Gifting Taylor Swift, $40B Laundry Idea, How to Start A Scripted Social Show

Hi Business Besties. Here’s what we’re covering today.

• Resource roundup

• RSVP to our mentor call with Charlotte from CharCharms

• The $40 billion opportunity in laundry

• How to start a scripted social show for your brand

• Skim the headlines

• How she turned an anonymous blog into a $54 million business

But first…

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• Fazit’s founder wants to teach you exactly how she got Taylor Swift to wear her beauty brand on TV, generating millions in sales. Join the free workshop at 7pm ET 22 July. 🔗Tell me more

• This DTC insider put together her top agency and tool recommendations. 🔗Tell me more

• Enter to win this quick and easy $1k grant, awarded quarterly. 🔗Tell me more

• Apply to be named one of The US Chamber of Commerce’s Top 100 Small Businesses (and win $25k while you’re at it). 🔗Tell me more

• Dream Ventures Accelerator is officially enrolling for Summer School: Fundraising Edition. It’s definitely not free (the program costs $1700) but comes highly recommended in our group chat for anyone seriously wanting to raise money. 🔗Tell me more

• This program teaches financial readiness and awards $5k to participants. 🔗Tell me more

• Here’s $40k up for grabs for female food and beverage founders. 🔗Tell me more

July 22 at 5pm ET with Charlotte Trecartin, CharCharms

Charlotte Trecartin, founder of CharCharms, is joining the Female Founder World group chat for a live Q&A call. She started a business making Stanley cup charms in her parents’ garage and profitably bootstrapped to $6.5 million in annual revenue. The brand’s been on Shark Tank and is now stocked in Target and Dick’s Sporting Goods. Come ask her all about it, Business Besties.

There’s a $40 billion global opportunity in laundry that’s hiding in plain sight.

Ireland McCaughey noticed that “boring businesses” like laundromats haven’t seen any innovation in decades. And, as Boomers retire and close or sell their companies, the opportunity in this space is getting bigger.

She put together her financial projections, created a plan, and pitched some angel investors. Now, she’s just opened her first “Launderette” location in Williamsburg, New York, a full-service laundry with the vibe and service a Millennial or Gen Z customer expects.

The opportunity for Millennials and Gen Z entrepreneurs to start or acquire “boring businesses” as millions of Baby Boomers are set to retire over the next decade is huge. Ireland lays out exactly how she got started on the show this week.

In a feed of content that feels pretty same-same, scripted social media shows are just about the only thing I’m paying attention to.

Scripted social shows are videos usually produced with higher production value than your regular UGC video, dropped in episodes (just like a regular TV series) that are short and bite-sized for social channels and usually formatted for TikTok and Instagram Reels. This isn’t a content project that you can whip up in a week, but they have huge viral and brand-building potential for those who take the time to get it right.

There are a couple of ways you can do this.

The first route follows Gant’s example. They’re making aesthetic, escapist mini episodes for a number of series: “The Perfect Summer Getaway” and “Postcards From Puglia” are my favorites. The Puglia series follows a group of friends on vacation, checking into the hotel, greeting each other, and short exchanges about stuff like the correct pronunciation of “croissant”. The voiceover usually reads from a postcard narrating what you see happening on screen.

It feels a little like an ad compared to some of the other examples I’m going to share, but I still like it.

Brooklyn Coffee Shop is a viral series with a similar approach that’s not attached to a brand, but is a creative project by actor and creator Pooja Tripathi. This account gained 135,000 followers over 50 short episodes. It’s vibey, aesthetic, and short, and feels like a true scripted series with new characters and recognizable faces in each segment.

I can totally see other brands with distinctive aesthetics and brand identities, like Crown Affair, following this format and nailing it.

Kate Spade also did this years ago with its “MissAdventure” YouTube series featuring Gloria Steinem, Anna Kendrick, and Anna Faris. They should absolutely re-cut that for TikTok and bring it back.

The second approach follows the lead of projects like Shop Cats. I’m linking the IG here, but you can find them on TikTok, too.

Shop Cats follows a recognizable format in each episode as the host introduces you to shop cats in different delis and bodegas across New York. It feels more social native and raw than the Brooklyn Coffee Shop and Gant examples, but is still clearly following an episodic format.

Something that falls outside the ‘scripted series’ category and more into the docuseries category is the video content being produced by creator Aija Mayrock. You can do something similar using Veo 3, Google latest AI model for text-to-video generation.

So what’s your brand’s version of this? While you’re brainstorming, consider these four elements:

• Theme First, Plot Second: Before breaking down the plot of each episode, zoom out to think about the theme. Shop Cats is about… well, shop cats. Gant’s ‘Postcards from Puglia’ is about a group vacationing in Italy and writing home. This offers the container in which each episode will live. Choose something that feels repeatable.

• Make It Instantly Recognizable: Repetition creates recognition. The lighting, colors, aesthetic, speed/pace of editing and the setting across the videos in each series should be uniform across the series and distinctive to your brand. Audiences should know they’re tuning back into their favorite social show the second it appears in their feed.

• Characters = Connection: Most of the shows have repeat main characters that you see again and again in each episode. Brooklyn Coffee Shop features the same two baristas with a rotating cast of customers. This breeds familiarity and emotional stickiness, just like you expect from your favorite longform series.

• Cast for Clout and Distribution: Filming a mini series that stars influencers offers in-built distribution for the series and is a fresh way to partner with creators that doesn’t feel as salesy as the typical sponsored post.

If I was doing this today (and honestly, I might), I’d reach out to a local film school to find interns who can collaborate on the project.

FOUNDER GOSS: This is interestingggg. Outdoor Voices just dropped a cryptic social media refresh that might suggest founder Ty Haney is returning to the brand she launched 12 years ago. Clue #1: The brand wiped all of its TikTok and Instagram content. Clue #2: They unfollowed every account on Instagram except one: Ty Haney’s. The brand also updated its social bio to “doing things, brb.” OK, we’re invested!!

CHATGPT: ChatGPT wants to be your new virtual assistant and can now ‘think’ and ‘act’ for you thanks to a new update available to paid users. Using the platform’s new agent mode you can ask Chat to “look at my calendar and brief me on upcoming client meetings based on recent news” or “plan and buy ingredients to make Japanese breakfast for four.” OpenAI’s CEO said the tech is cutting edge and experimental, but not something to apply to high-stakes uses or with a lot of personal information - yet.

BEAUTY: Ami Colé and its founder Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye have been a beacon of possibility and a role model for many founders whose vision is rooted in inclusion. The news this week that the brand is closing hit a lot of you hard. Same - what a loss. Diarrha pointed to fluctuating tariff rates, increasing overhead costs and a downplay of the importance of inclusivity as reasons why the brand can’t continue: “Instead of focusing on the healthy, sustainable future of the company and meeting the needs of our loyal fan base, I rode a temperamental wave of appraising investors—some of whom seemed to have an attitude toward equity and ‘betting big on inclusivity’ that changed its tune a lot, to my ears, from what it sounded like in 2020,” she wrote.

INSTAGRAM: Google is now indexing Instagram content and serving it up in search results. Take advantage of the changes by ensuring your public business account has posts with captions featuring keywords that highlight search terms you want to hit.

MONEY: According to new McKinsey studies, the amount of money and assets owned by women is growing faster than the overall market. The number has grown 10% in the last year. Considering financial institutions and industries servicing wealthy individuals have consistently centered men, this shift opens up a big opportunity for service providers, educators, and platforms to meet the needs of a new demographic.

OFFLINE INFLUENCERS: Are you thinking about IRL and offline communities in your influencer marketing strategy? Vogue predicts community event leaders (so, the leaders behind run clubs and IRL events) will be the next influencers.

CELEBRITY BRANDS: Sydney Sweeney is launching a lingerie brand, and Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez have reportedly invested in it. In 2023 she collaborated with Frankies Bikinis, which might have been her way of testing the idea.

FRAGRANCE: Melanie Bender, Rhode’s first CEO who also fuelled the growth of brands Merit and Versed, is working on her 4th brand with the founders of Youth to the People and Milk Makeup. It’s a fragrance line that will launch into Sephora. Makes sense, given fragrance is dominating sales growth across the U.S. mass (up 8%) and prestige (up 4%) beauty sectors last quarter.

She Started An Anonymous Blog, Then Sold It For $54 Million

When Aleen Dreksler was in university, “bro content” was dominating online, but there wasn’t a media brand speaking to young women in a relatable way. She teamed up with two friends to launch an anonymous blog to meet the gap in 2011. That little blog became Betches, a viral media brand that’s beloved by hundreds of millions of women. Aleen and her cofounders, Samantha Sage and Jordana Abraham, bootstrapped the business and eventually sold it in a deal reported to be worth upwards of $50 million.

Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and wherever you get podcasts.

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