Interview with Wendy Venema Founder of Cozy Cadence

cozy cadence wendy venema May 05, 2026

Please tell us about yourself!

I am Wendy Venema, the founder of Cozy Cadence, a brand and email community for overwhelmed moms who are quietly exhausted from carrying everything alone. I live in the Netherlands with my boyfriend, five kids in a blended family, a dog, and a cat with judgment. I help women understand the hidden mental load they carry and build a sustainable rhythm with what they actually have, not what they wish they had.

What kind of work do you do?

I help overstimulated moms find more peace and calm in their day to day life.

I do that through digital products built around one specific idea: that what most moms call burnout is actually a capacity problem in disguise, and capacity problems need different solutions than the morning routines and gratitude journals everyone keeps recommending.

My current suite includes The Unshakable Mom Formula, a five step workshop and workbook for moms who want to finally understand their own emotional capacity. The Art of the Handoff, a course for redistributing the invisible load without having a screaming match with your partner. The Tired Moms Club, a small membership that arrives weekly without asking anything of you. And later this year, Becoming Her, my signature program for the mom who has tried everything and still feels like something fundamental has not shifted.

The daily emails are how I stay in touch with my audience. The products are how I actually help her change her life.

What inspired you to get started as an entrepreneur?

I started Cozy Cadence after I realised I had been the notification.

There is a moment in my house when the bin needed taking out. The Dutch garbage system has three different bins on different pickup days, and an app that sends you a reminder the night before. Every single time, I was the one who noticed the notification, processed it, and told my partner. He would nod and take the bin out. From the outside the whole system looked completely fine.

Except I was the system. I was the app, the calendar, the reminder, the tracker. I was the entire infrastructure keeping the bin from missing pickup.

One night I stood in my living room and just broke. Not about the bin. About every piece of invisible work I had quietly absorbed for years without being able to name what was happening. I started writing about it because there was nothing I could find that talked about it the way I needed someone to talk about it. The first emails I wrote were not for an audience. They were for me, trying to make sense of what I was carrying. It turns out a lot of women were carrying the same thing, just as quietly.

What was your biggest struggle to get things going for your online business?

The thing I underestimated most was how much of running a business is selling, not creating.

I am a writer at heart. I love sitting down with a coffee and writing emails. The actual work of the business, the words on the page, has always come naturally. What did not come naturally was the part where I had to look at my list of subscribers and ask them to buy something.

For a long time, my emails were beautiful. Subscribers opened them at extraordinary rates. People replied to say my words made them feel less alone. And almost no one bought anything. Because I had not figured out how to ask. I was afraid of being the woman who only emailed people when she wanted money. So I overcorrected into being the woman who almost never asked for money at all.

The struggle was not learning to write or learning to build a list. It was learning that selling is not the opposite of caring. The two go together when you do them honestly. Real selling is naming what you have built and letting the right people decide whether they want it. Once I figured that out, things started moving.

Was there a time you thought about giving up? What kept you from quitting?

Many times. The most honest answer is that I have not fully had a "giving up" moment, but I have had plenty of "this is not working" moments. The slow ones are the hardest. The months where revenue is flat and the list is growing slowly and you start wondering if you made up the whole idea that this could work.

What kept me going is that I am building this for something specific. My boyfriend works long hours and I want to give him the choice to walk away from that job and have the freedom to build something on his own terms. Cozy Cadence is not a side project for me. It is the thing that buys our family time back. When I am tired, I think about that. When I want to skip a day of writing, I think about that. It does not always make the work easier, but it always makes it clearer.

I also stay because the work itself is meaningful. Every time a subscriber replies to tell me one of my emails made her sit down and cry a little, I remember that this is real to her, even on the days it does not feel real to me.

What have you learned since beginning?

The biggest thing I have learned is that I cannot shortcut my way to a real audience.

Early on I tried every tactic. Pinterest strategies. Bundle list-building. Lead magnet funnels. Some of them worked. Some of them brought in subscribers who would never have stayed if I had been honest about what I actually do. The subscribers who stay long term are the ones who arrived because something I wrote matched what they were actually living. Not because I tricked them into signing up.

The second thing I have learned is that capacity is the most ignored topic in the entire online creator space. Most of us are running businesses while parenting, while exhausted, while carrying things nobody can see. The people who teach us how to grow businesses rarely talk about how to do that without breaking. I have had to learn it on my own. And what I have figured out about my own capacity has become the foundation of what I teach my audience about theirs.

The third thing is that a real brand voice is your single most defensible advantage. Every tactic can be copied. Every funnel can be replicated. The way you sound to your readers cannot. So I stopped trying to sound like other creators and started sounding more like myself, and that is when things shifted.

What’s the best advice you’ve received?

Stop trying to sound like the people you admire and start sounding like yourself.

I spent so much energy early on studying other creators in my space, breaking down their funnels, mimicking their structure, trying to absorb whatever made them successful. None of it worked the way I hoped it would, and looking back I understand why. A copy of someone else cannot compete with the original. But there is no original of me. That part of the market was wide open the entire time.

The advice itself was not new. I had heard it a hundred times before. The difference was that the person who said it to me named exactly what I was doing wrong, which was the gentle imitation of people I respected. Once I let go of that and started writing the way I actually think, things started moving in a way they had not before.

What advice would you give someone just starting out?

Build the brand voice first. Everything else can wait.

When you are starting out you are constantly tempted to focus on the operational pieces. The funnel, the landing page, the lead magnet, the welcome sequence, the choice of email platform. All of these matter. None of them matter as much as how you sound on the page.

Your brand voice is the thing that makes someone open your email at 9pm on a Tuesday when they are exhausted and ignoring forty other emails. It is the thing that makes them remember you when they hear your topic mentioned in a podcast. It is the thing that turns a casual reader into someone who would actually open their wallet for you.

Most new entrepreneurs spend the first year tweaking their funnels and the second year wondering why their audience is not engaged. They have it backwards. Spend the first year obsessing over how you sound. Spend the second year building the operational pieces around a voice your audience already trusts. Things will move much faster.

What’s the professional win you’re most proud of?

The win I am most proud of is not a revenue number or a list size. It is the day I realised my subscribers were screenshotting my emails and sending them to their friends.

I have a small list compared to many creators in my space. I do not have a viral moment story. What I have is a community where my words travel by hand, from one tired mom to another, because something I wrote captured what one of them was feeling and she wanted the other one to feel less alone.

That is the actual product I am building. Not the courses, not the workbooks, not the membership. Those are how I make a living. The product is the recognition between women who are quietly carrying too much. My work is just the language they are using to find each other.

Every time someone forwards one of my emails to a friend, that is the win.

Which book(s) would you recommend to help entrepreneurs with success and personal development?

You Are a Badass at Making Money by Jen Sincero.

That is the one I would recommend to any woman building a business right now. I read it during a stretch where I was undercharging for my work and quietly resentful about it. The book did not give me a magic formula. It gave me permission to look at the way I had been thinking about money and notice the parts that were not actually mine. The parts I had absorbed from culture, family, and a lifetime of being told that wanting more was somehow impolite. If you have a complicated relationship with charging for your work, that book is the one.

For context, I read constantly. Business books during the day, dark romance and fantasy in the evenings. I use every free minute I have for it. Most business books say roughly the same thing in a different voice, which is why I land hard on the few that actually shift something. The Sincero book is one of those. The rest of my reading life is for the part of my brain that needs to escape into something that is not optimization, not strategy, not capacity work.

Reading is the rhythm I have built around my own brain. The business books keep me sharp. The fiction keeps me human.

Do you have a routine that you attest to your success? If yes, what is it?

I prefer rhythms over routines, and that distinction is actually the foundation of my work.

A routine is the same thing every day, in the same order, regardless of what your life is actually doing. Most routines fall apart the first time a kid wakes up sick or a deadline lands or your nervous system has had enough. I know this because I have built and broken twenty different morning routines over the past five years. None of them survived a Tuesday with a vomiting child and a dog trying to eat it.

A rhythm is different. A rhythm is a shape your week takes that bends without breaking. I write best in the morning before my brain fills with logistics, so I write in the morning when I can. I have sales emails that go out on specific days because the discipline of that schedule keeps my business honest. I take weekends off because I have learned that pretending I have unlimited hours just turns me into a worse version of myself by Tuesday.

The success piece is not in any specific time of day or productivity hack. It is in being honest about my real capacity each week and building the rhythm of that week around what is actually true. That is what I teach my audience to do, because it is what I have had to learn for myself.

How has social media played a factor in your success?

I am not on social media. That is a deliberate choice, not an oversight.

Cozy Cadence runs entirely on email, a small private community on Skool, and bundle collaborations with other creators. I have never built an Instagram audience. I do not post on TikTok. I do not have a viral video to my name. And I have built a real business anyway, with real subscribers and real revenue, on a foundation that does not require me to perform my life in fifteen second clips.

The reason is partly practical. I have five kids and twenty hours per week of work time. Social media is the single highest-time-investment, lowest-control marketing channel available to a creator. Every algorithm change costs you reach you spent years building. That is not a foundation I want to build a business on.

The reason is also strategic. The women I am writing for are not on social media looking for me. They are overwhelmed. They are exhausted. The last thing they need is another creator competing for their attention in a feed. They need quiet, honest writing that arrives in their inbox when they are ready for it.

Email is the only place I can be the version of myself I actually want to be, on the schedule I actually want to keep. So that is where I work.

What are the biggest social media mistakes you see commonly made?

I am not on social media as a creator, so I have the luxury of watching this from the outside. From here, the biggest mistake I see is creators who treat social media as their whole foundation instead of a tool inside a foundation.

You can spend three years building an Instagram audience, have it grow beautifully, post consistently, do everything right, and then one algorithm change quietly takes away the reach you spent those three years earning. I have watched friends go through this. The platform owes them nothing. The audience they thought they had is not actually theirs in any way that survives a bad week at Meta headquarters.

The second mistake is the constant performance. Showing up daily on stories, in reels, in carousels, in lives, all of it presented as authentic but most of it not actually feeling that way to the woman creating it. Burnout in this space is a feature of the model, not a personal failing.

If I were on social media as a creator, the thing I would protect hardest is the difference between sharing and performing. Sharing is honest. Performing is the slow erosion of who you actually are. The moment those two collapse into each other, the woman behind the account starts disappearing.

What is the business tool that’s been most helpful?

Kartra. With one honest caveat.

Kartra is the tool that runs my entire business. Email, landing pages, products, automations, checkouts, membership site, all of it lives in one place. For a business my size, that consolidation is what makes the operation possible at all. If I had to manage seven different platforms talking to each other, I would spend half my work week on integration headaches instead of writing.

The caveat is that no tool replaces clear thinking. I spent my first year of business chasing tools, convinced that the next email platform or funnel builder would be the thing that finally made everything click. None of them were. The business started growing when I stopped asking what tool I needed and started asking what I was actually trying to build.

Tools matter. But they matter much less than most beginners think they do.

Is there something you wish everyone knew?

I wish more entrepreneurs knew that exhaustion is not a strategy.

Most of us are running businesses while being told that hustle is the price of success. That if we just push a little harder, automate a little smarter, post a little more, we will eventually break through. Then we wonder why we are tired all the time, why our work has lost its edge, why the business we built to give us freedom ended up running our life.

The thing I had to learn is that capacity is not a weakness in business. It is a constraint that, once you respect it, makes every decision sharper. I run my business in twenty hours a week. I have five kids. I do not work weekends. I am not on social media. None of those are obstacles I am fighting. They are boundaries that force me to choose what actually matters. Most of my best work has come from those constraints, not in spite of them.

I wish every entrepreneur knew that they are allowed to build a business that matches the life they actually want, not the life they think they should want. The moment you stop trying to perform someone else's version of success, you can start building your own version, which is the only version that actually sustains.

What’s coming up for you in the next few months?

A few things, actually.

I just launched a new product called The Art of the Handoff. It is a workshop and workbook for the mom who is done carrying the invisible load alone but does not want to have the screaming match that usually comes with trying to redistribute it. It teaches her ten specific techniques for handing things back to her partner without explaining invisible load theory, without waiting for him to suddenly understand, and without sitting him down for the conversation she has been dreading. She does the work. He starts carrying more. That is the whole thing.

In July I am hosting the second round of my own bundle, the Motherhood Unfiltered Bundle, The School Run Edition. The first round in April pulled 1,500 subscribers and a lineup of contributors I am genuinely proud of. The July round is going to be bigger.

In August I am launching what I think will become my signature product. It is called Becoming Her, and it is the deepest version of my capacity work. Five phases, designed for the mom who has tried everything and still feels like something fundamental has not shifted. The phrase that keeps coming back to me when I think about this product is "she does not become someone new. She becomes her." That is what the course is built around.

And underneath all of it, the daily emails. Those are the thing that holds everything else together.

What has being successful taught you?

I am still in the middle of building toward what most people would call success, so my honest answer is that the version of "successful" I imagined when I started is not the version I am building toward anymore.

When I started Cozy Cadence I thought success would look like a six figure year and a list of fifty thousand people. Now I am much more interested in a smaller, more honest version. A list where most subscribers genuinely want to be there. Revenue that comes from a few products that I deeply believe in, sold to women who deeply needed them. Time at home with my five kids that does not feel borrowed from work I should be doing.

What the work has taught me so far is that the women who measure success by how they actually feel at the end of a Tuesday are usually closer to the version of their life they want than the women chasing a number on a chart. Numbers matter. They are how I know the business is working. But they are not the thing the business is for.

The thing the business is for is letting my boyfriend walk away from a job he is staying in for our family. The thing the business is for is being present in my life instead of rushing through it. The thing the business is for is making something real for the women who read my emails. Those are the things I am measuring against now.

What are some fun facts about you?

I do not drink coffee, which surprises people because I write about exhausted moms for a living. The bakery knows my tea order instead.

I was once called a labrador with ADHD, and I have not figured out how to argue with it.

My mom used to say I would read the back of a food package if that was the only thing within reach, which is mostly still true. I read constantly. Business books during work hours to keep me sharp. Dark romance and fantasy in the evenings to keep me human. The two halves of my brain need very different things.

I have been called an introvert my whole life, only to realise as an adult that I am not actually introverted. I am just selective. Most people drain me. The right ones do not. It turns out that is not introversion, it is just being honest about what fits.

I do not have a lot of friends because friendship is the one place I keep quietly cutting time to make space for other things. I am working on that.

I live in the Netherlands with five kids in a blended family, a dog who just wants me to be okay, and a cat who watches me struggle with judgment in her eyes.

At my core I am a huge "huismuis," which is the Dutch word for someone who would rather be at home than basically anywhere else. Cozy Cadence makes more sense once you know that about me.

How can our readers find you online?

Everything starts at cozycadence.com.

If you recognized yourself in any part of this interview, the best first step is my free community, Motherhood Unfiltered. It is hosted on Skool. It is a small, honest, judgment-free space for moms who are quietly carrying too much. There are real conversations happening there every day, between women who finally found a place where they do not have to perform.

It is free to join, and you do not need to buy anything to belong there. You can find the link on my website.

From there, my daily emails are where I show up most consistently. They are not short marketing emails. They are honest, slightly long, slightly funny, written like a friend at the kitchen table telling you the truth about what motherhood actually feels like.

When you are ready for something deeper, my full suite of digital products is on the site. The Unshakable Mom Formula. The Art of the Handoff. The Tired Moms Club. And later this year, Becoming Her, my signature program. Each one is built for a specific moment in a mom's life. You will know which one is yours when you are there.

If you are a fellow creator, my brand is built almost entirely on collaboration. I host my own bundle twice a year, the Motherhood Unfiltered Bundle. The next round is in July 2026. If that sounds like you, head to my website and reach out by email.

I am not on Instagram, TikTok, or any other social media platform. The whole conversation lives in email and in my community. If that sounds like the kind of online life you are quietly hoping for, you will probably feel at home here.

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Interview with Wendy Venema Founder of Cozy Cadence

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