Interview with Kathryn Minshew about starting her business The Muse.
This is part nine of the ten part series. Follow the Starting a Business as a Young Entrepreneur interview series and don’t miss an interview!
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While searching job boards to find what she wanted to do with her life, Kathryn Minshew found it, but it wasn’t a job. Kathryn is founder and CEO of The Muse, a career website which she describes as, “The place people come to figure out what they want to do with their life.” Kathryn identified what was missing in the career site niche and set out to make The Muse a reality. Career and job related websites are nothing new. Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com have been around since the late 1990’s, so what sets The Muse apart? “One of the biggest problems I’ve seen with career sites is a lot of sites are really boring. They might be effective, but they’re not any fun to use.” The Muse has created a community that focuses on inspiration and helping young and old professionals in their current profession and future ones. The site averages a million visits a month. The job market and the opportunities available when it comes to career choices have changed dramatically in the past decade, but for the most part, career websites haven’t. The Muse has taken advantage of this and has captured a significant piece of the market through offering an “end to end experience.” Kathryn Minshew has always displayed traits of being entrepreneurial, she just didn’t know it. She had started a nonprofit and was working as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. The idea of being an entrepreneur really started to develop after a close friend started a gourmet ketchup company. “I remember thinking…If he can do it, I wonder if I can do it too.” After deciding to pursue her idea for The Muse, Kathryn easily secured millions of dollars, became an instant success and lived happily ever after Kathryn struggled to get others to believe in her idea as much as the founding team, which consisted of her and a couple of her best friends. “In our first couple months, I pitched 150 investors. 148 said no, 2 said yes, but they only wanted to invest until (other investors joined) in the round.” Instead of using her dwindling checking account as a crutch, she used it to her advantage. Kathryn only had $5,000 left to her name and said that they were “living on fumes.” “We got really good at getting things we needed without spending a lot of money on them. We did some incredibly creative swaps – figured out how to do more with less. We came up with some of our best ideas because we couldn’t just buy the solution.” This not only saved The Muse much needed funds in their early stages, but helped them to develop exactly what they needed, instead of purchasing imperfect solutions.
