YouSaid · the spoken record

Tracy DiNunzio

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28
first
2014-09-24
most recent
2014-09-24
sittings or episodes
1
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  1. “They were all like, oh, that would be great. That's something I would use. But as the conversations went deeper, they all told me what a lot of the potential issues would be. And I didn't listen because I was so excited about the idea of having two websites like two's better than one. And so I launched it. I put a lot of time and effort into it. It definitely slowed down the growth of recycled bride to some degree. It didn't take off the way that recycled bride did. And so, you know, in the two-ish years since we launched Tradezy, my co-founder, I have two co-founders now who came on when we were starting TradeZ. My co-founder, Sasha Tanzer, who's our chief product officer, was always the great sort of focus police. And anytime I would come in and say, hey, you guys, I have this idea we should be producing a line of handbags. He just shuts it down and says, remember, we haven't accomplished our first goal yet. So I think that's a really important mistake that I made in big lessons.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Oh, too many to count, but one that stands out is that once upon a time there was also a website called Recycled Tyke, and it was a disaster. So six months into Recycled Bride, I decided that I needed two websites, not one. And so, you know, kind of first rule or lesson there is like if you don't own the market in the area that you initially focused on and set out to build within, then expanding into another market and spreading your resources even thinner doesn't usually work out in your favor. So I launched this recycled tike, which was the same concept of a peer-to-peer marketplace, but for babying kids stuff. And I think one, the loss of focus was a huge mistake. But even more importantly, I didn't listen to the customer. So I had probably 10 or 15 girlfriends who were moms. And I talked to them about the idea. And first blush blush.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “That we've made so far in terms of both dilution and partnership. And then the other trade off is some people would call it control or at least influence over the direction of your company. But again, in our case, I feel like the investors we've worked with have brought us nothing but good input and really impactful help. So both of those trade-offs have been very, very good ones for us. It's not always that way and that's why everyone tells you to be really careful about choosing your VC partner, which I always found funny because for many years I wasn't in a position to choose. It wasn't like they were lining up. But I think like people find the like people, and I've been really lucky to find investors who share the same values and vision that myself and my team do for the company.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Sure. I mean, the biggest trade off is the dilution. So you start off owning 100% of your entity and then as you take on investment capital, people own pieces of the company and you own smaller pieces of the company. So that's a trade-off, although it's not something that I ever really saw as a negative trade-off. I saw it as a really positive trade-off because the amounts of money, like I think in the VC world and in that sector, people get a little bit cynical about the actual amounts of capital we're talking about. But the first time that I saw $1.5 million hit our bank account, it was so overwhelming and shocking. And it's a tremendous amount of money for someone to trust you with and put in your hands to make something out of nothing. So, you know, when I say trade off, I want to kind of couch that in it's a decision you make. Every decision you make in life is a trade-off. I'm really happy with the trade-off.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Oh gosh, I wish I had a really impressive sounding list of mentors and influences, but I was really kind of flying blind. The time and effort and concentration that it took to learn all the things I needed to know in that couple of years of bootstrapping and to get the business off the ground and run it and play every role within the company. I probably didn't do enough exploring of what it really meant to take venture capital. So in a way, I backed into it. I just thought I need funding. Who has funding? Looks like it's people call it VCs, so I'll go talk to them. Yeah, I didn't know. And I didn't understand all the trade-offs that come with venture capital at the time.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “That idea and realize that this kind of month to month paycheck to paycheck thing wasn't going to give me the kind of breadth of opportunity that we needed to move quickly.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “I had developed an appetite for something bigger at that point and there was already competition in the market but even if there hadn't been competition at that point that the market was just so big that the bootstrapping efforts would have taken so long that if the opportunity was as big and as timely as I believed it to be, someone else was going to raise a bunch of money and beat me to it. So I really believe that like the scrappy bootstrapper can beat the bloated with funding big startup in some cases. But when you're looking at a market that's huge and an opportunity that feels like it's up for grabs at any moment, having fuel in the tank is kind of necessary. And I think UC once told me something that's just so true. It's crazy true. The only reason that a business ever fails is because it runs out of money. And so I had kind of integrated”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “I'm going to put it all back on the table and include recycled bride in the overall entity that also includes the future website tradesy.com so that we have the ability to either run both or merge them together and the investors that I'm approaching are going to already get a valuable asset included in this deal. So, you know, after two and a half years of bootstrapping to a point where I could finally pay my rent, I said, okay, well, why not throw it all back in and take another big risk? And so during the four months I was in Launchpad, I met a slew of early stage investors raised our first financing of $1.5 million. That was in the summer of 2012 and started hiring a team and building trades.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Marketplace, and that's a much bigger and more exciting opportunity for this kind of peer-to-peer marketplace system that's already showing that it works. And I started asking some people I knew, like, what do you think? How would I make this leap? And met with some investors early on who probably were just horrified at how green I was. And eventually I applied to Launchpad LA, which is an incubator accelerator here in Los Angeles. And it was a blind application. I didn't know anybody involved with the program. They gave me kind of like a mercy interview and took me as what they would now call like their biggest risk ever because I was a single founder. I didn't have a tech team. And Trade Z wasn't launched yet and that was the opportunity that they were really interested in. So as part of getting into that program and moving towards making the value proposition more attractive to investors, I thought, well,”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “It was a crawl. It was not a jump. It was a crawl. I would say that when I was a little over a year into recycled bride and the system, the kind of model, business model foundation of the peer-to-peer economy that I had been iterating on really started to work. I thought, well, goodness, why am I just doing this for weddings when there are two and a half million weddings a year in the US and every year you lose your customers and you have to go out and get new ones because people usually don't get married twice or at least they don't get two big white wedding dresses. And so I had my eye on the fashion space for probably two years before moving into actually launching Tradesy. And in those two years, I spent a lot of time improving myself, really, improving my own skills. So I thought, well, gosh, I want to move into this much bigger market. You know, we've got instead of two and a half million weddings, there are 50 million women in the US alone in our target market for a fashion.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “In search engine optimization because we have user generated content, meaning that all of the products that are for sale on our site, they're not products that we have. And this was true of recycled bride and of tradesy. They're products that individual people have in their homes and are posting online for sale. So we have zero cost of inventory. We don't pay to have listings. But if those listings describe the product in a way that's very accurate and also mirrors the way that people who are searching would describe that product, then you have this incredible volume of content that people can find when they're searching on the internet. So simplest way to explain that is, you know, if you're searching for a Kate Spade black alligator bag and Tracy has one or 10, chances are we have it at the best price. We have a really interesting description that's unique. And when you accumulate all of that content, it becomes easier.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Commonplace and more often than not monetized. So between the kind of noisiness and the crowdedness of all consumer facing spaces and most B2B spaces paired with the monetization of most of our social platforms, it's become more expensive, more time consuming, and ultimately not always a great return on investment to put time and energy and money into social media channels as acquisition channels. So I think if I were starting over today and I knew what I know now, I would skip right over social media, which sounds like a little radical and counterintuitive, but that's what the numbers say, at least in our sector and for the companies that I advise. In terms of kind of secret sauce that was really impactful, social media was for us in the beginning, as well as the SEO. And without revealing kind of the secret sauce, although I think we're at a stage now where it probably doesn't matter, I saw a huge opportunity.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Well, first of all, I couldn't agree more. It is noisy and crowded out there on the internet. That low barrier to entry is a beautiful thing, but it means that there's more competition, more smart people throwing their hats in the ring. So here's an interesting lesson that I learned from starting then. So I was able to leverage social media back in 2009, 2010 to build a really nice following and drive a decent amount of traffic to recycled bread. In the years since then, I've seen this sort of, I'm now bearish on social media as an acquisition channel for e-commerce companies, because I've seen that in 2009 or 2010, if you were a brand talking to customers on Facebook, that was like revolutionary. That was surprising. It was shockingly warm to receive a message in your Facebook news feed from a company or an organization. Whereas now it's very”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “TradeSeet to help finance their dream. So I really like the idea of kind of spreading the idea that you don't need all these things to start what you want to do. You just kind of start and piece it together from what you have. And there are all these great platforms around now that let us do that.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Paperclip. Absolutely. The red paperclip, one red paperclip. That's one of my favorite stories because I think in a way that idea that you already have everything you need becomes more and more true, no matter what you actually do have as a philosophy, as all of these platforms proliferate and we get these new and exciting ways to connect with people and I mean, share, I think, is a misnomer because it's not sharing. It's really buying and selling in a kind of non-corporate paradigm. So I see people now even using tradesy in that same way that I used Airbnb and it's like the most heartwarming thing in the world. We have two women who are launching an alternative modeling agency in Chicago. So models who don't look like your typical idea of a model but who are rather interesting or unique or especially athletic and they're selling a lot of their closets and I think some stuff that they're picking up at a state sales and all of that.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Yeah, one of the kind of core values at Tracy is that you already have everything you need. So if you think of, do you remember that guy who turned a paperclip into a house by constantly trading up?”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “I started using Airbnb about a year into it. So right around when we started turning a profit. But of course, the moment you start turning a profit, you see that there's so much more room to turn more of a profit and that you need to invest probably more than you're making. So that was where Airbnb came in. I was able to fund some of the features that led us monetize with Airbnb. But after my first guest, who I'm now married to, he stayed. My roommate moved out and we ended up renting our spare bedroom out then to over a hundred guests over the following year.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “So I kept the company afloat just barely. That's how, you know, meaning, I mean, I was scrambling to pay rent every month. I borrowed the same $8,000 from my parents like four times over that year. And it was a true bootstrap effort. And in a way, that whole kind of marketplace or peer-to-peer economy really came into play for me in my life. I lived in a large building. I had a lot of really interesting neighbors and friends. And I would solicit their support or their help, whether it was, you know, can you bring me food for a week and I'll help you figure out your social media because I didn't have money for food sometimes or, you know, just asking people to teach me things and trying to, you know, do favors or give them big smiles in return. And you continue.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Traffic and members. So in the first year, you know, I kind of the day that the site launched, I kind of sat down and went, what the heck have I done? How am I going to get anyone to visit this thing? And at the time in 2009, I literally Googled how to get free traffic to your website and started to understand that there was organic search and there was social media and that those could be two very promising channels for getting people to come to the site. And I started blogging on the site and promoting it via social media. I became a Twitter ninja and I also wrote a very crude script for search engine optimization. And it took about a year for all of those things to really start bearing fruit and for the numbers to get big enough where I thought, okay, if we put some paid features into this experience, people might just be willing to give us their credit card number.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Yeah, so I was really focused on driving revenue, which was something that wasn't possible in the first year or so as we were growing. And then I was building in features to allow us to monetize. And the site got to profitability after about a year and a half and profitability just meaning that I was earning more money per month than I was spending on maintenance and improvements. My goals really shifted as I went. So it feels like along this whole journey, every horizon that we finally cross suddenly you realize once you've crossed it that there's another bigger, much more exciting horizon ahead. So I never dreamed of an IPO. I never even dreamed of a company the size of Tracy today, but those dreams just started shifting with every new milestone we hit.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “You know, I didn't know when I started that company about this whole sort of startup world. I didn't know what a BC was. I didn't know how to use Excel and create a forecast for our financials. So my goal at that time was to have a business. And shockingly enough, in the startup world, I just thought that a business made more money than it spent. And so that was my shocking, shocking observation.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “So, really simply put, the back end technology is deeper technology, and in the case of the platform that I was building, we were using a number of different languages to create different functions. And it would have taken me a long time to catch up and learn how to handle.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Believe it or not, he was a roommate who couldn't pay his rent. And so I said, well, I got to get a roommate who can pay rent, but you're welcome to move down to the Sturgidge unit if you can continue working on the project. And that was for about a year or so. And then in early 2010, I heard about this new website called Airbnb. And at the time, the concept of renting out your home to strangers was kind of far into a lot of people. But I thought like, great, that's right up my alley. And I did have another roommate at the time, but I decided I was going to sleep on my couch and rent out my bedroom in order to continue funding the company. And I got really lucky because the very first guest that I had back in September of 2010 is now my husband.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Painfully. So nobody in investors, traditional investors, aren't really lining up to give painters with no track record a whole bunch of money. So I started with some credit cards and a couple thousand dollars of my own money that I made from selling off the last of my paintings and some of my nicer clothes. And it was a true bootstrapping situation. I hired back-end developers, but I taught myself how to do everything else from design and marketing and customer acquisition to even a little bit of front-end code and writing some kind of crude scripts for functionality of the site. So I was really in a learning process and I was bartering the whole way through. At one point I had a web developer living in my underground storage unit in exchange for work. So that's how kind of scrappy it got.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Well, it's interesting because peer-to-peer isn't really a layman's term, and I don't even know if I knew that term in 2009, but I had been living this kind of like barter lifestyle as an artist for such a long time. You know, I always sold the stuff that I wasn't using or wearing to make money to continue on and get new stuff and have new experiences. So I think in that way, the transition was very natural because I was just kind of thinking about my own lifestyle, imagining that some other folks might be interested in living similarly and built a web platform around that concept.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “So it was in, let's see, 2009 that I launched a peer-to-peer marketplace for everything wedding related, so primarily wedding dresses and then decorations and accessories, etc. And so it had the same exact business model that Tradesy now has. Tradesy is a peer-to-peer marketplace for fashion, kind of like eBay, but easier, safer, simpler, faster to use. And so Tracy was really an outgrowth of that first company, which was called Recycled Bride, and kind of lived at my dining room table for a few years.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Suitcase and sold my work and lived that way. And as I got to be kind of closer to 30, I thought about doing something that had a little more stability than painting. There are very few things that have less stability than painting. So startups, even though they're kind of notoriously risky, actually felt like a really secure path for me.”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Sure, a short version of that is going to miss out on a lot of the fun, but I grew up on Long Island, suburbs of New York, like deep suburbia, ran away the minute I turned eighteen and went to school in Manhattan for fine arts. So I have a bachelor's degree from the School of Visual Arts in Fine Arts. And then after I graduated from college, I was doing some painting exhibits in Manhattan. And because I was young, I decided to run away to Mexico and get a master's degree in Mexico. So I also have an MFA in painting from a university in Mexico, which is definitely not the typical CEO and founder kind of resume. And for about 10 years, like most of my 20s, I was a painter and I traveled all over South America and Europe with a backpack on my back and a bunch of canvases rolled up in a”

    2014-09-24 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Ep 30: Tracy DiNunzio, Founder of Tradesy, on High-Velocity Growth and Tactics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT