Being A Founder, What Like It's Hard?

Being a Founder, What Like It’s Hard?

Being a founder, what like it’s hard? Yes Elle Woods, being a founder is hard, and being a founder in a bear market is even harder. Yet, it is one of the most rewarding experiences with many opportunities for professional and personal growth. Being a founder during a bear market constantly pushes you to innovate and adapt, cultivating resilience to withstand the market adversity.

Beyond navigating challenges and learning invaluable lessons, it's the relationships I’ve built during these times that have impact beyond measure. Connecting with fellow founders, sharing experiences, asking them for help, and learning from their journeys is an invaluable resource. These relationships not only provide a support system but also offer insights that can’t be found from reading a business book.

At the SheFi Summit, four incredible founders took the stage to share their founder origin story, advice on fundraising, insights on achieving product-market fit, and the indispensable value of building strong relationships. Below are a few highlights of this talk that has been viewed 370 times within the past two weeks! I highly encourage everyone to watch this powerful panel.

Panelists: Evin McMullen founder & CEO of Disco, Laura Jaramillo co-founder & CEO of SONA and Reka Medvecz Co-Founder and CMO of Guild. Moderated by Jules Worring co-founder & CEO of ensō.

• Understanding incentives and dynamics: Being self-aware in your team and your team's relationship to others is a continuous evolving challenge. Contemplating how you engage with your team, how your team engages with others, how you engage with your community, and being mindful of the incentives that drive everyone in that table can help you have more productive conversations. If you understand what another team is looking for, you can approach them and say, I know these are your goals, here are something we can do together that will pay off for both of us. - Evin McMullen

• Fundraising Realities: Something that I didn't expect was a lot of prejudice about the fact that I was a non-technical founder and an inability for funds to look at the team that had been built. As a founder, you're not going to be the expert in everything and in every piece of this business, but your ability to create a team is so important. So a big piece of advice is like don't be disappointed by investors’ rejections and find ways to like highlight the strength of what you're doing with conviction and your team in your pitch. Maybe a secret piece of advice is if you don't hear back in a week, keep moving because it probably means it's not going to happen. - Laura Jaramillo

• Product-Market Fit: How you know your product is doing well and it's growing? You do need to have a north star metric for usage. Adoption is retention of users. Are they coming back to use your product? How much do they like it? You are going to need to grow consistently before you can monetize it. I think it’s most important to validate yourself that your idea is working and then you can make money out of it. - Reka Medvecz

SheFi Community Updates

You’re invited to office hours with me TODAY, August 16, at 12 PM ET! Hosted by Ladidai, media, music and NFT entrepreneur.

Learn what REALLY happens behind the SheFi portal and about our global community of 1700 women and non-binary professionals and entrepreneurs from 50+ countries. We’re going live on YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn. RSVP here

8/23 - Web3 Security Panel with Webacy, Harpie, and Quantstamp.We’re going live on YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn. RSVP

8/23 - NYC IRL: dYdX and SheFi panel and mingle. RSVP

SheFi Summit is heading to Istanbul for Devconnect! 🇹🇷 Join our SheFi Summit telegram group to stay updated on location, content, tickets and more!

Get rewarded for referring new members to SheFi:

• 3 paying referrals - digital token

• 5 paying referrals - SheFi merch 

• 7 paying referrals - One hour Mastermind session with Maggie

AthenaDAO Token Launch:

We women make up about half of the global population and yet women’s health gets approximately 1% of funding and innovation globally. Unacceptable? Our friends at AthenaDAO agree. They’re launching their token to flip the system on its head and we’ve secured some SheFi spots on the allowlist. Join the community to hear about the latest and get on the whitelist*. If you’d like to learn more about DeSci or how to participate in a token launch, AthenaDAO will be hosting How to DeSci 101 Office Hours at 8:30am all next week. *The auction is open to non-Americans.

*Many SheFi members are AthenaDAO members. Congrats to Erin, Laura and team!

Givepact, a platform that supports crypto donations to non-profits, launched this month! Now you can donate crypto to causes you care about. Congrats to SheFi member Alicia Maule and team!

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