inspiring female founders

© 2014 MeetingMole GmbH. All rights reserved. October 2014

Inspiring Female Founders

Aren’t we all inspiring? Here’s some figures:

43% of founders in Germany are women

Only 1/3 of male founders have a child, almost 1/2 of female founders have at least one

Companies founded by women are just as sustainable as those founded by men

Now I want to inspire you a little, with my story, and some things I wish I had known a year ago:

Let’s start with the idea. For me, I sat in a meeting room with my sales team and discussed how we could improve meeting

follow-ups and leave a better impression than our competition.

For you, it might have been or will be rather different. But it all boils down to the initial idea.

You will have it one day or, more likely, it will form over time – out of your passion or even frustration.

If you love it, then you’ll probably find yourself in a feverish nocturnal planning session, ideally with an

inspiring co-founder. This is how it went for me, anyway.

Now you have a first rough draft of your idea, be it a product or a service, an initial business model and

so on. This is the time to look at your idea more critical, view it from all angles, probe it, question it –

most importantly: talk about it with absolutely anyone who will listen. And then listen!

A great place to really get insight on ideation, business planning and how to go from idea to founding is

the Founder Institute. They are an early stage incubator with mentors to help you along – the best

thing is, you don’t even have to have a worked-out idea yet and you can do the programme next to a

full-time job.

They are currently accepting applications – and ladies, there’s a free female scholarship to be won!

This brings me to my next point: leaving your day job I had my first little startup, a translation agency, when I was 20, I had just started working and was – to

be honest – bored with my job. So, I thought there’ll be plenty of time and energy left to do this next to

my boring 40h job. Well, for a while that worked quite well, but as my job got more exciting and

demanding and I felt more and more tired in the evening, I didn’t put as much time and energy into it as

a startup deserves and needs. When you feel too stressed to write an invoice, you know something’s

wrong! I was plain too comfortable!

Now, I’m not saying, quit your job as soon as you have an idea. But I am saying, to do it right, you’ll need

to take the leap of faith at some point.

For me, this time round, it was when we weren’t just planning anymore – we had a team together, were

actively working on developing the product and preparing for the official founding.

So pick the right time for yourself!


Founding a company Now, there’s a couple of things, I really wish I had known.

I was glad not to have a fulltime office job anymore at the time. It’s busy!

You’ll have to find a bank, a lawyer, a tax advisor, a notary, talk to the tax office – you will running

papers from A to B for about a month or two.

Here’s a few Practical Tipps for operation & setup:

Gründungszuschuss,

The German unemployment agency handles this. So if you are eligible for unemployment benefits (ALG

I) because you have worked and paid tax in Germany before founding, you will be eligible for the

Gründungszuschuss, which is a combination of what you would get as unemployment benefits plus 300

€/month for 6 months, after that you can apply for the 300€/month for another 9 months.

Be aware that if you quit your job, which will be most likely the case, you won’t get any money for a

period of three months. So make sure you have that covered.

Lawyers,

Find a law firm that has experience with startups, ideally also in your specific field. And most

importantly, negotiate fixed fees! Startup lawyers do that and it helps you to calculate your costs.

Free software,

There’s a lot of free software for startups, for example the fantastic Microsoft BizSpark programme,

where you can not only get all your usual Office Programmes, like Outlook, PowerPoint and Word, but

also free development tools that would otherwise cost you a fortune!

Also Salesforce.com will be rolling out startup licences end of this year.

Remote Co-working,

If you are founding in a team, like I did, you may think you need an office. Think again!

Save your young company a lot of money and just get organised with your collaboration tools. There’s

great stuff out there that makes it really easy to keep up communication.

We at MeetingMole for example use Google Hangouts for day-to-day chats or quick questions,

Confluence as our WIKI and knowledge base, Microsoft Team Foundation Server to organise our

development sprints and handle all product-related task, OneDrive for sharing documents and Skype

for getting some face time or weekly meetings if we don’t manage to meet up.

LEAN methodology

If you aren’t from the product side of things originally, like me – I’m a Sales chick – make sure to do your

homework and read up on some stuff, ask your technical co-founders lots of questions and get into the

mind-set of building a product. A good way to start changing your mind-set is the LEAN methodology,

great stuff for startups.

There’s meetups in Munich and lots and lots of books and articles to read.


I also want to talk a little about teams and about co-founders. Co-Founders are the best thing you can do to make sure your startup stands a chance!

Let me give you a personal example: I have two co-founders, both techies – well, we do software.

Those two have gone from planning a product to releasing a really great BETA product in less than 9

months! And they did it next to full-time jobs with a regular 60 – 80h week.

This means, they’ve been coding through nights and through weekends, they accepted severe cuts in

their social lives and have basically just spent 2014 in front of a computer. That’s co-founders!

I am very proud of the tenacity and stamina of my team – and I tell you this, paid employees would have

not put in that sort of commitment.

All their hard work aside for a moment, what’s best about them: they are very different from me.

They have different skills, different mind-sets, different approaches and different ideas – all what I

need.

So get yourself a great team of co-founders together that complements each other – I meet people at

every startup event who are searching for that other half their business needs. They are out there.

Now you have your team together. What now? Now it’s time for you to take responsibility. This is your team, your company, your idea.

Make sure every team member knows who has what responsibility and, yes it is important, who is boss.

Annette and I have talked about it a while back, this seems to be a difficult point for many women.

Don’t make it difficult, just decide and communicate.

You might want to decide that you are not a natural born leader and would rather have another co-

founder be the CEO of your company. That’s fine, just make a decision. It’s important.

A wise man once told me: “A company is not a democracy. It wouldn’t work if it were.”

Female Founders have Female Challenges This is something all founders should face before they fully commit to being an entrepreneur, but

maybe a little more relevant to women.

It’s your environment, your partner, your family – have a candid talk with them. Prepare them (and

yourself) for what is coming: long hours at the desk, many evening events to attend, less time for

household and kids, no or little income.

What you need as a founder is a supportive environment, drop the doubters and the negative people,

make your private appointments with positive and supportive friends and other founders.

Make sure you can handle the financial bottlenecks together with your partner and most of all, make

sure he understand that you’ll need him/her. And you will! For sharing responsibilities, understanding

of what you do and for morale and motivation.

I’m very lucky, my partner in life is also my partner in business – so he gets it. We looked at our financial

situation, got a cleaning lady to accommodate for our new situation, and are fine with talking about the

business 24/7.


What does it feel like to be an entrepreneur? Well, you’ll be working a lot, thinking a lot and worrying a lot. I believe worrying about everything and

doubting yourself are two disciplines women sadly excel in. Trust me, I’m a master!

But that doesn’t mean we can’t do it!

Just surround yourself with supportive people, get inspiration and motivation out of others.

Sometimes it helps me to go for a quick coffee with another founder – I call it my “self-help” network.

Or read an article about someone’s who made it, a real inspiration for me was Sheryl Sandberg’s book

“Lean In”. I take great motivation from my team and we’ll try to share and celebrate every little

achievement – that keeps us motivated.

Founding means you’ll be very tired every day - but you know what you are doing it for!

Your Passion Staying motivated and hanging in there, even when things aren’t going your way, result from PASSION.

Passion for your idea, your product, your company.

I founded mine because I truly believe that customer experience is key to any business communication,

and that customer interactions can be done better and more exciting than we are doing it today. I want

to do no less than change the world. And you shouldn’t either.

So, ladies:

If you want – and can be – your own boss, and you think you can handle the ups and downs of being an

entrepreneur, AND burn with a passion – then stop doubting yourselves and follow your dreams!

A talk held by our CEO, Jenny Richter at a Munich Female Founders event in October 2014.

inspiring female founders

Small Business & Entrepreneurship