London Tech Conference + Summer Drinks + Meetups Outside London

Hello July 👋

This is an update for June, a behind the scenes at Female Founders Rise .

If you want to join the community do so here (emails focused to founders on a Friday @ 10 AM)

We've done a lot since the start of 2023 - it's all coming together with the help of our members and supporters. But there is still so much more we want to do. You know how it is - the impatience of wanting to do everything all at once. But then also knowing that it's better not to rush things!

We have VCs getting involved, supporters coming on board and new members joining us daily. We're also seeing our existing members get funded, grow their businesses and come to our meetups again and again which is wonderful.

Early on this quarter, we cemented the wording around our purpose

Enabling financial freedom for women through entrepreneurship

Need to share more soon about what this means, but essentially we want to see more women building long-term profitable and financially sustainable businesses, creating more wealth and freedom for women.

Other things we have been working on 👇

Our community platform

We have signed up to Circle for our community platform. Will have an onboarding call next week and hope to start with beta testers soon.

Circle allows us to do everything that we want to do and has an app. At the moment it's the Circle app, but our website uses its own domain. Can transfer to a branded app in the future but $25K a year.

Have spoken/ researched lots of communities and Circle seems to be the best solution and will enable us to grow. (Thanks Adele Aitchison who has introduced me to someone that is running big communities on this platform)

We asked our community what other platforms they were on and what they liked/dislike. Slack and WhatsApp are used a lot but they do have limitations with functionality for all the things we need, and it seems that many people end up muting them as they can't keep up with the deluge of notifications and messages.

Our new platform will enable us to host big PODS (for verticals/ stages of business etc) and smaller PODS of 6 or so for those that want to build close relationships. We're looking for members in their specialist areas to come forward and lead some of the PODS.

London Tech Conference

Met with Neil Lock from Google about The London Tech Conference on 4th October. The venue is amazing (defo need to improve my video editing skills!)

A 240-seat theatre, smaller conference space for 50, boardrooms, and networking areas.

We asked our tech founders who they wanted to hear from and what they wanted to get out of the event and over 50 have given us feedback 🙌

As a result, we already have wonderful female founders like Saasha Celestial-One from Olio • Share More, Waste Less , and Eshita Kabra from By Rotation going to be joining us, alongside many more great workshops and panels. The agenda is being finalised as we speak.

We need to find sponsors for this event as we'll need to cover some of the food, drinks and costs. I need to put together an event budget = not something I have done before.

BCorp and Pending BCorp

One of our goals for Female Founders Rise is to register as a pending BCorp this year and start ourselves off on that impact journey.

One of my startups 4 years ago was a pending BCorp and ever since then I have loved everything it stands for 🌎

We will be measuring our impact through the work that we do and reporting on this as part of being a BCorp - or so is the plan! Everything that we do will be focused on helping our founders and making sure that we are delivering meaningful change.

This week I had a call a B Leader who comes highly recommended about helping us with our BCorp accreditation. Despite the fact that we are already an impact-led business there is still a lot of work and cost to applying. It comes to about £5K which is a lot of money 🥲 for an early-stage business that at the moment is not generating much revenue.

I think I will try and do the Pending B Corp myself and then we can review.

Quite a lot of money to be paying right now. Feels like this is a barrier to early-stage businesses which is a shame!

Meet ups outside London

Had our first meet-up outside of London in Leamington Spa - very efficiently organised by Elizabeth Marshall and Georgina Waterhouse from dayze family platform + community .

It was incredible to see 37 female founders come together and to hear from Tara Attfield-Tomes and Jane Davis about their journeys as female founders. Thanks to 1 Mill Street for hosting us. So much fun!

Summer Drinks (no 2)

We are wrapping up the summer with drinks for our members and investors on the 18th of July at a lovely female-founded venue called Kindred . We're sold out with over 130 people coming for drinks, panel, and chats.

We have an amazing panel with Nicola Ward + Erika Brodnock MBE + Lottie Unwin (she/her)

Hosted by Hattie Willis (who runs the podcast Not My First Guess Podcast

Grateful to our sponsors Seven Legal and Founder + Lightning and And Rising for stepping up and supporting the event.

We need sponsors for our events so that we can keep ticket prices affordable and tempt investors and VCs to join us with free tickets!

New team members

Meera Mawkin and Karolina Ba 🌿 joined us to help out with Female Founders Rise - they are both female founders that are passionate about what we are doing and have jumped in to support with offline events (Meera) and our new platform and curating online events (Karolina)

Edinburgh Meet up

Had a call with Jo Forster who has been super helpful in supporting our work and is based up in Scotland. She is keen to help host a FFR event in Edinburgh with some of her connections. Looks like we have a wonderful venue and help with a panel and inviting attendees. November date is in the diary but TBC.

Jo suggested that this could be a beta test for how we roll out to other cities and how we collaborate with local groups on the ground. Hopefully, they will see the benefits for their founders of collaborating with a national community like FFR, whilst we see the benefits for our founders being involved with the local community groups.

This newsletter is already getting so long, I need to wrap up now, even though there is so much more to write about.

Register here to join our community> Female Founders Rise

Things we need help with

1) Beta testers for our new platform (those currently raising tech and product founders - will reach out to our members this coming week)

2) Introductions to sponsors for London Tech Conference

3) Any VCs who would like to get involved in pitch practice (in person) or otherwise in our fundraising Q&A.

Feel free to DM me Emmie Faust or message us Female Founders Rise

Have a wonderful week

Emmie and Team