before we dive into the show. Today we have some super exciting news as of this month. Female startup club is officially part of the hubspot podcast network, something we love about the hubspot podcast network is all of the inspiring shows dedicated to helping professionals learn and grow, especially women in business. So if you love female startup club and want to check out other shows like us, we definitely recommend checking out being boss, the gold digger podcast and the shakeup Check out all these shows and more at hubspot dot com slash podcast network. This is kelly Higbee for female startup club. Hi everyone doing here today, I'm joined by kelly, hug me the founder of bug bite thing, you might have seen her wowing all the sharks on shark tank a few years ago, bug bite thing dedicates itself to offering customers a chemical free eco friendly solution that effectively alleviates the discomfort, stinging itching and swelling caused by insect bites and stings. In three years, it's quickly become Amazon's number one selling product for insect by relief.

With more than 30,000 positive reviews. The revolutionary tool initially gained nationwide recognition in 2019 when founder Kelly and her mum appeared on ACC's hit show Shark Tank, the duo successfully secured inventor and entrepreneur Lori Greener as their business partner in this episode, We're chatting about how she brought this product to market globally after experiencing its wonders firsthand why you don't need to be an inventor to create something magical. The 30,000 plus five star reviews that she has on amazon and what a brand protection program is and how it's helped her And while I've got you here, I just want to say a huge thank you for tuning into these episodes every week. As of today we're in the top 1% of all podcasts globally and I am just beyond thrilled about it. I literally can't believe it. I'm so grateful that you're putting me into your ears to hear these incredible founder stories because without you, this show wouldn't be possible.

And the other really cool thing I want to quickly mention is to anyone who's listening that bought our course. The ads, NBA by female startup club. As you know with every sale, $30 is donated to the Malala Fund that fights for girls rights to 12 years of free, safe quality education. And as of last week we were able to process our very first donation with them all thanks to you. So a very special thank you from the bottom of my heart for making that possible. Female startup club exists on the mission to empower women and everyone taking part in the course is empowering not only themselves but women and girls all around the world, but that's enough of my update. Let's get stuck into this episode. This is kelly for female startup club. Mhm two Mhm customers want more from brands, delivering more means, owning the customer experience, taking control over data acquisition analysis, creative and delivery, Clay vo calls this owned marketing and believe it's the best path to growth for more, visit clay vo dot com slash FCC.

That's clay vo dot com slash F. S. C. And one last thing before we jump into this episode, I want to quickly shout about our course. The ads, M. B. A. Although I'm totally biased, I'm told by so many of the hundreds of women who have taken it so far that it's amazing and they've been able to increase their revenue in their business using the methods taught the ads. N. B. A. Is A. D. I. Y. Course to help you master the technical skills needed to run profitable facebook and instagram ads by yourself. We've partnered with leading performance marketing agency amplifier to create the best online program out there and these guys know a serious thing or two about performance marketing. They've spent more than $100 million dollars in ads during their time. You'll learn everything from winning ad creatives to identifying your target KPI S, implementing retargeting funnels and deploying scaling strategies to increase your revenue to upwards of six and seven figures per year. It includes six modules with more than 30 video lessons and you can learn at your own pace.

But what we're most proud of is that $30 from every sale is donated towards girls secondary education through the Malala Fund, a charity that champions every girl's right to 12 years of free, safe, quality education and is working for a world where every girl can learn and lead to learn more. Head to female startup club.com. Female startup club precincts kelly. Hi, hello and welcome to the female startup club podcast. Hi, thanks so much for having me on today. I'm so excited to dig into your product and what you've been building and I always love to start by getting you to introduce yourself and tell us what your business actually is. Sure my name's kelly hit me. I'm the founder and ceo of bug bite thing. Bug bite thing is a suction tool that removes insects alive and venom from bug bites and stinks. So you stop producing the reactions that's caused from the irritate the saliva in the venom so you can get immediate relief from the itching, stinging swelling caused from mosquito bites, these wasps, ants and other biting insects.

I wish I had this growing up. I grew up in the bush in Australia where there are so many bugs, so many mosquitoes, this would have been amazing. Yeah, we'll have to get you out one. Yeah, 100%. For sure. Where does your entrepreneurial story start? Where does this journey begin? Yeah, I never thought I would be the bug lady, but I'll take a step back and we'll get, we'll get into it. So back in 2013 I had the opportunity to move relocate our family from California to south Florida. I come from a long line of entrepreneur women. My grandmother started her own company. My mother had her own company and I actually got the opportunity to learn to take over the family business. Hence the move. And one thing we were not prepared for when we moved out here were how bad the mosquitoes were and how bad it would impact the quality of our life. Never in a million years, I've always suffered from mosquitoes, but not to the magnitude of what was happening to us out here in south florida.

And most what was really happening was I had a six month old daughter at the time and her reactions were horrendous. One bite when I would take her outside to go get the mail or whatever would turn into golf ball sized welts. She II and what do you do? You have to keep applying creams over and over. You're, my child was six months at the time. They were full of chemicals, she was putting things in her mouth. So I was really struggling. So I was researching extensively because none of the over the counter creams were working on anybody in my family. And I discovered this little known suction tool, it was sold to some industrial first aid kits overseas. And the premise behind it was actually eliminated the problem because it removed the irritant and what a lot of people don't realize it's, it's your own body producing that reaction to the irritant. So if you can get their tent out in turn, your body doesn't produce those uncomfortable symptoms and reactions? So of course I'm thinking there's no way this is going to work because why isn't it available?

And why isn't it everywhere? So I ordered one in, not thinking much of it and um, you know, got bit on the way to my mailbox and I got to try it and I was dumbfounded, shocked, completely shocked after years of dealing with these bug bites and it affecting, you know, our quality of life. My daughter was having to be on antibiotics regularly because she would get a skin infection called cellulitis from bug bites. So I had this tool and in 20 seconds, all of the irritation, all the swelling, everything was just gone. And I was like, well that's odd. Why is this not here? And I could not drop the idea. So I started doing some testing market research, I started trying it out on friends and family to make sure it wasn't just me that was getting the same response. And it was, it was really effective on all the other people that I was trying. So I had to figure out how to make this available here. It would not leave my head. And so that's kind of the beginning of what started this idea.

And so being the entrepreneur and growing up an entrepreneur family, we were able to track down the factory that was producing this product? I pitched to him and explain this product needs to be available everywhere. Why doesn't, you know, every mom that's suffering, who doesn't have anything for their Children, why is this not available to them? And we we aligned, he saw that I was really passionate about my vision and I was able to secure exclusive distribution rights for the product for the United States. I branded it bug bite thing and I began selling it amazing. So that's kind of where the journey begins. Yeah, Gosh, I love that. I'm interested to know about this guy when you say you got the exclusive distribution rights, what does that mean for the partnership side of things? Like is he your business partner or do you pay him, you know, royalties for everything sold. What does that setup look like? It's very differently now because we're three years into this process and now we're partnered, they've converted their factory there now bug bite thing headquarters in europe, so they're only selling our product now, our branded products.

So we're partnered with them on a different level. Now. Now we have global distribution rights. We team up together on both sides of the world and we were launching globally this year. So was he like, you know, just a small manufacturer, he was creating this product that wasn't branded, it was for some kind of local use and Some industrial first aid kits that was being sold in some industry, I think, you know, the idea was always make this a household product, you know, and because it works, the product was invented by a doctor over 30 years ago and it's just never gotten the attention it deserves in my opinion. And because it was so impactful on me and my family and after you know, really getting started with launching this business and learning everything that came with it, I you know, it just it never it was never about selling a product for me was always about I have this tool and nobody knows about it and it works. So my entire, you know, mission for starting this brand kind of came out of a drive and a passion of something I really believed in.

Um and I think that's what kept me going, absolutely amplifying that message and helping people on a larger scale. I mean I love it, I love it so much. Yeah, I always love to ask about the money piece, Especially in the beginning when you were just getting started, are you able to share what kind of capital you needed to get started and how you were financing the brand in the beginning? Sure, I'll tell you um I am very grassroots. So I didn't have a lot of money when I started this again, I was learning my family distribution company. So once after, I'll rewind the story once we landed exclusive distribution rights for the U. S. And I branded it, I literally started selling it as a side business in conjunction when I was learning my family owned company, I wanted to test the market, I had to do things smart, I started selling them at my daughter's bake sales every friday I would get up there and I had to start I had to start something and so I was selling about my daughter's bake sales and my first little taste of you know the demand was when I started getting tracked down in her parking lot of the preschool, not during the bake sale for people trying to flag me down to buy more above buy things because they needed one for the golf bag or their you know their fishing, you know for their boat or whatever.

So that's when I I got a really good, I did a lot of market research during that period and once I realized I had something really viable and the response from the consumer on a smaller level was really good. That's when I decided to make that big leap, my mom told me that she that if I was gonna do this and I was going to go full force, I had to do it smart. So my husband and I actually made a huge sacrifice. We sold our house and we moved into a rental because again this was a new business so I needed to make sure that we could afford our bills, why I was going to You know quit my other job to do this full time. So we took the money that we had sold from our house and I invested in my first batch of inventory, there were 30,000 pieces and that was supposed to last me all season and about a month into taking this on full time. I had to start teaching myself the ins and outs of social media market. I didn't know anything, you know, this was a new e commerce business was new for me, my background is in you know distribution and international business and you know marketing but not for consumer products.

So it was new. So I I was taking you to meet classes. I was teaching myself how to navigate through social media. I literally started with $10 on facebook and I just kept reinvesting that back in. And it was one, It was, it was, it was mother's day weekend 2018 and that was when I was full force and somebody had brought it up in a mom group And a bunch of people because again I started in my own backyard. So it was just local community members. But it was a very authentic thread and somebody had mentioned our product saying it was a local mom trying to get the word out and a reporter happened to see it and they came out to my house CBS 12 news and they came out and they did a whole piece on me selling these little tools from my house within my rental house. I had packing stations set up in my kitchen and so it aired and then the next day it got syndicated to like all these news stations in the US, there was probably about 2030 news stations and I sold out of all of my inventory in every, my God.

And then I didn't know what to do because I was like, oh my gosh, like, okay, there really is a demand once people realized what it was, what it did. And, and then that's when I had to start navigating. Okay, now there's the skepticism that's coming now there's this, how do I overcome those? And that's when I started really learning about my product and what resonated with people. That's when I added 100% money back guarantee because I wanted people to feel confident in purchasing my product. We still have that to this day, you know, and we sell millions of bug bite things at this point, but I still believe in the product and you know, we don't get enough returns. There's enough people that this is life changing for that. It just keeps spreading, you know, by word of mouth, just like it was for me, it was life changing. I love a money back guarantee. It makes you feel so secure and I know it's part of like, you know, some brands really do offer and it's part of the, the strategy or whatever, but it really does work. Like I had to do it out of necessity.

I was trying to just get people to try my product because I knew if they tried it and they used it. It would be a game changer because I knew I knew what it was doing and I had enough feedback of the people that tried it that I just needed to get it in people's hands. Right? Absolutely. So you have this crazy week where you sell out of 30,000 units of stock, you are in your house presumably packing this stuff yourself. You don't have a three pl fulfilling orders for you. How do you carry on that momentum and take it, you know further and keep it going, especially with no stock. Well, the stock situation was the first problem I had to get that resolved right away because if nobody could have predicted that, that is just a viral situation that happens. And you can't predict that especially in a startup to be 100% honest with you. Since I launched bug bite thing in that initial thing took off. We still are having to cushion our projections every year for growth and we're still off.

So it's promising there's so much more untapped. We haven't even scratched the circles in my opinion. So I think there's a lot of potential with our product and brand and you know, the good thing about our product is that it belongs everywhere. You know, it doesn't discriminate against age race anything. So it belongs for anybody that truly suffers from bug bites or stings. Mm for sure. Yeah. Everyone literally, everyone can have it every single household. I love that every single person can have and they need multiple because you know, the product is most effective when used as soon as you notice a bite because again, it's your own body producing that reaction. So you always want to keep them around. Like eyeglasses, throw one in your glove box, your purse, your diaper bag, you know, mm hmm. Absolutely. But it's also a benefit for you because what do you do if you're out and you get stung by a bee. I always ask people that are skeptical about our product or what happens if you have a child that you're out of the park and they get stung by a wasp, what do you do? Yeah, totally. You got a child screaming and pain stinger sticking out.

You have to stop everything. You run in the car, load them up in the car seat, they're screaming, they're swelling. Now you have a tool, you can just take it out of your purse, suck out the venom and they can go keep playing and that's, that's what's happening with our customers and you know, we have over 30 or 40,000 reviews on amazon now that are all just positive, life changing situations like that. So I want to get to the amazon reviews thing because I was browsing and I'm going to come back to that in a second. I just had one quick question before we go on with marketing. Does it work on animals? My mom's dog got bit by a B the other day and the poor little thing was just, you know, having a horrendous time. It is, it is, and that's, it's a first a tool. So technically it does work on animals. We don't market it because there's a learning curve. Again, we're trying to penetrate the consumer market first, but were we also need to do more research. So I, you know, I want to get testing on animals to make sure they're like our clinical trials are done on mosquitoes and humans not pets.

So, but in theory you would need to get, be able to use suction. So you would need to either shape the for or you know, the animal has thinner skin, maybe wet it down to be able to get an actual section, but it's a suction tool? Yeah. So interesting When you look back over the last three years, what are the kind of key factors that have kept that growth going along and like those key tipping points to kind of, you know, I mean 30,000 reviews. That's crazy. I think that I think the number one thing I can say is I listen to my customers, we are a bug bite thing is 100% consumer focused. Everything is about our consumer when I started this, it was just me and I had to get all of the people that were using our product to turn into my advocates for me because I didn't have the funds or the capital to blow this up on a big level. So we really started organic and we have a really loyal following. So you know the way that we treat our customers, they're inclined and they tell 10 more people about the product and that's what's kept us going and it works, it's better.

It's more effective. You know, it's, it's solving the problem versus masking it over and over with creams for sure, Okay, 30,000 reviews I want to ask you for Amazon, what's the strategy there and you know, how do you actually drive people to leave a review or is it literally just, you don't say anything and people are happy to leave a review. So thus far we haven't done anything proactively to solicit reviews or get any reviews just to put things into perspective before. So last year was the first year we had a season since we had aired on shark tank. So that was our first real sample of what The shark tank effect would have on us. We went from like, I think it was 3000 Amazon reviews to over 40,000 and like a year. So the amount of interest and you know, life change, I mean, this all happened within a year. We had maybe 3000 before this last year. So this year it really blew up by word of mouth and you know, if you go through the reviews, you know, the ones that like their life changing, you know, it's where has this been my entire life?

I've suffered my entire life. I'm constantly having to get antibiotic creams. I, you know, last time ended me up in the, er, because of the reaction, I mean, and so this is, it's helping people. So that's what drives me to be so passionate. I see all the feedback totally and it's such a big driver. I imagine it must be so thrilling to see those kinds of things. Tell me about shark tank. What was it like, surreal? Um, you know, I'll say this and I say it till I'm blue in the face. I'm self talk. Okay, so I taught myself social media marketing shark tank. Actually discovered one of my ads from doing that organically and they reached out and encouraged me to audition for the show. So again, anybody can do this. You know, anybody that has drive passion, think things through has smart ideas, you know, takes one ft in front of the other. There's an opportunity is what I'm saying. I didn't, you know, I didn't, it could have happened to anybody, but shark tank was a blessing.

It was definitely a huge platform to really launch our product on a national level, you know, we were so fortunate to get interest from all five sharks. We partnered with Lori Grenier, so she's our business partner and she's just been an incredible mentor role model. She's really helped, you know, give me the confidence to have a voice and keep going with what I'm doing because it's working, I start again, I'm self taught, so the confidence level, what I'm dealing with some of these really experienced and reputable ceos, you know, it's a learning curve for me. Absolutely, for sure, I can't even imagine what are the kinds of things that Laurie helps you with when it comes to mentor ship, like you said, like, how does it actually work these relationships? I think it works a little bit differently for everybody, you know, our, our company, I mean, Laurie, we utilize Lori when we can utilize Lori, I mean, she's a huge asset, she, she uses the product, she believes in the product, she knows it's helping other people and you know, and she's just got a wealth of knowledge on business and contracts and, you know, some of the stuff that we're getting into now on a bigger level, you know, big box retail and some of these other, you know, avenues that we have to, to branch into.

So it's nice to have somebody who has that much experience be on your side. Yeah. Gosh, I bet. Yeah, we're talking about lots of the good stuff and you know, lots of the success that you've had, but obviously entrepreneurship is difficult and it's hard. Can you share some of the flip side of your experience, what are the kinds of challenges that you face or some of the learnings that you've had to overcome? There's a lot of them, I mean for one entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart, it can take a huge impact on your mental health, your physical health. If you don't set those boundaries and figure out a good method, home work life balance for yourself, you can burn out, it's real and that prevents you from being able to hit your goals in your company. So that's something that I struggled with early on. So I feel like it's something I constantly work on to get better. My business is my other child, you know, I've got my two girls and I've got my business, so I try to give them all the, you know, the attention they need to succeed.

So being split, you know, between being a mom and a ceo and it's a challenge. So if you don't figure it out how to make yourself have inner peace and hit what is most important to you, then what are you doing it for? That's my that's my question, you know, absolutely, another piece of advice I can give people is don't be afraid to pivot if I didn't pivot 50 times. This wouldn't be at the magnitude it's as if I would have listened to people who said this is never gonna work as a one skew item. This is never gonna work at the retail level as a one product item, you're never gonna be able to compete and launch as a brand with one item so many times. And I didn't listen because I was listening to the consumer demand. They were telling me they wanted it. They were telling me how life changing it was. So why was I going to listen to the background noise? I had to figure out what worked for my business. And ironically, after I was able to create the demand, the retailers came to us.

So, you know, don't think business is always just one way. There's there's unique things you can do with every business. Every business is unique. Mm And I think there's a lot to be said about following your intuition and that gut instinct versus oh, you know what? You know better than me. Perhaps I should do what you say, Mark II source marketing agencies. I was literally, I was trying to get my product out there because I knew the demand, but nobody was seeing it the way I was seeing it. It wasn't, it wasn't a passion for them. They weren't seeing, they weren't going through and reading the testimonials, they were seeing how much numbers they could get back on return of ad spend. But they were missing the whole point. So until I took that back and really started understanding what resonated with our customers. Why were they responding that way? How can I fix that response with credibility? How can I repurpose real people's experiences? So other people knew they were authentic. So that's when I created with my marketing. And again it just became because I didn't have the funds.

I'm self taught, you know, I did this all from my house and I figured it out, you know, was it asked is probably not. But I think if I didn't go through this experience I wouldn't we wouldn't be and have the infrastructure and the routes that we have going into, you know, this brand. Absolutely. In the future. Yeah, I was reading something about you. It was in an interview I read online that you have a brand protection program. Can you talk about what that is and why it's important? Sure. And again, every company runs differently. But for us it was critical, it was imperative. So because I'm not the inventor of the product and it's been circulating around the product, you know, it can be replicated. So it came down to really building a strong brand for us and offering a quality product with quality materials eco friendly. I wanted to put out a really good product and my concern was because of the price point, we would get knocked off, we would get blown out of the water before we had a chance.

So I kept the product out of distribution for the first three years and I did that on purpose. I I didn't I didn't sell to small mom pop shops, I didn't sell through distribution. I sold on my dot com and I focused on my amazon business and we worked on getting ourselves into amazon programs were in, there's a lot of programs that amazon offers two brands that maybe have counterfeit issues or that we need to protect their I. P. There is the there's transparency programs where you can put unique three D. Bar codes on the back of your product. So when you do go into distribution you can figure out where your product's going. So I wanted to get all of that set up the infrastructure portion first before we really released it and launched it. This is the first year now that we're you know, three years into their brand enforcement program that we're gonna be selling to retail on a big level will be in over 25,000 locations this year at retail. Yeah. God I know. And we're gonna be launching in 25 countries this year. So I'm super excited to make holy yeah, that's crazy.

I know, I'm hoping we pop up out of the middle of nowhere. So people are gonna be like oh overnight success and you're gonna be like, it took me a few years to get, it took four years of nonstop work. You know, that's my biggest strong. I did. You know, it becomes a You have to, I have to stop myself. I get really, really wrapped into my work because there's so much that needs to be done still. And I have to constantly be reminded by my mom, you know, who's a business owner for 30 years, who is also an entrepreneur who also has the same brain as me. It's not, you can space it out, you know, every year we introduced something new and that keeps our brand relevant. You don't grow too quick because then we can't figure out where the, you know, the issues come in. So we're even though we're growing quickly, we're doing it steady and thought out considered. Have you had any issues with the brand protection program or you know, in terms of people ripping off your product, that kind of thing. Not since we've been able to get into these programs again, their brain enforcement look into all the programs, especially with your amazon business and also who you're gonna be selling too.

So like for us, we like I said, we kept it on a distribution, we still now that we're opening it back up to, you know, some wholesalers and and smaller businesses and mom pops we no, we'll be able to tell their breaking any of our policies, you know, if they're breaking our map policy, which you know, they're selling under for the, you know, advertised price that we're allowing if they're posting it on. We don't allow any of our host sellers to sell on third party websites like Amazon or Ebay. But again, we'll be able to enforce those by ordering in a product and being able to see our unique barcodes and other ways of measuring that. Who ordered it and who's violating our policies. Mm Okay. Got it. So interesting. I love that. I've never spoken about that on the show before. Yeah. I think it's important. I think it's important. I'm sorry I say that. But every brand should really when there if your new business and you have a really good product and you need to protect it before you just open it up and get excited to sell to everybody. If there's a demand, do it smart, take a step back and vet.

You know, we we make sure all of our our retail partners, even a small mom pops now they have to have a brick and mortar location. They have to have, they have to understand our our business model. They have to follow our brand guidelines. There's there's procedures, we were not quick to just sell it to anybody that wanted it because I knew from experience from, from my husband's previous positions. My mother's previous positions. I knew that the second you open it up without a good brand enforcement program, your pricing gets destroyed, Your product quality gets destroyed. It can get end up in places and liquidation sites palates and now you destroy the integrity of your pricing before you even have a shot. And retailers don't like that other big online host sailors don't like that. So creating a strong brain enforcement program is really wise. Really key. It sounds like for sure Where is the business today? What does the team look like? What's the scale? I mean I know you just said you're about to launch into 25,000 retail. Absoluteal not paint the picture for me like where are you today?

So I'll paint the picture. So again two years ago I was doing this all out of my garage. Okay so I'm packing orders out of my garage. We get we we go on shark tank, Shark tank airs we film in june it airs in october and So we relocated from my garage to like a 5000 square foot office facility which was supposed to last three years. We made it through one season. Outgrew that space that we secured a second facility and now we're very quickly outgrowing this facility. So we went from me and another gal at my house too. We have about 30 employees now and we're in two facilities that were looking into a temporary third until we can move into one big big facility. Hello sally yeah there's a lot happening, lots going on, lots going on. I always ask at the end of every episode before we jump into the 6th. Quick questions, what is your key piece of advice for women who have a big idea and want to start their own business don't be intimidated because there's always ways to create your own business, your own unique way.

Like if somebody else has another idea that's okay. But again with bug bite thing, we built our business off of our consumers so anybody can do that if you build a loyal following and you offer them quality products, you give them excellent customer service, they're going to keep coming back. So don't be intimidated on reaching for the stars, thinking bigger. I think for me even personally I didn't give myself enough credit for what I had done and I was still thinking really small, I didn't you know, I didn't know this could be a global brand at the time. I was literally thinking I was going to be selling these up bake sales. So you never know, don't be intimidated by what you read, you can create your own destiny, it's your own business, you can do whatever you want. Love it. What do you think you're like the best advice you received from your mom and your grandma, the best advice and I still use it every day and businesses figure out how to make things a win, win, win, my take on every problem situation, anything that happens I figure out how is this going to be a win win win for all parties.

And that piece of information has got me really far in our business. I love that. A win win win. Focus on the win win win. Very cool. Okay. We are up to the six quick questions part of the episode. I asked you every woman on the show some of the things we might have touched on already, but we still go through it. Yeah. Question number one is, What's your why? Why do you do what you do? I want people to know that there is a better, more effective chemical free option to get relief from bug bites and stings. This should be the first line of defense. Not something that you're having to reapply over and over. That has chemicals. Mm hmm. Yeah, I'm so into that. So into that Question. Number two, it does make sense. It makes total sense. Question number two is what's been the number one marketing moment that made the business pop? I think I'll refer back to that first mom group. That was my first little taste of it. And again, that was very grassroots and organic. It was just because I was selling them in my own backyard in my own community.

And that they all were rooting for me. And I think a lot of brands missed that sometimes. Or think that that's not an option anymore. And it totally is. I'm living proof of that. Mm. The power of moms on facebook? You never know. You don't underestimate us. You never know. My groups are no joke. 100%, definitely don't underestimate they are no joke and they know when you're lying. So it's never been about selling the product. It's just been about educating. That's been the biggest thing for me. Huh? Question # three is where do you hang out to get smarter? What are you reading or have you read that you recommend or podcasts or newsletters? I read everywhere. I online articles, business articles. My mentality is the more scenarios I can read about of how other businesses have navigated a situation. Bring those insights that I've learned from them mixed with my own ideas and I usually can get some really good solid directional, you know, moves for the company with that.

I'm also a part of Forbes Councils. So some of my other fellow, you know, council members, we do these articles that you know, how do you handle customer service with an angry customer And there's these little snippets and you know, other successful business owners and things that are part of the Forbes council will contribute And I love reading those because obviously I, you know, I have my own ideas but they have there's 10 different people who are all have really good ideas too. So why not? You know, read everything and very best version. So I love that question number four is how do you win the day? What are your am or PM rituals and habits that keep you feeling successful and motivated and happy I listen. I'm a huge believer in music therapy. So every morning I listen to my classical music, it's classical concentration on amazon music and that starts my day, turn something out of my brain to get me focused on my day ahead.

I always do that. And then every night my husband and I, we go in the jacuzzi and that's our turn it off from work. We're not allowed to touch our phones after the jacuzzi and that's it. So those, I make it a habit every single day I forced myself and at the end of the day I always go was it worth it? And every time it's like yes, it was, that was my one second to myself. You know, I'm constantly being tracked down by you know, my team and I'm very involved in the business so I forget to take care of myself. Sometimes I mandate it. I mean I'm so into this jacuzzi vibe. I was actually talking to my husband about why don't more people have jacuzzis like it's therapy, they're awesome. It shuts everything off. It's good. It I don't know, I love my jacuzzi every night. That was, that was also wonder if you could turn it into a bit of an ice bath situation from time to time. You know, tip in some ice to get cold therapy. Yeah have some cold water shock therapy, love that, that there you go.

Question # five is If you only had $1,000 left in the business bank account, where would you spend it? I would say social media because again I started with $10 on social media and it was the creativity of how I changed the words and the verb ege and the copy and that's what I was displaying it was that mixture of what would crack the code to really resonate with our customers to get them to try it. And I think I would go right back to those grassroots and do the same thing over because it worked and it makes sense totally. And last question question # six is how do you deal with failure? What's your mindset and approach? I think it is a mindset, I don't think of failure as an option. I pivot. So anytime somebody says that didn't work I go okay we pivot it's not a failure. It's a learning experience that you pivot and get better for the next time. So how many times could I have said said I failed that buck by thing I mean I launched to the wrong demographic at the beginning, I mean there were so many, we sold out of inventory, there was a lot of mistakes but what I did from those failures is I pivoted and I got better and I figured out solutions to avoid those mistakes in the future.

Amazing kelly, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show. I am super, super excited for you and I can't wait to see all over the world in all the places. Thank you. Not ready for that yet. I'm so grateful for having you on the show today. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Hey, it's Doom here. Thanks for listening to this episode of the female startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show, I'd recommend checking out female startup club dot com where you can subscribe to our newsletter and learn more about our D I Y. Course the ads. M. B. A. I also truly appreciate each and every review that comes our way. It might seem like such a small thing, but reviews help others find us. So please do jump on and subscribe rate and review the show. And finally, if you know someone who would benefit from hearing these inspiring stories, please do share it with them and empower the women in your network. See you soon. Mhm mm hmm.