Mariam Naficy, founder of Minted and Eve.com, discusses the fundraising hurdles and valuation discounts she faced while launching Minted while pregnant.
“They do write you down a little bit if you're a mom and you're pregnant and you're starting a company, versus if you're a young, twenty-eight-year-old Entrepreneur starting a company. There's significantly different ways in which you're treated, actually, as an entrepreneur raising capital.”
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More from Mariam Naficy
Insight
Naficy: Startups should budget as if they only have half their capital
“Things are always more expensive than you think they are, and they're always going to take more time to prove out, and you're going to need more optimizations and more loops to correct things than you think you will. That's why we just say, roughly speaking, i…”
Mariam NaficyNov 21, 2019▶ 22:39Raise more money than you need, with Minted’s Mariam Naficy
“Making prices all equal for different kinds of paper and realizing the analysis paralysis people went through, you like almost had to give them a reason to make a decision just by changing the price.”
Mariam NaficyNov 21, 2019▶ 21:20Raise more money than you need, with Minted’s Mariam Naficy
Insight
Naficy: Millennial grooms' involvement forced Minted to adopt less feminine designs
“Millennial men like to be involved in the wedding decision with the millennial woman. They're more involved dads, and they're more involved husbands, actually, it turns out. So, we learned that our designs were too feminine in weddings, and you wouldn't necess…”
Mariam NaficyNov 21, 2019▶ 21:54Raise more money than you need, with Minted’s Mariam Naficy
Disclosure
Naficy originally planned Minted as a bootstrapped lifestyle business without VCs
“This time I was, I said to myself, let's not bring in all the VCs at the beginning. I know what I'm doing this time. So I chose no co-founder this time, no VC at this time. Let's figure out how to build perhaps a sustainable lifestyle business, cash flow busin…”
Mariam NaficyNov 21, 2019▶ 11:46Raise more money than you need, with Minted’s Mariam Naficy
Disclosure
Naficy: Minted recorded zero sales during its first month after launch
“I opened the doors. There's not a sale for an entire month. Nobody wants the branded stationery products that we'd spent most of our two and a half million Launching, because again, being conservative, I'd said, I know, I'll do an eve.com, I'll put all these b…”
Mariam NaficyNov 21, 2019▶ 15:49Raise more money than you need, with Minted’s Mariam Naficy
AssertionSupported
Naficy: Minted closed its venture round two weeks before Lehman collapsed
“And we raised our venture around two weeks before Lehman failed because this investor of mine had said to me, I feel something really bad is going to happen. You should go raise. So we just went out August. Who's in town? Anybody? Is anyone in town in August? …”
Mariam NaficyNov 21, 2019▶ 19:22Raise more money than you need, with Minted’s Mariam Naficy
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