We recently connected with Sara Haller and have shared our conversation below.
Sara, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
In late 2019 my husband and I felt compelled to start a business. My husband worked in tech at the time and I had a background in social media marketing. We were drawn to the horticulture industry because we love what it does for the world and could see that it also tends to be a little tired out and was a place where we knew we could contribute.
We jumped in with both feet and started by selling seeds and dahlias. We quickly learned the struggles faced by those in the industry, why some of the problems we had seen as consumers existed, and really felt first hand the pain, fear, and motivations felt by the small business owner.
Big problems we could see the industry experiencing:
It’s very difficult to get good product information and photography/videography. When you’re selling shoes, you have them, and so you can photograph them in a million ways whenever you want. When all you have is a warehouse full of seeds, with no land, then how do you photograph your product? All of a sudden we began to see why as consumers most of the websites we had been on used the same stock photo from the wholesaler or no photo at all. And product videos were pretty much non-existent.
2. In the early days of starting our business we relied heavily on influencer marketing to get our shop in front of new people. Through that process we learned that influencers are at their core just content creators. They face their own struggles trying to monetize and there is no rhyme or reason to what they charge or why. We also realized that social media platforms are really just monetizing off of someone else’s content without passing any of those earnings to the people who keep them in business. That’s their entire business model. Also sometimes we were getting ripped off by content creators and not seeing a return for what we paid. Many business owners were seeing the same thing. We also observed that there are A LOT of talented content creators but they aren’t willing to share everything about their life or even be in front of the camera. We recognized that there is a whole demographic of creatives who are underpaid and underutilized by the system. We wished there was a better way to connect with these people who could help us get the product videos we needed but in a symbiosis that didn’t make our costs go up, since our margins were already so thin.
3. In 2023 small businesses that relied on Instagram suddenly took a nose dive as Instagram changed its business model to compete with TikTok and increase revenue. They did this by upgrading their algorithm to favor entertainment content that holds your attention at all costs, and buries business content so as to incentivize businesses to pay for advertising rather than getting free exposure through content creation. Instagram increased their revenue by 8 Billion that year, but little shops like ours were a casualty as we and many others like us took a nose dive. Up to that point we had begun to observe intuitively that social media wasn’t designed for commerce. It wasn’t designed to help business owners. It wasn’t designed to help content creators monetize, and it wasn’t designed to help people find and sell products. So this got us thinking: Why is there not a social media shopping platform? Why is there not a place that FAVORS businesses AND content creators – that was designed FOR them – AND for shoppers to help them see what they are buying and make purchase decisions.
It was at that time that we realized with a bolt of lightning that WE could design that platform. That we needed to completely pivot our business and that THAT is the place in the industry and in the world where we could contribute our talents most. It was really painful to make that drastic change. It involved selling everything we had worked for – all of our seeds and shelving and inventory and operations. We had learned so much and we had felt poised to go forward BUT we knew that we needed to try and solve this bigger problem faced by the entrepreneur.
And thus was born Halden. Halden is a social media mobile video shopping platform. All of the videos posted to the app are about product and contain a price, product title, product description and link to the respective website. There is no social or entertainment content on the app. It was built for shoppers by people who understand the inner workings of commerce. The app allows creatives to post their own product videos and passively monetize by collecting a set click rate which is determined by the creator and agreed to by the business owner. The app elevates the shopping experience for buyers and helps them SEE the products they are in need of.
At Halden we set out to create abundance – a WIN – WIN – WIN. A win for the shopper who has an enhanced shopping experience. A win for the video content creator who no longer has to publish free content that they aren’t allowed to monetize on. And a win for the business owner who is able to work symbiotically to get quality product videos and be seen by shoppers who are looking for their products.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My name is Sara Haller. I have 6 young kids. My main priority in life is as a mom. I told Mitchell when we started our business that I’m willing to take risks, I’m willing to sacrifice, but I’m not willing to watch our kids not thrive, or miss out on their lives because of this business. So I’m a stay at home Mom. I do Halden in my spare time. How is that possible? A lot of delegating and creative use of time.
I got in to social media because of prayer. If you knew me personally you would never guess that I’ve studied social media insatiably. There was a moment in college when I ran into an old friend and after we said goodbye I sat down to look her up on social media and realized she didn’t exist on the internet. She had no social media. I was really jealous and right then and there I went to delete all of my social media accounts. As I went to do so I heard a voice in my mind say quietly “no.” I understood in that moment that social media was important for me to understand and that I would have the ability to better serve the world if I understood it and would use it for good to the best of my ability. It was then that I really undertook a rigorous study of the subject and began jumping in and learning all I could.
I hope that Halden is the beginning of my contribution in the social media field. There are many things that I love about social media – it’s efficiency in communication, it’s beauty and good and connections that it creates. The cultivation of creativity. Social media to me can be collaboration at its finest. But I am also disgusted by the gross and demeaning side of it. I hate that people use it to introduce pornography – that when I go to look up a travel location that I have to see naked bums. I worry about this ideology of “Hold their attention at all costs” Give the people want they want, create algorithms that feed and feed and feed them content. It doesn’t matter if this content is good for them or bad for them. It just matters that it holds their attention. I hope that we get the chance to one day enter the entertainment social media space but create it in a way that SERVES people and improves their lives rather than just supplying a steady stream of intellectual junk food that damages their spirit, wastes their time, invades their privacy, introduces predatorily behavior, and demoralizes and destroys their self esteem. As a society we can do better and we should do better. Social media is not going away but it needs to change.
Our hope is that Halden is the first step on a thousand mile journey toward that end.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
I met my business partner and co-founder on a blind date a few weeks after having returned home from a church mission, where I learned Spanish and lived among the people of the inner city in Kentucky and Indiana. Mitchell invited me to go skiing and I was attracted to his confidence and unassuming personality. I could sense his goodness and that he wasn’t trying to be anybody. Very quickly into our marriage I saw that I truly had married the right person for me. I love so many things about Mitchell but one of the things I love most is that he lets me fly. When I have an idea or dream he encourages me to do it, even if it could fail or be hard. He believes in me and that has given me strength and courage that I would have never otherwise found. He affirms me even when I fail and encourages me to keep going when I feel discouraged. I hope I do the same for him. Every entrepreneur needs someone in their back pocket who will always believe in them and love them no matter what. Because heaven knows there will be a whole army of doubters out there who won’t see the vision, who won’t invest, who won’t encourage you, who are ready to doll out warnings and watch you fail. Take it all in and listen and be willing to trip and get hurt but then ultimately listen to the believers and take your mistakes with you and keep going.
Any advice for managing a team?
My main advice when working with anyone is to love them. That can seem a little strange but you have to love those who you work with – care about them, worry about their development, know them and their story, affirm them regularly and teach with love and gentleness. Everyone needs to be loved. They need to know they are needed and they need to know how important they are. Along with that, make sure that roles are very well defined and that expectations are high and realistic. People will thrive when it is very clear what is expected of them and if there are measures in place for success. We’ve had plenty of times where we hired a great person but the role they were in was not clear enough to them or us and so they were showing up and spinning their wheels and we were losing money on employing them. Love is important but without a proper system, employees might hear affirming words but fundamentally they will be frustrated because they will fail to contribute to the best of their ability. You really need a blend of both in management: a strong system and love.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.haldengarden.com
- Instagram: @halden
Image Credits
These are my personal photos.