00:00 Introduction

Welcome to Give It A Nudge. Today finally we have a guest who we have been trying to get on for, I think we were just discussing, close to two years, who’s achieved a lot in that time and we wanted to get her on even before that. So super exciting to have Lucy here.

I run two companies. One of them is called Normal and we do sex toys and funding-free online digital sex education. We’re about three years old. And in the course of being a founder, supporting others, coaching different people in the startup world, I kept coming across the problem that a lot of us get taught very clear kind of subject-matter skills like accounting or engineering in our degrees, but when you actually get into a career there are these soft or generalist skills that become really vital to succeeding and flourishing. So I set up a second company late last year with a co-founder Harry Hamilton called Fuzzy to teach those skills.

05:00 Growing up and studying at Cambridge

I grew up in Brisbane. I ended up studying overseas so I studied social sciences, a combination of sociology, psychology, political science, economics, international relations, anthropology. All of the different ologies. That was really driven by just being very curious about human beings and how we organise ourselves and how societies work, and also with a focus on how do you create positive social change.

I’d also always been very fascinated by businesses. I remember my mum tells this story, before I realised it was rude I would just ask people how much money they earn because I was genuinely curious. I was trying to figure out why is that thing worth more than that thing.

09:00 The Cambridge student magazine

My first startup was a student magazine at the University of Cambridge, started with a couple of friends in the UK. We looked around at all the newspapers on campus and thought a lot of these feel like they’re either trying to imitate British tabloids or doing a worse version of the BBC trying to do news reporting. But we have this whole campus full of people who are actually really thoughtful, interesting, can go very deep on topics. So we wanted to create something that felt more like the New Yorker or the Atlantic for campus.

What was good about that experience was going through the process of being like, what’s the gap that’s missing, and then thinking about how do we want to fill that, how do we create a really high quality product, pitching writers and editors, essentially creating a brand out of nothing and saying hey, everyone jump at the same time so that the brand actually does exist.

15:00 McKinsey and leaving without a job

I started as a management consultant at McKinsey, spent a couple of years there, and then moved into startup. I think I knew very early on at McKinsey that this was probably not going to be for life, but it’s a valuable skill set. I think I really couldn’t make a good decision about what I want to do next while I’m here, and so I left without a job to go to.

Then I had a delightful period of 18 months of glorified testing around, which is awesome. For a while I thought I might be a playwright. That’s not going to happen. But helpful nonetheless. I can write reasonably well now, which has actually turned out to be a rare skill. In that period I also tried working with startups and did a little bit of work reporting on the venture sector in Australia.

21:00 Meeting Eucalyptus and building Normal

I’d been doing the Star Women’s Fellowship, which is a great program bringing women from the corporate world into the startup space, and through that had ended up working for two health tech company startups in Australia. One of them led me to Tim Doyle, who was the CEO of Eucalyptus. I had a bunch of digital marketing questions about health tech to ask him. I had an hour of Tim’s time asking him basically to share all of his mental models.

At the end of that conversation he was like, we’re actually planning to launch a fourth brand, it’s probably going to be in sexual health or women’s health. I think you’d be a really good GM for it, do you want to apply? And I was like, well, I’ve been thinking about sex tech the last couple of years on my own time anyway. So yeah, I think that would be great. I don’t know how to start a consumer brand but I suspect you could tell me.

27:00 Launching Normal into COVID

We got lucky in some ways out of the gate because launching a vibrator company into a global pandemic is a perfect time. Lots of people stuck at home, lots of discretionary income, no dating. I mean, timing is timing. I think every product in the world can benefit or be hindered by timing and no one’s got control of that.