How I Built a 7-Figure Brand: A Conversation About Growth, Pivoting and Scaling

26:01Wow. The level of maturity that it takes to recognize that there are big gaps in our knowledge and what we do to fill those gaps without letting the situation, the endeavor, almost crush our confidence. or maybe we don't feel as competent and we can use that as a reason to not pursue it, to not like, you know, we almost just like, we're like, you know what, that dream was cool, but I don't wanna do that anymore, you know? How has this influenced your confidence as you've grown over the last three years with what you shared? I was actually talking to our COO yesterday about this and I had said, I think my exact words were, We can do anything.

26:50I have seen the depths of hell and we survived. I can do anything. So I think that, you know, knock on wood, knock on wood. Of course, you know, my mentor always says that you earn the right to solve bigger problems. May it never be that I have solved the hardest problem of my career because that means I'm regressing. I earned the right to bigger problems. And so it is nice to be in a spot where I could look back at a venture and say, we earned the right to solve those problems and still end up on the other side standing. Now, the next venture, whatever that may be, as we diversify the business, it doesn't mean that I will have the answers and there will be times where I feel not confident at all.

27:37But your confidence increases. If I at my deathbed were to say I wished to die a confident person, then I must have gone through entirely in situations where I lacked confidence and then chose to become the thing I desired. If you want to be a patient person and you want to die saying that person was patient, you will be getting a long life of people who are trying your patience and you build a muscle for it. So when you ask how confident I feel, I am looking forward to the next challenge. But at the time of this recording, it feels really dang good to be where we are right now. Heck yeah. I love that resilience.

28:19You can feel it in the way that you speak about it. So what is the vision for social curators? Tell me, I know that's three years old now, a little over three years old. Where are you headed? How are you feeling about the product development? I mean, people are only creating more and more social content. So I'm curious what you are able to share there. Okay. So we actually are going to be meeting at an offsite with the president of Social Curator and our COO. And I took a good hard look at what do I love about the business? And what do I want to have my hands directly in? And what do I think the next level entrepreneur needs?

29:01Because we became a SaaS offering. So Social Curator started off as a membership, and then we launched the SaaS platform in 2021. And the reason we did this was because people had said, we really want an easy way to schedule and push out our content. And in order for us to do that, we had to integrate with all of the largest social platforms. So we spent a lot of time, money, development in making an API, which is basically a brain in our company to talk the brain of meta, to talk the brain of TikTok, to talk to the brain of LinkedIn. And so now that we have that mechanism for people to take action in the platform, what do I believe?

29:37And this is just a guess, and this is the case I'm going to be putting forward to the president, is what do I believe? I believe that small business owners are exhausted from the ever-changing content and the algorithms and the desire to stay updated and how everything always feels like it's iterating too fast so that if you ever feel confident with your marketing, it's going to shift. And then I also feel like people want a place to go and be around people who think just as a little bit weird and crazy as them. So my big push for 2025 and beyond is really going to be how do we build out community?

30:13How do we make this a place and a space that is not just a thing to do, but becomes a destination? How do we become the unparalleled disseminator of marketing information where it is a spigot? Somebody will come in and say, I want a fire hydrant of information. Great. We have every marketing question answered in great detail with tutorials and how-tos. Or if somebody's like, I want it to be just a dribble of water. I just need to make sure that I can show up once a week and get my content out. We can be that too. In order for us to become a destination and not an obligation, that what we have to do is create familiarity and community in such a deep way that people say, this, this is my tribe.

30:56This is my people. This is the marketing. And this is where I'm going to grow. And that's big. I think that we're going to have to change user interface. and experience. I think that onboarding might have to change. And so we just have a lot of big questions to ask because we essentially have to be predictors of the future in order for us to survive. If we don't put ourselves out of business, somebody else will. So we need to say, where is the hockey puck going? What do people want? What do they need? And then what are they willing to pay for? And so there's a lot of things that are going to be happening there.

31:23And every step of the way, I look forward that we will have the tech to match with our ambitions. Yeah, that's huge. delineation between you want to be a destination and not an obligation. And that's the center of building community. I absolutely love that. And obviously, we're in community at Circle. And so just hearing that that's where your head is, but how does that actually feed into the product itself from a user perspective and how they're connecting with each other? I think that's brilliant. So I want to shift the topic to obviously social media, because we've talked about the social curator side of things, but when it comes to your brand persona and your unique voice on social media, how did you first go about developing that in terms of how you show up online?

32:12I think there's the strategy of how to grow and there's strategies of how much you should be posting. But when it comes to your personality online, how did you figure out what that was, what you shared, what was private, how much of your passion to bring, how much professionalism to bring? I'm curious what that journey has been like for you. Well, I'll start by saying it changes. It changes with the different phases that I'm in in life. There are times where I want to show up differently because of who I am and where I am. I will say that, you know, how I was showing up in 2019 was really different than how I was showing up in 2020 when I became a mom.

32:57Not for any other reason. It wasn't intentional. It was just my time got very limited. I adopted my daughter and it was public about how we did. And I just wasn't, I was still very new. What am I sharing? What's okay to share? We were in a pandemic. I mean, there was a lot of stuff that was happening. So I shifted how I showed up. But the only common thread between making my first blog post in 2007 to making content in 2025 has been the reps. Your consistency will be the only thing to develop your voice. You will only ever know how much passion to exert or not exert. You will ever know how much professionalism to exert or not exert.

33:40You will never know how much silliness to exert or not exert until you create the content, you have data and analytics, and you have emotion. Because there have been times, and I will definitely say that at the end of 2023, I had a very good, cold, hard conversation with the team and said, I knew what it was going to take to grow on Instagram. And that was a lot of dancing, pointing funky videos. In fact, if you want to grow on Instagram, continue to dance, continue to point, continue to have multiple characters and skits. That is the quick path to growth. And people cringe when they hear that, but it's true because it works.

34:24I had wake up and I thought, I don't want to do that. And I only earned the right to have that opinion because I had tried it. I had grown. I had gotten lots of success. There was clear business metrics. And then I said, even though data and analytics tell me to keep on doing this, then the emotion, which is the only unquantifiable thing, had said, I tried it. I deployed. I beat the thing I wanted to be, I don't want to do it anymore. But there are people who say, I don't want to do it having not tried it. And that's okay. That's okay. But I do believe that you feel stronger in your conviction and you earn the right to have a very clear opinion after having done something.

35:11So how do I find my voice? It changes, but the commonality is showing up consistently using data and analytics and then measuring it against how do I feel about that content being out there? Yeah. Where does authenticity come in? Because is there an aspect of showing up online, especially for business, that's strategic? And so that you might even be like putting on a different persona where it's not as authentic? Or is authenticity and bringing your full self to creating content? Is that a requirement or a criteria for you? Because I know that different entrepreneurs have different feelings about this.

35:50Right, which is why I wanted to start off by saying there's actually not a right or wrong. But I will tell you just from my perspective, this is what I see. I see the benefit and the ability to put on a persona that works on social media. I could see that as a model and it works. However, the percentage of people that it works for is about 0.5 to 1 % because it takes an element of cognizant acting to actually become that persona. And some people can act and it works and it's flawless for the business. So that works. But for 99 % of the rest of us, when we try to put on a persona, because social media has been around now a decade, we've become attuned to visually, like almost we could smell it through the internet.

36:40Something's not right. Like this just feels fake. And we can't actually identify it, but we're good enough to know if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck. And so when we know that or we feel that somebody's not showing up as themselves and people become so honed with this one social media and seeing the insincerity and the fakeness of it again and again, now that we're attuned to it, I would just say, if at all humanly possible, stay as far away from persona unless you know it's a skill set as humanly possible. because our job as entrepreneurs is to curry favor and trust.

37:12Social media is less about sales. Social media should be about favor. Hey, I want to follow this person. I want to spend time with them and trust. When you do that on social, then you can close on sales. That will happen via a promotion, via DM, but it's very, very, very few people will have an Instagram post and they're like, this single post drove$100 ,000. No, no, no. It's the level of consistency again and again of you being your authentic self. You will sell more. You will enjoy the process more. You will have more evangelist when you are yourself. Will there be people who don't like you, who say negative, nasty things and just think that you're the worst thing since their drunk Aunt Hilda at Thanksgiving?

37:54Yes, and they will tell you that. They will tell you that, but they were never going to be customers to begin with. But the people who do like you and have a fondness for their grandmother, Aunt Hilda, who's a drunk at Thanksgiving, they love her. They're about her. They'll defend her. you want to only do one of two things on social media, attract or repel. It's the people in the middle who don't see results, who play it safe, who put on a persona and people can say, I just don't feel you because you're not being real. It is better to be disliked for a hundred percent of who you are than to be liked for carbon copy because you have to keep track of who am I?

38:28What is my story? What have I said? And that will always come back and bite you in the butt. Hmm. Taking us to church today. I love this. I love this so much. For someone that's trying to build their personal brand and they're struggling with this, they're struggling with the authenticity, they're struggling with the thick skin because there's an aspect of like, I need to have a unique point of view. I need to be standing on something, but I'm nervous about what people will think of me. What pieces of advice would you give for someone who's like, I want to build a personal brand. I have this vision, but I can't get over that piece.

39:05Well, the truth of the matter is some people love the Lakers and they hate you for not loving the Clippers. And some people love the Clippers and hate you for not loving the Lakers. Some people love you for running marathons or hate you for not eating a slice of pizza on the couch. Some people hate you for drinking a green smoothie and some people love you for going to the gym. Some people absolutely love a certain political party and then hate another. The issue becomes there will always be a group of people who dislike or disagree with you. Even if you do nothing, you walk into 31 Flavors, you're like, I like vanilla.

39:41Someone's like, whoever eats vanilla? That's the most boring thing. Like, how can I go wrong with vanilla? There are people who like vanilla and who despise vanilla. you just being you inherently you have an opinion so if you have an opinion and 50 percent of people are going to like you and dislike you and then you don't have an opinion and 50 percent of people are going to like it or not like it you might as well have an opinion people think that by lacking integrity authenticity showing up as they are or stating people say oh i need to have a unique point of view no you don't you need to have a point of view there's no such thing as a unique point of view.

40:16Very few people, 0.005 % of people will ever have a unique point of view. And these are by and large mathematicians and scientists who are developing something that's never been done before. The fact that you're saying I need to have a unique point of view, a unique point of view on what business that's been around for eons, that there's still the same hooks that work on social media, worked in the 1940s in print newspaper, that worked in the 1950s on radio, that worked in the 1980s on cable networks, those same hooks work every decade. You want to have a unique point of view? How about you just have a point of view and understand that half the people like it and half the people won't?

40:49I love this so much. I feel like this is the level of honesty that I think we can just overthink so much. When you're creating anything, you can really overthink. And so this is the level of honesty that I think people really need. And so I appreciate you bringing the heat today. is there one and before i before before we go on i will say i will say i understand it's hard i understand it's difficult i understand we we you me everybody i can still get in my head i can look at a piece of content and just be like is is this a little weird there was a time where i had posted content and somebody had said that it looks like i just tried too hard and that is not easy to hear.

41:39But then when I took a big step back, I realized I do. I try really hard. It's not easy. And I make an active decision. So I think that sometimes I get riled up and I'm like, oh, yeah, da-da-da-da-da. And so people say, wow, she has something that I don't have so she can do that. And what I want to be very clear is I am deeply empathetic to the journey, the story, the difficulties. But the main difference between me and people who don't show up is I will press post and I will let my content define and defend who I am for the right group of people. It won't be for everybody, but for the small people who want to go deep with my business.

42:23And who am I beholden to? I am beholden to myself, my vision, my destiny, God's calling on my life and my family. If I can put out content that resonates with a small group of people who pays my bills, who gets my daughter and my husband to go on our annual vacations, to have the cars that we drive and the places we go and to give to charitable organizations and to empower others to do the same thing. Hot dang. I'll get over myself to do that. Because your vision is so clear. It's so much bigger than honestly a comment. And I think that's where we get, we can sometimes fixate on the negativity and we can sometimes fixate on pushing something out there and there's crickets, but it's like, okay, if you've got the vision and you know where you're trying to go, that purpose and mission has to be bigger than opposition and resistance and sometimes negativity.

43:15So I hear you through and through. If someone is focusing on this right now, where do you think most people are overlooking? Like you think people should pay a little bit more attention to? Well, the good news is that it always changes. So between us recording this and it debuting, it might change. And people have a very difficult time with, hey, what's working or what are people overlooking? But when you say something is overlooked and people notice it's overlooked, all good marketers and content go and go to the thing that's overlooked. That is the natural thing. It's like marketers kill everything good.

43:53It's just the truth, right? And so at the end of the day, instead of talking about what's being overlooked, I would say if you're getting started or you really want to foster a level of consistency, choose what is the lightest for you. I am not saying choose what's easy for the rest of your life. I am just saying choose what is lightest for you. This is like when you go to the gym and you feel very intimidated and you don't know where to go and you see all of these like buff people doing all of this other stuff. Just pick up the five pound weight. Just pick up the five pound weight and see I can do this today for right now.

44:27If I want to build abs or build glutes, I probably shouldn't pick up the five pound weight and work on my arms, right? However, I am building the level of consistency doing something that I feel comfortable doing right now. So the reason why social platforms change what's working is it keeps people guessing. And when people guess and when they can't predict, it keeps them interested. It is a sick and distorted, disgusting way. But guess what? All of the addiction psychologists and strategists and social designers work for the largest social platforms. And they say, we know what makes you tick.

45:07And if you could predict what is going to be good or always work, you would quickly get bored. So they're always changing it. So I firmly believe there was a time when going live on Instagram was the greatest mechanism to growth. Because not a lot of people were doing it. It was a new feature. People were like, oh my gosh, bringing somebody to come on live with you was a such new novel thing. And then after people started doing it, it started losing its interest. But what happens is everything comes back in cycles. So I continue doing Instagram Lives even when they're like slowly dwindling. But what I noticed recently at the time of this recording is that Instagram, when you're going live, it will now insert it into stories.

45:49So if you're navigating in stories, you'll now see a card pop up that says this person's going live. That's actually a new feature iteration. So I think, oh, listen, for all the people, all the gangsters who are continuing to go live, there is now a push or an uptick for you to do that again. I believe that Instagram is doing this so that it starts prepping its engines to compete with TikTok and their social sellers. Right now, TikTok, if you have a product to sell, TikTok is unparalleled. They are creating QVC, like these shopping networks on your phone with easy ways to shop. Amazon is doing the same thing.

46:26They are having and cultivating social sellers on Amazon that they're going to be soon. This is what I strongly think is going to happen. You're watching a prime movie or show. There comes up a commercial and on that commercial is a QR code. Or if you're watching on your phone, you could press that, add it to an Amazon cart. I believe that people are going to be doing this and using this so much more. So I believe now going back to what is unleveraged attention or where should we best spend our time? Number one, go to what's easiest, stay there, master it. It will kind of always come back in cycles and circles.

47:01But the key here is to be consistent. Lastly, I'll say, since we're geeking out on social, is there was a time where the Instagram dropped the carousel function where you can upload multiple photos and it kind of dwindled. But what has been happening is that Instagram has been able to measure engagement by a carousel. So let's just say you upload 20 photos in a carousel. If you have somebody go through and see all 10 photos of the carousel, they're ranking that as huge engagement because somebody is continuing to swipe on your account versus somebody swipes just to the first one and then kind of scrolls over.

47:33So what we see has been a resurgence of carousels as a way to measure engagement. So all of that to say, All of that to say is choose one and stick with it. It will always come back around. I love this. Your point on the QVC really hit. It's almost like passive e-commerce versus active. And you're building a consumer that's focused on passive consumption. 100%. Versus like, I have to go online shop. I have to go to that URL. I have to go to Amazon. versus TikTok shop and Amazon sponsors videos. I'm like, oh, I want the add to cart app Apple pay boom. And it's so passive and dangerous for the consumer.

48:17But yeah, that's really, really interesting. I'm glad you brought that up. Do you see any other things in the social media landscape or even the creator online business industry that you see shifting in the next 12 months? Oh, I think it's shifting right now. So, okay. So what we've seen in the creator ecosystem that's worked so well on Facebook and then scaled on Instagram was companies were finding creators and the creators were promoting the company and they would get a cut. They would get paid for their post and then they would get a cut as affiliates. And then what we started seeing happening was creators starting their own businesses.

48:58and what we saw in that in the last four or five years is that some creators have business acumen and some don't and so creators because they had this large audience like i can make money and then like they had to realize wait i have to run a business so you see a lot of tenuous balance with this and then some people made made a go of it but what we see now distinct shifts in trends is what we see on tiktok which i'm pretty sure we'll be leaking on over into instagram is you can, as long as you have over a thousand followers on TikTok, you can apply to become a TikTok influencer. But when you think about it, a thousand, that's not a hundred thousand, that's not a hundred million.

49:33So what happens is it's pure meritocracy. If I ask to become an influencer on TikTok and I want to talk about ramen noodles, I can reach out to the company and I can say, I want to be an influencer. I can get product, a few bags of ramen, which is less than a dollar. And as long as I'm making content and I'm like, oh my gosh, this ramen is so good. You have to try it. My lips are just burning with awesomeness. Click here. That company takes 0.00001 % risk. And this person is only paid on the product that they push. Now, some people might hear that mega influencers on Instagram would be like, that's terrible.

50:12These people are going to their audience and they're not getting monetized for the halo effect. Like just somebody talking about your business is worth something. But those people on TikTok are not getting paid for it. Well, as the creators and influencers on Instagram, they're getting paid to talk about it. They're getting paid for the affiliate. What we see is companies taking little risk, sending product and having people create on meritocracy. That is going to be a huge shift in the creator economy. You're only getting paid for the content you push and your competition isn't the other creators with 100 ,000.

50:47Your competition is the person with 1 ,000. Because if you have 1 ,000 followers and you create a viral TikTok on ramen, all you need is one viral video for you to get$800,$4 ,000,$10 ,000. And that is life-changing money for somebody who is at their house with a phone and very limited prospects. The game is entirely changing for brands and e-com. that's huge i mean you already see this with tiktok shop i mean a lot of my tiktok shop ads are not necessarily big influencers or big creators they're just everyday people and i am seeing another shift i know i could geek out i could geek out another big shift i'm seeing is the shift towards the small creator i don't know if you've seen this trend on tiktok in literally the last couple of weeks but it's like really focusing on these small creators and supporting each other 5 ,000 followers, 700 followers.

51:45And it's this shift of these small creators become mini celebrities and shifting away from the big, big, big influencers. I don't think it's fully shifting attention, but it's an interesting thing to watch. And you saw it on Instagram with micro influencers, but now it's on TikTok as well. And I think that there's going to be more focus and maybe even more trust built with like these smaller, smaller creators, smaller content creators. That's right. That's right. And the reason why these smaller creators, so traditionally a micro-influencer on Instagram was defined as somebody between five and 10 ,000 followers, but TikTok has redefined that.

52:29Like you're a micro-influencer as long as you have a thousand followers. And why it's so powerful is that somebody with a thousand followers can respond to all of their comments and all of their DMs. So you get a small group of people who are so emblazoned and passionate about that person who sees them, who knows them, who engages on their content versus the influencer who has 100 ,000 followers and yes, they live this beautiful, amazing life, but they're not responding to DMs and they're not responding to comments and that person doesn't really feel like they're known. If they see an ad for ramen from the mega influencer who's paid no attention to them and an ad for ramen from the micro influencer who regularly leaves a comment, who are they buying from?

53:07The person who feels like they know them. And this all gets back to a relationship, right? In the trust that you're building with your audience. This has been incredible. Thank you so, so much for this conversation, Jasmine. I want to leave you with one last question. What is a big dream that you're focusing on in the next six to 12 months for yourself? And this could be a personal dream. This could be a business dream. But is there anything that you're scheming that's in the next year? Wow. I was not expecting this question and I'm going to speak my truth. Yesterday, I had a work day that I absolutely freaking loved and it didn't look like I was working hard.

53:54There is this appreciation, I have it too, for the grit, the hustle, the grind. I wake up early and I go to but yesterday my day was writing podcast episodes outdoors with a cup of tea yesterday my the meetings and the consulting that i had was amazing i sit as advisors for companies and so be able to hop in on a 30 minute meeting consult on the strategy and say okay like to the moon let's go with this new tech platform this new option and then to be able like i did a consulting session with this brilliant doctor who's building on her business and i got off the call and i was like this is amazing.

54:28And my husband said, I'm going to take Luna, our daughter, to the beach. And she said, mommy, can you come with me? And I said, I'm sorry, I have to write a podcast episode. And I thought to myself, I can write a podcast episode at the beach. So I got my stuff. We went to the beach and I was working and then we went to dinner after. And I felt that it just didn't look like I was working hard. It wasn't the grit and grind. And what I had to grapple with internally was my deep dream and desire over the next six to 12 months is to build my work days like that. To be able to work long and hard, but have it be in flow and have it be good and have it be generous and have it be beautiful.

55:11So my dream is to resist the temptation that working hard or grit looks a certain way or has to feel a certain way and simply say, I get to work hard and I get to love the business that I'm building, but it doesn't have to look like anybody else's term of what working hard looks like or means. Yeah, that's beautiful. And also that's why you're a builder. That's why you're an entrepreneur is because you get to choose, you get to decide. I can't wait to witness what this evolution looks like for you over the next six to 12 months. Cause I think there's a lot of inspiration, um, in the roots of that for other women and other female entrepreneurs as well.

55:49So, thank you so much for this conversation. This was beautiful. Where can people stay connected with you? Well, podcast listeners, listen to my podcast, The Jasmine Starr Show. I would love to see you there. I'd love to have conversations. If you are a builder and you want to know how to build in the good, the bad, and the oh so fugly, this podcast is going to be a deep dive into amazing business stories along with digesting and dissecting my journey. That's The Jasmine Starr Show, and you can find me at jasminestar.com. Amazing. Thank you so much, Jasmine. Thank you for being generous with your time and your energy.

56:24We love you. You are just the best. Love you back. Thank you. This has been amazing. Thank you, Alexis. What an incredible conversation. Jasmine's story is proof that success isn't about having all of the answers before you start. It's about taking action and figuring things out along the way. And hey, if you're feeling inspired, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review. It helps more entrepreneurs like you find the show. Until next time, keep taking bold steps toward your dreams. You never know what's possible until you start.