I Spent 10 Years Marketing Other Brands. Then I Became My Own Client.

Before I ever became a founder, I spent more than a decade helping build other people’s companies.

Looking back, I think of those years as my education—except instead of paying tuition, I got paid to learn.

I have always worked at startups, and I’m an eldest daughter, which is a particularly effective combination. Tell me what needs to be done and by EOD I will have figured out how to do it.

I learned how businesses actually run. How teams work (and how they don’t). How to hire. How to launch a product. How to spend money. How to read data. How to figure out why something isn’t working and what to try next.

And because I was doing it for other companies, I got to learn with guardrails. I could manage millions of dollars in marketing spend without those millions being my dollars.

Turns out, that’s a pretty incredible education for becoming a founder.

My crash course in building a company

One of the most formative experiences of my career was joining Ava Women.

I was employee #2, and I joined about three months before we launched. My job was to figure out how we were going to bring the product to market.

The strategy was heavily digital, and I wasn’t just sitting in meetings deciding what the marketing team should do.

I was the marketing team.

I built the strategy. I ran the ads. I watched the data. I figured out what worked, changed what didn’t, and kept going.

By the time I left, I was leading direct-to-consumer globally. We were selling in 26 countries, doing millions in revenue, and had grown from a handful of people to a team of more than 40.

Then my son was born extremely premature.

And I left.

Then I accidentally learned that time and money don’t have to be connected

After my son was born, a consultant I had hired while I was at Ava reached out.

Side note: mentors and advisors are so important. Hire people who are better than you at things. Learn everything you can from them.

He asked if I wanted to consult with some of his clients. I could work as much or as little as I wanted.

I said yes.

And suddenly I was working around five hours a week and making more than I had in my competitive, San Francisco-based director-level salary.

That broke my brain a little bit.

I had been working since I was 16. I had never really stopped.

Then, all at once, I had a baby—an extremely premature, medically complex baby—a global pandemic happened, I took the first real break from work I’d had in my adult life, and consulting completely decoupled time from money for me.

I realized I never wanted to work full time again.

And the funny thing is: I love working.

I love marketing. I love figuring out why people buy things. I love digging through data looking for clues. I love finding the bottleneck in a business and testing my way through it.

I didn’t want to stop working.

I just no longer believed that doing meaningful, valuable work required giving it 40 or 50 or 60 hours of my life every week.

Over the next several years, I consulted with more than a dozen companies of all sizes. I helped startups grow from essentially nothing to millions in revenue. I worked alongside some of the best marketing consultants in the world.

And the entire time, I wanted to start something of my own.

I just didn’t have the idea.

I could kill every business idea before midnight

I am, unfortunately for my entrepreneurial ambitions, extremely pragmatic.

I’d come up with a business idea and immediately start finding holes in it.

What’s the margin?

How much will it cost to acquire a customer?

Why would someone buy this instead of the 27 versions that already exist?

Why doesn’t this already exist?

Can I actually scale it?

Is this a product people need—or do I just think it’s cool?

I could shoot 100 holes in almost any idea before midnight.

And if I could convince myself not to build it that easily, I definitely wasn’t going to spend my money building it.

I had wanted to be a founder for years. The truth is, though, I don’t think I was ready yet.

Then came the idea for Poppy.

For the first time, I couldn’t kill the idea.

And this time, I had something else I hadn’t had years earlier:

I had the chops.

I became my own client

I used money from consulting to fund my first sample, and later my production run.

I found a manufacturer on Google. (They ended up not being a great fit and aren’t our manufacturer today.)

I drew the designs myself, then hired someone to turn my drawings into a technical pack that a manufacturer could actually use.

I sourced my own materials and had them shipped to the manufacturer because material quality and environmental impact were incredibly important to me from the beginning.

And I gave myself rules.

I would start with just 100 bags.

I wouldn’t take outside money.

And I wouldn’t keep spending money on advertising unless I could generate at least a 3x return on ad spend.

Basically, I dared it not to work.

This wasn’t, I believe in my dream so much that I’m going to put everything I have into it.

Absolutely not.

It was: Here’s a hypothesis. Here’s the amount I’m willing to risk to test it. Here are the numbers it needs to hit to earn the next investment.

Which, now that I think about it, is exactly what I would have told a client to do.

For the first time, the client was me.

It worked. Slowly.

Poppy started very small.

I was mostly a mom. Then I was a consultant. And somewhere after those two things, I worked on this little bag company I had started.

But from the beginning, it was profitable.

So I kept going.

Every year, it grew.

And grew.

Eventually the order of my work started to flip. Today, I only consult with one or two companies at a time, and Poppy is the majority of my work.

The business now generates six figures in profit each year.

I still work about 15 hours a week.

And I still run essentially all of Poppy’s marketing myself.

I run our advertising. I write our emails. I manage the website. I design products. I plan inventory. I build the content calendar. I make the marketing decisions.

Not because I think founders should do everything themselves forever.

Because I’m very particular about what deserves my time—and what deserves the company’s money.

I don’t care if my business looks big. I care if it is good.

Poppy’s Instagram has around 7,000 followers.

We look much smaller from the outside than we actually are.

And I truly do not care.

Followers don’t pay my bills.

Revenue does. Profit does. Contribution margin does.

I’m not interested in spending hours every day making three Instagram posts and hoping the algorithm decides to bless me.

I use paid advertising because I can measure it.

I care deeply about our email list because we own it.

Social media is valuable, but for me, one of its primary jobs is getting people into an ecosystem I have more control over.

I work about three months ahead on my content calendar. I have systems for what I focus on and when. I try very hard not to wake up every morning and ask, What does the business need from me today?

Because the answer to that question will always be:

Everything.

There will always be more you could do.

So I’ve had to become very good at deciding what actually matters.

Every dollar is a vote for the kind of company I want to build

I am strict with money.

I’m bootstrapped. I don’t have investors or partners, and I don’t intend to take outside capital.

So yes, I care a lot about profitability.

But profitability doesn’t mean choosing the cheapest possible option every time.

When Poppy got big enough that I couldn’t reasonably pack every order and answer every customer email myself, I could have sent fulfillment to a warehouse.

Instead, I hired another mom in my town.

She packs our orders and handles customer service. She can bring her baby to work with her. And I pay her way over minimum wage.

Is that the absolute cheapest possible way to fulfill an order?

Probably not.

I don’t care.

If I’m going to outsource something, I’d rather that money go to a person in my community and create the kind of job I would actually want someone to have.

There’s a narrative that small businesses will be able to make choices according to their values later, when they’re bigger and have more money.

I don’t really buy that.

We’re a small business. We can afford to do it.

Which makes me pretty confident the giant companies could afford to do it, too, if it mattered enough to them.

I’m still my own client

The funny thing is, my job hasn’t actually changed that much.

For years, companies paid me to come in, look at their businesses and ask questions.

What’s actually driving growth?

Where are we wasting money?

What’s the bottleneck?

What does the data say?

What’s noise?

What’s worth testing?

Where should the next dollar go?

What deserves our attention right now?

I ask myself those exact same questions every day at Poppy.

The difference is that now the dollars are mine.

And the time is mine.

So I think about almost everything as a bet.

An ad is a bet.

A new product is a bet.

PR is a bet.

Hiring someone is a bet.

An hour of my time is a bet.

I don’t need every bet to work. That’s not how business works.

I need to be thoughtful about which bets I place, keep them survivable when I’m wrong, pay attention to what happens, and put more behind the ones that are working.

That’s probably the biggest thing those 10+ years taught me.

I want to build a business that’s profitable. One that makes products I’m proud of. One that treats people well. One that doesn’t require outside capital to survive. And one that leaves room for the rest of my life.

I spent more than a decade helping other brands figure out how to grow.

Now I get to be my own client.

And it turns out, I’m a pretty good client.