2015 Year in Review: Public Wins, Private Battles & Lessons Learned (aka #StartupLife)

By: Katelyn Bourgoin

This was a big year at Vendeve.

It was a year filled with “Hell Yeahs”, “AH HA!” moments and a handful of “oh f#ck’s”.

Below are some of the standout moments of 2015…

We had lots of public wins, but I also fought private battles and learned hard lessons. That’s really what the first year of running a startup is all about though, right!?

So without further ado…

Public Wins

Calee (Co-founder & COO), Deepika (CTO) and Sarah (Community Manager & Chief Noise Maker) joined the Vendeve team — hallelujah.

We won Volta’s “I Got 99 Problems But A Pitch Ain’t One” pitch competition.

We launched Vendeve 1.0 — a skill swapping marketplace for women entrepreneurs—in Halifax, Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver.

We were invited to join the DMZ startup incubator in Toronto. [we declined for financial/logistical reasons]

We were selected to join Women Startup Crowdfunding Challenge—a crowdfunding campaign that aimed to raise awareness around the struggle many female founders face when fundraising [e.g. men are 86% more likely to get venture funding than women despite the fact that female founders outperformed their male peers by 63% in 2015.]

We won the Fundica Funding Roadshow pitch competition.

We secured our lead investor and raised more than half our seed round.

We launched Vendeve 1.5 — a marketplace for women entrepreneurs to buy, sell and swap skills—worldwide and attracted thousands of new members from 45 countries and counting.

We were invited to present to the OneNS Coalition.

We were invited to present to World’s President Organization (WPO).

We were accepted into The Mill accelerator in Las Vegas.

Vendeve was nominated as Halifax’s Innovative Business of the Year.

We added some business heavyweights to our advisory board. [more details TBD]

I was nominated as one of Atlantic Business Magazine’s Top 50 CEOs.

We were featured in major publications including: Careers 2.0, Forbes, Huffington Post, Bustle, Tech.co, BetaKit, Canadian Business Magazine and others

We were featured in local media including: The Coast, Global News, CTV News, Entrevestor, Chronicle Herald, News 95.7, Atlantic Business Journal and many others

We launched Vendeve 2.0—a referral platform for women entrepreneurs.

We were scouted for TechStars. [we declined to focus on fundraising and execution]

We got oodles of love letters and encouragement from our members reminding us that what we are doing really, really matters.

Private Battles

Everything took 2 to 3 times longer than expected. Apparently this is pretty normal, but still… ugh.

We were dangerously close to the edge a number of times. We made some hard choices and deployed some creative, unconventional methods to pull through in the 11th hour.

I battled feelings of resentment and hopelessness as we continued to make meaningful progress, yet struggled to raise funds (reading articles like this one *ugh* and this one *double ugh* didn’t help).

I worried… a lot. I worried that I was a bad wife. A bad leader. A bad friend. Sometimes I managed the stress well and sometimes it managed me…

I experienced the psychological price of entrepreneurship firsthand as I battled severe anxiety and depression during my time in Las Vegas.

Lessons Learned

Strategy: Clarity comes from engagement, experimentation and rapid iteration.

Team building: Startups move at a dizzying pace. It takes a special combination of drive, intelligence (I&EQ), passion, and insanity to thrive in this environment. It’s not for everyone. And that’s ok.

Fundraising: People invest in people they trust who solve problems they’re passionate about. If investors can’t resonate with the pain we solve, it won’t matter how disruptive our product is, how great our traction is, or how big the opportunity is. It’s not about us. It’s about them.

Failure: It’s ok to swing and miss… as long as you learn from it and get back up and swing again.

Balance: The cost of burnout far outweighs the risk of taking the time off to avoid it.

Leadership: Seek first to understand. Then to be understood.

Resolution for 2016

I’m reading Zig Ziglar’s Secrets to Closing the Sale right now. Of all the business advice I’ve ever heard, I think this is the most succinct…

“Remember you can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough people get what they want.” — Zig Ziglar

As we move into 2016, that bit of advice will permeate everything we do…

2016, let’s fucking do this!!