Tammy Hembrow on how she made $38 million.

“I was good at doing the work, but I didn’t feel like I was actually learning anything. It wasn’t until the end of the degree and I had a unit on entrepreneurship that I knew that was what I wanted to do. It was the only class that made sense to me,”
she said. “I decided I would be my own boss, do it myself, and I left uni.”

Then Hembrow unexpectedly fell pregnant.

At this point, Hembrow was already slowly starting to build a following on social media.

Listen to Lady Startup Stories. Post continues after audio.

But when she started to document her pregnancy and motherhood journey at 20 years old on Instagram, her following increased dramatically. It was a far cry away from the people who had once told Hembrow that falling pregnant was the worst thing she could
do for her career.

“People said to me, ‘Oh, your life is ruined now’. All these negative things were being said. But I wanted to make people see the opposite of that and prove them all wrong. I wanted to show that I could still do everything I wanted to do while being a
young mum,” she said.

The 28-year-old is now a mum to three kids – son Wolf, seven, daughter Saskia, six, and baby Posy, who is a few months old.

Hembrow knew that marketing was an incredibly important tool when building a business – and what better way to self-promote a business and profile than by creating an engaged audience on Instagram.

“I had so many different ideas. I was in the gym training all the time and I wanted to share that with people and make this into a profitable business,” she shared on How I Made It.

She started out by offering fitness programs that she designed herself to her Instagram and YouTube followers.

“My initial investment was about $400, which I spent with someone to illustrate the exercises on the programs I was making. So the illustrator drew up the professional shots, and it eventually evolved into Tammy Fit the app.”

She then used all the money she had accrued from selling the programs as well as her influencer promotional posts to design the app, which was a large initial investment. But Hembrow knew it would pay off.