Birthing a Substack and giving it life with doula Nikko Kennedy

Hi friends,

I feel like a complete schmuck. A couple months ago I told you about our Awesome Creator Spotlight starting with our interview with …and then I completely forgot to check it for two months.

Well, in fairness, I thought I set it to tell me when somebody responded, but I didn’t. Then, I came back to find this lovely interview with postpartum doula and writer .

It was originally my intention to feature more successful Substackers in this spotlight, but you’ve told me that you really appreciate the perspective that smaller Substackers offer, and I’m excited to bring this perspective to you. If you’re interested in filling out our spotlight, you can do so here.

I promise not to forget to check it for months…no, I can’t make that promise. I promise to not intentionally forget about it for two months, especially when there are lovely interviews like this inside it.

What is the most unusual or funny thing that’s happened during your writing journey?

As a writer, people make up their own sound for your voice. My husband is a radio DJ, and so in his work, he has the opposite: people know his voice, but don’t know his face.

Anyways, I recently connected with a wonderful woman about doing a collab, and during the meeting, she confessed she expected me to have a foreign accent! Her own doula had been Russian, and since I am a doula and have the name “Nikko” which is surely international, she had been filling in this accent! Now for fun, I sometimes imagine my writing in an accent not my own.

How do you stay motivated and inspired to create new content and stay relevant?

My work is motivated by my curiosity, which is a very powerful force in my life. Since they say teaching is a great way to learn, in some ways, my Substack is a journal of my self-directed “masters in midwifery and quantum and circadian health.” When I work with a client or do an interview and they almost always bring questions to me in a way that sparks my own curiosity. So, the human connection is the part that helps me stay relevant. Otherwise, I do have a tendency to spiral off into (ever more) obscure explorations of research and jargon.

In the rapidly changing world of publishing and media, what strategies have you employed to adapt and remain successful? How do you prepare for potential changes or disruptions in the future?

This year, I’ve been really enjoying guesting on podcasts and trying to get out there in a more multimedia way. It’s more casual and “real” in many ways, and gives people more of a sense of who I am, how I arrived at my focus area of Nature-wellness and maternity, and also shows how I interact interpersonally.

Where many people have the simple goal of moving from social to Substack, I am moving from Social —> Substack —> client relationships and collaborations. It’s really a swirl since people enter and end up on different paths through my work as I am gifting it to the world. I am always trying new things, and rely deeply on both my gut sense and the feedback from my community when it comes to what I keep doing and what I drop.

All in all, my work is centered around people I know and care about. Networking is a powerful force and is truly the reason I am doing this at all. Otherwise, all these notes and citations could just sit on my own device for my own pleasure.

In the digital age, how do you approach the use of technology and social media to connect with your audience and market your work?

I worked as a marketing manager for close to a decade while I was getting my education and preparing for my career in birth work that my Substack publication is an extension of. Based on that experience, I have already seen it play out time and again that it doesn’t matter so much how much or what or where you post, but who you connect with. Therefore, if I had to spell out a framework, it would be seeking friendships with awesome people who have similar interests.

I don’t mess around with doing marketing things that don’t bring me joy, because if I was going to do that, I would have just stuck with my safe marketing business helping other people take all the risk. There are infinite schemes one could potentially explore, but there is only so much time in the day. This is especially true since I am raising 4 children and running a birth business while working on writing. I have long ago resolved not to be away from my family for anything less than excellence.

What's the most unexpected place or situation where you've come up with a brilliant story idea?

My favorite way of discovering new and brilliant ideas is when someone asks me a question that reframes my knowledge in a new way—it’s a huge thrill when talking with someone and having the realization that there’s a new or different or more complete way I can revisit a topic. My topic is quite narrow: Nature, sunlight, darkness, earthing, fertility, pregnancy, birth, postpartum. However, within that, it’s a constantly evolving mobile rotating in lived experience and new scientific research.

What have been some of your most effective strategies for audience engagement and building a loyal fan base?

At first, people showed up just for me, because they knew me and I invited them to come follow along. Then, strangers started showing up because they resonated with my topic. Now, I’m spiraling around in a new way towards figuring out new ways to get to know my readers better and to facilitate ways they can in turn, meet each other and build their own resonant relationships.

This has looked like attending and hosting live events, participating in tangential communities, being consistent in sharing information in different mediums, and in doing 1-1 consults.

If there was a Venn diagram of my work, it would be quantum health and birth work. So, within the quantum world, I am bringing the specifics about how childbearing is affected by the science they already know. Within the birth community, I am bringing the knowledge of how this new science impacts the processes around childbearing they already know. It’s multidisciplinary and I am honestly still working on refining my efforts. I feel like I still have room and attention for many more friends in the work.

How do you balance the business side of your career, such as marketing and promotion, with the creative side of your work?

Being a mission-driven writer, these two tasks are only different in their medium. I am so grateful for the decade I spent as a marketing manager for others, because I have seen huge campaigns flop, tiny campaigns succeed with flying colors, and all kinds of things in between.

Without that experience, I might take things all a lot more personally and failures might feel more crushing. Instead, I am always just trying to reframe the importance of connecting mamas with Nature so they can have happier and healthier births and babies. It’s a mission I believe I was born for, and have made my own. Every chance I have to share this message is a happy one for me. Life is too unpredictable to wait for a better time or a better way I haven’t thought of yet. It’s to be lived in the present.

What is your favorite failure, either the one that taught you the most or the one that meant the most to you in retrospect?

One of my first subscribers was a doctor I really looked up to and admired. I was so proud and did a great big happy dance when I saw them subscribe. They followed along for a while, reading most of my posts. One day, they shared something about taking risks and learning from failures.

I literally had that post in mind and I wrote a quick post to promote a workshop I was teaching in-person, thinking, what the heck, people online might not be able to make it but they might be interested anyways! I had put my headshot on my flyer and attached it to my post, and so it was also the first time I shared a picture of my face to my Substack.

This hasty post also had a messed up and irrelevant header because at that time I was customizing the header for every post (I don’t do that anymore).

Anyways, right after I sent this post I got the email disabled notification from this doctor I admired so much. I was devastated! Was it my header? Was it that the workshop was irrelevant? Was it—gasp—my face? To this day, I don’t know but it was a huge learning moment for me.

I am actually putting a lot more of my face and events in my Substack now, because I want to build relationships. If my readers aren’t going to like BOTH my topic and me, it doesn’t make sense for them to be here. I think in the beginning, I was really hiding behind the words and the research and this was the breaking point where I had gone as far as I could under that shield.

What's your favorite spot for inspiration or relaxation when you're not working?

In nature, all the way.

How do you decide which projects to pursue, and which ones to pass on? What criteria do you use to make these decisions? Has it changed over the years?

I have huge lists of post ideas at all times, and some have been on there for years and I just keep not getting around to them. As a mother, only excellence can keep my attention and justify itself to me for being away from my busy home life.

I also created a Google form and pinned it to my desktop, so when I am reading research or doing whatever, if I find a good quote or idea that would work for a post, I drop it in the form with the citation and/or graphic and then it gets added to a spreadsheet I can use when I am ready to make a new batch of content.

I also keep a Google Drive folder for research (this is the perk in my Founding Member’s tier which is for other practitioners).

I meticulously download all full-text PDFs I can find about my topic and so this drive is ever growing in the years I have been writing. It’s very foundational to my work and right now I only publish things that I can also reference back to peer-reviewed research. This is something I am considering changing, as I think there is more to be said about my lived experience, but this is kind of a newer thought. I didn’t set out to be a mommy blogger (not that there is anything wrong with that, it just was never on my personal bucket list).

Can you share a memorable fan encounter or interaction that made a lasting impression on you?

I have been so “it” focused, it surprises me so much whenever someone turns around and says “you.” When I think about my readers, I imagine them sitting at my side and we are both exploring this topic together. I kind of think of them as though they are all also deeply steeped in these topics and I am just reminding them of things, or maybe pointing to a resource they haven’t discovered yet.

So it is totally normal and expected when I hear someone say “Wow, this is so amazing” or “I wish I had known this earlier!”, because I feel the same way. But when they say anything like, “You are so amazing for putting this together” it is always really jarring—like when the 4th wall is broken in the movie. I’m like, me? But this is about “it.” Hahaha.

What's your guilty pleasure when it comes to reading or writing? Any guilty-pleasure genres or topics?

Tangential topics in PubMed. It’s super nerdy, but I was trained to be a science writer and so all this jargon makes me really happy. I’m contstantly trying to break it down in my publication into words people without my years of study will understand. But my secret wish is to be able to use all the jargon and to have ever-more very high-level thinkers in these areas of inquiry paying attention to my work (I am blessed to have quite a few in my sphere already) and for them to be pushing the edge of my own knowledge with related concepts I haven’t thought to explore yet.

If you lost it all tomorrow and had to start again with nothing but a computer and $1,000, how would you start to rebuild your business?

I’d reach out to everyone I know and can remember contact details of that has been interested in my work before—email, social media, and in-person.

My message would say a bit about what I was working on with an invitation to join as well as a request to recommend my work to the mamas and wellness professionals in their lives. So much of my work is backed up in the cloud, it’s hard to imagine it all being gone! But if it was, the first thing I would rebuild is my Pregnancy workshop, because people have been more than happy to pay for my workshop and it has also been extremely valuable to people and even changed their lives.

Next, I would probably focus on doing another podcast tour, because guesting has brought in people who really care and have proved interested in both my topic and in me—which as I shared earlier has been my biggest AHA realization about the particular challenge of this kind of publishing work online and on Substack.

What upcoming projects or initiatives are you currently working on, and how do they align with your long-term career goals?

I just re-launched my Practitioner’s tier inside of the Founding Members option in my Substack. It’s a mentorship community where I am creating deeper resources, video lessons, and giving business & marketing coaching to help other wellness professionals, birth workers and parents integrate this circadian and quantum health stuff into their lives and businesses. It’s part of my love for working with people in a way that feels real and tangible. My ideal audience is of “friends in the work.”

We all are helping to birth a new paradigm of perinatal care that actually respects the wisdom of circadian and quantum biology and our human need to connect meaningfully with Nature on a daily basis.

Coffee, tea, or something else entirely? What's your preferred writing beverage?

Trace minerals! In my house, we call them “drops” and we all—even the toddlers—love adding them to our “cloud water.”

Nikko Kennedy is a perinatal quantum biology practitioner and certified labor and postpartum doula with a B.S. in Biopsychology. She is the mother of 4 children and lives with her husband in beautiful Southern Oregon. You can find her on Instagram and Linkedin.

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