I am enjoying interviewing professionals and mom bosses about their line of work or their side hustles. Today I am sharing an interview with the lovely Carly of The Mamma’s List.
Tell us about yourself and your motherhood website The Mammas List.
Hi there! I’m Carly and I’m a full-time working mom of two little girls, ages 5 and 1. By day I work at a Fortune 500 company in marketing, and by night I chase kids, run The Mamma’s List (TML), and occasionally try to have a conversation or two with my husband.
Since the girls came along I have never been happier – or busier. I remember I used to think I was busy with work and trying to get to the gym 3-5 times a week. I haven’t seen a gym five times in one week in years. But, while my free time has been zapped, one thing that didn’t leave with motherhood was my anxiety.
As a first-time mom, I was incredibly anxious, and spent hours upon hours on google, ensuring I was getting the “best” products, that my daughter was hitting her milestones, and checking on every single cold symptom on the planet. Seriously, I spent over 10 hours researching her first tube of sunscreen. And I knew that there had to be a better way. If I’d had a single source I fully trusted, I wouldn’t have needed to spend all my free time researching 75 opinions on diaper cream.
The Mamma’s List is my personal mission to help new moms make the transition to motherhood, one woman at a time. The business is built to support new moms from pregnancy through postpartum, infancy, and the toddler years. If you’ve got a question (or 50) I probably had it too, and I researched it on google. And now I’m hoping to make this phase easier for you.
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What inspired you to launch this blog and business?
As I mentioned above, I felt like becoming a mom hit me like a ton of bricks. I felt like I was failing at everything. At motherhood, at my job, at being a wife, friend, and keeping my house clean.
I am a person who thrives on routine, planning, and having her life in order. Having a baby took my entire world and turned it upside down. As I was learning to redefine myself as a working mom, I had so many doubts and questions.
After making it through that challenging first year, I knew I wanted to help other women make the transition to motherhood. It was the most transformative experience of my life, but it was still so hard! My goal is to make things easier for moms as they enter motherhood.
How does The Mammas List help reduce the stress and mental load of new motherhood?
A lot of what I share on my website are how-tos, preparation checklists, and free courses on important topics for moms-to-be and new moms. I hope that by giving women pre-made checklists, budgeting templates, and information, it reduces some of the anxiety and stress they’re no doubt feeling through this time.
While I know nothing “done-for-you” is ever perfect, I feel like it’s important to give people a starting point. Whether it’s a registry checklist, baby prep course, or a breastfeeding overview — women need an anchor point and somewhere to start.
If you feel like I’m too in the weeds, that’s fine. If you want to get more granular after you’ve read my stuff — awesome. My goal is to give every woman a baseline and make things just a little bit easier.
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What resources do you share with your readers?
I mentioned a few of them above, but my two most popular free resources are a Baby Prep Checklist Powerpack, and a Breastfeeding mini-course. They’re both geared towards moms-to-be, but the breastfeeding course is also great for very newly breastfeeding moms as they get the hang of things.
Best resources for moms-to-be:
- Baby Prep Checklist Powerpack: This checklist powerpack will help you get confident you’re ready for your baby, even if you have a zillion things left on your not-yet-made to-do list
- Free Breastfeeding mini-course: This mini-course will help you get off to a fast start breastfeeding and successfully breastfeed your newborn. Even if you’ve never changed a diaper. Or held a baby. At the end of five days, you’ll have everything you need for success, as well as tools to overcome any obstacle you face along the way.
- Five Day Crash Course for Baby Prep: If you’re pregnant and overwhelmed with everything you need to do to get ready for your new baby, this is for you. This five-day email course covers everything from pregnancy through delivery in bite-size pieces of information.
Best resource for new moms:
- Breastfeeding Schedule Cheat Sheet (for currently breastfeeding moms): Stop stressing over how much your baby is eating. Find out the range of nursing options for infants from three months throughout the first year.
- Free Breastfeeding mini-course (if you’re newly breastfeeding, the mini-course described above might still help you out!)
I understand you launched a book! Give us the deets on Breastfeeding Breakthrough: From Stuck to Success ebook.
I wrote this ebook as the next level to the Breastfeeding Basics Mini-Course. Breastfeeding as a new mom is SO hard. It’s one of the most rewarding things you can do with your baby, but it’s not always sunshine and roses. And almost every mom will tell you she hit some roadblocks along the way.
Breastfeeding kind of takes over your life at first, especially if things aren’t going well. I wanted to provide a comprehensive resource that moms could refer back to for information, especially if things got tough. Not having a foundation for breastfeeding or the critical information about supply and demand is a huge reason why so many moms quit breastfeeding before they’d like to.
I wanted to bring a breastfeeding education opportunity in an easy-to-digest format. Sometimes the two-hour in-person classes just aren’t enough. I remember holding a baby doll in the cradle position, but I don’t think that helped me learn to breastfeed my actual baby one bit. I created the Breastfeeding Breakthrough Ebook for moms who either wanted a solid foundation before they started breastfeeding or for moms who were in the early phases of breastfeeding and were struggling.
Tell us about your newest product, The Registry Fairy.
The Registry fairy is a done-for-you registry guide that takes the guesswork out of building your baby registry. We cover everything from where to register (at least two to three places), how to get everything set up and maximize your completion discount, and obviously what the best items are for your family. If you’ve ever wondered WHY a certain product is the best, or which version you should consider of a brand – this is for you.
You’ll get done-for-you spreadsheets so you can track all your items, your budget, and where you registered for each gift, and three in-depth videos with all my baby registry top tips. The Registry Fairy answers all your questions and keeps everything easy to understand so you can just ditch the overwhelm that comes with picking out all the stuff.
The best news is that you can get through the entire course in about an hour and a half, even after sifting through my top registry picks and reading reviews online. It’s one of the best foundational things you can do for yourself as you begin to set up your registry.
Trust me – save yourself the headache and hop into the videos. You’ll probably learn so much more than you wanted to know about every category of baby item, but it will save you tons of research in the long run.
What are some of your favorite things about running your business?
I LOVE meeting and talking to other moms. And I love helping new moms even more. Knowing that I’ve made someone’s day or week easier is so motivating to me. A group of moms is such a powerful thing.
I have a Facebook group for pregnant and postpartum moms, and it’s amazing to hear everyone’s stories. Moms give such good advice, and while the main goal of my business (and my presence in the group) is to help and encourage everyone along the way – it’s a nice benefit to be able to collaborate and learn from other moms as well.
What are some challenges you ran into when starting your business?
Oh, you mean the challenges I still face every day? Lol. Not knowing where to start or what to focus on. When you’re starting a business and learning from the ground up it’s so easy to feel like you have to do all the things. Or to only focus on the one thing that worked for that one person you follow on Instagram.
I work on my business alongside a corporate career, so there’s truly never enough time to do everything that I’d like to do. It’s really become about focusing on where I can move the needle in a meaningful way.
Right now, that’s in my Facebook group, and with my online courses. But learning all the technical aspects of blogging as well as everything I needed to know about online business definitely bogged me down in the first couple of years.
I’m about four years in and still learning every day, and honestly, still refining my business model into what works best for my life and my customers. But, I take it day by day and learned after baby #2 came along to give myself a little more grace.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And while patience isn’t my strongest virtue, I’m committed to the business and the women I can serve along the way.
Any advice you want to give fellow moms?
This is just a season. No matter what phase you’re in, it’s a season. While it may feel like it will last forever (especially if you’re in the sleepless newborn phase) one day you’ll wake up out of the blue and realize you’ve moved on.
You’ll be in a new season with new challenges, and everything you think you know about your baby or parenting may flip on its head. There isn’t a guidebook for this, and you’re doing an awesome job. Even if you’ve had peanut butter sandwiches every night for dinner for a week, or you don’t remember what day it was when the baby had a bath. You’re the best mom for your baby, and they love you more than anyone in the whole world.
If you would like to be interviewed for my side hustle series, get in touch.
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