Strongsuit Helps Women and Men Manage Homes and Families to Relieve Mental Load
This month’s Founder’s Story shares the journey of two entrepreneurs whose personal and deep analytic understanding of their market and its problems led to Strongsuit, a startup with such pitch-perfect product/market fit that there is a waitlist of subscribers for its $5899/year membership.
The story of Strongsuit begins when Co-founder and CEO Lindsey Michaelides had her first child. A high-performing consultant on a fast track to partner, she was assigned to lead an internal project to determine how to retain high-performing women in the workforce after they start families.
After analyzing data on hundreds of female performers who left the company, Michaelides realized that the problem that was causing women to exit their positions wasn’t long hours and travel–it was the cumulative mental load of dropping balls and the feeling of letting down the people they cared about.
That started the wheels turning.
Those wheels really ground when Michaelides had her second child. In 2018 she and Co-founder and COO Ashley Lambrix founded Strongsuit (formerly named Speedwell and Yarrow) to provide a career-altering solution to help business professionals, especially women better manage the demands of their lives beyond work.
Click here to learn how Strongsuit does it.
A few highlights of the Strongsuit journey
- How launching a B2B business the week that the pandemic shut down the world helped the founders pivot to B2C and discover a pipeline of eager customers.
- How a direct-to-consumer business model driven by word-of-mouth that sells $500 per month subscription memberships (in 30 minutes or less) attracted customers and investors with a less than a $10,000 marketing spend.
- How a business that originated as a solution to retain women in the workforce pivoted to serve parents, single or dual households, and all kinds of professionals with relationships that are important to them.
- How telling a compelling story that focuses on target customers will attract the right investors to any deal.
Notes from the Strongsuit playbook
- “You can’t convince someone if they don’t empathize with the problem. All the models in the world aren’t going to change their minds. When you can’t empathize with the problem, it is easy to think it is super small. Our investors happen to be all male. They get the problem that Strongsuit solves. They are customers. There are more than ten million working women making more than $100K per year. That’s not a niche.”
- “After I left my job to pursue the startup, I started by going to a startup event. That’s the first time I met the people from Rev1. It was a natural fit to start our company here.”
- “Get comfortable with failure. Celebrate failure. We have a weekly contest to champion failure and taking risk. Often perfection is the enemy of good.”
Enjoy this enlightening conversation about building a successful company by starting with the customer’s problem and working back to the technology. Lots of companies talk about it. Strongsuit walks the talk.
ABOUT THE FOUNDER
Lindsey Michaelides is co-founder and CEO of Strongsuit. Prior to founding Strongsuit, she was a business strategist and management consultant with McKinsey & Company. Lindsey has more than 10 years of experience in business strategy with experience across the healthcare, retail, and media industries. Both as a consultant and corporate strategy leader, Lindsey focused largely on business model transformation and large-scale mergers and acquisitions and joint venture creation.
ABOUT STRONGSUIT
Strongsuit is a company providing balance to its client’s mental load by helping to anticipate life’s needs, look around the corners, and manage the projects start to finish and disrupting the cycle of having to do it all alone.
