🤳 AI workshop for biz owners, pitch deck template, $500k investment opportunity

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👇 Today we're covering

• 👀 Our biggest IRL event yet is coming to New York this March! Space is limited and pre-sale will start this week. Keep your eyes on that inbox, besties.

• 📓 Resource roundup

• 🗞️ Skim the headlines

• 🎟 Upcoming online events: How to Launch an App on a Budget; UGC 101 for Business Owners Workshop; Group Business Coaching with Kaylin Marcotte (Founder of Jiggy Puzzles); AI Shortcuts to Simplify and Supercharge Your Content Workflow

• 🚀 This 30-year-old ex-recruiter built a $52M dollar activewear brand

• 💰 A viral medium post helped her raise $4M+ in 30 days

📓 Resource roundup

• Lana Elie, founder of flower delivery startup Floom (try 'em for Valentine's Day with code FFW10 for 10% off in Feb!) shared her investor deck with Female Founder World Business Bestie subscribers. 🔗 Tell me more

• New York founders: Hello Alice is democratizing the 'friends and family round' (when founders raise money from their network). Women of color who are based in New York are eligible to apply for $25,000 in grants and mentorship. 🔗 Tell me more 

• Asian and Pacific Islander founders can apply for Gold House’s accelerator. A $150,000 investment in your biz is the cherry on top of their killer programming. 🔗 Tell me more

• Working on a media business? The Next Challenge for Media and Journalism might be exactly what you need to level up. 🔗 Tell me more

• Get the 💸 support 💸 your business deserves in 2023. Access Female Founder World’s guide to grants, accelerator and incubator programs for female founders happening in 2023. 🔗 Tell me more

• This event is basically the crystal ball for learning exactly what VCs are looking for in founders. Pitch a Founder is a virtual summit created for Black founders to learn about raising capital straight from experienced founders and investors. 🔗 Tell me more

• If you’re a US-based founder you can share your story for a chance to win up to $60,000 thanks to this small biz contest. 🔗 Tell me more

• Ladies who Launch Small Business Grant and Mentorship program is accepting applications. Get your hands on a $10,000 cash grant, plus six months of mentorship. 🔗 Tell me more

🗞️ Skim the headlines

EQUALITY: Ugh. Startups with all-women teams raised less VC money in 2022 than in 2021—and we weren't exactly cheering about the 2021 number either. In 2022 startups led by all-women founding teams received 1.9% of all venture capital invested, compared with 2.4% in the year before. Unsurprisingly, if you have a male co-founder that statistic jumps all the way to 17.2%. @ VCs, please give Female Founder World a call if you need some intros to women entrepreneurs, we know a couple. 🙃

BEAUTY: thirteen lune, the spot for discovering beauty brands created by Black and Brown founders, just closed $8M in investment. Founder Nyakio Grieco's going to be busy—she plans to add more bricks and mortar locations, including a flagship LA store, expand into 600 JCPenny locations, and grow thirteen lune's own skincare brand Relevant: Your Skin Seen.

Scalp care's having a moment (Cosmopolitan, Byrdie and Allure agree), with Australian scalp care brand Straand landing $2M 💰 in pre-seed funding from Unilever Ventures, the venture capital arm of Unilever. Straand's creating skincare for your scalp, wrapped up in cute branding. They'll spend the cash on expanding into the US, China, the UK and Europe, while also ramping up on Amazon and launching new products.

Congrats to founder Cyndi Ramirez and the Chillhouse team—the modern destination for self care and maker of TikTok's favorite press-on nails 💅 has landed a big partnership with Target. Chillhouse's 'Chill Tips' press-on nails are now available in 500 Target stores across the US!

MONEY: You know Sophia Amoruso as the OG Girlboss and founder of Nastygal—but she's also in the investing game. Sophia's new fund, 'Trust Fund', is looking for investors to help raise $5M, which she'll use to back digital consumer companies. $1M of that will come from a 'community raise'—accredited investors are invited to write checks between $2,000 and $10,000 and participate in the fund. If you're a digital consumer biz, now's the time to dust off your pitch deck and fire off some emails.

🎟 4 Female Founder World online events to level-up your biz

✨ Workshop: How to Launch an App on a Budget with Olivia DeRamus, founder of Communia (Business Bestie Subscribers Only) on 21 February at 6pm ET

You heard her on the pod this week and now Olivia DeRamus, founder of Communia, an inclusive social media app with over 100,000 downloads, is popping into the Female Founder World community to host a workshop. Olivia will each us how to get an app idea out of your head and into the world, and how to make it happen on a budget.

She’ll be covering: who should build your app and how to find them; white-labeling; budgets and where to spend; creating your priority features list; and how to get your first users.

✨ Workshop: UGC 101 for Business Owners with YouMe Lin (Business Bestie Subscribers Only) on 28 February at 6pm ET

YouMe Lin is the creator of content marketing agency Cloud Studio. She helps brands like Bumble and Clarins achieve incredible milestones—we're talking viral videos with 1M+ views and 10x increases in site traffic.

In this workshop YouMe will be teaching business owners how to win with user generated content (UGC). She'll be covering:

• What exactly is UGC?

• The different types of UGC your business needs.

• How do brands benefit from UGC?

• How to repurpose UGC.

• Cost effective ways to get more UGC content.

• UGC usage rights

✨ Group Business Coaching with Kaylin Marcotte, founder of Jiggy Puzzles on 23 February at 6:30pm ET

Kaylin Marcotte, founder of Jiggy Puzzles, is hosting a group business coaching call and we wanna see you there! Kaylin launched Jiggy Puzzles with $25,000 in savings and in its first 9 months of business, Jiggy hit $1.6M in sales. Three years later, Kaylin's sold over 250,000 puzzles! This call is open to all Female Founder World community members (not just paid Business Bestie subscribers). Bring your questions.

✨ AI Shortcuts to Simplify and Supercharge Your Content Workflow on 14 March at 6pm ET

Everyone's talking about ChatGPT at the moment, but there are dozens of AI tools that business owners and content marketers should be using in their content workflows. We'll be covering the best ones, including ChatGPT, and how to use them in this live workshop exclusively for Business Bestie subscribers.

🚀 This 30-year-old ex-recruiter built a $52M activewear brand

Matilda Murray left her 9-5 recruiting job in 2019 to team up with her fiancé and build STAX. If you’re an Aussie or you wear athleisure, you likely know (and wear) this brand. STAX. was started by Matilda’s partner, who was $80,000 in debt at the time, from a spare room in his mom's house. Today, they're working together, hitting five-figures in daily sales, and have a $52 million valuation.

Matilda’s partner started the business after finding customers were more interested in buying branded hoodies than buying the supplements of his original business. Matilda originally had no interest in entrepreneurship, but knew STAX. would be more successful with her influence—she says it desperately needed a "woman's touch". She waited until the brand was making $5,000 in daily sales before quitting her full time job.

Two things set STAX. products apart: their fabrics and sizing. They have patents for their first two fabrics, which took 18 months and three years to develop respectively. From day one, STAX. has offered sizing from extra small to 4XL.

Matilda focusses on PR, community, and marketing in the business—and she's great at it.

Her VIP SMS strategy generated $200,000 in sales of the brand’s Winter ’22 line in under five minutes. The strategy was simple, but smart: STAX. built a database with over 100,000 VIP customers, and shared an SMS with the group giving access to shop the new product line the night before it dropped to the public. Shoppers, evidently, were very into it.

Early on, Matilda also created a Facebook group to build a strong community around STAX. Conversation within the community extends beyond the brand to beauty, fashion, and pop culture. She works with the community to shape brand and product decisions.

She's constantly exploring new influencer and PR strategies and says STAX. will be testing influencer marketing on gaming platform, Twitch.

Instead of focusing solely on mega-influencers and celebrities at the beginning, STAX. gifted friends of celebrities and celebrity stylists. These influencers were more accessible than reaching out to celebs with millions of followers, and are interesting in staying on top of new trends and brands.

Her influencer strategy also turned out to be a smart way to get exposed to top-tier celebrities indirectly. With this approach, STAX. has been worn by Megan Fox, Hailey Beiber, Jennifer Lopez, Addison Rae, Lizzo, and more famous women.

💰 A viral medium post helped her raise $4M+ in 30 days

Nathalie Walton built a career in tech before becoming an Expectful user and fan—at the time the app was solely focused on pregnancy meditation. Today, they're a leading tool for fertility and pregnancy, with over 500,000 users—and last month Expectful was acquired by Babylist!

Nathalie was asked join the app as a late-stage co-founder and CEO. Her first task was raising over $4M to pivot the app to capture a bigger market including fertility, pregnancy and motherhood. She did it within 30 days.

Once onboard, one of Nathalie's first decisions as CEO turned out to be a mistake: She invested in PR to announce her new role, but found no editors wanted to cover her story—yet. What she did next helped changed the trajectory of the business and helped the app hit 500,000 downloads.

Nathalie took matters into her own hands and wrote a Medium post connecting her personal story about motherhood to why she joined Expectful—and it hit. The post went viral on LinkedIn, and she continued sharing this story while fundraising $4M+ to pivot the app.

Now editors wanted to cover Expectful and Nathalie's story. Following the fundraise and viral post, journalists were more excited to share Nathalie's story, and she landed coverage in Goop, Entrepreneur, Vogue, and Forbes (not once, but five times).

Nathalie's tip for other founders is to “focus on building your personal brand and business brand so that you can translate that story.”

Nathalie’s fundraising tips that helped her raise $4M:

• Have a strong deck and a strong story.

• Sharing traction is essential. Do you have users? Do you have a waitlist? Talk about it.

• Ask other founders for intros to investors.

• Find a coach to help you fundraise, ideally an entrepreneur who’s been through the process already.

Nathalie wanted Expectful to appeal to a bigger market and helped the team re-strategize the app from only offering pregnancy meditation to becoming a comprehensive resource for fertility, pregnancy and postpartum. This re-focus has gained Expectful over 500,000 downloads and has been a huge part of their recent acquisition.