🎧🍌 Building a $510 Million Personal Care Giant, with Danielle Cohen-Shohet, Founder and CEO of GlossGenius
🎧🍌 Building a $510 Million Personal Care Giant, with Danielle Cohen-Shohet, Founder and CEO of GlossGenius
Her secrets to capital efficiency, navigating COVID as a tool for in-person services, how she learned to delegate, why most companies aren't good at hiring, and why she answers customer support emails
Danielle Cohen-Shohet is the CEO and Founder of GlossGenius, the all-in-one booking, payments and POS solution that helps beauty and wellness professionals drive bookings and grow their business.
Danielle started the company in 2016 and has since grown it to a $510 million valuation. This is while taking a disciplined approach to fundraising, raising roughly $70 million throughout the life of the company.
Topics discussed include:
A crash course on the $160 billion beauty, health, and wellness market
How the industry's shifting to time-based billing and upfront payments
Why GlossGenius spends so much time on customer experience
Surviving a 90% drop in revenue during COVID
Why she credits talking to and listening to customers to GlossGenius success
A look inside each funding round, and why Danielle kept them small
How she learned to delegate as the company scaled
Why the big picture is often made of little details
Danielle’s secrets for running a capital efficient business
GlossGenius’ Hiring and Interviewing Manual
Why most companies aren’t good at hiring
Danielle’s favorite interview questions
Find Danielle on LinkedIn and Twitter
💫 Trying something new - check out these TikTok clips from the episode (and please let me know if these don’t show up in your inbox!)
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
So beauty and wellness, really interesting market. A lot of us interact with it as consumers, but it may be kind of abstracted away from some people. Can you give us a crash course on how it all works, how big is it?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
All right, crash course. Here we go, and thanks for having me.
So the market we're in is a large market, it's a growing market, and when we talk about the beauty and wellness market, we're actually just talking about local businesses primarily in the personal care space. So for example, businesses in the hair category, the aesthetics category, the wellness space, these are all personal care businesses. And there's probably three bullet points that you need to know about the market.
First, it's a large market. Looking at the global market for personal care, it's probably over about $160 billion. That's not software but service revenue. And it's basically spent inside the market at all these businesses. The second is that the market is really fragmented and it's fragmented in terms of size of businesses and also across multiple different types of end markets like hair, skin, nails and other types of sub-verticals in the beauty and wellness space. And then the third thing, and this is probably more relevant to why we're here, you should probably know about the market, is that it's a large market that has lagged a lot in technological adoption. Many businesses are starting to pick up technology estimates of how many businesses are not using any kind of technology or solution, probably reach about 40%. And when you look at smaller, less sophisticated customers, that number is even larger.
But I think this point is really important to understand because what lagging in technological adoption is meant for our industry is that our customers typically have systems that are scattered and disconnected and in their words, their systems don't talk to each other and makes it really hard for them to work together and understand what's happening in their business and ultimately succeed in the business. And so when you think about the market we're in, it's a large and growing market, but one that has lagged a lot in technological adoption and one that has so much opportunity to empower a lot of local entrepreneurs to be running, managing and scaling successful businesses.
Turner Novak:
So I'm really interested, when you say it's lagging, can you maybe give us kind of an inside look at maybe somebody who doesn't yet use GlossGenius, what does their business look like, some of the problems that they're facing and then how you guys end up helping?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Yeah, definitely. So looking at what their business looks like, I'd first start decomposing what parts of the client journey or client experience are actually there, particularly when it comes to administrative work. So client journey experience touches everything from online booking to relationship management, information, gathering collection for forms and waivers, client consultation data, checkout, receipts, marketing, reporting analytics, expense management, inventory management, staff management, everything that goes into basically running the front of house and back of house to accommodate client services.
And when you look at all those disparate parts of someone's operations, for someone who's not using technology, it's really time-consuming to manage all of them and if they're even managing all of them at all. Many business owners, because they're generally running a lot of different parts of the show, don't have time to, and what that means when they don't have time to manage a lot of the front of house and back of house well is they're kind of strapped when it comes to actually managing and growing a business. And what I find most interesting that many of us forget is that many small businesses, local businesses have to be profitable from day one. And when you think about how difficult it is for a business with a very small amount of resources and time to have to hit profitability standards from day one, the burden of all this administrative work becomes even greater and even more stressful and keeps business owners away from really pursuing what they love doing.
Turner Novak:
When you mention it being fragmented, do you know why it hasn't kind of consolidated and why is it so local? Why are there so many small local players in the health and wellness space specifically?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
I think it's because of the underlying value that's being sold as part of a service experience and that's ultimately talent. And in an age right now where a lot of talent is able to get discovered across different forms of social media and online, I think this has enabled many more very talented service providers to go out and start their own. And what has become of this is more fragmentation in the market, which I think is a wonderful opportunity for more local entrepreneurship because, ultimately, clients in this industry want to have differentiated experiences and the type of talent we see in this industry matches the ability to provide that.
Turner Novak:
So then how do they usually get started? If I want to start my own local, just in the business, get some friends, people in my neighborhood, what's usually the journey look like?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
It depends for many of them. And I think if we're considering the point past any type of advanced training and a degree in cosmetology for example, so let's assume that that's kind of out of the way, if not, then the first step would be to start there. But assuming that's out of the way, how they get started generally would be working out of a business and getting some trade experience and building a book of clients. Or now the fact that building a book of clients has become a lot easier with social media and other types of online forms to get found, many of these professionals are just starting out on their own and going and renting a small space and starting to build and attract a loyal following much earlier in their careers.
Turner Novak:
Is it mostly in person or do most of them leverage the internet or social media in some capacity?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
I'd say at this point in time, many professionals are leveraging social media. There's more that are catching up. There is a high degree of word of mouth that is still driving a lot of business for professionals and I think always will be because the type of trust that clients have in service providers and the value of a recommendation from another friend that trusts someone else is high. So word of mouth will always be there, but the aspect of building a client following that's loyal is changing, particularly when you consider new forms of attracting clients that social media has made available.
Turner Novak:
You said loyal, that sounds like a pretty important word. Is that a big thing that you guys really focus on and how GlossGenius empowers some of your customers?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Definitely. This is core to a lot of the way we build products and understanding and respecting the relationships that business owners and service professionals have and have always had with clients they serve is important when it comes to the things that we want to establish around our brand and how our brand shows up, how their brand shows up, how we're furthering the type of relationships that professionals can build and enabling them to build deeper, stronger, more profitable relationships all through technology. This has been core to how we think about a lot of different past products functionality we've built and future ones as well. And I think taking a step back, you look at a lot of behavior in the world around us and you ask yourself, "What's a truth?" And the fact that there's been a lot of loyalty and longstanding relationships with service providers that clients trust has been a truth of our industry and I believe will always exist and technology can only make it stronger.
Turner Novak:
Maybe a way we can expand on this a little bit more is what are ways that you've designed the products and how do you think about that in terms of helping with loyalty? Do you do things around scheduling? Do you do things around like SMS pushes like, "Hey, Danielle, you haven't been in for a month"? Are there any examples of ways that you guys have built that into the product?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
For sure. But let me take a step back first and anchor to the way we think about it at least. And when you think about businesses in our industry, and we're talking about loyalty and trust, trust is inherently built off of knowledge and understanding of someone else, and in this case it's knowledge and understanding that service provider has of a client. The more the service provider can understand clients and more information they have on clients, the more clients can trust them. And the more clients trust them, the more service providers can in turn deepen their understanding of clients.
So when you think about that interaction, we focus a lot on how do we improve service providers' understanding of clients across the client experience that touches many different parts of digital and in-person interactions. So whether you're looking at opportunity to help service providers and business owners collect more information about clients upfront during client booking or pre-appointment processes such as filling out forms and waivers and having all this streamlined automated and a part of every single person's client file now helps service providers and businesses understand clients much more, especially when clients get in the door, it's already a magical experience because people know everything that they should know about clients.
And so relationships already kind of accelerated with technology in that case. If you pan back a little bit to after the client is done with a service and they've left the studio or spa or salon, what technology can help them do when it comes to this cycle of trust is help professionals reach back out to clients to check in on them, to give them relevant offers or information about certain products or aftercare experiences they should be following. And all these things come together to build more trust between service providers and clients that ultimately helps drive so much more loyalty.
Turner Novak:
It seems like there's a really, you've kind of mentioned this before, but the really big focus on leverage with technology, like these things that they might want to do manually. I'm sure anyone who runs a business wants to follow up individually with each customer. But if the core of your business is not sitting at a desk or on your phone, you're actually doing a service of some kind, having that automated for you probably can't even value. It's like an undefined amount of value that you're providing because it's just infinite leverage.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
It's huge. It's infinite leverage, particularly to service professionals and business owners whose time is the main unit of currency for how they scale their business.
Turner Novak:
Maybe this is more of like me selfishly. I'm just curious, if I were to be a health and wellness entrepreneur running a business, how much can you usually make?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
There's a range there, but it would not be surprising to see a health and wellness professional making over six figures.
Turner Novak:
This is take home, right? And just net what you live off of at the end of the day?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Right.
Turner Novak:
Okay. Which is pretty good. That's a pretty good living.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Do you know then what are some of the big problems that you think they're still facing? Or maybe another way to think about it is what are you kind of thinking about on the GlossGenius side of what you might be doing?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Look, I think running a business is hard because you look at all the things that have to be managed by business owners that have so little time and are also generally folks who are performing. Many of the services are very involved and there's problems across a lot of different parts of the front office and back office. I think some of the main ones would generally be around, number one, getting more clients in the door. Particularly for businesses who are just starting out, this is a big problem. And I think there is a lot of different ways that this is getting easier too with social media and Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. But there still is a lot of time that professionals have to spend outside of doing what they really love, engaging clients or followers on these social media platforms.
So not only do they have to be good at doing what they love, but they also have to be good at social media and other forms of marketing for example. And I think if you use that as a synopsis to look at other parts of the back office, you can see why it's difficult running and managing a small business and why technology can be so powerful here. Another area of problem that stands out would generally be maintaining and growing client relationships too. I think this gets back to where technology can be really powerful with enabling more business owners and service providers to have more information about clients earlier on, improve the client experience, deepen more trust earlier on too. And so there's a lot of work to do there.
Then reporting is complex. There's a lot of things to manage. The more time you're spending on doing what you love, the less time you have to actually understand what's happening in your business and think ahead. So thinking ahead generally when it comes to analytics and understanding reporting has been tough for businesses and all of these things technology can make easier. So I'm really excited about the opportunity for that.
Turner Novak:
I'm hearing essentially all the problems that they're facing are essentially what you've already touched on that you do. So it seems like they're just kind of outstanding questions. I mean it's grow your business, run it more efficiently. It's like that's a never ending hamster wheel of like you can always grow more, you can always be more efficient.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
And the busier people get the harder it is to manage business. So there's just a never ending cycle of things to do. And balancing all of these administrative level tasks with the craft and the reason why many service professionals and business owners got into the industry in the first place is super tough.
Turner Novak:
What are some of the big trends right now that you're following in the industry?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Some interesting things happening, and I think this industry has always been evolving and there's new things when it comes to different sub-verticals and experience trends that are popping up or even just the way businesses are working. I'll kind of dial into the way businesses are working because I've spent a lot of my time thinking about that too, particularly given our focus to help businesses work better. So one of them that I think is really interesting is the move towards more digital experiences. It's starting first with online booking. We've seen online bookings start to get a lot of adoption.
Most of us now on the client side are loving that we can make reservations digitally at any time of the day and don't need to call anyone. It's amazing. Normally the experience has started once you're in the chair when it comes to the experience you're actually getting from a business. But with the move towards more of these digital experiences, I think the trend here is that the experience is going to start even sooner with first impressions that clients are having with businesses that offer some of them upfront before they've even gotten in the door.
Another trend I think is really interesting is pricing for services on a per hour basis instead of for a particular service. So if you look at other service based industries, it is the case that other service-based professionals are paid for the time they spend and they charge per hour. And you ask yourself, "Why is it that we are in a service-based industry where the unit of currency for any business owner to scale is time and yet we don't necessarily pay for time, we just pay for a service?" I think we're starting to see a little bit of that change or some early trends around some of the pricing done on a per hour basis instead of per service. Because ultimately professionals are not really selling the service, it's their time, it's the talent they're selling. So I'm kind of intrigued by that one.
Then another one that we're definitely seeing a lot more of is more and more advanced payment. And this is another interesting point here too, that when I look at our industry, our industry is pretty behind here, we're catching up, but why is it the case that any personal care appointment is effectively an experience, but we pay for it after the fact? When you think about other experiences that we generally have, right now, it's super standard to reserve and pay for them in advance. So traveling, shows, flights, buses, classes, all these are experiences that you take and you pay for upfront. And you look at our industry and we typically haven't had a lot of services paid for upfront and they're an experience at the end of the day. And we're starting to see a lot more professionals value more of their time. And what I think this means is that we're going to be paying for services a little bit more upfront, particularly if we're going to some of the best professionals.
Turner Novak:
I hadn't even really thought about the unit of time and how we don't necessarily pay for time here, but we do in a lot of other cases. And then upfront payment is probably huge. You book something two weeks out, you're a business, you get the cash right away.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
I mean it's interesting. Think about any experience that you have that involves you going and sitting somewhere in a seat, on an airplane, on a bus, at a show, you're always reserving and paying for that upfront. And if you abstract a lot of the industry experience that clients get here, effectively you're kind of doing the same thing. You're going to a business and you're sitting in a seat that no one else can sit in and you're basically getting an experience there. So I'm very intrigued by this one because I think this industry is long overdue when it comes to securing more professionals and business owners' time.
Turner Novak:
How are you thinking about it from the product side? Are you open to sharing?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
There's so much there. And on the product side, I think it kind of just comes back to how do we help professionals make more money with every unit of time they have available? And I think that's the first question we're starting with when it comes to thinking through that problem.
Turner Novak:
So I'm really curious, you have a pretty long history working in the health and wellness industry. I'm super curious how you came up with the idea. I know those are both kind of intertwined. But if we can just kind of go way back, when did it all start?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
I loved makeup artistry in college. I was doing makeup artistry when I was at Princeton. There was always events happening there. And I started freelance because it was just a side hustle and passion of mine. And it was actually during that time I started learning a lot about what would later become some pretty big shifts in our market that were just starting then.
Turner Novak:
What were some of the big shifts?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
The move towards more and more fragmentation with businesses, more talented professionals going out and starting their own building loyal client followings. And an industry that was lagging in technological adoption, didn't have purpose built things and needed them given how big and growing the industry was. At that same time back in college, so my twin sister and I, who she runs other parts of GlossGenius now, actually pursued a digital receipts point of sale venture.
So basically it was a point of sale payments company that digitized receipts so we could basically understand valuable customer transaction information. So payments and point of sale was always an area of interest for us. And then interestingly, I wrote my senior thesis in college on how economic reforms would be leveling the playing field for small businesses in a developing country like India. And I had a technical background. So when you put all those things together, it's no surprise that I started a software payments company that was leveling the playing field for small businesses in an industry that I love, that was GlossGenius.
Turner Novak:
I'm curious now, the receipt business. I've heard you talk about it before, but I'm curious, what did you learn from that? It sounds like you're not doing it anymore, but what all did you learn from it?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
It was a really fun experience. I learned a lot about point of sale and payments and how critical it was to a lot of different parts of workflow. And I think that was a really useful insight, particularly because over the recent years we've seen deep integrations between payments and other parts of workflow. But it was entirely novel at the time to be thinking about payments, connecting to other parts of a back office system. And every point of sale solution was separate from every other part of a business's front office or back office. And yet it contained really valuable information about customers that would actually be useful for businesses to use for things like marketing, retargeting, bringing customers back in.
So that was one of the most important things that I kind of started to get insight over and learn and felt really strongly about because when I started Gloss Genus, it wasn't conventional to think about payments being a part of the workflow suite. And in fact, there were so many people that discouraged me from integrating payments because at the time everyone had thought payments was a totally separate business. But the thinking there given a lot of the early understanding that I'd gotten from the digital receipts venture and really going deep on point of sale was, well, on the surface it could be a different business, but it's all the same business for the type of local business we're helping.
Turner Novak:
And at the end of the day, if you are running a point of sale business and you're running a, I don't know, back of office or software, both are trying to acquire the same customer. It's almost like, "All right, if we're spending the money to acquire the customer, let's just generate more revenue from the customers that we're acquiring. It'll be more profitable." And that's kind of the whole vertical software, vertical SaaS thesis.
Smaller businesses, maybe they're not as exciting as having Disney as a customer. Disney you could probably generate tens of millions of revenue. I'm thinking your customers are probably a little bit smaller. But if you can go really full stack and serve a lot of different needs, from your business perspective, you're taking a small slice of their revenue, however big they are, you're generating however much in revenue. And I'm assuming the product that you have sort of grows on itself. Is that a fair thing to say?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
For sure. And I think the product we have is a trusted business partner with customers that we serve. And when you serve from that point of view, then the opportunity that we have to keep serving customers on deeper and deeper and more nuanced problems gives us the further right to serve them in even deeper ways on even more nuanced problems. And I think that's a big opportunity for software companies, the ability to go really deep.
Turner Novak:
So you had this thesis, the thesis on economic enablement, you had this expertise in the space. How did you decide what to do first, the very first product that you built or was there a journey to get there?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
The very first product to build was a pretty easy decision because I just built what I would've needed to use as a starting point when I was doing any kind of freelancing for something I really loved. And because the interest I had with payments from the venture with my twin sister, payments became a natural part of it, even at a time when, as I mentioned, it wasn't really conventional to integrate payments with other parts of the stack. And so I kind of just simplified, "What are the most important parts of running a business that take the most time? Let me just figure out how to put these into a really elegant, easy to use software product that can actually help people." And that was a decision to start where I did.
Turner Novak:
So what was the very first product then or the first features?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
The first features were scheduling, payments, very light reporting and client relationship management.
Turner Novak:
So it was if you were... And what was the first market? Did you start with makeup artists specifically?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
We actually didn't. We started with hair professionals first.
Turner Novak:
With hair. Okay. How did you decide who to start with in terms of customers?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
This was an interesting one, but I mostly wanted to focus on hair because the industry was changing quite a bit. A lot of fragmentation starting to happen in an industry where also businesses were doing it more so full-time. I think the part-time nature with a lot of other types of businesses or service professionals in the makeup artistry made it hard to initially get really, really deep feedback on being mission-critical. And so I wanted to start with a group of sub-vertical industry folks that would help me understand if this was actually mission-critical or not.
Turner Novak:
I'm curious then how did you go from, we skipped over this part, but you worked at Goldman Sachs, you're working on Wall Street, how did you go from that to then finding and getting in front of and talking to all your potential customers? What was that journey?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
I'm one of those people that could be pretty fearless if I'm determined to do something. And so just getting going actually came down to something that I asked friends of mine who were in the industry to help me with. I basically had them share this with colleagues that they knew, but I didn't know. And the reason I did that was because I felt like folks that I knew in the industry might be obliged to use something that I had shared with them and tell me it was great when maybe that really wasn't the true feeling, but colleagues of theirs that were in the industry didn't have any obligation to tell me what I might've wanted to hear. And I thought that was going to get the truest form of feedback by just seeing real usage stats if I was able to get this in the hands of people that didn't even know me. And so that was really how I got the first very early group of users going.
Turner Novak:
What did the first version look like? Did you have an app? Was it all web? Were people using it on their computer? What was that very first product?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
First version was a web app and it was highly mobile responsive. So if they wanted to use it on their mobile phone, they could, but it was all web app.
Turner Novak:
Do you remember just the landscape at the time, not even just what you were building, but just all the options? Was there any options or did people even do that? Was there anything to use?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
There were a few different types of tools and certainly as the opportunity in this space has become more recognized, there's been more folks focusing on it. But the tools that were available at the time were really hard to use. They were super clunky. They weren't really connected to a lot of parts of business owner's workflow and they were expensive to use. So when you kind of put all that together, it was clear that there was an opportunity to create a vertical software payments company that was purpose built for an industry that was changing fast.
Turner Novak:
Was there anything encouraging early on, certain moment where you were like, "Holy shit, this is going to work. This is it"?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Yeah, there were probably a few moments early on that made me feel that way. And the most powerful ones were always about customers. So I remember we had a beta product rolled out, was super bare bones. As I mentioned, I give it to colleagues of professionals that I knew, they started using it and that small group of early users that were using it basically turned into this "holy shit" moment when I was getting emails from them asking if there were other colleagues around them that could start to use the beta too.
Turner Novak:
And these were support emails. They were emailing you through the support channel.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Right. And that was really the only email that we had available, support one. And I thought it was very telling because even though we were talking about really small numbers, like your group of five that would then turn to 7, 10, 12, so on and so forth, what I thought was very telling was that there was this early word of mouth motion when customers used the product that to me signified something special was going on and that I really paid attention to and was super exciting.
Other kind of "holy shit" moments with customers probably had to do a lot with the customer love we. So we launched a product and customers started unsolicitedly posting really positive things about it on Instagram, social media. And Leah, my twin sister who I could always count on to give me a brutally honest opinion, said to me, "This is really special. These are people who've never really liked the business side of things posting about how obsessed they are with a business product." And looking at the customer love and kind of that dynamic of what she laid out, I was like, "Wow. Yeah. Oh my gosh, this is special. And there's something really exciting here." And I think that combined with the early beta reach outs that we got as well, were very telling about the promise of this product to be picked up, be loved, and to be shared with other types of professionals that really loved using it too.
Turner Novak:
Were you able to track attribution on some of those early signups? Was there self-serve, were you manually onboarding people? How did all that work?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
It was a bit of manual onboarding and then quickly there was all the self-serve stuff that was built. Tracking was always kind of a moving target because there were so many other things for us to have to do inside the product. And the most important thing for me was to make sure we were showing value to customers and I was spending an insane amount of my time focused on making the product better and better and better so customers could realize more and more value from it. So looking back, I'd say probably a lot of the attribution and some of the early data tracking probably fell by the wayside given the just maniacal focus on delivering more recognizable value to customers.
Turner Novak:
So it was just manual, it was just you talked to them and got feedback and that was how it happened?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Yeah. And then signup became self-serve and a lot more of it became automated and a lot of the tracking and attribution then started getting put into the product. And a lot of the understanding of where customers started to come from, I'd put together in my head when I would just reach out and ask customers, "How'd you hear about us?" And someone would talk about the other friend that they knew that was using us that loved it or someone else who was raving about it. And I started to really put together a picture of what was powering a lot of the early customer signups and it was a lot of the word of mouth from the product.
Turner Novak:
What happened next? Were you charging people to use it initially or was it all free?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
The beta we were not initially charging folks for because it was super early and it was really important for us just to get feedback on. In retrospect, I'm not sure that was actually kind of the right thing to do. I do believe that if you have something valuable that putting a price sticker on it is actually helpful because it shows commitment from customers. But fast-forward to then when the product that's now out in the market launched, that was middle of 2017, there was a price sticker on it because we thought it was a very valuable set of functionality and for customers they were using it, they'd be getting an outsized amount of value from the product. So we launched the product that's now in the market in that way, and since then we kind of have been growing that.
Turner Novak:
Was everything free, like you had no revenue until 2017?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
That's right. In no revenue until 2017.
Turner Novak:
Wow. So what were kind of the key metrics you were tracking? Was it just usage or number of end customers or what were kind of the big KPIs that you followed?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
The most important KPI that I was personally tracking was return usage.
Turner Novak:
Returning end customers coming back or just your clients, like the businesses staying on board?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Businesses.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So I'm actually interested, were there customers that you found the product didn't work for or was there a lot of, I don't know, churn sort of? Did you learn anything in the early days?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Churn is something that can be structural with small businesses, particularly given it's hard to run small business and some small businesses may not make it. So I think something that was definitely apparent early on was the product wasn't right for businesses that were super early in their journey and just getting started, the product was really great for businesses that were just starting to become more viable.
Turner Novak:
Did you realize that right away or was there any confusion and you're like, "I don't know why this isn't working", or any kind of journey there?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
I realized it really quickly from just chatting with customers and mapping out where they were in the journey of their business and then finding patterns and it was a really quick realization that the product would be really, really suitable for customers who had just started getting their business going to some amount of viability.
Turner Novak:
Seems like a really key takeaway so far is talk to customers, getting feedback. How did you do it? Did you have any structure or was it kind of random?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
I approached it voraciously. Any opportunity I had to talk to a customer, I take it. Any hour of the day, any form, medium, email, text, phone call, support tickets. I also, on that topic, with support was super, super dialed in because it was just another opportunity for me to be on the front lines with customers and hear the questions they were asking, how they were using the product, the things that they were giving us feedback on were all part of the early experience. And customers that would come in that were new, I'd send them an email and ask to talk to them. I'd go visit many of them in person. My day was filled with just talking to customers.
Turner Novak:
And were you based in New York at the time?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Okay. Was most of the customer concentration in and around New York or did it kind of start to spread across the country?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
It started to spread across the country. The very early customer concentration was in and around New York. And then when we started basically getting more people using it, then we started realizing some of the word of mouth dynamic with customers in different locations that had started to sign up based off of someone else who was in that location.
Turner Novak:
I forget the exact date, but you raised a seed round at some point. What year was that?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
That was 2016.
Turner Novak:
Okay, so that was year or two after you launched. A lot of people were using it. Do you remember how many customers or what was the headline, "This is how we're valuing the business", in the seed round?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
It was still early, particularly given comparison to where we are now. But we basically raised from a small group of [inaudible 00:36:01] angels who really believed in what we were doing. And the traction I think spoke for itself. At the time we probably had a few hundred customers.
Turner Novak:
And you weren't charging anyone yet, right?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
That's right.
Turner Novak:
And was there a cut of payment revenue or anything like that or was still GMV based or bookings based?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Yeah, because the volume of payments was quite small at the time, it really wasn't even meaningful.
Turner Novak:
So in terms of getting the seed round done, the process that you went through, which is kind of advice that you would give to somebody else to get it done efficiently, quickly, how do the conversations go?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
So I could probably click into a piece of advice here on even just conversations because all of the conversations I had when I was raising from a few angels were very similar and they all basically followed the same pattern, which is, "Here's what we're doing, here's where we're going and here's how we're going to get there." And I think the ability for me to just clearly communicate the plan and how I thought through things and the problems in front of me was really helpful for angel investors. And I'd say that's probably an area of advice that I give to a lot of founders approaching this is just simplify communication, clarify different opportunities and challenges in the business and show a clear plan.
Turner Novak:
And then what was the plan? I'm assuming that involved roadmap over the next couple of years?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Road mapping, I'd point to kind how I was going to do this capital efficiently. I had a technical background, "Here's the product we've already put in the market, here's the product that we're working on right now, here's what we're going to do after that. Here's where we will be." And what are the biggest hurdles and basically how are we going to overcome them.
Turner Novak:
So close the seed round, this was 2016. What happened next? Did you hire people?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
No, we just kept going. We didn't really hire folks too early on, it was mostly about customer milestones and making sure that we were de-risking every part of the experience and data we were getting from usage, kept building great functionality and getting more and more signal on usage. And once we got signal on that usage, getting more and more signal on other forms of usage, and it sounds kind of simple, but we just kept going and we just kept going deeper and we just kept learning and we tried to learn as quickly as possible because the most important thing for me was always showing traction with customers and that was really what I just stayed focused on.
Turner Novak:
Then it sounds like 2017 you launched the more fully fleshed out people were starting to pay for it. How did that go? Smooth launch? Everything better than expected or any surprises?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Yeah, smooth launch generally. I think the biggest surprise was that we were very under-prepared for all the other stuff that came that day. So we launched one day and then we basically had a customer service channel that was set up to take calls and customers started calling and customers would submit tickets. And alongside trying to manage customer service with a super, super lean team, I was also trying to make progress on building more functionality in the product and then doing other marketing bits and basically kind of having my hand across every single area of the startup with such a lean operation. So I think we were pretty under-prepared. But that said, we never really had the approach of over-engineering and kind of overbuilding a team before we actually had proof points and traction. So it was hard when we first launched because we were constantly trying to get out of this endless cycle of things to do and try to think forward about all the other stuff we had to do into the future for customers. And we did, but it was super fun.
Turner Novak:
So you got all this feedback from customers, the avalanche of support. It sounds like that's a good problem to have in the grand scheme of things, too many customers, too much excitement and feedback.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Yeah, we definitely got a lot of feedback on areas our product could be easier to use, particularly because we saw customers asking questions about certain things or opportunities for our product, and probably what was most top of mind for customers too when it came to areas of our roadmap that we wanted to evolve. And all that stuff came right from being on the front lines with customers.
And I think this is one of the things that founders generally don't recognize earlier on and maybe don't spend enough time earlier on here as they should. And that area is just engaging a lot with customers and whether it's sitting in support queue or just constantly being in touch with customers, you just start to pick up patterns and signals and you build this intuition for the product that helps you cut through so much other noise as well. And after no time at all, whether you're sitting on support queue or talking to a bunch of customers, you start to basically understand what's really important, what's kind of medium important and what's like a nice to have, but you could put away and table for now so you can focus on the really important stuff for customers that are actually deal breakers and keeping customers away from being successful with your product.
Turner Novak:
From there, you had a decent amount of, I don't know, organic growth, just the product was just growing. What was that like in terms of the next couple of years? Were you growing like 2% a month, 5%, 20% a month? What did that kind of feel like internally?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
It was exciting internally. Every single month, depending on what we were doing, different ways that we were evolving the product, we'd be growing 10% month over month. If you look across the next few years after we launched, we were growing really quickly organically. Now obviously the base of customers was small, but it was exciting to see.
Turner Novak:
It was not like you were probably going out and dumping tons of money on paid acquisition and doing all this fancy stuff. It was just like the customers just came and they told people and they just kept growing. That's a good way to grow no matter how fast it is, but it sounds like it was still pretty fast.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
It helped us reinvest back into customers faster, which was really important because we were growing and we were growing efficiently and we didn't have a ton of resources. But that meant that resources we did have, we could invest back into customers that would help us grow even more and so on and so forth. So that early cycle of capital efficiency and reinvestment back into customers, we got really right.
Turner Novak:
So I think another really big event in the history of GlossGenius, COVID hit beginning of 2020. What was that like?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
I look back on that experience, a frightening time, but with the benefit of hindsight, I'm oddly grateful for the leadership experience and opportunity I got during it. Normally a startup at any given time, there are so many variables and risks. And when you look at COVID, basically all the variables and risks that any startup would normally face just became multiplied by a lot more. And particularly for a company like ours, the pandemic shutdowns were tough because it forced all of our customers' businesses to close.
So you didn't really know how long it would last, how it would feel when shutdowns were released and people were going back together and getting services. Would they even trust businesses in our industry and service professionals to perform intimate services on them? All these things sound crazy that we're talking about them now, but they were actually kind of being contemplated at the time and the company hadn't yet raised a big institutional round. So navigating COVID during such a frightening time for the company, it was all consuming. There were days that I would get up early in the morning, I'd get straight to work, I wouldn't have time for anything, and then suddenly it was 6:00 PM and I realized I hadn't eaten breakfast yet, or I barely moved from the chair I was sitting at in the kitchen.
Turner Novak:
How did you manage that, as the founder of a company that's revenue dropped 90% within a week?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
It was super tricky and I think there were so many different plans and scenarios that I was working through, but then by the time you'd look at the plan A, you'd move to the plan B and then plan C and D would later have to be picked up and worked on, and then you turn to another type of scenario analysis. So I was doing that all the time in addition to getting super hands-on and working on things that would actually be driving value to customers. But I think the most important way I managed this was through this principle that I've kind of always believed in. And this principle certainly carried us through some of the toughest times during COVID and helped us take advantage of I think some of the most unique opportunities during it. But it was that our customer's success was our success.
And so you mentioned revenues dropping 90%. What was on my mind there was we had to find a way to make our customers successful. If we found a way to make our customers successful, our success would follow. And so how could we just stay focused and be ruthlessly prioritized towards this idea of whatever it is we could do to be accelerating on the roadmap to help customers make more money, stay afloat and succeed during its super scary time for them too. I knew that if we could stay focused on that, it would be tough, but we'd be able to make it through a super tough time. And we did.
I think looking at that principle and what we changed on the roadmap and with our company to get things on the roadmap that would've normally taken months done in weeks or days, and other things that we hadn't even contemplated yet on the roadmap that we now started doing such as loans and giving our customers more access to capital. In a few days, we facilitated more than $45 million of loans. This was astounding for us at the time, the volume of loans that we facilitated in such a short period of time. But when you put all this together, it was all in service of helping our customers and business owners stay afloat. And the most important thing we did during that time was just say true a principle that has always been true for our business, which is if our customers are succeeding, then we will too.
Turner Novak:
Had you done any kind of lending product before COVID hit?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
No.
Turner Novak:
Wow. Was it on the roadmap at least?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
It wasn't even on the roadmap.
Turner Novak:
Wow. And you just spun it up. How quickly did you get that out?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
It was a Saturday morning I was working and then I basically just went down this rabbit hole of SBA 79(a) lending and new programs and all this other stuff that we could be doing. Then I put together a plan, started getting comms together for the team, and then we had a all hands and we were just quickly at work then making sure that we were getting everything ready. The customer service team picked up a lot of knowledge. Our product team started helping customers use information from transactions and expenses that would be useful for them to apply for loans. All this other stuff that kind of came together beautifully inside the product that gave us the right to help customers here. And that was kind of the important piece. It wasn't something that was unrelated to customers' businesses. We had all the inputs that made our customers that much more successful applying for loans, and it made it that much easier for customers to apply. And so I think we really just kind of seized the opportunity to help customers stay afloat and our success followed after that.
Turner Novak:
So what happened after COVID?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
So the days when the shutdowns were kind of getting released, if you recall, it was state by state. And so we kind of got an early look into possibly how things would pan out post pandemic shutdowns, which was promising because the states who had opened up first were generally going well. And there was a few slow days, but I think many clients had had enough and they were going back in to get services and there was a surge in demand for businesses and business owners couldn't keep up. They didn't have enough time in the day to serve clients.
Now, there were some clients that were still cautious to go back for an intimate service, and I think we saw that be the case for prolonged period of time. But there was a surge in demand with clients that were ready to go back. And our industry being as entrepreneurial as they are, also really adapted. There were business owners that were setting up chairs outside and doing all sorts of crazy cool, innovative things to be meeting clients where they were and serving them as best as they could. So I think it was kind the meeting of both sides that helped the industry succeed post pandemic shutdowns.
Turner Novak:
I believe shortly after, you did end up raising an institutional round of a series A. How did that all come together?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
So that all came together pretty quickly. We had gotten to know Bessemer and the team there, and I was so impressed with all of them, particularly given the focus the firm has had, not just on incredible software company investing, but specifically vertical software investing. And so we started working with Bessemer and we then raised the series A round.
Turner Novak:
How did you initially meet them? I know they do a lot of outbound. Did they reach out to you or did you somehow connect with them from someone else?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Yeah, they had initially reached out. And I think I had shared with them that I was super heads down. This was after the pandemic shutdowns were released. Everything was all hands on deck. And I initially had postponed a meeting I had with them because I was just focused on the business. And then a few weeks went by and they had followed up. I decided to take a meeting with them, and the conversation we had was awesome. It was talking about vertical software, the future of the industry. And just the type of dialogue we had, I could tell that they really understood what we were doing. Things kind of progressed from there, and I had a chance to share more about the business and they likely had a good chance to see how I thought about the business with that. And I just really loved working with them and I loved the type of interactions I had with everyone at the firm.
Turner Novak:
Do you remember that series A? What were investors most interested in terms of the investability of GlossGenius? Did they really like this vertical SaaS thesis? Was it specifically the sub-sector or sector that you were in?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
There were several other investors leaning in and they were super excited about what we were doing. So that was definitely rewarding for me to experience. But I think the common denominator among a lot of the interests that many of them had in the business was just the extreme capital efficiency we had, the traction that was there, the fact that the business had real fundamentals, it was viable, it was working, and it had been growing very quickly and very consistently for a period of time. And I think that really meant a lot to folks who got a chance to understand a lot more about the business. And it was definitely impressive and certainly at the time stood out.
Turner Novak:
You also raised a series B and you raised a series C. Were those similar types of conversations?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Definitely.
Turner Novak:
And I think the B, it was just all existing investors. They were like, "Here's more money."
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
There's two new investors. One was Imaginary and another one was Left Lane.
Turner Novak:
Then the most recent round you did the series C, you raised $28 million for series C. That is a pretty small series C. It took very little dilution it sounds like. Why such little dilution? Why such a small round when traditionally you might see people raise a little bit more money?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Yeah, look, I think the business has always been really disciplined with its use of capital. And the capital efficiency has always been a hallmark here and something I've cared a lot about. We had already had a lot of our capital left from the last round, the B, and it was really more about the partnership and the opportunity work with someone that I really had a lot of admiration for and a affirm that I really respected. And looking at that, that was the kind of foundation. And the fact that we had an opportunity to accelerate some other things we were working on in some areas was exciting. And so that's kind of why we decided to do it.
Turner Novak:
Did it give you anything, hire a little bit, like lean more into R&D and new product areas?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Definitely. The first thing it gave me was another wonderful partner to help me think through different parts of the business, and that's extremely important and I value a lot of the partnership that I have with every single one of our investors. But other things it gave us were the ability to think a little bit more longer term and heavier with big areas of investment and lean into things that have always been important to the company, product namely, and other motions of the company too that have been important for us and are getting a lot more of my attention and time and starting to get scaled with company too. Go-to-market, CX, design, other types of operations and finance roles.
Turner Novak:
So it sounds like, and we were kind of mentioning this earlier, the trade-off is the founders, the CEO, being high level, delegating when you're in the details. How do you do that as the founder?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Most people's strengths are another side of their weaknesses generally. And I think for founders, this one particularly about getting hands-on and being involved in certain areas is certainly a strength of many founders. But also as the business grows, can be a weakness when it comes time to building other teams and empowering other folks. And so I think striking the right balance has been extremely important. But it's part of the secret sauce, I believe, we have as a company. The fact that I've built all areas of the organization, I understand what each organization needs because I was doing it at some point in time and I can be a very deep thought partner across a lot of different areas of the business, I think has made the company much stronger and it certainly made me stronger as a CEO in many ways. And other ways has given me other things to think through and work on when it comes to what's next for the company.
So navigating that has been really exciting and I kind of want to take the best parts of getting hands-on and in the details and combine that with the best parts of doing what I need to do as well when it comes to thinking big picture. But if I could probably close on one point here, it's that the big picture is made up of the little details oftentimes, and I think you could have a really great big picture, but if you're not really executing well on little details, and if every pixel in the product, for example, isn't delighting customers or might not necessarily set up the right amount of trust with customers that you need it to, you might actually be compromising the big picture opportunity you have.
Turner Novak:
Related. Are you still answering support emails?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Not all of them, but I spend a lot of time still in the front lines with customers. I am really queued into different Slack channels with customer comments, summaries, synthesis, different random emails that I'll get from customers or reach outs that I'll do there. And I like to stay really glued into it because I think it's one of the most important things that I can do in my position. And also when it comes time to making sure other departments are kind of collaborating effectively when it comes to true customer needs, I can be a source of truth for that.
Turner Novak:
So question on importance and customers. When you're running a vertical SaaS business, do you think is it more important to focus on something like workflow and operational efficiency or increasing revenue? Those kind of seems like two of the main things that you do. How do you square that up?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
It's a tough question. I would generally say it depends on the customer journey. There's businesses that become so busy that the most important thing they need help with is increasing operational efficiency and then at some point in time they'll kind of come back once they've gotten around the corner on that to needing to increase revenue. And then at some point in time they'll probably need to get back to increasing operational efficiency. So it ebbs and flows depending on the business needs. I don't think one is more important than the other. I think it's kind of temporal for businesses, but they're both extremely important to businesses at different times in their life cycle. Vertical software companies though I think in the very long term will have to do both.
Turner Novak:
That's true. You're basically building an operating system for someone to run their business. Should be efficient, should help them grow all, those things.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
It's kind of like at a software company, what's more important, making sure the product runs well or getting more customers to use the product? Both matter. And software companies have to focus on both eventually. But if we are to look at the lifecycle of companies, probably early on it's more important to make sure the product is running right before you're getting more customers to use it. But at some point in time it's going to be really important to get more customers to use the product because we know it's running right.
Turner Novak:
You mentioned a lot about how capital efficient you were. What do you think you've done in terms of being so capital efficient? Because it's a challenge it seems like for a lot of companies, but it's so important.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
First we started with a problem that was serving a real need. When I think about customers that were paying for the product because the product was providing outsized amount of value to them, more than what they were paying for obviously, that it was kind of the starting point of capital efficiency. I don't think you can run a capital efficient business if you're not doing that well.
Turner Novak:
Solve a problem that you can charge a lot for.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Yeah. And it sounds simple, but we kind of forget about how many other companies don't really do that. Or maybe they solve a problem that customers have, but the problem from day one doesn't really have positive unit economics or doesn't have a path to getting there. So that way, while it's great that customers are kind of getting a problem solved, there's more problems for the business solving the problems for customers because the business actually doesn't know how to keep solving this problem viably for customers. So I think there's really something that we spent a lot of time on when it came time to just getting the early workings of the product and the fundamentals right, particularly in a industry that was fast moving and had lower ACVs and other enterprise software product companies. And that made us a better company and it made us more capital efficient because it forced us to focus on the most important things.
Turner Novak:
I don't have the inside view, but just thinking about how the product has evolved over time, you've figured out a go-to-market motion that was probably profitable with just the core software product, and then you added something like lending. You're probably making money from that, but you're still probably keeping that similar go-to-market motion. So I would assume your margins expand, more products that you add, I'm assuming you get a little bit of margin expansion there too.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Definitely, definitely. And look, I think one of the beautiful things about the model here with vertical software companies is if you play that out, you're spot on. You basically can get a lot of incremental margin at very little or zero cost of customer acquisition because you already have a customer relationship and you can go deeper with customers. And I think that makes for a really efficient type of business because you're not necessarily spending inefficiently to acquire customers. Now you're basically just deepening relationships you're having with them and that feeds into another virtuous cycle as well.
Turner Novak:
One more kind of big topic I want to hit on. You have this GlossGenius hiring manual. Can you just talk about that process and just share a little bit more?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Look, I think hiring is one of the most important things that startups do, and I don't actually think most companies are good at it. Even the best companies still make mistakes. By most standards, if more than 70% of the people you hired were A+ players, I think you'd have an insane track record. If that were true, think about what that would mean. That means that you might have missed 30% of the time. If you think about how crazy that is and now you think about, that's the best, think about what other companies are actually hitting at if they're not really deliberate about hiring.
And the reason I've always been really focused on this is I started my career at Goldman Sachs. One of the main reasons why I was drawn there was because of the people. People were smart, they were commercial, ambitious, hungry. They were people I wanted to work with. And I knew I would go to Goldman Sachs and learn something from the people I was around. And I wanted to create the same type of feeling at the company, get a bunch of smart people together in a room and create an environment where smart people would develop so much human capital just for having been a part of the team.
Because I wanted to create that, I spent so much time on hiring and interviewing. And so this manual, I created this whole entire guide for folks at the company to become better interviewers. And it helped us get a lot more structure around our process and it helped us get so much more focused on the things that really mattered to not just the roles we were hiring for, but also the type of culture we wanted to create. There's a lot of different stages that we have throughout the hiring process, different screens, interviews for critical competencies, cultural competencies, sometimes case studies, chatting with former coworkers of different candidates. I'm proud of the process. We've evolved because it's helped us build a really fantastic team that I'm super proud of.
Turner Novak:
What are some of the big takeaways? Like if you were just to share somebody just the snapshots and the high level of putting something like this together?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Be structured, look at the role you're hiring for and think about the most important competencies to getting the job done. Create interview questions that map to those competencies. And for each interview go really, really deep on a very small set of questions instead of going very, very wide across many questions. I think this is something people do pretty poorly in interviews. They'll ask a bunch of questions and get surface level answers instead of just focusing on maybe two or three topics for an hour long interview and going really, really deep to see how far candidates can go and how curious they could be about a certain subject, or what their experience in a certain subject they're ready to talk about actually is like.
So I'm a big fan of going deep with fewer questions rather than more. That's one. I'm a big fan of chatting with folks who've worked with candidates before in the past and spending a lot of time on the cultural interview and getting it right. And one of the pieces that I really like to understand in a candidate is their ability to breakthrough walls. And I think this is one of the most important traits to have if you're successful at a startup, is your ability to basically overcome different types of challenges and get something done.
Turner Novak:
How do you pull that out in an interview? I could just make anything up and just tell you that's what I do. How do you find that?
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
I mean, I ask and it's, "What walls have you broken through in your life?" And the things I hear are really interesting because sometimes it's really not always about work walls, sometimes it's personal walls. But you learn a lot when you're getting different perspectives from candidates, whether they're telling you about something valuable they broke through if it was a work wall person. But I think you learn about someone's resilience and someone's grit to just get something done. And the idea in a startup that you're creating tens, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars of value in such a short period of time is astounding. And I don't think you can do that unless you have a team that is determined to break through walls. Because creating tens, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars of value is actually breaking through walls and kind of established practices and behaviors around us in the world we live in today. So you just have to have this mindset in people you work with. And for this reason, I love spending time understanding how people break through walls during the interview process.
Turner Novak:
And it's not even just for creating value for GlossGenius, for your customers, we were talking beforehand that you touch tens of millions of end customers in the US. That's pretty incredible. It's like percentages of the population. That's really, really cool.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
Yeah, the end clients we serve via the businesses we empower. Yeah, it's cool. And yeah, we wouldn't have gone there without out of the box thinking, resourcefulness and just a relentless tenacity to get stuff done.
Turner Novak:
So last question, what's the best way to apply to GlossGenius? I know you guys are hiring right now.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet:
A lot of the team is through employee networks. I would say the best way to apply as either get to know someone at the company and that also gives you the opportunity to get a first look at what it's like to work here too. But if you're not going to do that, then I love getting pitched on interesting ideas. Again, when I go back to this idea of out of the box thinking, resourcefulness, sometimes that comes through during interview processes with candidates that come through and it stands out. So that could be a really good way. Find something that demonstrates you're out of the box thinking, resourcefulness and relentlessness, and I think you'll be a good fit here.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I think that's a good way to end it. I mean, it sounds like the theme of GlossGenius just as the whole history, it's like resourcefulness, relentlessness, revenue dropping 90% during COVID, not giving up. It's amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on. This was really fun.
Stream the full episode on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
Find transcripts of all other episodes here.