Sunshine Hanson didn’t set out to disrupt an entire industry. She set out to give the ultimate gift, three times over.
As a gestational surrogate, she experienced the profound joy of helping families achieve their dreams of parenthood. She also witnessed critical gaps in care, support, and ethics that left both surrogates and intended parents feeling alone, exploited, and underserved. Where others might have walked away, Sunshine built something instead.
Today, she’s the founder and CEO of Surrogacy Is, a full-service agency that has grown from a pandemic-era startup into one of the largest in the United States, entirely self-funded and fiercely independent.
In an industry long criticized for treating surrogates as vessels rather than whole people, Sunshine’s approach looks different by design. Her “human-first” model offers generous compensation, ongoing mental health support, and proactive care coordination. Over the past six years, her agency has supported more than 3,000 women in starting their surrogacy journeys.
That growth hasn’t come without cost. She and her partners relocated from California to Georgia when cash flow got tight. They’ve turned down venture capital to protect the mission. They’ve faced antagonism from established agencies that didn’t appreciate having their shortcomings exposed. And they’ve learned, sometimes the hard way, that doing the right thing rarely comes without friction.
Featured in Business Insider, Cosmopolitan, LGBTQ Nation, and Authority Magazine, Sunshine brings tactical clarity to what it actually takes to build a business from deep personal expertise and scale it without selling out your values.
Below, she shares what she’s learned about resilience, partnership, and the real cost of building the agency she wishes had existed when she needed it most.
Sunshine Hanson, founder of Surrogacy Is
You served as a surrogate three times before founding Surrogacy Is. What was the pivotal moment when you realized you needed to transition from practitioner to entrepreneur, and what gave you the confidence to make that leap?
There wasn’t one pivotal moment. The path that brought me here and brought Surrogacy Is to life was a compounded series of experiences that showed me the need, and then ultimately led me to feel confident that I had something to offer to fill that need, and it was a worthwhile thing to pour my everything into.
As a first-time surrogate, I was really naive, and I put a lot of trust into the agency referral of an acquaintance. Thankfully, the agency I worked with wasn’t a bad actor, but as I gained more experience on the professional side, I realized how lucky I was. Unfortunately, there are surrogacy agencies who aren’t transparent, who are exploitative of surrogates and parents. Not only that, but my experiences as a surrogate were with agencies that really did the bare minimum to support me and my intended parents. Once we got beyond matching, we really felt alone to figure things out.
Something all of the agencies I worked with, whether as a surrogate or professionally as an intake coordinator and case manager, had in common was a serious struggle to inspire and attract qualified surrogates. I used to talk with my husband about it and get his ideas because he had spent his career in marketing and had success growing and selling an IT business. When his digital marketing agency started taking off, I reluctantly quit my job to help him grow. Through that business, we offered CRM, website, and marketing support to a few surrogacy agencies and we offered a couple of them a full marketing plan that they were ultimately scared to invest in. This was in 2020 at the height of COVID, and we decided, you know what, this is a really freaking good idea.
So at that point, we made the decision to pivot the marketing agency and offboard all of our clients, so we could just build the funnel for surrogates ourselves and help them find their way to the surrogacy agencies we trusted, and Surrogacy Is was born. We operated as an advocacy and referral group for about three years and eventually, we accepted the fact that trusting other agencies to support surrogates the way we expected was not working.
So in 2023, Surrogacy Is blossomed into a full-service agency. Now it’s the surrogacy agency that I would have dreamed of working with on my own journeys, and we are fully in control of making sure everyone has that white glove experience. It’s been so rewarding and healing to create that experience for other women and families.
During your personal surrogacy experiences, what were the most critical gaps in the standard of care that you witnessed, and how did those observations shape the core foundation of your business model?
During my first journey, the biggest gap was the lack of support surrounding my compensation and benefits and making sure I was protected. The intended parents’ attorney set caps on my lost wages and put a ceiling on compensation that I felt I couldn’t negotiate, but later with more experience, I learned that I could have.
In my second journey, the real lack of support showed in how unsupported my intended parents were. Although they shared all of their wishes with the agency up front, the agency failed to communicate extra requests, such as requiring me to relocate close to delivery to birth at their hospital of choice. Rather than owning their own mistake, the agency blamed me when talking to the parents, and blamed the parents when talking with me. My intended mother also had a lot of fear and trauma surrounding pregnancy, and the agency offered little to no support.
When my partner Casey and I were designing our program, a few of the things that were really important to us was to have a very generous benefit package for surrogates that honors the gift and commitment they are making. We also highly value ongoing mental health support for both surrogates and parents. We strongly prioritize proactive care, allowing our journey coordinators to keep a low caseload so they can always be two steps ahead.
You’ve self-funded Surrogacy Is while scaling it into a national brand. Can you share the tactical financial strategies you used to bootstrap your business, and what advice would you give to women who are considering self-funding their startups?
Starting a business during COVID was risky, but it also afforded us resources we wouldn’t have normally had. We had access to low-interest/forgivable loans and grants since we already had our marketing business, and that helped us fund our startup. My husband also had capital from the sale of his previous business, and I had savings from my previous surrogacy compensation, which provided us some flexibility.
We were putting money in and not breaking even for about 18-24 months before we were even able to take a paycheck. When things got tight and we had to consider reducing our ad spend, my husband and I made the decision to move from California to Georgia to cut our living expenses. We sold his truck and shared my paid-off Venza for a year to live without a car payment. It was a wild time.
As we scaled, we were approached many times by Venture Capital and Private Equity firms. While that capital would have been really really helpful in the moments we were struggling, Kyle, Casey, and I ultimately decided we didn’t want to cede control to corporate money. Many agencies in this space are beholden to investors, but we wanted to maintain total autonomy so that when we make decisions about what is best for our team and our clients, we don’t have to answer to a bottom line that doesn’t care the way we do.
If I had not been proactive about how I wanted to direct the funds from my surrogacy compensation, it would have been easy to just let lifestyle creep eat up our extra earnings. Surrogacy compensation can really be life-changing for young families if they are intentional about it. It certainly was for me.
The surrogacy industry has operated in traditional ways for decades. What has been your biggest challenge as a disruptor in this legacy industry, and how have you navigated resistance from established players?
One of the biggest challenges is a lack of transparency and a competitive nature from some established agencies. Many agencies that have been operating for a long time were resistant to us entering the space. Even though several agencies early on came to count on us to refer them high-caliber surrogate candidates, they just were not interested in hearing the feedback we shared.
If women were having communication frustrations or bait-and-switch benefit packages, there were a few agencies who didn’t want to hear it from us. We really had to go to bat for our surrogates, and that felt very “David and Goliath” to us at the time because some of these agency owners were also leaders on ethics boards.
They had large platforms and tried to smear our reputation to protect their own when we confronted them about these things.
In the early days, they had a lot of power to crush us. Fortunately, we were able to overcome that antagonism and today I think they’ve mostly accepted that we aren’t going anywhere. But we always kept receipts. When we entered the space, we really believed everyone had good intentions. A lot of people, sadly, don’t, and put self-preservation ahead of doing the right thing.
You describe your model as “human-first” rather than transactional. Can you walk us through what this looks like in practice, and how this approach has influenced your business growth and client relationships?
When we first started, my partner Casey and I connected personally with every single surrogate. Now that we have grown so much, it’s not possible for us to do that anymore. But something that keeps me connected is that I personally hand-write a card and send a welcome gift to every single woman who enters our matching process. Casey hand-writes a card and mails gifts to every surrogate and intended parent after each baby is born.
These are processes our team has tried to take off our plate, but Casey and I agree that they would have to wrestle it from our cold, dead hands! She and I caused a couple of delays, but we talked behind the scenes and we agreed we would not let the team down with delays anymore if they let us keep it!
I’m an introvert, but Casey is an extreme extrovert; she calls every single surrogate after delivery to hear their birth story and celebrate them. Casey and I were both retired from surrogacy after too many c-sections, but we both remember the high of seeing our intended parents hold their babies for the first time. On my deathbed, that is something I will hold onto with so much pride.
Running a mission-driven company that deals with intimate and emotional aspects of women’s health can be emotionally taxing. How do you protect your own mental health and prevent burnout while staying deeply connected to your mission?
This is so challenging because as much magic as there is in family building, there are also lots of moments of heartache and stress. Sometimes we sign up to be the punching bag for frustrations coming from IVF clinics or insurance issues just to protect the relationship between the parents and the surrogate.
Something we implemented this year is mental health support for ourselves and our staff. We pay monthly for access to counseling sessions with the same providers who support our clients. We also do team sessions with each department to talk through things like how to support surrogate candidates when we have to decline them in intake. Saying no to someone who doesn’t pass screening after you build a relationship with them is HARD.
What does your typical day or week look like, and what strategies have you implemented to balance the demands of building a national company with your personal life and well-being?
My days are never the same. If I can get ahead of anything, I must, because I can count on something unexpected coming to derail a plan on any given day. My role used to be on the phone with surrogates all day, but as we’ve grown, I have spent a lot more time building our educational resources, creating content, and managing the backend business side.
In the early days, I was in CA and didn’t move to GA until later, so I had to get used to being available for staff on both coasts. I used to burn myself out working 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., but that wasn’t sustainable. I have slow mornings now and rarely get to my desk before 10 a.m., which makes my late nights so much more bearable.
You’ve been featured in Business Insider, Cosmopolitan, LGBTQ Nation, and Authority Magazine. How have you strategically positioned yourself as a thought leader in this space, and what role has media presence played in your business growth?
I feel really fortunate to have been offered so many opportunities to share my perspective, because I don’t see a lot of folks speak with such candor. I’ve always been an open book.
I really want to have an impact on fighting for greater transparency and better protections for surrogates and intended parents. They have to rely on professionals who look the same on paper, since there is no federal regulation for surrogacy in the United States…yet. I also hate seeing so much negative press about surrogacy, because although those stories are real and important, they are so not the norm.
Surrogacy in the United States is usually done really well and the majority of outcomes I’ve seen in the last decade working in this space are of beautiful relationships and happy families. Whenever I am approached to talk about surrogacy and shed light on the beauty and vulnerability of it, I will.
How do you balance sharing your personal surrogacy story with establishing yourself as a business leader and industry expert? Where do you draw the line between vulnerability and professional authority?
Funnily enough, I guess I don’t draw a line. My personal surrogacy stories, my work, my life, they’re not separable. They just aren’t. My family-building story has been so unique. I was a teen mom; I beat the odds and graduated high school with honors and went on to earn my English degree and taught high school for years before discovering surrogacy.
I unexpectedly fostered and adopted my youngest daughter during my second surrogacy journey. My husband has raised two children with me although he’s never had a biological child, and we work really hard every day to make biological family building possible for others. We are huge believers that the only ingredient that matters for family building is love.
What were the key strategic decisions and operational shifts required to take Surrogacy Is from a startup to a national brand? What surprised you most about that scaling process?
Something that was most important to us in our early hiring decisions was lived experience as a surrogate. However, we learned that this work takes more than personal passion; it takes a level of dedication to service, organizational acumen, and professional excellence.
We went through a lot of turnover as we searched for core leaders, but once we had the right people in the right places, we were able to scale from a founder-only team, to a 5-person team to now 35+ today. We still have the most hands-on boutique feel, yet we are actually one of the largest surrogacy agencies in the United States. And we are very careful not to grow faster than our infrastructure can withstand because we would never want our service to suffer as a result of unchecked growth.
Many women in our community have deep expertise from their lived experiences but struggle to monetize or scale that knowledge. What tactical advice can you offer about transforming personal experience into a viable, scalable business model?
Honestly, that’s hard to say. I don’t know. We took a lot of risks and doubled down on them with no guarantee that it would succeed. I think you have to be willing to take risks and be willing to fail too.
When Kyle pushed me to start Surrogacy Is, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t scared. I believed in it and I knew we could do it. We lived extremely frugally and didn’t ever consider quitting. I always believed that you never really lose unless you quit while you’re down.
My tactical advice is to find a partner who has the skills you lack. I had the heart and the experience, but Kyle had the marketing engine. We brought on a third partner, Casey, really early on because being the only one able to talk to every surrogate and manage the operations side of a business (liability insurance, taxes, and compliance) wasn’t going to work with just the two of us.
We needed to find someone like Casey who was truly energized by building those connections so she could stay on the phone for 10 hours a day and help us grow, while I built the infrastructure and Kyle kept the marketing engine going. Without all three of us, we couldn’t have scaled. Literally, if a single one of us wasn’t there, the whole thing would have collapsed in the early days.
For the women in our audience who are balancing professional growth, personal well-being, and the desire to make a meaningful impact, what’s the one piece of hard-earned wisdom from your journey that you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?
I’ve learned that when you start making a significant impact, you inadvertently become a target for people who preferred you when you were small. The one piece of wisdom I wish someone had told me is that while these critics are noisy, you simply cannot afford to listen to them. In fact, you must tune them out, or they will distract you from your mission.
The only power they have is the power you give them. It was a shock to realize that sometimes the loudest voices come from surprising places. People who liked you better when you were struggling. Everyone is not going to be supportive of your success, even if you are doing amazing things for all the right reasons.
I never knew what it meant to deal with “haters”; I thought that was just a term you hear in songs. But they are real, and when you start succeeding, they make themselves known. You have to be prepared to protect your peace and stay focused on the work you’re doing. In our case, it’s the incredible women and families we’re helping.
Lastly, is there a specific mantra, quote, or affirmation that you hold close to your heart?
Kyle and I joke about this, but it’s true. Our motto is: “We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.”
We had no idea how hard it would be to build this business. The hours, the money, the personal sacrifices. If we had known the full weight of it, we might not have started, but I am so incredibly glad we did. If you have something to offer, just jump in. Don’t quit when it gets hard. You have to be willing to ride the razor’s edge as long as it takes.
You don’t need to have every answer on Day 1. You just need to have the integrity to do the right thing when the wrong thing looks easier. We have helped over 3,000 women start their surrogacy journeys in the last 6 years. The ripple effect of that impact is unknowable to us, and it makes me so proud.
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