🥳 Hey, Kasey here! Welcome to this week’s 🏔High Growth Founders🏔 newsletter.
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Pamper Your Period
I love getting a long, luxurious massage — when I take the time to schedule one — which is rare.
Lately, I’ve started scheduling small moments of pampering.
A weekly bubble bath
A long slow walk in the sunshine
A glass of chilled champagne on my back deck on a Friday evening
A monthly My Comma period care box — filled with surprise snacks in my favorite flavors and products personalized to my experience.
If you're a woman and/or a menstruator, it’s time to delegate some monthly self-care with a personalized and luxurious period care subscription box.
The powerful and dynamic Founders at My Comma are crowdfunding the next phase of their business. I just invested in them — and myself — with a quarterly subscription.
Gift yourself, or a friend, colleague, or cofounder, the luxury of delegated self-care.
In This Issue:
Growth Insight: Slow Down to Speed Up
Growth Event: LA Femtech Salon
High Growth Founders Episode of the Week: The 6 Dichotomies of a Life Well-Lived
Growth Resource I Love:
Thank you and some news…
Growth Insight:
In entrepreneurship, there are a fuck ton (yes, that’s a technical term) of ways to waste time and money.
But from my experience, there is one method that is not only one of the most common but also arguably the most costly.
Essentially, you waste time, by trying to aggressively save it.
Trying to outsource, engineer, or automate a system that you haven’t proven works manually.
You skip valuable steps that ultimately wind up costing you.
What do I mean by this?
Perhaps you’ve sold a few products or services and you’re ready to ramp up your sales, so you invest in an agency or tool to launch automated outbound messages on Linkedin to book meetings with prospects.
But once you launch the campaign, you struggle to get the right people to schedule and attend calls and ultimately waste a ton of time talking to people that can’t afford you, or worse, are trying to sell to you.
Maybe you read an article or watched a video of someone talking about how they generated a ton of new leads for their business by engaging with the people commenting on Instagram or Youtube accounts of influencers in your industry, so you go to Upwork and hire some VA in Asia for $5 to give it a shot for you.
Except once they start engaging, you realize they can’t emulate your voice, the comments sound tone deaf, and none of it leads to followers or sales opportunities.
Or because of your many years in an industry or your personal experience struggling with a particular problem, you decide you know exactly how to solve it. So you build a product, create a course, or launch a service without ever asking a member of your target market if they want what you’re creating.
You spend months building and weeks planning your launch. You introduce your product to the world only to hear…crickets. No one buys.
Sound familiar? I don’t think I know a single entrepreneur who hasn’t fallen victim to this instinct in their career. I know I have — multiple times.
This problem is so dang common, I recently recorded an HGF episode about exactly this.
Listen now — Website | Apple | Spotify
Here’s how to avoid this all too common time waster.
Slowing down to speed up
#1. Create the minimum viable version of everything.
Hopefully, by now, you know what a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is. The concept traditionally refers to, well, a product — either physical or software — but we can apply this mode of thinking to anything we do.
An outbound sales sequence, a new marketing campaign, a product offering, or even a new benefits program for employees.
The idea is to launch something in a super simple, easy manner to test its effectiveness.
Does this solve the customer’s (or your) problems?
Would people (or you) pay for this?
Will it deliver the results you are seeking?
#2. Emphasize experimentation
The benefit of the MVP is your ability to get initial feedback and use that insight to improve your project, reconfiguring your plans to deliver greater results, but without investing ample time or resources. Staying nimble is key.
Once you’ve launched the MVP version of whatever your new initiative is, figure out what’s working and what isn’t. Make some small adjustments to improve and try again.
Within a few weeks or months, your results will be dramatically improved, but your spend will remain manageable.
#3. Feedback is everything.
Stop thinking you can figure it all out on your own. Ask customers, colleagues, mentors, and friends how they would solve this problem. Don’t share your solution yet. That’s leading the witness.
One of the worst ways to get honest, helpful feedback on a solution is to say: “I built this thing, what do you think?”
People are too nice. They’ll almost always be pretty positive and give you encouragement, but then never buy the product or respond positively to the effort as a prospect or customer.
Instead say, hey I’m trying to build something that will solve X problem, how would you approach that? What would be a perfect solution in your mind?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I can’t say it enough. Slow the F*** Down!
I know you are racing to turn this business of yours into a success. Or to lose that weight. Or to get married. Or whatever life goal you’re focused on now.
But when you are so focused on the outcome that you can’t appreciate and honor the process of doing it right, you will only waste time.
HGF Episode of the Week:
To honor my 40th birthday last week (!!!!!), I wanted to share some of the most powerful lessons I’ve learned about life in my 40 years on this Earth.
When I sat down to record this episode, I realized that much of what I learned was contradictory. It made me think about one of my favorite books on leadership, The Dichotomy of Leadership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. In it, they describe the push and pull that exists in every great leader — to be confident, but still humble, to be strong, but still malleable, etc.
Give a listen and let me know what you think.
Have a fabulous weekend, everyone. I’ll be sharing some big news next week, so stay tuned.
In Love and Growth,
Kasey