Meet the King’s20 Founder: Danielle Dodoo, Founder and CEO, Pintro

Each week, we’re catching up with one of the founders on the King’s20 Accelerator, part of the Entrepreneurship Institute, about the story behind their venture. 

This week we spoke to Danielle Dodoo, founder and CEO of Pintro – a start-up that makes it easy for individuals and businesses to find the right people, ask for help, share what you know and learn from others.

What’s the story behind Pintro?

My experiences over the last few years have taught me that we cannot succeed alone. We all need community to strengthen us, support us through our challenges and uplift us to reach our goals. I’ve never felt the need for community as much as I have throughout my entrepreneurial journey. Throughout my corporate career I've always had a side hustle and I have experienced the challenges of taking a vision from idea stage to live product, more than once on my own. Despite having a great personal support system, it has always surprised me how hard it is to search for and connect with the people and communities that I needed to progress at various stages of getting my product live, unlock doors and support me on my journey.

As an entrepreneur and freelancer, and particularly as a solo female founder, my need to find the right people to unlock doors for me has always been a priority for my success. With the plethora of social networking tools, it can still be incredibly hard to make the right connections. I remember having to rely heavily on books, Google, YouTube, articles and blogs to help me get my head around the process, tools and various stages that I needed to take to get my apps live. The advice and narrative was always from a third-party perspective; from people I hadn't met, couldn't relate to, who couldn't tailor their advice to my specific challenges and the time and effort I spent could have been halved if I had met people earlier who could share their first hand experience and advice. Not knowing who I could turn to for help really took a toll on my motivation and my ability to maintain a momentum to move forwards.

Whilst there are plenty of communities out there, accessing the right people within them was always a challenge. When I was at a coworking space or an event, it became very clear that I was missing out on opportunities to make valuable and meaningful connections. Networking events were the worst. My inability to identify the right people in the room was like Russian roulette. I found the whole process exhausting and had no tools to help me navigate the room. Apart from a few serendipitous encounters, I left events deflated and feeling like I had wasted my time.

Pintro is a pivot from another social app (Piin) I launched in 2018, and the idea behind Piin was to help individuals connect with like-minded people in real life, organically whilst encouraging people to socialise offline and in the real world. It allows people to match based on preferences with the goal to network, date or find friends. Piin is currently available on both AppStores and the userbase is growing organically at the moment, with around 3000 users. It was the challenges I faced during the journey to get Piin live that inspired me to research and understand why a large number of entrepreneurs and freelancers like me continue to feel like we don't have a support network to support our goals and continue to find it difficult to tap into the communities we are already a part of. 

So I decided to build Pintro.

What does Pintro do?

Pintro makes it easy for individuals and businesses to tap into their community hubs to request peer introductions and seek help on their numerous challenges. 

Pintro makes it easy for individuals and businesses to tap into their communities to request peer introductions and seek help on their numerous challenges. It also allows people to easily showcase their skills (superpowers) and the support they can offer other people. Our goal is to help people engage efficiently with their communities to find people who can open doors for them, introduce and refer them to relevant people and access knowledge and shared experiences.  

Our vision is to build a community behind Pintro that understand that the most successful way to network is with a spirit of generosity. A community who understands that helping others ultimately strengthens the community that will help them thrive.  

Why you’ll succeed…

I’m passionate about bringing people together to help them achieve their goals. Opening doors for others via my own network is something I have enjoyed doing for years. This plus with my experience of successfully launching more than one app makes me feel confident we will succeed in launching Pintro and scaling the community. I’m currently looking for a co-founder who shares the Pintro vision but as a solopreneur, l am still incredibly excited and motivated to now have the tools and support network to leverage to make this a success. Pintro is launching with a number of unique features that differentiate it from existing social network platforms so I can’t wait for it to add some real value to others striving to reach their goals.

Mistakes you’ve made along the way?

Being a perfectionist. I certainly didn't follow the lean canvas model with my first app, Piin. It was a fully blown product when I launched, which meant I made a lot of assumptions. Whilst it hasn't been detrimental, I wasted around 6 months and lots of money making everything pretty and bug free before getting the app into users hands. 

I also locked myself away, alone, for too long. As a solo founder, I felt overwhelmed with everything I had to achieve and thought it was necessary to learn the skills of every role that I believed a successful company needed. Having to juggle all the balls, whilst keeping myself motivated and being my own cheerleader was incredibly hard. Not having a support community took its toll and lead to total burnout. 

Now I feel like I understand what balance looks like for me and I'm confident I won't push myself to the point of exhaustion again.

Goals for the future?

Our vision is to unlock the potential in every start-up community – and that includes the ecosystem of founders, freelancers and small business owners that are all trying to leverage community.

Our goal is to make online and offline networking more efficient whilst being a kind environment where people are incentivised to pay it forward.

We are in lockdown so coworking spaces, universities, accelerators are full of individuals who need support now, more than ever. We can’t wait for the idea generators and visionaries to access technologists, experts and individuals whom they can share knowledge and ideas with, provide mutual support, make valuable introductions and collaborate. 

We are currently in the final stages of building the MVP and are keen to pilot and get feedback from selected communities and once we come out of lockdown, we will open up to coworking spaces and other community hubs, such as King's. 

We'd also like to grow the team over the coming months. If you want to be part of something exciting, get in touch!

Why is the King’s20 Accelerator important to you?

Acceptance on the Accelerator came at the perfect time. Piin had launched, was gaining some traction but I felt like I was floating. I knew I had a strong desire to solve a slightly different social networking problem but I was beating myself up for taking my foot off the pedal for my first project. The obvious next step was to scale Piin but I couldn’t put aside my desire to focus on Pintro. 

After I’d spoken with a few of the coaches and the experts in residence I let go of the guilt and decided I was happy to start again, back at the customer development stage to find a solution to the professional networking problem. 

It’s also been great to be able to give back and share what I’ve learned with the other founders, and gain from the wealth of experience within the cohort.  

Do you have any advice for fellow entrepreneurs?

Plenty! There are three things I try and remind myself of weekly. One, to always question whether I’m being busy or productive. I can look back on a week and realise I haven’t moved any of my critical tasks forwards. But yet I haven’t had a minutes rest. You need to keep re-evaluating where you spend your energy and confirm if there’s been a tangible outcome. 

Second. Be prepared for the mundane. Imagine days of admin and doing boring stuff that’s not sexy and multiply that by ten. That’s how much time you’ll spend on the mundane. Embrace it. It’s a necessity. 

Third. If you’ve come from a corporate background or you’ve been sucked into believing the hype on most of the 'inspirational' business Instagram accounts then you’ll probably think that to be successful you need to strive for excellence - all day long; that you need to work around the clock, else you’re not serious or you’re a failure. Well, if you strive for excellence you will never deliver anything. If you’re a perfectionist like me, you need to get comfortable delivering products you’re embarrassed to put out in public and decks that you’re not a hundred percent happy with because the lean business model canvas should and will become your bible. Get the basics out. Get feedback. Iterate. 

And working round the clock will kill you. And when it does, who will carry your vision forwards? ;) Balance is your best friend.

Pintro would love to hear from any Community Managers who want to pilot the app with their members, for free. Getting feedback at early stages is vital to ensure they are delivering value. They would also like to understand their pain points and challenges in engaging and adding value to the communities they currently manage. They are also starting to look at funding opportunities and are open to any Grant suggestions and interest from Angels who feel they would be interested in following their progress as they gain traction. Also - any interns who would love to get involved - holla!

W: https://pintro.co

Instagram: /pintro.app

Facebook: /pintroapp

Email: [email protected]