Flora's April Updates

Hello hello! 🌷

Welcome back to another edition of Flora’s monthly updates! We had a month full of milestones, exciting new connections, development, and setting ourselves up for a busy May. THIS MONTH WENT SO FAST. Here’s a brief recap:

Flora Turns 1! 🥳

You’ve probably already seen a million photos from this event if you follow us on Instagram or LinkedIn (and if you don’t, you should 😉). But we had so much fun celebrating Flora’s 1-year party!

We were surrounded by an amazing mix of family, friends, mentors, coworkers, and fellow entrepreneurs—it was the perfect group to celebrate with. Sharing our vision for Flora and how we’re working toward it is always meaningful, but getting to do that with the people who’ve been with us since day one? That’s the best part.

Thank you to everyone who came, you mean the world to us. And don’t worry if you missed this one; there will definitely be more! We’re already excited to keep growing and making these celebrations bigger each year.

We are also thankful for Melissa, the owner of La Boulangerie Marguerite for hosting us. This was a wonderful event space and if you’re ever in NE Minneapolis go check out her place, we highly recommend the pretzel bites.

And of course, this wouldn’t have been possible without the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship, who so generously sponsored the event. We’re endlessly grateful for our alma mater and the resources it continues to provide. Roll Toms! 💜💜

Our Website is Live🥳

Well, we’ve always had a landing page, but now you can find a little more info about us. While it’s still very basic, we’re excited to share a bit more—and hopefully boost our SEO. If you haven’t Googled Grow with Flora yet... let’s just say, it’s a lot of plant companies and not much of us haha.

We’re excited to keep adding resources to this page and getting it in front of more parents ahead of our launch. It’s exciting to get these little baby steps out of the way.

Want to check it out?? Click here » https://www.growwithflora.app/

Met Our Team of Developers

Team Flora is now growing! We have started our partnership with Prime Digital Academy and now have a team of 5 building our MVP! We were lucky to receive a development grant from The Owatonna Business Development Center to make this connection and bring Flora 1.0 to life for FREE! More details to come, but you can expect a working prototype by July. 😊 

Course content development

We have had a big development in our course material writing! We now have 30 micro-courses written out for girls to learn from. Some micro-courses to give examples are, “How to talk to friends about puberty”, “How to build your emergency period kit”, and “What’s normal, busting period myths”.

(P.S. Justina here👋…Payton has crushed this and deserves a million kudos for how awesome these have turned out).

Networking Wins of April

The Flora team attended our first networking event as co-founders: the MN Founders Pickleball Tournament! Although we didn’t win, it was a great way to get more immersed in the local startup ecosystem. This month, we also had an exciting meeting with Kristen Lilla, a sex therapist who has written several puberty books and shared fantastic advice on how to get our content out there. Finally, we’re thrilled to share a major connection—Dr. Chattha, a Pediatric Gynecologist from Mayo Clinic, will be partnering with us to medically review our micro-courses!

Our Instagram Glow Up

If you follow us on Instagram, you may have noticed a recent glow-up to our feed. That’s 100% thanks to Quincy, who has officially taken over our socials! She’s taken a huge weight off our shoulders and has made our feed more aligned with our branding while creating more engaging content. We highly encourage you to check it out, as well as her other work!

A Sneak Peek into May:

As we look to May, we have a BIG month ahead. We are working towards our Global Finals for The Fowler Global Social Innovation Challenge on May 30th & 31st. We will be competing against multiple countries in this amazing competition and hoping to secure some additional capital!

We are also setting up school conversations to work on our B2B business model and get the learn more about the opportunities of getting into the education system.

Continued MVP development will be a theme for May and we will have updates on what we have built by the end of the month—stay tuned!

We also want to invite everyone to sign up for our Flora Waitlist —> HERE This is a major KPI for our competition, and your support will help us build momentum as we move closer to launching our MVP. We pinky promise we won’t spam you or sell your data😅 

A Couple of Needs:

🌷We are currently looking into the possibility of crowdfunding to help us develop our app. If you have gone this route before, or have experience helping others, we would love to hear your opinions. Whether you loved it, or its one of your biggest entrepreneurial regrets, we want to hear it!

🌷With development getting started, we are looking for more connections with parents that have daughters ages 6-14. Particularly to interview, but also to meet potential beta testers for the future. If you know of anyone, send us an email!

🌷We do have a few doctors and educators lined up to have us review content, but the more the merrier! We want as many eyes as possible to review our content quickly and make sure our courses are not only age appropriate, but also accurate.

If anyone popped into your mind for any of these, shoot us an email [email protected] . We look forward to making more connections!

Oof! That ended up being much longer than I expected. If you made it all the way through, we appreciate you! Cheers to an incredibly fun month, and a challenging month ahead that we can’t wait to tackle.

Happy May everyone, see you next month!

xx,

Justina & Payton