Meet Jessica: Mompreneur + Startup Guru
When Jessica and I crossed paths on Instagram, the stars truly aligned! She shares a passion for empowering women that is so unashamedly genuine- her brand glows because she glows by being 100% herself. She wants all women to experience success in their entrepreneurial endeavors and is a true source of wisdom for all of us. Take her advice and run with it!
1. Can you share a little of your journey with who you are?
My journey into entrepreneurship really just kind of happened to me by accident, really. I was working at Bloomingdale's. I had dreams to go to New York. That was my plan. I was on my way, and then a girlfriend of mine who worked at corporate called me one day told me she had really shitty news. She told me they would be cutting jobs corporate wide. My whole job would be eliminated.
That’s how corporate America goes. This is how the agency that my husband and I started came about- he had the technology background, and I had the PR/ Marketing background- we were all in to do our own thing! Within a weekend, we built our first website (it was total crap), and then we started the agency that Monday morning. It then really grew organically over four years with my clients- they were coming to us!
I came to a point where I hit a ceiling, and I never could figure out why. And it wasn't until I put my all into entrepreneurship that I realized: oh- this is my tribe! These are my people! In a traditional sense, I had never really understood what it meant to own a business or be a founder. It wasn't something that I grew up knowing, or knowing everything about.
When I became a mom, it shifted my perspective once more. Prior to starting SoHuis, I was working at a nonprofit organization as a director of marketing. It was a good organization that supported entrepreneurship all over the world! I really got to see entrepreneurial ecosystems start and grow. We did work with the European Union and with the US Department of State! We would help bring entrepreneurs from Europe and Central America into the US and teach them how to expand into the US market.
I was there for about a year or so, and I ended up leaving, because it just wasn't a good environment for me anymore, just personally and professionally. SoHuis started out as a brand consultancy, but with my daughter getting older, I started realizing very quickly that time is money. Consulting is not scalable. And quite frankly, is not very rewarding either.
I really wanted to set out to create a digital product that could be scaled to turn it into something really interesting. I took time to reflect on all the work I’d done over the past 10 years. A lot of the workshops and things that I do for my clients and a lot of the conversations I had were always asking me the same stuff such as: how do you build a brand? How do I know who my customer is? How do I communicate to my customer? Which platform should I be on?
I never thought that creating an online course would be something I would be doing. But I just started thinking outside the box and asking myself: what can I do to scale content? What's really working? What's not working? The Lean Startup methodology is a big part of what I do. The founder Eric Reis has been around for a long time. It's only until recent history that it's become an entrepreneurial thing to do. Basically, Lean refers to trying to maximize resources and output as much as possible- eliminate waste. As an entrepreneur, a lot of the problems that founders have is that they don't know their priorities of what to focus on first. So one of the principles of The Lean Startup is to prioritize what's going to give you the most output. For example, don't spend a year building an app that you're not sure anybody wants! Get out there and validate those ideas and test for buy in and fail and learn as quickly as possible so that you can make sure that you're maximizing resources.
My theory was that if I developed a comprehensive course, that touched on all these subjects, I think that founders would really enjoy it. Particularly, I love serving female founders. It's just a passion of mine as a part of my DNA. In light of Lean Startup, I sent out a test- just because you as the founder thinks it's a good idea, doesn't mean others will think the same. I told myself that if 25 people ended up signing up for this free beta program for the course to test it, then I'll go ahead and create it. I had over 100 people sign up for the beta!
As a result, SoHuis has moved out of consulting and is now framework for teaching female founders through core curriculum and others like free curated content how to brand a new business.
2. Tell us about the mission of your brand. How does it empower women?
My mission is really simple. The Marketing and Communications landscape is super confusing, and it just keeps getting more confusing with the new algorithms rule and so on. My purpose is to declutter and streamline to completely cut away all of the bullshit that’s related to marketing particularly for females!
As women, we get caught up with trying to be perfect, or our website needs to be perfect, or our logo needs to be exactly right. Oftentimes, that fear just actually does more harm than good. So part of the course, the first half of the course, is actually all about Lean. It’s about teaching the course participants how to rethink their business- their approach to marketing and what failure actually means. The goal is just to empower them to be able to build a brand that they have an idea for without knowing how to get there.
3. What is the biggest challenge you've had to pass press through as a female entrepreneur, and what are the steps you had to take to overcome it?
Personally, I'm not only my a female entrepreneur, but I'm a solo founder- I don't have a co founder, or a team. I’m kind of in my own head as a result. So I would say the isolation of being an entrepreneur has been something that I've struggled a lot with. I didn't at the time have anyone I could bounce ideas off of. Everything was from my point of view, and you can't do that, as an entrepreneur. You have to have diverse points of view!
To overcome this, I just reached out to good friends and acquaintances. In fact, I started just really loving Instagram and cultivating a community with two or three women on Instagram that I've never even met in person! But we have like minded interests, and we follow each other’s stuff plus it’s genuine when we share each other’s posts! They are basically my unspoken advisory board for myself!
4. What sets your brand apart from others?
The actual product piece of my brand is set apart because I tried to make it very affordable! As cheesy as it might seem, I genuinely think that what sets the brand apart is that the brand is just 100% authentically needed, and it isn’t trying to be anything else other than what it is. Ultimately, my brand exists to serve female founders who are typically at an idea stage, or they have a really small business! My brand doesn't really serve giant institutions or CEOs of large companies. Could they? Could they take the course? Sure, but my brand doesn't exist to do that!
You definitely don't have to be a mom to I take my course either. However, I am a mother of a young child who's trying to run a business and has a million other things to do so I do want to empower other moms to be able to run their business in a successful, strategic way!
5. How do you collaborate with others working towards a better world?
Collaboration is probably the number one thing that I always have set my sights on. I'm collaborating with a bunch of different people who have similar interests in order to create courses together, even webinars, E-books, and blog series! There's all kinds of ways to make sure that you're creating super valuable content, and really serving your audience.
My idea of a better world for my mission is that women feel empowered to be able to build brands that they're really really proud of!
6. What advice would you give for female entrepreneurs in the beginning stages of launching their brand or business this question?
There's so much I could say, but the number one thing I would say is that it doesn't need to be perfect. You have to start with the vision you have, and you cannot let your fear of failure, or the concern about failure stop you from starting! The biggest thing I would say is you just have to start! If you never start, you're never going to get there. Part of the Lean methodology that I really like to follow is you have to learn as you go- you're not going to get it right the first time so you should just remove the idea that you're going to launch this perfect business, because it's literally not going to happen.
The faster you launch, the faster you can actually learn from and listen to your customers and the feedback that you're receiving. You have be open to customer feedback as well!
Check out her free guide to finding your target audience here!