Fem Start

Inspiration

We know that VC funding is heavily favored in the direction of male-headed startups - female founders of startups often find it difficult to receive the same level of funding as male founders. This inequitable balance of startup investment leads to not only pitfalls for female participants in the tech industry but in the economy as a whole when great ideas are ignored due to flaws with the system, not the product. We wanted to connect female leaders with VC funding and move Silicon Valley forward to more equitable times, and encourage the growth and participation of groups within tech not normally noticed by tech.

What it does

There are numerous things that this app does, mostly all orientated around the female-led or female-focused, or other under-represented groups in tech, startup. There are three different types of accounts - regular users, startup accounts, and investor accounts. Regular users will use the app to apply for jobs for female-orientated startups and also find mentorship and mentee-ship opportunities through the app. They can join communities of likeminded interests, say an emphasis on environmentally conscious work or distribution of feminine hygiene products, and discuss similar interests and how to support the work of companies who they agree with, and to also find companies they would like to work at. Using social networks and social media tactics, we connect female startups with VC funding as people are able to see who interacts with them the most, investors have a good look at products and companies that we have esteemed through our algorithm, trusting our algorithm to recommend them startups that are at the very least worth looking into. We place high value on the activities of our influential investors and users, who are committed venture capitalists and have high reaching influence on the investment world. If one startup is noticed by these influential individuals, either through likes on their profile or views on a video or actual investment in the company, and more people invest, we see this is as a company with some confidence built into it and will therefore place it as "hot" or "trending" and put it on more people's feeds, so that they too might also want to follow the trend.

How I built it

We mainly built our prototype in figma as we did not have enough time or experience to build our project completely in a coding framework.

Challenges I ran into

All my teammates and I are unfortunately novice coders and therefore had a difficult time with Expo and Xcode, because we were not very experienced with Javascript. This lead to us focusing mainly on our prototype and the general implementation and impact we would hope to have with this app, instead of trying to hard code what we could.

We also realized that to implement our app on a large scale and to make it marketable in the real world, we would have to consider many different factors and problems, the hardest of which is making sure supply and demand coincide and trying to attract investors to our app who are willing and capable of investing in female-orientated startups. Marketplace apps are very difficult but we figured out some solutions to attract a userbase, such as playing on investor's like of philanthropy to convince them to invest in good causes, as our app is filled with startups that target issues of under-represented communities or are helmed by them, and as such it would look good for their social image. We would also have to have some way of retaining a userbase, and attracting new consumers and growth, which is difficult when there are already other apps out their with similar purposes, but we hope that the idea of a female orientated space will attract those normally ignored, and also attract perhaps female investors who would like to support female tech.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We're proud of being able to think of this idea and being able to create a safe place for women in the App Store. We put a lot of time and effort into this project and tried to work out the kinks the best we could. We became a lot better at using Sigma and also thinking about the user experience and what they would want on an app.

What I learned

I'm proud of how much we learned while working on this project - we didn't realize the scope of startup investment and just how complex of a place in the industry it is. While talking to mentors, among ourselves, and also while doing personal individual research, we understand that there is a lot of thinking that comes into the implementation of an app like this. We learned more about common investor pitfalls and other such things related to the industry.