In the manner of “The three mistakes of my life” and “Three Idiots”, as the year 2023 winds to a close, I sit down to write about the three things we did this year at FlexiBees.
Now founders will go on and on about how hard they work, and some may even claim to have done more than three things in one DAY! Far be it from us to pop this self-serving bubble, all we mean by this three thingscx business - is that in the no-nonsense way that hindsight has, all the things we did and didn’t do, that we accomplished and didn’t, appear to have been slapped together into three clean arcs.
The first to make it on the list of our big actions for the year, the most difficult of them all, was..
Waiting…
Yes you read that right.
Good news first. A fund-raise is on the horizon..
..and has remained on the horizon for most of this year.
We have always been the kind of founders who believe that businesses, first and foremost, should have revenue and horror of horrors, a margin too. So FlexiBees has had both since day 1, but somewhere along the way we realized that to serve the scale that we think is possible and needed in this space, we would need external capital.
So we raised our first round a couple of years ago and closed our second round earlier this year.
However, for reasons beyond our control, a procedural delay, a regulatory hurdle, or as the cynical would say - a regular day at the businesses - for a large part of the year, we were not able to take the money in.
And this unusual situation tested us in a variety of ways.
Entrepreneurs love motion. More than anything else, they are doers. Forward or at times even backwards, we thrive on action, we learn from it, we are addicted to it. And so those long months of limbo, as far as the fund-raise process is concerned, were hard.
However, like all else, it had a silver lining.
(A word to the wise - founders are compulsively and recklessly programmed to find silver linings that would elude most of humanity, so believe it at your own peril).
Ah yes, the silver lining.
In simple terms, we were standing in place for most of this year. And when you are stuck, you think. You think about why you started and why you should go on. You question the choices you made, the assumptions you thought were set in stone.
Most importantly, you learn to deal with the mental see-saw of emotions.
In those months, we self-soothed, compartmentalized, made and executed back-up plans and then back-ups to those - until each of us were walking around with a mesh of plans branching outwards from the fertile soil in our heads, like Antlers in the wild.
Through it all, we become even more convinced of our right to exist and our capability to grow.
Because we survived and we held - in our minds as in the business. With increased work-load (all those back-ups!), with reduced spends, but with the same team, holding on and holding together.
And finally, as all things must pass - pertinacious kidney stones and similarly obstinate regulatory hurdles - this particular obstacle has also now been overcome. Fund-raise back on track, the first few months of 2024 look promising and we wait with open arms for a downpour of winter rain.
We Dug Deep
This year has been about going back to the basics. As marketing budgets had to keep dwindling, we fell back on the resources that were truly our own, our vision and our skills.
We started with writing and publishing our own book! On a tight timeline and a small budget, but with loads of heart nevertheless.
And seeing the world again through the eyes of the women whose stories we told, was a moving experience, even for us who have worked in this space for a few years now. It was both emotional and validating, reminding us of why we had started and showing us how far we had come.
Nothing like seeing your vision in physical form being sold on Amazon, eh? Highly recommend it!
We also mined for gold, or its equivalent for small businesses, leads, like our life depended on it (and it did). We set big goals, made channel-wise targets, experimented with trial plans, and brought it all together in the form of trackers and collaterals to achieve unprecedented results.
Already frugal to begin with, this year made us hone it to an art form, as we continually thought of new ways to reach new and existing audiences.
And we fully intend to carry this mindset to the years that stretch ahead of us, greener and more abundant though they may be.
And we reached a few milestones
It would be amiss of us to not acknowledge that this year too came with its own achievements, despite our struggles and all the sweeter for it.
We got selected as one of the 26 startups in the AWS-Lightspeed backed AccelerateHer, which was a wonderful experience from top to end. Having done the circuit of accelerator programs, I would say that this one is a cut above the rest, in how founder-focused it is, and in the wonderful people we met there.
We hit and passed the 700 clients billed mark.
More than the revenue-value of this number, what fills us with joy and hope is the fact that we have given 700 businesses amazing women talent, many of whom are returning to work and almost all of whom work flexibly in complete alignment with their life needs.
All through we have received many heartfelt notes from our clients who have benefitted from our offerings and some feedback too, that we welcome wholeheartedly as it makes us better.
The universe has been kind to us and we want to pay it forward. Aided by the unprecedented acceptance of remote work today, we intend to take this movement and turn it into a revolution - where each and every woman in the knowledge economy and in any part of the world, has the ability to participate in paid work.
And a final milestone to make this list, and that touched all our hearts in the way that small, everyday things do, was when someone mentioned FlexiBees to me, not knowing I that was one of the founders.
Aaaand that’s a wrap.
We have built this company - with our hearts, minds and imaginations. With our guts.
It has not been easy and nothing worth doing ever is. But that is the entrepreneurial itch, to make the impossible possible, to leave the world a little better, a little easier, with a little bit of ourselves in it.
So here is wishing all you intrepid entrepreneurs an eventful and fulfilling 2024. May it be a year of growth, a year of growing; a year full of wonder and wonderful things.
