By Nancy Dahlberg
Goody, a gift-giving platform for businesses and consumers, has a new CEO at the helm.
Katy Carrigan, previously Goody’s chief revenue officer, will replace Goody’s former CEO, Edward Lando. Lando, co-founder and Goody investor, becomes Goody’s chairman of the board. “My job as a startup investor is to recognize talent before the whole world does and bet that someone has the capacity to eventually run a large company. I am convinced that Katy has that ability,” says Lando, who is also managing partner of Pareto Holdings, an early stage investment and incubation vehicle based in Miami founded by Shutterstock founder Jon Oringer and Lando.
Founded in 2020, based in Miami and backed by SoftBank, Goody makes gift-giving as simple as sending a text. After the gift giver sends a present from the comfort of their phone with just a couple of clicks on the Goody app, the recipient enters their address, and perhaps their size or color choice too. The gift giver doesn’t pay until the present is accepted and the platform allows users to swap their gifts.
In her new role as CEO, Carrigan will oversee Goody’s product roadmap and growth of both its consumer and enterprise lines. She’s also part of an elite group now: Just 14% of startup CEOs are women, according to Statistica. “I know everyone says it, but it really is true that it’s your support network that elevates you. Fill your corner with mentors, peers who will challenge you, and curious newcomers,” Carrigan says.
Since the launch of Goody for Business last year, the platform as added over 1,000 enterprise customers every month. They have used Goody to send over 150,000 gifts. Goody has now attracted more than $32 million in venture capital, including its $15 million SoftBank-led round announced in November of 2021. Goody has about 32 employees in addition to contractors, and the team is remote.
Carrigan came aboard as a consultant in April 2021. She quickly moved into a full-time role as head of sales and then chief revenue officer and after checking out Miami and falling in love with its vibrancy, she happily moved here in December. Before Goody, she led sales and go-to-market teams at Dropbox in San Francisco during her 6-year career there.
We took the opportunity to find out more about Carrigan and Goody. Here are excerpts of the conversation.
What drew you to Goody and what excites you about being CEO?
I just absolutely fell in love with what they were doing and building. It became a pretty easy choice to make the jump over to the team and it’s been a really fun ride.
I first interacted with Goody by receiving one and I was very impressed by the technology and the UX. It was just an extremely sleek process of receiving a gift and as I learned more about it, I really felt the need and the pain that it was solving for. Particularly this was in the heart of the pandemic and we’re in this distributed workforce, potentially not seeing friends and family members in the same regularity as we were before. This app that had been introduced to me made it incredibly easy and seamless to get those gifts to individuals and show that you’re thinking about them, without all the logistics that are often around gift giving nowadays.
It’s been fun for a lot of different ways. If I want to recommend a book for someone I could be in mid conversation and within like three clicks I am sending them that book. I think a lot about it too for celebrating life moments from new parents to those who are getting married. What I really also love about it is our swap functionality. Half our recipients tend to swap. With gift giving you do try to be thoughtful and find the right thing for the person, but ultimately, if you give them that choice and they choose something that they really need or want, it’s not going to be wasteful or going to collect dust.
As a female startup CEO, how does it feel to be part of the 14%?
It’s a little surreal to be honest. We’re a tight-knit team and I want to be in the trenches working with my team and really building this product and moving it forward and in growing the user base, so sometimes there’s still a bit of like, wow, that’s my title now. But I’m getting more used to it every day and getting more and more excited around really being the person at the helm of the ship and leading us through this next phase.
I’ll say, Nancy, I have had big career ambitions for a while and from early on I definitely have to attribute that to being raised by a number of strong women in my life who were always working and striving for more, whether it was higher degrees in education or in their own jobs. I have to give a big shout out to my family for giving me the foundation that has allowed me to take risks and go after opportunities.
How has your experience at Dropbox prepared you for this role?
I feel like [Dropbox] was one of the best schools to learn from. There are a few reasons for that and I think one of the main ones was how good of a job they did creating teams and hiring people. If you can bring in the right people and bring in a diverse set of people, that really can be the game changer on whether something makes it or doesn’t. They also gave me the opportunity to work in a number of different roles in a revenue capacity from being a frontline seller to being in operations … and I had this opportunity to work with people who are big thinkers to others who were extremely structured and process oriented. So I like to think that I’m a modulation of all these wonderful leaders and people I worked with before and had this chance to take the bits and pieces I like the best.
Please tell me about Goody’s recent growth.
Over the last couple of months and really since the SoftBank raise, we’ve seen a lot of great growth and we had a huge Q4. Now we are starting to focus on building out our SaaS revenue channels with Pro, which is an individual higher tier professional plan for Goody, and also our employee engagement plan, which is focused on those individuals and HR people who are looking to really celebrate their employees and show appreciation.
And so, what percent roughly is b2b versus consumer now?
I won’t share exact percentages yet, but the majority right now is our b2b side and we’ve put a lot of focus on that – almost 10,000 different companies have signed up for Goody for some sort of celebratory moment. And what we’re seeing too is that in a lot of these companies we have this ability to go viral. One team member finds us and then other teams start using Goody. There’s so many use cases from that mid-level manager wanting to celebrate their team after they finished a really hard project to someone in people ops looking at programmatic gifting and trying to make sure that every single person gets recognized on their work anniversary and no one’s falling through the cracks.
Do you still have a free model?
We want to always be accessible and so there are no plans of ever getting rid of a free product, both on our consumer and business side. As we continue to build out some of these great features, they may sit in a premium package.
So what’s ahead for Goody?
I’m really excited about focusing on our recipient experience some more and on things that people have been asking for, like international shipping. We recently just launched alcohol on the platform and gift cards – those are asks that people have regularly. Another one that we hear often is someone wanting to be able to send multiple Goodys at once and we’re working on that.
We’re excited about the coming months. We have this awesome team in place, we have great investors, we’re well funded and we have this awesome product, so we’re feeling really confident and good even though the market conditions are changing a bit.
I liked the recent tip you shared on LinkedIn using Goody to send soup mixes to a sick friend. What are some more ways to use Goody?
For the consumer, if you’re not taking advantage of our birthday feature yet, absolutely do that. That has really helped me multiple times. Now I get a nice notification letting me know that a friend’s birthday is coming up and then I can click into it easily. A second tip is one is to make it even easier for people as we have this good gifting option called Gift Collections. And what those are is you’re basically able to send someone a dollar amount that they can spend on Goody and they don’t know that dollar amount but then they get to select what they want. They see many good items if they just use that treat yourself gift collection or we do other curations and we have one going on right now for Pride Month as well as our summer collection. You allow that recipient to pick what they want without the price being exposed like a normal gift card.
On the business side, if you don’t have a solution today for making sure that your employees get recognized for milestones, I highly recommend working with us. We integrate with over 25 different HR systems so the likelihood is we have you covered. What I love about it is, because I even remember this in my own experience, there are companies where someone on the team, because their work anniversary, let’s say, fell during the middle of the week, has this celebration in office and maybe mine was like the weekend and no one says anything. Or maybe one manager is good at it, but other managers are just never recognizing employees. And by putting something in place like Goody, you have that equitable experience across the company. It’s a really great tool for all different use cases from someone who’s planning events, sending Goodys to the speakers of the event. Or Someone in sales looking to celebrate one of the champions who’s pushing their deal forward by sending them maybe a sweatshirt with their favorite sports team, or they’re really into cooking and we have some of the best olive oils on our platform.
READ MORE ON REFRESH MIAMI:
- Rigor lands $3.5M seed to build blockchain-based construction lending platform
- Digital Twin Marine’s innovative system builds 3D models of vessels in days, not months
- PayCargo raises $130M from Blackstone Group to expand internationally
Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter @ndahlberg or email her at [email protected]
- Human ingenuity, inspiration, a call to action: Miami Tech Talent Coalition takes the stage at eMerge Americas - April 24, 2024
- Miami Tech Month, where developers get their own conference, VCs take the stage, and anything is POSSIBLE - April 23, 2024
- Full circle moment for Johanna Mikkola, the new CEO for Tech Equity Miami - April 22, 2024