2 Women Create A Judgment Free Digital Space For Modern Moms, Encouraging Them To “Do You”

PowerToFly
PowerToFly
Published in
12 min readMar 9, 2016

By: Chie Davis

Elizabeth “Liz” Tenety and Jill Koziol, were both independent thinkers before they became co-creators of the online platform, Motherly. With 12 years of business consulting and strategy experience under her belt, Jill comes from a family of entrepreneurs. She invented the SwingEase a playground toddler swing adaptor, before collaborating with Liz. Prior to Motherly, Liz, an award winning journalist and editor, worked in traditional media for over a decade, largely at The Washington Post.

Jill Koziol (L) and Liz Tenety (R)

Between the two of them, they have four children under the age of four. As new moms, they found themselves looking for information that didn’t exist online, saying “We wanted a supportive, non-judgmental place to provide truly useful solutions on everything from how to survive morning sickness, to going back to work after baby, to how to keep love alive in the midst of life with toddlers.” In an effort to fulfill that need, and carve out more flexible career paths, they created Motherly. The site provides personalized “snackable” sized content guides to help inspire and inform millennial women on life, motherhood, love and work.

PowerToFly spoke with the two entrepreneurs about how they went from remote workers to remote business partners, how motherhood changed the way they work, and what they wished they’d known before venturing out on their own.

Courtesy of Motherly

How did motherhood change how you think about work and how you do business?

Liz: I found a new appreciation for early mornings. I get a lot of work done before a lot of other humans are up. Now my mantra is work smarter, not harder. I’m not working to sit my butt in a chair, I’m working to achieve things. There’s a study that shows that moms of two are the most efficient workers. Becoming a mom helped me achieve things that I’ve always wanted to do, but maybe haven’t had the ability and maturity to apply to my professional life.

Jill: As a consultant, I used to go really deep into something for a period of time, learn it, then move onto the next thing. Now, everything is in micro-moments of time, because I prioritize what I do. For me the ability to focus has strengthened. Whatever I’m doing for work has to be something I’m really passionate about, that makes it worthwhile being away from my two young daughters. I want to do something that makes them proud.

Courtesy of Motherly

When and how did you decide to create Motherly together?

Liz: Working for traditional institutions in media, it started to feel way more like a box I didn’t want to be in. Living in Silicon Valley, while my husband was getting his MBA and breathing the startup air, there’s a lot of people blowing up traditional ideas and saying how can we radically re-understand what work means. I wanted to do something different and outside of the box, which for me, was a really big surprise professionally.

Working with Jill was kind of an arranged marriage. We knew each other when our husbands were going to business school at Stanford together. We kind of lived parallel lives, until we started working together. I wanted a partner, but thought that was down the line. Jill’s enthusiasm and ability to get things done blew me away. I’m the sort of the creative, ideas and juices person. I came at her with this firehose of ideas. A few days later she had a business plan and I was wowed.

Jill: We took a huge risk doing this. I was living in Manhattan at the time. She was in the Bay Area. We actually didn’t see each other until after we launched. We worked remotely. Luckily both of us had worked remotely for other jobs before, so we knew the tempo and what needed to be done to make it work. Being a mother, specifically a millennial mom, and being beyond the Mommy wars, we find strength in our differences. This is something we brought very early into the culture of Motherly. I think that a lot of women start businesses as friends. We’ve become very close, but we are business partners first. There’s a level of respect that comes with that.

Jill and Liz at Matter., an accelerator program

How did you go from being a remote worker to having your own remote company?

Jill: We were both comfortable leading, had management experience, and knew how to take something from the idea stage into execution. Taking the actual leap, a lot of it’s about having a passion. (As a) venture backed startup, there’s a lot of pressure. For us it’s always about connecting back to that user and that passion to fill this need and build. Days when we feel like, “Gosh life was so much easier when someone told us what to do,” there’s so many more perks to doing this. There’s something about the autonomy that you have, the ability to own your own schedule, especially as a mom, and really just go down your own path that is exciting and rewarding.

Liz: What I’d recommend to other women who are like, “Where do I even begin?” is to understand the hypothesis that they’re testing. What’s the core of your business that you want out get other there? Get it out as quickly as you can, while you’re still proud enough to show your face in public. Our product isn’t perfect yet, but we thought it was better to go live and learn more about how people are using it.

Courtesy of Motherly

What’s a typical day like in your lives?

Liz: I wake up before my kids and have a giant cup of coffee, to get my brain going. I’ve stopped checking my emails first thing. I set my agenda for the day. I start working on one to two important tasks. Usually overnight things will come up with tech. I get caught up on urgent items, then the kids get up. I help with the kids in the morning. We have an au pair that lives with us named Marina. She’s from Brazil and she’s kind of our hero. Between 8 and 9 a.m., I start working. I work until about 3 p.m., then I take a break. I spend some time with the kids, then get back online to work from about 7 to 9 p.m. Jill and I are trying to figure out what the right co-working times are, as we add to our team. Part of our culture is that we know that our schedules are evolving and may change.

Liz and her family

Jill: My children wake up at 7:30 a.m. I wake up at 7, and am showered and ready to go by 7:30 a.m. Then I spend an hour with them. I do tend to check my email in the morning, first thing. Part of it is being on the West Coast. A lot has happened by 7 a.m. pst. The children go off to school and to activities with their nanny. Right now I’m doing a lot of investor meetings and lots of product management things with our tech team. I also handle business operations. I’m done by 5p.m. at the latest, so that I can have dinner and bedtime with my children. Then at 7:30 p.m. when they go to bed, I’m generally online until 11:30 p.m. That’s some of my most concentrated time, because there are no meetings during that time.

Jill and her family

How involved are you on the tech side?

Jill: We outsource tech to an investor in our company. Our technology is done via Quintype. They have a platform that we’re on and they’ve built everything that you see on Motherly, including our personalization engine. The company is based in here in the Bay Area, so I have local programmers that I can work with on some of our design and our user experience support is here. The bulk of the team is actually in India, which has worked out pretty well. If I talk to them at 9 p.m. my time, by the time I get up things are done, which is lovely. We’re really trying to focus on making that user experience the best it can be, so that we have really high user engagement.

You changed from having a blog styled website to a curated site. Why did you make that change?

Liz: We launched six weeks after having our first conversation. We knew this was the most minimally viable product that we could get out there, so that we could start learning from our users. We joined a San Francisco based incubator called Matter., in August, to explore those needs. Today’s mom has many needs, as Jill and I personally know and we also interviewed 100 different women across the U.S.. We (found) this semi-obvious but unfulfilled need. When you’re on the journey to motherhood, from planning a pregnancy through the toddler years, your needs and lifestyle changes very dramatically over about a two and a half year period. If we understand where a woman is in that journey, then we can give her the best information and help guide her along the way. We do that across four areas: the development and stage of her child, her personal life — including food and fitness, her love life and work. Then, we personalize it. So, if she’s a stay at home mom of a 6-month-old, she gets different information than if she’s a working mom who is 6 months pregnant. By personalizing the experience, our engagement rates have doubled on our content. This essential point, of getting women the information that they need when they need it, not just about their baby but also about how their lives are being transformed didn’t exist.

Motherly’s presentation at Matter.

How do you curate Motherly’s content?

Liz: We have editors across the four channels that work on leveraging social, as well as search trends. They discover the core topics are women need help with and then plug them into those points on the journey. We’ve blended expert information with doctors, pediatricians and career coaches, with what we call “mom to mom inspiration.” These are really popular essays on micro-moments in motherhood, from everyday moms and popular bloggers, to sometimes the experts themselves. Once we developed the personalization feature we saw that the personal essays do really well, because they speak to something a woman’s going through, perhaps that particular week.

What sets Motherly apart from its competitors?

Liz: So many moms say that they don’t know who to trust, because it’s just a mess of conflicting information. Women are giving each other medical advice and there’s conflicting medical advice out there, so what we do is let the doctors give the medical advice, let the mothers give each other inspiration, and take the best of what each party is bringing to the table.

How do you maintain a judgment free zone?

Liz: I change a lot of content into the first person. I think that this is a generation that’s like “You do you!” Moms are not about judging one another anymore. This is a generation that wants inspiration and support, whatever their decisions are. Women are just looking for that village and they’re looking for it online. Some of that comes out into our editorial tone. Being a mother is incredibly rewarding, demanding and probably the most powerful experience in many women’s lives, so we want to be able to support them as much as possible and not have it in any way be “I’m right — you’re wrong.”

Courtesy of Motherly

What are your tips for other working moms who want more flexibility in their work lives?

Jill: My to-do list includes chunks of time to do work and also now chunks of “me time.” I make that appointment with myself to work out. Liz and I also try to pick a day over the weekends where we really unplug. For me, Sundays is family time. After the kids are in bed, I usually get back online and start the week off.

Liz: One change I made over the last six months is not checking email in the morning. Because I’d be in bed checking email and would have a panic attack. Every day it was something different. I was spinning into reaction mode, instead of looking at my daily goals. It helps me to write down my daily goals, then have more flexibility at what’s at the bottom of the list. Being in a more intentional mode helps me to get that done, rather than just responding to problems.

What are your “work from home mom” hacks?

Liz: You have to get really good at checking in with yourself and reading yourself, because work and life can really bleed into each other when you’re working from home. For me, interacting at Starbucks with another human helps me get energized and into production mode.

Jill: I close my laptop, close the door, and have a little physical separation from work and home in the evening. Doing video conferences to connect helps. I also do meal planning. On Sunday evenings I plan our meals for the entire week, so that I can optimize grocery shopping and plan things out. We’re in the Bay Area, so we have a lot of cool companies to test out, like Google Express. Outsource what you can so that you can really focus on your work, your family and yourself.

Courtesy of Motherly

What advice would you give yourself a year ago when you first started on your entrepreneurial journey?

Jill: I would focus on more self care and setting better boundaries. As moms we always put our children first. Then I have this new baby called Motherly. It’s like having a newborn. I didn’t work out for like nine months. Now I’m really trying to, not just for the physical feeling, but also having that release mentally. I think that women who launch their own companies are high achievers. We’ve very critical and demanding of ourselves. I have a different kind of calmness now. This needs to complement and be part of my life. This will be a long haul, so I try to prepare myself for that, instead of jumping on the hamster wheel and always thinking that there’s something else to be done.

Liz: I wish I took more vacations. I went from three part-time jobs and launching Motherly, to going to an accelerator. When we got into the accelerator, I quit all of my jobs. I haven’t taken a week off in a year, so that’s going to happen soon. I feel like a snow globe. When you’re busy and you shake the snow globe and everything is flying everywhere and you can’t see. If you take the break, things settle. They settle differently every time and you can see things in a new way. I know that taking a break is not just good for myself, it’s also good for the business.

Jill: Our goal is that we have to model (work/life balance). We want Motherly to be a place where not only our users thrive, but also our team and employees thrive as well.

Courtesy of Motherly

To find out more about Motherly, visit their website.

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