Launching Your Business To A Community With Jasmine Garnsworthy

0:28Hi, welcome back to Female Founder World. conversations that are happening in the female founder world community on Geneva about how you launch a new product or how you launch a new business. So whether you're somebody who is working in an established business and you need up-to-date relevant marketing ideas and case studies and really tactical next steps for your next product launch or if you're getting your business out into the world for the first time, this is going to be hyper relevant. We are not talking about marketing strategies that really big companies have used over the last 10 years.

1:04This is the small scrappy stuff that drives real impact and real returns. So Launch Lab is going to be a workshop series that kicks off at the end of the summer over six weeks. We're going to be talking about things like affiliate marketing, hosting an IRL event, we're going to be chatting about community sampling and wild posting and all of these things that consumer businesses are doing in the real world right now to get a new product out into the world. And we are going to be hearing from founders, from senior leadership on the teams at amazing consumer brands, as well as the subject matter experts working in agencies that are partnering with the consumer brands that you love to bring that specialized experience.

1:49As we gear up for this workshop series, we're going to give you a taste into some of the topics that we'll be covering in the workshop. We're going to be introducing them on the podcast. And to kick it off, it is me, Jasmine, teaching you all about community building, which is a question that I get asked all the time in the community and on social media. How do I build a community like Female Founder World for my brand? I'm launching my business for the first time and I want to do some community building efforts or I want to create a new product and we want to launch it to a private community.

2:23How do we do that? So I'm going to be going over an introduction into community building in this conversation. All of the podcast sessions and the workshops that you'll be engaging with throughout Launch Lab are all based on real experiences and case studies. So you can actually see how this advice has been applied in the real world. If you enjoy this episode, we are going to have many more coming up over the next few weeks, all about launch marketing. Like I said, to give you a taste into what that workshop series will be diving into in a much more deep way. If you're enjoying it, please jump into the show notes.

3:01There is a link there for you to join the wait list to hear about Launch Lab when it is available for you to register. Okay, so community building. This is why, first of all, that you need to be listening to me when I'm talking about community building. You will know me from the Female Founder World community. I hope that you are in our private community on Geneva. If not, we have built this thriving space where people are connecting with the experiences and the resources and most importantly, the people that they need to build a consumer business. And we have an IRL event piece within that community offering.

3:39Our events now hit registration capacity within hours once we post them. And we have built something I think really, really special. But I've also worked with really big private sector clients building closed communities for consumer facing brands. And I've also worked for the United Nations on community building and membership efforts for them as well. So I've been doing this work for a while. I was a fashion and beauty editor before that. So I have a lot of like content skills and experience, but this community piece is really my bread and butter and what I think is very much my zone of genius.

4:13So there's a few things that we're going to talk about over this episode. First of all, I want to give you some thoughts about what community is versus an audience and what you should be using community for and what your expectations should be from a community. Then we're going to talk about gating your community and how to exclude to include. Then we'll chat about programming and how to entice people to join your community. And finally, we'll talk about platforms and where you should actually build your community. When I host a video workshop as part of the Launch Lab workshop series at the end of the summer, I will be going into much more depth onto all of these points plus a lot more.

4:52So make sure that you are registered to come along to that session when it happens. I put a link in the show notes to get on the wait list. So what is a community? How is it different from an audience? I think there is a lot of confusion about what community actually is. And that's because a lot of social media marketers have spoken about their efforts in community building. But what they're really talking about is perhaps a following on Instagram or TikTok or a newsletter list. Whereas I think of community as something that is person to person and really building a network of relationships. Whereas those other things that I mentioned before, that is really more of an audience.

5:31When you think about disseminating information to a group of people in an open kind of environment, that is building an audience, which is a very valid, useful thing when you're launching a business, but community is something different. It's about depth, not breadth. So I think about it as being housed in a platform that allows communication between people and not just from one centralized person who is maybe posting a TikTok video and then people are commenting underneath. That is a very top-down kind of audience building strategy, but community is about people speaking with each other and building value through connections in that way.

6:12As a community builder, your job is to connect people and to be a facilitator of valuable networking and relationships. So you'll see me in the FEMA Founder World community all the time when people post questions. If somebody hasn't had a lot of responses or a lot of valuable feedback, I will dig through my Rolodex and I will find, I mean, I do not have a Rolodex, but my brain Rolodex. And I will think about the people who could add value to their question and I will tag them. I will send it to them. I will entice them to engage in that content to make sure that people are making connections and getting the information that they need.

6:50So that's what a community is. I want to also talk about what the purpose of your community is. This is something that you need to determine right off the bat before you think about anything else. Not everybody needs to have a community. And I think for a lot of brands, if you are launching for the first time, maybe community won't be the first thing that you think about. But for a lot of brands, this has been a really successful strategy. I know that, for example, August, the period care company by Nadia Okamoto, she's the co-founder and she's been on the podcast. She's spoken at a lot of our events.

7:25She has built a really thriving community around her brand's mission about sustainable and inclusive period care for all. And she built that on a platform called Geneva, which is where the FEMA Founder World community is also hosted. It's a great space and we'll talk about that in a minute, but they don't really just focus on necessarily their products. It's very much around their purpose, like I said, of inclusive and sustainable period care. And that's what they talk about in the community. It's not just about their product. And so they've been able to build something really strong there. Ceremonia, a Latinx hair care brand by Barbara Rivera.

8:03Also on the podcast, go back and listen to her episode, It's Awesome. She also launched to a community and that helped her hit more than$100 ,000 in sales within the first few months. And that was really by building a community and launching to that group and incentivizing them to spread the word, getting involved in their campaigns. That's definitely a case study that you should check out if you're interested in community building. She also built her community on Geneva. But when you think about the purpose of a community, I don't really want you to right off the bat be thinking about necessarily return on investment or reducing your customer acquisition costs or brand loyalty.

8:42These are all things that, yes, are side effects of community, but it is not the purpose that is going to bind people together in your community. No one is joining a group so they can help a hair care brand sell more shampoo, but they might join a community to help a beauty business that is celebrating their culture like Ceremonia is celebrating Latinx culture through their beauty products and through their messaging and so that's banded people together around a common cause a common mission and a common interest so think about your purpose as something that is something that will rally people together Female Founder World is about bringing women together to create their consumer businesses We are connecting you to the experiences, the people, the tools that you need to do that.

9:27And we are binding people together in that experience. And that purpose drives all of the decisions that we make around the platform, how we gate the community, who's allowed in, who's not allowed in, and about the programming that we have in place as well. So once you have your purpose and have a real think about this, it should obviously speak to your brand's purpose and your brand's mission. But once you have this set, I want you to think about who you need to exclude in order to properly include. And we are all obviously, like I hope this goes without saying and I hope this is taken the right way, Female Founder World is an inclusive space.

10:06And I think that all of you listening to this are building inclusive brands in the way that we understand inclusivity. However, when you're building a community, you need to make sure that folks are adding value to each other in that space. So you need to have some gates around your community and some questions that will help you determine whether a person who is applying is the right fit for your community. So for example, we are for women building consumer brands. We are not for people who are maybe selling services, who are freelancers, who are building agencies, who are building tech products.

10:43These might be people who would like to sell something to brand owners and brand builders, but it's not necessarily the core user who is going to be adding value to other folks in the community. So I don't want people who are not building a consumer business to be in the community because they could be trying to sell stuff. They could dilute the conversation and they're probably not adding a whole lot of value. Sometimes it's useful to rope those people in for specific activations and workshops and to share their knowledge, but they're probably not the right people to be in our community group all the time.

11:15So I ask people when they join, are you actively launching or have you launched a consumer brand or do you work for a consumer brand? That's one of the first questions that I ask and that's what determines whether or not you are accepted into the female founder world space. So have a think about what questions you need to ask to exclude people in order to really include people in your community and to add value through who is in the space. So next, I want to talk about programming, IRL events, and how you actually get people into your community. We are going to dive into this in the Launch Lab workshop at the end of summer in a really big way.

11:52But let me just give you some like thought starters and really just an introduction into how you need to be thinking about this piece of community building. When you think about programming, I'm talking about online events, workshops, virtual coffee chats, content that you are creating for the space. I'm also talking about in-person events as well. I find that programming that takes place in your community that is hyper-specific to your ideal community member is the best way to bring people in. So when I started Female Founder World, we did and we still do a lot of free virtual workshops, group business coaching calls, in-person events and we tailored these sessions to be exactly what somebody who is building a consumer brand wants to hear and who they want to hear from so we know that if they're registering for this they are probably somebody who would be an awesome fit for our online community and we would host these sessions in the online community space and so people would come in and then they would be a part of it they would then embed themselves in the community through conversations asking questions seeing what other people are talking about and they would stick around in the workshop we're going to speak way more about how you need to introduce people when they get into the community because this is super super important but i feel like i need to share this on video down the track so make sure you're on the wait list for that session if you want to learn more i would have these workshops i would have these group coaching calls these in-person events and i'd be sharing them on social media with other brands to share in their newsletter with the speakers to share with their audiences and that's kind of how you get the ball rolling with getting people into your community.

13:34When you're thinking about in-person events, I want you to think about it as in-person events being the way to really drive culture and stickiness in your URL community. So you're creating in-person activations to build the online community. In-person is kind of hard to scale. Virtual is pretty limitless in terms of scaling. So when I host an in-person event, I know that I might only be reaching a fraction of people who are in our community because the community is quite global, but the in-person events usually take place in York or LA, sometimes in Austin. We're looking at London and Sydney, but really we can't activate in every single city where we have a virtual community member.

14:18So I think about those in-person moments as being a real culture shaper. People who come to those events just get a way better idea about what it means to be in the female founder world community through the conversations and the prompts that we have and the speakers that we have and the physical environment that we create at the events. And then they are the ones who are holding the torch and championing that culture in the online space. And it just trickles down and helps you create something really, really special. There is a lot more that I want to say about how to host those events and how to do them in a really thoughtful way to build a really strong community, but also in a really cost-effective way.

15:00Again, we'll get into that in the workshop, but just to let you know, that is a really important piece of community building, I think. So the last thing I want to touch on is platforms. This is a question I get all the time. Where should I build my community? Like, should I go on Facebook groups, Geneva? Should I use a platform like Mighty Networks or Kajabi? We are built on Geneva and that is a very intentional decision. Like I said, up the top, the purpose that is driving your community should influence every decision and that includes the platform that you choose. So we are, like I said, for consumer brand builders.

15:35So I didn't want to build this on a platform like Discord, which is a very, I don't know, it feels super like tech bro-y and the early users were gamers and they shaped the community of that space. Whereas on Geneva, the early users are people who are also doing in-person events and they are shaping the culture of the space. That is a very, very different wedge to get into the community space and it shaped a different UX, a different type of person on the platform and different expectations around how people interact that just speaks to the kind of community that I want to build. And so that's why we use Geneva.

16:14It has a lot of the functionality that you need. It's not perfect. We're going to go over this in the workshop, but you may also be thinking about somewhere like Facebook groups. I didn't want to use Facebook groups because we speak mostly to like an older Gen Z, younger millennial kind of woman. And Facebook is not the platform that they're using. If you maybe had an older demographic, Facebook's probably awesome. Like Gen X, maybe definitely boomer. Facebook might be the way to go. Then you might be looking of platforms like Mighty Networks, which are more ownable. You can kind of brand the space a little bit more.

16:45You can have your own URL. But the reason why we haven't used a platform like that is because I wanted to create community in a space where there are other communities that people are logging on to check. If I was on Mighty Networks, you would have to go to like femalefounderworld.com, log in, jump into our group, and you would have to go to the URL just for Female Founder World. That's a really high bar to set for people to open your app specifically or open your web app specifically to get your content and your community. We're on Geneva where there are a ton of awesome communities and people adding new ones all the time.

17:20And I'm constantly hyping up this platform because it's great. And so I know that people who are using Female Founder World are probably also in a beauty community on that space. They might be on Beauty Chat, which is the beauty community that I have, or they might be in the Inner Cycle, which is august community that we spoke about before it's not really on me to constantly bring people to this platform they're kind of in there all the time and they'll check female founder world while they're there so it just reduces the pressure that's why i think of using one of these platforms with lots of communities to host it rather than somewhere like kajabi mighty networks circle where they would just have to be going to your url i hope that makes sense this is a very quick introduction to community building we're going to dive into this in a much more meaningful way in the Launch Lab workshop series.

18:08Please drop your name and email address on our wait list so that I can let you know as soon as this opens. I'm so excited. We've been working on Female Founder World for a couple of years now, and this Launch Lab series is literally every tangible piece of marketing advice that I have taken from the conversations that we've had. It is tapping my network to find exactly the people that need to speak to the case studies and the lessons about how you actually launch a product and launch a business in 2023. It's hyper relevant. It's going to be really easy to follow. Make sure you get on the wait list.

18:45And over the next few weeks, you're going to be hearing from different experts who will be in the workshop series to give you a little taste into what they'll be teaching, taking over the pod for a little while in our podcast series. I think you guys are going to love it. Something a little bit different for the summer. Okay, I'll chat to you next week. Quick shout out to all of our business bestie 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.

19:21Head to femalefounderworld.com forward slash subscriber for more.

19:30Thank you.