SPEAKER_02 0:00

I love being able to build behind the scenes. I love being able to see something from start to finish and my idea come to life. And that's really what I get to do all the time in building my business. And I I love it. I love building a team. I really love the operations behind building a business. So I realized that was lighting me up and having to like put myself on camera every single day wasn't. I want my community to still know I'm behind the brand, but moving more into like CEO, founder, and not just having to show up every single day on camera.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

Hi, Huntresses.

SPEAKER_03 0:36

This is Talk Rich to me.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Where we get more comfortable talking about money and dealing with money.

SPEAKER_03 0:43

Brought to you by Huntress Wealth. 71% of women are investing, but only one in six feels confident about where she's headed. Huntress is the all-in-one financial app built to help you make a plan, get actionable steps, and build your wealth. Join the wait list at HuntressWealth.com and get good with money.

SPEAKER_02 1:14

Hi, thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

And this is the third in our series on entrepreneurship. We're talking about a whole other way to do it that can only exist in the age of new media.

SPEAKER_02 1:25

So, first, let's start with a little bit about you. We're a digital media business that is a go-to non-toxic living platform. At our core, we're educating our community on ingredients and then the best products to buy on the market, both online and in retailers. We started as a restaurant Instagram account in New York City in 2014 and did that for about six years as a hobby, passion project. I was an event planner during that time and then actually got diagnosed with a rare disease. And that led me to becoming a health coach where I wanted to share what I was learning with more people. And so I learned all about ingredients, started caring about what I was putting in and on my body, turning over food packaging and reading the ingredients and seeing what was actually in the products versus what was on the front with the marketing. I kind of went into health coaching school with the idea that I wanted to start a food product. I started networking with a bunch of different food founders, really learning about the space, realized that starting a food brand is not for me, but that's kind of what fed my love into products and discovery and founders. And it kind of pivoted into more of an educational content platform at the start of 2020. And then over time has just grown into a digital media business, spanning Instagram, Pinterest, Substack, which is our newsletter, and our website.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

Yeah. And then the timing of the pandemic, I'm sure, helped also transition from like restaurant focused to product focused.

SPEAKER_02 3:01

Yeah, it was at the start. I actually tried doing recipes for a little bit, realized really quickly that recipes were not my thing and it wasn't my passion, and just started sharing more content around the best products to buy, swaps to make, and started with food and beverage and really dialed in on that as a category. And then my community kept asking for swaps around beauty products, household products. And I educated myself in that space for about a year on ingredients because they're completely different than food and bev. And from there moved into supplements and now cover a whole gamut of different categories that touch human to pet health.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

Oh, is it like being a creator? You had the day job. When was the first time that you made money from content?

SPEAKER_02 3:43

Yeah, it was definitely a hobby. I was living in York at the time. So the goal was to be able to eat for free at restaurants and while working full-time and not making that much money in the city. It was really at the start of Instagram too. When we started, Instagram stories didn't exist, reels didn't exist, and it was just such a different space at that time. So it was really focused on photos at restaurants. I worked with a bunch of restaurants and then did get some paid partnerships, like towards the end of restaurant blogging.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

Well, and hopefully free food. Like, did it work?

SPEAKER_02 4:14

There was a lot of free food, but it was actually interesting because I I started to eat out three to four to five times a week and for free. It just was hurting my health more than helping it, especially when I was getting diagnosed. So I just realized like I wasn't authentically showing up and my passion wasn't in the restaurant space.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

Well, and it's hard to know the ingredients and stuff in that. Like you're not like gonna go in and grill a chef every time.

SPEAKER_02 4:38

Yeah, and that circles back to how I still live my life. It's this thought about balance. So I absolutely love food. And so I don't think you ever have to limit yourself when you go to a restaurant. It's more about enjoy yourself when you go out and do the best you can at home. And that's the philosophy I live by. And I still go out to eat. I love now I live in Austin, so I love going to try all the new restaurants here. And when I travel, I never limit myself. It is really hard to know what you're you're eating. And now it's definitely a lot more in moderation. It was a really good pivot for me and my health as well.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Like I know one of your core principles on this is like not diet culture, not shame culture. Your language specifically on non-toxic is intentionally this neutral language. You're very data-driven on all of this, right?

SPEAKER_02 5:23

Yeah, absolutely. It's this idea around small changes add up, and you don't need to go and overhaul your entire life and go out and spend thousands of dollars changing everything in your home just when you run out of something, make a small change. If you know you are using something every single day on your body in your kitchen, like your cookware, maybe it's a good idea to swap it to something better, but you don't have to do it all at once. And it's this idea about progress over perfection, which is honestly how I live my lifestyle. I'm on year like eight of living a non-toxic lifestyle, and I'm still making changes to this day.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

I think this notion of it is a process and a lifestyle and not a project or the one-time shot in the arm is true for both money and the wellness space in total. As Huntress, we're always like, we're beyond the budget. Budgeting is a very like helpful tool, but a lot of people do it beyond when that tool is helpful.

SPEAKER_02 6:16

Yeah. Both of what we do is all about that. And I think we come from it from a very approachable way, from an empowerment place and not ashamed place and not making you feel bad about you know what you're using or how you're spending your money. I think that is just such a big differentiator in both in what both of us do.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

There's like nothing wrong with where you are now. Yeah, nothing. But like once you kind of know better and have the opportunity to do differently, then like you do so.

SPEAKER_02 6:41

Yeah, and we're both about you know, providing the knowledge and knowledge is power. And that is my whole thing. It's like have the knowledge and then use it how you want. You know, everyone is coming to our platform, different budgets, different lifestyles. We understand that and understand that what you might be coming to our platform for is very different than what I might be. So picking and choosing what works for you.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

And I like that you have a tool where people can submit for a review. And I feel like that's like such a customer-led way of doing things.

SPEAKER_02 7:09

Yeah. I mean, community has always been at our core since day one. Already doing educational content. I've been doing QA's pretty much every single, every single week. I do community poll engagements. I'm trying to understand like what can we do better for you? What are you liking about our platform? And something I was constantly getting in the DMs was is this is this brand approved? Is this product approved? And I'm the one that people are talking to. I realized, like, you know, if I'm answering one person, but 10 other people might want to know about that same brand, that same product, there has to be a better way. So we actually started integrating into our Substacks, um, both brands that are approved and brands that are not approved in two different Substack newsletters, but just as a way to be able to get the information out to more people.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

When did you realize like this was the business? When did it start to be like I can make an income this way?

SPEAKER_02 7:56

It was definitely a few years after deciding I'm gonna go all in because obviously COVID did change things with event planning. I was freelancing, decided to leave New York and move back home, actually moved back in with my mom for a little bit, saved money, and while I was living with her, I was able to actually put all my energy and effort into building something, trying things. Um, that was when TikTok was taking off. So definitely a couple years of really putting all in, all my eggs in the basket of I want to be my own boss, I want to run my own company. I started to realize how much I loved working for myself. Yeah. Um, which has obviously changed with being able to now have a team, but I've realized at the end of the day, I absolutely love building a business. And it definitely didn't just happen overnight. It took a lot of years of consistency.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Something I was fascinated about when I first met you was your insight into seeing that this needed to be more than you. And you're very, very conscious on where you are showing up in the brand versus building the brand on its own. Can you talk about that a little bit?

SPEAKER_02 8:59

Yeah. So I made a decision a couple years ago to move away from being fully a personal brand, but still, like you said, keeping my standards, my vetting all at the forefront. I want my community to still know I'm behind the brand, but moving more into like CEO, founder, and not just having to show up every single day on camera. I kind of realized that it was sucking my energy to have to be on camera every single day. I love being able to build behind the scenes. And I think that's why I loved event planning so much too, was I love being able to see something from start to finish and my idea come to life. And that's really what I get to do all the time in building my business. And I I love it. I love building a team. I really love the operations behind building a business. So I realized that was lighting me up and having to like put myself on camera every single day wasn't. So I'm still really strategic and I still show up. I I'm on the feed, like I still want people to know I'm I'm behind the brand. And I am, and I I bet every single piece of content that goes out, every single thing that my team is doing, I am overseeing everything. I'm making all decisions. So upholding those standards, which also makes us so unique and and still showing up but in a in a different way.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

You do have a good-sized team now. When did you make the first hire?

SPEAKER_02 10:15

Ooh, I feel like it was two years into going full-time, but it was more for graphic design and getting just like templates and and website and website uh creative. But over the past two years, when I've really decided to build out something bigger so that I can actually focus on the care is the business that I need to be in while having help and support. How big is it now?

SPEAKER_01 10:40

I think we're nine. How do you think about that financially? We don't have to like say exact numbers or anything, but this is your business, right? Like, how do you think about like paying yourself versus investing in the business?

SPEAKER_02 10:53

I realized in order to be able to grow and scale and do everything I want to do because I'm an executor, I needed to bring on people that I trusted and that could help me in areas that I could delegate out to so that I could stay in the place of helping with like random partnerships, you know, overseeing content strategy, doing more like deep work and also growth work. It's so unpredictable in our space because it's not like you have a paycheck and you get a salary payment every single month, which can be scary, but at the same time does light a fire because you know, I do have a team to pay and that's my number one priority. And I want to make sure that they're all set up for success. So it kind of just differs month to month just based on what's coming in, but I always am putting money back into the business. And I would say hiring a team is definitely my biggest expense, but it's the best thing I ever did. There's just no way I'd be able to get done what we do by myself.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

Yeah. And so I know y'all were primarily on Instagram, and you've mentioned several other platforms now. What prompted going out to other platforms?

SPEAKER_02 11:59

Yeah, I think well, Instagram's just been my bread and butter since you know 2014. So I know it really well. It's an amazing platform, uh, especially for what we do with like being able to share our content, save our content, engage, and really actually know who your community is and who you're serving. So that is always like number one platform for us. And then we had a newsletter that was something we started honestly right when we launched our website to own the emails versus Instagram, Pinterest is all rented space. If you lost your platform one day, everything could be could be gone. Right now, SubSec is completely different strategy and content than Instagram because it is longer format. You can actually explain why we are recommending this product. We can go deeper with brands. Um and Pinterest, I think it's a slept-on platform, and I think it's amazing for the kind of type of content we do. At first, it was kind of more of like a repurpose strategy, and let's just use the content we're already creating and make it for Pinterest. And now we have a whole Pinterest strategy. So it's definitely a really great discovery platform. And with Pinterest, people are getting off of the platform versus TikTok and Instagram are keeping you on there. And so it's just also a very different strategy with content there.

SPEAKER_01 13:06

I'm just fascinated with your business. I've already fascinated with the like creator economy, but where you've taken it is just like kind of next level. So you have, you know, brand partnerships, um, mostly affiliate relationships, right? Various. We do a lot of paid partnerships, and then we also do affiliate. Okay. And every single one like you've negotiated, you have relationships with these brands. Uh did you always like show up from the beginning with knowing what to go negotiate with brands? It's very much so with sales jobs. I'm like very fascinated.

SPEAKER_02 13:42

It's 100% a sales job. Yeah. Um, and I think building relationships, it especially with brand partners, is so, so important. I think I learned that early on when I worked at my first company. I worked in digital media and I was working with brands on events really scrappily. And I kind of learned early on like the relationship to have brands is imperative to success. So that was kind of number one like importance for me when I was bringing in brand partners work with us. Something I also decided early on was that I wanted to keep everything in-house. So I wanted these relationships to be in-house. I didn't want to have an external agency pitching us, you know, not having access to the emails, the contacts, these were, especially if it was relationships I was handing over to them. It's relationships I built. Now that's really where I stand as head of partnerships and and overseeing all the partnerships that come in alongside my team. But that's what we're doing also with is unique in the space. And I think a lot of brands are still putting us in like the influencer bucket or in the publisher bucket, and we're really at this unique intersection. And so I get on calls as much as possible brands to really explain to them, especially aligned partners, like what are we doing and make sure that we're fully aligned and it's not like you're just like producing three reels or something.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

That's a kind of a standard brand partnership relationship. You have a whole marketplace that people can go shop brands that you've researched and studied and have relationships with. It's not just your grid that people are shopping from.

SPEAKER_02 15:12

Yeah, we built out a little less than two years ago a product marketplace on our website. So over 5,000 Girl Suite approved products organized by subcategories to help our community shop easier. But it is like this combination of influencer, publisher, and market application. There's so many like creator-led businesses now, and that's definitely big in the space. But in terms of what we're doing, like I call it like new wave digital media because there really isn't, and I'll talk to people that have been like legacy media companies and they're not familiar with kind of the newer platforms. And then I talk to people that are on the influencer space and they're not familiar as much with it with the publishing platforms. And it is like this kind of new space that we've created. I always like to think like what can we be doing differently, yeah, uniquely? What is our unique value prop and what you know is gonna help people as much as possible? Cause at the end of the day, like that's my number one goal is help as many people as possible, take their health into their own hands, and then and then secondly, we're business.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

No, you have the passion of making again the decision that this wasn't a creator brand and not just about you, and this is building the Girls Who E brand. Do you see this as a business that like could be sold? Or is this like always Jamie at the heart of it?

SPEAKER_02 16:24

It's something I've thought about. I mean, I think about a lot of different things. Eventually, could it be that? But there's also so many other paths that it could be as well that I I think could be really exciting.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

Like what?

SPEAKER_02 16:36

Can't share.

SPEAKER_01 16:37

Okay, okay. All right, you cover a whole lot more than food now. But your latest segment is travel and hospitality. Tell us more.

SPEAKER_02 16:46

Yeah. So we just launched travel about a coup two weeks ago at the beginning of April. Um, you know, again, led from our community. I always share my trips and travels. I'm a big traveler. Get tons of questions, and I realized like I'm doing all this research, you know, I'm looking into better hotels, better properties that are putting wellness travel at the forefront.

SPEAKER_01 17:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:07

And no one was really bringing our non-toxic standards to the travel space. You know, you have companies that are doing amazing travel content around like boutique hotels or or highlighting wellness properties, but no one really doing a deep dive in asking the hotels for transparency and more about the products they're using and the air when you walk into the lobby if fragrance is being pumped through, you know, the HVAC. So we realize there's this big white space to highlight these hotels that are doing it better. How do you even tackle that? So we started by actually building out what are our standards first. And with travel, it's a bit different than Food and Bev and all CPG products, because with that, we can actually look at every single ingredient in CPG and say, this has 0.01% of ingredient we don't approve of, so it's not a fit. With travel, it's a bit different, right? So we had to kind of set different tiers up. So we started with the standards, we created a tier system. So if a hotel meets our property meets, you know, one standard, they're in our lowest tier, but there's room for improvement. If they have two to three standards met, they're in our middle tier. And then if they have anywhere from three to ten of our standards, they're in our highest tier. We're not saying you have to meet every single one of our standards, especially with hotels. Like I understand that they're very different than consumer. And so we built tier systems and who we think could meet within those standards. And then we actually reached out to over 400 hotels.

SPEAKER_01 18:33

How do how are you approaching it?

SPEAKER_02 18:35

Yeah. So we built out a form um, you know, custom for what we're building and are having hotels fill it out. It's actually been very interesting who will fill it out and who won't. Um, but that's kind of the first step. And then we are hoping to, you know, visit more of the properties over the next couple of years. I'm going to Costa Rica next month, so we'll be visiting a few properties then. And then we'll be going to Portugal in July. So we'll be visiting properties. So every year me or someone on my team will be able to visit some of the properties and be able to write about them.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

I'm sure it'd be real easy to get people signed up for secret shopping if you wanted them to. Like secret travel. Yeah. Yeah. All secretio. Okay, we're like big old shades.

SPEAKER_02 19:15

Yeah, you you can wear whatever you want.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

Um, amazing. All right. Where do you see girls who eat going?

SPEAKER_02 19:25

Yeah, I think continuing to just build in the digital media space and pivot when needed. Um, I think LinkedIn is an amazing platform as well. Right. Um, so just continuing growing on strategic platforms for us, I think there's always a shiny object. And I've become very secure in myself of knowing like this is a platform that we could succeed on, or this is a platform that doesn't deserve our attention right now. Yeah. And so I think it's just, you know, keeping our finger on the pulse with what's happening in the media space, continuing to stay true to ourselves, growing authentically and organically, which is how we've always grown our platforms in our community and just continue to build.

SPEAKER_01 20:02

Sounds like you're making like really sustainable business decisions, right? Like where you want to be able to sustain yourself and your team, and that team can grow. But how how do you think about making sure it stays sustainable?

SPEAKER_02 20:16

I'm very scrappy, but I think my career in working at startups really helped me to be scrappy. We were doing, you know, we were a team of four at the time when I started 60 events a year around the country with really small budgets, having to think out of the box. And I think that really did help me in my business now because I'm strategic. Yeah. I have support, but I'm also really trusting in myself to know what's worth time, energy, and money.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

Are you ever gonna do girls who eat events?

SPEAKER_02 20:44

That's actually like a very big area that I'm I'm thinking about. I think events would be really fun, and uh that maybe it's like a full circle moment.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

I'd love that. Let me know. Yeah, let's make it happen. Put it on a calendar. I'm there. Um, amazing. And this has become your career. You've fully invested in this. What do you hope it enables for you outside of work?

SPEAKER_02 21:08

To keep just doing what I love. I mean, I wake up every day and I'm obsessed with what I do, and the day goes by so fast I don't understand how it's already five o'clock because I'm just so locked in and love every second of it. Um, but also I think it's really taught me to trust my instinct and my gut, and I bring that into kind of every instance and experience outside of work because you do have to really listen to your intuition. Uh, you have so many people telling you what to do. You have so many different people telling you, oh, you're not good enough. And so I think it's really taught me that you know, I have all the answers and I just need to look inward and trust my gut. And I I use that now across my whole lifestyle.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

I think there's something to knowing yourself, building that clarity, and then that the listening to that becomes a lot easier. You've you've been through hard things. Your perspective.

SPEAKER_02 22:01

Yeah. And I think that takes time too, right? Like it didn't just happen like year one. You learn so much from building a business. And now that trust, I feel so secure in my decisions and trusting my instinct, but it didn't come easy. And you make a lot of mistakes and you learn from them. And you you pivot. And I think that's what's helped me a lot. What is one piece of advice you have for all the huntresses out there? Okay. My advice is to build without permission. I think so many people get in their own way of success and just starting. And so just look at what you're passionate about, start building, pivot when you need to. You might fail here and there, but it will all be worth it. And the last question: what does rich mean to you? Rich to me means autonomy. So getting to build what I want, build the team that I want, and honestly build the life that I want. All right. Thanks for being here, Jamie. Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

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