Start Up Princess Discusses Significant Milestones for Year 1 (Part 2)

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Here’s Chapter 2 of Our Start Up Princess Fairy Tale (for Chapter 1, click here)

A significant introduction (thanks to Nancy Cadjan) and interview was Heather Ledeboer of Mom4Life (now a Fairy Godmother for us). Heather emailed her clients and vendors and shared the interview with them, plus invited them to become members and be considered for a featured article. Until we interviewed Heather I could accommodate most requests for features, but once her interview was published we were swamped with requests and many new members so a shift occurred where now we no longer have to solicit members and have daily inquires from a variety of women entrepreneurs to interview at anytime.

Start Up Princess Profile Pages (found on right of site, left column, names of women entrepreneurs are listed alphabetically by first name) these became more important for us as we started to grow since we could offer most women entrepreneurs their own profile page, a chance to tell their story and be linked to from our site, a bit of free PR and low time commitment from us since it is a standard form, win-win. We find most women entrepreneurs are anxious to share their answers and it’s interesting to read how everyone’s answers and experiences vary so much.

In October 2006 Seth Godin wrote about me and an email l I sent to him regarding my “theme song” as an entrepreneur with a post originally called Start Up Princess (the URL title tag still says Start Up Princess) then he changed the title of the post to be called “What’s Your Theme Song?”. It literally as my “BIG Blogging Break”, validation, and a pure miracle. I remember seeing hundreds of links coming in and screaming on the phone to Janet about it. I felt like I was on Oprah–it was so awesome. I will be forever grateful for that link and post because the link brought over 1200 referrals and helped us to gain respect from national bloggers and entrepreneurs who learned about our site and consequently introduced themselves and contacted us. Even months later I will meet people and they will say that they learn about our site from Seth. Thank you forever, Seth! (It was awesome to meet Seth in person in May 2007; he’s even MORE amazing in person)

The same week that Seth featured us we started to get interest from companies who wanted to sponsor our site…and even an investor told me that he wanted to give us $5000 to develop the site because he saw so much potential, but I wasn’t willing to give up 30% of the company. This experience was critical as I realized there was something here and maybe I should pay more attention to Start Up Princess as a viable company, not just as my hobby.

However, I still wanted to develop my child retail business, so I took November and December to concentrate on launching it with limited personal resources. During that time I wrote about my experiences producing holiday events for children and doing the mall kiosk during Christmas with Carolynn Duncan of Hundred Dollar Business.

While I enjoyed finally seeing my concept executed on a very minor scale and I learned a great deal about being an entrepreneur…firsthand (not just writing about it) and it was very eyeopening for me. I realized what it would take to do a retail business longterm (bootstrapping, without funding like I originally planned) and decided after much thought and consideration that I should concentrate my efforts on this site and community…helping other women entrepreneurs. Start Up Princess made sense in my heart (although it was very difficult to accept and admit to myself after trying to develop Princess Sweet for nearly 2 1/2 years)…Start Up Princess was perfect for a mom entrepreneur because I could do it on my own time, my own hours, with my young family running around if I had to…there’s just no way you can bring 3 kids to work with you at the mall.

Following my decision to give Start Up Princess more focus we produced our *First Conference and our First Podcast. You can listen to it here. Thanks to Jennifer Napier Pearce who sponsored the recording and editing!

We also had more interest with sponsors and Sarah Lewis of Blogging Expertise became a sponsor and she moved our site from wordpress.com to our current site.

On Valentine’s Day we moved to the new site with real stats I was shocked to see that our traffic wasn’t as hot as I thought since views are not the same as unique visitors and I was learning this for the first time (wordpress doesn’t show uniques, only hits/views). So I was disappointed to see that we were only 40 unique visitors a day! But that didn’t last long…with the feedburner/RSS button installed things started to improve.

Fairy Godmothers/Guest Bloggers have become an amazing component of the site, helping the site to reach a wider audience and also elevate the quality of our posts and broaden our subjects/mentoring

Great Press that has blessed us in 2007:

Featured in Daily Herald, Utah’s Newspaper: Mommy Blog article

Entrepreneur magazine mentioned us as a Top Resource for Women Entrepreneurs in Heather Ledeboer’s feature, May 2007 (THANKS HEATHER!) That was super for helping us “Build the Kingdom”

We helped promote Costco Connection’s article on MomEntrepreneurs on our website and Start Up Princess Marina Westerdahl applied and was chosen for a feature. In her interview she mentioned us a Top Resource for Women Entrepreneurs. The article listed our web address in two places and was distributed to 6.5 Million! We received many significant contacts out of this piece. (THANKS MARINA!)

Growing the Team: In May I posted that I needed an intern and Virtual Assistant, Lisa Callsen responded and she’s been an incredible help with keeping up with emails, profile pages, and helping us prepare our eBook due out this Fall!

In May we met the fabulous editor and new Fairy Godmother Laura Mayo and she offered to sponsor our eBook and edited many articles for our eBook.

In May Brigham Young University asked me to organize the first Home-Based Business Plan Competition in 2007-2008 School Year, it will be a wonderful opportunity for Start Up Princess to sponsor and support that event.

We started getting serious about social bookmarking and joined a wonderful Stumble Upon e-mail group that have helped us to significantly increase our daily traffic up to 900 uniques a day (our average is 700 uniques). With more traffic comes more members, more opportunities for everyone!

In July I started learning about professional blogging from Internet Marketing Guru Yaro Starak by joining his OUTSTANDING, Highly-recommended Blogmastermind Course

Fairy Godmother Cathy Gonsalves sponsored our newsletter design; we’ll start our official Kingdom News soon! If you would like to subscribe, please contact us.

***In July the local SBA office in Orem, as part of Utah Valley University offered to sponsor ALL of our local networking tea parties and our Fall conference! Plus granted our wish to have an administrative assistant to handle the organizing of those events!****

and there’s more press to come…today we’re being interviewed for Entrepreneur magazine…

As you can see, we’ve had many, many happy wishes come true. I am truly humbled by all that this site has become. Our very first ‘magic wand’ was HOPE…and I tell you that I certainly have seen what hope and faith can do. Thank you to God for hearing my prayers and showing me (us all) that you love women entrepreneurs and want us all to succeed.

Thank you for being a part of The Kingdom. Thank you for helping The Kingdom grow to what it is today and what it will be tomorrow.

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