Invisible Ink

How do you bring a radically new idea down to earth and make it real? How do you validate the market for a product that doesn’t even exist? And how do you do this with a view to getting a very specific kind of incubation and growth support, as well as capital, in a narrow, niche industry?

In this episode, insurance technology entrepreneur Soton Rosanwo talks about her incredibly thoughtful and systematic approach to getting, capturing and selecting ideas, how she balances head and heart in navigating her startup path, her step-by-step approach to validating her market with a small budget, getting the exact right accelerator for her niche startup, and much more.

Episode highlights:
- How to never lose a potential startup idea again
- How to figure out if an idea is a good fit for you
- How to evaluate the merits of an idea you like
- How to zoom in on the vital few factors that will make or break your idea's success
- How to collect reliable data even a VC will accept, without breaking the bank
- How to collect market data when you don't have a research budget, even a small one
- How to develop your idea systematically through stages so you don't waste time or money
- How to select the right accelerator for YOUR business
- How to find, hire and compensate your earliest employees
- The one warning sign to watch for when hiring new employees
- How to find the right investors for your startup
- How get better negotiating outcomes, even if you hate to negotiate
- The one thing to never lose sight of during your entire entrepreneurial journey

How do you transform a deeply personal, even traumatic experience into a transformational moment for thousands of other people?

How do you scale personal change and impact so it manifests in behavior and attitudinal change that affects the bottomline?

How do you package all of this into a real, economically healthy and scalable business that does well, makes money AND promotes greater economic and social benefits for all?

In this episode, academic turned entrepreneur Nassim Abdi, founder of Storybolt, talks about how she started with an idea that wouldn’t let go, and built an impactful and successful business step by step, how she learned everything about business from the ground up, and much more.

Episode Highlights:

- How passion translates to a viable startup idea - the real life version
- How to build a great business model around an idea
- Don't start fundraising without this - the one must-have factor you must nail down
- Inside tips for successful selling - organizational solutions for B2B startups
- How to choose the right business vehicle for your startup, and what pitfalls to avoid
- Is your idea worth the sacrifice - the foolproof test for entrepreneurs who are moms that always gives you the right answer
- How to start where you are - even when you have no money, knowledge or experience
- The savvy entrepreneur's guide to finding right-fit investors, without burning up a lot of time
- How to overcome implicit bias as a "minority" founder
- How to find the right co-founder and build a great team
- How hats can help with good decision-making
- The one attribute above all attributes that no founder can do without

How do you go from zero to sixty in mastering the angel fundraising game? What hidden indicators signal to investors that you’re a pro and not a rookie entrepreneur when it comes to your startup?

What’s the one thing angel investors look for in a pitch that most entrepreneurs miss? What small action will get you off to a great start with any angel investor?

In this episode, veteran angel investor and author Susan Preston talks about how she started the first group of women angels, the ABC’s of angel investing that you’ve always wondered about, how to decode investor responses to your pitch, get off to a great start, and much more.

Episode Highlights:
- The steps you must have in place before seeking angel investment
- How to tell when your product is customer ready
- When to approach angel investors
- How to find the right angel investors for your stage and industry
- How to avoid wasting time with "tire kickers"
- Hidden sources of angel investor referrals
- How to estimate your funding needs realistically
- Angel investor must-haves: realistic projections, competitor awareness, bench strength, traction
- What angel investor due diligence looks like
- The many disguises of an angel investor's "no" and how to move on quickly to your first "yes"
- The basics of angel investing: SAFE's and convertible notes
- How to manage the post-investment relationship with angel investors
- Notes on valuation and how to go the extra mile
- Then one thing women entrepreneurs can do to become more successful

How do you start with a revolutionary technological product, no educational credentials, and $600 in your pocket and sign up a huge name in your market?

How do you stretch your time and money so far that one small order from one surprise customer opens up an entire market for you?

How do you get over self-doubt, blatant reverse ageism and sexism to create a product that literally saves lives for less than the cost of filling gas in your car?

In this episode, entrepreneur and vc analyst Tayyaba Ali talks about how she strategically used pitch competitions to win a neat pot of startup cash, how she reverse-engineered exiting products to build a completely innovative new product on a shoestring budget, how she learned to overcome thinking small, doubting herself and negotiation pitfalls to bootstrap an industry-changing social impact venture, and much more.

Episode Highlights:
- How to find inspiration for innovation from your lived experience
- How to supercharge impact via product design innovation
- The hidden pitfall social ventures and nonprofits succumb to, and how to avoid it
- How to right-size your product scope
- Shortcuts to bringing product to market without breaking the bank
- How to raise funding without diluting your stake and wasting your time
- How to find high-impact customers without risking your brand
- How to create a perfect-fit advisory board when you have no money and no network
- How not to sabotage your startup with bad pricing decisions, especially if you're a woman
- How to get over crippling diffidence as a woman founder and maximize confidence 
- Secret funding sources nobody knows about, and how to pick the right ones for your business
- The risks of fundraising as a woman, and how to stay the course
- The high cost of social impact entrepreneurship, and the massive rewards that make the struggle worthwhile

Summary

How do you take an important but noisy subject like workplace equity and move it into the realm of data, discipline and impactful action?

How do you stay true to mission while staying solvent AND relevant to your paying clients?

How can you find the right markets to serve so you can deliver impact AND grow at the same time?

In this episode, Aparna Rae, entrepreneur and founder of Moving Beyond, talks about how to bring substance to organizational change initiatives, how to develop and effectively sell an impactful, science-based offering, non-obvious factors to consider in crafting your funding strategy, and much more.

Episode Highlights:

- How to tap opportunity when the time is right
- How to bring discipline and data to a "fluffy" field
- How to find the power levers to make data impactful to an organization
- How to create a compelling service offering that can demonstrate immediate impact
- The secret to finding and pitching the right B2B customers for your business service offering
- How to leverage your service business to build a scalable product without outside funding
- How to select the right source of funding for your business
- The challenges of getting angel investment
- How to make the tough decisions when mission conflicts with economics
- How to build and nurture investor networks and relationships for long-term success

How do you take your skills from a traditional career and transform them into the core of a monetizable business? How do you mine the experience, contacts and the tacit knowledge you’ve built up over years into value-adding assets Day One?

And how do you find creative and enterprising ways to take care of important parts of the business, but that you really hate or aren’t good at?

In this episode, journalist, author and media business founder Elizabeth MacBride, talks about how she leveraged her prior career, raised founder-fit funding, resourcefully navigated tough challenges and negotiations, and much more.

Episode Highlights:
- How to use your previous career to jumpstart your entrepreneurial venture
- Things to consider before establishing a business path.
- How to set up the basic financial infrastructure you need for your business
- The importance of protecting your intellectual property
- How to find the right trusted professionals  for legal and financial well-being of your venture
- Why not to pursue venture funding especially for women over 30
- The simple and "safe" funding path to secure friends and family funding for small, fledgling ventures
- What makes a media business unique and challenging to run
- The only thing that matters for getting pricing right
- Ways to break into power networks for budding entrepreneurs.
- Intuition or planning? The correct way to lead a business, financially.
- The hidden risks of being too open with your business plans

If you’re a woman in STEM trying to establish yourself, it can feel almost impossible to get your foot in the door. Double that if you’re also a person of color. And once you’re in the door, you’re only starting - you still have to deliver, get paid, get new business, find and keep great people, and have the means to pay them.

Feels like an impossible task, that is, unless you’re Kimberly Moore, founder of KDM Engineering

In this episode, Kimberly talks about how she crafted a path successfully as one of the very few African American woman managing electrical engineering design for very large utilities, how she cracked the problem of finding and keeping qualified people, and still manages to give back to the community in very deep and meaningful ways.

Here’s Kimberly, with her story of inspiration, hard-headed business acumen and a big heart for giving back

Episode highlights:
1. How to uncover your hidden genius when you don't even know it exists
2. What they don't tech you about starting out on your own, and how to get up to speed quickly
3. How to leverage your personal brand to build business credibility quickly
4. How to hire top talent when you can't afford to pay top dollar
5. How to do business development in industries with really long sales cycles
6. The one asset you should always keep building
7. How to get smart about finances when you have no one to turn to
8. How to finance your growth when financing isn't available
9. How to manage inflation when your costs rise but prices don't
10. How to use financial transparency with employees to gain  competitive advantage
11. How to give back by leveraging the core strengths of your business
12. The surprising rewards from treating people right

How do you go from a pure social services background to founding a financial services company? How do you run that while staying true to mission?

What is a certified B Corp and why would you choose that route? How do you learn everything you need to learn while bootstrapping your business from scratch ?

In this episode, SpringFour founder Rochelle Nawrocki Gorey talks about her journey from grassroots social work to founding an award-wining financial services firm that’s also a certified B corp.

Hear Rochelle’s take on why a nonprofit background is the idea training ground for entrepreneurship, hacks to get smart on finances quickly, and much more

Episode highlights
1. The smart way to move from nonprofit work to social entrepreneurship
2. The hidden fundraising advantage of working in a nonprofit
3. The key to selling large profit-driven ventures on a social impact offering 
4. The value of passion in driving early success, especially if you're small
5. The tradeoffs between funding strategy and venture growth, and how to make the right call for you
6. The costs and benefits of getting certified as a B Corporation
7. How to hire financial professionals in smart, low-cost ways
8. A mission-driven approach to growing strategically, or how not to be a slave to numbers-driven growth
9. Smart tips on negotiating for people who hate to negotiate
10. Real-life tips on how to build and tap into your network, even if you're an introvert
11. How to stay motivated in a social impact venture

You’ve seen the numbers - the minuscule amount of funding that goes to women-founded businesses, the uphill battles, the struggle.

What if you could turn the whole conventional model on its head and making fundraising less like the hunger games and more like getting an unexpected banquet?

In this episode, Vicki Saunders, activator and founder of She-EO, now Coralus, talks about the inspiration behind SheEO’s unique model for funding, her vision of helping women entrepreneurs tackle the world’s “to do” list, how getting access to the right community can supercharge your venture, and much more...

Episode highlights

1. The seeds of SheEO's unique funding and entrepreneur support model
2. The unique advantages of a "grassroots" startup investing model versus the traditional "top-down" vc funding model
3. How the SheEO crowdfunding model adds value above just capital for founders
4. Surprise learnings  - how going against the grain makes founders more successful
5. How to make interactions between funders and founders productive
6. Why the cookie-cutter approach to mentoring is flawed, and how to improve it
7. The surprising ways in which being in a community brings out your true potential
8. How to get past self-limiting attitudes, particularly those related to money, earning money, and pricing setting.
9. The secret to tackling sexism and prejudices in the world of finance
10. Encouraging advice for second career entrepreneurs.
11. A strategy for creating a network that supports your industry
12. The foot-in-the-door strategy for entrepreneurs who aren't affiliated with SheEO.

Have you ever been frustrated by how much money we spend on healthcare and yet how bureaucratic and inefficient the system is? Or wondered why nobody’s fixing it?

The good news is somebody already is! And it’s an amazing woman, no less, who’s also an accomplished doctor

In this episode, radiologist and tech entrepreneur Dr. Aneesa Majid talks about how her frustrations with an antiquated healthcare system that still sends billions of faxes prompted her to found Zip Data.

Listen to Aneesa’s hard-won insights on how she manages a tech startup as CEO, what she recommends women and minority founders do to improve their funding prospects, where she gets high-value advice on game-changing money matters with her startup, and much more.

Episode highlights

1. Capitalism at loggerheads with efficiency and progress?
2. How to run a startup with a full-time career
3. The challenges of b2b tech for fundraising and profitability
4. How to play well with multiple cofounders 
5. How to use your category to maximize your economics
6. How using an end-to-end view improves your pricing effectiveness
7. How to develop a good sales strategy
8. Surprising ways a network helps improve your fundraising
9. The one expense a founder should never skimp on if fundraising externally
10. How to maximize your chance of success as an under-represented woman founder