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How to Build a Massive Brand Community with Lindsay Pinchuk

mentors collective | Best mentor collective

[buzzsprout episode=’4932422′ player=’true’]

Jay Feldman 0:00
How’s it going everybody and welcome to the mentors collective on entrepreneurship. On this episode we’re going to be talking about building a community for your business. If you have a highly engaged community, your business is going to succeed no matter what. And I found the ultimate lady boss to come on. She has built a massive, massive community of moms parents, and which has just exploded over the entire COVID situation. She’s the founder of bump club and beyond. She’s connected parents to products resources information for the past 10 years, she was named among the best entrepreneurs in Crain’s Chicago, best mommy community by Chicago magazine. We’re honored to have her on the show. Lindsey Pinchuk, thank you so much for joining me.

Lindsay Pinchuk 0:41
Thanks so much for having me.

Jay Feldman 0:42
So you’ve been building this community of parents for the past 10 years now. And I took I took a look at the community. It’s massive, they’re engaged. They love you guys. I would love to hear kind of from your perspective, what went into starting this growing it nurturing, fostering and engaging this massive community that you’ve been in? To build.

Lindsay Pinchuk 1:00
Yeah, of course, so I started Bob club when I was expecting my first daughter. She’s turning 10 in October, which to me is like, insane. I went from having this baby to like a tween who actually like talks back to me and is on tik tok now, which is not. So I started Bub club when I was really looking for my own support and community when I was pregnant, there was really nowhere in Chicago to go to meet expectant parents. And I found that once you had a baby, there were so many options, and there were classes and groups and whatnot. But when you’re pregnant, you have so many questions and you have your body’s doing different things. You need all these products, and there’s so much being thrown at you. And so, to me, I was like, I need to find some pregnant friends. None of my friends were pregnant at the same time as me. However, we all do have third graders are going into fourth graders. So I just happened to be the first one amongst my group of friends. I said to my husband, I really think there’s something here and I wasn’t quite sure what it was. But I said I think there’s something here it could be a business. I’m going to I’m going to start something And I was working at the time in publishing and advertising for the Hearst Corporation. I was pregnant. And I started hosting events in Chicago, we did a prenatal workout with like a local boutique fitness company. And we did a shopping event at a maternity store. You know, at the time, this was 10 years ago, there were no business Facebook pages. It was, you know, very word of mouth. There was no Instagram, there was no Snapchat, Pinterest wasn’t a thing. It was a totally different social landscape than it is now. And so I started I hosted these two events, I sent an email to everyone I knew, I’ve always been like a connector. I mean, I’ve always, you know, kept good connections and I keep up with people. So I sent an email and I posted it on my personal Facebook and we had like 50 expected moms come to each of the first events. And through my background in advertising and marketing, I got some brands to donate product. We did some gift bags. And that was really the catalyst for the start of this community throughout my pregnancy. That’s when kind of we grew the backbone of, I guess, the education platform that you would now call it our prenatal curriculum. I knew what I needed as an expectant parent and then talking to the women who are coming to our events. I asked them what they needed. We also in the, in the very beginning, we surveyed people intensively. So you know, we were on Facebook, we were on email. And a lot of what we did in the beginning was really just building this uncompromised arena where where women could come and talk to each other and get good information. And I was putting my face on it, and I was sharing my thoughts and I was saying things that I think at the time, a lot of women didn’t say about being pregnant and little did I I didn’t know this at the time, but you know, maybe me I was garnering this level of trust with these women who were coming to our events. And from there, like I said, we were surveying, making changes and then I had my daughter, and after I had my daughter, all these women were like also also having babies And they were like, well, now what? Because we love bump club and we don’t we want to keep coming. So six weeks after Jordan was born, we hosted our very first mom event. And from there, we just continued to really grow and add. And really in the beginning, it was word of mouth. And I go so in depth about this, because I think a lot of people when building community when trying to decide what they’re going to do, they think it’s going to happen overnight. And they, you know, we’ll buy followers now and all these different kind of uncompromised ways to garner community. And that’s, that’s not how it happens. Like, this didn’t happen by accident. It took a lot of hard work, but it took a lot of time. And it took a lot of gaining the trust of this audience and, you know, sharing my thoughts and getting other moms to share their thoughts and engaging together through Facebook groups once they were created. And it took time and so I you know, I think like you know, in the beginning stages of growing your community, you really need to put that time in and figure out what the community wants, so that you’re not compromising your brand. Absolutely. So, I mean, I could talk about this forever. I feel like I kind of went on a lot of tangents. But I feel like that is the most important thing when you’re starting out. So I

Jay Feldman 5:18
want to get a little bit into some specific details. Such as I know, when you started this in Facebook groups, you said weren’t a thing. Facebook business pages weren’t a thing. What was kind of your hub, your center place for your community to engage, sign up and become an official part of this community? Was it a website?

Lindsay Pinchuk 5:35
Yes. So we built this like, bare bones website, which is crazy. Like I built the first one. And I am by no means a web designer. I built it on iWeb. And they would come to the website and actually, I’m going to back up for a minute when we first started. It was send me an email, I didn’t even use like a Google form. It was like send me an email and I tracked the registration in like an Excel document. So it was not even automated. It was just it was we didn’t have the tools that we have now. And then we moved to a website. And the website was really the hub where we put the events on the website. And from there, it grew. And obviously, our content grew. We started hosting, you know, putting more content not only on our website, but as Facebook and social media grew, that did become the hub for where we were putting content where we were putting our events, you know, the minute Facebook started business pages, it wasn’t long after I started, we immediately got a page and that became a very big central hub for bump club and beyond and for our events, our content, our community to really go and engage and now I think our website is definitely bigger than our Facebook page. But at the time it was that was not the case. So that was kind of where in the beginning that was kind of like the hub and now it is our website. It is you know, our website is there and people are engaging on our website on our Facebook or Instagram on Pinterest in our Facebook group. email and email has always played a very big role in everything that we’ve done. My background is in integrated marketing communications and part of the whole IMC model is really getting to the root of your customer. And I did use email even when it wasn’t like automated or whatnot to get the feedback and to make the changes and to make sure we are giving the information that this audience wants.

Jay Feldman 7:22
Yeah, that’s awesome. Okay, so you have a website, you’ve got this massive hub, you’ve reached out to all of your connections, your personal people who are interested who are having babies have just had babies, did you do anything to grow this community other than word of mouth obviously mommies telling each other I’m part of this awesome community of women, I went to this event, we love it, you should join. But is there any marketing that you did to grow the community?

Lindsay Pinchuk 7:44
So in the beginning, really, and truly No. I mean, in the beginning, in the beginning, I would say the first few years, it was very much word of mouth referral, and we asked people to refer and like, we like would ask people to refer in the beginning and Give them discounts on events because at the time all like a lot of our events were ticketed and paid for. But that was something that like we like me and my assistant managed internally, it was not an automated software. And this was 10 years ago. So we did a lot of incentive. But it was such a unique product, and there was nothing like it. And there really is nothing like it. Now at the time, there was nothing that if you were expecting and you were in Chicago, it was a natural thing to say like, oh, did you go to bump club and like everyone who came like would tell their friends and bring their friends and, you know, we were having dinners with 100 expectant women every single month they were sold out, we would have weightless, like, you know, and I was one person with an assistant and it was at the time, like very hard to keep up with that. And so from a marketing standpoint, it almost like wasn’t necessary because at the time I didn’t really have the bandwidth nor the capacity as we started growing a big part of our growth were the partnerships that we’ve created with with the brands. And in the beginning, our revenue stream was purely like tickets and And, you know, digital content wasn’t really a thing. And I said in the beginning like to my husband like, I’m going to quit my job after I go back from maternity leave. And as long as we make enough money to pay the nanny, we’re good for this year. And like that was a very big leap for us because I did have a very successful executive career before I started bumped club, but I wanted to give this a fair shot. And in the beginning, it was a lot of brand activation and brand sponsoring. And that was my background at Hearst. And so it was very natural for me to reach out to brands and ask them to, you know, be a part of what we were doing in person through the brand connections. We started working with, you know, the small It was like small baby brands, and then we started working with larger brands. So like we had Microsoft reach out to us. That was probably our first really big one. And this was I want to say this was maybe our second or third year in existence, and it was they asked us to put on this whole day of like, education and information within one of their stores. And it was like the first time like I had gotten like a five figure deal. And it was a lot of work. And it was amazing. And it was so great to work with Microsoft. And that was really an eye opener for me that we needed to be exploring larger partnerships. There’s kind of been two paths because I had a I had women who reached out to me and wanted to work for bump clubs. So we did bring on other people in other cities across the country. So that also helped to grow our community, because other women and other cities wanted to do what we were doing. And they came on and they started hosting events in Austin and in Minneapolis, and in Los Angeles. And so that was like a natural growth for us. And then we started working with bigger brands target Nordstrom were the two big ones on this company. And we started putting on like large activations for these brands. And it really put us on the national landscape in terms of the parenting space. It also helped us to grow our community, because here we are working with target and we’re hosting events in 20 different cities. So and we had budget to advertise the events on Facebook and through SEO and through targeted email. All campaigns. And so that was kind of the natural step to how we grew our community in a, in a bigger national way, was working with the brands and the brand partnerships.

Jay Feldman 11:09
Gotcha. So a little bit going into the business model of this thing. I guess your first step was giving your audience value building this community around it. And then I guess your next step is figuring out how to monetize it, which was at first, these live classes and interactions where people would buy tickets and come and you would do I guess,

Lindsay Pinchuk 11:28
Seminars, yeah.

Jay Feldman 11:29
Yeah, seminars and I mean, what other kind of courses and stuff Did you offer? Yeah.

Lindsay Pinchuk 11:35
So the interesting that the unique thing about bump club and how we differentiate ourselves from like a hospital class was was the community. So that was why people came so they would come to our expectant parents dinners. They would get a talk every month was different breastfeeding, sleep, safety, labor, delivery, etc. But they would have an hour and a half before the talk hour and a half to sit at a table with other expectant women. And then eventually meant to because we started opening it up to parents as well. And they would come in, they would be able to form their own community. And from our dinners, I was seeing play groups being formed and groups of women and they were making like these mom group friends. And that’s really, that was the hub of the events, like the events were necessary because we all needed this information. But at the same time, they were, you know, they were forming their own communities within our community. So they would come they would have dinner, they would have the talk, they would also go home with a giant gift bag. So we worked with a lot of the brands and we in so we brought a lot of value. And so it was a compliment to like the classes they were taking in the hospital. They were going to the hospital for kind of like medical education, but ours was like the friendship and the community, the product knowledge, the freebies that you got, and it was kind of like a whole three hour thing. And in the beginning it was when I was pregnant, and I felt this way too. It was very much like my one time of the month or like would come and I could just be pregnant. And like everyone knew what I was going through. And that was, that was really the heart like the connector was the pregnancy, the Parenthood, you know, and I was explaining to someone yesterday, I was actually talking to a very big brand yesterday who was asking about, like our diversity in our community. And one of the things that I am most proud of with bump club is like from day one, you would walk into our events and you would see all skin colors, all religions, you know, all ages, you would see different sexual orientations. We’ve had a lot of same sex couples over the years, we’ve had surrogates come, you know, people who were expected to be a surrogate surrogacy, and we’ve just, there’s no judgement like that starts from the top down, obviously, but that’s how I am like, I am just like an all welcoming and encompassing person. And so that I think also helped to drive the community in the sense that everyone that came like, knew that they didn’t have to like come with the front, like that you were going to come and it was going to be okay. If you didn’t know anyone,

Jay Feldman 14:01
yeah, that says so much about the brand. Everyone’s welcome. You could just come and be yourself and be pregnant. Sounds like fun to me actually kind of jealous on that.

Lindsay Pinchuk 14:10
And then from there too, we started growing our events and we started doing like we’d have the paid events that you would pay to come to but then we also started doing free community events workouts, playdates for moms with their babies, various like seminars like smaller scale seminars that maybe weren’t, you know, as product focus webinars on our website. And so that naturally helped us to grow the community because even if someone didn’t want to come pay for a ticket, they could still come work out for free. And from there, we got sponsors of those series and we started working with larger brands to bring those free activations to life and over the course of time prior to COVID. We had one event series last two events series left that were paid to attend. And the reason you were paying was you are getting a dinner or a meal and like a giant gift that but a lot of what we We’re doing and what we do now is free and it’s brand supported and brand sponsored. And, you know, we have this very large coveted audience that the brands want to meet and see and engage with. And they trust us. And and that is something that is also incredibly important when you are developing a community and growing a community is that you cannot do anything to undermine their trust, we say no to brands, we always have, like we have, you know, if a product comes to us and kind of our team looks at each other, and we’re like, we would never use this. We wouldn’t pay that you could give us all the money in the world and a very big brand recently did offer. They wanted to sample in our bags. And it was like it was a cleaning company like a cleaning supply company. And I felt like it was just like, all chemicals. It was like not our gas. It just wasn’t on brand for bomb club. And we said no.

Jay Feldman 15:52
It’s in our values and integrity intact. Absolutely. Especially with so you need to maintain the trust of your community. And that’s how you do it.

Lindsay Pinchuk 15:59
It’s me It’s our team who are on right now especially a lot of these like Facebook Live engagements. And we’re putting our faces out there and talking to the brands. And it’s very obvious when you’re talking to a brand if you don’t like their product, or you wouldn’t use it, or you know nothing about it, and consumers are so smart, they see through it. And so it’s been just a really natural progression for us. And it’s taken a lot of work and a lot of time and you do have to really think about it. And I think that’s the other thing too is a lot of people when they’re starting a community just think like, you know, if we build it, they will come that isn’t the case like it’s, it’s like a natural, seamless progression and it feels very natural, but you also have to make it very meticulous because there are things that you have to do in order to gain that trust, which then grows your your audience and we’ve never like bought Instagram followers or Facebook followers we’ve we’ve run ad campaigns for various things in the social space, but we’ve never like bought followers bought bots like anything like that. That.

Jay Feldman 17:00
So it’s a good thing because that’s poison. Yeah. Okay. So I have, you know, a relatively large entrepreneurial community and I would be terrified to host my first event host my first live seminar and say, pay me for a ticket. And let’s see what happens. Let’s pray people come What was your first event like, and talk me through some of the learning experiences you had and mistakes that you’ve made.

Lindsay Pinchuk 17:22
So the first two events that we did were free, and I and I think that was a really big key as well, because, like, if you don’t have a reputation, and people don’t know about you, you have to kind of whet their palate and make them want to come back for more. And you just so you want to make that first engagement. Amazing and and let them know what they’re going to be getting from you. So the first thing that we did was we partnered with a local boutique fitness company, and we did a prenatal workout. So there was something of value for the audience to come. They were just like showing up and who knows what it was come to a prenatal workout, which If you’re pregnant, like that’s a natural thing to want to do, you’ll meet other expectant moms, we’ll have some goodies and giveaways. And I was able to get some donations from local businesses on snacks. And the fitness company also, like pitched in, in terms of spreading the word. So I think like working with good partners to help spread the word about what you’re doing is very important as well. You want them to be on brand, of course. And then after the event took place, you know, we sent out an immediate email. Thank you so much for joining us. This is what we have next. I think you always need to have the next thing set up so that you’re not waiting and people are that you don’t want them to believe Well, what’s next? What’s next? So you want to add an immediate next offering. And then you also want to say what do you want down the road? And what’s important to you right now. And that’s really where we built our curriculum. Like, I had an idea of what I wanted to do, but the dinners really came out of the feedback from this and these two initial events and it’s so crazy to me, because that is The backbone of funk club are these awesome

Jay Feldman 19:02
dinners. So your first event you hosted for free? And seems like the partnerships that you created, covered a lot of the cost, I guess what were the some of the costs involved, just the space,

Lindsay Pinchuk 19:13
there really wasn’t any like, and that was that was the beauty of this business was that, you know, the fitness facility agreed to do it, because they wanted the exposure amongst expectant parents. I mean, really, and truly like, Tammy who owns the who owns the facility, like took a chance, you know, but for her it was marketing budget. And really, she wasn’t out much either. We did it during the time when she didn’t have any other classes running. And so it was really my time and like that, and in the beginning, that’s really what the cost was of this business. And the beauty of this business was that there wasn’t much overhead, and we made it so that there wasn’t much overhead and it wasn’t until we were getting into like really big events like we do this very large event series called your Palooza that we take to 15 different cities across the country. It’s like hundreds of people attend It’s not an expo but like a boutique Expo is, I guess the best way to describe it. Once we started getting into those type of events, yes, we had very significant costs. But at that point, you know, we were a few years in, and we had a lot under our belt in terms of sponsorship connections and brand connections, and then the growth of our community, of course,

Jay Feldman 20:19
and you got all those brand connections on your own, just you making phone calls?

Lindsay Pinchuk 20:23
Making phone calls. And then also like, once certain brands saw that we were working with brands and they started, you know, reaching out to us as well. The Parenting of baby spaces is an amazing, very unique community. I have worked with many of the same people for 10 years. I mean, these are people that like I count as friends now, even if they’ve left friends have gone to other brands. It’s a very close knit community. And it’s it’s amazing. And I think, you know, once I attended a trade show, the first trade show I attended was maybe my second year it was it was 2011. And that was kind of like there was like a little buzz about bump club. We had started Doing some bigger things. And a lot of the brands wanted to meet with us. And that’s kind of where we really started big with the brands, but like our second or third expected parent dinner was sponsored by great go. And that was just a phone call.

Jay Feldman 21:14
Wow, that’s amazing.

Lindsay Pinchuk 21:15
That was me like calling them up and you know, sending emails and, you know, really pounding the pavement to get the word out about what we were doing. And they they bid at it. And there’s still a partner of ours today. They just were a sponsor of this large target activation. We did. Yeah,

Jay Feldman 21:30
that’s what you have to do. You have to put the put the tires to the pavement and start going. That’s awesome. How many people showed up to your first live event?

Lindsay Pinchuk 21:36
So our first live event was the workout and I want to say we had about 30 people. I remember it’s hard to it’s It was crazy. I was like 13 weeks pregnant at the time. So my memories a little foggy, but we had two classes. I remember we oversold and we had two classes going so it was probably over 30 people were utilizing both the rooms. And then the second event was a couple weeks Later, and that was within a maternity boutique that we worked with and which, sadly is not in business anymore. And we had over 50 expectant parents show up to that. And then from there, the next one was unexpected parent dinner and we charged and that was also over 50 people. So it’s awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And it was just, it was also I think, as many businesses start, you know, it was there was a need for this and no one else was doing it. And they’re really just there was no one else connecting expectant parents. And expected parents are such an impressionable audience. They have a lot of money to spend, they’re being targeted with a lot of brand messaging. And they I think, just when we came to market it was like, Oh my God help us weed through all this because there’s just so much going on and you’re worried about so many things when you’re expecting so the last thing you want to worry about is like the unimportant things that aren’t health related. You want someone to help you with those decisions hundred percent. Talk to me

Jay Feldman 22:55
a little bit about monetizing your community. We talked about selling tickets to To the seminars and the live events, we talked about some of the brand partnerships, we also talked about at the end of the seminar, you want to let them know what’s next. I’ve been to some of these entrepreneurial seminars where you go there, and then you know, you pay $300 for a ticket. And at the end of the show, it’s $10,000 for the mastermind, $20,000 for the year long course, then there’s products or trying to sell you online courses. Have you done anything like that? Do you have products that you sell? do you have? We have not

Lindsay Pinchuk 23:26
done that yet, is I told you before we started, I know, you know, we were acquired in 2019. And part of that was really I like had reached the bandwidth of, I just couldn’t grow this anymore on my own and with my team, and I’m so thankful that this partnership happened because I now have access to a wealth of resources that I didn’t have access to previously, and it’s allowed us to help scale the business, especially right now during COVID. We have not done any products or any product extensions. And in fact, I almost think we’ve gone the whole opposite direction from what you described because at first, we were placing a lot of the cost of our services and our education and our information on our audience because we didn’t have any one else to drive that cost when you’re first starting or drive that revenue when you’re first starting out. But as we’ve grown over time, we’ve been able to monetize the audience. And we’ve slowly been able to peel back, putting the charge on them. And we’ve been paid, we’ve been charging the brands who want to reach them, the brands want this audience, they are a very coveted audience. And so we have put the charge on the brands and the brands are the ones that are mostly right now, pain to reach the audience in the community. We’ve grown I mean, we have over half a million families in our arsenal. It’s a very robust number. And obviously as we’ve grown, we’ve been able to add different products to monetize our audience, to the brands and that’s really now how we are moving forward with business. I do anticipate I hope when we come out of COVID we are able to do in person And events again. And I do anticipate we will have ticketed options for some of these big events. I do also hope that we are able to move forward with more community events that are sponsored and free because we now have a much larger audience because of the digital space that we’ve we’ve really, you know, catapulted in over COVID. So to your point, like, in terms of monetizing our audience, it has been more of a progression to grow the audience and then turn to the brands and say, Look at this audience we have, they’re so engaged here, the stats here the survey results that we’ve done, and they have that in turn wanted to pay to have access in terms of revenue streams. Now, you know, we have digital content that that brands pay for. They’re paying for everything from my emails to advertorial custom content. We do a lot of Facebook Lives. dual screen talks with the brands we work with retailers like target to drive to their registry program and the brands are a part of that as well. We also when we were acquired, this is this was kind of the biggest For our revenue, and our also our capabilities that we’re able to offer brands, is we now have a fulfillment center. And so we are able to drive mass amounts of samples like mass, like we can do anything from like, you know, 10,000 to 100,000. And we have a fulfillment center to do that. And so we’re working with a lot of brands right now on sampling activations, especially direct to home, because expectant parents are not going into stores right now. So we’re doing that. We also moved we used to have a program called bcb VIP. And it was a program that like our most engaged customers paid for and it was kind of when it was okay to charge for apps like really charge for apps that people paid $50 a year to roughly $50 a year to have access to the bump club app. And within the app, there were dozens of discounts like hundreds of discounts to all the products that we worked with and the various like photographers and lactation consultants, we did like VIP perks when you would call to an event, you might get a free gift like it, we’re just our most engaged customer. And over the last year, when we were acquired and we redeveloped our website, I always wanted to do this, and I’m thrilled that we did, we moved it to a community model that’s free. And so now it’s free to join the bump club community. And in turn, we will monetize that for the brands that we work with in terms of free samples for our community, and you know, various like data acquisition for for brands. So we’ve really shifted course as to how we, we started in more of like a media model. And now we really are more of like a brand sponsorship model.

Jay Feldman 27:36
Yeah, that’s amazing. So obviously COVID has changed a lot of things for parenting for moms, for basically everybody, but I want to know, just a few minutes for any expectant mothers or parents that might be watching this kind of what’s been going on in the parenting world is there as a thought leader in the parenting space. Do you have any advice for mothers and parents right now, and expectations going forward?

Lindsay Pinchuk 27:57
I want to share a couple of nuggets of advice and then I’m gonna To share kind of what we did early on that I think has really been helpful for our families. One, I would say take every day, one day at a time, and maybe even that’s one hour at a time. I think it’s okay to not be perfect outside of COVID. But especially right now, and just not to worry about the little things. I think that there are so many things that we’re all worried about right now. And it’s a lot easier said than done. But parents need to know that they’re not alone in this. I mean, I have gone on Instagram, it was every night when COVID started. But then now it’s a few times a week, and I talked to the art community and I asked them how they’re feeling. And I and people are very honest about it. But I also think that people feel very alone right now. And you can’t feel alone right now. Like you’re the things that you’re thinking and feeling. I guarantee you every parent out there is feeling and so I think it’s just very important to do you and do what’s best for your family and to not beat yourself up. Because if you give your kid the screen, it’s okay like you know, we’re all Just trying to get by right now. And we all will come out of this. And I also have been telling our community since the beginning that we must try to find the positives from this. And that has been something that has gotten me through this, as a mom and as a business owner, entrepreneur and wife and a friend, is that we need to find the positives, because there have been plenty and I asked our audience probably weekly now, like, share your positives. And, you know, I think that for a lot of families, this pause was really needed, especially parents with kids who are like school aged and who have a million activities and are running in every direction. I know for me, we have eaten dinner together every single night since March 13, except for one, and that was because I had a conference call with someone on the other side of the world. We didn’t do that previously. And my kids, I think, and I hope we’ll look back on this time. And remember it is the time that we were together as a family and also the time that we made a shift in how we operated as a family and I almost hope they don’t remember how crazy it was. Before COVID, because there were times before COVID, that I felt like we were running in a gazillion different directions. And I was running to catch a plane and I was gone a couple nights a week. And I feel like I’ve really been able to get to know my kids, I urge everyone to really find those pieces of positive. And if they’re not done perfectly, that’s fine. But I think that that helps with your mentality to get through this it because it is a really negative time. And from that bump club, really, like unknowingly. I went online on March 13. And I said like, I set it on Facebook and I set it on Instagram, I said, We are here for you like we are going to be here for you no matter what, no matter how long this takes. And no matter how long we’re locked down. Bob club is going to support you. I did not think five months later, we would still be churning out COVID related content. But from there, we really did a quick pivot and we took all of our in person community building events and we move them online. You know, we’re doing regular facebook live classes with our enrichment partners for Kids, whether it’s baby music or storytime with we’ve storytime every Friday, or sports classes, dance classes, we’ve been doing them for free with our partners on Facebook Live, we’ve been doing split screen talks with experts, not just you know how to get through COVID. But we really have been giving the content that we’ve always given in our in person events, but online because guess what pregnancy and parenting are paused, we need that information. So we will continue to do that. One of the first pieces of content we put out for COVID was like 101 family friendly movies that you should be watching with your kids. And it’s probably been one of the most trafficked pages on our websites. It’s a good one. And now we went on and did like TV shows to binge watch, like binge watch, like movies to watch after your kids are in bed. So we’ve been doing a lot of light and fluffy stuff as well, and sharing resources for things that you can do with your kids and toys and games to play. I mean, it really it hasn’t stopped. I think, you know, for us it’s only gotten bigger and it’s exploded and I and I feel Very confident in what we’ve put out to help our community right now. And I think it’s showing me that post COVID we will continue with a big online presence because we’re reaching so many more people than ever before. I get direct messages, emails, text messages, people find me and they’re like, thank you so much for this. And so when, when I get that response, I know we’re doing our job.

Jay Feldman 32:21
Yeah, honestly, Lindsay, you’re an inspiration entrepreneur, not everybody can say about their own business, that it’s something that there’s truly passionate about, and that they really think that they’re making the world a better place and helping people. Not everyone has a business like that I didn’t until recently, and it inspires me and you’re an amazing woman. I want to thank you again for being on the show. And thank you for having me. Before we close this out, is there any final golden nuggets or pieces of advice that you want to lend out to the aspiring entrepreneurial community?

Lindsay Pinchuk 32:51
Yeah, I think you know, and I’m asked this a lot and I and I wish that I took this advice earlier on and you know, it took me a while to realize this. So you know, Maybe it sounds hokey, but I do very much mean it. And like I said, I wish that I did it earlier is you need to learn to delegate. And as an entrepreneur, if you are an entrepreneur, most likely you’re really Taipei and you’re wired like, you know, you want to do everything, but you can’t do everything. And I think it’s very important to know what you’re good at and what you’re not good at. And for me, like, I am not good at finance, I’m not good at numbers, I am the first to admit that I’m a marketer. I’m a salesperson, I’m a connector, and I didn’t realize how big the business was going to get for me. And I wish that earlier on, I would have brought on a financial person because I don’t think it would have taken 10 years to get acquired. Had I done that. I also think that like when you’re starting a business, usually you are either the financial person or the marketing person, find that person to compliment you and find that co founder, because I think that like for me, I think if I would have done that we would have gotten bigger, a lot faster, and I would have been able to take this to greater heights earlier on which again, it’s a learning process and then once you’re in the business, you need to learn to delegate because you cannot do everything you also need to learn when to say no, you know, I see and I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs just in the entrepreneur community, like here in Chicago get very wrapped up in like the networking events and the and the this and that and like it looks from the outside, like they are killing it because they’re everywhere and they’re everywhere every event but if you’re at every networking event and speaking on every panel and schmoozing, you’re not working on your business. It’s not ironic that those are the people that I’ve seen go out of business, you know, and it’s like, you know, people that had their like, one year of like, Oh my god, or they got funding and, and they were but they’ve lost sight of their business. So don’t lose sight of what you’re doing. You got to stay on track and learn to say no, and really only take those engagements when you know and think that they’re going to be beneficial to you and to your business.

Jay Feldman 34:53
That was all super helpful advice. You’ve seen those people who just keep building and networking, gathering information and not doing doing deals. And absolutely i mean entrepreneurship and building a successful business is all about action doing and giving value. With that being said to find Lindsey and to join the bump club and beyond if you’re watching this and you are expecting or one day you will be or an already parent or parent book club and beyond calm I’m going to link all of your socials Lindsey in the show notes so you won’t you won’t have to search hard to find her also put them club and beyond in there. This was an awesome episode. Thank you so much again for coming. And I look you know, the mommy community is not something that I actually became even aware of until this past year. But it is huge. It is powerful. It’s amazing. And some of the best community members ever I’ve seen the interactions on your, on your posts on your website. And it’s it’s super powerful. So thank you.

Lindsay Pinchuk 35:44
Thank you so much for you for taking the time to to interview me and to open up your community and your thought, you know, your knowledge base to the parent community as well. I appreciate

Jay Feldman 35:54
it was an absolute honor. I’ll until next time. This is Dr. Jay Feldman and I just wanted to take a moment Thank you so much for your support and also asked you for a little bit more. If you can take the next 10 seconds and write us a review on iTunes, Google Play or Spotify. Just let me know your feedback. It means the world to me again, thank you for watching. If you love this episode, please share it with your friends. Share it with your family. Until next time!

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