Mia Freedman is a journalist, author, activist and co-founder of Mamamia, the largest independent women’s website in Australia.
When she first started her blog in 2007, she never anticipated the reach she has today.
With a total of 800,000 online readers and 100 people working for Mamamia, it’s hardly considered a small business today. However, it definitely started out that way. In fact, Mamamia started out in Mia’s living room when she was unemployed and pregnant with her third child.
“I didn’t have a business plan; I didn’t have any plan. I just instinctively wanted to create content for women online. After 18 months, it absolutely wasn’t a business. It started to build a strong following and an organic, large audience but I didn’t know how to convert that,” Mia says.
In some ways, Mamamia was an accidental startup. The real challenge came when it expanded beyond the startup scale and became a fully-fledged business.
From blog to the biggest women's website in Australia. Source: Supplied
“When you’re a startup, it’s very seat of your pants. Anything goes. It’s quite renegade. But then when you have a certain amount of employees, or a certain amount of revenue, you need things like a HR department, you need policies about things like expenses,” she says.
“It’s like becoming an adult, it’s like going through puberty.”
The intense growth of Mamamia had Mia’s husband Jason Lavigne come on board to help establish the website as a self-sustaining enterprise. Mia and Jason balanced each other out; he took care of the business strategy, while she took care of the creative side of things.
Mia and Jason - along with staffers and contributors - have grown Mamamia to become an institution. It's a platform for women to voice their opinions, from motherhood to politics, to pop culture. Despite the name, it doesn't pigeonhole itself as a 'mummy' blog.
Like all successful businesses, Mamamia's power is in its ability to understand its consumers. While engagement of traditional media is declining, Mamamia stays ahead of the curve with online data analytics.
The offices of Mamamia. Source: Supplied
“The great thing about working online is that you see everything in real time. We have software program and data that shows us who’s reading every story, where they’re reading to on that story, where they click off, where they go when they click off. So the amount of data you have is astonishing in terms of understanding your reader’s behaviour.”
Most importantly, Mia says, is that Mamamia understands how to engage with women. She recounts a meeting with an advertiser in which the man called the women's website an “interesting niche.”
“And it’s like….more than 50% of our population buddy,” she laughs.
“The idea of balance is absolute bollocks”
As a business owner and mother of three, work-life balance is something Mia is regularly asked to comment on. She says there is no such thing as a work-life balance.
“I think the idea of balance is absolute bollocks. I don’t think it exists. And I think a lot of women – myself included – beat ourselves up because we don’t feel balanced.”
Research shows women would rather take lower pay to have a job that is flexible with time. It's also why many women turn to running their own business as a way to manage work and home life. Mia says there is the perk of flexibility, but at what cost?
Mamamia's wall of inspirational women. Source: Supplied
“Yes your time is your own to control, but you have less of it.”
“I’ve never worked more hours in my life than I have since I’ve run my own business.”'
She takes inspiration from Facebook Chief Operating Officer and activist Sheryl Sandberg, simply saying, “Sometimes you need to lean into work, sometimes you need to lean into your family. By leaning into one thing, you have to lean out of another.”
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