Tell us a bit about your idea or organisation

Hi, I'm Sophie O'Brien. I'm the founder of Pollen Careers: a careers community for entry level job seekers. We help them with resources, guidance and support that they need when entering the world of work. And we also connect them with really amazing employers and give them the fair job opportunities that they deserve.

What have been some of your biggest challenges so far?

Because I'm a first-time founder, my perception of fundraising was all quite rosy, I didn't understand the challenges that all founders faced, certainly women. Growing my network of other founders helped me to become exposed to those issues. I'm really relieved that I did that, because I've heard some really horrific stories of what people had gone through. I also know people in bigger businesses have gone and got private equity funding, and the situations women have found themselves in as part of that journey have been pretty horrific.

My perceptions have changed a lot, but I feel very fortunate I that proactively averted any compromised positions.  In my fundraising journey, I've felt incredibly empowered, in control, and - I hate to say it - but I found it quite straightforward. I feel very lucky, but it took me building up that network and meeting a lot of founders to who have had those challenges for me to be like, "I don't want that, that's not for me."

I've read that only 2% of all female founded teams do get funded, I took a step back knowing those challenges that women face and thought, well, do I want to put myself in difficult situations? I want to protect my mental well-being, I want to make sure that if I do fundraise that it is with the right investors who share my values, who believe in the impact we are trying to make, and who back me!

I want to make sure that if I do fundraise that it is with the right investors who share my values, who believe in the impact we are trying to make, and who back me!

I want to know that anybody on my cap table is my supporter and isn't going to try to encourage me to take a different direction than what I believe this business really needs. So that's always been something at the heart of what we do both as a business and a founder trying to raise investment.

How did you approach fundraising for your impact-focused business?

When I set up the business, I thought I was going to fundraise quite early on. I had a big vision for the company that we would be an amazing tech platform; we'd be innovating in the entry-level recruitment space, and I would need a lot of capital to get that started.

It was a relatively new area for me; my career before setting up the business was in media and marketing. I had a little bit of knowledge, but not a huge amount. I knew that I also wanted to set up a business for good that was impact first. The biggest thing I learned was actually that I probably didn't need to fundraise so soon knowing that we were an impact first business; it made me question whether funding was the right thing for us, full stop.

The biggest thing I learned was actually that I probably didn't need to fundraise so soon knowing that we were an impact first business; it made me question whether funding was the right thing for us, full stop.

I basically just built my own version. I know that sounds techy - but it wasn't really! I considered the proper solution to the problem - or at least one of the solutions to the problem using a combination of Google Sheets and email automation tools and form builders. Like it was like "oh, wow, jackpot!" This is working and I was doing stuff to help the community.

In the interim, we were developing a product that employers could use. Inadvertently, the employers that I was working with were like, "Oh, I gotta pay you for this". I was like, "Well, I didn't really I wasn't intending for that to happen". We started accidentally revenue generating!

That's sort of been happening now for six - nine months, but then got to a stage where I was just like, "Okay, we need to make this better; what we have now is okay, but it's not scalable." And it was at that moment I was like "right, if we had an injection of cash into the business, that would help us to press on a bit more, it would help us to grow, it would give us the security; we can exist for another 12 months." That ended up becoming the motivation nine months after that initial force, that I learned about fundraising.

Sophie graduated from The Alternative Funding School (Cohort 6). Want to join our next cohort?