Sarah Hawley

Like, I'm very uncomfortable as an entrepreneur just sitting here waiting for somebody else to build my product.

And what do I do with myself?

And so I saw this as an opportunity to start building our brand and get people interested and engaged in what we were going to launch.

In the end, it sounds like a very strategic plan, and it actually worked out really well.

I don't know what would have been better, though, getting my product live.

Sooner might have been more appealing to me.

But essentially what we did was we used October to December.

Sorry.

to gather the survey responses and by marketing this survey and putting it out there and driving people to our website we were getting their email addresses for this pre-launch and just gaining excitement.

And then we spent January preparing the report so that we could market it and put it out there and then February to April we were able to use that as a

marketing tool that positioned us as experts so that when we went live in April, we had established quite a bit of brand awareness and credibility, and we also had some really cool stats and things that we could then take into our marketing moving forward.

To give you some perspective on where we are in terms of a business,

So that was when we launched in April 24th of 2021, and this is kind of our latest quarter here.

So this has been our trajectory.

And looking back now, I'm very glad we launched with a community of people who actually knew who we were, because it might have looked a little bit more pushed out if we hadn't.

So when I think about community and growing a community-first brand, it's really all about bringing people together around a common vision and a common mission.

And it's an opportunity to genuinely engage with them and use their feedback and use their insights regularly to build the company.

And obviously early on, but also still now.

And we are a mission-driven company.

So community-led growth makes a lot of sense because people want to be a part of what we're building.