Female Founder's Journal

Sailing Solo & Loving It

Hi there, Sonia here with another episode of the female founder's journey. This week I will share what it is like building technology on my own, my approach to time management, and why being stubborn is a superpower when you learn to harness the potency of resilience.

For those of you who recently joined me, I was laid off from a big tech company at the beginning of 2023, along with 200k of my tech worker brethren. The burnout that had existed for years was hidden because I had to bury the exhaustion to keep going.

If this sounds familiar, consider self-work to get out of the physical and mental state that is burnout. Consult your therapist friends; no shame.

So after the layoff dust settled, I figured now or never for starting my startup— TheTechMargin.

A decade in corporate tech, another decade as a web developer and graphic designer, and quite a few years bartending have taught me that we can find our groove just about anywhere and that money can and will be made by those who understand that money is relative and success is a mindset.

So I leaped into the unknown with my skills as a software engineer, a vast and supportive network of colleagues built throughout my career, and an incredible resource, the CEI Women's Business Center.*

I signed up for every networking opportunity locally and online that resonated with me in those first couple of months. The most impactful resource for developing my startup has been the CEI business accelerators, accountability cohorts of entrepreneurial women across the state that meet to learn, support, and amplify our collective efforts. When I am having a shitty day, knowing the ladies in my cohort are out there hitting the wall, blasting through it, and feeling the same self-doubt and overcoming it, I want to win for them as much as for me.

Community is vital when trailblazing. A community of fellow female trailblazers who want to see you succeed right along with them is pure gold.

*Side note, if you are starting a business on your own, look for the SBA resources available to you in your state (US readers only, though other countries likely have an equivalent).

Architecture and Runway

The how and what of building any application is the architecture. For those not in the domain, we do a lot of schema designs (databases), integration patterns, and deciding on what "stack" to use for back, middle, and front-end implementations. I have spent most of my time building applications in the cloud ecosystem, specifically those that live within or are installed into CRM tools such as Salesforce. So my stack has been dictated by the company or client requesting the project. Now I have left this restriction in the rearview mirror.

I love zero-to-one builds (or greenfield projects). These are projects that are net-new. When done well, the design time and coding time are 1:1. Usually, these projects are not done well, mainly because it is hard to convince people that designing or architecting the solution before writing code is super important. For various reasons irrelevant to this discussion, there is a misplaced belief that coding is like laying bricks, and laying bricks is progress, and progress is good. I will allow your imagination to explore how laying bricks without a plan is not good.

Now I am on my own, and I can architect and design to my heart's content... well, no, I can't because I have what we call "runway" in startup land. Runway is the amount of time your company has to get off the ground before your ass is broke. I don't love thinking about this, but it is the reality of the situation.

A few dates are marked in my calendar, keeping me from distractions. For example, the end of October will bring with it the hunt for affordable health insurance on the open market. My corporate jobs have provided insurance for our family of four over the years with varying degrees of coverage but always affordable to our family. In the United States, health insurance premiums for individuals are ludicrous. I am looking at nearly two thousand dollars per month for coverage unless I pay for catastrophic only.

This is our world, and we are still trying to figure out healthcare that works for humans, not insurance companies.

I am also aware of the end of the calendar year and hoping the markets rebound for tech stocks because my investments are nothing but in the red, and I am leaving them alone unless I run out of runway.

But seriously, this is not doom and gloom. I was broke when I moved to Maine and went back to school. I was also a single mom, and I applied for help with childcare, healthcare, and food stamps. No shame.

Financially alone, I did what I needed to do to take care of my kids and myself. Dental care was covered by the state for the kids but not for adults, and when the lack of dental coverage meant a second extracted molar, a fire was lit under my ass to get real health insurance by way of a corporate job.

I know I can do this because I did that. Mad libs that last sentence with anything you are struggling with right now.

My income was under 30k per year back then, working two jobs as a single mom and going back to school— classic. It is vital to get candid about numbers; the only beneficiaries of doing otherwise are those who stand to benefit by keeping us in our boxes.

Money is relative. It takes seeing the numbers to realize the truth in this. 15 years ago, my face got sweaty when I quoted my new freelancing rate had increased from 30 to 50 dollars per hour.

Last year I paid more in taxes than I was making in a whole year when I needed help from the system to which I pay those same taxes.

I don't care who I upset by telling my truth. If you do not enjoy reading my truth, you are not my audience and are free to move on.

I know my story will help another young woman struggling to believe in herself while doing the tightrope walk of raising her kids by herself. Sister, you are more than you know, and no box can contain you when you believe it.

I did that. And I can do this.

Getting Strict About Time

Being effective means being a hard-ass about my time. Sorry friends, reading my newsletter is how I am keeping everyone up to speed. Social events are limited to those of the highest order, e.g., graduations, significant birthdays, etc. Weekends are when I take a few hours on a day that does not need to be Saturday or Sunday because every day is build day.

Meetings are to be avoided at all costs. If I don't know you and you ask to schedule time with me on my LinkedIn messages, say hello to my "other" inbox for spam and bots pretending to be humans.

If I know you, remember that one hour of Zoom is two hours from our day as we lose 30 minutes before and after due to the overhead of task switching. Email me, Slack, or text me to chat.

I am working on some ideas to enable collective mentoring within networks because there ARE some things that require the proximity of meeting, providing and receiving mentorship, therapy and coaching, and technical design sessions are the primary ones that I will break my focus for.

I have been working remotely for seven years, and I am more productive in my studio at home than I have ever been in an office of any type, e.g., cubes, short cubes, tall cubes, open isles like a grocery store.

Florescent lights, background noise, more meetings, and less exercise than I get when I am remote are the reality of returning to the office.

I love the chance to run a design session in person with a handful of focused colleagues, but otherwise, I am all set in my home office.

I will cover my home studio (office/studio better together) in another article when there are fewer updates and backstories to cover.

I rearrange my space when I am starting a new big project. When I decided to start TheTechMargin, I moved my office to the dining room for a month because it was January and the light was better. You can change your physical space to accommodate your internal space and where you need to grow.

Stubborn as a Coder with a Bone, Dog.

What, if anything, is the secret to being good at software engineering?

The truth is, you will spend hours and days that bleed together into nights of dreaming about, waking up thinking about, and falling asleep still thinking about a given problem. The really good problems to solve are always like this.

Some days will leave you feeling completely spent, like a total failure, a big L on your forehead, etc. These days might run together too, and you may wonder if you have what it takes. You know you are doing something good and challenging when you get here. You are pushing past your comfort zone and into the choppy waters of growth, my friend.

When I have taken to laying on the floor of my studio and calling myself names, I know I am in the growth place.

This is when you need your superpower.

The problem and you are now marching in lockstep; every lens by which you view the world is a possible entry point into solving your puzzle.

This is why intersectionality is essential (and my favorite of all things).

Intersections give insight into problems by viewing the problem from another domain, often not directly related to the problem domain.

For example, my husband is an artist and has a similar process when working on a large and complicated painting. We will discuss the struggles of solving problems and meeting our own exhaustion head-on, and often we find paths to overcoming roadblocks through a multidisciplinary approach.

Our small view of the world requires that we believe our minds are either technical or creative, but not both. We assume that technical people look and talk a certain way and come from a particular background; the same applies to our assumptions about creatives.

The plasticity of our brains allows for all attended-to skills to blossom. Creativity is not limited to the arts, just as technical skills are not limited to engineering. What a ludicrous idea that we must be one or the other, left or right, up or down, etc.

Seeing and imagining being essential to both engineering and art-making, it is not surprising that Leonardo DaVinci discovered how heart valves pump blood through his interdisciplinary work.

Finally, one must not be afraid to be bold. Recently I was told that a good head space to try to remain in when starting a startup is to have strong opinions that are loosely held, or to put it another way, be obsessed with the "who" and the "why" of your idea but not the "what."

Discomfort means you (or someone or something) are challenging your assumptions, making you uncomfortable.

What happens if you stay in that space a little longer than you usually would?

What happens if you lean into the space of growth?

I promise you it is worth finding out.

At the end of all of the struggling, the Eureka moment arrives, this is when we have a private victory dance. This is the reward for being a stubborn mofo.

You have to enjoy the feeling of that moment of figuring it out enough to push yourself through your own resistance. Spend enough time working a problem and with enough learned skill and you will have a series of private victories that will add up to real world competence.

That is it. That is is the secret.

Until next time,

-Sonia

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