It took eight years from the moment I knew I wanted to run my own tech startup to me finally quitting my job to launch my social planning app, PlanSnap. A lack of role models and funding are two of the biggest things stopping women from starting their own businesses, but I come from a family of encouraging small business owners, and my first employer pledged to back any company I started! Others had clearly decided that I could run a company, but I turned the money down. I didn’t think I could do it because I didn’t have the skills, I couldn’t talk the language and I assumed that entrepreneurs were a different breed with an innate confidence that I simply didn’t possess. No one I know would describe me as unconfident, though. I am the woman whose motto is, “you can always ask.” When I was younger that led me to extra packets of sweets and later bed times, and in my twenties to things like free Glastonbury tickets after blagging a press pass to review tents for my (very freshly set up) blog. You’ll be amazed at what you can make happen when you ask.
But confidence at work is a very different matter. We know men apply for jobs when they meet 60 percent of the criteria, but women often apply only if they feel they are 100 percent qualified. It was the same for me when starting a business – I just wasn’t 100 percent sure I could pull it off. In the early years, I devoted evenings to reading everything I could find on startup life, attending networking events, and following the entire tech startup industry on Twitter, hoping to pick up the elusive skills and qualities I needed by some kind of digital osmosis.
But the more I observed over the years, the more I realised that skill and innate ability had very little to do with deciding to start a business. And that, in fact, given the huge number of hats founders have to wear at any point in time it’s nearly impossible to prepare for running a business anyway. Timing, luck, financial security, resilience, personal network and hustle all seemed to play a much bigger part. Above all, the only difference between them and me appeared to be…that they had the confidence to get on and do it.
The tech founders I knew divided into three groups: the ones who displayed confidence but were utterly deluded, those who were at a later stage and had some evidence that their confidence was appropriately placed and everyone else. That left me to conclude that the majority of founders were simply faking it until they felt it. As soon as I realised that, I handed in my notice and set about turning my idea to make any social plan in two taps in to a real business. Eight years after they first pledged to invest in any company I started, my first employer became my first investor, and from that day onwards I decided no matter what I thought I would fake confidence until I felt it.
A year on and I have reasons to be confident now. We have just closed a seed round of investment and signed for new offices for our growing team of six, after winning a place on a coveted business accelerator. Our app is launching in November, and most of all I’m confident that people will love it.
