SheTrailblazes

In my first year of starting my own company, the business revenue was already at 85% of my last corporate salary. And I was still waking up every morning thinking I just got lucky and it was all about to fall apart. Every founder I looked up to was either fundraising or building a software company. I was bootstrapping so mine was not a traditional startup story. I often felt like the black sheep of entrepreneurship. And that feeling spiraled me into constant self doubt. Every decision I made, every way I was trying to build, I questioned it. In my head the next quarter was always the one where everything fell to zero and I had no other option left. So I kept an option B warm. I took calls from recruiters and hiring managers. Even when I knew I did not want to accept another role. I was constantly living in the “what ifs.” Looking back, the uncertainty was never really the hardest part. You sign up for that the day you start. The hardest part was not being able to find another woman founder who was bootstrapping, building a company and building a life as a mom at the same time. My friends were climbing the corporate ladder. They could not give me the right advice except "keep doing this Bosky." So I had no way of knowing whether what I was feeling was a normal part of being a first time founder or whether I was just not cut out for this. My social conditioning did not help either. I did not grow up in a family of entrepreneurs. Not one person in my immediate or extended family has ever built a business. And fifteen years of my own career was spent in that same world. So stepping outside it, even when the revenue was growing, was disorienting in ways I could not quite make sense of at the time. A study of over 2000 women founders found that 78% said human connection was the single most important part of their entrepreneurial journey. That number made complete sense to me. Because what I kept hearing from women founders was the same thing every time. That personalized advice for the kind of business you are actually building changes everything. That a community of women who are in it with you increases your chances of generating revenue. And that building without the hustle and grind is a very intentional choice. I wish I knew I was not alone in my journey back when I started. If you are in the early years of your entrepreneurship journey, what has helped you the most when you were unsure or when you felt lonely in your journey?

I recently watched Sedge Beswick share why she backed Eshita Kabra-Davies of By Rotation, now the world's largest shared wardrobe. It wasn't a pitch deck that convinced her. Eshita started with a WhatsApp group. Women sharing clothes with each other. No funding. No website. She just started and women showed up. When she went to raise money VC firms mostly run by men didn't get it. So she called the successful women in her personal contact book and asked them to back her with their savings. Five said yes. She has raised over £1 million from female angel investors and still owns 70 per cent of her company. She then stood at the UN and told a room full of CEOs and said, “Women Founders don't need more mentorship. We need money.” I've believed that for a long time. Eight years ago I started SheTrailblazes because I was exhausted with the narrative that women need mentorship to rise. What women actually need is access. I built a community and ecosystem on Slack and within 72 hours 4600 women joined. Because they were tired of being told what they needed by people who had never been in their shoes. Founders Edge came a few years later because a community is where it starts. But a business has to make money. And that is what we do every single day, helping women founders get started, grow and scale from the ground up with community, personalized guidance and real access to what they need. Eshita said something in a Times interview that I keep coming back to: "I'd rather be financially successful and stable than famous." We talk a lot about how much women raise. We should be talking about how much of their company they still own. P.S. I want to see more women founder trailblazers on my feed. If you know someone whose story I should spotlight please tag them below.

When I left my C-suite role in 2019 people didn't tell me I couldn't do it. They just kept asking why I would want to. "Why do you want so much?"  "Why do you want to add more financial burden to your husband by leaving a nice cushy C-suite role?"  "Have you thought about getting a male co-founder so people take you seriously?" These were not from strangers. They were from people I knew. Men and women. People my age especially. The problem was that none of this sounded like a criticism of me in any way. It felt like people who cared about me genuinely were asking this because of some reckless decision I was making. I have watched my mum navigate these same questions her whole career. Every time she tried to explain her rationale, it went nowhere. The people asking had already judged that by focusses on her career, she was somehow not a good mother. The explanation just gave them more to work with. So I made a decision a long time ago. I was never going to explain my career or life choices to people who should have zero say in them. Those questions really mess up with your head. Your brain is not built to ignore them. Two thirds of your brain's motivation system is wired to focus on the negative. So when someone asks why you want so much your brain does not file it away. It holds onto it. Looks for more evidence that they were right. Your brain was never going to let those questions go quietly. That is just how it works. When I work with women founders we spend time on this. The questions that sat too long. The voices and judgement that had no business shaping their decisions. Because if you don't deal with that noise it becomes so much easier to walk away from something that was actually right for you. It is 2026. Women are still being asked these questions. By strangers and by people who love them. For every woman who left corporate or is thinking about it, what is your why?

Everyone I know is building an app right now. Very few of them are building a company. Not a day goes by without someone telling me they pivoted from corporate to entrepreneurship because they spun up an app with AI. And I am genuinely excited that so many people can build something without a technical background. But building an app is not the same as entrepreneurship. So I always end up asking the same question: do you have a paying customer yet, or a clear path to one? The answer is almost always no. Building an app has never been easier. You can have something deployed by end of this week. That is exciting. But it has also created real confusion, and I hear this from so many women founders and solopreneurs right now. Early on, a founder I really admired said something that I did not fully appreciate then but I am beginning to. Your business revenue will only grow to the extent you grow as an entrepreneur. And that means actually working on yourself, not just the product (or the service). I put this quote on my laptop because as an entrepreneur I have to keep reminding myself to not just go back to being a "doer". That was the thing I was really good at in every job I had. But doing more was not what my business needed. Growing as a founder was. The more I sit with this, the more I believe that building the app was never the hard part. It isn't the hard part today either. Everything that comes after, finding paying customers, learning to sell, building revenue without burning yourself out or hustling every hour, that is the part nobody warned me about either.

You can want to build your own business so much, and still feel completely "not ready", at the same time. Both things, fully true, at once. There's an old idea called the law of polarity. Everything has an opposite, and the opposite is part of the same thing. Like hot and cold. I experienced this through 5 failed attempts to build my business before SheTrailblazes. I had good ideas and people loved them, but none generated consistent revenue. I had to shut them all down. What made it worse was that I could lead ideas to revenue at work. So why wasn't this happening for my own business? In 2018 I was terrified it would happen again. But somewhere I knew there was a way. I just didn't know how yet. Reading about the law of polarity helped me. That feeling of "ready" and "not ready" had been true for me the whole time. And every bootstrapping woman founder I've worked with has felt it too. The feeling didn't go away before we started. It changed because we started. The bad days don't mean something is wrong with you or your idea. They're just the other side of the coin. And so is most of the advice we've been given. The books, the frameworks, the stuff everyone quotes, wasn't written for women, by women, or with kids in the picture. So when it doesn't work, we don't blame the advice. We blame ourselves. That's the law of polarity again. What feels true and what is actually true are often the same thing, seen from two different ends. You can 2X your prices and keep your customers. You can build a real business with one idea, not a hundred. You can grow without raising a single dollar. You can keep your job and build on the side, at the same time. Usually there's one specific thing standing between where someone is and one of these. And often these show up as big blockers stalling our progress. This is why, I'm opening up a few free 1:1 time for women founders to look for that one thing in your business, together. 💛 Details are in the first comment. I'll pick 10 and email you to book a slot.

There is “building in public”. And then there is performatively building in public. LinkedIn is full of the second one right now. Last month I asked every founder in a session inside Founders Edge one question. Is what you are posting on social media actually converting into paying customers. Every single hand went up with a “No”. Every founder was posting consistently and showing up but none of it was turning into paying customers. It is so easy to fall into the frenzy of feeding the content machine instead of having conversations to your actual customers. Erica Wenger, a VC, recently said something that I just love. "For anyone building in public, you have to perfect the ship to yap ratio." Nobody cares about your accolades or how many hours you put in or which tools you are using. They care about one thing; can they see themselves in what you are sharing. Does it sound like you understand their problem. One thing founders inside Founders Edge hold onto is this. You have to be where your target audience is. And you have to spend 80 percent of your time building and getting your product or service into the hands of your ICP. The content writing comes after that. Not before. If you get too distracted becoming an influencer you will look up one day and realize you built an audience instead of a business. Unless your whole business is being an influencer. In which case yap away. After that session we went deep into the Get 100 Paying Customers method. The wins that have come out of it since have been something else. Not every post needs to convert today. But it should make the right person stop and think… this founder gets it. She understands exactly what I am dealing with. That person will come back. And when they are ready they will buy.

Julia Cheek didn't know enough about healthcare to know how impossible her idea was. She built a $2.9 billion business anyway. Julia was in her late twenties when she started feeling genuinely unwell. She simply could not explain her symptoms: brain fog, fatigue, and aches. Neither could her doctors. She spent six months going from specialist to specialist. Each one ran the same tests as the person before them. She had good insurance and still ended up paying thousands out of pocket. Most of the time she never even got her results back. When she finally got an answer, it was vitamin deficiencies and hormone imbalances. These should have been simple things to diagnose, right? She was relieved but she could not stop thinking about how hard the whole process had been. She noticed that lab testing still worked the same way it had for decades. So she decided to change that. But, she did not have a medical background or a technical co-founder, so not a single VC invested in her. She got to $6 million in revenue without any VC funding. Everlywell is now valued at $2.9 billion. 🙌 She once called herself the least qualified person to start a healthcare company. She later said she regrets saying that. She said: "When I first started Everlywell, I was rejected for funding dozens of times. I knew I only needed one person to say yes to me." That one yes exists for you too. The question is how many "nos" you are willing to be OK with. How long will you go all in because your conviction is stronger than every "no" you will keep hearing. When you are convinced about your why, you always figure out the how. I see this a lot. Women who already know the problem inside out because of something they have experienced first hand. But she still believes she cannot become the founder who solves it because she does not fit the typical founder checklist. There is no secret founder checklist. This is especially true right now. It is up to us to believe this. ♻️ Share this with a woman founder who keeps saying she is not ready.

Last week I sat with a woman founder who spent a full year fighting to stay in her own company.🥵 Her co-founder and investor ended up on the same side. She tried to hold her ground but she didn't have enough of a grip on the commercial side to make her case stick. She lost, and she had to walk away from something she'd spent three years on. When I asked what she wished someone had told her earlier, she didn't say “pick a better co-founder” or “choose a better idea.” She said she wished she'd understood her numbers well enough that she never needed anyone else to explain them to her. I've been sitting with that for a few days. Because it's not really a numbers problem, is it? I'll share something embarrassing from my own journey: When I started Founders Edge, I was told by people I respected in this industry, “Bosky, keep your prices between $50 and $250 because women don't like to pay and want free stuff.” And because so many recognised names were saying it, I spent months genuinely asking myself: “Am I right or are they right.” ”Do I even know what I am doing here?” ”Have I lost my mind to charge premium?” The less confident I felt with my business's financials and pricing, the more I stalled in taking action or feeling excited about my business. The less revenue my company brought, the less excited I felt to keep going.” That is what not knowing your commercial numbers does to you. You start falling for any and every piece of advice whether it is right for you or not.

A founder just raised $106M at a $2.6B valuation. He has heart palpitations and sleeps three hours a night on a mattress in his office. The comments called it visionary. I think it's diabolical. He's been saying a lot of things and going viral this week. He said "I'm dying anyway." So he believes founders and employees should go all in 7 days a week. He then went on to say "If your days off happen to be Saturday and Sunday every week, then you will not have a place at his company." I kept thinking about who "they" is in his interviews. A few weeks ago I was at the ER. One man was shaking, had gone pale, his BP was all over the place. He kept saying he needed to send a status report to his leadership team. He was in the middle of a full blown anxiety attack and he was thinking about a status report. A friend told me yesterday she miscarried a couple of years ago and still got on a 16 hour flight the same day for a work trip. Nobody calls any of that visionary. So, is this it? Is this the thing we are supposed to want? Everything about this rhetoric goes against laws of nature. The law of entropy says everything in nature moves toward disorder and breakdown without rest and recovery. This is not some "work life balance" modern day philosophy. It's science. Period. I meet women founders every week who are building real companies and still picking their kids up from school. And honestly I never get tired of seeing it. Helping more women do this in a world that honestly feels pretty messed up right now; and that's the whole point. Isn't it? You have one life. That's it. Irrespective of whether we are all dying or not, at least we should not be doing everything scientifically proven to shorten it. ♻️ Share this to inspire someone who is feeling pressured by 24/7 hustle culture.

Bhargavi Arrunategui, known as Barbie Patel, did her own makeup on her wedding day because she could not find a single makeup artist who knew how to work with her skin tone. She was at LexisNexis. South Asian and first generation in a community where choosing beauty over medicine or engineering was not something accepted as norm. She kept her corporate job when she started Cinderella Bridez on the side. Every week I talk to women founders doing exactly what Barbie did. Keeping their job. Keeping their corporate salary and not yet ready to take a full leap into entrepreneurship. And this is where her story gets interesting. She built one compounding loop around one customer in her 3 businesses. The bride who books her for the wedding becomes a travel client for the destination honeymoon. The artist she trains in her school becomes a partner in her network. Every customer generates multiple revenue moments across the same relationship. She worked with 2500 brides over 157 weddings in 2024 alone. She has over 400 students with 30% reporting 2 to 5x income growth. She’s also made over $1 million in annual venue bookings. For so many women who grew up being told exactly what success should look like; forging your own path comes with so many hurdles. I grew up being told architecture (like designing buildings) was not a real career. I chose Computer Science instead and never wrote a single line of code in 18 years of corporate work. Now I am building Vela. Most of us have a Barbie story. We just stopped telling it to ourselves.