Taylor Majewski is the founder of Lemon Lab. Previously she was an EIR at Human Ventures, and her writing has been published in the New York Times, Vox, and One Zero. Find her on Twitter: @TaylorMajewski.
Hana Mohan is an entrepreneur and the founder of MagicBell, a plug-and-play notifications inbox geared toward developers building their own products. Most recently, she was the first openly transgender woman to go through Y Combinator. In 2016, while working on her previous business, SupportBee, she transitioned. Hana has written extensively about entrepreneurship and being a transgender woman, covering topics like gender dysphoria, cis-passing, surgeries as a transgender person, and HRT (hormone replacement therapy).
We spoke on the phone in a series of interviews about her experiences going through YC, transitioning while running a company, where she finds support systems as a founder and the challenges of practicing inclusivity as a leader.
I’d love to start with the opportunity you saw for MagicBell. What does the company do?
We want to help every product team develop a relevant notification experience to their customers. For example, if you use a multi-platform app like Slack or Whatsapp, the notifications just work. In Whatsapp, if you get a notification on your phone and then check it on your desktop first, it removes it from your phone. The best companies today are already building notification experiences that are very finely tuned. We want to make those experiences available to every app developer without having to build the infrastructure of all the edge cases themselves.
It’s also a growing market. We’re relying on notifications more and more with remote work and with more people using cloud apps, it’s growing a lot. More and more, I think having a notification system versus not having one is going to become a competitive differentiator between apps.
This excerpt is from an article originally published on Every, a publication and writer collective focused on business. Read the full interview here.