YouSaid · the spoken record

Philip Krim

lines on the record: 118
first: 2021-06-28
most recent: 2021-06-28
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

“We gave him a free Casper mattress when we launched to thank him for the inspiration. So I'd say it worked out well on both ends.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No connection to the ghost. We were all working out of wherever we could from time to time. And so we would often work out a Luke's apartment in Brooklyn. And Luke had an extra bedroom that he would rent out on Airbnb. And Luke's roommate at this time when we were working on Casper was a six foot six German guy whose name was Casper with a K. And we would always, for whatever reason, whenever we were over at Luke's, he was there sleeping and he did not fit on his twin mattress at all. And it was always a funny sight to us. And so again, we kind of gave ourselves a deadline on the branding. We had a list of a million names. And when we ended up voting on the name that we all liked the most, Casper won the day because I think we all got a good laugh out of Casper's, the visualization of Casper sleeping on a twin mattress. And so he was our inspiration for the name. We ended up going with a C instead of the K.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wouldn't say it's easy because I'm sure whoever invented it wouldn't like that, but it really is just a question of pressure per square inch. And if you put enough PSI onto some big steel plates, you can compress a lot of things, including a mattress. And it turns out foam is actually a lot of air, so you have to get the air out of it.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we actually would include GIFs with our early purchases. So we went to the Strand Bookstore here in New York City and we would buy old vintage bedtime stories and include that. And so we made it a thing. And we did it just because we said, let's try to optimize every step of the customer journey that we could in order to surprise into like customers. That was kind of the overarching philosophy, if you will, on why we thought to go do that. But it actually ended up having a huge impact on our business in a way that we didn't anticipate, which was sharing. And when we started looking at sources of traffic to our website, we started seeing a ton of traffic come from YouTube in our early days. And it ended up that the Casper unboxing experience was something that people love to film on their phone and love to post online and share. And that, I think, is one of the biggest drivers that just created, we're a catalyst to creating Casper in our early days.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. To my knowledge, we were the first to ever brand the unboxing experience. And so we put the stripes on the box, on the exterior, and we put a tray on the interior. We designed kind of an instruction manual on how to unbox it. We actually included a cutting tool so you could cut open the mattress that was basically shrink-wrapped to stay compressed.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it just gave us enough time to feel like we could get it done, but not so much time where we felt like we were wasting time. So, you know, I said we're not going to let the date slip. That's what we told our investors. We're going to do it.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, there were tons of discussions, tons of debates, very debate focused group of founders. Ultimately, though, we said we're going to pick a date and we're going to launch on that date wherever we are, wherever we are on the branding, wherever we are on the website design, wherever we are on the product roadmap, we're going to launch. And so I think it was early 2014 we said April 22nd. That's going to be our date.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When did you guys know? When did you all sort of agree that you finally got the formula right at a certain point or was there a discussion among the founders where you all had different, some of you had different views?”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, we would get foam samples from different manufacturers. There was one manufacturer that ended up being excited to work with us. It was very hard to find a manufacturer. At this point in time, because we were building something custom, we were doing proprietary foams and layers. But we had all of these different kinds of foams, and foams come in different densities and have different qualities based on the formulation. And so we could build thousands, tens of thousands of different permutations of mattresses. That's what Jeff was spending time doing getting the feedback, testing different properties, whether it was heat or ergonomics, things like that, and just constantly iterating to try to build the perfect mattress.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. It was a combination of memory foam and latex to get the right amount of bounce and sync and heat absorption and the feel that we were going for through user testing”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So ours was a all foam mattress with memory foam on top. But what we had worked on for months was just how do we construct it to be super comfortable? And this goes back to Jeff is a brilliant industrial designer. It's all about user-tested design. And so we would bring our friends over to an apartment to lay on different prototypes and get feedback. What's the right level of bounciness and what bed sleeps the coolest throughout the night? And what bed feels kind of universally the right firmness knowing that firmness was very subjective. And so we went through dozens of different prototypes to get to the Casper mattress that we launched with.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Ben is a big name in seed investing. And so using his initial check into Casper was how we were able to build momentum to fill the round.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, more of them, considerably more than that. And so when he kind of signed off on that or decided to invest, that's when you get the waterfall. You get other people who want to join because they think, well, this guy's doing it, I'll do it too.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, he's a partner at Lira Hippo Ventures, and Ben had invested in Warby Parker and had invested in some other great consumer companies, was running Thrillist, and Ben immediately got it and was very passionate about it and excited. And he did want to see, like, I got to try one of these things out. So we delivered. The four of us Neil, Luke, Gabe, and myself delivered a bed to his apartment in Soho. And he slept on that for years and ultimately led our seed round. And he's the reason why Casper is in existence today.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we would sometimes bring foam samples with us so you could feel what the bed was going to be made out of Understand the construction a little bit more, but the only person who ended up getting one of our first demo beds was Ben Lear, who led our seed round. Eventually we were introduced to Ben.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when you went to meet with these investors, you said, Did you bring a box and say, this is the box that we're going to compress the mattress in? It's going to come to your home and a box. You'll order it on the internet and it'll come to your home. Were you showing them that?”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, enthusiastic. And then just one after the other was no interested, not a good time. All the traditional venture and angel excuses. And so it was tough and it was demoralizing because you get your hopes up and then not. And then, oh, we're meeting with this person. They would be the best anchor investor, the best lead investor ever. And then for whatever reason, they don't come in. And there were definitely moments where like, I don't know if this is going to come together. Maybe we're missing something. And so it just creates a lot of self-doubt and a big roller coaster of emotions.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. No one ever tells you what they actually think. And this is why fundraising is always so emotional. But we thought these guys loved us. We thought people wanted to invest in us and that the idea, everyone was very polite. Everyone was very...”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally reasonable It's a good question, but you can make a lot of money selling mattresses. You don't need frequency. Right. The other one was just, you know, it was hard to visualize something cool in, you know, the mattress space. No one had ever bragged about buying a mattress before. No one posted on Twitter or Facebook. Check out the mattress I just got. And so the idea of creating a cool brand, I think, just didn't resonate with people. And so we were told, no dozens and dozens and dozens of times.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every six to eight years, but actually the average household's in market every two to three years because the average household has two to three mattresses.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were going to anyone that we could get a meeting with, and the reception was terrible, like icy, icy cold. Several common objections were, I don't understand, like, how do you have lifetime value if someone's buying a mattress and you're only going to sell them ever so often?”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you basically went to go start raising money for this because this is not a dropship company. This is a big idea. You're going to need some money for this. So where did you, I mean, that summer did you start to look for money?”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was kind of a natural division. I mean, we said let's divide and conquer. So Gabe was self-taught on coding, and so he was our CTO. If you met Luke, who's naturally the brand genius and guru, and so he took on kind of the creative lead. Neil is brilliant and a jack of all trades. And so he kind of started to wear the operations hat because we really needed someone to go figure that out. And that was confusing and different I wore the CEO hat and Jeff wore the product hat.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It went to Brown and Jeff's. Design studio was in providence. In pro We brought Jeff on to go build a better mattress and start to iterate and test that. And we hired kind of our first agency partner, which was a group out of Brooklyn called Red Antler to help us with the website and the branding and the experience side of things. And then we went to work on the operations side, so finding a manufacturer who would build the mattress that we designed, finding the packaging suppliers And so we went to kind of go put all these pieces together”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So we called up Jeff and we said, you know, here's our idea. Do you know anything about building mattresses? And it turns out yes, IDO had clients that were in the space. And he thought our idea on kind of direct to consumer and going to circumvent the traditional retail experience was interesting. Jeff had a design studio in Providence, Rhode Island. Actually, most people don't realize we actually incorporated the business as Providence Mattress Company.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So this is definitely an example of just being very fortuitous. But so we said, okay, we need a product designer. Who among us know a product designer? And one of us Neil knew one product designer. So we said, let's just call Jeff. We knew he was exideo.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we quickly honed in on kind of three themes. There were a lot of sub-ideas under this, but the three themes were we have to build a brand that's interesting, right? Like it has to stand for something. It has to be something that people remember that they want to connect with. That's one. Two, is that however we sell that brand, so kind of our go-to-market strategy in this case, like our website, has to be really easy to use, interesting, frictionless, and make the whole experience as easy as possible. And the third, and this is the one where we saw that we had a gap with the four of us, was that we needed to build a product that really was the best. And so that's when we brought on our fifth co-founder, Jeff Chapin.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All four of you decide you're going to go for it. You have the meeting with this guy who co-founded or founded Harry's Razors and you're thinking, okay, we got his blessing. We're going to start this thing. Presumably you have to start doing some research about the direct consumer opportunity and what people want. And so how do you start doing that research”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and that was one way that you couldn't price shop it. So it very well could be that Macy's is selling ABC mattress and Sleepies is selling XYZ mattress. Those could be the same mattress for all intents and purposes, but you would never know that because you couldn't. Couldn't compare them. Even at this point in time, you asked most people, and we did this survey work before we started Casper, was what kind of bed do you sleep on? Almost no one could recall it. And if you could recall it, it was usually either IKEA or temperedic. But at that point in time, there was nothing that we as consumers, you know, in our 20s and early 30s, were still on a budget and wanted to buy something that we felt proud of there was nothing that existed in that kind of category. And so that was the problem we wanted to solve.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And these stores felt like they hadn't been renovated in a long time. And it just was to us, we said, worse than buying a used car. And at this point in time, used cars had been improved thanks to the internet, and you could get information and transparency. But this was a marketplace that was specifically very opaque. You had no idea what you should pay for a mattress. You had no idea what MSRP is or any kind of quality standards of a mattress. The manufacturers change the names on the mattresses year in and year out.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you're in your early 20s, you could sleep on pretty much anything. And so that's a great solution if you're on a budget and in your early 20s. And then other than that, you were kind of relegated to going into a store. Like, really, mattresses weren't popular online. And when you talk about going into a store, it just was the worst consumer experience in existence. At that point in time, we were living in New York, and so Sleepies was the predominant retailer back then.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you could go do that if you wanted to go spend a few hundred dollars and get something that would last you generally not very long.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought he was right. I was like, this should exist. It will exist. I think it would be really fun to go try to make this exist with this group. And let's go give it a shot.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you so much for making time. We know you're crazy busy. We really appreciate it. Just five minutes. Here's our idea. What are we missing? And he like, you know, he thought about it. And I remember him being very contemplative and asking great questions. And he's like, no, I think this could work. And like for us, that was validation from the highest authority. We were like, okay, this is amazing. And we were still hesitant because we were still working on our respective businesses. And we're like, okay, now what? And I remember Luke looking at me in the eye and saying, you know that if we don't do this, someone will do that. Won't that just kill you? And that was the question that I couldn't get out of my head.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, we would sketch out how would this business work if we wanted to do direct to consumer and mattresses and what were the things that would entail? And, you know, so you have to go build a brand. You have to go create the product. You have to create a website, et cetera. And after it felt like we sketched a lot of this out, we all looked at it and we're like, yeah, this seems like pretty reasonable. Like we're probably missing something. And so we then went and sat down with Jeff Rader, one of the founders of Harry's, the Razor Company. Jeff was also a founder of Warby Parker. And we're like.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Massive amounts of money. All these companies were raising Know that goes back to the sense that we felt like there was this whole universe going on that we weren't a part of.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's funny. I think it started as a conversation around sleep, and Niels dad is a sleep doctor. He's a pulmonologist. So Neil knew a bunch about sleep. This was also when jawbones and Fitbits were really first coming into the market. I had to start talking about What was it that led the mattress industry to exist the way it existed today? And it was also just based around like business models. And we started talking about what Harry's was doing and what.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were trying to help bloggers and content creators monetize their traffic by selling curated e-commerce goods. So it was kind of like trying to operate a marketplace on bloggers' websites.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. It was Gabe, Luke, and Neal. They were working on a business. They were friends from Brown University. Their business had an e-commerce component to it.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so at some point, why you were still working on the startup, I guess you were accepted into an accelerator program in New York and was at that program where you would eventually meet the guys who you would become your co-founders for Casper, right?”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had learned a ton, but I never had a traditional job. I never knew what a traditional kind of company gig looked like. But of course, like still had the entrepreneurial itch and I was working on vocalize. But I just knew it was going to be a tough gig. And so maybe, you know, back to your point, started thinking about. What I would want to do next”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would say that's fair. It was probably less on the traditional side. I had my friends that were at bankers and saw what they were doing and was not envious of that. More I was interested in just the tech scene and what was going on, Facebook was all the rage. And you saw these companies getting big and successful and a lot of people making all this money. And it felt like an ecosystem that was totally walled off and unavailable. At one point, I tried to apply for a job at Facebook and was told I wasn't what they were looking for. So I didn't know what I was going to do”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's harder, and there was a lot of churn. And again, you would just see these budgets, they would afford an advertising campaign this month and not be able to afford it next month. And it's just a grind.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, there were like two core challenges that were hard to overcome, which is one, explaining to small businesses what click to call was Where you were generating these leads from, et cetera, still very nascent. And then what I saw was just selling to small businesses is really challenging. These are businesses which I appreciated every dollar matters. These are businesses, they're family businesses where if something doesn't work, they're making less money personally. And so Know a lot of times the sales would work and they would help build a business, and that felt great, but a lot of times they didn't work, and it was very contentious, and it just was difficult and not something I enjoyed.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was a WeWork tenant, ended up kind of bringing on a partner who was based in Atlanta who was kind of back and forth between Atlanta and New York. And we ultimately set up kind of a call center to sell to local businesses that was based in Atlanta. So I would go down there, and that's where we had some employees. But I was the only one in New York working, and it was out of a WeWork.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So at the time, if you searched Houston tow truck driver, You could click directly from that search using a Google ad and be connected to a local tow truck company. You could go in and do that yourself and work with Google and set up your ads, but our idea was to. Make the technology super easy and do it in more of a full service model. So we would set up everything for you. We would record the calls so you could audit them. We would give you a dashboard so you had analytics around the leads that you were getting. And instead of paying per click, which is how Google would charge you, we would just charge you on a per lead or per call basis. And so we tried to make it as easy as possible for a local advertiser to embrace mobile advertising, which was still pretty nascent at that point.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So towards the tail end of when I was running Mayor Group, what I saw and what started to emerge then was really mobile advertising. And so the idea that I wanted to work on was if I could help make the mobile searches and mobile traffic as easy as possible for local businesses, I thought that would be really interesting. Led to starting vocalized mobile, which was basically click to call search for local businesses.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. There's a lot of complexity that goes into when you hear things like exited or sold. And it's not always the best situation. Like I said, we were kind of forced to that point because we never raised outside capital. It was just funding from myself and my family. Again, I had been around kind of the family entrepreneurial journey and understood the ups and downs of that, but it's different when you're living it yourself. So, I totally agree with your point, though. Stories and headlines are often misleading.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. It wasn't sold in a big exit. It was sold to manufacturers. And it was a really way just to kind of maintain continuity when we didn't see a path to kind of continue to operate it profitably”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, we had our ups and downs towards the end, the business got very tough from a profitability standpoint. And one of the areas that I always personally focused on was our online marketing and our customer acquisition strategy. And what I saw was just every year customer acquisition costs went up. I think one of the brilliant parts of the Google invention is just the auction-based model for buying ads. And so you just saw ad rates and unique visitors and cost per clicks go up very steadily. And so over time, it just got harder. We realized we didn't have kind of enough of a moat around the business to have a defensible way to run the business profitably. And it's all lessons learned, learned a ton in the early days and all the way through when things got tougher.”
2021-06-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Casper: Philip Krim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT