Illustration: Rachelle Baker It’s pretty common for a small business to fall on its face. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about half of small businesses survive longer than five years. And while most entrepreneurs don’t jump at the chance to relive their past failures, others attribute their subsequent victories to what they learned from their setbacks.
In the meantime, I was approached to become a co-founder at a food-tech start-up. The product was a yogurt-maker, and I joined as head of marketing. I learned a lot about the process of raising money and building an audience. But there were problems with leadership. If the product is not the right fit, the leader needs to be able to identify that, and pivot to what the customers actually want and need.
“I did everything totally backwards.”—Karen Cahn, co-founder of iFundWomen, a crowdfunding platform for entrepreneurs. Previous failed business: VProud.tv, a video platform for women. I had a long career in sales at Google and YouTube, and I left the corporate world with this idea to start a channel of my own. It was called VProud, and it was supposed to be like YouTube for women, without the trolls.
I’m not going to lie, of course there was a mourning period. It was sad and weird to wind down all the work we had done. We had created all of these videos, and we had to go through and de-list them one by one. That was awful. But at the same time, we started building iFundWomen immediately, and that was fun. And we knew we were solving a real problem, which is that women-owned businesses don’t get enough funding.
Another thing I did differently the second time around was that I had two other co-founders. I had hired Kate and Sarah as employees at VProud, but when we started iFundWomen, I said, “I’m not going to start this business without co-founders from the beginning. Are you all in?” And they said yes, and we’ve made every decision together. They keep me in check. This is not my show; it’s ours.
At the same time, I was still doing freelance writing for people’s businesses. And as part of that, I had learned how to use Squarespace, which was relatively new at the time. Clients and friends were asking me to make their websites, and I started designing landing pages for events and graphics for social media. And it dawned on me that all of my interests were better served in web design. It was the common thread between everything I’d been doing all along.