Advice Line with Anthony Casalena of Squarespace

28:10I mean, I think the ultimate price for us is a mass retailer like a Target or, you know, we're definitely going down the natural path, grocer route. It's just really expensive to be into retail. A quick question. Who are your are your customers like you and your co-founder? I mean, you think of your customers as moms who are going to have these in their bags or their purse or whatever, or do you think more broadly? I think that's a really great question. And it's funny when people ask us who our demographic is, we say anyone with skin. I would say, though, our primary target audience, we are definitely speaking to moms.

28:50We feel like moms are the original influencer, right? They're the gatekeepers to their communities. And yes, we make all of our products thinking three steps ahead, as we believe moms do, right? So everything we make is in a travel size. we think about our dispensers and how we're like for example our our pen or our cream is not in a tube it's actually in a lip gloss dispenser and so the idea behind it is that you're there's not as much waste a child or any person could put it on with one hand and it's really you can pack it on the go and then I feel like there's a halo effect once you get to mom right you're getting to her friends.

29:29She just has this social currency. And so, but we have a lot of like Gen Zers and young people that love our products, again, because of that travel nature that we're thinking about everything with ease and it's better, right? We're committed to making everything chemical-free and as clean as possible. Got it. Building on that travel nature idea, one of the places that I have recently discovered a couple of brands that I wouldn't have known about are actually via hotel partnerships. They had put certain brands in the rooms. And I actually became big buyers of certain brands via that where it's kind of a free sample but kind of selected.

30:09And if I have an affinity towards the hotel chain, thinking about like, hey, let's try that out. Or even like, I mean, hopefully you're not hurt at the hotel, but like, I don't know, take it, right? And then that way you kind of are giving out in a non-cheesy free sample sort of way. And it's related to travel. I don't know. Is that, did that ever come up? Yeah, absolutely. I think like those big brands, like especially the family brands, like a Hilton or a Hyatt, we're currently in about six different Four Seasons properties, which is a little bit, I think, which I think is actually a little bit more premium than we want our brand to be.

30:46We're in some auto camps, which is a really, really cool, like mobile park resort type of place. Absolutely. I think you kind of nailed it, right? Like we have products that people might not pack, but then they need them in an urgent situation. And I guess the question is, how do we, we continue to seed product, put it as many places as we can, but it's that idea, right? You might not buy the hydrocortisone or something to relieve that itch until you need it, Or our Band-Aids, bandages, most people don't know that a huge percentage of current Band-Aids or bandages on the market are full of Forever Chemicals, PFAs.

31:29They are sitting in our landfills. So it's like these types of things that people probably don't even think about on a daily basis. And as a society, we think so much what we're putting into our bodies, but we're not thinking about what we're putting on our body, our skin, which is our body's largest organ. I think that all of that is really compelling. And I think when people hear about those things, it does inform their choices. But I keep thinking back to so many brands we've done on the show and what it comes down to is convenience and price and effectiveness, right? Efficacy. And so you clearly have all three of those, right?

32:06You have a product that works, that people like. And I think really it's – you've got beautiful branding. It's a great name. But educating people about that is going to take a lot of time. To me, it seems like this omni-channel strategy is really critical. The direct-to-consumer is harder. Anthony, you could talk about that, right? Even with Squarespace, even with all of the tools that are available to people, there's just more noise out there. And I feel like having an omni-channel strategy where you can get this in as many places as possible, especially airport shops where people are traveling quickly.

32:43If I go to the airport, I forgot shaving cream. I'm going to spend$10 on whatever I can buy at that store. And I feel like here in San Francisco, there's some great stores at the airports, gift shops. I feel like that's really – it's going to sell itself simply because it looks good. It's got a great name. And then maybe on the product over time, you can think about simple ways to explain that story, you know, plant-based, chemical-free, better for you, whatever you want to say that you can quickly, you know, sort of transmit to consumers on the label. Because that's really where people are going to find out about it.

33:22Yes, they'll find out about it from influencers and from other moms. It's just going to take more time. So I feel like you really want to focus on getting it into as many places as possible where people make convenience purchases. Yeah, that's great. Thank you. I guess that was maybe my question too. It's like, where is that purchase? Is it a convenience purchase? Is it an impulse purchase? When do people have this kind of purchase on their minds? Is it part of another cycle? Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting because the truth is because of our branding in a really weird way, we can live so many places, right?

33:57We can live at the cash wrap as an impulse purchase. I love, I love the idea of airports. That would be like huge for us. No doubt. I think that's a really great observation. Thank you. And maybe that's it. Maybe it's like just getting more people to find out about us when they need us. And then when they go home, they're reminded, hey, I need to replace those Band-Aids with what I found from All Better Co. when I was traveling. And maybe that's the switch that like needs to be flipped right there. Yeah. And I think your branding lends itself. I'm taking a look at the website now. I think it looks great.

34:30And it lends itself to not being like a – I don't know how to put this – like a sterile medical purchase. Like going and buying like Neosporin or something feels different than buying what you have because of how you're positioning it. And I'm sort of wondering what that enables you to do that like Neosporin can't do. You know what I mean? Because that's like. Yeah, it's a perfect example because if you speak to any dermatologist, they're actually going to tell you that Neosporin is the one thing they don't want you to use. It actually causes more harm than good, and there are more people allergic to it than we think about.

35:08So that's a perfect example right there. I just think that's an uphill battle for now. If you had$20 million to spread that message, that's one thing. You've got a great brand. You've got great branding. You've got to focus on just as a good product. It's like method soap. They didn't say, hey, it's organic and plant-based. It was. It's a beautiful bottle, and it works well. I really feel like that's what you want to lean into. If you want to send that message, I don't see it on your packaging. I see Better Bandage. I see a bamboo bandage. I see biodegradable, latex-free. I don't see that message that you're – but then you go on the website and it says sensitive to skin.

35:50So I feel like you can use the packaging a bit better to just add some of that stuff because Better Bandage isn't enough. It's tell me why. Better for sense of skin. Amazing. Okay. This is better than Neosporin. Obviously, you don't want to get in a lawsuit with them. But, you know, better for you than the leading, you know, anti-whatever, bacterial brand or whatever it is. You know, something like that. We don't use chemicals or something like that. But I do think that you want to just have a couple of – I think RX Bar nailed it. It's like four eggs, you know, six almonds. It was all the macros.

36:29You see that on like pints of ice cream, this idea of just simple macros. Take what you see in food with seven grams of protein, 10 grams of fiber or whatever, and apply that to what you're doing. and i i'm i'm gonna echo what you're saying i like i'm on the i'm on the side looking at the products i don't get the i wouldn't have known a lot of what you're saying there about like you know alternative products and what the negatives might be like i don't i don't get the education part from from a glance at this and i might have appreciated that because i've actually never even heard anyone say that so yeah you know um just look at food i'm holding i don't know this brand This is a brand of bars here, Keto Bar.

37:09It's 17 fat, 2 grams of net carbs, 12 protein. This is a thing that food is doing really well. And I think simple messages like that could work. We've got to run. Thank you for calling in, Stacey. The brand is called All Better Co. Good luck. We're cheering you on. Thank you for having me. Good luck, Stacey. It's awesome. Thank you so much. Congrats. All right. We're going to take another quick break, but we'll be right back with another caller. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to The Advice Line right here on How I Built This Lab.

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39:22Welcome back to The Device Line on How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and I'm with Anthony Casalena. He is the founder of Squarespace, and we are taking your calls. And Anthony, are you ready for our next call? I sure am. All right, let's bring in our next caller. Hello, you're welcome to The Device Line. Tell us your name, where you're calling from, and just a little bit about your business, please. Hello. Hi, Guy and Anthony. My name is Mahak Mohan. I'm calling in from New York City. I am the co-founder and CEO of Kahani, which is a personalized recovery companion for eating disorders. Awesome.

39:56Welcome to the show. Thanks for calling us. So this is an app that helps people in recovery from eating disorders. And tell me what it does and why. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about it. Yes. So my co-founder and I actually built this when we were when I was at Stanford Business School. and we kind of partnered with some of the leading clinical psychologists to think about how we could make recovery more accessible, meaning how do we apply evidence-based therapies in a bite-sized format that's then able to be personalized to an individual's unique goals, patterns, triggers, and behaviors. And that way you can have a 24-7 companion because recovery isn't just happening at 2 p.m.

40:37on a Wednesday. Awesome. But we met before, haven't we? We did, yes. We did, yeah, through Adam Grant. Okay, I remember you now. So, okay, so this is cool. So you've got this thing, and it helps people get through eating disorders. And tell me a little bit about where it is now. I mean, because you guys recently launched this, right, in the last year. Yeah, so I think right after we talked, we closed our pre-seed round, which happened at the end of June. And so now we're chugging along, building the second version of the app. And this is kind of a reimagined landscape where we're sort of sitting in between this happy medium of being gamified and engaging, as we know lots of consumer apps must be, but also not too clinical focused.

41:23And so we want to create this beautiful blend of skill-based progression so that you actually feel like you're recovering. And it's not too much on the gamification side, like there are a lot of apps like that these days. So we're about to launch, and that actually leads into my question around the App Store, which is our biggest milestone is we're about to come out of private beta in the next couple of months. We're about to launch on the App Store. And so I was really curious to learn more about most unique go-to-market strategies to be able to create the most effective launch specifically for our target demographic.

41:59And just briefly, how will this – this will be a subscription model. You will pay monthly to use this? Got it. Okay. So now you are about to launch the App Store. You're looking to figure out how do you get people to be aware of it, right? There's millions of apps out there, right? How do you get people to adopt this? Anthony, I want to bring you in here because we've got lots of questions and also some thoughts on how to do that. so the challenge is obviously that there's millions of apps out there and then there's also a fatigue related to apps i think that i don't have the stats off the top of my head but i i feel it personally myself it's like it's kind of a lot for me to install a a new app um obviously you know something as targeted as yours i think there'd be maybe uh less resistance to but i i I guess I would say this.

42:57Imagine it wasn't even an app. Where do I find it? And does it need to be an app? Could it be a website that then leads you to an app once you use it? So imagining it wasn't an app, because I'm actually not somebody who's ever been successful or really launched a lot of things in the app store that weren't related to another thing. How do people find it? How do they find it? Mm-hmm. So this is a really interesting question because, to your point, like many things, recovery is not linear, and so motivation can wax and wane. So we started to think about less so of the demographics of the type of person who might use this and more so of the psychographics of the type of individual who's motivated and in that place in recovery in which they're looking for extra support.

43:47This is likely someone who's been through lots of different treatment centers. They've been through higher levels of care, come back down, cycled through, and now they're really focused on recovery because they have probably a bigger goal, something of a life change that's occurring. So there are two kind of parts of this dynamic that we've thought about in terms of where people might find the app. One being when you might come off of a treatment center or a higher acuity level of care. And two, maybe when you're in an outpatient setting. So you have a current therapist or a dietician, but that's not good enough because you're spending a lot of time on TikTok.

44:20In between sessions, you're spending a lot of time in your day-to-day. Maybe your work is really stressful. And so there's a real opportunity to target. Our users have actually probably found us through lots of community engagement. So you're also in the place in recovery in which you are not in denial. So that's a big piece because maybe they're in a community group like Facebook or in a TikTok chat. Yeah. Yeah. Make, I'm curious, and I think I asked you this when we first met, not on the show. I remember we talked and I said, you know, I don't know about this. I'm a 50-year-old man. And I think you had mentioned to me that many of your potential customers are women and women in a certain age demographic.

45:03Is that fair to say? Yeah, so this was actually one of the most interesting things we learned in our first pilot, which is what motivated us to keep building this out is initially you think of a gamified sort of, you know, fun, cutesy, engaging app. And you think maybe teen women would be the most likely to use something like this. And sure, we do have lots of teen women using this app. But what we learned is that based on the psychographics and the type of engagement and retention data we were seeing, it was actually women in their 30s and 40s who ended up being the most engaged because they weren't in denial of an eating disorder.

45:36They were looking for recovery. They tried a lot of things before. And they were probably in a moment of life change. Maybe it's a wedding, a job change, finishing a graduate degree. And this is becoming now not recovering is a big hindrance to achieving those goals. I know you've got you just went through you tested it out with people and you had a test group. Do you have more roughly 50 60 100 users total? Yes, we have about 100 users who've tested this out. We saw a 23 % symptom decrease in four weeks with super users who used it for more than seven minutes a day. Some people seeing 60 to 70 % decreases in symptoms in that time span.

46:17They have to be your early ambassadors. That is where you're going to build this out. It's going to be slow but then fast, which is they – I mean, I wonder if you can build a closed community on Slack or Circle or one of these places because they – these are your ambassadors. I have a friend who has sciatica, okay? And I said, hey, he's going to do all kinds of expensive physical therapy. I said, great, do that. He's thinking about surgery. I said, try this out too. There's a guy who does all these amazing videos on stretching. I've been using it for three years. I tell people about this all the time because it has transformed my flexibility.

46:55And that's where you are going to really – if you're saying, hey, 23 percent decrease or better outcomes, those are your ambassadors. Can you incentivize them? Sorry, Anthony. Go ahead. So my question is sort of building on the vein you're in. So without knowing the app, was the method or the things developed in the app based on a known protocol that a doctor's developed or something? Or is it something you guys have discovered and you are the authority that, you know, is the person, you know, talking through this? And I guess where that would go is, you know, if it's based on some known branded method, okay, obviously that's your angle.

47:37If it's not a known branded method, that maybe makes you the storyteller for this method. And, you know, could you be that personality that people are going to look to to, you know, know that story? Yeah, so that is a really interesting element of what we're doing is we are leveraging studies that have been done in hundreds of clinical trials where there's evidence of CBT, so cognitive behavioral therapy, DBT, and other forms of evidence-based therapies that have all worked in different veins for treatment for eating disorders. And so we've basically curated all of these exercises and broken them down into deeply personal applications into someone's current lived experience.

48:26So what they've got in their current day-to-day routine, how can we apply these therapies so it's actually relevant like they would do homework-wise in between therapy sessions. So we're not creating anything new, but we are creating a new implementation, let's say, of it. And really, I would imagine one of the ways to get this into people's brain space is to target, you know, targeted ads. I mean, there are people who are going to be searching for, you know, eating disorder help. And so there are ways to target those people. But we know that customer acquisition costs have just skyrocketed over the last five years.

49:02And, you know, you don't have a$30,$50 million ad war chest. But you do want to experiment with some of that. But I also wonder whether some of your users might be willing to go public and allow you to create some social media content with them telling their stories. Yeah, we actually had one person from our pilot, our first pilot, post a really long TikTok video on how she was able to use Kahani and some of the impact it had on her and that we were looking for more people to help us build out the second version. And because of the TikTok algorithm, we actually ended up getting maybe five or six organic inbounds.

49:43And I didn't even know this had been posted because I didn't have a TikTok at that time. And so it was really interesting getting emails saying, I found you on TikTok. I'm like, no way, I don't have a TikTok. So it's really interesting to see that. And so that is, I think, the hope. That is, I think, a bit of a demographic split on maybe our younger participants would be more willing to do that. I haven't seen excitement from our older participants to do that, and they are our more highly engaged ones. So hopefully that might change, but that's certainly something we're trying to play around with a little bit more.

50:16I mean, some combination of those vulnerable stories that can relate to people authentically and maybe spread virally is, I think, great. And I like the numbers you used. You were like, we got five. That's amazing. It's a lot. Then you can get 10. Yeah. Then you can get 20, right? You didn't say, like, how do we get a thousand? Like, you know, I'm a big fan of that sort of snowball spreading and you encouraging the mechanisms of why it has spread. But, again, the vulnerable stories are, I think, what everyone wants to kind of hear in search for. For sure. The app is called Kahani. Mehak Mohan, thanks so much.

50:53Good luck. And turn you on. Let us know how it goes. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I think that it's like – I mean, again, you know this. The best form of marketing is word of mouth because if somebody you know is using it, you trust them and they're like, this is really good. I'm not going to recommend something to somebody, especially if it's expensive or a commitment of cash up front, unless I really think it's great. And also the ability to talk about how it actually authentically helped you is going to be better than any paid marketing you could ever do. Yeah, it's interesting because I – admittedly, I don't know what the total addressable market is here because I don't – I'm lucky I don't have one, right?

51:38I don't have any of these or I don't know anybody who does. Maybe I do. I don't know. But it's an interesting idea and I – and listen, she's smart. She's a smart entrepreneur. She and so clearly there's something to this. Anthony, before I let you go, I want to ask you one question, which is now that you have, you know, you've gone public. Now you're private again. You've running a hugely successful business. Started as a little, you know, little website software. Now it's a full package e-commerce, you know, business. if you could go back to you you know this programming nerd and you know 22 year old kid and you're like hey Anthony I'm coming back from the future and I'm telling you this was going to happen but but just so you know I want to give you some advice now because this is important for you to know what do you think you would be able to say now that you know all this stuff I think the thing everyone says, you know, follow your gut, right?

52:36And sometimes you do. And sometimes that takes a while. And I think that I would look back and go, you know, what decisions do I always delay on? And I'm always looking back and going, I wish I had done that faster. And I wonder why I've never gone to those decisions and gone, wow, I went too fast on that one, right? Like, why does it always error in one direction. And what does that mean? And I think I try and watch out for that stuff now and realize that sometimes I never move too quick on certain things and just kind of keep that in mind. And it's like, you could have just gone faster. You knew what to do.

53:15I love it. All right. It's great advice. That's Anthony Casalina, founder and CEO of Squarespace. Anthony, thanks so much for coming back on the show. Yeah, real pleasure. Thanks for having me. I'm honored. So fun. And by the way, if you guys haven't heard Anthony's original How I Built this episode, you've got to go back, check it out. We'll put a link to it in the show notes, the podcast description. And here's one of my favorite moments from that interview. Somewhere along the way, I get like a call on my cell phone from a customer. And guys like, hey, is Squarespace okay? So I call the data center.

53:45I'm like, hey, can you reboot this server? And it doesn't come back. And it wasn't coming back. Completely crashed. Wow. And I was like, I got to go to New York right now. And I just drive to New York. and I'm having a panic attack the whole way up because I'm like, it's screwed. I lost all the data. It's all gone. That little experiment's over. Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to check out my newsletter. You can sign up for it for free at gyros.com. Each week, it's packed with tons of insights from entrepreneurs and my own observations and experiences interviewing some of the greatest entrepreneurs ever.

54:20And if you're working on a business and you'd like to be on this show, Send us a one-minute message that tells us about your business, the issues or questions you'd like help with, and hopefully we can help you with them. And make sure to tell us how to reach you. You can send us a voice memo at hibtid.wondery.com or call us at 1-800-433-1298 and leave a message there. And we'll put all this in the podcast description as well. This episode was produced by Sam Paulson with music composed by Ramtin Ereblui. It was edited by Andrea Bruce, and our audio engineer was James Willits. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Elaine Coates, J.C.

55:04Howard, Neva Grant, Casey Herman, Chris Messini, Catherine Seifer, Carrie Thompson, and Ramel Wood. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to The Advice Line on How I Built This Lab.

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