The world needs more female entrepreneurs.

​Founders I Love​ is a Boise-based coaching, courses, and community platform built for women entrepreneurs. It’s the work of Janessa and Kaija, two women who have started, scaled, and survived enough business chaos to fill a graduate program. They are on a mission to share the resources and knowledge they wish they had when starting out.

Most business advice assumes you want to raise venture money, hire fast, and grind your way to an exit. That works for some people. But for others, building a business is more about building something with intention that works with your life. Founders I Love is built for people following the latter path: businesses rooted in values, paced for a real human body, and built to actually help people. Janessa and Kaija believe that you can build something profitable without burning yourself down to do it.

Meet Janessa

Back in 2016, Janessa had the itch to start her own business and had already been experimenting with a gardening business and a personal shopping business. At the same time, she was dating a gentleman, Matt Dalley, who was working on a business idea centered on elopements and small weddings. She had a background in event coordination and a knack for customer service, so she offered to team up. They rebranded the business to Simply Eloped​, built a website, and two weeks later they had their first customer.

Couples would come to Simply Eloped and the team would help them secure a ceremony location and source all their vendors, like the officiant, florals, and photography. The business took off. Within three years, it had crossed $1 million in revenue.

“It was wild. He and I did absolutely everything in the beginning stages of the business,” said Janessa. “And we had such a blast doing it.”

After 10 years, Simply Eloped was acquired by The Knot Worldwide, the largest wedding company on the planet. It was exactly the outcome Janessa and her co-founder had in mind when they started.

But that’s the tidy version. The real story, the one that actually led her to start Founders I Love, isn’t nearly as clean.

Janessa and Matt founded Simply Eloped in 2016. By 2019 they’d hit $1 million in revenue. The numbers were amazing, but the systems behind the scenes were struggling to keep up with the pace of growth.

“I was doing what every first time business owner does. I made every single mistake,” said Janessa. “We had cultural issues, hiring issues, training issues, HR issues.”

In 2020, COVID hit and more than half of their ceremonies were cancelled or rescheduled. They had more than 2,500 weddings on the books and then, almost overnight, hundreds of cancellations. As a company, they decided to refund anyone who asked for it. One upside of this time was the chance to catch up on the organizational side of the business. She spent several months working with her team to put together SOPs, processes, and actual structure.

“We had just been running so fast and furiously. And this is a mistake that I see almost all founders make,” said Janessa. “We were so focused on product and marketing. But infrastructurally we were a disaster.”

In the middle of 2020, another stroke of luck: for a while, eloping was basically the only way to have a wedding. After a few months of quiet, business surged. Simply Eloped was already established in 34 destinations, so if one state shut down, they could move a wedding somewhere else without missing a beat.

Before COVID, eloping had been a little stigmatized. Then, because it was the only option, it became trendy. Suddenly, Simply Eloped had real competition for the first time.

“Elopements became trendy and basically overnight, in a really intense way, we had a ton of competition,” said Janessa. “All of the language we had been working on as a business started getting ripped off and duplicated.”

In 2021, after five years of running Simply Eloped together, Janessa and Matt broke up, which inevitably meant breaking up as business partners too. Not the most ideal scenario for a couple running a wedding company, but it stayed amicable. Janessa took over the business and kept things going. The next year, she hit $7 million in annual revenue – their biggest year yet.

Then, in 2023, came the big one: Janessa was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had to step back from a company that was thriving but could not really run without her. She took six months off and came back to a business that was struggling. There was no choice but to get back to work.

“For the next 6 months I was literally fighting for my life and for the life of my business,” she said. Eventually, she got the business back on stable footing and soon after sold it to The Knot.

That whole experience taught her something she now talks to founders about constantly: you have to know the heartbeat of your business. Healthy founders equal healthy businesses. Your business should support your life, not consume it.

“I think I saw the writing on the wall that I needed to start prioritizing my own health,” she said, reflecting on the chronic stress she carried for most of the years running Simply Eloped. “What I was doing was not sustainable, and something needed to change. The business was relying upon me.”

I think this is something a lot of founders and entrepreneurs experience. I certainly have. As Janessa put it, when you’re starting a business, it’s like your baby. It’s really hard to have the foresight, while you’re building it, to think about how it would ever run without you.

The reality is, you can’t control what happens in life. COVID, cancer, breakups. Nobody can foresee that stuff, let alone plan around it. But these things absolutely affect your business. What Janessa wants to help people do now is build a business that can weather the storms, so that when life happens (and it will), the business keeps going.

Meet Kaija

Kaija and Janessa met almost by accident. They were at a retreat when Janessa spotted Kaija wearing a Boise State Venture College shirt. They struck up a conversation, and over the course of the weekend Janessa learned that Kaija had an entire worldview about business she couldn’t stop talking about.

Kaija is fascinated by shared ownership models and by companies that spread profit around instead of concentrating it at the top. She believes the health of a community is inextricably linked to the health of the businesses inside it: how they treat their employees, what kind of culture they build, and whether they share what they make. Get enough of that right and a whole town feels it, whether or not anyone could name why.

Her background is a Fortune 100 tech company, where she’s held roles across product, AI, and strategy, and she has an MBA. What she really loves is helping women who have never taken a business class, never sat in a strategy meeting, never seen a pricing model. They have an idea and a lot of nerve, and Kaija’s passion is making sure that’s enough.

When Kaija and Janessa met, Janessa had already bought the domain for Founders I Love. She just needed a partner. By the end of that retreat, the two of them had found a partner in each other and a shared reason to build: get more women to take the leap, and help them start businesses that are healthy for them and for the places they live.

Meet Founders I Love

Founders I Love has three components: courses, coaching, and community. The foundational course is ​Starting a Business That Matters​, a seven-module course with a 90+ page workbook that walks a first-time founder from idea to a validated plan. It covers everything from mission and values to pricing models and reaching customers. The second component is ​one-on-one coaching​ with Janessa. This is ideal for founders who already have a business off the ground and are hitting growth or scaling problems.

Janessa and Kaija know that building a business is often lonely, which is where community comes in. ​Founders Circle​ is a free community that was created specifically to not feel like a networking group. No pitching, no follower-count flexing. It’s just an even playing field with other people building a business. Women at every stage of business are there to ask questions, share fears, get support, and celebrate wins of every size.

“Women need different things than men. We need tools, education, community, support, and encouragement. That is why I started Founders I Love,” said Janessa. “I want others to not make the same mistakes I did.”

A personal take

Janessa and I first met while working together at Treefort Music Fest. When I started freelancing in 2018, Simply Eloped was my very first client. I was in charge of PR and copywriting.

Fast forward to 2024. I ran into Janessa again and we caught up over drinks. I was pregnant and telling her how From Boise basically couldn’t run without me doing everything, and I had no idea how I’d take a maternity leave. She offered to help me figure it out, and over three dinners, she taught me how to document all of my internal processes, create SOPs, and hire and train someone to take over parts of my business. I did exactly what she told me to do, and I was able to hand off most of the content so I could actually take a few months off.

Fast forward again to 2026. In 2025 I hit my big goal of crossing $100,000 in revenue. Now what? I started this year yearning for a mentor. I had ideas about ways I could keep growing, and I knew there were things I was still doing that could be delegated to someone else. I felt like I was in the middle of another identity leap. First I was just a writer, then I moved to being a solo entrepreneur, and now I am trying to figure out how to be the CEO. I was desperate to talk to someone who’d give me honest feedback, tell me what I was overlooking, point out where I needed to grow, someone who wouldn’t be afraid to challenge my ideas. Once again, here comes Janessa.

She reached out asking if I could help connect her with local founders as she launched Founders I Love. I responded asking if I could be her first coaching client.

One of the most impactful exercises we did together was collecting data. I am slightly embarrassed by how much I wasn’t tracking. I can tell you exactly how many subscribers we have, how open rates have held steady since I started, and how I went from making no money at all to crossing six figures. But I couldn’t have told you how one month I could spend $100 on advertising and grow by 700 subscribers, and the next month spend $1,000 on ads and only grow by 200. I couldn’t tell you which ads were converting best. I couldn’t have told you the breakdown of revenue by source each month off the top of my head. “These are numbers you need to spend time with every single day. You need to know them by heart,” she told me.

This is what I love about being coached by Janessa. She’s genuinely excited about my business and about me reaching my goals. She’s fun and easy to work with. She’s tactical. And, perhaps most importantly, she is not afraid to tell me what’s up.

The truth is, owning and running a business can be very lonely and isolating. Having someone who’s been there, someone to bounce ideas off of, ask the dumb questions you wouldn’t ask a peer, and celebrate wins with, is invaluable.

Join the club

Boise has resources for founders, and it’s actually a really exciting time to start a business here. We have Trailhead, the Venture College, and there’s plenty of mentorship and networking groups. But a lot of it exists in silos, and none of them were built specifically with women in mind. Founders I Love is the room where you’re not the only woman in it.

You don’t have to be local to work with them, and Janessa will tell you plainly that coaching works best once you already have a business off the ground. But if you have a business idea and don’t know where to start, or you’re a few years in and starting to feel like your business is running you instead of the other way around, you should check it out.

You can join the free ​Founders Circle community​, dig into the ​Starting a Business That Matters course​, or ​book a session directly with Janessa​.

Learn more at ​foundersilove.com​.

Thanks for reading!

With love from Boise,

Marissa

If you’re interested in getting your product, service, or event in front of 25k Boise locals → ​book a call​