Hello! Thank you for checking out our very first blog post!
We decided to use our first post to introduce ourselves a little beyond our “About Us”
page. In this post we thought we’d talk a little about what motivated us to start Discover
Date Night, and how our pursuit of finding our right path has brought us to where we are
today.
For more on what we mean by right path, check out our next post, Finding the Right
Path Starts With Taking the First Step: Part 2!
The Backstory of Discover Date Night
We have always wanted to run our own business. When I was 10, if my sisters and I
weren’t creating dance routines to Paula Abdul songs, we were playing business. We
would convert our parents’ garage into our first business using cardboard boxes for
computers and desks. We would pretend we were running a business called Help for
Wealth, where we helped desperate people find amazing careers. We thought the idea
was an innovation, and we totally thought we’d be rich someday when we were adults
and could make this business for real. Sadly, we had never heard of an unemployment
office.
So, we grew up, went to college, got “real” jobs, bought houses, and started families.
Individually, we each still thought about starting our own businesses once in a
while…but life…
Fast forward to March of 2018. I was becoming increasingly unhappy at my job, so I
started my first passion project business to do on the side, a little tie dye store
downtown. I learned a lot through that experience, but I never really got it off the
ground, because, SURPRISE, in December of 2018 my 3rd child was born.
With a new baby at home, I didn’t have the time or energy or money to put into growing
my tie dye business, so I told myself I would do it someday.
Then COVID.
Tie dye seemed like such a silly thing to be concerned with when so much was
happening in our world. I was just so grateful that our family stayed healthy and that we
still had jobs, that I didn’t think much about starting another business.
But, in December of 2021, Hope was bit hard by the I-want-to-start-my-own-business
bug. She wanted to try something big! She was adamant that it was time to try
something now or we would never know! She knew we could do it if we worked at it
together! Her spark was contagious, as it always is, and it reignited my desire to start a
business too.
So, we had a shared Google Doc where we brainstormed ideas on how we could
combine our experiences and skills to create a business together. We wrote manifestos
and future goals, and came up with a bunch of different business ideas.
Our mission statement looked something like this…
- We want to build our own business. We are excited by the idea of working
together and finding financial freedom and real work/life balance. - We want to do work that we love so much that we would do for free.
- We want to support women.
- We want to get people out and enjoying life again.
- We want to help our parents retire before they are too old to enjoy it.
- We want to have the money to support our children’s future endeavors.
But, nothing really happened. We just added things to the Google Doc and dreamed
that maybe one day….
We spent about a 6 months just sitting on our business ideas. The one we kept coming
back to was Discover Date Night. It seemed like something that might really be fun and
might really help other couples who, like us, didn’t know what to do on Date Night
anymore after two years of quarantining.
Every few days, we would randomly text each other something like, “Discover Date
Night. We NEED to do this.”
Last month, Hope got a bonus at work that she wasn’t expecting.
She decided it was now or never and we used that money to register Discover Date
Night as an official business, open a bank account, and start planning our first Date
Night! We took a few really big first steps all at once. Honestly, so many big steps that
I’m not sure our feet have even hit the ground yet! We are equal parts terrified and so
excited we can’t sleep.
Like, “What did we just do???…Look what we are doing!!