In this episode of Prototype Thinking in Action, we talk to Frances, second time founder of Shitty Mom Guide, to help her tackle the challenge of growth.

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Transcript

Pablo: Welcome to Prototype Thinking in Action. I'm Pablo, your host, and this is the podcast where we talk to founders, dive into one big challenge that they are facing, and help them solve it by using the prototype thinking method. Let's get started.

J: Hey, Frances, thank you so much for joining us today.

Frances: I'm so excited to be here!

Pablo: Frances, if I'm understanding this correctly, you're a second time founder, so maybe you can briefly tell us a little bit about your previous startup as much as you're comfortable with.

Frances: Oh, I'm comfortable, to the detriment of the audience. So my previous startup was called Awkward Essentials and we made a cum sponge, so it was an after sex cleanup tool. Those of you that are having sex with a man and have a vagina, everything comes out if you're not using a condom, and it was incredibly annoying, and I was like, why is there no solution to this? I told a few friends, they were like go for it, so I I did it.

Pablo: One of the things I love is that you're a problem solver.

Frances: I'm a founder, that's just who I am. I have this disease, it's genetic, it's never going to go away, and I like to build things.

J: What are you building this time?

Frances: Shitty Mom Guide is a weekly free email newsletter for parents in Orange County who are just like looking for things to do on the weekend all in one place cuz as a parent things are just insane, and it's so hard to plan ahead, but then the weekend comes and you're like I need to like get out of the house with my kids. So it's all the events that are happening kind of broken down by area in Orange County with some additional like parent relevant stuff. It comes every Thursday, and it just has like a list of everything that's going on.

Pablo: What would you say makes it different from other guys?

Frances: So I noticed that when I was working 9 to 5 and had my baby, I was like I want to take her to do things, right? Like I want her to have a good childhood. I want her to have experiences, this is important. People on Instagram were like, oh look at me and my daughter at this like tea time and this like amazing like Mom walk in art class and dance class and I was like, I want to do those things, of course, right, but all of those things were always in the middle of the day, and I was working full-time and they'd be like, we have this amazing story time hour at 10:00a.m. on a Tuesday or at like 12:00 p.m. on Wednesday, and if you're working full-time hours, like you can't do that. And I was like, there have to be other parents who are also working full-time, there are many parents who work full-time, so where's all the stuff for us? So initially I wanted to be like specifically for working parents, like stuff on the weekend, and then I thought about it a little bit more. I thought about, I'm a huge brand person, I thought about my personal brand, and I was like you know what, I actually feel like a really shitty mom because I can't do this, so I decided to name it Shitty Mom Guide instead.

J: Like, realistic mom guide, really.

Frances: Right? Like we all feel like shitty moms, right? Like the internet is like, you're

a shitty mom! That's kind of the whole like essence of the brand. Parents are people. We are people too! We are humans, like our entire self is not just as a parent, and so it's that tone that I also want to capture to differentiate like, yeah we're people and we just happen to have kids but we also do other things. And then the fact that it is an email that comes directly to you. It's not like a social account that relies on the algorithm. It's not a blog where you have to like do the mental work to like go to the website and click through everything and figure it out yourself. It just comes directly to you in an email and it's sort by location which I also find can be an issue when looking for things to do.

J: You're building a resource for real life parents, by default parents with full-time jobs. The goal of it is to make this more approachable and accessible.

Frances: Yeah, like let's make your life a little bit easier and put everything in one place.

Pablo: I love it. I think it's a fantastic pitch. What do you say is the biggest challenge you're facing now in terms of the business?

Frances: It would be growth. We've already sent out quite a few newsletters. Great open rates, great clickthrough rates, great feedback, and so I want to reach more parents, and I know the majority of email newsletter owners do it via paid Facebook ads. I don't have a million dollars to dump into paid, so what are the alternatives?

Pablo: I see. Yeah, can you give us a ballpark feel for how many subscribers you already have

and that sort of thing?

Frances: So we have 800 people on the email list. I'm doing a little bit of paid ads, I'm doing a little bit of organic social. The plan is to partner and do a couple like in-person events, so do things and do those a little bit differently too. So I always want to provide value to the parent themselves right because yes, it is about your kid, but it's about you too. Like come on. Like nobody thinks about us. And so an example for an event would be like, okay we'll do an event, try to have some babysitters on site so that you can actually connect with other parents and have a full-fledged conversation, because it's impossible when your kids are running around, and then maybe do like how to take better family photos with your iPhone. It benefits everyone. So that's the idea for some in-person events which are definitely more like time and labor intensive.

Pablo: Have you figured out monetization? What's the current thinking about the revenue model?

Frances: I would like to hit 5,000 subscribers and then we can begin charging for sponsorships.

J: But then, you're really also building a community, right, because events are a very different thing to sell than newsletters, right?

Frances: They are. So the event thing, I go back and forth on because I know local newsletter folks that actually have venues that pay them to host the event, to like bring people to the venue.

J: Okay, so let's talk about your engagement. So you said you have 500 people on it right

now. Like, what is your clickthrough rate?

Frances: My clickthrough rate is in the 30%, and the open rate is in the 70-75%.

J: And you're getting people to consistently be doing that like week over week?

Frances: Yeah yeah, it's like the same people are consistently using it. Well, so it's growing pretty quickly, I'd say like 100 to 200% week over week just because it's so small, so we're at 800 people so it's growing consistently.

J: And those statistics are consistent? Have you debriefed people on what the experience is like? Have you talked to users who have been using it for a while?

Frances: I haven't. I've only sent out like five maybe.

J: I see, yeah, for me the thing I'm curious about, how many people really are using it consistently and what value are they getting out of it? Like if we go back and debrief them and be like well you're opening this every week and you're looking at it, what is the value you're getting out of it? And one of the things we're looking for is, are they getting a behavior change transformative amount of value in it, or is it just one more piece of information in their feed? Are they all clicking in it because every piece of information that could possibly be relevant they want to look at or is this something that is good enough to be recommendable? So one of the things that we talk about is our value impact scale, right? So on a scale of 1 to 10 where one is horrible, 10 is mind-blowing, and five is like normal, it's fine, how valuable is it for the person in question? And the the way the value impact scale works is that for consumers, you want about a three-point offset from your status quo or your alternative to be better enough to drive organic growth behavior change and adoption. In this case, you're giving people water in the environment they're starving in, right? Like they are starving for this information, so what about the newsletter becomes valuable and growth worthy beyond yet another piece of information about what's available? How do we make sure that your newsletter is good enough to be valued for for the curation itself and valued for the information in it instead of you know one of 20 pieces of information they get?

Frances: Yeah, I mean, I think it's the aggregation. So it's the aggregation and like visually it’s not it's not cluttered. I mean, I wanted to do the aggregating myself manually, like there's no VAs, it's literally me scouring like multiple websites, copying and pasting links to just like get a true understanding of like, this information is very disjointed, it is in multiple places, so it is that aggregation for. From a defensibility standpoint, I would like the actual like tone and personality to be the thing that just differentiates it, like it's entertaining, it's funny. Not only is it valuable for this, but I look forward to reading this, and that is kind of important to me for a lot of reasons. I mean, I think there's a lot of local newsletters and it's good and a lot of people have a hard time injecting personality into to brand.

J: I am 100% your target user on this, right? Like I'm dying for a resource like this. I completely

understand the value proposition, right? I think that our next step is to get data about it, right? So what I would recommend you do is to go and debrief your power users and get their language for what is resonating with them. There's a million ways to aggregate. What is it that people actually care about? Is it events? Is it what's going on at their library? Or is that everywhere and it's like you know these kind of really specific little things that are happening? Right, are there like unique local vendors? There's different types of things to prioritize aggregating and specifically the grammar that they're thinking about the value proposition in because your key to scale is going to be in that grammar. So I think like as parents, like certainly in my mind like what you're describing is the thing I think I want right but then like actually the humans who have had the experience of going through it like, which individual line items resonated with them and why, and quite often what happens is that the things that resonate with us are not actually in our conscious mind. Like if you were to verbally interview me with what I wanted as a parent versus if you were to actually debrief my experience of the newsletter, almost every consumer user surfaces different results once you actually debrief their interaction with your prototype. So then you're looking for what those key touch points are to go and scale those.

Frances: It's kind of like how we used to say like okay let's read the reviews of our product and figure out what language those people are actually using and like kind of pull that together.

J: Yeah, but you can do like 15 or 20 minute debrief calls with them, just systematically go through like every newsletter they got and be like, what was your reaction to this and what things did you look at, but like ask super broad questions. You know, it was 2

weeks ago, this hit your inbox, walk me through everything that happened, talk out loud, what was going on in your mind? And what they'll do is they'll pick different parts of the newsletter to respond to. Rather than systematically asking them questions about what did you think about this, what do you think about this, then we pay attention to well, which parts of it did they react to and what are they saying about it and what words are they using to describe it and then what are the trends across people, because then ultimately what you're going to have is a much tighter value prop, right? Like there's something in there that's the Magic Moment. Is 90% of

your newsletter the magic moment or is 15% of your newsletter the magic moment

and the rest of it is other stuff? And once you know what the Magic Moment is, then you can design the rest of it around that. As I've, you know, done this with a lot of other projects, right, like the results turn out often surprising, right? Maybe it's like everybody actually responded to these two lines. You've done all the research but people just care about these two categories of things. Your newsletter could actually be a text message, right? And like, but like if you nail those two things in every neighborhood, everybody wants a text message. Or it could be this one neighborhood behaves really differently than all other neighborhoods because like there's something frustrating about the way that people are getting information there and maybe growth is neighborhood by neighborhood, like you really nail one neighborhood, figure out the grammar of what it takes to nail a single neighborhood, and then scale it to the next one. That's kind of what we don't know about scale until we can figure out the grammar of what's been working for people.

Pablo: Okay so next episode we're going to be talking to one of Frances's power users and do, which is really fascinating if you ask me and really interesting, a step-by-step live

user test with them. Like there's many methodologies out, there many ways to do this, but we're going to deep dive into how Prototype Thinking does and how J, who is a master at this, how she does it. So please join us next time, I think it'll be really worth your while and see you soon. See you next time. Thank you for listening to Prototype Thinking in Action. Please don't forget to Like and Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, join our email list, and follow us for exclusive access to tools, case studies, and live workshops. All links can be found in the description below. See you next time.

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