Transcript
Speaker: Hi and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: I'm your host Jennifer Muldani aka the Glam Reaper herself.
Speaker: On this week's episode I am talking to a fabulous CEO from a interestingly called website called Cake and it's actually joincake.com so let's take it away.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: I'm your host, Jennifer Muldowney, aka the Glam Reaper.
Speaker: And on today's podcast, we are talking cake.
Speaker: One of my favorite things.
Speaker: It's not the cake that you and I maybe know, but Sue Lynn is joining us and she is going to fill us in all about joincake.com.
Speaker: This is going to be a good episode.
Speaker: Sue Lynn, welcome.
Speaker: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker: great to have you I apologize for I was calling Sue Lynn Sue Ellen which kind of makes me laugh isn't that from like Little House on the Prairie I think I used to watch that when I grew up or something it's from one of those wild American shows anyway um I'm sure you probably get that well maybe I am the only person who's ever said that to you am I oh no it's pretty common
Speaker: Okay, that's okay.
Speaker: That's okay.
Speaker: On one of my episodes, there was a girl called Emma Payne and she deals with grief a lot.
Speaker: And I said, that's interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, I know her.
Speaker: Oh, there you go.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So apparently I was the first person who associated her name with what she does.
Speaker: And she was like, what?
Speaker: And I was like, how am I the only person who said that to you?
Speaker: So anyway.
Speaker: Anyway, moving swiftly along, tell me, join Cake.
Speaker: Tell me.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It sounds so lovely.
Speaker: It sounds like something I want, but it is funeral focused, so.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So the, where should I start just from the very beginning?
Speaker: So Cake, so I'm Sule and I'm the CEO of Cake.
Speaker: We are an online platform that helps people navigate end of life planning as well as bereavement support.
Speaker: So we do both sides of it.
Speaker: What happens after loss and helping people figure out what they need to do, as well as what kind of planning can you do in advance to kind of unburden your loved ones?
Speaker: And so we're, I think, the largest site in the world for this.
Speaker: We have about 40 million people a year on the platform.
Speaker: So but it's a digital platform.
Speaker: So it's mostly digital self-serve content and a suite of tools spanning from planning to bereavement support.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And so, so tell me a little bit about that for anybody who doesn't know.
Speaker: I've obviously checked out the website and great, lots of great articles.
Speaker: Can somebody plan their entire funeral from start to finish?
Speaker: You know, what about the legal implications, different countries, different states?
Speaker: How do you work with all that?
Speaker: Yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker: So we, from a content and tools perspective, we are US focused, although we do have people from all over the world on the site.
Speaker: Some things are very general, so they don't need to be country specific.
Speaker: You know, if you want to figure out what music you want at your funeral or something like that, it doesn't have to be country specific.
Speaker: But that being said, of course, the legal documents are quite country and even state specific.
Speaker: So that's kind of how I might think about it.
Speaker: Our site has a lot of utility regardless of where you are.
Speaker: But if you're trying to make a will, that's mostly just for the U.S. Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: If somebody can, so if I wanted to do a will today, I can go onto the website.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Is it a link to somebody externally or is it all within your website or how does that work?
Speaker: Yeah, it's a combination of things.
Speaker: A will we can do, but we also, you know, our goal is to connect people to whatever solutions they need.
Speaker: So it's a combination of things that we're offering in-house, but we certainly also work.
Speaker: partner with many other companies in the general end of life category to help people find solutions.
Speaker: We work with a lot of companies like Eternova.
Speaker: I don't know if you know them.
Speaker: They turn ashes into diamonds.
Speaker: So companies like that, you know, we will, we do not have that technology ourselves.
Speaker: We're mostly a technology, like a digital tech company.
Speaker: But of course we have folks on our platform who are interested in what they do.
Speaker: And we are more than happy to connect them to companies like that.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So if I have lost somebody and I go on to joincake.com, is there like sections that I can go into?
Speaker: And, you know, if I'm looking for jewelry, say, and so I go into.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And you can also search on the site.
Speaker: So we have maybe 5,000 original articles that cover, that span all sorts of different topics.
Speaker: And then planning tools as well.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: And so if I went into the jewelry section, is there sort of loads of different types of jewelry or do you just partner with one or two?
Speaker: And how does that?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, we kind of aim to be more like have a lot of different things, but also curate.
Speaker: So we, if we have an official partnership, we always talk to the founders, we talk to the team, we try to understand what the user experience is going to be like, because we really want to make sure that anyone who we're sending our folks over to is going to have a good experience.
Speaker: So we definitely do vetting and kind of our own diligence on these companies.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so what we are trying to balance is to really give people a sense of what options they have.
Speaker: Because as you know, a lot of people don't even know what options they have.
Speaker: They don't know what they don't know.
Speaker: This might not be a topic they've thought a lot about.
Speaker: And so we want to present them with the kind of huge spectrum of options that are now available.
Speaker: There's so many new companies in this space.
Speaker: There's so many things that people can do.
Speaker: At the same time, we don't want to overwhelm people with choice.
Speaker: So we want to make sure that they that we also curate.
Speaker: And then we have a lot of data in the background on, you know, someone like this clicked here and bought this.
Speaker: And so as we grow and as we get more sophisticated with our algorithms, our matching algorithms and our recommendations, we can become even more good at kind of making good recommendations to people.
Speaker: So it is more curated based on what we already know about you in terms of your user behavior on the site.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I'll just make a quick analogy.
Speaker: So it's just like when you go on any kind of e-commerce site or shopping experience, I mean, in 2022, you know, they will recommend things.
Speaker: And sometimes it's quite useful, right, because they kind of know a little bit about you and what you've already browsed at.
Speaker: And so they can kind of help guide you to things that are relevant to you.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And one of the questions I've had since I fell upon your website is where did the name come from?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: It's a great question.
Speaker: So we really wanted to highlight the fact that all of this planning activity and all of this, if you're coming to our site, it's because you want to honor life.
Speaker: That is actually the motivation.
Speaker: So anything that's related to thinking about death, trying to plan for it,
Speaker: Really, it's a gift to your loved ones.
Speaker: It's also about a gift to yourself and kind of honoring who you are.
Speaker: So we saw cake as a symbol of celebrating life moments.
Speaker: And that's really where we want to center our brand and our experience.
Speaker: It's really about that.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: Very good.
Speaker: And do you, by taking sort of bereavement, grief, funeral planning, death care, by taking sort of all of those topics, do you think you're taking on too much maybe?
Speaker: Do you think you're, you know, are you trying to sort of
Speaker: I don't want to say, but be all things to everyone, you know, too fast.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or, you know, yeah, we're not.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think that's a really good question.
Speaker: So we're not trying to be all things to everyone, but we are, what we are trying to be is the trusted partner that people would go to when they're trying to navigate any of this.
Speaker: And then, like I said, it's not as if we are fulfilling all the solutions.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But we are in a way like quarterbacking for people and helping them navigate it because the space is very fragmented.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: Our goal is to lift up the whole ecosystem.
Speaker: It's not necessarily about one point solution.
Speaker: So we see a lot of amazing solutions out there.
Speaker: They're having trouble finding audience sometimes, right?
Speaker: They're having trouble acquiring people.
Speaker: Well, we have 120,000 people a day on the site.
Speaker: So our goal is, can we connect these people to things that they need?
Speaker: And I think the challenge in this category is it
Speaker: It's quite variable how people interact with this space and also most people on our site actually have multiple needs in the space.
Speaker: So let's say you come in and use our online memorial tool.
Speaker: Chances are you also have planning needs that are unmet.
Speaker: And so it makes sense.
Speaker: You're already here.
Speaker: You might be already in that headspace for us to help you with that.
Speaker: We want to guide people and have an end to end solution that they can know that they can come to us, whether or not we are fulfilling all of the actual solutions.
Speaker: Does that make sense?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And yeah.
Speaker: And so I guess for me, it comes down to your, I guess, because you do some stuff in-house and then you have external people, we'll call them on, on the, you know, sell the service.
Speaker: So you're, you're, you do, you're good at certain things that you do and you're doing them in-house and then other things you're sort of like, okay, here's people, we agree with these, we like these, these are our friends, you can go to them and you'll be treated as such.
Speaker: Yeah, to be treated.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, you can think of us like maybe the in real life analogy, right, is like people might have a folder or a binder, right, of things they want to pass on.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So obviously that should live securely in the cloud.
Speaker: And also we can help you structure that information and give you prompts and help you understand what are the things that others will want to know.
Speaker: when you're gone or if you're incapacitated.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So those are the things that we would own.
Speaker: So we have secure vault storage.
Speaker: We have all of that.
Speaker: But then we also are somewhat agnostic.
Speaker: Like we have a will tool.
Speaker: But if you already have a will within a state attorney, we're not, you know, we're not like you have to use our will tool.
Speaker: We just have it because we know a lot of people on our site want it.
Speaker: And it's helpful for it to be available.
Speaker: But like I said, we are agnostic to how you do your planning.
Speaker: And then, but we want to be that nexus for everyone to kind of all get on the same page.
Speaker: Gotcha.
Speaker: Gotcha.
Speaker: Now, something I'm sort of obsessed with a little bit on the Glamour Reaper podcast is how, you know, your journey came to this.
Speaker: Like, I mean, how many people are you employing at Join Cake right now?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, we have dozens of employees.
Speaker: It kind of depends on how you think about it, whether it's full-time or part-time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, so we have a lot of people on the team, probably around 40.
Speaker: But some of them are part time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And how did your journey come from?
Speaker: Like, what's your background?
Speaker: How did you come into this space to being now in this space with employing 40 people?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, that's on funerals.
Speaker: It's kind of funny.
Speaker: I am.
Speaker: I definitely did not start off knowing I would do this.
Speaker: And I think probably most people in this industry don't, you know, you're not like a three or four year old saying, I want to, you know, be in this category.
Speaker: It's like, I have a three and five year old and they, you know, they want to be, I don't even know, mermaids or something.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So yeah, no.
Speaker: So anyway, I was very interested in making an impact somehow, which I think a lot of folks in this space probably do.
Speaker: Like you're very driven, I'm sure, by wanting to help people.
Speaker: And so I always thought that I would do that through the medical field.
Speaker: I did my undergrad and PhD at MIT.
Speaker: I was working in medical technology.
Speaker: That was actually the first time I was exposed to the idea that, at least in the US,
Speaker: there's this sort of bias towards treatment, more aggressive treatment, which is the right choice for a lot of people, but it's not the right choice for some people.
Speaker: And so my PhD was focused on helping doctors make those types of treatment decisions based on prognosis.
Speaker: So I was working in various different cancers, trying to find better prognostic information to decide whether to treat, because there's sometimes trade-offs to treatment.
Speaker: There can be a reduction in quality of life,
Speaker: And so I was very early on, I think, exposed to this idea that more quantity of life is not always the goal for people.
Speaker: Sometimes it is, but these conversations aren't happening.
Speaker: And I kind of realized that part of the reason these conversations aren't happening is it can be an uncomfortable conversation.
Speaker: No one's kind of owning it.
Speaker: And there aren't a lot of tools available, especially back then in our society to help guide people on this.
Speaker: I think now there are many more resources, but at the time there was really nothing.
Speaker: And then I went on more on the business side.
Speaker: So I worked in transaction advising and healthcare.
Speaker: So my clients were generally therapeutics companies.
Speaker: I was working on the sales side.
Speaker: And again, a lot of my work was how do you extend life by a couple more months?
Speaker: And what does that actually mean?
Speaker: And then I was also realizing that our healthcare system, there are exceptions of course, but as a whole, I didn't feel like they were supporting families.
Speaker: when somebody dies, which is where everybody ends up no matter how long you extend life.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, um, I just got really interested in it.
Speaker: Of course, I also had personal experiences, um, and my family members passing away and there being a lot of conflict, um, as a result.
Speaker: And I felt like it was avoidable had there been more conversations.
Speaker: And I think that's a very common story actually in many families across the world.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: Anyway, I just became very obsessed with the idea that this is an area that needs more support.
Speaker: And I looked around, I didn't see any companies that were doing it at the time.
Speaker: So I thought, oh, I can just start one, which was very naive.
Speaker: But here we are.
Speaker: And then, yeah.
Speaker: And then actually one other thing that I did, which was, this was like, while I was still transaction advising for healthcare companies,
Speaker: My friend, a very dear friend of mine, who's not working in this space, but has a very strong, I guess, like meditation mindfulness practice.
Speaker: She invited my husband and I to write our own obituaries.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Have you ever done that?
Speaker: No, I haven't.
Speaker: I've done a funeral plan and everything else, but now it never gets me through.
Speaker: If that's something that you're interested in, you have?
Speaker: No, I have partly done it.
Speaker: Yes, I forgot.
Speaker: Oh my God.
Speaker: Yeah, I forgot I did that.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: How was that experience for you?
Speaker: It was weird.
Speaker: I mean, I cried an awful lot.
Speaker: I cried too.
Speaker: It was kind of one of those things like, that's so amazing.
Speaker: Oh my God.
Speaker: It was a little bit of a...
Speaker: Oh no, I'll be so sad when I'm not here anymore.
Speaker: It was interesting.
Speaker: I actually cried for a different reason.
Speaker: Oh, I cried because I felt so it was like an aspirational obituary.
Speaker: And I felt like, even though I love my job, I was very intellectually stimulated.
Speaker: I love my coworkers.
Speaker: I felt like I was doing good, but I realized it wasn't the path that I felt like I wanted to be on.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And that's sort of like, and I, you know, so they do this exercise in a lot of business schools.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: as sort of a career visioning exercise.
Speaker: That wasn't necessarily the purpose of, you know, basically my friend invited us over.
Speaker: It was like a dinner party, like a double date where we all like wrote our own obituaries and read them aloud to each other.
Speaker: It was actually really cool.
Speaker: I definitely recommend it.
Speaker: I think we have directions on our website if you want to search on the site.
Speaker: But anyway.
Speaker: So yeah, so I think that was also very clarifying, you know.
Speaker: So anyway, so that's kind of how I came to this space.
Speaker: And then the more I learned about it, the more I realized how underserved it is.
Speaker: It's literally impacts everybody.
Speaker: It's a part of the human experience.
Speaker: And yet there's so much kind of taboo or stigma around it in our society, although it's changing, luckily, and thanks to people like you.
Speaker: And yeah,
Speaker: But certainly at the time, and I think for still a lot of this world, I think there's a lot of fear to talk about it and to address it head on, which I think not only can create avoidable pain for people who are left behind when someone passes away, but also I think prevents us
Speaker: From fully embracing what we want to be doing in life right now.
Speaker: Because if we just pretend like we're going to live forever, then it's really hard to stay motivated and focused around how you want to spend your time and what's important to you and stuff like that.
Speaker: Yeah, I completely agree with that.
Speaker: And it's funny doing things like writing your funeral plan and writing your obituary.
Speaker: And it really and I know for me and in what I do on a daily basis, it's that reminder of death.
Speaker: Unfortunately,
Speaker: reminds you of your own and so you know you know life is short and it could happen at any day you and I it could be today it could be the day like we don't get a notification it doesn't come in on your Facebook like today's the day um and so I I think that it's healthy to do things like every five to ten years doing some sort of thing that it does stop you and go is this life is this what you wanted is this what how you would have expected and and
Speaker: I think that the interesting thing about your obituary exercise versus mine was mine was very much I was writing it as if I was gone now and you know what I would want people to know that I feel about them or about the universe or you know so but it's so interesting I'm actually think I'm going to try your version as well I mean I think I probably do that in my own little business ways of like my little vision boards and all the different stuff and you know the things I aspire to in this
Speaker: sector and stuff.
Speaker: But yeah, it's fascinating.
Speaker: And I think it's something that Joe blogs and I think people should do more often.
Speaker: And even funeral directors themselves, I feel like because they work in, it's like a doctor because they work in the
Speaker: industry so much and it's a day-to-day job and I was only talking about this with somebody yesterday that it can become a bit monotonous and a bit sort of you just show up and you do it and you don't um it can like I think anything can and then there'll be that pace that will like hit you to your core and shake you up and and all that sort of stuff so
Speaker: And so that's one of the questions I would have is for you and the website and everything.
Speaker: And there's two prongs to this question is one, how do you work with the funeral directors, funeral homes or industry people?
Speaker: And two, how has that been for you in terms of female, you know, in terms of like,
Speaker: diversity um you know it is a very male white male dominated yes industry space in the us especially in ireland where i'm from um and so i found it quite interesting that journey um as one lady uh i'm speaking with yesterday referenced me to um that i've i've taken my hatchet and gone through the forest and i've
Speaker: I've cleared away some of the brambles and some of the thorns, but there's still an awful lot left behind.
Speaker: You know, you can't.
Speaker: So, yeah, it's an interesting journey.
Speaker: So, yeah, I want to know how you work with people in the industry and how that journey has been for you.
Speaker: Yeah, no, that's such a great question.
Speaker: I mean, we mostly had focused on the planning side, so we hadn't really proactively made, you know, formal relationships with people in the like funeral home industry, I would say.
Speaker: Now.
Speaker: given our scale and the fact that we do cover support people after loss as well now, but on the digital side of things.
Speaker: So we're not, you know, carrying out death care, I would say, but we are kind of guiding people on the digital side of things.
Speaker: And also giving more transparency, like our goal is to empower the consumer to understand, you know, I think it's hard to find good information online about these things.
Speaker: And of course, there's a huge range of folks who work in this industry, but there is a history of predatory practices.
Speaker: And so we wanted to make sure that we are providing people good information.
Speaker: So that's more where we've played.
Speaker: That said, a lot of these funeral conglomerates and funeral homes have reached out to us.
Speaker: We are in active conversations with many of them now, actually both in the U.S. and in the U.K., because with our expertise around kind of digital experiences,
Speaker: and they're more brick and mortar businesses.
Speaker: There's an kind of obvious potential there.
Speaker: But yeah, so we've mostly focused on what is the best user experience for a person, but not necessarily veering into the actual in real life type of parts, more so giving people information.
Speaker: So when they do,
Speaker: walk into if you're home they have information and can feel like there's like can feel confident that they understand their you know anything from pricing to you know what their options might be right um and are you like do you work with any of the associations and stuff over here or have you yeah just starting to i mean like i said we started off more on the planning side so
Speaker: For that reason, it's a little less, you know, makes a little less sense to start with partnerships there.
Speaker: So our early partnerships are more with health systems, banks, insurance companies are more of the partners we've been working with and then now starting to expand into
Speaker: the funeral industry.
Speaker: It was more before and if you were pre-planning really.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: If you were setting yourself up as opposed to meet.
Speaker: Okay, gotcha, gotcha.
Speaker: Yeah, so the vast majority of our current partners as well as the folks who've been reaching out are a lot in the financial services industry because we're in the largest period of wealth transfer in human history.
Speaker: They understand that they want to help their customers with end-of-life planning
Speaker: but they're not really sure how to approach the topic.
Speaker: They don't really know what to do.
Speaker: So they are asking us, how do we do this?
Speaker: Can we work with you to help our customers do this?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Very good.
Speaker: I mean, it sounds like it's only a budding business that's going to go from strength to strength, which is very exciting.
Speaker: So do you have partners as in terms of, is it just you or is this your baby?
Speaker: Like mine's my baby.
Speaker: I know you've got babies, but I joke that mine's my actual baby.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a baby in a certain sense.
Speaker: I co-founded the company with a palliative care doctor.
Speaker: And then I now work very closely with our chief marketing officer who has a consumer technology and digital marketing background.
Speaker: So and, you know, he is brilliant and has had personal experience of personal experiences of loss, but also thinks on a very large scale and understands how big of an impact we could have just given the
Speaker: how many people in the world need a product like this and also how to scale a large technology business to reach a lot of people.
Speaker: So that's kind of how we think about things, you know, that we know that this can be gigantic.
Speaker: And we also think that there's so much to be learned about people's behavior and desires and needs in this space that we think thus far has been somewhat hidden.
Speaker: So we want to,
Speaker: use that data to kind of help people understand what others are even doing to kind of give a little bit more of this kind of peer validation and transparency of like, what are, you know, because I think what we see a lot of the times is people don't understand, like people don't know if they're weird to be thinking about this a lot.
Speaker: But what they don't realize is so many other people are thinking about this.
Speaker: Okay, cool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like this might sound weird.
Speaker: I'm like, it is not weird.
Speaker: I can tell you.
Speaker: I don't know what to say, but I know it's not weird.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: And I think that if people only knew how common this is and how many other human beings are thinking about the exact same things.
Speaker: And I think they can also be inspired by each other.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: This is what we see a lot is there's a discovery.
Speaker: We call it kind of discovery aspect of this category where people,
Speaker: People don't know what they don't know.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so once they're once they see that, oh, like this person wanted to get buried with a six pack of Bud Light and this person wanted to have a funeral in a movie theater.
Speaker: And then they think, wow.
Speaker: And they may not want the Bud Light, but they might that might expand their notion of what's possible and realize that they can personalize things more than they ever envisioned before.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, that is, I think, a wonderful note for us to end on because, you know, as everybody knows, who's listened to me long enough harping on about the personalization of everything.
Speaker: I think that's a great note to to finish off and say goodbye and farewell for now.
Speaker: I'm very excited to watch this space and with joincake.com and we'll leave all the links and everything in the boxes below.
Speaker: And yeah, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story.
Speaker: yeah thank you so much it was a real pleasure to talk to you so that was our chat please feel free to send us any comments or email us any questions that you might have on end of life planning um it's glamoury for podcast at gmail.com and we look forward to talking to you again soon ciao for now
