Substack With Sue B

From Boxer Shorts to Instagram Icon: Sue B. Zimmerman’s Blueprint for Selling From the Soul

Brittni Schroeder welcomes Instagram expert Sue B. Zimmerman to this episode of Redefine Business, and it’s the kind of conversation that reminds you why community, authenticity, and a willingness to pivot matter more than any algorithm ever will.

Sue B. has built and sold 18 businesses over more than three decades as an entrepreneur. Her very first venture was a hand-painted boxer shorts company she started right out of college — no business degree required, just a passion for painting that grew into a million-dollar brand selling to Disney and college campuses across the country. From there she ran a scrapbook business that landed her on QVC twice, then spent seven years selling jewelry, clothing, and accessories out of her store on Cape Cod. It was that retail shop where she first discovered the power of Instagram, watched her sales climb, and realized she could stop selling inventory altogether and start selling what she knew instead.

That realization launched the career she’s best known for today: teaching Instagram marketing to women, solopreneurs, and small business owners for the past 15 years. She’s spoken on stages around the world, including Social Media Marketing World, and built an online course business — all without ever publishing a book. As she puts it, if you’ve been told you need a book to get paid to keynote, she’s living proof that isn’t true.

Instagram as a village, not a square photo

Sue B. has watched Instagram evolve from a single square photo grid into what she describes as a village made up of distinct neighborhoods — stories, reels, lives, the feed, and now notes. Her core teaching point is simple but often overlooked: if there’s a disconnect between the promise you make in your bio and the content you actually share, that’s not your audience’s problem to figure out. It’s yours. Making it effortless for people to see you, feel you, and understand what you sell is the real job of a business owner on social media.

On the subject of AI and content creation, Sue B. is candid. She uses AI tools to tighten up grammar and make her writing more concise, but she doesn’t lean on them to generate her content or her strategy. Her philosophy is that authenticity and relatability are what actually build opportunity — something no tool can manufacture for you.

Why she’s building a new audience on Substack

A major theme of this conversation is Sue B.’s pivot toward Substack, a platform she joined in August of 2025. She’s drawn to it because of the range of formats it supports — she can host her own podcast, go live, publish short-form notes, and share video, all threaded together in one place. She’s built a paid community there called the Soulful Selling Sisterhood, with a monthly subscription priced at $10 (or $80 for the year), which she describes as the lowest-cost entry point into her time and expertise compared to her $597 Instagram program or $1,000 strategy audits.

She gates some of her Substack articles behind a paywall and keeps her podcast episodes there under six minutes, because, as she says, time is everything. It’s been a slow, steady build rather than a fast one, but it’s opened the door to a new audience in a way that feels different from the noise on Instagram.

A new vertical: Atmosfera

Sue B. also shares the story of how one of her coaching clients introduced her to Atmosfera, a clean, climate-curated skincare company that originated in Canada and recently launched in the U.S. What started as a $50 affiliate signup turned into a new business vertical for her — she’s now built a skincare routine for the first time in her life and is teaching multiple trainings to help her growing team get started. She’s careful to note this doesn’t feel like typical affiliate marketing to her, largely because she genuinely loves the products and the women-led team behind them.

The power of community and grassroots marketing

Throughout the episode, Sue B. keeps returning to one idea: find the community where you’re the expert, and let your reputation do the talking. She’s built in-person masterminds on Cape Cod and in La Jolla, California, specifically to create the kind of connection that can’t be replicated online. Her advice to listeners is to get into rooms — literal or digital — with people who are in alignment with your skills and talents, because that’s where real opportunity and referrals come from.

Connect with Sue B. Zimmerman:

• Website: learnwithsbz.com
• Instagram: @suebzimmerman
• Free resource: Grab Sue B.’s Instagram DM icon guide