M
ichelle Kennedy arrived at lunch, nervous about
the conversation she was about to have with her
best friend. It was 2016, and Kennedy had just
made a big career decision. She was going to
leave her job as a tech exec and launch a new app
for moms. It was exciting—a new adventure, a
massive market, a lot of potential upside.
But the downside was this: Her best friend,
BBC journalist Sophie Sulehria, had been
struggling for years to have a baby. In fact, at
the time, Sulehria had just completed her third
failed round of in vitro fertilization, and it was
taking a toll on her mental health. Kennedy
didn’t want to add to the burden.
“It was a very bad time. My husband and
I were really suffering,” says Sulehria. “When
Michelle said she had something to tell me, I
thought, Oh God; she’s having another baby!
But she told me about the business, and she
was so worried: ‘I don’t want to be your best
friend who’s not only got a kid but also has a
mum business—I don’t want to alienate you.’ ”
But Sulehria was supportive. She knew the business was a fantas-
tic idea, even though her exclusion from its target audience was kill-
ing her. So she asked Kennedy for a favor, as a friend and as a hopeful
mom. This would be the earliest feedback Kennedy would receive as
an entrepreneur, and although she wouldn’t know it yet, it would set
the tone for how she would build her business—by listening to, and
quickly responding to, the needs of the community it serves.
“I said, ‘Promise me one thing: When this app becomes successful,
create a piece of it for people like me, a place where women having
fertility issues can find support and friendship and discussions and
information, because wouldn’t that be fantastic?’ ” Sulehria recalls.
“And Michelle literally looked at me that day and said, ‘I promise.’ ”
Today, Kennedy’s company is called Peanut, and it has a million users
and $9.8 million in funding. But back in 2013, before Peanut was
even a twinkle in its founder’s eye, Kennedy was a rising star in the
dating app world. She was deputy CEO of a European dating network
called Badoo, and she also had a role in launching the brand Bumble,
which would go on to become one of the industry’s major players.
Kennedy’s life was changing. Her personal dating days were behind
her. She’d just given birth to her son, Finlay, and didn’t have many
girlfriends with kids in her hometown of London. She wanted to find
some like-minded women at a similar stage of life, but all she could
find were archaic message boards and Facebook groups.
“The products available to me were all, quite frankly, crap,”
Kennedy says. “Nothing represented me as a mother.” At the same
time, she was watching a flood of utility-based applications enter the
market—new ways to order food or pick up your dry cleaning—and
felt that a huge opportunity was being overlooked.
“Women are 50 percent of the population the last time I checked,
and motherhood, in some way, will touch everyone’s life,” she says.
“But no one is touching this space?”
She came up with an idea for a networking app for moms and
called it Peanut, after her nickname for her baby bump when she was
pregnant. But she didn’t feel ready to take the leap—until three years
later. “There were just signals in the market,” she says. “People were
starting to talk about motherhood differently because we’d started to
talk about womanhood differently, and it just felt like the right time.”
In 2016, she began ideating in earnest, brought three trusted team
members on board, and got to work. f
40 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / March 2020
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