WHERE THOUSANDS OF ENTREPRENEURS LEARN HOW TO GROW WEEKLY
Start with the market, not the product: How to nail product-market fit with Nicole Basset, co-founder The Renewal Workshop
Learn from Nicole Basset, co-founder of The Renewal Workshop
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Hey, It's Alex!
🍵 Here's Your Weekly Tea
Some lucky son of a gun in Illinois won $1.3 Billion in the lottery. Power to em' BUT it also pissed me off. I started thinking about how we're socialized into a lottery mentality. We get stuck in systems that benefit from us playing the game while we hold on for dear life waiting and hoping for our "very own" lottery moment. What if we stopped playing the lottery in business & life?🤔
Let's get into your weekly briefing!
💸 HERE'S YOUR TRACTION BRIEFING
Founder: Nicole Basset | Company: The Renewal Workshop | Location: Cascade Locks, OR
Receipts: Nicole successfully scaled a sustainable brand, raised $12M, and got to an exit.
Here's your traction playbook...
How To Find The Right Product-Market Fit
Make Yourself The Customer: "I think the biggest and best thing (which is hard advice to give) was, I was the consumer for years. So when I went out and started researching solutions for us as a company, I had very clear criteria of what purposes it had to serve." - Nicole Bassett. Providing value is the name of the game. Unfortunately finding the right product-market fit can be difficult especially early on. Nicole Bassett learned how to communicate that value because she was the end consumer of her product. She learned what customers wanted to see and what services they required from her company. Learn more here.
How To Craft A Successful Go-To-Market Strategy
Get Clear On Your Goals: When creating her business, Nicole set clear criteria for her business. Understanding what her goals were helped her make key decisions that were a big part of her go-to-market strategy. She understood everything from what she wanted her business to achieve to how it would connect to the market that was available. Learn more here.
How To Exit From The Company You Founded and Love
Find An Acquirer That's A Great Fit: Leaving a company you founded and love is never easy. For many, it's a painful process. While processing the emotions that come with exiting your company can take a while, there's comfort in knowing that your business is going in a direction that you initially had for your company. What made the exit easy for Nicole was the fact that she and her partner were able to find a great fit for their company and their overall goals. Learn more here.
Support Nicole in Scaling Impact: Simply take care of yourselves.
TRACTION TOOLS: How to get it done...
How-To Guide To Product-Market Fit: Start with the market, not the product. Here's a guide to get started.
Get Your First 100 Customers: Here's a foolproof guide for getting your first 100 customers.
Craft A Successful GTM Strategy: Here's a proven process of developing your go-to-market strategy.
Product Testing: Find out how our queen Jacquelyn De Jesu used product testing to create what her customers actually needed here.
How To Prepare For An Exit: Here's how Mia Saini was able to prepare for an early
🤗 JOIN THE COMMUNITY: Join our community membership waitlist here.
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Focus On Your 1%: The Secret To Building A Community-Based Business with Sarah Smith, co-founder The Dyrt
Learn from Sarah Smith, co-founder of The Dyrt
You're viewing an archive of Get Sh!t Done Weekly Email Traction Briefings. Join free to receive your weekly 5-minute growth playbooks & grow alongside thousands of entrepreneurs
Hey, It's Alex!
🍵 Here's Your Weekly Tea
Do we really need to keep hearing about the consistent bad behavior in both business and in the personal life of some guy so thirsty for attention that he wanted to prove he could buy a company without the intention of actually doing it? Here's the thing about assets - the most valuable is your time. Anything taking up your time but not adding value - gotta go. The folks at Twitter know this well that's why their trial was expedited because ain't nobody got time. I think we can all agree that the public ego stroking of yet another narcissist in business - gotta go! Let's carry on like the queens and kings we are, shall we?
Let's get into your weekly briefing!
⭐ COMMUNITY MEMBER SPOTLIGHT: Learn how Queen Jillian Rothe increased sales 482% MOM YTD here.
Join our community membership waitlist here.
💸 HERE'S YOUR TRACTION BRIEFING
Founder: Sarah Smith | Company: The Dyrt | Location: Portland, OR
Receipts: Sarah scaled a camping community through user-generated content, well thought out monetization strategy and in the process raised $22 million.
Here's your traction playbook...
How To Build A Solid Community
Focus On The 1% And Keep Them Happy: 1% of your community will provide you with free content, 9% will engage with that content and 90% will simply consume. The reality is a large number of your community/audience will not do more than consume your content. Realizing this, The Dyrt put their focus on finding ways to intrigue and excite the 1%. By making them happy, they created a solid team of reviewers who were ready and willing to provide free content. Learn more here.
How To Monetize Your Platform
Listen To What Your Users Want: In the beginning, Sarah and her team didn't have a clear path to monetization. By listening to her community and learning from them, she found areas where she could provide more value at a cost. Simply putting their ears to ground helped them come up with The Dyrt Pro a $36 a year membership that has been their biggest success yet. Learn more here.
How To Fundraise For Your Business
Find People Who Believe In Your Idea: It took The Dyrt a year and a half to raise their seed round of $500,000 and less time to raise $11,000,000. The lesson? Initially not many people will believe or understand how your idea provides value. Finding a few people who do gives you credibility and makes it so much easier for others to get on board. Not everyone has to believe in you, you just need to find the right ones. Learn more here.
Support Sarah in Scaling Impact: Check out, buy from, and review The Dyrt. Also, go camping🏕️!
TRACTION TOOLS: How to get it done...
Encourage User Generated Content: Here are 5 steps to turn your customers into advocates.
Guide To Raising Capital: The ultimate guide to raising capital for your startup here.
Build A Strong Community: Here's how you can build a strong community around your brand.
Make Your Customers Your Community Members: Find out how our queen Ceata Lash was able to turn her customers into an engaging community here.
Create Mutually Beneficial Partnerships: Here's how Tanya Van Court used the right strategies to secure partnerships.
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How to Navigate Business Funding for Startups; Finding the Right Hire at Every Stage; Is Your Startup VC-Backable? with Barbara Clarke, co-founder The Impact Seat LLC
Learn from Barbara Clarke, co-founder of The Impact Seat LLC.
You're viewing an archive of Get Sh!t Done Weekly Email Traction Briefings. Join free to receive your weekly 5-minute growth playbooks & grow alongside thousands of entrepreneurs
Hey, It's Alex! 💛
Welcome to your Weekly Traction Briefing, where we break down how to Get Sh!t Done and grow your business. If this briefing is helpful to you, share it with your friends so they can grow with you & thousands of other entrepreneurs.
🍵 THIS WEEK'S TEA
If I weren't my Valentine, Rihanna would be. Was that Superbowl performance my fave? Nah. But homegirl got up on a floating stage and basically said - since y'all are not going to get an album, you can watch me look fabulous and pregnant AND run up those streams 640% to my bank account. If that ain't queen behavior, I don't know what is. Office spaces are getting their a**es handed to them in places like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Workers are spending THOUSANDS of dollars less from not going into the office. TBH - I don't feel bad 🤷🏽♀️ People can barely afford to breathe in these cities. Save them coins and reinvest office rent back into your biz, babe. Speaking of real estate - "Adam Neumann is not interested in doing the hard work of building value" - Scott Galloway responded to Neumann's new company that is literally just apartment buildings re-packaged as "ownership". Boy oh boy, does "charisma" get ya far in life. JLO created a female empowerment cruise. What ya think? I don't know about you but, you can't pay me to be stuck in the middle of the ocean and seasick. But I ain't mad at it. Get that paper, Jenny. Get that paper 💸
❓ GET YOUR GROWTH QUESTIONS ANSWERED❓
Want your growth questions answered on the podcast?
We're answering your specific growth questions with our guests! If your question is selected, we'll give you and your company a shout out on the podcast and in our weekly emails 🙌🏾
👑 Founder: Barbara Clarke | Company: The Impact Seat LLC | Location: Boston, MA
🧾 Receipts: With a background in economics and helping businesses thrive, Barbara is an investor who has made most of her money the old fashioned way - buying low and selling high. She now mostly seeks capital efficient companies solving a big problem which may be undervalued.
💸 HERE'S YOUR TRACTION BRIEFING
How Founders Can Find The Right Hires
Hire for Your Company's Stage - "I really think the biggest hiring mistake entrepreneurs make is hiring that person from famous large company. They think that they’re going to get all that experience and they don’t realize that that person’s success was built upon a massive infrastructure at that company." - Barbara Clarke Finding the right people for your team means hiring for your company's current stage - whether you need a go-getter for a startup or a seasoned pro for an established enterprise! HERE is how Barbara recommends you do this.
🛠️ MORE TOOLS TO GET IT DONE: Learn how to scale hiring for an early-stage startup HERE.
🤗 JOIN THE COMMUNITY: Ready to grow your revenues consistently? Want access to the right people & expand your network? Tired of going at it alone? Join our community membership waitlist here.
How Founders Can Make Their Startups VC-Backable
Learn What Successful Players In Your Industry Have Done - By learning from successful players in your industry, you can gain a deeper understanding of what investors are looking for and what it takes to succeed in your market. Whether it's building a strong business model, developing a compelling value proposition, or cultivating relationships with key stakeholders, studying the successes of others can provide valuable insights and help you position your startup for success. HERE are more insights into how you can make your startup VC-Backable.
🛠️ MORE TOOLS TO GET IT DONE: Learn how funding works HERE.
Other Financing Options Available To Startups (Apart from VC).
Focus on Customer Funded Revenue - "It’s not one-size-fits-all. Taking that risk capital is not going to be the only source of capital you’ll need." Who needs VCs when you've got customers? By generating revenue from paying customers, startups can prove their business model, maintain greater control over their operations, and avoid the pressure to scale too quickly. Plus, since it doesn't involve giving up equity, customer-funded revenue lets founders keep more of their business and grow at their own pace. HERE are other financing options available to startups.
🛠️ MORE TOOLS TO GET IT DONE: Learn how to know which funding options are right for youHERE.
RSVP TO THIS MONTH'S TRACTION TRAINING
Thursday, Feb 16th @ 6pm: How to Tap Into The Power of Connection for Business Success. RSVP
Tuesday, Feb 21st @ 12pm EST: How to Develop Partnerships & Accelerate Revenues. RSVP
Wednesday, March 1st @ 6pm EST: How to Apply for Grants & NOT Waste Your Time. RSVP
THIS WEEK'S GROWTH GUIDE
The pros and cons of VC and if it is the right funding vehicle for your startup.
Learn how to scale by mastering different growth channels in the Traction Library.
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With Love & Impact,
Alex Batdorf
Chief Get Sh!t Done Officer
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The power of branding for product marketing; How to find alternative financing; Why testing is a must-have for your GTM strategy with Jacquelyn De Jesu Center, founder SHHHOWERCAP
Learn from Jacquelyn De Jesu Center, founder of SHHHOWERCAP
You're viewing an archive of Get Sh!t Done Weekly Email Traction Briefings. Join free to receive your weekly 5-minute growth playbooks & grow alongside thousands of entrepreneurs
"Know your audience, know your consumer, know your why- that’s basically your brand strategy." - Jacquelyn De Jesu Center
Hey, It's Alex!
Customers today are hella smart.
They see beyond gimmicks and thinly veiled attempts to "relate" and speak their language.
You need to have a clear why beyond selling stuff that resonates with your audience in a way that only you can.
Ready to learn how a solid brand strategy built an 8-figure empire?
Let's get into it...
P.S Enjoy our weekly traction briefings? Share with friends so we can support more womxn founders in breaking barriers to scale generational impact!
Founder: Jacquelyn De Jesu Center | Company: SHHHOWERCAP | Location: New York, NY
Receipts: She bootstrapped an 8-figure company by creating a strong brand, creating a high-quality product and seeking alternative financing.
Here's your traction playbook...
How To Build A Long-Lasting Brand
Effective Branding Builds Businesses: Branding is more than the colors and logos you pick for your company. Branding is your company's entire identity. From your customer interactions to the values within the company - everything speaks to your brand identity.
Lesson - "Everything is a branding decision." - Jacquelyn De Jesu Center
While for some businesses, branding is purely visual, Jacquelyn stands on the firm belief that branding is inescapable. Whether it's how your product functions or how your employees represent your company, all these little elements affect how people perceive your business. Make sure that all the decisions you make for your business positively reflects who you are. Learn here how branding helped SHHHOWERCAP grow to 8-figures.
Here's how branding can help you create trust with your customers and turn them to advocates.
How To Scale With Alternative Financing
VC Isn't The Only Route: Traditional VC isn't the only answer. Actually, it's not the answer for 99% of businesses. There's no one-size-fits-all approach to capitalizing your business so it's important that you know all of your options.
Lesson - There's more than one source of alternative financing. For SHHHOWERCAP, securing financing meant looking at all the options available to them. That meant creating factoring relationships with retailers and looking for founder-friendly capital solutions that fit her needs like Clearco to support her with cash infusions when needed.
Understand alternative financing here.
How Product-Testing Helped Her Create Products Her Customers Needed.
Spend Time In Development: You can't create a quality product without testing. Testing gives you the opportunity to find out if your product is something the market actually wants. Not only does it give proof of concept, but it can help you save a lot of coin.
Lesson - "My story is also unique in that, I did it right. I spent my time in development, which I think a lot of founders don’t, to make sure that my product really stunned. That I could claim everything that I wanted, and that I could back up what I wanted to patent." - Jacquelyn De Jesu
30,000 products are launched every year and about 95% of them fail. Rushing to market without testing the viability of your product is a recipe for failure. Learn here why spending time in testing and development was critical to SHHHOWERCAP's overall success.
TRACTION TOOLS: How to get it done...
How To Master An Omnichannel Retail Strategy: Building a retail business can be challenging. Find out here how using an omnichannel strategy helped our queen build a nationwide retail empire.
Alternative Funding Sources: Here are the top 8 types of funding options for small businesses.
Tell A Powerful Story: A key element of creating a winning brand strategy is learning how to tell your brand story. Learn here how Uncle Nearest did this.
Concept Test: Get a step-by-step guide on how to concept test for any new product you want to launch. Access here.
Use Grassroots Marketing To Grow Your Brand: Here's how a financial platform grew their customer-base using grassroot marketing strategies.
Is Branding Being Misused?: Find out what top designers and brand consultants feel about the subject here.
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Founder Money Trauma (We Feel You); Master Guerrilla Marketing To Grow Your Customer-Base with Shiloh Johnson, founder ComplYant
Learn from Shiloh Johnson, founder of ComplYant
You're viewing an archive of Get Sh!t Done Weekly Email Traction Briefings. Join free to receive your weekly 5-minute growth playbooks & grow alongside thousands of entrepreneurs
"We have to take a step back and get back to the management side before we can start to do some of these wealth creation things." - Shiloh Johnson
Hey, It's Alex!
Financial money management is a challenge that many founders face - especially early on.
Our relationship with money from as early as in our childhood knowingly or unknowingly affects our financial decisions.
It takes a lot of introspection to unlearn some bad habits that we've developed with time - but this process is very necessary.
You can't build wealth if you can't manage your money.
Let's get into it...
P.S Enjoy our weekly traction briefings? Share with friends so we can support more womxn founders in breaking barriers to scale generational impact!
Founder: Shiloh Johnson | Company: ComplYantApp | Location: Los Angeles, CA
Receipts: She scaled a multi-million dollar tax compliance platform through grassroots marketing and relevant partnerships.
Here's your traction playbook...
How To Use Grassroots Marketing Strategies To Build Your Brand
Low Barrier To Entry: Generating much-needed and valuable content is perhaps one of the easiest ways to break into your industry. Not only does it help other businesses but it also solidifies your position as an authority on a particular subject.
Lesson - Shiloh learned early-on in her career and in her business journey that she had knowledge to offer. Before she could sell anyone on her business, she had to teach them what the problem was, and why they needed to address it. This strategy peaked interest with other people and other brands jumped on board. Her advice, don't do anything extravagant. Start small! Here is her advice for founders looking to leverage this strategy.
Here's how to use grassroots marketing to make an impact.
How Money Trauma Affects Small Businesses - And How To Get Past It
It Starts In Childhood: While money-trauma is discussed in personal money management, we rarely discuss how it haunts founders. Your relationship with money can and will affect how you make financial business decisions. Anxiety around money and money management stems from our childhood.
Lesson - You're not alone. 1 in 4 Americans suffer from financially-induced post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. The biggest money trauma for most small businesses is how to maintain and how to grow. Before you can focus on wealth creation, you need to master money management. Taking active steps to understand your relationship with money and finding the best money management techniques will help your business grow. Learn why managing financial trauma is the
Click here to learn how to overcome past financial trauma and increase your wealth.
How To Identify Unique Channels To Help Scale Your Business
Understand Your Industry: Understanding your industry gives you the ability to identify unique ways you can fulfill your customers' needs. For ComplYant, that meant working with key industry players to reach more people who would benefit from her services.
Lesson - "Sometimes it’s thinking about who else is affected in your circle and going to them and using them as an upshot to get to the end user." - Shiloh Johnson
Shiloh understood the impact municipalities and local governments played in building her business. By gaining their trust, she was able to leverage their support and reach out to more customers. Here's how partnership marketing worked for this business.
Here are the powerful benefits of partnership marketing
Support Shiloh in Scaling Impact
Here's how you can support Shiloh: Participate and share their webinars with your network. Also engage with them on all their social media platforms (@complyant)
Here's Your Weekly Tea
Startup layoffs hit crypto and real estate companies hard as funding opportunities dry up. Looking to raise VC this year? Checks are drying up due to over-inflated rounds the past 2 years. It's not that VC's don't have the $. They do but they're saving cash reserves for current portfolio companies in case they meet despair and companies with outstanding traction. Don't believe it? Funding is on track to drop another 19% by the end of June, according to Scott Galloway.
TRACTION TOOLS: How to get it done...
How To Master Partnership Marketing: The right partnerships helped this company tremendously grow their customer-base. Find out how COI Energy mastered this strategy here.
Master Budgeting: Here's how budgeting and money management helped Jennifer Eden scale a 7-figure business.
Grassroots Marketing: Learn about grassroot marketing and how to run successful grassroots marketing campaigns here.
Use Webinars To Generate Leads: Here are 9 tips on how to use webinars to generate more leads.
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How to Bootstrap Your Startup to 7-Figures In Under 10 Years with Caroll Lee, founder Provenance Meals
Learn from Caroll Lee, founder of Provenance Meals.
You're viewing an archive of Get Sh!t Done Weekly Email Traction Briefings. Join free to receive your weekly 5-minute growth playbooks & grow alongside thousands of entrepreneurs
"I knew that I already failed at a business, and what went wrong. I learned so many lessons from that failure, so when I started Provenance, I knew what I didn’t want!" - Caroll Lee
Hey, It's Alex here
Have you started a business or a project and failed at times along the way?
Lemme tell you, you won't learn unless you fail.
The catch is to fail quickly and develop an understanding of why you failed.
Is that easy? Nah. You have to shift your mindset towards careful introspection and disciplined response.
What you'll find in this traction briefing:
How failure is an asset for future businesses.
How to scale a capital intensive company with little to no capital through strategic partnerships.
How to craft a successful go-to-market strategy.
How to leverage influencers and strategic partners to market and increase your company’s visibility.
How NOT to layoff your employees
Founder: Caroll Lee| Company: Provenance Meals| Location: New York, NY
Where was she before Provenance Meals?
Caroll started her career right at the brink of the dotcom boom. She ventured into helping to launch ecommerce and tech businesses before embarking on her true passion - helping people access healthy food!
Problem
Where can busy professionals access healthy, nutritious, sustainably-sourced and ready to go meals?
For Caroll Lee, Provenance Meals was more than a business - it was a passion. Although her journey as a food entrepreneur was rough initially, she knew that she was in the right industry. Her dream was to help more people have access to healthy, nutritious, and ethically sourced foods. Foods that could be used as medicine. Food that busy professionals on the go could prepare easily and quickly.
Provenance Meals was created to show that quick meals can be healthy and tasty at the same time.
Here's what you'll learn...
Fail Successfully
A lot of successful business people have failed at at least one other business. But how do you use that failure to your advantage? When Caroll Lee started Provenance Meals, she had already failed at one other business. How was she going to make her new company different?
Lesson - Use your past business failure as a lesson for what you do not want to do going forward. Failure is scary, but it gives you information and skills you wouldn't have had otherwise.
High-Quality Product = High-Quality Brand Experience
With increased competition in the meal kit industry over the years, marketing has become even harder. Businesses need to learn how to set themselves apart from the other products within their market.
Lesson - High-quality products speak for themselves! Provenance Meals has had a long-standing reputation of not only providing high-quality meals, but also providing an all round high-quality experience.
Influencers, Celebrities, and Industry Partners Can Be Your Biggest Marketing Asset - When Used Strategically
How do you bring a new product to market? With no visibility, Provenance Meals leveraged content marketing strategies early on but with more businesses entering the space, they needed to find a new strategy.
Lesson - Influencers, celebrities and industry partners can be your strongest marketing asset. The trick is learning what differentiates a good partner from a bad partner. Learn more here.
Here's Your Weekly Tea
How NOT To Layoff Your Employees - The Story Of Better.com
Better.com is soon entering its third round of layoffs. The first two can only be considered a hot mess and there some key lessons we can takeaway from that experience.
Here’s where they f**ked up:
Mass Layoffs that ARE preventable: Similar to many high-growth companies, Better.com laid off 900 employees over Zoom. Venture-backed companies get put in a pressure cooker in order to get to some sort of an exit in 5-7 years (no more than 10) As soon as that big check comes in, startups spend and spend fast because their VC's are telling them too. One of the first major investments is usually human capital. Unfortunately, just as many people that get hired all at once, inevitably get fired just as quickly because hiring a ton of people can NEVER solve for a business model that still needs work.
NEVER Call Your Employees Dumb: We hoped this went without saying but clearly not everyone got the memo. Layoffs are difficult times for those affected so compassion is key. Transparency and kindness can go a long way here.
It's Not About You: As difficult as it is for you as the founder, it's hella difficult for your employees who now have to figure out their next move to pay bills. Leading through empathy by acknowledging the error and taking accountability matters. Statements like, "The last time I did this, I cried." do nothing to make the process easier for the people who are now unemployed. While founders also need a supportive outlet in making that difficult decision, your employees ain't it.
Key Takeaway: If you were an employee, how would you want to be laid off? It's as simple as that. There's no perfect way to layoff an employee or employees, but you can always show your humanity in the process.
TRACTION TOOLS: How to get it done...
Here are some tools that will help non-profits scale<3
Curious to learn about influencer marketing and if it's the right marketing strategy for your business? Learn more here.
Failure is an asset, and never an endpoint. If you have experienced failure before, pivot and re-strategize.
To raise or not to raise? Here what some of our founders had to say on the topic here.
Your customers eat with their eyes first! For entrepreneurs within the food industry, here's why the first visual impression matters so much.
JOIN THE COMMUNITY
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