Photo of the week: cats basking in the sun on a window sill in Brooklyn this past Easter Sunday
Hello! We’re Kim and Jenn. We’re two moms who hail from Boston and New York, respectively. We left the world of tech startups, and now we’re making a go at starting up a business to help startup founders, independent consultants and mom-owned businesses.
We hope to share the workflows, frameworks, tools and analyses that worked for us at startups so that our fellow (aspiring) entrepreneurs can learn from our mistakes, increase their business’ longevity and improve their chances for success.
What to Expect (from this newsletter)
We’ll play around with formats, but we’ll show up in your inbox every week (aiming for Tuesdays, with this week as an exception — Easter weekend, no school Monday).
Startup trends
Software we use
Tools we’ve built
Building wealth
Empowering moms to be SAHMs
Once a month, we’ll use this newsletter to give you a recap of the previous month — how it started, how it’s going, what’s next.
With that said and the start of April and Q2, let’s kick off this newsletter with a recap of our first quarter.
Q1 Recap
Activities
Since inception 3 months ago — January 5, 2024 to be exact! — this is what we’ve been up to:
Established our mission and manifestos (for Kim and Jenn), target audience and potential revenue streams
Set up our website on Webflow
Wrote 35 blog articles
Created 5 digital product and listed on Etsy, 2 items purchased
Posted 33x on Instagram and twice on Facebook
Did a 1-week sprint on Reels
Did a 1-week sprint on digital products
Met once in person (filming content, defining personas, pitching client project)
What we learned
Right now, much of our learnings are based on workflows, business models, and how to get more learnings. Not many metrics yet, but we’ll include those later on as we have more to share
Reels (social media) are not our core competency and not part of our focus at this stage
We know that Instagram’s algo prioritizes them, and we don’t discount the benefits
But, they take us longer than they should to do, and they distract us from working on our blog content.
However, we have seen in the analytics that we still have to socialize content to get traffic to our site
Digital products are worth the investment
We build the tools to answer questions we personally come across, which may be useful to others
Tools give us more content to write about
Posting on Etsy allows us to test demand
Target audience should be niche, but not too niche
It was hard trying to write for such a broad audience (at one point all SAHMs who are aspiring entrepreneurs) — we needed some set of assumptions in order to narrow down our content, voice and offerings. We settled on the personas: independent consultants, aspiring board advisors and creators who generate six figures. We’ll get more into this another time.
Too narrow of an audience, and the market is just not big enough / attractive
For April
We are still in the content creation phase.
Reach a total of 50 blog posts - our kids’ Spring Break week may get in the way with our productivity this week
Produce a total of 20 digital products to create a portfolio to start advertising on
Get more consistent at socializing our blog content on FaceBook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest, but in a lightweight way
Launch a newsletter! ✅
Signing off, see you next week!
Kim and Jenn