Building in Public #8: Community, I need your help 🤔

A recap of what's happened while building Mane Hook-Up.

Feb 25, 2025

Hey there 👋🏾,

For those of you who are short on time, here are the sections of the newsletter you can skip ahead to…

Community question🤔: What do you want to see more of in the newsletter?
Progress🏅: We helped Black and Mixed-race children in foster care get free hair care
Plans💡: Launch our virtual community events

🎯What do you want from Inside Small Giants?

It’s been five months since I re-introduced this newsletter as Inside Small Giants and been thinking long and hard about what I can do to improve the way I share advice and what’s happening behind the scenes with Mane Hook-Up.

So, before I go and tear up the carpet, can everyone answer these three polls so I can get a better idea of what to keep, drop and improve. I’d like to know:

What content you want to see: more resources, deep-dives, recaps or anything else in-between.
How often you want the newsletter: Right now, we’re weekly (for paid subscribers) and bi-weekly (for free) but that can change.
Whether you want to connect with each other: Because it’s hard enough to find other founders to learn from and connect with, so I’m happy to create a space for all of us.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll review the answers and make some adjustments to the newsletter based on what all of you have to say. So remember, your vote counts!

You can only select one answer for this question, but think about the newsletter that you find most useful/insightful. If you’re really struggling to choose one of the above, leave a comment with more details.

Right now, the newsletter is weekly, but that can change if you’d prefer to hear from me less often (but maybe in more detail).

Finally, I appreciate that a lot of Founders struggle to find a safe space to connect and chat, so I’m happy to create that space for us. Just let me know if a community space is something you’d find helpful by answering the poll above.

A big thank you to everyone who has answered the polls, left comments or emailed suggestions to me. I really appreciate the support and I’ll work hard to make sure this newsletter is bigger and better.

🏅 Progress

We helped vulnerable children get free hair care and products at our charity event

For the last three months, we’ve teamed up with Doops Braiding Studio to plan two charity days to offer Black and Mixed-race children in foster care access to free hair care, products and education.

Mainly as, many of them are homed by families from different cultural backgrounds, which often leaves them without access to the right people, products and information that can help them to properly care for their hair.

It’s been a whirlwind to prepare for, but our first event in Leicester took place on Thursday. Not only did it go down well, but it was a huge milestone. On that day, we:

Offered 30+ children in foster care get free hair appointments
Gave away 30+ Replenish Culture product boxes (with extra goodies from Shea Moisture)
Gathered some incredible feedback from the children, their carers and the social workers who attended

One of the biggest wins of the day was seeing just what it would take to run a day like this in the flesh. Emi (the Founder of Doops) had done an incredible job of organising everything and everyone on the day, making sure the day ran smoothly and every child truly enjoyed themselves. With all of the knowledge we now have, there’s a perfect opportunity to apply these lessons to the London event in April.

Knowing that we had the power to help so much children, and have such a positive impact on a local level, the more we want to make sure this is deeply engrained into the fabric of Mane Hook-Up. Especially when people tell us just how much it meant to them…

I was watching this little man getting his hair done, and when the stylist had finished he was literally just shaking with joy… and it brought me to tears. Wow look at what’s happening here, this little boy is being poured into by sitting here and getting someone to braid his hair. The joy that I saw on his face, I shall never forget it, it was beautiful.
— Social Worker

Even though these events don’t have an impact on out bottom line, they allow us to collaborate with like minded brands and bring something beautiful to life. To me, serving our community, and unearthing some of the systemic issues in the foster care system, is just worth it.

HELP US RAISE MONEY FOR THE LONDON EVENT: We’ve raised about 40% of the funds for our venue and have locked in a few other suppliers. Here’s the link to our GoFundMe for anyone who’s also interested in supporting the cause.

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💡 Plans

Launch our virtual community events

As we transition over to running monthly community gatherings, there is a tonne of work to do in order to make that happen too.

While I already have 5x months of guests lined up, we still need to:

Confirm our event space, making sure it’s as accessible as possible
Starting conversations with potential sponsors & partners

As many of these things are a work in progress, I’m starting with events online events to make sure our community can still get access to valuable advice. That said, we have two virtual guests lined up, and my objective over the next two weeks is to make sure we get as many people registered as possible.

For those who are wondering, we use Luma to manage all of our events, whether they’re in-person or virtual, it’s very simple to get up and running so I highly recommend.

I’ll keep you all posted on the progress!

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.