S8E8: Ty Haney and Breana Teubner, CEO and COO of TYB, Share about the Future of Commerce by Leveraging Community as a Growth Chanel

In the direct-to-consumer world, everyone was acquiring customers online, and so we focused on doing the opposite. It's a strategy that I call activate IRL and then amplify through digital and social. Literally, this started in this little house that became the first Outdoor Voices store in Austin, Texas, in the neighborhood called Clarksville.

Welcome back to season 8. Clauds, how we doing?

So well, can't believe it's 8 seasons of The Room Podcast.

It feels like just yesterday we were getting started in the middle of COVID and had this vision for sharing the future of founding stories to let other founders be in the room where it happened. And so much has changed for us since August 2020 when we first had this inception. You're now a founder and co-CEO of Priv, which is a startup unlocking and disrupting recurring revenue for e-commerce brands.

And Madison, you're crushing it in venture. You're now a partner overseeing investments at Divide VC, an early-stage venture firm in the Bay Area, and of course, an investor in Pryve. We're just two women navigating our careers and asking the people who inspire us to shed light on their stories. Unlocking Access starts with a conversation context, and as a reminder, we open the door to moments in technology history that traditionally happened behind closed doors. With our guests, we unpack the experiences that led to their success and look towards the future in their verticals.

And we hit an incredible milestone at the end of last season with Spotify sharing that we were a top 5% global shared podcast in the technology sector. And so we wanna thank you for being a loyal listener and helping us achieve this milestone of amplifying more equitable voices in the room where it happens. As you look towards season 8, get excited. We're excited. We have some incredible founders from the founder of Superhuman, the founder of Incredible Health, Webflow, Ty Haney with her new business TYB, and more. So join us every Tuesday where we sit down with leaders, founders, and funders who are changing the way it's always been done. You can expect themes across, of course, generative AI, navigating your startup in a downturn, the creator economy, and more. So be sure to hit subscribe, like, and follow so you don't miss any Tuesdays in the near future.

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Cooley is a global law firm built around startups and venture capital. The firm has been devoted to entrepreneurs and investors, partnering with both to transform breakthrough ideas into successful companies. Cooley works with thousands of entrepreneurs and newly formed companies to ensure that they are structured for growth and long-term success. Since 2005, Cooley has been ranked the number one most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Learn more about the firm at cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com, Cooley's award-winning free legal resource for startups. On today's episode of The Room Podcast, we sat down with Ty Haney and Branna Tubiner, CEO and COO of TYB, or Try Your Best. If you think you've heard Ty's name before, perhaps you have from her first startup, which she founded out of college, Outdoor Voices. A global athleisure retail phenomenon. Outdoor Voices redefined what it means to do things together in the outdoors with friends. You can still shop Outdoor Voices as a brand today. Ty and Brianna are partnering to bring some of that OV magic around community and brand loyalty to challenger and established brands alike with TYB. Their platform empowers community-integrated commerce by leveraging blockchain technology to help brands truly know and in turn reward their customers. Both Brianna and Ty came from creative roots at a young age through their family of origins. However, these creative launch pads took each of them into divergent journeys. In contrast to Ty's early entrepreneurial endeavors, Brianna's first job out of college was in politics. She highlights how her time from politics through to management consulting, strategy at Banana Republic, and most recently in gaming unlocked her passion for entrepreneurship. The two explore the etymology of TYB, partnering together at the C-suite level, and more. I have to say, this is an extra special episode for me as Brianna was and is one of my close mentors from my time at Gap, and I've always admired Ty from afar. In today's episode, we delve into themes such as leveraging communities as a growth channel, acquiring long-term meaningful customers in e-commerce, given the current shifts in data regulation and scaling effectively with an early-stage board. Let's open the door. Ty and Brianna, thank you so much for joining us today in The Room.

Happy to be here. Thanks for having us. And Madison, I love your green.

Thank you so much. It's almost spring, so I feel like I'm just really manifesting it into existence here in San Francisco. We're so excited to have you both to tell the story of TYB and what you're building in the future of brand loyalty and more. But we love to start with the beginning with all of our guests. So could you both tell us a little bit more about where you each grew up and how that informed your view of the world?

I'm zooming in from Tucson, Arizona, which feels somewhat similar to where I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. Big mountains to climb, lots of nature, lots of hiking. And that's really how I grew up with my family in Boulder, super outdoorsy, into sports. We'd hike what's called the Flatiron mountains, this area called Chautauqua above the University of Colorado every day. My mom and my aunt, they're twins and they love to hike. And so we love to hike as well. And prior to this was most recently in Austin, Texas, which I love. However, there's no mountains there. And so didn't realize until living in a very flat city how important and core to my being having things to climb and mountains to hike are. That's important just in movements, very much something that's important to my everyday and With my first company, After Voices, that was really the first kind of illustration of that being a core tenet of and kind of value to my life. And something I wake up very excited about still today is helping myself and people make movement as foundational to your everyday as eating, drinking, and sleeping.

I grew up in Southern California in Orange County. I think one of the more formative things is the oldest of 3 girls. So certainly have a father that is a changed man for having 3 women. And I think the thing that was Amazing is that he talked to us for real in the sense that I grew up believing that I could do anything that I set my mind to. And we grew up near the beach, and so the ocean has always been something that has been near and dear to my heart. So I joke with Ty, she's a little too inland for me now. I'm now in San Francisco, so I can get down to the marina or the beach quite often, but there's just something that feels like home for me. Being by the beach. I grew up with a family of creatives. I always say I'm the black sheep in terms of building businesses. My mom is a writer and my dad is an architect, and we thought differently in our house a lot. Like, I remember my dad painted a bright pink accent wall in my bedroom growing up because it was in style, and girls would come over to my house and be like, this is amazing. And he put up trapeze in my room as well. And so I got to play on the trapeze because it was fun. So I grew up in this world thinking anything was possible if it felt good and it felt right.

Both of you had like super formative experiences with your families and your sense of space. I love how you both are drawing on natural beauty that's around you, that inspired from within, and you're both incredibly successful and have this incredible confidence today. And to see that pull through from early childhood to what you're doing now, I'm curious, being a founder today is such an identity in and of yourself. Is that something, Ty, that you thought you would ever find yourself being?

Both my parents were great examples of founders, so I grew up with that view of the world. And it's funny that Brianna mentions a pink accent wall. My mom and my aunt started a company called Fresh Produce not too long before I was born. It's essentially this really brightly colored resortwear line, and they had many stores sold all over. You may have seen it growing up. They had mom and like kid matching muumuus with bright pink fish. But anyway, my mom and my aunt wear like fuchsia bright pink lipstick. And so that was their signature. And we'd always be observing colors of walls and colors of other people's lipsticks, et cetera. And they were very much builders. And I learned very much how to set a vision from my early years and then go do it because that's what they did every day. And they were amazing. Really fortunate to grow up in a household both my own and then my mom's twin sister, where just building and having curiosity, asking questions, observing, learning, having the desire to make things better was what I knew from being tiny. And then one other kind of funny thing just tied to where we are today. My mom and aunt were really into track, and so I got really into track and I have this very distinct image of, I think I was in 5th grade and we'd have like the school-wide whatever, run session, both girls and boys. And I was quite fast in 5th grade and I held the record from 4th grade into 5th grade. And as I was coming to the last part of the lap, my mom and my aunt are like sitting down outside the gate, go try, TYB baby, TYB baby. And like the best cheerleaders ever. But TYB stands for try your best and literally comes from my mom every day saying TYB baby in that kind of instance where you're trying to cross the finish line first or also to soccer practice, slumber party, whatever. It was something that she instilled in us from day one.

I had a chance to spend time with Ty's mom, and it's so interesting because now every time Ty talks about things, I'm like, ah, I know where that's from. It's infectious. And so I text her sometimes too, where her mom said a few things to me, I'm like, I'm still thinking about that. She's quite inspirational. But I've learned a lot from Ty. My background is quite different in the sense that I went more on a traditional— I don't even like using that word, but more of a path in terms of working for major big corporations like Walmart and Gap. And I'm a recovery management consultant. So for those listening, knowing that path. And so I spent a lot of time studying how things at scale work. And over the last few years, you know, joining and building a gaming company and scaling that from private to public, and then now Building TYB with Ty, I've learned so much about how you match these visions and these audacious goals that you have when you're building a company with a broader market and a market at scale. And so that's been a really interesting thing for me to see how you reconcile the two.

No, absolutely. I mean, both touch on so many great points. I love the, the idiom turned name of your now company. I'm an idiom user myself, as Claudia knows, or probably too much. But I think specifically what you're talking about, Brianna, of like the Ty coming from this origin story of founder first and knowing that was a path that was available to her through her origin. And then for you, it wasn't as obvious that was something you could become or something you could do. Could you touch a little bit on just the transition you felt in like your own sense of identity from being on Capitol Hill where you got your career started out in DC, coast to coast, and then back to the California coast and a little bit more about that metamorphosis for yourself.

I always joke, if you were to put out a continuum of the most structured, deliberately slow-moving organization to my life in TYB right now, I'm not sure if there's a more extreme, going from Capitol Hill to founding and building a company. The mental transformation that occurs for me has been more of an integration. When we talked about that origin story of growing up and the creativity, I think art, beauty, design at its essence is observing things around you and creating something from that. That's something that has been present in my personal life for so long. I think for me, my personal transformation was the confidence to integrate that into the business world and say, oh, I can see things in the way that they're working and this would make it better and more beautiful and more elegant. And so let me go build that. Again, I've learned so much from Ty in terms of her nature to start from that and build that. And I think why we work together is that I am bringing the market perspective of having been in that world and translating the way that people think in a world at scale.

You both have stellar backgrounds to build Try Your Best, or TYB, which is a community management platform to directly engage and reward fans for taking valuable actions within your ecosystem. Both your backgrounds really have set you apart and brought forth this kind of incredible vision, which we'll dive a little bit deeper into momentarily. Brianna, you spent years at brands like Walmart and Banana Republic, and Ty, you of course, as you mentioned, were the founder of Outdoor Voices. Ty, could you ground our listeners in what the aha moment was for Outdoor Voices back in 2014?

It connects to my origin story, so this is a nice walk-up. I kind of in high school, played many sports, ran track, played basketball, rode horses, et cetera, and was someone who thought at one point, if I can just get fast enough, I'll be in the Olympics running hurdles. I didn't get fast enough. Damn it. Right after high school, I was deciding where to go to college. I ended up taking a year off, have always been design inclined, and ended up going to Parsons Design School in the city. At Parsons, I was on the intramural basketball team, which didn't last too long cuz my height landed me right into the janitor's armpits. That were like super sweaty, super stinky, and I'm like, get the hell outta here. But something I had noticed was I was a lot less active cuz I didn't have practice or coaches to keep me active. And more so than physically, I noticed the effects on my mind. And so I started very dissimilar to most kids who went to Parsons, just like requiring that I ran every day. And it wasn't a fast run, it was a jog on the West Side Highway. And in school I recognized looking back how much a brand like Nike had impacted me in the sense that I felt like I could be the fastest, cross the finish line first, et cetera. But really activity had transformed into like a whole new version and it was less around being the fastest and all around how do I find inspiration on a daily basis to like move my body, particularly in a place like New York City. And so that was the little kernel of inspiration for Outdoor Voices, which ultimately became this little— I think of it as like the younger sister to Nike, but this little rebel rouser in the activewear space that had been a traditionally male-founded world. And our mission was to get the world moving by simply inspiring people to be active on a daily basis, by making activity fun, social, something that you do with friends, and like free fitness from performance. And so Outdoor Voices, I started the concept came to me obviously through in school, but I formally started it like a year out of Parsons. I think I was 23, and it really became this beautiful company that we had this really passionate, engaged community of recreationalists, we called it, that we're doing things. And that was really the motto. You may have seen— I spent 8 years building After Voices directly out of my Parsons school experience.

That's such a fun little tie with your mom's company that was so known for the bright pinks, where Outdoor Voices— I mean, everyone has seen your two-tone kind of pastel and navy legging on a trail near you. Definitely part of redefining what activewear was and is and really making movement cool again. So thank you for sharing that founding journey and story there. Brianna, in the same timeframe, you were joining Banana Republic global supply chain team. What was a scaled brand like BR's orientation towards these up-and-comer direct-to-consumer brands, like the cool kids on the block?

First of all, I have to make two shoutouts. One is that Madison and I were working together at that time. You were in the product management group, right?

Yes, exactly.

Yes. And then the second, the team there has just done an incredible relaunch of the brand. So if you haven't seen it, it's beautiful. And I think the whole quiet luxury trend is just super on point. I bought more in the last year from Banana Republic than I had when I worked there.

I know, and we don't have our discounts anymore, and I'm kind of sad about it.

Literally every other day, Madison and I are like, did you see that thing? It's from BR. Like, we want that.

Shout out to their creative director, Adam. He's an amazing friend and done a wonderful job. But yes, we were worried, and this talks about why I think the vision of Try Your Best and TYB is so poignant right now is because what we noticed, and like any good management consultant, I remember building this 2x2 where we were looking at all of these D2C brands that were coming on the scene. We were also looking at their size. A lot of them had $20 to maybe $200 million in revenue. So we knew a couple things. One, it was really hard to get past $500 million as a consumer brand at the time. Headline, it's still really hard to do that. And second, we saw how specific and particular a brand could be for a subset of a community. And what I mean by that is with the advent of social and technology and our ability to see more of each other and see what problems to solve in brand speak existed, we saw a lot of brands that were popping up to serve a more quote unquote niche audience where they could better solve specific problems, whether that's fit for petites or movement every day in the active space or hue tone colors for your actual color of skin. What we saw is that this universal paintbrush for all of America isn't going to work as well, and we need to understand how you would get really close to a community and understand the problems that they want to solve. And the brand experience that they want to be a part of. And so when we talk about TYB, I think you'll see why we built a tool that enables that for all brands of all sizes to know the community better.

I think community is just such an important concept that brands are investing in right now, and it's core to making sure you're building a loyal following that's going to continue to buy from you, especially in uncertain macroeconomic times. So I'd love to dig into community a little bit more. Tai, we could probably spend a whole other podcast talking about the journey and path at Outdoor Voices, but one question that feels relevant for where you are today is how OV thought about building community and what that meant for your go-to-market. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Community is such a buzzword, and we're with TIB helping brands make it more tangible. So when you say community, when you engage your community, How do you actually show essentially the return on investment when you can make community a growth channel? My experience with this is at Outdoor Voices, community was really our moat. And in the direct-to-consumer world, everyone was acquiring customers online. And so we focused on doing the opposite. And it's a strategy that I call activate IRL and then amplify through digital and social. And so literally this started in this little house that became the first Outdoor Voices store in Austin, Texas, in the neighborhood called Clarksville. And we picked this low-rent house in a residential neighborhood because we wanted a place where we could activate and it'd be convenient to get to, almost like a coffee shop that you visit every day. And so we started hosting dog walks, joggers clubs, yoga on the lawn, and really creating this buzz around this tiny little store. That activation, that IRL programming, that community started to help us unlock the total channel. So we'd see direct impact from a new customer perspective to Texas as a full market in the total business view. And so that's really the strategy that we leaned into and then went to Nashville, went to LA, went to New York, but really a different playbook than going to Fifth Avenue and securing kind of a high-dollar lease. And so what we found as we clicked into the data was this community IRL activation strategy ultimately netted 4 times more valuable customers from a lifetime value perspective than anyone who came in through the more paid-to-play Instagram or Facebook journey. So that was the first aha and a lot of what's informed our strategy at TYB.

Those learnings and insights are obviously integral to what TYB is doing today. It's 2020. You've left Ovi. E-commerce is hitting an all-time high because everyone's stuck at home online shopping. I was definitely one of those people. And the entrepreneurial bug strikes again. Tell us about the initial concept and product for Try Your Best.

I say this quite often now, but I very much believe that direct-to-consumer as we've known it for the last 10 years is not direct. And most companies are spending, in our case it was 30 to 40% of our dollars raised on acquiring not sticky customers through Instagram or Facebook. And I had to take a step back and say, who's winning here? I think next to that, the direct-to-consumer VC-funded model is very challenged and I got stuck squarely in the middle of that, in that it was easy to raise capital. In a lot of cases, we raised too much capital for the businesses we were building, which connected to this huge pressure to grow at breakneck speeds. And so that was certainly not a model or recipe for building a long-term sustainable business. And I was like right in the middle of that happening. So a question I asked myself coming off of that OV experience is, who's winning here? It wasn't the founder and it wasn't the fans, though we were the ones who had really built this company. And so I took a moment and recognized that there was an opportunity to create a better business model for brands that had been structurally reliant on ad platforms like we were at Outdoor Voices. And like many great companies, it started with a personal pain point and experience in terms of this being a challenge that the model's broken. And at the same time, started seeing these really interesting, almost supercharged communities taking flight in the Web3 world. And as I learned more about the architecture of these communities, I became really interested in essentially bringing this blockchain technology to the consumer world and truly creating a place where brands could directly incentivize their loyal fans for helping them to grow. And then ultimately fans would have something to show for it from a value creation standpoint over time.

We're gonna dive a little bit deeper into what your technology is doing and the impact on customer loyalty, but I'd love to dig a little bit deeper into a core part of the founding journey, which is fundraising. To date, you've raised over $10 million in funding from the likes of Unusual, Castle Island, and more. First of all, congratulations. We're curious, who was the first person to say yes to investing in TYB?

That's a great question. Two people, Jen Rubio from Away, who is a peer founder, and then Aldag, who was an investor at Outdoor Voices and had seen everything that we had gone through, but believed in my and the founding team's ability to set a vision and go after it. And I think my mom was in there too in a small way. So she's very core to this entire story.

That's awesome. You have this incredible concept, you've raised capital, things are looking up and to the right. You're obviously crushing it. But as a founder myself, I know how things don't always go as planned. Could you share a moment in this journey where you were like, oh no, this is not going the way we thought it was going to go?

Outdoor Voices, I spent 8 years building it and 90% of that experience was awesome. 10% was like, holy shit, what the fuck's going on here? Maybe I've heard it a few times. People are like, I can't believe you started building again. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, that's in my nature. Of course I'm gonna build again. I'm offended. But one thing I'm very grateful for coming off the OV experience is that I have a whole host of learnings that are now actively being applied to TYB and doing things differently. And the number one thing that I learned from the OV experience was when shit got really hard, I didn't have a robust leadership team in place. And that's something that I've done very differently at TYB and So lucky to have Brianna and some other people on the team. That was, I remember at the end of my time at Outdoor Voices looking around and being like, this is very lonely. And tying that back to this pressure kind of at the board level to hire the best person for these roles in a way that they almost became unicorns. And so I'd spend so much time with expensive recruiters trying to find the perfect person. And I think of hiring almost like dating where you need to find someone with a very sharp spike for what you love and need, but they don't need to have every single thing. Brianna has every single thing. That was like a very lonely moment looking around and not having leadership team at Outdoor Voices. And ultimately that's very much informed how I and we are building differently at TYB.

In terms of what came to mind for me when Ty was just speaking is a moth to a flame in the sense that I had spent so much time seeing firsthand the challenges and problems that companies of all scale and size were having in terms of resonating with the market. And I had seen gaming to the point that I went to go and join a gaming company. It was this idea when Ty mentioned in Austin and creating this house and this place that people wanted to be and go, it's just for me, gaming was seeing that 75% of the gaming industry, literally the revenue is from people buying goods inside of games. And that revenue stream only started in 2006. We all know before, right, we would go and buy the cartridge and the console and you would play your game for as long as possible and then you'd go buy another one. So the advent of cloud gaming and microtransactions inside of games is something that's happened over the last 10 or 15 years. And when I saw that and I saw the engagement, you know, on our gaming platform, it was— the plurality was women 35 to 45 playing Candy Crush, picking up their kids from school. And I saw that this was the new mall and Instagram combined, and that every brand was gonna have to not go into gaming is how I think a lot of people think about it now, but thinking about what that engagement feels like, just like it feels 20, 30 years ago, it felt fun to go to the mall. Now it feels fun and normal and natural to participate in this competition and this identity expression inside of these games. And so I knew that brands were gonna have to figure out a way to create that same experience to be relevant. And so when I saw what Ty was doing, I immediately saw it. To her point about dating, when you see something and you know something to be true, so I, I reached out through one of our investors and we got to know each other. I was like, this is something that we can commercialize and scale together, and I wanna do that.

I'm thinking a lot about this at the investor level because I think in COVID everyone thought e-commerce left 10 years into the future, and in many ways it did. However, now that we're back to what everyone's calling post-pandemic, there are some behaviors that are remaining offline and it's not completely left us forward, but we know more about the community and the users who had tried to become digital native in this era in which that was our only safe option. And I think it has forced forevermore large brands, gaming companies, and more to think about how do I intimately know my community, both IRL and URL. And so I'm very bullish on what you're building with TOAB. Taking a step back, we talk about the product a little bit. How do we think about TOAB's core product? I wanna dovetail a bit into how that is slightly different for both large-scale than our price brands like a Gap versus more of a long-tail Shopify store, but maybe we could start with the product.

Very simply, TYB enables brands to make their community a growth channel. So what do we mean by that? It's an all-in-one platform that enables brands to directly engage and reward their fans for taking valuable actions. Valuable actions can be anything from hosting or attending an IRL event to sharing on social, writing reviews, inviting their friends to participate. And then most importantly, we are building measurement of that community. So understanding those actions, connecting IRL to digital and being able to measure. We see a future where all brands, regardless of shape, size, or scale, will have community as what we know today as part of their return on ad spending model. And they'll know for every dollar that they invest, they're getting X% back on their LTV, whether that's an average order value or an increased frequency. And so our tool not only enables brands to participate, manage, and engage with their communities in those actions, but also make community measurable.

I've often thought about this. I'm a loyal Rent the Runway user. I interned for them back in the day and was a part of their ambassador program. Technically still am, RTR Madison, for anyone wondering. But I actually one time, I don't know for what reason, signed up with my work email instead of logging in through my normal personal email, and I still get emails from them on my work email. They should know. Homegirl's been a loyal subscription member for like 5 years. How do they not know this is the same person? And so I think there's both identity reconciliation here and then understanding the true ROI of a user that is just being lost today.

100%. And that's the first step with a brand onboarding their community into their community ecosystem on TYB. It starts with a collectible. And this is something again, coming from the OV experience where At OV, we had this blue Doing Things hat that was physical and you could only get it by participating in the mission. So it became this earn-to-play type engagement. You had to show up to an event, stretch, get sweaty, whatever it was, and then you got this blue Doing Things hat as your reward. And then you'd see people on the trail in Austin or yoga class in New York high five, hey, you're part of this too. Like, that's so cool. And it really became this symbol of your belonging as an individual to the Outdoor Voices belief system, our community, etc. In our world today, this blue physical Doing Things hat becomes digital, lives in a wallet, but it's connected to your ID. And so this collectible essentially starts to, anywhere you go, become your passport as Madison and reflect essentially your contributions to the community from a dynamic rewards perspective. So it's a really elegant and seamless way to leverage the blockchain technology to give people that one view of themselves and brands that one view of that customer.

Yeah, what we've seen on the market side is that again, brands of all sizes and scale have traditionally engaged with a loyalty program that's quite transactional and plops down, right? When you join a loyalty program on a brand right now, spend $100, get 100 points, that's it. Or we have the ambassador side where they're investing in particular influencers coming out to use their product. But we all know that I care way more what my neighbor and friend Claire feeds her dog than I do Kim Kardashian at this point. And so we found these really interesting pain points to solve in terms of the now of how brands want to democratize and make more three-dimensional, right? Not just two-way, but peer-to-peer and enable that social proof that people are into your brands. I think too, the last 15 years in terms of the CEO agenda for brand, for consumer brand builders, it's been omni and it's been solely focused on omni inventory and moving inventory across e-com and IRL stores. The next generation is gonna be about omni digital. And so how do you connect the upper funnel of marketing, these activities, the style in store, the makeup try-on to the lower funnel, performance marketing, loyalty, and ambassador conversion programs. And we're providing a view of the entire funnel for brand marketers.

It couldn't be a more important time to be doing this with iOS changes, Google algorithm changes. Maybe just bring it to life. How are you working with brands like Topicals?

We love a la mode. So Topicals is the fastest growing skincare brand in Sephora. They were having challenges around their ambassador program with managing it via multiple spreadsheets and not being able to be as inclusive in terms of the type of influencers and members that they could bring into their community. And then lastly, the community couldn't see each other. So for those of you all that built brands, you cast a really wide net to find these influencers and ambassadors that perhaps resonate with your brand, maybe 2 or 3. Become ROI positive. It's quite laborious and the ROI is quite low. And so Topicals, they transferred over to TYB in October. They had about a little over 1,000 members at the time. They transferred 95% of those community members onto the platform. They've now grown 25% month over month. They're almost at 4,000 community members on our platform. And so the natural question is why? There's been 8x engagement on the TYB platform than there was prior, and that's primarily driven by the fact that they can now see and hear each other for the first time. So they share their content with each other, they share tips on how to create and make content, and then they're incentivized and they're rewarded for the actions that they're taking that they can now redeem on the Topicals website via our Shopify application. For really cool perks like discounts for their body butter product.

TYB helps brands create kind of an experiential funnel in a very consistent and seamless way. And a lot of brand builders have asked me like, how did you do this at Outre Voices, et cetera? And it's quite simple. It's about giving your community something to do and then starting to build in these rituals and routines that they can participate in, tell their friends about, and you know, it grows and grows over time. But we're really thinking about TYB as this engagement layer that sits into the tech e-com stack. A lot of people in our consumer space have baggage around NFT and crypto and that world as we've seen it, which is fair. We're really focused on creating this experience where none of that language is used, but you're getting the benefit of the technology. And so what TYB is today is a toolkit that allows brands to automate and scale rewards for users taking these actions and make community measurable, which is tied to my belief and our belief that really the future and the near-term future of brand building is two-part. It's about co-creating. So bringing this trusted group of fans into this world where they can help influence and shape the future of a brand. It could be through picking names of Topicals body butter or picking from a line sheet, like which of the 5 styles you wanna move forward with. And then tied to that is incentivization. And so within 2iV, as people take action, they get rewarded automatically with brand coins into their wallet, which is quite cool.

That's incredible. And I can see how that impact across many different brands for the consumer can help them feel just plugged in and really a true partner to the brand itself. Claudia works with brands every day. You guys are working with brands every day. I'm actually the one least working with brands on this call, but I still feel like I know brands and talk to founders. But the average consumer like doesn't really talk to a brand founder. And so what I love about this is it creates more accessibility, which is part of our mission here at the podcast around knowing and being a part of a true community.

We're seeing this resonate with big companies, massive companies with hundreds of thousands of customers as well. I think the McDonald's CEO had a lovely quote a couple of weeks ago saying, we realize we're going to have to pass the pen. So you see all these challenges. Around helping us name the menu item or co-create the menu item. And I think what we're learning from a lot of our enterprise customers, which are brands over $200 million in revenue, is that they're using the tool to experiment with how to get to know their community and evolve their consumer insights into a more dynamic loyalty program. So this is really for all shapes and sizes of brands to get to the next generation.

Well, and partnership within the e-commerce tech stack is incredibly important. You mentioned you guys sit within the marketing layer, but also of course touching other parts of the ecosystem as an engagement tool. How do you guys think about partnering within the e-commerce tech stack? Of course, besides Priv, what are you thinking about our up-and-coming players in and around that ecosystem?

The players are all solving the same problem. Problem. And the problem is that in order for a brand to grow at this point, you have to know your customer in a more intimate way. What's happened over the last 5 years, Madison, you referenced with the 14 iOS and Google privacy changes, is that the old system is this way of, I'm going to track your digital ID or ISP through cookies and figure out, okay, Madison, went to Kuyana this morning and looked at bags, and then she looked at a flight to Nantucket, and then she was looking for a West Elm couch. And then I hire a bunch of really smart data machine learning capabilities to help me understand the probabilistic outcome of you clicking on an ad that I'm going to create and convert. And so that world is is somewhat in decline in the sense that for every brand CAC, that, that ad spend has risen by almost 60%. And then the customers acquired through that are one and done. They're not sticking around. And so that is the problem that I think anyone in the e-com enablement tech stack is looking at on the consumer acquisition and retention side. And ultimately, as we start to measure and define out the entire funnel for brands where they can start to connect those activations, those IRL activations, incentivize their community members to wanna be part of something that's bigger than themselves and bigger than the brand, they'll be able to connect that to their conversion funnel. And essentially we call it community integrated commerce. We think the future is built on community integrated commerce KPIs where you're able to measure and connect the entire funnel.

Thank you for breaking down that connective thread through what everyone's focusing on in e-commerce enablement. What you mentioned is exactly what we're focusing on in e-commerce enablement with subscriptions and just trying to get folks to be more loyal consumers to our brand. So certainly resonates.

You guys are partnering together as CEO and COO to scale and build TYB, and I feel confident that the hands of my consumer loyalty is in good hands with you guys. So I'm excited to see Come to a brand near me soon. But as you're scaling a business, especially in this more challenged macroeconomic time, you've both worked in the past in other companies with boards at the early stage all the way through scaled businesses. And I know even for you, Brandon, at the public company board level, and I think more and more we're seeing candidly at the founder level today that people are starting boards and they're establishing them within one of their initial or second fundraisers. Just curious what your guys' shared take on the perspective of the board is, pros and cons or lessons you've learned with working with board members.

It's a dance. And so, in my first experience, I would say I was potentially too impressionable and I think the right outcome comes from the healthy amount of friction. And so obviously we're coming from a management perspective recommending to the board what we think is the best kind of path forward. And board members are reporting to their LPs. Until I went through the last experience with Outdoor Voices, I wasn't eyes wide open to all of the dynamics. And the best thing in the world is having a politician on your team. And so I really look for that in checking the box with the COO and Brianna's experience is fantastic in the boardroom. But my headline is there needs to be a healthy tension and that should be table stakes. It's not always kumbaya and that's okay.

Yeah, I think Ty hits on a really important point that being aware of the business that we're all in, which includes many stakeholders, right? It includes the customers, the problems that you're trying to solve, and we have complexity there in the sense Ty and I talk a lot about this. Are we solving the brand customer problem here or, and are we solving the user customer problem here, right? And there's always tension there. I say, look, I'm gonna put my brand customer hat on today and advocate for the brand customer, and she'll put her community hat on and just say that that's not cool. And I, and I get it, and I trust her on that side of the coin. And we have great tension there. And I think what we're both doing is we're representing the customer there to build the best product possible. How that transfers to your question, Madison, is similarly venture investors enable this wonderful world, right? Where we can say, we think there's a problem here to solve, like give us some time to go flesh that market out and help subsidize that. And then as we start to grow, then we're all successful. I think in this time of early stage building, the venture, the investor side, their customer is their investor, their LPs, and they have to adhere to those market constraints. And so as we build, I think it's always working with the board to say, okay, is this realistic? Meaning, does a market want to invest in this? And are we growing at the right pace where we can invest in this business model? So similarly, I think we have wonderful board members that create that lovely tension for us and keep us honest in the sense of, are we building something that's gonna scale in a market that receives funding in this way?

I've also learned that defining what winning looks like is a helpful exercise. And I think it's obvious because this is how venture's set up, but like they are investing in teams that are taking big swings, but knowing firsthand there's a small percentage of those massive swings that actually come to fruition. And so in a lot of our sessions, we start with just realigning on what winning looks like. And for me and for us, that's optionality. And so whether it's 5 years from now selling for 5x or 10x, X versus 7 years from now selling for 1,000X, whatever that might be. The name of the game for me is having the optionality to exit sooner or later, but for outcomes that, you know, we're all happy with. That alignment on the definition for each of us around winning has been an important topic to start board meetings with.

It's an active question I'm asking myself as I'm entering into having been an investor for 3.5 years and taking on more board positions. And so I really appreciate you guys touching on that because I'm aspiring to be the best board member I can be and learning from people like you who are on the other side and Claudia as well, really helpful to understand like what is value add at the board level versus like what detracts and distracts. So appreciate you touching on that topic.

It's also super helpful, me as a founder, like seed stage founder, to be able to hear those perspectives because I think as we're kind of scaling and growing, it's been interesting to just hear so many different perspectives on the board. So I think really what you laid out resonates and seems very realistic.

My brother-in-law is a founder, had a big exit recently and is kind of in startup mode again. And I got to observe essentially one of his calls with his board members and like, it's feisty and like a whole different dynamic than the way that I've played ball. And I'm starting to get more comfortable going head to head, respectfully of course, but here's what, you know, our goals are, here's what winning looks like, and then let's let this be conversational. I wanna hear directly what's top of mind for you, like no tiptoeing around things. And that dynamic, just getting to see how it's done differently, particularly with a male CEO with his board members, is like an interesting model that has been helpful kind of to get a more productive dynamic in board sessions as of late.

It's super helpful to just like hear that called out because I think a lot of people have preconceived notions of, as a founder, this is how I should be interacting with the board. So I appreciate that, that perspective. As we come up on time, I'd love to shift gears away from TYB to yourselves personally. Brianna Thai, what's next for both of you as people?

We were just texting about this. I can't wait until I can become the next mom pop star. And I saw someone's opening, I think it was from Maggie Rogers, and I haven't looked at this band yet, but they're called Soccer Mommy. And I'm like, damn, I'm gonna have to go like buy that name from them. That's so good. I have two kids, a lot of dogs, et cetera, and a country singer for a husband. And sometimes I'm like, damn, that looks like so much fun. And so that's what's next for me. I don't know how soon or how far.

My vision is to, in the vein of Chainsmokers and Coco and Breezy, so basically be a DJ where all the moms come out and then you get to like dance your pants off. It's great exercise. So that's kind of what I'm looking to do. So maybe, maybe tour of like 2028 or something like that.

DJ Breezy? Is that your— could that be your—

my DJ name is B Money.

Oh, sorry.

Okay.

Yes. Apologize.

I already had that figured out, please. I've got lots of playlists on Spotify too. So for those listening, uh, you know, DM me.

We'll link those below.

Yeah, exactly. I have a couple sets, so I would love to get the co-creation from this community and the feedback. I made a— now you got me going. I made a really great— produced by Rick Rubin. I'm obsessed with Rick Rubin, the music producer. So I got some. I'm gonna send 'em to you and you're gonna link to 'em.

Please do.

All right, so here's the beginning. Yeah, and then I think one thing that Ty and I both share is just this, I'll say it in my words, but like an inner world where movement is important. So for me, that's really been yoga. I have similar to like, for those of you that have seen Gladiator where he has those flash forwards or back where he's walking through his land with the brushing the wheat. For me, it's like me and having just finished yoga in my clogs, like working on my garden. So. I think that's the future that I have painted out.

These were probably the most fun answers we've ever gotten to this question. So thank you.

Most people say like doubling down my revenue growth.

Like, I mean, honestly, that's a tribute to Ty and I'm going to embarrass you a little bit, but I think as we talked about my integration of creativity and fun into the business world, I think that's something that comes so natural to her. And so she's really shown me how I can bring that side of myself into the business world. And I think particularly as women, giving us permission and the confidence to bring the things that we can see that others can't into the business world, and that can also be successful in what's best for business.

We have our hero question, our closing question that we ask everyone on the podcast. Who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on yourself and your career?

Whitney Wolfe from Bumble. So we met when we were both running companies, our companies in Austin, and I think she's phenomenal, but I think we both built companies that were very mission-driven. And really what I respect and love about her is her focus on making money. And that's something that I'm much more equally bringing to the table in just the way that we run the company on a daily basis. So I'm gonna go back and say yes. Tripling, quadrupling our revenue this quarter. That's what's next for us. But tied to that, I think just from a female founder making money and exiting in such a tremendous way really is going to allow more women to essentially get capital for their companies. And so that's obviously a big issue, but someone asked me the other day, like, how do we move that 2% or even less of females getting funded? How do we move that up? And we just need more examples of big exits. Like people go where the money goes, and she's been a tremendous kind of example of that.

It's so interesting 'cause we didn't even, we didn't talk about this before, or Ty and I didn't talk about this answer before, obviously, but mine is a woman named Sonia Singhal, who was the CEO of Gap Inc., so $16, $17 billion company. And I started working with her when she was the head of global supply chain for the Gap Inc. brands and sat near her and interacted with her quite a bit. As she became the CEO of Old Navy and then the CEO of Gap Inc. And right before I, I left the Gap Inc. family, we were in a room and she had just gotten back from Washington, DC. She had been invited to go meet with the president at the time to talk about the pandemic and the recovery as a major consumer brand. And there was a moment, 'cause having been in Washington and then here in San Francisco at Gap, and I was, just, "Sonia, that's so exciting. Like how you were the only woman there, the only woman of color." I will never forget this. She looked me dead in the eye and she said, "Brianna, now we have to win." And Ty and I share this incredibly where we do have a maniacal focus on the market and conversion and revenue. And it's not just about being here. And to Ty's credit, when we first met in person, we had a very honest conversation where I said, "I'm a woman, in case you hadn't noticed." And, uh, to her credit, she looked me dead in the eye and she said, "We'll use it to our advantage." And so I think that's a huge credit to her. And the point is, now that we're all here, we have to win.

There's no better note to end on than that.

Mic drop. Thank you so much, Ty and Brianna, for coming on the podcast today. This was such a fun conversation. We've loved sitting down with you and learning more about your stories.

Thank you, ladies. Thanks for creating this platform. Congratulations to you on your 8th season.

Really appreciate the time, you guys. Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast. If you want more from The Room every week, subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com/newsletter. We'll be back next week with a new episode Tuesday, 10:00 AM Eastern, 7:00 AM Pacific. See you in the room.

All opinions expressed by Claudia Madison McIlwain and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of The5EC. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.