Jessica Christiansen-Franks
Jessica Christiansen-Franks
Fifty logins, a Friday layoff, and a phishing scam mid-wedding - then REA came knocking.
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Jessica Christiansen-Franks
Jess trained as a landscape architect before co-founding Neighbourlytics in 2017. REA Group acquired the business in late 2025. She is now Managing Director of the Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship at Ormond College, University of Melbourne.
In 2017 Jess co-founded Neighbourlytics, a data business that measures what people actually do in a neighbourhood. It grew to cover more than twenty thousand neighbourhoods across twelve countries, took five raises and about five million dollars, and REA Group acquired it in late 2025. Jess is now Managing Director of the Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship at Ormond College, University of Melbourne.
In this episode: the quarter she found fifty logins against $600,000 of revenue, the Friday she gave her team four weeks' notice, and the phishing scam that drained the bank account while she was at a wedding in the UK.
Three life lessons run through the back half of the episode: it is always harder than you think, so tackle one problem at a time and don't believe your own bullshit; people and culture is the hard, unglamorous work of doing right by people rather than avoiding the difficult conversations, because raising investment is only about four per cent of running a business; and don't tie your identity to being a business leader - hers was never the business, it was having a team, which is why finding a new one at Wade made her feel like herself again.