How I Got Started: The Juggernaut (YC-backed media company by a solo female founder)

I had SO much fun talking to Snigdha (who I originally met through this interview, and has since become a founder friend and someone I really look up to 🥺). It’s no surprise to me that she’s building a media company, because she’s an incredible storyteller while also being very practical and informative with her words.

Among many other gems, she talks about:

• What it’s like building in a space that’s not considered “hot” by traditional VCs

• Her YC application process, and how she turned her first interview’s “maybe” into a second interview and a “yes”

• So many other gems about how to grow a consumer company by being scrappy, creative, and occasionally doing things that don’t scale

How she knew she wanted to be a founder
Hindsight is 20/20! I didn't realize that there were many elements of who I was that made me a founder by the time I started my company.

In college, for example, I started my college's first student-run South Asian Film Festival and went door-to-door asking different departments for funding. I then recruited all my friends for free and created a mini startup crew. By my senior year, the biggest thing that we did was convincing the head of my college to invite the biggest Bollywood star, Shah Rukh Khan, to come to Yale. I guess I never called myself a founder despite all of those things.

After I had graduated from business school, I had just started dating this guy who was a late-stage venture capitalist. He was observing me and my behavior - the fact that I worked at McKinsey but wasn’t happy, and that I had gone through a coding bootcamp and knew how to code - and was like "Well, have you ever thought about starting your own thing?" And so I did that.

Truly, I did not think of myself as a founder until that happened, which was kind of weird.

How she developed the idea behind The Juggernaut
Growing up in New York City, I was surrounded by different cultures and never had time to dwell on my own because I was living it everyday. I went home and ate food from where I was from, and I’d frequently go to religious celebrations with childhood friends.

It wasn’t until I went to college in New Haven and realized that environment was unique and hard to create out of thin air. I became a South Asian studies major because of this and was infused in South Asian literature, culture, and film.

Similarly, when I started The Juggernaut, it came out of a desire to serve myself and others who were feeling this gap as they got older. I think these are the most powerful companies because these fundamental needs don’t change. We’re not just opportunistically trying to find what’s hot like AI or crypto.

How she built her MVP and got her first subscribers (completely organically!)
The ideation phase involved me thinking about the simplest thing I could do while still working at a consulting firm that took up a lot of my time. I couldn't start a business because I was a full-time employee.

The first test I did was to create a weekly newsletter on Mailchimp that was free. I didn't even pay to remove the Mailchimp branding. I just aggregated my thoughts and analyses on South Asian news to see if people were interested.

Our open rates were really high, and after a certain point, it wasn't just my friends opening it. I had to find a circle outside of my friends. More than 50% of the people who opened the newsletter were people I didn't know, and our open rates were still high. Our unique open rates were 80%, which is insane because that's not even our actual open rate. I think our actual open rate was above 80%. This wasn't a large sample size, but it was enough for me to see that we were onto something.

How she went about finding a co-founder, and ultimately being a solo founder
Finding a co-founder was tough for me. Part of it may have been because we’re in the journalism industry where getting people from the NYT or WSJ to leave is extremely difficult, and there’s a lot of bad blood from stories like BuzzFeed to Vice to Ozy. I was looking for an editor-in-chief to be my journalistic co-founder, but I talked to over 40 people and they all said no.

Later, I met someone who was more of a product business person, but I didn't pursue that co-founding relationship because I thought we were too similar. In hindsight, I wish I had questioned the typical advice people give about co-founders, which is to find someone who's complementary to you. Now that I have more maturity in my business, I actually think that's false advice.

The most important thing about a co-founder is how you solve problems. Even if you have the same skill set, that doesn't mean you can't get together and hire out complementary skill sets. If you can get along even in crisis and with problems, it's worth the world because it's like a marriage. It doesn't matter if you guys are doing the same thing.

How she dominated her YC application, and how they ultimately became her first check
My YC process was somewhat unexpected.

At this point, I had seeded about 150 friends to my newsletter and had seen it grow to 700 - all people I didn’t know. I had two friends who had gone through YC before me, and their encouragement is a big reason why I applied (even though I had missed the deadline and was 5 days late).

In my first interview, I got a maybe, but I didn't give up. I called my friend (Eric, the co-founder of Ramp) who had gotten into YC and asked for feedback. He gave me five pointers, which I applied in my second interview.

One of the things he told me was that I wasn't being aggressive enough and formidable enough, which YC loves to see. That's a really big word that YC loves to use. "Are you formidable enough in the room?" in terms of showing off my expertise and why I was confident that it would work.

Because here's the thing, right? Even if they don't know if it's going to work, if you seem sure as hell like it's going to work, they're going to start to notice and question themselves and be like, "she knows something I don't know." I think I had to amp up that formidability. Each time I said a statement, I would back it up with sentences and facts or the data I had.

I just printed out my MailChimp report and took it to YC. Even though they didn't understand exactly what I was building, they couldn't really refute my data. Women especially have to rely on data because it's harder to refute.

How she got her first PR through cold outreach by being creative
Some of our first PR coverage I got by myself, first by making a list of all the people writing about new media companies. I wrote an email to Sara Fischer of Axios in the format of an Axios article. She was impressed, called me up to chase down the story, and then we got published in Axios early on.

We punched way above our weight and got all of this attention we probably didn’t deserve at the time, but Sara got the scoop on a new media company that nobody else was writing about, and I gave her the exclusive.

Other highlights with Snigdha

On how every founder should have two types of founder friends
The most important thing, I would say, for each founder is to find two types of founder friends.

One type of founder friend should not be directly in your line of business because you need those friends to keep you in check. There are usually no feelings of jealousy or comparability because they're in a completely different track, so keep those people close.

The second type of founder friend is someone in a similar sector, but not exactly in your topic. For example, we're in the consumer subscription business model, so I tried to find people in the same business model. I have a lot of friends from The Athletic to The Nudge to other consumer subscription companies. They're not directly competing with my audience, but they have the exact functional knowledge to push me to the next level.

On understanding context behind advice before taking advice
I loved YC, but so many companies going through YC are B2B SaaS, so their advice is through that lens.

They were telling me not to do Facebook ads or to not do a PR launch, but that’s actually the wrong advice for a consumer company. For a consumer company, you want to get in front of people, as many people as possible, in as big of a spot as possible.

On things she did that don’t scale during YC to grow
I had an existing audience for the newsletter, so by the time I launched the subscription, I had more than 1300 free newsletter readers, and I used that email campaign to convert many of them to being paid subscribers.

To grow beyond that, in the early days, I threw a mini launch party with my friends and paid for food and drinks. I encouraged my friends to bring their friends and asked them to buy at least one subscription.

I also spoke at a conference at my alma mater, Yale, and had an audience of over 150 Yale students and I encouraged them to subscribe. That's kind of how we got our first customers.

On how fundraising was her biggest challenge since YC
Even though I had “the perfect pedigree”, that's when I really realized that the world is biased, and that it’s really freaking hard to raise money.

I was seeing my friends who were often fresh out of college, who were often two men raising $2M to $5M rounds on crazy valuations with no product, just an idea, and no customers. I had lots of customers, revenue, and a product, and I struggled to raise $800K. That was a struggle bus that took forever - about three or four months.

But guess what? I've outlived them. So many of those companies - these dudes that raised from elite investors on demo day - are dead.

On thinking about VC as a search problem, not a persuasion problem
Founders, if you're having a hard time raising, and it's at an early stage, the odds are stacked against us. We often talk about VCs as a search problem - it’s not a persuasion problem. Either people will get it or they won't.

Unfortunately, if you're in a sector or a problem area that is new and innovative, VC’s may not have seen those patterns before at an early stage, so they're less likely to move quickly. That's what happened with some of those early companies like Airbnb. Even if it takes you 200 or 300 meetings, keep searching because there are going to be people out there who will get it and who will get it early.

On wanting more women to apply to YC
I want to see more women apply to YC. The number of women as a percentage of founders in YC is infinitesimally small. The number of solo women is even smaller. If you look at solo founder + women of color, I think I was the only one. I hope I'm not erasing anyone here, but it's tiny.

The biggest manifestation of it is when you go to the bathroom; there's a line all the way around the freaking loft area or, like, the big area in the Menlo Park office, all at the door for the men. For the women, there's barely a line; you just go in. I would say to all female founders out there, please apply to YC.

I want everyone to apply, and I want everyone to put their best foot forward. I also think you have to brag in that application. You have to brag hard. I had to bring out some brags that I had never used in years.

On how she decided to pursue a subscription business model (instead of ad model) in media
When we got into YC, we only had the newsletter, and I was solely focused on growing that. In hindsight, this was also around the time Morning Brew was there.

I'm a business school nerd, but ad businesses have really low valuation multiples. Ad businesses sell anywhere from 0.5x to 2x of their revenue. Why? Because most ad businesses are capital-intensive businesses. This means that if you put an ad in a newsletter, and you’re a big company like Walmart, you usually negotiate terms where you don't have to pay until 30 days after the ad has been delivered. Meanwhile, the company has already spent that money, whether it's through account executives or ad creative writers, etc. It's a poor business model because you need more cash to operate than a usual company. This is why B2B, SaaS, and Consumer SaaS get closer to 8-10x multiples.

During YC, I quickly realized that if I wanted to get the attention of people like The Athletic or people who had invested in The Athletic, I wanted to start a subscription business faster than I had initially anticipated.

Today, 85% of my subscribers pay us for their access at the beginning of the year, and it’s a big reason why we’ve been able to be so capital efficient (raising just ~$2.1m in 4+ years).