The First Step I Took to Build a Business Alongside Motherhood

What does it take to start a small business while raising young children—and how in the world do you know where to start? The Daybreak founder shares her path to launching a business that blends with family life.

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When my first son was young, I remember feeling like so much of my mental energy had shifted into execution mode: washing bottles, changing diapers, doing laundry, keeping track of nap schedules. I wanted to be able to sit on the floor and really play with my son without mentally cataloging everything that needed to be done around me. I wanted more of those deep, connected moments with my husband. I wanted to feel playful and creative and light again.

And I realized this was something my new circle of mom friends was talking about too: How do we actually relax? How do we get out of our heads and into the moment? How do we have fun and feel like ourselves while we're also in this incredibly demanding season of raising small children? A glass of wine might relax me for a few hours, but then I'd wake up in the middle of the night, sleep terribly, and still have a small child who needed me the next morning.

So my husband, Drew, and I started exploring other ways of accessing that feeling of relaxation and connection, and mushroom chocolates became one of them. And pretty quickly, we became the people in our friend group everyone came to with questions: Where do you get them? How much do you take? What does it feel like? How do you know what you're actually getting? How do you avoid taking too much?

Start Talking to People

That's when the idea for Daybreak really started to take shape. There was tremendous curiosity among women, but also tremendous apprehension. So, we started by talking to people. Our friends became our informal research group. We let them try different blends. We asked them how they felt. We asked what they liked and didn't like. We listened to their questions and fears. We watched them interact with the packaging. We learned which parts of the experience needed more explanation.

The formulation itself was happening in parallel. We spent a lot of time testing different blends and thinking very intentionally about the experience we wanted to create. 

But one thing Drew and I knew from our previous experience building companies was that packaging always takes the longest to develop and deliver. It's absolutely bonkers. If you don't start designing your packaging at the same time you're developing the product and brand, you can easily delay your launch by six months just because of packaging manufacturing lead times.

Our friends became our informal research group. We let them try different blends. We asked them how they felt. We asked what they liked and didn't like. We listened to their questions and fears.

So while we were doing customer research and refining the formulation, we immediately started working on the tin and packaging in parallel. That was one of the first practical decisions we made: start with the thing that's going to take the longest.

One of my biggest concerns with the mushroom chocolates we had tried was the packaging. They often came as chocolate bars where you broke off individual pieces. The chocolate could crumble, and once you'd opened the package, I never felt like there was a sufficiently secure way to store it in a house with little kids or pets.

Drew is an engineer and designer, so we started developing a child-resistant tin. We ordered samples from manufacturers. We'd hand them to friends without instructions and watch them try to open them. We wanted to know whether the mechanism was intuitive for an adult without being easy for a child. And then we did something very practical: we handed the sample tins to our own kids. Could they figure them out? Could they get inside?

That process of observing people actually interacting with the packaging, rather than assuming we knew how they'd use it, helped us refine the tin that eventually became such a recognizable part of Daybreak. The chocolates themselves became individual, jewel-like pieces rather than squares you break off a bar. The tin gave them a secure home. And I wanted opening it to feel beautiful and special, not illicit or intimidating.

The Takeaway

So my advice to someone wondering whether an idea is worth pursuing isn't necessarily to quit your job, write a business plan or raise money. Start talking about it. Find the people who have the problem you think you're solving. Ask questions. Give them something imperfect to react to. Watch what they do, not only what they tell you. Let them have a hand in shaping it.

Build mental equity before you ever ask someone to become a customer. The more people you bring along in the journey, the better your product will be and the more people you'll have invested in its success when you're ready to put it into the world.