Hi! I’m Doone, your hype girl in business. This is your weekly source of inspiration & information on all things in the e-commerce and CPG space, read by like-minded Entrepreneurs - that happen to be women - like you. If you find value in this content please like & share above, or forward it to someone in your network. I love it when you do that!

If someone forwarded you this email you can subscribe here:

A Quick Recap on Industry News 🗞

No VC, No Problem: How Bootstrapped Brands grow on their own. Function of Beauty acquires personalized skincare company Atolla. How Fly By Jing gives Chinese cuisine the respect it deserves. Bubble is about to take over your TikTok. What it takes to land wholesale on Bulletin. Los Angeles Venture Capital Leaders out-pacing national funding for women. Divvy Homes Startup (Adena Hefets) $2B valuation on new fundraising round. India mints new billionaire woman. Venus William joins HumanCo’s advisory board.

🔑 Insights From This Week’s Episodes on the Female Startup Club Podcast

Directly from the women building the world’s most exciting businesses in the e-commerce and CPG space.

1. It’s Big, It’s Glass, It’s Heavy 🤯

EP196: Katina knows shipping glass can be a challenge. You learn that lesson quickly when 10% of your Kosterina premium olive oil shipments end up on your customers’ front porches. Ouch.

👉 What do entrepreneurs who ship something like this need to know?

It’s Expensive 💰

Shipping costs are - put simply - going to be much higher. It’s a pretty significant part of getting to your gross margins on your DTC channel.

What does it look like when someone orders one bottle? Two bottles? A case?

It’s an Opportunity 📦

Your shipment doesn’t increase by that much when you add additional bottles; you have more margin to spread over one shipping cost. So why not use this as a chance to create a cool promo for your customers?

It’s Fragile 🍷

Spend money & time figuring out how to safely transport the goods. Working with a packaging designer has seen Kosterina reduce their breakage rate to less than 0.5%. It’s worth it.

2. A Problem Shared = A Problem Halved ❤️

EP197: Azora picks apart the consistent hustle that comes with being a solo entrepreneur, from her personal experience founding Goldune in 2020.

I think we’ve touched on the biggest problem facing female entrepreneurs today. There is increasing awareness around the idea of work life balance and mental health, but you’re also asking the extreme of yourself. How can we do both?

Find a safe space to have conversations. A problem shared, really is, a problem halved. Whether it’s an executive coach. Therapist. Your family. Hype Club (our recommendation). Find that place where you really feel supported.

FSC Mini-Series 🍷 from the Founder

In this new mini-series within the FSC podcast, I’m taking you on the journey while I develop my non-alc wine brand and build it in public. I will be sharing what’s happening in real-time, including the mistakes we learn along the way.

Part 4: The survey that got 100s of responses in 48 hrs 📈

For this episode, I hosted a mini-masterclass in how we approached our customer survey for the non-alc wine brand. This step was so critical for us to get those gems and nuggets that we might’ve otherwise overlooked. We’ll cover the questions, what we did well & what we would do differently next time.

Content 🧐

This is basically the survey that we did. Feel free to copy it if you feel it’s valuable to you. It could be considered long (it takes a few good minutes), but really worked for us.

Tips ✏️

We received 212 responses in under 48 hours and were pretty chuffed with that. Here are some tips that allowed us to ensure a strong response rate & great quality of the information we received.

• Snowballing: we three founders sent the survey to a bunch of people we knew, with a prompt for them to send it to at least one friend - this helped spread the demographic far beyond our individual circles

• Staying Incognito: anonymous surveys are much better in fetching honest answers, allowing you to collect real feedback to transcribe into accurate data

• If you want… However, we did provide a space for respondents to give their email should they want to hear from us in the future - & with 76 filling this out we have a fab group of highly engaged beta users for the next stage!

• Thought Box: a free text field box at the end of the survey provided a space for people to fully express their thoughts and notes on our concept

• Go, go, go! Lastly, the survey doesn’t need to be perfect. Get it together, get it out, and get working with those insights.

Next Time… 🤔

In the Hype Club last week, our Modern Mentor Kailey Bradt (from Susteau) dished out some tips when it comes to creating surveys. One thing that really stuck with me (that we did not do):

I personally think this is such a great idea. In hindsight I would love to be able to take that approach, but such is life.

🎧 Tune in next Saturday for the next part of the journey!

Biz Failz 🎢

Here’s a few crackers straight from Hype Club.

We’ve got an ongoing Biz Wins & Fails chat going in HC. But tbh… The fails are far more interesting than the highlights. This is where we can learn and hopefully avoid in our own journeys, and what keeps us feeling like we are not in this alone. A lot of us are seeing a lot of highlights, but there are so many downs and things that go wrong.

Larissa from Henrie shared a fail this week:

“I waited months and spent $2000 on express shipping to get our previous round of samples, rushed to our design agency to drop them off (so they can work on the packaging) and when I got home realized they were made in the wrong dimensions.”

However, as a nice reminder that when one door closes another opens…

“We just got the latest batch in (and found a much cheaper way to ship) so the ball is rolling again. Our next delivery should be the golden sample.”

Shouting It Out 📢

I want to take a minute to tell you about one brand from a woman in the Hype Club that is just so. much. fun. SwearBy Skin. Futuristic, dreamy, lilac purple, ultra-cool LED face mask that does all the things that you want a face mask to do. Anti-aging-acne-pigmentation. All of that good stuff.

It’s super different from all the face tech stuff I’ve seen on the market recently. So if you’re on the lookout for the next cool thing, this is it. It’s totally Tiktok-worthy & results-driven, and you’ll be supporting a female-founded small biz doing cool stuff that’s worth talking about.

And if you want to get in on this Hype Club action, come say hi! The only requirement is you must be actively working on your own ecommerce biz.

*Our pricing is currently $59 per month, cancel anytime.

What’s on this week? 👀

Let’s see what we have in store for you this week…

TUES: Kailey Donewald from Sacred Serve - innovating ice cream 🍨

THURS: Allison Ellsworth from Poppi - the fun(ctional) prebiotic soda for all 🥤

SAT: Doone’s back - Part 5 of the non-alc wine brand journey 🍷

Click here to tune in! 🎧

What to Read, What to Listen to 🤔

📚 Healing Begins in the Sanctification of the Heart, by Dr. M. K. Strydom: discover the foundation of all diseases with insight into the spiritual, psychological, and physical mechanisms behind disease.

🎧 The Tim Ferris Show, with (you guessed it) Tim Ferris: the guy that wrote the 4-hour workweek now hosts Apple Podcasts’ #1 Business Podcast.

Job Alert Time! 💼

Check out these cool job listings on our radar:

USA 🇺🇸

• We’re hiring! We're looking for a U.S based Tiktok creator. Said creator simply needs to be a Tiktok user that understands the platform, has fingers on the pulse of trends + pop culture and has a keen interest in ExPeRiMeNtInG. No following required. Just hit reply.

Remote 🌎

• ThingTesting, your guide to new brands, is always looking for exceptional people to join their team. Think you can help shape their future? Apply.

• Equilibria is the premium CBD brand for the modern woman, and they’re on the lookout for a bunch of people to join their growing team. Check it out.

Byron Bay 🏄🏻‍♂️

• Standard Procedure, the Aussie sun & skincare brand, is looking for an Operations and eCommerce Assistant. Check out the listing here.

PS:

Tell me something… What would you do with $1000 no strings attached grant money? Just hit reply. 👋