Ten Things Learnt in Ten Months of Being a Female Founder
This month we launched the first version of the Yodomo platform — our new marketplace for creative learning. The past ten months have been the steepest professional and personal learning curve of my lifetime. I’ve been a ‘founder’ before — a founder of a small business, a founder of a national literary prize, a founder of a number of arts and technology initiatives; and I’ve raised funds before — from major public funds through to commercial sponsorships and more, and I’ve worked with countless start-ups over the past eight years. This experience, however, couldn’t truly prepare me for the roller-coaster of getting a tech startup off the ground.
I’ve been encouraged to document my experiences — and despite initial reticence (after all, there are definitely enough startup founder posts on Medium…), I’ve decided to chart some of the journey, namely in a bid to help other founders — and maybe as some form of cathartic therapy.
So for what it’s worth, let’s start with Ten Things I’ve Learnt in Ten Months of Being a Female Founder (of a tech startup).
- It’s an Old Boys’ Network
Let’s get this one out of the way — the investment world is resoundingly an old boys’ network. Fortune magazine reported earlier on in the year that Venture Capital’s Funding Gender Gap Is Actually Getting Worse with women getting just 2.19% of venture capital funding — ‘a smaller piece of the pie than in every year this past decade, with the exception of 2008 and 2012.’ It seems hard to believe that this is still the state of play, given that in 2015 Fortune reported that ‘women CEOs in the Fortune 1000 drive three times the returns as S&P 500 enterprises run predominantly by men’.
The flipside to this seemingly immovable status quo is a number of initiatives have been launched to try and help female founders. Some of these events are better than others. At one event I was met with a cupcake reception and a glass of prosecco — evidently the organisers managed to stop short of putting a massive pink bow on my head on arrival — but other events have been really useful. Affordable SheWorx events have put me in direct contact with a number of leading investors, and also offered an informal forum to ask questions. AllBright — launched last September — offers support through its academy, club and its fund. While these initiatives should be jumped on, it should certainly not offer an excuse to other VCs that the women are simply being looked after ‘over there’.
Currently, my standard question in any investor meeting is ‘How many companies led by female CEOs have you funded?’
2) Everyday Sexism is a Real Thing
I’m female. I’m 45. I’m a parent.
One would like to believe that in 2017 this wouldn’t present a problem, but the odds are apparently stacked against me.
There is a perception that sexism has been stamped out in the workplace but it’s still rife, and perhaps even more so in the tech sector.
Some little personal examples in the past 10 months just by way of illustration:
A technologist sitting down and politely trying to explain to me the difference between the internet and an intranet, slowing down to pronounce the two words really carefully — ‘the in-ter-net and an in-tra-net’.
A male media agency owner explaining to me earnestly, ‘I’m so lucky that my senior female staff don’t have kids’. This is coming from someone who I would otherwise have thought was very forward-thinking.
In a shared co-working space sat with around 20 male designers, technologists and others. The female receptionist goes out to lunch. A male project manager brings over the phone to me and asks ‘Are you OK to man the phone over lunch?’. I politely say ‘no’.
OK — so we’re not exactly in Weinstein territory here, but I hope it illustrates the point.
It has to be said though, that a lot of really supportive male colleagues have helped me so far on my journey, who have been both respectful and encouraging. I know it’s not the majority, but I’m trying to write an honest account here and it just happens.
3) Don’t Worry About Being (A Bit) Older
There’s nothing like going to a startup founder event full of enthusiastic 20-year-olds to make you feel decrepit.
They have a bullish confidence that is exactly the kind of thing that investors look for in a CEO. They don’t have mortgages.
On the upside, those 20+ years of working in London has had its uses. Developing early partnerships with major partners, getting through the door with investors through a friend of a friend, thinking about building a team — a proper team, thinking globally… Experience.
4) Your Big Idea Probably Isn’t Big Enough
First off, IP alert, I clocked this on Alex Blumberg’s Startup Podcast. He had the same revelation… When talking to investors you quickly find that your Big Idea probably isn’t big enough.
One of the first people that I showed the Yodomo pitch deck to was Alex Chung, CEO and founder of Giphy. It was less of a pitch meeting and more of a counselling session. Alex was amazingly generous and helped us to think really hard about the bigger picture. Where could this go? What could this be? It helped me to go from thinking of Yodomo as a platform for artisanal tutorials, to envisioning Yodomo as a global media company for creative learning.
5) Define and Achieve Goals
Early on, people ask you about your exit strategy. It can be discombobulating to have to start thinking about this before you’ve even really started, but naturally investors want to know what the plan is.
With all this Big Idea stuff it becomes really easy to lose perspective of the here and now and, with that, the momentum needed to get your product off the ground.
My good friend, Richard Townsend from Circus Street is great on this. He says, ‘You just have to focus on the phases’. Define goals, achieve goals, feel like you’re moving forward. If you’re feeling unproductive, break these down even further.
Today’s goal, for example: Finally plot my experience to date on Medium.
6) Meet Potential Investors Even If You’re Not Quite Ready
At the SheWorx100 London event, it was suggested by Debbie Wosskow, Founder of AllBright, that female entrepreneurs tend not to meet with potential investors unless they feel wholly confident that they have the answers to everything. Maybe it’s that enduring image of Peter Jones on Dragon’s Den trying to trip you up with a finance question that puts this fear into people.
First off, if you’re running an early stage startup then you’re unlikely to have all the answers. It’s OK to say, ‘I’m not sure’ — so long as you make it clear you are trying to find an answer to this question.
Maybe this is the luck of the draw, but all the potential investors I’ve met so far have been informative, encouraging, helpful and, above all, human.
If you’re too early for them, they’ll explain why and also give pointers on what shape you need to be in to come back. It’s helpful to go through the deck, get the feedback and start to anticipate the kind of questions you need to be answering.
7) Show Don’t Tell
An investor at Forward Partners gave me some early advice in ‘showing not telling’ and since then, my personal mantra has been ‘Relentlessly Focus on Shipping The Product’.
Going into a meeting and showing something you’ve built is a much easier sell than talking about something you want to build.
As the year has gone on, I’ve started leaning more heavily on the Do-ers than the Thinkers. Sure — you need the Thinkers too, but if you want to really get things moving then work out who around you can actually build and develop and iterate the product that you’ve envisaged. That’s the person you really need right now.
8) Small Data Is Better Than Nothing
“What is your Customer Acquisition Cost?” — it’s the question that keeps coming up again and again. Right now I’m trying to work this out, but, realistically, until we start fully trading, selling courses, selling products, running bigger ad campaigns and more, it’s hard for us to come up with an accurate figure.
However, early on we ran a number of small Facebook campaigns and Instagram sponsored posts and tracked these alongside Sign Up on the website, and even with teeny tiny spends there are some figures that you can start to glean some insight from.
This piece by Koho’s Daniel Eberhand explains how they used $1k to raise $1m by getting to a realistic customer acquisition cost to relay to investors.
9) Trust In Your Own Conviction But Recognise Your Weaknesses
Don’t worry about being all of the people all of the time. No-one is expecting you to have the skills of a CTO, CMO and CFO rolled into one.
Richard Branson doesn’t know the difference between Gross and Net.
If you can’t do it yourself then just know who can. Work out the ‘who’ and then work out how you can afford to work with them — through vested equity or working it into your future projections.
You’ll make mistakes. Expensive ones.
It’s OK.
10) Keep Some Perspective For Your Own Sanity
Yes, your Big Idea is Really Very Important and you have to sell this story to everyone around you. But a burnt-out CEO is no good to anyone.
If it’s all getting on top of you, get some perspective. As my good friend Miranda West says in her excellent Do Lecture, when it all gets too much take yourself away to something much bigger than you — going to the sea is her example. Leave your phone at home and go for a run. Remember the most important things in life — focus on your family and your friends. Sleep.
Don’t find yourself throwing in the towel early simply because you haven’t given yourself this time.
That’s all for now. Expect another update in — probably — ten months time.
Yodomo v1 is now live at www.yodomo.co.
