Can your family afford to live without FAYE?

Finally, a way to get ahead or even get rid of your to-do list. So many of us are getting a little bit overwhelmed by just the sheer volume of work tasks there are to do, especially if you've got children and a job and all the other aspects of life. But my guest today has got a solution for you, and she has built a business with her partner that within just a couple of years actually managed to raise a 7-figure VC VC investment. So she's solving a problem for people like you and me, but also she's a very, very successful entrepreneur. We're going all the way to Ogden in Utah and talking to Emily King, who is the co-founder of a company called Faye. Emily, welcome to the show.

Hi, James. Thanks so much for having me.

Well, you're welcome because you're going to help me and other people to get ahead of our to-do list. How have you built FEY? We're going to talk about the business itself, this dual marketplace, and how you get both the, the client and the advisor on the platform. We're going to talk about how you raised money so quickly for the business and who have been some of the interesting sort of hiring, uh, opportunities and, and solutions that you found in building up FEY for your business. So Emily, tell us first of all about FEY. What is it and what problem do you solve?

Yeah, so Fae is a marketplace that connects busy people, busy families with local family advisors who help you manage your mental load. This, you know, the whole idea is that those of us who have really complex lives, which are a lot of us, just don't have much time or energy to manage our own personal life. And at work, executives have an executive assistant, or better yet, a chief of staff. But we don't, we don't give ourselves that in our personal life. And the idea is, how can we actually, you know, match a busy family like mine with a local professional who has a really strong executive skill set to help me run my household.

I love that. And you talk about, um, chief of staff, and I'm assuming in light of recent events that, um, privacy and security and confidentiality— we have to cover that for your chief of staff. I'm sure isn't sending messages—

a new meaning.

Yeah, yeah. Isn't sending messages to, to people that shouldn't have them, right?

Right. Yes, I actually think, you know, it's, it's Funny you bring that up. My co-founder is, he has an incredible background, software engineer, but before we started Fey, he was one of the lead engineers at Roblox for their safety and security team, trust and safety team. So, fully covered. That's critical. That's, you know, table stakes, especially in a business like ours.

Well, and joking apart, you are offering, when you say a chief of staff, something very different to the sort of conventional either virtual assistant where people are hiring in the Philippines or Mexico, I think as well now in America, if you like, relatively junior or admin staff to handle bookkeeping or maybe making flight arrangements. But you're talking about someone really quite senior, aren't you? So just take us through the process then, Emily, of the kind of clients that you're attracting and the kind of advisors that you're attracting?

Sure. I mean, when it comes to the family, we want the best. You know, there are certain areas of life where you might be okay with the 80/20 rule. But when it comes to, you know, finding the right swim teacher for your kid, or finding the right insurance provider, or getting the, the best electrician to come fix something in your home, Families care deeply about that and want to make sure that they are, you know, dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's and sure to ensure that they get the best service. And so as we think about this chief of staff role for the family, it's not a role that is best served by someone, A, who doesn't know you, who doesn't know your area. Who doesn't have similar experience. So the insight here was, how do I actually go out and find someone who has all of that, a professional working background, a strong communication skill set, uh, a real deep understanding of the types of challenges that I have as a parent, um, understands my local area? And we thought, hey, can we— you know, we think there are, are many people out there like that, whether these are other moms like me who have maybe stepped back a bit from the workforce. They might work part-time. They might now be stay-at-home moms, but once had big careers. They might be current full-time employees who work in a job that is fine and pays well, but maybe is not creative or fulfilling. And they have a little extra time to do something on the side. And our whole network of advisors, you know, they have like a deep desire to help others. And we're telling them, hey, you can help others, plus get paid for it. So there's a strong value proposition on the supply side to do this type of work. And many of these mostly moms do this work for their own family and have never been paid for it. And we're saying, hey, this is valued work. There are millions of people like me who need the support, who don't have time to do this work.

Yeah.

And of course, it's your pay and connects the two parties.

That's wonderful because in Asia where I lived for 25 years, when we had the children, we were able to have an ayi, we called them, right? Someone who was there all the time. And of course, in Asia, that's been part of many people's lives as middle class. They can have people to do those tasks for them. But you're connecting people who, as you say, maybe have lived those experiences already as a mum, or maybe a dad as well, but it sounds like you're mainly, mainly dads. And it's an amazing amount of wisdom that these women actually have and skill sets, as you say, whether it's choosing the right dentist or the swim teacher or, or a plumber that they know actually will turn up and fix the washing machine, right?

Yeah, which makes them both faster at what they do, right? If I ask my family advisor, you know, I mean, this was something that came up the other day. It was like, we're looking for something fun to do this weekend. She had actually just gone to the same, you know, gone to a play or a musical that she had recommended, right? So she was able to fire off 5 great things to do without even having to do the research because she'd experienced them herself. So not only does it make her faster and therefore the, the hourly dollars that I'm spending as a client more valuable, um, it's just higher quality information, you know, it's up to date, local, valuable. And that's very, as opposed to paying a virtual assistant to go conduct a Google search to send you information.

And I think that's one of the things that we're going to talk about later is who made the best advisors, right? Which kind of personal profile? We're going to talk about that a little bit. Emily, let's just talk a little bit about the platform that you've built because it's a matching service and other people might then have just said, oh, I know somebody or here's a Facebook group you could connect with. What's been the strategy from a technology point of view for Fey? And maybe then that will lead us into the VC raise because you've obviously added value over and beyond matching.

Yeah. So as Kip and I like to say, we are unapologetically pro-human. And while we are as excited as anybody else in the developments and proliferation of AI for matters of the family where trust is critical and like authentic EQ is critical to solving problems. We really think the answer here is merging, you know, the technology behind AI with an actual talented, bright human advisor who can help, you know, vet the results from AI and or just, you know, supplement that with their own experience. And so our investment at FEI from a technology perspective has mainly been in the tool that our advisors use. And this is, we can call it an all-in-one CRM or comms platform that allows an advisor to manage multiple families. And yet deliver very high-quality one-to-one service with each of their own clients. So from my perspective as a client, it feels like I've got Katie's full attention. She's my advisor, but she might have 6 other families that she's managing or more. And what that allows for is one, for me to pay an affordable price to have this high-quality assistant. And on the advisor side, it allows for Katie to earn a lot more, right? Because she can do more with less.

That's great. And just in terms of pricing, let's just talk about that for a moment because it's very affordable, isn't it? So this is not a boutique sort of concierge service that would only be affordable by people living in, you know, in Park Avenue, right? You want to just take us through, take us through the pricing?

Yeah. So clients pay between $35 to $42 per hour. Depending on which plan you sign up for. So if you kind of pre-buy more hours, you get the slightly lower rate. And it's really simple. It's super flexible. Everything is month to month. We don't lock you into annual contracts. We want you to love Faye or not continue. And luckily, most people do love Faye. And so our retention numbers are excellent. But there's a lot of flexibility in terms of working with a family advisor.

Yeah, so that's great. So anything between like $169 a month up to $569. These are prices correct at sort of the time we're talking and you must check them of course with Emily. But the point is if you are a busy executive, you're probably making a couple hundred dollars an hour, right? I would think or more.

Oh yeah.

At which point the service has paid for itself, right? The opportunity cost of—

In an hour. Yes, in an hour.

Depending on who you are.

Yeah, which is interesting. What we've found is the value prop for entrepreneurs or consultants or any of us who are like acutely aware of what our time is worth, especially from an hourly perspective. You know, we have, for example, we have a lot of female attorneys and lawyers. And I tend to think that's because they're sitting and doing the math like, oh, 1 hour of my time might pay for— Yep. An entire month of support, like this is a no-brainer. Why would I not do this?

Yeah, exactly, Emily. And talk about value proposition. Let's move on. So we understood you've got a model. You could just share with us how you're attracting the two halves because in any SaaS platform, you've got to get the clients and the advisors or the buyers and the suppliers, whichever way you want to look at it. Take us through how you're getting enough, if you like, advisors to service the clients and enough clients to make it worth getting advisors on board.

Yeah, I know that can be really tricky sometimes with marketplace businesses. We have been fortunate in that both our supply and demand have very similar profiles. They tend to live in the same areas and, you know, live in very— the, the value of their homes are very similar. Um, so this is really like a peer-to-peer services marketplace, which means we can advertise to one cohort and acquire the other side effectively for free. Um, which from a business perspective, if you're only paying customer acquisition costs on one side of the marketplace, uh, that becomes obviously a lot more attractive to investors, but also just to your unit economics.

And when you say advertising, just take us through that, Emily, because I can imagine there's a big word of mouth and then there is reviews.

Yeah.

How do you keep that momentum going and getting some more scale?

Yeah. I mean, I think we, we find clients. In a lot of different ways. Our three kind of most common paths, one is like what you said, word of mouth, clients recommending other clients, whether that's a mom who's seen a lot of success with Faye and she brings it up with the other soccer moms at the game on Saturday or at a dinner party. There's a lot of like actual, like physical word of mouth, people talking about us out in the community. And that is a major source of growth for us. Um, the other has been, you know, investing in paid media and there are, you know, several channels we've explored here. I think at this early of a stage, um, we've found Meta to be the most useful simply because it's been a great way for us to test positioning early on, even pricing, like understanding what the clear value prop is on the client side and to run rapid iterations versus running, you know, a larger media campaign someplace else. And then the third source is that our advisors will go find their own business as well. So, um, that's, that's excellent, right? We bring on a new advisor and she goes out and finds a few clients. Maybe takes a few clients from us, and that is how we scale FEI.

Nice. And presumably it's almost a bit like a franchise for your advisors. Do they get a geography or they get a sort of a number of houses or a postcode or something to stop people?

Yeah, we don't. Kind of one of our core principles at FEI is that we're collaborative, not competitive, and helping each other actually sort of raises you know, is good for everyone. And on that note, it's pretty cool as part of our advisor toolset, we have a really active forum, and it's amazing to watch the community helping each other. So if one advisor is asked to complete a task that they're not quite sure how to do, they might post the question in our forum and It's like all of the advisors jump in with advice or ways that they've handled it before, sharing tips. And so being a FAE advisor, not only are you making some cash on the side, but you also have this community. Friendships have been built throughout that and it's like you're in this with others, which I think is really special.

Great. As you say, probably because you've got a pretty much an unlimited demand, it sounds like. I mean, there are so many people there that need that. And in the old days, people had their relatives around, right? I mean, and also again in China, we had aunts and grandparents. And so there were always extended families. And that isn't the case anymore, is it? So people are getting to be part of a community, be connected with other people that are also coaching each other. It sounds like you're meeting a social need as well.

Yeah, I think, you know, advisor to advisor, there's community being built. I think there's also really strong connections happening between client and advisor. Like I said, they tend to be of the same kind of socioeconomic class, similar backgrounds. We try to match, you know, based on some attributes and like real friendships and partnerships are created between clients and advisors. In fact, my advisor was telling me the other day that one of her clients. She's based here in Ogden, but she lived in San Diego for quite a while and she has several clients in San Diego. She's going to San Diego for spring break and they're going to meet up and hang out as families. And I'm like, that is so cool.

That's very nice. Yeah. And I'm sure we've got 101 stories like that, which is brilliant. But Emily, let us move on though, because you you're meeting some great needs on both sides of the marketplace, but also in the marketplace for money. You've gone out and raised money, a 7-figure— you haven't issued a press release yet, so we can't say exactly how much it was, but the very fact you've raised money within just a couple of years of getting a, a marketplace going is incredible. Could you just tell us what was the process? What did you and Kip do to raise money and any lessons that you can share from that?

Yeah. So we raised this first round in October of 2023. Was it? Yes. Which is a really, really, really tricky year for fundraising. In fact, Kip and I decided to go into business together and lean into this idea about a week before the whole SVB debacle.

Um, that's Silicon Valley Bank, by the way, for anyone that isn't sure. I mean, it's come and gone, but yes, which some people forget.

Um, but at the time, investors were very anxious. It was sort of the worst possible time to, to go out and have fundraising conversations. And so Kip and I, uh, decided, you know, both from a perspective that it wasn't a great time to go raise venture capital, but also because we wanted to, you know, be confident for ourselves that this was the right business opportunity to pursue. We decided to bootstrap this idea for at least a few months, um, to really understand, is there demand? Can we get people, you know, can we get people to actually pay for this service? Can we build a product that provides leverage to advisors? And so we just rolled up our sleeves and did it ourselves. I was the family advisor. I went and quickly found 4 families that would pay me to help their family out. Uh, Kip built the, um, basically the, you know, the whole product on the backend. It's since become a lot more sophisticated, but it was certainly workable. And when we were ready to go raise capital, we had, you know, several months of paying customers, like who were thrilled with the service, who wanted to invest themselves as angels because they believed so fundamentally in the value that we were providing them as clients. But also, yeah, we had a, we had a working product, revenue, clients, a story. And that really helped us. you know, have a compelling pitch to investors. Um, you know, some people can go raise with like a great team and a big dream. Hopefully we had that plus some actual meat on the bones of a business we were operating and that helped a lot. So I always, you know, when aspiring entrepreneurs ask me for advice, like the more you have there, the better, like yes to go raise capital. But you're the biggest shareholder. So, if you're going to invest all of your time and energy into something, like make sure it's the right thing. Like make sure you love it, make sure you believe there's big impact that you can create. And the best way to do that is just to get going.

Yeah, and I think as you say, to get customers, right? I mean, at the end of the day, that's the proof. Everything else is theory until you've got someone to pay. Pay for it, right? Even just one validates the business model.

Emily.

Yeah. Emily, you've been growing the business. You've got team across the country. So just tell us, how are you managing to build the company when you're in Ogden in Utah, which you said is actually where the Transcontinental Railway connected? That was for anyone that was interested in a bit of American history there. But you've got the team all distributed. How are you managing to build the company and the communication with the distributed workforce as well around Faye?

Yeah, we're a tiny team. There are 5 full-time employees, including myself. And so just by the nature of the size, it's not too hard to keep on the same page. We have a morning check-in every single day for 15 to 30 minutes, which I think helps us keep— stay connected. We're pretty clear on exactly who is responsible for what. And so, that keeps things moving smoothly and effectively. We use Slack, you know, which is great. Yeah, I mean, I think most of us are coming from companies where we either were working remotely or in a hybrid work culture. And so, it feels comfortable to be everywhere. And I do think it's an advantage for us. I mean, if one, our plan is for Faya advisors and Faya clients to be everywhere in the US, and that's true. I think we're like technically live in 20 or 25 markets or whatnot. And so there's nothing that— there's no like center where we should formally be based. Um, and I've always believed especially me being in Ogden, and I— this is something that I feel pretty strongly about. I've always wanted to build a company that works for everyone in all places. And I think in terms of size, Ogden is like 360 in terms of, you know, population in the US, we're like the 360th size city. And I've always just felt like if it can work here, if you can make it work in a city like this, then you can have broad appeal. And that's critical to me. And I watch so many tech startups that are for, you know, are trying to build for everyone based in these like unnatural locations. And so I think there's real power there, right? Like, you know, this works for me on my street in Ogden, Utah. We have had clients sign up in Ogden who don't know me. That's important.

Okay. So, so wonderful. So we're really now building businesses where the DNA is, is if you like a virtual business, they're no longer from an HQ, a headquarter and then distributed out because of COVID Actually companies now starting up at the very beginning without a base. That's, that's also inspirational for people to not to worry about having to pay overhead and rent and, or having to move to one place. Let's also just move on then a bit, Emily, because we've got a little while left. So you're building the business, you've been marketing through word of mouth, but also through advertising on Meta. That's where your customer base is. It's virtual. You've raised the money because you're able to really show proof of life and get a valid business model already going through. Has there been something that hasn't gone quite as planned? Because so far it sounds like you and Kip have had a kind of a textbook launch. Any lessons that you've learned or something that didn't go quite as planned?

Well, I think, you know, there's always messiness, right? Underneath the facade. But I think that's what attracted both Kip and I to even being an entrepreneur in the first place. He and I met at Nextdoor. I was kind of running our ad sales business and Kip was one of the lead engineers building the ad platform. And we, it was sort of an intense working environment, but we were building and we sort of loved that, right? We love the pressure. We love building quickly. And so, yes, there have been Certainly plenty of tests and plenty of failures in this first year as we've created this business. But oddly, that's like what makes it fun is the testing and learning. You know, a lot of insights, non-obvious insights have surfaced through this time. One I had mentioned earlier is just you know, thinking about the persona of who we're looking for on the advisor side. So initially we thought, gosh, we'll go out and find people who are already personal assistants or are already executive assistants or have a strong background. They've been EAs before. And we did find some. And what we found is that they were not the strongest advisors. Um, what our clients really wanted was someone who had been in a similar job to them, who had kind of thought about problems in the same way, operated at their executive level. And so now, as we think about who to accept onto our platform as advisors, we are looking for kind of a breadth of experience. And some of our strongest advisors are former lawyers, data scientists, current data scientists, project managers, which you'd expect. I mean, you're managing a lot of moving pieces. So, so that makes sense. Former teachers are awesome. Yeah, really strong communicators have like worked with the complexity. Especially if they've worked with little kids before, they like, you know, yeah, they're great with like busy executives who don't have like a big attention span. So I think that's been really insightful. We care a lot less about your precise back background, but just that it is, that it's professional. You have a really strong communication skill set. You're a strategic thinker. And that means that we have advisors from a wide array of backgrounds.

Yeah, that's interesting, Emily, that you can go out thinking that you're going to need one kind of person, just like people think they might have one kind of client, and then it kind of meets reality and that you change a little bit.

Yeah, and on the client side, what's interesting there too is we, you know, we really positioned this initially and still frankly position it in this way. That this service is for busy families. Our kind of customer, our, our key customer profile is like a dual working, dual income family with kids under 18. And that is the majority because we've been marketing to them. That is the majority of our client base. But even with this family forward messaging and like branding, 30% of our clients don't have kids. Many are single. So I mean, that I think has been a bit of a surprise as well, but it has just further illuminated the fact that really everyone can use this type of support.

Yeah, absolutely.

Which makes the market that much larger.

Yeah, Emily, and that's for sure. Fey's got an amazing future. So a couple of quick questions for you. One, very briefly, a top tip that you would give any aspiring or unnoticed entrepreneur?

I mean, just keep at it, right? It's like, wake up. I think you, you have peaks and valleys and, you know, something great happens today, something, you know, tricky could happen tomorrow and just like sticking with it. I think is common advice. So, nothing new there. But I will add that if you're feeling— I guess my other piece would be is if you're considering becoming an entrepreneur, I wanted to start a business. I was convinced I wanted to be an entrepreneur at 25. And I did not start this business until I was 41 because I felt like you know, there was always another job that came up or, you know, I needed to build more experience. And it's amazing once you finally, if you are feeling that way, once you finally kind of take control and do the thing that you wanted to do, which in my case was build something, it's incredible. It's incredibly invigorating. And, you know, so if you are thinking about taking the leap, do it.

Great. Well, Emily, that's good and encouraging words. I, I've been an entrepreneur since I was 27. I went to Singapore to start my first, uh, business, and I'm probably at the other end of the scale after 30 years. I'm thinking, oh, I could do the rest.

Nice to work for those companies.

I would. I wish I'd got a nice, a nice secure and steady job over all those years. Uh, I'd probably have a few less wrinkles. Emily King, one book or blog that you would recommend for people?

Yeah, this is hard, but I'm going to plug one of my favorites. It's a very short book. It's a great book to give to someone. It is called This Is Water by David Foster Wallace. And it's of particular, you know, it's very popular. A lot of people talk about it. I was lucky enough to here. So it was a graduation speech originally that has been turned into a book. And I was lucky enough to hear it delivered firsthand at my college graduation in 2005 from Kenyon College. The author, David Foster Wallace, then died a few years later. It was published posthumously, and it's become quite popular. But it is a, you know, it'll take you 20 minutes to read the little book. And it is something that you will— it is a message that you will think about often. I literally was thinking about it this morning. Okay. And I think it's great for entrepreneurs. Again, it's like, helps you keep perspective. I will leave it at that. But it's an incredibly powerful Okay, David Foster Wallace. Yes, this is water.

This is water. And if you would like to drink from the cooling tower that is Faye and get rid of all their problems, how can they get hold of you, Emily King?

Yeah, so our website is findfaye.com. So that's the easiest way to learn more about us and sign up. You can sign up for a free consultation, or you can go ahead and sign up for the service. If you want to reach me, I'm emily@findfaye.com and would love to help you or your family out. Or if any potential advisors are listening to this podcast, we're always looking for talent on the supply side as well.

Emily, that's fantastic. You pay so well. It pays better than podcasting. If I was in America, I'd be picking up a job. Yeah, unfortunately they don't have any advisors here in the UK. Emily King, thank you so much. We've used up our time. Thank you so much for joining me on the show today.

Thank you. It was lovely.

It was really lovely. So we've been talking to Emily Faye in that well-known town called Ogden. I think it's 360th by size as opposed to 360 population, just to clarify that. But a couple of lessons there. One is obviously that Finding a business that has both the buyers and the sellers and making sure that the proposition you've got is valid before you scale. And that is going to be a key takeaway, but also that to some degree, the simplicity of Emily's model, that there is, there is a need out there and she's matching it, but she's using the technology to add a lot of value. To that, and that's really where they're going to get the, the flywheel effect from that business. Once again, thank you for joining me, Jim James, on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. If you've enjoyed it, please do review it and share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur, because we don't want anyone to get left behind. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.