Mari & Jessica, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What were some of the most unexpected problems you’ve faced in your business and how did you resolve those issues?

Building any business is ripe with uncertainty and challenges – I feel like there’s a new challenge every week! I’m thinking through the beginning stages of Her Brand & Co when we tried to launch our membership model. We saw many brands in our space doing similar models, and we thought for sure it would work for us, and it completely failed. We did customer discovery, we got feedback, we heard from our customers that they wanted this, and we couldn’t sell it. We were stumped!

After digging further and dusting it off, we realized that we did have a valuable product, which is our educational platform, but selling it as a membership was a miss because founders didn’t want to pay for content this type of gated content. They were willing to pay for a membership IF it included more than just the content. This was data we didn’t have access to, and we didn’t know until we launched and it flopped.

From that experience, we learned to open up our educational platform for free, which helps us with lead acquisition and brand awareness, and now 2.5 years later, we’re going to launch another membership for a customer who already trusts us and who has been on our platform for a while and understands our value. The issue wasn’t WHAT we sold, but it was WHEN in their customer journey they were willing to buy it. This was a huge unlock and obstacle for us to figure out.

Another big challenge for us is maintaining profitability and making hard decisions with that in mind. We have an internal rule that we never dip below 6-months of operational costs in the bank, we always have a 6-month runway for our cash burn rate. And by doing this, this allows us to make strategic, rational decisions instead of fear based, quick decisions because we’re worried about making quick revenue. We can keep the long game in mind and make calm, strategic decisions as a business. This is a lot harder said than done, because that means you might not be able to hire your dream employee (right now), or you may have to pass on that great paid PR opportunity and focus on another strategy in the short term, putting off other strategies for the long term. Prioritization is always a challenge.

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?

Collectively, we have over 20 years of experience in marketing, programming, branding, entrepreneurship and higher education. We joined forces in late 2020 because we had a shared vision and interest — the educate and help as many early-stage female entrepreneurs as possible. We knew that this customer needed the most help due to the fact that the 2nd reason small businesses fail is marketing (the 1st is access to capital), which is directly correlated to marketing and sales.

However, while this customer needs the most help, she doesn’t have the resources to hire an expert or an agency to completely handle all of her marketing activities. She can’t outsource it, and oftentimes when she does, she’s not getting the results that she wants. This is because she isn’t driving the strategy and fully understanding the marketing engine. And that’s where Her Brand & Co. comes in. We’ve figured out a way to build and aggregate marketing education under one platform. There are SO many marketing tools and classes on the internet, it’s impossible for our customer to understand where to get started. Not to mention — she has to actually DO the marketing herself. So she’s learning by fire without any guidance.

With all of this said, we saw a huge discrepancy in the market for what she needed vs what was available to her. So we built out a platform and made it completely free, which helps us deliver on our mission to democratize access to marketing education. And then we’ve built a few higher-touch programs to help founders on a deeper level who are ready to take the next step. We’re very excited to launch the next stage of our membership in 2024, which will help us scale the business and provide a membership model experience for customers that doesn’t exist anywhere else. More on that to come. :)

How’d you meet your business partner?

We met through a mutual friend – who, coincidentally – worked for both of us in different companies at different times. We didn’t know each other at the time! Jess had been running the company in a different capacity and under a different name for 3 years, and then when I joined, we decided to rebrand and restructure the business model away from her personal brand to a lifestyle brand that everyone could see themselves in.

We “dated” for about a year before we made it official and launched a formal business entity under a new name, and then we did our due diligence is finding a great attorney to help us with our operating agreement. Many founders go into business with someone because they’re jazzed and excited to partner, but they really don’t do the due diligence on testing if this partner is really the best fit.

Everything is fine while the business makes money and things are “working”, but the quality of the relationship is really tested when you have to pivot, make hard decisions, or have a difference in how you see the growth trajectory. Communication is KEY, and being open with your business partner in the same way you would be open with a spouse, is how we’ve made our relationship successful.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

It took us a couple years to get here, and it started with one of our biggest learnings I talked about earlier in the piece – opening up our platform for free. This was a critical decision in the business that opened up our growth like never before. When we made the decision to make our platform free, we then decided that we would focus exclusively on creating education while we targeted female-oriented communities and groups that excelled at events and other offerings. We knew we had a like-minded audience, and we knew that educational programming wasn’t there core business. However, we knew it would be very complimentary to their events and other offerings.

From there, we pitched that we would give their community exclusive access to our platform for a limited time (this would done via an enrollment period), which ensured that we were getting quality leads on our platform. It was a win-win because they could use our educational as a value-add to their services, and we could grow an engaged and hyper-targeted lead list via the founders on the platform.

From there, we’ve landed large partnerships like Amazon’s Small Business Academy, the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC), and many others. Collectively, these partners have access and trust built with hundreds of thousands of our ideal customers.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://herbrandandco.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/herbrandandco/

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