Surviving as a Tech Entrepreneur
Starting a business is inherently appealing. You get to work your own hours, have limitless potential to grow, and realize dreams of changing the world. But from a financial standpoint, becoming an entrepreneur means a significant investment and no salary. Typical tech startups take about 5 years before they become profitable. So how can it be done?
Here to answer this question is tech entrepreneur and CEO of SpellBound, Christina York. SpellBound is an early stage startup which uses alternate reality to get children to cooperate with medical treatment and avoid the use of sedation or restraints.
However, Christina’s story didn’t start with SpellBound. She worked for 14 years as a UX/UI developer in education and health care, eventually leaving and setting out with a cofounder with the goal of becoming a tech consultant for large businesses. She described it, “We [My cofounder and I] were looking for a challenge and thought that by helping big companies innovate products, we would avoid being bored.”
Leaving a job isn’t easy. Imagine the lifestyle changes when going from a six figure salary straight to 0. Then imagine doing that voluntarily. Christina put it, “We faced lifestyle changes like a decrease in eating out which we used to do all the time. Started making a budget around food and preparing food/bringing lunch to work, using public transportation and carpooling”
Fortunately enough, Christina was able to start from a financially stable point. She dipped in her kids college funds and was able to get both financial and emotional support from her husband, family and friends.
One weekend, Christina and her co-founder decided to attend the 2016 Detroit Startup weekend to practice her pitching skills. Here she came up with her first startup idea titled MagicBook, which used alternate reality tech to literally bring book characters to life. After winning the Detroit startup weekend, then moving on to be a winner in the national competition, Christina won a paid trip the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas to connect with other tech entrepreneurs, as well as almost inadvertently ending up on Shark Tank.
Christina pursued MagicBook for about a year until she realized it wasn’t getting much real traction. She was in contact with big name publishers, but people didn’t want to buy the product. When talking to a potential consumer who worked in a hospital, she got the idea to pivot into SpellBound.
To continue her entrepreneurship, Christina worked to raise money from VC investors, and by pitching to anyone who would listen. She describes her experience, “While asking around, one of my friend said they pitched 118 times before getting a yes [from an investor]. 118?! Are you kidding me! It’s frustrating and emotional, just like dating.”
She eventually raised a $75k pre-seed, but paying the bills hasn’t been easy. “We’ve missed payroll a couple of times. We’ve never had a large amount of working capital so there’s been times where we’re waiting on a customer check to be able to pay people. The best thing to do is to be upfront about it.”
Through these difficulties, Christina’s still on her way to success. SpellBound currently has 21 different hospitals as clients, and they are looking to be profitable by the end of 2019.
To conclude, Christina has some words of advice for other aspiring entrepreneurs.
“You’re building a company not a product, that’s very different. Ultimately you have to be thinking bigger than just building a product. And you’re not just building a company to sell product, you’re building a community around your business.
As an entrepreneur you have to focus on building a community around yourself. It’s a very lonely and difficult job and if I didn’t have a supportive husband and friends there’s a million ways it would have burned out by now.
My cofounder exited when we pivoted the company and that was really hard for me and it’s really hard to do it by yourself. The only reason I’ve survived is by building friendships and business relations and relations with other entrepreneurs.”
So if you have a dream, don’t be afraid to follow it. Share your dream and take support from those around you.
