How to Learn from a Failed Business Venture
The ManifestHer Founding Story
In 2018, I had this insight - making friends as an adult was hard. More than that, when you make new friends as an adult, your new relationships orient around celebrating the good — a promotion, a new house, having a baby, etc. and rarely do they create space for the “real real” conversations around where you are struggling, whether that’s in your marriage, as a mother, feeling like your relationships or career is draining you, or feeling like your playing the game of life to just not lose, as opposed to playing the game of life to win, and you’re starting to feel like the big dreams that once gave your life energy are eluding you and you fear you’ll never truly step into your purpose. Have you ever felt this way?
If you have, you’re not alone. In fact, I was feeling this way in 2018. On paper, I had it all — a great husband, a great job with a cushy salary, a cute dog, a fabulous apartment in the city, a wonderful network of friends, all of it! But I kept waking up feeling like something was missing. It’s not like you book a four top at a hot sushi restaurant on a Friday night to bare your soul to your pals… so I felt like, there was this open space in the market to bring like-minded, ambitious women together to break bread, and facilitate REAL conversations.
And that’s exactly what we created (me, Tasha, Helena, and Taylor) with ManifestHer.
A wonderful community of women who came together for one reason: to support each other in the pursuit of their biggest dreams and wildest ambitions. It was magnificent. We built a community hundreds of women strong with IRL events each month to bring them together for conversations that supported their personal and professional growth — either led by other fabulous women, or facilitated by us (me, Tasha, Helena).
And then something terrible happened — there was a global pandemic. Overnight, revenue coming in from our IRL events dried up instantly and we were forced to pivot to a digital events business. We started bringing women together virtually via zoom, each event we hosted was instantly more profitable (which was fantastic), but the quality of the event and connection that our clients walked away with was not the same. Not even close.
And then something even worse happened — the pandemic dragged on and on, the whole world went from IRL to Zoom fatigue in a matter of 90 days, and little did we know even after those initial 90 days, we had about another year and a half of “figuring it out” to do as a society.
It was in this time that a few things happened: Tasha took on a new, BIG, career change. I took on a new, BIG, career change. Helena took on a new, BIG, promotion. And ultimately none of us had the energy, desire, nor creativity to figure out a sustainable revenue stream for ManifestHer, nor did any of us carry a vision for what the future of the business would (or could) become. Ultimately, we made the decision to wind the business down.
I’ll tell you what… I felt like a massive failure. I think it being 2023 and me finally feeling ready to talk about this is an indicator of how much I harbored feelings of failure around this business, considering this blog post is about five years in the making, and two years into the healing journey.
All this said, in reflecting on the end-to-end journey of ManifestHer, and what this business taught me, it’s not all bad. In fact, it’s mainly good! Good either a) because I learned a TON about the customer experience and how to deliver a product that generated SO much word of mouth, we hardly had to market (read: we had no marketing strategy), or b) because building and winding down a business that you’ve bootstrapped (read: not taken on any outside capital, or more blatantly, fully funded via credit card and re-investing revenues generated) probably lessens the blow of the failure by about tenfold, as you don’t have to report to your friends, family, or institutional investors that their money is gone and they’re not getting it back.
Okay… so where does this net out in terms of what I learned? Here’s a few bullet points that come to mind.
What makes a great company?
A great product that solves a problem for customers.
A business model that makes acquiring new customers, retaining existing customers and delivering products to these customers result in more money in, than money out, aka profit.
A mission and vision that recruits new customers and new team members to come help you with growth and evolution of the business over time.
Predictability in terms of how you’ll bring in dollars from both new and recurring revenue streams which you’ll generate via your core products/offerings and new, innovative products created as a result of customer feedback.
To summarize — in my opinion a great company generates predictable revenue and profit that grows over the course of time by delivering a set of great products to new and existing customers, and is run by a great team of people who work together to deliver products that serve the overall mission of the business in the direction of the ultimate vision. Maybe I am missing a few components, but I think overall that summarizes what I believe.
So using this as our definition of a great business… let’s look at ManifestHer.
What ManifestHer had:
A great core product. Our ManifestHer half-day retreat events for women in Chicago had a Net Promoter Score of close to 100. Nearly all of our customers recommended our retreat to a friend, who ended up buying from us. This constant drip of referrals made it basically free for us to acquire new customers (which was great considering we had no concept of marketing ‘strategy’).
To deliver our great core product, we had a great team of people (Tasha, Helena, Taylor and some other contractors) who worked well together to ensure we delivered an incredible product to our incredible customers.
We listened very well to our customers, and innovated with new event formats (new products) and a dedicated digital space (which we didn’t productize, but in hindsight could have/should have), for our customers to keep up with one another between events.
What ManifestHer lacked:
Despite having the best intentions, we had no clear and consistent vision for where the company was going, and when you have no vision, you have no execution. At best, we had an elusive and ever-changing vision. I take ownership for this as ManifestHer was my brainchild and I recruited Tasha, Helena and Taylor to come along. I can’t imagine now what it must have been like to be them: at first the vision was to have a physical social/co-working club in Chicago (kind of like The Wing), focused on wellness; then it was to become a product company and to develop consumer goods for the community of women we served, next it was to become a coaching collective whereby our ManifestHers that succeeded in our program would become part of our coaching community and we would take a % revenue share on coaching opportunities they booked through our platform. Indeed, all of these ideas could become viable businesses and offerings, but our pursuits of them were feeble, didn’t have timelines or KPIs associated with their implementation and success, and ultimately I think this is the main cause of my frustration for ManifestHer to ‘take off’ and generate predictable, scalable, revenues. The ideas were there, the consistent vision-holding and corresponding execution was not.
Because of the elusive, evolving vision, there was no clear revenue strategy to hang our hat on. One-by-one event revenues don’t scale due to the fact that events are expensive, time-consuming and involve low/no profit margins. Don’t get me wrong, IRL events are a wonderful marketing tool for recruiting new customers, engaging existing customers, and generating brand awareness through organic social media, and in some cases free press… but they are NOT a way to generate predictable, scalable, revenues with delicious margins.
I’m sure I could find other things to blame (poor marketing, lack of distribution) for some of our downfall, but ultimately had we had a solid vision, product, strategy, and execution of that strategy it would have meant a world of difference.
Why we decided to wind down the business:
At it’s core, the idea behind ManifestHer was to engage a community of ambitious women through real talk and in real life to help them achieve success and happiness in their life and career, together. The Pandemic changed everything and did so for a very long time. The changes this required in the business in order to continue serving our customers were inauthentic to the very mission of the brand (and to us, as a founding team!). Because we had the luxury of being a bootstrapped business, answering to no one but ourselves, and my husband (for the small amount of credit card debt I racked up to cover our startup costs), we could ‘call it quits’ whenever we wanted, and so we did. This is a luxury not every business has, and as time has gone on, I’ve learned to appreciate it.
My career took off (and so did Tasha and Helena’s). I think this relates to the idea of opportunity cost. Choosing to do something is inherently choosing NOT to do something else. I was given the opportunity to take on the biggest role of my professional career, in part because of what I’d proven by building (or at least, trying to build) ManifestHer. When considering the options in front of me — to forge ahead down the path of entrepreneurship given all the ‘warts’ on the ManifestHer business (so-to-speak), versus accelerating my earnings and choosing to go acquire new skills and experiences on someone else’s dime, at the stage I was in my career and life (planning to buy a home and start a family), it was a no brainer to make the career move.
Now, had I seen a clear strategy with predictable revenue in front of me, would I have perhaps chosen differently? Perhaps. However, I didn’t see a path to scaling the business in a way that was enjoyable for me, nor a clear strategy that I wanted to pursue, and the team needed to go in different directions.
What I will do different next time because of ManifestHer:
Start with a strong mission and a clear vision of what I want to build.
Determine from the onset what success looks like (at least somewhat clearly, for at least an initial period of time).
Begin by building community through content and shared experiences for the people I want to eventually serve as my customers.
Develop an excellent core product, that has a clear ‘job to be done’ which serves the needs of customers.
Consider and set targets for profit margins and revenue from the onset.
Have a clear marketing and distribution strategy (incl. both DTC and wholesale) to make scaling the business less costly over time and (ideally) decreasing the cost to acquire new customers.
Be a better people leader by facilitating clear goals for the company and aligning team members to those goals, empowering them to come up with solutions for achieving those goals.
A Silver Lining in the ManifestHer Journey:
All this said, one thing that will never go away from the days of ManifestHer which I am both proud of, continues to deliver revenue to this day, and will in perpetuity is:
The ManifestHer book — an incredible artifact of the community we created and the mission we had. This not only lives on in the hearts and on the bookshelves of the community we created, but it continues to induct new members to that community despite the ‘company’ being wound down. If you haven’t read it, some background on the book, plus, links to where you can buy it can be found here.
A Note to Future Founders:
All in all, while ManifestHer was indeed a “failure” in many senses of the word, to me, it was a huge learning opportunity and the experience of a lifetime. The relationships built through the ManifestHer community and the supporting team are ones I will forever cherish. The lessons learned on the business side continue to help me in business, and again, I am grateful to have learned such BIG lessons with such LITTLE risk.
So if you are considering starting your own business, my recommendation? Do it. You’ll either succeed, or you’ll learn. My guess is you’ll do a bit of both. Stop over-thinking it. Just do it. And… Good luck!
