YouSaid · the spoken record

Natalie Gordon

lines on the record: 93
first: 2025-11-03
most recent: 2025-11-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Five of the ten bloggers wrote about the launch. It was fantastic. One of them started to rank for Best Baby Registry in SEO, so in Google. And that was also the steady stream of traffic that drove babyless registries for many years, but particularly in that first year, like a couple every day.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As Babylist was launching, I think I started to apply to affiliate programs. You come to my registry, you click over to Target to buy a $100 stroller, then Target would pay us some percentage, let's say 5%. So we'd receive $5 of whatever you bought because we referred the traffic to Target. And it's a part of their marketing spend. And so that was the original business model for Babylist.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we didn't need any stores permission. If you had a website, like the baby list button would work and then what it looked like to the gift giver is you would tell baby list you were going to buy the item and then you would click over to the actual website that sold the item and then you would buy it as normal.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Technologists that works like Reddit called Hacker News. And so I posted to Hacker News, I'm a pregnant hacker. Please review my side project. And it just linked to Babylist.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I remember it felt so uncomfortable to do. I was avoiding it and avoiding it. So I forced myself to go to a coffee shop and say, you can't leave this coffee shop until you've sent 10 emails to 10 bloggers that you're going to launch this thing in the next couple of months. And for each of them, I created a registry, which products, like products that they themselves recommended or would like. So there was an Eco mom website. So I put a lot of green products on it. There was a design mom blogger. I put a lot of MOMA products on it so they could really see that this worked and you could really express yourself because you could choose products from any store. And then lawn was the very beginning of February 2011. And there was a really popular discussion board for”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably working like 10 hours a day. Some other things I had really, what you asked like how did people learn about Languaherro? In this case, I was like distribution. Like, I need to figure that out. This is going to be the hardest thing is how do people find this?”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I knew I couldn't do that part myself. I brought on a designer and she did that. And so I posted to this online forum about the project and that I was looking for a designer. I think I had one real response. And it was from this woman Lindsay, a design student in the Philippines. And so we partnered on this first version of it.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I ended up quitting my consulting job. I truly at the very beginning when I had the idea. And that wasn't true. I think it was maybe one month before I actually made the MVP go live. So I was really, really taking this minimal viable product seriously.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Alright, so you're pregnant. You're doing consulting work. And on the side, you start to write the code. And it's just you like tapping your fingers on the keys furiously, not furiously, intensely working on this thing.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The bassinet. You need the baby swing. You need the Harvey carp tapes, the F7Ss or whatever they are. You need it all, but you don't really know, right? And so you knew that. That's a problem. But the other thing is, if I'm understanding your thought process correctly, is that you wanted other stuff like maybe cloth diaper service? And it would be cool if one friend could fund that for a month and then another friend could fund it for another. So you wanted like more than just the stuff. You wanted optionality, like ways for people to help you with other things that you would need as an early, like in the early days or I wanted.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, do you need a crib and a bassinet? How does your car seat work with your stroller? Like, there's so many questions.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember not knowing what is a diaper bag, why is a diaper bag different than a backpack? What is actually a diaper pail? Is that just an expensive garbage can? Like I had all of these very, very basic questions. Yeah.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I talk to people particularly people who are interviewing to be employees here. And they're like, well, I don't have any kids. And I'm like, yeah, neither do our users. Our users don't know what any of this stuff is.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so let's go back to kind of just kind of this idea is germinating, right? Which is you had this experience at babies R Us, right? The problem is that many expecting parents know they need a lot of junk and stuff, I should say junk. They need stuff, but they don't know exactly what it is they need because no one teaches you how to be a parent. Like all of a sudden, you're like, oh, we're going to be parents in nine months. How do we do that? And then like the baby's born and you go home from the hospital and you're like, I remember it. You remember? You're like, okay, I guess we got to just figure it out.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Retrospect, this was a terrible idea, but I was very into cloth diapering. Like, I thought cloth diapering was like the right thing to do. The cloth diaper service, it costs $60 a month, which was a lot of money. And so if someone could be like, we'll get you February for your cloth diapering service in $60. That felt amazing. And so I just, so what it felt like is I knew exactly what needed to be built. I think my aspirations for it at the time were like, oh, maybe this will be a great side hustle. And it could make some passive income and like always kind of be on. So it would be like worth me building it because maybe then over many years it'll make a little bit of money.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or there were a couple general universal wish lists where you could add items from a few sites, but it would be a wish list. And I wanted to ask for these other things. So we had a dog. We had adopted her in Mexico, PASA. And it was like if someone could walk her every morning, like that's such a meaningful gift.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I thought a baby registry, it's a list of products you can go buy the products, but I could see exactly how I wanted it to work. And so one example is they all looked terrible. They were pink and blue with giraffes. It felt embarrassing to send that out to family and friends. I was like, I want this to actually feel modern and to feel cool to send out. I really wanted it to work across retailers. Most baby registries were single-store registries. And so you could only add items from Babies R Us. And then you'd have a second registry for Amazon.com.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alright, so okay, so you have this experience, and was it immediately revelatory to you? Was it like a light bulb moment, or did it kind of percolate for some time and get you thinking that, you know, like there's been a better way to do this?”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was like, I know exactly the baby registry I would want. And that's the thing that I was really excited to like now build. Still again, as a really fun project, like much less like, oh, this is the company I'm now going to. Work on for 15 years.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think money was really tight for us. I was doing this consulting work. August was in. In school, and I felt this real pressure, like I wanted to really make sure we got the stuff we needed. I didn't want to make mistakes. I didn't want to try things out. I didn't have the money for a consultant. And so in this babies RS experience, like I walked in and I think I did not even add one item to my registry. I put the scan gun down and I like walked out in tears. And I've heard that story from so many people in these good old days when there were so many baby stores around. Like that's kind of like what it was like.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it would be like I'm in the bottle section. There's hundreds of products here. There's hundreds of nipples and bottles. Like which bottle should I get? You needed to.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I was now really getting prepared for having a baby. And I was going to have a baby shower. I had a best friend, my sister-in-law both lived in Vancouver. They were like, you need to create a baby registry. And so the way you do that is you would walk into Baby's R Us and they would give you a scan gun and you'd walk around. And it was this big box experience. I walked in. It was immediately overwhelming.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, and I think at this point you and August actually decide to shut Lenguero down. It's kind of run its course and it comes to an end. And then meanwhile, you're in Vancouver and you're doing this coding job, right?”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Massively influential book. He really describes also a software engineer's mindset and how they get it wrong, where the solution is to build new features where he really is introducing this like new way to build something. And I was like, I want another at bet. Like I see everything I did that really is why Langua Jero didn't work. I would love to.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So a couple things lined up. One of them was I read the book The Lean Startup by Eric Rees. I've never talked to him, but so influential in my life because I read the book and it's like it was titled, Natalie Here's Everything You Did Wrong with Linguero. Here's your manual.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For another company that, and no one was even really using their product, they wanted people to use their product. And so the solution was to make it go viral by spamming Facebook. And so that's what I was doing all day.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we got married in early 2010 at the very tail end of this trip. And then we knew we wanted to move back somewhere, get back into life, and chose to move back to Canada. We are living in Vancouver, which was a new city to me. I was doing contract work, so I was actually working again. I was consulting for a startup down in the Bay Area. And yeah, I was pregnant with my first son. It was like a pretty crappy time. Like we lived in a really crappy house that was like on a slant. The day after I found out I was pregnant and when I started to feel nauseous, I found a bed bug and then had to do all of the fumigation. I didn't really feel like I had friends and I felt like life was really changing. And I really hated the work I was doing, this consulting work. It was that time period. I'm sure you remember where on Facebook everyone was playing Farmville. Facebook had opened up their API. So I was.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, fair enough. So, all right. So you are working on this project. Meantime, I think around 2010 or maybe earlier, you've become pregnant. And you're going to have a baby, right? And you in August at this point are married.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I had saved up so much money from Amazon. So this entire time it was really living off of savings and living in Latin America was cheaper than living in Seattle.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we partnered with podcasts. There were language learning communities and groups on Facebook. It was pretty grassroots. It had thousands of users and there were some real power users who absolutely loved it”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The biggest problem with this is there was no business model. And so like maybe that would make sense, but in this case, like it never really was set up to make money. In its top month, it only ever made $40. And so to me, I even feel bad about calling it a startup. Like it felt like a project that I was really excited to do.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, in this case, it was all about the peer-to-peer learning. And so it was go search who's online right now, see what their interests are, and click a button and see if they want to talk to you.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“CODA website. And then I remember we launched it once we lived in Oaxaca. And then it was, it was live for a number of months. So it was actually like one of the main things we did during that entire trip.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I had a lot of ideas, but the thing that was really true in that trip was I was getting the most benefit from meeting Spanish speakers and actually practicing my Spanish. And there were so many people who really wanted to talk to me because they themselves were learning English and they were so motivated to learn English. And so it'd be called an intercombio where you would speak Spanish for 20 minutes, they would kind of correct some of your pronunciation and then you would talk in English for 20 minutes. And so it was like, oh, like there's all these people who want to do this. And so like that was the vision. The vision was a place you could go online. You could click a button and actually have this real practice with a native. Speaker, specifically for Spanish and English.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like where you're setting up the web server and the database and choosing the language. And so that was, and it felt like a gap. It felt like something that I had some imposter syndrome over. And so that was the thing I was excited to do.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not at all. I don't think I ever thought of myself as an entrepreneur. The first place we were was Havana, Cuba. And at that time, there was very limited access to the internet there. And so it was actually this total digital detox where I was learning Spanish all day, like walking to the University of Havana, really exploring that city, making some friends. And I started feeling really excited that I wanted to build something. And my actual framing for it was I went to college for four years. I worked at Amazon for four years. And like, I don't actually know how to build an app or a website from end-to-end.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I made myself a promise when I took the job because I had really gotten from high school to college. I hadn't taken any summers off. I had been in this internship program that I really wanted to see the world. I really, really wanted to travel. And so that was really what I was, why I left. I was really excited about traveling in Latin America, learning Spanish. And so with my boyfriend at the time in this trip that it was about a year and a half, we ended up living in three places in Havana, Cuba, Medellin, Colombia, and then Oaxaca, Mexico.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was books. They were just going into music. A lot of the cultural elements of like what make Amazon were there, but they were absolutely the upstart. Like truthfully, getting a job at Microsoft was much more prestigious than getting a job at Amazon at that time in Seattle.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I mean, you were there from 2004, 2008, and people think of Amazon as this 800-pound gorilla that's been like that since the day it started. But at that time, I mean, yes, Amazon was already certainly a significant, a big company, but it was still as mainstream as it is now. Like in 2004, 5, 6, not everybody, in fact, probably most people were still not ordering lots of stuff from Amazon. If they order stuff, it was books.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a really great time to be at Amazon. I really was part of the founding team for Amazon Fresh. Which was so hard. It was like the normal Amazon order had two items, and Amazon Fresh had a hundred items because it was groceries. There were just all of these problems to solve.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Service, or a friend walking your dog while you adjust it to life with a newborn. And what made Babylist different was that Natalie was building it while living it. She was a new mom writing every line of code during nap times and solving problems for herself and other parents at the same time. Since its launch, BabyList has grown into one of the most popular baby registries in the US, with its own retail shop, product reviews, and educational content. Nearly 100 million gifts have been given through the site and annual sales are estimated at over half a billion dollars. As for Natalie, she grew up in Ontario, in Canada. She was a pretty good student and in college she studied math and computer science. In the early 2000s, she landed her first job at Amazon just as the company was at a critical turning point.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Babies need a lot of stuff, changing tables, changing pads, car seats, cribs, strollers, bouncers, it's endless. But what do new parents actually need? Which products are worth it? And where do you even start? Well, back in 2010, Natalie Gordon was asking those very same questions. She was pregnant with her first child living in Vancouver and working as a software engineer, and like a lot of expecting parents, she didn't have much time or money to waste. The baby stores were overwhelming, too many brands, too many shelves, and baby registries? They only worked with specific retailers, so you couldn't mix and match from different stores. So Natalie decided to fix it. She quit her job and started building the kind of registry she wanted, one that included everything, from traditional gifts to practical help like a diaper.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our current CFO, Jocelyn, we gave her presentation to do. And her presentation started with, here's all the ways e-commerce is terrible, and we should not be going into it. You have to collect sales tax on like for every state. You have to deal with returns. You have to deal with products that are being discontinued. And we were so naive about how hard it was actually going to be to do the logistics side of this business.”
2025-11-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT