Crafting a company from scratch leads to countless lessons learned by founders around the world. Women who launch their own startups have a particularly unique perspective, especially as they regularly face different challenges as they launch and grow their companies. We caught up with the female founders from three NYC startups to learn what advice they’d give to other people considering building their own business.
Naomi Hirabayashi and Marah Lidey are the co-founders of Shine, an SMS and Facebook Messenger service that sends daily interactive mindful living messages. The two women were close friends and co-workers at DoSomething.org, which inspires teens to get involved in their communities using SMS and other messaging tools, when they decided to launch Shine just over a year ago.
“Take the next step,” said Hirabayashi and Lidey in a collaborative response. “Whether it’s telling the first person about your business idea, to writing a powerful op-ed about your point of view on an important issue, to speaking up about a problem you’re seeing in the market, there’s a next step that's the tipping point of you making a statement and staking your claim.
“If you’re a founder in the early stages, the best thing you can do is push through to the most important next thing to build your business, because seeing ‘the next step’ through is what’s usually the difference between you and everybody else.”
By the time she launched WayUp, co-founder and CEO Liz Wessel had already created a handful of other businesses while she was a student at the University of Pennsylvania. Now WayUp, which helps students find jobs and internships during their college years, has raised more than $27 million — including their March Series B, which brought in $18.5 million.
"The best advice I can give is that no one actually knows what they are doing — except doctors, I hope,” Wessel said. “So, stop worrying about the fact that you have never raised capital or managed a large team before. As a founder, all you can do is take your best guesses, try new things, learn from people smarter than you, and don't make the same mistake twice!"
In mid-2016, Allison Esposito left her job at Google to launch Tech Ladies, an international online community for women in tech.
"Play the long game,” Esposito said. “Create a habit of constantly listening to your company to find out what it needs and then act strategically only on the true needs of your company. Don't hire people, build a feature or get an office unless your company absolutely demands that at that point in time. Do you actually need an office, or would it just make you happy? Take your ego out of every decision you make. Launch quick and fast with little investment so you can steer the other way if it isn't working. Focus on building something that could be sustainable for 10+ years to come, and build something that you love more than the idea of just making money from it."
Photos via featured companies.
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