GTM Sauce

Solid Starts · B2C · baby feeding app

Hire people obsessed with the problem

Credited for product quality; no numbers

Workedteam-process

What they did

Solid Starts' team members each messaged the founder out of passion for baby-led weaning; Replika hired ML people before ML was popular.

What happened

Credited for the products' quality and impact; no numbers.
Stage
any

In their words

Make Ugly Ads to Grow Your App – Yuliya Lennox (Solid Starts)

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Yuliya Lennox… actually super, I would say, almost religious about what they do. In Replika, when you have people that were like ML, and ML wasn't a super popular thing, we will think of LLMs, we will test that, we will know what to do. And you're like, "Okay, you have a super great app on the market because of that." Because at that point, we literally got millions of messages saying that you have a person in Ohio that is responding to me, this is not real.

Yuliya LennoxBut no, it wasn't LLM that was that good. And with Solid Starts, that's 10 times higher because everybody on that team is keen on baby led weaning and on feeding babies. And I know they're all stories and it's crazy to think that each one of them messaged the founder being like, "I'm so passionate about that, that I want to be on your team no matter what." And this is where you see the results being so amazing because if I'm just doing my job, I'm just doing my job. I clock in, clock out. If you have a person that is passionate about it, that is already a super beneficial thing for your team. But if you have 20 people that are just about that, this is why Solid Starts is actually changing the whole baby-led weaning, not even category, the baby-led weaning in the USA in the world.

Yuliya LennoxThey're changing the way that people start allergens and therefore there are less allergic people in the world. That is super, super important. And when I grow up, I really want to have a team of people that will be super interested in what they're doing. I think what the market is actually lacking because I'm a little bit in a mental health space right now, the market is lacking an app, for example, that will be made by actual doctors, the team …

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Tags: hiring, mission-driven