♪ How to win on TikTok in 2023, $30k small biz grant, influencers rate best and worst brands to work with

Hey friends, I want to thank you for joining me on this wild, offbeat entrepreneurial ride. I love building Female Founder World alongside all of you, and watching you launch and grow your own businesses. We're only a year in and already there are tens of thousands of us building our businesses together. If you're loving Female Founder World's content, please forward this email to one friend who will find it useful. Let's keep growing this universe of entrepreneurial baddies building consumer brands.

— Jasmine 

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👇 Today we're covering

• 🎫 Two New York City Female Founder World events happening this week!

• 📓 Resource roundup

• 🗞️ Skim the headlines

• 🚀 This 24-year-old sold $1 million in period products by building community—and showing her period blood online

• 🛒 How to build an online store like Away

• 📚 Live business coaching call: Alicia Scott, Range Beauty

• ♪ How to win on TikTok in 2023

🗽 New York: Female Founder World Content Camp Presented by Shopify

Nadya Okamoto (cofounder of August), Éva Goicochea (founder of Maude) and one special guest speaker to be announced will be speaking at this Female Founder World panel and networking night in New York City!

You'll also get access to a photo booth pop-up curated with Moodelier (bring your products and we'll shoot 'em on-site—for $FREE.99!), and speed dating sessions with experts in influencer marketing and content marketing.

There will be drinks, snacks, and a dope crowd of entrepreneurial baddies who want to help you and your business win.

🗓️ Friday, 6 January at 6:30PM – 9:00PM

🧘 New York: Female Founder World New Year Reset Presented by Shopify

Join Female Founder World and Shopify New York for our New Year Reset, a space to rest and refocus that we've created for you, our business besties. This is what we have planned ⬇️.

6pm: Doors open / 6:30pm: Guided goal-setting session with Communia / 7pm: Yoga and meditation class with obé Fitness.

You'll also love the vision boarding pop-up by Landing, healthy drinks and snacks, and the room full of entrepreneurial New Yorkers waiting to meet you. Bring your yoga mat!

🗓️ Thursday, 5 January at 6PM – 8:30PM (yoga class begins at 7pm sharp)

📓 Resource roundup

• The annual FedEx Small Business Grant Contest opens for applications 31 January and is offering U.S.-based businesses a chance to win $30,000. 🔗 Tell me more

• Learn the basics about venture capital with 'Gen Z VC' creator Meagan Loyst. She's teaching a wildly affordable ($5!) 6-week live class, kicking off next week. 🔗 Tell me more

• Target's 2023 accelerator programs will open for applications on 9 January. Start sharpening your pitch. 🔗 Tell me more

• Your favorite IG account, @feminist, just dropped #FEMINISTZINE, publishing thoughts by 50+ authors, creators, artists, educators and activists about what it means to be a feminist today. 🔗 Tell me more

• Julianna Dahbura, founder of nail sticker business Deco Miami, has landed product partnerships with big and buzzy brands like Otherland, Oceanus Swim, and Lele Sadoughi. In a 40-minute workshop next week Julianna will walk you through how she plans, executes and promotes these partnerships. 🔗 Tell me more

🗞️ Skim the headlines

SOCIAL MEDIA: What makes influencers and creators want to work with a certain brand—or avoid them? FYPM, the Glassdoor for influencers, spilled the tea on the 10 worst and best brands to work with, and 👀👀👀. Hero Cosmetics, Amazon and Adobe feature in the best brands, while Glamnetic, Truly Beauty and NAKD are among the worst rated. How do you avoid ending up in the bottom 10? The best rated brands had professional and organized teams who respected creators, were upfront about expectations and timelines, trusted influencers to do their thing and allowed them creative freedom, and paid fairly and on-time.

PSA, brands aren't scheduling and planning our digital content anymore apparently–it's all about 'spontaneous social media'. Founders and creators regularly tell us that off-the-cuff content performs best on TikTok, and BeReal (an app that literally forces you to be more candid) is bigger than ever, so it's natural that even the most pro brands are leaning into a slightly chaotic posting schedule.

2023 PREDICTIONS: Journalists and commentators are continuing to pull out their crystal balls to predict what's going to happen this year—and a few recent guesses caught our attention. TechCrunch wrote that major CPG brands may start selling cannabis products, and this will wipe out a lot of smaller startups (umm, not if we have anything to do with it).

When it comes to fashion, both Refinery29 and Vogue are predicting sheer clothing will be big. Allure thinks we're about to be hit with a deluge of new prescription topicals, pills and laser beauty treatments as the FDA shifts some energy away from COVID to approving skin treatments. A new focus on menopause wellness and skin products is also poised to take off in 2023, along with more visibility for women over 40 (great news for female founded brand Womaness).

In the marketing world, Trends.co is predicting more brands will tap Discord as a growth channel. Discord has over 350 million users, meaning it's already bigger than Twitter (and growing fast). Many of those users are gen z, and we all known they're about to flex some serious purchasing power in the global economy over the next decade.

SUSTAINABILITY: Pangaia has achieved B Corp status and is now one of around 6,000 brands that can say the same (others include Allbirds and Veja). B Corps are businesses that meet very specific, very high social and environmental standards.

💅 This 24-year-old sold $1 million in period products by building community—and showing her period blood online

Would you show your period blood on the internet? Maybe not. But that's exactly what 24-year-old Nadya Okamoto, cofounder of period care company August, shares with her millions of TikTok followers in the name of destigmatizing periods. It's also a strategy that helped her sell over $1 milllion of period products.

Nadya's path to launching August hasn't been linear. At 16-years-old she founded Period, a nonprofit committed to ending period poverty. By 19, she was the youngest Asian American to run for city council in Massachusetts. A year later, her book Period Power: A Manifesto for the Menstrual Movement, came out. At 21, she launched August.

In between, she's been homeless, cancelled and disowned by her grandparents. It's a wild story of resilience and savvy entrepreneurship—here's the gist of it.

When Nadya first started working on August, she wanted to keep as much ownership as possible and raised $2 million from investors—just enough money to launch and operate the business for 6-8 months. She knew this idea was big, and only wanted enough cash to get solid data and traction that she could take into a future fundraise and get a higher valuation.

It took Nadya and her cofounder over a year (which was also her senior year of college) to land the right investors. Before taking money from anyone, she asked herself:

“Are they aligned with the vision of the company? Do they understand what we're trying to do? Are they cool with us showing period blood? Do they know that we're gonna be really focused on the community, that we don't wanna spend so much money on paid marketing?”

August has rallied a thriving community around its mission. There are nearly 5,000 members of “The Inner Circle”, August's group on community platform Geneva.com.

Here, the teams hosts online events and convenes themed chat rooms, with topics like “Photo Dump” and “Cramps and Cravings”. This group helped shape August's early product development.

“We actually launched in June 2021, but we started the community in 2020. We didn't even officially decide to do the company or what products we were gonna do until we had the community set. At the beginning a lot of it was just like following their lead.”

Before August products launched, Nadya built an audience on TikTok and Instagram. Within eight months, she hit 3 million followers on TikTok. A literal content machine, there were times when Nadya was posting up to 100 times a day on TikTok to figure out what worked.

By posting so often and becoming an influencer herself, Nadya was able to really double down on what worked and save money on outsourcing to content creators and influencers. Today, while Nadya is very much the public and social media face August, she says she only spends at the most 2 hours a day on content creation.

Listen to Nadya speak live at the Female Founder World Content Camp in New York on Friday, 6 January.

🤝 Group business coaching with Alicia Scott, founder of Range Beauty

Alicia Scott, founder of Range Beauty, is jumping into the Female Founder World community home to deliver the group biz coaching session you’ve been asking for at 6pm ET on Tuesday, 10 January! Alicia started formulating her cosmetic products with $150, and today counts Beyonce, Issa Rae and Gabrielle Union as fans. She’s also the first Black woman to secure funding from Shark Tank for a cosmetic brand, is stocked in major retailers like Target, and was recently accepted into the 2023 Sephora Accelerate Cohort.

Bring your questions to this call—Alicia has a lot of knowledge to share!

You need to be a paid Business Bestie member to access this class. But don't worry, we've made it super easy and affordable to sign up here.

🛒 How to build an online store like Away

Away is one of the original ecommerce brands to blow up on Instagram. In its first year of business, the luggage brand made $12 million, and within four years hit $150 million in revenue. 

But you don't need to be hitting 9-figure sales to use the exact same ecommerce tech tools that Away tapped to grow its online store. Scroll to see the apps and tools Away is using to sell online and to benchmark your business against this category leader.

Total website visits in September: 2M (up 33.64% from last month)

Bounce Rate: 44.94%

Average visit duration: 2 minutes, 42 seconds

Average pages viewed per site visit: 5.70

Ecommerce tech stack: Snap Inventory for inventory management, AdRoll Marketing for email marketing, Attentive for SMS marketing, Kustomer for customer support

Instagram insights: 600,000 Instagram followers, average 1580 likes per post, 40 comments per post

TikTok insights: 17,600 TikTok followers

Homepage evolution: 2016 vs 2023

♪ How to win on TikTok in 2023

Sandy Lin is a content creator and the founder of Creobase, a platform helping creators monetize their content. She also has over a half a million TikTok followers, and is one of the app's rising stars. Scroll on for Sandy's best tips on how brands and creators can win on TikTok in 2023.

Sandy was one of the last in her friendship group to join TikTok, signing up in 2020. Since she first started, Sandy says the landscape has changed —and so should your content strategy. Not only is it more difficult to go viral, different types of content are performing now compared to what worked in previous years.

Sandy says there are two ways to win on TikTok in 2023: Be a great storyteller or be an educator, sharing your expertise and speaking credibly on a certain subject.

She wants you to dig deeper into content ideas to find a strong angle or storytelling hook for TikTok: “You can't just be like, 'How to make 10 grand a month.' That doesn't work anymore. 'How did this brand make 10 grand a month? And how can you do it?' That's what's gonna work right now on TikTok.”

Sandy now posts 5-6 times per week on TikTok, but during her first six months posted two or three times a day. She recommends new creators and brands post multiple times daily and test different types of content rather than picking one niche. Then, double down on the type of content that's resonating.

Sandy recommends founders share their journey to build their own personal brand on TikTok, so that audiences can grow to like and trust you, and then in turn your brand.

"Sell your journey. Your journey is your biggest asset, and that is what make brands go viral. Why did you found this company? Did you quit your full-time job or did you drop out of school to found this company?”

Sandy’s top TikTok growth tips: 

• Don't give up too early. You might not see growth after a couple of months, but with consistent effort you will see results.

• Post as often as possible, doubling down on what performs the best.

• Study your competitors. How can you recreate their content, but make it even better?

• Don’t stick to one niche. Just like you have a variety of interests, so does your audience.

Want to learn more about where Sandy thinks TikTok and social media marketing is headed? Check out episode 110 of the Female Founder World podcast.