Dr Dupe Burgess – The founder and CEO of gynaecological health app Bloomful on the challenges that inspired her business, the importance of your community and the ways everyone can help female founders.
If things go wrong, you’ve got to be able to move, go with the motions and adapt.
Founders have to be really resilient, to be able to pick themselves up when things are not going their way.
Be willing to learn. Be willing to take challenges on and use that to actually improve yourself, improve what you’re doing, and continuously adapt and grow.
I started my career as a doctor. I was able to see that women were not getting the care that they needed for their gynaecological health. That was a real turning point for me.
I just decided that I really wanted to build something meaningful and that I had the capability to do so.
When I decided to leave medicine and enter the corporate world, I gained a whole bunch of skills that gave me the confidence to start a business, learn how to solve problems, learn how to pull people together, and build a mission and a vision.
I have always loved the idea of building something from nothing, seeing a problem in the world, and having to figure out how to solve it, using all of my own skills, but also the resources around me – my knowledge and gathering people together.
The power of your network can’t be understated when you’re building a business. You need everybody from mentors to advisors to peers who will help you to think through your idea and actually put it into fruition.
Find and build a community of people around you who are really going to be able to help you to pull your idea together and bring it to life.
Getting funding is a continuous journey of making sure you’re delivering value and ensuring you’re able to communicate what that value is to potential investors.
It’s very, very difficult for any entrepreneur to raise investment at the moment, but particularly as a female founder, a solo founder, and a founder in a field that is known to be very difficult, it has been hard at times to feel like I can do it. Thankfully, we have been successful in getting some amazing angels on board.
There are so many ways people can support female founders. Firstly, championing them publicly, talking about them, putting them forward for different events and competitions, really looking to connect them to people in your network, helping them to find mentors and advisors.
Investing in female founders doesn’t just have to take the form of giving them money to help them to build or start or scale their businesses, but also actually buying from them and supporting them in that way.
