#324 - Lee Rubin, Founder and CEO of Confetti - on designing for business resilience.

Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to build a business that can survive crises and emerge stronger every time. My guest is Lee Rubin, founder and CEO of Confetti.

Lee is a visionary culture leader with over a decade of experience in B2B sales. In 2014 she founded Wekudo - a remote corporate event planning agency. The idea behind it came while working at ZocDoc, where she struggled with the bureaucracy and logistics of planning team-building events.

Soon after that, she founded Confetti, realizing that the problem could only be solved through a combination of technology and people (not just people).

Under Lee's leadership, Confetti achieved exponential 600% growth during the COVID-19 pandemic and grew it as the leading solution for virtual team-building through a relentless focus on quality experiences.

Their mission: to simplify event planning while empowering organizations to build stronger, happier, and more holistic teams through unforgettable shared experiences that make work life more memorable.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Lee to my podcast. We explore her journey to build a successful B2B SaaS company in a period when most of her competitors ceased to exist. Lee shares her story about a remarkable pivot during Covid, and why she decided to do nothing when "back to work" kicked in again. She also shares how she wasted 3 valuable years at the start, and what she could have done differently to avoid that. Last but not least, she elaborates on what ingredients she doubles down on to build a product people just keep talking about.

Here's one of her quotes

The main contributor to our success is that we built a platform that had a very strong form of agility. The platform can support various different use cases if we really want it to. It allowed us to pivot super quickly [during Covid]. The last invoice that we got from an in-person event and the first invoice that we got for a virtual was 10 days. We didn't spend time sitting in sadness that our events business was in shambles. We got right back to the drawing board, back to playing and having fun and trying to see what sticks - and the virtual events stuck.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. What she has done differently to survive during & post-COVID when other competitors closed their doors.
2. How she managed to pivot her entire business in less than 10 days when Covid started.
3. What she learned from niching down, where everyone else was widening the net - and how that played to their advantage.
4. How she's embedded delivering "wow factor" in every aspect of her company - and why this has become unnegotiable for her.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Lee Rubin
• Website: Confetti

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