Sunroom Co-Founder Michelle Battersby on knowing your strengths and the power of intuition

This story is part of a content partnership between Blackbird and Missing Perspectives, High Agency Women: profiles and stories that shine a light on what women are building, and how they're building it. You can find the full series at Missing Perspectives, and if you're a founder looking for investment in your startup, we'd love to hear from you here.

Story by Melbourne-based writer Hannah Cohen.

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Michelle Battersby isn’t scared of a business idea in infancy.

In fact, it’s the lack of red tape – a quality that might deter the average career-haver from leaping head first into a startup – that draws her in and ignites her famed entrepreneurial spirit.

“It’s the most exciting part for me,” she muses. “Maybe it’s the hope, the potential that you see, the fact that there is no red tape – there are no processes.”

You may know of Battersby for one of her many awe-inspiring career moves in the tech industry. 

Maybe you know her for being the first Australian employee at dating app Bumble back in 2016. Or from joining one of the nation’s most popular wellness apps, Kic, as their chief marketing officer. 

Maybe you stumbled across her in an article about her co-founding and banking nearly $10.4 million in funding from a mix of angel investors, and later, venture capital firms like Blackbird, for Sunroom; a platform that allows women and non-binary individuals to be paid for sharing personal content with their loyal online communities. 

Or maybe you feel seen by her content on Instagram, where she shares candidly about her experiences with the intersection of new motherhood and her career.

As a mid-twenties young professional who spends hours fawning over successful women’s careers to mine for even the smallest nuggets of advice, when it came to Zoom calling Battersby from her home in Los Angeles, I was curious to explore her affinity for forming what appeared to be the perfect stepping stones on her path to her present day entrepreneurial role as a Sunroom co-founder. 

The key takeaways? Chase opportunity, strive to learn more, collaborate openly, and listen to your gut. 

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Throwing sh*t at the wall

When asked what drew her to her career-defining start at Bumble, Battersby touches on “timing and luck” playing a part in her landing the role.

“No one had heard about Bumble. It was still early days, and often people don’t realise with startups, you don’t really have your pick of the litter when it’s something that you’re building from the ground up.”

“Really experienced people with a lot of notches under their belt often aren’t willing to sacrifice a really high paying job or stability and go and give a random startup a crack.”

Battersby’s willingness to throw caution to the wind played to her favour in this instance, but more than this, founding chief executive officer of Bumble Whitney Wolf Herde, saw great value in Battersby’s experience marketing to university students through her role running the graduate program at Citibank. 

It was her time spent at Bumble, and in particular, the trust Wolf Herde placed in Battersby to lead the local strategy, that birthed the rumblings of an idea to one day take a business of her own to the big stage.

“I was hired directly by the CEO and founder, and from the moment she offered me the role, she was like, ‘I don’t know this market, you know this market better than me, you grew up here, you know where everyone’s going out, you know who the influential people are, you know who the influential brands are, so I trust you to just get this stuff done.’”

Being handed the opportunity to exercise autonomy, with such a high level of belief and freedom in Battersby’s ability to make decisions on behalf of the business, was the perfect crash course in running her own company – without the personal financial risk that usually comes in tow.

“It was the start of me honing in on my intuition… and it was from that point on, I realised I wasn’t ever going to be able to work, whether for someone else or for myself, if it wasn’t something that I was truly passionate about and didn’t have a bigger mission.”

“It was just amazing, a massive blessing and a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

Hand-in-hand with this trust, was the privilege to access failure without out punishment. Battersby shares that a large part of the confidence in her career that she exudes came from the opportunities she was granted to throw something at a wall and see what happens.

If it sticks, she says, try it again and again. And if it doesn’t, experiment and find another way. 

“[Whitney] really allowed me to call the shots and make mistakes – failure was really not a problem at Bumble… it wasn’t something you were punished for… you don’t [make the same mistake] twice, but you learn and keep rolling with it.”

“A little bit addicted” to the feeling of slight naivety when it comes to the manual-less nature of a start-up, Battersby’s time at Bumble formed the building blocks of what would become an illustrious career of learning, founding and trailblazing within the tech space.

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Trusting your gut

Launching Sunroom was not an immediate next step for Battersby after her time at Bumble. 

While Battersby’s Bumble tenure planted the seed to continue launching apps to international markets, and built on her desire to empower women through her work in tech, she felt she still had more to learn. An opportunity to work at Kic gave her a way to get further into the weeds of app engineering.  

“I needed to get some experience working at a company’s headquarters… I want to work more closely with engineers on product design, and just start to build that side of my experience out.”

The runway to starting her own business was slow, steady and intentional. 

“I was just kind of always taking little steps to gain more and more confidence and be able to, then apply those learnings to whatever I was going to do next.”

But although she prioritises her career moves around what will best round out her skill portfolio, Battersby also has a pattern of making career defining decisions based on one important thing: a gut feeling.

When joining Bumble, dating apps were stigmatised and shamed for being a cringe way to connect. 

“I actually had a friend that was getting married back in 2016 and none of her family knew that she’d met her partner on Tinder. She didn’t want anyone to know,” Battersby shares.

So initially, due to general sentiment around the apps, she wasn’t immediately drawn to the role. 

“But it was this phone call [with Whitney] and I just got goosebumps, and I just had this feeling inside me. I actually heard a voice that said, ‘this is going to be huge, this will change your life.’ I said to Whitney on the call, I’ve got goosebumps. I just have a really good feeling about this.”

Battersby recalls a similar intuition guiding her when it came to the deciding to go all in on a venture with her co-founder Lucy Mort.

“It was similar. I can remember exactly where I was sitting, I can remember specific things that she said, and with Lucy, I just felt like this woman was a fucking gun, like she’s so smart,” she recalls. 

“She’d been working in New York… she was the lead designer at Hinge and I hadn’t met another Australian who had been really early at one of these dating apps. We had a similar level of hunger, both loved our time at these dating apps and kind of wanted to just give something a crack. I felt like she would be the person to do it with.”

But how does one learn to not only hear that intuitive voice, but act on it? 

It’s a skill that seems to stem inherently from Battersby’s deep and genuinely confident sense of self.

“I used to spend a lot of time trying to be what I thought I was supposed to be… and trying to say the right thing all the time… I think I was scared to reveal my [whole] self because it might not be right or I might not fit the mould,” she ponders.

“I’m often in rooms where I’m shitting myself and feel like I don’t deserve to be there. But then I just kind of remind myself of what my unique qualities are and the fact that there might not actually be anyone like me in this room.”

“My view might not always be the smartest, but it might be a way of thinking that no one else has thought about. And there’s value in that,” she continues.

“It’s about authenticity, I’m really quite true to myself and what you see is what you get.” 

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Let’s talk money

Although her initial chat with Lucy sparked instant goosebumps, actually going all in on Sunroom was a slower burn. 

“It wasn’t an immediate ‘fuck yes’ for me when Lucy and I first started speaking about this. It was something that I needed to build conviction in over time,” she shares. 

“I think the best way to validate your idea is to do some research and to speak to the people who might be the ones using your product.”

So Battersby and Mort spent arduous time interrogating their networks; asking influencers they knew how they felt about monetising their content, how they made their money through partnerships and brand deals, whether this was a reliable income source and whether they had thought about using platforms like Patreon and Only Fans.

Similar to the stigma facing dating apps when she joined Bumble in 2016, these paid platforms were shrouded in a cloud of shame. 

Though the creators had, at points, considered joining these sites, they were worried about the potentially adverse reaction that their followers and brand partners may have due to the sites’ platforming of online sex work. They also feared their personal boundaries may be poked and prodded at in ways they weren’t comfortable with.

Sunroom was born as a solution to a problem Battersby and Mort identified from these conversations.  

“I think if you’re going to start a company, you almost need to find something that really bothers you about a problem, and bothers you enough to drive you and motivate you [to solve it],” she said.

“I think where my bother came from is that women were actually missing out on making more money purely because of the stigma associated with OnlyFans… and that doesn’t feel right to me, it doesn’t feel right that women are judged for putting a price on their content, time, creativity, intimacy.”

 “Those are all valuable things that they’ve built up online, and they should be able to take those things and monetize them on a platform. But it just didn’t feel like the right kind of platform existed. So that’s kind of where Sunroom stemmed from.”

It was this quality time spent getting to know their customer that attracted Blackbird partner Nick Crocker to investing in the start up.

“They had both spent a long time getting to know their customer – not in an abstract way but through hundreds of direct conversations,” he says. 

“And they had such a strong point of view about how the world needed to be different, and how Sunroom was the bridge to that new world. I also just remember the visual identity of the brand being stunning – from the first slide of the deck I was seeing something original, and that is a rare thing.”

Sunroom, in a lot of ways, is the antithesis to Instagram. Instead of it being a space in which any person can build up their own personal brand and develop a following, Sunroom has been developed to function as another income stream for those with communities wanting more. 

It’s algorithm-less, you can’t go viral, community guidelines skew away from misogynistic censorship, it’s moderated by women, and so there’s no such thing as a discovery page – so the best way to find someone’s account is by clicking through a personal link.

“Sunroom is what you’re using for your super fans.”

Instead of punishing women and non-binary people for sharing the intimate and outspoken sides of themselves through shadow banning and censorship, on Sunroom, they’re rewarded for it.

The most successful creators on the app app make the most money from fees charged for raw and unfiltered windows into the most personal and often, mundane parts of their life.

“There’s an Australian creator, actually, who makes about $30,000 USD a month on Sunroom. Her content is just so casual. Like she really is just goofy dancing by her pool with a friend, or laying in bed talking about what she’s going to do on the weekend,” she says. 

“Or she posts a series of outfit hauls, and… just gets her members (paying followers) to vote on what she wears, and them just feeling like they’ve participated in [her life] seems to be enough for them to pay to be there.”

Keeping up personal communication with some of the app’s top-earning creators, who after hitting a certain level of income through Sunroom can unlock access to a creative cohort with a direct line to the app’s team, Battersby says it’s been rewarding to see how Sunroom has changed the lives of so many creators. 

“We’ll often get DMs ranging from creators buying houses, to a creator messaging [us] to say ‘I use this money every month to pay my car insurance,’ or, ‘this money pays my rent,’ or ‘I’ve always wanted to do this yoga course over in Bali and now I can go,” Battersby says. 

“Those are the things that definitely keep you going and keep you motivated – the fact that people are actually earning a living on Sunroom, and it’s positively impacting their lives in that way.”

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On matching your energy 

Collaboration has been at the helm of a lot of Battersby’s success. From the moment she met co-founder Lucy Mort, she could see the potential to build on their different, yet palpably complimentary experiences.

“It is very important to go into [business] with someone who has a complimentary skill set. That was a big reason why it made sense to do this with Lucy,” she says.

“She had a design background, I have a marketing background. And when we started, there were actually three co-founders, so we also had another woman who had an engineering background. It just felt like it was the trifecta, to be honest.”

Nick Crocker says Mort and Battersby’s ying-yang-like strengths led to co-founder synergy, inspiring him as an investor. 

“It is rare that you find such a classic founding team profile of a builder and seller on day one,” he shares.

“Lucy started her career as a designer but I could see the brilliance in her product vision from the first meeting, and Michelle’s work in prior marketing roles was legendary. Layered on top of that was the sense of them doing their life’s work. They were instantly fundable founders.”

As the business grows, her knack for working with people who both share and level up her vision through different sets of skills, guides how she hires at Sunroom to this day. 

“I think that’s actually the best feeling, [taking] a step back and seeing a group of people in another room brainstorming a problem, a problem that your business has – it is probably one of the most rewarding feelings ever,” she shares.

Reflecting on the evolution of her career, she harks back to learning the benefits of giving talented, specialised people the trust and freedom to experiment in your business from those early years at Bumble; following in the footsteps of her former mentor and now, investor in Sunroom, Whitney Wolf Herde. 

Through both being given this freedom and empowering her own staff with the same level of trust, her experience reflects that this attitude can take your businesses to new heights.

“Something that I learned a bit from Whitney… [is] to hire people that almost scare you,” she says. 

“[My team] are really intelligent, they’re really passionate, they are really hungry in their careers, and they’re going to challenge you and [you need to] give them the freedom to do their thing.”

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