The Road Less Traveled
Detours, timing, and trust: the unspoken architecture of startups.
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Meet Lizzie Brown
Despite all of the playbooks, every founder journey is unique like a snowflake. Sometimes you are cruising along and hit a sign: Road Work Ahead. It’s not a caution — it’s a truth. Things shift. You reroute. And sometimes, what looks like a delay is actually the work that makes everything stronger. In this edition, we talk with Lizzie Brown, co-founder of Yoga Wake Up, about what it means to build a business on your own terms, in sync with your life, your timing, and your gut. From launching her app without venture capital, to pausing for an MBA, to focusing on what her customers actually needed, Lizzie’s story is a powerful reminder: growth doesn’t always follow a map. It can look like slower seasons, pivots, or even a move to Spain. Sometimes, the freedom to choose your own road is the measure of success.
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🎙️Listen to the podcast
Lizzie Brown is the co-founder and CEO of Yoga Wake Up, the first-ever audio-guided yoga alarm clock. She shares her founder path — from launching early, raising from friends and family, facing rejections from VCs, and eventually building a product deeply shaped by user feedback and lived experience. Her story is a refreshing reminder that sustainable growth doesn’t have to follow the typical playbook.
📧 Connect with Lizzie!
↩️ Turning Is Still Moving Forward
Lizzie and her husband co-built Yoga Wake Up while navigating life, family, and the realities of bootstrapping. While the app was growing in paid subscriptions, the revenue couldn’t support both full time, so they adapted—one stepped back, the other leaned in. It wasn’t a planned pivot, but an adaptive reroute that kept the mission moving forward.
It’s also the norm in successful startups: 93% of high-growth companies pivot at least once before finding lasting traction. In fact many ventures take 7–10 years to mature into the business founders originally envisioned.
“We went all in, and then we pulled out, and then we went all in again.”
🎓 The Founder Is the Way
When fundraising stalled and burnout began creeping in, Lizzie paused — not to quit, but to invest in herself. Getting her MBA gave her new clarity and tools, leading to a Spanish-language expansion of the app and a relocation to Spain that aligned with her life and values. She didn’t push through the obstacle — she rerouted through it and lived by Ryan Holiday’s stoic words, “What stands in the way becomes the way.” (I highly recommend his book The Obstacle is the Way).
“Instead of investing in the business, it was like a way of investing in me instead and taking everything I learned that I can then inject into the business.”
According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, 1 in 3 women entrepreneurs pursue further education or pivot within five years to evolve alongside their business. Lizzie’s move wasn’t a break, it was a planned re-alignment.
🎯 Focus by Necessity
Without venture backing, Yoga Wake Up was forced to run lean — and that constraint became a strength. Lizzie cut unnecessary spend, got closer to her users, and built only what was needed, when it was needed. What emerged was a tighter, more resonant product — not for everyone, but deeply right for the people who rely on it.
“I used to chase growth. Now I ask my users what they really want.”
The truth is, a lot of women think they’re behind, not because they are, but because they don’t hear the stories that show the real path. The ones that don’t scale overnight. The pauses or pivots that take longer. Those stories don’t make it into the playbooks but they’re often the ones that matter most. When we share them, it gives us some breathing room to stop doubting the road we are on. We can start trusting that we are exactly where we’re supposed to be and just focus on the road ahead. 🌱
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