The Muse YCombinator Application

We don't have an online demo for our more sophisticated job products yet; they're still in the whiteboard stage.

The Daily Muse is building a massive community of job-­seeking women to rival The Ladders. We curate high cache job opportunities across fields that reflect the varied interests of today's professionals: finance, start­up, tech, media, fashion, and global public health, just to name a few. In addition to pay-to-­post career opportunities, we offer smart content and soon to be ­launched professional development courses. We want to corner "career" for professional women.

We live in New York City, and the company would be based here after YC.

We brought Alec Turnbull, a close friend of mine and a great web dev, onto the team in June to build our minimum ­viable ­product. He's a great guy but in September we mutually decided that his heart wasn't in staying with us long term, so we've been helping him find his next move and he's been helping us interview developers. We have narrowed the field down to two highly awesome, amazing female developers, one of whom we would like to bring on as soon as we close a round. (We like male devs too! We just happen to be finding females at the moment).

All three founders met while working together at McKinsey & Company in the summer of 2008. We have worked together on numerous McKinsey-­related projects throughout 2008, 2009, and 2010, culminating in the Takalani Sesame 10­-year strategic planning and review described above. In September 2010, KMinshew and ACavoulacos founded their first company together, PYP Media, with two other ex-­McKinsey women. We quickly brought MMcCreery in as our first employee and Managing Editor. PYP grew quickly and won a Forbes' award for Top Websites for Women under Kathryn and Alex's leadership and Melissa's editorial direction, but some jockeying for control by founders #3-­4 led to the disbanding of the founding team (pre-­funding) and the formation of The Daily Muse in July 2011, with KMinshew, ACavoulacos, and MMcCreery as co­founders. It was a painful and an expensive learning experience ­ but a great one for us to have so early on. Needless to say, we've learned some pretty incredible lessons from the failure of our first company. [For reference, we worked closely with Bo Yaghmaie at Cooley LLP to make sure our new company was 100% legally kosher, and we're good.]

For several months in 2009 and 2010, all three co-founders co-­led a team that tackled the 10­-year strategic review for Sesame Workshop (aka Sesame Street)'s South African production, Takalani Sesame. We created a strategy and operations project that focused on key strengths and weaknesses of the organization's partners (broadcasting, production, and funding), as well as areas for Takalani's growth in the future. Starting in September 2010, all three cofounders began working on a venture called PYP Media, which was the predecessor to The Daily Muse. We had two co-founders at the time who were not a good fit, which led to a split in July 2011 after which we formed The Daily Muse (see below).

In 2010 KMinshew worked on the national strategic plan for the introduction of the HPV Vaccine for the Government of Rwanda, including the development of a comprehensive plan for cervical cancer screening and treatment. As part of her role, she supported negotiations between the Rwandan Ministry of Health and Merck that led to a quadrupling in the amount of vaccine donated by Merck, from 500,000 doses to 2 million, and the introduction of the vaccine to Rwanda in April 2011 as the first sub-Saharan African country to offer it via the public health system. After millions of Americans lost their retirement savings in the 2008 economic downturn, ACavoulacos created the first holistic model that computed by age and income group ­ how far from retirement security each demographic segment would be on the day they retired. With that complete picture into our (dire) future, she was able to model the effects of 10 potential laws being considered by a lobby in DC, to ensure that bills presented to lawmakers would in fact have the positive impact on our country that they hoped. The best of those are currently making it through Congress. Under MMcCreery's leadership, our previous start­up PYP Media was named a Forbes' Top Website for Women and lauded for the sharp content and avid following it had earned. She was also the former Executive Editorial Editor of the Harvard Crimson.

I spent 77 days traveling around the world and only paid for a hotel room once; instead I stayed with friends from the year I spent living abroad, former colleagues from my time working at the UN, families I met en route, and a few shared hostel dorms when the first 3 options fell through. I spent time in Oman, China, and Ecuador as well as France, Australia and Sweden, and a lot of places in between. In Belize, I once managed to talk my way onto a plane that departed 12 minutes after I arrived at the airport. Traveling light and cheaply is all about hacking systems, finding work­arounds, turning strangers into allies and not giving up no matter how zany things get. I freaking love that stuff.

We had 22,000 users to our beta in September with 25-­30% growth predicted for October. We've done our first revenue deal, a recruiting contact with Uber, which was a flat fee for the job posting / "Career Concierge" newsletter plus a performance bonus for each hire sourced through The Daily Muse. That newsletter and contract begins the day after tomorrow (10/12/11).

Our beta site is up and running at http://www.thedailymuse.com with a minimum viable product based on attracting the userbase necessary to hit the ground running with our job products. We are launching our first career newsletter Wednesday with a paid placement by Uber and are working on the outlines for our predictive job products.

We picked this idea because we are our customer: ambitious, confident women who don't want to find our next job on Monster.com; who are equally likely to consider a tech start­up as the Gates Foundation as a hedge fund; who spent years searching for smart content that doesn't dumb down career issues for women. Among the members of the founding team we have domain expertise in recruiting; in content creation and promotion; and in directly engaging with women ages 20-­35. What's more, we've been working in this specific field (job opportunities and career advice for professional women) for the last year, and the response from women has been unbelievable. Our user testimonials sometimes verge on the fanatical.

Members of our target demographic are currently finding jobs primarily via personal connections and occasionally via high­-touch recruiters who charge 20% of starting salary per hire; a small minority uses sites like the Ladders and an even smaller percentage turns to Monster.com, SimplyHired and the like. The skewed ratios of men to women on these sites is reflective of the research on transactional vs. relationship-­based networking, which is why the content arm of The Daily Muse is extremely important towards attracting and retaining a large pool of qualified women. No one is currently tackling the "smart content for women" space, and it's one we can begin to capture with front runner advantage. Marie Claire is releasing a special issue on career, which they are consulting us about, and sites like ForbesWomen and Excelle at Monster.com are desperately trying to capture the younger demographic. We have it and we're growing quickly.

We understand the demographic, inside and out. Most of the people trying to hire these women, market to them, and entertain them are well outside of it. They may have the "fashion advice for women" angle down pat, but we have a deep and nuanced understanding of the ambitious professional that makes our fans rabid and our voice distinct.

LinkedIn will always be a fearsome player in the recruiting space, but its approach and interface will always leave room for other players in the space. The Ladders is another likely competitor, though we believe they are limited by the banker­-esque brand they've created and the fact that many young professionals do not solely define themselves by the ability to make over a certain salary; more and more, individuals are drawn to tech start­ups or global development in addition to, say, corporate strategy. On the media end, Marie Claire is moving sharply in our direction (professional women, career content) but because of its strategy and the limitations of its mass-­market, print-­focused model, it is likely to become more of an ally than a competitor. We are in frequent touch with Marie Claire's publishers to talk about how we can work together. LearnVest is another potential competitor, should we decide to move into personal finance or should they move strongly into career.

We have a clear step-­by-­step sense of how we could make $40M/year and market data that suggests a much larger opportunity if we can figure out how to monetize it. Currently, we're interested in: Recruiting: - Email newsletters targeted by industry containing a mixture of content, paid job postings and sponsorships; - A dynamic job board organized by industry and location, with additional predictive abilities telling candidates who possess certain skills or are looking in certain niche areas to consider [ X ] job in an unrelated field which fits a similar profile; - A large resume database which recruiters and hiring managers can access and search for a fee, again with predictive and skills-­based abilities to suggest that a certain professional in finance might be a very good fit for a lead dev role at a burgeoning start­up (To go bottom up, we believe email newsletters can get a $250 CPM for targeted job listings and a $2500 finders' fee for successful hires; job boards for our demographic can charge roughly $350/post, and resume database access runs roughly $1000 per recruiter per month ­ more if predictive functions are added. Top down, there are 7.5M women in our demographic changing jobs every year. If the top 10% are worth $20,000 each time that happens, the overall addressable market for recruiting alone is $15B.) Training & Professional Development: - Direct to customer or business / white labeled training program (a natural extension of our core content which we've already been approached about by several companies) (To go bottom up, we believe individuals will pay $15 per course or, as LearnVest & Lynda have demonstrated, $120-­$250 for a year of access to courses. Businesses, on the other hand, spend over $55B every year on training and development in the US alone, and this market has a 9.8% CAGR). Advertising & Branded Content: -Examples here include content branded by Dove's self esteem campaign; sponsorship of our "Finance" vertical by CitiCards, or an AmEx and Dell sponsored Women's Symposium

We use content as a lead gen to attract users: our content is currently syndicated out via Huffington Post, Forbes, Business Insider, and Inc, and we're working on closing a video deal with HuffPost that will drive additional thousands of users back to our site. One of our strategies that has been very successful has been having inspirational and influential women write original content for The Daily Muse. Arianna Huffington wrote the lead article for our launch in September, and she's been followed by women ranging from Cindy Gallop and Rachel Sklar to the head of the U.S. Geological Survey. Marissa Mayer from Google and Nicole Lapin from CNBC have agreed to write as well. We've also agreed to a partnership with Refinery29, a global fashion newsletter with 500,000 subscribers, to provide information & plugs for The Daily Muse to all of their subs in November in exchange for awesome tailored career content from us. If it goes well, we plan to extend it.

Nope :)

91% of women feel advertisers don't understand them. Also, honey badger don't care.