resurgo July 2023 update
Hey everybody, Laurel Anne Stark here, the founder of resurgo, with an update as to what is happening here at resurgo.
So 16 months ago, we launched our founding members community, and effective immediately we will be winding it down.
Here is what happened.
So we launched our founding members' community after two years plus of research into the obstacles that self-employed women face.
The issues that we were looking to solve were: overwhelm, isolation, and just the stress that comes along with being a self-employed woman, especially looking at the systemic factors that are in the way of self-employed Women to thrive.
So two years of research included:
Launching the very first ever, first and only, report ever done on self-employed women's mental health called "The State of Female Entrepreneur Mental Health" which we launched in 2020.
We also spent six months researching and getting your feedback on our prototype. And we talked to so many wonderful volunteer self-employed women who told us what they thought of the prototype.
We did about 100 hours of interviews on the obstacles self-employed women face and with that we launched our founding members community, and it started off so so well.
We had over 500 women on our waitlist, and over 75 signed up right away. At one point we were hitting $500 in monthly reoccurring revenue but here's what happened. I wouldn't say the pandemic was over yet.
In 2022 there were still a lot of things going on that made the world a stressful place to live as it still is today.
And what we started to notice is that when women get busy and they get overwhelmed their self-care is the very first thing that gets put on the back burner.
So, women would sign up and they wouldn't even log into the platform or attend a single session. Women would log in on average three to five times before they would no longer log in and engage with the platform.
We were noticing that even though we were offering some incredible services, for example, one on one with a registered nurse to help build a self-care plan, co-working sessions, mastermind sessions, and accountability buddies, the ability to promote your business within the community and lots of workshops and training, attendance just continued to drop off slowly over the course of the 16 months.
And we also received feedback that women just felt that they were too busy. There were persistent issues with login and password retrieval that were really irritating that we weren't able to resolve to anybody's satisfaction.
Another issue experienced was that, as the founder, I am a self-employed woman as well.
I'm also trying to mitigate the effects of isolation, overwhelm, and the stress of being self-employed.
“resurgo is a project that I've been running off the side of my desk along with my full-time communications business.”
I definitely found it extremely challenging, both personally and professionally over the course of the pandemic to run both companies successfully as well as maintain my own mental health. And so that has been certainly a challenge. I have felt like I haven't had the proper resources, to dedicate to a project this important. And certainly, that was a contributing factor to the performance of our initial iteration and our initial solution, this first go-round.
So due to all of these factors, as well as staffing shortages and the overall economic climate right now, we do need to wind down the project - the very very first beta or prototype.
That's not to say that we won't be back.
I still am extremely passionate about solving this issue for self-employed women to level the playing field and help us thrive at the rate of our self-employed male counterparts.
That being said, the overwhelming feedback from the community is that this solution isn't it, so we're gonna put it on the shelf and hit pause and go back to the drawing board and hopefully, we'll be back to you very soon with a different solution that hopefully will work better to solve the issues stated and meet the needs of our community.
“That being said, I just want to thank every single person from the bottom of my heart who saw the vision and supported the project, whether it was with your time, with your advice, with your money.”
Thank you to every single person who backed the project through crowdfunding, who signed up as part of the founding member’s community, who gave us your feedback through the prototype, and every single person who engaged with us on social media and shared our posts.
I'm so so grateful to every single one of you for sharing in my vision.
And it's been an incredibly rewarding journey so far. And I just want to thank you all very much for your time and support and I hope to be back with you soon with something else. So stay tuned, and I wish you all a wonderful rest of your day.
Thank you so much.