From Landing to Zeen: A Story of Evolution and Focus

Join us as we chat with Miri Buckland and Ellie Buckingham, the powerhouse duo behind Zeen. We dive into their incredible journey from building the creative powerhouse Landing to evolving into Zeen, a platform revolutionizing visual and shoppable blogs. Discover the challenges they faced, the key lessons they learned about focus and iteration, and the passion that fuels their mission to empower global creativity.

Check out Zeen at: https://info.myzeen.app/ 

Follow Miri Buckland and Ellie Buckingham on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miri-buckland-42620679/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellie-buckingham-305817b4/

Follow us on Tik Tok @shesambitiousaf for more content and episode teasers!

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to She's Ambitious AF, the bold and empowering podcast that turns up the volume on female entrepreneurship. Join us as we dive headfirst into the wild world of boss babes, where we spill the tea on all things ambition, success, and the occasional hilarious disaster. 

Miri Buckland: Welcome to another episode of She's Ambitious AF. Today, I'm joined by guests, Mary Buckland and Ellie Buckingham. Mary, why don't you kick off with introductions? Hi. Well, thank you for having us. I'm really excited to be here and to share more about what we're building and just have a chat about everything. But I'm Mary co founder and co CEO of zine from the UK. As you maybe can tell, my background is I actually worked in TV for a few years and then came to the U.

Miri Buckland: S. To for business school, which is where I met Ellie at Stanford. And we have been building Landing and then now Zine ever since. And the thread really of [00:01:00] our story has always been about how do you empower creativity, which personally for me has been a really meaningful and worthwhile mission for the last few years.

Ellie Buckingham: I definitely grew up as someone who didn't really consider themselves to be creative. I was much more the math and science kid. So my journey with landing and now with Zine has really been all about like discovering my own creativity and empowering other people's too. And I'm Ellie, other, other half of the Landing and Zine team. As Mary mentioned, we met in business school, but my background is a little bit different. I would essentially self classify myself as a 50 50 right left brain split. I studied studio art in undergrad. Then I went to go work at Goldman for a couple of years on the trading floor and pretty ironically came back to business school to do something more creative.

Ellie Buckingham: I was really excited about the potential of joining a really early stage team or starting a company and had this mission kind of coming from the other side [00:02:00] of the coin that, I had always been told I was creative because I could draw in the lines when I was five years old. And I kind of developed this perspective over time that just because I had this, like, very kind of down the fairway skill set at a very young age didn't necessarily actually mean that I was more creative than, Those who didn't and I started kind of developing this perspective that creativity isn't something you're born with or not, but is actually something that can be fostered over time in anyone with the right encouragement and community and tooling.

Ellie Buckingham: And so Miri and I were so lucky to meet in business school and really connected over the fact that we really cared about this problem, but from two opposite. Sides of the coin, and we started working on a bunch of different iterations of what it could look like to empower creativity, and that is how The original landing came to be, we actually started in the home design space, helping people create spaces that they could be proud of.

Ellie Buckingham: [00:03:00] COVID hit and we couldn't be in people's apartments anymore. And so we actually focused on. A digital design tool to essentially help people lay out their spaces and decide what type of furnishing and design elements they wanted in their homes. We built the tool very flexibly and we started seeing some really interesting behavior of people using This mood boarding tool for not just home design, but for other verticals like fashion planning and making manifestation mood boards and all sorts of things.

Ellie Buckingham: And so we basically follow the thread of this kind of empowerment of creativity outside of just the kind of physical world and much more into the digital realm. So we can dive a lot. deeper into the path, but that's the high level background. I

Angelica Maestas (Host): Well, I love that you gave me hope in that creativity can be cultivated because I'm very left brain. I've just, I've always been that way. And anything that I [00:04:00] attempt to. Draw or design just never really looks like anything. The only thing I found a knack for is I like interior design that sometimes I just, I find myself naturally creative there, but anything else is just kind of a roadblock.

Angelica Maestas (Host): But I'm, I'm, I would love to learn about kind of the process even to becoming founders. so you met at Stanford business school. I also got my undergrad in business, but I had never intended to be an entrepreneur when I got it. I went into finance. I worked in corporate initially before I went into entrepreneurship.

Angelica Maestas (Host): So I'm, I'm curious. I think Ellie, you said you had intended to, to start a business. Is that why you went to business school?

Ellie Buckingham: hope to, but I think if I'm being completely honest, I had a little bit of imposter syndrome that who was I, who was I to think that I could start a company? I had no experience obviously doing it. And one of the beautiful benefits of being a At Stanford was the access that we had to hundreds of founders [00:05:00] who had started different companies who came to speak in all of our classes and meet with students.

Ellie Buckingham: And one of the most amazing things about hearing all their stories was this realization that the one thing they all really had in common was just extreme grit and refusal to give up. And they were really, really good at continuing to work hard and trying to break through walls, even when Things seemed like they weren't necessarily working and finding a way to make them work.

Ellie Buckingham: They didn't necessarily all have a common thread of a specific type of genius or something that was so out of reach. They just had a really high pain tolerance. And I think I had this realization that I also have a pain, a high pain tolerance and like, I should definitely, definitely actually try this.

Ellie Buckingham: Like there, there's no better time than the present. So that was a little bit of my coming to terms, but Mary, I think, yeah, it would be great also to hear yours.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Did you plan, Mary, to start a business? Because you're very left brain, so I'm curious what

Miri Buckland: Yeah, I did not. I really did not. And [00:06:00] like, even coming to business school, like I knew I wanted to be like start closer to startup world. Like, that's why I went out to the West Coast from London, because I felt so far away from like startups and technology in my like, previous life, I guess in the UK.

Miri Buckland: But I had never intended to become a founder. And I think part of it was to Ellie's point, like I hadn't seen many role models. I hadn't seen many people close to me who I could see myself in or who I could like look up to and think like, Oh, they've done that. Like that feels viable for me too. Or like I could do the same thing and just seeing like the whole range of people, different demographics, different backgrounds, different skill sets who had started companies and had had success and failure, like made me think that, okay.

Miri Buckland: Maybe I can do that too. Like I could see myself in that founder role, which I think typically carries a lot of stereotypes and also like a lot of weight as a title. And so it was like intimidating for me at first and also felt really far away and Stanford did a lot to like, [00:07:00] boost my confidence in that and also just like show me what I can do.

Miri Buckland: All the different types of people who have like been able to take on that role in their own like unique way

Angelica Maestas (Host): Did you find yourself drawn to any particular roles within startup world that you thought you'd be a good fit for? Because I'm, what I want to get to is. What roles did each of you have at Landing and now Zine?

Miri Buckland: Yeah I think for me I was always like really fascinated in like how you take a product to market like what is the like consumer psychology that you're like tapping into and What value are you really providing to people? I think One of my favorite examples of companies is Liquid Death, the water brand, because I'm just like, that is water in a can, but they've tapped into something amazing in our psychology that like has built this incredible business.

Miri Buckland: And I'm like, sometimes it's not like the fanciest product. It's just like, you're actually doing something, delivering something in a way that people like really resonate with. And so for me, [00:08:00] I was always really excited hearing those kind of stories from brands at school about like, what realization did you have about like where the consumer mind was going or what was happening in the zeitgeist that allowed you to like bring this product to market at the exact right time and really like tap into that That need from a consumer in a new way.

Miri Buckland: So for me, like what I do day to day at Zine and at Landing previously is run all of our kind of like go to market operations. So all of our kind of like community stuff and marketing and like some of our user research side too, to really like inform what we're building and why, and take it to market in a way that resonates with people.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Gotcha. And Ellie, what was, what's been your role?

Ellie Buckingham: Yeah, so I have sat on the other side of the coin and Kind of taken a head first dive into product land. I own all product and kind of oversee our design and engineering at zine and previously landing. So how do we take the idea of the thing that we think people might want, [00:09:00] figure out how to build the minimum viable version of that and test it as quickly as possible and get out into the world.

Ellie Buckingham: And also build. Kind of like a world class technical team to be able to do that. Neither Miriam or myself are technical from background perspective. And so part of that is also thinking about like the right team and how we bring the right people around the table. But I think from just like a, in, in, in terms of like, Skill set and interest perspective.

Ellie Buckingham: It is really the first time in my life that I'm using both the right and the left sides of my brain, like pretty equally on a day to day basis. We, from a product perspective are, are building tooling to help people be. creative. That's like the bread and butter of what our team is really, really good at and has been kind of like the through line through the different iterations and versions of products that we've built.

Ellie Buckingham: And it truly is the most fun thing I've ever had the opportunity to work on. And I feel like I've really had the chance also to learn from Teammates who are just [00:10:00] 10x smarter and better and more amazing than I will ever be. It's like it is really a gift.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah, I can, I can tell when a founder's face lights up when they talk about what they do. So I can, I can see that you both are having a good time in the build stage and the growth stage. And it is a privilege to surround yourself by experts because not no one person or no two founders can bring everything that a company needs.

Ellie Buckingham: I'm curious, what have been some of the maybe lessons you can share as far as growing with landing and building that team? So many.

Miri Buckland: So many, I was just like, where do we start?

Ellie Buckingham: I can take a bruise, a bruise pass. We have some amazing, amazing teammates. And I think one of the biggest, biggest learnings that I've had personally, especially coming from like a much larger corporate environment prior to business school is that working at a really early stage startup, like truly is not for everyone and it shouldn't be, it is the most [00:11:00] irrational thing you could ever do.

Ellie Buckingham: You are working for. super kind of suboptimal cash compensation relative to what you could get working at a big company. You're working for, you know, equity that might not be valuable at any point in time. You're working a lot, a lot, a lot under extreme uncertainty. No matter how much certainty, like Mary and I can attempt to provide to the team at the end of the day, like part of the benefit of working at a, Startup and being a startup is just like speed of iteration.

Ellie Buckingham: And that means that your day to day and your week to week can look a little volatile. And so when I look at the team that we have today and who has performed so well and really like leveled up landing and now Zine it is all, it's a group of people who like really thrives in that environment.

Ellie Buckingham: And I think the lesson from that is really like being hyper specific when Recruiting about the almost like anti pitch or anti sell that like, you don't need to want [00:12:00] to do this. Most people shouldn't want to do this. Like, why do you actually want to do this irrational thing? Versus trying to pitch too hard in the interview setting.

Ellie Buckingham: Well,

Angelica Maestas (Host): I'm going to, I'm going to quote that I'll put that in the social media posts. It's the most irrational thing you could ever do. That's just perfect way to describe going into a startup world. What about you, Mary?

Miri Buckland: Yeah, I was just thinking about it. I think one of the pieces of advice we heard really early on, actually from Jen Hyman, who's one of the founders of Rent the Runway, was to hire people for their strengths, not their weaknesses, specifically at the really early stage. And that really stuck with me and has been like something that I think we've proven to be true again and again.

Miri Buckland: Like we are surrounded by amazing people on our team. No one's good at everything, but people are amazing. We put them in positions and they then play to their strengths and like, that's the best thing we can do. And I think like, as a startup, you have like, finite resources, you don't have a lot of time, so like, you [00:13:00] really need people who can like, cover your own gaps and like, To start, you need to be aware of what your own gaps are.

Miri Buckland: But then like put people in there and help them play to their strengths rather than expecting them to like do everything. And I think we've been really, really lucky in that we have like a plus players in these roles where they have like been able to like 10 X their strengths because of that.

Miri Buckland: So that's been really awesome. And then I think the other thing I've really learned is that one of the Best things to screen for is just like ownership mentality. Like, are people going to treat like this company as if it's their own? And we have this saying at landing, like, and a zine, like you're one of 11.

Miri Buckland: There are 11 of us around the table. Like you're each one of 11. Like what you say really matters. And so we need to hear it. We need to encourage each other to speak up. And I think that's one of the things I'm most proud of in our team is that we have across the board, whatever, you know, experience you've had or like level you are, I guess, like you are, [00:14:00] your voice really matters and you are an owner of this company.

Miri Buckland: And that has, that's been amazing because I think people really just self direct and are able to kind of like fly when they are trusted with that level of ownership.

Angelica Maestas (Host): kudos to what you've built. You built an amazing team. How did you how'd you get to the point from landing to now zine? And I guess we need to describe and tell our listeners. What is zine? I guess that's a good starting point. 

Miri Buckland: Okay, so Zine is a platform for visual and shoppable blogs. So you can think of it a little bit like a visual version of a sub stack, or if sub stack were more like a magazine. It's a web platform, not a mobile app, and our creators use it to make distribute and earn from their blocks.

Miri Buckland: Those blogs include collages. They also include products. So a lot of our creators are creating around fashion content. They're creating like Halloween outfit ideas and what I want to buy this for. And like their favorite finds some secondhand things, some new things. And they're sharing them in a kind of like magazine [00:15:00] style format.

Miri Buckland: So that zine, zine launched about 15 days ago. So not long ago, it's, it's just gone live. We have nearly a hundred creators on the platform now who are creating this kind of content. And creation right now is gated. It's invite only, but anyone could subscribe to the zines on the platform and read and discover products from these amazing creators that have joined.

Miri Buckland: So yeah, yeah. That's, that's what zine is today. I think your question was about, you know, how did we get here from landing? So landing was an app that was kind of like a Gen Z version of Pinterest. It was a social app where you could create and share collages. We built that over a few years.

Miri Buckland: We had an app as well as. Website. And we learned so much from that. We ended up having about a million downloads of the app, which was crazy. It was, A really special experience building something so creative and so positive. And I think our team especially learned a lot about how do you build creative [00:16:00] tooling products and how do you build for a younger audience, especially a Gen Z audience.

Miri Buckland: So we really had a front row seat to seeing how our users on landing were creating what they wanted from creative tooling, what they wanted from product discovery. And what they wanted from social as well. And fashion was always one of the biggest verticals on landing. And we always saw people creating fashion collages and people also wanting to shop from them.

Miri Buckland: We had always wanted to build commerce and shop ability into landing. But over the last kind of six months or so, we really saw the core needs emerging from these creatures where it felt too strong to ignore. And we decided that zine deserved to be a standalone platform instead of a subset of landing.

Miri Buckland: So that was a lot of the rationale for spinning out zine and building that. And obviously as a small team, it's not. possible for us to keep multiple platforms going at this point in our journey. So we had to make the decision to [00:17:00] shut landing, but it really came out of landing and was because we saw this super promising behavior happening on landing around fashion.

Miri Buckland: Where it made a lot of sense for us to kind of create zine as a as a separate platform so That's a little bit of the story, but maybe ellie can chime in also Yeah,

Ellie Buckingham: it was kind of a birthing of a new thing. It's not necessarily saying goodbye. It necessarily it's. it gave birth to, to a new idea and a new community to cultivate. Yeah. And I think one of the things that we took away as a core learning from our landing era was this idea that it's, it's very, very hard to be everything. for everyone. We had no vertical specificity on landing. We were by definition a very, very flexible creative tool. So people on landing created everything from Taylor Swift fan boards, to manifestation mood boards, to Halloween outfit planning, to like, you name it.

Ellie Buckingham: The, the spectrum was [00:18:00] very, very, very broad, which was beautiful and amazing. And scrolling through the feed and landing was just truly an eye into like global Gen Z creativity. It was amazing. But the flip side of that is that the, the core need for each of those verticals of creation is, is relatively different.

Ellie Buckingham: And those groups of users are also relatively different. And so to Mary's point, as we started to see these threads of very specific core needs from our fashion creators, it just became increasingly clear that we weren't going to be able to like focus on this user and provide them the value that they deserved and needed and wanted.

Ellie Buckingham: While also trying to provide similar levels of value for the broad range of creators on landings. So the, this idea of kind of going back into a really vertical specific focus was very purposeful and one that was born out of For a little while, trying, trying to be too much [00:19:00] for everyone.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah, that's a valuable lesson for sure. So is the entire team now part of zine or were there changes that you made?

Ellie Buckingham: Yes, the full team has come along with everyone's really excited about zine. I think it's a testament to kind of how strong the signal has been going into the shift. Sorry.

Miri Buckland: And I'd love to hear what's next for zine. So you just announced 15 days ago. What are, what are the biggest goals that you have this coming year for zine? we're super excited about it. The reception from creators has just been amazing I think a lot of them have been kind of craving this more authentic and Less salesy way to share their product recommendations in a way that feels like more creative and more inspirational and more like a magazine so we're really excited to just ramp up the number of creators on the platform from the first hundred to the next Few hundreds and thousands.

Miri Buckland: So that's like a big goal and I [00:20:00] think also just trying to help them Elevate their zines to their communities, share about them and also build our creator community. A lot of our creators are kind of business people of one, you know, they, they work, they, they work by themselves. They're entrepreneurs too.

Miri Buckland: And a lot of them, I think are kind of craving a bit more community around what they do. So we're thinking of some exciting ways to kind of bring them together and start building our like zine creator community from the grounds up. So really excited about that. And Ellie, maybe you can speak to some of like the product side of things.

Ellie Buckingham: Yeah, from the product perspective, we're super excited to continue building out. Creative tooling and the actual kind of functionality for creators on zine to not just be a 2x better product than a Canva for products, but a 10x, 100x better product. And so that looks like AI creation assistance within our studio.

Ellie Buckingham: It looks like automagic features that allow our creators to do the thing that they [00:21:00] love doing, which is. Choosing, curating, finding amazing product recommendations, but then really help them move kind of from this recommendation selection phase of their creative process into a really visual, amazing, shareable output that includes those products in a way that feels creative, but also like very seamless and magic and fun versus time consuming and hard and, and laborious.

Miri Buckland: Well, I'm looking forward to following the journey and seeing how zine evolves and grows. I'd love to conclude with just a couple of rapid fire questions. All right. What's the first app you check when you wake up in the morning? Sadly, my aura, aura app to check my sleep score.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Okay.

Miri Buckland: Need the sleep.

Ellie Buckingham: sadly same. Actually recently, recently I'm checking Nanette. I have a seven month old baby, so,

Angelica Maestas (Host): [00:22:00] Oh,

Ellie Buckingham: I'm making sure she's still asleep.

Miri Buckland: okay. What's your most used emoji when discussing work? Oh, I think it's probably the black heart right now. Our, our brand colors are black and white and with some pops of color. So we use the black car a lot. Go to productivity hack. Ellie, you probably have some since having Rose

Ellie Buckingham: Extreme time boxing.

Miri Buckland: If you could describe your entrepreneurial journey in one word. unexpected,

Ellie Buckingham: Chaos.

Miri Buckland: All right. And last but not least, what can our listeners do to support you all? come and check out Zine, sign up, subscribe to some creators and check out the awesome content that they are, they are making on there.

Miri Buckland: Wonderful. Well, it was great having you on. Thank you.

Angelica Maestas (Host): for having us. And that's a wrap on another episode of She's Ambitious AF. Remember to dream big, [00:23:00] hustle harder, and show the world that when it comes to success, we're not just ambitious, we're Ambitious AF.