Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Julie Bogart. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Julie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

In my prior life, I was a freelance ghostwriter, editor, and magazine writer. I homeschooled my five kids. Parents began asking me for help to teach their children to write. It was the 1990s and internet communities were just being born. My approach to writing comes from my professional writing background. I start with focusing on the writing voice and giving a lot of space to cultivating a writing life that is meaningful to the writer.

As I gave advice to families and watched it create happy, willing writers, it became clear that there was a market for a writing program (curriculum) built from these principles, practices and ideas. I write a manual and launched an online class (via email) before I even had a website in January 2000. Twenty-five years later, I went from a solopreneur company to 50 employees, hundreds of thousands of customers from all over the globe, and over 200 pieces of curricula as well as a full fledged online writing class program.

My next book coming out is dedicated to explaining the success of this pedagogy and how parents can adopt it at home with their kids—homeschooled or not!

Help! My Kid Hates Writing comes out April 15, 2025.

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?

Brave Writer exists to create a joyful, meaningful experience of teaching writing to kids. In fact, one of the distinctive concepts in my approach is how important I consider the parent-child relationship in the growth of a young writer. When a child has a parent who is both coach and ally, that student is far more likely to grow in writing skills and confidence. My unique method teaches parents how to read a child’s writing as a reader first—valuing and commenting on what works in the writing. Revision comments are delivered as meaningful messages from a reader, rather than an evaluator. For instance, rather than saying to a child “Vague” or “Needs more detail,” a parent reader would say, “Can you tell me more about the beach? What was the weather like? Did you need a cover-up or was the sunshine warm?” This kind of invitational approach to feedback leads a child to feeling empowered to make their own revision choices. It’s a revolutionary approach.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

For Brave Writer, our customers trust veteran home educators. I happen to be a good writer and speaker, as well as a veteran homeschooler of five adult kids. My ability to convey my ideas and personal stories gave me credibility. I took every opportunity to be available to speak at conferences, I launched a podcast, I wrote daily on social media, I responded to every single email sent to our company for years (until I hired people to do that for me), and my cell phone was my business/customer service line for years.

It felt like I brought in every customer we ever had for over a decade. I was hands on and available. I am a good communicator. And parents are desperate for writing help.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

In 2020, when we were heading into our 20th year in business, I made a decision to give away membership to our valued membership community if people purchased our bundled products. That same year, the pandemic came along right before shopping season. I threw together a week long conference that ran 5 hours a day with one of the other highly respected home educators. We filled the hours with all kinds of experts to teach parents how to homeschool. Every day, we had between 2000-2500 attendees for five days.

That investment plus the sale we created led us to double our revenue that year. It was hands down the best combination of circumstances with our own strategic ideas that led to our best revenue year ever.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://bravewriter.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/juliebravewriter/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliebogart/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/bravewriter

Image Credits

Becca Johnson: https://www.instagram.com/heybeccaphoto/