Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Emily Retamozo. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Emily, appreciate you joining us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?
I have to give all the credit to my brother, Tim for this one. I REALLY struggle when it comes to naming things (which is kind of ironic because I would consider myself a pretty creative person)!
My business is called Sift. It is a mobile app for creative home businesses. The idea for this app was born out of the struggles I was experiencing with my own creative side hustle. I was having a really hard time balancing my full time teaching job along with my cookie decorating side hustle and Sift was my solution to those problems. We got started with the app development and then it was time to decide on a name. I really wanted something that made sense with the functionality of the app and played into my own baking background (without being TOO baking centered since the app would be for ALL creative home businesses, not just bakers). I couldn’t come up with ANYTHING.
I went to dinner one night at my parents’ house and asked my family to help me come up with some name ideas based on my criteria. Without second thought, my brother started spewing off names and they were WAY better than anything I came up with. He mentioned Sift, and that was it! It had the baking element I was looking for and also played into the purpose of the app which was to help users “sift” through all of the project details, client communication, and inquiries! It was perfect.
So, if you need help naming your business, ask the people around you for help! I tend to overthink things way too much, so outside ideas were the key for me!
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?
A few years into my career as a high school physics teacher I decided to start a cookie decorating side hustle. It ended up taking off so much more than I ever anticipated. I very quickly found myself in a situation where I was trying to balance a home business and a full time job. The creative outlet that once brought me so much joy had now become a small business that required so many hours of administrative work that I never expected. I was overwhelmed and started to feel like I just couldn’t do it all anymore. I began looking for a way to get the administrative tasks of my side hustle under control so that I could feel more organized and also save myself time on that side of things. I searched for some type of app or software system that would help me, but I kept running into the same issues: the free tools were too basic and didn’t really help me achieve the streamlined workflow I was looking for, but the programs that were made for small businesses were just too much (in every sense). They had way too many features which made them overwhelming along with steep monthly fees. I really wasn’t into spending a lot of money on something I wouldn’t fully utilize. Everything I looked into was designed for a well established small business and I was really just a one woman show with a creative home business. I felt like the tech industry was missing resources and tools for people like me who had a creative side hustle that was somewhere between a hobby and a full fledged small business. Us “one-woman-shows” needed a tool to help us balance life’s responsibilities and our side hustles, and there just really wasn’t anything out there for us.
That is why I created Sift, a tool designed specifically for creative home business owners like myself. It is a simple, straightforward mobile app that anyone can figure out how to use in a matter of minutes. It can be implemented right away and is free to use! I know first hand what it is like to be just starting out and not really know how to manage the administrative tasks that come with a creative side hustle and I really wanted to make sure to offer a free option for those people just trying to figure things out. We also offer a Pro version with a monthly subscription cost of $9.99. Again, I wanted to keep it cheap because my goal is for Sift to be a tool for side hustles rather than small businesses that make a significant income. I think even the smallest of side hustlers deserve tools to help them out!
How did you build your audience on social media?
I vividly remember the moment I decided I was going to build a social media audience. It was a conscious decision I made and worked towards. It was not something that just kind of “happened” over time. I knew if I was going to launch a mobile app for creatives, I needed to have some credibility and an audience to launch it to. I think the first step in growing an audience is understanding WHY you want to grow an audience in the first place. This will give you focus and help you decide what type of content you should put out. Always keep that goal in mind. My business is two-fold. I have a custom cookie business and a mobile app. I wanted to be able to market my app to creatives and I figured a great place to start would be in the community I was a part of. So, I began growing my cookie business audience. I learned that people like to connect with the person behind the business. I started (very awkwardly) showing my face on social media and teaching new techniques and my account grew and grew. People like LEARNING. Instead of selling to people, serve them and then they will buy from you! Growing my cookie account gave me credibility in that community which made it easier for me to get my app out to them. Fellow cookiers already knew, liked, and trusted me because I had been teaching and serving them through instagram so they were so much more willing to try out my app for their business!
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
Looking back on this story I truly have no CLUE what I was thinking. We were in the middle of developing Sift and I decided I was going to sign up (and pay) to be a vendor at CookieCon (a convention for cookie decorators). Sift was BARELY scheduled to be available in the App Store by the time of the convention. We were scrambling to get it in the App Store days before the convention. The week before we left, I really wasn’t sure if I was going to have anything to show people who came to our booth. Sift went live in the App Store DAYS before the convention and had not undergone any Beta testing at that point. It went live in Google Play while we were at the convention. It was so new and honestly, barely worked. Nonetheless, my husband and I were there, with our vendor booth telling people about Sift, hoping people would buy into the idea and download the free app. Luckily, cookie people are VERY nice and gave us the boost of confidence we needed! They were excited about this new tool we were bring them! In the end, I am happy we went and got our feet wet as vendors and got word out about Sift, even if it wasn’t fully functional at the time. Sometimes, taking a big risk pays off. We have gone back to the same convention year after year and now people come up to our booth and say “oh I’ve heard of you guys!” Creating that brand awareness started at that very first convention with an app that was barely functional and here we are now, about to launch our premium subscription based version!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.siftmobileapp.com , www.emilyretamozo.com
- Instagram: @simplysift @Emily_retamozo
- Facebook: Sift Mobile App