Billie Quinlan’s career journey from startup tech to the science of sexual wellness

The Escape Artists: Episode 2 Billie Quinlan

A career journey from startup tech to the science of sexual wellness

To listen to the episode in full and follow The Escape Artists visit this link. Or search for The Escape Artists wherever you get your podcasts. 

Ferly uses cognitive behavioural therapy, the science of sex, guided meditations and more to help improve the sexual wellbeing of it’s users.

Find out more and download the app at weareferly.com

Follow them on Instagram: @weareferly and Twitter: @weareferly

About the podcast:

Dom Jackman & Skye Robertson bring you incredible stories from those who have made their Escapes. From bold heretics to wild entrepreneurial journeys, we share the ups and downs, and the lessons learned along the way. 

We hope it brings inspiration to those looking to make the leap into something different. Because life’s too short to do work that doesn’t matter to you.

Episode 2 transcript:

Skye: Today's Escape Artist is Billy Quinlan, the co-founder and CEO of sexual wellness startup Ferly. 

Billie: I do have a past previous to that, but it's far less interesting and this is what makes me most exciting as an individual. But I know the Escape team because they basically helped me pivot into this more interesting version of myself and I'm forever grateful for them, which is why they've dragged me onto this podcast. 

Dom: Thanks very much. Well, I kind of want to know a little bit more about the backstory, your pre escape. I want to explore the pre escape, the messy middle, the transition and now hopefully good reflections on your journey through that escape.

So can you start from school, university, what did you study? What were you wanting to do in your early career? All that sort of stuff. 

Billie: Definitely. So I've had four pitches today and they've all said you have the most random career to getting to be a sexual wellness startup founder.

So I was trying to kind of piece together the threads. I'll take it back to school. I did a mixture of performing arts and then geography and law – the humanities subjects and I loved performing arts, except the singing. I'm absolutely awful at singing. In my final A-level exam, they made me mime in the background of everyone else. I know, can you believe it? I got an A* for miming. But dance and drama I loved so much and I had this fantasy of being an A list actress, or working on Broadway and Strictly Come Dancing is still my north star goal if anyone's listening and wants to bring me on.

But I was also very good at geography. So I come from a very traditional background. My dad worked in the city, in finance as a broker. My mum was an amazing stay at home mum and then has gone back to work since we've become adults.

And their idea of work is that traditional city life and those traditional roles that are much easier to understand - nothing in the creative industry at all. I remember being 16 or 17 and my dad teaching me how to walk effectively through the office, to get the attention of the bankers, and I thought ‘this weird.’

Dom: What was the walking strategy?

Billie: It was like a very self-assured but slightly sassy walk, so that I would be known and make an entrance. Watching a 50 year old white man do that and try and pull that off is enough to scare you out of doing that for life.

Dom: I’ve never heard of someone being told how to walk through the office – that is a first!

Syke: I like it! I want to see it. I'm excited to see this!

Billie: The people around me that I had to seek advice from on where do I go with the university - and I had this sort of split decision to make - came very much from that more traditional roots. They all felt that whilst performing arts was fun and great for an A level, it wasn't a career. And I should go down the geography route as it’s a good solid university degree that would set me up for whatever I possibly wanted to do in life.

Looking back it’s obviously crazy because it actually gives you no direction at all, and that's sometimes the hardest part. So I did geography and I really hated it. I loved it at school, but I really didn't get on with it while at university. But I did the three years at Southampton and threw myself into all kinds of extra activities there. I'm a big sailor so I was part of the sailing committee, I was the vice-president there and ran the social secretary side of it. And when I left university, I really didn't know what I was going to do with this “really good, solid degree” that gave me no indication of where I wanted to go at all. 

And so I moved back home and I got a job with an old employer - I used to work as a butcher - it was my high school Sunday job, I wasn't often allowed to actually handle the machinery, but I have been locked inside a fridge with some hanging carcuses one too many times. So I came out of university and the farmer's son was creating a food line and asked me to come in and support the growth of that. And that was actually really interesting and exciting. 

There were three of us in the team, two founders and then myself, and we grew it across Sainsbury's and Selfridges and the co-op and it was a very exciting period. But it was based in Burnham-on-Crouch, which is where I was born, near Essex on the coast. And after about a year and a half there, I started to get my confidence up. And  I could see where I fit in in the career world in this sales and growth typerole, but I really wanted to be in London.

I was really interested in technology and this opportunity came up to work with a cybersecurity company. Again, I was the first employee and after the founder, and the goal was to grow the business across the Benelux and the UK and take this US product and bring it over here to the market. It was a really interesting, very different career area and industry but I loved it and it was really good fun. 

I got to go out to the US and spend some time over there with the business and that was the first time I'd really understood the startup and the venture capital ecosystem. They got a 35 million series A from Goldman Sachs for their first bit of money.

Dom: A cool 35 mills for your first round…

Billie: Here I am begging for like 2 million and they can just get 35. But it was really exciting to see their growth from being a team of 5 to suddenly being a team of 150 - they had a slide in their office -  it was all very wild and exciting. I was there for again about a year and a half before I was headhunted into an IT consultancy for investment banking.

Again, the goal was the same, to grow the cybersecurity and backend infrastructure offering within these investment banks. But you know when you walk into somewhere and you immediately know you're in the wrong place… I had gone from working in this cyber security company in my leggings as no one ever saw what I wore, to having to wear that very corporate attire for an investment banking organisation. I just felt totally out of place from day one.

And it was a very male dominated space where there's a clear hierarchy. There were very few women in the office, especially sort of at my level or within my role, the women that were there were the EAs, the office managers. And I was explicitly told that I wasn't allowed to socialise with them because it would lower my reputation and my standing amongst the more senior sales and consultants within the office.

So it was just a really strange environment to operate in. And then - slight trigger warning here for your audience - I was sexually assaulted in the workplace, so by a senior manager and he was a mentor of mine. He'd been mentoring me for a few months and then completely crossed the boundaries.

And that had a really detrimental impact on my mental health, as you can imagine. So I really struggled to understand and conceptualise what had happened and make sense of it and know my place in the office and how to operate. I'd gone from being a very confident self-assured woman to suddenly being afraid of how I was coming across and whether that would lead to  more incidents like this.

I was really afraid of my personality, essentially. I became totally terrified of myself because I believed that I had somehow led myself to this situation and it was my fault. And I think so many women share that same sentiment when these things happen, they immediately blame themselves and say, what was I doing?

And I went from doing my sassy little office walk to hiding away. I went from wearing colourful outfits to wearing all black. I stopped socialising with anyone in the office, which was very detrimental to my role, being a very social role and all about relationships. I was unable to kind of go to meetings with the clients, which were typically men without a woman partner coming with me so that really stalled my growth in the company.

And my poor dad - I used to go for lunch with him every week and I'd walk in and I just look at him and immediately burst out crying. And he'd be like, what is going on with you? Like what is happening? And obviously totally unable to communicate.

I was really at rock bottom. I was in a really, really bad space and I went and I found Escape The City. And this is why I honestly say it was a saving grace for me finding Escape The City. I'm not quite sure how I came across it, probably typing into Google ‘escape the city,’ how do I escape this city!? And the geniusly named Escape the City came up! 

I went along to an event and was like, this is exactly what I need in my life right now. I really need a structured way to help me escape this environment because I feel completely stuck and I have no idea how to get out of this.

I signed up and I remember talking to Sophie on the first open day just before we started and I completely broke down on her. I shared a little bit about what was going on with me. And she said, this might not be the right thing for you. You might need therapy or more support in that way, or it could be the right thing for you so let's just give it a go and we'll monitor it. if you need something else, you need something else. But you're obviously welcome here and welcome to start. 

I just felt so reassured and wrapped up and held, and that there was going to be a way for me to suddenly move through this.

And if it wasn't Escape The City, then at least there was going to be a direction or pointers or support to getting the right help that I needed. And it turned out it was Escape The City and it was everything I needed and more, and that's how I came to be on the program. 

Skye: What a hugely traumatic experience. Just for you to try to exist in that environment, after something so awful happened to you. Did you speak to people in the company? Did people know, did anybody support you? 

Billie: For about six to eight months, I just didn't say anything and I very much felt this was my fault. And then eventually I plucked up the courage to say something to my manager. I remember his feedback immediately was “don't tell anyone else, because this will totally ruin your career and your chances of succeeding in this industry.” 

And then he obviously went away to speak to someone that night. I don't know if his wife or a female colleague gave him some advice around how to better handle it. He came in the next day, took me into a room and said, “I don't think I handled that very well yesterday, Billie. I just have to tell you it's not your fault.” And I was like, okay, thanks so much for that.

Then he was like okay let's see if we can move you out of this. And so their solution was to send me to New York. That was the solution because they were never going to get rid of the guy as he was a really big revenue generator of the business so better to just send me to New York. 

And the reason I spoke up was because one of the lessons that we'd done at Escape was if you want to move on, try and take back control of where you are and leave on a positive, rather than a negative, because that negativity can follow you from job to job.

So try and leave on your terms and on a positive note. So that's why I kind of bothered to say anything in the first place. And I actually found out that the guy was trying to recruit a lot of women into his team and it just felt horrendous. I just felt like I needed to say something at that point.

So then I moved into a secondment within the company, into the HR team because I really wanted to start changing some of the policies and use my experience to change the organisation a little bit. And that was an interesting experience. I remember, the woman that I got lumbered with didn't want me in the team. She was like, who are you, you have no experience and suddenly I've got to have you on my team?

I remember she made me do a Myers Briggs test. She sat me down in this room and was going through this Myers-Brigg test and going through my qualities and it ended with, “and you're an entrepreneur, and that was your result.” And I was sitting there thinking, “fucking hell, this is so good, I am an absolute boss!” All these qualities that she was saying were amazing. I was thinking, “wow, this is so great!” And then she turned around to me and said, “I don't want any of these qualities in my team, this does not make a good team.”

Skye: Oh god. 

Billie: And she called me, actually, about six months ago, it was five years later and asked for my help. How the tables have turned, I love it.

But I did actually leave on my terms in the end. I made an impact there and was able to have a really positive ending there and changed things significantly and left a mark in the organisation in a really positive way. And that was really important for me to have the confidence and self-belief to go off and do whatever it was I was going to do next. 

And again, thanks to Escape,  it's mad to think that Escape was only a three month program and it completely changed the direction of my life and my career forever. It was just a really special program.

Skye: Amazing! 

Dom: That's great to hear. Just want to say that we're actually not doing those programs anymore for people you keep on thinking that, what is that? COVID has been tricky.

So you did the review, you did the program because you were at this crisis point in your life where you're thinking ‘I don't know what I want to do but I need to do something and I need to find some direction ultimately.’ So you came on this program and this wasn't my reason why we wanted to get you onto the podcast to talk about it…

Billie: Yeah, it's a shame you're not running it anymore, but what you created was really cool. But yes, they didn't pay me to come on here and promote that program!

Skye: But when we are programming again we will get you in here to talk about it!

Dom: I am right in thinking that you went onto the Escape Tribe or the Career Change Programme as we called it back then and said like, I’m trying to find some direction? Was there a penny drop moment where you said I'm going to go and join Zinc? 

Billie: One of the key methodologies during the program was that if you don't know what you want to do then you need to start tasting all of the ice cream flavours, get out there and just experiment and have no expectations on anything you're doing.

So I really took that to heart and tried a whole spectrum of things. It's going to sound ridiculous, but I was in such a low point in my life, my self-esteem was so low that even doing certain things that I wanted to do - like wearing a headband that was very colourful - was so far out of my comfort zone in case I got judged or in case someone kind of critiqued me for it and I was too sensitive to be able to take that critique. 

I was so afraid of putting myself out there. So, the journey from where I was to where I am now started with building up enough confidence to wear a suit, to wear a colourful headband, that was like the first step, which is mad.

I remember I went on holiday to Turkey and I wore this headband and I remember sending it back to the tribe and everyone was like, “woooh, you did it!”

But yeah, so really lean into your interests and just explore them. One was around dance and really getting back out there again, so I went to twerking classes and salsa classes and brought all my friends along who absolutely hated all of it, but were there to support me.

And I was just kind of getting a flavour of ‘does this bring me joy’ and ‘what interests me about this?’ I was struggling with IBS at the time because of the depression, anxiety, and it really triggered IBS. So I started reading a lot about poo and gut health. I was like, what's interesting about this?

And then moving jobs within the company again, the HR department and then the learning and development department and I was going in thinking, ‘what is interesting about this?’ So I was testing all these different areas that brought me some sort of curiosity and then diving into them a bit more thoroughly.

And the gut health one actually was the one that was most interesting to me because I was trying to overcome the experience and the negative mental health and the systems that are set up to support you just weren't supporting me, and I didn't feel they resonated with me and I was really struggling with my IBS.

So I started reading all about that and I read this amazing book called the gut health or something. I was dating this guy for like three weeks before we decided to go on holiday together. It was a four day trip and all I was doing was reading this book about poo and kept telling him all these poo facts. I was like, ‘we need to change the way we shit, we need to start squatting.’ He was like, ‘oh my gosh, you're so weird and not sexy. So there’s me coming in while he's pooing, like, you're doing it wrong like this is not good for your gut health.’ I was super fascinated by it.

And then I really followed that curiosity and there was this coaching program called the Institute of Integrative Nutrition. And it was a one-year coaching course where it really helped you to get into holistic coaching and holistic lifestyle choices and healing through food. And so I went on to that and I was really excited.

So I left Escape and joined the programme and six months later I left my job and was still completing this program. I was kind of halfway through that and I was coaching a lot of women who were my pilot women - so I wasn't fully qualified but I had to take on some clients to get practice - and we were talking about food, but it was very holistic about all these pillars of your life. 

I think because of my experience around sexual trauma, I really opened up a space to share about sex. So I'd ask, ‘what's going on with sex what's happening around that?’ It was the first time these women had ever been asked that question and given a platform and a space to talk about it

And when you ask a woman about sex in a way that makes her feel safe, you can't shut her up. You literally can’t shut her up. I feel very privileged to have been gifted those stories, but the upsetting thing was just the number of women that have the same experience as me, or slight variations of it or much worse or who just have very negative relationships, sexuality. 

I felt quite hopeless about that, I didn't feel like it was something that could be solved. So I was in that intersection of being really interested in women's wellness and then technology because of my background being in the tech space. I always had these ambitions to be bigger than just myself and to have more of an impact.

I think at that time there was this fire lit inside me around women's equality and changing these experiences for women, because I was lit up with fury by what happened to myself and then coming out the other side of that, looking back at myself and being like, fucking hell, a man took this year from me in such a horrendous way.

I didn’t want other women to go through that. I knew that if I did coaching one-to-one I would only ever be able to scale it as big as my hours in a week. So I started to really think about how to use technology to scale up this coaching interaction. How do you use technology to help more women access the right materials, the right knowledge and the right support to overcome these sexual challenges and move back to a place of pleasure.

And that's when Zinc landed on my doorstep, it was someone from Escape actually who sent it to me. And they said, have you seen this Zinc program? Zinc was a six month business builder and it literally was, “how do you solve women's mental health with technology?” And I was like, oh my God, the synergies, when you put stuff out into the world, what lands in your lap.

It was their first ever program and I thought, ‘this is the thing for me.’ Then I opened up their criteria of what they were looking for, and I think Skye, I mentioned to you possibly the time, ‘fuck, I'm never going to get onto this program, what they're looking for is not me, I don't have the qualifications, I just don't fit this criteria.’ 

I was really stuck with this moment of, ‘this is everything I want, I've never felt more sure about something ever, I know that I could be amazing, I know that I've got the grit and determination and insight and passion, I just don't have the skills and ninja skills as they call them to do it.’

And I remember speaking to a friend and he said, “just blag it, just make shit up.” I was like, fuck it I'm going to. And I did.

Skye: And you did, you did it and  I love it so much. You have to tell Dom and everybody else, how you did that because I just love it so much. 

Billie: So the assessment criteria was made up of three parts, they were looking for three types of people. They were looking for commercial folk who had a lot of sort of business experience, designers and UX designers and UI designers, and then technologists. Those were the three criteria. 

I'm definitely not a designer, you should see my life drawing over since lockdown, it's horrendous, I do not do these women justice. So I'm definitely not in that category. And I'm definitely not a technologist, I had never sort of done a line of code. I could barely use an iPhone at this point.

So I sort of fit that criteria of the first one, commercial, but it was really strict around what they were looking for within that and like the level of experience that you had to have. You had to be a ‘ninja’ in this, iit was not good enough just to be okay at it, you had to be - people use the word ninja.

I spoke to Mark and he said ‘just blag it, just lie, just say you’re ninja and really over exaggerate your examples and get through to the first round.’ Once you get through that, then you've got a chance because at this point they're just screening all these applications and you're going to get through, and then you're going to have to kind of own up to these things. So you better have something underneath it to give them a reason why they should go for you. 

So the second round was this video interview and then the third round was this assessment site and you had to meet everyone and do these collaborative tasks. And I remember thinking that if I'm going to do this, I need to be really impressive and there's nothing really impressive about me right now. And I have to have a lot of connection to this mission. And so I signed up to go on this retreat, which was around raising money for the Panzi hospital, which is an amazing organization in the Congo, which supports women back into their communities after wartime violence, sexual violence, and you had to raise two grand or something to get onto it.

So I decided to do a shit ton of cycling and raise all this money for it. And so I did all these hundred mile cycle rides and raised a load of money and did these video appeals, which another guy from escape helped me do. And just thinking back to being able to put myself out there like that from where I was for six months previously, it was just insane.

And I went on to this retreat and it was in one sense, the most harrowing experience ever, and in the other sentence, the most incredible experience ever. It was all around bringing together a group of 50 women to raise money for this charity and about 45 of the women had been a survivors of sexual violence themselves.

And that's not even including myself in that. So the sharing and the vulnerability was just incredible and it opened my eyes again to this totally different world. And actually when I was thinking of going onto Escape, I was thinking of going into it through a nutrition lens and how do we help women's health through nutrition. Then I went onto this and it was incredible and there's so much needed to be done around sexuality and sexual wellness. So that was one piece, so I did this charity component and showed that I was very invested in women's health and women's equality from that side.

And then I went on a coding bootcamp and I learned to be a front end developer in three months. This was before the second interview, so that I could talk about all these amazing things that I'm doing. That really highlighted to me that I should never be a developer. I think I broke two laptops with the frustration of writing code, certainly front end, CSS and HTML.

Dom: Were you still working at this point?

Billie: No. I had left work. So actually one of your questions before, you didn't ask me this, but I've seen the question was around how did I make that transition? 

Dom: How did you make that transition?

Billie: Oh! Good question! Through creating my escape fund. So, I had been assaulted and then seven months later started the escape programme, and then been through the three months of that, and then seven months later left. So it has been a total of 14 months. 

When I was on Escape, they said if you're thinking of a career change, you need to be able to support yourself and you need to create this escape fund. And that completely shifted my narrative of work. So now I was no longer working for someone I was working for myself and my escape fund. Every day I showed up, I was like, “yes, they’re mugs, they don't realise that they're paying for my escape. 

Skye: I love it. 

Dom: That’s exactly what I did!

Billie: It was so cool, It's great. It really changes the dynamic doesn't it? You're like ‘you fools!’

Dom: So you were saving, you had that escape fund, how much runway did you give yourself?

Billie: I gave myself six months, but I'm very privileged because I was able to move back with mum and dad. I was actually only 23 or 24 at the time so I wasn't earning big bucks, so saving a couple of hundred quid a month was quite a big deal.

And I think I was actually saving like 600 quid a month. So I was saving a lot of my salary while still living in London. But then I was able to just save enough that I could sustain myself and move back home. I just needed like 400 quid a month to live on, barely anything, to contribute a little bit to food and the car, but I know that that's a very privileged position to be in and they were incredible to let me live there.

They were like, damn it, we thought we'd got rid of your 10 years ago!

Dom: But that's a big step to go from living in London with a job that looks from the outside as successful. You’ve obviously gone through that trauma and this isn't for you, and then you're saving and basically scrimping around the edges to then have to then basically go back home with tail between your legs little bit and think, okay, well, I've just got to do this and regroup and figure out what I'm going to do. Was that a difficult decision to make?

Billie: It wasn't a difficult decision because I finally felt like I was taking control of my career. It was challenging to look at all of my friends, seeing them get promotions and be successful, quote on quote ‘successful,’ in their roles, and that I was moving back home. 

And then I had have to have that kind of experience of living back with mom and dad again, and the impact of that would have on my sex life - teasing really - though I'm not teasing, my dad found my vibrator in the bed after kindly trying to make it for me. And you know what he did, he took it out of the bed and he left it on the step up to my bedroom.

And I was like why did he not just leave it there? We never spoke about it. I just came home and saw this vibrator on the step and my made bed and thought, ‘that's why you make your bed every morning.’

But yeah, I finally felt like I was taking control of my career and I felt very lucky to have that support system to be able to do that. I knew that it was going to set me up to go somewhere better so it wasn't a difficult decision. It took a while to get to that thinking, there are lots of social narratives that you have to unpack first and beliefs about where you should be and these kinds of social markers and these statuses that you have to reconcile.

But once I'd reconciled those, then it was easy. And, to your point, when I told my boss that I was leaving - because there was a period between Zinc applications coming out and then actually the course starting, which was about six months or four months - so I told my boss that I was leaving and I knew that I hadn't got the place of the program, but I knew that I was going to get it.

I knew it was the thing for me. I remember he said to me, ‘you're an idiot, you're walking away from the earning potential of 500 grand in the next five years, annual salary, to nothing, to pursue this ridiculous dream, so you're very foolish and I just laughed at him.

I thought, God, that's such a sad attitude. 

Skye: You talk about having to deal with the social norms and unpick all of that stuff, if your peers are all working in city jobs and living that lifestyle, what was that like for you telling other people that you are going to do something different, how did people respond? Because I know that can be a huge barrier for people to break free from those norms. 

Billie: They all thought I was mental, I think they all still think I'm mental. I did actually have a very good group of friends, they knew how bitterly unhappy I was, and actually they were ready for me to leave a long time before I made the realisation I needed to leave. They were desperate for me to get out of that situation and that environment, because they could just see, I was really withdrawing from everyone and I was becoming like a very shadow version of myself.

So when they saw me go through that career change moment and do the course, and they saw me getting back to myself, they were really excited. They thought I was mental for taking such a different career choice but they were also incredibly supportive of me moving on from where I was.

They still think I'm crazy, but now they have a real admiration for what I've achieved and are very inspired by what I've done and it has led to a few of my other friends pursuing different careers. So I think that we do have these norms, but it's amazing how many of us want to be doing something different.

And it just takes one person to sort of lead the flock and then others can see that there's a route forward. So yes, it was and it still is tough. I'm earning nothing, I run my own company, and I'm earning absolutely jack shit with this promise of being a billionaire one day, but that kind of belief or that distant reward is enough to motivate me at the moment. Really it's the impact I'm having every day in the business that really motivates me, but it is challenging when I see friends of mine who work half as hard as me, don't love their jobs, they're just going through the motions and they're earning like four times what I'm earning. My friend bought a Porsche the other day and I've just stolen my dad's 2004 VW 2004.

And they're buying houses and they're getting married and having babies. They’ve got a lot of financial stability and a real direction and a ladder that you're following and it's not hard. It's hard in different ways, but you haven't got to think about where you're going, you're just going up this ladder. And you've got a checklist of things that you've got to do to get to the next rung and it's all laid out for you and it’s rewarding in the immediacy. You're never going to be really wealthy, you're never going to make generational wealth, you're never going to really break beyond your social status but that's pretty good. 

You know I come from an affluent background, I definitely come from a privileged community. So, 150 grand is a lot of money and you can have a very nice life if you're in a partnership and both of you are earning £150K, that is £300K combined income.

So that's challenging, and it's definitely one that I still have to reconcile. I went through a real period of burnout this year and I was like, ‘is it worth it, like, what is it for, why is it worth it?’ And then I got this email from one of my customers who tells me that they've been using Ferly for three months and they've had their first orgasm and sexual experience without having a panic attack in five years and I think, ‘yeah, it's worth it. It's amazing.’

Dom: I wanted to ask about your good idea criteria, and you've kind of hinted at what some of them might be, such as impact, but what were they? 

Billie: So I'm definitely a very money motivated person. I'm not earning right now. And maybe I'm a bit kind of psychotic and I think that there's an opportunity to earn loads down the line, but that for me is exciting. The second one is impact and that I think has really come from the experience that I lived through, I just want to reach as many women as possible. I really want to have a global impact and create something that is accessible for populations that have been ignored and left out of those systems.

And that's global, that’s women from different socioeconomic statuses within the UK, but also we have a massive cohort in India, and being able to really change their narratives and change their level of equality, that really matters to me. So those are the two real things.

So there’s impact - in terms of scale -, then the financial goal at the end of it, and then the third one is around equality. I'm incredibly passionate about equality and how we work to close some of these gender gaps. I genuinely believe to my core that closing the sexual pleasure gap is fundamental to close the gender gap, because it's not about, ‘are you having good sex?’ It's about, do you, as a woman, believe that you have the right to prioritise yourself, to show up fully as a human and for all of your needs to be met in your most intimate and vulnerable space. 

And if you believe that then that cascades into all other areas. If you can ask for your want and your needs to be met in this really difficult environment, which is a taboo and shameful space of sexuality where women's pleasure isn't prioritised at all, even in science, we still don't really understand women's pleasure.

So if you can understand that and you can ask for it in this very intimate space where his pleasure is often prioritised over your pleasure, and you can get through that most uncomfortable conversation, then you can do anything and you know that you matter and that your pleasure matters. And then it's easy to say, ‘I need a couple of days off or, I want a pay rise, those things are easy after that. So when you know you matter and your pleasure matters, then I think we start to make strides towards gender equality. And I think it also starts to really change how men see women as well. 

Skye: So when you first joined Zinc, because you blagged your way on and they met you and thought, well, we have to have this absolutely amazing person on the program, which is exactly what they did. You had this interest and curiosity and passion about sexual wellbeing, particularly with women and girls all over the place, and had worked with rape survivors and had the experience yourself, how did you kind of go from that interest and wanting to use technology to actually coming up with the idea for Ferly? 

Billie: So when I joined Zinc, the first part of the program was all around making connections, throwing around ideas and just testing whether you can work with these people. So it's kind of like relationship matching.

I remember on the first day this crazy curly haired Canadian stepped up to the mic and introduced herself. And I was like, this bird is mad and I love her, she's great. She’s this crazy scientist and her mind  pinged all over the place and she had so much energy. I just thought she was fantastic.

And I was just obsessed with her mind. Her mind is just so interesting and the way that she works, she's so different to me. She's an academic, really intellectual and I was just blown away by her. But they kept saying on the program not to build a business with your friends, you don't have to like each other, just really test out these different dynamics. 

So at first I thought, well, I can't build a business with this woman because I just love her so much, we only met for a day and I think she's amazing. We tested out a lot of these different relationships to really understand the values, how we work together, are there skills synergies, are you different enough to add value to each other, what do you want to work on? 

I explored a lot of different topics in that period with a lot of different individuals, but Anna and I just kept coming back together. We were working so effectively together because we're really different. I'm incredibly linear, very action-orientated and really like to drive things on. And then she balances me with being much more considered, very intellectual, her brain thinks in this web-like way. And so she comes up with all these weird and wonderful ideas, and then I translate that into something actionable and we then take that forward.

We were just incredibly dynamic as a pair. We kept coming back together and actually we didn't know that we were going to work on sex. We were floating these ideas around and then she shared her experience and I shared my experience and we really connected on that leve – around our insights into sexual difficulties and women's experience trying to get the support they need to come back to a place of pleasure. 

And ultimately we were just like two angry feminists slamming our fists on the floor being ‘the world is so unequal and fuck the boys!’ No, not fuck the boys, fuck the patriarchy. There's some good boys out there, Dom, I'm sure you're one of them. 

And at first our insight was, women are massively disconnected from their bodies and masturbation is seen as very shameful. In order to get more pleasure, you need to feel comfortable exploring your body and getting to know what you like.

We were having a lot of conversations with women who kept just saying that good sex was when a man knew what he was doing. And you think, how can you pass off all of your pleasure to someone that doesn't know your body?’ If you're having a one night stand or you're getting into a new relationship and you're expecting them to understand your pleasure and your orgasms and how your body works, we can't just rely on them having that information. 

We need to take control of that and be able to guide and move them around in the right way. And so for us we thought we need to just help women masturbate more. What we need to do then is we need to create better porn because the porn is just a bit icky and makes most of us feel a bit gross after watching it.

So let's create some really amazing erotica and then let's give women back the power. We were also working with this engineer at the time who was an absolute genius, but he was really into natural language processing NLP - natural language programming, basically voice tech.

And he said,’yes, I love this. What we can do is we can create this chat bot, which tells you the story and then checks in with you and asks you if you want to continue and then you have to say yes.’ So we created this chat bot that was like, blah, blah, blah, sexy, sexy story. Would you like me to continue?

And then you have to be like, ‘yes, I'd like you to continue.’ It would then carry on, ooh, sexy, sexy, sexy, then…”does this feel good for you?” And women were like, this is really weird because I'm like talking to this AI bot thing and you know what, if I'm trying to explore my body and like my partner's downstairs or I'm in a flat share in London and all they're hearing is like, “yes, yes, it feels good, continue, continue.”

So that was Ferly version 1 and then we quickly moved on to version 2 because we realised, you know, no one wants to do that.

Dom: Tell me about the app. How does it work? 

Billie: So today it’s very different from that. We have really moved much more to a health tech product today, we focus on women that struggle with sexual difficulties. That’s 51% of the female population, and it includes things like an inability to orgasm, low libido, sexual anxiety, or pain during sex. And that statistic is probably low, it's probably much higher than that, but 51% of women express distress about that. 

And to put that into context, only 25% of men struggle with sexual disfunctions, yet there's such a limited understanding about female sexual difficulties versus male sexual difficulties. We've got a multi-billion dollar industry behind male sexual dysfunctions because apparently premature ejaculation or erections are more important than women's having a good time because we can still have sex, even if it's horrendous, but you can't have sex if you don't have a boner.

We've really prioritised that male functioning and now we're starting to really understand female sexual difficulties a bit more, and what the interventions and protocols are to helping women overcome those difficulties. Although it is a mindfuck, because we are a bit more complicated, it doesn't mean that we are less sexual, it doesn't mean that we have lower desire, it just means that it operates differently and we've been operating through a male lens. So we've not been doing women justice. 

So with the app today, there's three components to it. We call it our heal, our maintain and our transform chapters of the app.

And if you join, you move into the heal phase, it's a 12 week program that helps you overcome your initial sexual difficulty. It's made up of the theory and the science of sex. So really empowering you through knowledge and giving you that insight, that we've never been taught about our sexual functioning.

And then it gives you these guided practices. It takes a very somatic approach to helping you reconnect with your body and your mind in a very embodied way. The scientific bit is the most valuable, the women get the biggest ah-ha! moments and suddenly feel seen and heard and recognised, They say, ‘wow, it makes total sense now, I'm not broken, we just didn't know this about ourselves or about the science of sex.’ 

And so that's the first eight weeks and you can go through that guided or unguided. So unguided is just, you go through it in your own timeline guided as you join a weekly discussion group with a cohort of women who are going through it at the same pace as you.

And so we leverage kind of peer to peer learning and this facilitated group experience and women can share their reflections and their experiences. That is the most powerful part of the app, women get so much value from being able to hear from other women. The number one question we get asked all the time is, am I normal?

And the only way to really show there's no such thing as normal is by showing a diverse range of experiences. So that's the first element, that's the heal element. And then you move into sort of the maintenance area, which is about building habits and behaviors that support your sexual wellness.

These are things like building a regular masturbation practice and connecting regularly with your body through kind of central breath work or guided practices of exploration. And that is just really helping you just get comfortable, seeing yourself as a sexual being and really exploring your body and slowing down a little bit, being much more mindful about your interaction with sex.

And so it stops becoming just this physical act that we do that's just about penetration and getting to an orgasm, and it becomes much more about helping you feel relaxed, feeling calm, feeling embodied between your mind and your body. And we do this through these central stories and these guided practices.

You can take someone through an 8 week or 12 week program, but that's not it, you're not fixed at the end of that. That's just the beginning to understand your journey and then you have to continue those practices and then the transform phase. So maybe you want to go deep on certain topics.

You want to become a really good communicator to improve your relationship. You want to develop erotic mindset so that you can flirt confidently and feel confident going out and dating as a single woman. You want to learn how to overcome your disordered eating and relationship with food so that you can have a much better relationship with your body, so you can start to feel good and sexy again.

And so that's how the app works. It's all audio content and it's been co-created with the world's best academics and practitioners in this space who have clinically validated these protocols and are working already one-to-one with patients and we're just scaling that. So that's how that works.

Dom: It's amazing. And how's it all going from a business and progress perspective? 

Billie: Yeah, it's going well. We launched in 2019, we raised a really big pre-seed round, we did a 1.5 million pre-seed round from some amazing investors, including some really cool angels like the founder of Calm, the original CMO of Spotify she was the fourth employee there and really took it to the brand is today. So that was early 2019, that was pre-product. We didn't even have anything in market then it was just an idea. I think that really speaks to the zeitgeists at that moment around female pleasure and sexual wellness.

There was just a real excitement about getting into our space. And we were sort of the market leader there, one of the first to market. And then we have had over 250,000 women use the app today, they've taken over 10 and a half million actions within the app. We're in 210 countries with average 35% month over month growth this year since becoming a paid product, which is really cool.

And our NPS scores, our net promoter score is really high. So we got incredible feedback from the women using it. And yeah, the efficacy is really profound as well. The ability to actually change health outcomes across what we measure is really strong, so the product is performing from an efficacy point of view, from a retention and engagement point of view and we've been able to kind of scale it, so now we're raising more money to really take that to the next level. I'm in the throes of that at the moment, but it's been fun, but it definitely has come with its challenges.

We've been a team of three, then we were a team of eight, then we were a team of two because we moved to the US and we let go of everyone, then COVID hit. So we literally were in the US for six weeks. I mean, my co-founder never even made it and then we scaled back up to a team of eight and it's back down to six.

So it's come with its challenges, but we're still smiling just about. It's been fun and it's been a wild ride and it is lovely to reflect on where I was in 2016 versus where I am in 2021 and what we've achieved as a company since then and what I have achieved personally, since making that career switch as well.

It really strikes me because that's only five years ago, two of which have been pandemic. So you also have to take that into account, so really it's only been three years, how much transition and how much change. That's such an amazing journey in such a short amount of time. 

Billie: Yeah, it's funny. Cause sometimes I feel like there's no time at all and then sometimes I'm like, wow, five years, half a decade. We've been doing this kind of transition. 

Dom: Does it feel like a long time?

Billie: No, it doesn't, it really doesn't. When I think that we started Zinc in 2017, and I always talk about Ferly really launching in 2019, but when I think about that it feels so long ago. Because of the world that we're in, we're a venture backed business and the scale and the speed at which some of these companies grow. Hopin for example, the events platform. They went from two to three people to a multi-billion dollar business in basically 12 months. You have venture capitalists telling you, you get to this stage in 2 years, and they tell you it’s slow. And you're like, wow. 

So sometimes it feels like a very long time. And then sometimes it feels incredibly quick. So I guess it depends who you're like pitting yourself against. 

Dom: We launched in 2010 and so many people have come and gone since then. I look at people who have just been on this massive, crazy trajectory and they started their business in 2020, you know, ‘what the heck? Oh my gosh they are so much further ahead than we were.’ And I've been here grinding away for 12 years, and you think why this is not fair. 

Where are you now with your own relative to your own measure of success?

Billie: Definitely financially below. That is definitely an area that I have to reconcile often. And hopefully with this next round, I'll be a little bit closer to where I want to be to feel comfortable. But in terms of my personal development and growth, we had a coach who recently passed away through cancer, unfortunately, but she was an incredible coach for two years and really helped us reflect and reminded us of the stratospheric growth that we've been on as individuals.

And you have to constantly stop and check in with that. Five years is a long time, but would I have been able to achieve what I've achieved as an individual and as a person and as a leader in five years, if I had stayed in my job on that trajectory? No, I don't think I would have. The opportunities and the experiences and the highs and the lows that I've had to navigate are way bigger than what I would have been able to achieve working in a more traditional route. 

So for that, I feel like I've learned and grown so much, and I'm really proud of who I’m becoming. I definitely don't get it right all the time, but I've got to a point now where I can recognize those kinds of mishaps, check in with myself and figure out how we would do something differently and so that's quite a big shift for me as well. 

And then from an impact point of view, we've helped 250,000 women. When we set out and we said, if we can help one woman, we'd be really happy. The fact that we've personally built something that helps one woman change her life and we've helped thousands of women change their lives.

Skye: Okay. I've got a question. Looking back at your journey, and obviously you've taken part in lots of courses, and been super proactive about everything that you've done, but there are a lot of people who are afraid to do that and to make a change and they sit in that kind of analysis paralysis for a really long time. What advice would you give to somebody who is wanting to do something else, wanting to start their own thing, wanting to do something different?

Billie: It's really hard because the easiest thing to say is just start, but that is the hardest first step in a lot of instances. I mentor a few women now who are thinking about starting and there is often that paralysis of that first step and perfectionism, not wanting to put anything out there that is less than perfect. 

I think the same advice that I followed was just removing expectations. Remove it from being The Thing and put a few different things out there and test the waters across a few different areas, because then it removes that sort of expectation that this one thing has to be The Thing. So I think starting, when you’re still in something that's secure that still makes you feel safe is great because it doesn't feel so weighted. And then starting a few little different things by just throwing ideas at the wall. And it doesn't even have to be ideas, for me, it was taking on a new hobby, whether that'd be twerking - which I should definitely not do - or coding, something totally different, but just committing to yourself to this thing for six weeks.

Thinking I’m going to commit myself to this thing for four weeks and just see what it brings about and just follow that curiosity is one way to get going with it. And also I think one of the biggest things that certainly I found is that when you know that you want to do something different but you're in a job that is leaving you feeling massively de-motivated or sucking your creativity from you, you're never going to be able to start that thing. 

If you get home every evening, maybe at five o'clock and you have five hours before you go to bed, but you're mentally drained, you're mentally exhausted. So how do you start to bring some of that joy and excitement back into your life to re-energise you so that on the weekend or in the evening, you can do that again? That might be going into a life drawing class after work if you love drawing and that gives you feeling inspired suddenly, and then you've got an hour home that you can work with that you've got that inspiration energy.

So how do you start to bring joy back into your life that then fuels creativity, so that then you can use that energy? If you're just hoping that that kind of energy will come from brute force, it often doesn’t.

I think those are my key tips. 

Skye: The multipliers, the things that multiply your energy, they're always the first thing to go when people are stressed as well but they're the last thing that should go because that space is what keeps you going. 

Dom: Final question from me. So your good idea criteria was money, impact and equality. Where are you with those impacts? 

Billie: Impact we’re at about 0.4% from where we want to be. 80 million women in the US and the UK struggle with sexual difficulties. Even if we went for the women that were most acute, there's 12 million women and that's just the US and the UK.

So we are having impact, but it's low right now for where we want to be. Equality, it’s quite hard to measure, but I would say of the women that we're working with, the women that have used the product, rather than all women out there in the world, I would feel really happy with the progress we've made. 

Then money… *sighs. But I’ve also got a very amazing partner who is able to pay a bit more to make us have a little bit more fun. Otherwise it'd be quite constrained.

Billie: Ah Billie, I've heard so much about you from so many people who've done the programs and you've helped us out with so many events subsequently. Thank you for coming on the podcast. 

Skye: What did I say to the team earlier? I said, “we're going to interview Billie” and I was really excited about it and I said, “Billy is just such a legend of such a hero.” You’re a badass and I think that so much. You've been through something that is really horrible and traumatic that so many women experience and don't have the support systems or somebody else to help them build up their confidence and just seeing you and your journey going from having that and making meaning out of that trauma into something that's really impacting and supporting other people that are going through that is just such a gift. I feel personally just so inspired by you and your energy and what you're doing. So thanks for being a badass

Billie: I already said at the beginning that Escape was the catalyst for everything that I've been able to achieve here. So my success is as much your success, the impact that I've been able to have across the world is because of what you created. I will be forever indebted to Escape The City and I'll always be a massive supporter and a fan. 

What I find really comforting is when I hear the stories of women that we've impacted and I hope that you know the impact that you have had on my life. Thank you both, because I do mean that from the bottom of my heart.

Skye: What an amazing story Billy has, she's such a firecracker and I just love all of the things that she's done to get herself to where she is today. 

Dom: Yeah, she's got a great story. It was so cool to hear her talk about it.