A Million Dollar Idea For Female Entrepreneurs 🙋

My biggest piece of advice to people starting a business: See the world as it is, not as you’d like it to be.

This will stop you making amateur-ish mistakes like thinking people will intrinsically do “good” things.

No, no, no.

People act only out of self-interest.

Once you understand that and can play with it, you can start to give your idea the oxygen it deserves.

So

A trend I’ve noticed amongst some of my most successful female friends such as Lauren Olson & Jen Friel, is:

Becoming everything a startup needs when facing the world

Let me explain ….

Most startups are started by kinda geeky people who are AMAZING at product, but not so good at expressing those ideas to the outside world

Or communicating with the outside world

Or positioning the brand

Or getting the word out about the brand

Or design/copy

Or social media

Or Marketing

Or frankly, dealing with the many other groups of humans that a company needs to come into contact with — influencers, affiliates, press etc

SO

You may have noticed the above is a LOT of things to do

The bad news? You are going to do ALL of them!

Yes, You will be wearing a lot of hats.

Yes, It will be stressful.

But here’s my idea for you females 🚀

Is to find a small, promising startup who has already raised a seed round (this just validates they are on to something, that’s how startups work, ideas don’t mean anything, in most cases VC money = they know how to execute)

and

Be their ENTIRE outward-facing unit.

PR, social media, managing influencers & affiliates, writing copy & blog posts, maybe even sales.

Frankly, you’re likely to be the first female in the company.

But you’ll be able to bring a tonne of advantages the code monkeys can’t do.

Dealing with customers is so under-rated for startups, who often obsess over vanity metrics, raising money, and free users.

There’s a story I love.

Infamous marketer Dan Kennedy is consulting with Weight Watchers.

The Weight Watchers CEO pulls him into his office and says “Dan, you’re doing a great job, but I’ve just noticed we’re paying you ten times as much as I get, we have to do something about this”.

Dan replies: “Yes, that is true. Here’s the thing: You can do everything required to run this company apart from getting customers, which is the one thing I can do. And without that one thing, you don’t have a company”.

…Needless to say, his rate did not get lowered.

How is the above a million dollar idea?

If you can hold your ground like Dan did above, and show value, you WILL get shares in these startups as they’re gonna value the hell out of what you’re doing.

Those shares are often worth millions, especially if you pick the right horse (call it women’s intuition!)

So.

Go find a company.

Write 2 pages of ideas of what you’d do for their company (as ever, feel free to rip off my ideas, I want to see y’all win like I do) and send it to them inside a box of doughnuts.

Your phone will be ringing in no time.

Go become a millionaire!

p.s. If you’re wondering why the above is for women specifically, and not everyone…Most of the above, in my opinion, are a little more intrinsic to women.

Before I get destroyed in the comments, I hope this gives some of you ideas.

There are a TONNE of startups out there who are so clueless in the above areas I listed.