- First-time founders often struggle to get access to all the tools they need when starting a company.
- Many told VC Meagan Loyst that the full tech stacks they needed could be prohibitively expensive.
- Now she’s launched a founder guide where over 50 startup vendors offer discounts for young founders.
Brooke Yoakam is a college sophomore at Boston College and the founder of fintech startup, Giftpocket, an app that allows users to manage their gift cards.
She first had the idea for her company when she was only 12 years old. She spent her teen years building up her business, and launched a consumer app while in high school. But as a young startup founder, she struggled to find everything from early funding to develop products to information about how to file taxes or find legal help.
“These are all questions that would be super easy for second or third time founders, but definitely not the easiest questions for first time founders,” said Yoakam.
Yoakam is among a group of Gen Z startup founders who had to learn how to run their companies on the fly. And more often than not, young founders who just started their companies or are raising capital for the first time are struggling to get all of the software tools — like dev ops and payment tools — it takes to run a startup.
To help get more access to those tools, Meagan Loyst, an investor at Lerer Hippeau and founder of the Gen Z VCs online
Slack
community, has launched her latest Gen Z VC initiative: a comprehensive guide and marketplace for young founders to learn about and access the software tools they need to launch a startup.
She hopes this will help demystify all of the different steps young first-time founders should follow when building their first companies.
“A lot of this is information behind closed doors to people that have access to funding, but none of this is democratized for the everyday person,” said Loyst.
Loyst has partnered with Builtfirst, a community marketplace startup run by fellow Gen Z founder Alex Bailey, to launch a software marketplace where founders can get discounts on over 50 different software tools like Mercury, Neo.tax, Pilot, Brex, Justworks, and Carta.
Currently, the Gen Z VC marketplace spans 14 tool categories, from HR software to dev ops and design tools.
For many of these young startup founders, software tools to help grow their budding businesses are sometimes the last thing their tight budgets will allow for.
“SaaS tools are always the fixed cost that hurts the most. They’re so vital to doing business that it almost feels like you need to pay for dozens of tools before you can even start working,” said Annelise Hillman, the founder of skincare startup Frontman.
Founders in the Gen Z VC community were polled ahead of time to find out where they would need the most help.
For Nick King, the founder of wine investing startup Vint, the tools have already been a huge help.”There are some things such as state administrative filings that end up in my inbox and I just have to figure out how to file them,” he said.
Yoakam is also seeing the benefits. “Having one place to find all of these resources will save me so much time and allow me to put effort into other things in my startup,” she said.
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