What You Get When You Join Our Community
Discover more from Startup Parent
What You Get When You Join Our Community
Unlock access to the secret podcast, parent advice threads, community forums, and our members-only book club.
While our newsletter is free—and we publish a minimum of three times per month—we also have private content exclusively for our paid subscribers. I have a stack of delightful perks for you if you decide to upgrade and become a paid subscriber. Did someone say perks? Yes, yes I did.
Our paid subscribers get access to the following bonuses:
📫 Access to the Private Podcast: ASK SARAH, where you can call in with any question about life, business, or parenting, and I’ll tell you how I think about your puzzle, plus call in any experts or creators that I think can help with your situation. The first episode is all about rest and sleep with young kids, and the second episode talks about whether or not discipline and willpower work if you’re an exhausted new parent. Our future episodes include a behind-the-scenes look at how I design my programs and communities, and an episode where I help a reader figure out a digital content marketing plan for her business.
🧶 Member-only COMMUNITY THREADS for you to share your stories and insights with other thoughtful, kind, curious parents. Our community threads are a space for you to share ideas, ask for advice, and help each other out. There are currently four public threads that you can browse to get an example of what our forums look like: How your parenting has changed because of the pandemic, what mom guilt is and who feels it, the books you’re reading right now, and a thread about loneliness as a grown-up. If you want more threads like this, go paid!
🔥 Secret links to view the PAID TALKS we do for organizations and teams. These presentations take weeks and months to put together, and occasionally I’ll share a video recording with our paid backers. Last month, we shared The Dark Side of Hustle Culture, and next month I’ll be dropping in a copy of How To Say No, a presentation I give on the five word-for-word scripts I use to say no in almost any situation. We’re also going to share an exclusive sneak peek at the talks we hosted in our Summer Series on getting the rest you need, setting boundaries, and making better decisions. Want access to the recordings? Go paid!
📘 An invitation to join our monthly BOOK CLUB we host for subscribers and community members. Come talk about books with other smart, interesting, kind people. You’ll get a chance to connect with other parents, business owners, and thoughtful folks—and discuss one of the books from our selections for the year ahead.
Startup Parent is a newsletter for tired parents, founders with kids, and parents in leadership. Get the private podcast, book club, and secret links when you become a paid subscriber.
To do all of this, we rely on our paid backers—like you.
The vast majority of you are on the free plan, which means you get our weekly essays and our public podcast. In order to create all of this, I’d love to ask you to consider becoming a paid backer. You can support us anywhere from our annual plan at $5.80 a month or our $8 monthly plan. This directly supports the work of Startup Parent.
Click the link below to upgrade your subscription and become one of our community members. When you join, you’ll get access to our secret podcast, our book club, and many more perks.
About our work.
We publish weekly essays for everyone in support of a new vision of life, family, and work—one that is imaginative, playful, joyful and healthy.
We put a spotlight on what’s typically been hidden when it comes to work and family—like the systemic problems within American motherhood, the depth of early pregnancy exhaustion, the way that television depictions of babies are utter lies, the utter hilarity in most morning routines, why it’s normal to feel regret, sadness, or ambivalence as a parent, the parenting math that doesn’t add up, and the lengthy lists of domestic labor that were deliberately excluded from economic accounting.
Our motto at Startup Parent is “we don’t have to do things the way they’ve always been done.”
We support business leaders, entrepreneurs, and career folks in rejecting the status quo and rethinking how we parent and build families, how we build businesses and careers, and what we need in our communities and lives.
Help us bring new voices to Startup Parent
When you go paid, you’re also helping us with our long-term vision to expand our roster of writers. One of my goals is to hire a few more writers to join this publication, specifically to talk about parenting from new perspectives. Once we reach the critical threshold of paid subscribers—we need at least two hundred backers to launch this—it will be possible to hire more voices for this publication.
That’s why I’d love it if you’d go paid. It’s why I’d love for your friends to go paid. Because we’re just getting the ball rolling together and this is the first time I’m asking you directly to back us, I hope you’ll take me up on the offer and become one of our earliest backers.
We can’t just keep doing things the way they’ve always been done and expect new results.
Do you believe in changing how we parent & work?
In addition to supporting the podcast and articles, when you become a backer, you’re supporting us in our mission to make life better for busy parents. We believe it’s time to radically rethink what parenting and working look like.
If you reject the status quo of motherhood & fatherhood, if you're a parent that doesn't need any more "hustle" advice, or you want to be around people rethinking work and family, then you’re in the right place. At our core, we believe that improving our future means doing things differently—that how we work, how we parent, how we build community, and how we run our businesses needs a refresh.
That includes journalism. If you’re used to getting content for free on the internet (which we all are), that’s because the last 40+ years of content have been built on the backs of advertising as a model. But getting information for free costs something—it means you’re invisibly subscribing to the advertising model of journalism that uses click-bait and attention stealing to compete for clicks, and it pushes quality writing to the bottom of the barrel. It also means that you’re saying you’re okay with advertisers grabbing your data and selling it to the highest bidder.
We are in the midst of a sweeping change in publishing and content creation in the world at large. The advertising models are historically why content has been free, but it’s in decline, and local news organizations (and even large organizations) are in flux.
If, however, you’re someone who appreciates new ideas, thoughtful analysis, and better visions of the future of work, then I’ll encourage you to support as many authors and organizations as you can. Every year, I support a minimum of 10 writers and I set a target budget for book buying to make sure my money is supporting innovators and ideas.
If you don’t mind reading articles covered in advertising, pop-ups, and click-bait, then stay on free plans—but know that this results in local news collapsing, and watching the quality & diversity of news decline.
Why it’s so important to support your favorite writers and creators directly (and why I moved to Substack)
In August of 2022, I moved my writing and podcast over to Substack. It’s is a place to publish things, kind of like Wordpress or Medium, and it specializes in helping writers create great essays, and in supporting readers in discover new writers. If you’re reading this now, you’re reading on Substack.
As the news industry continues to change (and shrink—local newspapers all over the world are closing and many can’t make enough money without tons of advertising spend), individual writers are pivoting to newsletters to see if they can make a living bringing you their essays directly. This is a gamble: instead of working with a much larger institution, like Wired, Fast Company, Time Magazine, etc, writers are going to readers directly and saying, “Hey! If you want to read without being bombarded by pop-ups and advertisements and interruptions, then help support these writers directly for the cost of about three books.” It’s as if you’re going out to coffee with me once a month (our membership is just $5/month right now.)
Why else did I move here? Well, before I joined Substack, I was hosting a private email list, a blog, a separate podcast, and a Patreon where people could chip in a few dollars per month to support my writing. But having so many separate places to update and manage creating a lot of unnecessary extra work, which is why I finally moved here to streamline everything. Our Substack community is now over 10k+ members!
Becoming a paid subscriber is about changing the way we think about paying for journalism and ideas. It’s about getting new writers and new ideas into the world.
If you want to help build a different future of ideas, then backing writers and outlets directly with your subscriptions is part of the change we all need to make. That’s why Substack created a way to directly support the writers you follow. When you back Startup Parent, that helps me bring you more guest essays, thoughtful interviews, and new ideas about parenting and work into the world, and available for parents who need this.
You’re also declaring that you reject the status quo.
Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent
If you’re someone affected by economic hardship or inequality, or the cost of a subscription is currently prohibitive for you but you still want to be a part of our community, we have sliding scale $3/monthly plan and a $1/monthly plan. Pick the plan that makes the most sense for you right now, no questions asked. We appreciate every single backer.
If you want to become a paid subscriber but you can’t afford it right now, hit reply and ask for a paid subscription (include the email address you’d like it to go to), and I’ll send you a complementary paid subscription, no questions asked.
Actual footage of me trying to drink coffee while children are around.
The Startup Parent Podcast — What people are saying:
Click here to subscribe to the Startup Parent Podcast in your favorite player.
“This is a crucial conversation that is missing, for the most part, from our cultural conversation.”
“It’s rare to find a podcaster who can make you feel like you’re just having a chat with a friend over coffee, while still asking such poignant, crucial, and sometimes challenging questions. As a new mom and an entrepreneur, this is the first podcast I’ve found that really speaks to the challenges and joys I’m facing.”
We haven’t met yet? Hi, my name is Sarah K Peck.
I’m an author, startup advisor, and yoga teacher based in New York City. I founded Startup Parent in 2017 as a place to create conversations, community, and change in the lives of working parents and women in leadership. Motherhood continuously fascinates me, and I write about the untapped potential of parenting to transform our future leaders, as well as the lies we tell about what mothers and fathers “should” look like and why that holds so many of us back.
My writing and work have been featured in Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Fast Company, Inc, Psychology Today, and more. I’ve spoken at Harvard, Penn, Berkeley, the University of Virginia, Quantic School of Business & Technology, Be On Deck, and at conferences around the globe.
My research journey includes continuing to deepen my understanding of how gender, sex, race, class, and other systems influence and oppress everyone. It’s worth telling you that I hold a butt-load (my six-year old’s latest term) of advantages because things about me are generally deemed ‘acceptable’ and seen as ‘normal’ by the current rules of society and culture. Some examples: I identify as a woman, I date men, I’m currently married, and I’m a tall, white, athletic lady—all of which, with the exception of gender, is often given immediate approval and acceptability in other people’s eyes. But that also means I have blind spots, and so I continue to read, inquire, and learn more. Some of the people that have expanded my mindset and understanding include Desiree Adaway, Patti Digh, Trudy Lebron, Ijeoma Oluo, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and so many more writers, activists, and teachers. In my own writing, I’ll do my best to explain my thinking, own my shortcomings, listen deeply, and provide a space where we can grow and learn alongside one another.
And if you’re still here, click the button and do the thing!
If you love the podcast and the newsletter, then become a paying subscriber. For less than the cost of a six-year-old’s booster seat, you’ll get exclusive access to bonus private podcast episodes, subscriber-only Q/A’s with Sarah, and our members-only chats. Your subscription helps us build the work we’re doing in the world.
Thank you so much.