The ecosystem I wished existed. It does now.

A personal letter from Joelle.

I’m a multi-sector Founder with 4 exits. Most recently, I built a (12x patented) product company before I built FIRE. I grew it from an idea into a nationally recognized brand, landed a deal on Shark Tank® and ultimately walked away with a successful seven-figure exit. So, I know what it feels like to stare at a spreadsheet at one in the morning, wondering if a single purchase order could sink you. To feel alone building. To not know who to call. To email a hundred factories and hear back from four. To get denied capital just to grow. To walk into a room and realize nobody else there is carrying what you’re carrying.

Along the way, I pitched (OH, DID I PITCH!), eventually raised funding, negotiated with buyers, brought products to market, and yes, pitched my brand, FunkkOFF!® onto the ultimate entrepreneurial stage: Shark Tank®. What I learned firsthand is that building a company can feel incredibly lonely. Not because the information wasn’t out there. Not because the women who’d already navigated the hard parts didn’t exist. They did. But they were scattered, disconnected, rarely in one place. There was no roadmap built for women taking a physical product from sketch to shelf, from funding to scale, from idea to successful exit. Doors weren’t open to rooms, chairs weren’t pulled up to table, especially for funding conversations.

What was missing?

The communities I found were either too broad to be useful or too closed to get into. General startup advice doesn’t teach you how to navigate a manufacturing agreement, price for real margins, land a retail buyer, secure access to capital, or scale a physical product.

It was not just my experience. Over the past decade, only 4% of US patents issued named only women inventors. And 1.1% of US venture capital went to companies founded solely by women, down from 2.1% the year before. Mixed teams do far better on both counts. Women building on their own do not. Those numbers are the reason I stopped treating it as my own bad luck.

I wanted more than information. I wanted truly trusted connections, real support, and access to women who had already solved the problems I was facing. I wanted the templates and contracts I eventually paid lawyers to redraft. I wanted a network I could actually trust. And I wanted a community small enough that a real person would give me a real answer.

That’s the kind of community I wish I had. It simply did not exist.

So I built it.

FIRE is that room, the one ecosystem, built on purpose and kept intentional. We cap the founding membership so it stays a room and not a stadium. We are careful about who joins and what we publish. Everything inside it is something I wish someone had handed me on day one, from the forms library to the network to the working sessions, to access to capital and to where founders actually help each other.

If you are building anything, you are in the right room. I am really glad you found FIRE. And, let’s have some fun along the way!