087 Growing a Value-Based Startup with Sandy Connery and Jeni Barcelos

In this episode of the Marketing in Yoga Pants Podcast, Brit interviews Sandy Connery and Jeni Barcelos, Founders at Namastream and Soulful MBA. Sandy and Jeni are online educators, providing wellness instruction to customers and business courses to their instructors to help them succeed through their software and education platforms. Learn how they are opening up the world of wellness to consumers and practitioners.

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Starting Namastream together after finishing an entrepreneurship program that taught them how to build software.
Jeni came from a non-profit background as a human rights and environmental lawyer and a software company felt like her next best step
Sandy came from her background as a Pedorithist and needed a change after burning out in her clinical practice, and software checked those boxes for her
Sandy and Jeni met at a live event to celebrate the completion of their entrepreneur program and clicked
Sandy joined Namastream after it was accepted in a tech accelerator to start scaling the business
Jeni got into yoga and wellness in her final year of law school where she was dealing with personal tragedy on top of it.
She saw through keeping up her wellness routine the struggles of the practitioners and providers to turn a profit and grow as business owners
Realizing her company could allow wellness business owners to thrive by teaching online
Walking away from potential investors and bootstrapping the company on their own
Crowdsourcing investment from their email list and customers through hosting webinars and taking pre-sales for version two of their platform
Leaning into slow, meaningful growth and bucking the trend of fast growth at the expense of their existing users
Leading their company based on their core values, and empowering the instructors that they work with to do the same in their businesses
Figuring out the balance between growth and providing the support to their existing users that they’re known for
Looking forward to growing their team in 2019