Her Story
About Kristen
I've always been interested in consumer behavior around food, which drew me to my first role in Consumer Insights at Kellogg's, working with a million-plus panel. I really enjoyed understanding how people respond to food ads and their behaviors around food. That positioned me in food for my next several jobs, doing market research for companies like Land of Lakes and Hormel through various market research agencies. Then I landed my dream role at Raptive, a programmatic advertisement company where I was essentially building research programs for food creators. I helped creators with food blogs understand their consumers and their behaviors around recipes and content so they could improve their content and grow their income streams. In that role, I really fell in love with the food creator. I love the creator economy - I think it's probably one of the most inspiring spaces and industries. After being laid off in 2024, I decided that I wanted to stay in this field and continue to support and help creators grow. At the same time, I was planning a meal for my own family one day, and as a user of the recipe internet, I went to Pinterest looking through recipes and got overwhelmed. I said I'm done with this, there's got to be a better way. That's what led me to build ReciFix, which is a meal planning platform for home cooks. They get everything from making it easy to decide what's for dinner to actually getting it on the table, and it's all ad-free. They pay a subscription price, and the subscription actually goes towards helping food creators earn recurring compounding revenue. It's a two-sided market that helps creators build their brand and earn recurring revenue, which doesn't exist right now, and it helps home cooks just breathe and makes dinner easy.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Kristen
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would say grit. Being able to fall and get back up. I'm very much a challenge-accepted type of person. When I was pursuing my PhD, I got a lot of pushback for deciding to go into industry instead of academia, which was not the norm even 5 years ago, but especially 6, 7, 10 years ago. That really motivated me to prove that this path was not only more financially rewarding, because academia is not even comparable to the income you can make in industry, but it was also just more fulfilling for me. I think what's cool about it now is I get asked to talk on panels about transitioning my PhD education into an industry job. That's really satisfying and exciting, and it was definitely a huge motivator for me to commit to switching roles, especially when you are being pushed in a certain direction because that's the expectation.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
For starting your own business, do it. I kick myself for not doing it sooner. If you feel like you've got a good idea and you feel like you can solve users' problems, whatever your target audience is, start building. Even if it's just two hours on the weekend, start building. You have to start somewhere, and everybody starts somewhere. For going into the creator economy, you're working with creatives who are also business owners, marketers, and financial gurus - they have to do it all. Any problem that you can solve for them that makes their lives easier, it's gonna be a win.
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