Building in Public #5: Reflection and 2025 goal setting
A recap of what's happened while building Mane Hook-Up.
Hey there 👋🏾,
For those of you who are short on time, here are the sections of the newsletter you can skip ahead to…
Progress🏅: Setting objectives for 2025
Problems🤕: How the first two weeks of this year kicked my a**
Plans💡: Planning project community and giving back
🎯 My reflections on 2024
A year of laying strong foundations
2024 was quite the ride.
It was full of the typical ups and downs that all Founders experience. Layered with lessons, opportunities, near misses, and major pains. It’s almost as if each quarter took on a personality of its own.
Winter (January to February) was full of excitement and optimism as we closed our first Angel investor, started planning our first in-person event and began the search for our Head of Product.
Spring (March to May), which is usually full of hope and renewal, was painfully low as my 240 Days to Raise fundraising newsletter came to an end… when I failed to close the round. It was both a relief to stop speaking to investors but, equally, it hurt to accept that the dream of closing just didn’t become a reality.
Summer (June to August) was the big strategic pivot. Forget fundraising and focus on the product. We found our head of technology, redesigned and began building again. I personally found joy in my work again and felt more in tune with our mission. I looked forward to calls with celebrity stylists, brainstorming sessions with the team and landing more of the right advisors to develop our support system from the inside.
Autumn was full of new beginnings. New product launched in the new location. We joined an accelerator program and travelled to San Francisco, gained a mentor, started brand collaborations, launching a crowdfunding campaign (that was layered with social good) and welcomed our fifth team member.
Winter was the crescendo. Instead of coming to a close slowly, with plenty of time to think about what we needed to focus on in 2025, I was pulled into the wonderful world of TED Ideas, and presented with an opportunity to talk about how the hair industry can help our community create generational wealth. Failing yet another funding round — via the crowdfunding — and my mind being being swallowed by a tonne of ideas on what to do next. This was followed by a healthy dose of end of year burn out, which led to my hibernation in the final weeks of the year.
Like I said, it was quite the ride.
But, as I sit here and reflect on everything that myself and the team managed to achieve, I can’t help but feel a strange push and pull. On one hand, there is a deep sense of gratitude for everything that we accomplished, the many people who have supported us and the opportunities that came along.
On the other hand, there’s a sting from the moments I’ve fallen and a deep desire to do better. This isn’t about aiming for perfection. I just firmly believe that Mane Hook-Up can make the world a better place, but I as a Founder, need to make decisions to get us there faster.
If last year was the time to lay foundations…
2025 will be the break through.
Here’s to the next 12 months. May they be filled with even better memories
And a huge thank you to everyone who’s reading who has joined me along the way.
🏅 Progress
Setting hard objectives for 2025
Last year was full of good ideas, projects and good intentions.
But, I made the one mistake that stops Founder from making concrete progress (e.g. more users, more revenue, more money).
We did too much.
From fundraising (twice, in different ways), to product development, events and millions of calls, it was no wonder I felt stretched.
One thing I’ve realised, it’s very easy to get swept up into all of the things that you want to do and sound like a good idea. Prioritisation is key, not just to make good use of time, but to ensure our business serves our community properly (and in a way that leads to sustainable growth).
That said, after reflecting what we did and didn’t manage to achieve last year, I came to two conclusions:
We will have two objectives for the year; revenue and audience growth 💰: By narrowing down our focus to just two things, the team will be aligned and we will be able to make the most of the time that our part-time team members have.
We will spend more time speaking to our customers than ever before 🗣️: There are a lot of people building beauty booking platforms in some way, shape or form. We’re not the first to come up with the concept of a marketplace specifically for the textured hair community. But, we have every intention of becoming the best. That means understanding our community better than anyone else, and that will come from speaking to as many of them as possible.
Last year, I briefly spoke to a Founder who decided he didn’t take calls with anyone or attend events, unless they were with his customers. At the time, I thought that was odd — not to mention a bit limiting — but knowing what I know now, it make sense. Time spent away from customers comes at a cost (which is often growth). So I may even take a leaf out of their book this year and only have meetings with my team or customers.
All of that in mind, we have a numbers for these two objectives and initiatives (that I might share in a later newsletter 😉) and we will measure our progress month on month.
For those who are struggling to set objectives of some kind, here’s my advice:
🤔 Think, if you achieved only one thing this year, what would it need to be to take the business to the next level? That will often help to narrow your focus down to a handful of options.
👥 Ask, where is your time being spent and where is the wastage coming from? Mine has definitely been too many meetings with the wrong people. Hence the customer centric focus.
✨ Dream, who could you collaborate with to achieve some of these goals? Because let’s face it, if you want to go far you need to go together as a team.
My final two pence is you need to have somewhere everyone can see and review these objectives all in one place. My personal choice is Notion because it also means my team can take ownership of everything that they do. But… more on that in the next section.
TIP FOR GOAL SETTING: Don't complicate it. If you aren't able to properly explain a goal, you are probably trying to combine one too many things. Strip it back and make sure your team has a clear sense of focus. Improving operations with a five-person team
Going from a one-woman band to five people was honestly one of the highlights of last year.
But, operationally, I was far from prepared for it to happen 😮💨.
Mainly as, a lot of our information was stored in my head, in Google docs or in documents and folders dotted around my cloud (which is totally unhelpful to my team). So, I’ve also spent a tonne of time creating a mass team Wiki in Notion.
For those who don’t know, a Wiki looks something like this:
Consider it the one-stop information shop for all things related to your business. It allows teams to store, share and collaborate, centralising knowledge and information so it’s easy to use.
From now on, every team meeting, every process, every piece of content, every project will be documented from beginning to end in Notion. Giving everyone the visibility of what other people are working on now and next. Also making it much easier for someone else to step in and take a project over when another team member is away.
I built our Wiki in about two weeks by following this guide written by Frances Matthews who is also the author of this fabulous newsletter 👇🏾. As much as I could list the 101 things that I did to build our wiki, you’re much better off reading a few of Frances’ newsletters as she is a Notion expert.
My ten pence for anyone who also wants to build a team Wiki is, think about how you want your company to operate in the future and try to put some of those practices in place now. Whether that’s a structured 1:1 process, having all of your documents listed in one place or a project management board that actually works, do it now and get the habit instilled into your existing team to make it easier for anyone else who joins in the future.
TIP FOR CREATING TEAM WIKIS: Consider brain dumping your ideas on paper first before you jump into Notion. As tempting as it can be to just pull some templated together, you'll stand a better chance of getting it set up the right way if you spend some time mapping out how the information will be mapped out before getting started. Is this helpful? Share the Inside Small Giants newsletter with your community.
🤕 Problems
The first two weeks of 2025 have kicked my a**
Anyone else walk into 2025 with good intentions 🙋🏾♀️
I was convinced it would all start with a bang. First two weeks? Let’s get projects set up, deliver the strategy to the team, start attacking those objectives — I had all of the 'typical let’s go energy.
The reality? I was knocked sideways.
Personally and work-wise, knocked sideways and left winded lol 🫨. Given life decided to rain a few slaps on me, I took the time to be still and spend a couple of days in recovery, taking care of little tasks to tick things over, but nothing excessive.
Sadly, the pressure of wanting to perform this year has left me feeling that I’m now behind schedule, but this moment gave me some time to think about the kind of leader I want to be. Admittedly, I can’t sit still in every moment of pain that comes my way. Otherwise, how can anything really move forward? But I can, occasionally, extend myself some grace and take a moment to sit in whatever I’m feeling. Whether that’s stress, anxiety, overwhelm or burnout.
I say all of this to remind any Founders reading this newsletter that you hitting lows is normal, often annoying (especially when they happen at the most inconvenient times) and it is fine to take a moment to process what you’re feeling to come back well-grounded.
Give yourself some grace.
It goes a long way.
TIPS FOR FOUNDERS WHO ARE FEELING DRAINED: I know we're two weeks into the year and everyone is busy shouting 'new year, new me' from the rooftops but it's OK to not join them. You will be re-energised at another moment in time, and that's fine. Take the first month of the year to re-group and consider what you need to put in place to prevent reaching burnout next time. 💡 Plans
Planning for project Community and Giving Back
At the end of last year, I tried to combine crowdfunding with giving back to our community — namely by setting up a charity day where we would help vulnerable children with textured hair get their hair done for free.
We wanted to raise £100k (with 10% going to our charitable cause).
We had a tonne of positive feedback.
Support from brands and stylists.
But astronomically failed to hit our target by raising just over 2% 😿.
It was pretty painful to fall so far from a mark I was convinced we could hit (I’ll talk about this more in a deep-dive on processing and analysing failures). Fortunately, there wasn’t a lot of time to sit in this as we’re now partnering up with another brand that’s working on a similar initiative for vulnerable children.
For me, giving back to our community will always be an essential part of what Mane Hook-Up does, and this charity event will be one of many to come. So, a large portion of my time will be spent setting things up for our event. From organising stylists to landing a venue and organising sponsors, the next two weeks will be spent on event planning to make sure this collaboration goes off without a hitch.
This will be balances with organising the project plan and strategies for generating a consistent flow of MRR by providing our community with value beyond the product. This means:
Defining what community looks like and means to us: because it can mean, do and serve people in various ways. Our job in the next few weeks is to iron out what it will take for stylists to fall in love with it.
Solidifying relevant partnerships: that benefit stylists, helping them to build the business of their dreams.
This means running interviews with stylists as often as we can to better understand (and document) how we can serve them.
That’s all for now! I’ll be back next week with a new deep dive (for our paid subscribers) so look out for that.
MY ASK: I’d love to know what problems some of you are facing so I can answer them. Feel free to reply to this email, DM me or leave a comment with any topic suggestions that you have. 🤔 Questions?
Feel free to drop any questions in the comments below! Until next week,
J x
P.S. Here are some of my other posts:
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Ahh thank you for the shout out!