How can I find my product has a potential market, Lynn?
We were so lucky to have executed an AMA session with Lynn Power, the co-Founder & CEO, of MASAMI haircare. Her founder stories extend beyond MASAMI, however. As a serial entrepreneur, Lynn also founded Isle de Nature bee-powered luxury home fragrance, and the HMS Beagle! She positions herself as an advertising executive turned entrepreneur with a passion for leveraging creative thinking to build businesses. She is passionate about helping brands survive and thrive. Throughout her career she has built a strong experience in cultural & business transformation, digital strategy, consumer insights, talent design and marketing modernization.
Correspondingly, she is a member of Women’s Forum of NY, CEW, Betaworks. In our AMA session, we had the chance to hear from our audience members to deliver their questions to Lynn. Lynn gave very elaborate and extensive information building up from her experience and professional insights.
Here are some amazing highlights from our AMA session with Lynn:
Learnings from Lynn Power
- She left the world of advertising and a position in the C-suite because she felt rather than doing her job, most of her workday was spent dealing with internal fires, legal issues, HR issues and more. She wanted to use her creative energy and lead a project she was actually passionate about. That is how she left her corporate job in an extremely senior position and founded her own brands.
- Today’s marketing strategies should always involve the lookout for new platforms and new ways of engaging with new customers. Lynn has found experimental methods in livestreaming social selling, ecommerce and multi channel strategies to be particularly useful. She argues that you should not confine your marketing efforts into one channel or idea. You should come at it full force from all angles.
- When founding a company it is good to be engaged with the idea, but you should be realistic about your offering. Is this a good product? Is there a market for this? Just because you love the idea doesn’t mean everyone else is going to love it. Founders should constantly look for feedback or reviews before launching. Some good avenues could be Clubhouse or Survey Monkey.
- You should find like minded brands and do partnerships, live streams, blog posts, podcasting, and more. These creative channels are extremely effective. Lynn has actively participated in over 75 podcasts in the past year. She thinks podcasts are an evergreen form of content, they sit around forever, and are very easy. Content is necessary for bootstrap marketing. Your content should be alive, tell a story, and associate your brand with that identity. Lynn has published a new content series talking about the Japanese heritage of her products.
- Content and marketing is great to build credibility, SEO, and more. Guest blogging on other platforms could also get you good traction.
- You should make your peace with affiliate marketing vehicles. If you can’t beat it, join it. This is Lynn’s feeling about Amazon as she found it helpful in her sales initiatives. Position yourself in a place where you can be found. If that is Amazon, then it is Amazon.
- To get to the first 1000 people, you should focus on the soft launch with friends and family, get many reviews, establish a referral program, conduct influencer outreach for credibility, and more. Before someone buys your product, you need at least 7 to 10 touch points so it is important to surround them with those touchpoints. Influencers may not get you to more sales, but they will get you more credibility!
- Facebook groups for services are fantastic! You should explore options in female entrepreneur pages and more. People are really helpful! Another avenue people can try in this respect is Clubhouse. Even though it has lost some blood since its initial hype, Lynn thinks there is still a lot of opportunity associated with the platform. Especially as the invite only rule starts to be lifted, it may be a great avenue for business opportunities.
- When asked the most unique challenge for a female founder, Lynn says she has experienced more issues surrounding her age than her gender. The ageism bias has left her having to have uncomfortable conversations with investors. Further, most women are still dealing with personal and work life at home, still taking on a lot of responsibility, making their professional life hard to navigate. Lynn says there should be a better methodology of delegating responsibilities associated with children and family life across both parents for this situation to be mitigated.
We thank Lynn for an extremely fruitful AMA session and have really appreciated her insights. For more networking opportunities and AMA sessions, follow Potlatch on all social media sites where we post routine updates on upcoming events, and invite our users to more networking opportunities.
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