To acquire users without spending money, we reached out to like-minded groups and personally invited them to check out The Muse, which led to valuable word-of-mouth sharing.

When launching The Muse, I offered Forbes career content in exchange for traffic, which took several attempts to finalize.

The Muse's first website, launched in 2011, was not great, but it attracted 20,000 users in the first month, indicating we struck a chord despite its flaws.

We launched our first version of The Muse using a WordPress site, providing career advice targeted at women in their twenties, despite investors claiming it was a small market.

The initial version of The Muse didn't look like a billion-dollar company, but getting it out there was essential for our growth.

To build The Muse, we focused on creating valuable career content to attract users before we had job listings, which helped us establish a marketplace.

Building The Muse was incredibly challenging, especially in the early days when I was cold emailing 800 student groups to gain our first users and pitching to over 150 VC firms, receiving 148 rejections in six months. Despite the struggle, I learned that while it never truly gets easy, the risk of failure diminishes as the company grows.

Creating great content on career issues helped us grow our audience and generate buzz around The Muse, as it appealed to a wider audience than just job seekers.

If we had waited to launch The Muse until it looked perfect, we would have failed before we even started. When we launched The Muse, we were excited to track user data, but we realized that not all metrics, like video views, were essential for our success.