Female Founders in Tech and unconscious bias

Hi, I have faced exact opposite problem, of being a tech founder and written off as not worthy. Being single founder is hard irrespective of the gender. I guess gender bias adds to the issues. I have found some solace in microconf and effectuation.org which may be some solutions to your situation. Having said that I feel its a matter of time and you will take off very soon. Good Luck with everything.

Startups with no technical founders have abysmal success rates, which is why it's easier for investors to just reject them all. It isn't personal. Investors don't want to invest in a company without a technical founder because when it goes bust (and it likely will) the investor ends up looking foolish.

Stop referring to yourself as non-technical. Stop thinking of yourself as non-technical. When asked you can say you're the product architect and that you make all the important technical decisions. Don't say you're outsourcing, instead say you want to hire a great CTO and engineering team so you can focus on your CEO duties: hiring, sales, marketing, and fundraising. Explain why you are uniquely qualified to run your startup. Talk about your strengths and accomplishments. Talk about your traction and how big the opportunity is.

If you get written off based on what's on paper, change what's on paper. Don't disqualify yourself.

4K active users is very low to get even angels excited, unless they are paying users. I know many companies with 50-100k active users not being able to raise 500k

Above is just so you have that Baseline in mind.

Not having a technical founder makes a degree harder to find you.

Best way to get around is grow twice as much as a solo founder than a cofounder team and then go to market to raise. You will differentiate yourself.

Also if you have to get a tech founder who is a male, it doesn’t sound that bad. Find a one that respects you.

Make it happen.

To answer your initial question: There is not necessarily unconscious bias, but the process is biased, in terms of the skills and lingo it expects.

The better you know that, the better you can counter this - one extra step you have to take, if that is what you want.

the data does suggest there is a bias against women and against single founders

Capital as a service is one that is trying to overcome the first basis. As for the second maybe you can count yourself as technical, however if you can afford outsourcing you can hire someone and give them 10% and a cofounder title just like Atlassian did. The earlier you catch women the more there are becuase they haven't been pushed out yet. You can do tests of programming ability for someone who can't code then put them through a coding boot camp and training.

I am in your shoes. Female non technical solo founder in tech. We should connect!

Sorry for sounding harsh, but money does not flow to a certain gender but to bussines opportunities.

4k is not much and having a single person carrying the whole work load is a tremendous risk.

Stop defining yourself non-technical. Experienced female engineers (what is what you are actually looking for) very often hate to work with ladies that play the I-m-not-the-technical-girl-card. As a female engineer you worked too hard to evercome this evil picture.