I tried being a student female founder for 2 weeks — here’s what I learnt
Nitika Midha is the Marketing Coordinator at Textbook Venture’s. She’s a 3rd year student at UNSW studying Commerce (Marketing)/ Arts (International Studies). Marketing is her forte and she’s already interned at Adobe in digital marketing, and currently works as a part-time marketing intern at Canon. Nitika took part in UNSW Founder’s New Wave Program earlier this year, a 2-week program aimed at simulating the startup founder experience for young women. Here’s what she discovered over 2 weeks as a student female founder!
Building a sustainable startup is a challenging and relentless journey, and you’re much more likely to fail than succeed. But what is already difficult for entrepreneurs becomes extremely more difficult for female founders. Female founders received only 2.2% of venture capital (Forbes) raised by startups in 2018, and one in three women end up funding their own startups. With the chances of raising VC funds being that small, it’s obvious that women have a more difficult time within the startup ecosystem.
But times are shifting. With the massive gender gap being recognised, new programs which encourage and cultivate female entrepreneurship are being built everywhere. Over my term break, I took part in UNSW’s New Wave Program, a 2-week boot camp teaching young women the fundamentals of building a startup from scratch.
Here are THREE of my biggest takeaways from those 2 golden weeks!
Focus on you
If there’s something great about entrepreneurship it’s that revolutionary ideas don’t just come from a particular experience or from being a certain type of person. Instead, the best ideas came to fruition when founders embed their personal experiences and strengths into their solutions.
This is especially true for female founders, who on average, divert more attention to addressing problems they’ve experienced personally. This is one of the factors which helps female founders generate an above-market return on investment.
This factor rings true when looking at some of the biggest female-founded startups today — whether it’s Mahisha Dellinger who launched CURLS after having a hard time finding quality products for women with natural hair textures, or Payal Kadakia, who founded ClassPass because she wanted to share her love for dancing.
This was also the case for my co-founders and I during the New Wave Program, as our idea for a digital planner came about after we realised that we had all encountered stress because of poor time management skills throughout uni.
Confidence is key
I’m fascinated by entrepreneurship and the journey founders embark on as they launch their startups — but a small part of me has always been scared of coming up with my own ideas because I fear that someone will say it’s wrong or just terrible.
This experience of self-doubt, as I learned in New Wave, is all-too-common amongst female founders. In situations such as this, building up the confidence to network and pitch your business with conviction is super important. Here are some of the ways I achieved that:
- Practise
Public speaking isn’t something that comes naturally to me. When I’m presenting in front of large groups, I normally find that I start to shake out of nervousness. But throughout the program by practising pitching again and again I become more comfortable with it. Paying attention to things like my posture (making sure I stood straight, with my head and shoulders held high), my voice projection (with diaphragmatic breathing) and using my hands (to reiterate my points) really made a difference.
- Believe in yourself
My self-doubt has, on multiple occasions in my life, hindered my confidence. But now, every time I catch myself questioning the validity of my thoughts and capabilities, I remember that my personal experiences, along with that of my co-founders during New Wave, led us to come up with our solution. Using stronger language such as “I expect” and “I’m convinced” instead of weaker words like “I think” and “I believe” has also helped build my confidence.
Network and connect
The startup world can be a scary place, but meeting other women who you can learn from and grow with, both personally and professionally, can be game-changing. Being in a network of passionate female founders who gave me tonnes of inspiration and support through the New Wave Program certainly made the journey of founding Momi a more memorable one.
Not only was I able to learn the fundamentals of creating a startup, talking to other young women who were also facing the same challenge gave me a dose of reality and kept me charging forward when I needed it most. I’ll always be thankful for the Program and the leap I took as the most rewarding thing was finding a group of other women who made me feel empowered.
Even though the New Wave program is over, it’s just the beginning for the startups which were formed, including mine!
This piece was written by Nitika Midha of Textbook Ventures — we organise startup events, write newsletters and cater exciting activities for student entrepreneurs across NSW (sign up to our weekly newsletter and check out our Facebook to stay in the loop!)
