limited funds is hard to do. Also, we’re in an environment right now where there’s a lot of mixed message coming to entrepreneurs. Is it all about growth? I don’t think it’s any longer about growth at any cost. Or is it about sensible growth, responsible growth, the unit economics, making sure that you’re making money on orders, finding a path to profitability, all these things. There’s a lot of trade-offs. I feel that as an entrepreneur, I’ve got all these tools. I’ve got money, I’ve got customers, I’ve got suppliers, I’ve got team, partnerships with hospitality companies and vacation rental companies and things like that. And my job is to try and conduct it. And the question is, how fast do I want that rhythm to be? So that we don’t just all crash.

Melinda Wittstock (30:53):

What about challenges in terms of leadership, building a team? On this podcast, it comes up a lot that a lot of women struggle with thinking they have to do it all. And not only that-

Fran Meier (31:08):

Oh, yeah, I probably do that, too.

Melinda Wittstock (31:10):

Yeah. And perfectionism-

Fran Meier (31:12):

Early on, I learned that it’s worth it to pay good people. I think what’s really nice right now, and one of my key hires last year is Victoria Coffee. She came from Cincinnati and she worked with Kroger’s and Dyson and US Bank and product roles. I probably couldn’t have afforded to… Would I have hired her? She was living in Cincinnati. But we’re a remote team and we can do it. I think this whole move to remote, which we were doing before the pandemic, really means you could find cost-effective hires in other markets that in San Francisco would’ve been some 20, 30% more expensive. And I also try and make sure I have good bonus and stock option plans, so everybody’s aligned. I try not to be penny wise and pound foolish.

Melinda Wittstock (32:15):

Do you have any advice about when you’re hiring different people and how to hire? Because I think a lot of women tend to hire too late and regard the team members as an expense. Like, “Oh my goodness, what if I can’t make it with this payroll?” Rather than as an investment. What’s going on there? And how have you navigated that, just in your own trajectory of not only when to hire, but how to make sure you’re hiring people that really thinking about them as an investment and [inaudible 00:32:54]

Fran Meier (32:54):

What you also do is you end up hiring for different stages of the company. And when you’re early on, you need all-around players. A marketing person that is willing to try and do it all. And this has been the trajectory for BabyQuip. In fact, my VP of Marketing was first a quality provider. She had her own baby gear rental business outside Washington, DC. She was a high performer and she’s like, “I can really help you guys.” She used to work at Google, and when I lost somebody, I was like, “Okay, Nicole, come on in.”

(33:39):

Then she was just a marketing manager, now she’s VP of Marketing. She oversees a team of, I don’t know, six or seven. But now, she has really good people who are more specialists. A social media manager, an email marketing manager. These people now have a lot of experience. As you experience turnover, and if you’re still growing, it’s a good opportunity to upgrade the positions and redesign them around the right people. But it’s hard right now. Before this call, I was working on a revised forecast for the end of the year. I don’t have a CFO, I do it. And it is occurring to me, I really should get a CFO, but…

Melinda Wittstock (34:39):

For all these different [inaudible 00:34:43] positions. And at what point do you know enough about your product market fit that you get into that? Yeah, I think where you’re at right now, where you’re in the operational piece of optimizing everything and really knowing your numbers and your systems and repeatable paths, all these sorts of things. When is the right time to be doing these different things? And of course, there’s so much information out there for everybody in terms of-

Fran Meier (35:14):

There’s really some good tools that actually have made it more easier for me to do it. Another debate I’m having right now is do we hire a product person for some of the new product stuff or for different experiences, mobile versus web? Or do I hire a data scientist who might be able to give us a lot of really good insights? And I think I’m probably going to go to the product person because we hired a a couple people that together have the data experience and a consultant. But you’re always weighing things. BabyQuip’s really blessed in that we have this community of over 1800 quality providers. And when we have a job opening, we go to the community first. And you’d be amazed at the work experience these people have. I’d say of my team of 18, more than half started out as quality providers.

Melinda Wittstock (36:13):

Interesting.

Fran Meier (36:14):

Then when they come on board, they know the business. The onboarding is so much faster.

Melinda Wittstock (36:36):

We started to talk a little bit about membership models and such and community and danced around that women are actually quite good at that. Your whole model is very collaborative. Do you think that that’s really the future for women in business? Are women inherently better at businesses like that? And is that really the way our economy is transformed?

Fran Meier (37:04):

Maybe we understand social networks and power of community a little bit more, but for what I’ve read, and it stands true, is a lot of female entrepreneurs come from years of professional experience. They know what the problems are and who the customers are and all of that. And I think before a woman decides to start a company, she has to feel much more confident that it will succeed before she even takes that step. And that might be the reason why women do have businesses that seem, maybe they don’t get to the unicorn quite as often, but they’re in pretty good shape. And it’s because I think they already bring years and years of experience before they even start.

Melinda Wittstock (37:57):

The other thing, when you look at the profile of a lot of female entrepreneurs, a lot of women entrepreneurs enter into entrepreneurship a little bit later in life. After they’ve really succeeded in corporate or have done something, have something under their belt. They’ve more than likely hired and fired, done all the things, or they have an area of domain expertise or whatever and go into it in their thirties. Actually, a lot of them in their forties and fifties, which is very different from the profile of the male entrepreneurs, more likely to be in the hoodie in the garage all the time.

Fran Meier (38:38):

And that image is so damaging to women.

Melinda Wittstock (38:40):

It really is because we’re different. Whether it’s around children or whatever, just when we have the confidence… There was a woman on TikTok not so long ago that I thought was hilarious. She was an entrepreneur in her fifties, and she was talking about how she’d really come into her own in her fifties. She didn’t have any Fs left to give. She was a little more forthright in the swearing department than me, but literally. She just didn’t care what other people thought of her anymore. So it was just like, “You know, what the hell? I’m just going to go for it.” It was an element of that. But we don’t fit that pattern insofar as investors, investment pattern recognition, or just even when you’re doing a partnership with another big corporation or you’re negotiating something like that on all those levels.

Fran Meier (39:36):

That’s exactly right. They bring to it a lot more experience, potentially a lot more focus, especially if they’re a little older. I look back as when I was in my early thirties working at Match, I had two small children. There really was not the support for female entrepreneurs, or entrepreneurs in general, like there is now. Childcare was definitely a big issue. It continues to be a big issue. I think husbands back then did not necessarily understand this either, how to support their ambitious working wife and new technology. It was definitely a challenge. And I think things are probably going to change, but it is still a battle.

Melinda Wittstock (40:33):

It is. Tell me about the big vision for BabyQuip. Where you’re ultimately taking it, what’s success to you? Is this something you’re going to exit at a certain point, or where are you going with it?

Fran Meier (40:47):

There’s a lot of exciting things going on. One is we’re really expanding internationally. I just don’t think you could be a travel brand without serving people wherever they’re going. And I also don’t want anybody in Europe or South America or any place else to start to say, “Hey, we could do this too” and take the market. It’s scary because there’s a lot of unknowns, there’s a lot of different regulatory issues, there’s a lot of different cultural issues. For example, Americans are very focused in our whole baby gear safety on car seats, for example. Other countries are not that concerned about car seats. Just to name one thing. There’s a lot of different regulatory and privacy issues. Going international is definitely challenging.

(41:38):

I also think that if you look at our big assets that we have right now, our community of quality providers probably will be close to 2000 by the end of the year. It’s the brand and it’s association, 95 Net Promoter Score, and it’s association with trust and safety, and our technology platform. How do you leverage each of these big assets? With our technology platform and our community together, we might go into some new categories on rental categories. Broaden that from baby gear to maybe outdoor gear or pet gear or maybe elder care. There may be some other things that we could be doing.

(42:24):

Those are the big things I’m looking at. I expect us to continue to grow very, very quickly. I think we’re getting to the point that we’re seeing the benefits of scale. Companies are coming to us to partner with us, to provide our baby gear deals to our quality providers, cheaper prices on sub-services. We’re just getting big enough, and that’s a real exciting place to be right now.

Melinda Wittstock (42:54):

So exciting. Fran, you’re very, very inspiring and thank you so much for sharing your entrepreneurial journey and the insights that you’ve learned along the way. I want to make sure that everybody who’s in need of baby gear knows the best way. And I think you have an offer for our listeners. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Fran Meier (43:42):

Oh yes, we have a great offer. We have a promotion. The code is “wings,” W-I-N-G-S, and it’s $20 off an order of a hundred dollars or more. Also, I’d invite you to go see our crowdfunding effort on StartEngine. You could just go to StartEngine.com and search for BabyQuip and learn all about that.

Melinda Wittstock (44:09):

Fantastic. That’s great. Thank you for that generous offer for everybody, and thanks for putting on your wings and flying with us today, Fran.

Fran Meier (44:17):

Thank you so much. Yes, that was fun.