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12 Women Tech Entrepreneurs in the Windy City

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By Marian Mangoubi (Founder & CEO, Sassy CEO) Across the nation, you can see and feel the rise of the entrepreneurial spirit. Companies are blooming, many started by women, and public/private partnerships are being created to help new entrepreneurs maneuver the path to success.

What kind of startups depends on where you live. The West Coast has a lot of software and app development, and the East Coast fashion and media. But where does that leave us in the Midwest? Interestingly enough, in a good position.

Here in the Windy City you’ll find healthcare, clean energy, media, consumer-oriented, and software companies. We have the full-gamut. And yes, there are women tech entrepreneurs in that mix.

Why haven't we heard of these rockstar women entrepreneurs before? Well, truth-be-told, we’re often working heads down on creating and building out our businesses that we forget to market ourselves outside of the Windy City.

But that is all changing. There is a movement building amongst many gals in tech here to make our voices be known. We don’t want to just be at the table. Rather, we want to be leading the discussions.

Here are 12 Midwest Superstar Women Entrepreneurs: Betsy Huigens (Founder, BlueLight App) The BlueLight app, an iPhone safety app, is a must have for everyone. It offers the user a way to feel safe without having to compromise privacy or independence. It has been dubbed the “call me when you get there 2.0” and received venture capital funding from Sandbox Industries. Follow her startup on Twitter at @BlueLightApp.

Hallie Steube (Founder, BookYap) Hallie Steube is an avid reader who was always looking for a new book to read and wanted to find a way to emulate the offline book browsing experience online. When she couldn’t find a site that offered this experience, she decided to create BookYap, a web-based application that offers smart book recommendations based on your interests. She received venture capital funding from Sandbox Industries, a Chicago-based venture capital and incubator firm. Follow her on Twitter at @HallieSteube and her startup at @BookYap.

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Building Customer Demand Before Startup Launch: A Lean Startup Case Study with House of Mikko

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By Kaitlin Pike (Marketing & Community Manager, Web 2.0 Expo) Founder Labs graduate Kimberly Dillon’s beauty product recommendation startup House of Mikko has the kind of demand and buzz most founders dream of --

With only a simple landing page and low-budget marketing campaign, Kimberly built a community of passionate users from 100 beta testers the first week to a few thousand members (and 66,000 fans on Facebook) a few months later -- all this before the site even fully launched.

“We use lean startup principles,” Kimberly said about her approach to building the site. “We think ‘What is the next thing we’re going to build out?’ before we spend any money on advertising.”

Test Your Hypothesis Until You Find the “Golden Nugget”

House of Mikko provides “personalized hair and beauty recommendations for women based on their ‘beauty twin.’” Before they can explore the site, a new visitor must first fill out a survey about their skin and hair type to match them with similar women. The end goal is providing members highly personalized beauty advice from real women intimately familiar with a user’s beauty questions.

Kimberly came up with the idea for House of Mikko as a response to poorly targeted and uninformative beauty product marketing. For instance, one company she came across promoted a product that works well only on straight, light-colored hair to women with dark, curly hair. As a result of this and similar misleading marketing, women frequently turn to each other for the real scoop on products.

“Frustrated women ask friends, ask women who look like them, ask women they think look good what they do [for beauty products],” Kimberly said.

“I wanted to do what women do offline, online.”

Instead of jumping in and building the site right away, Kimberly decided to first prove her concept with potential customers. She built a simple landing page with a 25-question survey and information about what her company would provide to members. She promoted this page with minimal advertising (low budget paid search campaign, social media, sponsorships of a few beauty-focused Meetup groups), and found exactly what she needed to know before moving forward.

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All Hail The Team! An Early-Stage Startup Forms

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By Virgilia Singh (Participant, Founder Labs) All Founder Labs participants had to choose their partners for the next 4 weeks. It’s like a game of dodge ball, where you have to choose people based on compatible skill set and personality. And boy, was it an intense 2 hours!

People teamed up based on a variety of reasons, from similar interests to pure likability. During this time we had Shaherose’s voice in the back of our mind “people matter, ideas don’t” -- something we learned quite quickly.

At the end of the day, the people you work with and the team dynamics that ensue as a result matter more than the idea you initially come to the table with. There were teams that were interested in education that ended up pitching ideas in online marketplaces. Others walked into the program with one very focused idea, but then ended up pivoting after finding a good group to work with.

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I Didn’t Choose Startups. Startups Chose Me.

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By Sue Kim (Founder, Dress Me Sue) I was a happy cog for 10 years -- plugging away in my little corner of the old school Chicagoland e-commerce and digital scene. I had begun my IT career late (age 28), but managed to work my way up successfully. I was an overachiever, a manager's dream. The harder I worked though, the more I knew there was something amiss.

One day I started to explore blogs and stumbled across notice of a Women 2.0 Startup Weekend in San Francisco. I registered and immediately bought my plane ticket. I was locked in. So I went.

Friday pitch night at Startup Weekend tops my list of most scariest experiences ever.

My self confidence was so low that I abandoned my idea immediately after pitching and just walked around gabbing (with secret plans to ditch the weekend). By some grace unknown, my team was formed around my idea -- and in the end we had a great time.

Dress Me Sue is the Etsy of personal styling. We help busy people solve the headache and hassle of figuring out what to wear by putting them in touch with their local style hero. Our advice platform delivers on service and experience by integrating the best of web, mobile, email, and text. This is an opportunity to break new ground in experiential shopping.

I am not exaggerating when I say that I was beyond green.

EVERYTHING felt new and not in a good way. I was not familiar with modern day product management and user experience methodologies, let alone lean startup. I remember the distinct feeling of bewildered insecurity watching Cindy Alvarez's team walk around for A/B feedback on some simple yet sophisticated sketches. "How did they do that? I can't do this." It sure would have felt good to hightail it back to my one-room schoolhouse where I could get straight A's forever.

I remember once my teammate mentioned checking the code in as open source -- I immediately asked him to make it private and thought "What the hell? Why would we want to share our code base right now?" I recall his slight pause of surprised unfamiliarity, as he probably wondered what kind of rock I had crawled out from under. I was heavily habituated in waterfall development, new to Twitter, never heard of GitHub.. the list goes on.

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Uncategorized2 min read
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GrowLab Accelerator To Provide Startups With Seed Funding in Vancouver, San Francisco

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By Debbie Landa (Co-Founder, GrowLab) GrowLab is a “startup boot camp” for entrepreneurs whose companies receive up to $25,000 in seed funding, four months of mentorship, free office space and a $150,000 in follow-on funding upon graduation of the program. The first three months of the program are in Vancouver and the fourth is in San Francisco.

Deadline for GrowLab applications is June 15, 2011 and the program begins on August 15th, 2011.

GrowLab is on the lookout for the great entrepreneurs. We've had a good number of applicants so far but I would love to see more female entrepreneurs apply for GrowLab. I look forward to the day when over 50% of our applicants come from women instead of only 5%.

Apply here for GrowLab by June 15.

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Yoxi, A Competition Platform for Social Innovation

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By Sharon Chang (Founder, Yoxi) What if changing the world could be fun? What if competitions inspired by the style of “American Idol” could yield life-changing results? What if “social entrepreneurship” wasn’t just a “profession” for a select group of people, but also a creative endeavor for everyone to embark on so they may turn ideas into action and inspire others?

Innovate for Good, Starting with Reinventing Fast Food Yoxi is a creative competition platform to discover rockstars of social innovation. During the summer of 2010, I began building this vision with a small team of passionate creative-thinkers who believed in media’s power to shape social change. We introduced Yoxi last fall with our beta competition: Reinvent Fast Food.

In this competition, 10 teams battled in a 6-week long elimination challenge through 3 rounds of video-making. The winning team garnered seed funding, industry connections for mentorship, and a loyal fan base. Currently, they’re designing an interactive program for communities to influence their local fast food. Take a look at their journey.

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Uncategorized1 min read
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500 Startups’ Dave McClure: Women Co-Founders and CEOs an Advantage

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By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0) Last week, Pemo Theodore interviewed 500 Startups Dave McClure along with several women co-founders in his portfolio: Prerna Gupta (CEO, khu.sh), Elizabeth Yin and Jennifer Chin (Co-Founders, LaunchBit).

"Women founders or co-founders are probably 20-25% of the [500 Startups] portfolio. I think there is probably some bias in investing in what we know and VCs tend to be white males from finance or MBA backgrounds who invest in white males from finance or MBA backgrounds... You invest in things that you know. So for me, I grew up around my mom who was an entrepreneur and other people... and as we've got experience as women as founders and CEOs, we've gotten more comfortable with that..."

"I do look for [women founders] now because it's an advantage. My intent is to corner the market on awesome smart women founders because there are plenty of them out and if there is any bias whatsoever, we'd like to selfishly take advantage of that," -- Dave McClure, 500 Startups.

Watch the whole interview with Dave McClure and some female founders in the 500 Startup portfolio:

Read the transcript from Pemo here at EZebis.

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