For three years, Nate Quigley built a family-memories app called Just Family that almost nobody used. Then his wife Vanessa came down the stairs and told him she didn’t want to use it, her sisters didn’t want to use it, and if he could just print her Instagram, that would be great. That became Chatbooks.

Nate and Vanessa are the husband-and-wife co-founders of Chatbooks, the Utah company that turns the photos on your phone into printed photo books. They’ve sold millions of books, raised more than $20 million in venture capital and grew past 100 employees. Nate tells John and Tyler how he got there: BYU, McKinsey in Los Angeles and Paris, Harvard Business School, turning down McKinsey’s tuition payback (“the decision to stay poor”), a software startup that shrank from 60 people to 11 after the dot-com crash and 9/11, and running JetBlue’s LiveTV. He admits he spent the Florida years building feature after feature for an audience of two (his mom and his cousin) until the family moved to Utah, Kickstart and Peterson Ventures backed him anyway, and Vanessa’s intervention turned the company around in a few weeks.

They cover the first books selling out their print capacity within three days, hand-delivering books and cookies to Allison Faulkner, the Harmon Brothers ad, an automated influencer program called Megatron, growth from $1M to $10M to $30M, losing Instagram as the main photo source, and the $15-a-month Month Books subscription that now brings in about 75% of revenue. Plus: what it’s like to run a company as a married couple with seven kids, what Vanessa gave up to do it, and Nate’s startup formula: “Don’t quit, don’t run out of money.”

(00:00:00) Cold open: “If you could just print my Instagram”
(00:01:05) Welcome: Nate and Vanessa Quigley of Chatbooks
(00:02:15) The bio: BYU, Harvard Business School, McKinsey, a mom of seven
(00:17:42) “The decision to stay poor”: skipping McKinsey after Harvard
(00:23:01) The dot-com crash and 9/11: from 60 employees to 11
(00:24:47) Running JetBlue’s LiveTV
(00:26:54) The spark: a grandpa’s recording of “Home on the Range”
(00:28:41) Build, build, build: three years of not listening
(00:36:26) Kickstart and Peterson Ventures bet on founder-market fit
(00:38:22) Almost broke: the founder’s dark night of the soul
(00:39:01) Vanessa’s intervention: “Just print my Instagram”
(00:44:00) Zero validation, and “can I give you my credit card?”
(00:44:22) Why “should” is the kiss of death
(00:48:30) First marketing: Allison Faulkner and a plate of cookies
(00:55:08) Series A and the Harmon Brothers ad
(00:57:24) Megatron: automated influencer marketing
(01:00:13) Series A and B, cash flow positive since 2018, $30M before COVID
(01:02:28) Month Books: the next hero product
(01:05:20) Running a company as husband and wife with seven kids
(01:09:22) Advice: “Don’t quit, don’t run out of money”
(01:10:32) What’s next: the Chatbooks family memory system

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