Hey! It’s Doone, your hype girl in biz…. Today we’re covering 👇

• ✨ How to DIY your website on a budget

• ✨ Invest time over $$$ to build your waitlist with this formula

• ✨ Dreamy collabs & fun launches: all the news this week

• ✨ $10,000 Grant for Canadian biz owners + 5 juicy recs!

• ✨ Oula has a remote job op + 3 others

“The most simple website can make a lot of money” 👀

Ready to dive into the world of e-commerce but feeling overwhelmed by the idea of building your own website? Same. But it’s ok because Katie’s here to spill the tea on how to DIY your Shopify website on a limited budget.

When you start a biz, everyone’s trying to sell you something. The reality is if you blow your budget on a super fancy website with all the bells and whistles, you won’t have the budget needed to sell your products (aka marketing).

The truth of the matter: the most simple website can make a lot of money.

SO, don’t get caught up trying to make your site look like Zara’s a glossy mag. You’d be surprised by how much you can DIY. Yes, you can build a functional, attractive website on your own, Shopify has come a srsly long way:

1. Start Scrappy: operate on the zero dollar budget mindset to keep it scrappy. Start with doing what you can with free resources and templates to get started

2. Trade Tricks: focus on show-casing your best-selling products at the top and feature glowing reviews (check out Tolstoy for this!); (hot tip: any ads you run should go straight to the product page—making it super easy for your customers to purchase from there on out—not your homepage)

3. Simplicity is Key: there’s a certain navigation style people expect and deviating far from that can be confusing; find your faves & replicate. Ignore embellishment and customising anything. We hear on repeat this is wasted money - especially in the early days before you’ve found product market fit

4. Test Your UX: Make sure your website is supppppper easy to navigate; the easiest way to do this is to ask a friend (in your demographic) to have a go. The goal is to get your customer to the info they need asap (so they can checkout and bring that dreamy Shopify DING to your ears!)

5. Keep Learning: There are sooo online tutorials and communities ready to help you master Shopify (ilovecreatives & squarestylist). And Katie is always sharing great stuff on her channels right here.

Meet Katie on the podcast 👋 

PS: Hit reply to this email with any questions or topics you want us to cover in our next episode with Katie.

🍒 ICYMI: Try it out for free here 🍒

Building your email waitlist (to 20,000) 💌

From experience (💅) building your email list is all about creating irresistible content series on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. These are your free golden tickets to drive traffic to your link in bio, where people can download a high-value freebie in exchange for their email. For example… Our best-performing lead magnet was a grant document tailored for female founders and early-stage business owners (you know the one). It was a hit! And it still drives leads. Here's the secret sauce:

• Up Your Content Game ✨ I focused on building my TikTok and IG accounts with videos about grants, and they became a bit of a vibe: this engagement drove video virality and that gave me insight on what to create and double down on (enter our Grant Tracker!)

• Automate 🤖 Once I had the idea, we whipped up the grant doc and I set up a landing page to capture emails in return for the download: people would click the link in my bio, drop their email, and receive access to the document automatically (tools like Beehiiv, ManyChat and Zapier are lifesavers here—they keep the process seamless and hands-off)

• Test Before Invest(ing time) ⏰ Take step 1 seriously seriously: don’t spend 20 hours creating something that might flop (use quick, MVP-style approaches to test what your audience wants; spend an hour tops whipping something up and see if it works, if it flops, move on)

• Rinse and Repeat 🔁 Once you’ve found your magic formula; repeat the process and go again, the key is consistency!

And there you have it. With a bit of creativity and a lot of consistency, you can build an email waitlist that’s the envy of the internet. For time instead of money. Go get 'em! 💪✨

Listen to the full breakdown on the pod →

• Walmart has opened their annual Open Call for US brands

• How Starface’s lip balm launch is already a hit pre-launch

• Love Shack Fancy x Stanley is a collab I can get behind

• BTS of EssilorLuxottica’s $1.5B acquisition of Supreme

• This anonymous dating companion app makes dating safer

• It’s bad news for *us* trying to eradicate the gender pay gap

• The brand doing $1.1M in sales in just 3 months on Amazon

• Historic $250M deal for this highest-valued women sports team

• The one place IRL still matters is in luxury shopping

• SeenCulture raises a $1 million pre-Seed round

• Confessions from the fundraising trenches

Resources & Reccies 👀

Female-founded side hustles and remote jobs you can work alongside building your ✨dream biz✨:

REMOTE 🏝️

• Oula, redesigning maternity care from the ground up, is hiring a Business Development & Partnerships Manager | APPLY HERE.

ON THE SIDE 🐥

• Boston-based subscription food service Wild Grain is on the hunt for someone to take on their Organic Social strategy | APPLY HERE.

• Online artist marketplace Minted is looking for a part-time contractor to work on Brand Communications within media | APPLY HERE.

✨ That’s a wrap!