Founder Spotlights: Insights from Genevieve Ryan Bellaire, CEO & founder of Realworld
If you’re looking for a candid conversation about a founder’s journeys and how our entrepreneurial community is navigating the global pandemic, you’ve come to the right place. Since March Grasshopper Bank has held a virtual event series in partnership with the NY Tech Alliance! Hosted by NYTA’s Andy Saldaña and Grasshopper Bank’s Micah Baldwin, Founder Spotlights is a monthly check-in for tech founders, entrepreneurs, and small business leaders to come together and chat about their experiences.
When does one actually become an adult and how prepared are any of us to really do so? This question bubbled up to the surface for Genevieve Ryan Bellaire as she completed her schooling and was thrust into the colloquial “real world”. Even as a lawyer with an MBA, Genevieve found herself at a loss when it came to fundamental life skills such as personal finance, navigating the healthcare system, and doing taxes. Even with extensive education she was unprepared for these new challenges and found herself turning to her parents and to Google for help. But the answers weren’t centralized, they weren’t engaging, and Genevieve saw that she was not alone in her unfamiliarity with these tasks.
Genevieve Ryan Bellaire, CEO & Founder of Realworld, was inspired to help solve this problem for young adults, creating a platform for navigating life moments. Realworld is an online platform offering information, tips, and tricks to help people conquer some of life’s most mundane but necessary adult moments. Today, she has a community logging into her platform frequently to exchange ideas and offer one another advice. Genevieve sat down with us to discuss her journey and what the past six months have been like for her as a founder.
Building WITH, not for, your community
Most young adults rely on parental advice or the results of their Google searches to navigate the more mundane aspects of adulthood, which is part of what makes the sense of community that the Realworld platform has managed to build so special. Genevieve admits to initially thinking, “If you build it, they will come” but she quickly realized that her users were looking for more than just a centralized repository of advice. Today, she keeps the quality of the Realworld community high by relying on those within it. The category experts in the community have become leaders too, sharing knowledge, encouraging acceptance across the platform, and sharing personal experiences and stories. Building with the user top of mind has been central to Genevieve’s approach from the beginning. In fact, she spent about six months testing Realworld with over one thousand college seniors and recent graduates, using surveys and interviews and asking for introductions to new surveyees from each person she interviewed. The Realworld team built a moat of defensibility for the business as a result, proving the need for their solution with a critical mass of interested would-be-users. Perhaps even more critically, her team learned a lot about what motivated their audience.
Being attuned to the people around you
Genevieve shares that the most surprising thing she learned when standing up her business was that it was embarrassing for young people to admit that they didn’t have these skills. She says, “The emotional lens to something we had thought of as tactical was surprising”. It influenced the look and feel of the platform, which is lighthearted and fun, rather than the authoritative look and feel that a financial services website might have. The Realworld team also discovered that students weren’t necessarily their target audience, recent graduates were. Genevieve reflects, “You don’t know what you need until it hits you in the face” and recent graduates were learning about things like filing taxes and how to read a lease on the fly after college. Willing to be flexible and iterative about your primary audience is a challenge for many founders as it’s very easy to become wedded to your idea when you’ve invested so much into it. Genevieve credits her team with helping her stay focused, especially early on when founders are wearing multiple hats. She says her team helps with “…making sure we continue to iterate and keep focusing on the user, even if it doesn’t impact our bottom line because we want to build the most world class product that will help us scale”.
The pros and cons of channel partners
So how do you scale when your target audience is massive, your user demographics vary widely, and your main competition, ostensibly, is Google? Needing to reach so many people in a cost effective way, Genevieve turned to colleges, asking them to offer Realworld as a gift to new graduates and helping get the word out about the platform in the process. Using colleges and universities as channel partners helped them to scale quickly and offered a trusted authority through which to introduce the platform. The downside is selling your solution twice — once to the schools and again to drive engagement among recent graduates. It can also be difficult to iterate quickly when selling through a channel partner, as any changes have to make their way through your partner and down to your users. Genevieve and team make it a point to keep talking to their users and shared a wonderful moment that happened during a user testing session recently. Genevieve ran out of time showing the user some new designs, but when asking for any final suggestions, the user proposed a solution that was nearly identical to the feature they had run out of time to show. Taking a few extra minutes, they were able to confirm that the improvement met the user’s needs. It showed the Realworld team how close they were getting to product market fit — a huge milestone for a startup! Genevieve uses the scale built through channel partnerships to her advantage, carefully navigating potential pitfalls by talking to users and keeping their needs in sharp focus as they build out the Realworld solution.
Genevieve’s insights fit nicely with one another. Together, they offer a great blueprint for how to build a user-centric platform, keep your team’s priorities aligned, and scale your business while maintaining your north star. We hope this story inspires you to keep iterating and keep building! And if you want to watch the full replay, you can do so here.
Please join us for our next installment of Founder Spotlights with Emily Anhalt, psyD, Co Founder & Chief Clinical Officer at Coa on 9/30.
In the meantime, please have a look at some resources we have pulled together that we’d like to share with you: Grasshopper Bank’s Resource Guide — A compilation of the best articles, strategies and tips for managing a business and maintaining your mental well-being during challenging times.
