So exciting… this is my first blog entry as a female founder!
In this blog, I’m gonna explain my journey as a female entrepreneur. If you are interested in hearing what motivated me to finally have the courage to start my own business – continue reading… 🙂
Hi everyone,
I’m Carmen, 28, and it’s weird to say (or better write) it out loud: I AM A FEMALE (frehsly-baked) ENTREPRENEUR.
I just started my side-business alongside my regular job as a consultant at a small company located in Munich, Germany, because having my own business was always something I was dreaming about.
What I found out when writing this first article was, that the German word “Unternehmensgründerin” (female version for company founder) cannot be translated into English as the online dictionary I typically use did not know the German female word for “company founder”.This is quite shocking and unacceptable, so this needs to change – the Austrian, German, or even European startup ecosystem needs to become more FEMININE – yes, that’s right!
That’s what I wanna change in the future. I’m passionate about bringing women (students / workers or even unemployed women) closer to the thought about founding their own business. Typically, I would argue, the thought of founding your own business can be scary. Especially women often don’t have the self-confidence to believe in themselves. This is in particular true, when you have no real starting point or no connection to someone that is self-employed. To be honest, I had an easier start, as both of my parents are self-employed and as far as I can think back, my parents were operating their own business. However, this wouldn’t make me feeling less pressure or less scared to found my own business.
In fact, I was quite scared of founding my own business, because I was SCARED OF FAILURE.
If you are interested in hearing what motivated me to finally have the courage to start my own business, you should keep reading my article and follow my profile to keep updated on my ups-and-downs on my journey as a female entrepreneur. Furthermore, if you want to read about what I was struggling with at the beginning of my company start-up, you should be following my exciting journey as a female company founder. I truly hope that reading about my story makes at least one other female starting heir own business – this would make me as happy as I can be!
Let’s start at the beginning…
During 16 months as a strategy consultant at a leading boutique consultancy focusing on international projects in the automotive industry, I was able to gain a lot of experience and prove my analytical skills on a daily basis. However, some part of me was always missing the FREEDOM of deciding on my own and being my own boss. The FREEDOM and ENRICHMENT every self-employed person is feeling when they can decide for themselves whether or not to do something in a specific way without having to consult anybody else. I’m not saying this is not what today’s employers can provide you with – they actually should provide this feeling of self-determination in order to make “us” millennials happy in their workplace – put this is another story.I’ve been thinking about my business idea since almost half a year – but never really had the guts to just go and do it. Yesterday was the beginning of an exciting and thrilling journey. Instead of always talking about my idea, I finally decided to JUST DO IT.
First things first…
- I decided on a name for my product idea (MaskKey) – just on my own after a quick research of what names and domains are already taken (I can recommend using www.namechk.com) and
- purchased my domain (www.mask-key.com) via GoDaddy.
As I was working with WordPress before, I thought I am ready to start downloading a template and start working on my website. Seriously I had very limited previous knowledge about WordPress – I promise you it is something everyone can learn via watching youtube videos and reading on websites and blogs about it! In case you don’t feel comfortable doing it yourself, you can always purchase it from a cheap website programmer or supplier or at least get help with setting it up.
Mistake #1I did not think about purchasing a webhosting and literally could not link a WordPress template with the domain I just bought.
- After finding out that a hosting provider was missing, I purchased a webhosting I found over the internet (there are numerous out there, I can recommend www.netcup.de/hosting as this is good value for money, or www.checkdomain.de/hosting but there are several good options available).
- Then, I had to request an authorization code to transfer my domain from GoDaddy to another registrar. In other words, I had to link the domain with the webhosting or the other way round, I don’t quite know how to explain it tbh. Depending on the top level domain (TLD), a so-called “Auth-Code” (also known as EEP-Code) is required for a successful domain transfer. In other words, the EEP-Code will transfer the domain (in my case on GoDaddy) to your hosting provider (e.g. netcup). According to Wikipedia, this “transfer secret, also known as EPP Code, is a randomly generated complex code by a domain registrar which can contain numbers, letters and special characters”. You can also read more about here: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/epp-status-codes-2014-06-16-en Don’t stress out if understanding this or managing the linkage between them takes a while, for me I used like an hour to understand this and was able to export my GoDaddy domain (https://de.godaddy.com/help/holen-sie-sich-den-autorisierungscode-per-download-19030). There are lots of blog entries that explain how to do it – I’m sure you will manage 🙂
Now I am still waiting for my website host (netcup) to allocate my payment so I can finally START with my website.
Will update you in my next article on how to proceed with your website when you got everything aligned. I hope I could help you if you felt lost or insecure about founding your own business – LET’S JUST DO IT!!