Many entrepreneurs today define themselves by finding a passion and making it work as a business. Rachel Brathen is an excellent example of someone who has found something that she believes in and wants others to experience it the same way she does. The Swedish native and New York Times best-selling author realized how yoga could change her life and built an entire business around it.
Moving Around Before Finding the Groove
Brathen was born in Sweden but didn’t feel like she belonged there. After graduating from school in Stockholm, she immediately started looking for places she could move to, if only for a little bit. Her first stop was Costa Rica, which opened her eyes to a core truth.
While there, she learned the joy of incorporating yoga into her everyday life. She then moved to Central America, where she spent years studying the intricate interplay of yoga and how it interacted with the world around her. This learning set the foundation for her business.
Teaching Yoga in Aruba
After getting to grips with the nuances of yoga, she moved to Aruba and started teaching there. Each yoga instructor has their own teaching style, and Brathen developed hers into one that incorporated more than just the stretching motions that most other teachers would rely on.
Brathen included holistic therapeutic tools that helped her students well beyond the yoga session. She encouraged people to speak to others, journal, and implement active listening into their daily lives. Many students say that her work helped them improve their lives.
Founding The First Online Yoga Platform
Brathen was also instrumental in founding the world’s first online yoga platform. In its initial iteration, the business was known as oneOeight.com, a crowd-funded project that brought together her unique view of yoga and therapy to help as many people as possible. It has now been rebranded as Yoga Girl, in keeping with Brathen’s Instagram handle.
Building this platform gave Brathen insight into creating and cultivating a community of people who wanted what she was willing to provide them with. It also taught her how to link her business to social media and use the latter to funnel traffic to the former.
Social Media Is Visibility
Brathen believes that social media is a perfect vehicle to see if people want something or not. Thanks to how algorithms are designed, people who interact with a certain content topic get more of that content. That’s why tagging and categorizing your social media page is crucial to growing a business.
However, many entrepreneurs don’t understand that social media content isn’t technically your content. Brathen says that having content on social media works well for visibility, but one mistake could lead to the page getting struck and all that content and the connections being removed. She advises entrepreneurs to set up their own businesses elsewhere.

Don’t Fear Community or Crowdfunding
As one of the early adopters of crowdfunding, Brathen is eager to advise new entrepreneurs on navigating the system. However, she underscores her advice with a warning that a crowdfunding campaign is only as good as the community attached to the campaign.
Community building comes from interaction on social media and from reaching out to others. Social media and online business are not a matter of building something people will just use. It’s more about taking the time to create a platform that entrepreneurs can use to get their message and their product out to the world.
Be Passionate About Your Offering
Brathen advises new entrepreneurs to offer something they’re passionate about to their online audience. She says that too many online entrepreneurs are “phoning it in” and that an audience can see through that in an instant. She also admits that there are some benefits attached to offering something you’re passionate about.
According to Brathen, nothing you do will be considered work if you’re passionate about something. She doesn’t believe entrepreneurs should force themselves to do anything, and if they have to, then it’s not the thing they should be trying to give to the public. That passion is the core of what social media business should be about.
Authenticity Matters
Being honest and open with your social media following is one of Brathen’s core tenets. She says that the more authentic the words she shared on her IG account, the more interaction she would have with people on the platform. Her words resonated with her audience and got them to share them around, bringing in new followers. Her view is similar to other entrepreneurs we’ve mentioned before.
She also advises entrepreneurs to be cautious about believing everything they see on social media. Accounts on social media, especially Instagram, sell a story of a life that the originators might not actually be living. Remembering that keeps entrepreneurs grounded and focused on themselves.
Choose Who You Work With
Partnerships in online business can be beneficial, but there’s also the unspoken cost attached to such a partnership. When you partner with a brand, Brathen says, you put your stamp of approval on it. That means you should at least try out what the brand is selling before you stake your name and reputation on it.
Brathen also advises against doing business with family and friends. There’s a line of separation and certain feelings that business requires that don’t mesh with the relationship you have with your family and friends. Including them in your company may require you to make sacrifices that are detrimental to your business. It’s best to just avoid it and build your business on your own.
Draw The Line
Brathen is a firm believer in knowing where business ends and home begins. She loves her wonderful family and wants to be there for them. Despite being a powerful and successful entrepreneur, she knows where one should draw the line to ensure that their business doesn’t bleed into their real life.
Giving Back Is Crucial
Brathen and Yoga Girl continue to be among the most popular brands on Instagram, but she believes that her success wouldn’t be possible without the people who follow her. She likes to give back to the community through two non-profits, one based in Aruba and the other one not. She’s definitely girl-bossing her way to success, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon.