Episode 15: White Privilege and Gender Gap in Startup Funding with IFundWomen CEO Karen Cahn
Listen closely: There are funding options for women!
In this episode, Karen Cahn is joining me to talk about white privilege and the gender gap in startup funding.
Karen Cahn is the Founder & CEO of IFundWomen, the go-to funding marketplace for women-owned businesses and the people who want to support them with access to capital, coaching, and connections all designed to launch and grow profitable, sustainable businesses. Since founding IFundWomen, thousands of women-owned companies, who started their businesses on the IFundWomen platform, have raised over $100M in early-stage capital and have created tens of thousands of jobs, helping to fuel the startup and small business economy.
Named to Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 Female Founders of 2020, and The City and State of New York’s Most Responsible CEOs of 2020, Karen is a true pioneer in tech and media. Karen was an early Google Intrapreneur, spending 10 years leading sales teams in search, display, and video. Most notably, in 2006, Karen started the Branded Entertainment business at YouTube by making powerful and substantive connections between big, global brands and creators, resulting in the creation of the first native video ad experiences that helped creators make exponentially more money from their YouTube videos. Karen then went on to spend three years at Aol where she started Aol’s female creative economy in video by funding and monetizing dozens of women-produced, premium-quality video series, resulting in Aol nabbing its first-ever Emmy nod. Karen holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, double majoring in African-American Studies and US History.
Together we discuss why hiring a coach to guide you through fundraising is crucial, the challenges that women of color have in the funding landscape, and the clear steps that you need to take to get started funding your business as a woman.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
What white privilege really means
The funding gap between white women and women of color
What crowdfunding is and why it’s more difficult for women of color
Actionable tips for struggling business owners
Why there are so many necessity entrepreneurs post-COVID
The best and worst advice about getting funding
There is no overnight success, but there are steps you can take to be successful and get funding. Do your research, talk to other entrepreneurs, and take advantage of the resources that are available to you - especially the ones through IFundWomen!
Remember, your best first step is crowdfunding, but you have to make sure that you have been creating content on your website and social media channels for a while even before that. To get more guidance and support throughout your entire startup journey, visit https://ifundwomen.com!
If you are looking for ways to get featured even before you’ve made any money, I invite you to watch my PR Secrets Masterclass where I reveal the exact methods thousands of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their own PR. You can register for FREE to watch it here: http://gloriachoupr.com/masterclass!
Resources Mentioned:
Follow Karen on Instagram: www.instagram.com/karencahn
Connect with Karen on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-cahn
Follow Karen on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/karen.cahn
Visit the IFundWomen website: https://ifundwomen.com/startup-coaching-plans
Additional Resources:
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Transcript
Speaker1: [00:00:00] If you are looking for a no BS and honest conversation about white Hey, friends, I'm Gloria Chou, small business PR expert, award winning pitch writer and your unofficial hype woman. Nothing makes me happier than seeing people get the recognition they deserve. And that starts with feeling more confident to go bigger with your message, because let's be honest, we simply cannot make the impact. We're here to make, by hiding behind the scenes. So on this podcast, I will share with you the untraditional yet proven strategies for PR marketing and creating more opportunity in your business. If you are ready to take control of your narrative and be your most unapologetic and confident self, you're in the right place. This is the Small Business PR podcast. Hi, everyone, I am so, so excited for our amazing special guest. The one, the only, Karen Cahn of IFundWomen. Now, she is not only a powerhouse, she has helped so many women. And in the five years that she started IFundWomen. She has helped women raise over one hundred and thirty five million dollars, which went on to create over 30000 jobs for people around the world. So without further ado, Karen, I'm so happy that you're here. Welcome to the
Speaker2: [00:01:20] podcast! Thanks, Gloria. I'm so happy to be here with you. Haven't seen you like your face in like two years?
Speaker1: [00:01:27] It's amazing to be here with you. I mean, obviously we can definitely get into like everything you're building. You just celebrated your five year anniversary of your business, so congratulations.
Speaker2: [00:01:37] Thank girl. We made it. It was. It's a road. But we made. We made it. I feel like we are, you know, finally out of diapers and walking. And we're we're still we're still in kindergarten. Are we in first grade? I think we're in first grade now.
Speaker1: [00:01:54] Honey, I think you've been there, done that, graduated and then some. I mean, the impact. Yeah.
Speaker2: [00:01:58] God, no. I mean, thanks. But no, it doesn't feel like that. But it feels it does feel great to make it to five years. You know, when we started, it was when the Wing and the Riveter and Ella Vest, which is still crushing it. A lot of women founded brands for women by women brands, whether they were co-working or in finance, were started really in like late 2016. And, you know, not all of them are kind of doing sort of still around, you know, to be honest, like, you know, the brands are there, but the, you know, all of us is still crushing it. But the riveter is a different kind of thing and and the wing is owned by men now. So it's just it's very different.
Speaker1: [00:02:44] Yeah, we can. That's a whole nother conversation,
Speaker2: [00:02:46] A whole nother conversation, but I feel lucky. I feel very blessed that we're still here and that, you know, really comes down to our team. So give them a shout out.
Speaker1: [00:02:55] And one thing, one thing I want to just say like, you know, as a woman of color, as as someone who is, you know, first generation immigrant, I will say that I fund women I feel like has this level of inclusion and diversity that I don't see as like, you know, present and other female founded places. Not that they're not, but I do feel like you especially are fully committed to elevating women of color and you actually have, you know,IFundWomen of color as well. So talk to me a little bit about why, as a white woman, you made that conscious choice.
Speaker2: [00:03:26] Thank you for asking me that, Gloria, because a lot of people don't ask me that. And I and I appreciate you saying, like as a white woman, why you would be so surprised how how many people just tiptoe around like the fact that I am white and like really white and my name is Karen. It's like a whole. It's a whole. It's a disaster. But you know, so I since I was a young child, I have always been an activist for racial, and the reason for that is a do like the very short origin story of my activism as I grew up in a very small, very homogenous, very white suburb of Boston. Boston is still a very sort of segregated, yeah, pretty racist city, quite frankly, kind of getting a little better, but not so much. And back when I was, you know, born and raised in the suburbs there, I mean, there was not one black or brown person in my town. I was the diversity as a Jew, which is ridiculous. Right. So but then at home, my parents, both were activists. They would they were marching on Washington, like in the sixties, like literal activists and in my house, all my parents played was black music and soul music and funk and Motown. And you know, that's what I grew up with, was in the home like black music and activism and being aware of the news.
Speaker2: [00:04:45] And then when I went on the school bus, it was like this small like town where, you know, people were just not open to up to strangers. And it's so weird to even say the word strangers, but as like a white woman, but so that it just never felt normal to me to be part of this like white world when I knew out there there were all of these other interesting people. So when I went away to college, I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I actually majored in African-American studies. This was back in 1993- ish kind of before Dee and I were even letters that they put together, like people weren't thinking about these things at all. And I was definitely like the only white kid in class. And like, I didn't care. But it was it was incredible. I just learned about obviously the history, right? Why things are the way they are now is directly related to the history of the world, and you can't get around it right. So I've always been very passionate about equity for people of color in this country. I mean, definitely globally, but like I can't. I'm even having like a hard time knowing if I can solve the funding gap problem here in the United States, let alone like globally, so, you know, talk to me in 10 or 20 years and we'll see where we're at.
Speaker2: [00:06:03] But yeah, so I just it. It is not OK to me at all that my white privilege in that and most people don't, even most white people still don't even know what that is. So white people, your white privilege, forget the word privilege because I think that's like really after with people like because privilege you think of as like wealth. It's not what that's about white privilege. White people listen up is literally about the color of your skin and the and the freedom that that affords you in that you can, you know, go to school and people don't look at you differently. At work your ideas are going to be heard more than people of color's ideas, especially Black and Latin people. Right? It's it's literally the privilege or the honor or the, you know, the it's privilege. But again, it's not wealth, it's privilege of having white skin. So I've always deeply understood this and deeply just hated it and back. It really just have built my career, frankly, around creating equity for specifically women of color because it's just it's just literally not fair what goes on. And I don't like things that aren't fair. So, yeah,
Speaker1: [00:07:24] That's why I have to be on the on the podcast because you're so no B.S. about it and you're not shy about it. What you said about tiptoeing, I think the reason why we have the issues that we do because people lump everyone in one umbrella and there's such a nuance right between women funded business and BIPOC and and black and Latino. So talk to me a little bit about because you're kind of in this point where you've helped thousands of entrepreneurs white and not white. What are some of the nuances that you see and what do you want people to understand about the funding gap not only between men and women, but between like women of color?
Speaker2: [00:07:56] Yes, you're asking like the best questions I left this podcast already, seriously. God bless you for being so real and like wanting to have a cool conversation. So, OK, let me let me sort of like try not to take this back to 400 years ago, but really just talk about the here and now. So we all know that people of color in this country, whether they are East Asian Americans, South Asian-Americans, Hispanic, Latin X, I mean, there's you know, there's they're not a monolith. Women of color are not obviously not a monolith. There are multiple different layers people from all around the world, also people that were born here. And you know, there's immigrants. It's a whole melting pot, which is like the beautiful, wonderful, amazing part of this country, if you, you know, if that's your world. But when it comes to wealth and equity, the disparity is is insane. And I'm not going to like, lecture you about the numbers or even give them because it's just it's just, you know, everyone knows them. So when we started, IFundWomen. It was Sarah and Kate and I, three white women, OK, we had started our first startup together. It failed. Everybody knows about it. Don't even need to go into it. And when we started, when we pivoted and we started, IFundWomen. We actually did research on our customers this time, as opposed to the first failed startup.
Speaker2: [00:09:18] We were like, Let's just build a software for, you know, women creators, video creators because everyone wants it. We actually did customer discovery and customer research, and it was very clear to us from the minute we literally got the URL before we launched that most of our customers were likely going to be women of color, predominantly black women and and Hispanic women, potentially so because those were the two groups inside the U.S. that were starting businesses the fastest. And the reason why women of color, particularly black and Hispanic, Latina, Latina women, there is a difference. I say there's a difference. So I know you know that. But for anyone listening, there's a difference between a Latina or Latinx and Hispanic, and the jury's out on which word people prefer because they identify as different things. So you've got to be inclusive. And P.S. about the BIPOC thing I hear from black people all the time. They hate the word, the acronym BIPOC. They're like, really just but it's it's fascinating races, I think, the most fascinating subject. Let me stay on task, though, and on focus and talk about why we knew we needed to start IFundWomen. So when we started I-phone, women of color, pardon me. So when we started IFundWomen, Sarah, Kate and I were doing our research, and we realized that most of our customers were going to be women of color.
Speaker2: [00:10:41] So they kind of looked at me and they're like, What are we doing now? I'm like, Well, we hire people at our company, from engineering to product coaching to marketing through every discipline who look like our customers. Period. And, you know, and they were like, that's logical, because women are logical. And we did it. So our first hire and it was not like we were like, OK, we need to go find, you know, 60 percent black people and 30 percent, you know, Latin X people. We didn't obviously like we weren't performative about it. We just knew that we needed to hire because if we wanted to hire, if we wanted our company to succeed and make money, we needed to have people building products and services for our customers that have shared somewhat of their lived experience. Now everyone's experiences are different, right? Everyone doesn't matter if you're, you know, it's a group of black women. Many of their experiences are going to be different. Their socioeconomic status is going to be different. That being said, there are commonalities, obviously, with women of the same race. And so we hired so long story long, we ended up hiring and we still have a highly majority minority company had an engineering product. So Olivia Owens was our first hire literally was higher number one when we first started.
Speaker2: [00:12:07] Oh yeah. She's a founding team member. I mean, she literally is. She's been there since the very beginning. Her mother, Deborah, owns Shout Out. Deborah was part of our beta cohort when we were in stealth. So that's how I met Olivia, because Deborah and I became Deborah, who is like a phenom. She's a wealth coach, and she spent, I think, like 20 years at Fidelity. She's really, like, created her own wealth. And when she came to, I found women to beat her with us. She was building an app called Wealthy You, which was for finance, for personal financial savings and paying down debt and all that kind of stuff. And that's what she still does. But we became friends, and I said to her, I'm like, OK, so we've got this like thing that people want. And apparently there's a real funding gap because we have all these people coming to us and I'm like, Oh my God, I hope our platform doesn't break. It was like. So like MVP's, we called her Frankenstein. She was built on like a WordPress page with like a crowdfunding plug in, and we had a Slack channel just for customer service. We made people's videos for them for free. Sarah and I made them like in my house or at YouTube Studios in New York, or we would like. I mean, it was so scotch tape together. So with our beta, we were like ladies.
Speaker2: [00:13:20] She may break. But if you need funding like and you want to get a free video like come and we'll help you, we'll put this thing up for you and you can test it. We were very honest about it and P.S. it didn't break, and the women who crowdfunded with us were a diverse group of women because of course, we, you know, we had 200 applications for 20 spots and we were making free everything for everybody, so we couldn't take more than 20. So we, of course, picked a very diverse group of women and also because we were in beta. And when you beta, you want to test things out. We had hypotheses around like how much easier it would be for white women to raise money versus women of color, obviously because of what I started off talking about. So it's actually like a full circle mom already, right? White, white privilege. Like, it's easier. It's been easier for me my whole life because I have white skin versus like the Karen who's my same age. Born in the same place, blah blah blah who is black like two equal Karens different skin color god. The name Karen is so bad, but you know it's going to be easier for me. Fundamentally, so we tested it on our own platform and found the same thing, right? That the white women just they had wealthier networks, period.
Speaker2: [00:14:40] And so when you think about it, what is crowdfunding? Crowdfunding is when you, the entrepreneur, go out and raise small increments of money from lots of people that you know, to add up to just enough money to get your thing off the ground, your business off the ground. Right. So like when we crowdfunded for our MVP, you know, we crowdfunded thirty thousand dollars. It was like the hardest thing I had ever done. It really was so like the women who have come on to IFundWomen and raised fifty thousand one hundred thousand three hundred thousand. I like bowed down to them. That is not easy. So we knew in our beta that it was going to be harder for women of color founders to raise in crowdfunding because their networks were not as wealthy as the white women's networks. We saw that in the beta. So we started kind of talking with Olivia about, you know? IFundWomen of color was an idea that we had kind of from the beginning, but we sort of were like, OK, Olivia was like, don't other, you know, she was like, it was, it was sort of before. It was before people woke up for sure. I mean, absolutely, and it was also during the time when. Well, listen, black people and people of color have always been quote othered and that feels like shit.
Speaker2: [00:15:58] I'm sure. I don't know because I'm a white woman. I can't tell you how it feels. But basically, Olivia's point was like, Let's keep going forward, keep building out the product and services. Let's you know, we're building the coaching platform, we're building the brokered grants, all the other things that we have. Let's see if we can move the needle without creating a separate space because we just don't. We're like over being othered and I got that completely. I got that completely. So we three years so twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen twenty nineteen, our first three years of full funding volume. And that's our number one North Star KPI key performance indicator. That's the number one thing we care about at the company is funding volume. So we were going along, building, coaching and doing all the other things, and people were crowdfunding and it was we worked up into the right and rocket shipping and all the great things, and we looked at the first three years of funding. And unsurprisingly, the 70 percent of our customers who self-identified as women of color had raised 30 percent of the cumulative funding volume and the 30 percent of non-women of color founders. Only 22 percent of whom were white, the other eight percent they say they didn't want to tell us so they could be anything, but we'll just assume they're white, 30 percent.
Speaker2: [00:17:21] We're raising 70 percent. And Olivia and I looked at each other, we went before the pandemic, we sat next to each other in the office because we we've always been like probably the closest collaborators that IFundWomen like since the beginning. And I looked at her, I was like, Dude, she's like, I know. So I was like, See you later. So she found herself an engineer and a product person, and she built it on women of color, and she launched it on stage at the Women's March in January of 2020. And in one year in one year, we brought the cumulative funding volume over the past four years, up to fifty one percent. Women of color founders. And the reason Gloria is so two things one, we're just getting started and women of color are not a monolith. So like, we're not sitting here like being like our work is done. Yay for us, right? We're. We realize that like, we're just getting started and we need to do so much more. And the large majority of those women were black women. And that's great. But we have there's lots of other women of color, you know, and we want to be able to provide the same level of concentration and understanding and service and in different languages. So that's why we're just getting started. But the reason I think the story is so important is because Olivia and I and I said this at our life and women entrepreneur of the year in my speech
Speaker2: [00:18:46] the other night, I'll send you the video and you can like, link it or something. But I said and I said in my speech and I said this all the time, like the reason I love telling the IFundWomen of color story is not because it's like, yes, at all. It's because we're just regular people like, I am not a celebrity. Olivia is not a celebrity. Sarah and Kate aren't celebrities. You know, Maya Brooks, who's our product was our product manager and head of product at the time. Black Woman, not a celebrity like none of us are people who are celebrities. None of the twenty nine of us. Yet as a team and as leaders, Olivia and I, when you're passionate about something and you really want to make a change, you can do it, you can do it. You don't have to be Oprah and Adele. That's what I said the other night, because that was like the latest duo. I don't know if you saw Adele's concert or the thing with Oprah, but it was so awesome. Anyway, so you don't have to be Oprah at Adele to start up to start a movement, you can be Karen and Olivia. And so, yeah, it's just it's just way easier to do everything when you're right, including raise capital.
Speaker1: [00:19:53] Yeah, yeah. And I also think you touched upon something really interesting is you're not doing the whole white savior narrative like, look at what I've done for these people of color. It's all about regular everyday people, mothers, single mothers raising money and working probably twice or three times as hard, but still getting achieving that dream. They just need like a vessel of support and like coming from an intention. It's like I see you. I hear you and I'm going to combine you and this this bigger umbrella of just women because your experience is different. So I love I love that you're not doing this like white savior thing that I think a lot of. I think a lot of honestly, a lot of other companies are doing with the whole lady like, Oh, we hired this totally black person for a marketing brochure.
Speaker2: [00:20:35] Totally. No, you're right. And I'm not going to defend that shit because it's you're not wrong. I think that and thank you for saying that. I very much appreciate that because I. I for it's funny, for a long time, I did I didn't even really participate in IFundWomen women of color because, yes, I'm the founder of the company. Olivia is absolutely the creator and the GM of it and the brain behind it. Like all the programing, all of the everything is Olivia's doing like because you can't do that if you don't know the unique challenges, right? So Olivia did. Not only did she do tons of research to build the programing, but she also is a woman of color herself and so is her team. So I'm not. I don't think of myself as a white savior. I certainly don't behave that way. And and this has been a passion for me to not for me to help create equity for black and brown people. But I think the performative caring about race that happened in 2020 with the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd is like such bullshit and we all know it. And. You know it. We'll see. Look, I am always hopeful, but I'm also believe it or not, Gloria, I'm like, actually still kind of naive and gullible. I am. There's one thing about myself that I have that I have known and learned is that I, I sometimes to my detriment, believed too much of the good in people.
Speaker2: [00:22:05] So I wouldn't have said what I just said. Probably six months ago, I would have been like, You know what? Let's give people a chance. You know, like, yes, it was a press release. And yes, you know, they are doing good things like they're actually putting their money where their mouth is. And but let's see. But here we are, ending 2021, and I can tell you that IFundWomen in 2020 because we had IFundWomen of color already built up and we were already doing it. We were walking the walk before the pandemic even hit before George Floyd was murdered. And so all the brands that were like, Oh shit, we need to care about women and minority entrepreneurs now because the pandemic and everyone starting a business, because the women are getting kicked out, we're getting unemployed faster. You know, that's the other thing. Like when you look at race, who who were the first people to get laid off? Hispanic and black women. Right, and then and and then men and then men of color. So it's just like, it's so infuriating, but let me land the plane a little bit here. The one of the reasons why IFundWomen of color worked so well. Well, there's two. Two reasons. One is if you can't find it, you cannot fund it. And conversely, if you can find it, you can fund it, right? That's what we learn.
Speaker2: [00:23:24] Like right out the gate. We were like, Oh my God, like, we just like, put up this thing we put up. We basically duplicate, we put up a platform within a platform, right? It's like not even like the like a semi, pretty like OK ish marketing page on the front home page. And we had an amazing partner who we still have, who definitely walks the walk. So I want to be clear that like we have a couple of partners and this isn't me like. I'm not going to shout that well, I don't need to shout them out, but what I will say is the partners that we've had working with us on IFundWomen and IFundWomen of color to specific partners, I'm thinking about that we're consistently since 2019, been doing grants, coaching grants, doing everything they can like. There are some brands out there that legit care. So not all of them, and they're the ones that actually are doing it more quietly and we're doing it before. So we launched. IFundWomen of color with caress, who? Unilever, who is a partner before the pandemic, before George Floyd. Before any of that they were they were in it with us from the build in 2019. So, you know, I did. I'm happy to give them a little shout out because you know what? Bless their hearts. Like they're still consistently funding consistently, consistently visas another one. But so, so if you can find it, you can fund it.
Speaker2: [00:24:50] That's what we were like. Oh, wow, discovery is such a problem on platforms. Nobody searches perfect unless you're Google, right? So like, you know, as we work to refine search on, IFundWomen and we're working to refine finding the search bar, which, by the way, is in in the in the nav. It's a little search box, but you can't search by race necessarily, but you can search by keywords. So if you wanted to come to fund women and find, you know, East Asian women to fund or South Asian women to fund or queer women to fund or, you know, queer people to find, pardon me, the list goes on for, you know, non marginalized communities, right? You can go in our main nav and we have separate pages for people, for, you know, that live in those groups. So not just black women. And you know, the list goes on so you can do it that way. You can also search by keywords. So if you search for, like queer owned or queer, you will find the queer owned businesses if you want to support them. So it's just, I guess it's so funny because what you asked was like, there's so much intention, and I sort of take it for granted without my own, within my own brain. Because yes, it's it's completely with intention, always like it's it's actually just second nature for some reason.
Speaker1: [00:26:13] Yeah, it's not rocket science. I'll never forget. So I join a mastermind group. And one of the first things I noticed about this coach was that he is so nice. And you know, I love being a part of his mastermind program, but I know there's not a single person of color on his website, and it's such a
Speaker2: [00:26:28] Seriously?
Speaker1: [00:26:30] Such a small detail and he has people of color that he's mentored, right? And so I asked him that and he's like, Wow, thank you for noting that because I definitely have have people in my mastermind that are people of color. But I just think sometimes when you are so in that space and you start to, like, go into rooms where everyone looks like you, you just you don't even like, think and question like what that might be like for someone who doesn't look like you. And I think since we've had these conversations, he's actively, like, been, you know, rejecting panels of like all white marketing pros, for example, that's like doing great. Yes. And he's like, I'm not going on this panel unless you have someone who is not a racist white male, right? So it's not rocket science to do the little tweaks. And when people ask me, like, why is it that your customer base is like 90 percent women of color? Like, I don't know why, but like people just don't find me. And it's like, look within yourself. Like, Who are you surrounding yourself with? Right? You're a white woman and your name is Karen. Yet you've built an entire platform for like over 50, 60, 70, 70 percent women of color. So it's
Speaker2: [00:27:29] That's funny. That's right. That is hilarious.
Speaker1: [00:27:35] So, so now you've given us such gems for anyone that's listening. I mean, I know it's called the Small Business PR podcast, but there are there are probably white men listening to this and white women and just, you know, take some notes. But I want you to tell the people who are actually like, not in the leadership level where they're just starting their business. They have a side hustle, they're juggling all these things, they're single mom. And they think that the funding gap is just too far to reach. There's no way they can get started. What kind of actionable tips do you have for the struggling business owner who's trying to do it all? What can you tell them? How can they get started?
Speaker2: [00:28:05] Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, like you, we are. We are you, and we definitely see you. So and you can do it, even though it feels I think it feels insurmountable and I'm running the business that's helping the businesses. So I understand how you feel. And so you're you're like, cosigned. Not that you need my validation, but it is frickin hard. That being said, it is doable and it's about it really, truly. And you know, I don't want to make this a sales pitch in the slightest, but truly, it is about if you are starting a business or you want to start a business, maybe you have a nine to five job you hate, but you can't quit it because you're the breadwinner and you're putting food on the table, but you really want to start this business that you're passionate about. In your spare time and hopefully see if it can grow into something that you do full time. I'm I'm going to use that as a use case. Is that work for you? Gloria, do you think that's a good use case for your listeners? One hundred percent. Ok, great. Or if you're like a freelancer, a freelance creative, but you know, work these steady jobs and you're doing one thing, you know, so it's call that your nine to five, but you have this other passion for like, you know, something totally not related. Ok. That's the sort of the same thing, because it's all about time, right? It's how are you going to spend your time making money because you need to make that extra money and you want to start this business.
Speaker2: [00:29:29] But it seems so daunting and it's expensive to start a business. That's all those things are true. And what I would say to you is. Come to IFundWomen and just start coming to the free workshops and just get your feet wet and learn what you need to like, we have a free course. It's a crowdfunding course. Yes, you have a course. All the courses and, you know, Gloria, I can go on and on about you, but I'll do that later. So when you're getting started, you literally want to just you want to learn. You want to do some research before you jump in that pool, because once you're in it, you're in it. Ok, so you're and once you're in it, you're starting to rack up your credit card debt. So it's, you know, buying your URL, getting a website up, you know, buying, you know, getting whether you're making bags and you need to, you know, make your prototype or your sample or your technology, you know, you're building an app, you have to get your or your program or whatever it is. You're starting to spend money building this thing. And you don't want to go into debt funding the earliest days of your startup because, frankly, most startups fail, and that's fine, but don't fail in going into debt is the worst. I mean, the worst. Take it from someone who did it. There's nothing worse than a failed startup where you have spent so much money and you're now like paying that debt off like bad and not like bad shaming people like it's.
Speaker2: [00:31:00] Ok, so come to IFundWomen and learn about what it means to have a business, right? You have what you have to do to get one set up. And even before you set up a legitimate business, how you can test your hypothesis that everybody is going to want this electronic knitting needle that counts the stitches, right? You think that you want it and you think that like people in your sewing circle want it? But will they pay for it? How much will they pay for it? And that's the beauty of crowdfunding, because you get to test all of these things pricing demand, you know, colors, whatever it is. Things like features on the app. You get to test out whether people want this stuff, if they buy into it on your crowdfunding campaign, either through your rewards or buying your product or service or whatever it is or being on your list for your beta or signing up for your newsletter or all these things that like you have to do to get your business going. You also have to start being like a mad dog like content creator, and no one will tell you more about that than you am. I am going to begin. But like, you can't just like start a business and think that like, Oh, it's field of dreams. I've put up my Instagram and I put up my website and here are all my customers here. All like all they come. That's like, so not how it works. I think selling online looks so much easier than it actually is, don't you think?
Speaker1: [00:32:24] Yeah, I'm exhausted.
Speaker2: [00:32:26] Yeah. But like, didn't you when you got into it, think it was going to be kind of easy?
Speaker1: [00:32:31] I think people make it look easy that the people who have been there before. But then you don't actually see the years of torment and and all the messages in all the tech failures. And I think I think now I understand why people are entrepreneurs is because they're so passionate about their why that they're willing to get the hate message that they're willing to give up on those vacations for their why. And I think that's why entrepreneurs are my people because they're so committed to that purpose.
Speaker2: [00:32:56] I love what you just said. You have a way with words, which is why you do what you do. Seriously, you have. I mean, my job. Oh my god, I'm so I am such a rambler. But thank you. That's very sweet. Yeah. You know, not every entrepreneur has the luxury of having a why, though, so there is the rise of the necessity entrepreneurs, which has been happening for the last 10 or so years, 10 to 20 years, to be honest. And then when COVID hit necessity, entrepreneurs became were booming. And when I say booming, I'm not saying that in a in a glamorous way. It's because people needed to start a business. It was a necessity. So it's not necessarily the passion was there for the business that they started. And in a lot of cases, these are one, you know, sole proprietors and it's business services and it's what they knew how to do, maybe in their corporate world that they've been shoved out of. Whether it's accounting or, you know, being a lawyer or whatever it is, you know, we've seen the rise of the necessity entrepreneur. And it's hard when you can't fit into the corporate structure or not, you can't fit in. Pardon me when they've shoved you the fuck out. Are we able to say that for it on your?
Speaker1: [00:34:19] I love it, let's just roll. I mean, I'm a necessity entrepreneur, I built my business after losing every single dollar from my consulting retainer.
Speaker2: [00:34:26] I don't think I knew that.
Speaker1: [00:34:28] No. So I came to your event and no, I knew. I know I hit. I lost 60 grand worth of upcoming projects, and in March of 2020, I made zero dollars. I didn't know where my money was going to come from. And then I completely pivoted. I went from working with startup pros to now working with mostly women of color. You know, business owners, you know, and I found my calling, and that's why we're all in this conversation here.
Speaker2: [00:34:51] Gloria, I'm blown away, you're you should be honored because that is a very, very, very difficult thing to come back from so quickly. Hmm. I mean, think about that for a second. You did not have income in March of 2020. Is that what you just said? Yeah. Zero zero income. That's really, really scary. And you know, you are you're right. You are the epitome of a necessity entrepreneur. You needed to make money. So, you know, but but you're. But I think the the lucky thing or I guess it's luck or it's I don't really know if I would call it luck. But the good thing the bright side of it is that you, you are extraordinarily talented in your domain and your domain could be done on a, you know, you could be a business owner. So you opened a boutique firm, right? So it's like it's it's it's a the pivot is easy to see. I'm sure it was hard f to do, especially starting from no money
Speaker1: [00:36:00] Because you have to my privilege to, I think, you know, as as an Asian woman who has, you know, more access and a lot of other people like, you know, English speaking, first language, you know, had access to higher education. So I'm fully aware of my privilege as well. But I think for the necessity of entrepreneurs that you've really worked with as well, and IFundWomen of color, I mean, really, they're single moms. They have, you know, three kids. I mean, that's a whole another level of challenge and struggle.
Speaker2: [00:36:27] Yes, I mean, not, you know, so it's interesting because our members, yes, we have. We we I mean, I'm a single mom. We have lots of single moms. I actually, you know, it's interesting because when we think about our audience and again, we're still small. I mean, we've got two hundred and fifty thousand members. Half are founders and half her funders, so it's about one hundred and thirty thousand founders who are members of our of our community, which is small when you think about it, there are 13 million female founders in the U.S. alone. So we're like just getting started. We like, need you, actually. We need some PR there. We need more. I don't know what we need to do, but yeah, I mean, it's it's we have not reached the underserved, the truly underserved. I think the woman you just described is truly underserved. She's underbanked. We haven't reached her yet, and I don't truly know if we actually have the the skill set yet in-house to really be able to help an underserved person. The women that we have, the women of color that we have are have excelled in their careers. Have, you know, you know, they're they're they're they're all, we're all equal. I mean, they're all just like us. I feel like it's like celebrities are just like us from like us magazine. Did you ever read that like, I'm so old, so you're probably like, What are you talking about? But like? And if you strip away the race. If you literally just strip it away, OK, we're we're really all very similar at IFundWomen, all of the customers and I'm including myself, I'm like waving my hands. For those people who can't see me, I'm like, including myself in it. We're really all very similar. We are all I would say. I would not say wealthy, I would not say I would not say economically like privilege
Speaker1: [00:38:27] As a resilient as fuck,
Speaker2: [00:38:28] Resilient as fuck, but also educated like our audiences, highly educated. I mean, we have PhDs. We've got Masters, MBAs, we've got. So it's not, you know, I want to be clear that like. Our audience is mostly women of color, and they are by and large like highly educated, super savvy women. And that doesn't mean we don't want to help women who are less fortunate. It just means we just they haven't come to us yet. There's been a couple who have been, you know, like Precious Williams, for example, came to us and I didn't know this. Whether you're on the podcast was, Oh my god, oh girl, get ready to get like so fired up. She's amazing. I didn't know this. I knew what I knew about Precious was actually very little. I didn't dig into like who she was, she just became a coaching member. She was smart enough to get the coaching because little did I know she had gone to Georgetown Law School. She she went to somewhere amazing. Oh, she went to Spelman College. She got a full ride to Spelman. Wow. And she was a beaten. You know, a child, an abused child from a broken home in Missouri. I mean, just like you would, you would never think that her outcome was going to be full boat to Spelman College, you know, and Shark Tank, Shark Tank, I mean, like and homeless in the middle of that. So it's it's just everyone's story is so different. And I didn't know that about precious, but now and it's funny, I didn't know it until recently when I saw her giving a TEDx talk. So it made it actually made me think I'm like, Wow. She was a real necessity entrepreneur, but I never knew it. Why didn't I know it? Because she's so educated, I guess. And. Just bought the coaching. I didn't know she was getting her coaching from like the the the shelter she was living in the women's shelter in Brooklyn. Wow. I know. So, you know. Maybe we are reaching people. You know, it's it's it's so hard to know.
Speaker1: [00:40:50] It's hard to know how all your free coaching, which I think is phenomenal. You have I mean, I know this because I did a workshop for you and the standard is very high. It's very organized. There's no promotion. There's worksheets, there's actionable steps. And so I've given to now, IFundWomen PR workshops. So if you actually go into ifundwomen.com, you can you can search like how to hack your own PR and you'll find my workshop, among others. But for the necessity entrepreneur, like you know, you've now helped like so many. Like if you're just getting started like what, what, what, what some of the best advice you've heard about funding and what some of the worst advice that's out there about about funding and starting a business.
Speaker2: [00:41:25] The best advice I can tell people is to is to get get help, get a coach or, you know, just talk to other entrepreneurs in the community as you're getting started. Don't keep your idea to yourself. No one is going to rip it off. And none of us are original. Everything is iterative. We didn't invent crowdfunding, period. So like, talk to people about your idea, solicit feedback and and take the feedback in not personally. Right. This is not about you as a person. This is about your business. You want to know if someone's going to buy one to buy into it. Do that before you start the business. Talk to as many people in your industry as possible. Do as much research on your competition as possible on their pricing. How do they present in the world? How do they show up? How do they market research, research, research before you start your business and then once you're ready, if you're like, I am doing it, I am ready, she ready. You come and you get involved with the community and you go to the workshops. Like at the minimum, there's the nine dollars a month workshop access plan at IFundWomen. So we've got a lot of free stuff. But if you want Gloria's podcast, if you want Gloria's classes that she has taught in the past, they were free on the day she taught them live and now they're behind a paywall because we have to keep the lights on right.
Speaker2: [00:42:52] We have to have the staff and the people to be able to do the coaching. So it's nine dollars a month. Very affordable and you can have access to there's thousands of hours of learning and instruction, and it's not B.S.. It's not like, Oh, you know, it's easy. Just do these three steps and you'll have PR. It's actually like no B.S. Here's how to do it here. It's formulaic, and it's like, Yeah, it takes a while and you're not going to get it right out the gate and all the things. And I would also say to people like. Take steps you an overnight success, takes five to 10 years. Know that going in so set a goal for year one that maybe includes, you know, all your market research and getting your website up or some sort of like a blog or something where you can start talking about what you're doing if you haven't already, hopefully you already have done these things before you get to IFundWomen because, you know, if you're going to crowdfund, you have to have all the content and you have to be legitimate and you have to be a person who has been talking about this business for a while or this idea or this passion, right? So I would say before you even get started with IFundWomen or get started with your business, you have to have been talking about this out in the world.
Speaker2: [00:44:15] So whether it's knitting needles, let's just keep knitting. Like, if you were into knitting everyone in your Insta, everyone in your Facebook, everyone in your whatever your, you know, your friend group, they'd be like, Karen's a crazy ass knitter. Like, Don't bug her. She's knitting and watching, you know, the Real Housewives. I don't knit or watch The Real Housewives, but I figured I'd just go with the Karen thing and just continue. I don't even know Karen's. I do that. But yeah, so like if Karen's talking about knitting 24-7 and it's all over her gram for like a year and then, oh my gosh, she's starting like a yarn store. That makes sense. I know she's into it, right? So it's all about being legit. It's about building up content and talking about what your passion is and what you're doing. Well, before you even think about monetizing it, also known as starting a business. So that's what I would say. To people thinking about starting a business, if you're thinking about it, you better be doing it. And when I say doing it, it means talking about it content. All the things.
Speaker1: [00:45:19] Right, because if you're not so committed to it, then why should I commit to your vision, right?
Speaker2: [00:45:24] Well. You mean as a customer? Or as a person who is going to do a crowd, like contribute to the crowd funding?
Speaker1: [00:45:32] No, as a customer, I need to believe that you know your stuff and that you've been like devoting time and resources and energy to this because you believe in it so much.
Speaker2: [00:45:40] Well, as a funder, absolutely as a funder for something. So if we're talking about getting funding and what's the best first step to getting funding, your best first step is crowdfunding, and the reason is is because you're raising cash. You get that cash immediately. When someone puts it in your campaign, you are not waiting for that working capital. It is debt free. You do not have to pay it back. Yep. And so that's the first step in funding and you're proving demand. But before you can even crowdfund, you have to be again having the website up the Instagram, the Facebook, whatever it is. Have been talking about this thing. Have content ready to go all that jazz.
Speaker1: [00:46:18] All right. So why don't you tell us? Leave us with like a little burst of inspiration, like, what do you want to leave our audiences with?
Speaker2: [00:46:26] First of inspo, OK? I mean, look, if you know, Gloria can come from making no money in March of 2020, which was when the pandemic hit to being who she is now, who is a very, very important woman making lots of money in PR, you can do it, too. Honestly, it's it's true. Like you can do it. It seems hard. It is hard. Entrepreneurship is a hard fucking road. But if you are passionate about what you are doing and you love what you're doing, you can do it like, I promise you, you can do it and we are going to be here to help you. You can do it. You can do
Speaker1: [00:47:09] It. Thank you so much, Karen. Success is inevitable, and thank you for reminding us of that.
Speaker2: [00:47:13] Yes, absolutely. Success is inevitable. That's a beautiful thing to say.
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