Katy Carrigan: From Head of Sales to CEO of the Rapidly Growing Gift-Giving App, Goody
I had the pleasure of interviewing Katy Carrigan, CEO. Katy joined Goody as a consultant in April 2021. She quickly moved into a full-time role as Head of Sales and then Chief Revenue Officer. After a successful year of growing the firm’s revenue and customer base, she was asked to step into the CEO role.
Goody is a gift-giving app for both businesses and consumers. It allows individuals to easily send one or thousands of gifts at once. Since launching in 2020, Goody has seen explosive user growth, with use cases that range from wishing your friends happy birthday to employee recognition and sales prospecting.
Before Goody, Katy worked on multiple go-to-market teams at Dropbox in San Francisco. In her last role before leaving the company, she was leading Dropbox’s Global Sales Assist team.
Thank you so much for joining us!
Spending 6+ years at Dropbox, what motivated you to join an earlier stage startup like Goody?
The product! I first interacted with Goody by receiving a gift and was instantly impressed with the sleek experience. It was also instantly clear to me which problems Goody was looking to solve. As someone who moved away from home, I was often scrambling to send birthday gifts to family members across the country, or, as a manager during COVID that led a disrupted team, I wanted to meaningfully show employee appreciation outside of Zoom shoutouts. Goody filled both of these needs perfectly.
Coming from Dropbox where I saw the power of product-led-growth, I knew Goody had similar potential. Once people started using it, they would be hooked by the simplicity and seamlessness to the point that they would want to share it with others.
Also, and of equal importance, the people! The energy, smarts, and hustle of the founding team was infectious. I knew that I would learn a ton working with this group and together we would build something really special.
What is it that excites you about what you’re building at Goody?
There is something extremely delightful and special about the Goody experience. With a few clicks someone can celebrate a milestone and show someone they care. I’ve literally seen it change people’s behaviors by helping them show-up better in their relationships, both personally and professionally. Not many products can do that. We’ve made multi-party commerce frictionless and I can’t wait to see how we continue to innovate and enhance the experience.
What has been the most significant obstacle you have encountered while growing Goody?
Building remotely. As mentioned earlier, it is the people that make the company and I wish we could all be in the same room more often. Don’t get me wrong, by having the option to work remotely, we’ve been able to bring an exceptionally strong team together, which otherwise would have been significantly tougher to pull off, but I often think about how much faster we could go if we were next to one another on a daily basis.
However, it is important to also acknowledge that it has made us stronger as a company. A distributed workforce requires more effective communicators, self-starters, and problem solvers.
As someone who has gone from Head of Sales to CEO at a Series-A startup, what advice would you give to employees at early-stage startups who aspire to advance in their careers?
Be comfortable being uncomfortable and leave your ego at the door. At a startup, you have to wear a lot of hats and be okay with ambiguity and failure. Embrace the chaos and use it to prove your value to the company. Ask yourself: “How do I go beyond my defined scope to help get the company to the next level?”
I tell my team all the time, no one at a startup is a cog in the machine. Every single person can have an outsized impact on the success of the company. You could be working on the feature that helps us go viral or closing a deal that changes our company’s runway. Your work can make the difference between failure and success.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
You can find my LinkedIn here, but I definitely also recommend following @ongoody on Instagram to see some of the coolest new products and brands we’re adding to our gift collection.
This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!
