Connecting the Next Gen of Female Founders to Opportunities Even in a Crisis

After helping to launch the 500 Female Forces, I wanted to dig deeper with some of the people helping female founders for this week’s Community Letter.

Meet Ravina and Michelle, the co-founders of FLIK. They’ve been running their own Female Founder / Apprenticeship Portal, a space where female-identifying founders or leaders and apprentices discover each other and connect. How did they build the community pre-COVID and how are they serving both founders and students during this time? 

Holistically Understand Your Stakeholders

Founders and students have a couple things in common including huge workloads. One way the founders were able to grab the attention of both parties was by being as available as possible, allowing for their customers to control the schedule and give blunt feedback. 

“When we first launched FLIK, we completely opened our calendars, welcoming real-time, one-on-one user feedback to personally get to know each person, whoever they were. In having these candid conversations and investing our own time to not only talk about their experiences on our platform, but also understand who they are as a person, business owner, student, etc., we were able to better paint a holistic picture of our users. 

We took notes in every conversation, and in having these casual, broad-based chats, patterns began to emerge. We allowed stakeholders to tell us what value they were searching for instead of us leading them to a conclusion we believed was right.”

Misconceptions About Building Communities for Women 

Ravina and Michelle find that many of the female founder communities are built similarly and run into the same problems over and over. “They’re all a space to empower women to create conversations without specific directions, which pre-defines any other women-focused platform as just another generic message board for females.”

While empathy is an important thing to cultivate in communities, not having a clear direction or goal to come together can lead to the community fizzling. “They just need a purpose and a direction to meaningfully share.” That’s why instead of building another messaging board or content platform, they built FLIK with the pointed, actionable goal of connecting female founders to promising female apprentices. 

Community Building Tools & Tactics 

• BE AVAILABLE 24/7

When they opened their calendars, they tried to be as flexible as possible so that students and founders were able to find a time that best suited their schedule. “We would wake up in the middle of the night and answer emails even if the questions were already answered on the website.”

• LEVERAGE PERSONAL BRANDS 

Both Ravina and Michelle are no stranger to building personal brands and this became imperative to their success with FLIK. 

“To make sure you’re getting that special personal touch, sign the end of all of your messages if you’re on a team account. We’ll introduce ourselves to every new person who is DMing us so we are humanizing the social connection experience. I’d rather talk to a Michelle or a Ravina than just an ambiguous FLIK team person!”

• GO SOCIAL-FIRST

“Community engagement definitely started through social media and the one app that Michelle swears by is Buffer, so that she is able to buffer 30 days of meaningful content at a time, then focus on personally engaging with all our subscribers.”

Supporting Founders During COVID-19

For other community managers that work with founders? Here’s some of the suggestions from the FLIK co-founders: 

• “Open your calendars and offer one-on-one founder office hours.” - Ravina and Michelle are finding that founders during this time may be searching for empathy where a survey or data may fall flat. 
• “Everyone knows founders need capital right now, but you could be a key puzzle piece in what they uniquely need, even if it’s not capital. Instead of searching for a needle in a haystack, directly ask them what you can help them with and you’ll find the answer much quicker.” 

For female founders looking to find community during this time, what other organizations should they check out? 

Elpha! Both on 500’s list of female founder resources and recommended by Ravina and Michelle, Elpha is “one of the communities that does a really good job at driving meaningful conversations amongst women, helps women find job opportunities, and allows women to find communities they resonate with.”

Huge thank you to Michelle and Ravina for all of their incredible work on FLIK and for being willing to be profiled for this week’s Community Letter. Know of someone who is building a community during this time and should be profiled? Let me know in the comments. 

If you’re interested in what FLIK is all about, check out their website here: weareflik.com