Lisa Barnett - Co-Founder of Little Spoon

What's up? Jason Tatum here. Ball up. Wherever you are with NBA 2K mobile, plan game events to collect NBA legends and rising stars to assemble your dream team and settle things on the court. NBA 2K mobile lets you put together your dream team with your favorite NBA legends and current goats. Download NBA 2K mobile now on the App Store and Google play Monarch. Legacy of Monsters An Apple Original series. The world is on fire. I decided to do something about it on November 17th. This place, it's not ours. Believe me, the most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything. I promise. Oh my God. Go, go, go. Legacy of Monsters stream November 17th only on Apple TV. What's going on everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode, I sat down with Lisa Barnett. Lisa Barnett is the co founder and president of Little Spoon, the fastest growing direct to consumer children's food and nutrition company, reinventing the modern parents experience of keeping their child healthy. She has been recognized as one of the woman changing the food industry by well and good and by Forbes as 30 under 30 in venture capital. This conversation was absolutely amazing. Lisa's personality is awesome and the way she has built her team I believe anyone can learn something from. So with that being said, please take a moment to share this episode with a friend and enjoy the show. All right, what is going on everyone? Kasey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode we have Lisa Barnett, the founder of Little Spoon. Thanks so much for coming on Lisa.

Thanks for having me.

So Little Spoon, this is such a intriguing company. I know that you guys like to say that you're making kids and babies healthier. Where did this idea and concept come from?

Yeah, yeah. Well, spoiler alert. I'm not actually a parent, so people are generally surprised though I hope to be one one day. But the genesis for Little Spoon, which we are, you know, a direct to consumer baby food, children's food and nutrition company, really came from actually while I was working in venture capital right before A Little Spoon, I was still spending a lot of time looking at the healthcare industry, looking at obesity, looking at diabetes. And it sort of led me down a path of realizing that so many of these issues that we're trying to put money into, spend money in, solving, actually originate from way earlier in life. So that was kind of one piece. Then on the other end of the spectrum, I was just generally as a vc, looking at the these macro trends and realizing that there is A generation of consumers that now are hitting an inflection point and becoming parents. So I think it was in 2016, four and five babies were born to millennial parents and we launched in 2018. That is not an accident. The reason this is interesting and was interesting to me is because this is a generation of consumers that have really created billion dollar categories in pretty much every other consumer category. You know, mattresses, dog food, everything. And now this group that's clearly very different demands, different products, different experiences, a different set of attributes, is now having children and they're bringing those behaviors to how they're making decisions for their children. Except none of the products and services have caught up. And so that was really interesting to me and started diving in deeper at that time. And my sister, who's like my best friend, had her first kid, started getting really deep into this world of parenting and thinking about, wow, I'm watching my sister, who is well educated, has access to resources and is in the health space, struggle to do basic things like keep her kid healthy because there just aren't convenient options out there. And that is just not fair. And I'm going to become a parent one day. My friends will or have already become parents, and I don't want it to be that hard.

Yeah.

So Little Swim was really born out of that frustration. And my co founders, who come from the food industry stars, kind of aligned and we came together to dive in and build a platform and a brand that's really all about making keeping your kid healthy a lot easier and affordable.

I love that, like the whole concept and how it came to fruition. I was going to ask if you're a parent yourself, and I love how you opened with that. I'm sure you get that all the time.

Always a question. I mean, even from the very beginning when I was doing my first fundraising. So you must be a parent. No, I'm just hyper anxious about becoming a parent. So I have to fix all the things that scare me. Yeah, I'm being slightly facetious. No, I'm not a parent. One of my co founders has three children, so I feel like it's enough for us right now.

Totally. When you were like doing that research and noticing trends in the baby food market, what did you notice prior to launching? Because I know that you said I'm not a parent myself and my older brother actually has a four year old daughter, but he taught me a lot over the last four years about baby food and what he's buying, but I haven't even ever thought about that. As a consumer, when it comes to buying healthy food for babies, like what did you notice about the industry? Is it very unhealthy options or was it something that is growing like you noticed?

It's a confluence of things. So on the one hand, it is a generation that is way more aware on average of the connection between food and nutrition and health. And we were demanding those solutions and better options for ourselves as adults. So it's very natural that we would apply that same reasoning and more so to our children. So that was one piece. There's definitely just a way higher awareness that I think tipped the market this opportunity. Now, like this wouldn't little spoon would. I think about it all the time. If I tried to start this 10 years ago, I don't think it would have taken off the way it did. We didn't hit that inflection point of this generation becoming parents and entering this life stage. But on the other hand, then when I was starting to look at just the options out there, you know, you look at the average household for young parents, not 8 out of 10 of them are dual income, which means that they're even busier, so they have less time to prepare things on their own like a previous generation. So the reliance on convenient options is higher. So I started looking at, okay, well there must be great convenient options if there are so many people who are trying to juggle at all. And what I learned very quickly was that the baby food, the kids food, everything that's sold on a grocery store shelf has been sitting there longer than the baby eating it's been alive. So we're talking shelf stable, highly heat processed, oftentimes preservative packed baby food. And that's going into your child's body at a time when their bodies and brains are growing faster than they'll ever grow in a lifetime. And food underlies all of that growth. So it's kind of abysmal when you look at that to ignore.

Absolutely. When you guys were launching, how long was the process from having the idea to having your first products ready to ship?

Quite a long process, but I'd say it was more of a drawn out process. So my co founders on the other end of the spectrum were kind of tinkering around and thinking through ideas in this space. They were coming at it from a very different angle than I was coming at it. They were, they are, they are from the food industry. And so we're looking at how stagnant certain categories like baby food and like kids food and nutritional, you know, we Also have supplements and natural medicines. All that stuff were kind of just broken and stale from a product perspective. So, you know, probably thinking about this and testing and starting on things for a handful of years, but once we sort of got together, the four of us, we very quickly, quickly went for it and probably took about you know, 10, 10 months to get everything. You know, the first set of SKUs produced, tested all that kind of stuff, set up the supply chain. It is a fresh food product, it's an entirely cold chain. So it's a pretty complicated thing to get to your door.

Yeah.

With very little room for error. So as a first time founder, I just, I clearly just am a masochist because fresh food is really difficult.

Absolutely.

But yeah, it, so it was a fairly efficient process once we got everything together and decided like we're all going full time to do this.

I love that. When you guys launched and setting up that supply chain, what was the most important thing to get right and what did you learn through setting that up? As a first time founder.

There'S probably not one single most important element of that. They're. The unfortunate truth when you're dealing with a fresh product, when you're dealing with children and kids, is that there is no room for error. So having just every detail set in stone, you really can't cut corners. They're bringing in the right experts whenever we needed it. All of those things are super important. I would say more as a general learning. When you're kind of getting started, you, you can't, I can't stress less the importance of just keeping the lines of communication open with your target customer, taking in feedback, being willing to adjust. I think when you spend a lot of time setting something up and you're excited about an idea, you can be very reluctant to change that idea because you spent all this time thinking about it. And that's kind of the fallacy of, at least for me, what I think founders fall into. They think like, oh, I have to find an idea that I'm just so obsessed with and launch it. It's like, no, become obsessed with a problem and then you will be open to any kind of solution depending on what the market and your customers telling you. And I try to embody that to my core. Because you're going to get it wrong more times than you get it right.

Yeah, absolutely. So speaking on your background, prior to Little Spoon, you were in the venture capital world. What led you into that sector and how long were you a part of it?

Yeah, I sort of accidentally fell into Venture capital, which I guess most people might not say, I don't know. So going back before vc, I worked in the brand space. I'd been a part of lots of different brands, mostly on the corporate side and you know, was in beauty. I worked at Estee Lauder companies, I worked at bcg, I worked with a bunch of different fashion houses, all that kind of stuff. And I was hyper focused on building brands, building community and you know, increasingly started to get a lot of experience with, you know, digital channels like E Commerce because I was working at these incumbent brands that had retail models and that weren't accustomed to EE Commerce and DTC. But at the time that was when it was like the rise of dollar Shave Club and Warby Parker. And it was the first time that these larger organizations realized like, oh crap, we've got to really adjust because the majority of our top line is coming from a channel that people are no longer spending through, like a department store for example, which is the case in beauty. That's the traditional distribution channel and that actually oriented most of my time towards then thinking through and building direct to consumer and E commerce businesses within these larger organizations. And ironically through that process I started getting deep into the startup world and meeting people at all these like OG D2C companies and learning about that world. Startups weren't even in my vocabulary when I graduated college. It wasn't a thing for me and for most people except for the real pioneers there. But through that process started meeting so many different founders and got really interested and started circling the drain around a number of different ideas that I wanted to pursue myself as an entrepreneur and in that process ended up going to business school and then getting connected with a bunch of VCs that ended up hiring me. So I kind of just like fell into that and I didn't have a specific idea that was really picking up at the time even though I knew that my skill set, just my personality I think is definitely very well suited to being an operator though. I loved investing, but yeah, fell into VC and worked at two different firms for it was only about two and a half, three years of time before I jumped ship and left to start Littlespoon.

Very cool when you're creating a brand because you've done that so well. What's your advice with picking the things that people see? The domain, the name, the logo. How have you experienced, experienced building a brand and what have you learned through creating Little Spoon that you could tell a new founder today?

Yeah, I feel, you know, very strongly about how to Create a brand that actually has the potential to be breakthrough, to become a household name. And I think a lot about brand building in the same way that one would go about building, you know, and going about rallying the troops for like a social cause or social movement. It's really important to kind of take a step back from the specific product that you're selling and think about how do you get people to care about you and get them to talk about you? Because that's what's really going to help you scale. And the theory here about building a movement that far exceeds the transaction itself is, you know, you can ultimately build this army of customers that is a community that becomes your most powerful form of marketing and customer acquisition. So what does that mean tactically? It means, you know, from the beginning you want to think about, you know, what is something that can inspire people to come together around a change that they want to see. So going back to something I said earlier about being obsessed with a problem, not a concept, it's very much rooted in this idea that a good brand needs to be way bigger than just a product itself. So for Little Spoon, for example, first step is like, who are you going up against? Like, who is your enemy? That's a really important step when you're just starting out and picking a brand name. What you stand for, all that kind of stuff is like, who are you going up against? And most people would think, oh, little Spoon, you're going up against Gerbers or some sort of like really well known competitor. But I argue that you really should think a lot more broadly. Are you going up against a status quo? Are you going up against a paradigm? Are you going for Little Spoon? We're going up against the parenting industry, the paradigm of parenting, which is that there's a ton of unfair trade offs that people have to make when they become parents that are a direct result of just not the right resources and support for that, you know, segment of the population. You think about other great brands, like Glossier is another great example, I think that embodies the like social movement philosophy. They're going up against not, you know, Clinique or whatever, you know, beauty brand. They're going up against the ideals of the beauty industry. Glossier is all about like a bottom up approach to beauty. You define what you think is beautiful, not this random brand that's.

That tells you what to think.

Yeah, exactly. So that's like a critical piece. And then once you have that well defined and thought through, you have to construct your story for existence. You have to, you know, the best movements and best brands and communities are built around this why you exist, so people can relate to your problem. And so first it's like, what are you frustrated about that you're looking to try to change with your brand that people can relate to. And then how is your solution alleviating that pain point? Once you kind of walk through that, you can really then create these moments and events to get people to notice and care about you. And I love this piece when you're thinking about like launching a company, for example, because you have to like make a splash. But it's not so simple as like trying to round up a bunch of pr. I'm sure you know from all your experience it's not that easy.

Yeah.

So you either have to figure out is there some organic real event that's happening that you could latch onto. For example, Ashley Graham, who, for those who don't know who she is, she is a supermodel, a plus size model. She recently became a mom and she has been very honest and transparent about the experience of being a mother and all of the sides that people aren't warned about. And she posted this picture of herself in a postpartum diaper. So little do you know women, all women get sent home from the hospital in a diaper. Nobody tells you that beforehand. It's again representative of this like rose colored mirror that the parenting industry has put up around motherhood. That makes no sense. That's unsupportive, it's counterproductive. And she was standing up against that. So little spoon. We use that as an opportunity to rally our community and reinforce what we stand for. Because it was out there in the news, it was getting a lot of pickup. But you could also construct an event. You can manufacture, you can write an op ed totally. You can write a manifesto. And then once people notice you just build an on ramp to get them to participate in both big and small ways. You don't create a breakthrough brand. People don't just come to you. Your superfans are cultivated and you have to give them ways to, to gradually go up that ramp and curve so that they start out just by posting about you. Then all of a sudden they're organizing an event for you. And I think that's really the magic that gets unlocked when you start to think about your brand way broader and as a movement that you're trying to instill and change in a certain industry.

I love that. That was very well said. I learned a lot there.

Good.

I'm glad when you guys are thinking about your target consumer and your followers as a brand, how do you define your customers and what does that culture look like in Little Spoon?

Yeah, our customers, I mean, demographically, by and large, our customers are more often than not working parents, generally dual income households, or if you're a single parent, single income household, but working, working parents, who are the majority of millennial parents, by the way, who are, you know, hyper aware that, you know, food and health matter, but don't necessarily have the time or resources to, you know, spend money on a chef or don't want to buy the food in the grocery store and that we really see exist everywhere. Surprisingly, to many people, we are not only popular on the coast, which of course we are, there's a high, you know, density of people in general in New York and California and all that. But we actually started seeing the Little Spoon community rise in a lot of, you know, more like tier 2, tier 3 cities. One of the first cities that we saw pop where we got like a few orders and then all of a sudden it was like a multiplying effect was Tampa.

Okay.

And so that was really interesting because we had sort of done a beta launch in New York, and given, I think just the connections that lots of New Yorkers have to Florida, we ended up seeing Florida take off as soon as we opened up the regions really quickly. So, you know, that's like the general customer from a demographic perspective. But we really think about our customer as, you know, an average, just normal parent. We are priced very accessibly by design. We think quality nutrition is more of a right than a privilege. So we do our best to try to bring the highest quality product that's actually at a reasonable price point. So it does create a good diversity of types of parents that are purchasing from us.

Very cool. Where do you spend your time day to day at Little Spoon. And has that evolved over the past years since you guys started?

So where do I spend my time? So, yes, it's evolved. I think the only consistent thing about my, the way I spend my time is that it's like, different every single day. Particularly with COVID I'm on zoom calls pretty much since I wake, like, from the moment I wake up to the moment I, like, take a break to eat or work out or whatever it is. But right now I spend a split of my day between anything from, you know, reviewing creative to working on, you know, our forecasting and budgeting to thinking through and doing campaign planning to, you know, consumer insights research that informs our product innovation My role at Little Spoon is pretty varied. I'm the president. I'm also the cmo, so I wear lots of different hats. You get to work with a lot of different people, which is really fun. A lot of my day is spent, as I said before, in meetings with my teams. So the downtime of, like, the thing I do try to schedule out some thinking time in my day. Usually it's the early morning before people are fully awake and working. It's kind of the best time I could carve out for myself to just think and work on my own. But I really have to be intentional about finding that time. Otherwise, I will just, like, autopilot through the day without even realizing. When I started out, we were small for a very long time, so we're now just under 30 people. But we took a really long time to hire, and that was mostly on purpose, actually, as a byproduct, I think, at least for me, of being in venture capital. One of the mistakes and worries that I had as a result of my experience there was seeing a lot of founders raise money and then bloat their headcount quickly. And I'm one of those people who's a big believer in the value of constraining your resources because it creates a lot of creativity and scrappiness and hustle that is actually, to a point, very effective. So we embodied that philosophy. It's my philosophy of building a company until very recently. So when that was the case, I was doing everything from packing boxes up for influencers to, you know, raising money and pitching little spoon. So two very different sides of the coin, for sure. Yeah. Now that we have teams, it's a lot more spending time with people and making sure we're focused on the right things. I think the hardest thing is just prioritizing the million different things you want to do at any given time.

Yep. What have you learned about team building? And I know that you said you guys hired slower than you would say other companies do, and that was very intentional about building a team and building culture, especially like you said earlier on Zoom Calls and how the offices are shut down and how everything has shifted this year. What have you learned about just building a culture and scaling at the rate you have? Because you've done it very intentionally, it sounds like. Which is very different and a different approach than other founders. So I'd love to hear your story and what you learned through that process.

Yeah, no, I love this topic. I think it's easy to get really busy as a founder, as a leader in A company and not think about culture. And you know, you might go out saying, I'm going to start this company, this is the kind of culture I want to build. And like, it's like falls to the bottom of the totem pole always. It's not because it's not important, it's just because it's less tangible. We are very fortunate. My co founders and I are really great friends and we are very, we're very casual. Like ideas and hustle win out over everything. And that's just like core to my DNA. So that is my management style too. I expect everyone to contribute at the highest level. I don't care what your title is. I don't care what your experience is. You were hired for a reason. I want your opinion. That because it's so core to who I am, I think has become very core to the culture at Little Spoon. It's core to my co founders as well. But you know, I would describe the littlespoon culture where we're very familial, we're very caring. We put the customer as the center and the nucleus and the heart and soul of everything at Little Spoon. In fact, oftentimes we, we don't really even describe ourselves as a company that's solving problems for kids. We're solving a problem for a parent, which is that like taking care of your kid and keeping them healthy is really hard. And we're very aware and in tune of how difficult that mind state is when you are trying to balance everything. And that carries over to how we treat our employees. We don't, you know, like many startups, we don't have a set number of vacation days, but we really prioritize the well being of our, of our teams. I think, I hope if you were to talk to anyone at Little Spoon, they would say, I never feel like I can't take the time to myself if I need a day or if I need a few hours to do what I got to do. We have parents on our team who have children who are now balancing remote school or, you know, a hybrid model. It's not easy right now.

That's a lot.

We're a supportive environment. And that, that's just come from talking to our team and having a very open dialogue. I mean, even when we were solidifying our company values, we involved the whole company in the process. We actually made it a collaborative process where we just shared stories that stood out to us during our tenure and then was able to codify what did those stories and those behaviors represent. And how do we back into our values rather than saying this is what we want to be? That was a very authentic way to solidify what it's like to be at Little Swoon and what we value. And telling you that anecdote because I think it's very reflective of the kind of culture and company that we've built and who we are.

Absolutely. Regarding the future of Little Spoon, I know that you guys are in vitamins, probiotics, obviously baby food. And then I see that newly toddler and big kid meals, as you guys like to say. What are you excited about looking forward and what is the team just amped about moving into 2021?

Yeah. So this year we started a. We kind of solidified our community under this parenting portal called Is this Normal? And this is a parenting platform where you can submit like any question that you have. We have some incredible parents, super notable people who are like awesome that you never get to connect with and answering your random worries and questions as a parent. And then we've since connected the parents together to be in a forum to just ask each other as well. That has really taken off for a Little Spoon. Everybody there really is united under this philosophy of like, let's help each other, let's stop pretending that we're okay because it's hard some days and we should be supporting each other through that time. So we're really excited about what that is bringing both to the world and hopefully changing the conversation around parenting. And also of course, from a business perspective, how we're able to monetize that owned audience now the name of the game for startups and the reason that I'm so adamant about how to build a brand around community is because the traditional ways of building a brand on Facebook, where you don't own the platform, you don't own the audience, are not going to not going to last. Whether that's because it just gets unsustainable from a cost perspective or because like what's already happening, privacy laws change. Apple iOS just changed a bunch of rules that are going to reduce our ability to get effective ad served to our target. Like, you can't rely on that. The only thing that's going to take you to the next level and let you last is if you own and build a community. So we're very excited about what we're seeing with Is this Normal. And then as it relates to the solution side and the products, we are working on a number of different innovations on the product side to help make meal time and all these moments around nourishment and nutrition. A lot easier for anything from like your baby's just born all the way through, you know, 10, 12 years old. So we're going to continue to launch different products on our platform and couldn't be more excited about that.

That's super exciting when you're testing different products. I know that you said you have many parents on the team. Is it something that. I'm sure it is where parents that are on there are super excited about a new product to have their kids to try then and to give it to them. Is that the type of culture that is happening at Little Spoon? Because that's what I sense is like if I'm a parent working at Little Spoon, you guys are creating innovative products for kids. It must be like a thrill when going through that product development and having a new product come out there as an employee and as someone that's on the team.

Yeah, it's really fun because we do involve our parents and the whole company really. We have a large majority of our company are self proclaimed foodies. Lots of great cooks, lots of restaurants. Everybody really loves food. So everybody, whether you're a parent or not, has been integrally involved in testing and tasting the product. We do have a formal innovation process that we go through that is heavily rooted in the consumer and testing and constantly asking questions throughout the way. And now that we have a customer base, it's so different than when we were launching because we just have to design products that are that our customers who are already purchasing Little Spoon love and want, so we have them right there. And we're very lucky that we have a really loyal, engaged following. So we have a whole process that we take at every step of the way from just like researching and understanding unmet needs to then coming up with an mvp, testing that out, to then playing around in the kitchen, sourcing different things to then actually sending out food and collecting that insight. And then once we launch, we do it in kind of a test kitchen before we scale to a commercial sized kitchen so that we're open to making adjustments to those products that really, you know, nail the product market fit. And I'm very hyper vigilant about collecting that, that feedback. I think it's easier said than done. It's like, of course it's obvious you should collect feedback from your customers, you should get their input, but when you're trying to move really quickly, it can, it can feel like it's actually slowing you down. And as a founder, you're thinking about these things like 24 7. So sometimes it's hard to shake yourself into reality and be like, you might not know everything. It's a big blind spot that I know I can have that I think most founders actually have. So I tried to implement and I think we've done a good job of implementing a process that forces us to touch base with our customer and our community regularly so that we're constantly challenging our assumptions about what will work.

I love that. Well, last question, Lisa, before we wrap up. And that is just where is the best place for everyone listening to learn more about Little Spoon, to buy the product and most importantly, to follow you along your journey as the founder.

Ah, well, of course you can visit littlespoon.com you could visit our parenting portal if you are a fellow parent. Is this normal? Co Our Instagram is just Ittlespoon and I am not really active on anything besides Instagram personally, so you can follow me at Lisa D. Barnett on Instagram.

Awesome. Well, Lisa.

And meeting people.

So I love it. Absolutely. Well, Lisa, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It was so much fun.

Thank you for having me. This was awesome.

Legacy of Monsters An Apple original series. The world is on fire. I decided to do something about it on November 17th. This place, it's not ours. Believe me, the most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything. I promise. Oh my God.

Go, go, go.

Monarch Legacy of monsters streaming November 17th only on Apple TV. Plus.