Jasmine Star: (00:00:13) - I used to be embarrassed of my name. I'd cringe when my mom would call out for me like in public Ja Starr, she would whisper over her shoulder on the way out of the library. Please go and get your twin sister Bianca Flower. Uh, yeah, Bianca Flower, Jasmine Starr. Those were our names. My mom was a hippie but I was just one flower in her garden of children. Welcome to the Jasmine Star Show y'all. This is where we talk about life and business and today I'm gonna do a deep dive on my origin story to brings us up here till today. It is not new that I talk about this, but it is new in some of the things that I reveal. So when we go back, my mom was calling out to her garden children, uh, you know, all these years later I love my name.

Jasmine Star: (00:00:57) - When I stand on a stage or if I shake somebody's hand or if I introduce myself, I just smile and I say My name is Jasmine Starr, speaker Podcaster and c e o of Social Curator. Now for those of you who don't know, social curator helps entrepreneurs overcome the stress of marketing their business by using our customized resources and education and social media scheduling app. So you and many other business owners can get followers who turn into customers. Now, all these years later, I am very proud to say that social curator serves thousands of small business owners and it is a monthly subscription to help people market their business and grow with a proven plan. But I say all this stuff because as a bootstrap founder, I'm excited to share like all of the pivots that led my career to this point. Now I have been very open.

Jasmine Star: (00:01:44) - I love this part of my story. I love who I am and where I'm from. I am a first generation Latina daughter of an immigrant. My father is from Mexico and my mother is from Puerto Rico and they fell in love on the streets of East Los Angeles. They got married in a church basement and they had a potluck reception and then somewhere along the lines they raised five children. I was homeschooled until I was in high school. Yeah, me and my sister were homeschooled until we went into our freshman year. And then I earned an academic scholarship to Whittier College and then later I earned a scholarship to UCLA Law School. Now it was during this time that life kind of turned upside down. I had a very, very, very hard time with where I was and who I was in the state of my life.

Jasmine Star: (00:02:24) - My mom had a relapse with brain cancer during my first year of law school. She was first diagnosed when I was 19 years old and I was in college and that really caused me to like pause and take a deep breath. And I found myself going home a lot during the week and the weekend to take care of my younger brothers and sisters. And so she was diagnosed when I was 19 and then she had a relapse when I was in law school and it was a lot. It was a lot. So she was diagnosed when I was 19 years old and then later during my first year of law school she had a relapse and that's when I was diagnosed with depression. I have done a lot of work around that and I'm very proud of the journey that I've been on. But at the time I was exhausted, I was overwhelmed.

Jasmine Star: (00:03:06) - I hated law school, but I didn't have the courage to leave school until I visited my mom in the hospital. Uh, she was in I C U and it was after her brain's surgery. And I don't talk too much. Well, I talk a little bit about it, but it was New Year's Eve and myself, my siblings and my dad, we had gone to USC Norris Hospital and we walked up to the I C U after her brain surgery and you know, we didn't talk about what she had done with her life. What we did is we gathered around her and what she said and what she was talking about was, was she gonna make it through? And as she was talking about life and wondering if she was gonna make it through, she talked about all the things that she hadn't done. She hadn't written the children's book that she wanted to write and she hadn't, hadn't visited Austria and she hadn't ever traveled first class.

Jasmine Star: (00:03:56) - And all of those seem uh, really small. But to her they were so big. And it was at that moment I knew that I was gonna drop outta law school because I didn't want to arrive at the end of life and wonder what if my mom talked about Austria and children's books in first class And there was a list of things that I had not done that I didn't wanna wonder like what if I had done that? What if I had the courage? And it was on the back of those conversations that I ended up quitting law school. I just walked into the dean's office and I was just like, I need to go home. I need to be with my mom. Like I'm gonna come back to law school. I went to law school on a scholarship. I had three years to go back and reclaim a scholarship, which is crazy.

Jasmine Star: (00:04:39) - So I just thought, well of course that's what I'm gonna do. I'm just like having a really hard time with life. So that's what happened. I moved home, yeah, back to my childhood home to be with my mom and my dad. And then in a crazy turn of events, my high school sweetheart proposed and we planned a wedding in three months. I had been with JD at this point in time, like nine years. And I wanted my mom and dad to see me get married. And so against all odds cuz the doctor said, oh, your mom's not gonna be able to walk and she's not gonna be able to fly. And against all odds, my mom and my dad walked me down the aisle and it's at this time my mom's hair. She had very little hair and she was uh, had palsy. So like half of her body was working.

Jasmine Star: (00:05:20) - And so she kind of limped me down the aisle and I have to tell you, best dang day of my life, I get a little little lump of my throat when I just talk about it. It was great, it was awesome, it was great, it was great. So all of this stuff, and I should probably say I probably get a little emotional because like my mom's still here with us today. So at the time of this recording this podcast, she's texting me and she's checking in and I think to myself, dang, at that time I had no idea what was gonna happen and we thought we were gonna lose her. And that was like the whole coming two of my life. I had a wake up call. And then to see that life is so short and those decisions that I made have brought me here to record this podcast, it feels really, really, really good.

Jasmine Star: (00:05:54) - But I didn't know any of that then. I didn't know that quitting law school was going to be the best decision. I didn't know if my mom was gonna survive. And it's only now that I've gone through the mere that I look back and think I'm really happy that she made the courageous decision to keep pushing on. And I'm very happy that I have made courageous decisions to keep moving on. But we didn't know any of this. So when we returned from our honeymoon, remember like we planned a really quick wedding and then we have this honeymoon. My brand new husband, he asked if I was planning to return to law school because that was always the plan and I was ashamed of saying, no, I don't wanna go back. But I pushed back that shame because I knew that I had to at least try pursuing my passion.

Jasmine Star: (00:06:37) - It wasn't even passion, it was like a dream. I had this dream like I wanna be a photographer. And then we were eating this pente pasta and he looks up for me at our dining room table in our apartment and he says, but you don't even own a camera. And I was like, I know he was thoroughly confused. Like I explained that if I got a camera, I really think that I could make it a business. Me and my camera, I don't, don't have a camera and I've never made a business, but I think I can do it. And he looked across the table and he said to me, I'd rather see you fail at something you love than succeed at something you hate. Boom, three months later as a Christmas gift, my husband JD bought me a camera from Best Buy and I started my photography business in 2007.

Jasmine Star: (00:07:22) - It was a Canon 20 D. If you are a camera nerd, it's not even like a professional com, it's like a prosumer camera. It's like the camera that's like right on the edge of are you a professional or are you just really into photos? That's what we could afford. And that was my gift. And a couple years later when the business really took off, I convinced JD to be my co-founder, like my business partner because when we back up in that first year of business, the bus the year that I was like, I'm not sure if I can merely make this a business and my dreams and aspirations, you know, becoming a lawyer was I'm gonna get my family from East Los Angeles to West Los Angeles when I'm making money and I'm gonna be a lawyer who makes six figures. And then all of a sudden in my first year of business as a photographer, having never had a camera and never having had a business, I was able to supersede six figures in business.

Jasmine Star: (00:08:06) - That was crazy to me. And then within three years I started getting awards for my work and then I was being paid to travel the world with my camera and with my business partner and husband, like my career took off. It was crazy. And this whole time I was creating content and as I was creating content so much for me, I started creating content for other business owners and they started paying me to create content for them. And then on the back of me getting understanding that I have a deep robust understanding of marketing and branding, what I then pivoted to what I then started doing was consulting. I started consulting and I was becoming a photographer. I was creating a seven figure multiple stream as a photographer. I was creating educational resources for photographers, which created another multi seven figure revenue stream. And then I started consulting.

Jasmine Star: (00:08:59) - And so as we start going through this in a relatively short amount of time, there was a lot of stuff happening. So I wanna give like a quick peak at my career iteration. 2006, I become a photographer. 2010 I become a content creator. And then two years later, in 2012, I am consulting instead of being the person who's doing the creation, I'm consulting on other creators to create for businesses. And then I realize that if I'm to grow my business as a consultant, I would have to create an agency. And I didn't wanna create an agency, I didn't wanna manage a bunch of people, I didn't wanna scale in that way. I wanted to serve more people in a streamlined way. And so in 2015, I decided to become a course creator. I was creating courses for business owners to market their business and build brands.

Jasmine Star: (00:09:47) - And then I realized, well a lot of the people who are buying courses aren't finishing them or they become quickly updated. So that in 2017 I created a membership and it's in the back of this membership that we're getting fresh content and things were being updated and it was a vibrant community. And then I realized that this membership had to do with marketing businesses and yet we weren't integrated with the largest social platforms. So in 2020 made a big sweeping decision to build our own tech stack on the inside of Social Curator and integrate with every largest social platform. So the marketing resources that are being created for business owners are then being able to be planned and scheduled. That's crazy. When I look at my career and I take a look back and I'm like, wow. Like at each turn I was uneducated, unfunded, unqualified and unprepared to start a new business.

Jasmine Star: (00:10:35) - But then I did it with every iteration I learned something new to carry into my next offer. And this worked like really well until I wanted to create a SaaS business, like software as a service, as a non-technical founder because I don't know coding, I wait, I didn't and I don't, uh, I didn't know U I U X, I didn't even know the slightest thing about being a tech startup founder. But one thing that has carried through in every iteration of my career, I got back up after every gun wrenching knockdown and there were a lot, there's so much that doesn't get to see the light of day on social media. There's so much like heartbreak and pain and embarrassment. I will never forget, oh, I'm gonna get to this story in a little bit. I'll get to this story in a little bit, but let me back up a a second.

Jasmine Star: (00:11:22) - I had assembled a tech team and we bootstrapped social curator and we launched with our very own tech stack in late 2020. And then we were able to debut it to users in early 2021. This is all really recent you guys. I am recording this podcast in 2023, like the debut hit two years ago. So people often ask how we built the first version of our product, and I can only explain it this way, I felt like a tornado swept me up and dropped me in the middle of a different country in a different universe. Like that's just the truth of it. I would sit in dev meetings and I didn't know what was being said. It sounded like they were speaking a different language totally and completely. But I forced myself to ask questions, dumb questions, basic questions, questions about my dang questions. I drew design ideas on pieces of paper and then I would be able to put them out.

Jasmine Star: (00:12:17) - Then I could scrutinize a roadmap. And then I tried writing assumptions docs like I was learning all of this on the fly and it was hard and I wasn't even good. I was c e o, but I was also head of product and being ahead of product. I didn't even know what that term was until we started assembling a tech team. The responsibilities completely and totally intimidated me and I was so nervous for our all hand tech meetings, like my stomach would turn with like acid waves. I would sit in the car like we would often drive to Los Angeles for our tech meetings. And then I would sit in the car and I would be paralyzed with fear. I was so scared. I was scared in the unknown. I was scared of feeling so stupid. I was so in over my head. And then I knew being in over my head isn't new.

Jasmine Star: (00:13:09) - I've been in over my head the vast majority of my career then even though I've been in over my head for the vast majority of my career, I somehow found a way out. It wasn't easy, it never was. But more than finding a way out, one thing I do knew and I know today that I knew then is I loved our team. I love this team so darn much that I was determined to learn as fast as I could. I started investing in education, in mentorship and joining groups online. And I started realizing that everything can be searched for and found on the internet. And so I began investing in coaching and communities and learning how to start a SaaS company. I was literally spinning my wheels and learning in the process. And there is still so much to learn, but I am still asking the world's dumbest questions.

Jasmine Star: (00:13:58) - But I've found a cadence that makes me feel confident pushing the team forward. Now, one of the trickiest things about building a SaaS product for social media is that like there is an ever-changing nature of api like APIs and like access for like Facebook and Instagram and like other platforms like LinkedIn and TikTok, like they change all the time. And we have learned that we need to quickly iterate and we need to get like extra educational resources for users and people who are paying us as soon as possible. We have to move as fast as these big tech companies who have millions and millions of dollars in tech funding. And then the second most common question that I get asked is how we launched Social Curator. Now, I didn't know that Social Curator was going to be a SaaS subscription. In fact, it originally started as a monthly membership for social media resources and trainings and courses and we had this really vibrant community.

Jasmine Star: (00:14:48) - I know I've said that before, but really the community is amazing. But then in June, 2017, social curator, we launched it as a membership. And when I talked to you about how we launched this membership, I should be like big freaking air quotes because y'all, we built social curator, it was Frankenstein, like we don't have a tech founder. We just had somebody put together like it was WordPress sites and widgets and then we used Infusionsoft, you guys, Infusionsoft is like an email marketing software. I look back at this decision and all I'm like, oh my God, did you really build this Frankenstein on like WordPress and Infusionsoft? Like what the heck? Our first website was so scrappy and it was clear we were trying to figure out how to build something from literally nothing. We had never seen it done before. It was the first, at least to me, the thing first time I'd ever seen something like this.

Jasmine Star: (00:15:35) - So we had opened doors for a one week period. We said, Hey, we're just gonna gauge interest. We're not quite sure what we're gonna be doing. We're gonna open it for one week. And at the end of seven days we had 2,444 members and JD and I were, we were shocked, we were shocked. We knew we were onto something amazing, but things quickly got super complicated When our tech couldn't scale with our needs. I mean obviously it was like WordPress and Infusionsoft and a bunch of other widgets like the site would crash. Membership resources weren't properly distributed on a monthly basis and the code was a mess. Like we worked with a dev shop. So we felt completely handcuffed to their timelines, their bandwidth, their budgets, what they can give to us and when they could want it to. And then we continued opening enrollment every four months.

Jasmine Star: (00:16:21) - And then we would welcome and about an average of 1800 new members at a time. Sometimes we would even like welcome over 3000 people in at a time. But our tech hampered our long-term experience and it completely amplified churn. The problem is we were able to get a ton of people in, but the tech couldn't sustain it. In 2019, I will never forget I was at a copywriting workshop in San Diego, California and I started getting all these text messages over a weekend from my team saying like, Hey, it's broken again. The sides down. People are waiting for their resources. And then I broadcasted a live video. I literally made a live video. I went into the social curator community and then I had to explain yet again another sight crash. And members stated like how disappointed they were. They were right, they totally should have been disappointed.

Jasmine Star: (00:17:08) - I was disappointed. I apologized profusely. And then because I'm just being honest in full disclosure, I couldn't even get out the apology because I started crying. Like I was like, I'm so sorry. And then I got choked up and I was just trying to keep it all in and I was so humiliated. I was like so embarrassed, literally looking at thousands of people saying like, I don't know what I'm doing. We're working on it as fast as we can. We will get it fixed. And that was when I knew things had to change. We couldn't be dependent on a dev shop anymore. We were completely handcuffed. We needed our own product and development team, particularly because we needed to change from a membership to a SaaS company. And then by changing to a SaaS company, this would allow us to integrate with the social platforms, which is what our users wanted.

Jasmine Star: (00:17:50) - So we hired our first C T O, our chief technology officer in March, 2020. And by October, 2020, our first text tech debuted to the team. We were like, it's happening, like it's happening people. We shifted social curator messaging from being a membership to a SaaS subscription. And then we started integrating with social platforms so users could plan and schedule their marketing content. And then we were no longer had enrollment periods, okay, we were open. Now we were officially like we're going full force. And despite it all social curator has continued to grow and we attribute a lot of the growth to content, content, content. I believe so much that content hasn't just become a source of lead generation and social credibility, but content has become a key differentiating factor between between like social curator and its competitors. We aren't just a social media scheduling app. Heck no.

Jasmine Star: (00:18:45) - Social curator is a digital marketing agency in your pocket. Business owners aren't just like overwhelmed and stressed with social marketing. Most people don't even know where to begin because it's always changing. Now we have Dotty, our completely new debuted on a platform. It is an AI component to the business that is fully customized for your business, your industry and your voice. And the more you use it, the more it is trained to write captions on behalf of a business owner. Our belief is that if we wanted users to take action, we needed to make it as easy as possible. We don't just provide the tools like the what we provide, the education, the how, and most importantly, we provide the community the way, the why, the how all for business owners to discuss what's working, like how to stay on top of the changing algorithms, how to stay on top of trends.

Jasmine Star: (00:19:36) - And I get to do business coaching on the inside of it. Okay, so let's walk through an example. If a user wanted to quickly learn like, hey, like how do I create an Instagram reel that's really perfect for my business? They could search our database of marketing action plans and find tutorials. They also have an opportunity to create accountability with a simple daily challenge. These are super powerful on getting consistent action. And then using the social curator post editor, a user can then create a post for Instagram and schedule it for a desired date and time. And they could also schedule it to any other social platform right there. Social curator also shares tons of free educational content on our blog and social platforms like, you know, shout out to Instagram, we all love us some Instagram. Another reason we're huge proponents of organic content is how effective it's at it keeping traffic warm and then we keep traffic warm and then we'll retarget them with paid ads.

Jasmine Star: (00:20:26) - So during promotional periods, it's common for a social carrier to get around 25 to 30,000 leads for a free training. And we're getting these at A C P L less than $4 a lead. And we're doing this during a three week promo period. And we attribute a lot of this to our consistency of our content, engaging with followers and building trust over time. At the time of recording this podcast, we have debuted our upgraded social curator platform. And I couldn't be more hopeful and I couldn't be more excited. We have spent the last two years drilling down on the product, identifying the value for like users, and we have stripped down the product. And then we began testing in October of 2022. The reason I'm making this video is yes, to bring you in on the process and journey and give you a much clearer look at the pitfalls in, uh, the really hard moments of building a business.

Jasmine Star: (00:21:18) - But I'm recording this because I wanna look back at this video in five or 10 years and I'm gonna say something that feels like a little bit much. I believe that my future self is gonna look back at my present self and say thank you for not giving up. Because there have been plenty of times that I wanna give up. Like there have been plenty of times where I'm just like, Hey, it's good, we're good. We gave it a good effort. I can't see the path of doing more than what we currently have now despite our best efforts. And so I wanna record this video as a documentation of being in like the messy middle and being in the hard parts. And one of the hardest parts of my career, specifically as c e o was in October, 2022. Um, to be honest, it was very painful.

Jasmine Star: (00:22:00) - We made the decision to stop all promotional efforts. We stopped all lead generation. We stopped inviting people to a trial. I had to face the reality that we had grown and we had continued growing and then we plateaued from 2021 to 2022 because we hadn't really found product market fit. We could get people on the front end and we had a really hard time keeping them with the product. Now we couldn't scale until we redefined the vision and then we built scrappy, we built it very scrappy, and then we tested it and we tested so many hypotheses like we did it again and again. And that we did it so often that we became confident pressing the gas pedal again. So in October, 2022, we had to downsize, not we had to. I made the decision to downsize the team. And I have to tell you, that was the hardest thing that I have ever done as a founder.

Jasmine Star: (00:22:53) - I hope I never have to do it again. But we did this because we needed to elongate our runway. We have been entirely bootstrapped from the beginning and we have been profitable from day one. I did not want to compound our stress with unsustainable overhead and I had to make a very hard call. And as painful as that call was, it was the right call. And I think that me growing as a person and an as an entrepreneur, I'm learning these things because it's amplifying my education for who I need to become as c e o It is terrifying to push the brakes, but my mentor told me that it is best to slow down before you speed up. And so that's what we did. We slowed the heck down in May, 2023. We introduced the platform to users and the feedback was, uh, promising. Ah, no, it's better than promising.

Jasmine Star: (00:23:46) - In fact, we've been seeing reviews like we've outdone ourselves with the amazing platform or it's that it's a its spectacular experience that's sure to be a game changer. Or how Dotty our new social media assistant who will help you easily create custom content. Will Dotty help create a post that it was less than a few minutes and it sound exactly their voice. Okay. We rebuilt our tech stack, we buttressed our architecture for scale and we focused heavily on incorporating features that people have been asking for for years. Like now we have a built in calendar. You can upload videos, you can upload carousels, you have custom captions that sound like your precise voice. This has taken us so long to get here and our platform debuted earlier this month and we celebrated by hosting Free masterclass this week, y'all. I showed how to create a month of content in less than two hours in like, I think it's even way less than two hours.

Jasmine Star: (00:24:37) - And I know it sounds crazy. It it, maybe it does sound crazy, but what I know is that it's true. Yes, this process just doesn't work for me, but it works for thousands of business owners, like business owners who are just like you. I am obsessed. And this week we have a sale to celebrate the upgraded platform. Uh, so a lot of moving things and a lot of moving pieces. But before I go, um, whenever I talk about pivots that I made to grow my career, people will often ask advice on how to grow their business. I think they expect me to say something like deep or wise, but I'm just gonna be real. It's actually the opposite. My advice is so simple, but few people actually accept it and even few people actually like use it. Why? It's simple, but it's not easy. In case you're interested, uh, here's my advice to grow your business.

Jasmine Star: (00:25:26) - I'm gonna break this down in five simple steps. Number one, don't get fancy. You don't need funding. You don't need extensive websites. You don't need visual branding to start. You need to get customers. So focus on that. Number two, be consistent. It's small daily actions like those are the only reps you need. I know it's tempting to think that you need to like long jump from one big success to another, but it's the tiny consistencies that compound over time. Number three, document your journey. It's easy to focus on like what's next or the next big growth spurt. But looking back at how far you've come is so sobering. It is a sobering reminder of what you are capable of. Number four, ask for help. I waited too long to ask for help and if I'm being honest, I was scared and I was embarrassed to ask for help.

Jasmine Star: (00:26:12) - I was worried if somebody discovered just how incapable I was, that they would call me out for the fraud. I felt like as soon as I developed the courage to ask the business change entirely, and I want the same for yours. And number five, call your mom. My mom had a miraculous recovery with brain cancer and she has been in remission since 2006. So during my darkest moments, I call her to remember that night in the ICU after her brain surgery when she thought she was dying. She like always will point me in the right direction so I never have to wonder what life would be like if I didn't follow my dreams. Thank you for listening to the Jasmine Star Show. It is an honor to walk alongside you and I hope to see you on the inside of our upgraded social curator platform and in the community for my business coaching and your customized marketing resources. Friends, if you found this podcast helpful in any way as you pivot your business, be sure to post an Instagram story and tag me in it because I love sharing those stories. I love connecting with you. And when you share this podcast, it allows both of our businesses to grow. Much love and much appreciation for being here.