Today we’d like to introduce you to Jodie Rodriguez.
Hi Jodie, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I moved to Austin by myself two years ago in 2021 and wanted to start focusing on making friendships in the new city I was in. I previously worked at Amazon in Kyle, Texas, as an Area Manager with a hectic schedule. I wanted to find any ladies that had a similar availability to mine. I went on Facebook and joined a few Women’s Austin Facebook groups to be active and meet up with women.
Getting sidetracked with work and dating at the time, I needed to be more active in the Facebook Groups I joined and prioritize making friendships. After some time, I reprioritized making friendships and heard about the app Bumble BFF, where you can “match” with people that are also trying to make friends. I wanted to find a “girl gang” and was getting impatient trying to meet with girls one-on-one and coordinate for everyone to meet. Creating friendships was personally a little more difficult than dating. In the app, many women would start a conversation and then fall off, meet once, and then not communicate again, or people would say in their Bumble BFF Bio that they don’t regularly check their app and it’s better just to message them on Instagram.
I remembered that I joined some Women’s Facebook Groups and decided to make an “Introduction Post” that members usually post where they describe a little about themselves and how to reach them if they want to connect. In my post, I added that I wanted to meet regularly once a week on a weekday to have consistency. I was very nervous creating that post, thinking I would need someone to contact me.
The following day, I woke up with over 60 comments from women wanting to connect and be part of the weekly meet-up. I was startled and in awe by how many women wanted to meet me and try to be consistent with a weekly hangout. I was panicking about how to make these weekly hangouts happen with so many women. I thought a Facebook Group would be the easiest and most organized way to create events for the women interested in meeting up with me. Just off the top of my head, I quickly decided to name the group “ATX Girl Hangouts” and sent the invite link in the comments under my post. After that, I started researching which location would have enough seating for us and decided to host our first weekly hangout at Central Machine Works for the upcoming week on Thursday. I met some lovely ladies for our first hangout and kept making weekly hangouts with the group of girls and would post on the Facebook group about our next weekly meet-up. The meet-ups were mainly for meeting up at a cute bar spot we liked and having casual drinks and chatting, board game nights, or dancing.
About a month or two after creating the group, I started getting a lot of requests to join the group, and it quickly became overwhelming to sort through all the requests. I was thinking about deleting the group because it took a lot of my time to accept the daily requests and keep the group organized, but I decided to keep it and see where it goes.
During the summer, I started making weekly volleyball hangouts at Zilker and hosted our first boat party, Bad Bunny themed. I was still keeping up with the “Happy Hour” hangouts, but some months were inconsistent due to my schedule and work. I only realized how much the group was growing once someone pointed out how many people were in the group, which was about 10,000 members at the time. I was blown away by that number and decided to start being more consistent with creating hangouts and events for the Facebook Group.
This summer, I have been hosting weekly “Happy Hour” events where anywhere from 15-50 ladies meet up and meet new women. I have also hosted our second boat party, Karol G Themed, a Painting with a Twist event, a Girls’ Night In (Mean Girls Themed), and a 30-person pool party. There have been a lot of requests for events and hangouts along with my ideas, so I am excited to keep hosting events and have women meet up on their own through their own “Introduction” posts and events that they create and host themselves in the Facebook Group.
Reflecting on when I first started trying to look for friends and not having much success when I moved to Austin, I would sometimes feel that something was wrong with me or that I was not interesting enough to have many friends. Still, once I started seeing the outpour of posts from women also trying to look for friends, I realized that I was not alone. Since I knew how overwhelming it can be to make friendships, I wanted to help other women have more opportunities in a safe and welcoming space to meet new women and kindle friendships.
One thing that I find amazing about this community is that almost all the women that come to the meet-up events are coming by themselves and stepping out of their comfort zone to meet new people. I hope I have created a community where women feel safe and welcome to attend an event, hang out, and have an enjoyable time while meeting new women. I would never have imagined that my “introduction” post in another Facebook group would have led me to have and lead a community of over 18,000 women in Austin, Texas, and its surrounding areas. The original post was for me to create friendships because I was struggling to meet friends, and now, I’m incredibly grateful to be able to help women meet other women and find those friendships a little easier.
Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned? Looking back, has it been easy or smooth in retrospect?
When I first started creating weekly events at the beginning of 2022, I intended not to create a “meet-up community.” I was creating hangouts so that I could meet new friends. Once the Facebook Group was getting traction and more and more requests were coming in, I started getting overwhelmed with trying to manage everything. I wanted to keep the group as organized as possible and strictly only allow posts about introducing themselves or wanting to meet up. Once I set up those restrictions, I sometimes would get aggressive private messages, or members would create posts that would include profanities about me because their posts got declined. Those things are never pleasant, and I would have to step back and not take it personally. That type of energy is different from what I want in the group. I would hate for someone to experience aggression or any disrespect, so I am extremely strict on removing any members that would create posts like that or would send me or anyone else messages that were aggressive, rude, or disrespectful, adding to making the group organized, it was a challenge to set up all the parameters and automation to help me not take up so much time looking through posts that did not meet the group rules I have set up. Thankfully, Facebook has a lot of automation where I can set up keywords to flag posts that violate any group rules.
As the group is growing very rapidly in less than 1,5 years of creating this group, one of my obstacles is trying to be organized and creative about coming up with event ideas, finding locations that have enough seating, and also trying to make sure that there are different types of events and hangouts that different people can enjoy and be a part of it. I am starting to ask for help from the group with hosting, event creation, and volunteers to help with set-up and clean-up, so I am excited to have a group that will be able to help me! One of my main goals in the group is to keep it as safe as possible, so one of my challenges is ensuring that all profiles are real and that they are indeed women. Initially, some men would try to enter the group or pretend to be women, and unfortunately, Facebook does not have a way to flag all male profiles. I manually accept every request that comes in to make sure that they are not a male and see if their profile does not look fake. Thankfully, all the women attending the meet-ups and events have been amiable, sweet, and have positive energy. I am so thankful that they are respectful to one another and treat everyone very well.
Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Most of my background is in Operations Management- I have worked at Amazon as an Area Manager and an Operations Manager at a real-estate tech start-up company that streamlined make-ready and unit-turn services for multi-family properties in Texas and Florida. In 2020, I was doing online fitness coaching on the side, and it was my goal to make it into a full-time career. In August of 2022, I decided to jump straight into online fitness coaching as a full-time career after being an Operations Manager in my previous job. I have a Bachelor’s in Exercise and Sports Science.
As an online fitness coach, I create an all-inclusive coaching program with weight-lifting workouts, a daily step plan, nutrition guidelines, habit and mindset coaching, and accountability through check-ins and support from me. My goal as an online fitness coach is to design a coaching program that is doable, sustainable, and enjoyable so that they can realistically stick to it for the rest of their life. I create their program based on their workout setting (home, total gym, or apartment gym), schedule, and preferences, and start at whatever baseline they are at.
Most women that I have had a conversation with think that they need to be 100% perfect with their plan or think that they need to do an extreme diet or workout plan to get results, so I coach them on an approach that is far more enjoyable and sustainable so that they won’t have to keep resetting every week, month, year on a new workout or diet plan.
I am known as an online fitness coach that coaches women that it’s 100% possible to have a balanced lifestyle where they don’t need to cut out any specific foods or drastically change their lifestyle to feel better and reach any health or physique goals they may have. My life has certainly undergone many changes, and I have made many difficult decisions about where my life should be heading or looking. I would previously put a lot of pressure on myself and feel shame for changing my mind on many different things, but now, I feel more at peace and give myself more credit for trying out new things.
I have always wanted to become an entrepreneur and have my own business, and my itch to try it has grown and grown over the years since I graduated college. Now that I have 100% tried doing my own thing as a fitness coach, that itch has finally been scratched, and I learned a lot about having a business. I am very proud of myself for not stopping myself from trying new things, even when others doubt or express disappointment in my decisions. It is tough to jump into uncertainty, but I am grateful that I put my fears aside and tried it. I am still planning on having a few coaching clients, but I will be transitioning back into the Operations world, where my strengths lie. I am excited to keep growing the ATX Girl Hangouts community and grow professionally in my new role.
Risk-taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
When I was in college, I was very much opposed to risk-taking. I had a set plan about becoming an Occupational Therapist. It was a solid career, and I wanted to make my family proud of entering the medical field. I never changed my major in college, and the only tweak I made was from wanting to be a Physical Therapist to an Occupational Therapist. I had blinders on, and that was my only end goal. I reflected on why I wanted to enter that career deeply in my Junior year in college. I had to do hundreds of observational hours with Occupational Therapists and slowly realized that this career may not be for me. But I was stubborn and knew I sacrificed a lot to get to where I was, so I stuck to my plan.
In my last year in college, I decided not to pursue being an occupational therapist and did not apply to graduate school. For one year, I decided to reflect on what I wanted to do with my life and thought about being a middle school educator, a band director, and a software engineer. I became frustrated with myself, especially after seeing that other former classmates were enrolling in graduate school or starting their professional careers already. I applied to graduate school for occupational therapy and started in the summer of 2019. After one month of school, I knew this career was not for me. It was a tough decision because I devoted all my time in school to studying to excel in my classes and have a high GPA for graduate applications. Still, I did not want to force myself into a career I already had doubts about and regretted staying.
This was when I started working at Amazon as an associate, and during my time as an associate, I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do. With one of my passions being health and fitness, I decided to start online fitness coaching on the side while I was still an associate at Amazon. While still at Amazon, I got promoted twice in less than 2 years and unexpectedly fell in love with Operations and relit my passion for leadership and team-building. In high school and college, I was a section leader for the flute section in my band programs and also held leadership positions in a band service sorority.
With my experience with Amazon, I decided to change and started working as an Operations Manager at a real estate tech start-up company. I took a break from online fitness coaching because coaching and holding a full-time job was overwhelming.
Eventually, my itch to own my own business was getting greater and greater. I had an internal struggle to hold on to a stable job in tech and trying to pursue a new business venture. It was getting increasingly difficult to push one of my dreams aside, and I did not want to regret not trying it. I was terrified of leaving my job and jumping into uncertainty. I am glad I tried online fitness coaching full-time and learned many things about owning a business and, most importantly, myself and how I want to live my life.
Taking risks is not easy and extremely difficult, but it was very much worth it for me. I learned my preferences and goals because I pushed myself to try something I’ve always wanted to do. I am so proud of my own story, and it took a lot to finally get here without feeling shame or disappointment. It was a rough ride, and I never expected it to be incredibly challenging, but again, I am so proud of myself for taking the chance.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/atxgirlhangouts/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/atxgirlhangouts
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodie-k-rodriguez/
- Other: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100092945166385
