Find a Team to Play With

“I could describe from a product development perspective what I wanted the product to do, and how I wanted it to function. I could do the financial modeling. I could do the venture capital presentation. But I could not code. That was really the biggest hurdle for me—finding someone who I trusted, who had a broad enough skill set, and who was also interested in coming to work for a start-up.”

Risking and Believing

“My husband and I agreed that we would spend up to a certain threshold. What I actually spent before I took outside money is $80,000, which is a tremendous amount of money. But, again, I really believed in my idea. I really believed it had legs, and my husband did as well, and so we were willing to do that. And that paid for, mostly, my engineer’s salary, but also some design support. We rented a little space to work in and things like that. I did take funding after we launched our alpha site. I went out to look for funding and was very fortunate to get some amazing investors to support me and to share my vision.”

Smart Money Is More Money

“We certainly roughed it. We certainly were very aware of every dollar we spent. But honestly, it was a very good feeling to have that. We were, in my opinion, focused on the right things, putting money where it mattered, which was into the actual product itself.”

Building a Pretty Picture

“The fact that the market size was so significant was really very important. The fact that MySpace was as big as it was, and is, was also very important to our pitch, because ultimately what I was creating was a MySpace for moms. Also, the list of folks who were committed advisors—they were pretty awesome people that are respected by a lot of folks. So those three factors were very important. And we weren’t just pitching an idea. When we were out asking for money, we had an alpha product out there, which really is important because it shows that there’s something real to invest in.

People underestimate the importance of having something to show. Very few companies get funded on an idea, so unless you have a track record of success in terms of previous companies you’ve worked on, or you have just amazing industry experience or knowledge in a particular subject matter, it will be very difficult to get funding without something tangible.”

Critical Testing

“It was a private [site], so you couldn’t see it as a public member of the Internet. You had to have a special invite. I basically invited 50 people I knew. So 50 people were playing around with it for about six months. It definitely wasn’t ready for prime time at that point. But it still was a significant milestone for us, in that we had something that people could use.”

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