Meet Kim Gamez, Founder of Sober(ish)
"I was never taught the box. So I've always been thinking outside of the box."
I love being in conversation with other awesome female founders. There’s so much to learn from their stories. Here’s the fourth in a series of interviews with women business owners who are identifying problems, seizing opportunities, and changing the way things are done in their industries. I hope you love them as much as I do.
A self-described “serial entrepreneur,” Kim has founded businesses in both the U.S. and Mexico across multiple categories, including food service, event planning and now product sales within the surging THC/CBD industry.
Her last company, “Mi Padrino,” grew from an idea to over a million users in three years and was acquired by a bridal events company in 2022. Her new venture, “Sober(ish),” is a non-alcoholic marketplace and product line that has quickly surged to over $1 million in sales — all without spending a dime on advertising. Now, she’s helping other entrepreneurs through her role at Michigan State University’s Research Foundation, where she coaches startups across the state.
One note before we dive in… this interview took place before the federal spending bill was passed on November 13th. A provision was quietly added to the bill that “prohibits products containing more than 0.4 milligrams of THC per container,” essentially banning all hemp-derived THC products (think CBD gummies and topical pain relievers, and yes, THC infused drinks).
In response, Kim shared this thoughtful, honest, heartfelt video on Instagram and this post on LinkedIn. I encourage you to watch the video and read about how she’s taking action in the now less than 365 days until the ban goes into effect.
1. I’d love to learn about your origin story. What was your path to entrepreneurship?
Honestly, I was raised by entrepreneurs. I didn’t know a different way. My parents were real estate investors. They own their own real estate firm. So right out of high school, I remember I got $2,000 in gifts for my graduation party. And my dad was like, gosh, you could put a down payment on a house with that. And so at 18 years old, I bought my first duplex because I didn’t know that wasn’t what the normal 18-year-old did.
“I was never taught the box. So I’ve always been thinking outside of the box.”
When it came time to get a corporate job, I remember looking at my parents, specifically my mom, and she was able to attend all of our sporting events. And I remember thinking about my dad and how he wanted that new boat, so he went and hustled to be able to buy a new boat.
And so I thought gosh, with a corporate job, I’m only ever going to make the same amount of money, where when you’re an entrepreneur, if you really want it bad enough, you can maybe figure out a way to make it happen.
So at 18, I invested in that very first rental property. But that same year, I started dating this very cute Mexican man (Hugo), who eventually became my husband at 20. So I was 20 with a husband, and then I found out that I was pregnant.
That same year, I remember my husband telling my dad or my parents that it was always his family’s dream to own a restaurant. And so in our first year of marriage, there was this little hole in the wall bar in our downtown. My dad was going to list it and he said, you know, before I list this, I bet you they would take a land contract. And I said, well, what’s a land contract? It meant you can buy it for little to no money down.
My dad told us that you don’t have to get a bank involved and you could follow Hugo’s family’s dream and open this restaurant. And so again, we were naive [about the restaurant business] – I had waited tables and my husband had line cooked in a restaurant – but we’ve never obviously run any type of company before.
We ended up buying that restaurant on the land contract. A fun fact, you can have a liquor license in the state of Michigan, or at least you could at the time at 18 years old, you could serve the liquor, but you could not consume it. But, you know at 20, I had test recipes for the menu. So it was all in good fun.
We had that restaurant for 17 years. And along the way, even though we didn’t know anything about running a restaurant, what we did well was we really just loved on our customers. We asked them what they liked. We were open all kinds of crazy hours. And I learned what hours they actually came in. What hours were the peak hours.
And now, 20 some years into this, I see that’s customer discovery, learning from your customers, having your customers tell you what they want. Really not necessarily what they say they want, but what they actually want.
And then with that… I didn’t know how to be a bartender, my husband didn’t know how to manage a kitchen. And we had this amazing staff. So, not only did we love on our customers, but we loved on our staff, because we realized at the end of the day, a customer wasn’t going to come in again, or, if they had a complaint, it wasn’t because of my husband and me, it was because maybe a bartender, a server, or something was wrong with their food.
We had to make sure that we took care of the staff knowing that was ultimately taking care of our customers. And that’s continued with me from that restaurant to another restaurant, and a banquet facility.
2. What came next?
While we had the first restaurant, we invested all of our taco money into real estate. Again, just because, I didn’t know any better. I’m like, stocks? Like, what is this? I understand real estate because of my parents.
So we invested more into real estate. We opened another restaurant and a banquet facility. And about that time, we had just around 140 rental units. And we were getting pulled at all angles.
I was not looking for another business, like not at all. But I was helping my niece plan her quinceañera. If you’re not familiar with what a quinceañera is, it’s a coming-of-age celebration for 15 year-old-girls in the Hispanic community. So I was looking online [to find out] how you plan a quinceañera. Is there a checklist for planning?
I was trying to find anything on the internet to help me help her plan this event. And I was shocked. There was nothing online to help families plan. And I thought, well, goodness, if I was planning a wedding, I’ve been to plenty of weddings, but the second I have to actually plan my own wedding, I don’t know how to plan a wedding.
And there’s a million resources to plan a wedding online. Why are there no resources to help these families plan these events? So, I did a little bit of market research and realized there were over 500,000 of these events celebrated in the U.S. every year. And the average quinceañera was around $20,000. So quick girl math. That’s huge.
So, I thought, well, gosh, I don’t know how to, I don’t know how to launch an app. I don’t even know where I would begin. But I thought back to the restaurants. I don’t even know how to turn on these fryers in the kitchen. I have an amazing staff who knows exactly what to do and can bring our ideas to life.
And so with that, I knew I could probably hire a team, which we did. Then I ended up convincing my husband to sell the restaurant and banquet facility and use our savings to invest into launching what was called Mi Padrino.
It was an event planning platform focused on the Hispanic community. We were hoping to have, maybe 100 users the first year. We ended up with 50,000 users the first year. And we had 150,000 users in the second year, and a million in Year Three.
And then, it was ultimately acquired during the pandemic. So it was just kind of mind boggling.
3. How did you market Mi Padrino?
When we launched, I was assuming we would be marketing to the 14-year-old girl who was going to be planning her 15th birthday party. We soon realized she does not plan this. This is her mom’s party. Her mom is living through her daughter. It’s her mom who picks the color. Her mom picks the band. Her mom does everything.
So we’re like, okay, where’s Mama Quinceañera at? She is on Facebook. So we started doing some different ads, just testing different things. But I remember it was crazy. When we first launched the site, I said, let’s put up a Facebook [video] ad. And I know people will respond to this or share this ad with someone just because I know this community I feel like so well.
I just said, do you know anyone planning a quinceañera? There is a new quinceañera app. Because everyone in this community knows someone planning a quinceañera. And that video went viral. We were hoping to get 10 signups or something like that that first night. We had 20,000 hits to our site, and it actually broke our site.
So although it was terrifying the night of, “how is this down and what happened?” It was honestly great because we went back and said, okay, we can’t handle 20,000 hits to the site. But what can we do to the platform so we can handle not only 20,000 hits, but maybe 20 million hits in one night? We were able to identify that early, which was kind of a blessing in disguise.
4. Tell me how Sober(ish) came about?
Mi Padrino was acquired in 2022, and when my contract with that company was up, I was like, “what am I going to do now?” And I had this awesome opportunity to lead entrepreneurship and innovation, a part of the Michigan State University’s Research Foundation, and I thought, wow, they’re going to pay me to give my opinions and help startups the easy way. I want to share all of the knowledge. I hate the fact that I had to just learn it all on my own. I thought, this is a dream job. And I do. I love it.
I am still at Michigan State University. I still love my job there. But in all honesty, always being an entrepreneur, your brain is busy all the time. And so I didn’t know what to do with myself at 4 p.m. when they were like, OK, you’re off work. I’m like, “what do you mean? I don’t have to think about anything all night long. I get weekends off. What?”
Think about this. I was around restaurants, seven days a week, an all-day job. Then I was a landlord. Same thing. No time off. And then I was a startup founder. And so again, you just never have this time off. Very quickly realized I’m a better wife and mother when my brain is busy.
And I realized that I was sharing all these marketing tips and tricks to these companies [at MSU], but knowing that marketing constantly changes – something that’s hot with the algorithm this week might not be next week. So, if I’m out of the game for a year, I’m going to lose it all. Like this sensei is not going to be able to fight. How am I able to teach or train these startups? You know, with all of this, these skills that I’ve mastered, if they’re not relevant in a couple of weeks.
So, I remember at the time I was coaching a company and they were talking about Tik Tok. I told them my kids used that app, but I’ve never really played with it. They were trying to boost a video and wanted to know if I knew anything.
I said, no, I don’t, but you know what? Let me look into it. So with the help of my 15-year-old daughter, I got started creating an account and with the goal of posting a couple of cool videos. No one will know me. I’m 40-years-old. Obviously none of my friends are on TikTok.
So, I threw up the phone and I just started posting videos. Nothing really worked. But at the same time, my mom, who struggles with alcoholism, moved in with us. And I told her there’s like this whole sober curious movement. Let me get some of the products and we can try them.
I remember we got our first order in and I decided to prop up my camera and do a video review because those [product reviews] seem to be hot on this app. Let me see if we can do something that actually has some views. So, we crack open these beverages and do our first review.
And people were just flooding the comment section. Where did you get those products? And they had all these other questions. I thought that’s interesting. So that was kind of the start of my mom and I becoming these mini, sober curious influencers, which was really fun.
Brands were reaching out for us to try their products and they would send us things. And honestly, a lot of the products had cannabis in them, hemp, specifically hemp, not marijuana. And it was really fun. Fun to just experience this new category as someone who was a non-cannabis user and just being vulnerable to the people that were watching the videos.
And I’m thinking, “oh my gosh, this is CBD. Am I going to get high?” And people in our conversation were like, you are a moron. That will not get you high. I didn’t know. But so many women, just like my mom and me were like, wait, how did you feel? Where did you get those products? And I knew that there’s something here. We just kept leaning into that. And that was the early story of what is now Sober(ish).
5. Who’s the Sober(ish) customer?
The Soberi(ish) customer is the 35- to 65-year-old woman who is a non-cannabis user. She was raised in the D.A.R.E. era, as we call it — you know, say no to drugs — but she also can’t hang with the hangovers anymore.
She’s a professional or a mom. A lot of our customers are saying that they’re either watching their weight and the empty calories, but it’s just really, they’re looking for a healthier alternative to alcohol.
6. Tell me about the products you sell on your site?
So when my mom and I started trying these products online, a lot of the brands that were sending us products said, here’s an affiliate link. If you sell anything and you give them your coupon code or this link, we’ll give you a commission.
Originally, I didn’t want the commission. But then I realized we’re creating value for these brands and that I would have a way to track conversions. I put together this simple landing page. It was KimmyG.com. I put the image for each one of the products and links with the affiliate code. I thought maybe we’re creating a couple thousand dollars in value for these brands and maybe we’ll sell a few a month. This will be fun just to see.
We launched that two years ago in August. And we ended up selling $60,000 worth of product in our first month. And I thought, well, damn it. This was supposed to be this fun little hobby with my mom. Now I have a business on my hands.
The customers were speaking. They wanted a place where there the products that have been tried and explained [to them]. As I mentioned, these were non-cannabis customers, just like me, who wanted somebody to actually walk them through what they should be buying. That was the “aha” moment that spun into us launching February of last year, soberish.com, which is a marketplace for all things we consider sober-ish.
We have hemp infused products, through just non-alcoholic wines and spirits, and kind of anything in between. But during the course of us launching the marketplace, I was trying these mocktails, non-alcoholic tequila for example. And I thought, these are delicious, but I really miss that buzz that I was getting from the hemp derived products because this micro-dose buzz really does feel like wine.
That’s how I launched our very first product, which was our Sober(ish) Drops. It’s a small bottle that has 30 servings. You can carry it in your purse. So, if you’re out and having a mocktail or a Diet Coke, you can add one drop into your drink and get that wine-like buzz in 15 minutes.
Then, about six months into Sober(ish), with both the marketplace and our singular product, I was trying to describe these products, sometimes virtually, without having somebody taste it. It’s hard. And I thought, why is there not just like a vodka flavor replacement? Like an Absolute Citron or a Bacardi or a Smirnoff raspberry.
Why is there not a simple brand flavor replacement for a particular vodka? We were in a meeting and I thought why not a Sober(ish) berry or a Sober(ish) citrus. You can make it the exact same way as if you were using a berry vodka. I didn’t really want to launch another product, but I thought it should exist. So we started out with shots. Let’s do a test and see if they sell. We launched a line of four flavored shots and that was our second product.
And again, just really leaning into, what are the customers saying? What kind of products resonate with them? In this case, it was something that they easily understood versus the drops, where the customer was not used to putting a dropper of something in their drink.
Now with a shot on the other hand, they were used to making a cocktail with some type of liquid, like a shot and making a cocktail. And so we thought that form factor was a little bit better for her [our customer] and it’s proven to be right. Our shots have been really successful.
7. What has been your experience fundraising for your businesses?
It can be a double-edged sword, because at least for Mi Padrino, our whole business model was the eyeballs game, similar to Facebook. Once you have all the eyeballs, you can monetize them. And so we were just straight burning capital every month. It was tough. We knew we needed so many users per city to turn on, because we had a vendor platform. Think about bakeries, DJs, photographers who could list their businesses, similar to Yelp, to get in front of our user base. And so we needed the users there [on our site]. We had to spend a lot of money to get them there to use all of our free tools.
This meant we had to raise capital, but it was really hard. I don’t know if you can see in the pictures behind me, I have five kids. And so what happened when I invested, when I convinced my husband to sell the restaurant as well as invest all of our savings into this business, guess who showed up pregnant two weeks later?
This girl. And I’m like, what am I going to do now? I don’t even know how to do this thing called building an app. I don’t know one thing really about raising money from investors, but I guess we’re going to figure it out with a baby bump. And it proved to be just as difficult as you read about. And it was even more difficult being pregnant.
I’m a pretty good salesperson when I’m passionate about something. I wholeheartedly believed in the idea that I didn’t feel like I was selling. I really was giving the opportunity for these people to be a part of this with me, but it was tough.
I pitched easily 250 times, if not more, to get to 15 yeses. And this was prior to Zoom being as cool as it is now. So I had to fly all over the country to pitch to investors. Two weeks after I had my daughter, I was on a plane [with her] and pitching an event in upstate New York.
When it came time for Mi Padrino to be acquired, I don’t know what was harder, raising the money or selling the company. Everyone [all of my investors] had an opinion. It was like herding cats to get everyone to sign off on it. I thought that should have been the easiest time to work with my investors.And it actually was probably the hardest because everyone had to agree and it was just really tough.
So when I started this company [Sober(ish)], I thought either it’s going to be profitable from day one, or I’m just going to invest my own money and we will grow this as far as possible, but I’m not raising a penny from investors.
Fast forward. I haven’t raised money and I haven’t invested a penny of my own money. We have been profitable since day one. I actually used the money that TikTok gave me from their creator fund to start the business. I used that first $400 they sent me to pay for the Shopify, you know, website or whatever that I built.
We haven’t put any money into this company. I do work for free. I haven’t paid myself anything. But now as we’re growing Sober(ish), so we’ve been a hundred percent direct to consumer. So we can ship directly to our consumers at home, but consumers at the end of the day want to buy beverages in-store. They don’t want to wait three days. They know they’re going somewhere tonight. They want to stop by their local, you know, liquor store, grocery store and buy what they want for the weekend.
The whole plan this year was to launch in retail. Well, retail is tricky because there’s distributors, then there’s larger retailers. And typically they have net terms, whether that’s 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days. You have to pay for the inventory up front. And it’s not just the inventory up front. It’s that you have to pay a deposit on the inventory that you’re going to create to get the inventory to sell the inventory to distributors to eventually get paid in 30, 60, 90 days. It’s literally six months before that first payment on your deposit is actually paid back to you by the distributor.
So although we’ve been very profitable, I don’t know how comfortable I am going into retail because I’d like to grow as fast in retail as I have direct-to-consumer, but I could see there to be a cashflow crunch. With that, I have been discussing whether to raise capital or not, but for now, we’re growing slowly.
I want to do it. I’m trying to do it exactly how we did it, direct-to-consumer. It’s one thing online for me to be able to show a video of me talking about a product. For example, our shots. You’re going to feel like this. You’re going to taste like this. On a retail shelf, that bottle has to say that entire message. If our packaging isn’t correct, or the container that they’re in on display isn’t correct, or the little shelf talker isn’t correct, they’re not going to sell. I need to make sure all of that is correct before I go all-in.
And so again, just like with customer discovery, we’re seeing what works, what doesn’t, what flavors resonate in-store that maybe don’t online or vice versa.
It’s just been fun that we’re in probably a dozen retail locations now. It’s nothing crazy, but we’re learning so much about what’s moving on the shelf to actually build up, it’s almost like a roadmap for how to go after larger retail.
Then we should be able to back into what will that cost? And then I hope the case is that I’m going to need to raise capital, I will.
8. What’s your approach been to team building?
I think I was blessed learning about that early on by not having the skills for my first business. It was the restaurant and I started making a list… you’re going to need a cook, a server, a busser, and a bartender. And because I don’t know how to do any of those things, they have to be good at their job.
I had to do research to make sure that they’ve managed a bar before and all these things. That approach goes with a tech startup. I don’t know how to build an app. I need to find some developers. And like there‘s different kinds of chefs, there’s different types of developers. So again, researching.
And because I’m very vocal, I shared the idea anywhere I could and people would say, you know, I love your idea. What can I help you with? I’d say, I’m really looking for a developer. I don’t, I don’t know what kind of developer, because I don’t know anything about that, but I need somebody who can build this for me.
And just because I was vulnerable, people said, all right, girl, I think you’re going to need a front end developer and back end developer. I’m like, I don’t know what that means. And they’re asked, well, what kind of language are you going to build? And I’m like, in English? And they’re like, no, no, what kind of language is the code? And I’m like, computer language?
I just had no idea. I will leave that to whoever I hire to build it in their language of choice. I was so oblivious, Katherine. I had just no idea, but again, being vulnerable and putting myself out there, people just genuinely wanted to help me. They’re thinking, this poor blonde has no idea what she’s doing. Also, when I was building Mi Padrino and pitching to raise capital, there was always an ask around building on my team.
And I don’t know if it’s just luck, but I would have people say, hey, if you need help, let me help you. So, I’d bring them on part-time. I never brought anybody on full-time at the beginning Mi Padrino or Sober(ish). It was always contract employees. Why? Because I couldn’t afford them full-time and I could fire them if they didn’t do what they said they’re going to do.
That’s been a recipe of success. With my last company, I could not afford the senior engineer at Amazon, but he wanted to help me for whatever reason. And when I raised my first just over a million dollars, part of that raise was to bring Alex on full-time. It went from a contract position, with him helping me a couple hours a week, to hopefully, getting him to love me enough and love the mission enough and the thing that we were building enough that he really wanted to leave that secure job and help us. And he did.
Right now with with Sober(ish), it’s been the same thing.
9. In your experience, what are the differences between running service-based and product-based businesses?
Well, for one, whether it’s a service business like Mi Padrino or a service business like a restaurant, you can anticipate your team costs. With the restaurant there was a math equation for your employees. If you had more than a hundred tables in a day, you knew you’re going to have to have another cook on. With Mi Padrino it was the same thing. We had a sales team that worked 1:1 with vendors and, each one needed a new salesperson.
On the product side [with Sober(ish)], I still have the same four employees as when I was selling 40 products a day. And now I just sold 450 products yesterday. I have the same team. It did not require any more bodies.
That’s what I would say is the biggest difference, the team size. That said, if I was going into retail, I would have to add the sales support there too.
The other difference on the product side is the inventory. And we’re still learning every day. It’s hard to project, when we’ve reached 30 million people a month on social media. You never know which [organic] video is going to pop off and we’re going to sell through one of the SKUs.
Why? Who knows? The algorithm is an interesting thing. It’s easier when you’re just putting ads out and you can say, you know, I’m going to get Y amount of sales by investing this amount into ads in.
When you’re banking on 50% of your sales coming organically, it can be a surprise to see what works. My experience of this was when we launched the drops and people were asking, what were those drops you put in that recipe?
I thought, I know I need to create a lot of content, and I don’t even have my hair done, but you know what? I got this silly can opener that takes the top off of the can. I’m going to talk about these drops and try this can opener.
So I prop open my phone again and I look like hot hell, and I’m like, alright, you want to know about these drops? Well, I’m going to try this can opener while I tell you about these drops. I just started taking the top of the can off with the can opener. And I’m talking about why we created them [the drops] and whatever else came to mind. And then I’m like, damn, this thing is stuck.
And you know what? It must’ve been entertaining because I have millions of views on this ridiculous video that has now produced millions of dollars in revenue for those silly drops. Did I think that it was gonna go viral? No idea. I would have put on some mascara. Maybe I would have maybe thrown on a bra. But no, it probably wouldn’t have worked if I would have looked halfway decent. It’s just crazy how things work.
Back to inventory… it’s brutal, brutal, just because you don’t know. You just don’t know what things are going to move. You might have a hunch that something does really well. But the rate that we’re growing, even for Black Friday this year, it’s like, what would we do last year?
Last year, we had 80 sales a day on a very, very good day. Now we have anywhere between 400 and 500 orders a day. And last year, we sold out of our Black Friday special three days. Which means we have no baseline for the rest of November or December because we were out of stock.
So here we are wondering, well, what are we going to do this year? That’s exactly how I feel with inventory most days. It’s terrible.
10. What other challenges have you faced in your businesses?
So many challenges. Whether it was pitching to investors or talking to our partners, I kept getting the feedback like, why should we trust you? You’re not even a Latina? And so just knowing about our customer base and understanding her, I was able to bring that back into conversations.
Same thing with Sober(ish). I was a non-cannabis user before I started this. I keep saying I have no business running this business because I’m just an outsider, but I think I’m using that to my superpower because I understand our customer.
I understand her more than anyone else because I was her. I was there. That professional mom who couldn’t hang with her hangovers, was on a weight loss journey, was tired of drinking her empty calories.
“And so I feel like, if anything, the unknowns and being the outsider have been the biggest challenges, but they’ve also been like my, honest to God, superpower, because I don’t have a baseline to go from.”
I think if I was a Latina, knowing the language and being immersed in the culture, I might’ve built the platform completely differently and built it for myself instead of building it for the community. But on the flip side of that, I’m building Sober(ish) for me. Our customer is just like me.
That said, with Sober(ish), people think I’m selling drugs online. I mean, it’s just tough. Being an entrepreneur, gosh, what’s the saying? If it was easy, everyone would do it. It’s not easy. And so just that constant like pep talk of you’ll get it, you’ll get through it, you’ll do it, is sometimes exhausting, but it’s all hard.
11. What advice would you have to someone launching or scaling a business?
I always say, if you want to dream big, you have to think like chess. Meaning you need to think 10 steps ahead and then back up. How are you going to get there? And then, that very first step has to be very small.
I’ve used this analogy before. Let’s say you want to create a scarf company and you want to sell scarves globally. You want to be known as the whatever scarf lady. You want to have your scarves in all the fancy department stores.
You need to hand sew those first couple scarves. That is not scalable, but you need to get them in front of people, see how they use them, see how they wash them, see how much they’re going to pay for them. Then you’re going to take the next step and do 10 scarves and see how you’re going to market them.
What do people actually say about them? It’s a very manual process of getting somewhere and then taking a step and saying, is my scarf different than the scarves that are where I want to be? And if it’s not, okay, is my story big enough? Do I have a different skill set that’s going to get me to be able to compete with them? Or is there something really magical about what I’m doing that the big guys aren’t doing?
Just start small, love your customers, love your staff. Because at the end of the day, not only should you just be a descent human and be great to your employees, but they will make or break your business, whether it’s a scarf company, a restaurant, an app, and you’re going to spend a hell of a lot of time with them. So you might as well like them. And so, just love on your staff, really understand your customers.
Also, try to put aside your personal biases. With the scarf example, if your favorite color is blue and you think blue is going to be the next thing, but your customer’s telling you she wants ivory, make that ivory scarf. Really listen to your customers, love on your staff, start small, but keep your head up.
And dream big, because you don’t want to get into habit of making all the scarves yourself. You have to think like, okay, I’m making it this way, but is there a way that, how am I going to scale this? Is there, you know, a company that can sew this way? Because if it can’t scale, then don’t do it. To get there, give yourself permission to think outside of the box. Challenge yourself… why can’t you scale this way? Could I bring someone on to do things differently?.
If you were to start a company today that you wanted to grow large – nationwide, globally, or even locally, for God’s sake, right now, social media is your secret weapon.
Know that people want to buy from people. Right now, they’re scared that they’re going to buy something online from someone overseas that is just going to steal their money. The more that you can put your face out there, your story, your why behind your product or your service, the more people will want to take a bet on you, the person.
When you’re showing up, show the good, bad, and the ugly of growing a company. I feel with that approach people trust me because I’m very vocal about things that are happening and why I’m doing something. When you’re starting your company, just start sharing your journey. Maybe it’s with a customer wearing the scarf. Maybe something happens to it. And you’re like, oh, this thread did whatever and that didn’t work. And you’re sharing that with the world. And guess what? When you start launching them [the scarves], people will buy and you won’t have to pay for ads.
When we launched Sober(ish), I said to my mother, if we did a hundred thousand dollars this year, wouldn’t that be crazy? And that was the goal that we set for ourselves. And we ended up doing a million dollars in our first year of sales without ads, press, or investment.
And it was just because I leaned into telling our story, telling the highs and the lows and sharing it, loving on our customers, loving on staff. It all worked. And I didn’t have to pay Meta. I didn’t have to pay Google $1 to get those customers.
Now I am. Now, because I know the game and I want to grow larger. But if you can do that and keep all that money to yourself to grow the company, while learning what works organically, you can convert those high performing posts to paid ads.
And when you create on social media, if it works well organically, you can convert that to an ad, just like that crazy can opener video I recorded on the fly. That did really well and then we put money behind it and made it an ad and it’s like our best performing ad.
12. What do you wish you had known then when you started Mi Padrino and Sober(ish) that you now know today?
I think the biggest thing is to dream big. You know, when I first launched Mi Padrino, when I just had the idea for it, I thought, wow, there’s a half a million of these parties [every year].
What if we could help a thousand moms? Then I would doubt myself and say, well, gosh, Kim, in our town, there’s probably only 10 women who maybe would be able to use this. Do you really think you could get a hundred, let alone a thousand? I just had all this like self-doubt.
I refused to think really big, but I thought even at a hundred moms buy and they are paying X, Y, Z money, it can work. And it’s probably only going to cost us a couple hundred dollars a month to have an app. I just had no idea. But I didn’t allow myself to think big until it happened – when we launched that first app and it went crazy.
We had 20,000 hits and 20,000 people wanted to plan their events with us. What?! Then the next year it blew up again. And I thought, oh my gosh, you can be just this. I always say, I’m a six-foot-tall blonde from Jackson, Michigan, with five little kids, who has an idea for a platform and you get to dream dream big.
That was a sobering moment. Now, I don’t think small. People are like, oh, you could set up at a farmer’s stand or you could do this [Sober(ish)]. And I’m like, I’m not doing this to set up at a farmer’s stand. I’m doing this to sell a million bottles.
Just that permission to tell yourself, you don’t have to be someone special to do the big thing. You just have to allow yourself to dream that big.
Learn more about Kim and Sober(ish) in these online spaces:
And in case you’re wondering about the story behind the name, Sober(ish) comes from…
“The original name for the company was my TikTok handle, which my daughter created, which was Kim Gamez 301. And my daughter was like, that is so lame. She deleted it. And she was like, Kimmy G. And I was like, am I a stripper? Am I like a DJ? Is this my stage name?
She’s like, ma, just leave it. It’s way better than the name you created. And I was like, Kimmy G it is. So when I was trying to come up with the company and remember that landing page I talked about, I was like, what, what am I going to call it? What’s the domain going to be? I was like, Kimmy G LLC is what I named the company initially. Then I created KimmyG.com. [And I knew}, we needed to come up with a better name.
And so it was just spitballing maybe over a couple sober-ish cocktails. And I’m like, you know, we’re not sober, we’re sober curious, try it to like it, and I don’t know, ish, like, kind of sober-ish.
Which made me go to GoDaddy and check to see if soberish.com was available. It was expensive, but I purchased it because I thought it was well worth it. And I, you know, did a quick search, called my girlfriend from high school, who’s a trademark attorney. And I asked her, do you think we could get this name? And she’s like, yeah, I think we could. So that’s how the name came about.
#ICYMI
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