limited. So you’re either sharing personal information publicly or cut
off. It doesn’t solve the need.”
Sulehria backed that up. She found no comfort in the major social
media networks, and in-person support groups were too far from
where she lived. “Plus, the face-to-face thing is so daunting—to walk
into a room and say, ‘Hi; I’m having this mental health problem,’ ” she
says. “I just wanted something I could look at and engage with while
I was lying in bed.”
Peanut had identified a problem worth solving, but the team knew
it couldn’t just create some new message boards called TTC and invite
their users in. The psychological struggles facing the TTC community
are significant and nuanced, and the internet can quickly become an
emotional minefield.
“There are articles and articles out there saying, ‘If you’re going
through [infertility], just get off Facebook,’ ” says Barbara Collura,
president and CEO of Resolve: The National Infertility Association.
“Because the moment someone inevitably drops an ultrasound photo
on there, it’s like...Oh my God. Women feel bombarded by this day
in, day out. People stop going to the mall, restaurants, family events.
So in a digital space, they want to feel safe. Anyone who’s trying to be
inclusive to an audience of people who are trying to conceive has to
be übersensitive.”
Keeping these sensitivities in mind, Kennedy decided to shield the
TTC community from the rest of the app. Peanut TTC would function
almost like a separate platform and have its own onboarding process.
That way, TTC users wouldn’t accidentally stumble upon conversa-
tions from happy new moms (though they could opt in to see every-
thing else if they wanted).
After that, the Peanut team had to dive into the nuances of the TTC
world, and they leaned heavily on Sulehria as a guiding voice and gut
check. Kennedy also asked Sulehria to connect her with other women
who’d been struggling to conceive and may be willing to share their
experience. Slowly but surely, a small but mighty focus group helped
her build this new product with care.
The team learned, as an example, that there are plenty of tensions
within the TTC community that Peanut would have to contend with. “A
woman who’s been trying for five months and a woman who’s been try-
ing for five years are in very different positions,” Kennedy says. “To put
them in one bucket? That’s not the experience we want to give users.”
Kennedy had started to see evidence of this earlier. On Peanut,
where some women had created fertility-related message boards,
there was a lot of debate about which posts belonged. “A woman who
had become pregnant posted an image of her positive pee stick, which
can be really triggering for other women,” she says. “We’d get notifica-
tions and reports, and we’d also see our users say to each other, ‘Hey,
maybe you should take it down, or post it somewhere else.’ ”
So in Peanut TTC, the company created UX solutions for those sen-
sitivities. Blurred filters can be applied to potentially sensitive content
(flagged by the creator or other users), and women will have to opt
in to see those messages or images. The team developed proprietary
artificial intelligence, which monitors group discussions and flags any
comments that may not suit the brand’s ethos. “If a user is writing a
comment and we detect an element of negativity, the app will say,
‘Hey, are you sure you don’t want to rephrase that? Peanut is a place
of supportive conversation,’ ” explains Hastings.
In November 2019, after nine months in development, the com-
pany launched Peanut TTC. The community grew quickly, and
user engagement skyrocketed—60 percent above Peanut’s typical
engagement.
It’s a good start, but Kennedy knows there’s a lot still left to do. She
wants Peanut to expand its sensitivity features, improve how it matches
women with relevant groups, and create room for TTC women to cel-
ebrate their pregnancies. And, more important, she also wants to keep
following this line of thinking—watching how people use her product,
and reacting with new solutions. She’s already seeing many options:
Women are using the app to talk about raising teenagers, fighting
chronic health conditions, sex after the age of 50, and more.
“Women have all these different life stages,” Kennedy says. “We can
be the product that helps you find other women like you at every stage.”Peanut is still in that early stage of a tech company’s life, when user
growth is prioritized over profit. Which is to say: The app is free to use
and makes no money. But Kennedy is building a monetization strat-
egy based on premium products or in-app purchases. Imagine a user
paying a small fee for direct access to a respected doctor, or an expert
who can quickly and personally respond to a health-related question.
Maybe it’s a great idea. Maybe it’s not. Maybe women will be inter-
ested in using it, but not so interested in paying for it. Either way,
Kennedy believes she’ll find her answer, so long as she keeps engaging
and listening to her users.
To do that, her team is hustling to repeat the success of TTC with
other communities. Later in 2020, for example, they’ll roll out Peanut
Meno, for women approaching and going through menopause.
They also go beyond just monitoring conversations on the app.
Peanut formally recruited some of its most engaged users to serve
as MVPs—Most Valuable Peanuts. The brand ambassador program
rewards some users with a tote bag or a sweatshirt when they share
the app with other women. Other MVPs do more structured work,
like distribute flyers at local coffee shops or the library, or organize a
group meetup. The tasks are paid (“If I’d pay someone else to do the
job, why wouldn’t I pay my user?” Kennedy says) and selected at the
leisure of the user; some women have earned up to $500 in a month.
In Kennedy’s eyes, it’s a small expense to elevate the insights of
Peanut’s most tuned-in community members. Her 1,500 current MVPs
are, indeed, incredibly valuable. “They’re the women creating our prod-
uct,” she says. “We look at the data, listen, engage, and implement. We
get feedback, iterate, and do it again. And when we don’t get it right, we
have 1,500 women ready to tell us how to fix it. And those 1,500 women
know, because they have direct access to our million women, engaging
with them, organically and naturally, day after day.”
Kennedy calls this a “constant user feedback loop,” and perhaps
nobody better embodies that than an MVP named Tricia Bowden.
She’s a former marketing exec who, in 2017, moved back to New York
after spending a year on the West Coast. She had a 1-year-old son
and was new to life as a stay-at-home mom, and a lot of the friends
she’d returned home to weren’t yet mothers. “I googled ‘Meeting mom
friends’ and came across Peanut,” Bowden says. She joined, started
lining up playdates, and before too long had a reliable network of
friends close by.
Her passion for the brand grew fast, and Bowden soon became one
of Peanut’s most valuable MVPs, and one of the loud voices push-
ing Peanut to expand to the “Meno” community sooner than later.
Kennedy was impressed and gave her a promotion: In January,
Bowden started a full-time gig as Peanut’s head of strategic growth
and partnerships for the New York market, where the company will
build out an office later this year.
Bowden’s first order of business is to optimize and scale the exist-
ing MVP program, rolling it out on a hyperlocal, local, and national
level—which is to say, Bowden basically became the feedback loop.
She’s a user who helped shape Peanut, who then joined Peanut, who
is now helping Peanut find and attract more people like her, who, of
course, will then go on to shape Peanut anew.Stephanie Schomer is Entrepreneur’s deputy editor.March 2020 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / 43