Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / The ‘Hot Girls Have IBS’ billboard, buying Facebook groups & tips for building community with BelliWelli Founder Katie Wilson (part 1)

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The ‘Hot Girls Have IBS’ billboard, buying Facebook groups & tips for building community with BelliWelli Founder Katie Wilson (part 1) · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is Katie Wilson for Female Startup Club. Hey everyone, it's Dune here, your host and hype girl. Today on the show, we're learning from Katie Wilson, the founder of Belly Welly.
• 0:23
  Belly Welly is a functional wellness brand that offers a healthy snack alternative while also creating a movement around the very common but rarely talked about struggle of digestive health, which affects over 70% of US adults. Katie saw a gap in the $280 billion functional food market and set out to create a treat that was made by gut sufferers for gut sufferers with the first gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan, and certified low FODMAP bar being born.
• 0:53
  Thank you.
• 0:54
  This episode is so much fun. Katie is a marketing genius and shares so many learnings around how she built her communities, grassroots initiatives to get the word out there about the brand, and the billboard that went totally viral. If you love this episode as much as I did recording it, remember to screenshot and share on Instagram stories to help other ears find us. Let's jump straight into this episode. This is Katie for Female Startup Club.
• 1:24
  Katie, hi, welcome to the Female Startup Club podcast. Hi, I'm so excited for this conversation. I've been looking forward to it all week. Thank you for having me on. I'm so excited too. For everyone listening, we were just sharing some similarities in our stomach issues. I am a fellow stomach issue sufferer of all the things. We need a name for this. We need a name for this, yeah.
• 1:50
  A fellow gut struggler. Yeah, the gut strugglers. Oh my gosh, it's been a disaster, but I'm so excited to dig into your story and your brand. I think I'm going to learn a lot from you. I'm really excited. Do you want to give everyone listening a little bit of an introduction to who you are and what your brand is? Yeah, absolutely. I'm Katie. I'm here in SoCal and I run a company called Belly Welly. So I'm
• 2:16
  As you briefly mentioned, we make brownie bars, snack bars, cookie bars, little square bars for anyone who knows the daily gut struggle. So that's bloating, IBS, food intolerances, just a sensitive stomach, a sensitive gut, SIBO, leaky gut. Our bars are for you. And even if you don't have stomach issues, i.e. my husband who co-founded the company with me, you love these little bars. I think he eats more than I do a day, actually.
• 2:46
  Love that. Now, I know that you come from a background of dealing with stomach issues and your health issues kind of started this idea, I guess, or this business. But I'd love to go back to, you know, what you're up to in life before you started the business. Were you always destined to be an entrepreneur? What was going on? Give us the lay of the land.
• 3:07
  A hundred percent no. And never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I'd be here running an IBS friendly snacks CPG brand. So I was one of the odd few in life that knew at age 10 that I wanted to be a matchmaker, a professional matchmaker. I should have a really good reason for you at this point as to why, but I don't. I just knew I loved matching people. Yeah.
• 3:30
  In college, I interned for professional matchmakers in LA every summer. Luckily, I had very cool parents who just said, okay, this sounds totally sketchy, but you do you and we're behind you. So I did that for four summers in LA and then eventually walked away thinking, gosh, maybe this is not a very lucrative career path. And so I went to go work in tech. I went to go work at Hulu, actually, and still couldn't shake matchmaking. So I found someone who was building a matchmaking startup, joined forces.
• 3:59
  loved every minute, scaled matchmaking into 15 US cities. And then eventually I fell into celebrity matchmaking. So I then became a celebrity matchmaker for years. Oh my God, like who? Tell us. I've signed my life away 10 times over, which was the worst part, right, is that I never get to share all the crazy cool stories. But yeah.
• 4:21
  So did that for years. And then eventually the CEO of Match convinced me to come be the chief dating strategist at Match, which totally I think will go down in my mind as the best job title ever. I still can't tell you exactly what it means, but I went over and studied dating apps and talked more about dating and relationships and dating.
• 4:43
  Anyway, so no, never in my wildest dreams did I see myself here. And I can absolutely share more as to how dating turned into founding an IBS-friendly snack bar company. But yeah, you could say this was not part of the grand plan. And so how does this start to enter the story? Like what was happening in your personal life that started leading you towards Belly Welly? Yeah, so about six years ago, I got a bout of food poisoning.
• 5:12
  And I know we were talking about stomach troubles here at the beginning of the call, but about a food poisoning. And I'll spare you the TMI, but things never resolve themselves. Right. So I got this food poisoning. My symptoms lingered. And so I did all the things you do to go try to fix said symptom. Colonoscopies, endoscopies, breath pests, diets.
• 5:33
  random probiotics. I even, I mean, I was so desperate that I was ordering the supplements that take like five months to get to you on Amazon that have no brand name, right? I was trying everything and I was grieving this pre-stomach problem life. Right. I could remember a day where I would eat mac and cheese and be fine, right? Hours later. Be fun. Yeah. So developed these gut issues and became obsessed with trying to fix them.
• 6:00
  And in doing so, I started camping out in Facebook groups, which almost sounds old school at this point. But notice that there was thousands of Facebook groups dedicated to buzzwords that have become important in my life. Things like IBS, SIBO, bloating, low FODMAP, reflux, cramping.
• 6:17
  And these words were just missing from the retail grocery store shelf. Yet everyone was talking about these words. And I think in retail, you often saw gut friendly or gut healthy, which was totally missing the boat. It wasn't speaking my language or the language of these thousands of other people I was meeting in these Facebook groups. So the other thing that happened at that point is I was sitting across from what should be some of the healthiest people in the
• 6:41
  For those that don't know, most celebrities have live-in chefs, live-in trainers, live-in nutritionists, dietitians. And just like anything that starts impacting your life, you start talking about it with anyone that'll listen, which is what I did. And at the time, that happened to be the celebrity clients I was working with. And I couldn't believe how many of them could relate to this idea that they were living with daily gut issues.
• 7:04
  So I started to feel like, gosh, this feels like it's everyone. Could this be? Could we all just be living with gut issues and no one's talking about it out loud? And so still no aspiration of starting a company, but I started growing this huge online community on Facebook.
• 7:20
  And I found myself in tears one night because I missed chocolate chip cookies, which sounds so petty. But anyone listening that has gut issues will understand that you get to a point where you can't eat rice and vegetables one more time, right? You want the on the go and the sweet treat. And I was limiting my life. I noticed that I was starting to limit what I was doing because of my gut issues, which was so unlike me, right? I would
• 7:44
  We'd plan a trip and my first thought would be, well, what am I going to eat on the plane? And then what am I going to eat when I get there? Is the food going to be tough for me? And I was like, this is crazy. This is so not me. So my husband said, look, I'm going to make you the perfect gut-friendly chocolate chip cookie. I'm going to hire a food scientist and a dietician over Zoom. And I'm going to work on this in our kitchen for five months. So he did. Worked on it for hours in our kitchen. He would Zoom with these professionals. And he eventually made me the perfect...
• 8:12
  gut-friendly, IBS-friendly chocolate chip cookies. I mean, husband of the year. Well, husband of the decade, rather. This poor guy had no baking experience either. I mean, this guy is not a baker or a chef in the slightest. At this point, is he baking it truly just for you, or has it already started to form a business idea in the background? No, I'm like matchmaking it up and loving my job. It didn't occur to me to start a business. I just was fiercely curious about the space.
• 8:42
  And becoming increasingly more obsessed, the more I understood that it felt like it was everyone. And it was like the secret that everyone was unintentionally keeping. And actually, in fact, a moment or kind of a pivotal point in the story is I sent out a survey monkey to my personal network at one point.
• 9:03
  Just again, fierce curiosity. And one of the questions I asked was, do you consider yourself an IBS suffer or do you suffer from daily IBS symptoms? And I sent it to personal network and ended up reaching 500 people between my husband and I, no affiliation with gut health or gut issues. And 76% of respondents said yes. And that blew my mind, right? Because not only does it mean that
• 9:26
  75% of us have this, but it means we're not talking about it here. It turns out that 75% of my network is dealing with this and we're not having that conversation. It's crazy. Crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. So love this chocolate chip cookie. I told Nick, hey, make 10 extra chocolate chip cookies. I want to share this with the community we built on Facebook. How big is your community, by the way, just to interject? Yeah, 300,000 people on Facebook. Yeah.
• 9:53
  Okay, it's a really big community. It's huge. Okay, got it. Yep. So one thing I'll back up one thing I had done is I had started buying Facebook groups. Oh, so I had started a Facebook group. And then I woke up one day and thought, I just want to make this community huge. Let me offer $500 and buy Facebook groups and some of these ads. And it worked. Can you can you group Facebook groups together?
• 10:16
  No. So I had to keep a lot of it separate. But what you can do is you can share links to your other groups within your groups and then everyone joins the same group. Oh, my gosh. OK, cool. So you start buying the groups and then kind of like cross marketing and just. And it sounds crazy, but I still didn't have an aspiration of starting a company. It was just this like it was call it a passion project.
• 10:36
  So he makes me these cookies. And by the way, where this starts to cross from a cookie to a bar, we almost have like this amazing identity crisis. We're not a bar. We're not a cookie. We're not a brownie. We're something kind of all three. I started stuffing the cookies into bar molds that I had bought on Amazon so I could take them with on trips, out for a day. So I said, look, let's share these cookie bars with the community. Can you make 10 extra bars? Ha ha. Because we woke up to 800 orders.
• 11:07
  So we, at that point, convert our entire little LA apartment into a commercial kitchen. And I'm dead serious when I say like our entire little 700 square foot apartment into a commercial kitchen with one oven, shelving, lining the whole thing, ingredient containers, tables. And Nick starts making thousands of bars every day. My dad's a pilot. He's flying in every two days to help him.
• 11:33
  And UPS is coming to our house six times a day. At three months in, right, we were doing thousands of dollars of the sales from the home kitchen. So at that point, that's when we made the decision to do what you do, which in our case was scale out of the kitchen. And we can talk about everything that that entails, but scale out of the kitchen into a co-packer, raise money and create a real and thoughtful brand.
• 11:59
  I love how you're like, I wasn't starting a business. Wake up one day. Oh, I have a business. I've got 800 orders. I actually do have a business now because I've just accepted money from all these people. So when do you quit your job? So we worked out of the home kitchen for months and I was still full time at Match as the chief dating strategist. So we, again, raised our first million.
• 12:24
  you know, I decided we need to create a really thoughtful brand. So of course I called the designer, the lead designer at match, um, who's designed some of the best dating apps in the world and said, Hey, can you build a brand that makes gut issues cool? So they designed the brand. Um, we found a co-packing broker, a formulator and launched the business on March 26th of last year. We've been operating for just, just over a year. And I quit the,
• 12:49
  So everyone at Match knew I was working on this, right? But I don't think everyone knew to what degree. So I was very nervous about it. And I quit my job. I gave my two weeks, two weeks before we were launching Belly Welly. And Forbes was doing an article. So it was like, I knew it was going to be public that we'd raised money. So I went to my boss and I said, you know, I was super nervous about the conversation. And I said, look, I've actually, this business I kept talking about has actually gotten bigger and I've raised money and now it's a thing and I'm going to quit. And he said, you can quit if I can invest.
• 13:20
  And so he was one of our first investors. And actually, many members of my team ended up writing checks into the business, their first angel check. So it was pretty special. Oh, my gosh. That's so cool. Wow. Yeah. So the other piece of this is we launched the business from the hospital. And I can talk about that. But technically, my last day was the day before Belly Welly launched on March 25th. And we launched March 26th.
• 13:44
  And I read that you went into premature labor and that's why you're in hospital the following day. Yes. So we I had made the decision. I think this is like another whole conversation that's really interesting nowadays. But fundraising while pregnant. Right. How do you handle that? How do you navigate that? I don't know the answer, but I know that what I did is I didn't tell anyone. And I can't I don't know if that was super intentional or if it was just this
• 14:10
  thing that like, you know, all of a sudden I hadn't told anyone. So therefore it was too weird to tell someone. But anyways, I didn't tell anyone that I was pregnant while I was fundraising. And so I thought I had time, right? But I just, I hit six months pregnant, just over six months pregnant. And we're launching the business the next day, quite literally. And I'm watching an episode of the Kardashians. I still blame the Kardashians because I've never watched the show ever. I watched an episode of the Kardashians and my water broke.
• 14:39
  And I was shocked, right? It was so early. It's almost three months early. And so go to the hospital. We give birth to little Veda. She's two pounds. So very, very, very, very tall, like smaller than my hand. Oh my God. And then I had a severe complication. So I ended up hemorrhaging and they ended up saving my life with the hysterectomy. One in a million complication, no one saw it coming. Um,
• 15:02
  I mean, kind of the kind of complication where they had me say goodbye to everyone in the operating room. Oh my God. What? Yeah. So they saved my life. We wake up, betas, betas, you know, in the NICU and we launched the business from the hospital bed the next day. What? And I was there for a really long time. Yeah. And it was so the next day was weird in that we were writing investors an email saying, not only have I been pregnant, but premature baby, we're launching the business from the hospital. Yeah.
• 15:31
  met with nothing but support and kindness. And so I was there for a long time and Veda was there for almost three months. So we ran the business from the hospital for a long time. And so the doctors and nurses were actually a huge part of our launch story.
• 15:44
  Oh my gosh. What a journey. There's so many things to unpack here. I don't even know where to start. Oh my God. Wow. Okay. So you launched the business. At this point, you've done like a pilot, I guess. Like you've done kind of a soft launch. You've launched to your community and you're selling kind of from your apartment. Then you raise the million dollars. You find a co-packer. You launch the business to kind of like,
• 16:10
  more officially. I know that you at some point changed your name from IBSimple to Belly Welly. Was that before or after launching? Yeah, great question. So IBSimple was the kitchen brand. That's the easiest. So by the time we launched officially March 26th, you know, our launch day, that was the first time anyone had heard the word Belly Welly. Got it. And so what made you change the name and how did you come up with Belly Welly? It's so cute. I love it. I think it's a classic case of founder bias. And I think it's,
• 16:39
  It's a great example of why it's important to have investors and advisors who've done it before around you. So I created this name. We were in a home kitchen. I had Tunnel Vision and was just focused on this IBS community. And so as we're kind of raising money and getting ready to launch, two of my favorite investors and advisors are...
• 17:00
  the early SmartSweets team member. So they helped build the brand SmartSweets. And I think... You know what's so funny? I actually just interviewed Tara before this. Oh my gosh. So this is Beth and Corianne. That's such weird timing. It is weird timing. Beth was number two at SmartSweets with Tara. Yeah, she talks about Beth in the whole episode. Oh my gosh, that's so cool. Beth is amazing. So it was Beth over Zoom that was like, so I think...
• 17:25
  We should change the name. And I think at the time I was like, no, it's such a good name. IB Simple is an amazing name. And Beth and Corian were great. It was just like, I think they brought it up a couple of times. Like, let's just talk about changing the name. And I just had this tunnel vision, right? Like, oh, I think this name is so amazing. Why would we ever change it? And eventually I came to my senses and we had a big brainstorm tech session. And I can't remember who cracked the name eventually, but...
• 17:52
  Thank goodness I changed the name, right? Why were they saying that you should change the name? Limiting, I think, is the best way to put it. I don't know if you can build the fun brand that I think Belly Willey is today with the name IB Simple, right? And I think IB Simple was the...
• 18:08
  What we did with Belly Welly is we took a lot of risk, right? We made metallic packages. We really moved away from traditional health and wellness norms in terms of packaging, branding, name. And IB Simple was just safe and boring, in my opinion. So anyways, the importance of having smart people who've done it before and aren't afraid to challenge you was the takeaway there.
• 18:30
  I'm such a fan of your brand, by the way. I mean, you can probably tell just by looking at me. I'm like pink and sparkly, all the things. So it resonates to me. It speaks to my soul. Our COO is like the most logical person. And I, Belly Welly definitely represents my personality. And so he calls it the Katie Sparkle Pony brand, which I love because it totally is. Love that. Yeah. Claiming that for sure.
• 18:55
  Let's talk about the launch of the official store from the hospital bed. What happens? How do you kind of, I imagine you've obviously, you've got this huge community. You're able to grow very organically through the community that you've spent like, you know, potentially a year or two years or however many years building. What comes next to try and get out of the community that you've already built and beyond that? So we really relied on the community.
• 19:22
  only for the first couple months, which was amazing. Community, word of mouth. The advantage that we had and I suppose continue to have is there quite literally isn't anyone in the space, right? So normally in CPG, you're up against, I don't know, nowadays, 10 plus brands, right, in your category.
• 19:43
  We didn't have anyone. So it was almost as if everyone had been waiting for us, right? In fact, most of what we heard initially was, where has this been? Why has no one ever said these words out loud? And I still don't know the answer. I mean, I think about that all the time. It's like, why was no one in the space? Is it just that no one had thought to say we're going to... I mean, people had talked about gut health, but no one had literally spoken to the 75% of us living with gut issues, which is almost...
• 20:11
  a different conversation than just let's promote gut health or let's boost gut health. It's a different conversation. No one had that. So we really were able to rely on organic reach and growth for the first couple of months, which is great. And our Facebook community was a huge part of that. Is it still a huge part of it? Yes and no, it is. And I haven't put resources into growing that community much, much more. So the community is, is grown a bit, but it's not, you know,
• 20:41
  community doesn't have a million plus people in it today, but where the community absolutely impacts the business is they tend to dictate all of our decisions. And I don't throw that around as a, we talk to our community before making decisions. When I say that, we quite literally let them make decisions. So a couple of really good examples. One recently, right? I mentioned that we are about to launch Peaches and Green, right? That's an idea that they had and loved. So my belief has always been they're the ones we're making this for.
• 21:11
  It got to go with their suggestion. So they've chosen the ingredients in the product. They chose our tagline. I wanted to change our tagline. So I recently surveyed them. They all said no. So now we're not changing the tagline. Is the tagline the hot girls have IBS? Well, I wanted to put that on all of our retail packaging. And they were like, do not. Oh, I love that. I know. I know me too. But that's where I've really tried to say, look, I mean, I'm part of the community, right? I live with gut issues and that's why this works.
• 21:41
  I'm one person. And so they, they literally do make, make decisions for the brand. Just a side question. That's not really related to the story. It's going back to the Facebook group business model. How do you buy a Facebook group in terms of like, how do you know how much to pay for a Facebook group? Yeah. This is like, we're, there's no good answer. So it's not a thing is like, where is where I'll start. People often say, what's the process? There is none. So when I
• 22:10
  I called our attorney and I said, could you give me an agreement? Or he laughed. He's like, that's not a thing. Like, I don't think you can even technically transfer ownership like that, but like, go take the risk, right? I mean, try it. So what I did, and it worked. I don't know if it's just because I've, you know,
• 22:26
  The low FODMAP, IBS gut-friendly community is a really ethical community. But in my case, I reached out to admins of the group and I just explained. I said, look, I'm creating a community. I'm fascinated by the space. I want to be a part of the community. I want to be a responsible member of the community. This was before the brand too. So it was just all true. And I'd love to offer you X price to buy your group. And I would usually...
• 22:55
  There was no scientific answer to price. I would use a number of people in the group, right, to model out my decision. But I always spend somewhere between $500 and $1,000. And I would say, look, I'll PayPal you. You can add me as an admin. And once you receive the PayPal, remove yourself as admin. And it worked. So I don't know. I don't know if you could replicate it in every industry. But in my case, it was...
• 23:18
  amazing fascinating and like how big was a group that you would pay for like a thousand dollars for yeah like 50,000 uh 50 50,000 there was one that was 85,000 I think that's the I paid the most I think I paid 1100 for that and then you like kind of pick a kind of one as the main one that was the most engaged or something and then try to funnel more people to that no because in in my community they're uh very different functions in each group so
• 23:46
  You know, low FODMAP is a component of our bar in our story. So lots of low FODMAP specific groups. Sometimes there was just bloating specific groups. Sometimes there was SIBO specific groups. So sometimes there was overlap. But yeah, almost different communities within the same category and space.
• 24:05
  Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay, cool. Right. Now I've got the Facebook thing down pat. I've learned that. I'm super fascinated by it. That's so cool. I've never had someone on the show kind of go down that pathway. Love it. I want to talk about the billboard and the merch. Tell us about the billboard and the merch. So I would love to pretend this was some big strategic plan that I'd had from the beginning, but like so many things in a startup, it was a happy accident.
• 24:34
  You know, part of our mission here, and I knew from day one that the uphill battle we were going to have is normalizing the conversation around gut issues, right? Because no one had done it. And I'll never forget. Another founder had told me when I was first starting the brand. No one is ever going to buy a food product that talks about IBS. I'd like to think that person's wrong. But that was always in my head, right? It was like, I've got to overcome that, right? Because people believe that. And yeah.
• 25:02
  So we all, I'm, I'm a TikTok obsessed and we all know that there's this trend on TikTok of, of using the phrase gorgeous, gorgeous girls or hot girls have insert stigmatized topic, right? As like a means of reclaiming the space. So
• 25:19
  Hot girls have anxiety, right? Gorgeous, gorgeous girls have anxiety. And it's a cool movement, right? That, again, reclaims things that are stigmatized. And so I had never seen that done with gut issues very well. But gut talk and gut issues are a huge phenomena on TikTok, too. So anyways, I was driving in the middle of LA one day and I thought, what if I put up a hot pink billboard that says hot girls have IBSs?
• 25:45
  as a means of just starting this conversation. And I felt like it was something, it was something you, because IBS and hot girls is such a polarizing thing, right? I felt like it worked. And I also thought it was something someone might pull over and take a picture of and share with a friend. And that's where I think out of home works. I don't think out of home is very successful. Like call 1-800-SMILE-CLUB, right? I don't,
• 26:09
  So my biggest concern was that people were going to misinterpret the message. I didn't want people to think I literally meant hot girls have IBS. I didn't want this to be exclusive by any means. But anyways, got home and I Googled billboard people. The first number that popped up.
• 26:29
  And it was two guys. And I said, hi guys, I'm Katie. And I want to put up a billboard that says hot girls have IBS. And I think there was dead silence on the other side of the phone. I think they said, have you ever put up a billboard before? And I was like, no, but that's what I want to do. And they said, okay, let's do it. And so I got a design together and I said, show me placements in LA. I don't want to, I think I initially told them, I don't want to spend more than $5,000 and they were both like,
• 26:58
  think you're going to have to increase your budget. So then I bumped it up to $7,000. And that for anyone listening gets you like remnant billboards space that no one wants to buy. And it happens to be available for 30 to 60 days. So I said, show me the remnant billboard options. And they came back with a bunch of options and our COO and I spent hours deciding which option to choose. We just got lucky and chose a placement that worked. It happened to be
• 27:27
  Freeway visible and then part of LA that everyone drives by and you're stuck in traffic. And so we put up this billboard and people went crazy for it. Like so crazy that you drove by it most days and there was a line of people outside the billboard taking a photo or selfie in front of it. That's super cool. But what was cooler to me is that it had the intended effect. People were proud to share the billboard and say, this is so me.
• 27:51
  This is so me. The number of times I heard this photos in my group text right now with three of my friends. So it really had the intended effect. And so we started selling the merch. And to this day, we cannot keep the merch in stock. It's like the bane of our existence, which I love because not only is it a great business, right? But I love that.
• 28:10
  it is made it okay to talk about gut issues. And we used IBS because IBS is a term that's recognizable, but we're more than an IBS brand. It's just that fit within the campaign really well. Off the back of like that as a campaign, what have you kind of done to continue the growth and the momentum and what's kind of like in your marketing house at the moment? So we've continued on the out of home path. So after LA, we did a Portland billboard, which is where I'm from.
• 28:39
  same exact thing happened. Actually in Portland, there was someone on Reddit found the billboard and arranged a meetup with a bunch of strangers in Portland to meet at the billboard who all had gut issues. Amazing. Shout out to that person. Love that. Yeah. Love that. And then we did it again in Times Square. And then we're back again in LA. So we only do one at a time. We've stuck with it within our budget. So we never spent a lot of money. What's the Times Square budget? Under $10,000 is what I'll say.
• 29:10
  But that required me to wake up at 4 a.m., sign a random piece that I was waiting on it. Because you get these remnant spots. And you really only need 30 to 45 days to make an impression, right? Because that's enough time for everyone to see you on social and share it. So that's been our theory. So out of home continues. I mean...
• 29:28
  The Hawker IBS campaign specifically has definitely taken on a life of its own. For example, we just hosted a dinner with two of my favorite brands, Olipop and Doe at a restaurant called Impasta in LA. And we called it the Hawker IBS Dinner.
• 29:42
  Um, and we had a bunch of creators and slubs to the dinner and everyone was rocking hot girls, IBS loud and proud. Right. Which is just like taken on a life of itself. So, oh my God, I love it so much. Me too. Yeah. So, but the only, the only problem I'll say is that again, we're not just IBS. It's just, um, that campaign resonates because most people know what IBS means. And if you have kind of a sensitive gut, you know, that it's probably for you, but, um,
• 30:10
  you know, we want to be mindful of not pigeonholing ourselves there too. Totally. Reading through like your comments on Instagram and TikTok and things like that, the sheer amount of comments that you get, you can see how deeply engaged your community is. What are some of your key tips for keeping the community alive? Like, I know that it sounds kind of like you're just, it's just organic and it's just doing its own thing, but I'm sure that's not the case.
• 30:38
  I'm crazy is the answer. I email 50 customers every night between 2 and 4 a.m. So I've never missed a day. So I choose 50 people. What? Woman, when do you sleep? Not yet. So I...
• 30:57
  I'm a matchmaker at heart, right? I always just say like, I'm a matchmaker who happens to be running a CB. So what I mean by that is I just like people and I just like hearing stories. So I have the way I've tried to approach this, or I shouldn't even say I have tried, like the way that what feels authentic to me is building this as if I'm doing it with like thousands of new friends by my side versus customers. And so if you're treating customers like friends, right, you don't just talk to them about Belly Welly, right? You get to know them as friends and people.
• 31:25
  And so that's what I try to do. So every night, right. I'll choose 50 people. I'll email them. I mean, I'll introduce myself, ask if I can hear their story, their gut health journey, anything they're willing to share. So it's like, I really do feel like I've made just like thousands of new friends that happen to be building the company with us. And I try to do five things a week for customers that have nothing to do with belly welly. So I,
• 31:51
  My first job ever was a cashier at Nordstrom. And one thing Nordstrom does that I'll never forget is even back in the day, they're way ahead of their time thinking about it. You have this little personal book where you would write down customer details, things about their life. So when you came back in as a customer and the cashier was like, how's your son's college applications going? You felt really heard and seen. So I try to do that. I keep a huge spreadsheet to the best of my ability and try to keep up on everyone's,
• 32:20
  on lives. So for example, yesterday, a woman, her one of our customers, her daughter was going into surgery, really worried about it. So we sent a little care package, nothing to do with belly belly to their house. And so, um, yeah, I try to do as much of that as possible. I refuse to give up customer service or Instagram, which I need to eventually part with, um, because I like to have those interactions. So I send voice notes to everyone on Instagram. Um,
• 32:50
  I'm always happy to pick up the call, a phone and talk to a customer. So I don't know. Someday that won't be scalable, but right now it's what feels right and authentic.
• 33:00
  That is so cool. So cool. And it's funny, like people can look at a brand and be like, oh yeah, they just like popped and it was really organic and it does have that feel and there is so much organic to it. And you can see why with the, with the campaign and, and, you know, the brand and everything, why it has, but really behind the scenes, there is so much, you know, going into building those relationships and caring about the people who are supporting you and your brand.
• 33:27
  That's really amazing. I feel like you're someone who's going to have more organic kind of grassroots, like things that you've done. And I want to dig into more kind of things like this. Is there anything else that comes to mind that you're like, yes, I have also done X, Y, and Z?
• 33:57
  We didn't we we made a very conscious decision not to create a food as medicine product. Right. I think in our space you could quite easily and maybe there's even a case for doing this and another brand should do it. You could quite easily create like the insure of the space. Right. Which is like a much more has a much more medicinal approach. Right. I'm not saying insure is medicine, but it might sit with supplements. Right.
• 34:19
  You could create that product. And we had a lot of pressure initially to do that. People really thought that was where we should go. And I just adamantly felt like that was not right for us. I even have taken this very, you could call it controversial and you could call it wrong. And maybe it is wrong. But I don't believe our space, our place in the space is to be experts. I believe we can be good at surfacing expert information. And we do. I'd like to think we do that. Surfacing content from RDs and doctors and nutritionists.
• 34:49
  Um, but I think our place is we are here with you. We're part of the girl gang, right? We, we speak your language and we're here to relate and like have that, that judgment free, you know, to foster that judgment free zone and that conversation. And we're in this with you. So anyways, all that to say, I didn't expect us to be a fit for medicine and, um,
• 35:11
  It turns out doctors offices love having shiny pink, crazy looking things in their offices, right? Because they're fun and weird and GI offices tend to be sterile and
• 35:23
  white and boring right and so um it was this thing we stumbled into so what I initially started doing was I every Friday I would google GI doctors and I would send with unprompted no explanation I would send two boxes of belly wellies to GI offices every Friday to 10 different GI offices every Friday and then the next week I would call them and I would say look uh
• 35:47
  you probably got this shiny box of weird bars and you're probably thinking, what are these? I sent them their certified low FODMAP, which is recognized in the GI community, right? As, as something they generally put their, the low FODMAP diet is something they recommend to their patients.
• 36:02
  We're actually certified low FODMAP. We're the first snack bars making low FODMAP and gut issues. Cool to talk about. And so we really leaned into low FODMAP when it comes to that side of the business. And they loved it, right? They've never had anything like this. So these doctor's offices became totally addicted to carrying the bars. And then we started making little cards with special promo codes for each doctor that they could hand out to patients. So now we sit in tons and tons of GI offices around the country.
• 36:32
  Um, and it's like this little kind of secret, I say secret, it's not actually a secret, but it's kind of unknown piece of the business that drives a lot of revenue for us that most people don't know about. So yeah, we've seemed to crack the code on that thing that like an influencer, a creator, an average person is proud to pull out of their purse, but can also sit on a doctor shelf and be legitimate in that context too. Damn, that is so cool. Gosh, I'm so excited for all the future campaigns that we're going to see and like all the future stuff.
• 37:03
  Me too. I just have to think of it. But wow. Oh my goodness. Your brain is, is really cool. Very, very cool. Is there anything that you wish someone told you when you were just starting out? A million things. Yeah. I'm trying to think of the, um, yeah, it's actually my favorite thing. And I actually did know this starting out, but I think,
• 37:25
  This sounds very cynical and hard. Like I'll give a negative and a positive. My negative is like you don't get points for effort, right? This is just a business where you just have to perform. And if you're not performing, it doesn't matter that you tried really hard, right? And I think what's something else I would say?
• 37:44
  Again, I think we did a decent job of this, but like the community should be dictating every decision, in my opinion. Like I would just underscore that over and over again. It's like, that's what you're creating this for. You may think your ideas are amazing, right? Doesn't mean they are. And you've got to build this for people that really exist. I love that. That's the thing I guess I try to remember. And it's hard, right? Like I'll think I have this genius idea and then I'll ask everyone and they're like, no, that's not interesting. You missed the mark. Yeah, totally. Totally.
• 38:13
  Yeah, you just realize you're one person, right? It's like,
• 38:15
  Yeah, that's why TikTok's interesting. It's why videos go viral and you're like, why did that go viral? So what does the future hold? What do you want to shout about? What's coming up that we can get excited about? Three buckets. One is some upcoming fun collaborations. So we're going to be launching some new flavors with some cool folks in the space. One is coming up here very soon. And I don't know if I can chat about it, but two new flavors and three new products altogether. So new categories.
• 38:46
  Actually in four, we're going hard into retail this year. So retail will be a new exciting challenge. We've committed to being hot pink on the retail shelf. We can't figure out why hot pink doesn't exist on the retail shelf today. Maybe there's a good reason and we're really making a huge mistake, but we are. I think it's going to be a huge win. We think that's our secret sauce, right? We made the hot pink sparkliest package you've ever seen that will undoubtedly stand out at retail. Yeah.
• 39:15
  And we're going hard into that and going to hope it works. It's 100% going to work. I love that for you. I'm so excited. Oh, my gosh. What a cool year ahead. Yeah. I mean, learning a lot and I don't know, two kids at the same time. And my husband and I are still in this together. Right. So we're co-founders. So, yeah, you know, trying to figure it all out, how you juggle business, family, the whole shebang. The whole shebang. I'm sure you're going to figure it out just fine. Yeah.
• 39:47
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 40:12
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 40:34
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.
• 40:51
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 41:15
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 41:38
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show, and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.