E25 : Valentina Milanova (Daye)

From pitching to 180 investors, developing prototype products in her Kitchen freezer, hear the journey and sacrifices Valentina Milanova has taken create real change for women’s health with her brand, Daye. This is a phenomenal story that highlight the systemic change that still needs to happen for not only women’s health, but for women leading in business.

Included in this episode:

• The purpose behind Daye and why Valentina wanted to make a change in women’s health.
• The first steps Valentina took to build the innovative CBD tampons.
• How Valentina built the prototypes on her kitchen table
• How she funded the first prototypes and business at the beginning
• A real look into securing seed funding, including how she built her pitch, who she approached and a behind the scenes.
• The reality of investment of females. Only 1.8% of all funding goes to female founders.
• Securing 4.2 million in seed funding and the next steps in building the brand.
• Putting a team together (including operations, brand, design engineering)
• How Valentina started marketing the brand. Finding what worked (SEO/organic through a value-added blog, influencers) and what didn’t (PR). 
• Going against investor opinion and taking on an artists to build the brand and making a change in women’s health product branding. 
• Launching with a subscription model.
• The reality of launching a purpose-led brand that hasn’t been done so far. Battling the many barriers of women and working so hard (high levels of stress) that Valentina developed quite serious physical health conditions.
• Learning how to manage stress of being a founder.
• Highs, lows, and lessons learnt from the journey.