In short
Bryn Prattnum (Mirror founder) discusses building Mirror from a personal fitness need into a $500M Lululemon acquisition, then launching Board, a 24-inch touchscreen tabletop game system that supports unlimited finger touch and physical game pieces.
Guest backgrounds
Native New Yorker; trained as a professional ballerina (age 3 to late 20s), taught fitness, opened Refine Method gyms, then created Mirror (launched 2018) and later founded Board.
Key claims
Validate vision fast (she built a cheap mirror prototype using one-way glass and an Android tablet); leaders synthesize input and decide quickly; paid marketing hits a ceiling—build network effects; storytelling must be crisp so customers can advocate; constraints and nontraditional skills can be strengths; focus by saying no to distractions.
Notable examples
Mirror’s early validation with a one-way-glass tablet; $3M first venture round; big ad push (billboards/Subway/Super Bowl remnant buys) plus celebrity outreach; sold Mirror to Lululemon (deal signed March 2020, closed during COVID). Board: gesturing beyond 10 fingers and piece-based gameplay (e.g., knife “slices,” rocket “shoots”); Board raised $15M so far.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOBryn Prattnum's Background
0:45 to 1:46
Bryn shares her journey from ballerina to entrepreneur and CEO.
“I spent most of my early life actually as a ballerina from the age of three into my late 20s.”
Launching Mirror: The Early Days
1:46 to 3:21
Bryn discusses the initial steps in launching Mirror and validating her idea.
“so I come from obviously a very untraditional background I had never had a job I'd never worked in an office.”
Challenges in Creating a New Category
3:21 to 4:53
Bryn reflects on the challenges of introducing a new fitness product category.
“And we actually stayed very true to that vision throughout the building process of kind of the few things that I thought was important for the customer.”
Balancing Feedback and Vision
4:53 to 5:56
Bryn shares insights on balancing customer feedback with her vision as a leader.
“refers to the invention of the car, right?”
Marketing Strategies for Success
5:56 to 7:59
Bryn explains the marketing strategies employed to drive customer acquisition.
“I think that was honestly when we sort of knew we had something.”
Funding Journey and Growth
7:59 to 9:35
Bryn discusses her funding journey and the growth of Mirror.
“How does somebody get their product to a celebrity in the beginning?”
The Acquisition by Lululemon
9:35 to 11:46
Bryn recounts the acquisition process of Mirror by Lululemon.
“I want to understand a little bit more about the process of the acquisition.”
Launching Bored: A New Venture
11:46 to 14:01
Bryn introduces her new company, Bored, and its innovative technology.
“How does your life change after a decision like that to sell your company?”
Lessons from Building Board Games
14:01 to 16:46
Learn about the key lessons and strategies for building a successful team and business based on personal experiences.
“Yeah, I think one of my core learnings from Mira was there's a great Michael Jordan quote, which is talent wins games, but teams win championships.”
Navigating Fundraising Challenges
16:46 to 20:44
Discover insights on fundraising and the importance of understanding investors as customers.
“is if you build a team where everyone from the receptionist to the CEO executes really well at a high level day to day, victory comes.”
Show all 12 chapters
The Power of Constraints in Business
20:44 to 24:39
Explore how personal constraints can fuel creativity and innovation in product development.
“The great thing about board is you're playing with other people.”
Cultivating Creativity and Taste
24:39 to 26:24
Learn why surrounding yourself with creative influences is essential for entrepreneurial success.
“of women in this community who are building products based on a gap that they experience in their own lives.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Jasmine:This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Spring calls for a wardrobe refresh and Nordstrom has the best styles of the season. From dresses and denim to standout tops and accessories, find the trends and essentials that feel right for you. Discover new arrivals from brands you love like WAIFE, Princess Polly, Mango, Adidas and Free People. Plus, free shipping and returns and free styling appointments make everything so easy. Shop in stores at Nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app. Hey, Business Besties. Welcome back to Female Founder World. It's Jasmine here. I'm the host of the show.
0:34Jasmine:And today I'm chatting with Bryn Prattnum. She is the founder and former CEO of Mirror and the founder and CEO of Board. Bryn, welcome to the show.
0:42Brynn Putnam:Thank you so much for having me.
0:43Jasmine:Give people a little bit of background about your origin story and what you've built.
0:47Brynn Putnam:I grew up here in New York. I'm a native New Yorker. I spent most of my early life actually as a ballerina from the age of three into my late 20s. I was a professional dancer, which led me into the world of fitness. So teaching fitness was my side hustle when I was dancing. And when I retired, I opened a chain of bricks and mortar gyms called Refine Method, which ultimately led me to create Mirror, which was a way of bringing the studio experience I had created in home through a digital smart mirror.
1:16Jasmine:Wow. And you launched Mirror in 2016? 2018 we launched. 2018. Yeah. Okay. I want to understand what the launch process was for a business like that because when you it's easy to look back at the success the company had you're required for a significant amount of money the business what is kind of just so well known I knew it before I even kind of reached out to you to come on the show but I'd love to talk about those early days of how you I guess like the things that you did that set up for that trajectory what what were some of the first things that you did when you started the company
1:47Brynn Putnam:so I come from obviously a very untraditional background I had never had a job I'd never worked in an office. I had no technical skills, but I had a vision of who the customer was and what they wanted because the customer was me. I was newly pregnant and trying to figure out how to bring the studio experience home for myself. And so the first thing I did was just try to validate that this idea I had in my mind of seeing content through a one-way mirror would work. So I bought a cheap Android tablet on Amazon and a piece of one-way glass. And I read a bunch of Reddit chains and I figured out how to put text onto this tablet and just validated that seeing content through a mirror was going to work.
2:28Brynn Putnam:And then from there, I didn't build something functional at all. I built an animated video and a beautiful brand book, just sort of showing what the experience would be like for my customer. And I use that then to raise my first round of venture funding and eventually build out a team and build a real thing.
2:43Jasmine:Yeah, I don't, I don't, I haven't heard many stories of like the ballerina to text you.
2:48Brynn Putnam:I know. How many of you find any of them? I'll let you know. Like to meet them.
2:53Jasmine:I'll definitely let you know. Okay. So you basically like in the beginning, it was around the vision and what this could be and then selling that to people who could help fund you and get you where you wanted to go. How much did you raise in the beginning? Do we talk about this? Is it all public? Yeah. Yeah.
3:06Brynn Putnam:We raised a$3 million of venture funding with our first round and hired our first engineers and first people to actually build out the tech product. And the product spec at that time was really just a few bullets written on a napkin that I had written. And we actually stayed very true to that vision throughout the building process of kind of the few things that I thought was important for the customer. And what did the product look like the first time when you launched it? It looked very much how it looked in the end. It's a full-length mirror about one inch deep in this sort of beautiful bronze frame.
3:39Brynn Putnam:When it was off, it was a regular mirror. And when it was on, you could see yourself reflected and your instructor speaking to you and all your classmates and all of your metrics in one single display.
3:49Jasmine:It must have been something that was confusing for people in the beginning to understand what it was and how it worked.
3:54Brynn Putnam:Yeah.
3:54Jasmine:Did you find that? And how did you kind of overcome that through education and marketing?
3:59Brynn Putnam:Yeah. So early days, you know, sort of traditional business sense is you want to do customer interviews and customer surveys. You want to do a lot of research to sort of validate what you're building. And so because I'd never built anything before, really, I tried that. You know, we tried to do these interviews and research studies. But because we were creating a new category that didn't exist, you know, we were building a faster horse. No one liked the idea. No one understood what the idea was. And we didn't really have anything nice looking to show them. And so ultimately, just had to sort of say, you know, I believe in what we're building and we're going to build it.
4:33Brynn Putnam:And once it's there, you know, if you build it, they will come. It was a product I wanted and I felt there was others like me. But early days, it was very hard because we were creating a new category. You know, people weren't searching for fitness mirrors at that point. Ultimately, they were. We created a category and others followed us, but not in the early days.
4:49Jasmine:Okay. I want to go back to the quote we just said about building a faster horse because that refers to the invention of the car, right? Yeah. People who are wondering about that. Yeah. Something I do think about a lot when I'm talking to founders is when to take on that feedback from your community and your customers and build what they're asking for versus when to trust in your vision that the thing that you're creating is something that just doesn't exist and you can see the future and you can see what people are going to want. How do you, like, what advice do you have for people who are trying to differentiate between that?
5:22Brynn Putnam:I mean, to me, that's what makes a leader. That's what a good leader is. That's what vision is, is you should take as much input as possible. You should talk to your customers. You should look at product data, you should look at research, you should get opinions from your team and experts. But ultimately, that's what it is to be a leader is that you ingest all that data and you make a decision and you do it quickly and decisively. And you can always change course. But ultimately, I think people follow leaders because they are deciders and they can help sort of paint the vision of the future and where the team is going.
5:55Brynn Putnam:Right in the beginning, where were the first customers coming from for Mira? That was the interesting part. I think that was honestly when we sort of knew we had something. So we did a big reveal on the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt and turned our website live. And one of my investors reached out and said, I bought my mirror. Am I the first one? And I looked at the sales and we'd been live for a few minutes. And he wasn't the first one. He wasn't the 10th one. He wasn't the 50th one. We had sold a lot of mirrors and I didn't recognize any of them. And that was sort of, I think, when we realized that we were really onto something was when people who were not friends and family, you know, were seeing the vision.
6:34Brynn Putnam:Wow.
6:35Jasmine:And then as you're kind of building the business and growing, like what were some of those sources for customer acquisition?
6:40Brynn Putnam:So we sort of knew because it was a premium product. It was a$1 ,500 price point and it was a new category. As you said, we were creating the fitness mirror that we needed to seem like a bigger brand and a more established brand because people had to feel they could trust us, you know, the company was going to be there, that the product was going to be high quality, wasn't going to break. And so we actually used sort of like big company marketing tactics. We bought billboards and Subway ads and Super Bowl TV commercials, but we did it in a very scrappy way. So we were buying these sort of remnant ads and leftover stock of things.
7:15Brynn Putnam:How do you do that? There are agencies that will help you sort of buy, you know, sort of discounted, discounted. But we sort of inundated people with sort of big advertisements. And we made a point of doing sort of very targeted celebrity outreach. So we gifted with no expectation of celebrities posting or sharing. But what started to happen that was not intended was sort of the network effects of using the product then actually kicked in within the celebrity community. So, you know, celebrity one would see it and then their stylist would see it and the stylist would bring it to their clientele or their friends or their makeup artist or their agent.
7:53Brynn Putnam:So some of our earliest sort of network effects of the product was within the celebrity community of Los Angeles, which became very helpful for us then to sort of amplify our marketing.
8:02Jasmine:How does somebody get their product to a celebrity in the beginning? Like what's the process of doing that?
8:09Brynn Putnam:Things that are entirely unscalable. So you try to figure out friends of friends of friends. In our case, we were working with a stylist on our trainer outfits who happened to know a makeup artist who knew a dog walker who knew a friend, you know. But again, I think if you have a product that is good, customers are people. And so if you if they see something that they want, they'll use it and they'll recommend it.
8:35Jasmine:When you talk about the marketing that you were doing in the early days and just like the nature of the product that you've created, the thing that comes to mind is, oh, this is a really expensive thing to do, even if you're being super, super scrappy. Can you talk me through a little bit more about the funding story and like how you funded the business throughout those years?
8:53Brynn Putnam:Yeah, so we were definitely very fortunate that our business was being developed in a period where venture capital was more readily available and flowing. And because we did see sort of quick and early success, we were able to raise subsequent funding rounds. So I think we raised ultimately about$70 million all in before we were acquired. Probably$40 million of it was prior to launching even. So it was really just on the concept, the vision, and the early product without really any sales data or traction. So part of that was honestly was the time in which we were building, which was a great time for venture capital.
9:29Brynn Putnam:And then part of it was just we started to sell, we started to grow, and the business started to fuel itself.
9:35Jasmine:I want to understand a little bit more about the process of the acquisition. You sold Mira for$500 million to Lululemon within two years of launching. Can you tell me the story about how that happened?
9:45Brynn Putnam:Well, I think for me, you know, our relationship with Lululemon was a multi-year relationship. I had worked with them when I was a fitness instructor, a local fitness instructor here in New York as a brand ambassador. So I was familiar with the company and the values. And then when we were at Mir, they became an early investor and we partnered with them to make fitness content using some of their ambassadors. So we had worked together. We were familiar with each other. And, you know, we weren't for sale. We were a less than two-year-old company. We were growing very quickly. But when Lululemon sort of came to us and said we feel like, you know, we would be better, we'd be stronger together, it felt like sort of one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.
10:24Brynn Putnam:Throughout the course of running your business, you're always sort of selling your business. You're selling pieces of your business to investors. Ultimately, you are potentially selling via an IPO or an acquisition. So it's really a question of how much at what time and to who. So I think part of your job as a CEO is to be very familiar with the landscape of how your business potentially could be sold over time.
10:47Jasmine:When you signed that deal and it went through, what did you do the next day? Like what was your – how did you feel? What did you do?
10:55Brynn Putnam:Well, you have to keep running the business. at that point. For us, I think what people don't realize is we actually sold the company right before COVID. We signed our deal in March, right before all of the lockdowns and all of that. And so the way that these deals work is they take many months to actually close. And so for us, we operated the first few months of COVID still as an independent startup, navigating all that meant. So our factory closed down. We had to relocate our factory. Our instructors had to learn how to set up live streaming studios and the Airbnbs they were living in across the country to live stream fitness classes.
11:33Brynn Putnam:Our entire team went remote. So we really didn't have very much time to sit and feel anything really about the acquisition because we were trying to figure out how to navigate a very young startup through a period of incredible growth and incredible instability.
11:46Jasmine:How does your life change after a decision like that to sell your company?
11:50Brynn Putnam:I think that was the biggest learning for me. I think I thought my life wouldn't really change. I thought, you know, I was still entitled the CEO of Mir and growing the business. And in fact, I became really the GM of the Mir division, which was part of this very large, mature public retail company. So I had gone from being really a decisive, aggressive solo founder to someone who was navigating a very complex matrix organization and having to learn about what it meant to be part of a public company.
12:23Jasmine:You then went on pretty soon after to launch another company. Now you're the founder and CEO of Bored. First of all, tell us what Bored does and a little bit about the business. Yeah.
Read the full transcript
12:34Brynn Putnam:So board is a 24-inch touchscreen that sits on a table in a beautiful wooden frame. And most touchscreens only recognize 10 fingers. So you can only play with two hands. What our technology allows you to do is have an unlimited number of fingers touching and gesturing on the screen, as well as use physical pieces, game pieces. So our board knows if you put down the knife, it's over here, it's slicing. Or you put down the rocket, it's over here and it's shooting. So we've created a way of playing games all together, face to face, sitting around a table, using these physical pieces. So it's a new kind of game console.
13:12Jasmine:How did this idea come about? I've never heard of anything like this. Again, it's like, speaks to the same kind of founder that you were in the early days of Mirror, where you're kind of like seeing the future and seeing what people, what you think people are going to want. Where did the idea come from?
13:26Brynn Putnam:Yeah. So, you know, when I left Mirror, I took some time just to kind of reset my brain. and read books and experience the world. But my own life was in a very different place. I had gone from being newly pregnant with my first child with Mir to now I have two kids and three stepkids. So my Brady Bunch family goes from age two to 21.
13:48Jasmine:It's a big family.
13:48Brynn Putnam:It's a big crew. And we were trying to figure out how to spend time together, which really often looked like everyone on their phone in front of a movie, you know, not making eye contact, not laughing, not connecting. and for me as a kid games had always been a way that I made memories with the people I loved but I felt like there needed to be a new way to play for our generation and so that's where board came about is again just my own personal frustration at feeling like we needed the magic of video games but the feel of board games to kind of come together and really be able to make connections.
14:23Jasmine:When you were starting board is there anything that you thought okay I am never doing this again from my lesson with Mira or like I did that really well and I want to do it again in this business that you think people should know about as they're building their own companies?
14:37Brynn Putnam:Yeah, I think one of my core learnings from Mira was there's a great Michael Jordan quote, which is talent wins games, but teams win championships. And I think in Mira, I had some really exceptional employees who just weren't great members of the team. They created a, you know, they just created a culture that had friction in it. And I always sort of prioritize the excellence of the team member over the excellence of the team as a whole. And this go around, I think I've been very careful and clear about building a team where everyone, you know, works together and supports each other. And I think that's incredibly important, is to ensure that no member of the team is greater than the sum of the parts.
15:20Brynn Putnam:Things that I think we did well last time was be incredibly focused. So when you're creating a new business in a new category, you have so many ideas. That's why you're creating something. But you also have very limited resources and limited time. So you really have to figure out what are the one to three things you need to do very, very well. And everyone in the organization has to execute perfectly against those things. So I think the most important thing you can do is just say no. Say no to partnerships. Say no to new product ideas. Say no to things that take you away from those core things that will enable you to reach your vision.
15:57Brynn Putnam:Oh, that's so hard to do. It is. And it's because it's why most of us start things. Yeah. We are creative and we like building things. But you really do need to stay focused.
16:09Jasmine:Yeah, I think it's also it's hard to do because I think as as entrepreneurial people, as founders, you also can just think, oh, I can take on more and more and more. But when you get to the point where you're loading that onto a team, they can't execute on all of these different fragmented things. And it's like your job to focus them and their time and resources.
16:29Brynn Putnam:I think another thing that we did well that hopefully we're doing again here is more sports quotes today. I'm loving this. I know. It's like so funny. a man who likes sports, you know, there's this famous sporting honors coach, Bill Walsh, and he says the score takes care of itself. And I think that has been crucial to our success is if you build a team where everyone from the receptionist to the CEO executes really well at a high level day to day, victory comes. Whereas when you spend a lot of time kind of obsessing about what will happen in the future, will we win, will we lose? What does the outcome look like?
17:05Brynn Putnam:I think you lose your way. So really focusing on just creating a culture of really great executors.
17:11Jasmine:How do you do that, though? Like really practically speaking, how do you do that?
17:15Brynn Putnam:I think it's the tone that you set as a leader. So, you know, I think spending, obviously, you have to be aware of what the competition is doing. You have to be aware of macro trends and things happening in the world. But spending too much time kind of looking outside or discussing the far out future or too much time either dwelling on success or failure, I think creates a culture of distraction versus really focusing on what do we need to do today to be excellent.
17:43Jasmine:What about fundraising and funding? Were there any lessons that you took from Mira that you've brought into the second business?
17:49Brynn Putnam:Fundraising is a tough one. I think the core lesson for me is people sometimes think that investors are sort of like aliens, like that's like a totally different, person that you're talking to, but investors really are just customers. So they have biases and interests. And so I think really learning who the investor is, who are their stakeholders, how are they making their decisions, and then you're selling them just like you're selling your end customer. And so crafting a story that makes sense for that audience. Interesting.
18:20Jasmine:And what has the funding story been for Bored so far?
18:23Brynn Putnam:We've raised$15 million to date for board, most of it from people I worked with previously at Mir, which has been great. Do you invest in businesses? Are you an angel investor? I do. I invest a little bit in businesses. I think something I've learned about myself is I'm not a great investor. I'm really an operator. I'm a hands-on operator. But if there are places where I feel like I can be specifically or uniquely helpful, I do.
18:44Jasmine:Something that we were talking about before we hit record was around taste and why you think that's important for entrepreneurs. I'm really curious about your thoughts here?
18:51Brynn Putnam:Yeah. To me, I think taste is really probably the most or one of the most important things you can have as an entrepreneur. Just having a clear sense of what you like and what you don't like and why, because you're going to have a lot of opinions that sort of surround you and try to steer you. But having that internal sense as to your own taste, I think is critical.
19:13Jasmine:When you say that, I think, okay, I know what I like, but I do feel like there are so many external voices that can dilute that and algorithms can dilute that. And how do you stay true to that as you're building and as you kind of have all of these voices around you?
19:29Brynn Putnam:I think it's just recognizing that that's why you're a leader. That's what the leader needs to do and should do. You know, that's the job description is taking opinions and input from everywhere. But ultimately, it's your job to sort of synthesize and decide and do it quickly and decisively.
19:46Jasmine:Because I think
19:47Brynn Putnam:where cultures really go awry is when you have a leader who is constantly changing the direction of the ship it makes it really hard to navigate so absorb the opinions of your team your customer your surveys your data your experts but ultimately you've got to steer the ship one of the notes that
20:03Jasmine:i have here from you we did a little bit of like pre-show prep and you you spoke about how you you know when you're building mirror you couldn't just rely on on paid marketing and so i want to dig into that a little bit more about like what was fueling that growth yeah i think definitely one of the core
20:17Brynn Putnam:learnings of Mears, you reach a certain ceiling of growth off of paid marketing channels. And ultimately, you need to think about building what are called network effects, sort of referral loops into your core product. You need to figure out how to make your core customer your advocate and help them to sort of spread the word if you're really going to get past$50 million or$100 million in revenue, which hopefully you'll all reach. So that's definitely something we're thinking about now with board. The great thing about board is you're playing with other people. So there's this incredible built-in network effect that just by playing, I'm spreading the word of board and hopefully with every game, I'm selling more games.
20:57Brynn Putnam:So we've really been trying to facilitate that early days at board, doing a lot of events and really trying to equip our early customers with the resources they need. Game nights we sponsor or more formal influencer parties to help spread the word for us rather than relying just on paid channels.
21:13Jasmine:When you think about creating those inbuilt network effects and virality, so it sounds like one of the things. I mean, I think the biggest lesson for people is just like
21:22Brynn Putnam:all the things that you think you don't know are actually your strength.
21:25Jasmine:That's what will make you successful. Okay, let's talk about that. Okay, did you want to talk about that?
21:32Brynn Putnam:Yeah, I think storytelling is, that's the key. It's like you have to give your customer, you have to have really tight and crisp messaging because if your customer is going to be your advocate, they need to be able to like how you want the product described needs to be how they perceive the product so that they can spread the word. Yes. So having like very clear product storytelling. Yeah.
21:52Jasmine:It sounds like when you're talking about ways to like build these, like this virality and network effects, it's kind of like inbuilt into the product ideally.
22:01Brynn Putnam:Yeah. People think of brand as like colors and fonts. Yes. But it's really not. It's like having a clear message that resonates with your customers that they then become your advocate to your next customer. If your customer can't describe what your product is and why they love it, like your product can't grow.
22:19Jasmine:Yes. How are they going to recommend it to someone over like dinner or brunch? You can't. Yeah. That's so interesting. Okay. You also just spoke before the show about how your weaknesses are your strengths and how constraints can actually be really powerful for businesses. Let's talk about that. Tell me what you mean.
22:35Brynn Putnam:Yeah, I mean, early days of Mir, a lot of people said to me, are you going to get a technical co-founder? Are you going to find an engineer to build things? And I didn't because I felt like at the time a co-founder is really like a marriage. And at that point, you know, it felt very artificial to sort of just bring someone on and marry them without that kind of natural relationship. And so I think it's, in fact, was really our strength was that I didn't have that technical background because when you can build things and you can, you have those skills, sometimes I think you overbuild, you over-engineer.
23:09Brynn Putnam:Whereas because my focus was really the customer and the customer's needs, I think we stayed very focused on building just to the customer and kind of hacking away some of the inessential things that we might have done if I was more technical.
23:22Jasmine:That's such an interesting perspective because I can imagine that you would have had that pressure to like bring someone in, especially as like a first time founder, a female founder. I'm sure that a lot of investors were saying like, where is the technical co-founder coming in here?
23:36Brynn Putnam:Always. And I mean, even still today, now I'm building in games. I have no experience in games. I'm not a gamer. You won't find me with Call of Duty and my headset on. But I think it's really been a strength. I think it's been a strength of our team that I'm, you know, I'm who we're building for. I'm building for people who don't consider themselves gamers, but they want to play with people that they love and play as a way to bring people together. And so our games are hopefully really fun and accessible. And instead of controllers and joysticks, we're using pieces to manipulate the games because I come from that perspective of someone who wants things to be really fun and intuitive and accessible.
24:14Brynn Putnam:whereas I think if I came from deep in games you'd probably see a very different product yes and also
24:18Jasmine:just the way that you're explaining the product as well it just like feels so much more like tactile and like community focused and just such a different experience yep yeah interesting it's
24:28Brynn Putnam:definitely I think what your unique perspective is your strength so you should lean into your strength and build products that take advantage of what you uniquely are good at there are a lot
24:39Jasmine:of women in this community who are building products based on a gap that they experience in their own lives. And so I think it's really interesting for you to reflect that back of how you have done that in both businesses and how it has like actually been the superpower behind why you were so successful.
24:53Brynn Putnam:Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, even my first business, you know, I was starting a gym and the only space that I could rent was a room and a church. And the catch was every Sunday I had to give the room back to the church for Sunday services. And every Monday I turned it into a gym. So we couldn't put traditional gym equipment into the space. And I ended up basically like inventing a wall-mounted cable tower that used sailing lines and pulleys and elastic bands. And that was my first real foray into wall-mounted exercise equipment, which then ultimately led to Mir. But that was really born out of the fact that I couldn't afford a bigger space.
25:28Brynn Putnam:I couldn't afford fancy gym equipment. But it was critical. And that was sort of what led to ultimately the success of Mir.
25:35Jasmine:Wow. The last thing I want to ask you is for a resource recommendation or a couple of resource recommendations. For everyone who's out there building something and they're inspired by your story, what can they read? What can they do? What's a habit that they can pick up that can get them closer to the kind of success you've had?
25:50Brynn Putnam:I think for me, the key is to just surround yourself with beauty and creativity. So I would say get a museum membership, get a symphony ticket, go to the ballet, go to a show. So try to find a way to immerse yourself in creativity and culture and try to refine your own taste and your own vision. I think that's really the best way to build something incredible and also to refresh yourself. I love that. And also get out of your algorithm.
26:20Jasmine:Get out of the algorithm, put down the phone and go see some art. I love that. Thank you so much, Brian. Thank you for coming on the show. Where can people find you and where can they find Bored?
26:28Brynn Putnam:You can find us at Bored.fun and you can find us on Instagram also at Bored.fun.
26:34Jasmine:I just wanted to end the show with a quick shout out to all of our paid Business Besties subscribers. For$12.99 a month, you get access to a weekly live call with mentors who we handpick from this podcast community. These are founders who have been on the show, experts and operators that are helping to build their businesses. And we want to give you access in a small group setting on live calls every single week so that you can get the mentorship and advice that you need to take your business to the next level. In addition to the live calls and the community, you also get access to a big database of workshop recordings, group coaching call recordings, templates, contact lists, and just all of the tools and resources that you need to make this business a success.
27:17Jasmine:Head to bestie.femalfounderworld.com or the link in the show notes to sign up now.
From the publisher
Brynn Putnam is the founder and former CEO of Mirror, a fitness smart mirror that she sold to Lululemon for $500 Million. Now she’s building a new business, Board.
In this episode, Brynn tells Jasmine how she built a business to $500 Million in just a couple of years and what she’s doing differently in her second business.
Whether you’re a first-time founder or a seasoned entrepreneur, this episode is packed with insights on building, scaling, and innovating in new categories.
LINKS:
Become a Business Bestie subscriber: https://bestie.femalefounderworld.com
Find Board: https://board.fun
