Building a Million-Dollar Network With Female Founder World's Jasmine Garnsworthy

0:00Hey, business besties. Welcome back to the Female Founder World Podcast. I am Jasmine Garnsworthy. I'm the host of the show and I'm the creator of the Female Founder World universe. I am not actually the host today, though. Who is the host? Natalie, introduce yourself. You are now entering Female Founder World with your host, Jasmine Garnsworthy. Hi, everyone. I am Natalie. I am part of the Female Founder World team. And today I am taking on an unusual role and Jasmine is going to be the interviewee. Yeah. OK, we're going to have a quick bonus episode for you. just because honestly you've all bullied me into this.

0:36I don't like to be on the side of the conversation. I'm much more comfortable being the one asking the questions but a lot of people are coming to me saying how did you start this community? Why are you doing this? How have you grown it? And I think it is time for me to give a bit of a refresher on my story, what I'm doing and what we're building at Female Founder World. And I'm going to let you take it away now. Yeah, Jasmine, you owe us an explanation. I feel like you have so many layers and we need to know more about you as a community. But Female Founder World itself is almost its own little culture.

1:17It's a great community. We have so many great resources and you have built this almost pretty much by yourself your events sell out you have an amazing network I think people want to know how you brought this to life why you brought this to life um and we can go from there yeah okay cool all right what's your first question let's go okay well I think we should start at the origin story okay I don't think people understand or know why you started female founder world yeah um and you could just walk us through, you know, the beginnings of it. Okay. So I, I'm going back a long time now, but I, my background, I was a fashion and beauty editor for years.

1:56I built media properties for some of the biggest media companies in the world. I was at PopSugar, then I was at Stylecaster, Mamma Mia, which is the biggest women's publisher in Australia before I moved to New York. And I've also written for everyone from like Refinery29 to Birdie to Allure. that was my space. And I always wanted to start a business. I was one of those people, you know, we talked to two kinds of people on the show. Sometimes people who just like come up with an amazing idea and they feel like they've got this opportunity and they have to go for it. And then other people who just keep trying stuff again and again and again until something hits.

2:30And I am definitely the latter. I have tried multiple things that have not hit and Female Founder World is the one that did. I started a version of this business in 2015 and it was called The Dream job. It was a media platform, you know, social media. We had a blog and we had a podcast for about two seconds. And I built out this media platform that was basically interviews with founders and it was all written and it was kind of doing okay. We were getting a little bit of traction and I decided to start a podcast for it. And I put out one episode and just like died listening to my voice. I was so mortified at what I'd created that I deleted it, deleted the site and never did anything with it again.

3:14I cannot believe that. But I think that is such a shared feeling. And I think a lot of people avoid talking about those mishaps or those steps. Imagine how much bigger we would be if I had started then and just kept going. You can't think about that. Truly, like there was not a lot in that space at the time. Anyway, whatever. I can't think about that because it's too painful, but I let the self-doubt, the imposter syndrome get in my way. Even though I was a accomplished journalist and editor, I was one of the, truly the OG people creating content on the internet for women. For some reason, I didn't think I had permission to create content under my own name.

3:53I kind of felt protected that I was doing it under this like other company's name, like PopSugar, that that gave me a stamp of approval. So anyway, let this be a lesson to you that you just need to keep going and have a little bit more trust in yourself and that everyone's first product is a little bit shit. So that's okay. I think it's normal to crave that validation. Yeah. So anyway, I had this, I had this project that, that closed down and, um, a couple of years later came my next idea, which was a beauty business called The Buff. And this actually hit for a long time. We were a customized clean beauty brand.

4:23It was 2016, I think. And I wanted to create a beauty product when working as a beauty editor. And I saw this opportunity for customization. And there wasn't a lot in the space at this time, right? Like now customization, these fancy algorithms and people with robotics degrees are building it out. I did a diploma through this company called Formula Botanica. And I learned all about skincare formulation and I was creating these formulas myself. People would come to the Squarespace site, they would tell me about their skin and I would create a formula for them based on what I knew about these ingredients.

4:59And they were all botanical beauty oils, which are probably the easiest thing to create if you're formulating a product because you don't need preservatives, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that's what I was doing. We started getting a lot of traction. The packaging was beautiful. The idea was great. The product was really good. We had really high quality sourced ingredients. Didn't you have a pop-up as well? Yeah. So we started getting all this traction. I think we got in vogue within like five minutes, like right away they did a story. That's insane. Refinery29 did a story. Body and Soul, which is this huge media company in Australia, did a story.

5:36Then the influencer stuff started coming through and it just really, really snowballed. Then we got offered this free partnership to have a summer pop-up with Club Monaco on the Fifth Avenue store, which was also an amazing opportunity. And it just kind of like kept going from there. We built out a much more streamlined and professional website. We had a quiz before you could have just like a Shopify app for a quiz. I had to build out this platform with a developer and do this. and I was like, oh, this would really help with email acquisition if we had a quiz. Now it's table stakes but this was really early and something that was exciting to people to talk about and we did monogram packaging as well.

6:20So we had all of these early proof points that this was going to work. Then Urban Outfitters came to me and they wanted to be stocked in the – they wanted to stock the brand. And so we launched to them. I don't even know. Like I think this was within six months. Like it was really, really quick. Um, and I love hearing like all of the stories in the show about founders talking about the early days and the things that they do that are just so scrappy. I feel like there's been a few of those. We got this order from Urban Outfitters. And when I say to you, I had no idea how to handle retail. I had no idea how to handle retail.

6:56Like I hired a car and we had thousands of thousands of units that they ordered and we drove this product to gap pennsylvania and drove up this like hire car sports car drove it through to this massive industrial center where we you have to pull up and normally it's like obviously big trucks that pull up to these days and it was me and my husband in this like sports car unloading our boxes like that is classic it was like the classic story. Anyway, we did professionalize and grow from there. But after about three years, the space started to change a lot, right? Like big VC money was going into customization.

7:41Mostly like, this is another story, but mostly male owned companies were coming into beauty and were doing these crazy algorithms and they had robotics degrees. And I was just like, oh, I'd like I've got no hope. Like I don't even know where I sit in this. I don't know how to raise money. No investor is going to back me. I'm just like, you know, the girly from who's writing beauty content on the internet. Like why would they back me? I had no self-confidence, confidence. I had no real understanding about the value of what I had built and that the skills that I had were so valuable to a company.

8:23And, you know, this is one of the reasons why we use words like girly and bestie. And we use this language in the female founder world community now because I'm really trying to own it. That's like I thought that's what I was and that that was some kind of disparaging way to talk about somebody. But actually I think that being that close to your customer and having that skill set is a superpower. But that's a tangent. Yeah, you do wonders demystifying the whole space. Thank you. Anyway, so I basically just froze and let this massive opportunity pass me by. The space started getting more crowded.

9:01I did nothing to try and raise money to try and grow the business. I was just really frozen and flooded by this sense of imposter syndrome and who am I to be doing this and like lost the business. I ended up closing it in 2020. And out of that experience, once I like pulled myself out of this like hole of depression was kind of like, what did I get wrong? Like what, what is the opportunity that I missed here? And why couldn't I make this happen? When did you have that aha moment that there was a community lacking here and you wanted to build it? Yeah. I started doing these Zoom calls during 20, like late 2020, early 2021, where we were inviting different founders who were in my network that I'd built at, you know, built this network as an editor.

9:51I'd been covering their brands for years. And also as a founder myself, I, you, you bring people along with you. And I said, like, can we just talk through what's going on? Um, and instead of it just being me, I, uh, opened it up to this community that I had on Instagram and said, if you want to join these calls, we have, for example, Ali Kriegsman from Bulletin. She's going to be chatting with me about business and teaching you a little bit about like how she's built her network and what's been working for her. And there was no branding. There was no name. It was just like a thing. And that kind of started to hit.

10:25And I was building an email list as I was doing this and decided that I wanted to try the podcast thing again. And so we started the podcast and then we started doing in person. And it wasn't until I think we did the first in-person event that I was like, oh, there's actually something here. There are so many communities. There are so many platforms that are around business content. But like, why wasn't there something for me? Why didn't I feel like this content was for me? And how do I plug that gap? I think that there's a big opportunity here and it's really resonating what we're doing and how we're doing it differently.

11:05So those Zoom calls were kind of the foundation of Female Thunderworld. But how did you build the traction upon that? And I know personally if I were putting on an event kind of starting from the ground up, I'd be a little worried that no one would show up. 100%. I was so worried no one would show up. We definitely like oversubscribed the first couple of events to make sure that, you know, I didn't know how many people or the registered folks would actually come in person. But I think that if you are able to have a, if you're able to have a community that will show up for you in person, you have a true community.

11:37Otherwise, it's just people on the internet. Like I truly believe that that is the strongest testament for community is will they show up for you in person? And once I realized that people would do that and they would do it again and they would do it again and then they would pay to do it, that we really had something there. And we really built traction by a couple of ways. One was the positioning. It was the way that we talk. We're real people talking like normal people. The same way that you would be in your group chat with your girlfriends, like that is the way that we are talking with our community about serious topics in business and really tangible stuff that is going to help you make money and build your dream business and build your dream life.

12:17We're talking in that same way that I think a lot of business content wasn't. But in the same way, we're not glossing over the subject matter. Like we're not, we're not just having these top level conversations. Like we're going really, really deep and we're doing it in an approachable way that makes you think this is for me. I truly believe like the next, and it's already happening, the next big consumer businesses are going to be built by the people who are representing their customers. And we see way too much in beauty, fashion, wellness, in all of these consumer spaces that it's been a certain kind of person, a guy mostly, who is benefiting from a huge amount of spending power that is all female spending power.

13:08And I think that women should be building these products and building these businesses. And so we really come to it from that lens and that positioning. And that I think is like the core of the story that then the tactical stuff that we do, like for example, collaborative posts on Instagram work really well, making sure that we are tapping into the communities of all of the people that we are featuring and finding ways to do that through group coaching calls and getting emails when people sign up for that and doing the collaborative posts on Instagram, making sure that they're sharing their podcast episodes, like that kind of stuff is all really important.

13:49But if you don't have that foundational, like point of view and positioning, that stuff won't work. And I think what sets you apart as well as that playful voice, you know, people want to feel seen, heard or see something and think, oh, that's me. Totally. And I think you've done a really great job building that. And I found that that was how I was talking to the women that I connected with who was, you know, their companies were making millions of dollars. That's how I was having conversations with them. We weren't like sitting in some like formal stuffy way. And it wasn't intimidating to me.

14:20It was, it made it feel like accessible and, oh, okay, you're like me. If you can do it, I can do it too. And I wanted to bring that kind of conversation to more women. I want to talk about your network because I don't know that I've ever met someone that had such a vast network and Rolodex of people that you know. And the thing is, it's not just a network of transactions. It's a network of people that you feel really closely with. I would consider friends probably for you. Totally. And that takes a lot of time and effort to build. And I know you have an editor background, so that's a little bit of an advantage, but it's possible.

14:56Anything is possible if you really work towards something like that. So could you give us some advice on how to build that community and network, no matter what industry you may be in? There are three things that I've learned as I've been doing this. And the first one is, you should be looking at peer mentorship, like, don't necessarily go straight into this, this kind of stuff, thinking that you need to be like, I am not reaching out when I was starting a beauty brand. I wasn't like reaching out to Emily at Glossier saying, can you be my mentor? Like, I probably actually probably did. But like, that didn't work.

15:28What actually worked was over many years finding people who wanted to go the same place that I wanted to go and maybe we weren't there yet but we were kind of on the way together and like collecting those people around you and that is natural like that isn't a transactional thing that is a that is how you form friends right like it's you've got something in common but it's this really core thing in common of you're going the same direction. And then over time, you know, over years, you'll look around and all of these people who have this thing in common of wanting to go to the same place as you, they're there.

16:07And all of a sudden you have this group of founders who are building incredible companies. Like I first became friends, for example, with Baba at Ceremonia who now is just this powerhouse founder, so impressive, gives so much back to this community. and if you don't know her go and listen to her episode but she and I first connected when she was working on like an influencer agency something totally different or maybe she was even just leaving oh you guys go way back like she thinks she may have still been working at uber like it was really early and but we both were entrepreneurial and we've been adding value back and forth to each other in this mutually beneficial relationship ever since and now we have a strong connection and that's an example of one person that I've built a relationship with and I've done that over and over and over and over again.

16:53The next thing that I think you really need to think about is, so there's peer mentorship. The next thing is leading with value first. You don't want to be asking people for something off the bat. Always go into these conversations with what are you giving them? And I'm not saying email them and offer them something right off the bat. I'm saying naturally in conversation, like be forthcoming with the resources that you can offer. If you can add value in any conversation, do it. Like, don't be afraid that someone's going to like steal your network or steal your idea or like steal your manufacturer, like offer that stuff up early on because it's through adding value that you become valuable.

17:35And most of the time people will learn to trust you and like you and they will reciprocate because they understand that that's how relationships and network is built. Sometimes you're going to find people who it is like those conversations feel really transactional and like it is really frustrating. I have had many situations like that where it just feels really one-sided but overall I promise over the trajectory of your career this stuff like really pays off. Yeah. And then my final thing is IRL like you want to be in real life with people as much as you can because I just think like one in-person connection is worth 10 ,000 likes on their story and comments on Instagram.

18:17And like you can build connection virtually, but show up to the stuff. And unfortunately, I do think that means that you need to live in a big city, at least for some period of your career. And I think this is unpopular advice. I don't think you need to live in a big city to build a business. I don't think that you need to live in a big city to have a successful career. But if you want to build something that is leveraging a big network, which I think is a huge advantage. I think being in person in a city like New York, LA, London, Sydney, like these biggest cities, you're just going to be in the same rooms as the kind of people, like it just attracts a certain kind of person.

18:56I don't know how to explain that any better. Like it just attracts a certain kind of person who at some point in their life thought, fuck it, I'm going to leave my hometown and go do this thing. And you want to be in the rooms with those people. I feel like half the battle sometimes is just being present and showing up and seeing those familiar faces over and over again, whether it's planned or not. And I think it's really hard to let go of that scarcity mindset that there's not enough to go around. But I think when you surround yourself with people that are building similar things, you kind of have that bond.

19:24I agree. And you build on that. Totally. 100%. Yeah. So when you chat with these founders, you always ask them for their favorite resource or something that would help someone maybe in earlier stages. I want to know what your resource is for people listening and what's your favorite female founder world resource? We have so many. Oh yeah. Okay. There are some good ones. Um, I would say the business bestie membership because I priced this at$9 a month when I was getting started and I was like, I don't know if anyone's going to buy this. And now we're stuck at$9 a month and it's definitely should be like$60 a month.

19:54So it's just a no brainer. You've got access to all of these like really personal group coaching calls and conversations and workshops. And we're really about learning from practitioners and founders, not learning from coaches. And so if you want to tap that network of like someone who is actually doing the thing, become a business bestie, watch all of those workshop recordings. There's so much good stuff in there. Another resource that I really love, that's something that I do all the time is Lacey Phillips program to be magnetic. Sounds really woo woo. It's called a neural manifestation or something like that.

20:31But it's really about practices to help you be more reflective, to work on that inner child stuff. Like why didn't I feel like the value that I brought to my first business was enough for me to be able to fundraise? Why didn't I think that I could go to a bank and get a loan? Like why didn't I think that that was right for me? I think sometimes it takes some reflection and deep work to go there. And then when I started Female founder world I was so anxious about showing up on TikTok about showing up as a podcast host and I had to do a lot of work to feel comfortable to do that and this program is how I was able to do that so I 100 % recommend it it's I think it's$20 a month to be magnetic I have to say if it's any consolation it's working oh thanks it's so funny I actually had recently met a couple people that have been to a female founder world event and they were like Jasmine is wonderful she's great She's this, she's that.

21:27She's just so personal. You can come on the show anytime. I'm just saying this because it's true. And when we were at the summit, there was a line of people waiting to speak to you. I bet that instilled a little bit of an imposter syndrome for you knowing you. I mean, I don't think it's warranted, but I can imagine, you know, it's kind of shocking when you realize like, wow, people think I have value here. So I don't know. Maybe the course is doing something. Yeah, 100%. That's awesome. Well, those are great resources. I'm glad we finally got down to like what you use in your personal life. I feel like, do I wrap up this show?

22:05Like we don't have a format. Okay, go ahead. All right. Natalie, thank you so much for being co-host on Female Founder World. I hope this was valuable to people. I think they were good questions. I think we really got to know you a lot better and I'm excited to hear some feedback. Quick shout out to all of our business besties subscribers. If you are loving this show and you are building a consumer, CPG, or e-commerce business, or you're about to build one, this membership will give you access to the people, experiences, and the tools that you really need to build your dream business. Head to femalefounderworld.com forward slash subscriber for more.