How Holly Cardew Raised The Largest Ever Seed Round in Her Country

0:00Hey, business besties. Welcome back to Female Founder World. I'm Jasmine. I'm the host of the show. I'm the person behind all things female founder world. Today I'm chatting with Holly Cardew. She's the founder of a business called Hearted. They are a tech business based out of San Francisco and she is building a shopping super app. When she actually started this company back in 2021, they raised the largest seed round ever raised in Australia. So we're going to talk a lot about, yes, the fundraising process, but also what she's seeing in the tech space, how she's built her team, how she's automated one of her other businesses that is still running and is fully bootstrapped while she's growing Carded.

0:35There's so much that I want to get into in this show. But first, Holly, I gave a very brief intro into Carded there. Why don't you give us a bit more of the background? Yeah, sure. So we're building a shopping super app. Think about it as like your shopping assistant of the future, where you can save any item from any store and track prices. We really want shopping to be intentional and personalized and intelligent for consumers. Can you share some milestones to help people understand where the business is at right now? Yeah, so we launched a year ago and we have over 5 million shopper insights that we've sent users, which is tracking on the items that they care about.

1:10So that's a back in stock alert and a price drop. So that means that if I was using Carded and there was a product that I was interested in, I would like flag that and then Carded would let me know if information on that product changed. Exactly. Okay, love that. We've also had over tens of millions of dollars of items marked as purchase and that also doesn't include items. Yes. Wow. It doesn't include items that people have purchased but haven't marked as purchased. Oh, that's incredible. That's carded and that's what we're going to talk about most in this conversation. But I'm also really curious about how you got to the point where you started this company that was able to raise the largest seed round ever in Australia.

1:46Oh, where do I start? How did you get into e-com? So actually over 10 years ago, I was living in country Australia. I'm from Sydney, but I moved to the country. I went into a shop and I wanted them to be part of my online marketplace that I was building at the time. And the lady in the shop, Pip from Jumbled, that you may know, she said, oh, I don't want to be part of your marketplace, but I would love you to build me a site. And I really wanted to build a site. Didn't really know how to do it. Went home to Google it. But before that, she didn't have any online presence, like no Facebook page.

2:17This was back in the day before Instagram was a thing. And I said, I need to build your socials first to drive traffic to a website. Otherwise, you'll have a website with no traffic and no sales. And then soon after I built that website, I realized that I could really move into the Shopify app ecosystem to build out software that would automate processes for merchants and not just helping pip and jumbles, but I could then help many, many more stores. Very clever. Okay, let's talk about the early days of Carded. What was the problem that you saw that you wanted to solve? So having been in the commerce space for a while and having solved a lot of problems for merchants, I realized that consumers were underserved.

2:56Tools have always been built for merchants. Email marketing tools, paid ad tools, UX, any tool, I guess, in the Shopify app store is built for a merchant. It's never really built for a consumer in mind. And we realized that consumers were underserved and how could we make better shopping experiences for them? And we wanted to be really, really close to the customer. We were indexing every single product on the web. We had over a billion products in our database and we realized, no, hang on, we need to really care about what is going on for the consumer. What did they want? And the biggest problem was that the data is so, so messy.

3:33Their product listings are out of stock. There's not enough information. The variant level information is incorrect. So how could we structure that data to then surface for a consumer? And that sounds a bit odd, but when you go shopping, we think about it as a shopping journey that you go through. You have a stimulus and then you have a knee recognition of, oh, I have a hole in my sneaker and making it up. What do I need? Oh, should I go into Instagram to have a look? Should I go into Pinterest? Maybe I'll ask a friend. Then you kind of go through a few websites and you're looking. And so we really wanted to be able to surface that information because shopping is really an information search problem.

4:12and we open up Google tabs and we open up social and we open up our phone to message a friend. And so how could we structure that data and structure that information to build a smart shopping assistant for you? Okay. So how does somebody use Carded? So let's say I'm shopping, I've seen something on TikTok and I want to go and buy a pair of shoes that look like that. What do I do? Yeah. Well, I think this is the thing. No shopping journey is a straight line and we don't necessarily go oh I saw that on TikTok I want it we go oh I saw that on TikTok I like that sometimes you buy but you still have to go to the website do they ship to me what are their returns policy do they accept after pay or paying for solution are they in my size oh guess what you just discovered it comes in another color oh I want the other color I have this exact example I bought some Adidas shoes last week and I wanted these black ones JD Sports doesn't have them in store, Hype DC, Foot Locker.

5:09They don't have them in store. Then I went on to JD Sports site and they said that they ship in two to three days. I needed them as soon as possible, but they didn't. And then they were sold out in my size. Then I called the store. And so I think it's like, yes, we see something, we want to buy it, but usually it's that shopping journey. So how do we help users with that? And what we've really started with is the evaluation of alternatives. So when you're deciding, okay, I do want some sneakers. I've sort of narrowed it down. I want to be intentional. I want to think about it. It's not just about a sale, but I really want to think about my purchase.

5:40Is this the one that I want? We allow people to save any item from any store, including resale and track that item. So you can get a price drop or a back in stock alert. But again, it's not just about waiting for it to go on sale. It's, is that the one I want? Or, oh, you've got an event coming up and you've saved multiple items and you're thinking about it. this sounds like such a big complicated problem what are the first steps in figuring this out you've raised some money there's cash in the bank now what are you doing we have decided to focus on the hardest problem first okay what's that that is the data yeah right okay i think having been in this space for so long everybody skips the step they go okay i'm going to do one-on-one merchant integrations and i'm going to do that by affiliate feeds I don't know if anyone realizes affiliate feeds are extremely out of date.

6:29It's usually someone in the team updating them. They're not necessarily in real time or accurate. And then you have to do those one-on-one merchant integrations with every store and be approved. So you're never really solving the problem for a shopper because as we all know, you'll see a shopping site or a shopping app and you'll go in and you'll be like, this is great. But I also, Google Shopping is a great example. you're like oh they have the ads at the top the product ads but then they don't necessarily surface the merchant that you think they should surface or you're looking for so you keep going down a rabbit hole to try and find it so we've started with the data first to be able to structure that and we've also started with not doing one-on-one merchant integrations we've built technology that can basically index any product from any page on the web and also keep that live and up to date who's on your team and who did you hire first like who builds this so we have engineers on our team and our head of engineering which is Jonathan he leads engineering we're still a small lean efficient team I think with AI it's amazing what you can get done but we have a very technical product manager as well and then a growth and ops person we had breakfast the other or lunch the other day and that's something that I found really interesting because female founder world our team are just everywhere like I've got people in New York I've got people in Canada I've got now someone who's just moved to Paris and I'm between Australia and New York and I find the working across like different time zones and having a distributed team really really hard I really miss like sitting in an office with everyone your team are also remote how do you think about managing that what tools do you use I would love your advice on how I should be figuring this out because I am struggling I understand why you're struggling I think the one thing I've done I have also built a remote team with my previous business.

8:21So I know remote teams well. I think that obviously gave us sort of like a head start in terms of when it was the pandemic and everybody was distributed. But I think for us, I've decided to hire on the same time zone. I think remote teams are really, really challenging. I have done multiple time zones and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. Maybe the best is in person. That's not possible for everybody these days. and it also restricts your hiring of who you can hire. But I think at least trying to be on as close to the same time zone as possible is the most important. But I know that doesn't necessarily work for you.

8:57Yeah, it's so hard. Okay, I want to switch gears and talk about marketing and how you are getting people to use Carded. Can you talk me through what that process looks like? Because we speak to a lot of consumer brand founders and I'm interested in how that differs between your space. Okay, business besties, let's switch gears for a second. real quick, I want to talk to you about this season's presenting sponsor, Vistaprint. They are sponsoring this entire season of the Female Founder World podcast, and we love a supportive sponsor. So much so that we're actually working with Vistaprint ourselves to create the merch and all of those beautiful event perks that you know and love from our in real life Female Founder world events.

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10:23Use the code FFW25 at checkout and step up your branding game. We put a link in the show notes if you want to learn more. we made a conscious decision to really focus on brand first it wasn't growth at all costs it was how do we position ourselves in the market which was absolutely critical and i think that has really helped us the other thing is we wanted to position ourselves in the market and get the right users for two reasons number one that is like really going to help your product development developing the product further and having a good retention rate in terms of what is the feedback you're getting from our users.

11:03And the other thing is that our users are essentially our data collectors. They will inform us what do they want. Whereas if we just had everybody under the sun collecting, adding in links and adding in products, that doesn't help us build out our product graph. How do you actually do that then? How do you like establish yourself as a brand and then how do you reach the right people we partnered with specific creators not necessarily based on numbers but based on who was aligned to our brand who would use the product who felt like a true carded user and had similar values and then we teamed that up with some paid marketing as well like paid ads and I think they go hand in hand because your paid ads will perform we found that performs better when we have creative content as well.

11:51So you're using the creative content as the creative in your ads? Not necessarily. I think it's just Instagram knows. I'm not an ad expert. But Instagram really understands that when you've got other people posting about it. And then the other thing is users see, oh, I saw an ad. But then I also saw like my favorite creator posting about it as well is I think is having that crossover. I think being in the consumer space, you kind of need to see something. I say seven times before you download or use or buy a product. and so it's like how do you get those multiple touch points oh they saw us on an ad oh they saw us in a press article oh they saw us on this creator and that creator and then they saw us like pop up at fashion week or you know do an event so many of us are working with creators doing influencer marketing how many are you working with are you guys handling that in-house i want to know more we worked with a lot of creators we actually started in australia usually i would go us first but we started in australia just because given our contacts here at the time last year.

12:47We handpicked creators. We did it in-house. The reason why we did it in-house is we wanted to learn the whole process. I think as a startup you can easily delegate and outsource the job and I don't think that's the right thing to do when you're learning how to build your brand. You're learning how to do the process but then also building your brand. I'm not saying this is forever but you really want to understand what works and what doesn't before you outsource that and give it to somebody else. The creative industry, as you probably know, is very, very different to something like I've ever worked with.

13:21I think it's still so new. I'm not a creator myself, but just seeing how the whole industry works is really fascinating. Some people have managers, some people don't. Some people are very particular about what they do. There's no playbook and it's really just like lots of learning and lots of building relationships and finding people who work for your brand. We really wanted to work with people and do multiple touch points. So not just a once-off post. For us, that's inauthentic. You know, it's like we really wanted people who were using the app, who loved the app. And so that worked for us as like having an ongoing partnership.

13:56So did you find people who were already using it or did you reach out to creators who you think would love the platform and bring them in? We did a bit of both. Yeah. We initially, we reached out to people who we thought would love it. Stylists as well, who talk about shopping, who talk about wardrobe curation. We also emailed out some of our users and said, like, do you know anyone and got recommendations that way? Can we talk about fundraising? We spoke at the beginning of the show about you've raised this really impressive seed round when you first got started in 2021. For people who want to raise money, I want to know what advice you have and what your learnings were about, like, what really works during the process to make it so successful.

14:32I decided to run a really tight process and that really helped. What does that mean? I did my pitch deck. Yep. And then I had a list of 30 investors and then I got some investors that I knew to add more names to the list. I guess I did it in multiple different ways. I messaged some people, direct DM, literally slide into the DMs on Twitter or wherever you want to find, like to get people on board because people will respond, which I think was incredible. And then I emailed as many people as possible and told them what we were doing and got on a call. and I ran three weeks of talking to investors back to back.

15:11I probably had over 100 calls. I told them how much we were raising, but we didn't talk about valuation. I think that's really for the investors to set. And I think that also gives you a competitive advantage because essentially you're running a process where the investors have to come to you with a term sheet and then that allows for multiple term sheets. Whereas I think if you go into a raise of saying, I'm going to raise 1 million at 8 million valuation or whatever it is, that you're kind of already capping yourself at what it could be. Oh, interesting. Yeah, because I've really heard of people doing that before about letting the investors set the valuation from the beginning.

15:44I've always just kind of assumed it was the other way around. I mean, you can obviously say no to the valuation and decide not to take it or you can negotiate. We went out raising five and ended up with 10. Wow. Well done. You're a solo founder. You don't have a co-founder in this. It's just you who's building this and leading this. How much equity are you giving away when you're raising? I'm not saying you, but how much are people giving away when they're raising? What's normal? From a tech point of view, I'm talking specifically to a tech company here, is that you're typically giving anywhere from 10 % to 25%.

16:14Okay. Not around. Do you do any angel investing? I have done a couple. Yes. What do you look for? I'm curious about this. I've only angel invested in a couple of businesses, really small checks, but I want to do more. Yeah. I just love to. I would love to do more. I actually invested in Gab Waller's business. Did you? I did. I know she was on. Gab, I would totally invest in that. I know. Come to me. Yeah. And I invested in another one during the pandemic. But I haven't done enough. Like, absolutely. I'm very much a public stock market person versus a private. But I would love to do more of it.

16:46I think it's really interesting. I think, though, it's like how do you be on top of everything that's happening? And sometimes I'm like, I don't know if I have the time and capacity. Yeah. When you're looking at businesses that you want to invest in yourself, what are you looking for and what do you think about? I feel like I haven't invested in enough to give solid advice. Why did you invest in Gab? People. Yeah. Her. Because she's amazing. She's amazing. She's amazing. She's built an incredible business prior, the GabWaller.com business. I do want to support females in the ecosystem. People who don't know who Gab is, scroll back in your podcast feed a few episodes.

17:18I had an interview with her in LA a little while ago and she is building a fashion sourcing business and she's building like an AI tool in the space, which gets me onto AI because you're living in San Francisco and I'm really curious about what you're seeing, what conversations you're seeing and whether you're using AI in your day-to-day business in Carded as you run the team. Talk me through what's going on. AI is a hot topic. I feel like everybody's talking about AI. Sometimes I'm like, I am over AI. When are we going to drop the AI and just be like, we are X because everything has AI in a way.

17:55But it is super exciting about what is happening, the change in which things are happening as well. This is really a new period of time where we had mobile and mobile enabled us to have Uber and Instagram. And now what is AI going to enable? And I think this movement of tools that do work for us and really enhance our life, both in our work life and personal life is super exciting. I think there's also the flip side where there's a lot of tools that don't do what they say is on the box. Does that make sense? There are a lot of fancy demos and it does take time to weed through the tools. I think at the moment it's quite noisy.

18:34Somebody messaged me on the way here this morning and said, oh, what are you using for your pitch deck, for your design? What AI tool do you use? And I just said, we don't. Yeah, we're in Canva. We actually use Figma. It's more work to do it with AI and it's not right. For us, don't just replace everything with AI for the sake of it. I get the same stuff with people saying write your podcast scripts, turn your podcast scripts into social, but like whatever through AI. And yes, there's definitely some like efficiencies I think we could find. But I think you take away the process. Like if AI was creating a pitch deck, like the process of creating the pitch deck is actually like the process of thinking and problem solving, deepening your knowledge before you have conversations with investors and before you take the business to whatever the next stage is.

19:17And if something else is doing that for you, how do you have that thinking process? Absolutely agree. The other thing that AI doesn't have is taste. Totally. I think about this all the time. And this is the biggest, one of the biggest. Good taste is going to be the. The data. So it doesn't have the information, which is what we talk about at Carded. And then it doesn't have the taste. Yes, you can upload your website and say, hey, this is my brand. But it just doesn't have the taste yet. Will it be able to? Who knows? But that's like the biggest missing piece. And I agree with you on the process.

19:50I said to ChatGPT the other day, you're making this up. Because I gave it all this information and it came out with random stuff. Oh, yes, thank you for correcting me. I am. And it's like a big shock when you realize that it too knows that it's wrong, but it's not going to say until you push back. You got into this kind of e-commerce space really early with the Shopify apps. I feel like you're someone who can kind of like see the future really well. For someone who is thinking about opportunities and business ideas, I think that it does make a lot of sense to explore opportunities in AI. We don't have a lot of women getting into this space.

20:25I think 80 % chat GPT users right now are men. Most of them are in their 20s. And that is the entry level kind of into this space. So it's really, really shocking about how few women are actually shaping what is going to be the future of the internet and the world. If you see someone, she wants to build something, she's interested in this space. Are there any opportunities that you think AI could be good to solve for? I think it's about solving a problem that you're really passionate about. I don't think it's just saying AI exists so let's solve something. And I think we're looking for holes to fix.

20:58Totally. Like you're just thinking of an idea because it's easy to do all of a sudden. Because it's easy to do. I think the one thing is one of my best friends is on maternity leave and is usually working at Google. But at the moment she's using Vercel, which they have a product called VZero, and you can prompt it to code and build things. and she wanted to build a translation website to teach her kids Cantonese. It was very basic, but I think the opportunity actually for us, if you are non-technical, is you can now build prototypes. You can get pretty far without having an engineer. And I think that is a huge unlock because there are a lot of problems that women face that men don't necessarily face.

21:39Yes. And there's things that we want to build and we always get stuck because we're like, we don't have a technical co-founder. We don't have access to money. We don't have access to money. How are we going to do it? Whereas I think there's a lot more products out there where you can literally prompt. I think the one thing that we should all upskill at is like, how do you prompt? How do you ask the right questions to get the outcome? I was never a good student, but a good student is one that knows like, how do you ask the right question to get the information that you need? And that's the same I find with AI.

22:12What are some of the tools that you're using or if someone who's just getting into the space, like what do you think people should go and check out? Is there anything that you're using at Carded in your team? I actually don't go and look at lots of tools. I've played with Mid Journey, which I don't know if you play with Mid Journey or pay for it. You know, it was cool. It was generating images, but I was like, what am I actually doing with these images? I think they're great for mock-ups, but again, you spend all your time prompting it to get the outcome. I know my friend who's a creative director at Pinterest.

22:36She was using it before doing a shoot. She would visualize and talk through what she wanted so then she could give it to her team to be like this is what I'm thinking I mean I like to switch between ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude to really understand who's doing what but for me it's more of a learning it's a test and learn it's not a reliance on one thing or the other. One tool that we've been using that I really like is called Opus AI it was recommended to Natalie and on team she recently went to this event for YouTube and it takes your videos and turns them into little clips and it's really good at doing it good to know and there are so many so many tools that say it will do that and it doesn't and it's terrible but this is actually one that works and creates good content so I'm going to link that in the show notes for everyone as well you're a year into this business being up and running what does success look like and like what is your timeline for doing this I don't think if we talk enough about okay but like what is the end game here no one is hustling at this so that they can do it for the next 40 years you know what I mean why not I mean maybe you are maybe you are yeah but that's also really interesting I think for us it's to build a shopping super out that is literally the shopping assistant in your pocket yeah that for any purchasing decision you open up carded and I'm not talking about clothes we are all shoppers we buy toilet paper we all go through a journey we open something we open up Amazon we open up a tab we really want to be part of your purchasing decisions and journey do you have people who like formal mentors and advisors who have helped you as you've been building this i don't you don't i don't my team is incredible that's amazing we work and think about this deeply we have worked on this like we have worked in the commerce space for decades combined how do you think about new competitors coming into your space and i feel like there's been a few new shopping kind of platforms how do you feel when you see something launch i love it do you i love it fashion tech is having a moment it really is it just shows that everybody is like ready for a tool to solve their problem where there's the challenge is the data problem hasn't been solved there is no product catalog of the world there is no organized structured product data that's invariant level data in real that provides you with insights in real time and building that infrastructure structure has been the most and is the most important thing to solve any of these problems yeah wow and i just don't think ai will solve it either until they have the structured product data your answers will only ever be as good as the data and so that's where we've really focused on so actually i love the space i love that people are building in the space the last thing i want to ask you is you said you don't really have any formal mentors or advisors but who do you look up to you're like that person is incredible i want to build something like that i could rattle off 20 people who I'd like to be like but you clearly are just on your own path well I admire Melanie Perkins from Canva I know she gets everybody talks about her but I just remember going into her office when she was 13 when she had 13 people and from day one she said she's building a trillion dollar company yeah wow and it's stuck in my mind and every and she's like I'm going to beat Adobe and she is well on the path to beat Adobe and I think having that clear vision has been incredible I think it's really easy to compare yourself or think about other people, but all of our journeys are so different and so unique.

25:52And they're also of the time. What worked for Canva 10 years ago was SEO pages and adaptable pages. And they generated, do you remember when you go onto Google and you would say like, what size is the Facebook cover image? Yes. Because then you would need to go back to Photoshop and like open up. They created pages that said Facebook cover image this size and then they give you all the templates below. That strategy just doesn't work now. So there's definitely people I admire in what they've done like Whitney from Bumble being the first female taking a company public and everything she went through to build that app.

26:28I admire people in the Shopify ecosystem who every investor under the sun 10 years ago said you cannot build a big business on Shopify. and now you have like billion dollar companies like Klaviyo, email marketing software that were all part of that ecosystem and they've gone on to do incredibly well. But there's not one specific person who I'm like, I would like to be that. I think it's like different aspects of different things. I really envy people that have that level of confidence and like clear vision. I think I have a very clear vision on what's possible. I think anything's possible. When you're surrounded by people and you realize, oh they're just human too yeah in san francisco you see the founder of pinterest at a cafe and you're like okay they're human you see the founder of instagram they're human i want to end the show by asking you for a resource recommendation something that's been helping you as you've been building the company yeah definitely i have actually really lent into coaches and people not necessarily a business coach i've lent into speaking to a psychologist because i feel that building a business is all about the people, whether it's your investors, your customers, your team.

27:39And so speaking to a psychologist helps me to really understand different interactions with different people. The other thing is really visualization and working with someone to do a visualization exercise around like, what is it that you want? I think manifesting is one thing and like doing a vision board, but every day being able to talk to yourself in the right way to say like that is going to happen and in positive tone is really, really important. And then visualize like what you want and how you want that to play out. Otherwise, if we constantly are thinking like that's not going to work, that's going to fail, you know, negative self-talk, it's like not going to be beneficial.

28:14Okay, who helps you do this? I want to work with her. Yes. So I actually found her on TikTok, which is kind of wild, but I love it. And her name is Namara Wild. Okay. So I always joke that, yeah, this is wild. But I saw one of her videos and I was like, wow, this is really powerful. So I started working with her. As females in particular, we have limiting beliefs. Like we all do, not just women. And how do we overcome those limiting beliefs? And so it's really like, okay, what challenge are you facing? What do you want to achieve? What are the things you need to do to get there? And speaking through like how that could play out, but not from a, oh, I will try.

28:48Or it might work. Or if you visualize what you want and you know where you're going, then your subconscious brain looks for things to help you get there. my place in San Francisco has a mirror and I can see the mirror from my shower and I put on post-it notes onto my mirror and you say it to yourself every morning and I always thought that was so woo-woo but now I'm like no I love it and it gets you in like a mindset and gets you excited I love that amazing Holly thank you so much for coming on Female Founder World and congratulations on everything you're building where can people find Carded thanks for having me firstly it's been really exciting to sit down and chat to you after all this time of following your journey you can Find us at carded on Instagram, carded.com online and carded in the app store.