Building a life-changing startup, making your own marketing, and rejection + conviction: Kathryn Cross (Anja Health, YC W22)

Today’s guest is Kathryn Cross from Anja Health (YC W22), which reimagines cord blood banking.Kathryn previously founded Bridge Strategy, a management consultancy helping early-stage businesses grow their Gen Z consumer base and worked at MIT Research Lab and Goldman Sachs.Anja Health is helping pregnant parents save the most personal source of stem cells - from their umbilical cord and placenta - to unlock future disease treatments. Offering cord blood banking, cord tissue banking, and placenta stem cell banking.Listen on to learn more about Kathryn’s YC application and journey!Prefer to curl up and read the transcript? Read our newsletter at https://ycfounderstories.substack.com/Episode Timestamps:00:42: What is your startup idea?00:53: How did you come up with the idea?01:36: When did you get into YC?01:45: What are the key elements to focus on when applying to YC?02:14: Share your YC interview experience in 1-2 sentences.02:38: How did YC help you go from 0 to 1 to N?03:12: Share a “do things that don’t scale” story in your startup journey.03:34: How did you get your first 1000 users?03:44: Share 3 tips for founders who are trying to get into YC.04:56: How was Demo Day?05:36: Talk to me about how much of a struggle is for you to educate parents.07:35: What are the biggest gaps you’re seeing in educating parents and how does Anja Health fill that gap?09:25: How do you show parents the importance of Anja Health?11:14: What does the biggest chunk of your audience look like?12:12: Talk to me about Anja’s business model.13:20: How did you convince YC to invest in you during the interview?14:34: When you got rejections, what were the things that they didn't believe in that you had a strong conviction towards?15:30: How is the experience working with Alexis Ohanian from Seven Seven Six, since he is an investor in Anja Health?17:03: How did you prove that your product was successful and how did you go to market and scale that up?19:19: How do you keep up with the competition when you create content as well as your own competition in healthcare?21:36: What is an ambitious goal you're chasing?22:56: Any closing thoughts before we wrap up?👉🏼 About the Host:Sharath is a founder, creator, and community builder. He is also a serial maker who built and shipped 15+ projects using no-code tools. His SaaS product Shoutout generated $30k ARR, which was sold to a UK-based product studio. Prev, Sharath worked for world-changing startups like Product Hunt and On Deck, where he helped build and nurture communities. He also grew his audience on Twitter from 200 to 22,000 using give-first principles and creating high-value content. Currently, he is the Head of Community + Brand at Threado, building a side project called GuestLab, and runs a podcast called Undefeated Underdogs alongside hosting this podcast.👉🏼 Where to find Kathryn:Anja Health: https://www.anjahealth.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/kathrynjc7Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-cross/👉🏼 Where to find Sharath:Twitter: https://twitter.com/5harathYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@5harathWebsite: https://5harath.com/Newsletter: https://ycfounderstories.substack.com/The Undefeated Underdogs Podcast: https://undefeatedunderdogs.com/