#awinewith Rebecca Grainger
MEET Rebecca, founder of Triiyo.
You can find them here:
Transcript
Danielle Lewis (00:05):
Oh, Rebecca, before we made it. Welcome to Spark tv.
Rebecca Grainger (00:09):
Thank you for having me.
Danielle Lewis (00:11):
I felt for sure that we were going to have an entire podcast worth of conversations before we hit record, so I am very excited that you've come on the show today and are open to telling your story. So thank you so much for being here.
Rebecca Grainger (00:26):
Thank you.
Danielle Lewis (00:27):
Let's start out by telling everyone who you are and what you do.
Rebecca Grainger (00:31):
I'm Rebecca and I'm the founder of trio. Trio is a SAS platform that supports employees through life events at work.
Danielle Lewis (00:41):
I love that. I've been through many a life event at work and I'm pretty sure I just cried and left the building many times. So loving the sound of this. So you said SaaS platform, does that mean that there's kind of a web app, a mobile app, or how do employees and employers interact on the platform?
Rebecca Grainger (01:03):
Yes, I need to drop the jargon sometimes, don't I? So we're a full technology platform. We sit outside of an organization and we are a web platform mobile enabled so people can access us on their phones. We sit outside because all life events that we look after. So from starting a family to retiring, mental health, menopause, divorce, long-term, sick car, receive all of the stuff that happens in our working career from the moment we start to the moment we retire, all of those life events happen during our career, but they are badly managed by organizations and in fact most of those life events are perceived to be career limiting organizations dunno about them until the very last minute. Employees don't feel safe talking about them and raising it. And so there was no point us putting it into their existing systems because there's information there on the internet that people don't access anyway and it's because we don't have psychologically safe environments in the workplace.
(02:03):
As much as organizations say that they do, we really don't feel safe when these things are happening. And so what we've done is created a solution that sits outside. It is purely employee led, it's employee centric. Organizations pet us in, they have their own branded platform. They can put their own content on there, but it's really just for the employees. All of the data is anonymized. So the employers do know what's happening, but they dunno with who. So they do get insights into what's happening with their people, but what we offer is what we call journeys. So their email communication flows that employees sign up to, they put in their personal dates and it delivers information to me based on my personal dates and deliver to me at the time I need to know it. So when you're going through something for the first time and baby infertility, divorce heading into menopause, you dunno what you don't know.
(02:54):
So you can't just go, oh, just Google it. You don't really know what you're Googling. We deliver the information at the point, people need to know it or they need to be thinking about it. And if employees want to add in their manager that they can. So there is a flow that holds the hand of the manager, but it's really about how do we guide employees through these inevitable life events that's going to happen to us with compassion, simplicity, and really opening up their knowledge base in terms of what do I need to think about, what do I need to do? But in real time
Danielle Lewis (03:29):
I love it so much because you are so right. There is no way to separate our home life and our work life. Well, it doesn't matter if you're an employee, it doesn't matter if you're a business owner. The two are as much as we say work-life balance and the separation and all of this stuff. There is no way that when you walk in the door at work, you leave everything that's happened to you behind it is stuck in your brain and you're not getting rid of it.
Rebecca Grainger (03:56):
And these are just phases. I've been through lots of little things. I can tick a lot of these boxes and they are just a phase and you do come through it and employees need to be a lot more compassionate and human in the way that they manage their humans because without people we don't have companies.
Danielle Lewis (04:18):
Exactly. So where did this come from? How did you get into developing a software platform, tech platform, mobile app for HR employees?
Rebecca Grainger (04:32):
So just non-technical at all. My background's recruitment for my sins and when I was in my recruitment company, when I got pregnant, I'd previously had a miscarriage. The employer didn't know I'd kept it all inside. When I got pregnant, I was working one day a week from home and they were like, no, you can't do that anymore. You have to be in the office. We're going to make you work these extended hours. They didn't even know that I was the first person in the office anyway. So it was basically I had this experience of pregnancy discrimination. I was like, wow, when I come back and they don't even know it's been an 18 month journey, when I come back, I'm never going to be able to work four days. I've made that clear and I was like, there's just no option for me to stay.
(05:24):
It was really had become a very horrible environment. So I left, I was four months pregnant. This was 10 plus years ago. You can't really get a job when you're four months pregnant and you're showing. So I just started career coaching, career coaching women and the only women that came to me were women either on maternity leave as it was called then or they're returned and they all had the same story. No one's spoken to me, no one's been in contact. The transition back has been horrible. I find an employer who cares. I was like, this is crazy. These are professional women on the upward stretch of their career. They want to work, but we have to keep the human race going, which means we have to have babies and in the world we live in women families need two people working most of the time.
(06:16):
So I was like, how can I just help companies look after? At the time it was just women look after women, better keep the manager connected to the person on their terms, keep informed about what's going on. They were like, I've come back, my managers changed. I'm in a different team, the office, all of this stuff. It's just basics. And so we started out, well actually back 10 years ago I didn't know how to do it, so I just held onto this thought process and for four years I just coached women. It just was the same message. And then in 2018 I came across an accelerator, which I didn't even know they existed, a technology ator that took non-tech founders and SE napkin stayed ideas. So I was like, okay, let's go. And by this point we had marriage equality and I was like, we'd need to include all parents.
(07:09):
So we actually went to market, I went through the accelerator. We went to market with the first fully gender neutral parental leave journey that just spoke to parents on the basis that we need to get more of dads taking leave to open the door for more women to return to work. We need to change the narrative, we need to change the stereotype on all of that stuff that we all know. So we did that and that was our first little MVP, which was just emails going out. So we now have a completely different platform, but that's how we started.
Danielle Lewis (07:43):
That's so cool because I think people do get caught up in the tech. They're like, I've got to have a mobile app or I've got to have a piece of software or I've got to have an AI algorithm to solve a problem. But there's so many different ways that you can actually test solving problems first. And I love the idea of emails just, and it's also tech that people understand it's low barrier to entry. Getting people to give you their email address versus signing up to an app or downloading something actually when you're first starting out and trying to get that initial use of feedback is such a brilliant idea. I love it.
Rebecca Grainger (08:24):
Well you have to go to where your customers are. So we started off just with parental leave and we launched six months before we went into our first lockdown. Really bad timing. But since then we've now become a solution for every single life event. So we now have a point where there are five generations in the workplace for the first time in history, if we're trying to talk to people that are going into retirement, we still have to have something that relates to them as well as maybe a 25-year-old that's thinking about having their first baby. So we needed something that cut across generations. And the other thing that sort of came up when you were talking then you are taught when you go through an accelerator to do things like concierge. So when I was on the accelerator and to test the market, so for example, I was just using MailChimp. So within the accelerator I got a couple of clients and we still have one of those clients. Refugee film is still with us to this day. And I started off just writing each night a MailChimp email and sending it out to the people that we were testing with to see do they open the email, do they engage with the content, do they want the content delivered this way? Is it helping them? So you're testing and that's called sort of concierge. You're doing everything yourself to test your concept.
(09:52):
A book called The Lean Startup by Eric Reese, which I think most, a lot of startups, certainly tech startups are told to read. And it's that concept iterate, learn, iterate, learn, do something really basic. And I know before I stepped into Trio, I had this other sort of business called Mama Hub and I wanted to work with moms returners to work, which was my interim between recruitment and trio. And I barely got anything out into the world because it was never perfect enough.
(10:22):
I was crippled with this thought that it can't go out until it is perfect and I'm going to be judged. And I felt so vulnerable, pressing, go on the first website and then I went into this et cetera. So I basically almost made no money because it was never good enough to release to the public. And it's like you're doing people a disservice. You can't help anyone if they dunno if you exist, you don't even have anything out there. And then it was flipped when I went into the accelerator because I dunno how to build tech I had to follow.
(11:00):
That's when they're like, no, you don't ever build anything until you know the very you bit by bit. Are they going to open an email if people don't open emails, then my whole business idea's gone. You'd have to iterate. So you do all the bits, like little bits, bit by bits and then you just start building. And we are now in a point now where we've got nine journeys we want to bring more on. And we've got actually today another account management meeting with Fujifilm to see where are we, where is the data? Who signed up, what journeys are they on? Because until we know that I don't know what more expert partners do I need to bring on the platform? What more content do I need to bring? Do they engage with that AI algorithm? Our AI companion now got Amy, we've got ai, so what's being used, what's not? And we put community channels on the platform. So at one point in the past we did a piece of research and people were like, I want to have a community. I want to find other people in the workplace that are on the same journey as me. We are working hybrid distributed, some companies are fully remote. How do I find the other people that say having a baby? So we put community channels on there and no one dead absolutely tumble with no one used it.
Danielle Lewis (12:22):
Wow, really?
Rebecca Grainger (12:23):
Yeah, we invested all this time and money because we did this piece of research and then we left it on there and we then got a community. We got a community manager going in and trying to create engagement absolute zero.
Danielle Lewis (12:39):
Wow,
Rebecca Grainger (12:40):
Nothing. And it's like, wow, really? This is where you have to constantly iterate, learn, do little bits to test it before investing fully otherwise. And we have wasted a lot of time and money still even knowing that doing things because you will ask. And what I now know is you don't always react on handful of people's requests because you'll end up building a ton of stuff that only a few people want. Wait until you've got 10, 20 requests of the same thing and then you go and build and then you build your MVP to test that within a bigger product.
Danielle Lewis (13:21):
Oh my god, you're just triggering me hardcore here. So I just did a speech at a women's leadership conference last week and just telling my life story and it's just flash backing right now because before we got to scrunch the influencer marketing platform, I think there was three or four iterations of what we were trying to build. We were trying to build a 3D virtual model for fashion, a fashion discovery platform, an inventory management platform, a social media monitoring tool. We did four huge builds and we burned through a house by house deposit. We burned through credit cards, personal loans, we then had to go out capital raising. I took so long to learn that lesson. I'm just like, if we can punctuate this with do things as you can to see if people will buy it first. Yeah, seriously. That is the
Rebecca Grainger (14:25):
Biggest lesson. It's journey. Go to my say this is our beta, this is our prelaunch you are in as a pilot, prelaunch, early adopter. It's not going to be perfect, but people love that. They get to be involved. Like I say, Fujifilm is still with us today from when I was on the accelerator in 2018 and it has taken me years to build this damn thing and everything taken everything from me. And there's one other thing, there's called a lean canvas. Do you use that?
Danielle Lewis (15:00):
Oh, I have before. Yeah, definitely
Rebecca Grainger (15:03):
Just at the beginning. That's a great way for people to get down their ideas in a really, really simple format. That was something else that we were told to use but, and there's so much open source software you can build and with Chacha PD now you can actually code off that. I don't do any of that, but I know you can. And there is open source software, which is basically very cheap open source. Anyone can use it. Very simple to use. There's an app called Bubble app, which is apparently very, very simple way of creating apps. You can wrap websites, basically web platforms and kind of wrap it into an app these days as well. There's so much that can be done super cheap just in market. You don't need to go out raising millions of dollars and have
Danielle Lewis (15:58):
Or spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on developers. Please public service announcement,
Rebecca Grainger (16:06):
Announce. And if anyone wants an amazing dev team, I have been through four, I've been through three onshore CTOs and I now have a team which I absolutely trust. They only work with startups. So I'm happy to give anyone because it has cost me everything to get to that point of a stable dev team.
Danielle Lewis (16:28):
Oh my god, it's interesting. It happens so much in tech. It blows my mind. All of the women that I've had on this podcast talking about their tech platforms have been through the exact same experience. I've been through the same experience. Just finding developers who are actually good at what they do and can do what they say they're going to do and actually deliver on it is a lot harder than you would think it would be.
Rebecca Grainger (16:58):
And are not full of ego that will build it. As a startup, you need solid foundations, but you're constantly integrating the tech constantly iterates. You don't need to build a platform that I need to go into Westpac with. When we are day zero, when you're going into Westpac, build something, then that's a good problem to have further down the line, but build what you need today. Oh my God, as a non-tech founder, it is. And you have to trust because I have no other way of,
Danielle Lewis (17:35):
Well, it's not like hiring a marketing person where you go, oh, okay, they can't do copy and the images look like shit. So you're fired. It takes you months and months before you realize that you're being screwed
Rebecca Grainger (17:48):
And dunno. And they're telling me this is the architecture we need to have. And I'm like, okay,
Danielle Lewis (17:54):
I
Rebecca Grainger (17:54):
Can tell you if it was right or wrong.
Danielle Lewis (17:57):
Yeah, yeah. It really sucks to be honest. So how else does sugarcoat that? So how have you financed the business to date? So I know a lot of tech startups go through capital raises, some do bootstrapping. How have you gotten to where you're at now?
Rebecca Grainger (18:17):
So when I went through the accelerator, the first build was paid for by the accelerator and they take shares. You then have a very small raise of 38,000 coming out of that. I self-finance just bootstrapped, didn't go out much. Literally joked that my son lived on tins of eight beans and passed that. Luckily he just liked pasta and bread, but it was very lean lived, very, very lean. And then I did do a raise. I did a raise through covid twice. So we raised about 1.3 million. Wow. That was a really hard traumatic experience.
Danielle Lewis (19:08):
Did you go through what level? Angel investors, VCs, what high net worths? How did you, where'd you go?
Rebecca Grainger (19:17):
So we had VCs on, had a couple of VCs on our cap table already through the accelerator. So they did come in and then I went from friends and family, so five grand checks all the way through to high net worth. And then we had the VCs there. As a solo founder, you are taken off building your business and you're taken off selling. So I would do things differently again if I had my time. Again, solo female founders get N 0.6% of the pie. So I spent hours, like months, months and months. I spoke to hundreds of investors, funds, VCs. A lot of it is a waste of time. I've been to pitch events, I've been to Singapore pitching it definitely, it's a real catch 22. So it delays, you're building your business because it takes months to raise money, but you can then do more stuff. But what is the opportunity cost and the loss of that time reporting about 30% of your time is taken up by reporting back it to investors. I would've delayed if I had my time again, if I could find a co-founder as a tech person who's tech, I would do
(20:48):
A hundred percent of nothing is nothing. I am very open and I was always open, just could never find the right person. Finding a co-founder is not easy either bootstrapping to a point where you are, have some revenue, makes you a lot more appealing to investors. And I was raising as pre-seed, when you look at how many who will invest at pre-seed, seed series and so forth. The pre-seed market is really, really small in Australia.
Danielle Lewis (21:24):
I reckon it's worse now as well. Post covid investors want profitable businesses.
Rebecca Grainger (21:31):
They say giving me a million dollar turnover
(21:35):
R. And it's like, well yeah, it's super, super hard. So I mean I had a little flat in the UK that I sold. I bought that money over burnt through that. I've worked part-time on the side to keep a roof over my head. I've had tech people completely screw me. They are a thousand dollars a day. So when we raised the money, we burnt through it very, very quickly. Rebuilding platforms and that's what I'm saying, do the minimum amount that you can to test iterate, but never take your eyes off sales. And I had to take my eyes off sales because I was raising funds. And the other thing is no one ever sells your business as well as you do. So I did bring in somebody else to run sales and she's lovely. She was great at top of the funnel, didn't close a deal because actually no one knows your business the way you do, but no one else can really raise money for your business the way that the founder can. So you are pulled into all of these different places and it's super hard.
Danielle Lewis (22:47):
It is so hard. It is. I mean just fucking kudos to you for being here after all of that. It is so hard and you're so spot on with that experience. That's exactly what I went through and I'm a sales person by trade, so I actually like sales. But to be able to keep it up whilst capital raising, which everyone says you have to, but it's like how do you do that? There is only so many hours in a day and your experience was the same as mine. Hundreds of investor conversations to get a handful investing, that's every waking moment of that's more than a full-time job.
Rebecca Grainger (23:31):
Yeah, it's is ruthless. And then you've also got to look after people. You've got to do your project. You've got to know what the hell is going on everywhere else. You're bringing in partners, you're bringing in experts, you keep putting content on back, you keep trying to keep your customers happy that are on the platform. I mean you literally don't sleep, which is what I got to the point I did to last year, which was literally not being able to speak so.
Danielle Lewis (24:01):
So talk to me about that. Talk to me about where you got to.
Rebecca Grainger (24:06):
Oh my God. I mean the last four years, stupid time to try and start a business, especially when you're selling to HR and hr were like, no, I can't talk to you anymore. God. I went through three different tech people who weren't great, took a lot of money. We tried to rera again, tried to do a round, a bridge round, it's called last year, beginning of last year because the market has been since covid, just super challenging. Its heads were still being cut in terms of redundancies. Budgets were super tight. People know they need to look after their people. So in our business we were like, how do we find the painkiller versus the vitamin
(25:04):
And looking after your people. So pre covid we sold even to Citibank, we sold to Citibank and it was on two meetings and they were done. It was a completely different experience post Covid looking after your people who has become a nice to have, except last year the new psychosocial risk legislation came in place, which is basically the shitty stick of the government saying we cannot, and this is the HR opinion of why this has come in. We can't look after and fix the mental health of the nation post covid. We are, it is in tatters and therefore employers, you now have a duty of care that you have to take. Correct, psychologically safe workplaces and that includes the mental safety of your people. So we had this painkiller shit stick that came out. We started hooking on that and it is definitely working, but the sales cycle has gone from two to three months post covid to over 12 months. Wow. It's really long. So I looked to raise some money at the beginning of last year so that I could keep the teams on and so forth. And it didn't happen. We were set up to bring money in and I needed to find another a hundred thousand to unlock this other money
(26:36):
And I just couldn't find that a hundred thousand. I was literally in Singapore pitching everywhere. And we lost, as I said, the government client. We lost two government clients when they went from liberal to labor, but the labor didn't renew the budget. And so we lost a lot of money through the government, the government contract falling through. And I will say as with a hat on large companies, governments, they are, and I was told this in the accelerator, they're startup killers. They take so much time and all of your capacity and resources, which they had done,
(27:20):
And then you lose them or one person says no and it's gone. So that's another learn. It sounded great. And if we had won and if we'd won the second year, it would've been awesome. But just like that, it was gone. We'd spent three months passing a pen test for them, which is their new cyber security stuff, which we did cost us a lot of money. But anyway, the government fell through, the investor pulled out, it was like a domino effect. The rest went down. So we had to start making redundancies and it was just all horrible. It was just all horrible. It was sort of four years in after covid, whatever you want to call it, a recession, whatever is going on. And the pressure of having employees is huge. I'm a single mom as well. There is only me that can keep a roof over my son's head. So it all just got too much and I wasn't suicidal. And I have been a very young age, well in my early twenties in that space and I knew I wasn't there, but I knew that things weren't working. I was thinking and I couldn't speak. So there was this complete disconnect or separation happening. And so I took myself off for a week completely to a retreat and there was no, it was the first time I didn't open my laptop since 2018. I don't think I'd taken a weekend off without looking at my laptop.
(28:59):
And I just went away. And during that time I realized that health is well without health, we have nothing without health, I don't have me, my son, I can't be a good mom, I can't run a business. I can't do any of the stuff that I actually want to do in the world if I am not well. So I have really shifted the way I work. Since then I've created lots of time and space for me, meditation every single day and a ton of other stuff, which we've spoken about. And it's going inwards is really the secret I think to opening up opportunities beyond that. You can even imagine the moment uncage, what we think we are creating. We give it wings and it has an energy of itself where that it can find its flow and its frequency in the world. We've birthed something when we birth a business and that has its own energy signature.
(30:08):
And we often think it has to work like this and it is only going to work like this. We put this cage around and go, well this is how you're going to exist in the world. And actually the moment we can uncage something, it can spread its wings and it can fly and it can find the frequency that it needs to exist. If we can just give it that, I guess it's like, yeah, space and what we do with our own kids, you let them at some point they're going to lie. So I feel it's like that for businesses too.
Danielle Lewis (30:44):
I just love it because we said this before we hit record, I started out by saying, we all say, oh we're busy. But I was like, I feel like at the moment with everyone being so a bit overwhelmed, the market being a bit rubbish and I'm very guilty of being the one also saying and doing more. I was going, oh well if it's not working like this, I got to find more things to do. Try harder, figure it out. And I love that you just said maybe there's another way, perhaps it is in the moments of rest and recuperation and healing that the better ideas come, the opportunities open up. We do open up space for bigger things. And it was funny as we had that brief conversation before we started recording and as you were just saying it, then it struck me, I was watching a YouTube video yesterday as you do, and it was around, so it was Neil, what's his name?
(31:48):
I think it's Neil Patel. No, he's the marketing guy and the guy that teaches you about finances and he's just had a Netflix series and now I can't remember his name. Anyway, he was talking about dreaming bigger. And it was so interesting because I just had that kind of on while I was having a cup of coffee trying to wake up and the ideas are percolating and I was like, oh, maybe I haven't been thinking big enough for what I want spark to be. And I just had this download of ideas and I was like, oh my god. And I got so excited. And so it's interesting, isn't it, that I've been like, oh, I've got to work harder, I've got to do more. I've got to show up more. And then I was in the moment of just sitting, relaxing, having a cup of coffee going and giving myself permission to think a little bigger. The actual interesting ideas started to flow through.
Rebecca Grainger (32:38):
Yeah, true. We don't know what the universe has in plan for us. And by limiting it to our own perception is just doing it a disservice. Gravel. What are the possibilities beyond my wildest dreams? I'd like to help millions of people in the workplace. I have no idea how that's going to happen. And I previously was like, well it have to be like this and it's going to be like this. And it's like, actually I know maybe there's a million other ways. I dunno. Let's just unbox it and go what is possible?
(33:20):
Because we live in a limitless universe that everything is possible and we can't be expected to know every solution and way forward. So let's just take inspired action. So that is one thing I would say definitely helps is if you get this spark and go, I feel like I need to connect with this person on LinkedIn or I need to go to this event. I dunno why or it doesn't make sense, or I'll just step out my content zone and just make it an instructional whatever it is, do it. If in the moment there is a spark, take that inspired action and something always trickles through. And whenever I go to an event, I say just one person. Just one person. Make connection with one person and say yes to something or agree to a meeting or a podcast or whatever it is. And then it's just a ripple effect and it happens. But inspired action I think is everything that for me is our spirit, our guide nudging us along the path.
Danielle Lewis (34:30):
Totally. And I just love what you said around we do limit things to our own perception. It reminds me totally getting off track, but I remember when we were pricing, so my own business scrunch the influencer marketing platform, I remember the girls in the office were like, oh no, that's way too expensive. And it's the first time I kind of got to realize, oh, they're limited by their bank account, but our customer is someone who has a company credit card. And I love that you've translated that into, we limit our businesses by what we perceive as reality when in actual fact we don't know what the universe has in store for us. We don't know the infinite possibilities or the infinite potential that our business has.
Rebecca Grainger (35:18):
And until we take the cage away, we can't track in other things because if it doesn't align with what we originally had in the cage, only this fits into this and anything outside of that is not welcome. It's like, well let's take the cage away because actually everything is, if it helps me get to what my end goal is and your North star. So just always keep your north star in mind. And mine is I want to help millions of people navigate life events at work. So how can that happen? Maybe it isn't going to end up true looking the way it is right now, but that's okay if I get that end goal.
Danielle Lewis (35:59):
Oh my God, I love it. Rebecca, you are absolutely incredible. This was just such an amazing conversation. I appreciate you so much. Let's wrap up by giving our beautiful spark community. One last piece of advice. So reflecting on your time in business, what would be a piece of advice that you would give other women on their business journey?
Rebecca Grainger (36:25):
Trusting yourself? Just start. It's never going to be perfect, so just birth something into the world and go from there.
Danielle Lewis (36:35):
Oh, you are amazing. Thank you so much for your time today
Rebecca Grainger (36:39):
Having me. It's been so lovely talking to you, Denny. Thank you.
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