Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing Our Newest Show: Social Currency with Sammi Cohen
Mon, 19 May 2025
Today, we're sharing the first episode of MNN's newest podcast Social Currency with Sammi Cohen. In her first episode, Sammi sits down with entrepreneur Ty Haney. Ty shares what she wishes she knew as a first-time founder while building the brand Outdoor Voices, the dark side of VC and the most important lesson she’s learned on equity as a founder. She also shares the latest on her new ventures—Joggy, a clean energy brand, and TYB, a platform redefining what community-powered business looks like. If you've ever launched, led, or lost something you built, this one will hit home. Follow Sammi on Instagram here Follow Ty on Instagram here Check out TYB here and Joggy here Here’s what Sammi covers today with Ty: 00:00 How Ty Haney Scaled Outdoor Voices to $100M 02:05 How to Build Community within your Business 06:17 The Curse of the Girlboss Era 08:41 The Trap of Growth Versus Profitability 21:13 The Importance of Equity as a Founder 23:27 Second Acts: TYB and Joggy 29:37 The Value Proposition of Joggy 32:21 The Value Proposition of TYB 46:00 Insights and Reflections 48:52 Social Currency Corner 49:58 Advice for Founders
Chapter 1: How did Ty Haney scale Outdoor Voices to $100M?
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There was an article that came out and I that night saw it and literally looked up how to resign. For me, it was no option to like come off this wave of painfulness, losing essentially the company that I started and being caught up in this female founder takedown thing. But I had no choice but to get back on the horse. It's amazing to be able to start again.
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Chapter 2: What role does community play in business?
When you were in the early days of TYB, what were those initial pitches like to get brands on the platform before they even knew what it looked like?
Yeah. I mean, there's such a standard for what traditional loyalty programs look and feel like. It's like baked into your site as a brand. It's points for purchases that you then earn on your birthday. It's such a rote, I guess, program. And so we've kind of exploded that definition to include a lot more of the fun, active participant.
type behavior where we as brand builders know things like high-quality, authentic, user-generated content is something that I'd happily pay for, right? Generally, brands would want this experience white-labeled. What we very much believe in at TYB is Users want one portal into rewards and relationships from their favorite brands.
And they want essentially their status with one brand to potentially mean something across this universe of brands within the TYB experience. And so the early innings was us convincing brands that loyalty just on their site and this traditional points system was ultimately not where the engagement happens. And rather...
fans of the future, the most high value consumers are going to be in an app playing games and they want all of their favorite friends and interests and favorite products in one spot. Brands were resistant to that. Now we see 50% monthly active users in the TYB app, which is for every brand that signs on by far their most engaged channel.
So where the engagement happens, we're then connecting that and being able to show the frequency of purchase in LTV. And It's cool because every brand that comes on expands the ecosystem. And so this becomes very much like a multi-brand loyalty network.
And it's where people are on a daily basis tuning in, completing challenges, collecting badges, progressively earning status within communities to unlock special perks. And I think game at the end of the day says a lot of it because loyalty hasn't felt like a game. It hasn't been a fun thing to engage with. And loyalty status within one brand hasn't spoken to others.
And that's what I think becomes quite compelling over time.
And how are the brands themselves promoting the fact that they're even on TYB?
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Chapter 6: What are the value propositions of Joggy and TYB?
At that point in time, when I was starting After Voices, when Emily was starting Glossier, it wasn't all that common to see women in these founder, CEO, leadership positions, especially starting companies from scratch.
Of course, in history, there have been those, but it was a moment in time where barrier to entry to start a company and then funding next to that really allowed for these great visionaries and people who were obsessed with product and could see by our own personal pain points, what was missing in the market for young women in particular, that caught fire and was accelerated quickly with D2C.
I think at the same time, whether this was intentional or not, we became stories like connected to these brands and people fell in love with it, but it ultimately also became an Achilles heel. And so we had this really beautiful rise of exciting founders and brands and people really emotionally connected to these companies.
And then I think at the end of this, and we felt this similarly, that exposure being the face of the brand became an Achilles heel. I remember at the end of my chapter at Outdoor Voices, there was a BuzzFeed article that had allegations around, I think it was someone on my team having to clean up my dog's poop at some point in time in the office.
And I thought my life was over when that story was about to break with these crazy allegations. But for whatever reason, there had been this trend for journalists to go interview ex-employees of a company, potentially people who had been fired or let go. And that became this sensationalized clickbait story, which really made these journalists and these outlets make money.
And so we had set ourselves up to be these brands that people really cared about, but then it flipped on us. I think I'm very grateful, and I'm curious your thoughts here. I think people are becoming a little less sensitive. So there's potentially less importance in... takedowns, particularly with female founders, and what's been most important to me having gone through that.
And 90% of my time building Outdoor Voices and being a young founder, having started Outdoor Voices at 23, was amazing. And I can look back at that and tie a bow on a masterclass. Thank you. I know much better how to run a business today and what I will do again and what I won't do again and who I'll play ball with. But the most important thing for me is just starting again.
So for me, it was no option to come off this wave of awesomeness and then painfulness, losing essentially the company that I started and being caught up in this female founder takedown thing. But I had no choice but to get back on the horse. And I think for me, like modeling that behavior has become very much kind of part of what's so important with TYB and Joggy. We can start again.
It's amazing to be able to start again And being able to do so a second time with so many learnings and all of this experience under my belt, I'm a much more refined and savvy brand and businesswoman.
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Chapter 7: What advice does Ty have for first-time founders?
Whereas before, that was almost like the sideshow of like, this is what we're doing. And it was very hand wavy. It speaks to the venture capital environment and the money in the space where it was okay to not be profitable.
Totally. Yes, we had stories and products and fandom that were very investable. But in a lot of ways, as young founders, we were able to raise too much money too quickly. And then the stakes got so high, like growth at all costs and like, massively compounding quarters, quarter after quarter.
And when you're selling things in a physical, like physical widgets, so leggings in our case, things can go very wrong when it's an inventory business. And so those variables compressed and then this mandate to grow at all costs in a lot of ways made the wheels come off in situations that probably didn't have to go that way. So D2C is cool.
I think many of us found ourselves in that equation where we were able to raise a the stakes got very high and then maybe didn't have the infrastructure or certainly the experience to know how to navigate that in a way that the outcome and kind of the sustainability of the business would be in the best interest of all the stakeholders.
And there was also no one that was telling you otherwise, right? It was all of these potential investors, your stakeholders, everyone who had something to say about the money that you took into the business, right? No one was probably saying, pump the brakes, let's get you to profitability, and then you can take on more money.
It was just, here, here's more capital, here's more capital, keep growing, open all these retail stores, continue to grow and expand. And I think now it's so easy to play armchair expert and say, oh, well, all of these companies just raised too much money when it was just... a state of the times, really. I want to talk about an article from The Cut that came out in 2023.
And this was a few years after you left Outdoor Voices, where you were actually very open about how you felt the brand had changed since your departure. And it seems like people were almost surprised that you were still thinking about the company that you had worked at and created. And I'm curious why you think people were even surprised by that.
That cut article blessed them. That was quite funny. I just remember sex and bananas is like my two favorite interests. So that was nice. Nice of them. Marked in time forever. Anyway, yeah, I think if you haven't been a founder yourself, you... could certainly have a perspective, but you don't really know. You don't really get it. Like, I don't know why people would be feeling that way.
I think, for me, OB, you know, it's deeply rooted in me. It's in my DNA. It's from how I grew up. And so obsession is what comes up for me. Like, when you're a founder, when you truly commit to taking something from zero to something, it requires an insane obsession. And so... It took a number of years for me from when I resigned at After Voices, and the resignation details are kind of funny.
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