Meet Heather

Heather Anderson is both a community-leading activist, and marketing strategist who’s passionate about fostering organic growth for businesses through strategic partnerships and engaging customers through storytelling.  She’s the Founder of The Mamahood, the largest and most diverse support group for mothers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and The Club, a holistic support group for women entrepreneurs. 

The Club helps diverse women- and gender non-binary CEOs, Founders, Business Owners, Experts and Creatives succeed through exposure to potential customers, peer community, and curated resources. 

By moderating these forums through a lens of social justice, she has leaned heavily into her own anti-racism work while bringing her members along on the journey. Her talk, “Social Justice Within Online Communities: How to Moderate for Diversity and Inclusion” was featured at Facebook’s Community Summit 2019, and she contributed to activist Myisha T. Hill’s book, Check Your Privilege, released March 2020. 

She’s also a writer, speaker,  a songwriter for her band, Blue Rabbit, and a mother of five with a penchant for graphic novels and reading cookbooks without actually cooking. Her first memoir, Liar Liar Heart on Fire, was published in 2020, and the prequel, The Story of Sadie is a musical memoir of love stories and lyrics, being published weekly on Substack.

Founders/Entrepreneurs:

Book a free 30-min hello call!

Or book a 1-hr strategy session (and if we work together, we’ll apply the fee to our work).

For Bay Area Moms:
Book a concierge call. I’ll do a 1-hour deep dive into your current situation and needs and follow up with a custom prescription for next steps, connecting you directly to every possible recommended resource in my arsenal. Ex:) moving to or within the Bay Area? I might introduce you to a relocation specialist for help choosing a neighborhood or a recommended realtor or loan agent who can serve your desired region or financial situation.  Struggling postpartum? Maybe you need postpartum doula, a sleep specialist, meal delivery, a therapist, a night nurse, a housecleaner, a personal chef, a new moms’ group or a mommy and me yoga class! I’ll hook you up. 

Want the full story? Buckle up!

A serial entrepreneur since childhood - beginning with reading “how kids can make money” at age 6 and getting in trouble for selling homemade candies at recess in 4th grade, I didn’t get serious about marketing until after college - when I began a decade of community-based marketing, growing brands organically through relationships with little to no advertising spend. 

For 15 years, I marketed day and night. 

By day - I helped grow a private bank startup (founded by my entrepreneurial dad, Tom Anderson) to a national force with $1 Bil in assets with almost no advertising budget. Our primary focus - and greatest success - was building a national network of symbiotic professionals. We then provided them with free education (via once revolutionary ‘teleseminars’ - now ‘webinars’), and in gratitude, they referred to us all of their clients who needed our very niche services.

By night,  I handled all the marketing, biz dev, and PR for my own indie alt pop band in San Francisco, Blue Rabbit. In the music industry, you learn quickly that everything is done in collaboration. Each successful show would be co-created with the involvement of up to 15 or more businesses, artists, professionals. At its most basic, you’ve always got the venue, the other bands in the lineup, the photographer, videographer, graphic designer for the poster and promotional graphics. But at best, you’re bringing in show promoters, booking agents, illustrators, fine artists, other types of performing artists to enhance the production - dancers, face painters, magicians, spoken word artists,etc.

For bands or brands, you want to do the same thing for a customer who’s going to become a loyal fan: create an experience, tell a story, share in the behind-the-scenes process. 

Producing, promoting and filling successful shows led me to becoming fascinated with the general metaphor that all businesses juggle the same dichotomy between what’s happening behind the scenes - that magical shitshow of collaborative chaos, rollercoaster of mishaps and experimentation and mess - the goofs, the fails, the throwing of spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks, and the public ‘performance’ - quite literally on stage - but also our polished websites, sales pages, business pitches and pretty social media feeds. 

And a thriving business will delve into both aspects. We can’t be afraid to show ‘how the sausage is made’ - nor shy away from realizing it’s done best in community. Failing in a vacuum is slow and inefficient, whereas sharing that mess allows Founders and creatives to avoid reinventing the wheel, allows them to work in teams rather than as solo athletes. Together, we can draft beside and behind one another, learn from each other’s mistakes, and emulate what’s worked. 

In art and business, everything has been done before - but it’s how we borrow and ‘steal like an artist’ (incredible book by the way); it’s all about how we piggy back upon what’s been tried and true and make it our own that we thrive and are successful. 

Inspired by the vast number of extremely talented and yet financially floundering artists who constantly asked me “how the heck did you pull off XYZ’ for your band, my first business after leaving the bank day job, was a collaborative co-working space set up specifically for musicians and related creatives in Emeryville. It was called The Green Room Collective (Green Room to symbolize a space where creative entrepreneurs  truly connect backstage). As a concept, it was wonderful and wildly successful. Everyone I told about it wanted in -  immediately. But the timing wasn’t right: My partner got married and jumped ship, my building co-tenant was having issues with our coworking model, I got pregnant with my third in under three years. And so just after landing our lease, gutting the place, remodeling and opening doors, I decided to close only 2 glorious months later. I thought it would be a brief pause in which I could regroup and begin as a virtual community, but the building (which was fabulously unique with a live-work loft, kitchen, bathroom, recording studio and workshop spaces - even a tree in its middle atrium), was sold and converted into a condominium. So the pause became permanent. 

At the time I closed doors, I happened to be running a small but thriving support group for moms on Facebook (because I’d been using Facebook groups for business growth since they were first created). This is what would become The Mamahood today. I’d started the group purely out of personal need; I wanted to find and collect moms with babies near me, since none of my friends had babies at the same time I did. 

And so when the GRC closed, I focused on moderating that community until I figured out what the next venture would be. I had a few years where I was fortunate enough to be able to run the community full time from home while my partner, Danny Fuller, drew a salary from a series of various tech jobs - also all startups. 

During that period, I grew my little thriving mom community into a full-blown empire of 100k moms in 60+ topical breakout rooms, an accidental full-time volunteer job. 

A serial entrepreneur himself, Danny had left his last day job as a Technical Art Director and was in the midst of finalizing the investor pitch of an entertainment industry-disrupting startup he’d co-founded and for which he was the CTO, when I was hospitalized and bed-ridden from a near-fatal ectopic pregnancy. 

We decided it was time to swap roles so that from bed, I could transform The Mamahood community into a sustainable business model while he switched into SAHD-mode. 

I began by merging my love of marketing, women and entrepreneurship, and started marketing local women-founded brands to my moms. Each Founder was up to something awesome - but no matter how selective I was (community-centered, social impact focused, eco-friendly/sustainable/green), there were too many innovative, fabulous, change-making women and only one me.

I.e., the model wasn’t scalable.

I also noted that I couldn’t charge these incredible tiny startups what I needed to survive - because their marketing budgets were also tiny. 

So I spent two years working with a developer to custom build a platform where all of my favorite brands could be showcased and featured in one place - a searchable directory of mom-recommended resources called The M List (a nod to Oprah’s O List- but M for Mamahood or moms). 

This solved both my scalability and affordability problem, and the issue that moms make incredible recommendations to each other all day long within the groups, but the Facebook group search tool is super unreliable. So most of this gold was simply getting lost in the ‘ether’. 

With the 2017 launch of The M List web app, I now had a place to house (and market) all of my brands in one place, as well as a place to organize and display the thousands of community recommendations. 

That’s when I had my huge ‘ah-ha moment’. Here I was working with multiple women Founders individually, all of them hustling in their own isolation. And it suddenly dawned on me (something so obvious in retrospect), that I could recreate the magic of the Green Room Collective  - but for all women entrepreneurs instead of just musicians and creatives. 

And so just as I launched the first version of The M List, I also launched a community for women entrepreneurs to connect, collaborate and ‘hive-mind’ called The Club. 

And there we have it! It’s now been six years since launching The M List and The Club - and 13 since launching The Mamahood, and I’m super proud of the unique ecosystem we’ve built between founders and families.

Hosting a paid membership for business owners has supported the ability to maintain The Mamahood as a free and accessible resource for all Bay Area moms seeking recommendations, information, empathy and support. 

And in return, those families support our business owners while benefiting from their expertise, products and services (not to mention all the incredible Mamahood-exclusive deals and giveaways)! 

Working with small businesses led to consulting all sizes of Silicon Valley startups on organic growth in the mom market - namely user experience, user acquisition, and strategic partnerships. 

That’s my story. And so if you’re a mom-facing brand who is craving increased visibility, user feedback, customer engagement, and of course sales and growth, I can help. 

Also, to state the obvious only because I get asked: No, mom-facing products doesn’t just mean diaper bags and strollers - WHY is that still how people think? Moms buy and do everything!

The only type of businesses I don’t typically work with are B2B - unless your business could serve women Founders (CRMs, SEO, Marketing Software, Community Management Tools, etc.). 

If you’re selling cloud services to large corporations, I’m not your girl. 

If you’re in growth mode and curious, let’s talk! It’s free to say hello!

xo

Heather