#5 FFF How to support other fierce female founders.
Whether the person is female or male, an entrepreneur can use some support from their friends. But what kind of support does it actually help her? As a struggling entrepreneur myself, I got many bits of help and supports from my caring friends and thought I’d share the list that has well worked for me. Because I know you care about your friends and their success and want to help them in a meaningful way.
1. Be Her Test Users!
Beginning of product development, a user study is so crucial. Unfortunately, I skipped this part from my first business and spent a lot of time to fix the user experience and the entire business model. I decided not to repeat the same mistake with my new startup so-called YesPlz (AI for online fashion search that finds you the exact style you are looking for without browsing thousands of items.) but had a hard time to reach out to my target audience who are in the 20s and love shopping. I only know mid-aged people who don’t have much time for shopping. Not to mention I have a shoestring budget for the entire project. I asked around but did not have much luck.
Then I remembered my old colleague who is in the 20s and texted her out of the blue if she could introduce me to any of her friends for doing user study. Not only she offered herself as an interviewee, but also she introduced me to four of her friends!!! I couldn’t be more thankful and still thankful to her. (Joanne Park, I am talking about you.) Many of my founder friends also understand the importance of user study but very hesitant to do so because they don’t know where to find the target users and don’t have much to pay to them. If you can either volunteer your time (if you are the target audience) or connect with your friends, that’s huge!!! You are helping the very crucial part of startup development process.
2. Provide Feedbacks on Pros and Cons
This can be tricky. Say your friend started a new business and asked your opinion about the product. Most likely you will say something nice and supportive to your brave friend who started a new journey. Even if you want to share your concerns about the product, you might not know how to say so. When I was about to launch my product, I reached out to some of my friends who are more likely my target audience. Because they are nice and supportive friends, they were praising my bravado and my business idea. Then one of my friends, Janeen Marquardt sent me a long list of email with things to be fixed including grammatical errors. Of course, I am grateful to all my friends who were cheering for my new journey but I was especially impressed how Janeen spent her time to make sure I am prepared for a successful launch. To be fair, she is a professional project manager and probably very good at providing constructive criticism. Even if you are not a professional critic, you can still help like Sarah did.
I met Sarah at one of networking events. She’s a lawyer but was looking for a product manager position in tech companies. We talked about my business and I handed my business card to her saying I always appreciate any feedbacks of course not expecting to hear anything from her. Then, a few days later I got an email from Sarah with pros and cons of my products from her perspective. I probably said a hundred times that I’d appreciate any feedback if anyone can provide to me but she was the only one who got back to me with constructive feedback. It was delightful and again grateful.
If you can, try to provide the feedbacks in pros and cons. It has more impact than just saying “a good job”. Your entrepreneur friend will not forget your kind help. I certainly don’t.
3. Like it or Heart it. Backlinks.
Today, social media is a very important marketing tool and can be expensive. To get followers on social media, entrepreneurs spend a lot of money and time on advertising. It can cost from $0.20 to $20 to acquire a new follower.
Of course, you don’t want to mess your timeline with irrelevant postings simply because they are from your friends’ business. That’s why I decided not to ask my friends to follow my facebook business page and hopefully, a number of followers would organically grow. Well, it didn’t. Until I decided to pivot the first business, my Facebook followers were no more than 20 and my Instagram followers were 118. Yet I still don’t want to fill out my friends’ timeline with irrelevant content.
So here is what you can do instead: like or heart as many as postings from your friends’ social media. Your likes or hearts will automatically share the post to your networks and possibly reach out to a target audience among your network.
If you are not a social media person but a blogger, you can also help your friend in a great way. Mention your friend’s business and share the link of the business website. Even if you don’t have much traffic on your website, it is still a good promotion for your friend and most importantly helps to boost your friends’ website SEO ranking. That’s the part of the reasons I started writing this blog and sharing as many as my female founder friends’ business and link to their websites.
Digital promotion and SEO are super important and still expensive for many startups in early stage. Your likes and backlinks have a big impact and help your entrepreneur friends who will always be hungry for more SEO boosting!
4. Don’t ask how is her business doing. Ask what can you do to help!
I used to ask my entrepreneur friends how their business doing. Genuinely interested in how they are doing. I remember many of them didn’t sound interested in my question. Finally, I had a chance to understand why. When I was asked the same question, I had to take a big breath in first because I was reminded how my business was not doing well and I don’t have many clues what to do. Of course, if my business was doing well, I am sure I wish to be asked more often how well I am doing. Let’s keep that in mind only 2% of startups succeeds. My friend Soson was very wise about this.
When Soson and I were having a brunch catching up a little while after I started my own venture, she didn’t ask me how my business was doing. She congratulated me first then asked, “what can I do to help you?” Try this with your entrepreneur friend, I am sure she will feel that you sincerely care about her success and want to help just the way I felt with Soson’s kind words.
5. Believe and invest in your friend.
I had many friends who purchased products from my first business and I can’t thank enough for their trust in me. However what it really helped me was my friends betting a confidence in me.
Soyon Kim is our number one customer and my dear friend. Of course, her many purchases from my website helped me to keep going with my business. However I have to say her encouragement was the most powerful than any other helps. Her encouraging words were so powerful that energized me when things were down and doubting myself. She said “Unnie (it’s Korean for a sister), you can do this. I know it will be huge. Keep going.”
My friend Yukari a.k.a Porcupine Needle who is also an entrepreneur always have been generous showing the confidence in me. We met through one of co-founder dating apps. Every time, we met for catching up she always said “Jiwon, I think you will succeed in this. I know you will.” These encouragements never failed me to get back on my feet. My loving but extremely rational husband doesn’t understand this. How does a bunch of words can help you? They are just words and probably not helping to sell a product from your business. It is true they are just words of encouragement, but it does help me with a great deal especially when it comes from sincere heart rooting for my success.
If you are not a vocal person, that’s okay. You can still show your confidence in your friend by investing your time. Imju Byon who is another fierce female founder is always ready to listen to my struggles and give sincere advice. Travis is giving me his hands to build a prototype app with his android development expertise. Yukari also spent months to learn a new programming language to help me building a new feature for my website. I am forever in debt to these caring and awesome friends and will surely return the favor showing my confidence in them.
Closing:
We all know there is no right way or wrong way to help your friends. I just wanted to share certain things that specifically energized me to be a better entrepreneur. Hopefully, you can use some of these to your entrepreneur friends who are struggling but will eventually make it through to her own success. Because again, I know you care.
PS: I still have a lot of friends who were not been mentioned here. They show a great deal of care and help me by making a connection to the right network, shamelessly promoting my business to their family and friends, and even taking me out to lunch to cheer me up. I am just saving their stories for the right context. Hope you understand me!! Especially, my biggest supporter and partner in crime Sukjae Cho, your story is yet to come.
