Three AHA moments from our chat with Holly Cardew, founder of photo editing platform Pixc

Last week for LADY-LAND the podcast we sat down with the very smart, very talented founder of Pixc, Holly Cardew.  

She’s a solo, non-technical founder hailing from Orange in regional Australia, and just six years after putting up a simple landing page to test her product idea, Holly’s business is now a Silicon Valley based, multimillion-dollar tech start-up.  

Here’s what we learnt:  

LESSON 1: HIRE A VA TO DO YOUR DIRTY WORK  

As a founder, time is a precious limited resource. There’s only so much you can achieve in a 24-hour day and so spending this time on high-value, high-impact tasks is critical to success. Holly has built her entire business by hiring contract workers online, and she recommends delegating every process-driven piece of work you can. It takes a bit of time to set up, but it will pay off ten-fold in the long term.  

Hot tip: create an onboarding process for your contractors and document everything they do! If you lose a contractor and need to re-hire, all the relevant information about their tasks will be readily available, which will save you a ton of time. 

LESSON 2: FIGURE OUT WHETHER YOUR CUSTOMERS ACTUALLY WANT YOUR PRODUCT BEFORE YOU INVEST TIME AND MONEY IN CREATING IT 

Seems pretty obvious, right? You’d be surprised at how many business owners don’t validate their idea before taking it to market. To avoid losing a lot of cash, first build your customer avatar (this is your ideal customer) and gather data to help you understand whether your product or service is solving a problem that they actually have. Holly did this by developing a simple landing page and tracking conversion, but you can also gather rich insights by simply getting out there and talking to your customer base.  

LESSON 3: NEVER ASK TO PICK SOMEONE’S BRAINS. EVER.  

Relationships and connections have a huge impact on a founder’s success, and building a great network often involves reaching out to industry experts and mentors for advice. The very best way to approach someone you’d like to speak to is by offering value upfront, before asking a very specific question that shows you’ve done your research. This is precisely how Holly landed a phone call with the CEO of Mailchimp. She messaged him on LinkedIn, offering a suggestion about how to improve his product before asking exactly how he built his subscription base from 10K to 1 million.  

Hot tip: ask a tailored question that you can’t find the answer to on Google. It will get you much more cut through.  

The lady-land podcast is a PodcastOne Australia production. For more lady-land chats, you can find us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify to listen, subscribe, review - all the things!  

To find out more about our invite-only events and [LIVE] podcast shows, head to: www.ladybrains.com.au