Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / What happens when a climate activist becomes a tech founder? With One Small Step’s Founder Lily Dempster (part 1)

Transcript

What happens when a climate activist becomes a tech founder? With One Small Step’s Founder Lily Dempster (part 1) · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

0:00
This is Lily Dempster for Female Startup Club.
0:13
Hey everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today we're learning from Lily Dempster, the founder of One Small Step app. One Small Step is a social enterprise that uses technology and behavioral science to make it easy and rewarding for people to successfully adopt greener habits and reduce their carbon emissions. Their vision is to harness the best aspects of humanity to help avert the climate crisis and secure an environmentally healthy future.
0:40
It's designed to help millions of people reduce their carbon emissions and offers a clear path to personal net zero emissions and climate positivity through the delivery of free science-based data-informed courses and habits. One small step gives clarity on the impact of the food you eat, the purchases you make, how you travel, the energy you use, and the waste you produce.
1:06
It then provides solutions via easy step-by-step courses to reduce emissions with the option to switch to trusted sustainable products and services. This was such an interesting episode for me. I'm less in the loop when it comes to the blueprint of building an app and acquiring users. So I learned a lot and I'm sure you're going to as well.
1:30
And before we get into it, while I've got you here, remember to sign up to receive our weekly Hype Girl Hotline texts for a dose of motivation and joy. Head over to our Norby link to sign up for free at femalestartupclub.norby.live. Let's get into this episode. This is Lily for Female Startup Club.
1:52
Lily, hi, welcome to the Female Startup Club podcast. Thanks so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. I'm happy for us to be here too. It's been a long time in the works. I'm excited to learn more about your business, what you're up to, what's going on in your world. Where do you like to kind of kick off your story with One Small Step?
2:14
Where do I like to kick it off? Wow. I don't know. It's a long story. It's sort of my life's work. So for those that aren't familiar with it, yeah, I run One Small Step. It's a climate technology startup and started it out of Australia and it's a mobile application. So it helps you
2:33
reduce your carbon emissions through lifestyle changes. And it uses behavioral science to make it easy for you to adopt kind of green behaviors that really work for you and your lifestyle. And we've been running it. I've been running it since 2018. I'm a sole founder. And we launched it into the United States also at the start of this year.
2:54
My gosh, so cool. So interesting. You said that it's been your life's work. Do you want to kind of rewind, take us back to what you were doing before you started the business and what got you thinking about this idea in particular and that light bulb moment that happened to you? Yeah, sure. So I wanted to work in social impact or social justice ever since I was quite sort of
3:24
the kinds of conversations we had around the dinner table. My mom worked in mental health care and my dad was a journalist, but was very big on press freedom and public broadcasting. So they were both sort of activists in their own right. And I, so I was, I guess I was raised in a family where the value set was, you know, you want to do good work, but also how are you going to contribute to society? And that was just something that
3:52
I was raised in. And so that was a big frame of reference for me thinking about what I wanted to do through university. I studied law, which I decided I think now is a mistake for me, at least. I did a whole five-year arts law degree. And law is fantastic because it teaches you how to think and process lots of information, bless you, quickly. But the downside, at least at that point when I was studying is that
4:18
You know, you had to work in corporate law to get really good. There wasn't a lot happening in Australia in terms of really good public interest litigation compared to some of the firms overseas. So I early on in university realized that I wanted to work in the environmental movement because I saw climate change as a really significant social justice issue because it has such inequitable impacts.
4:43
both generationally and then for people that are the least responsible for having caused the damage are the ones that are most affected by it. And it also is just like a maximizer for human suffering and all kinds of human security threats that we want to avoid. So I felt like working on climate change was a really good use of my time and energy, highly intellectually challenging, very complex, lots and lots of different areas you could contribute to.
5:07
And so I started down that path, but really struggled with like how to apply my legal background effectively. And so I ended up moving into campaigning. So political campaigning, looking at top down reforms at the federal level.
5:20
I worked for an advocacy organisation called GetUp when I was in university fairly early on as a sort of junior campaigner and then had worked in Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, which is a part of the public service, to sort of learn how the sausage gets made in government, and that was very formative over two years, and then went back into campaigning on climate for GetUp, was working on renewable energy specifically and coal seam gas, and running those campaigns
5:50
I really got a sense of how significant an impact we can have when we mobilise people in sort of the thousands to make changes to their consumer choices and also changes to their behaviour. We sort of ran the numbers on some of the campaigns that I was responsible for. One where we were getting people to switch to an electricity provider that was only generating renewable energy through their generation side of the business and was offsetting everybody's emissions.
6:17
through their electricity, getting people to switch to green power, another scheme. And the impact was really significant with sort of 15,000 people in one campaign, 5,000 in another
6:27
took them a couple of minutes online to switch. So these were sort of fairly easy actions, and yet the impact was really significant, not only in terms of the emission reductions, but also the fact that it was growing the market share of environmentally friendly businesses, growing their market power. So you're kind of pushing against the fossil fuel energy incumbents with a really actually quite a positive campaign.
6:52
So that was sort of my lightbulb moment going, okay, there's an underutilised sort of area of effort we could be looking at in the environmental movement and that's really looking at people power and consumer movements. There's been a really big focus on top-down political reform and how essential that is.
7:12
It doesn't take away the fact that it's still essential, but that I think people fundamentally misunderstand how we change dynamic systems like our society, how we decarbonise society. And we really do need grassroots change at all levels of society in order to be successful.
7:29
And the IPCC report, the latest one that's come out, has sort of shown that now looking at, I'm going way too technical, but what's called demand-side climate change mitigation. They're like 40% to 70% of the global carbon emission reductions we need to make could potentially come from demand-side. So that's changes in behaviour effectively.
7:48
And one small step is dedicated to helping people make those changes in their behaviour. And I also studied a bit of economics and choice theory in my political science degree and had been obsessed with behavioural economics and behavioural science. So was really nerding out on the potential applications of that emerging research in the product I've ultimately built. How do we...
8:08
effectively support people to make better decisions, working with the way that people make decisions and take action, rather than just info dumping or sort of guilt tripping. We really wanted it to be positive and something that actually supported people in growing their wellbeing as well as having the environmental impact.
8:28
Wow. Sounds absolutely amazing. I love everything that you're doing. I'm so curious about this time in your life where you're having these thoughts. You studied law. You're obviously a non-technical founder from what I can tell, and you've decided to embark on becoming a tech entrepreneur and developing an app. Do you quit your job and go all in? Are you starting with a small MVP? And
8:57
I am less familiar with talking about tech and apps and all this kind of thing. So you're really going to have to step me through the blueprint of your journey like I'm a grandma. No, it's good because I was basically a grandma starting out, as you said, non-technical founder. So going, okay, I'm going to build.
9:13
you know, a mobile application with this sort of feature set where we can do A-B testing or multivariate testing of comms and design and user interface. Like that was a really tough ask when it was just me at the start. I would say the first few years of trying to do this were the toughest. I didn't really know who to listen to because, you know, I didn't have a coding background. So one option is, okay, I learned to code myself.
9:40
A second is that I bring in a technical co-founder who can execute the coding and development side for the business. And for me, the third was sort of raising money and hiring outsource developers. I went with an option where I went through an accelerator program that was designed for tech-enabled businesses sort of supporting female founders. And the intention was
10:02
They'll pair you with a team of developers and they'll help you build out your MVP. And you didn't have to front up the initial capital to do that. They took an equity stake.
10:10
and they would build the MVP. So on the face of it, it's called She Starts Through Blue Chili. On the face of it, that seemed like a good option, but I think I didn't have any experience in product management and I think I was also not great at sort of being really clear about what I knew. Like I knew my eco-conscious consumer market really well from years of grassroots campaigning.
10:34
And I knew a ton about what needed to be in the product from a behavior change standpoint. And I didn't push hard enough on that because I was sort of like, well, I don't know anything about running a business. I don't know anything about building a minimum viable product. So let's do it in the way that I'm being told to do it or being suggested. And so I think there was probably...
10:55
Yeah, a good 18 months where we've made very little headway despite working really hard, you know, doing some government grants, sort of bootstrapped it. I did a crowdfunding campaign where I raised $30,000 from the public, launched a local version of the app, kind of an early version in Canberra using some white labeling. So it was really tough because I just didn't have that.
11:18
technical co-founder who really understood what I was trying to achieve. And that alignment is so important when you're building something that's never been built before.
11:28
And for a long time, I had people often say to me, like, what you're trying to do isn't possible. No one's going to change their behavior through a mobile app. It's too hard. No one gives a crap about the environment. You know, your market's going to be really tiny. You know, you get all kinds of lots of opinions. The naysayers. Which is totally fine. I mean, you know, if it was obvious to everybody that was a good idea, it would already probably exist.
11:51
But what changed it for me was getting in some really fantastic technical advisors, really just through loose tie contacts. I had Simon Sheik, who was the former director of GetUp where I'd worked and now the founder of the ethical superannuation fund, Future Super. He introduced me to Brian Rollins, who was very senior in Atlassian, a senior product guy there. Atlassian is a massive software company in Australia.
12:17
And we just really hit it off. Like I remember I was like, sorry to swear, but kind of shitting myself when I first met him, talked to him on the phone because I thought, oh, this guy's not going to be interested in what I'm doing. You know, I barely have a product. It's really just me at this point. But he was just so lovely. You know, some of the best people I think for me in business that I've met are highly intelligent, but just have no ego and no pretension. And they're sort of the best people to work with. Yeah.
12:41
So Brian was really, really fantastic as a support. Same with Jason Serafino, another guy that came in as an advisor. He's a really experienced chief technology officer of a fintech in Australia. And I started working with those guys about mid-2019, and they really helped me to understand how to structure
13:00
you know, a lean product development business or lean product development team, helped me hire my first in-house developer and really understand what was needed, both in terms of tech stack choices and just how to manage developers as a non-technical person. And so I just got really good mentoring, basically. It was invaluable, raised some pre-seed funding with their support. And then we were sort of away and then software was sort of neutralized as an issue because whereas prior to that, it had been really tough
13:29
just to even get a product that worked in the way that, even at the most basic level, to test the assumptions that I had, it was really tough. So that was a huge turning point, getting those guys in my corner, and they're still both of them involved with the business to this day. And so thanks, Brian and Jason and Simon, for the intro. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, the technical part of getting that MVP ready and getting the first kind of versions, it just seems like such a challenge.
13:58
And then you've got to, I guess, onboard users and see what they're doing when they're using the app and starting to kind of take that next phase of launch and kind of marketing. How did you go about launching into the market and getting your first kind of core users? That part was easier because, again, the grassroots campaigning, there's a lot of similarity between digital marketing and
14:23
and sort of digital campaigning. So, you know, I ran some live events, did sort of launches, went to little festivals, collected, built an email list. And then just at that point, Facebook advertising was really good. It was cheap, unlike my experience with it now. And so a couple of hundred dollars behind some ads and,
14:46
Just I think for the crowdfunding campaign as well, we built a list that way. And, you know, the Facebook ads were really cheap. I think we put $200 behind them and we acquired our first thousand kind of signups that way. So we had a really good initial demand.
15:03
Oh, my God. And so that works really well. And, you know, because I think what we were doing was novel at the time and also really strong environmental focus, it's very mission-driven, it was pretty easy for us to get some press as well. So we had a few, you know, going through the accelerator and then with what we were trying to build, we had a – I sort of – because I was based in Canberra at the time, was able to use local media a bit to kind of get the brand awareness up
15:30
potentially too early. You know, we didn't necessarily need that exposure at that point when we barely had a product, but that helped too. So I think that initial phase of acquiring that first thousand sign-ups was easy. And then as we started to try to scale up user acquisition, which, you know, for the mechanics of a model like my business,
15:52
You really need to have accelerating user acquisition on a monthly basis if you're going to grow because you've got a high churn product with a mobile app. Even with good retention, you basically need to have an increasing number of new users.
16:05
to be able to scale the user base. And that's been a big challenge for us, actually. You know, we've found that we've got a pretty good what's called a paid user acquisition engine. We've done that through TikTok and then Google Ads and, you know, we're continuously testing different channels. And we were able to find a really good partner to work with that helped us on a pay-for-performance basis, which was great because you're not paying for the service, you're paying for the outcome. And they were an international firm. It's critical. Yeah.
16:33
Yeah, and so that's worked pretty well, but I think where we haven't done as well actually is like in our content marketing, we haven't had a full marketing person on staff the whole time. So, you know, we've got a really solid mailing list and we're sort of sending stuff out to people and we have our followings on social media. But we're sort of doing a lot through the app proper now in terms of community building. We have a bunch of community and group features working.
16:59
And we're really focusing on supporting people to connect into their local sustainability initiatives, working in groups on the activities that are suggested in the app. All of it's highly personalized, by the way, like the types of action plans that you get for yourself in the app to reduce emissions. But, yeah, it's sort of a community first strategy at the moment is how we're looking at growing, really focusing on user referrals. For you and like in this kind of model in general, how do you monetize or is it not for profit?
17:29
We're a profit for purpose. So in Australia, that means we're a proprietary limited company, which is standard. We have a constitution with environmental objectives, both the sort of the objects of the business and then as a director, director's duties include having to advance those
17:46
That's how we navigated that from a governance standpoint. We had Allen's Law Firm do our social enterprise constitution. And so, yeah, for profit, it meant that we were able to access capital from investment, sort of specifically a lot of impact investors, tech-based angel investors. That was easier initially than having to raise from philanthropic donors. So I think it was really a hard call on whether to go non-profit or for-profit.
18:15
And I think there's arguments for both, especially when you're cause-driven. But in terms of monetisation, you know, that's something where we're really working quite hard on at the moment. You know, we have a solid user base. I think the biggest achievement is that we've proven the product's effective. It actually does what it says it'll do. Probably could go a bit further in terms of being effective, but, you know, we've got users reducing their carbon emissions through the tool, which I think is a really awesome achievement given how difficult changing behaviour can be.
18:45
And so from a monetization standpoint, we had a subscription-based offer for a while. We took that off because we felt like we were sort of making it harder for people to access the best parts of the tool. And then we've had referral partnerships. So we do sort of like Good On You, if you're familiar with them, Ethical Consumers Australia. They're great, by the way. They rank fashion brands on their environmental and labor credentials. Yeah.
19:10
And so you can sort of scan a barcode at a shopping mall and see if, you know, there's a very comprehensive amount of brand ratings there. Plus you can search on their site for sort of the best brands. But they ran a referral arrangement that I think hit a really good balance between allowing them to bring in some revenue with a free product while also not compromising their integrity. And so the way we've tried to do that is we only recommend businesses that, you know,
19:36
Really, really supporting people to reduce emissions, not just in a marginal way, but in a big way. And then also we give non-sponsored recommendations and we show the basis of our recommendations. So with third-party accreditation. And examples in like superannuation, we have a green finance program in the app. We ask people to switch their super fund if they're up for it so they're not investing in fossil fuel projects. And there are several funds in Australia that have these screening policies where they won't invest in fossil fuels
20:04
And there's sort of third party accreditation for that or that market forces has done a really, really good assessment of the funds that have those kind of green portfolios. And so we recommend Verve Superannuation who are supporting us with a referral fee. They also support a lot of projects around gender equality. We think they're a really great fund, but there's a bunch of others as well that are good. And so we recommend those as well.
20:29
And that's kind of how we've looked at monetizing. We've also just launched One Small Step for Businesses. So it's sort of like a version of the app, but allows for a lot of collaboration between colleagues and then data dashboards. So you can kind of see the impact that you're all having, carbon emissions from staff, setting up live challenges. So we just launched that in the last month.
20:52
Wow. Well, that's really cool. And so do you go out and pitch to like the HR department of a company and try and get them onboarded? And do they, do they pay you for that or? Yeah, that's the point of monetizing with it. Definitely. It's on a subscription basis. Yeah. So they, you charge them to be on there. Got it.
21:13
Yeah, charge companies to use the product. At the moment, it's $2 per user per month annual or $5 per user per month monthly. Yeah, so that's a very low price point, but, you know, we're just starting with the offer. So, yeah. What's your, like, when you're looking at your marketing and kind of acquisition now, what is it that shifts the needle for kind of just getting the everyday consumer and getting businesses on board?
21:42
Yeah, you mean in terms of how do we get traction in acquiring new users, acquiring customers? Look, I don't think that we've sort of nailed that yet. It's something we're continuously working on.
21:54
Definitely I've found for my business that we have a surprisingly good impact in user acquisition from press coverage. I'd always thought of press coverage as it's like building brand value and brand awareness, but it's not going to necessarily have an obvious and direct impact on your acquisition numbers. But that's not been the case for us. Whenever we have press coverage, what we tend to find is that we'll see a dip in our cost per user acquisition
22:24
in the kind of couple of days following. So that's been a great one. And then with the enterprise piece, like offering the tool to businesses, we really have just started. So I wouldn't say that I've got a recipe for success there yet. I'm just sort of talking to people that I already have relationships with, looking at, you know, getting it, we did a fair bit of customer discovery of the types of industries that would be interested in using this tool.
22:48
and the types of jobs, titles, who are the decision makers. So it's all standard kind of enterprise SaaS business development stuff. Really, I'll see how we go. You've recently been going through a raise. I'm wondering what your experience has been like and what you've learned going through this process that you can pass on to anyone else who is going through the journey. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot.
23:14
that you can learn from doing capital raising. So it's a bit hard to answer that question, to be honest, because it's like, well, a lot. It really depends on what, you know, if you're listening to this, like what your goals are. I mean, I can just speaking from personal experience of what my goals were and then interacting with the kind of capital raising ecosystem in Australia, I guess some key things are that,
23:40
It's good to know what stage you're at. And so you can, you know, raising money is extremely intensive emotionally and in terms of the workload. Nick Crocker from Blackbird, who also supports the Startmate Accelerator, has some really good resources that are publicly available, I think, via Startmate's website on this. So if you're thinking about fundraising, I think some of his resources.
24:03
Advice and publications online are like excellent, but really it's about, you know, you can expect to work on this full time for months if you're doing a raise.
24:15
And the kind of key things that you'd want to be thinking about are like who you're targeting. So there's all these different sort of stages of investor sophistication. You have angel investors. They're often people who are really passionate about whatever you're working on, whatever problem you're trying to solve.
24:34
they're kind of happy to put in a bet that's fairly high risk and are supportive of you and that, you know, they're great people to find early. And then you've got sort of family offices, which can be kind of the in-between point between angels and venture investors and then institutional investors, venture investors, you know, they typically have a more sophisticated way of assessing, you know, deals and the suitability of your business for investment.
25:01
and typically also have higher expectations, not just in terms of your traction when you're going to them to raise, but also your prospective returns. One key thing to understand about venture investment is those funds are structured so that they need to have each investment at least conceivably being able to return the full amount of the fund. So they're looking at
25:24
Can you over time and fairly quickly get like over a 10x return on the investment they're making? And so it's really helpful to know your own numbers and know, you know, what you can conceivably think about. Like if you have an understanding of your revenue model, any points that you can validate, numbers that you can put in front of people where you validated your assumptions, always going to go really well.
25:48
And I would also just say, like, people are really happy to give feedback. So, you know, you can sort of soft start and just start to build relationships with people, ask for feedback. A lot of venture funds and some family offices do office hours. You know, you could meet with analysts and they'll give you feedback on how you're going. And that can be really helpful when you're just kind of getting a sense of the lay of the land. I remember when I did my seed round, I actually asked one investor, you know, what, what
26:14
how should I price this round? You know, what do you think I should do? And I had some angel investors as well. And I just sort of asked for advice and used the power of loose ties. So I didn't know anyone with money when I was starting out, but I'd been involved in the startup community in Melbourne. You know, I was working through a great co-working space called One Roof. And so I just sort of was like, how do I meet investors? And I just started there by asking the question and talking to people that I knew and slowly getting introductions that way. Yeah.
26:43
The other thing that I think is really great for when you're raising money is you want to have really regular communication. So for people who are on your list, think of it like customer record management. You've got a list of people who are prospective investors. You have an initial chat, you send them through some materials, then maybe a follow-up investment deck. So you have a couple of conversations. And between those conversations, you want to be sending updates as often as weekly to your investor list saying, this is what we said we were going to do. This is what we achieved.
27:11
This is what we're still working on. And you turn, you know, that's how you build a relationship because it's actually about, it's so much about relationship building. People want to feel that they can trust you. They want to feel that you do have the traction that you're saying you have. And so if you can communicate regularly, even just during that fundraising period for the three or four or six months or whatever, showing that you're delivering that, that has a really big impact.
27:34
Yeah. Sorry. That's probably, like I said, there's so much that you could talk about. Like so many insights there. So, so great. Thank you so much. I'm curious to know, like for you, it sounds like you're in series A, right? You're, you're doing a series A round or. No, we're still C. I wouldn't say that we're series A. We're not covering our costs. So I think, especially with the changes to the, to the market lately off the back of changes to the
28:01
You know, if we're doing Series A, we'd be wanting to have pretty significant monthly recurring revenue to feel that we could justify that and raise it a decent valuation. And for what you're doing now with this seed round, what does that enable you to do? What's the next phase of One Small Step?
28:21
Yeah, I mean, I think what I mentioned about maybe before we started recording, but launching in a couple of other countries. So, you know, going into the UK, New Zealand, Canada, there's still some, I think our focus is really we need to turn it into a viable and sustainable business financially.
28:37
That's a core part of what we're doing over the next six months, really because the capital raising environment isn't great at the moment, neither in Australia or the United States. So focusing on this enterprise kind of offer, one small step for businesses, and also really investing in the community features that we've built and supporting people in Australia.
28:57
tapping into local communities because we see that as a really strong growth strategy. So there's sort of three pillars. It's sort of like growing our revenue, growing our user acquisition through this community's piece and referrals. And then the third is just engagement, like working on making the tool as good as it can be, constantly improving it based on user feedback and insights. And there's a bunch of stuff that it's never done. You constantly want to make changes to it to make it more effective. Yeah.
29:27
How do you raise and like spend three, six months kind of full-time seeking investment and also, you know, continually focusing on growing and marketing and building the business? Like it just feels like it's two full-time jobs. Yeah, it is. I don't understand. Frankly, it's a huge amount of work.
29:45
And that's why, you know, I think I probably would do something differently than how I did do it in the business, which is I was really focused on product validation and making the product as effective as possible. And I think that, like, I'm really proud of the work that we've done there because it is really difficult and we're doing something so much more complex and ambitious than business.
30:05
I don't know, setting up like a really simple widget to support businesses to book calendar appointments more effectively. Like we're covering how do people change up their mode of transportation, diet, energy systems, like the food that they purchase, waste in their home. It's just such an ambitious and massive undertaking. So I'm proud of the work we achieved, but
30:29
I think not having a really strong revenue loop from the outset built into the initiative has made it harder because you do have to effectively work on the business and then take yourself out of it and trust that the team you have around you can kind of keep things moving along while you focus on investment.
30:48
So, yeah, if you can get to a point where you're covering your own costs, I often I really think that that's that's the best possible scenario, because then if you are raising money, you're doing it not because you need money to stay alive. You're doing it because, well, we want to scale up and we want to start offering our, you know, our app to these really large enterprise clients. And so we need account managers.
31:12
and we need some additional developers, you know, that's a fantastic way to pitch to a venture investor compared to, we validated some stuff, but we don't have any money. Can we have some money? Yeah. Yeah. So I would, I'd say like, definitely, I would have shifted our focus to be a lot more on revenue initially. And I think probably coming from a nonprofit background, and being so cause focused, I sort of
31:37
didn't have a strong interest in how we generate revenue initially. And I think the best thing you can do is really work very hard on the business model and validate that early. Because if you have revenue coming in, you know, it completely changes the whole scenario of what you're doing. You're in a much better position in terms of leverage with investors. And you also then have your own resources that you're generating to reinvest back into the initiative.
32:03
In this same kind of note that we're on at the moment, when you look back and reflect on this journey of building an app and kind of being in tech, is there anything else that you either wish you did differently at the beginning or wish that you knew before you started? Like hindsight bias is really seductive. I mean, there's so many things that I feel like I've done that were like,
32:28
only obviously mistakes like 12 months later. It really reminds me of Game of Thrones. Like, you know how the guy in season one, Sean Bean, he gets killed and he's sort of in Game of Thrones. And it's like the whole thing of Game of Thrones initially was like the characters pay for the consequences of their actions. But it's sort of like really like there's like a slow burn to you actually seeing that occur. And I feel like it's sort of similar with startups. Like you just don't know what you don't know. Yeah.
32:55
And you've got to make mistakes and that's okay. I feel like I'm very lucky because I've learned so much in doing this. And I think the thing I would have liked to have known before I started is actually to back myself and my instincts more, because if you're making other people's mistakes, you're not going to learn as well as if you're making your own. So go with your own instincts. Yeah.
33:23
You will fail faster and you'll learn more effectively if you say, well, I really thought this was a situation. I thought this is what was going to happen. And I executed these actions. And then the opposite happened or it did work as I intended. OK, well, I can start to build up a sense of trust in myself and my decision making or no, I need to recalibrate because I had my understanding of this situation was wrong. So you're building in your own feedback loop by testing things in the real world, but based on your best assumptions of what you think is going to occur.
33:53
And I think that's really important for women founders, not to stereotype, but there is a tendency to have what's called an external frame of reference, that I certainly have this and it's still something I have to work on, is constantly seeking advice, consuming information, trying to learn. And I often just need to pause and kind of go, well, what do I think about this? And not taking all of the external info and just figure out what I think first and go from that place. That's something I wish I'd known earlier. It would save me a lot of time.
34:23
Yeah, I feel like I fall into that trap a little bit, a lot. Yeah, it's really, really, it's really common because, you know, you don't want to be pig-headed and be like, I know everything and I'm just going to do it my way. And you don't want to be that person. But I think for most women, it's a safe bet that they're undervaluing their own decision-making skills. Yeah, that's powerful. Thanks for sharing that. I love that. Thank you. No worries.
34:53
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.
35:18
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.
35:40
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. Thank you.
35:56
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.
36:20
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.
36:43
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. Thank you.