We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kaila Uli a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Kaila, thanks for joining us today. Let’s kick things off with talking about how you serve the underserved, because in our view this is one of the most important things the small business community does for society – by serving those who the giant corporations ignore, small business helps create a more inclusive and just world for all of us.

Growing up poor, I always knew I wanted a way out and I found that by starting my own business.

I did it on my own and trial and error’ed my way to financial freedom and the journey taught me this:

Available resources are not designed for people who start out with a bad hand.

There’s so many layers that need to be peeled back. Money, jargon, business know how, predatory MLM’s that intentionally set up in impoverished communities.

My goal is teaching people who may not have access to the resources how to grow their businesses and teach them the groundwork they need to start earning their first 10k a month in sales through legitimate, tried-and-true methods.

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 e-commerce brands have ranged across Brillies Sunglasses, Starseed Nails, and currently Puffie Slippers were we sell the wildest, puffiest cloud slippers.

My service is a community called “The 6 Figure Growth Community” and it’s a space dedicated to revving up small businesses that are struggling with revenues, reworking their foundations, getting them a good grasp of marketing, ads, copy, etc through weekly coaching to help them get “unstuck”.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

I’m a bootstrapper. When you self-fund, you only have to convince one person of your dream – yourself.

I’m super tall, so I was able to get odd jobs as an ecommerce model. But because I’m mixed (Dutch Indonesian) I had to cut deals to be paid about half of what other models made so the vendors could “photoshop me later” and the amount of photoshopping they’d have to do on me was apparently enough to justify half-pay. Keep in mind, this was 12 years ago. Being tan and and ethnically ambiguous wasn’t cool yet.

But I scraped together all those coins, while simultaneously working on a marketing degree and taking any gig work I could find.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

I once wasted 50k on ads that turned into legitimately 8 sales. Not 800. 8.

What I learned from that mistake was that on site copy and messaging needs to speak to your customers in a way that compels them to buy. The days of “if you build it they will come” don’t exist anymore.

How well do you know your audience? How well are you communicating value to them? That’s how you get more sales.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: Kailauli
• Other: Tiktok: kailauli

Image Credits

None.