What Women Want
On building better tech for everyone.
In early Spring of 2014, I quit being a tech entrepreneur. It was a defining time in my life. I stopped living and breathing apps. I stopped eating Techcrunch for breakfast. I started decorating the house some more. I started getting pedicures more often. I started living like all those women that I had once hoped to build something impactful for.
I’ve been an aspiring entrepreneur for 5 years. Like so many others, I quit college on the East Coast, learned to code from my apartment, built some dinky little social experiment and was cut a few checks to move back West. It’s taken me 5 full years to learn this one seemingly small and simple thing—the importance of what women want.
I’m a woman. I’m don’t frequent forums. I’m into cars and automotive design. I don’t spend that much time grooming myself, but now I’m beginning to. I don’t wear t-shirts that often. I cook and experiment with food and beverage making but don’t have a consistent success rate. But I had no idea. Because the Vivian that read Svbtle’s feed religiously, that thought about vitamins vs. painkillers, and that read Ben Horowitz’s book before bedtime, wasn’t really paying attention to her real needs.
Who you are means a great deal to the product you build. It means the difference between an epic success versus a mediocre one.
In late October of 2014. I started working on the first product that aptly represents who I am and what I want. Arriving at this undertaking was a process 5 years in the making. Here are some takeaways from my experience:
- Be damn sure that what you’re working on is something you’d actually use.
- You should never be learning too much of your product’s industry from scratch.
- Being able to point out a handful of problems with the current state of your target market isn’t good enough.
- Your product is not a reflection of how smart or capable you are, it is a reflection of the world you live in.
- Pay attention to what women want. We are a drastically underserved market. There are 3.5 billion of us.☺
http://getpamper.com
