Amy Nelson founded The Riveter in 2017 to help women leave corporate jobs and start businesses. The community pivoted to online coaching during the pandemic, teaching members to use personal storytelling to sell products and grow audiences. Tori Dunlop built a multimillion-dollar financial-services business using only authentic brand storytelling, no paid ads.
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Good afternoon, everyone. Today I have the honor of speaking to Amy Nelson. Amy, how are you doing today?
I'm good, and thanks so much for having me.
Okay, so for those who may not know, Amy and I have gotten to know each other through some similar Amazon headaches, put it mildly. And we're going to talk a little bit about our company, Derivative. Tell us a little bit about your company and how it can help people who are selling items on the Internet.
Yeah. Thank you so much. So I started the riveter back in 2017 when I lived in Seattle. And at the time I had this idea that I wanted to bring women together who were pivoting from corporate America into building their own businesses, either as solopreneurs or small businesses sellers on Amazon, whatever they were doing. And so I created workspaces and then a number of events both online and in real life, where we talked about things like how to tell the world what you're good at, how to build a brand online, how to build a social media audience to direct them to things that you want to sell. And it was an amazing experience. In the first three years, we went from an idea to generating millions in revenue and had everyone from Robin Roberts and Abby Wambach come speak at our locations. Of course, then the pandemic happened and the Riveter shifted online. And today what we do at the Riveter is I lead a team of experts who teach women and men how to tell the world what they're good at so that they can effectively sell their products, their services, and be invited to speak on stages, be invited to speak on podcasts, launch newsletters. I myself have built social media audiences of over half a million on my own channels. And I'm really passionate about the fact that all of us have the opportunity to sell more, to generate more revenue, and to, you know, take a bigger place on the stage of the world. If we just simply learn how to say what we do, why we're doing it, and connect with people. People also really want to buy more from people than faceless brands. And all of us have the opportunity to put a face to what we're doing.
Right. So this is, I mean, social commerce basically is, is a reaction to that. I'm just thinking as, as you're talking and thank you. Do you think it's a reaction to the over reliance of AI that people want?
I think it might be an overreaction to that, but I think it might have started a little bit earlier. And I think it would be a reaction to just people Being kind of sick of being advertised to over and over and over again. You know, we hear that we're given 30,000 marketing messages a day, which makes sense. And I think that we want to know who we're doing business with. 50 years ago, you walked down to the corner store and you knew who you were doing business with. And some of us still have the ability to do that in our communities, but a lot of people don't. And when you're selling online, I think that it is an incredible opportunity to just connect with people by telling them who you are. And again, like I said, you don't even know the opportunities that can come from it because you can have a great storefront online. But if people don't know it's you behind it, they aren't going to invite you to talk on the TV show about, you know, trends in retail or to invite you to speak at a conference in person. And then when you take those opportunities to be in person, you can have even more opportunities. Like it's just that snowball impact that can grow your business a million different ways. And so in our membership we cover all of these things with different experts. Like we've had a woman named Tori Dunlop come in with her for her first 100k which does financial services and she's built a multimillion dollar business with just social commerce. She does not pay for ads, she does not pay for traditional marketing or pr. And it's entirely possible to do that.
Right. That's amazing. And I'm going to put a link which you're going to give me below and if anybody wants to join or considering. Amy has really been supportive of AFTG and related matters and I really would appreciate if you can. Thank you so much.
