Hey, starter! Read on for…

—Danny (tell me your biz dreams: [email protected])

👋 Thousands of business-builders around the world read For Starters every Friday. Thanks for being one of them.

1. Start over in the desert. In 2008, a Navajo American woman named Heather Basinger took a tour of a sake factory in the northern Japanese city of Akita. Her guide that day was an ambitious young brewer, Atsuo Sakurai.

It was, Heather said, love at first sight.

Back then, Atsuo had dreams to start his own sake brewery – he’d even go on to pass the exam to become a first-grade brewer – but it was near impossible to score a fresh license from the government.

The only realistic path was to buy one. But that was expensive…

So the couple, by then married, picked up sticks and eventually found themselves halfway across the planet in Heather’s hometown: Holbrook, Arizona, pop. 5,000, on old Route 66, near Navajo Nation. The literal desert.

And guess what, folks? He’s got his own sake brewery – one that won gold at the Tokyo Sake Competition, for the best internationally produced sake, only 18 months after his first batch.

If there’s an obstacle in your way, just go around it.

2. Bring good shoes. Speaking of obstacles… in this outdoor-influenced fashion brand shop in Seoul, you need to literally scale a monster boulder to access the retail space on the 2nd floor. Sweaty customer acquisition. 🪨💦

3. Starter manifesto. Poet Mary Oliver said it better than I ever could: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

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Starter Stack, in partnership with Hostinger

Josiah Powell could have built the website himself. He freelanced as a web developer for years and his day job is in cybersecurity. But he didn’t build it himself…

Last week in For Starters I caught up with Josiah & Sarah Powell, owners of Baltimore-based biz Dance With Sarah Powell. When it came to who would build their website, the question wasn’t whether Josiah could build it, but whether he should. He says a site that would have taken him 10 days to create took ~2.5 hours instead, using Hostinger AI Builder.

The time he got back went straight into the biz, and the work’s paying off: class attendance is up ~48.5% year on year, average revenue per class climbed ~149%, and their email list grew ~263% in a recent 7-month stretch.

Hostinger helped him build it all faster, he tells For Starters: “It stopped being just the company hosting our website and became part of how we’re actually building the business.”

Support For Starters by supporting our partners.

Motherhood sometimes gets treated like a moment in time: a stretch of pregnancy, then back to normal. Jessica Smith and Rebecca Heywood built their biz MAYAH on the opposite idea.

As they explain below, their new bodycare biz covers the “motherhood arc,” from trying to conceive onwards. And they got there by asking. (A lesson for any starter stuck in a rut: talk to real people and ask tons of questions.)

The two friends spoke to 300 mothers and mothers-to-be, then mapped 52+ concerns across every stage of motherhood. They found 76% were worried about their shift in body image postpartum and loss of identity, while 68% were unsure which products were safe to use.

The result of all that asking: 3 new products that navigate the (surprisingly sparse) gap between mother-and-baby products and generic bodycare.

→ Can they turn that product range into a community? Keep reading…

💬 Hey you two, MAYAH is weeks old. A newborn! How’s it going?

J: We launched about 7 weeks ago, so it’s very fresh and new. It feels really exciting. We’re also on an accelerator, which has kept us busy. 

💬 Nice one, what’s the accelerator?

J: It’s called Breakout Beauty. It’s backed by TikTok Shop and Boots. There were 300+ applicants – they selected 11. The winner gets into 50 Boots stores and the runner-up gets into Boots online.

R: The cohort that we’re with is amazing. All different levels of experience. Such a range of phenomenal founders that we can learn from.

💬 Very cool. So tell us about your brand and the pain point in the space that led you to launch it.

J: We were actually going to launch something completely different at first. Let me rewind a bit. A while back, our husbands played hockey together and Becca and I used to just hang out and talk about business ideas.

R: We were both freelance, so we worked on our own projects and also started to collaborate. It just kept going and getting bigger and bigger… 

J: During Covid we saw subscriptions take off, and there was also a huge baby boom. So we started working on a subscription box for mothers, a self-care selection for every trimester, called Maya, without the H. But we soon realised there wasn’t a bold, empowering, aspirational brand that was doing justice to what we knew was needed for mothers, who all go through their own fertility journeys, whether it’s miscarriages, fluctuating AMH levels, or challenges trying to conceive.

R: And we knew that if we felt that way, then other women probably did too. So we conducted proper market research. We spoke to 300+ mothers and mothers-to-be and mapped out their concerns across trying to conceive, pregnancy, and postpartum. We found 76% of women were worried about a shift in their body image, a loss of identity postpartum, and a change between who I was and who I’m becoming. There hasn’t been enough of a conversation around this dramatic hormonal shift. We wanted to address it in two ways: with a science-led product with proper levels of active ingredients, and with a beautiful, bold brand that speaks to women and which we could build a proper community around.

J: We also wanted it to be a product that you’d want to use beyond pregnancy. It’s funny, when we had calls with some investors – particularly investors in a specific demographic – they were, like, “This is quite a niche area you’re looking into!”

💬 Motherhood, such a niche! I remember interviewing founders and investors 15 years ago and, back then, any market gap or biz idea that was related to women was seen as niche.

J: Exactly. So we built a slide that looked at what we call “the motherhood arc”: trying to conceive can take 1-2 years (or more), then 9 months of pregnancy, then postpartum beyond that. But once you’re a mother you’re always a mother, and there wasn’t really a brand addressing that psychographic shift. Rather than seeing it as a small moment, we should be thinking about it as a category in its own right. That also influences our retail conversations: how can we present MAYAH differently? Does it have to live next to nappies and feminine hygiene products? Or can it live next to covetable bodycare products?

R: And even one step further: look at how they’ve packaged up brands within the menopause market and created a category. And why not? There’s such an opportunity for retailers to properly show up for these brands.

💬 Yeah, placement and context matter. From my own experience with magazines, if you’re stocked next to a biz mag like Businessweek or a lifestyle mag like Kinfolk, it impacts how you’re perceived. I get it. Let’s switch gears: tell us about your tagline: Era of Mother.

J: Sure. When brands say they’re disruptive or ‘creating a movement’ it can feel self-indulgent, but we really want to rebrand motherhood! That’s how we’ve framed it from the start – our north star. How can we show motherhood in a completely different way? Era of Mother encapsulates that, and our campaigns and thinking links back to that.

R: Remember when Rihanna came out with her bump? Before that, if you looked at visuals of how motherhood was articulated online, it was all soft, angelic, calm, pastels and beiges. There’s 100% a space for the organic, almond, crunchy mom, but motherhood is also this huge, empowering, transformative shift – and it’s not necessarily just about being soft or being put into this little box. Visually we’re trying to push those boundaries.

💬 Right now you sell MAYAH direct-to-consumer. But we just talked about retail – what’s your brick-and-mortar plan?

J: We’re starting DTC, but lots of conversations have happened these last few weeks! We’ve been approached by some amazing retailers, but these are conversations we need to nurture. We want to listen to our community, understand what they need, gather data, and then go into retail. The conversations we’ve been open to are more early adopter boutiques, lifestyle shops, parent members clubs, and hospitality and spa. For instance, is there a pregnancy massage we can sponsor or create our own treatment? Quite a lot of hotels are looking for ‘discovery brands’ at the moment.

💬 Do you have any guiding principles that help you make better decisions?

J: We’ve got a philosophy that we call the scenic route. As a brand, we always try to take the scenic route. You can apply the metaphor to motherhood, too: You can’t always plan life. You can’t always have a routine. If you apply it to the world of strategy, for everything we do, we ask: “How can we do it differently?”

R: We want to hold IRL events that bring women together. Things like a walk-and-talk for women who are going through life at the same pace as you. Especially for women postpartum, getting out of the house is a huge thing to tackle. The scenic route isn’t necessarily about going slowly. It’s about moving, looking around, enjoying it, and taking it all in. That’s what motherhood is.

J: Maybe one day we’ll be at Glastonbury with a stage for mothers. Or maybe on our walk-and-talks we’ll end at a coffee shop for a daytime rave.

R: Or we’ll host an early morning radio show for women who are in the trenches. They can listen to cool music and talk to a breastfeeding expert on the other side of the world: “My baby won’t latch. What can I do?”

💬 Who do you want to connect with? Shoot your shot.

R: Oh! Grace Beverley in the UK, and Emma Grede in the US.

J: That’s an easy answer! ☼

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A biz accelerator for literal kids 🧒 → “STAND is an IRL space where kids learn to create, problem-solve, communicate, and turn ideas into something real.”

Polyester 😭 → The latest innovative way Gen Z is insulting you.

A houseplant hospital 🪴 → A custom-built care space just for houseplants: “Whether your Monstera’s looking droopy or your Maranta has seen better days, the Houseplant Hospital is here to help.”

Half a cardigan ✂ → “MOF splits its knitwear down one side and lets shoppers pick both pieces, betting modular systems can outlast one-off purchases.”

Skåne 🍷 → The up-and-coming wine region of Sweden that’s becoming “Nordic Tuscany.”

Neo-etiquette basics 🫵 → The new rules of being human.

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Coop → “Buy from the bakers, growers, and makers a few blocks away – not a warehouse across the country.”

Source Material → A new weekly YouTube series by Figma, “where the designers & creatives shaping culture share the references that shaped them.”

The 12 phases of burnout → “Burnout doesn’t develop quickly. But once a person reaches burnout syndrome (or 12 on the chart), serious interventions are usually required.”

I launched a fake deodorant brand to see if AI would notice. Boys Club

The new economics of the art book. The Art Journal

The daughter who helped save her dad’s East London shoe shop. Khamsa

From acid house to Holy Carrot: inside the mind of chef Daniel Watkins. Service95

Words of wisdom from 25 world-class entrepreneurs. Monocle

The Spanish town doing capitalism better. RTBC

How to reclaim your flow state. Fast Company

47% → The increase in birdwatching as a hobby since 2018.

$90 billion → The size of the global agritourism industry, which has evolved from pay for your meal via hard labour to this organic bacon was made from our rare-breed pig in the garden.

Alright starters, let’s look for some coins in our sofa cushions… 💸

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Can stories save us? A month ago I interviewed FS subscriber Marianne Olaleye, founder of JAIKU, about her upcoming Storytelling Summit here in London. Just found out there’s only 10-15 tickets left. → For Starters (i.e. me) will be there as a media partner. Grab one of the last tix and say hi? 👋

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