Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / GEMS: Building a 150K-Strong Community with LIVELY founder Michelle Cordeiro Grant

Transcript

GEMS: Building a 150K-Strong Community with LIVELY founder Michelle Cordeiro Grant · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:08
  I also read around that time is when you started, you know, it was like the time when Instagram was popping, things were happening. That's like where everyone was focusing their efforts. I read that you were finding women in random places in America and building out content to build a community. Do you want to talk about like that kind of part of the story and what was working then?
• 0:34
  Yeah, yeah. So this is Instagram pre-stories, right? Like that's where Instagram was at that time. Still not as saturated as where it is today. But again, the idea of Lively was let's build a brand with the world, right? Like let's not build a brand and then try and sell it to the world. Let the world help us build a brand. And so that was twofold. Let's build a community digitally and let's also bring women in physically. So in parallel, we were having focus groups of women
• 1:03
  10 to 12 people at a time who were helping us choose images and words and taglines. Those women's choices are,
• 1:11
  through several sessions, which collectively created data said, this is the best image and this is the best tagline. Now let's take that to Instagram and find women who feel the same way and wanna share it. And so the image was a girl on a fire escape on the Bowery with a lively, leisure bralette and a fur coat, like super random, but people loved it. And the tagline was inspired by wild hearts and boss brains, meaning like the passion and vulnerability of women, the thing that makes us cry,
• 1:40
  If you actually channel that with business, it's fire. Wild hearts, false brains.
• 1:45
  And so we went to Instagram and what we actually tactically did was we looked at brands that we felt were very similar in mind. So at the time it was like SoulCycle and Saqqara and Sweetgreen and scanned their followers and then found people that didn't have a lot of followers, like 500 to 100 followers, but great content and said, now these are the people. They know how to take content. They're passionate about how they show their personal brand. Let's reach out to them.
• 2:15
  the middle of the country. And, and we built a community of a hundred women to help us launch. Do you mean like you were reaching out to them being like, Hey, come and join this, you know, private Facebook group or come and join this something online, or you're being like, Hey, here's this picture. Do you want to share it? And like, be part of like our community via that mechanic?
• 2:37
  Yeah. I mean, people ask me a lot about how that worked. And I'm like, we were very human about it. You know, we DM them and said, hey, we're a bunch of women in New York launching this brand called Lively. This is what it looks like. This is what it stands for. We'd love you to be a part of it. And then we realized and then we would try to get them over to email. And then, you know, like doing the transactional conversation and DM wasn't working. Once we got them to email, that was better. And then we would figure out, OK, she's going to be great at taking content.
• 3:07
  Or she's not comfortable taking content. We're going to send her content. So I think like where people mess up, if they try to create this machine out the gate, where I'm like, no, no, no, just be like a human. Just it's not the same for everybody. Don't overthink it. It's only 50 to 100 people. It's relationship building. Yeah. Build a relationship and then build a machine. We didn't build a machine for a year and a half until we had over a thousand people in our communities.
• 3:34
  Wow. Okay. So you had a thousand of these women that you had directly built relationships with online. And then this is you gearing up to go to launch, which is a great segue for us to slide into this part of the story, which I'm super excited about. Is that right? We had a hundred people at launch. Once we saw at launch, how explosive it was, we kept going with the program and ended up having a thousand. And now we have 150,000. Oh my God. 150,000 is such a wild number.
• 4:05
  Let's go back to the 100 women then around this point. I know you guys had a crazy launch that was totally unexpected from what I read. I want you to tell it in your own kind of words what happened and why you think it led to that craziness and what that time was like.
• 4:24
  Yeah. So, you know, we had the physical focus groups that help help women tell us this is the image. This is the tagline. This is the product. We had 100 women on Instagram saying, yes, love the image, love the tagline. Then we read about Harry's, the razor company who got 100000 emails in four weeks in 2011 when they launched their brand prelaunch.
• 4:46
  And the whole idea was, hey, if you get your friend to submit their email address to Harry's flash sale or flash page, we're going to give you a point towards your first razor. We're like, amazing. They got 100,000. We're going to get like 20,000 maybe over four weeks. So 5,000 emails a week.
• 5:03
  March 1st, it's a month before we're going to launch, quote unquote, launch lively and start selling physical products. And so my team and I sit down on a Friday, my team being three of us in the office, sit down on a Friday and say, all right, we're going to email this to everybody we know. And it was about 250 people that we found through scanning our Gmails. We only knew more people, to be honest, but apparently we don't.
• 5:31
  And I mean, we were like literally emailing like customer service at so-and-so company, like the guy that did my mortgage. Everyone got the email that we knew. And what we realized is social media had changed since 2011 because that night we had 500 emails, which was amazing. The next morning we had a thousand, which was amazing.
• 5:51
  more than we expected because we want 5,000 a week. Then we had 10,000, 20,000, 40,000. By dinner time, we had 50,000. That night we had 90,000 emails and I literally thought it was hacked because we did not create any type of system that showed how much credit we were giving because we didn't even tell people how much the bras were. We're just like, hey, if you got 10 people, you got a credit of $10 and then $20 and then $50 and then $100.
• 6:20
  Does 90,000 people have $100 credit to this company that hasn't made a dollar? I have no idea. Does it though? What happened there? No, thank God. The math works out. Thank God. But long story short, everything blows up from a technology standpoint. The developers are trying to shut this thing down to figure out what is going on because
• 6:44
  By the next morning, we had 300,000 sessions globally, like on a Google Analytics map, the whole world was like firing blue. And 280,000 unique sessions, which is 280,000 individual humans around the world came to our little splash page called where lively.com. And 133,000 emails were in there. And the developers were like, Michelle, it's real.
• 7:10
  And so I was like, turn on customer service. I tell people this is the day Lively launched because this is the day that people cared. And so we launched email and phone and chat. And all we were doing was fielding questions. Girls from Australia, England, all over the United States. Where's my Lively email? And where's my dashboard? We're like, we don't know. But why do you care? Yeah.
• 7:34
  We don't have any answers for you. We have nothing. But like, why do you like us? And why do you care? And we collected all that information and built our first emails to eventually launch Lively on April 1st. And we shipped to every state in the country within 45 days without any paid media. Just press this email list and marketing around what these women and girls were telling us. Humans sharing with humans. Wait.
• 8:04
  What? This is so crazy. I still don't really understand. Like, what did the email say that you sent to these 250 people?
• 8:14
  You know, to this day, I've personally tried to recreate things like this. And it was a viral moment. You know, again, luck and strategy, right? Luck and strategy. We hit the right Friday night, the right person or people started the snowball. But I fundamentally believe because we took the time to focus group and really, really narrow down to the perfect image, the right tagline.
• 8:43
  And like have confidence in that content that people were emotionally, women were emotionally grabbed. They were like, what is this? Must understand this. Who is this? I want to be a part of this.
• 9:00
  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.
• 9:24
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• 9:47
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