Podcast Episode 89 - The evolution of postpartum business
Interview with Naomi Chrisoulakis
I chat with Newborn Mothers graduate Naomi Chrisoulakis from Cocoon. Together we discuss the evolution of her postpartum business, moving from postpartum service delivery to postpartum education. At the core of this conversation, we explore how working as a postpartum professional can change over time to suit your season of life and your passions.
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About Naomi
Naomi is a certified postpartum doula and cook at Cocoon who lives with her husband and three-year-old daughter in Sydney. Naomi believes that every woman deserves a postpartum experience that’s restful, rejuvenating and respectful of the massive transition into motherhood. Naomi's food and care is about giving mothers the nourishment they need, the nurturing they deserve and the support to help them thrive. Naomi has created ‘Cook and Cocoon - a postpartum preparation and fourth-trimester cooking course’, a cookie mix for lactation biscuits, offers postpartum planning sessions and is currently working on a cookbook!
We explore the following questions:
Tell us what you’ve settled on after trying a bunch of different things. What does your day look like now?
Are you currently predominantly offering education at the moment rather than actual care?
What do you see for yourself for the next three or five years?
What are the kind of things you do for marketing? What will you do more of when you've finished creating stuff?
Can you tell us about when social media backfires?
What makes you keep going? Can you share any moments that you've had with clients or people who've bought your courses or you've done a planning session with that make you go, "Yes, I'm in the right place and this is actually making a difference for people?"
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Transcript
Julia Jones:
Hello and welcome to the Newborn Mothers Podcast. Today we have a repeat guest and I'm really excited to catch up with you again, Naomi. Naomi actually graduated from Newborn Mothers back in 2019. We already interviewed her on the podcast in episode 30. If anyone wants to jump back and have a look. That was only four months after you'd started your business, which is quite amazing.
Now we're in 2023, and obviously, a lot has changed in that time. At the time you were running a meal delivery service, and I think you were doing some in-home postpartum care, but since then you've had a baby. You've moved to a smaller town, and I know that you've changed your business model quite a lot. You're now doing an online postpartum cooking course and food preparation course for mums. You have Lactation Cookie Mix, which I know was a huge effort and took a lot of work to perfect. You still do in-home postpartum care work and also many of you probably know Naomi's podcast. I'm sure a lot of our students will also listen to that. Naomi, how are you?
Naomi Chrisoulakis:
I'm good, Julia. It feels like such a weird time warp to think about that time. So much has changed since then.
Julia Jones:
You were so beginner in your business, and I think it's a really great example of failing fast, which it's actually like a Silicon Valley idea that you just try different business ideas very quickly to begin with. Then you find out what you like. You've obviously tried quite a bunch of things in that time and you've settled on something different than what you started at.
Naomi Chrisoulakis:
Yeah.
Julia Jones:
Tell us what that is now. What does your day look like now?
Tell us what you’ve settled on after trying a bunch of different things. What does your day look like now? (01:55)
Naomi Chrisoulakis:
I really liked doing the food delivery side of things and the in-home support, but then COVID happened and it put the kibosh on the food delivery side. At the time I was in my second trimester of pregnancy, towards the end of that. I was going, ‘Oh, this is clearly just not the right timing. I'm going to shut it down. Then having a second baby really made me reassess a lot of things, particularly how I wanted to run things in the business, and how practical and feasible it was for me to do that with two children. One big lesson for me was not realizing how full-on it is with having two children versus one, or even just the ages. I started that food delivery business with my, she was two and a half, in daycare and grandparent care four days a week.
Then suddenly having two children, I was just like, ‘I don't feel like I can show up for myself, my kids, my clients in a way that I really want to without completely burning out.’ I didn't take up the food delivery service again after COVID because I just decided that that was going to be too much. We moved out of Sydney and we moved down near Wollongong, which was something that had been on the cards for a while, but COVID really kicked us up the ass to do that. Then I came back from maternity leave and started seeing clients. I was loving being back doing that work, that face-to-face. I'd been craving it. I tried doing some virtual stuff. I'd had a couple of clients doing virtual doula work with me. I liked it, but it didn't feel as connected as I wanted that, I love that in-home support.
I threw myself back into that. I took on clients locally to where I am and in Sydney. I was doing some job sharing with another doula. It became quite quickly apparent to me that I couldn't do this in the season of life that I'm in. I mean, I could, but I'd really suffer for it. I think I had a moment where I was cooking because a big part of myself, love food and food is my love language. I'm a total feeder and I was cooking, I was doing a Sunday afternoon cook-up for my clients. I had to kick my family out of the house so I could cook uninterrupted without little fingers trying to stick themselves into lactation cookies and whatever.
I made all these batches and batches of food for this family, and then my family came home and I was so exhausted. I was just like, "It's a packet of ravioli and a jar of pasta sauce, guys, that's dinner." Even though I am fine with doing that and I don't believe in making a full main meal every night, I also realized that something was really out of balance for me.
Mid-year, last year this was, I decided that I wanted to take a pause in August. I took a pause on taking on any more clients and I wanted to see what it would be like to do an online course because I'm a big fan of online courses and online offerings myself. I saw a real gap in the market for pregnant people and getting educated on postpartum because I feel like there's still so much work to be done around that culture and around the conversation.
People do a lot of birth education classes, which I think is awesome, but they're not doing the same for postpartum. One of the things that I like to do and encourage my clients and encourage anyone I ever speak to do is to fill their freezer for postpartum. I wanted to create something that was about filling your freezer with postpartum-appropriate food and educating yourself on what to expect, how to set up support and boundaries, and how to get people on your team. I created videos that grandparents, partners and best friends can watch as well. Which was a massive undertaking, creating an online course and doing something totally new. I nearly chucked it in multiple times trying to create that. Now my business is, it's looking quite different. I'm not seeing in-home clients at the moment. I would love to go back to it at some point, but right now I just don't think it's working for me.
I have my online course, and I've got my Cocoon Cookie Mix, which is the lactation cookie packet mix that I do on presale couple, two, three times a year. I've just finished a postpartum doula mentoring group, a three-month container. I still do some postpartum planning sessions online for people, but it's a totally different business model to where I started out and when we spoke in 2019. If you told me I would be doing this and living where I'm living, I would've laughed. I wouldn't have expected that at all.
Julia Jones:
That's so interesting, because that's one of the questions I want to ask you and we'll get to is, what's the next steps for you? It's funny because what you think your next steps are and where you think you might be could turn out to be totally different. Who knows? I love that you just follow your intuition, you try things and you feel what's right for you. I distinctly remember having exactly the same moment myself when I had babies. I think it was probably after my second baby was born as well. I was caring for someone in their home and I'd given them a massage, cooked them a meal, all of that. My own baby was still breastfeeding and my car got a flat tire on the way home, and the baby was due for a feed.
I was just like, "This isn't working. I don't know." I'm frazzled. It's dark. I'm waiting for the RAC to come and help me out. My husband was about to go down and buy some formula, which I think he bought as a backup, but I managed to get home in time anyway. It was just one of those moments where I was like, "No, this is not the season for me to be doing this." I actually love online work. I'm very introverted, so for me, being at home and educating is what I really love doing.
It's really nice to hear that whoever you are, whatever your strengths and gifts and preferences are, there's a way to do this work that will work for you. I love hearing all of those stories. I'm interested, because it sounds like you predominantly offer education at the moment rather than actual care. Is that right?
Are you currently predominantly offering education at the moment rather than actual care? (08:32)
Naomi Chrisoulakis:
Yeah, I guess that's true. I hadn't thought of it that way. Yes. I have the one physical product, which is the lactation cookies. Then it has been a focus on education. I've actually been experimenting with doing one-off classes. I did a return to work class, just a $22 sign up to a Zoom, a live class and get access to a recording. That went really well for me. I had like a 140 people sign up. Just yesterday I saw someone buy the class. I was just experimenting with, “Okay, let's show up, talk about returning to work after you've had a baby for 90 minutes”. It's something that I feel passionate about, because that was a real moment for me and I found that a really tricky transition. I think everything else is leaning that way at the moment.
Julia Jones:
It sounds like you still love doing the care work, and maybe you'll come back to that, but you're in a season of caring for your own babies. There's only so much capacity we have for that. It's interesting, as I grow in my business too, we're moving towards the term postpartum education and care professionals because we are noticing that education is half of the picture. You can go to someone's house and cook them a meal and things. I think this is from memory, how you moved into this work too. You'd been working in a women's magazine and there was no information about postpartum. You had no idea what to expect. I think that education is a really critical piece of the puzzle.
Naomi Chrisoulakis:
Absolutely. That was my experience in becoming a mother. It totally took me by surprise. I considered myself, I'd been the wellness editor at Marie Claire, I thought that I was on top of things. My mother had been a midwife, I'd been surrounded by babies, and yet postpartum completely took me by surprise. I saw that it was doing the same for lots of people. I completely agree. There needs to be more education out there.
Julia Jones:
I love it. Then that brings me to the next question is, what do you see for yourself for the next three or five years?
What do you see for yourself for the next three or five years? (10:55)
Naomi Chrisoulakis:
That's a great question. I'm not sure. I said to my husband I feel like I've been in a bit of a push, push, push phase. Where I've been building things, building to transition, building this online course. At the moment I'm creating a postpartum cookbook, which has been something I've been wanting to do since I started the food delivery service.
I feel like once I've got that, I want to focus on making the online business my dominant income. I want to look at different ways to market that, because right now it's out there, but I don't have all the marketing stuff, the sales funnels and the automation. That's what I want to look at doing next, but I need to stop creating in order to work on that backend stuff.
I've got quite a good little suite of products and services to offer, and that will be my focus for the second half of this year. Beyond that, I don't even know, but I do know that I'm a person who loves to start new things. I dare say that will be on the cards, but I don't have any other ideas at the moment that are germinating. We'll see.
Julia Jones:
I love it. I think that's a really important point because a lot of people love to make stuff and then don't follow through with the marketing. Marketing, you just have to do it all the time. That can feel like a drag sometimes.
Naomi Chrisoulakis:
It's the tech stuff as well, it feels overwhelming. I don't want to do that. I like having the ideas of working in it and doing it. My course launch went really well and I still get sales here and there. But because I'm not talking about it, no one's hearing about it and being reminded about it, I'm not going to make those sales if it doesn't happen. It feels pointless to have done all this work, and I know it's really great, for it to just sit there.
Julia Jones:
I reckon that is the story of so many entrepreneurs ever, that they've created something and then it just sits there. Creating something is maybe more fun and exciting than the maintenance stage of every week, every month, sending an email. That takes consistency and that's not as fun.
Naomi Chrisoulakis:
No, it is not.
Julia Jones:
Your gift with marketing is, since you've got a background as a journalist, you've got this great podcast that I know is really popular, but you're also really good on socials as well. What are the kind of things you do for marketing or what will you do more of when you've finished creating stuff?
What are the kind of things you do for marketing? What will you do more of when you've finished creating stuff? (13:35)
Naomi Chrisoulakis:
What I'm going to do is probably not where my personality lends itself to. I think what I have done that's worked well for me from the beginning was to show up a lot on social media and talk a lot about my personal story and why I'm doing this work. I'm a Leo, and I love to be like, "Yes, let me just talk about myself and here are my opinions." I'm naturally fine with doing that. Whereas I know it can be very hard for people to show up. I definitely have those moments of being like, "I don't want to show up because I don't have makeup on or I'm not feeling it or whatever." It's not like I'm happy to be on there all the time. Turning up, talking to people like they're my friends, which sometimes they do feel like, I'm creating a relationship with them.
Talking about why I'm doing the things that I'm doing, whether it's, ‘Okay, I'm making this food today for a client, let me show it to you and let me talk about what it is that makes it so great for postpartum’. Or whether it's me talking about challenges in motherhood or that moment in postpartum that really helped me or was a real challenge. I think people really look for that kind of connection. That's went well for me.
That's really the basis of the podcast as well, is women coming on and sharing their postpartum experiences. I also have experts, you've been on. I have experts coming on and just sharing their wisdom, their knowledge about postpartum. Helping people understand and process what they're going through, as well as offering advice and tips on how to improve their postpartum experience.
Just showing up consistently and sharing that personal side of things rather than... I know, one of the things that I was doing with some of the postpartum doulas I'd recently been helping was looking at their socials and going, "I don't even see your face on here." If people can't see your face they're not going to hire you because they don't know who you are. You've got someone who's coming into your house who's an intimate stranger who's going to see you with your boobs out. You need to show up for these people and show them who you are. It also means ideally you get rid of the people who aren't for you, the people who don't relate to you. They see that and they go, "Okay, this is not the person for me." Which will hopefully save some hassle down the track. I like social for the most part, until it backfires. Sometimes it does backfire, but for the most part it's good.
Julia Jones:
Can you tell us about when it backfires?
Can you tell us about when social media backfires? (16:45)
Naomi Chrisoulakis:
This week probably is a good example. I did a post which was a carousel. It said basically, ‘Postpartum is not the time for... Let's stop congratulating new mothers to being out and about. Postpartum is the time to rest and nest, not for proving that you can still carry on.’ Because I feel really strongly that we have this cultural conditioning that the quicker you are at the cafe or out and doing things, the more congratulations you're going to get from people. I see women in the supermarket all the time, having a new new baby in a carrier with a three-year-old doing the groceries. I'm like, "Why is someone else not doing that for you? This is bad, but people are going, "Good on you for doing that."
This carousel was talking about that whole thing and me saying, ‘I'm not going to be congratulating you. I'm going to be worrying about your pelvic floor. I'm going to be worrying you don't have the support. I'm going to be worrying that you're going to get postnatal depletion’. It went gangbusters for me. I think it got something like 2000 likes and people sending it all around the place. Predominantly 90% of the feedback was really positive, but I got quite a few people who don't follow me. They'd obviously been sent it or whatever, so they're not used to these conversations that I have on a regular basis. Coming in and going, "This is really judgmental." Because the final post was one of my postcard matches, which is "Lie the fuck down, just lie the fuck down."
People are going, "Well, some people can't just lie down and they've got..." I was like, "I know that. I realize that." It made me feel shitty that I made someone else feel judged or shamed or anything like that. It's really hard to get a nuanced conversation and all of the back and forth into one single Instagram post. Inevitably there's going to be people who misread, don't know the tone, don't know you, so they don't get your whole what you're about. They probably don't even understand the concept of postnatal depletion. It hits something in them, it's a projection, it hits a defensiveness and it triggers them. I totally understand that. And it still feels like shit from my end to get comments from people being like, ‘Ra ra ra ra ra ra ra.’
Julia Jones:
Especially when you know that's not what you meant. It's not even really what you said. It's usually just because people haven't seen the context. It's a really good example. That's happened to me a number of times as well, that people take one sentence and judge you on that without actually understanding the body of work - all of the deeper meaning and subtlety.
I was reflecting recently because Jerry Springer just died, and I was like, "Thank goodness we don't have those kind of shows on TV anymore." Then I was like, "Hang on. That's just now social media." That's where everyone goes for a bitch, a fight and a pile on. It's just part of human nature that I think there's always going to be someone who is just looking for an argument.
Naomi Chrisoulakis:
A hundred percent. A hundred percent. It's been particularly interesting for me to see these people are not part of my usual audience. I'm glad of that because I'd feel worse if it was people who had been following me for years and then went, ‘Hang on, this is not your message’. Whereas those people are going, ‘Yes! Exactly this’.
There were lots of comments from people being like, "But what's wrong? It's good for people to go to a cafe and it's nice for people to go and do a walk." I'm like, "Yeah, okay." I can't even have the conversation. We have to go really back to basics with you.
Julia Jones:
What you're talking about is we shouldn't be prioritizing productivity over deep health and long-term wellbeing. They're missing that.
Thanks for sharing that. What makes you keep going? When it is hard like that and you have those pile on, and not just on social media, but in general it is challenging running your own business. Can you share any moments that you've had with clients, people who've bought your courses or you've done a planning session with that make you go, "Yes, I'm in the right place and this is actually making a difference for people?"
What makes you keep going? Can you share any moments that you've had with clients or people who've bought your courses or you've done a planning session with that make you go, "Yes, I'm in the right place and this is actually making a difference for people?" (21:00)
Naomi Chrisoulakis:
I feel like for every negative moment, and most of the negative moments are in my own head. I do think running a small business is so much about mindset. There's often times that I'm like, "I'm done. I'm burning this all to the ground." For every moment that there's like 20 moments which make me go, "Oh no, this is the work for me and this is actually making a difference." It can often make me cry, some of the messages that I get.
I just recently asked, my last client, I was very slow to ask her for a testimonial, because I finished working with her sometime last year. She sent me just the most beautiful testimonial. I can't even tell you what the words were, but it made me cry. It was so beautiful the way she was just saying how much I helped her.
I've just finished mentoring this group of doulas and I sent them, not a goodbye, but a ‘we're finishing up’ message this past weekend. I just got inundated by these beautiful women saying, ‘Thank you so much. And it's helped me so much’. It means so much to me when I get that feedback. It can feel a bit lonely when you're doing it on your own.
Even though I don't believe you have to get all your validation externally, you do want to know that you're making a difference and that the work's appreciated. I remember someone said to me, "Oh, your voice was in my head, in my postpartum, saying lie the fuck down. Saying about a visitor, am I okay with having my boobs out in front of them?" That to me that makes me feel honored, really honored. Even though they're not my client, I'm not caring for them, what I've said to them has made a difference and helped them even in a tiny way to have a better experience postpartum. Which it's so meaningful, that work is so meaningful to me because I know how important postpartum is. So if you could help someone have a better postpartum, what is better than that!?
Julia Jones:
That's really beautiful. I think that's really true, and it is such an emotional extreme. I was going to say high, but low as well. It's just so emotional. I think people do remember for the rest of their lives those people who were like a little guardian angel for them in that moment. That's beautiful.
Naomi Chrisoulakis:
I know I do. Yeah.
Julia Jones:
Yeah. That's it from me. Thank you, Naomi. If anyone wants to check out the website, it's cocoonbynaomi.com. We'll put all your social links and things in the bio. Is there anything you want to share before we go?
Naomi Chrisoulakis:
I think that's everything. Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Julia Jones:
Thank you for the update. That's been beautiful.
