Melody McCloskey
CEO at StyleSeat, the largest marketplace in beauty services.
Discussion
M
Melody McCloskey
@melodymcc · CEO, StyleSeat
Hi all! I'm Melody. I started StyleSeat in 2011 so people can have an easier way to find book and pay for stylists, barbers and nail artists from their phone. Today we're the largest marketplace in beauty, with over 330k professionals in over 15,000 cities across the US and we'll power over $1B this year in appointments across our platform. I love pretty much all things involved with starting a business and I'm excited to chat! Ask me anything!
upvotesharetweet・
Russ Frushtick
@russfrushtick
@melodymcc Any personal stories that inspired the creation of the company?
M
Melody McCloskey
@melodymcc · CEO, StyleSeat
@russfrushtick when I moved to San Francisco it was really hard to find a stylist. I was a new grad, really broke and wanted to find someone at a good price point that knew how to style my curly hair. It took years to find someone and a lot of failed appointments to make that happen which was so frustrating. When I started having a lot of conversations with salon owners and stylists I realized they were frustrated as well because there isn't an easy way for them to showcase their services, specialities and get more clients so it because clear that there was room for a service to do that.
Erik Torenberg
@eriktorenberg · Former Product Hunt
Hey Melody. Thanks for joining us today.
What's something you've changed your mind about in the past 6 months with regards to being a CEO?
M
Melody McCloskey
@melodymcc · CEO, StyleSeat
@eriktorenberg ooh good one. I change my mind all the time. Being in this position is humbling because you realize you don't have all the answers. I'm also very transparent with my team. They know the latest about fundraising, they see our board decks, everyone has access to company-wide metrics and we drink a lot together so they know what's up. Let's see, I used to focus more on competitors which I don't as much anymore. I took for granted the fact that we have killer people and as we've scaled I realized that that's actually insanely hard to find. I spend a lot more time recruiting than I used to because I've learned that great people are the biggest factor to building something meaningful and big.
Mary Elise Chavez
@maryelisechavez · VP, Creative & Strategy @OysterLabs
@melodymcc If you had to articulate StyleSeat's unique brand moments that a customer experiences, what would they be? How have you evolved your customer experience to ensure satisfaction as you scale?
M
Melody McCloskey
@melodymcc · CEO, StyleSeat
@maryelisechavez ooh, good one. I think ExpressPay, our Uber-like payments experience where clients don't have to open their wallet after an appointment or worry about a weird tip moment is amazing. We've been told that it's one of the biggest life changers for clients. On the stylist side we almost double their revenue in year 1 with automatic business tools, and we just launched really cool business analytics and portfolio management tools that they love. Customer experience is everything to us. We have no marketing team, all of our growth and focus has been on product and engineering so it's important!
Mary Elise Chavez
@maryelisechavez · VP, Creative & Strategy @OysterLabs
@melodymcc Thanks so much, great to hear.
Mark Daniel
@markdaniel94 · CEO, Strut
Hi Ms. McCloskey, first of all, huge fan. What has been the best day of your career so far?
M
Melody McCloskey
@melodymcc · CEO, StyleSeat
@markdaniel94 oh hey fool! I just mentioned you to forbes the other day you're gonna get a shout out. Best day of my career? Launch day! I have never been that scared, thrilled, scared, happy or scared in my entire life. I was so proud of my team for pulling it off. I didn't realize our site broke 2 minutes before my presentation at TechCrunch Disrupt, I would have lost it but Dan didn't tell me which was a smart move :) We were live about 25 seconds before I went on stage.
Hunter Walk
@hunterwalk · Partner, Homebrew
@melodymcc a little off-topic question but you were part of a very interesting team at Current TV. Has that alumni base stayed close - lots of great people there.
M
Melody McCloskey
@melodymcc · CEO, StyleSeat
@hunterwalk We are still super close! Chloe Sladden went on to be VP of media at Twitter and grace the cover of Fast Company, Ezra Cooperstein was founding CEO of Maker Studio and is an exec at Fullscreen, Robin Sloan did amazing things at Twitter and is a big author, I chat with all of them pretty regularly actually. Current had some of the smartest people I've ever worked with
Mahathir Jeshan
@mahathir_jeshan · Intern, Coderstrust
If StyleSeat were flop, how did you inspire yourself for a new project?
M
Melody McCloskey
@melodymcc · CEO, StyleSeat
@mahathir_jeshan well i'm proud of what we've created. I will have that forever. I think I'm better equipped now than a few years ago to build something important so I'd try to be true to that and do it.
Mahathir Jeshan
@mahathir_jeshan · Intern, Coderstrust
@melodymcc thanks for your answer.
Eric Willis
@erictwillis · Working on something new
@melodymcc Hello Melody. Thanks for doing this AMA. What's a typical day for you? I'm just interested to get a rundown of a "normal" day for you from start to finish.
M
Melody McCloskey
@melodymcc · CEO, StyleSeat
@erictwillis wake up at 5:45/6, email, work out for a few hours, first mtgs around 9, meetings/work/design reviews until about 7, sometimes dinner meeting until about 9.
Miles Varghese
@m1lesv
@melodymcc Appreciate you taking the time Melody. There are a few solutions in the booking space. I'm always looking to glean insights as to how the best entrepreneurs position their product in the market. That being said, who do you consider your biggest competitors (i.e. Booker, myTime, etc)? And how do you differentiate from them? Thanks so much!
M
Melody McCloskey
@melodymcc · CEO, StyleSeat
@m1lesv great q. There aren't many marketplaces connecting stylists, barbers, nail artists, estheticians, etc to clients. There is a company called Schedulicity which is a horizontal solution and a company named Vagaro which has thousands of stylist. There are also about three dozen on demand beauty apps to get a service done in your home, but they power thousands of appointments a month. We power 2 million appointments a month and we're in 80% of US cities. I'm less focused on competitors and more focused on owning the market!
Emily Hodgins
@ems_hodge · Community and Marketing, Product Hunt
Hi Melody, thanks for joining us today. What have been the biggest challenges you've had to overcome to make StyleSeat the success it is today?
M
Melody McCloskey
@melodymcc · CEO, StyleSeat
@ems_hodge hmm, tons of challenges, and new crazy ones come up every day. For the majority of the time we've been around it was fundraising. Showing investors that they should care about hair stylists. It's a massive space, and we're doing something that truly transforms the lives of these small business owners but they didn't understand that or have passion for it. It took a lot of work to bring capital into the business, but now that we have, it's to our benefit that it was hard because we don't have dozens of competitors.
Kate
@katesegrin · Community @ Product Hunt
@melodymcc how did you go about getting small businesses using StyleSeat? Was it on your value prop alone or did you have to do something to really get them engaged?