Unfinished Business Podcast Episode 4 Part 3: How to Find Your Target Market and Grow Through Word of Mouth
In Part 3 of Unfinished Business Episode 4, NeedleCalm founders Lauren Barber and Elisha Mullins bring a familiar growth problem to the Growth Hotline: too many competing priorities and too many possible audiences. Anaita Sarkar and Tim Duggan help them narrow their starting market to parents, identify the communities where those customers gather and turn existing customer experiences into deliberate word of mouth.
One of the hardest moments in any business comes after you've built something people genuinely need. New opportunities keep appearing, but limited time and resources mean you can't pursue all of them at once.
That's the challenge facing founders Lauren Barber and Elisha Mullins, the team behind NeedleCalm. Their question for Anaita Sarkar and Tim Duggan is a familiar one: when everything feels important, what should you do next?
Meet NeedleCalm: an idea shaped by frontline experience
Lauren spent more than 16 years working as a nurse, much of that time in emergency dePartments. During her career, she saw first-hand how many people struggled with injections and blood tests.
After suffering a needle-stick injury that required surgery and time away from work, Lauren began researching needle anxiety more deeply.
“I saw connections between early needle phobia and people avoiding later healthcare.”
That research revealed a gap in the market and eventually became the foundation for NeedleCalm.
A discreet product that doesn't have a look
Lauren explains that needle anxiety often doesn't look the way people expect. People can appear completely confident while still experiencing significant anxiety around injections, blood tests and other procedures.
“Needle phobia affects everyone.”
As she points out, the person struggling with needle anxiety could just as easily be a heavily tattooed adult as anyone else. That understanding shaped NeedleCalm's design. Rather than creating something that stands out, the founders deliberately made it clinical, discreet and unobtrusive for use in healthcare settings.
How NeedleCalm works
NeedleCalm is a double-sided pad made from specialised thermoplastic material and stored in a refrigerator before use. The founders explain that it uses a combination of texture, pressure and temperature as Part of its intended use around needle procedures.
Because NeedleCalm operates in a regulated healthcare environment, Elisha notes the business must be careful about how it discusses efficacy and outcomes. The product is registered with Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration as a Class I medical device.
When every priority feels important
While the founders have made significant progress developing the product, their biggest challenge isn't product development. It’s market prioritisation.
Like many founders, Lauren and Elisha are juggling website improvements, social media, content, marketing, clinical research, funding opportunities and stakeholder relationships.
Individually, every activity feels important. Together, they create a prioritisation problem: what one activity will generate the momentum needed to fund everything else?
Choose the audience before the channel
Tim's response doesn't begin with marketing tactics. Instead, he takes a step back and asks a more fundamental question.
Who exactly are you trying to reach first?
Potential audiences include parents, nurses, pharmacists, hospitals and other healthcare providers. The challenge is that each audience requires a different message and marketing approach.
Rather than deciding where to market first, Tim encourages the founders to decide who they want to reach first.
After talking it through, the hosts and founders agree that parents are the most practical starting audience, not because they're the only market, but because they're the easiest group to access and understand.
Go where your customers are
Tim argues that founders often make growth harder than it needs to be by trying to pull people towards entirely new channels.
Instead, identify where your audience already gathers and who they already trust. For parents, that could include school communities, newsletters, Facebook groups and local parent networks.
The principle matters more than the channel itself: growth is often easier when you Participate in existing communities rather than building new ones from scratch.
Focus makes the next step obvious
Without a defined audience, the founders face an impossible challenge: marketing to everyone.
Tim's point is that focus creates clarity. Once the audience becomes specific, the questions become more practical.
How do we reach one school community? Who influences that audience? What information would they find useful?
The narrower the focus becomes, the easier it is to identify the next step.
Word of mouth is stronger when you ask for it
Tim also encourages the founders to make better use of existing customers.
Rather than hoping word of mouth happens naturally, he suggests following up after purchase and asking simple questions: Did they use the product? What was their experience? Would they recommend it to someone who might benefit from it?
Sometimes all it takes is a prompt to turn a happy customer into an advocate.
Use the origin story and education to make sharing easier
Another advantage NeedleCalm possesses is a genuinely compelling origin story. Lauren's experience as an emergency nurse, combined with the personal circumstances that led to developing the product, provides context that many customers may relate to.
“I ended up with a dirty needle in my finger and needed surgery.”
Not only do stories help people remember products, but they also help them explain products to others. These kinds of stories are shorthand for education. By helping families better understand needle anxiety, the topic becomes more comfortable, and the solution more obvious.
The founders also discuss initiatives such as the Ned the Needle mascot and associated activity pack, which may provide another way to engage children and families while creating opportunities for broader education.
For potential advocates, useful educational resources can often be just as shareable as the product itself.
From one useful customer experience to a community of buyers
Towards the end of the discussion, the founders mention an interesting observation. They've noticed clusters of orders coming from similar areas within Melbourne. The analytics aren’t super clear on what’s happening or why, but they do raise an interesting possibility.
Perhaps local conversations are already taking place.
Could these localised sales be happening when customers recommend the product to friends, neighbours or members of their community?
Tim says this kind of behaviour is not uncommon.
“All it takes is one person in the group saying, ‘I used this for my daughter. It was amazing. Here is the link".
It’s possible. It could also be something else entirely. The important point isn't proving the source – it’s recognising the signal. When multiple customers appear in the same area, it may indicate an opportunity worth investigating further.
For founders looking for growth, these small clues can often reveal valuable opportunities hiding in plain sight.
Key takeaways for small business owners
The NeedleCalm Growth Hotline offers several practical lessons for founders facing competing priorities:
1. Choose a starting audience before choosing a channel
Focus on one audience first to simplify messaging and avoid spreading resources too thin.
2. Go where your audience already is
Look for trusted communities, networks and information sources rather than building everything from scratch.
3. Narrow the problem
The more specific the audience, the easier it is to identify the next action.
4. Learn from your customers
Existing customers can reveal growth opportunities through their behaviour and feedback.
5. Follow up after purchase
Customer conversations create opportunities for insight, advocacy and referrals.
6. Ask for word-of-mouth referrals
A simple request can help satisfied customers spread the word.
7. Give people something worth sharing
Stories, education and useful resources make recommendations easier.
When resources are limited, growth is often less about doing more things and more about doing the next thing well.
Watch the full NeedleCalm Growth Hotline conversation
That's it for Part 3 of our Episode 4 recap.
You can read Part 1 here, and do a recap of Part 2 here
To hear Lauren and Elisha's full conversation with Tim and Anaita, watch or listen to Episode 4 of Unfinished Business, proudly published by Vodafone Business:
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