Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Your Hype Girl Day 4 gem with Five Minute Journal Founder Mimi Ikonn’s + Get Your Signed Copy

Transcript

Your Hype Girl Day 4 gem with Five Minute Journal Founder Mimi Ikonn’s + Get Your Signed Copy · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  Hi, it's Dune here, your host and hype girl. We are almost reaching the end of launch week. Oh my freaking God, I can't believe it. And of course, I want to say a huge thank you, first of all, to everyone who has supported me in some way, supported the book. Thank you.
• 0:23
  shared on social media, sent me thoughtful messages, bought the book or reviewed the book, or just even told friends about the book. I am absolutely overwhelmed with gratitude for this community and what we're building here. It has been
• 0:39
  So insane. And I'm starting to lose my voice, by the way, if you can hear that croakiness. And next week, I think I'm excited to go back through a bit of a, you know, recap on the plan and how I did this. And I was thinking that if there's enough interest, if anyone listening is interested in getting a blueprint on how to self-publish a book, I could put together an episode with, like,
• 1:08
  my top learnings, the tools that I used, resources, all that kind of stuff. So if that sounds good to you, drop me a note, let me know, and I can get that up and running. Now, in today's mini episode, I am going to take you through to chapter 36. So I'm just going to get the book.
• 1:33
  It's still just like mind blowing to me when I open this book, by the way. I just cannot believe that it's mine. Okay, so I'm at chapter 36. It's featuring a very talented friend of mine, Mimi Icon. And the chapter is called A True Icon.
• 1:56
  Mimi, if you don't know who she is already, is a true superwoman of entrepreneurship with many successful ventures and different talents. She co-founded Luxie Hair, which is one of the world's biggest providers of premium hair extensions, which she totally bootstrapped through to a lucrative exit.
• 2:17
  Following that, she co-founded Love Hair, which provides natural and sustainable hair care products. But that's just part of Mimi's adventures. She's written books. She's a YouTube influencer. She's an Instagrammer. But on YouTube, she has more than 2.8 million subscribers and over 350 million views.
• 2:42
  She's one of the biggest names in the beauty slash travel slash fashion space. And she's an OG on YouTube. But it doesn't end there. Mimi is now co-founder of a company called Intelligent Change. And this company has created best-selling products like the 5-Minute Journal and the Productivity Planner. I actually have the Productivity Planner sitting right next to me. I'm looking at it right now. And beside my bed, I have the 5-Minute Journal.
• 3:12
  These products aim to enrich your life through daily gratitude planners and productivity planners. And people like Tim Ferriss and Hayley Bieber are among the hundreds of thousands of fans around the world who use these products. If you listen to every episode, I am sure there's at least five times you've heard a founder say that they use the five-minute journal.
• 3:34
  And I was looking on their website recently and I saw that just for one of their original styles of the five-minute journal, there's like a million units sold. It's so crazy. Yeah.
• 3:44
  Anyway, Mimi's backstory is pretty interesting because we so often look at mega successful startup entrepreneurs like Mimi and we think, oh, overnight success. That just happened for her. Like, it's not going to happen for me. You know, it's so easy for her. And it's easy to look from the outside and think that they had some special opportunity that landed in their lap.
• 4:08
  But the truth is that most entrepreneurs start their journey from humble beginnings and simply with a dream. Often a dream that starts not with any clear direction, but just more of an end goal in terms of a desired lifestyle. So in her late teens and early 20s, Mimi tried her hand at many different things. She was a waitress. She was working as a nanny. She later worked at a bank. And although she was searching for the right fit...
• 4:37
  The one thing she did know was that she loved working with people, so she was always seeking out these customer service roles. And while working at the bank, Mimi met Alex, who would go on to become her future business partner, but also the love of her life.
• 4:53
  The two connected on many levels, but most importantly, they both had the same vision for the lifestyle they wanted to live. They both wanted to escape the corporate life and wanted a lifestyle of freedom and flexibility and the opportunity to travel the world.
• 5:11
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• 5:26
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• 5:41
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• 5:59
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• 6:21
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• 6:49
  The takeaway that I want to reflect on today is related to her business. It's you don't need a big marketing budget to get started. So I'm going to go back to Luxie Hare. When she was building this, her first company, remember, she was sourcing products from Alibaba, which can, of course, be hit or miss if you've ever ordered anything on Alibaba. She ordered 10 different samples to consider. And with a stroke of luck, one of the 10 was absolutely sensational.
• 7:19
  But she had zero dollars budget to put into marketing. And what she did was not let that deter her from thinking creatively. So often, as we've already touched on a lot this week, having little or no budget can really be a blessing in disguise because it forces entrepreneurs to think outside the box, do things a little differently, or figure out the platforms that are free that they can spread their message on.
• 7:47
  So Mimi and her sister just got started by making YouTube videos. They bought a camera and they got to work. They were showing people literally just how to use the products. They didn't push the products or, you know, say that they owned the company or anything like that. It was just simply them doing like how-to tutorials, sitting down, showing girls how to do these different hairstyles with extensions.
• 8:13
  Without a budget for social media advertising, their next organic marketing strategy was just to send out free product to followers as gifts. And it was an effective tactic. Word of mouth spread really quickly. So quickly in the fact that the first year, Luxie Hair turned over more than a million dollars in revenue, which is crazy, right? They had a marketing budget of zero dollars.
• 8:38
  It's easy to think that you need a lot of money to get started. And we've already spoken about this this week. But the reality is that keeping things grassroots can get you far. And I wanted to take this time to give you some insight on Female Startup Club. I was reflecting on this message when it relates to me and this journey I'm on right now.
• 9:00
  Chances are you've probably been listening to this show for a while. And take a second to think about how you heard about this show. How did you find us? If I had to wager a guess, I would say you found it through a random podcast search. Like it was recommended. You were either searching something or it was recommended to you because you listened to another show. Or you saw a founder post about us and you discovered us that way. What do you think? Does that sound about right? Yeah.
• 9:30
  To this day, we have not done any paid media through Facebook ads for the podcast. From the day we started, my distribution plan was simply to have brilliant women, amazing women on the show who would share to their own networks and just grow organically that way. I didn't have a budget. I had a budget of zero dollars. But what I did have was Instagram. I was able to show up every day on Instagram and now TikTok. TikTok.
• 9:59
  And that's free. And yes, we've since leaned into things like SEO and other channels, but we still don't use Facebook or Instagram ads as a tool to acquire listeners.
• 10:11
  And a lot of companies do do that. A lot of podcasts do acquire listeners through those channels. And we absolutely could, but we don't because my budget's $0. Well, it was $0 for the last two years. Actually, until this very book, we hadn't even paid for any marketing initiatives ever. Your Hype Girl is literally the first thing we've invested in as a way to further spread our message. So my point being...
• 10:41
  I encourage you to think about ways that you can get out there and find more of your target customers without having to pay for ads. Don't default to thinking that you're going to grow through ads.
• 10:55
  Maybe that's through, I don't know, something like a weekend market. Maybe that's through partnering with other like-minded companies to hand out free samples. Maybe it's giveaways. Maybe it's creating daily TikTok videos at scale to start creating a buzz online. TikTok is free. It just requires a time investment. It doesn't require a marketing budget.
• 11:18
  Or maybe it's YouTube. Maybe it's YouTube videos as well. Maybe it's tutorials. There are so many things that you can and should be doing before you lean into paid ads and paid marketing. If you want to invest money into anything or you have money to invest into something,
• 11:33
  Invested into product development because the better your product is, the happier customers you'll have, and they will just naturally and organically, naturally? I'm not sure about that. They'll organically spread the word for you. You'll have the word of mouth flywheel inherently built in to whatever you do, and that is priceless. Okay, that's my two cents for today. If you enjoyed this mini episode, you are going to love my book, Your Hyped Girl. Okay.
• 12:04
  And today I had a thought that I'm just going to run with. It applies to today and tomorrow only, 48 hours. It's a 48-hour window. If you buy the Kindle version on Amazon today, Thursday, or tomorrow, Friday, and you leave the book the best review ever on Amazon and send me a screenshot of that review, I will send you a signed copy of the book myself. So...
• 12:33
  Let's see how that goes. Running with it. That's my idea. Send me a screenshot of your review. If you don't know my email, it's hello at femalestartupclub.com. I'll also have it in the show notes. And remember, it's just for this 48-hour period only. Okay. See you tomorrow for my last reflection during launch week. Bye.
• 13:10
  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.
• 13:35
  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.
• 13:57
  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.