1 session inside Boa
Sarah Davidson
Co-founder, Matcha Maiden
Sarah Davidson is the co-founder of Matcha Maiden, which she started as a side hustle while working as a corporate lawyer, and the host of the podcast Seize the Yay. She built Matcha Maiden into a global product business alongside her husband and business partner, took it into Urban Outfitters in the United States, and went through an accelerator with Chobani before the company was bought by investors. She now runs several businesses and produces The Archive podcast with Rosalia Ruschan and Lana Wilkinson.
The session
What Sarah teaches
Use a future regret test to make the big, scary calls
Sarah calls it her future regret management matrix. When Urban Outfitters placed an order she could only fill by leaving her legal job to pack for roughly seven days straight, she asked what 80-year-old her and 10-years-from-now her would regret more. Trying and failing while first to market, or staying safe and watching the window close. Law would still be there a year later, the retailer would not.
From Sarah Davidson: going global, partnerships and knowing when to stop →Split your list into today, tomorrow and later, and only work today
Sarah physically writes a list every day and sorts every item into three buckets. If it is not a today job, it moves off the page so she does not carry it. Her rule against distraction came from her husband: she was worrying about shipping matcha to Afghanistan when they could not yet ship to Caulfield North. Be discerning about what is genuinely urgent, because busy work like fixing the font on a post going out in two weeks gives you the tick without the progress.
From Sarah Davidson: going global, partnerships and knowing when to stop →Partner with brands that own the other moments in your customer's day
Matcha Maiden stopped marketing as though matcha was the customer's whole identity. They mapped the rest of that person's day: fitness, activewear, plant-based milk. Then they ran joint giveaways, events and goodie bags with those brands, including repeated activations with Lululemon. Ten businesses running one competition could each pick up around 15,000 new email addresses off a shared consumer.
From Sarah Davidson: going global, partnerships and knowing when to stop →Collaborate with your closest category rival instead of fighting them
Golden Grind sold turmeric powder, a product close enough to look like a competitor, and the two brands were eventually bought by the same company. Matcha Maiden worked with them constantly and ran deals selling both products together, on the logic that a customer drinks matcha one day and turmeric the next. Same principle applied to collaboration partners generally: choose slight difference in audience, not an exact overlap, or you keep marketing to the same people.
From Sarah Davidson: going global, partnerships and knowing when to stop →
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