🛍️ Instagram Shop goss, how to get into Sephora Accelerate, new Kardashian businesses

Hey, welcome to Female Founder World. This is our free 5-minute email keeping thousands of consumer brand builders in the loop. New friends are welcome! Feel free to forward this email to your people and be the first to tell them about this very handy business resource 😎. — Jasmine 

Did someone forward you this email? Welcome! Subscribe here.

👇 Today we're covering

• 📓 Resource roundup

• 🗞️ Skim the headlines

• 💬 Sephora Accelerate applications are open: How to get in

• 🎁 Giveaway: $2,000 beauty and wellness bundle!

• 🗓️ You're invited: Shopify x Female Founder World in Los Angeles

• 📱 Audience-building lessons from a media biz: The Gist

📓 Resource roundup

• Applications are open now for the Sephora Accelerate program. Founders who get in will access to a six-month curriculum led by the Sephora team. This year's cohort will focus on founders who are people of color. 🔗 Tell me more

• Some States in the US make it easier than others to start and grow a business. This list breaks down exactly which states are most friendly to entrepreneurs. 🔗 Tell me more

• 'Deal Hunting' is an open-access Notion document to find investors and entrepreneurs, source deals, and figure out how and where to sell your company. 🔗 Tell me more

• Mission-driven businesses, Inc.'s Best in Business Awards is open for applications and will celebrate companies that made an "extraordinary impact over the past year in their field, within their communities, or on society at large". You'll need to cough up $895 to apply. 🔗 Tell me more

• HerStartup Pitch Night is awarding one Australian female founder a prize pack that includes $20K investment and a $5K cash prize. Applications close this week. 🔗 Tell me more

🗞️ Skim the headlines

INSTAGRAM: Meta is rethinking Instagram Shop 🛍️ to shift the company's attention back to an ad revenue-based model and away from commerce. This means changes are coming soon to the Instagram Shop tab, according to a leaked internal memo. Over the next few months Instagram will test a simpler and less personalized version of the shopping page known internally as "Tab Lite". Some users will see the changes to Instagram Shop as soon as this week.

KARDASHIANS: Kim Kardashian’s newest business is a private equity firm focused on the media and consumer space, SKKY Partners. 💰 Your girl Kim and her mom, Kris Jenner, have teamed up with Jay Simmons, who ran consumer investing at a major investment firm, Carlyle, before cofounding SKKY Partners. “The exciting part is to sit down with these founders and figure out what their dream is,” Kim said. “I want to support what that is, not change who they are in their DNA, but just support and get them to a different level.” SKKY hasn’t made any investments or started fundraising yet, but Kim says you can expect some announcements before the end of the year. Kim’s new business partner, Jay, previously invested in Beats By Dre and Supreme. Meanwhile, Kourtney Kardashian Barker announced she's starting a DTC business in a press release on Monday. Called Lemme, Kourtney's launching a "new vitamin and supplement brand with innovative science-backed formulations that are delicious, clean and packaged in 100% post consumer-recycled materials". Lemme is her first DTC consumer brand and will launch online September 27. Expect a $30 price point and gummy supplements targeting energy levels, stress, and focus.

EQUALITY: Y Combinator, the popular accelerator program that spawned startups like Stripe, Faire and Instacart held its Summer 2022 demo day last week and there's one depressing stat we can't ignore—just 9% of founders represented at demo day identified as female. That's down from 10% female representation last year. Hey YC, give us a shout if you need to learn about some great women-owned startups. 🙄

ACQUISITIONS: Huge congrats to Hero Cosmetics cofounder Ju Rhyu and her team team—you know this beauty brand for its ‘Mighty Patch’ pimple patch, and this month it was acquired for $630 million by Church & Dwight, a big manufacturer of household products. Here are the stats: Sales for the past 12 months were $115 million; 40% EBITDA margin; the biz sold for 5.5x revenue; Ju and her team started, scaled and sold in 5 years. Ju, who cofounded Hero Cosmetics in 2017, wrote in a statement that the “team is staying in tact and no one is going anywhere”—and that includes the three cofounders who Ju says will stay on to see through “this next chapter of growth”. Dive into Ju’s formula for scaling a skincare company on the Female Founder World podcast.

BRAND GOSS: In other brand news, Blume is the latest beauty brand to launch pimple patches, Good Side is raising a $2M seed round, Chillhouse released an almond shaped version of its cult-hit Chill Tips, and Marisa Zupan, cofounder and (former) CEO at United Sodas is stepping down from the CEO gig into a brand advisor position.

💬 Sephora Accelerate applications are open: Here's how to get into the program

Sephora Accelerate, a brand incubation program for beauty entrepreneurs who are also people of color, is open for applicants to join its 2023 program. If you get in, expect to be guided through a six-month curriculum focused on teaching founders how to build successful beauty businesses with a specific focus on what it takes to cut through on the shelves of Sephora.

Before you hit 'apply'—applications close September 26—soak in the tips that recent Sephora Accelerate grads shared with Female Founder World. The bottom line: Be yourself and focus on your founder story.

"Be authentic to yourself and your brand, and your brand will naturally stand out amongst others. Sephora believes in the power of founders, so connecting your brand with your personal story and mission is important." — Priyanka Ganjoo, Kulfi Beauty

"Be yourself. I know how cliche it sounds, but you want to show off who you are as a founder and a person. You are the expert, so the Sephora team wants to make sure you know your stuff, that you have a clear vision for your brand, understand your customers and their pain-points as well as how you plan to solve those pains. When it comes to the video portion of the application, you don’t have to spend money on a production team, it can be just you (and your partner), good lighting and your mobile phone. Be enthusiastic about your company and becoming a part of the Sephora family." — Scarlett Rocourt, Wondercurl

"Focus on the one thing that is truly unique to you and only you: your story. What life events made you want to develop a product? What were some of your struggles or challenges in the process? What are you hoping to achieve or solve through your product/brand? Why should people know about you and your brand? If you’ve already launched your brand, what impact has your business had on your customers? While the written part of the application is very important, I’d argue that the video portion is what you really need to nail. It’s your chance to showcase your personality, story, and energy. Your goal should be to have viewers walk away remembering you. In an industry as saturated as the beauty space, there is no shortage of innovative and effective products - and Sephora knows this. That’s why there wasn’t a single Accelerate session or Sephora employee we met - including the CEO - that did not reiterate the importance of the founder story. When approaching each question in the application, I suggest putting yourself in the shoes of the Accelerate team. They’re reading thousands of applications, so what can you say that will make them say, 'oh, that’s interesting'. I found that helped me reposition some of my answers as we were applying!" — Parisa Chasib, Basma

🎁 Giveaway: $2,000 beauty and wellness bundle

Enter the Female Founder World beauty and wellness bundle giveaway, valued at $2,000, for your chance to win skincare, makeup and wellness products, including a Beachwaver!

🗓️ You're invited: Shopify x Female Founder World in LA

Female Founder World is joining forces with Shopify to host the ultimate night for consumer brand builders in Los Angeles: Brand Camp.

After a sell-out New York showcase, we're bringing this founder favorite event to LA—and it's free to attend! Join us for a panel conversation with Amy Liu, founder of Tower28, and Natalie Holloway, founder of Bala, and moderated by Female Founder World creator Jasmine Garnsworthy—plus a special guest panelist to be announced. We'll also have a glitterbomb bar by Art of Sucre, and a curated female founder market!

Registration is free but space is very limited. Our last event hit capacity in 24 hours, so register now to confirm your spot.

See you there. 👋

📱 Audience-building lessons from a media biz: The Gist

Cofounders Ellen Hyslop, Roslyn McLarty and Jacie deHoop spotted a lack of representation in mainstream sports media and in 2017 launched The Gist, a sports news platform from women's perspectives and focused on all athletes. This year, The Gist is reaching more than 500,000 newsletter subscribers, plus audiences across its large social media and podcast footprint. In 2021, The Gist's had its first $1 million revenue year and raised a $1 million seed round.

Whether you like it or not, today every business is a media business (TY TikTok!). And who better to learn about audience-building from in 2022 than a media company that's totally focused on content?

We asked The Gist's cofounders to share what they know about audience building and scaling a media biz to coincide with a massive rebrand and redesign across The Gist's channels.

FOUNDERS STORIES:

 Before The Gist, we were all working in different areas of financial services in downtown Toronto: Jacie in management consulting, Ellen in insurance and Roslyn at a Big 4 accounting firm. It was really working in these more male-dominated, corporate environments, where we observed how sports are such a powerful connector and social currency in our society, but how for a lot of women, it’s a currency they don’t have access to and a community they’re excluded from. That’s what gave us the idea to start The Gist and make sports more accessible and inclusive for everyone.

GETTING TO 10K EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS:

Step one: It was really scrappy at first! The first thing was having an offering that resonated with people from a content, voice and branding perspective. So before we were really focused on growing, we focused on getting feedback from our audience to shape our newsletter offering. Before our official launch, we sent the email to 75 friends and family members, our beta testers, with surveys to gather feedback from them.

Step two: We hosted a launch party to celebrate our official launch, inviting a couple hundred friends and colleagues to a trendy downtown office with food and drinks and giving a presentation introducing The GIST to everyone. That’s how we got our first few hundred subscribers.

Step three: From there, it was word of mouth, some scrappy partnerships with local companies and franchises (e.g. watch parties hosted at Lululemon’s Toronto store which has a nice lounge area, referral incentives from Soulcycle, etc.), spray painting Toronto sidewalks with our logo and website and road tripping around our province to hand out flyers on different college campuses.

Step four: We were really fortunate to be admitted into an incubator program hosted in part by Facebook, which came with $50k in Facebook ad credits. That gave us the opportunity to start really testing out our creative, messaging and online audience targeting and get a feel for how to leverage only paid advertising, which we still use today at a much larger scale.

FUNDING A MEDIA BUSINESS:

When we originally started the business off the sides of our desks, we each put around $1,000 of our personal savings into the business to fund the very basics like a website, Mailchimp and some early marketing materials. We were fortunate enough early on to come by an incubator program that came with $100k in non-dilutive capital and $50k in Facebook ad credits which we survived on and ran the business with for a little over a year.

From there, we were able to raise a small angel round and were admitted into a Techstars program, which also came with some funding. Each time we came by some funding, we’ve been extremely intentional and capital efficient with it, especially since raising capital wasn’t easy in the early days, so our aim really has always been to get to a place where the business could be self-sufficient.

After raising a $1m seed round last year, we’re now at a point where we’re profitable which is so exciting to us. Now that we’re there and our space is growing so much, going forward we feel we can be opportunistic about bringing on capital when it makes sense to really accelerate our growth, while staying true to our original ethos and discipline around how we operate our business.

DECIDING ON AN EMAIL CADENCE:

The Gist newsletter started out as once per week and mainly targeted at a Toronto audience. Today, the newsletter goes out 4x-weekly (Monday, Wednesday and Friday plus a Sunday Scroll to dive deeper into a single topic). We also publish special editions to preview big upcoming sports events and seasons or postseasons kicking off. The newsletter is also localized to a number of regional markets so you can sign up for a newsletter that also talks about local sports in New York, LA, Boston, Philadelphia, DC, Seattle, Dallas, Denver, Toronto or Ottawa.

Expanding frequency really went hand in hand in us developing our capabilities to monetize our newsletters—we scaled up our frequency to meet brand partner demand, and also of course provide more value for GISTers (it was also with new revenue that we were able to expand our team to expand content).

BRANDING EVOLUTION:

With the new rebrand, we worked with ilovecreatives to create an energetic, fresh, and playful identity that invites everyone to enjoy sports. Taking inspiration from vintage ephemera and breathing new life into it, we came up with a system that is anything but traditional—just like The Gist.

The process took a year. After selecting the agency, we started with a brand audit for them to fully understand our brand values, purpose and personality so they could reflect that in the designs. Then came the brand identity—new logo, colors and art direction. Once we settled on that they applied it all to our newsletter, website and social template designs. From there it took a couple of months to develop everything. We’re working with ilovecreatives now on a phase 2 engagement to design merch, sales materials and additional emails in our new branding.