#63 - The Number One Goal is Getting Started - Avni Patel Thompson of Poppy

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Avni Patel Thompson. Avni's the founder and CEO of Poppy, and Poppy lets parents book the best caregivers with just a text. She went through YC in the winter 2016 batch, and we recorded this episode at our Female Founders Conference in Seattle. We're also hosting two more events this year for female founders, one in New York and one in San Francisco. So if you wanna get updates on those, you can sign up to our newsletter at blog.ycombinator.com.
All right, here we go.
So Avni, you by traditional standards were incredibly successful in the traditional world. Like you get an MBA at Harvard, you start working at these big companies. What made you decide that you wanted to leave that world when you're clearly on a trajectory to just be successful that way?

**Avni Patel Thompson** (0:49)
Yeah, it's a great question. It's one I sometimes ask myself at 3 a.m.
No, so the way I think about my career, so I actually have an undergrad in chemistry, which is a little bit kind of random maybe, but I started my career at Procter & Gamble in brand management.
And that a lot of about, it was just because as a young person, when you don't really know what you're wanting to do, you sort of take the opportunities that are kind of put in front of you and see what that leads to. And that has really served me well. And when I got to Procter & Gamble, they make things like Tide and Pampers and Crest, lots of different consumer things. And what I ended up, I didn't even realize this until I got into it, but what I ended up falling in love with is like consumer psychology. And they taught me how to really see consumers' problems. And so not as they say them, but as they actually experience them. And so that actually means like going into people's homes and not just like listening to what they're saying, but how they're actually, their behaviors and things like that.

**Craig Cannon** (1:45)
Was that your job?

**Avni Patel Thompson** (1:46)
Yeah. So as a brand manager, your job is for a different process, for the product that I worked on was actually in pharmaceuticals, so it was drugs.
And I was working on, for example, a packaging project. And you can have people come in to do kind of focus groups and stuff like that. But when you have them come in and even bring their little pill packs and stuff like that, they'll say, and you'll just ask them, hey, how's the packaging working for you? Any issues or things like that? You'll try to ask it in non-leading ways, but inevitably they're like, oh no, it's fine, I don't have any issues with it. And then we'd go do in homes, and there'd be fewer, like maybe just a couple of them. But you now see them kind of in the wild, and you'd see their homes and then just all these different things. I still remember this one time, I walked into a home, and I saw the pill pack on the kitchen table, and there was a pair of scissors next to it.
And the woman had just completely cut the damn thing up and had set each of the individual pill pack things into those daily kind of pill counters.

**Craig Cannon** (2:47)
So pill pack is like the blister pack, right?

**Avni Patel Thompson** (2:49)
It's like the tin foil. Yeah, the tin foil situation in some kind of cardboard packaging.

**Craig Cannon** (2:53)
And so she takes the scissors, cuts them out, puts it in like Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.

**Avni Patel Thompson** (2:56)
Right, and tried to approximate that. And I think the thing is, is that like, obviously like child resistant and all these types of things, but sometimes those can be challenging on the other end if you're older and got arthritis and things like that. So the insight there was, here we're spending all this money on this beautiful pill pack with all this kind of stuff, and people are just ripping into it, and there's no delight there, there's friction, all that kind of stuff. And so that was really powerful for me because I realized the importance already of talking to your users, but then also seeing their problems in real life and not just taking them at face value. So that's where I think also surveys and things like that can be limiting, because people sometimes, A, can't articulate what their problem is in the way that they want to, but sometimes there's other emotions at war, like shame or embarrassment or things like that, insecurity.