“I was good at doing the work, but I didn’t feel like I was learning anything. It wasn’t until the end of the degree and I had an entrepreneurship class that I knew that was what I wanted to do. It was the only class that made sense to me,” she said. “I decided to be my own boss, I did it myself and I left uni.”
Then Hembrow unexpectedly became pregnant.
At this time, Hembrow was slowly starting to build a following on social networks.
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But when she started documenting her pregnancy and motherhood journey on Instagram at age 20, her following skyrocketed. It was a far cry from the people who once told Hembrow that falling in love while pregnant was the worst thing she could do for her career.
“People said to me, ‘Oh, your life is ruined now.’ There were all these negative things being said. But I wanted to show people the opposite of that and prove them all wrong. I wanted to show that I can still do it. When I was a young mother, she said everything I wanted to do.”
The 28-year-old is now mum to three children – son Wolf, seven, daughter Saskia, six and baby Posy, who is a few months old.
Hembrow knew that marketing is an incredibly important tool when building a business – and what better way to promote your business and profile than to build an audience on Instagram.
“I had very different ideas. I was always in the gym training and I wanted to share that with people and make this a profitable business,” she shared how she got it.
She started by offering self-designed fitness programs to her Instagram and YouTube followers.
“The initial investment was about $400, which I spent with someone to demonstrate the exercises in the programs I was doing. So the illustrator produced professional footage, and eventually it turned into the Tammy Fit app.”
She then used all the money she saved from selling the programs, as well as promotional posts from her influencers, to design the app, which was a huge initial investment. But Hembrow knew it would cost.
