Fempowered Founders tells the story of 12 amazing women from diverse backgrounds, of all ages and varying degrees of experience but united in their dream to turn their idea into a business that will transform and benefit the world around them. Be inspired and moved by their fears, mistakes, achievements and triumphs.
These are their stories, as told by them.
Fempowered Founders tells the story of 12 amazing women from diverse backgrounds, of all ages and varying degrees of experience but united in their dream to turn their idea into a business that will transform and benefit the world around them. Be inspired and moved by their fears, mistakes, achievements and triumphs.
These are their stories, as told by them.
PLEASE TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT YOURSELF AND THE BUSINESS YOU ARE BUILDING.
Iām very passionate about empowering women, locally and globally. Iāve worked in startups for over 10 years, and I really wanted to take my content and communi-ty-building skills to create something which could have a big impact. I learned how hard it was to build a business by myself, and coaching really helped me turn that around. But it wasnāt easy to find a good coach.
I used to be a semi-professional fashion blogger and from there I learnt how to build businesses, but I didnāt really know what I was doing. So, I created a lot of meetups that I ran under the name of Business Betty. The more meetups I did, the more our community of businesswomen grew, and it was clear we all needed a bit of guidance or coaching. There was really no place for us go, no safe space to find people we could trust not to lie to us. I thought, well maybe thereās something in this community that I am building where we can also offer a coaching service to each other.
I built Hustle and Heart (Hstl&Hrt) as a platform about a year ago and started seeking coaches whose energy I liked. I believe you can tell a lot about a person just by how you feel being around them. This allowed me to pick nice, strong female leads as coaches for our customers to connect with.
So basically, women can come to our events, log onto our platform, and weāll connect them with a coach, match them with a mentor, or help them find friends. While it started as more of a marketplace, I see it now as being almost like a media platform driving connections along the different verticals that women might need.
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WHAT IS YOUR STARTUPāS UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION?
Hstl&Hrt is a social enterprise with one BIG mission: To change the world, one woman at a time.
We do this in a few ways. Hstl&Hrt connects women with professional coaches and mentors to help them thrive and level-up, in both business and life. We also have a Facebook group women can join for free and thereās a private memberās club for anyone who wants to be part of that group. We hold loads of fun events and can easily be found on all the social media platforms and podcasts.
Our unique value proposition is our social mission. Every time a woman invests in her personal or professional development, she invests in rescuing a woman from poverty and abuse. Hstl&Hrt donate a portion (10%) of profits and our time to working with organisations and charities helping women in need. We also run business and confidence skills programs to empower marginalised women to get back into work or create a business. Hstl&Hrt is very customer-centric, and thatās the main focus of our strategy and business approach. We officially launched in 2019 into all markets and launched globally from the beginning, which is exciting. Our only option was to scale from the outset, in order to secure the traction that we needed. Currently, I run the business part-time, as well as providing a lot of strategy and marketing consultancy to clients, which allows me to bootstrap the business until it can hold its own.
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WHY IS THIS MISSION SO IMPORTANT TO YOU?
Rescuing women from poverty and abuse is very personal to me, and thatās why we donate substantially to organisations and charities that address this problem. Itās something that really makes me angry. I thought, āWhy canāt a business that helps women in a privileged world also help women who are less privileged, whether itās rescuing workers from sex trafficking, or holding workshops for women who have escaped domestic violence, to help them feel more confident about themselves?ā Itās really about having that 360-degree approach to help every woman and girl, in any situation or any walk of life.
I really just wanted to create a place where a woman can turn up exactly as she is, and not just meet someone who will believe in her, but someone who will help her safely get to where she wants to go. Itās good to do that ā itās not a dangerous thing, and itās not a bad thing. I think itās important for more women to have this opportunity available to them. If they can Afterpay their shoes, why canāt they Afterpay their personal development? Thatās the model we are working towards. Itās like weāre building these Amazons of retail, but where are the Amazons of personal development? Why isnāt that as accessible for women? Thatās exactly what Iām building.
I want to be able to cater for any problem that a woman might have, so we have period coaches available, and are adding divorce, business, life, and mindset coaches. Anyone can literally come to our site and there will be someone there for them. We are just going to scale it, scale it, and scale it, and eventually use data and artificial intelligence to match people, but at the moment I (manually) match people myself (based on an hour-long interview with them) which is working out really well.
So, my personal approach to coaching is to help women with their big vision. If a woman sets a vision for her life, not just in business but for life generally, then I think it can get a woman out of any kind of situation. But what does that vision look like? For me, itās about ending gender inequality, itās about ending poverty for women, and itās about ending the trafficking of women. The way weāre going to do it is through this model that Iām creating ā with the help of a lot of partners as I canāt do it alone.
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HOW DID YOU TEST YOUR STARTUP IDEAāS BUSINESS VIABILITY?
You never know whether a business is going to be viable until you go ahead and do it. You have to use data and customer feedback to prove its viability. Every time you do, that evidence says to you, āRight, this is the way we need to go, or that other thing is getting more traction, so letās focus more on that.ā And that is the fun thing about business: You can make a hypothesis, test it, and then get the results to back your ideas. Thatās what I did and then went back and did more and more testing. We still are very much in early stages of testing what people want and what they donāt want. Hstl&Hrt has had to become quite savvy with a lot of digital analytics. We had to do a lot of research and track visitorsā actions on our website. We had to create user and customer journeys. Simply put, it means that we have to understand the needs of our customers, beginning with a hypothesis, test it by examining the different touchpoints of the customer journey, and consider how we would meet those requirements with messaging. Analytics at every point is crucial to understanding the client; for example through the number of website visitors, sign-ups to an event, clicks, purchases, popularity, effective copy, and so on. We use tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot Social Media Analytics, just everything to really feed into an acquisition strategy.
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HOW DO YOU MANAGE YOUR ENERGY?
I think thatās something Iām still learning. Itās early days and I still have to do most of it alone. It can get overwhelming at times. Between Hstl&Hrt and the content business, Iām essentially running two different businesses and theyāre both con- stantly seeking new clients. Itās a lot of outward energy. I reckon Iāve burnt out at least two or three times already, and itās taken me a year or so to get over each one.
I think Iāve only just started learning how to be an A-type personality, and I still need to learn to utilise more of my feminine energy. I think there might be something in that as I have been very masculine in my approach to business ā pushing and shoving and, you know, literally just getting stuff done. But I think that is not always the way to do it.
Now I work in a bit of a weird way that Iām not entirely comfortable with yet. I work only when I have the energy to do it. I find Iāll get things done three or four times faster than if Iām only coming at it with half the energy. This has really helped me; itās just about learning to listen to and to follow your intuition when the outside world is screaming for you to pay attention to it, rather than to your own internal voice.
I suppose the other thing I had to learn was to protect myself, my time, my boundaries, and my beliefs, even if that makes other people uncomfortable. This is a very powerful insight, but itās really hard for women to do, including me. I think that by doing those things that are important and working only with peo- ple you like and in situations where you are comfortable, you conserve so much more energy. And so, when it comes to what matters, youāve got more energy available to work on it.
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WHAT BUSINESS METRICS ARE YOU FOCUSED ON?
I donāt watch too many metrics like a hawk, because I think you can get pretty obsessed. What Iām interested in is, for example, how many people are joining our Facebook group versus how many Instagram followers we have, because thatās a great organic way of marketing. Or comparing how many people attended our pre- and post-COVID events and how the numbers have changed. Iām OK with the fact that it dropped off a bit ā I donāt get too hung up on it. Iām coming at this as a marketing consultant as well, which my clients might not like. But if you get too hung up on the numbers, you forget how to deal deeply with the people who you already have ā you have to serve the people who are really committed to you. So, I look at those people; I engage with them, and the numbers increase in their own right. Anytime that I became too micro-focused on numbers, it didnāt go well.
I also think about other things that I canāt measure: How are we making people feel? What feedback have they given to us about our events? Thatās way more important to me than how much money weāre making right now, because I know the finances will take care of themselves. As soon as we make somebody feel in- spired, or special, or confident, we know theyāre going to come back for more of that feeling, because itās addictive, right? Thatās all anyoneās looking for. And thatās when they start spending, because we are building for the long game with them.
With a business like mine, youāre not going to make a million dollars overnight, but eventually, when it snowballs, that feeling becomes like a collective conscious- ness. I think thatās the real power of it. I used to be so impatient and just wanted to make money immediately. And now Iām like, āNah, man, how many women can we make feel amazing?ā because that creates a power in itself.
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HOW DO YOU DEFINE SUCCESS?
I define success by how many women we help believe in themselves, as it makes the world a better and more equal place. A McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) study found that advancing womenās equality could add $12 trillion to the global economy by 2025. So, weāre here to get more women hired, promoted, and invested in, and get more businesses started.
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āI define success by how many women we help believe in themselves.ā
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When Iāve been depressed, itās been the big vision that has pulled me out of bed. It basically acts not just as a compass, but as a rope attached to me that pulls me forward with increasing momentum. I think that if every woman sets a vision for her lifeās goals, it would provide a boost to help her achieve the life she wants.
Our aim is to help empower 1 million women in the next five years.
We have now expanded this avenue with an eight-week business mastermind, to help female founders get clear on their vision, align their business goals, and create a roadmap, using a team of remote business experts and coaches.
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WHAT DREW YOU TO THE FISHBURNERS FEMPOWERED PROGRAM?
Iāve been working with Fishburners for a while as an events partner, and I love everything Nicole OāBrien (CEO) and the team does. So, when the chance came to join a program with similar values to mine, I jumped.
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āFishburners has been a significant addition to my life personally as Iāve made new friends and it provided the community I really needed as a founder. You canāt underestimate the importance of that.ā
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There were two things that attracted me to Fishburners. First was the oppor- tunity to be part of the community of amazing people who are trying to change the world. And the second was learning how to scale Hstl&Hrt to be even more of a global business than it already is!
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HOW HAS THE FEMPOWERED PROGRAM HELPED YOU TO SCALE?
Iām very prepared emotionally for how big my business is going to get. Itās easy to forget that your ideas are not everyoneās reality and people may not think the way you do either. Iām very frustrated working in the now, in the present. How can I be more present? Iām not good at it.
My mentors on the FEMPOWERED accelerator are amazing. They said, āRight, you have this huge vision. But you need to connect dots from where you are right now, to get where you want to be.ā And so part of the FEMPOWERED journey has been about how to bring my vision to life. Our motto is āChanging the world, one woman at a time.ā How can I ensure we make enough of an impact on each customer at each event, so that it snowballs into that bigger vision? Iām so impa- tient for this to happen! I know it will, but I really struggle sometimes with the day-to-day smallness of it.
I wonder sometimes whether Iāve gone so deeply into it so that I donāt have to deal with the stuff that I donāt want to deal with. It was much more exciting being at that future state. Being part of the accelerator has helped me build a business model and then weāre going to build financial models based on it. The program has grounded me ā eventually Iāll have people to do the day-to-day stuff so I can go back to what Iām best at ā but at the moment I donāt have that luxury or privilege as a solo founder. So, I need to stay focused and FEMPOWERED helps me do exactly that.
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WHAT FEMPOWERED EXPERIENCE HAS EMPOWERED OR SURPRISED YOU MOST?
I donāt know if thereās any one thing, but the entire experience has been pretty surprising. Iāve always had to do everything alone and, even though Iām building a community for this reason, itās been very unexpected for me to be part of a group of women I may not go to the pub with, but we really do come together as a community to help one another. And that has happened consistently. I think that, in an environment like Fishburners, youāre not just with your cohort. You also have the gift of meeting lots of other founders. Itās just lovely that weāve all been going through that journey together, even though weāre at different stages of our own separate journeys. And I think that has been a thing that Iāve always needed ā I never knew how lonely I was until I was in Fishburners. As well as thinking, āAh, these people get it; they donāt mind if I talk about my business all the time; theyāre not bored with it,ā I donāt feel like Iām putting anything on anyone. They actually help you a lot with strategising and feedback and, you know, we also self-mentor and peer-mentor each other within the program and within Fishburners. Speaking of independence, the best thing about something like Fishburners is that you can go there independently, whenever you want. You donāt have to sit there nine-to-five, but you still have all the camaraderie as if you were in an office job. So, youāre part of this hive, this community, but you have the freedom to leave when you want. And I think this is so important to mention. Youāre like a cat; you can come and go as you please and itās fine. For me, as a solo founder, that has been one of the most enjoyable things about Fishburners; I can turn up when I want ā or leave when I feel like it.
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WHATāS THE FEMPOWERED MENTORING EXPERIENCE BEEN LIKE?
Itās been very interesting having mentors whom Iāve learned to trust, especially as a lot of mentors have let me down in the past. Having Eric and Addy as part of the FEMPOWERED mentoring has been amazing. Weāve been in there for almost six months, and I think I perplexed them at times because I have an enormous vision, but then not very much self-confidence because I wasnāt brought up with many people believing in me. I donāt want to sound like a victim; thatās just the way it was. I would only be able to name a handful of people who have believed in me and helped me, so itās been hard.
Even though I really, really believe in this vision, sometimes I hear those voices. I think it was a bit of a conundrum for Addy and Eric because sometimes I would be self-confident, but then other days I would be very unsettled with low self-esteem. So, they would receive a bit of a āYeah, I donāt knowā response to their questions, and I wouldnāt want to speak to them, but they were amazing. They helped me understand what was happening and how I was trying to follow two different approaches. Iāve definitely come through the other side a lot more confident. And I think itās all been a testament to them. I donāt think it was even the business model that I necessarily needed help with ā I definitely needed help with financials ā itās been that separation of the self, and then bringing it back together again, and understanding that itās okay to be human. And everyoneās going through the same process. And, you know, thereās been a few times when the mentors said things that made me feel uncomfortable and I wasnāt sure I agreed with them. But the fact is that their comments made me think and then self-diagnose whether their advice was right for me. Thatās so important to me ā having my thoughts and ideas challenged and then being able to make my own choice rather than having a decision prescribed to me.
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āSometimes you want to fast track success by taking someone elseās experience and learning from it.ā
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I think weāve been very lucky with the mentors that we have, because some people in the ecosystem donāt know how to mentor. They think a mentor is a being a dictator. And itās not. A mentor should help people find their way through their problems with suggestions and advice and provide support if we ask them. Itās important that a person be asked how they want to be mentored. I donāt think a lot of mentors do that.
So, yeah, weāve been very lucky. And I honestly couldnāt have asked for better mentors. Theyāre very different to each other and very well-connected. They brought in great speakers who really humanise the founder approach and helped us understand that even if someoneās got a multi-million-dollar business, theyāre still human beings and thatās what I think a lot of the women in FEMPOWERED needed to see.
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WHAT DOES FISHBURNERS MEAN TO YOU?
Fishburners has been a great addition to my life personally, as Iāve made new friends and it has provided the community I really needed as a founder. You canāt underestimate the importance of that.
I was lucky to be made the community manager for female founders at Fishburners, using my industry connections to bring great speakers to inspire our women in business. I also partner with Fishburners on many events for female founders, and itās always so much fun and I really value the team there.
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WHAT ADVICE DO YOU WISH YOUāD BEEN TOLD WHEN YOU WERE STARTING OUT?
The advice I wish Iād been told when I was starting out is just to get started. Everyone says it, but just go and do it! Donāt hire a website designer, get on WordPress, or Squarespace; donāt hire a coder; and you donāt need a co-founder either. Itās instilled in us that we need co-founders because itās hard. Itās not true! You can do it on your own. And then when you have enough money, you can outsource what youāre not good enough to do yourself. In the interim, if you canāt afford to do it in Australia or the UK, you can outsource it to countries like the Philippines. There are major companies like Canva doing it, and huge agencies that do the same. Thereās nothing wrong with offshoring if you can get a trusted partner or set it up yourself.
Also, you donāt need to be perfect to do it. And you donāt have to wait. You donāt have to get an MBA. But if you want some help, thereās always a way of going out and finding it ā it might be hiring a business coach or asking someone to be your mentor. Donāt try to do it all yourself; sometimes you can fast track success by taking someone elseās experience and learning from it, so you donāt make the same mistakes they did. But thereās nothing to say that thereās anything wrong with making mistakes either.
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āThe biggest lesson of all is: Be patient.ā
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Go out and experiment! If it doesnāt work, itās not the end of the world. Play the long game. Nothing is going to happen overnight. Not even for Mark Zuckerberg. And that is the biggest lesson of all: Be patient.
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ANY FINAL MESSAGES YOUāD LIKE TO SHARE?
Donāt allow the past to dictate your future. It doesnāt matter what has happened in the past, you can literally be anything that you want to be. And you can start doing it tomorrow. Make a big vision for yourself and take the smallest steps. Do the right thing and, as Oprah says, do the next right thing. You really can do anything that you want, and donāt let anyone tell you otherwise, especially if they havenāt done what you are trying to achieve. I think this is so important
Established over a decade ago Fishburners is an Australian based not-for-profit organization dedicated to fostering tech entrepreneurs and their founders using various tools like mentorship programs, workshops, guest speaker opportunities, and assorted literature on the practicalities of starting a business. Folded within the Fishburners program is Fempowered, a partnership with Google for Startups intended to nurture and empower female founders as they grow their ideas and innovations into successful businesses in a variety of tech-related fields. Fempowered, the book, is a collection of 12 interviews with various women founders, alumni and current participants in the Fempowered program, about their work, their journey, and how Fishburners in general and Fempowered in particular helped them along the way.
All of that sounds a little dry, and a little like Iām trying to sell you something, and I suppose on a certain level I am. Fempowered is a book put out by a company about how awesome the services that company provides are.
That said, this is also a book full of impressive stories from incredible women who are all trying to change the world for the better, and if their testimony is true, then Fishburners has certainly helped them along the way. Whether the startup in question is geared towards helping parents and children handle scary doctor visits through learning tools like a teddy bear and accompanying storybook, or a company that creates green energy, and clean water, by recycling used grease from restaurants, or a company intended to help women connect with mentors and friends in their field, Fempowered the program has nurtured them all, and Fempowered the book contains their stories.
Framed as a series of interviews, what I appreciate most about Fempowered is that the interviews are not ācookie cuttersā from one to the other. Yes, there are some questions that appear in most of the chapters, but they are not identical. This variety of questions suits the varied experiences of these women, and brings out the best when it comes to the way they talk about both their work and the Fempowered program.
Again and again phrases like ānetworkingā and āmentorshipā appear, as woman after woman offers glowing reviews of the Fempowered program, and her unique experience within it. Likewise, frequent reference is made to the COVID 19 pandemic, and the way it, almost overnight, upended lives and ideas surrounding work all around the world. Just as frequently, the adaptability of Fishburners, and their rapid transition and re-organization to meet these changing needs for their clients in the midst of a global pandemic is brought up.
Overall, this is not a book many people will casually pick up and read, but those who do ā those who are specifically looking for women entrepreneurs like this to pattern their lives after, and for impetus in founding their own organization ā will find Fempowered full of useful advice, inspirational stories, and a hearty recommendation that they attend a Fishburners seminar pronto.