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Heinin Zhang: “I Saw the Freedom that My Family Had Because My Father Owned His Own Business.”

Heinin ZhangThe co-founder of yhangry, talks about the freedom of being a founder, the importance of a safety net and the catalyst for quitting her day job.

Think of us as Airbnb for food. yhangry is a platform for finding a private chef to cook for events such as birthdays or even your weekly meal prep.

The startup journey takes a lot longer than you think and is a lot harder than you initially expect. It takes grit. 

It’s great to have people you can ask for advice. And vent to. 

If you lose that positivity, it’s hard to keep going. Things definitely get tough in every startup journey. You need to be very optimistic and believe that what you’re working on will lead to a positive result

We started yhangry as a side hustle.

We went full time when we started getting worse at our day jobs. Our managers had picked up on us being somewhat distracted and pulled us into a meeting. That meeting was the catalyst to us quitting.

My family is entrepreneurial. Growing up, I saw the freedom that my family had because my father owned his own business. 

I like the freedom of being a founder. Having worked in finance and being bound to a desk working on the trading floor for a few years – it’s the opposite of freedom. You have to run to the bathroom and time yourself to be back at the desk in case prices go stale. 

Have a safety net in place in terms of savings. Starting a business will cost money, whether that’s investing into any infrastructure, marketing, or just quitting your job and being able to have a personal runway to sustain yourself while you are bootstrapping before you have a product that’s good enough to raise funding with. 

Once you start thinking and overthinking, it’s really easy to talk yourself out of doing something. Your mind is probably the biggest barrier to any action. Getting rid of some of these doubts, not overthinking things, is probably one of the biggest pieces of advice.

People can support female founders by being aware of the brands that are created by female founders. 

There are some great initiatives such as Buy Women Built.

A lot of consumers these days are interested in the story and the background of the business that they’re buying from. 

There are really small ways you can help. You don’t need to even buy from a female founded business. You can follow them on social media, and you can engage with their content, you can follow their blog, subscribe to their newsletter. All of these things help female founded brands.