We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Beeta Hashempour a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Beeta, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you come up with the idea for your business?
In December of 2010, one of my best friends was studying abroad in Paris and invited me to visit her on our winter break. At the time, I wasn’t a Francophile and in love with France like I am today. I just had Paris on my bucket list of places I wanted to travel to and thought it was the perfect opportunity to see a city I wanted to visit, hang out with a best friend, and do it all on a college budget (since I didn’t have to pay for a hotel or anywhere to stay). I didn’t expect how hard or fast I’d fall in love with Paris and French culture. Taking my last step up the metro station stairs, fresh off the train from the airport and right into the heart of the St. Germain des Pres neighborhood, I found myself completely enamored. Lovestruck, really. I quickly realized that Paris was one of those places that’s even better than it is in movies and tv shows, which I’ve found to be pretty rare in all my travels. I spent the next week indulging in incredible French food, walking among breathtaking architecture and picturesque scenes, adoring the fashion of French women, and basking in the deep conversations and fun evenings my friend and I spent with her friends at various French cafes. I didn’t want to go home! To say that trip changed me was an understatement. I came back home buying various French cookbooks, practicing all the recipes I enjoyed while I was in France, trying my best to simplify them and turn them into home cook-friendly recipes. At the time, Tumblr was the “it” platform and it’s where I would post my renditions of French recipes for fun. Around this same time, I was interning for a fashion company that was based in New York City while I was studying at UCLA. I was in charge of their social media platform for their college marketing division, and learning to get more and more comfortable with Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and everything else that was cool at the time. They eventually offered me a full-time position, which I took upon graduation, and it was there in their marketing department that I learned the business of social media and blogging. I learned how to create a WordPress site and all of the tech behind setting one up and running it. I decided to start posting my French recipes on my own personal WordPress site, and set that all up with the intention of having a more legitimate platform to share with family and friends. I didn’t initially go into that endeavor with the intention of making a business from my site. It wasn’t until I started receiving comments from random people on my recipe posts that I realized there were other people who were interested in the topic and what I had to say. So I started adopting some of the techniques I was using in my day job, like leveraging Pinterest, Facebook, and weekly email campaigns to grow my site. The process to grow my site to a point where I could monetize it took several years. That’s the thing about online businesses. There are a lot of people who think bloggers, digital entrepreneurs, influencers, and creators are all just overnight success stories. The truth is that unless you start out your endeavors with a legitimate business plan, strategy, and investment (both time and money), you’re not going to grow fast. Even then, it can take awhile to learn what your audience wants and how to deliver that in a way that gets them to invest in you. In my case, I never started my business with the intention of it being a business. Even when I started growing my audience and would do small partnerships (such as product reviews or brand sponsorships that were compensated for very little or in exchange for product), I viewed my site and brand as a side hustle. It wasn’t until I started receiving more and more emails from readers saying how much they loved my work and related to my love for France that I realized there was a legitimate audience of Francophiles that were desperate for any connection to France. And so, as this was confirmed to me over and over, I made sure that during my day job (which over the years involved other ecommerce businesses as well), I soaked up everything I could at work with the ultimate intention of becoming my own boss and running my own business full-time. I sat with the SEO guru at my day job and learned everything I could from him. I watched how my boss (VP of ecommerce) managed sales campaigns at work and made user experience top priority in everything we did. I learned from another boss (VP of marketing) how to pitch brands and partner up for collaborations in mutually beneficial way. And I took all that and applied it to my own business. In 2019, I was finally able to leave my day job and go all in with my own business, and since then, it’s been incredible to serve my Francophile community with not only French recipes, but an entire French lifestyle brand and in-person retreats in France.
Beeta, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Mon Petit Four® is truly an extension of my heart and soul. I am a true Francophile; I live, breathe, and practice the French lifestyle on a daily basis because I truly believe it is the best way to live. Whether it’s the French diet, French approach to style and personal expression, or the simple reverence for all things elegant and beautiful, I adhere to all of it and do my best to ensure my digital brand promotes these philosophies too.
When I first started my business, I started it as a personal creative endeavor to just share my love of French food and French cooking. As my audience and community around this endeavor grew, I learned more about what they wanted, which was, frankly, everything about the French lifestyle. Many of my followers and clients are just like me; they love all things French!
Knowing this, I expanded the business to also include French lifestyle articles on my site, and then an exclusive membership community that’s main goal was to make people feel more connected to France and more connected to others who felt the same way about France as they did. This membership community is called Everyday France and was one of the first digital products my business sold.
In 2021, I made the move to Paris and decided it was time to tackle my next goal of offering in-person retreats. I had always had the vision of creating an experience where members of my community could come together, in-person, in France to have the most incredible week of their lives. In fall 2021, I was able to do that and launched my first Paris retreat. It was a big success and started the retreat side of my business.
I opened up the retreats to the public at the end of 2022 and have now planned, sold, and hosted 4 French retreats with no plans of stopping! I basically tell retreat attendees that they just need to show up to Paris with their suitcase and I’ve got everything else covered and taken care of for them. I plan out an extensive itinerary that’s full of incredible hotels, restaurants, sights, experiences, and activities – all with vendors and connections that I have personally made after living in France. I deliver the best of the best in these retreats so that they’re unlike any travel experience you’ve had before. This is definitely not your typical AAA tour experience. Instead, these trips are designed to deliver the crème de la crème of France.
In 2023, I launched my podcast The Life of a Bon Vivant, where I share stories and discussions around living in France, making that dream come true, and how I continue to live the French life even when I’m back in the States. It’s a podcast really aimed at empowering women to believe they can have, do and be anything they want. It’s also what led to my audience begging me for another resource, specifically help with getting a long-stay visa to France.
I’m currently working on a step-by-step program that would help individuals who are interested in getting a long-stay visitor visa to France, helping them with the application process and the eventual move and set-up of life in France. This is something people always message me asking me about, and I’m excited to be able to create a resource that didn’t exist when I was going through the process so that others can have more clarity and ease around the whole thing.
Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?
One thing I’ve learned in business is that you don’t get anywhere without taking a leap of faith and just doing it. As someone who would describe herself as a perfectionist, for many years I struggled to take action on my ideas because I felt like everything had to look and be perfect before it was launched.
How could I charge someone for my product or service if it didn’t look like something produced and designed by a Forbes 500 company?! Now, I can look back at a question like that and see how silly it sounds, but back then, I really struggled with this issue of worthiness and accepting payment for my work. I see a lot of other female entrepreneurs struggle with this too.
It wasn’t until I delved further into my spiritual practices and studies that I realized that being paid for my work is simply an energetic exchange between myself and the client. When a client purchases something I sell, whether that’s a retreat, a membership, an e-book, or an affiliate product, they are actually saying yes to themselves and making the decision to feel a certain way about themselves and their worth.
That doesn’t mean I don’t run into that nervous or panicked energy when I launch something new. It just means I’ve become adept at regulating my nervous system and taking the leap anyway. I did this earlier this year when I launched an elevated version of my retreat model.
I had this vision of creating the ultimate luxury Paris retreat. Think 5-star hotels, spa experiences, Michelin-star restaurants, shopping experiences at high end stores, private workshops with talented artists and creatives, and so on. When I planned out the retreat and calculated the cost, it was way more than previous retreat experiences had cost because of all the elevated experiences and venues. People would need to pay 3x for this kind of trip, and I was incredibly nervous that people would think I’m crazy and out of my mind. I had never sold anything at that price point before in my business and I didn’t know how my audience would react.
I decided it wasn’t my job to make decisions about my audience’s financial capabilities, and let them make a decision for themselves. They’re all grown adults and who was I to decide what experience was too expensive for them or not. So I sent out the email announcing the retreat, and within two weeks and many inquiries later, the retreat was booked out! I was so incredibly excited to bring my vision of this retreat alive and give these women the experience of a lifetime, and that was only possible because of me taking a leap of faith and just putting my offer out there.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
For many years, my business was only a side hustle. I earned pennies from it in the early days, nothing I could ever live off of in Southern California. I could have given up on it a long time ago if I was going to follow all practical and realistic advice. The business barely earned enough to cover hosting expenses for my site.
In 2017, I was in between jobs and decided to create an online French pastry course in my free time with the hopes of selling my first digital product. The day before I planned to launch the class, my father very unexpectedly passed away, and my world turned upside down. I was absolutely devastated; my family and I are incredibly close and I was used to seeing my dad almost everyday.
My spirit was absolutely shattered and the idea of working on anything in my business was the last thing on my mind. A couple of months later, when I was starting to return to a new sense of normal, I decided the best thing for me to do at that time was to start working at another company to get myself back in a social atmosphere and create some financial stability after a rough couple of months.
While the job wasn’t my dream job, it offered a lot of opportunity for me to learn new skills that I could apply to my own business. And while I didn’t launch the pastry course until a long time after, I did apply the skills I learned to my website and marketing. I would come home everyday after a long day at work, and do my best to create new content for my site, often hosting live videos on Facebook showing me cooking the recipes that I’d share on my site.
Staying persistent in this endeavor allowed me to grow my business revenue to something that I probably could have lived off of by the end of 2018. It wasn’t equivalent to full-time salary, but it was probably 2/3 of it and if I had lived in a state other than California, I probably could have retired from my day job then.
Regardless, I realized that life is going to throw curveballs at you and running a successful business is truly a long game. It’s not enough to just have passion for what you do. You have to have loyalty to your business and to your vision for what it can be. And just because there are hard days that can cause delays or slow you down, you can’t give up because your business depends on you to be resilient and stick through it. Your success is inevitable if you do.
Contact Info:
- Website: MonPetitFour.com
- Instagram: @MonPetitFour
- Facebook: Facebook.com/MonPetitFourBlog
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/beetahashempour
Image Credits
Krystal Kenney (Miss Paris Photo)