She Was Rejected Hundreds of Times–Now She's Raised $3.5 Million

0:00Hey, business besties. Before we get into the show today, I have a quick reminder for you because we are less than five weeks out from the big end of year female founder world summit. This is happening on the 2nd of November in New York City and we are just honestly pretty flat out behind the scenes. We're filling this 35 ,000 square foot space with hundreds of people who can change the trajectory of your business and of your life. We have the most incredible speakers and I'm going to just reel off a couple of them. I've got the founder of Beauty Blender who's going to teach you how she built that iconic, iconic company.

0:37The founder of Gia, Mega Babe, Love Wellness, Hyper Skin, Chill House, so many more amazing speakers. And we've also carved out these really intentional spaces for you like the Money Lounge, which is a space for you to learn about all things funding and financing your business, but also about personal finance, how to build assets and build your wealth as an entrepreneurial woman. I think this is a conversation that we are not having enough. We have some incredible guides and mentors in that space who'll be available to meet and chat with you. We have Annie Evans from Dream Ventures and Kelly Arena from Golden Ventures who'll be in that space ready to meet and chat with you, as well as more really helpful, incredible people who, like I said, want to chat with you about what it means to build wealth, build your assets as an entrepreneurial woman.

1:29If you don't have a ticket yet, now is time. Like I said, less than five weeks to go. This is when the tickets really just start flying off the shelves. So if you've been thinking about it, just, you know, click the link in the show notes, go and secure your ticket. I don't want you to miss out. This is our biggest and best event of the year. And I cannot wait to see you all in New York City on the 2nd of November. Hey, business besties. Welcome back to the Female Founder World podcast. I'm Jasmine. I am the host of the show. I'm the person behind all things Female Founder World. And today I'm chatting with Christine Locker, the founder of Locker.

2:02Welcome to the show. You are now entering Female Founder World with your host, Jasmine Grinsworthy. Thank you for having me. What are you building? Tell people who don't know it. So essentially, Locker is like Pinterest for online shopping. So it's a way for any consumer online to save their favorites when they discover them. We have a Chrome extension, then we also have a mobile app. So if you find a product that you love, you can use our extension or mobile app and put it into your Locker. And it creates a bunch of different virtual wish lists for you. So you don't forget about the things you want to buy.

2:28Love it. How did you start this? So my background is actually in real estate. I started my career at Goldman. Then I became a commercial real estate broker. And I came to Building Locker really from the perspective of a consumer. I love to shop online. I'm constantly sending links back and forth to friends and family that I would see and be like, this is perfect for you. So I used to create Google spreadsheets full of links for people. And I was sitting at work and I remember Instagram launched shopping. Yeah. And I had this moment of if I'm going to build something, I need to do it now because obviously everything is moving in that direction in terms of social commerce.

3:04So I walked out of the door that day at work and I was like, I'm going to try and give myself like six months. Let's see how far I can get with this project and hired an engineer and we got started. Wow. How did you fund it in the very beginning to get this started? Because building a tech product, like you're not a developer. How did you do that? I actually used all of the money in my savings account. So I think I had obviously worked at Goldman. So I was making a good salary at the time. And then I also made a good amount of money during doing brokerage. And I'm a saver. Like when I make money, I save the money that I make.

3:41And so I'd hoarded all this money away during those six years. And so I decided I would just use my own savings account and see how far I could get. But I always told myself I would leave at least$25 ,000 of money. And I ended up going through that as well before we were able to raise, but I just spent all of my savings account on the company. So you bootstrapped to getting your first 10 ,000 users, which is a lot. How did you find those people? How did they find you? We did a little bit of influencer marketing at the very beginning. So I found micro creators and actually now they're bigger creators.

4:15Now the first influencer we ever worked with was Kennedy Crutchlow of Daily Drills. And then I also worked with Mary Ralph and then Ella Rose as well. And they're obviously all much bigger now, but at the time. They were up and coming creators. And so I worked with them and it was affordable for me as a small business owner. And that got us our first little bouts of users. We would get, they would post and we would get maybe 200 or 300. And that was way more than we were getting in any other capacity. And then outside of that, it would just be word of mouth. So people sharing it with their friends who would discover the platform.

4:53So very little paid and then mostly organic. How does that differ to today? Now that you're bigger, you've got some funding behind you. How are you finding customers now? It's now only organic. So we really believe in investing in the locker community. So we have something called the Locker Shopping Club, which is our internal referral program. And that essentially allows any user can sign up for the Locker Shopping Club. They have their own unique referral link and they can go and send it to their friends. And as they work their way through the tiers, they earn rewards. So the first reward is you earn like a locker sweatshirt or a locker hat and then you earn some money through the funnel.

5:31And that has worked extremely well for us. People love sharing locker organically with their friends. And then we have our own TikTok strategy that has done really well for us. I was going to say, I feel like I see you all over TikTok. Yeah. Are you doing that? Do you have a social manager on your team? Yeah. I see your face on there a lot. I try and be on there as much as possible. But Hannah is our social media manager. She's the brains behind all of the content on TikTok, which is amazing. And then MG on our team as well. She's our head of marketing. She also is amazing with TikTok. So we all try and post on our own socials and then also on locker socials, which I feel like creates like a really good feeling rather than more of a salesy feeling.

6:10I was talking with my sister about this the other day. I think it's really interesting like companies who are empowering certain people on their teams to then also post on their own channels about their life in the business there's this app called kick it's a fitness app in australia and i've seen that they're like head of pr is posting whenever they get a story she's like breaking down how she got that story and i'm following her for that now and other people on their team are posting about how they did certain pieces of building that part of the business. And I just think that's really smart.

6:41Make your employees work for you. Make them really be able to shop and advocate for you in that way publicly and empowering them and not being afraid of giving them that permission to do it if they've got that talent. Yeah, I think it's amazing because they always say in the startup world to hire people with entrepreneurial minds. It's almost like you want them to stay with you forever. But a lot of times those people that you hire are going to go off and start their own thing because they have such an entrepreneurial spirit. And I feel like that's a big part of it, too, is they want to have that feeling of ownership in the business and that they own that on their own socials, too.

7:14And then they can also be celebrated publicly as well. I think that if you're a forward facing founder of a business, you're often the one. Yeah, you're getting all of the rejection and all of the hate as well, but you're getting all of the credit. And it's really very much a team effort. So I think empowering people to speak on your behalf gives them that as well. Really clever. OK, business besties, I want to just pause for a second. I've got Natalie here on the Female Founder World team. And I want to ask, Nat, are you ready for the holidays? Honestly, no. And I feel like it's coming up so quickly.

7:46It's coming up so quickly. And that's why I wanted to take a second to chat about this season's presenting sponsor, Vistaprint. It's honestly the best place to start holiday shopping. And right now, Vistaprint is giving all Female Founder World listeners an early holiday gift, up to 50 % off holiday cards, wall calendars, and more. Oh, wow. 50 % is a pretty good deal. How do you even have time though for all this holiday shopping? I know. Honestly, I'm usually pretty disorganized, but I've been quite on it this year. And we've also been sending out these really cute thank you packs to different founders who have been on the podcast, speakers who have been at the events.

8:25We've printed really cute little fleece blankets. We have embroidered caps and also stuff for my family as well because everyone's going to be wearing the female founder world merch. Oh, of course. You got to bring the family into it. And I personally love a branded tote bag, but I also didn't know that they did embroidery. That's pretty cool. The embroidered caps are particularly cute. Oh, I love that. Highly recommend. So everyone go and get your holiday shopping buttoned up with up to 50 % off custom holiday cards, wall calendars, and more at vistaprint.com. Use the code HOLIDAY50 at checkout.

8:59Okay, let's get back into the show. I want to talk about fundraising and how, how you were able to raise, you were able to raise, I think a million dollars in June, a couple of years ago, 2022. Where did that come from and how did that happen? So I was running out of my own funds and I was like, I need to fundraise. I had never been in that world before. So I didn't know anything about what does a first round look like? Where are you supposed to get money from? And, but I just had started like working on a pitch deck thinking I'll find people to go out to. And I posted a couple of questions on social media that would go into the pitch deck, like survey type questions.

9:40And one of our users responded to the question and said, does this mean that you're fundraising? And this is a girl I had been in college with. We had kept in touch like very minimally, I would say, until I started Locker. And then we became closer in that process. And I was like, yes, I'm going to start thinking about fundraising and she had asked to talk and I my assumption of that was we're just gonna have a conversation about the pitch deck what does fundraising look like what does it look like being a founder and we got on the call and she wanted me to walk her through the pitch deck of what I had so far and she was like I would love to invest and my mind immediately went to okay maybe five thousand maybe ten thousand so I asked her how much do have in mind.

10:20And she was like a million. And so my job fell to the floor. I couldn't believe it. And we obviously went through a full diligence process together to just, I was like, are you sure that you want to put a million into this business? Do you know what that means? And she went through the whole process and she was like, I'm so sure. So she's been like my biggest champion, I would say since the beginning of Locker at the very beginning was also not what it looks like today. It was much worse in terms of functionality. And she just saw the vision from the start. That's incredible. Wow. Good on. Good for you.

10:57So after you had that investment, you made your first kind of like big full-time hire. Who was that and why was that important? I needed an engineer full-time. So the engineers who had started building Locker, they're amazing. I still love them today. Where did you find the first ones? That was on... Is this like a fiver? It was like a fiver. And I just put the posting. I was like, I need somebody who does react and node. And I didn't know what those words meant at all in terms of development terms. But somebody told me those are the languages your platform should be built in. I was like, great.

11:32I need someone who can build that. So I found they were two brothers. They went to USC. So they were on the younger side, but they like totally believed in me as well. So they were just contractors for us. And then when we raised the million, I just knew I needed somebody full time time with me, not only in feedback that I'd gotten from potential investors in terms of having that strength on the team, but the product is a tech product. You need somebody full-time who's working on the tech. I went out and I used AngelList to hire our first engineer. Okay. And that's actually been such an incredible place for me to find talent.

12:05I didn't realize that was a place to find talent. It's now called WellFound, I think. Maybe there was an acquisition somewhere in there, but yeah, an incredible place to find engineering talent. How do you find engineering talent on that platform? You put a job listing as if you were to post a job on LinkedIn and people will apply and then you can just give them coding interviews. Very good to know. In June, 2023, you launched the mobile app and you started hiring a little bit more. Talk me through what that year looks like. That was the year that I got married and it was also the year that I was on a podcast called The Pitch.

12:38So when the mobile app came out, I had done the Pitch podcast a week before, then the mobile app came out and then a week after I was getting married. And so I was very overwhelmed in terms of that. I would love to know what your astrology was at that time. Oh my gosh. I would love to know too. There was a lot of tears. I think I was crying like every single day of that month of June, but obviously all ended up going very well. From when we started Locker, obviously I started with a Chrome extension because I'm a big desktop shopper or laptop shopper. I just find myself browsing the most when I'm on my computer.

13:06It's the easiest experience for me. But the biggest piece of feedback we got when we started was, are you going to have a mobile app? Are you going to have a mobile app? Because a lot of people obviously spend so much time on their phone. So as soon as we had enough engineering power, it was like, okay, now we can focus on building the mobile app. So we started working on building the app, I want to say in April of that year. And we worked with our engineer who was full-time. And then we also hired a contractor to help us build the app. So the app got probably 80 % built from the contractor. And then our in-house engineer took over and completed it.

13:41But it was such an experience of the expectation of what does it look like going from just an extension to the mobile app? What is the reception going to be? Are people going to be really excited about it? Are people going to use both tools of the platform? But the app ended up just like taking over. People were obsessed with it. And it was really exciting for it to finally come out. How did you find going on the Pitch Podcast? It was the scariest experience in my life. I think it's an incredible, the Pitch Podcast is incredible. Josh and Lisa are amazing. I will say, and I've said this to them before, so when I went on the podcast, you have five judges, or five investors.

14:18Is it virtual? It was in person. It was in San Diego. And none of the investors were really at my stage for the company, or their investment thesis wasn't really aligned with Locker. So I went into it thinking nobody is going to really see the vision for Locker. So I got in the room and all of them obviously said no. I ended up crying on the podcast. And you walk out of the room and they deliberate after the fact. And they were like, we didn't really think she was a crier. And I was like, what does that say about me? Nothing. I was like, I'm really overwhelmed. So obviously nothing came of that day in particular.

14:52But when the podcast came out in November, I got an email from another founder. and he said he had listened to the podcast episode and he really resonated with my story and he would love to talk. So we had a conversation. His email actually came in the most like nondescript format. I was like, is this spam or is this a real person? I was like trying to Google him. And then I was like, it's virtual. What's the worst thing that can happen? I can just hang up the call if it's something that's not good. And we ended up going through the diligence process as well and he put with his brother-in-law they put a million and a half into the company in January of this year and I just think the lesson out of that and correct me if I'm wrong but you just need to get out there and tell people what you're doing and what your vision is and it's so scary like you obviously you cried on a podcast and in front of these people that I'm sure like you respected and you wanted to impress and like all of that and it's whatever you did it and look where that got you yeah incredible yeah I think it's amazing when you tell your story obviously not everyone's going to resonate but the people that do will resonate really well yeah so how much money have you raised now and I think it's important like most of the people come on the podcast are building consumer products but like physical like cpg those kind of products and I think fundraising for tech is like different the expectations are different the people that you're going to be fundraising from are different and like the potential is often quite different yeah Talk me through like how much you've raised and what the vision is.

16:21So we've raised three and a half million to date. The most recent round was the two and a half million that we closed in January of this year. The fundraising process, I would say one really interesting for me and not that I'm the only person who's experienced this, but I'm a first time solo, non-technical female founder. And if you look at that, having all of the cards stacked against you, they really want you to have a co-founder because there's less risk associated with that. You really don't want to invest in a first-time founder because God only knows if you're the right person to drive the ship.

16:53And so I dealt with a ton of rejection in the process. I would say also once you've already launched the product, like Locker was already out there in production. People are using it. The focus on the numbers becomes really intense. how many users do you have what are your daily active what are your monthly active what's your retention what is like their time spent on the platform are you driving any revenue and revenue was the biggest one for us so they would not invest in locker without us having revenue and so in march of last year i was like i have to figure out how to make money or nobody's going to invest in this company so we started turning on our revenue streams which is our first stream was affiliate and just trying to get with as many brands as possible to see our vision and want to pay us an affiliate fee.

17:43And that was like, that would be when people discover something through Locker or save something through Locker and then click through and buy, you get a commission. Exactly. And we just needed to be making money through affiliate. The second revenue stream we turned on was direct brand partnerships. So we will work with brands and curate content on their behalf and then share that on Locker. Locker as a business has a profile on Locker. So we'll curate content as like our profile and it gets shared on the platform. We'll also make content on social and we get paid flat fees, almost like an influencer partnership for brands, but through with Locker.

18:16As a media platform. That's interesting. Exactly. And so we were able to execute on that pretty quickly and pretty well. And that was like the reason we were able to fundraise was we were profitable in November and December of last year which as an early stage tech company because the numbers do look a lot different they were like okay this is probably going somewhere and that was like what gave them enough faith that's amazing yeah that's so cool are you paying yourself from the business now yes I just started paying myself in January of this year so I didn't take a salary for three years holy shit how I don't know I ended up I obviously had spent all of my savings and then I ended up meeting a boy and then he was supporting my rent and a lot of like my life.

19:03Yeah. Gave you the flexibility to then focus on the business. I think it's important to say these things and call them out because there are some people who sit there and I like not take a salary for three years and what does that look like? And a lot of the time we hear about founders who that's a situation and they just have to have additional jobs or their focus is on profitability immediately. But it's like important to recognize what your individual situation is and be able to optimize your plan based on that. So that's why I wanted to ask that because I think it's really important to call out.

19:31You're about to turn on another revenue stream, right? I think you launched a waitlist today. Okay. What is it? Tell me about it. So it won't be a new revenue stream for Locker, but it will be a new revenue stream for our community. Something when I started the platform, obviously, if you look at the landscape of social media, social commerce. On one side, you have influencer or link monetization tools. And then on the other side, you have social commerce in terms of Instagram shopping or TikTok shopping or live shopping. And when I came to building Locker, I really just wanted to build the organizational tool.

20:04I was like, the everyday consumer sees thousands of products and has nowhere to put them. We take screenshots products on our phone. Oh my God, the screenshots on my phone. embarrassing so many and the original purpose was okay just create this tool for the shopper in building the product I always was curious what would it look like if you could make money from buying things out of your locker or from sharing as an everyday consumer and that was something I always said it would either be for everybody or for nobody when it comes to sharing commission because I felt like I'm not an influencer. I don't have very many followers, but I am constantly sharing products with friends or family.

20:46You'll be out and about and someone will be like, I love those shoes. What are they? And you're like giving product recommendations, but there isn't access to the rewards part of that for smaller creators. And so that was something we wanted to create on Locker was a democratized version of the affiliate space. So it doesn't matter how many followers you have or what your aesthetic is that's one of the really cool things I love about Locker too is your aesthetic isn't tied to really just your taste yeah or your style like what furniture do you like or what clothing do you like and it doesn't have to be about a picture of yourself or what your apartment looks like.

21:19I love that yeah that's really interesting I'll be watching to see how that goes I think that sounds very cool. One of the things that I think a lot of founders deal with and you dealt with quite early is you you'd made this big hire who was like building the business with you and then they left. How did you, that's just like a mindfuck I think as well. And like someone who you're like going in, there's a vulnerability in hiring someone I think. And then if they're like, actually don't like it here, it's a, it's a hard thing to get your head around. What was that experience like and how did you move forward?

21:51I think it was really shocking for me because there were no breadcrumbs dropped in the process. I was not expecting it at all. Is your team remote? Yes. Yeah. This employee was based on the East Coast. Yeah. It's on the West Coast. We'd actually had a conversation like two weeks prior to him getting notice of how he could become CTO. I've kept Locker very, I don't know what the right word is, but a linear structure. Nobody feels higher than another. We're all on the same team. We all can contribute equally. Yeah. And so I never gave any titles of your CTO or your CMO. We're all just on this same level together.

22:27Yeah, exactly. And so he had a conversation with me of I would aspire to be the CTO. What would you need to see from me for it to look like that? And so we had had a conversation about it and my general thoughts. And then two weeks later, he asked me to jump on a call. He always did this to me, too. He would give me these cryptic messages. Hey, can you talk? And I was like, please give me some context. What am I jumping into right now? I do not like not having context with things. Give me like a little background on what you want to talk about. so we got on a call and he told me he was putting his notice in to go work on another project and obviously if somebody wants to be working on something else I think it's dating if they don't want to be with you you shouldn't want to be with them either it was it put me in a position of I need to find somebody else and we were just about to close our round when this happened and I felt really nervous that the money was going to get pulled out because our head engineer was leaving but we were able to hire somebody just like a week after he shifted out and so it was for the better yeah in the long run yeah dating like dating I love that my last question is around the resources that have been helping you as you've been building locker and it could be something really like tactical and specific or maybe something that's been just helping you as you've up-leveling from employee to founder, leader, CEO?

23:50Yeah. So because I went from real estate to building locker, I was like starting from point zero. The first thing I did when I left real estate was I Googled like how to, how do you start a company? What do you need to do? And then I found the resource for YC has startup school, which is just an online eight week program. And you can watch videos on your own time, but then you get put into these cohorts of other aspiring founders. And I met a group of really cool people. It's all virtual. And that was a good resource. It's stuff from, do you incorporate as a corporation or do you form an LLC? What makes sense for your business?

24:27How do you find the right legal team? What's affordable in terms of legal team? How much equity should you be sharing with employees? All of those things that are maybe gray areas when you're first starting a company. So that was a really important resource for me at the start. And then I also did this accelerator before I ever raised any money called Dream Ventures. It's with Annie Evans and it was also virtual, but I met incredible founders in that program, especially for CPG founders. I feel like it's really helpful resource on the tech side. You just interpret the CPG stuff and make it as tech relevant as possible.

24:59But that was also an amazing group. Amazing. Christine, thank you so much for coming on Female Founder world and congrats on everything you guys are doing thank you we're big fans thank you i just wanted to jump in and end the show with a quick thank you and shout out to all of our paid business besties subscribers for nine dollars a month business besties bypass literally years of networking by getting access to all of the people that you need to build your dream business besties get access to exclusive in-person meetups in cities all across the us australia and the uk You get access to our group chat and you get to bypass the wait list.