Why You Can't Run Ads Without This: The Marketing Foundation That Built My 7-Figure Business
Dear FoundHer...Real Founder Stories for Women Small Business Owners
Lindsay Pinchuk
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
In honor of Mother's Day, get $200 off a new Dear FoundHer... Forum membership through the month of May. Join the community built for women business owners over 40 who are building real businesses on their own terms. JOIN US INSIDE HERE, no code necessary to save.
If you're a small business owner who's been told to run ads to grow your business, and you're spending money on Meta or Google ads that aren't working, this episode is for you.
In this solo episode of Dear FoundHer…, host Lindsay Pinchuk breaks down why ads alone won't grow a small business, and the marketing foundation almost nobody is teaching women entrepreneurs to build first. Drawing on the same playbook that took Bump Club and Beyond from $500 of startup capital to a seven-figure exit, Lindsay walks through the three types of partnerships every small business owner should be running, the exact moment she finally turned on paid ads at Bump Club (year 7-8, not year 1), and how she's running the same playbook right now to grow Dear FoundHer.
This is the foundational episode for May 2026 on Dear FoundHer…, kicking off a full month focused on partnerships as the most underrated growth strategy for women business owners over 40.
WHAT YOU'LL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE
- Why "ads are an amplifier, not a foundation" and what that actually means for your marketing budget
- The three types of partnerships every small business should be running (most founders are running zero)
- How Lindsay used audience swaps, expert co-created content, and brand partnerships to grow Bump Club and Beyond to seven figures without paid ads for 7-8 years
- The smarter way to run paid ads when you're finally ready (hint: not to your homepage)
- How a paid Huggies campaign funded Bump Club's email list growth, and how you can structure similar deals
- The exact 5-step plan to start running partnerships in your business this week
- Why Lindsay is running the same playbook right now at Dear FoundHer, and what year five looks like when the foundation is built
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to another episode of Dear Founder. I am your host, Lindsay Pinchuk, and I am so glad that you're here. |
| 0:06.5 | Two weeks ago, I was standing in a room in Roslyn, New York, looking out at 250 women. |
| 0:13.7 | It was the latest stop on the Deer Fountain Live tour with Sunny and Jen. |
| 0:17.8 | That's Jen Sherman from Peloton and her best friend Pam Sunshine, |
| 0:21.3 | two 50-something women who pivoted into their second acts and are absolutely killing it, |
| 0:26.7 | living their best lives. They're my partners. We run this event series together, |
| 0:30.7 | and that night was one of our best shows that we've done. Here's the thing I want you to |
| 0:35.4 | understand about that room. We didn't run a single |
| 0:38.7 | ad to fill it. We didn't pay for promotion. We didn't have a viral moment. We had partnerships. |
| 0:45.2 | Ten businesses partnered with us for the event. Their logos were on the signage. We mentioned them |
| 0:50.2 | from the stage. We sent a follow-up email featuring all of them. And in exchange, they posted |
| 0:55.3 | about the event on their channels, bringing their communities to ours and bringing ours to theirs. |
| 1:00.4 | Over 20 women from inside our networking community, the Deer Founder Forum, were in that room |
| 1:06.0 | that night. Some of those women were the partner businesses themselves. Others were members |
| 1:10.8 | who came to support, |
| 1:12.1 | came to network, and to meet other partners. The whole event was held up by partnerships layered |
| 1:18.0 | on top of partnerships. 250 women, no ad spend, just relationships. And I'll tell you, when I was |
| 1:26.7 | standing there looking out at that room, |
| 1:28.5 | I thought to myself, this is exactly what I've been trying to teach women for two decades. |
| 1:34.6 | This. So today, I want to talk about why partnerships are the most underrated marketing |
| 1:40.1 | strategy in small business and why if you're trying to grow your business right now, |
| 1:45.0 | this is the foundation you have to build before you do almost anything else, including running |
... |
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