Building a Marketplace for Women-Owned, Home-Based Businesses with Sara Sparhawk & Lyn Johnson

In this week’s podcast episode, Emily chats with Lyn Johnson & Sara Sparhawk, the co-founders and creators of West Tenth, a venture capital backed app and movement to support more women-owned, home-based businesses in local communities all across the country. By simply downloading the app, you can shop the talents of women in your neighborhood like to find a homemade pie for your thanksgiving dinner or a tutor for your middle schooler.

Sara & Lyn got their start in finance together in New York City but went their separate ways, Sara to the tech startup world in Silicon Valley and then on to Amazon while Lyn stayed on the East Coast and worked her way up to CFO of a financial advisory firm. After Lyn made the decision to go back to graduate school, she started considering the idea of starting her own business and reached out to Sara to partner up. They both were passionate about closing the gender wealth gap and putting more money into women-owned businesses so they ideated until they landed on the idea for West Tenth: a marketplace that would allow women to monetize their talents and the average person to put more dollars into women-owned businesses in their community.

Lyn & Sara offer up an honest look at their story on the podcast today, chatting about what it was like to build an MVP (minimum viable product), raise capital from friends and family before finding a VC that they aligned with, and a recent holiday campaign they did to put more dollars into women-owned businesses (‘tis her season).

Tune in for topics like:

  • Gender wealth gap - what it is and how it’s different from the gender pay gap

  • How to use West Tenth as a customer and a seller

  • The growing pains that come with scaling your business

  • Why the standards for women today are impossibly high

  • How West Tenth allows women to turn domestic skills into profit

  • The unexpected connection that led to the right Venture Capital firm

  • What’s next for West Tenth

Links from the episode:

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Show NotesEmily Steele