We’re kicking things off with podcast royalty this episode with the team behind podcast, club and soon to be online course, lady-brains, Caitlin Judd and Anna Mackenzie. In this episode, Anna, Caitlin and I chat about finding your why, taking risks, and how they leveraged word of mouth to become the first official podcasters of Afterpay Australian Fashion Week.
Key Takeaways
- COVID has given a lot of people the space to reflect and reconsider what they want to do with their careers. People are looking for something more purposeful and aligned with their values.
- Relationship building has been at the core of lady-brains, which started with networking events that were about building deep, authentic connections with others.
- The events allowed people to be vulnerable, which allowed for deeper connections. This emphasis is carried into the lady-brains podcast.
- The physical spaces that lady-brains supper clubs were held were particularly important – spaces were chosen to allow for intimate conversation and connection.
- Your WHY can evolve as you evolve in your business or career. Having one line you can ‘print on a t-shirt’ doesn’t make your WHY more meaningful.
Podcast Transcript
Claire Deane:
Welcome, Anna McKenzie and Caitlin Judd, who are the founders of Lady Brain. Super excited to have you with me today.
Anna Mackenzie:
Thanks for having us.
Caitlin Judd:
Thank you.
Claire Deane:
No worries. So tell me a bit about yourselves. Tell me, you know, what your career journeys have been like so far. How did you come to launch Lady Brains? How did you get to this point?
Anna Mackenzie:
So I think the best place to start is with Caitlin and I meeting and being friends since high school. So we’ve been mates for 20 years. We were at school together. We were in the same house together. We did like the musicals together. We were in choirs together. We played netball and tennis together. So we’ve been friends for a long time. And I think a large part of our friendship has been built off a love of just like talking about ideas and learning and curiosity. So we’ve had this friendship for a long time, which has really formed the basis of, I guess, Lady Brains, but, you know, everything that we’ve done over the course about most of our lives. But we kinda now our separate ways, a little bit during university and afterwards. So we had very different careers that sort of came together in our late twenties.
When lady brain started, I sort of studied psychology and business and commerce and politics and had always planned to go into a career in international relations and intelligence, but that didn’t happen. And I got my first job with Uniqlo, which is obviously the Japanese fashion retailer helping a part of the founding team to help establish that brand in Australia or a big part of that was going up to Japan in Singapore and working and understanding kind of all about how an international, huge business operated. Which was really amazing. And you know, ultimately from a career perspective, I ended up at Mecca. And I was working there in a really interesting role helping kind of design and develop the store experience of the future. So it was very innovation-focused. I was traveling all around the world and, you know, looking at how other retailers were operating in New York and San Francisco and London and Paris and coming back and working with the team to kind of develop that vision for Mecca here. But during the time I was working there Caitlin and I were like ideating, lots of different business ideas, so many random ones. Weren’t we? So many random ones that you can go into.
Claire Deane:
Do you think any, now that you just wish that you were like, yes, we should have jumped on that one?
Caitlin Judd:
I still think the divorcee dating app is a good one. And we had a vision to build out this divorcee dating app to further, assist and help, I guess, you know, divorcee. Find a nanny, find a lawyer find like it’s like it was a resource hub for people that had been recently were divorced. You know how difficult that journey can be, how isolating that journey can be. Well, we don’t personally know this. We weren’t even close to getting married, let alone divorced. Single. Didn’t know exactly what that looked like, but I still think that there is an opportunity or yeah, definitely a gap in the market for that idea. But, yeah, we had a lot of different business ideas. Didn’t we?
Anna Mackenzie:
We had a lot of different business ideas and Lady Brains was sort of something that started to organically percolate when I was still working at Mecca and Caitlyn at the time you were working for yourself after spending many years as a coaching consultant.
Caitlin Judd:
So my journey was a little different. I did a study abroad during university. I just had this itch to get over to the US. I’d recently had taken a holiday with my family and, I saw all these incredible campuses over there and I was like, oh my God, I wanna go and experience college life. You know, I wonder what that’s like, especially in Australia, when you kind of go to school in little bubble, all my schooling was within like a 10-kilometer radius, if that, so it was nice to kind of go and spread my wings. And I, ended up over in Miami doing a semester abroad and just really fell in love with actually the work culture and the energy and the vibrancy and that entrepreneurial spirit that’s just so strong over there.
It’s kind of like everywhere you turn, that was a new opportunity. And I kind of just jumped into everything. I did a bit of acting. I did a little bit of like, I was working in the art scene, in a gallery, I was, I just managed to kind of get into whatever I could and I did a couple of internships, in marketing. So I graduated with a marketing and a media or communications degree. I like to say that I’m one of the very few people that actually uses both of my degrees, which is very unusual many days, but I did a stint kind of in advertising, in marketing did some internships over there. I came back and I got a marketing role in an industry that I guess is quite interesting for me personally.
It was in kind of a construction and manufacturing industry, not something that I probably now would choose to go into, but, coming back from overseas, I needed, I needed money. It was a well-paid job. And I wanted to kind of learn about, how does a marketing role actually work within an organization? Because I’d kind of was doing a lot of little jobs over in America. So I came back, I started that and I soon realized that, it wasn’t exactly lighting me up. It wasn’t an industry that I was passionate about. It was, there was some cool work there and like some great people, but, you know, it wasn’t really something that I was interested in. And so I was like, okay, well, you know, what’s my purpose?
What am I here to do? I started to kind of ask those questions. I guess at a relatively young age, what is there like, what is work outside of just a nine to five and making some money? So I started actually getting involved and, signing up for a lot of events, you know, networking events. I started watching a lot of webinars on, how to thrive in the workplace. I just started like, again, using my kind of curious nature to figure out, well, what is it that I wanted to do with my life? How can I make some change? Where can I go? What am my own little patch of grass and see what I can make grow. And, I started to look into wellbeing and positive psychology and really looking at how humans flourish and that just kind of really just it was so interesting to me because I saw so many people that, you know, would go to work, come home didn’t really think about what they were doing. A lot of them weren’t, it wasn’t enjoyable for them. It wasn’t something that was lighting them up, but I knew that, that it could be, cuz I had seen that, you know, work can be such a great enjoyable thing. So I started looking into that and by nature, I met some incredible book, incredible people in that space, in the, in the wellbeing and positive psychology space who kind of, opened their arms to me. And I started working for them in a marketing capacity. So I was working for them and I was able to explore the kind of pod psych wellbeing and how humans flourish and also kind of merge that with all the marketing and media knowledge that I had to help them build their businesses. So I went out on my own and started working for a few of these experts in this space at around 25, I think it was.
So pretty young, but, they were amazing. They kind of nurtured me and mentored me as well and gave me the space to kind of learn and grow. I started bringing in coaches and learning as much as I could and from there that’s really, I kind of went into. I had my own consultancy and practice and I was freelancing in a marketing kind of role in the well-being space, very niche. But you know, it just opened up a whole new world for me. It was like, there’s so much out there and there’s so many ways to encourage people to find what makes their heart sing. I think a lot of what we do through Lady Brains is that, we’re helping founders build something that not just is good for the world and good for the planet and people, but it’s also, speaks to their hearts and makes them happy.
Claire Deane:
Especially at the moment with all of the so much disruption and so much people just reassessing everything that they’re doing and just wanting to find what is that thing that lights them up rather than going back to normal, which might not have been that good in the first place.
Caitlin Judd:
Absolutely. Right. Everyone is able to now question it. There was space that’s been created over the last, I think, 18 months, this amazing opportunity to reflect, and to go, okay, is this the path? And you’re talking about the great resignation and it will be interesting to see what happens on the other side of that. Is it just a change in their role or is it that they’re gonna be looking for something more purposeful and aligned to their values? I think that’s, a lot of the work that we kind of, we do at Lady Brains as well is we encourage people to really tune in to their values and, and what lights them up.
Claire Deane:
So tell me, what is Lady Brains? What do you do? Why is it exciting?
Anna Mackenzie:
So Lady Brains is a platform for founders and founders to be who are really looking to build purposeful and profitable businesses. Our whole ethos is around helping founders and founders to thrive and survive in business. Because it’s a very up and down journey. It’s an emotional rollercoaster and there are times when thriving and there are times when you’ll be literally just in survival mode and we really try and support people through all stages of the journey. So it’s funny because we are probably best known for the podcast, but we actually didn’t start out that way. The podcast didn’t come along until probably about nine months into the journey. We actually started this as a bit of a passion project. Caitlin was still working myself. I was working at Mecca and we had all of these crazy ideas for businesses, which we didn’t necessarily, we pursued some of them quite far along, but we didn’t really get any of them off the ground.
Anna Mackenzie:
I think there was a time when we were like, okay, how do we immerse ourselves in the startup community in Melbourne? That’s where we started. Like, how do we just meet more people? Because we knew that opportunities come through connections, learning from others who’ve done it before is such a great way to kind of like jumped forward a few steps. So we were like, how do we meet these people? And we were like going to all the conferences and the networking events, we went to sort of different networking events, I guess. We just didn’t resonate with us. We didn’t meet anyone that we vibed with. We didn’t meet anyone that we met again, like we were just kind of forming these really surface-level, superficial connections.
So we were like we’ll create something ourself. And at the time we had just met Maya who was our third co-founder. And we were like, let’s just start a dinner. Let’s have dinner with maybe your friends, a couple of our friends who have businesses or wanna start a business and let’s just get in the same room and chat. That first dinner, we had eight people there. It was Mr. Wolfson’s children in there, so it was really nice and intimate. We had this beautiful table topic to kind of facilitate the discussion and we had wine and we had cheese and everyone just had the best time. Like we got the best feedback the next day. So we were like, well, let’s run another one, everyone bring a friend. So then the next one was 16 people cause everyone bought a friend and you had the same setup, the little name tags, the tabletop cards, and people loved it.
They were like, let’s do another one. I wanna bring my friend. So that’s when we were like, OK, we probably should get a what’s that. So we created a really simple landing page with like an application form for people to apply and we called this the Lady Brains club, and that literally just took off organically. It wasn’t like the three of us were sitting here going, oh, let’s create a business called Lady Brains to support women in business. It was like, let’s create an environment for ourselves and others to connect in a real way, like not in tacky surface-level way in a real way and see what happens. I think it was such a great lesson for us, in that when you are solving a real problem that you and others are experiencing and that you identify with yourself. The business almost builds itself in a way, like there was so much organic traction in the early days. So we did that like nine months to the point where we booked out an entire restaurant of people who had just been referred to us, which was so amazing. I think that connection and that relationship-building is really the Genesis of the business and the podcast came about nine months later.
Claire Deane:
What do you think it is that like, why are people seeking this connection? Why are people seeking this women in particular cause that’s who you’re targeting? Why do you think this is a real problem for people?
Caitlin Judd:
Well, I think there’s a few things. I think naturally women are connectors when networkers. We are relationship builders and I think in business, there’s just become this notion that you need to transact and you need to get something out of someone or some opportunity. And like, that’s great if you can and that there is an absolute place for that. But there’s also a time and a place to just build beautiful connections in business. It’s often, like we think that we just have to build friends like friendships need to be that way soft and, and caring and nurturing and warm. But I really do believe in business that you can build those relationships too. We make a really strong point to do that with a lot of our podcast guests and people in our community. So I think first and foremost, women in our network were kind of feeling like again, they were going to these big networking opportunities, but not being able to actually establish a really deep, authentic connection with someone else.
We said, check your ego at the door. You don’t need to come in with that. Check your business card at the door, come in and just build really authentic, meaningful connections and find someone that you resonate with, that you may have a shared experience and it could be a challenge. It could be a win. It doesn’t matter what it is, but find someone that you speak to on that kind of level, rather than thinking, what can I get from this person? So I just think, you know, first and foremost, it’s, it’s people looking for an opportunity to build meaningful relationships. And that is really what we, what we thrive off of, as humans. And then I think, another thing that we’ve identified is there is a lack of access to networks, especially as women, it’s harder to establish or insert yourself in a lot of these networks that have been established by and for men in business quite naturally.
I struggled as a founder myself or someone that was kind of, as a freelancer I didn’t have a huge network of people that were running their own businesses. It was out there. It was people wish you know, experiencing that, that same frustration. How do I get it? How do I network, if I’m not currently invited out onto the golf course, how do I network if I’m not invited to these corporate networking drinks? How do I build my relationships in a way, again, that’s meaningful to me? So I think there that it was being kind of frozen out of those opportunities. And then also any opportunities that we did that did come our way, it just didn’t feel like we were building really beautiful relationships. And so that is what we’ve tried to open up.
Anna Mackenzie:
I think the other thing is like building a business is lonely. I would say, Caitlin and I are very very lucky that we have each other. We’re in a business partnership and a friendship. So we have each other to kind of bounce ideas off of, and vent to, and get frustrated with and celebrate with. But lots of business owners, majority of them are doing it alone and it is lonely. Like as a business owner, you have the weight of the world on your shoulders Like are you going to be able to pay your bills, your staff, are you pushing the business forward? Are you doing the right thing for your customers? Have you made the right decision? Like, it’s a heavy title. I think, you can go to those networking events and people can share what they’re doing and they’ll share like the highlight reel.
But what we really try to create, and we still try to create that upper club. Even in our podcast is this sense of vulnerability and you can only do that in an intimate situation. Can’t do that at a conference. Like, and that’s where people are able to kind of share like the struggles and the hardships, which ultimately come with building any business. So I think it can be a lonely journey if you don’t have the right people around you and so that was the whole premise. The whole Genesis is like building these authentic connections that support and opportunities all of the sudden stuff can kind of flourish from.
Claire Deane:
And sort of like you were saying as well, like with the checking your ego at the door and checking the business card at the door. The expectations that you set going into those make such a big difference. You would never go into one of those big conferences expecting to be vulnerable. Whereas you have the opportunity to set something up where that’s the base level expectation that it is gonna be a completely different experience and they would get from a big conference.
Caitlin Judd:
You’re so right. Just like that whole idea of walking through a door, like, we talk about that so often. What’s just walk through the door. What’s on the other side of that door? Knock on that door, right? And it’s actually so true. Like when you think about walking into a networking event of say a thousand people, and it might be the most incredible speaker and you’re gonna be on a table of 10 with some amazing women don’t get me wrong, but you do go in there with ego attach and with a facade. And like, you put the heels on, you put the nice outfit on, and you go in there going, okay, I’ve got like, there’s a lot of women here. I wanna meet as many people. I wanna take something away from this talk. I wanna, you know, and it’s kind of like me, me, me, me, me. Whereas when you walk in the door too often, like, you know, we have, we host them kind of even underground, like in sellers and in places that are a little bit darker that like, you know, you kind of, you are almost going in like with this, like, where am I, what is this?
But, you know, I don’t think you can really actually walk in with wonder and curiosity and into that room, like you have to kind of choose one or the other. And if you going, going, okay, this feels maybe a little slightly uncomfortable. I know that this is quite intimate, but when you are walking into an intimate setting, it is hard to bring the ego. I think when you see other people dropping that, and that they’re already willing to have these kind of conversations and say, oh yeah, my day was an absolute show. I just lost a supplier or this, that the other, it just it’s disarming. And I think that’s, what’s incredible about these events that we were running is that people were just willing to be there and just open up and talk about anything and everything that has to do with building a business.
Claire Deane:
Interesting what you say about the setting, playing a quite important part in helping people to drop that guard. Has any of the stuff that you’ve done with Mecca in terms of developing those retail spaces and those kinds of things, has that played into the physical setting of where you host these events?
Anna Mackenzie:
I guess in a way in that experience, designing or working with architects and creators to design the maker spaces. Which are so incredibly thought through every single minute detail of the design and also the customer experience as they walk through that door all the way through the transacting and walking back out is intimately thought about debated in meetings, agonized over like to the point where it’s like, it’s just all-consuming. So I think throughout that experience at Mecca, I definitely learnt the importance of, a space and how it can make people feel. I think I also definitely learnt the importance of creating a really intentional customer journey with anything that we do. It’s actually really funny in the early days of Lady Brains. Our goal was to open a physical space, remember that Caitlyn in the beginning?
We would create like the wing, we would create mood boards of like all these beautiful finishes and, that was heavily inspired by Mecca. But I think that’s something that Caitlyn and I share. We both have a love for architecture and interior design. We appreciate the importance of a great space and how that can kind of instill creativity and vulnerability and all that stuff. So the space is super important when it comes to, I guess, like the dinners, but also the podcast recordings. Like in the beginning, we would intentionally go out to the founder’s office spaces so that they felt comfortable and that they could be in their environment. And we found that really allowed them to open up more easily. It was really interesting when we signed for the network and we started doing a lot of our recordings in studio.
We had to really, really, really work hard to make people feel comfort and vulnerable. Like it was a different vibe. We really had to work hard to make them feel comfortable so that they would open up, which is, I think part of the magic of our podcast chats is like we try and take that vulnerable environment conversation that we’ve had at those original dinners and have them with them that don’t usually talk about the hard stuff in the way that they do with us. So, yeah.
Claire Deane:
With these upper clubs and with the podcast, are you trying to solve the problems or address the problems that these founders are finding or are you really kind of trying to become a conduit or a channel for them to create those connections with others and to learn kind of vicariously through what these people are doing?
Anna Mackenzie:
I would say both. I think the way that we sort of think about our business is that we are building out these pillars of the business that address the main problems that our founders are facing and I think for us, it’s like the knowledge in order to build a successful business, you need the knowledge to be able to do that and part of that’s learning by doing, but a lot of that is learning from others. Who’ve done it before. And so the podcast kind of play into that and, this educational arm that we’re building out. Then it’s the network which we’ve spoken about. And I think the events, and the soccer clubs particularly goes into events can speak to that. And the third, which is one we’re starting to explore this year, next year is money. Like, how do people get access to money to make it work, and to get their businesses off the ground? So I think we’re kind of trying to do both. We’re trying to help founders solve those problems, but we’re also trying to offer the community for them to connect and kind of like, you know, sort of yeah. It’s like the grass roots support.
Caitlin Judd:
You can’t do this journey alone. I think that’s it, I could learn everything. I mean, you can’t, but I could try and learn everything that I need to know in order to build a business. But honestly, without the relationships, without other people making introductions, helping me understand or, just shooting the breeze, like on what needs to be done. Someone that I can strategize with, someone that I can bounce ideas of. Without those people, it makes it really difficult to build a business. So we kind of figured you can’t have one without the other. It’s not an easy task to try and build a business that offers both education and community. Then obviously, we’re looking at that third corner of that triangle. That’s like, okay, the money side of things. Fundamentally, I think you need to have all three in order to build a successful business.
Anna Mackenzie:
I think I was just going in and say, you need all three to build a successful business. You also need those relationships to enjoy the process that gets so lost in this conversation, which is like, you need to have a girl or a support crew around you because it’s hard. And you know, it’s actually not about the success and the destination and the end goal. Building a business is such a big journey and it’s like a personal development journey for any founder as well. I think those relationships are going to help make the journey to so much. It’s like so important. Like it’s your life. Why don’t we enjoy it?
Claire Deane:
I was reading a stat the other day about how people who are when they’re trying to get fit or lose weight or whatever. People who are doing that, who focus specifically on the numbers. So how much you weigh or how many calories you get, how many calories you count? They are not as likely to succeed as people who build a community around themselves when they’re trying to get fit or lose weight. So it’s really that community component that encourages people to be successful and that encourages them to stick with it, I guess.
Anna Mackenzie:
Totally.
Caitlin Judd:
Absolutely, and then I would add to that is like understanding your why. Why are you doing what you’re doing? That comes back to understanding your values which is something that we try and drive. Understanding what is? If this is gonna be a 10 year plus journey and it quite often is it will be. You really need to know why you’re waking up every day. What inspires you? What gets you motivated? So I think you’re right, building in that Why as well as the community and then having that goal and goal in mind, is critical.
Claire Deane:
So what would you say your why is?
Caitlin Judd:
So my why has been it for quite a while. This stems from my time working as a freelancer was to help women build profitable and purposeful businesses. By way, it’s kind of almost become Lady Brains as well. We obviously have a bunch of different offering, but ultimately, we are supporting women and minorities. We obviously welcome anyone that wants to join the Lady Brains community. To find that success both from a kind of values perspective, or whatever it means to whatever success means to them. What does that actually look like? And then from a financial perspective as well. I think that’s important and we need to have those conversations. I think those money conversations can be often something that we shy away from, especially as women. But I think, that’s something that we’re trying to encourage. So yeah, that is my why. That’s why I get up and do what I do.
Claire Deane:
How about you, Anna?
Anna Mackenzie:
It’s really interesting. I think, figuring out what your why is not easy. It’s bloody hard. I would say throughout my entire career up until we spent full time in Lady Brains. I didn’t really think intentionally about it to be totally honest. As I said, Lady Brains was super organic. I knew that I wanted to do something. I didn’t really know what it was. It just so happened that this community has become the thing. As Caitlin said, we talk about this a lot and we talk about it with our podcast guests a lot. It’s really forced me to go, why am I doing this? Like, what is it that really lights me up about this? And I’m still trying to figure out how to articulate this.
Probably not gonna come out well. But I think where I’m currently at in terms of my why is I see the impact that a conversation or an idea can have on the audience. I think it’s like the butterfly effect. If you can have a conversation with someone or frame something in a particular way, or offer someone a new perspective that ultimately changes their behavior or their view on the world. That is what lights me up. That’s what I love about the conversations and the content that we’re creating. I wanna have those conversations and we are having those conversations that will change audiences’ perspective better. I’m still working on that and figuring out exactly how that plays into Lady Brains. It plays into my life and all of that. It’s a journey. I think it’s a journey and it’s really hard to figure out what gets you motivated in the morning. It’s not an easy question to answer.
Caitlin Judd:
Can I just caveat that? Because like I have done a lot of work on this. It’s not like I just woke up, like I have done. I’ve studied positive psychology. So, and that is all value-based. That is like, one part of it is looking at your strengths and your values. That is what helps humans flourish, that’s one part. And so I have done a lot of work, in this space. So it’s easy for me to sit here and go, well, that is my why, but also, I think you articulated that really well, Anna, and I think what’s great about a why is that it can evolve. It does grow, but it’s also what I’ve recently been thinking about is not one thing. There are so many other things that get the relationships that I have with my family and friends, that is a why for me. That’s enough to get me up every day and go. I love building these relationships and having really deep and meaningful conversations that make me see the world in a new way.
That’s pretty special. And I love that. That is like one reason that I wanna continue to live. Like that’s that, that can also be enough. I don’t think that it has to just be one thing. I think sometimes we do think it’s like, what is the why? And what’s your one-sentence statement. And it’s like, you may have that and to a degree I do. But I’ve also started to look at my why and go. I think there’s actually more to it. There’s more to it. I do think again, the last two years of being in lockdown has allowed us a lot of time to think, but also reflect on what is truly important to us. And you know, Caitlin and I both have these incredibly curious brains.
I think curiosity by that actually is something that does drive us and light us up. We get up every day going, how can I learn something new today? How can I look at life in a new way? How can I continue to build meaningful relationships with other people and learn something about them and learn something about myself? I honestly think if you can get up and do that every day, you’re naturally gonna find that little thing that you love. You want to just keep working towards. And that is like, that’s the why. That’s the essence. That’s the beauty.
Claire Deane:
And can almost reducing it down to that one sentence that feels like a marketing tagline or whatever you, or that line. It has to be the perfect line. Like, does that almost sort of limit you in terms of, it can be a bit more fluid and a bit more flexible. It doesn’t have to just, just be this, you know, something you can print on a t-shirt kind of thing.
Anna Mackenzie:
It’s nuanced. Like, it’s complicated and it changes as your perspective and your situation in life evolves. So I think, there can be a lot of pressure, I love Simon Sinek and the whole start with why, framework. I absolutely love that, but it’s like, it’s not as clear-cut, perhaps for people. Yeah, of course it evolves as you evolve as a human being.
Claire Deane:
And some of our listeners will obviously be not in an entrepreneurial space, they’ll be working for agencies or for brands. You think it’s just as important to have a why for those kinds of people?
Caitlin Judd:
Yeah. As I said, it could be more personal, it doesn’t always have to be professional. It could be one and the same. W often get our founders to look at their why from a personal and a professional perspective. Oftentimes they are the same, but quite often, they’re not. It could be that the family and friends, or being a mom, or something drives you and that is your why. But then conversely, you have a job and there’s something in that, that you love and that gets you up every day. So I would say, look at it from all angles, it is nuanced. It is deeply personal and there’s no one size fits all. So what is it that drives you? But once you understand that it just unlocks so much, and it allows you to start to explore new opportunities within the thing that you love.
Claire Deane:
So back to the Lady Brain’s journey. You mentioned that a lot of what you’ve done has been really organic, a lot of it is word of mouth. Did there come a point in the business where you flip to hardcore marketing push? Was there anything strategy-wise that you did that you think really ruined the business to the point that it is now?
Anna Mackenzie:
I mean, to be honest, I think a large part of it has been grown by the community grassroots. I think the podcast has been our main brand and marketing channel. I can’t remember the stat, but like 70 or 80% of new podcast discovery comes through word of mouth and referral. And if you think about like podcasts that you listen to, it’s like, oh, my friend told me to listen to that. Therefore I will. A huge part of it has been word of mouth. But I think there’s a couple of things that have sort of worked on the journey really well for us and one of them was kind of pretty early on. We did, an activation at a cafe in Richmond, in Melbourne called Coco and that cafe, it was for the launch of our season two.
That cafe is kind of like a cult cafe in Melbourne. Everybody loves it. It’s right in the heart of their all the PR agencies and media and advertising agencies are. Everyone goes there for their morning coffee and so we traipsed down there, we had our Lady Brains branding, we’d done a sort of partnership with Coco and we said to everybody, we had flyers and we said to everybody Hey, this is our podcast if you post it on Instagram and your coffee. It was relatively cheap for us to do and it gained so much traction. Yeah. I think it was partially cuz we were there like talking to everybody and sharing and they were really curious about who we were and what we were doing. But also it was in the heart of people, the media space that talk and I think that is something we saw a pretty think uplift in terms of listens and our audience size from that activation. So that was sort of one thing that stands out to me that worked really well.
Claire Deane:
I love that. That’s such a great idea.
Caitlin Judd:
It was a great idea. You don’t have to have big budget. You don’t, you really don’t. I think like, think about where your customer is. Where do they hang out? Potential kind of customers that you’d love to tap into and then, and who isn’t motivated by a free coffee. Let’s be honest. It was just so much fun. I think obviously, we couldn’t do that throughout COVID it was lucky that we could do that before then, you don’t have to have huge budgets. I think, for us like the obviously the sub clubs, it was, it’s very grassroots and that’s how we grew, but the podcasts we were lucky to kind of get in early, and ride that wave. And there are people that obviously, got in on Instagram early and so the other platforms for us, it was podcasting. That really helped build the brand and the business.
Anna Mackenzie:
I think the other thing to note is like, we spoken about relationship building, but we put in so much time and energy building relationships with our guests long after we interviewed them. Last Christmas we baked cookies and sent them all around Australia. Wrote handwritten letters to all of our guests. We always send flowers or a thank you card to guests after we’ve interviewed. We are behind the scenes. If we think that is a good person to connect them with and do that, we spend a lot of energy and time building those relationships. And so have a lot of pretty incredible people out there in the community who brand. Again, it just comes down to ethos of, and I think that has really carried us. We’ve gone above and beyond, you know, really with that.
Claire Deane:
Has anything been a total flop?
Caitlin Judd:
This is real. I feel like this is, I don’t know, like, yes. The thing is like, go God everything always something’s always going wrong, but I’m like a total flop.
Claire Deane:
Or media-level flop?
Anna Mackenzie:
I mean, I don’t think like there were a few things that didn’t necessarily work. Like we doubled in the early days wed paid advertising for the podcast, which didn’t do anything. And again, like most people discovered through referrals or would’ve that didn’t really in the early days we did some sort of, Contra, promotional, I guess, deals with other like-minded podcasts where they promote our podcast on their show and vice versa that didn’t really work. But you know, my God so many things.
Caitlin Judd:
I’m trying to think it’s really bad. This is not insightful at all. Is it? It’s like guys, come on, you should know. And you know what, do you know what’s actually interesting? I probably my reflection here as I start to think about this is, I think next year for us is pushing the boundaries a little further. Probably, I don’t have a good answer for this because over the last two years, we haven’t been able to really do a whole lot. We were in survival mode. We weren’t thinking creatively and spending big bucks on interesting marketing campaigns. And so, it wasn’t high risk, high reward. It was, we were in survival mode. We probably weren’t spending that much on marketing. We were really serving our community and I don’t think, I think we did an excellent job at that.
I don’t think that there was anything there that we were running like Supper clubs virtually, we were showing up when we needed to. We were running our brains trust program, which is our signature mentor program. For founders, we were really focused on a community and less so focused on actually, marketing and therefore we just didn’t have over the last kind of as I said, 18 months, two years, we haven’t had a whole lot of slots because I guess we weren’t just spending the money and it wasn’t that risk involved. So moving forward next year, obviously, as we are coming out of lockdown, and we have new programs that are coming out and new products to offer. We’re gonna be experimenting a whole lot more in the marketing space. And obviously, there will be things that won’t work. So hopefully I have a better answer the interview. The focus has honestly been on supporting the community. That’s what it’s been about really. And we just haven’t yet.
Claire Deane:
You have done some risky things though. You’ve recently launched your range of, merchandise. Why did that come about? What was the thought process behind that?
Caitlin Judd:
Anna and I, we’ve been wanting to do merchandise for a while. It’s been on the radar. It’s just something that we kind of, hadn’t got to, and again, as I said, we are focusing solely on the community. But there comes a point where you have a business that’s that predominantly lives online, aside from the events, which we couldn’t run anymore. You know, we had to really pivot the business strategy from running these events, and brand sponsorships. Obviously brands kind of freaked out when COVID hit, stopped spending to focusing online, and going to how do we now serve our community virtually? And so, we were doing that, but when you exist online, it’s really hard to get this sense of, like to feel like you exist in the real world.
It’s probably the best way to describe it. And while we’re doing some incredible things online and we have a podcast and we were showing up, every fortnight we were rolling out a new episode. It was like, and I really wanted to see like the labor of our love. The fruits of our labor on people, but not only that on our community and on our listeners, but not only that, there was the demand coming from the other side. And everyone’s like, where are the jumpers? Where are the, where are these? We want to experience your brand IRL just as much as we wanted our audience to experience it.
Claire Deane:
And what lessons did you learn from that process? So physical, very different.
Anna Mackenzie:
Yeah. So many. So I think like, we learned a million lessons about product development design and the supply chain and logistics and pricing and Ecommerce. All of the things about that. But I think the biggest lesson for us when we came out of that is just Caitlin and I. We played to our strengths in that project and we carved out and divided and conquered. Like Caitlin was responsible for all of the design, the creative, the branding, the marketing. I was doing everything back in, e-com the logistic, the pricing, the tech, all of that. And it’s probably the first time in our business where we’ve really gone. Like, this is mine, this is yours. What we realized is like, you can do twice as more with half as much time, it’s super clear about doing what, and, I think it was a bit of a milestone moment for us. Cause when you’re in a business by itself or in a partnership, like everyone does everything, you know? This was probably the first time. Okay. We can kind of start to see how the different areas of the business have been carved out. And it was great. It was a super fun project from the inside because we just kind of were, we had moment.
Caitlin Judd:
We had momentum and we just had fun with it. I think, it was something that for us, again, it was enjoyable. We got to see people wear Lady Brains merchandise, which is great. It’s like a walking billboard, right. Your business. But you know, as well as learning about, as well as being able to kind of divide and conquer and play to our strengths. We also learned that true creativity comes from constraint, which is something that our podcast guest, CJ Henry talks about, on our show. We, at that time when we were launching our merchandise range, were still in lockdown Anna and I couldn’t see each other, this is something with a physical product, right? The first time we have a physical product that like, I wanted to shoot, I wanted to do like great, you know, photoshoot.
We were both gonna be in it, all this stuff, couldn’t do it. And so, again, and you kind of go, okay, well, I’m stuck inside. I’m gonna have to shoot it on my living room floor, the merchandise. I got, some people to help me do like a little nighttime shoot outside in the yard. We managed to pull it together and everyone just loved it. Everyone loved it. The feedback was like, oh, I loved how just like low-fi. You can see that we had to kind of make it up on the fly, but also we had fun with it. And I think you can tell that through the images and just tell that through the way we communicated it.
And our approach. And I think as Anna said, we divide, we did play to our strengths and we were able to divide and conquer. But I think when you go into a project like that, with just that attitude of like, let’s just have fun and let’s just learn, because we’ve never done this before. First time. And we have that saying FFT, I don’t, hopefully I’m allowed to go on this show. You know, that is, yeah. It, first time you just cut yourself a bit of slack and we did. It was fun and we sold out and it was awesome. And now we’ve got a second range of merch coming up, very soon.
Claire Deane:
Stubby Coolers. Did they make the card or no?
Caitlin Judd:
They did. The Stubby’s have made the card as well as some other really cool pieces, so yeah. We’re excited to roll them out.
Claire Deane:
Nice! That’s awesome. You also did something else relatively risky. Is launching your first online course around Black Friday. How did that come about?
Anna Mackenzie:
So online courses have been as part on our product roadmap for a long time. We’ve actually been working on a flagship online course for about 18 months now. So close. Oh my God. But we’ve been working on that big project for a long time. And so that was sort of happening in the background. And then, we were talking to our community and a lot of our community was saying like, it’s been such a tough 18 months into the years. I just wanna figure out how I can maximize the sales in this holiday period because I need to come home strong. Like what do I do? Kind of thing. So we hadn’t had that. Those conversations were happening in our community and it was just sort of like the divine intervention or the universe that one of our good friends who is a digital marketing expert, who’s worked over the States came to us and said like, Black Friday is just not, like Australian businesses aren’t capitalizing on this sales period.
And this could be so valuable for your community. Is there a way that I can share my knowledge and together, we sort of developed this Black Friday campaign, marketing course, which was amazing. And we’ve had so many incredible students coming through it. And I think, it was a really fantastic test for us to kind of get an online course up and out into the world. And we were able to test all of the backend, all the tech, all the systems, the content process, we were able to get all of our suppliers, onboard and into the business to help us sort of create all of the content. And it’s really allowed us to set ourselves up really well for our big people once next year. But yeah, that was an interesting one.
It was sort of top-down and bottom up, like the demand came from our community and that they wanted help to sort of close out the year really strongly. And then, we also had, we’re having these conversations with Gabby about how we can kinda share that knowledge. So yeah, it was good. And now it’s the week of Black Friday, although you’re not going to see this week, but we’re starting to see the fruits of everyone’s labor come through, which is just so rewarding. Like hearing one of our students that came through, she said that she had the biggest day that she’s ever had bigger than the whole Black Friday campaign period last year in one day. And it’s only Wednesday. Like that is awesome for us. It’s so amazing.
Claire Deane:
It seems to be a fairly common theme that you do get this feedback from your community and from your audience, and then turn that into something. How are you listening to them and how are you, how do you kind of filter out what are the ideas that resonate and, and the ones that might be just noise?
Anna Mackenzie:
I think it’s a great question. And I think, it is all about listening and I guess when you are in the DMS talking about community. We’re in the Facebook group, seeing and hearing what they’re talking about. Where we run own mentor program and we can see these kind of themes and these problems and these struggles continue to crop up and crop up and crop up. Like there’s actually quite a lot of universal shared problems across founders, any stage of the business in any industry. There’s a lot of shared challenges and struggles. And so, we’ve done the customer reset the formal customer, so we’ve done the surveys. We’ve done all of that and we continue to do that, but it’s really just having the chats in, like if you boil it down, we’re having conversations with people on the phone, in our mentor program, in the DMS and just, you know, listening to what they need.
Caitlin Judd:
Yes. It is. It’s exactly in every single channel, you are able to extract information and you start to see patterns and you start to see these things, common things cropping up over and over again. And you’re like, okay, well if that person’s experiencing that and that person’s like, I think there’s something here. How can we help kind of plug this? How we help these founders or most founders with this problem? We are often in a place and a position with our platform to be able to do that. And that’s the beauty of it.
Claire Deane:
Do you think you’ll maintain that as you grow? Is that something that you think that you guys will always be?
Anna Mackenzie:
One million percent.
Caitlin Judd:
We were talking to Steph Claire Smith and Laura Henshaw recently on our podcast. We interviewed them from Keep It Cleaner and, you know, they were telling us about how they’re like, it’s a huge business, those two, you know, hugely successful. They’ve got that their app, they offer fitness programs and recipes. They were telling us about how, like they’re always in their Facebook group, asking the community what it is that they need? What do you want? How can we improve things? That informs the next product for them. And so they were able to come out with like kick bump, which was for pregnant women, like safe workouts. , they’ve got a running app as well, or, a running program.
And so again, this is all informed by their community. And I think, you have to stay so close to your community and your customers. They are the ones that are buying at the end of the day, but they’re the ones that are gonna tell you exactly what they need and how to prove it, not just create it, but how to improve it as well. And so we are now in the process, coming out of this, Black Friday program. How can we improve it the next time we run it? And so we will send out that survey and we’ll ask them and get that feedback. So, you know, it’s an iterative process. You have to stay close and no matter how big we get, I think we also just really enjoy having those conversations. Like, I think we’ll always be available. We always have, we’ve got the time, whether it’s us or whether it’s someone from our team, we’ll always have the time to like talk to people in our community and, figure out how we can help.
Claire Deane:
So you’ve mentioned a couple of people that you have interviewed on your podcast. Have you got a favorite interviewee and what was your favorite piece of advice from them?
Anna Mackenzie:
Oh, there are so many, there are literally so many. But I think one of my favorite interviews and one that has performed incredibly well for us was, Bec and Ava from Ultra Violette, the skinscreen brand, they’re good friends of ours, and it was the first time they were both on a podcast. So it was really nice. It was a really nice conversation between the four of us. And I think they shared one piece of advice, which I think is just so relevant to everybody at the moment. Which is design your business with your lifestyle front of mind. And so Bec was talking about the fact that when they went into business, you know, she’s got a family, she wanted to be able to take her kids to school. She wanted to be able to take a holiday and she didn’t want to have to work every weekend.
And so their business, they could have easily raised money and built really a big team really quickly, but they intentionally decided not to cause it didn’t align with the lifestyle that they wanted to live. Now that might have changed. They’ve experienced phenomenal success recently, but I think that piece of advice still resonates. It’s like when you go into business, it’s a lifestyle choice. You know, you gain a lot of freedom in terms of how you spend your time and, what you’re doing and what you’re working on, but you also gain a to-do list that is longer than you ever be able to finish it. So you almost lose a bit of freedom in that sense. And so you have to really intentionally figure out how you’re to design your business with your lifestyle front of mind. And I mean, it’s something that, Caitlin and I talk about all the time. About how, it’s almost like a framework to frame your decisions like this decision to bring on another team member or invest money in this space. Does that support the life that we wanna leave right now? And it’s an interesting perspective. And I think one that’s like super relevant at the moment is people start to rethink what they want.
Claire Deane:
And it sort of ties into what you said earlier about, you’re doing this for the next 10 – 20 years, if you’re hating every second of it, because you can’t drop your kids at school or whatever, then it’s not gonna be sustainable. So having that mindset from the very beginning makes a lot of sense.
Caitlin Judd:
For sure. Absolutely. So for me, I mean, as there are so many lessons. We’ve pulled a lot out for our upcoming program, which is really exciting. But we recently had Alison Rice on the podcast. She also has a podcast called Offline and she’s all about like aligning your professional self or your profession to your true nature, unique gifts, passions, like very similar to what we’re kind of talking about. Making sure that, you’re aligned to both personally and professionally, what it is that you wanna do? And she came, we had a really great conversation, highly recommend listening to that one. We had a really great conversation with her and she said, no one is you and no one knows what you know.
And I think so often we kind of, we get caught up and say, what’s happening kind of left and right to us. And you know, maybe someone’s coming out doing a similar thing. You get caught up in that kind of competitive nature, especially in business, but at the end of the day, nobody know what you know, and no one can deliver it in a way that’s unique to you. So trust your uniqueness, trust the gifts that you have to offer this world and really lean into that and try not to get too distracted by what’s also going on, in both a personal and a professional sense. So yeah, I really loved that sentiment.
Claire Deane:
I’ve got a friend who always says, keep your eyes on your own yoga mat, which I think ties into that mostly.
Caitlin Judd:
That’s gorgeous. I like that. It’s a good one.
Claire Deane:
Yeah. , so tell me, how are you staying inspired right now? What are your next big plans for Lady Brains?
Caitlin Judd:
Anna and I are, I think constantly inspired by our community, that does continue to inspire us. And we’ve all been through a lot. It was a really tough, shared experience, you know, last year, the year before this year, like it’s been, for a lot of founders and we had to watch a lot of founders sadly walk away from their businesses. But we’ve also seen like some of our founders in our community just do the most craziest things like, they’ve overcome hardship and that’s inspiring. It’s really inspiring. So I think we are constantly inspired by the community that keeps us going. That keeps us building Lady Brains.
That’s why we wanna, continue to offer this platform so people can overcome their challenges and go on to do great things. I think, personally, we’re both very curious, as we said, we’re very interested in lots of different things and you’ll see that through Lady Brains, like we are inspired by fashion and beauty lifestyle interiors. There’s so many things that light us up and that inspire us, as individuals. Which we both bring to the business. You can see that in photoshoots, you can see that in our product development, you can see that in the podcast and the way we ask. And I think that’s really special. We always say, look outside of your world, look outside of the industry that you’re in for inspiration.
We’re always sourcing inspiration in some of the most unique places. We could be honestly anywhere. And like, that’s where we bring in our source of inspo. We’re inspired by the community. We’re inspired, what’s going on in the world, across other industries. What’s in our personal worlds daily. We just channel that into creating new products and new programs and hoping that they bring, joy but also joy to our community. But they also help them along their business-building journey. And so we’re channeling this inspiration into building our next signature program, for almost founders or founders to be that are building businesses. For Anna and I, we identified in those early days when we were trying to build a business, holy, this is hard. Do I need to download this like 70-page business document, like, and fill this out? So we are building a business that helps almost found as establish the foundations, the base for a business to grow from. So that’s what we’re working on at the minute, as well as the merchandise range. What else are we doing, Anna? We’re always doing something.
Anna Mackenzie:
We’ve got a couple of big partnerships actually that are happening. We’ve been working that eight or nine months in the background. So that’s exciting. Also looking to invest in our first business, our first business of a founder Q one of whom came through our brain trust mentor program last year or the year before. So, that’s also super exciting to us. So there’s a lot happening.
Caitlin Judd:
There’s a lot. And I think also we’ll need a cheeky little lie-down, we need a vacay. I’m inspired to get on the lie low, that’s the job. That’s it. You need to have a break. You need to rest, we find that when we take a break and that is actually important. This is important to say because oftentimes we think that, you have to work to find inspiration or work to create something great. Often when you step away and you give yourself the space, the time, the freedom to just be, and to not feel like you have to produce, that’s when the best ideas come, it’s an opportunity to reenergize, to reengage with yourself, with other people. And it’s then when you bring those amazing ideas, like to the table and to your partnership and go, all right, let’s see what we can make happen here. So don’t underestimate the power of stepping away and taking a break so important. And I think, it’s been a tough year. So if you, at that point, take the time, lean into it. Hundred percent.
Claire Deane:
So, final question. Tell me, what was the last thing that you Googled for work?
Anna Mackenzie:
I loved this question. I had to go back and look. I was like, what did I Google?
Caitlin Judd:
We loved these last two questions, the inspiration one and the Google. So I, well, does Zencaster have an app for my phone? Because I was like, I don’t have headphones that can go into my computer. Oh no, but I actually do, shameless. There’s actually a little, oh my God. I just didn’t know this new computer has it. I could look blonde moment, but yeah, there absolutely is a jack and I don’t need a Zencaster. That is what I was searching, what I was Googling.
Anna Mackenzie:
I was actually Googling the name of somebody who we’ve been trying to get on the podcast for about three and a half years, an American very high profile founder, who we’ve been trying to get on the podcast for three years. I have been writing to her or her team for three years. And after three years they responded. And so I was Googling her name so that I could go back with incredibly tailored response to their team, showing that I understood what was happening with her and her life.I think it’ll probably be another year or two years before we get her on the show. But the conversation lines are open now, so that’s good. But yeah, I was Googling her and what she’s been doing.
Caitlin Judd:
Hoping someone like Sarah Blakely or something like that, that’s what I’ve got my fingers crossed for. So I can speak to that one. We’ve got some really interesting and exciting international guests that we wanna try and like, yeah, lamp. So if anyone can help us, hit us up, hit us up into our DMS. We will welcome it.
Claire Deane:
So tell me finally, where can everybody find you?
Anna Mackenzie:
You can find us on Instagram @lady.brains. We’re on TikTok at Lady Brains. We’ve got a Facebook group called Lady Brains club.
Caitlin Judd:
Or the podcast. You can find us across like Apple, Spotify, and iHeart. Definitely go and search lady-brains. We are on there and there’s some really awesome episodes up at the moment. So go have a listen and share it with your friends.
