Viv Conway from Girls Get Off | #529

Viv Conway is on a mission to normalise female pleasure and create a positive, empowering space for women. A social media whiz turned taboo-busting entrepreneur, Viv and her business partner Jo Cummins, have built and sold multiple businesses, including Vivid Sportswear and Ace The Gram, helping brands scale their presence on Instagram. The two teamed up during lockdown in 2020 and launched Girls Get Off, a sexual wellness brand helping women feel good (literally) and laugh while they’re at it. Focused on breaking taboos and fostering community-driven brands, Viv and Jo continue to drive meaningful conversations and innovation.

Viv Conway is no ordinary founder, and Girls Get Off is no ordinary brand. As co-founder of one of ANZ’s most talked-about sexual wellness businesses, Viv has built a loyal fanbase of over 40,000 women, millions of organic video views, and a brand that’s rewriting the rules in a highly restricted category. She’s also no stranger to building brands. Before founding Girls Get Off she, and her ongoing business partner Jo Cummins, co-founded Ace The Gram, a social media growth agency she successfully exited in 2021, and launched and sold Vivid Sportswear.

In this Checkout, Viv dishes up her ecommerce essentials, business inspiration and the vulva costume she had custom-made on Airtasker. It’s equal parts brilliant and unhinged (in the best way possible).

Fabric Shopping for a Vulva

When asked about the weirdest thing she’s ever bought online, Viv doesn’t miss a beat. “You’re gonna love this one. For part of our Instagram content, we have life-sized vulva costumes. And when I moved to Australia, I was like, I really need a costume over here.”

Instead of jumping on Amazon, Viv went full founder mode. “So I put on Airtasker, can someone make me a vulva costume? And I was met by the most lovely lady who insisted I go to Spotlight with her to pick out the colours… She was like, ‘All I ever get to do is tailor people’s pants, this is so exciting for me.’”

She let the seamstress take the creative lead, and the result is a custom, vulva that features regularly on their channels.

From Budget Airlines to Sextech Strategy

Viv’s favourite brand inspo lately? A budget airline and a sex toy disruptor. Her first shoutout to Ryanair, because of their awesome Instagram content that capitalises on low-cost sass. Viv’s second shoutout goes to Lovense. She’s fascinated by how they’ve cornered a new market with wearable toys that integrate into live-streamed content. 

“They have this technology… you can connect into chat rooms. So on things like World Orgasm Day, everyone can orgasm together,” said Viv. It’s exactly the kind of outside-the-box  innovation that inspires her own product strategy.

Viv’s Top Tech Picks

You’d expect Viv to pick something spicy here, but her top ecommerce tech is surprisingly practical. “At the moment, hands down, ChatGPT. I just am obsessed, especially the deep research function: insane,” said Viv.

But when it comes to business-changing software, it was Gorgias that really made the difference: “We only got it because we were about to outsource our customer service. And it was probably one of the biggest facepalm moments I’ve ever had in this business going: why on earth were we even still using email?”

She recalls being on holiday in Japan, stuck handling customer emails manually: “There I am going, ‘Hey, no problem, just send me a video of that and I’ll get it sorted for you’… typing the same thing out every time.” For her, the macros in Gorgias were game-changing.

Orgasm Tech and Team Ops

When it comes to book and podcast recs, Viv goes practical—with a side of operations. “I love the book Traction… or Get a Grip. I can’t remember which one is the actual textbook and which one is the fable.” She’s also a big fan of the EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) method it talks about, especially for founders scaling small teams.

EOS helped bring clarity, accountability and structure to Girls Get Off. Viv broke it down for us: “It sets up your weekly, monthly, daily meetings, how you place people in the right seats, what their roles should look like… and how to eventually get to the stage where you, as the business owner, could sit on your beach in Bali and have your scorecard to see the health of your business.”

Scaling Without Selling Your Soul

Viv’s biggest challenge today isn’t launching products or creating content. It’s sustainable growth, especially in an economy that’s tightening up. At the moment they are content focused, “ doubling down” and “building the audience”.

After the boom of the COVID ecommerce rush, she says the pressure is now on to drive growth without discounts without burning the brand. “We don’t want to turn into the next, like, you know, discount brand. And we see a lot of brands doing that at the moment,” said Viv.That means finding new ways to scale, whether it’s through retail, influencers or smarter systems. As Viv explained: “We’ve kind of got to find something that works for us. And that could be retail, which we’re just about to start. That could be more influencers in a certain space.”

Vulvas, Velocity and the Value of Focus

Viv Conway is what happens when you combine content mastery, category bravery and a serious knack for building communities that convert. Whether it’s implementing EOS to run a lean team, using ChatGPT for research or installing macros to stop writing the same email ten times, Viv’s ecommerce brain is wired for impact. Add to that her fearless creativity (and costume budget), and you’ve got a founder who’s scaling fast without selling out.

Want more from Viv?
Listen to the full Checkout Episode here:

The Checkout is a short snippet of our conversations.