A brand is not a plan

Starting a brand is not a financial strategy + plus 🎉 birthday sale 🎉 on the Grant Strategy Workbook + Cheatsheet ($177, from $397) then it's GONE for good

Slutty Founder is a weekly-ish newsletter delivered to you by the girl you want to meet in the bathroom (for business advice).

“Nothing but the truth!” - Jadis (Paid Subscriber)

---

I’m Ending Grant Strategy Services

After 1+ years of helping early-stage brands land spots in some of the most competitive grant programs and accelerators in beauty (Sephora Accelerate, Ulta, Goldman Sachs, etc…) I'm retiring my Grant Strategy services for good — and I'm going out with a sale.

To celebrate 🎉 my birthday 🎉 and usher in the new energy I am marking my signature Grant Strategy Workbook + Cheatsheet down to $177 (from $397), which you have the opportunity to purchase here.

I am deleting this product on 5/18 midnight and will no longer be offering 1:1 Grant Strategy going forward.

The workbook is dense with the exact frameworks I used with clients, including a plug+ play Q+A and answer key. If you're looking to tighten your brand narrative for funding opportunities, this is the move.

---

If you're building a consumer brand and need 1:1 help thinking through positioning, partnerships, or your next move—you can reach me here or at essence@essenceiman.co.

A brand is not a plan

Ummm…why am I coming across so many aspiring female founders who think starting a consumer brand will get them out of their financial situation?

That is the WORST reason to start a business!

It’s like going to the casino and hoping you hit because you need to pay a bill.

I've been sitting on this because I didn't want to come across a bitch towards anyone who may have consulted with me in the recent past, but I fear this is becoming a wider epidemic that I can’t stand for.

I hear so many things like: “I’m just not made for a job” or “I’m tired of working for somebody else” or “all the energy I put into working for somebody else I could be putting towards a business.” “I just want to live at least a comfortable enough life.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is America. Who doesn’t?!

---

Employee vs. Founder Muscle

For the life of me, I simply cannot fathom how an employee-minded person (not derogatory) who is used to working, thinks they’re going to feel any better walking into something that demands everything and guarantees nothing.

Both of those things require two different sets of muscle. If you've spent years building the employee muscle, that's what you know. There's a comfort in that structure, even when you hate your boss and you're counting down to 5pm every single day. Think about what it would cost you mentally to go straight from that to no safety net?! You can’t replicate the safety of that monotony in the early days of working for yourself, even more so if you’re starting out under-resourced and looking to escape your current version of what you think is hell.

It goes both ways! When it comes to having a corporate job, I admit I’m pretty out of touch. When I’ve gone through occasional phases of exploring jobs, I realized I didn't know how to perform in that environment—the language they were looking for, how to show up, or what the unspoken rules even were. If it was something I wanted I really had to rehearse and I’ve never felt like the work at this stage.

The truth is, if you’re someone who’s used to living a low-risk life, the last thing you’ll want to do is capriciously assume the high-risk life of being a consumer brand founder, especially if you’re not someone who has a diabolical track record of making large and uncertain bets on their future.

Some days when I’m close to getting my period, even IIII wonder if I’ll wake up one day and regret how much time I spent throwing spaghetti against the wall. That’s just the nature of the entrepreneurial lifestyle when you had to start from zero.

Do you want that?

By the time I was starting a business around 27, my nervous system had already been primed to move through financial extremes and sudden life changes.

Is that you?

Some of you girls are crying over $40k in debt and have a conniption if your credit gets dinged by a few points (which to me is like child’s play).

I’m just saying……

I know right, who am I to talk and tell women not to take such chances on building a brand.

Starting with $200 became a huge piece of my public brand narrative. Although it worked for me, I would NOT do it again.

I’m flattered that so many baby founders reach out because maybe they want to be like me or aspire to a similar success journey, and I genuinely find that so touching and endearing! But I have no problem being honest in that my journey was the exception (not the rule). I truly believe the conditions that made that path possible for me 6 years ago do not exist today. The low-barrier-to-entry era of beauty, wide-eyed consumer discovery, forgiving margins, hyper-focus on indie beauty, a low CAC and high ROAS back when META was Facebook, and Instagram was still Instagram — those heydays are gone, my love.

There was also very unglamorous point where I went to work a job I HATED—DETESTED (in International Tax) just to keep my financial sanity and the business alive. Being a scrappy hustler and having to generate constant out-of-the-box ideas to stand in for a lack of funds was getting old fast, and I was barely a year in.

I could not have predicted the pandemic and how WFH would suddenly create favorable circumstances to my at home business. I could not have predicted quitting my job because of a tone-deaf company-wide email about the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery. I could not have predicted going viral the day after I quit said job because of a write up by an editor I'd seeded months earlier with zero expectations.

A lot of that was also luck and timing, which you’re even more desperado for when you don’t have all the right resources.

And luck is not a strategy.

---

Why I’m so adamant about this is because starting from scarcity sets the foundation for how you see the entire business.

When you’re building from a place of financial pressure, the lens you see through is so distorted. In my experience I’d go as far as to say that starting from scarcity wires how you show up in the business permanently.

• You make decisions from a place of stress and insecurity (even when the money is there)

• You may not feel worthy of the help you need and freak out about how much every conversation with a qualified person could potentially cost you

• You’re more emotionally volatile and tethered to every single outcome

• You burnout much faster because all of your energy is charged by lack + urgency

• You may even build the wrong products; for trend and this falses hope of giving people “options” — not building for the actual opportunity that exists (ex: I once had such a wide SKU assortment before I honed in on just body care as our focus)

• You strategize around survival and not long-term growth. You calibrate your pricing, positioning, and partnerships around what you can survive instead of what the opportunity actually calls for

• You’re prone to success dysmorphia!!!!

I can’t tell you how broke + stressed I felt CONSTANTLY while I was building my consumer brand even though I was objectively doing well and living comfortably. I so badly wish I could tell my former self “girl, you got it! you’re doing it! calm down!” But how I chose to show up Day 1 (desperate to make something of myself) oppressed me for the next several years. And once you’re so caught up in the business it’s really a hard energy to suck yourself out of.

Not to be all woo-woo, but in order create wealth you have to first feel wealthy. The energetic frequency of wealth is not dizzy and scattered. It’s slow and secure.

There is no perfect moment to start a business and I’m not telling you to wait for one. BUT—

Today, more than ever you need a brand with a big opportunity, tighty-tight positioning, some capital to burn and ideally you’re keenly invested in landing a certified dream team. You need to come in resourced, not hoping the business becomes the resource!

I believe that what a lot of women are reaching for isn’t a brand or a business, it’s comfort; some sort of reprieve from the throes of late-stage capitalism in a way that I don’t think most are able to articulate. It’s a completely legitimate thing to want and there is nothing wrong with that! But starting consumer brand isn't how you’re gonna get there.

Not even close.

xxo,

SF