Summary

Hello, my friends. Thanks for joining me tonight, uh, my soul filled build and public update. And if you're new to my podcast, I just wanna welcome you. I'm so glad that you are joining along on my journey to discovering and uncovering who I am and what I'm building, and how I'm gonna change the world. . So I'm Dr. Stacy Gonzalez, and I am the co-founder of Soul Growth. We are a boutique and unique lifestyle brand, creating soulful experiences both digitally and in person for women who desire to live the life they love and deserve. How did that sound? That is the first time that I feel like I got somewhere close to who we are. What we do, who we serve, and how we serve them. Um, I don't think it's exactly right, but it's closer and I can feel every day myself getting a little more clarity. And so for today's build and public update, I've got some really exciting news. At least it's exciting for me. Uh, Renee and I spent the majority of the day today. In a end of quarter review and of quarter one and a quarter two goals, uh, building exercise, and we just formed this partnership in January. Of this year, and it is now April 4th. And what's so interesting to me is we've, we've had a lot of, uh, personal success with one another. And this process tonight of us spending the time to really deeply reflect on how far we've come and what we've done in 90 short days has been really incredible. and the thing that stands out to me the most in this whole process of the past 90 days, which has felt like a complete whirlwind, is that we have really allowed ourselves to vet our partnership. We've spent time with each other, significant time. Uh, we've brought our partners together several times to get to know each other. Uh, we've embedded, um, them into our family and. Invited them in. Um, I have a really big extended family and we often have family parties and Renee and her partner have been invited to both, um, dinner with my, my family, my kids, along with my extended family, which there's about 18 of us, and it's a mad house, but it's a lot of fun. And so this first 90 days, the thing I'm walking away with the most is that every. Test of our partnership. I feel like we have genuinely passed with flying colors, and that is probably the thing I am the most proud of, personally and professionally for myself because I am not operating or functioning in business with dysfunctional. Or toxic patterns of behavior, and I am also working with a partner that is showing up to this partnership every day in a very emotionally mature way. With a whole lot of self-regulation, a whole lot of ability to, um, self soothe, right? Like all of the emotional inner work that needs to be done in order to be healthy. And I think in schools in particular, there is a lot of trauma that continues to happen and a lot of people cannot operate in ways. Are conducive to, um, professionalism. And so to be able to build a soulful company, a boutique and unique lifestyle brand that creates soulful experiences. When I look back at the past 90 days, that is what Renee and I are doing with each other. And what an awesome foundation as we go into quarter two with our goals. And so I'm gonna share. Some of the goals that we have created for ourselves today, um, as we sat together for hours, upon hours on end, um, working on this. And so here's, here's where, where we're setting our goals. We, we really only have three, th four. We have four big goals, and they are to increase brand awareness. Um, that that will be done through, and I'm, I'm looking at my sheet as I'm, as I'm sharing. So thank you for bearing with me on this. Um, we've got specific measurements on. LinkedIn and Instagram. So currently TikTok sits at 122 followers. Sole growth, LinkedIn. We're actually looking at the sole growth business page on LinkedIn has 138 and Instagram has 52. This is under Renee. So Renee is the lead on this. Um, we wanna increase followers across all three platforms by a thousand people at the end of the, um, 90 days. The way Renee is gonna do that is she is going to have, um, a TikTok Instagram and a LinkedIn post queued up every day for the next 90 days. In addition, uh, build 10 connections. Meaningful people who are doing similar work digitally or in person. And so really also thinking about curating the connections. And then she's gonna record, uh, daily metrics across the three platforms. The topic, the views, the likes, the comments, the, the dms. Uh, I have a little baby part in there where I'm gonna keep working my Twitter 15 minutes every day commenting, tweet. Our second goal is to launch a soul growth paid community, community platform with 50 women, uh, and the following components by May 7th. So I've got a lot of work to do, um, to get this done. This is my big rock, so I'm researching for community. With the pros and cons of the digital sites, and I need that short up by, um, uh, April 11th. I wanna determine the platform. I've already got some ideas, but I really want to, to solidify some things. Uh, we're gonna have a soft launch on April 30th. Um, and this week also I've got market research to do. So we've, we've got a group of about 25 women who have met with us, who have been helping us along the way. And so I've got some market research to do on the things they're looking for, pricing, what they'll pay for, what that might look like. Um, so that's the second big goal. And then the third big goal is to explore grant. and narrow down to one quality grant that we are gonna apply for by April 30th. And this really fe feeds into, um, what I'm thinking about with potentially working with a venture studio. I mentioned this, I might have mentioned this a couple podcasts ago, but, um, I'm really intrigued by this partnership approach that Venture Studios take with pre-revenue, pre idea startup founders. Um, I think I have a really unique background and experience that is attractive to potential venture studios. Um, coming from an education background where I have deep experiences running up people, processes, um, programming in large, comprehensive, bureaucratic, structured. Organizations, uh, in the education industry, highly regulated, right? And so I have these really, really rich experiences around what it takes internally to ensure that. Students, staff, all stakeholders are communicated with that. Uh, communication flows. Operations flows. And so I think that, and um, I also have a doctorate in ed tech, which is so interesting because never in a million years did I think getting a doctorate in ed tech would lead to me leaving education and being in the tech startup space that. Never on my radar when I got that degree. In fact, um, the reason I got it was because I had two master's degrees already. One in leadership and one in English literature, and I thought, I don't need another leadership degree. And I was a leader at that time. I was already a school administrator, I was running a school, so I thought, I don't need to do that. Um, what am I interested in? I love to learn. I love using technology in my c. And so I, as I started to look at programs around me, I found this amazing research based institution, um, in one of our state universities in Illinois, that I was in this amazing doctoral program in education technology with people from all over the country. and in all different professions, and it really opened my eyes. It nobody was in the startup space, interestingly. Um, well there were people, but it was like, in my head it was more foreign business. I didn't even understand startup at the time, frankly. Um, this was 20, you know, 20 10, 20 12. Um, and so, What that experience has brought to me was just this deep love of what technology can do when positioned correctly to genuinely change the world. So all that to say, um, thank you so much for being on this Build in Public journey with me. If you listen to yesterday's podcast and today's podcast, you can probably hear the difference in my tone, my. I've turned a corner. Um, this is right where I need to be, and I'm so thankful for all of you who are joining me on this journey. And maybe, maybe I'll get that intro down and eventually even get a theme song to start it out. Okay. Thanks.