The Story of Core to Coeur
A six part series reflecting on who we are, how far we’ve come, and where we’re going.
by Madison Page, CEO + Co-Founder of Core to Coeur
Be sure to follow this Medium page or check out our Instagram daily to see the story unfold!
Part I: The Pilates Lady With A Dream
Life Can be Trying As a Teacher of Pilates
It’s 2015, and I’ve just spent a year working to build my Pilates private practice. I have a good cadence in my studio group classes, private students, and making just enough money to cover the cost of my monthly Los Angeles rent, bills, and student loans. I was holding it together, but had been dreaming of living in a less expensive, quieter city, one that wouldn’t be such a grind. A quiet dream to move to the Pacific Northwest took shape. Bike rides, beer gardens, friends, home before 9:00pm. A balanced life. So I loaded up my tiny Prius in the middle of winter, and off I went to Portland, Oregon.
TL;DR: My utopian idea of Portland did not match the lived experience of Portland. Wage stagnation, rising housing costs if you could find a place to live. I had no idea how difficult it would be replicating my income in a new city, a town with less awareness of Pilates, and thus less willingness to pay for it. I got a job cleaning my apartment manager’s Airbnb, driving from the northwest to southwest many times in one day, jumping from one unsafe living situation to another. So basically the same version of L.A., only now with more rain and less secure housing.
Author’s Note: Studies show movement and fitness instructors make below poverty wage teaching classes, so my story is the same for many others. We often need to live in bigger cities where folks are willing to pay for quality movement instruction, but the cost of living exceeds our pay. We spend thousands of dollars on our education. We work with students with complicated histories, trauma from being a culture that demands we look a certain way, surgeries, injuries, and everything in between. We are a vastly over-educated population working alongside other trainers with little to no certifications, in gyms that don’t pay well, in an industry that’s vastly unregulated. But I digress. Back to the story.
Moving To The Great Unknown
Out of personal crisis of identity, purpose, and income, I moved south to a small Oregon town to live with my long — time partner. I was spending a lot of time communing with the internet goddesses of Instagram, in part due to loneliness, but also because of my new foray into the world of biomechanics and “natural movement”. Katy Bowman, and many other folks from the Restorative Exercise community often posted tips and science based insights on human movement. I could learn from them without being in the same physical place as them. I started noticing many movement teachers like me, advertising classes on Skype to their students on IG. I would look at their webpages, and thought — I could do this too, so I did.
So, I began to teach over Skype. I quit dancing professionally, I hiked a lot, listened to Frank Ocean’s blond album and cried, got a job at a local Pilates studio (that has since closed down due to COVID-19), and basically started off doing my own independent thing. One weekday night, my partner and I were having dinner with his group of start-up founder friends, him being a founder as well. Half buzzed from Japanese beer, half trying to connect with these weird start-up types that work for free for like 14 hours a day, I told them about what I was doing with my students and teaching them over Skype. They told me about Patreon, and other “maker” platforms who enable folks to go online and earn incomes. They encouraged me to think of my business on a larger scale. There were more movement teachers like me. So, I applied to the local start-up accelerator program to get the support to flesh this idea out.
I literally have no clue why I thought I could build what they were talking about. Total ignorance to think I could. I feverishly applied to the program with blind confidence.
My company name upon entry? SkyPilates.
Actual Application Question to the Accelerator Program:
Question 1: Who is your competition?
Maddy’s Answer: I don’t believe in competition.
Thank Goddess for a patient partner who edits everything I write.
My Time At A Start-Up Accelerator With Next To No Business Skills
I got into the program under the wire thanks to my partner’s editing prowess, along with twelve other incredible start-up founders. Entrepreneurs are also artists, I would soon learn, just in different clothes.
But I didn’t know what to wear in this new world. I didn’t have blazers, I thought I needed a pantsuit. My mom, assuaging my anxiety of looking like I was unprepared on my first day of class, purchased a box from StitchFix with business woman clothes, but for a Pilates person so I could continue to move around.
I realized very early on I was obsessed with the branding of this company as I was with the actual formation of it and I’m not ashamed to say it! Let’s be honest, most fitness brands are terribly uncool. I dreamed of colors, fonts, tone, and people representing the business that affirmed that magic one feels when they are content and healthy in their bodies. I became totally obsessed with finding the perfect name of this business that would embody ease, safety and most of all — play.
My pivoted company name? Attend.
I learned about business models, customer profiling, venture investing, bootstrapping, and some casual sexism and misogyny thrown in for good measure. I was a sponge, and I wanted to soak everything in. Except for the sexism obviously — that can go take a hike.
In start-ups, you’re taught that the best marker that the founder is onto something special is what’s called traction. With 0 dollars spent, I sent an email out to my friends and colleagues explaining that I needed a beta test with research participants to get feedback, learn about our customers, and understand what we should be building before we hit the ground running. We had 23 participants, and afterward, 12 converted into paying customers, and 10 are still on the platform today. Traction was on the horizon.
“You had a really successful beta. You are laser focused on your market” .
— Actual feedback I will never forget.
During this beta, we surveyed price-points for our participants, what classes they would take repeatedly, how old they were, how much they were willing to spend on fitness, and of course, what we should call the company after having experience taking these movement classes. I still did not have a clear idea. Everyone (every mentor, advisor, literally everyone) told me to stop focusing on the name. “Maddy. You need to spend this much energy on the actually development of the business.”
- HomeBody
- EnCore
- The Centre for Human Potential
- The Boney Landmark (Inside movement nerd joke)
- Bones and Curves
… on and on and on I would write these lists of names of the company.
I believed the name would carry the company forward. I believed it would serve to tell our story, that “working out” is never about “working out”. It’s about creating a relationship to your body that feels good, that feels like you’re being your own mama. So that people knew — these are our values— these are the teachers we will attract — these are the students that will develop lasting relationships to themselves and our company.
And then I woke up one morning about halfway into the program, tapped the notes app in my phone and wrote two words:
Core
Coeur.
The center of myself, meets the heart of my students, and vice versa. You can’t have one without the other.
Another Author’s note: Just this morning in 2020, I had a conversation with a dear friend, an early advocate, and now who’ll be joining the team of C2C. She said to me — “I know it’s cheesy but you all are doing the right thing at the core of all of it. And Maddy, you have so much heart”.
Final Name: Core to Coeur.
Every decision we have ever made has been guided by our name. And I’ll give this advice — if something is pulling you, an idea that you cannot quit — it’s totally okay. Even though it may be totally consuming your brain. It will make itself known in time.
The End of the Beginning
Pitch presentations (what the start-up cool kids refer to as “Demo Day”) finally arrived at the beginning of Fall 2018, and I was the very last presentation. Like the professional performer I was, I had practiced so much, that I could repeat the words backwards and forwards.
Three fourths of the way through the pitch, my mic went out.
Without blinking an eye, I put the mic behind my back, and shouted the rest of my pitch to the 250 person auditorium:
“The second Coeur of our business is French for heart. And that is exactly what we’re doing, creating a heart-centered approach to fitness.”
By the end of it, my voice was hoarse, I needed a glass of wine, but my business had launched.
All I needed was a viable business model, paying customers, and money to start it.
How we crafted the next chapter of Core to Coeur with research, long nights, and tons of standing at dynamic work stations — continued below in Part II.
Part II: How to Start a Start-Up from Scratch
A mentor and advisor Joe told me before I went on stage to pitch for Demo Day, that “This is just one small part of the long trajectory of your business, and it will have literally 0% bearing on the success of your company”. Oh how right he was. That pitch had nothing to do with how we’d learn how to operate the company, how to implement the initial idea in the first place, how to look for the right people to join the team, or how to continue building when there is no success in sight, no reward that would keep us moving.
My friends who have kids and I discuss the uncanny similarities between birthing a business and birthing a baby. You are creating something from nothing that will eventually live and exist in the world without you, and so if you are able, you need to plan as much as possible before its arrival while it’s in the womb.
As my friend and founding C2C teacher Anula Maiberg said at the very beginning of this journey:
“You are giving birth to a very digital baby”.
- Anula
So we got busy preparing.
Pushing The Boulder Up The Hill
Before you start a start up you need to decide on the proper type of business entity you’ll have, then file the entity with your state. In order to do that you need to fill out a lot of paper work. Then you need to go to your bank branch, fill out an Articles of Incorporation, stipulate who makes up your board and what percentage of ownership they have, get a separate bank account, get everyone on the founding team access to this bank account, and meet with an accountant named Mason who ends every sentence with some kind of weird inflection that is neither genuine nor accurately reflects an appropriate response to your previous statement and thus wastes about an hour’s worth of your time, every time you go into the branch.
(Mason): So… what is this business going to do?
(Maddy) Well it’s just me teaching Pilates and my co-founder teaching yoga to start, but we’re creating a platform for movement teachers to instruct over live video”.
(Mason): Hmm… Indubitably, indubitably.
It took about 3 months for the dust to settle, about 4 trips back and forth to visit Mason, crosses of our t’s and dots for our i’s, but we finally had an LLC and a bank account.
The Unfair Advantage
I can’t really continue to write our story without folks fully understanding how completely in over my head I was. I did not know how to do any of the business-y things. Not just operationally, but the small micro-decisions that say a lot more if you don’t do them. From how to compose a professional email, to creating a project management system, to bigger and long term goal setting such as managing cash flow and filling out a team. It’s one thing being an independent Pilates business woman, it’s entirely different to build a marketplace for thousands of movement and wellness practitioners and students. How did I bridge this knowledge gap in such little time?!
The artist formally known as D Money is how.
My partner Derek, a seasoned veteran of entrepreneurship, is one unfair advantage that continues to hold an edge on C2C’s competition. (At this point in the company in 2018 I had understood that competition is not up for a philosophical debate between the working hours of 8 to 8).
He is the rails, I am the bowling ball — and not necessarily by choice. Derek had learned the pitfalls of start-ups through painful experiential trial and error. When we began our relationship in 2016, I saw first-hand the inner-workings and sacrifices that few will ever see in any start up or business. He didn’t pay himself nearly the whole time to put every dollar back into the business, and become a marketing instructor at the University of Oregon to make ends meet. He taught twice weekly, at 8:00AM — 10:00AM, worked with students between that time, grade papers, and would have to prep the night before after he got home from work. This was on top of his full time job running his own start-up company ten hours per day. He also had another job leading workshops to entrepreneurs on weekends. He was adamant that this would not be my reality (nor could it be — this lady just does not have that kind of stamina without developing some serious substance abuse issues).
So, we agreed I would continue to teach Pilates part time to pay the bills, (and because I LOVE my students) and the rest of the time would be dedicated for research and development to avoid the pitfalls of not understanding our customers and what we needed to build for them before we ran out of money.
In the beginning, another advantage we had was time. Because we weren’t burning through cash, we were afforded time to intimately understand our two core segments — teachers and students. And because of me being a Pilates teacher myself, my innate understanding of movement and wellness practitioners has always been something that can’t be bottled up and sold to the next Mondo Burger.
Unfair Advantage #2: Me. Despite how much I needed to learn (and still do), I know that my movement community will never be fully understood to an outside entrepreneur just looking to get into the fitness industry for a money grab. Our kind is not for sale.
Cash is Queen
So began an 18 month incubation period of research and testing to ensure we were building an eventual product people would pay for. This was by strategy, importantly because we had no money besides my $1600 in savings to make the first MVP (minimum viable product) from a Squarespace site, Acuity Scheduling system, and Whereby video conferencing.
Important Skills acquired during this phase:
- Met with mentors to help me learn basic building blocks of websites
- Learned how to embed forms into Squarespace
- Learned how to embed video integrations with multiple different accounts
- Elements of design and how to change hex codes
- Email marketing services and how to integrate them into websites
Lastly, I met with anyone I could that knew anything about business. From legal (Joy), to branding (Kateigh), to business development (Spencer), it served to expand my network (also helped to spread the word about Core to Coeur). It was vulnerable because I was still learning, but invaluable because it got me into the habit of talking about my business, how to prepare for meetings, and importantly, how to take feedback.
If you’re looking to start a business, one of best decisions is to stop before you put money, or other people’s money into it, without proving your idea out first. You can spend money on things and turning your gears endlessly doing so. It will not drive your business forward before finding customers that will repeatedly pay for your service or good.
As my Venture Capitalist hero Arlan Hamilton advises, “You have to go slow to go fast.” This path is on the surface more difficult than raising a ton of money (we didn’t have that option either, more on that in Part III). “Bootstrapping” (self-funding) requires you to do a ton of different activities all at once that are entirely vulnerable, then improve your product based on what is working.
Based on feedback you must develop:
- A clear understanding of your customers
- A plan to attract those customers (marketing)
- A plan to retain those customers year over year
- A viable business model that will sustain and grow the business
We used a lot of paper.
Relying On Our Network
We wouldn’t be around if it wasn’t for my own students that helped shape Core to Coeur (Shout out to Curious Movers Club!). They were using the product all the time, noticing a substantial difference in their lives. What we realized was that so much of people’s issues around self care, fitness and wellness, has very little to do with their own issues. Rather, it’s about the environment that shapes their relationship to their workout routines.
Our early students were getting stronger because we created a meaningful solution to their problems. Not only that, what most potential investors would later neglect to ask about, is that they would spend much more for our service than other fitness competitors— because we weren’t creating a gimmick to make millions of bucks. And when you’re not in it for the money, ironically your customers are more than happy to pay. Not only that— they will stick with you, and continue support themselves through your product for a very very long time.
Because we weren’t afraid of losing money, I also was afforded my own time to teach myself and expand my toolkit. My co-founder and I enrolled in Y-Combinator’s Start-Up School, a free 10 week school that got us in to the habit of measuring our growth in a disciplined way. Those videos and live classes were game-changing in our direction, and I would never have been able to dive into them if we had cash to burn.
By now, you have grown weary with how much I am talking about money. It is honestly a weird concept because so many of our greatest ideas take 0 dollars to implement, and some of our ideas that require cash bring 0 dollars back into the company. Companies who have more runway (monthly cash in the bank) are looked at as far safer investments. It’s all very confusing on the outside looking in.
Venture investing, why we chose to seek money, and what we did once we got it, is coming up next in Part III.
Part III: Believing is Seeing, or is Seeing Believing?
When I went through the start-up accelerator I remember hearing the lecture about venture capital, how outside people who come to own parts of your company had influence in the trajectory and decision making of your business. They spoke about how the indicator of a “back-able” business is scale — it must be baked into your product. I remember thinking, “How can you build something completely scalable while ensuring the customer experience is exceptional?”
These ideas seemed at tension with one another to me. Could outside investors really understand Core to Coeur on a fundamental level — specifically if they were constantly viewing the world through a lens of “scale”?
Author’s Note: You may be wondering (maybe even criticizing) why we sought investment capital if the world of venture capital is fraught with painful issues and the wealth gets unfairly and administered to very specific type of people over and over again? Why participate in this system? We’ll get to those questions soon.
85% Male.
To date, I’ve been mostly surrounded by men giving me feedback on the business — mentors, advisors, potential and current investors. I am not interested in painting them all with a broad-brush because it’s my job to carry this vision forward and if they have critical advice, I always take it in. Some of these men have been instrumental in the formation of this business.
Having said that, I find myself having to frequently level set many of them on our students and our business in such a particular way that can be difficult and exhausting. The ramp up is often the entire conversation. It’s like first learning to read — before you even start to string words together, you have to go back to letters, how to shape them in your mouth, and learn to recognize letters and match them with sounds.
Below are some of my most memorable quotes provided by individuals listening to my pitch and/or hearing about our core customers for the first time:
“You’re telling me that these students are more introverted than normal fitness gym goers, right?”
“So this is for people who aren’t in as good as shape as other people, right?”
“This sounds interesting, I’ll have to ask my wife about this and see what she thinks”.
“I don’t understand why say you’re building this product for people who’ve felt discluded by fitness culture. I’d use this. I know a ton of dudes would use this too.”
“I use Mindbody and let me tell you you guys just can’t compete with Mindbody”.
“Why do you have to learn financial projections? All you have to do is go into the room and smile.”
:)
In early 2019, we started a seed round for financing by accident, before I knew how to play the game and talk the talk. I was trusting, I believed that what people said would be followed through.
We were in the middle of our teacher beta testing, where we had 17 instructors on Core to Coeur version one (the Squarespace site). I had been meeting with an analyst at a fund herein Oregon, regularly updating him on our progress, metrics, and traction. I really enjoyed speaking with him. One day, we were getting coffee and he told me that he showed our site to the fund manager and the fund manager liked it.
He said, “It reminds me of the bike and the TV!”.
He was talking about Peloton.
We are not Peloton.
I smiled and said, “Exactly. You got it”.
The analyst told me that a deal had fallen through and that the fund had money to invest, and if I wanted to pitch, I had to do it now.
I stared blankly. I said, “We’re not even done with our teacher beta testing. We don’t even have a roadmap, a viable business model, or a scalable platform”.
He said to me “It’s now or never”. And took a sip of his coffee.
So I guess we were fundraising.
That was on a Thursday. We spent the next 72 hours crafting and preparing to open a round of fundraising — most companies take months to prepare their fundraising documentation and deal room, the pitch, the numbers. We had 72 hours.
I ended up receiving a verbal commitment from them — and at the time, I wrongly assumed that meant the deal was done and they were “in”.
It did not turn out that way.
Pitching While Female
In the time since, I’ve learned there are a lot of micro-interactions and of course biases that shape the conversations in the investor rooms and whether or not a founder is investable or not.
What I can surmise about pitching a start up oriented towards women, LGBTQ and people of color, and seeing other male counterparts also pitch these same groups of investors, is that there is a level of what I’m calling believability in the room that comes in with you.
I spend most of the time convincing investors that these teachers and students exist in the first place. And then when my 30-60 minutes are up, I’ll get a follow up email that talks about how we didn’t dive into our current economics or our existing financial projections (a point still amusing to me given the fact that we are still a seed stage business so every number I put down is at best an educated guess based on fourteen different assumptions — which is also to say the numbers don’t actually matter right now and that the single most important thing an investor should be doing is getting to know the founding team, the problem to be solved, the vision to solve that problem, the market, and the team’s plan for executing at this stage of the investment and getting to the next milestone).
In other words, it feels like I’m pitching Uber — and I’m spending my entire time convincing investors that people who ride in cars exist.
The bind is that you can’t tell an investor that they didn’t do any kind of research into the space before the meeting and their tired assumptions won’t frame their thinking about the business opportunity in an optimal way. You will also want to tell them that their laziness is a plague and is contributing to a system that has always prioritized the needs of men. Their understanding of the company is so painfully antiquated and they didn’t ask the important questions — which is all to say — they didn’t do their job.
But, you cannot do that, because you have to always be thinking ten steps ahead, and who knows who they know or how they’ll talk to about you with other investors.
So you have to literally pretend that you aren’t mad as hell and send a very polite email with a lot of ! and :) thrown in to show just how congenial you are.
The ultimate slap in the face is that you’re also taught that if you didn’t communicate your business effectively, it’s your fault exclusively.
“You can’t let the investors get off track.”
“You have to wrangle them in.”
This is toxic. It further perpetuates underdogs and those less powerful continuing to tap dance in front of other people, breaking our backs in hopes to ensure we’re doing every trick in the books just for 10 cents. And oh! We didn’t know that if we didn’t follow up and say the exact right thing, in the exact way this particular investor needs, that we are now deemed an unworthy investment.
I have never, ever, in my entire life had more excruciating anxiety than the periods we’ve sought investment capital. It is playing a game that you don’t know the rules of the game beforehand. Try to understand the rules, and then when you finally sort of get the hang of it, the other player is listening hard for the exact moment you slip up and forget the rules, and then the game is over.
What I admire about myself seems to be at such great odds with raising capital:
- I am authentic.
- For better and for worse, I am a deeply sensitive person and I really care if people like Core to Coeur or not.
If I was an angel investor I would ask exactly one question, every single time I met with a founder:
Tell me what other people are missing about your business.
Which is inspired by of course, two women-identified VCs.
And one of which is Arlan Hamilton.
Finding A Purple JumpSuit in A Sea of Grey
Arlan Hamilton was introduced to me during Gimlet Media’s Start Up series. I follow her and every move she’s made for the last two and a half years. When I get frustrating emails, have meetings where I couldn’t insert myself to explain my skillset aptly, I would listen to female entrepreneurs and VC podcasts to set me straight, and Arlan’s is one of them.
Arlan is the scrappiest and most creative person that I’ve had the privilege of watching from afar, dissecting exactly how she gets from point a to b. She is a strategic mastermind and she’s kind.
I knew one day that I would have to do something to let her know about Core to Coeur because she is BUSY. This is our story about investment, not my own ingenious hacks so perhaps I’ll talk later about how I got her attention on an upcoming IG live, but suffice to say, I did something out of her own playbook by paying attention to how she forges her own connections, and optimizing for exactly one activity: a response to an email I sent her. It worked.
These were her questions:
No having to legitimize the product.
No having to convince that a large market that is in desperate need of a community and service such as Core to Coeur already exists.
She wanted to know how I was thinking about my company. She wanted to know my strategy and differentiation.
And that made my heart SING. Because that is where I shine. I know my company, I know my people, and I know how to grow (organically and cost effectively at that). I am looking forward to navigating raising capital with more aligned investors like Arlan (current and future) in the upcoming year. I just have to pitch her first!
So, Why Are We Raising Money?
Because, we need the money. There isn’t really much more of an explanation than that.
Kidding! I know you wouldn’t let me off the hook that easy!
At the earliest stages of a business, you’re going to spend more money than you make. I’m going to spend more time in the future talking about these early start-up mechanics, but I want to touch on something more important in answering the fundraising question.
I do not have a Plan B if Core to Coeur were not to work. COVID has dramatically changed the economics for movement and wellness teachers. If I, and many of my fellow teachers, were to cease teaching on the platform — many of us would be unable to make ends meet.
Personally, I am on a deferred student loan plan that is accruing interest. I don’t have a traditional business or formal degree that isn’t movement or performance related. This puts my future in a very delicate position. If I were to take a traditional line of credit out, or a small business loan (which I would not qualify for, I have no assets), and I couldn’t pay it back, my life would be pretty much dedicated to paying it off. I don’t have super rich friends or family that I would feel comfortable taking their money without a guarantee I can return it.
Giving a percentage of the company away in exchange for investment dollars is the calculus we had to make, where if the company were to fold, I wouldn’t be personally liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I could’ve also kept the business small (like many people advised me to do because, “You’d do pretty well if it was just you and your friends teaching”).
But… what the hell is the point of that?
There has never been one iota of me that doubted that this could and will be huge. I have seen it so clearly and have placed the bet on myself as a member of the movement community to push our industry to be more equitable, contemporary, and to reach people who desperately need to feel less stressed.
I am an ambitious woman. I have always been ambitious, but this business has awakened a beast. And I want us to go big because we deserve to go big.
Software needs to be built up, and development costs a lot of money. Like… a lot of money. Guess what else needs to be built up right now?
People. We’re living in unprecedented times where people are seriously, seriously in pain and need to be built up with care, attention, and strength. Movement instructors, meditation teachers, dancers — we deserve to get paid as much as developers because we are building people up, day after day, but because software is valued more than human wellness, most of us teachers are broke.
I know this is a lofty goal, but I want our teachers to live in fruitful abundance teaching what they love (and I want developers and computer people to take movement classes to lean how to stretch their hands and strengthen their backs because technology is AWESOME and we need them too).
Improving people’s relationship to their bodies, movement. and wellness is why Core to Coeur exists, and we needed the best and brightest in our industry to kick start our brand right from the start.
We came for the cake and not the crumbs.
-Arlan Hamilton
Our Founding 15 teachers and everything we did before we launched in February 2020 — is coming up next in Part IV.
Part IV: You Can Sit With Us
By summer of 2019, Core to Coeur had ended up raising our first (very) small round of financing. Our budget to develop out our first real platform was lean — every single dollar had to be meticulously and strategically spent.
As I discussed in Part II, when it comes to early startups — you need to be so laser focused on building something folks will buy before you run out of money. It didn’t hurt that years of teaching Pilates in big cities had trained me to be frugal.
One decision we made early on had to do with thinking through the tension between “scalability” and “quality” on the platform. Unlike slick online marketplaces for renting homes (e.g. AirBnB) or cars (e.g. Uber) — wellness and movement is inherently personal and relational.
As a result, we leaned in hard on curating for quality early on. That decision has always been more to do with my gut and vision than the economics of a “scalable” business. We had to combine what I knew about the wellness space, curious students, and the exceptional teachers that tied it all together.
There are a lot of exceptional teachers across the movement, wellness and fitness communities (tens, if not hundreds of thousands). Here’s a few traits we looked for early on:
- Teachers who are self-described movement nerds, whose life’s work is researching human movement. We think those teachers belong on Core to Coeur.
- Teachers who are “The Teacher’s Teacher” — people we would consider at the top of their field who share their knowledge and teach other movement and wellness teachers. We think those teachers belong on Core to Coeur.
- Teachers who are heavily inspired by and focus on movement in the context of social equality — in other words, what the mat might teach us about how we can live intentionally on this planet. We think those teachers belong on Core to Coeur.
So the question you’re probably asking is: (1) how the hell did we find these teachers; and (2) after we did, how did we get them to buy into the vision of something that didn’t exist yet?
When you’ve been in an industry for a while, you’re able to quickly tell who is a legitimate professional — and who is someone just posting yoga poses to large followers on Instagram without a certification (no shade, it just is what it is).
Over a six month period, we populated a spreadsheet of hundreds of teachers that fit our general thesis around *quality*. They had to be entrepreneurial. They had to carry an inquisitive nature in relation to movement and wellness. They had to be critical thinkers. They had to honor the inherent risk of teaching movement with people not in the same room as them. They had to have an x factor about them.
And most of all, they had to be good people.
The second part? Cold emails. One by one. Not just templates, but individual, thoughtful emails that reflected that we actually did our homework on who they were and what they taught.
And then we followed up with them! Over, and over, and over again.
And by the end of it all, we had curated and partnered with our “Founding 15” teachers — an inspiring group of movement and wellness professionals from around the world.
Focusing On Quality
This is a good time to emphasize again — from the very beginning, Core to Coeur was built around doing things that don’t scale. Wellness and movement isn’t an industry of shortcuts.
We also aren’t your normal technology company. We’re a teacher-forward movement and wellness marketplace — that just so happens to have great (and getting even better) technology :)
Curating the “Founding 15” teachers are a reflection of this idea. It’s also a reflection of the hard part of start-ups that no one ever gets to see — the vulnerability of carving out many hours per day to write emails that end up netting you a 5% returned response rate.
During my time at Y Combinator Start Up School, I would watch recordings of these lectures where the lecturers would rip student questions apart.
One particular video a lecturer was asked by a student — how do you find your first ten customers? And the lecturer said, very bluntly, “If you have to ask me that, you shouldn’t be the one starting your business.”
Yikes.
But the more I thought about this, the more I agreed with the sentiment. If a person is starting a business in a space where they don’t really know how to find people to use their product — do they really even understand what problem they’re solving?
A business should only exist if it’s solving *real* problems. Otherwise, you’re going to have a long road ahead trying to sell things to people that they don’t really need, and will waste a lot of money in the process of trying.
To this day, I believe the group of “Founding 15” teachers we found joined because they intimately understood the problems that needed solving in wellness and fitness. And they knew they could play a role in affecting meaningful change with Core to Coeur.
Over the next few months, I would have weekly conversations with this close-knit group of teachers. We would talk about shared frustrations of teaching, the pains and struggles of building a movement practice, and trying to carve out a life for ourselves that allowed us to make ends meet but didn’t leave us burned out.
We talked a lot about the concept of feeling seen for the work we put out in the world. To date, no one had built a product specifically for us movement and wellness teachers. Over the last few decades — movement and wellness teachers had long been treated as a commodity, a simple operating expense for studios, websites, or recorded video programs to generate revenue.
Core to Coeur would be different. For the first time, every teacher would be put first economically. We would provide the technology and tools to allow them to grow and build their digital practice. Core to Coeur would lift and empower the next generation of exceptional movement and wellness instruction.
It felt like I was talking to old friends, swapping stories over coffee. They were studio owners, independent instructors, instructors who traveled for workshops. They knew the industry, they understood its pitfalls.
But most importantly, they were teachers who saw the potential of Core to Coeur.
The “Founding 15” teachers were trailblazers for their specific wellness and fitness work in the world — with each one teaching a distinct modality across the platform.
M. Camellia taught adaptive yoga and yoga for larger bodies. Dr. Candace Harding (a doctor of Physical Therapy) taught Medical Therapeutic Yoga. Katy Lush specialized with older bodies and Pilates professionals. Galina Denzel was a Restorative Exercise guru with decades of somatic education and experience under her belt.
Imagine for a second you’re in the cafeteria and you have your lunch tray in your hand looking for a place to sit. You glance over at a table across the room and it’s filled with all the most interesting kids in school.
And not only are they all sitting together, but they’re also talking about the most radical and interesting things you could possibly imagine! And — they’re also kind to one another!
That’s pretty much how I felt waking up every day. Each morning, I would want to write them all emails, thank them (over and over again) for helping us shape the vision, and let them know (again) how much it meant to us having them join us on this journey.
But I would have to hold back — because I knew I would look like a total fan girl and perhaps a loser to the coolest kids in school.
In December 2019, our “Founding 15” teachers started learning how to use the software and design their studio pages. Our team would work with them to edit each one before they were published. All of us — the Core to Coeur team and the teachers — worked through early software bugs together. I continued to be astonished at their willingness to try new ideas.
In January of 2020 — I remember refreshing the Core to Coeur website and seeing that every single teacher had completed setting up their profiles, their photos, and teaching schedules.
It was a big day for our team.
It had been nearly two years of work. I was exhausted, overwhelmed, and insanely excited. I could feel that 2020 was going to be a breakout year for Core to Coeur.
Boy were we in for a surprise.
Part V will be released shortly on this same page — make sure to bookmark, and stay tuned :)
The title of Part IV is inspired by a hashtag used by Core to Coeur Pilates teacher Anula Maiberg. “You Can Sit With Us” is a riff from the Mean Girls quote, “You Can’t Sit With Us”. I see it as the past calling to the present, where exclusivity and competition reigned the wellness industry. Thanks to PureBody and teachers like Anula, the industry is working towards equity, accessibility, and a sense of belonging.
Part V: Um… What?
Come late January, Core to Coeur launched and our team spent one month working through logistics, on-boarding our earliest students, and going through market testing. Different from other venture-start-ups, our intention was never to have explosive growth right out of the gate. Rather, we choose to be intensely focused on meeting the needs of our students and teachers so we could continue building a platform people would want to call their self care home for the long haul.
Alongside that six week sprint, my partner Derek had been closely tracking a virus, originating from Wuhan, China, and proceeded to purchase a small army’s worth of masks, survival tablets, and of course — hand sanitizer. This was the end of January.
If you can recall January and February of this year, very very few people were offering caution for this novel coronavirus — everyone except for technocrats on Twitter. If you were on Twitter and just following the data major health and science accounts shared, you would have learned that major tech companies were already cutting down in-office hours, putting up signs, or having employees spend more time working from home.
The thing about my partner, something that he doesn’t bring up in any conversation (because doing so would be weird when you read this next paragraph) is that he was a national speed chess champion in middle school. By the time he was 8, he was beating his dad and most of his older opponents. His history has stuck with me when he starts doing things other people are literally sleeping on — his brain works in a different way than most people I am close to. He can see ten steps ahead, in different realities, different configurations of possibilities, the potential of certain outcomes, and the probability of most outcomes. It has saved us in many occasions, made us look strange in others, and offered deep comfort in times of stress. All of this to say, I do not, for a moment, doubt his intuition when people can’t see what he sees. So when it came to this virus — watching him get increasingly concerned, reading through the data and seeing people get sick in other countries, I too began to see 10 steps ahead and what it could mean for the U.S. given our political instability.
I could also see 10 steps ahead for Core to Coeur. So could our advisors, and people who knew what we were building. At the end of February, my co-founder and I were implementing a new fix based on to teacher feedback of our then video-conferencing system. In one evening, late into the night, we pivoted our whole system to Zoom. Up to this point, we tested every single conferencing system, and Zoom was very clearly the best. They’ve always had an obsessive focus on quality (sound familiar?). It was twice as expensive as what we were paying for our own video solution, but we had to double down on what we knew — we would not grow if the classes were unreliable. During the first few weeks of lock down, we were able to support thousands of interactions, and a class with 124 people from all over the world moving together because of Zoom’s reliability. You can see a snippet of the class below:
Our account manager William, would be reachable by his cell phone, and as we were setting up our account, we would talk casually for the whole hour, like I was the only account he had an appointment for that day. Think about what one hour of Zoom’s one on one time would be worth in September of 2020. In just six months, they would be the connecting force for the entire world’s interactions.
Running For Higher Ground.
In the first week of March, the founding team realized that we were perhaps the only technology system that could be helpful for instructors given that studios would be shutting down. Then, we realized that we had a responsibility to welcome anyone on the platform that would need to make a living because studios would also need a way to continue their businesses. In that edition of our curatorial newsletter The Forward Fold, we wrote that if anyone needed any kind of help navigating the video world, we were happy to offer free advice or a teaching spot on the platform.
Crickets.
In May of 2019 — nearly a full year before COVID-19, I wrote a medium piece titled, “Top 10 Tips For Teaching Live Online Movement, Wellness, and Fitness Class”. It’s still one of my favorite pieces.
For almost a full year, virtually no readers. Then the equivalent of a readership tsunami the second week of March 2020.
Not only has COVID-19 been stressful for the obvious personal and professional reasons, but for our small-start up it has been a unique kind of bittersweet hell. I say that fondly.
Every plan we had for slow and sustained growth went out the window when we just had to bunker down and meet demand. I would wake up, check my email and there would be twenty new inbounds — requests from potential teachers, issues signing up with the platform, new students trying to get into class, new teachers getting locked out of accounts.
An advisor reached out: “Make hay while the sun is shining!”, which is sort of an odd thing to write and then press “Send” during a pandemic, but I understood that she wanted me to take this moment, a moment where the whole world would be at home indefinitely, and run as fast as we could. I felt like I was the CEO of a start up in its second year of operation rather than its second month, but with the amount of experience at the job of the latter.
There would be many tensions taking shape over the next months that I still live with as I write this piece. In one reality, very few startups in history get this kind of natural and organic customer adoption and exposure. Pre COVID-19, no one knew what we were doing, and it was incredibly difficult to actually talk about our service in a way people understood. I got quizzical looks from friends, family, potential investors not fully understanding that the teacher could see the student and vice versa during online class, making our value totally distinct from other types of fitness and wellness products.
To help frame their understanding, I would always try and orient their focus on the relationships fostered during an hour of self-care, which made the experience of working out and taking time to exercise both achievable and supportive for a class of individuals who historically felt neither.
Pre-COVID, we played with various describing names of our service. Video conferencing sounded like a meeting. Skype is trademarked. Virtual training felt like it was a game. Interactive online classes? Too long. Video chat was still not exactly it either, but it was really the only term we could use that would be sort of understood. So we stuck with it. Now just a few months later, we’ve gained students like Grandma Marcia, who at 87, has a Zoom account and takes weekly group Functional Movement on Core to Coeur.
This kind of mass adoption? Where the whole world is now at home and don’t need an explanation of Core to Coeur’s marketplace? We’re grateful, but this growth certainly comes at an emotional price.
We’re inviting teachers and students to share in a moment of self-care — but who simultaneously hold massive amounts of grief, anxiety, and distraction.
We’re inviting mothers to work out, but they have to share the Zoom with their kids’ virtual learning sessions next door and so they kicked off of the account.
We’re inviting studio owners and their teachers to teach on the platform — a class of individuals who absolutely *love* teaching live classes, but don’t know if they’ll ever be able to reopen their physical doors due to a variety of concerns.
To boot, because our strategy was always to build the platform slowly, with consistent feedback, over a long time horizon and according to time and resources, Core to Coeur was (and still is) in its infancy.
There still remain many features we need to build for our teachers and students that live up to our promise of an exceptional experience.
There still remain bugs that are unearthed from an influx of customers with so many unanticipated ways of using the software. I am still amazed that it has held up so well given we built it on a shoestring budget, but importantly, it affirms our mission that our teachers and the classes they create is what is at the heart of our service even if the tech not perfect. They have and will always be our greatest asset.
This gets to the final point — what was before a feeling of flying under the radar, of feeling innovative and special, now facilitated a grave feeling of depression and anxiety. That there would be people and companies with far better resources, with far greater leverage, that would now start to see what I saw two years ago — that working out and sharing space over live video would be *the way* most people would want to move in the future.
Today, when I see big corporations making announcements about “democratizing” fitness classes and and “finding ways to facilitate” at-home virtual movement classes — then get public accolades for their innovative thinking — I have curled inside myself in despair with such lizard brain emotion that I have even scared myself.
So… there’s that, a CEO of a wellness and self care startup failing to rise above base and primitive emotions. But I digress.
But then I remember — this is what it’s all about! The narrative of “The American Dream”. Of David and Goliath. The reason why we all love a good start up story. We defy all odds with our force, grit, and will to bring this product into existence — with way less resources and more scrappiness than ever thought possible.
It’s a story that helps us contextualize and mobilize us out of our sorrows, woes, and insecurities. It’s the nouveau rags to riches narrative: Of course we would launch before COVID-19, have a bunch of new behemoth companies swinging their might and VC dollars around. That is the story that is so impossibly … start-upy.
And my training and lessons learned at the accelerator, in truth, have prepared me for this reality. I anticipated so many of the snafus of the start up reality (albeit not quite on this scale or timeline) and those learnings went directly into creating so many of the reasons why (right out of the gate) Core to Coeur has been able to face these crazy challenges head on.
We built a resilient community and product from the get-go on purpose.
Doubling Down On Our Core
Back in January 2020, we started sharing the introductory Instagram posts for each and every founding teacher, and over and over again we would have comments that said something to this extent —
I am so impressed by the diversity of teachers you have on the team.
It could be the Aquarian in me, but socioeconomic mobility and access are the secret, deeply personal missions of Core to Coeur (not so secret now!). I have had too many toxic experiences — in the dance class room, the Pilates studio, and every place in between to not be exacting and intentional about the teachers that would be on this platform.
I believe it is our collective responsibility to share access and privilege when we have it. And if I am starting a business that can level the playing field, or hell, create a jungle gym instead of a field, we will make sure that happens. And mind you, it is not because I am an altruistic person (even though I kind of am I suppose, my family eye rolls at my attempts to implement my moral superiority), but because like COVID-19 unearthed — if you do not have a plan to build for the future, which is *hint hint* using the Internet and welcoming all types of people, you will become part of the past.
Representation of all body types, abilities, genders, sexes, and people matters because that is what the human population literally looks like. To pattern match for the status quo is not only abhorrent discrimination, but it’s also short-sighted for the longevity and health of our organization.
In the wake of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others, and the uprisings as a result of these murders, there has been a civic and cultural reckoning with race and discrimination that no industry hasn’t had a public demand for a concrete plan of action to change their sorry and antiquated ways. For C2C, our trajectory has always been to carve a path for ourselves and reimagine wellness environments shaped by the people that make it up, not the other way around. In this way, no pivot, no “oh shit” moment, no public post about our commitment to diversity that gets a ton of emojis but no concrete action.
We were able to dig deeper, and go even further with our mission, not just donate partial funds or lip service. On every level of our business, we’re getting to have challenging, uncomfortable conversations on race, class and gender, and then actually implement solutions.
Where some companies have to embarrassingly start at square one — C2C can advance our mission in bigger and broader ways.
By my own admission, it isn’t enough to just pull a chair out, and make space for more people at the table. When I complained to an advisor that there wasn’t enough diversity in the networking events and so the people who I would talk to wouldn’t be able to properly advise me on Core to Coeur, he blankly said, “Well our door is always open for anyone, and the community knows that.”
When we know better, we do better, and it is our responsibility to foster deeper relationships than those at a high school cafeteria, with the EQ of a high-schooler to match it. We have to talk. We have to argue. We have to share, and we have to foster an environment where that is possible.
Opening up more space is not the same thing as creating an environment for sharing space.
Two months ago we received an email survey from one of our investors and they had a few questions to the extent of:
How has COVID-19 and/or the civic protests affected your business?
Our response:
“Businesses and people do not have the option in 2020, to avoid optimizing for accessibility on every level of their company if they want to survive. Capitalism is on the whole an imperfect system, but one thing it theoretically should get right is that the best businesses rise to the top. The trouble has always been that what “best” means was left to one group of people, until the people demanded differently of businesses. Optimizing for access, diversity, and inclusion — COVID-19 is exposing the inequities of life and work in painful, albeit necessary ways. Ultimately, we weren’t “lucky”. We didn’t just stumble upon access and inclusion. They were baked into our foundation because it will put us in good stead as good humans, but also as a good business”.
The last part of this six part series will lead us up to right now — like literally, as I am writing this. I’m excited to introduce you to the good humans that found their way into Core to Coeur’s internal team.
Part VI: We Have A Team!
It’s been a very full two years since Demo Day in October 2018. The idea that “You overestimate what you can do in a day, but underestimate what you can do in a year, comes to mind as I write this. With the tailwinds of COVID-19 and people forced into a new digital normal, I have often felt, even though I have a tremendous network of support — that I shoulder the responsibility for C2C. The amount of doing tasks outside my skillset, assuming each role that shapes this company until someone can fill it — has left me totally depleted. Every day — I stare at an impossibly endless to-do list, and it is enough for me to just sip my morning coffee and look at the to do list, eyes glazed over rather than check it off. Cue Sad trombone music.
Finally last month, it was like the fog started to clear and I could see a path before me: my baby seedling of an idea Core to Coeur was finally growing up. We were in a position to look outside of our core team of contractors.
We spent two months outlining the exact tasks that I was frankly — really really subpar at, despite how hard I tried. These included, but are not limited to:
- Anything that involves taking a massively large project and breaking it down into component parts, adding a timeline, standard operating procedure, assigning the tasks into deliverables with deadlines, then holding myself and team accountable for those goals. I am really good at dreaming up large projects, seeing the vision and basic implementation. Everything else — very large gaps in my thinking.
- Quickbooks. I am a whiz at budgeting and frugality. Not great at repeated tasks with numbers with little room for error.
- Product management for software.
I am actually, I’ll just say it — not necessarily bad at any of the above. As I write that out, I am forced to check myself, and realize how much I have improved in the last two years with all of the above points. This is the delicate balance a founder has to understand — what they are good at, what they aren’t, what they could do but shouldn’t, what needs to be hired out, and where to focus one’s energy. It’s a rigorous effort of forced prioritization.
As a founder, you have to do things you are not good at. And the painful thing about it is that as humans we want to do things we are good and comfortable with — it’s biology. But that can have massive irresponsible implications for the future of the company if you aren’t willing to do things that will stretch your skillset. For instance I am now a decent graphic designer. Did I start out that way? Hell no.
Make sure you have a firm grasp of yourself. Where do I shine? How can I bring value in a way that will uplift my company, and in a way that no one else can?
Here is my “Maddy’s Greatest Hits” list:
- The big vision for Core to Coeur. I can see everything in the next 5 -7 years. From future features for teachers, brand partnerships, accessibility, celebrity endorsements (What’s up Lizzo and Brene Brown), I know where we’re going and the compass of equity as our guide.
- Creative marketing and amplification strategies on a very little budget. Imagine what we can do with a bigger marketing budget!?
- Growth hacking. I am connected to a lot of people. I think people trust me because I don’t have ulterior motives, I just want Core to Coeur to be BIG and create a world where people have a space to fall in love with their bods.
- I work well with others. Perhaps it’s because I am woman and have had to. The ebb and flow of responsibility, taking feedback, working towards a common goal, I can do that and ensure people of the value they’re bringing to the company.
- Being self-directed. I do not need much external motivation. That’s cool.
- Motivating other people. I think motivational speakers are sort of weird because I am a therapy nerd and understand that blanket statements or activities that claim they work for everyone might actually undercut a person’s ability to heal. I think I can motivate people because I am not a bull-shitter. I think we all want to be seen, and I try to listen in order to assure that the person in front of me gets that they matter to me.
The importance of understanding oneself as a founder cannot be overstated, because when the time comes, you know who to look for to fill the gaps in your skillset. But until then, you’ll have to get pretty good at being a Jill of all Trades to get the company off of the ground.
One last thing — when you are a new company you will want to get a ton of seasoned professionals that are tried and tested and can get the job done, and this is a conundrum. First, hiring is desperately expensive for an early stage start up (for every company, large and small really). What most business owners won’t ever tell you is how much hiring people costs, often at the expense of getting paid themselves, and often at the expense of the business losing cash. Second, if you want to build an equitable company, pattern matching for experience can often breed homogeneity.
So, how did we move through these issues?
We pattern match for grit.
Admittedly, this exact phrasing I borrowed from Arlan Hamilton (go back to Part III if you forgot about her), but it has been the concept that I’ve lived by myself and look out for on the road of life. Grit defines my personal relationships, the people I admire, and what I aspire to possess each day I show up for this thing called life.
Grit is the single determining factor we look for when we invite people onto our team. What have they had to encounter and how did they solve those problems? Statistically, we know that minority founders can do much more with much less, because as resources go — we will always be constrained. So looking at this trait — grit — becomes crucial, so that when people don’t quite have the exact experience, you can see that they could, if they had a healthy recipe of good management, exposure, patience, and training.
Before I introduce our team, I have to note that again, to even say I have a team feels surreal. To say that I am a “boss”, I look around the room like the prom scenes in movies where the nerdy girl gets asked to dance and she touches her chest in disbelief.
Who, me?
I explain more towards the end of this part. Because you came to meet the team. I’ll introduce you to them in the order they arrived.
Blue 52!
In the early days, it was just my two co-founders, myself, and Emily.
Emily — Social Media Manager
Our very first official hire was Emily. Emily has been a C2C student since the very beginning, and has been a friend since high school. We mysteriously ended up in the same small town in Oregon, and Derek and I are friends with her whole family. She used to complain about her “weak ankles and back” all of the time before I started teaching her Pilates. Ask her about her weak ankles now.
We knew social media would play a dynamic role in building a community and a marketing plan in an affordable way, and lucky for us Emily simply loves social media. She told me about tiktok while it was still only being used by Gen-Zers. She is in basically every marketing campaign we have too, so we get a bargain for her being a great model. She works two jobs, has a daughter who is sunshine in human child form, is a good dresser, and just super interested in creating a community and the visual representation of C2C.
It also helps that her sense of humor is so weird and perfect that I can look at her Slack messages and literally LOL in the middle of a meeting. Which is obviously an essential part of the job:
What I love about Emily is that she is ride or die in this very specific way. She’s one of those people that I can count on to be a good person, and also do good work, and also tells me to f* off when she has to spend time with her family. She has ideas she’s been thinking about for campaigns, she needs so little direction, and she can handle me paying such close attention to what’s happening in our community that we change our posting schedule the day of and she has very little complaints. Together, we’ve learned Adobe Illustrator, Spark, countless social media apps, Canva, how to growth hack, and branding. Emily is fast and smart and catches on very quickly with 0 training in anything she’s doing for C2C and has mastered it in such a short time. I mean this sincerely, Emily has shaped the visual representation of our company as much as I have.
Veronica — Customer Service and Operations
There is a certain kind of personality trait that you have as a founder. I think I could best describe it as intensity. It looks different for every person, but ultimately you can sort of pick people out of the room and be like, “Yah, she gets it.”
March of this year, we were totally and absolutely under water with customer service requests. This stretch of time made me understand that if people are in the wrong role, there is a kind of depression that will inevitably take over, and that happened to me. Luckily, I have an incredible group of founders who support and mentor one another called Starve Ups. Starve Ups has been instrumental in funding, connection, friendship, and networking. Veronica was in the Starve Ups chapter in Portland, OR, and we just clicked. Her energy is palpable. We share a kind of zoominess. So during our customer service meltdown, I reached out to the Starve Ups network and wrote an email that you could basically feel the sobs in the spaces between the words. We desperately needed help.
Veronica came out of the wood work, again having been a founder herself, and just knew what the hell was up. I am not sure anyone else could’ve entered into C2C at that point — backend bugs, half manual ops half automatic, no standard procedures. Veronica can calm my mind with this kind of solid, “I got this” mentality. We share a love of hacking — what kind of efforts can I do that require $0 cash (or close to it), $0 in code, but can get the job done? From there, she has made some incredibly smart integrations, automated our videos for our teacher training program Core Academy, and so much more. I am so endlessly grateful to trust someone in this way.
Phil — Technical Co-Founder
In April of this year, we were so underwater development wise, with so much that still needed to be worked through, that working with an external development team proved to be more and more difficult. We simply didn’t have the time. Our advisor told me I needed to start looking for a technical co-founder. So, off I went, with 0 tech leads, and 0 dollars to pay them. I refined our posting on AngelList, then sent out an email to the University of Oregon’s Computer Science department.
I will tell you one thing about C2C, is that it has been so easy to find good people when you are in desperation. For some reason, up until those moments its like slogging through mud, I am a bull with a huge yolk climbing up a rocky mountain. Then, when I feel like I might burst, someone comes along where I’m like, “I don’t even need to see your face. You’re hired”.
That’s Phil. Phil was in charge of vetting the public posts for the Computer Science department and when he came across mine, he thought “I’d like to do this”. Phil is the head of the CS minor at the University of Oregon, has been a computer programmer for as long as I have been alive (not hyperbolic), has managed massive teams, built companies, and mentored young programmers right out of college. He has connections with programmers for future development, and he listens.
As a young woman, I had reservations of another male co-founder, who was older than me with much more experience. Like Joe Biden to Barack Obama, Phil has been more than happy to bolster and affirm my leadership. He does not interrupt me. He values and upholds my expertise, and has never tried to tell me what he thinks about movement, wellness and fitness (which is a miracle considering that everyone else has). He doesn’t mince words, he’s honest, and his council on our development leaves me with such confidence for our future. Technology is the linchpin to keep C2C running smoothly for everyone involved.
Lucas — Junior Software Engineer
In early summer we finally had a small budget to receive some regular development help. Software, as it turns out, is so expensive. 80% of our dollars are allocated to software buildout. Independent business owners like myself truly take for granted sites like Squarespace, Wordpress, Shopify, and hell even Instagram for that matter. It is vulnerable to know that in this day that is what people expect out of software. As a result, we are quite limited in what we can do for buildout.
Lucas came to us by way of Phil as a recent graduate from the University of Oregon. I told Phil that we would need someone sociable, transparent, and agile. Lucas is all of those things, as well as being mature in this way where he calls out his mistakes before you even notice he made one. Although this is practically Lucas’ first job and he’s still getting his bearings in that regard, he is a signal to me that we have launched into a new state of the business. He is our first person on the team that devotes 40 hours a week (and maybe more), and I am always so impressed and inspired at his care and attention to C2C, just being 22 and right out of college. He quickly understood how passionate I am (read obsessive) about the branding of the C2C being as integrated into the site as possible, and both Phil and Lucas have always respected and amplified those needs. He also hangs out with grandma on the regular, and we have plans to get her on C2C one of these days :).
Julio Montero — Teacher Liaison
In my previous life I was a professional dancer and performer, and Alexx Shilling gave me my first dance job when I was in college when I was Lucas’ age. We were and still are very much like family, having known each other now for just under a decade. Alexx was a my first Pilates mentor, helped me understand the art of cueing and the power of the Pilates Method. Pilates has a weird brand, and many people sort of don’t understand that it wasn’t made for rich skinny white ladies. Alexx did, and has fundamentally shaped me as an inclusive, sensitive, welcoming Pilates teacher.
But why the hell are we talking about Alexx Shilling, Maddy?
Julio Montero is the husband of Alexx Shilling and he was the sound designer for our first piece together. True to artist reality, Julio is adept at so many things, and runs the front desk of the movement studio Alexx spent years teaching at. When I reached out to out teacher community telling them that we needed someone who worked with the teachers and would somewhat take over my job, Julio applied. The humbling moment of understanding that I would be leading a company where Julio and I were working together feels surreal. He is super thorough, gracious, candid and has worked with movement teachers for as long as he’s been with Alexx (20+ years). He understands our strengths, our passions, and also the ways in which we need support. He is so patient. A real feminist of sorts. He’ll be producing our upcoming top secret project too (see what I mean about artists?).
I also just learned that he watches the European Futbol league. Who knew.
Claire Koln — Junior Software Engineer
When we were able to secure funds earlier this year, we knew we had to drastically overhaul and improve our technology as our teachers were using the software in ways that we didn’t predict (which happens to every technology company, it’s both really fun and also never ending), and we are in a current sprint gearing up for winter.
What was once a team of two women and one man, turned into a team of three men and one women on the day to day operations on C2C, and that to me couldn’t last forever. Statistically finding a female coder is very difficult for all of the reasons we know. I can summarize it by what Phil said when we were on the hunt for a 3rd developer.
“If you look at mathematics and science scores in elementary school, girls almost always do better than boys. And then something happens where it just switches, and in my classes for every 10 boy there is 1 girl.”
This is a shame to me. As I learn more and more about coding, I see how fun, creative, dynamic, and honestly apt I could have been as a programmer. Socializing takes over in these developmental years, where I and many other young women prioritized other things for sure, but something happens too in education where the school system begins to mirror the outer world, and less and less women end up in STEM classes.
Anyway, people think coding abstracts bias away, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. I see coding as another form of art, and you wouldn’t call artists’ work devoid of their personhood, would you?
Thus, it became crucial to me that we would have a female identifying developer or basically someone other than a cis-man on the team because whether we know it or not, she would think about problems and code differently. And that is crucial in a start-up — having a team that approaches problems in different ways so we can all find the best, quickest (and cheapest) solution to our laundry list of action items.
I know I haven’t introduced Claire yet, but I felt like it was important to understand the framework of looking for what Lucas calls “a unicorn” like Claire because this future person would balance the dev team in a crucial way.
I told Lucas and Phil that the next developer had to be a woman or someone other than a cis-man, for the aforementioned reasons, and Lucas said “It’s funny you should say that because the person that came to mind fits this description, let me see if I can get ahold of her.”
Magically Claire and Lucas were both computer software majors and worked together on a project in college. Lucas got ahold of her through LinkedIn, and set up an interview for the week after. Phil and I interviewed her, and I will say, her brain is beautiful. When we spoke, it felt as if I was going to a TedTalk, and actually left interviewing her feeling inspired. The world right now feels so dark, and listening to someone a bit younger than you with ideas to make it better can feel like sipping a beautiful latte that someone else made for you that has unicorn magic and pumpkin spice. Delicious. I also just found out that she makes weavings, which is my ultimate pass time when I have a moment away from running the company. Which tells me something very important about Claire — she likes to make beautiful things too.
Tanisha — Community Manager Intern
Tanisha is a yoga teacher on Core to Coeur, and came by way as a referral from Michelle Johnson (a founding teacher). Since the very first gathering, Tanisha has been at almost every C2C event, teacher building activities, our hosted podcast play readings and open community meetings. She has two kids and still managed to make time for Core to Coeur. In a previous career she was a chef and managed a kitchen, and we knew that some of those skills could be transferred into meaningful contributions to the business. We built this role for her because we just knew that if she was that committed to C2C and not part of the backend team, what would she be like when she was? Tanisha is a yoga teacher on the platform and thus is an invaluable person to help bridge the teachers and the backend C2C team. She knows what she would want as a far as software goes, and she also knows what she needs out of the community, and how she can give back to the community too. Having to start teaching virtually, especially during a pandemic, can feel incredibly isolating and scary when you have to essentially learn a whole new trade on your own. We’re creating communication channels with everyone involved, the backend C2C team and the teachers, and the teachers now have their own method of direct communication with each other. We can rely on our network to get us through this collectively trying time. Tanisha is a big part of that support system and facilitating conversations, and we’re so glad she’s here.
Also even though this woman has so much going on — she responds to emails lightening fast, and that in a start-up is a necessity.
Whitney Alexander — Operations
Whitney and I have known each other for many years because she was Derek’s old co-founder in a previous company, and they met in business school. We became fast friends, traveling to trade shows together in Vegas and other business-y type of work, and something just clicked. The way we saw the world — pretty different but also similar, and we got along so well that we were better because of each other’s perspectives.
She is one of the most authentically giving people I have ever met with generosity being a cornerstone of so many of her relationships. With these kinds of people I have an intimate understanding to not take advantage of such generosity, because I know the she really drops everything to help the people she loves.
For some magical reason, I am one of those people. She was one of the very first people who participated in C2C’s earliest beta testing as a student, and she was one of the people I felt we could build the kind of customers we envisioned on C2C. New to movement but curious. Committed because the workout was more accessible. Loyal to the teachers and the company.
Little did I know two years later, we would need her help in other major ways.
Whitney loves spreadsheets. Whitney loves the nitty gritty customer service issues that make my heart hurt and brain buzz so I avoid them. She loves putting together organizational flows. She loves to show up on a moment’s notice. I hate doing all of those things, but she loves them.
You’ll notice a pattern here, when I say something to the effect of the company was in hot water… and then this magical angel with the perfect skillset walked in, but that is legit how it feels.
Derek had an epiphany, when I was amidst another crying session about all the things that needed to be done for the fifth or sixth time that day.
We need Whitney.
It’s basically the equivalent of that big giant (before he turned into a white-walker) in Game of Thrones, and it’s like game over for the opponent.
Together, Whitney, Derek and I have been able to navigate the complex emotions of bringing someone from a past business into the current one, and how to bring the past learnings into C2C, but avoid the pitfalls. We can have meaningful dialogue fostered from respect, trust, and experience — something that can’t easily be replicated when you haven’t spent years getting to know a person.
When Whitney started coming into the fold my life got significantly better. It was like oh okay, so this is what it feels like to feel competent again. It allowed me to get into my zone of confidence, and get her in her’s.
It’s a huge sigh of relief to have someone that I’ve known for years, that I trust so deeply helping run this company, that can say “let me take some of this load”, and you believe they will.
Only one place to go.
So, as our origin story comes to a close, I get the sense that there is still so much more to tell you. So many moments that have made our start-up become stronger, healthier, more robust. I find the need to give people advice with all of this. To say to people thinking of wanting to start their own venture — listen, this is not for the the faint of heart. This is not comfortable. But it is very, very worthwhile if it is what you really want to do.
So perhaps I’ll leave you with this, a last hurrah of the things I’ve learned in our first six months of revenue generation.
Simplify every other decision you need to make in your life that is outside of your business or what you care about. There is a reason why Steve Jobs wore a black turtleneck everyday. My outfit of choice is the ever cool jumpsuit. Bedroom to boardroom and all that. I have about a dozen in rotation, including this stripey one:
I suffer most when I have to perform at such a high level for basically all waking hours and I have to make too many decisions. Make every meal on the weekend, or invest in a meal service, or budget takeout. Wear only comfortable things. Do not compare your spending habits to other people’s during this time. Do what you need to do to stay focused, and eliminate all other moments of agonizing choice making that will render you stressed.
Please prep your loved ones for going dark. Quite dramatically, you will be mostly unavailable for the people you love during your start-up time. It’s not really a choice. The bandwidth will become so little that you’ll have to let them know that you love them infinitely and that will not change, but you’ll have to communicate differently for the next 5–10 years. It’s weird to write that, but it’s true.
Invest in a self care practice that brings your nervous system back to baseline. Every day, I am so thankful I get to take class to take care of myself and my body because I am not sure if the company would survive if I didn’t get those breaks. It’s totally that expression — eating your own dog food (is that the expression?) and I couldn’t be happier about the dog food we made. This is not a plug for Core to Coeur, but if it were a plug for Core to Coeur, I’d put a link right here to email us with the code word ORIGIN in the subject line for 4 credits ($20) towards any self-care classes on C2C.
;)
Do not count your eggs before they hatch. Unless the money is in your bank, the dream teacher teaches their first class on C2C, until the new feature is in the production site, do not think the thing you’ve been assured is done is done. No one can level set expectations for you as the founder. You will have to do them yourself and for everyone else. If you tell people you are getting investment and then you don’t, you look unreliable. If you tell your customers they’ll be a getting a feature update that will make it easier for them to start a class and then they don’t, you look unreliable. And lastly, if you say you will do something, until you actually do it, don’t let anyone know, or you look unreliable.
This statement feels obvious when you read it, believe me I get that. But you will be faced with so many different decisions, fates hanging in the balances that you will want to rush a reality before it actually comes to fruition because you think by doing so it will make it real. It will not make it real, but it will make you look totally inexperienced.
Find ways to give yourself some perspective. When things get rough you will need a plan to help you zoom out to give you perspective that eventually all things must come to an end, that this start up means a lot, and to you it means literally everything, but that you will die and things will move on. My top hacks for perspective achieving activities:
- Walks
- Walks that are uphill
- Walks that are uphill and take you to a graveyard
- Walks that are uphill, take you to a graveyard that has your last name on a tombstone:
Once you’re there. Sit down, wait a while, and let it come over you that people who came before you had huge dynamic lives, and they’re now totally dust.
Attract friends that “Get It”. The worst thing I can do right now is call someone when I am in the pits of self-loathing and they have no clue what I am talking about, or how to handle it. Baseless advice is the literal worst.
“Get a second job”.
“Take the weekend off”.
“You sound stressed”.
You just want to pull your hair out — so heed my warning. It’s in your best interest to spend some time seeking out fellow founders, attend free workshops or conferences with start-up types and then force yourself to network, and work to build relationships outside of your wheelhouse.
I have an advisor Leigh that has spent a lifetime around and building marketplaces like Core to Coeur. Leigh not only understands the business side of what we need to be looking for at this stage, but also the emotional taxation. He also doesn’t care if I cry on the phone. He gets the impossible balance that it is not necessarily about working exhausting hours, even though you do, but what do you do to make your company tick without you being rendered incapable.
For everyone wondering how I managed to get Leigh on as an advisor having no start-up contacts here is exactly how I did it.
(1) There was a technology contracting firm in Portland that are amazing people but we couldn’t afford to hire them for our first tech build out.
(2) I developed a good rapport with one of their main employees. Being a female in business, in tech no less, is tough and I’ve found some brilliant tech women to call colleagues. I asked if she had any contacts I should be speaking with about Core to Coeur, please make an intro to these people.
(3) She intro’d me to a fund partner in Portland with whom I began speaking.
(4) The firm had a mentorship program with 30 advisors, and I meticulously looked up each one and took notes. I put a star next Leigh’s name — he was the guy.
(5) I reached out to the ones that had marketplace backgrounds, and also asked the fund partner to intro me as well to any of the mentors. I dropped very specific asks about the type of intros we were looking for (and you could’ve copied them from Leigh’s bio) and what do you know! She recommended I get in touch with Leigh and sent an intro email.
(6) Before my initial call with Leigh, I took half a day to prepare for the call. If you want to talk to anyone you deem important, prepare your butt off.
(7) We continued to email back and forth, and it turns out Leigh takes yoga and is tapped into to the yoga studios around San Fransisco; he began forwarding me newsletters of studio closures. Suffice to say, he got the problem we were solving for.
(8) I bit the bullet and invited him to try out a class with me.
Then he said if I wanted him to be our advisor he would do it… just like it was a miracle waiting to happen. As if I didn’t carefully position each step to ensure that he would connect the dots.
The thing about Leigh that I like the most is that he lifts me up by telling me what I am good at, but then he’s also very honest about my blindspots.
Every conversation can be summed up like this:
“You’re doing great… but don’t get cocky.”
So Long, Farewell.
And so dear reader, this is where I must say goodbye and leave you to it. I have to go back to work now. I hope you enjoyed reading about Core to Coeur, got a glimpse of a journey a first time founder, and are walking away with some sorely needed transparency into start-up culture. I wanted to write this to let you know that if you don’t look like the typical founder, you don’t know where to start, just take the next step. Keep moving forward, and keep me posted if I can be helpful. Let me know how you’re doing. You’ve got a comrade in me (but remember the advice above ;) ).
I’ll see you on the other side.
We hang out a lot on Instagram. Become part of our community there.
*This post is dedicated to our friend Aiyami, a trans scientist genius on a mission to save the planet through brain research with her start-up Magnosys. She had an uphill battle — struggling with mood disorders, housing insecurity, insufficient mental health care. She took her own life this summer, and our start-up community has never been the same since. Aiyami — we miss you and all wish we could’ve done better for you.
