Our Mission: Giving Female Entrepreneurs What They Need Most
In March, we set out to explore creating The B School as the logical continuation of the success stories explored on our podcast. Our goal was to give our listeners the education and connections they need to take their businesses to the next level. But before doing so, we set out to answer the following questions, which we discussed in various conversations with industry leaders and asked our community via a survey (many thanks to all who took the time to respond):
Which topics/courses offered by The B School would be most valuable to the growth of your business?
- What are you looking for in a mentor?
- What is the most valuable thing The B School could offer you?
- On a high level, our survey results reaffirmed what the research tells us: women struggle most with access to investors and fundraising.
In addition, we learned that women entrepreneurs value access to mentors, advisers and investors twice as much as they value education about building and launching a startup. Women entrepreneurs consider access to advisors and investors the most valuable asset a mentor can offer. They also want to learn more about fundraising strategy and industry expertise from mentors, and are relatively less interested in help with hiring or building a corporate culture. Not surprisingly, the most popular topics among women entrepreneurs were fundraising, customer acquisition, and stages of growth. The least popular were exit strategies and team building.
From the results of our research, we realized that what we thought women entrepreneurs need—an educational platform like The B School—was somewhat different from what our listeners think they need, which they described to be more about access to mentors and investors than about learning. Additionally, our survey response rate was lower than expected, suggesting that there may not be a market for The B School.
These findings raised more questions for us—in particular, how does one deliver a user experience that is built around the promise of high quality access to a relatively fragmented (and uncertified) pool of “mentors.” So for now, it’s back to the drawing board! We are not abandoning the BroadMic community, but will continue to work on solutions to what entrepreneurs need most.
Happy summer!
Sara Weinheimer