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11th Aug 2014

Her.ie Start-Up Diary: Week 3 – Sonya Lennon of frockadvisor

Starting out with frockadvisor...

Her

Each week, Her.ie will be bringing you the personal thoughts and tips from Irish entrepreneur Sonya Lennon – fashion stylist and co-founder of frockadvisor.

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Week 3 – An Entrepreneur’s Evolution

So he signed off the email ‘Best of luck with your appventure’. I like that, a lot.

This week was very much about the next stage of our technology. The question is, who is the best guardian to take our progeny from its ‘Minimum Viable Product (MVP – every day a new acronym in start-up land) to a fully-fledged native app and beyond into a throbbing platform to serve our community and our customers.

Do you go with the guys from Eastern Europe, Pakistan or those closer to home? Do you bring someone in-house? Luckily we have an amazing advisory board who have played this game before and who are incredibly generous with their time and knowledge. Technology and its providers, isn’t the problem. This is the thorny question of money coming in and money going out. Sometimes start-up feels like the ultimate luxury sport, somewhere on a par with polo or big game hunting. It is big game hunting, the Lions head is globalisation followed by a trade sale to a monster of ecommerce. Happy hunting.

The prize is not the technology, it’s having the money to resource it. I started www.DressforSuccessDublin.ie to give women the freedom to make the right choices in life by helping them towards economic independence. I now find myself in the same position – the stakes are no higher and the principles are the same. The right choices can only be made with adequate resources. We are in discussion with five investors, all of whom are a good fit for our current seed round. Today we email them the results of our early usage, the feedback from our customers and the traction we have seen on the platform.

We have never been more sure about our product. Now we pray to the god of start-up to drive this across the line and take us to our next stage of development. We’re sick of being a start up, we want to start being a business.

Sonya Lennon

Founder, frockadvisor.