Business, Babies, and Scaling and Growing a Community Online
CHEERS EPISODE No. 004Business, Babies, and Scaling and Growing a Community Online with Rachael from @heysleepybaby
Welcome to CHEERS! My “not-a-podcast” instagram live series where I interview peer experts about business, motherhood, mindset, and so much more. So grab your Diet Coke, pop your airpods in, and hang with us for the next 20 mins or so!
Q: How long has Hey Sleepy Baby been a thing and how did it start?
A:Hey Sleepy Baby will be four years in March. I started the Instagram page in March 2020. What a time to be alive. And I was actually on the maternity leave with my little Noe. She was five or six weeks old, and I was starting my first sleep certification course, it was called Baby Let's Sleep through Isla Grace. I thought it was going to be a side hustle because I was a teacher, for anybody that doesn't know that. Before this, I was an elementary school special ed teacher. I was on my maternity leave. We were broke, so I was like, this might be something that I could do to kind of bring in like a supplemental income. I could take clients right after school during the summer or weekends, nights, stuff like that. We were struggling with figuring out what to do with sleep after our first baby who we had sleep trained, or tried to, and it went terribly. I started researching the options and found this sleep certification and also a philosophy about sleep that I had never really heard about before. Like everyone around me sleep trained, my doctor told me to sleep train, it was all I really knew. And so it really intrigued me. The more I started following some people that were a part of that world and learning more about it, I was just like, oh, I think this will work for our family, but also I kind of want to do this as a side gig. I want to help moms not go through what we went through as a family. I didn’t have super high expectations at first and then it was the pandemic and I was, you know, juggling two kids at home now and daycare shut down, it was COVID. It became a lot. A wonderful thing that came out of starting the page at that time was that there were all these other moms out there that were looking for community too. We were all isolated, we were all shut in with our kids. It really just kind of blossomed into this wonderful community. And that summer I resigned from teaching when I decided I wanted to do this full time.
Q: What does your day usually look like with running a large business with babies at home?
A: To be real, it’s a huge struggle with three kids now. We have our hands full running a small business—it’s hard in so many ways. Growth is amazing but adds so many new challenges. Now I’m managing a whole team, which brings a lot of moving pieces. Plus, I have my baby with me constantly and juggle two schools for the kids. My husband takes our middle to school, so I handle our oldest and the baby’s drop-offs, pickups, and the mom duties that come up daily.
Typically, I have my baby, drop my oldest off, and if my daughter is not in preschool, I run errands like groceries while she naps in the car. That’s often when I’m on Stories—if you’ve followed me for a while, you know I pop on whenever I can, usually from the car. I’ve had to accept that I don’t need to be perfect; just showing up is enough. I can connect with my followers over the small stuff, and that sense of humor is enough for now.
Q: What are your tips for growing a community on Instagram?
A: I mean, it sounds so cliche but the only way that I know how to do it is to just be myself and show people as much of my real life as I'm comfortable with. And that has definitely, that's like a whole number topic, but that's something that I'm kind of always reassessing. How much of my real life and my kids and stuff like that do I want to show? But I think being real is really important and being genuine is really important. And I also find that there's this very fine line at least for me as a consumer of content and a lot of mom content. There's a very fine line between showing the real stuff, the hard stuff and complaining too much. And then there's the part where you want to be positive, you want to be uplifted, you want to be encouraging, but you don't want to be like toxically positive. I think it's a really hard thing to balance. I think if you think about it too much, that's probably where you're going to go wrong. Share the good and the bad and share where you're at. Share what you're currently watching, reading, thinking about, drinking. You have to be a real person to the people watching you. Think about someone you enjoy following and watching. What is it about that person that you like, and what is it about that person that makes you stick around and watch their content for a month or a year and a half?
Ready for another?
Check out my Cheers! Episode IG highlight below, where I house “not-a-podcast” instagram live series where I interview peer experts about business, motherhood, mindset, and so much more. So grab your Diet Coke, pop your airpods in, and hang with us for the next 20 mins or so as we learn to work smarter (not harder) in the margins of motherhood!
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