Case Study: Rethinking How to Build a Startup

Valeska Toro, Founder of Sola Reviews, came up with the idea for Sola, a travel review site designed for women travelers, on a trip to Japan in January 2017

She honed the idea of a startup geared towards women travelers throughout the customer discovery process: “What we found through customer discovery….is that women are afraid to travel alone. Women control the travel market — 80% of travel-related decisions are made by women — yet we are afraid to travel alone. And the only way we will get to a point where we do feel comfortable [doing that] is a change in the industry and the way that hotels [and] Airbnb treat us and prioritize us”.

It was important for Valeska to be able to keep her full-time job as a project manager for a major financial services firm while also developing her startup. This flexibility is a key feature of digitalundivided’s BIG Incubator. The community of other women of color founders was also an important factor, because her friends and family don’t fully understand why she is pursuing her enterprise.

Thinking back on her experience, Valeska recalled, “I think there is something very unique about every single founder being a minority female. Close to Demo Day, [I was] looking through YouTube videos of pitches from other Demo Days [to] get inspiration, and every single pitch was a white guy. That was the moment I realized how unique our environment was because for 6 months, I was just used to it being women. Entrepreneurship is so hard already. To be able to just… focus on you and what you’re building and no one to look at you in a certain way because of who you are — it’s really important”.