On November 30th, 2020, Sarah Hollingsworth opened her laptop to see a message from an ex-Googler named Tamiz Ahmed – he wanted to help her turn her new project into a startup.
Sarah was intrigued. She’d recently created a small Typeform-based project called Poppylist and left it on Product Hunt for the world to view. Now, an ex-Google Product Lead and former startup CTO was asking to help her make it better.
Eager to work with a skilled technical cofounder, Sarah said yes to teaming up. Thus began a four-year partnership that would birth the hottest new baby registry on the market. One with a multi-million dollar ARR and 5X year-over-year growth run by Sarah, Tamiz, and six remote employees.
To get this far, both cofounders sacrificed their paychecks for years and made hard pivots in their product when customers told them they wanted change – even when they weren’t sure of profits. When user growth eluded them, they got scrappy creating a viral Tiktok campaign that brought in millions of views despite no prior video-making experience.
Read on to hear how Sarah and Tamiz built the application your friends and family will probably be using at their next baby shower, and why they both chose to bootstrap for the sake of their families.
Sometimes, Entrepreneurship Lets You Slow Things Down
Around the time when Sarah first put Poppylist online, she and Tamiz happened to be at similar points in their life: Sarah had recently had her first child and Tamiz’s wife was pregnant with their first. They also were in the midst of high-flying careers in their respective fields.
Before co-founding Poppylist, Sarah planned events for businesses like the San Antonio Spurs and cloud solutions giant, Rackspace. Everything changed when she became pregnant with her first child in 2018. Three months later, Sarah tried to get the gears of her career back in motion and began commuting two hours round-trip from Austin to San Antonio for work. It quickly became a strain.
“I remember calling my boss to ask permission to take my sick kid to the pediatrician,” she says. “I realized that wasn’t the life I wanted.”
Sarah left her job at Rackspace in 2020 to spend more time with her newborn and figure out a side project. She’s always been a hustler, running a door-to-door car wash as a teenager with one of her friends before attending college.
Like most new and expecting parents, Sarah obsessed over which baby products to register and buy for her newborn.Then she realized other parents probably wanted the same. She created a complex Typeform personality quiz that recommended different baby products based on five different personality types. This was what she eventually posted on Product Hunt.
Tamiz was a self-taught coder and computer nerd. As a kid, he’d been quite entrepreneurial, dabbling in eBay stores and websites. He’d even run a successful wristband business in college inspired by the yellow Livestrong bracelet trend of 2004.
But, after graduation, he decided to forgo his entrepreneurial instincts and go corporate with a job at Google. He later moved to Bleacher Report, founded a food delivery startup in San Francisco, and joined a mental health startup’s team before stumbling across Sarah’s project on Product Hunt.
“I left Google because I wanted to work at a startup,” says Tamiz. “I’m always talking about starting something new or doing something new. I just love building something from the ground up.”
While Tamiz had no intention of slowing down his career when he became a full-time founder at Poppylist, he now admits the startup came at a perfect time in his life. Bootstrapping at his own pace alongside Sarah, he now has much more time to spend with his growing family.
When to Pivot Your Product Completely
The duo initially focused on organizing product recommendations into a dashboard. Users could check off products and link out to buy them — mostly via Amazon affiliate links.
“We were making pennies on the dollar,” Tamiz says. “We knew that wasn’t the business model we wanted, but we also wanted to be helpful while figuring it out.”
They did weekly customer interviews and heard the same request over and over: “This is great, but can I just register to buy these things here instead of exporting them to another site?”
They resisted. Building a baby registry was a huge undertaking. But when the chorus grew louder, they gave in. They spent the back half of 2021 building what became the Poppylist Baby Registry and launched it in early 2022.
“We rarely make decisions when one person asks for something,” says Tamiz. “But when we hear that chorus of feedback that’s consistent, that’s when we tend to make our decisions to build new things.”
For those who haven’t been to many baby showers or weddings recently, registries are online lists where you can select a gift to buy for the couple. They’ve become increasingly common through sites like Amazon. For a baby registry, baby shower hosts would include a link to the registry in the invitation, allowing guests to purchase a gift to support the growing family.
Most baby registries ship gifts immediately. But that’s not always helpful—especially for new parents living in small apartments. Listening again to user feedback, Sarah and Tamiz let gift recipients choose when they wanted gifts shipped or converted into cash or gift cards. It was a smash hit.
“Some customers convert their entire registry into cash,” says Tamiz. “We’ve seen payouts in the thousands. And we never tell the gift giver—they just know their gift was appreciated.”
Poppylist now makes money in two main ways: a small service fee on purchases and affiliate commissions on products they fulfill (some partner brands reach around 30 to 40 percent).
But by the end of 2022, Poppylist had only made a couple hundred dollars and was nowhere near a profitable business. The platform really took off when Sarah decided to sit down and get serious about marketing where her customers were: TikTok.
The Secret to a Viral TikTok Campaign
In March 2023, Sarah launched a 30-day TikTok series called Let’s Build Your Baby Registry Together.” One video hit 1.8 million views. Account signups exploded. And by April, revenue went through the roof.
“We didn’t see any revenue spikes for fifty to sixty days after people signed up,” Tamiz says. “But once that revenue hit, it just kept growing.”
Sarah’s secret to making good content? She credits it all to creator Alex Freeman who at the time was selling a TikTok course on Gumroad for twelve dollars. Following Alex’s advice, for 30 days Sarah launched a new video on TikTok every day and each one began with the same tagline “Let’s build your baby registry together on Poppylist.”
Still, even with their virality in March 2023 wasn’t all up and to the right. That Fall was slow and early 2024 was quiet. But they didn’t stop.
“We didn’t launch any groundbreaking features,” says Tamiz. “We just kept improving the product one percent at a time. Better customer service, better copy, better onboarding.”
“I really believe the consistency compounds,” says Sarah. “One thousand percent I have worked on Poppylist every single day since the day I got Tamiz’s email. I am chipping away at this company and doing something every single day.”
The quiet daily grind ended up paying off just as much as the instant viral success. By January 2025—three years after launching the registry—they finally paid themselves for the first time.
“Paying ourselves was a real change,” says Tamiz. “Now it feels like a real business.”
Build What You Care About
As for advice to other entrepreneurs, Sarah and Tamiz believe you should consider the following points.
- Don’t wait for perfection. “Your product doesn’t need to look good. It needs to work,” Sarah says. “Craigslist is still ugly. Gmail settings are a mess. Just launch it.”
- Start SEO early. Tamiz and Sarah wrote blog posts long before they had a product and, years later, those posts still drive signups.
- Build something you care about. Sarah and Tamiz wanted to build their product in the first place because it was something they both wanted for themselves. “If you’re only doing this for the money, you’ll quit the second it gets hard,” Tamiz says.
- Find your people. Sarah says she stays grounded as a remote founder by working out of a coffee shop where they know her order. “It’s my sanity,” she says. “Otherwise it’s just me, Slack, and six contractors.” Both founders make efforts to meet with some regularity despite living in different states.
