Case Study: Female Founder World by Jasmine Garnsworthy

Jasmine Garnsworthy started her career in digital publishing in Australia in the early days, when brands as big as Vogue were only print and had no digital presence. She worked in fashion brands like PopSugar Australia and Stylecaster (after relocating to NYC). Through this, she amassed a wide network reaching across the continents. So when she went out on her own and launched a content-driven skin care brand called The Buff, she started reaching out to the women she knew in the business world to learn from their experience.

When the pandemic scrambled most business plans, Jasmine saw the value in opening up the conversations she was having with experienced and successful women to other female founders. She launched a virtual workshop series in 2020, and then the Female Founder World podcast. The newsletter with the same name soon followed. The newsletter is a complement to the podcast, offering features like a “how to” and “founder finance diary” that give readers valuable business insights and lessons, plus a curated list of resources and headlines from the week.

But the most valuable thing that Female Founder World is creating is a community of women supporting each other, rooting for their collective success. This isn’t about being superficially pro-women, it’s about creating long-term change by building a strong network of women who are stepping out and taking their place in business and finance. As Jasmine put it, “Any community-driven movement is going to be more powerful than any corporate messaging. That connective tissue between people is hard to create and builds slowly, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

The Newsletter: Female Founder World

Founders: Jasmine Garnsworthy

Top posts to check out

🗽NYC networking event, pastel aesthetics are dead, TikTok x GIPHY

Anatomy of a $60k month, Australia's influencer ban, small biz grants

2022 Goals

We want every female founder to join our world and find their next business partner, product idea, wholesale strategy, graphic designer recommendation, and all the stuff you’d rather ask a friendly founder than Google.

Advice for other founders

When I interview founders, I ask them at the end of our conversation for a recommendation, thinking they’ll suggest a book or a podcast. Guests often talk about the importance of the network and the community around you. The advice is to go and build your community of peer mentors now, you’re going to need good people around you as your company grows. When you're at an event, speak to the people sitting on either side of you—don’t just focus on the people speaking on the panel. The fact that so many people speak to the importance of a founder community shows how instrumental and powerful that network has been to their success.

Favorite beehiiv feature

Templates are clean and fresh—it’s exactly how I want to receive information in my inbox, and how we want to communicate with our community.

Advice for anyone considering a switch to beehiiv

Beehiiv is intuitive, simple, clean. The platform has everything we need as a content company, and none of the distracting extras.

Tell me about Female Founder World

Gatekeeping is out, collaboration is in, and we’re helping female founders embrace the shift.

Female Founder World is an educational universe where women build their consumer businesses. Twice a week on the podcast and regularly in video workshops within our community on Geneva, we bring female founders into our orbit to teach the specific superpower, skill, blueprint, strategy, or approach that’s driving growth and success in their CPG or consumer brand business.

Our newsletter is a free 10-minute email keeping 5k+ consumer brand builders in the know. All the best learnings from the week are curated here in one friendly place. We amplify the most interesting knowledge directly from the female founder community, like the TikTok strategy behind Gen Z period care company August growing to 3 million followers in under a year—and how that’s driving down the brand’s CAC.

What was behind your decision to switch to beehiiv?

We were using a platform that was more suited to consumer brands, but not longform and community-driven email content. It wasn’t the right fit for what we’re building. We migrated to beehiiv in February, I heard about it through a newsletter I subscribe to. I liked how it looked and I scrolled down and saw that it was beehiiv and decided to check it out. It is so clean and there is no extra stuff that I didn’t need. I love that everything is drag and drop. It’s very intuitive and I could focus on creating content, it felt like the design was already there. I love it, I tell everyone to use it.

How has the business world changed since the pandemic?

I’m hearing from founders that it’s never been easier to launch a consumer business, but with new brands popping up every minute, it’s also never been harder to stay relevant.

TikTok is the most powerful tool to get traction around a product launch right now, and most brands that have bootstrapped a launch in the past two years invested in TikTok. With the cost of a paid digital strategy rising, founders also have a renewed appreciation of content, community, and pursuing a true omnichannel distribution strategy. I’m seeing brands moving away from pure DTC distribution and look to stockists/wholesale partners. On a different note, we’re seeing supply chain issues across the board.

What challenges are women founders facing?

The biggest challenge facing women is the access to funding, it’s a huge issue. Last year, women received about 2% of venture capital funding and if you break that down to BIPOC women, immigrant, and LGBTIQ women, it’s even smaller. One way we support women is to bring in experts to provide workshops on accessing funding. We worked with Nisha Dua, a Managing Partner at BBG Ventures, to lead a workshop on perfecting an investor pitch. Nisha co-founded an early-stage venture capital firm that’s committed to supporting women founders, so her insight was really valuable.

I also believe that by supporting the female founder community now, we will see more women entrepreneurs secure bigger exits over the coming decade, and there will be more equitable access to funding available as those female founders invest back in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Tell me about the ‘Founder Finance Diary’ feature

We get a lot of feedback on these, people love them—there’s a voyeuristic quality to them. Sometimes they’re anonymous and sometimes they aren’t. We published a Founder Finance Diary with Christina Ellis, co-founder of Lit Rituals, a crystal candle company. She shared how her company made $60 grand in the first year and a million in their third year. It was so illuminating that we organized a group call so that everyone in our community could join and ask Christina what actions drove her growth, and where she’s spending in the business. This type of radical transparency is invaluable.

Why is it important for women to talk openly about money?

I have an editorial background. During the early part of my career, I was not embedded in the commercial side of a business—I’m brand first, content first and community first. So, this is a conversation that I wanted to be having personally, and the more I spoke with other women, the more I realized many felt the same.

I’ve noticed that instead of talking about founder finances, there’s a lot of conversation around mission and purpose in business content targeting women. Heavy stereotypes still pervade about women being caregivers in home and work settings. So when society sees female founders earning money, we expect them to be scaling their caring duties through their business by pursuing a social purpose or mission. We don’t expect the same level of social responsibility from men, and we need to level the playing field for female founders.

What’s next for Female Founder World?

More in-person events! We’ve been hosting virtual events and are starting to ramp up the in-person events. We hosted an event with Shopify in NYC recently featuring a panel conversation with female founders to discuss topics like PR, growth marketing, wholesale strategy, and more. We’re hosting our next even in LA this summer!

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