Katy Carrigan Transcript
Clint Betts
Katy, thank you so much for coming on the show. You are leading an incredible company, a really interesting company, a very innovative company around gifting called Goody. Tell us about it and how you became CEO.
Katy Carrigan
Yeah, absolutely. Well, happy to be here, Clint. So, Goody, as you mentioned, is a gifting platform. We actually started off as a consumer product. So when we first launched, it was the heat of COVID; people weren't really seeing each other; they weren't traveling, but they still wanted to celebrate friends and family and didn't have a very good way to do that without ruining a surprise of, where are you right now? Can you share the address with me? Sometimes even getting it wrong. So food is sitting on the porch, or potentially, they have allergies you don't know about. So that's really the idea and concept of where Goody was born out of. We started as this mobile application that individuals could use to give to friends and family. I think, like any good tech product, you put it in the world thinking it's going to be used in one way, and then your users actually show you what they want to do with your product.
I think that, as a good leader, my job is to listen to what our customers and users are saying. What we saw was that people actually needed it for the workplace. The individuals who are spending the most money coming back most frequently were doing it for a work use case. So, we pivoted to serving our B2B community in 2021. While that's important or relevant to my story of becoming the CEO, when I joined Goody, I came in as a head of sales position with the focus on helping us move from this consumer to B2B. As we continued to build, we saw there was more and more opportunity in that business. It was becoming a bigger chunk of our revenue and really became the company's dominating strategy.
So, as the vision began to change, their current CEO realized this was no longer where he was best fit, and he was not looking to continue to grow the day-to-day in the same way. He is still involved; he's on our board, but we have started to look for the next CEO. In that process, it landed on me. So I often joke it escalated quickly from head of sales to CEO, but then I've been leading it since 2022, where we've had this focus on building a platform for business and for individuals to help gift their employees, sales prospects, clients, et cetera.
Clint Betts
How's it going? Since you've made that shift, what have you noticed? What have you learned? And have you made any tweaks to the platform?
Katy Carrigan
Yeah. So it's going well, and we're continuing to see a big growth year over year. We're about to go into our busy season, which is always very exciting. So, we definitely had to make a lot of tweaks to the platform. I think one of the biggest ones is we went from being a mobile application to really being primarily focused on a web application. So that's where the majority of people were getting their job done, having to send a large number of gifts. So our focus went from initially taking what we had built in a mobile version and basically just putting it onto the web. So some fields. Over the last couple of years, it's become more and more robust to include integrations and automation, more settings, and things like SSO and all of those features and functionalities that you need to win enterprise customers.
But I will say the thing that has continued to stay the same, and I think what differentiates us from potentially other platforms out there, is that we still have our consumer bones. So, at the end of the day, the people who are using our products are still just shoppers; they're still consumers who are looking for the best gifts to send to their employees, and we need to make it super easy, reduce the number of clicks, they have to find things that they want, the items that are tracking them on their social media platforms outside of work. So, while we've continued to have to build the more robust business side, at the end of the day, it's still just people using our product.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah. That's really cool. You have the biggest gift season of all coming up: the holiday here.
Katy Carrigan
Yes.
Clint Betts
How are you preparing for that? How are you thinking about that? And then this is kind of a question from left field: have you ever thought about doing the Secret Santa-type stuff for companies and things like that? That could be an interesting market to tap into as well.
Katy Carrigan
Yeah, absolutely. So it's really interesting how we prepare. I would say, the way I think of our calendar, it's kind of funny; it's kind of maybe February through July, and we're a little bit quieter. We can do some of that work that we put up. The rest of the year, it's all about preparing for the holiday season. I'm not sure. I'm sure you've had some other CEOs who've run seasonal businesses before, but so much of your year in the planning goes to being ready in those few months.
So right now, it's a lot of looking at our tech stacks on the engineering side. We're every day doing scaling tests. When will the site break? How do we have to ensure on the backside we have the right infrastructure set up on CX? You can think about, well, what kind of hiring we need to do. How do we ensure that we have the right workforce in place? Maybe not as extreme as Macy's hiring on the retail side during the holidays, but it's similar in a sense if you can think about it, that we need to make sure our staffing and technology are beefed up for a busy season, which does look different than July.
Clint Betts
Yeah.
Katy Carrigan
And then on the other side, I would say it's all about ensuring that we have the most optimized funnel that we can go in with. So at any given time, you can be on our site and we're running different experiments and constantly looking at what's winning, what's losing, implementing the winning strategy, and then revisiting where an experiment lost, why did it lose, and what else could we do to improve it?
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah. The reason why I asked about the Secret Santa thing is that a buddy of mine started Reddit gifts, which became a huge gift exchange, and it all happened on Reddit. I'm not entirely sure how it worked or how we figured out the logistics, but it seemed like they were actually exchanging each other's addresses; they're strangers and shipping stuff. I don't know how that worked, but it seemed like that's what they were doing. They put a limit like a 20, 25. Anyway, it was huge. Bill Gates and all the celebrities became this huge thing.
Katy Carrigan
Yeah.
Clint Betts
There's nothing like that anymore. That's been shut down by Reddit.
Katy Carrigan
So you could totally use our product to do that today because you could just generate a gift link and then send that person a link. So you could leverage our product in that way or for that use case, and I think that would be one of those fun examples of maybe we didn't intentionally build a Secret Santa out, but you could absolutely do that today. Sometimes, with some of the companies we work with, it's really fun; they'll come to us with like, "Oh, we want to do this holiday season," or, "These are our themes. Can you help us achieve it?" And usually, the answer is yes.
Clint Betts
Oh, that's awesome.
Katy Carrigan
Yeah.
Clint Betts
What does a typical day look like for you?
Katy Carrigan
Yeah. I would say a lot of meetings. I think running the business means making sure I'm in touch with all different department heads, learning what's happening, knowing what's at the top of their minds, and spending some time with product and engineering. I love that part of it. I really love the product. I love spending time talking about what the vision is, what the next iteration is, and where people are getting stuck. Something that I do constantly every day as well, and it can either be on a walk after work as I'm heading to the gym or something like that, is listening to Gong calls. So Gong, I would say, is typically not a tool that small companies will invest in because it is a fairly expensive item in the tech tool stack. But my recommendation to any leader or CEO is totally worth it. I love listening to customer calls and learning a ton of information. It's super easy, like having the recording and having the ability. They have a lot of great tools for themes, searching recordings, etc. Has really helped us in developing the product.
Clint Betts
How are you thinking about AI and how is that going to play a role in the product you're building and the future of even just gift exchanges?
Katy Carrigan
Yeah. I think there are two ways that I would say most leaders are thinking about AI, and the first one is how AI helps me run a more efficient business. I think that's one of the biggest focuses of looking for the right tools. So for us, for example, in getting ready for the holiday season, we implemented this amazing new CX tool called Sienna, and it's probably some of the best customer AI support I've seen, and it really helps us answer a lot more of our customers quickly going into the busy season. And then the second one is, where does it make sense in the product to add? Which I think does take a lot more thought because I definitely don't want to be in the game when I have limited resources, of just putting vanity features in to say, "Oh, we're AI gifting."
I think, generally, the baseline for any sort of shopping will include AI because people are going to look for personalized experiences and recommendations. So I think that's the area that we'll invest in our own marketplace, and hopefully we're going to work to be the best out of it, but generally, I think any sort of e-commerce site is going to need to have that.
Clint Betts
Yeah.
Katy Carrigan
And then also things like helping you write your gift message. I think those are some of those obvious places that people think about.
Clint Betts
How do you decide what products you put on the platform for people to gift? How do you decide that?
Katy Carrigan
Yeah. So we look at a lot of what's trending. We love being able to highlight businesses that have values that align with ours and align with the companies who are using us. So whether that's woman-founded, BIPOC-owned, or US-made, we look for those types of companies that we can really highlight in our catalog. I would say the interesting thing about what we're creating is that we have to have an everything store that I often describe. Because if you're talking about an employee sending out a gift to 10,000 people, I need to make sure every single one of those 10,000 people is going to find something within our marketplace within a certain price point too, not just ... Generally, yeah, there's something on their like, but let's say within a $50 that they like, that speaks to them. So the challenge becomes how do you build an everything store without it feeling like an everything store? I think that goes back to merchandising and how you can leverage AI to bring the right products to the right people at the right time.
Clint Betts
Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting. What have you learned about leadership since stepping into the CEO role? Going from the sales role to the CEO role, what have you learned about that, and what lessons would you have for our audience?
Katy Carrigan
Yeah. I'm a very hands-on leader. Actually, if people tend to, maybe if someone's listening to this podcast, then they're probably someone who also is just keeping up with general leadership news. There's been a lot of talk recently about founder mode and how often people were given the advice of just hire the right people and then trust them to do the work. I think that's sound advice and very true and has allowed us to grow in that.
I come from a sales background. I'm not an expert in SEM. I'm not an expert in engineering. I do need to truly trust my leaders in those channels, but that doesn't mean I can't be hands-off. I can't learn enough to be at least part of the conversations and understand the building, particularly when you're at the smaller size, but even as you scale, prioritize the time to go deep into the most important areas of your business so you have a good grasp of what's going on. I think that goes back to my wanting to listen to customer calls really regularly. I need to understand our customer sentiment and continue to have customer centrality as a main pillar of this business so that we can hit our goals.
Clint Betts
Yeah. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. What do you do for fun? I mean, how do you decompress?
Katy Carrigan
Yeah. I often say the reason I work hard, or my motivation, is probably for that decompressed side of spending time with my friends and family. So I love to throw a dinner party. I love to cook. I love to throw a large party. I do. I just really like ... I would say I'm just prioritizing spending time with my friends and family, and I hope to be rich and successful so I can bring them on vacations with me and throw these big lavish parties because I do really just enjoy spending time with everyone and having fun.
Clint Betts
Oh, that's incredible.
Katy Carrigan
Yeah.
Clint Betts
As CEO, how are you thinking about the current macroeconomic environment, the various trends that we're seeing, inflation, all that type of stuff? I know that's kind of like a broad question, but is that affecting your business at all? And what are you thinking, as you look to 2025, how that environment might change?
Katy Carrigan
Yeah. So I will say that I don't think it's impacted us necessarily because something that we've really focused on doing since the early days is trying to build a very agnostic product. And why that matters is, when I think back to, let's say, '22 to '23, tech was having a really hard time. So you could imagine employee onboarding is going down, holiday gifts are not available, and the spending isn't as much, right? In 2021, we did companies that had budgets for their holiday gifts that were just insane. We were building very cool boxes. That went away over the last few years. For us, that meant, okay, fine, we're going to focus on accounting firms and legal firms and other agencies that are not getting as hit by this change in the economy.
So I would say that's something that we're constantly looking at: what sectors are doing well, and how do we ensure that we can service that as a way to stay resilient when particular ones are getting hit? On a larger macro level of inflation, I mean, that's tough, but people are still spending, so it's hard. Hopefully, they continue to do so. When the reports come out, all of a sudden, the stocks will drop, and things get a little bearish. It makes me nervous, but then they keep going back up, and people continue to spend. It's a lot easier to spend a corporate card than your personal card as well.
Clint Betts
Yeah. For sure, for sure.
Katy Carrigan
Yeah.
Clint Betts
Yeah. That makes all the sense in the world. Finally, we end every interview with this question. We believe at CEO.com that the chances one gives are just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Katy Carrigan
Yeah. I would say I've been super fortunate to have had a lot of great leadership and managers along the way, particularly during my stint at Dropbox. So one person, I'd call out, Kate Taylor. She's now the global head of recruiting over at Notion and really was one of the first great leaders to give me the chance to join Dropbox. From there, I moved over and was under Yamini for a while, who's now the CEO of HubSpot. Having that opportunity, I think, particularly to work under very strong female leaders, not only showed me things like, "Okay, where can I go?" I think that it also becomes really important, especially when you're younger, to see yourself or to see other people in places that you want to be. But I then think particularly what was so awesome about working under them is that they created space and opportunity for people to stretch into roles and learn. So, I'd give a shout-out to those two.
Clint Betts
That's incredible.
Katy Carrigan
Yeah.
Clint Betts
Katy, thank you so much for coming on. Seriously, I love what you're doing. Everybody, check it out. It's ongoody.com. I think it's incredible.
Katy Carrigan
Yeah.
Clint Betts
I think it's very interesting way for companies and leaders to give to each other. It's awesome. Thank you so much.
Katy Carrigan
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Clint.
Edited for readability.