💌 Social media workflow, $1.3M in grant funding, Ty Haney's new venture

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👇 Today we're covering

• 📓 Resource roundup

• 🗞️ Skim the headlines

• 👀 What we know about Ty Haney's new venture, TYB

• 📱Your new social media workflow

• 🎧 On the podcast: Ty Haney on Launching and Leaving Outdoor Voices, Community-Building and Web 3

📓 Resource roundup

• Simplify and scale brand-to-brand partnerships 🤝. Apply to join kizmet and match with likeminded brands to drive awareness, conversions, and average order value through collabs. This invite-only platform is now open to the Female Founder World community 🤫. 🔗 Tell me more

• Food, beverage, and CPG founders, how does $20k in cash and prizes sound? The Enthuse Foundation is looking for women entrepreneurs to enter its pitch competition and win big. Applications close October 3. 🔗 Tell me more

• A grant program helping Black small business owners recover from the pandemic is back for its third year and offering $1.3 million in $5,000 grants. You'll need to employ between three and 20 people to be eligible. 🔗 Tell me more

• Join our free workshop: Trademarks and protecting your business. Our Female Founder World workshop host Nicole Swartz is an attorney and the founder of Sprout Law, a law firm helping women protect their brands. You've seen her in Forbes, the Washington Post, Girlboss, and speaking at events like Alt Summit, Craftcation, and South by Southwest. (Yep, she knows her stuff.) 🔗 Tell me more

🗞️ Skim the headlines

BEAUTY: Babba Rivera's Ceremonia made history by becoming Sephora ’s second-ever Latina-owned hair care brand. Following an online launch, Ceremonia will enter 83 Sephora stores on September 9. The prestige haircare category is on the up—particularly scalp care. Prestige haircare sales gained 32% to reach almost $750 million in first quarter of this year. The entire prestige beauty was up 19% to $5.3 billion for the same quarter.

VENTURE CAPITAL: Y Combinator's got a new president—Garry Tan, who founded Initialized Capital with Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian in 2012 and was an early investor in Coinbase, Instacart and supply chain software unicorn Flexport. This announcement is a full circle moment for Tan, who was a partner at YC from 2010-2015 and created YC’s internal alumni social network and forum Bookface (cheeky name!).

ECONOMY: Apple has downsized about 100 contract recruiters, a clear sign they're slowing growth and bracing for tougher economic conditions. Major tech companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, Oracle, Lyft, Opensea, Substack, Robinhood and many others, are also making moves to react to the slow economy, including hiring freezes and rescinding offers.

INSTAGRAM: Oof, the social media wars are exhausting. Meta is internally testing a new Instagram feature that’s very similar to BeReal, a social media app that's currently the top-ranking free app in the iOS App Store. BeReal sends out a push notification—⚠️ Time to BeReal. ⚠️—prompting users to snap a selfie and rear-facing photo within two minutes. The new 'IG Candid' feature was first leaked on Twitter last week and appears to mirror BeReal's most notable feature by prompting users to share an authentic photo at a random time each day. Be sure to try the feature if (when) it launches if you want more engagement—Instagram has a history of pushing content that uses its new features.

👀 What we know about Ty Haney's new venture, TYB

Ty Haney, founder of Outdoor Voices and TYB

TYB is a new way of doing loyalty on the blockhain. It is very much informed by the experience of building Outdoor Voices and shining a light on how important our most loyal fans were for our growth.

Blockchain unlocks a better business model for brands that today are structurally reliant on ad platforms. [Using TYB] you absolutely don't need to know that you're working in a web 3 interface. Our experience clarifies the complexity of the crypto world.

For example, if a brand raises X amount of dollars, 30-40% typically goes to acquisition channels (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) to acquire fans. TYB’s toolkit allows brands to take, let's say, 5% of that money and redistribute it directly to loyal fans to help growth.

People that love a product now have an incentive to continue to be fans. Brands start by offering a collectible. It's something that like feels right for your brand and that your audience is going to be attracted to. Then you connect it to some sort of utility—I’d start with access to a community channel, merch, and access to events.

When you bring your audience in as collectible holders, every action that they're taking to help your brand build and grow is rewarded with something like a brand coin. For [community members] who earn the most, [brands] can airdrop them a collectible that could be a physical product or access to a private zoom call with [the founder].

We launched supplement company Joggy as our first brand on TYB being like, let's see how this works. We sold 500 Joggy Doggy collectibles for $250 each. They're cute animated brown dogs jumping after a frisbee. These 500 people now have access to 5% of Joggy revenue as we grow.

The Joggy founding member story has been quite compelling. Of the founding members, 87% have a higher order frequency than non-founding members, their repeat spend is twice as high, and founding members are also five times more frequently opening emails or signing into TYB than non founding members.

📱Your new social media workflow

As TikTok continues to blow up, more founders are becoming the public face of their brands. For small business owners, it simply makes financial sense to keep content creation in house—and when you're a new biz, there's not always someone you can delegate to. So how are the folks who are doing this really well, doing it? We asked forward-facing founder of My Glow 2 and Huxden and social media marketing pro, Catie O'Neill, to walk us through her content workflow, tech stack, and tips.

CONTENT OVERVIEW: TikTok and Instagram are the main channels I use for my personal brand, but I'm creating a YouTube content strategy that will be launched within the next 6 months. I produce 5-7 pieces of content per week on TikTok and repurpose this across Instagram reels and YouTube shorts.

My personal accounts reach an average of 500,000 people per week on TikTok and 15,000 on Instagram.

CONTENT WORKFLOW: I use Notion to collate all my content ideas and plan my schedule (see below).

All content is filmed on my iPhone throughout the week or on the day it is to be edited and posted. I use a ring light from Australian, female owned brand, Etoile Collective. The raw videos are uploaded and edited in a video editing app called Inshot.

The final video is exported and uploaded to an app called Colourone to add a subtle filter. This assists in maintaining a consistent aesthetic. The video is uploaded to TikTok and edited with music and text.

Once published on TikTok, if the video is also going onto Instagram Reels, it's first exported using a website called Snap.Tik to remove the watermark. If there's a trending song on Reels that suits the content, I will replace the sound from TikTok with the new audio before posting.

LEAD TIME: Our company content is planned 2-4 weeks in advance. For my personal brand, I have what I call my ‘base content’. This is the content I film every week such as my Sunday Resets and cooking. I then aim to plan my other content 1 week in advance and thread my everyday lifestyle and business videos throughout. This content is dependent on my daily activities.

CONTENT CREATION APPS: Inshot, Asana, Notion, Planoly and Colourtone. Inshot is used to produce and edit all content from raw iPhone videos to the final production, Asana to manage our company content strategy, Planoly to schedule content, Notion for my personal brand to plan ideas and schedules, Colourtone for both our company and my personal brand to maintain a consistent brand aesthetic.

TIKTOK TRENDING SOUNDS: To identify trending sounds before the bell curve there are two methods: 1. Spend 10-20 mins scrolling through the FYP every second day and identify songs that are being repetitively used. Click on the song to see if it has been used on under 20k videos and if the top 3-5 videos are viral and posted in the last 5 days. If the song meets this criteria, there is a high possibly it will become a viral audio. 2. Take note of what songs the large creators are using. If they are repetitively using an audio it usually means they have recognized that the algorithm is favoring this audio. The songs in the TikTok ‘Viral’ folder are generally past the bell curve.

HOW TO BUILD A PERSONAL BRAND BRAND ON TIKTOK AND INSTAGRAM: The most efficient and effective way to build a personal brand on social media is to share the activities you are conducting on a daily basis. This will drastically reduce the time required to create, film and edit videos as you are simply sharing the activities you are already doing. If you are building a personal brand to help leverage your businesses, create content that is related to the interests of your business's audience. It does not have to be solely focused on your product or service offering. Find a creative way to encapsulate who you are as a person and embody your brand through the content you share. This will assist to build a community of like minded, engaged individuals.

QUICK TIPS: Use the same 1-2 fonts and colors to maintain consistency; ensure your videos are shot with clean, crisp lighting; and use a subtle filter to maintain a consistent aesthetic (do not over-do this, it should not be noticeable).

🗓️ Join Our Community Hang in New York with Olamide Olowe (Topicals), Natalie Mackey (Winky Lux) and Natalie Holloway (Bala)

🎉 This Female Founder World event is blowing up 🎉

Here's what you can expect from our upcoming Community Hang in New York, presented by Mason Hub, the modern fulfillment platform for beauty, fashion and wellness.

➡️ Two new speakers added to the lineup: Olamide Olowe and Natalie Mackey will now join Bala founder Natalie Holloway in a fireside chat moderated by Female Founder World's Jasmine Garnsworthy!

➡️ Drinks by women-led brands Nomadica, Halmi, TALEA Beer Co.

➡️ Mezcal tasting by Doce Mezcal cofounder Gabriela Lawrence

➡️ The most beautiful venue: Bala's stunning pop-up in Soho, New York (pictured above!)

🎫 Tickets are $FREE.99 but limited.

We hit registration capacity for this event in ONE DAY, but Female Founder World will be opening up some new places to our waitlisted guests ✩this week✩, so make sure your name is on the waitlist.

🎧 Latest podcast episode: Ty Haney on Launching and Leaving Outdoor Voices, Community-Building and Web 3