Today we’d like to introduce you to Thea Wayne.
Hi Thea, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I had an interesting childhood. I was born in Juneau, Alaska, spent my early years in a small hippie town in Southern Oregon, and then spent middle school and high school back in rural Alaska in a town called Homer, population 3,000. Along this journey, I went through alternative schooling that focused on teamwork, leadership, nature, and community. I strongly believe it was this creativity-forward childhood that inspired me to become the entrepreneur that I now am.
Being empowered by teachers and students at a young age to lean into my leadership and creativity gave me the confidence and discernment later in life to take risks when it came to going all in on passions and ideas, and I am forever grateful for that.
When I was 17, I was quite over small-town living, so I graduated a year early from high school and moved to Arcata, California, in Northern California, to go to Humboldt State University. At 20,000 people, Arcata felt big, new, and exciting. There was more than one bar; there were five, and additionally, it was gorgeous. If you’ve never heard of the redwoods, I recommend you Google it and plan a trip accordingly. A 5-minute walk from my campus doors, you were immersed in the redwood forest with trees hundreds of feet tall and years old and with ferns, mushrooms, and flowers all around.
Sadly, unlike many of the university attendees, I did not spend my first year hiking and exploring nature. I spent my first year partying. My mom had been quite strict in high school, rightfully so, as many of my friends were getting into drugs (small-town problems). My inner rebel had been developing for quite some time, and so when I got to college, all bets were off.
I had only drunk heavily a handful of times in high school, but that first week at college with my new roommate and thousands of other new students was like out of a movie. We drank fifths of cheap alcohol and walked around the town trying to get our way into house parties that didn’t want freshmen at them. It didn’t matter; we felt free, invincible, and like grown-ups.
Sadly, my college experience was quite party-heavy, and while I regret nothing and know that all the chapters of my life made me who I am today, I am sad about how much I tried to use alcohol to medicate and well as a tool to learn how to flirt and have sex. I am now proudly sober, and I believe that my sobriety is an important part of what makes me successful and able to grow businesses and ideas.
Humboldt County (where Arcata, CA sits) and its neighboring counties, during this time, produced 80%+ of the cannabis consumed in the United States. By my second year of college, I was trimming cannabis on a farm to pay my way through college, and it was extremely lucrative. Sometimes, I would go to the farm for a weekend and come back to town with 1-2 thousand dollars. This laid a foundation for my young mind psychology that if I ever needed money, more was right around the corner—something I am still learning to navigate today.
During my senior year of college, I realized I loved building and creating business ideas, but I would have had to extend my college experience by 1-2 more years if I hadn’t switched from an international relations major to a business major. Instead of doing that I joined the entrepreneurship club, which ended up having a profound impact on my life. We drove 12+ hours from Arcata to Seattle one weekend to participate in a Startup Weekend where you pitch ideas, build teams, and build a prototype of a product in a weekend. On the drive up, I had the idea for an app that helps you split bills between roommates in a simplified way, which was something I had been struggling with at the time. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to take my real-life pain points and turn them into user-friendly concepts.
I nervously pitched the idea, and it was accepted, and all of a sudden, at 22, I was anxiously leading a team of 10 people of various ages and experience levels through building a product. It was a powerful weekend. My idea got second place; headed home from that experience, I remember having a newfound sense of clarity and confidence.
Shortly after graduating college, and a year or so before cannabis was legalized in California (it was medically legal, so patients could get prescriptions for it), I had the idea for a cannabis-infused skincare company. There were a few brands on the market at the dispensaries around town, but the packaging was awful, and they smelled terrible.
Although I didn’t have much experience with product formulation, I got busy. I was suffering from some severe chronic illness symptoms after returning from an internship in Nepal with a parasite, and so for a year, I was in a lot of discomfort and had a lot of downtime. I used the time and suffering as fuel for my ideas, busily blending essential oils with cannabis distillate and lotions and oils.
Humble Flower launched in 2016, and I hit the ground running. I’ll never forget the first dispensary giving me an envelope with $1000 cash for their first order. Creating products, manufacturing products, and doing anything business-related doesn’t feel like work to me—so this first payment almost felt too easy. The industry was a bit like the Wild West until state legalization hit, and my business grew very quickly. Before I knew it, I was manufacturing tens of thousands of dollars of skincare products in my small studio apartment. As I grew, I needed investors, so I connected with a woman who invested in the brand. I was able to move to Los Angeles and begin to scale the business, with the brand beginning to be in dozens and dozens of dispensaries around the state. I would drive out into the Palm Springs area to hand-manufacture thousands of products in a small trailer for compliance reasons; I was beyond determined to grow this thing.
As cannabis legalization happened in the state of California, I couldn’t afford the licensing fees and leasing costs involved, which started at around a quarter million dollars, so I began looking for someone to buy the brand. A home was found for the brand in 2019 when a larger parent company purchased it. During that first six months with the new company, the brand attended Kim Kardashian’s CBD-themed baby shower, we launched a CBD line that was on the shelves of stores like Anthropologie and Saks Fifth Avenue, and that first year the brand did one million dollars in retail revenue, and we did a complete rebrand.
It wasn’t long after the brand began to soar that the pandemic hit. In a complex and challenging series of events, the parent company let me go and killed the brand. It was a painful and important lesson in my entrepreneurial journey when it comes to picking who you work with.
The reality was though, I had emotionally already moved on. I loved the building and launching phases of building brands. Not so much the long-term scaling part that requires a ton of patience.
Right before the pandemic hit, I stopped drinking alcohol, which was an important piece of my journey. Sobriety for me from alcohol is vital to my success as an entrepreneur and content creator. Waking up every day with a clear mind is my preferred form of intoxication, and I’m thankful that I chose the path of sobriety.
Since I had stopped drinking, I started getting creative with beverages and matcha and finding fun ways to add flavor and color to lattes. So, during the pandemic, I got back into the kitchen mixing up recipes and a year later, launched Adaptology Co, a line of adaptogen-enhanced latte powders. Shortly after launching, I had a bit of an existential crisis. I realized once again I love the building and launching but not the scaling.
Around this time, I left the two-year relationship I was in, one where I had thought I was asexual because of a lack of chemistry, and bought a one-way ticket to Austin, Texas. It was during my first year in Austin that I realized product-based businesses were not for me, and I sold Adaptology Co to a women-owned adaptogenic coffee company.
During my drinking days in college, I had sex with a lot of people. I often felt a lot of shame, guilt, and embarrassment about this. I was the friend who always had the adventurous late-night rendezvous stories that my friends loved hearing about. Behind closed doors, though, I thought something was wrong with me and that my promiscuous activities, as fun as they were, made it so no one would ever love me and that I would be made fun of. So those sexy adventures continued through college but were almost always booze-soaked.
Flash forward to being sober, leaving a close-to-sexless relationship, and moving to a new city as a single woman, it was a new opportunity to explore my relationship with sex and dating. I met a dominatrix quite randomly, sitting next to her one day at a personal development workshop. When she quietly whispered and told me what she did, my eyes lit up. It was like something activated. Ever since I was young, I had always been passionate and curious about the world of sex, but I didn’t know how to get involved in the world or the communities surrounding it. We became fast friends, and she invited me to my first PG-13 event that involved Shibari and touch exercises; my life also changed that night.
Since those two experiences, I have done nothing short of jumping all in on the exploration of sex, kink, BDSM, and power dynamics. I quite frankly find it all fascinating, and I love learning and understanding the psychology of why people like and crave the things they do. I am passionate about making the taboo digestible for the curious.
Professionally I began doing business coaching and took a marketing job, but as is very on-brand for me: that wasn’t enough, I wanted to build, create, and share what I was exploring, experiencing, and learning with the world.
By this time, I had scaled numerous Instagram and TikTok accounts across various social platforms and was confident in my ability to reach the masses.
However, I had a big decision to make. The world saw me as a young and successful founder, CEO, and entrepreneur. They knew nothing about my sex life, my explorations, or my desires. I was terrified about what friends and family would think if I openly shared about this part of my life on the internet; I was worried about what it might do to my reputation as a founder and concerned about what my dating life would look like. They all were and are valid concerns, but at the end of the day, my vision was more important.
I was more committed to women and men, knowing their desires, thoughts, and kinks were valid and that moving away from shame and guilt and towards compassion about these things is the most healing thing that we can do. Aside from that, I was a passionate consumer of podcasts and loved it as a media format. I loved the idea of interviewing and connecting with sex experts, sex workers, and educators in the space to share their stories.
I knew from a marketing standpoint that to stand out in a world where everyone and their mother has a podcast, high-quality video, and studio-quality content would be crucial to my growth. I film at Authentic Exposure Studio here in Austin, and it has been crucial to my success and brand. To keep the lights on, I needed the podcast to become profitable in the first six months, which is no small feat as the space is crowded.
So, one day, I decided to go all in, at least on the first episode. I felt nervous to commit beyond that, in case I recorded, and it didn’t feel like the right path. To this day, a year later, I still get nervous the second I sit down to interview someone. That has not gone away, but again, the mission I have feels a lot more important than getting nervous here and there. It was a strange and sometimes difficult process to tell people about the podcast, but I think a lot of it was truly overcoming that original shame and guilt I experienced about my sex life to share what I am doing now from a proud and empowered stance.
The third episode of Seggs Talk Radio went viral overnight; within a week of that episode taking off, I had 30k new followers and an excited and eager audience. From there, I started booking bigger and bigger guests, signing brand deals and sponsorships, and working day and night to hand-select and edit clips and produce the podcast. Up until very recently, with hiring an assistant, I was doing almost everything myself, and I still do the produce piece completely on my own. It is a labor of love, and sometimes I can’t believe that this is my job because I really do care so much about what I am building and the people it does and could impact.
April 20th will be one year from my first episode going live, and in just a year, Seggs Talk Radio has amassed 113K Instagram followers, thousands of YouTube subscribers, a dozen brand partners, and over 90k downloads. I just recently returned from Los Angeles, where I interviewed some of Porn’s biggest names and stars, and I have a wild lineup for the rest of the year ranging from famous dominatrixes to PhDs in human sexuality and more.
I am currently in the beginning phases of building a sex-tech product that will revolutionize how adult content creators communicate with their top fans, and will be raising my first round of funding in the next year.
Sex is the genesis of life and pervades American media and culture, yet paradoxically, our introduction to it is often rooted in fear. Schools and families focus on the mechanics—condoms and STIs—rather than pleasure, orgasm, or consent. Meanwhile, the media portrays it as something steamy and taboo, leaving many of us intrigued yet confused. This contradiction fosters a societal reluctance to openly discuss sex and sexuality as we start to explore these integral aspects of our identity. It’s a perplexing landscape.
My mission with Seggs Talk Radio is to demystify these topics, fostering a space where people can share and learn without feeling isolated. If I can make even a small difference in helping others feel understood and not alone, I will consider my mission accomplished.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Relating to the podcast:
– Fear of judgment from friends and family
– Difficult conversations with family
– Haters/mean comments
– Sharing so much on the internet, making my dating life challenging
– Fear of people not taking me seriously as an entrepreneur because I am in the sex space
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am most proud of my ability to start from scratch with confidence in my vision. I know that the world needs the projects and companies I have built, and that always remains more important than any issues that may arise along the way.
I am proud of the way I have learned to hack social media and build audiences and communities almost overnight through authenticity and vulnerability.
What sets me apart from other podcasters, content creators, and entrepreneurs is my tenacity, my passion, and my determination.
At present I:
– Work by day at a marketing agency
– Run and produce the podcast by night
– Do freelance viral social media strategy
– Run my Patreon account, where I share sexy stories and photos, and audios
Risk-taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
I have always been a risk-taker in my endeavors.
Earlier on in my entrepreneurial journey, I took too many risks. Meaning I wasn’t thinking very far ahead financially or strategically, and I often ended up counting my eggs before they hatched. For example, I was making huge financial investments for my businesses because people had promised to pay their invoices.
Granted, I was very young when I started my first company, so I had to learn the hard way.
I would still consider myself someone who takes risks, and I have realized in my 30s that very few people take risks the way entrepreneurs do. I think we quite enjoy it and perhaps get off on it a bit.
I love the energy (and probably dopamine) of the “fuck it” moment with a business idea. Where you sign the contract, pay for the podcast studio rental, and decide to produce your first batch, whatever it may be. It’s exciting, liberating, and rebellious.
Almost every human I talk to has a business idea. Very few execute. This is common because of fear of failure, judgment, or not knowing how to do it “right.” That’s what I see the most. Thinking there is a perfect road map towards building a successful business, brand, or podcast at letting the “not knowing” prevent someone from taking that first leap and risk.
My advice to entrepreneurs is this: it’s always going to be messy, especially if it’s your first entrepreneurial rodeo, you need to know that and also not be attached to what you are building, it will likely change a lot in the first few months or year.
Contact Info:
- Website: seggstalkradio.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seggstalkradiopodcast
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thea-wayne-b23a86a5/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/itsthearose
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SeggsTalkRadioPodcast
