Building a New Business in 30 Days
I blog a lot about tapping into your passion and purpose, and how your entire life can change once you KNOW what you’re meant to do.
Once you do, you can do things like launch an entire new business in 30 days.
The Brownie Bites super over-simplified takeaway is this:
1. Build what does not exist today that you wish existed, because YOU need it.
2. Find a Co-Founder or Collaborator. It’s a lot easier and honestly…I wish I had known that for my prior businesses.
3. Crawl, walk, run. Take everything in steps, like climbing a mountain. If you try to do everything perfect and all at once, you won’t even begin. If you look at the list of 1,000+ things to do, you won’t start. Look at the first 5, and take it day by day.
When you know, you know. (And don’t worry, I’ll get into how I knew later on in this blog).
But for now, let me tell you about how 30 days ago, I had an empty WordPress site that still said “hello world!”
And now my Co-Founder and I have a fully functioning Ecommerce business ready to help women optimize their health. We’ll be soft-launching next Sunday.
Whew. Let’s get into how all this came to be, and lessons YOU can take away to make your dream happen.
For me, my vision required a collaborator.
Our Story
Co-Founder At First Sight
For the first half of 2024 I had a basic overarching idea.
In consulting, I like to call it the “umbrella”–the big picture of what I want to DO, and the audience I want to serve.
I knew I wanted to help women look and feel better, age well, and extend the time of their fertility (pretty bold but, hey). But I had some grand visions I knew I couldn’t launch on my own.
When I met Maddy Cunningham, she was building her OWN company with biomarkers and testing to help women conceive but was unsure how to make her bold vision a reality.
Maddy and I both had shared our frustrations with being gaslit and shamed by doctors…and how clinical and, well, masculine, all the current health testing companies are. We both said how much we wished a company existed that conducted biomarker testing, but also had personalized recommendations and a nurturing community. Something more holistic…and aligned with both of values.
That’s when Maddy and I said to each other, well,
Perhaps we need to build it.
We just knew.
Lessons from a Hike Up a Mountain
Maddy and I knew this was exactly what we needed to do, so we didn’t waste any time getting started. We decided to block off the entire weekend of July 4th to work on the business.
On Friday we hiked this mountain trail that was supposed to be super easy–in and out within an hour.
Nope. It was more like, I’m going to say 3 and a half hours.
Though I have brain fog on it since it was about 85 degrees with high humidity and it was essentially a scramble up a steep cliff the entire time.
I’m sort of exaggerating.
But it was not a simple hike.
PERFECT.
What a metaphor for building a company!!!
Yeah. Building a business in 30 days is like climbing a mountain path that was supposed to be an easy hour in and out, but turns out to be a vertical climb with sweat pouring into your eyes, and it keeps going and going and going and you are out of water and your dog is tired and you are getting bit by bugs and everything hurts. (And yep I purposely run-on sentenced that, so you can get a gist of what it is like).
Then you get to the top and it is bliss. Pure elation. Remembering what is on the other side of building is business is important.
By the end of the weekend we had a basic company formed, and the basic idea of who the audience was and what the products would be.
But we had some frustrations.
It took me, no lie, 5 tries to get shareholder documents correct. It was a comedy of errors. I changed the Articles of Amendment for a company I had formed last year (and did nothing with, welcome to entrepreneur life).
The 3 products we originally came up with were modified (pretty significantly) over the course of a week.
The details of how we would serve our products and creating the Website fluctuated.
It took me an entire week to get into my Google workspace because of something ridiculous. We spent an hour on the phone with Stripe because we couldn’t get into our account.
And all this, my friends, is what a startup is.
So the first lesson, if you want to build a business in 30 days, is you need to let some shit go.
Everything Changed, Except the “North Star.”
When you are creating a new business, none of the details are concrete (and it’s ok!)
But you need to be VERY clear about what the purpose of the business is.
In consulting, I call this the “North Star.”
I legit start all my consulting projects off with this, in fact, I REQUIRE it as the first step in any gig. I can’t create a marketing plan, or digital strategy, or optimize your ecommerce store if I am not crystal clear who you serve, and what is your higher purpose as a brand or business.
It starts with truly building for your audience, and what THEY need.
You cannot be all things to all people, so it’s helpful to keep your audience niche (but not too niche!).
Here’s where it gets scary:
You quite frankly, have no idea what your audience is going to like the most about your offerings, (even if you’ve done all the research in the world, or, in Maddy and I’s case…we were being asked for the services).
The reality is, you don’t know until you launch.
So waiting until everything is perfect before launch is counterintuitive.
You are creating as you go. It sort of goes like this..you start writing the “about us” page and….the idea starts changing. You start putting together the products and you’re like…hmmm, wait. Can we even DO that? Or create it? Or make it happen?
The answer to a lot is NOPE, or not now, or not worth it.
You start filtering out everything by whether you think the audience will prioritize it. And then, my friends,
you publish it.
YEP YOU DO. EVEN WHEN YOU ARE NOT SURE.
Even when you think you are going to throw up with nerves!
You just do it. Because it is the only way to start.
If you don’t get it out there you don’t know what needs to evolve.
This is where my expertise as a serial entrepreneur comes in:
You cannot steer a car unless you are driving.
Get something out there, and modify it.
Launch something.
If anything becomes too challenging to figure out (right now), that shit gets de-prioritized.
Everything is “Figureoutable,” as Marie Forleo says.
Making it Happen
So back to that mountain. We knew it was going to take a lot more time than we thought, have more frustrations than planned, and take a lot of steps.
We self-imposed this deadline for the end of July which was kind of at the edge of crazy.
But we both knew we had to keep the momentum strong.
I’ve been down this path before.
I’ve helped with more than 100 launches, including one for Johnson and Johnson at the White House. The key is to do a little every day–every day, including weekends.
But, you must leave time for balance. Some of you know I can get a little woo-woo about things, and I truly believe that how you feel when you build something reflects in the entire energy and vibe of the company. If you’re a big stressball when you create…the business might always feel chaotic.
I refuse to let chaos into my life, although I do like adventures.
Maddy and I took breaks, including walking down Newbury Street to get organic smoothies from Mother Juice. I spent a lot of time in my pool, thinking. When I walked my dog, I recorded voice memos of ideas. Maddy would do the same when driving.
The two of us spilt up the tasks, and some tasks required both of us to sit and create together, because we were forming the brand. The combination of our voices becomes the fuel of the company, and there is no other way to do that but simply spend the time to do it.
We only did a few things each day, yet it was every single day since July 4.
And here it is, July 21 and honestly, we are basically ready to go live. The only holdup is a few of the offline things and the social media and content planning.
Want to know the best part?
We built a business that is scalable, and one that will eventually enable passive income.
All businesses require a solid foundation: one that protects you as you grow.
If you’ve been a consulting client of mine, you know one of my favorite sayings when I talk about scalability is: “don’t buy a 2-seater Porsche as your only car if you’re pregnant with twins.” Meaning, if you know you are going to grow your family or business in the future, make decisions now that scale in the future.
So…we built it our website on wordpress allowing us to scale it and have the commerce on our site, with lower transaction fees.
And we set up all the accounts as if we were a multi-million dollar company already, ensuring we had partners and vendors in place for when we started transacting a lot.
We are so very small right now, just the two of us, and I have a feeling within the next month we’ll need to hire, since we are already getting asked by clients when we are launching.
I’d just love to wake up one day to a stripe notification of 100k in sales and call Maddy (or text her, since she’s a millennial) to say, “hey, we’re going to need to hire a few people in the next day to help box and ship all these lab kits…”
Bring it on.
We launch next Sunday, July 28, 2024. I’ll announce it on LinkedIn first.
