Monday night GoKid joined nine other women-led start-ups for a night of pitching at Women Who Tech’s Women Startup Challenge. Microsoft hosted at their Times Square location providing an enormous room that was packed with hundreds of people before the pitching began. The companies were extremely diverse and roughly fit into four categories:
Women Startup Challenge. Photo by NY Intl
Lifestyle Apps by and for Millennials:
On the lighter side there was a dating app, HeyU, and a clothes-sharing app, Closet Collective. Both apps were launched by founders in their twenties and had a playful vibe, but also were clever reinventions of longstanding concepts. HeyU takes traditional online dating and adds humorous videos that emphasize creativity. Closet Collective provides a platform for the type of clothes swapping that many of us engaged in with roommates in college or siblings at home and extends the concept to the stylish young professional woman who does not have the budget to indulge her fashion sense. Closet Collective allows her to borrow a few key stylish pieces a month for a low fee, and then return them when she feels that cute jacket or slinky skirt has shown up on Instagram/Facebook too many times.
Power to Women Apps:
Two other companies had women-focused products that were more serious– Siren, a stylish, yet highly engineered, cocktail ring that can serve to ward off potential assailants by emitting a pierce “siren”, and Lia, a total reworking on the traditional awkward plastic pregnancy test resulting in a small, foldable and flushable test. We were so impressed with these clever innovations. I plan to get my daughter a Siren ring when they are available in stores (they are currently sold out) and Lia has unbelievable potential to improve the lives of so many women. Stefanie and I recently read Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn; while listening to the Lia team present I found myself thinking of that book’s focus on maternal health as being the primary factor in determining the economic and social health of a nation. I hope in a few years time Lia will be widely available, especially in developing nations where improvements to maternal health care are much needed and an inexpensive, compact, biodegradable pregnancy test could be a game changer.
Data Crunching for Better Business Decisions:
Three ventures harness all the data that is now available on the internet and use different mechanisms to crunch and sort that information to better serve their clients. Upscored is a job placement site that uses complex interactive algorithms to customize job searches– interactive questions allow Upscored to refine searches in response to the job seeker– think about Pandora and the thumbs up/thumbs down feature and how Pandora “learns” what kind of music you like over time. Similarly Upscored tracks the jobs you like or don’t like and recommends new opportunities accordingly. Vizalytics is working with the City of New York to synthesize the city’s open data and organize and deliver it to residents in a way that it meaningful and manageable. One of their ventures, Mind My Business, brings real time information to local shopkeepers so they can be prepared for power outages, street closings and other issues. Finally StyleSage scans real time retail information to provide guidance to retailers on trends as they are happening. StyleSage’s approach allows managers to make decisions about when to run a sale based not just on the feedback from their own sales staff, but on trends in the city, the country, or the world.
Technology and Health:
Women Startup Challenge winners Softspot – photo by Kristin Johnson @KSuzJ
Finally there were two companies focused on health, although from very different angles. Rubitection is a healthcare company that is developing a diagnostic tool for early and accurate detection of bed sores. This was the most serious pitch of the night, and probably the most technical. It seems like an amazing innovation and the team, based out of Pittsburgh and partnered with Carnegie Mellon, is top notch. SoftSpot is a data tracking tool for biometrics. Essentially it is a fabric patch that works like a FitBit. The patch can be sewn into any article of clothing–sport bra, leggings, t-shirt–and will track things like heart rate, temperature, blood pressure, and metabolism. The go to market strategy for SoftSpot is to be included in all athletic gear produced by companies like Nike, Under Armor etc. SoftSpot was the big winner of the night. Of course we at GoKid would have loved to win, but SoftSpot is a great concept and certainly have a very clear monetization strategy that no one else in the room could compete with.
We had a great time at the Women Startup Challenge and we were so proud to be included with these amazing women. I hope all of these companies will flourish and we will be staying in touch to watch them grow. Starting a company is hard, launching is even harder and then keep it going will no doubt be even harder, but I feel completely invigorated by our peers who are all throwing themselves into these endeavors with passion and commitment.
On this rainy afternoon as I work on our strategy for 2016 I am drawing inspiration from these two quotes, and from the women we were with this week.
“Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover.” Mark Twain
“I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” – Steve Jobs
