SkinnyScoop founders Erin Crocker and Eden Godsoe
We are hooked on the TheSkinnyScoop, an online surveying tool for women. While our first impression of this website was, ”It’s just another resource for women who over-engineer parenting,” the SkinnyScoop is more than we thought. For starters, the site sets itself apart from other resources that feed on mothers’ insecurities. SkinnyScoop provides information direct from other women without any editorializing or product pitches. And, it goes beyond parenting and poses questions like “Have you ever hit the glass ceiling at work?” (Okay, so we posted that one.)
As SkinnyScoop founders Eden Godsoe and Erin Crocker point out, when it comes to most family and household decisions, women call the shots. At SkinnyScoop, they can find and share information to make sure they spend wisely – and as you know, we are big fans of women using their purchasing power for good not evil.
Says Godsoe, “The whole idea behind SkinnyScoop is that women seek out the advice of other women for our purchase choices and other major decisions. We want to know how our girlfriends and other women we respect have tackled the same issue or purchase.”
Godsoe and Crocker met when they were roommates at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Crocker is a fact finder. She researches everything from vacation destinations to strollers to healthy food choices and she likes sharing her findings and helping other women. Godsoe, on the other hand, is perfectly happy to rely upon the research other women conduct and go with the choices of her ”go-to” girlfriends. Following careers in technology, banking and parenting, they launched the site together at the end of 2009.
“We believe the differences in our backgrounds and our personalities is one of the key success factors to both SkinnyScoop and our friendship,” says Godsoe.
We recently caught up with the ladies of the Scoop and asked them a few questions about their foray into entrepreneurship.
Q. What are the biggest challenges you face as working mothers?
A. It’s always tough to balance work and home life and we don’t profess to have found the magic potion. In fact, while Eden feels good about her work-life balance, Erin struggles with it. What is interesting is that Eden has always worked full-time outside the home and puts in about 80 hours per week on SkinnyScoop while raising 2 young children; Erin was a stay-at-home mom to her 2 children for 7 years before launching SkinnyScoop and currently works part-time at SkinnyScoop. There is no target ratio of work hours to family hours that results in the right work-life balance. Eden has always accepted that there is no perfect solution and that the whole discussion around work-life balance puts undue pressure on working women. Once you take away guilt and find a way to live in the moment – be that a business meeting or playtime with the kids or date night with a partner – you will be happier.
Q. As women entrepreneurs, what are your biggest challenges?
A. We face the same challenges that any entrepreneur (male or female) faces, including staying focused yet being flexible, building a strong team, attracting early funding, growing our traffic while also driving revenues, etc. At the same time there are additional challenges as female entrepreneurs. We find it surprising that while there is a lot of focus on the mom space (everyone from large companies to start-ups seems to have (finally) figured out that women hold the purse strings and collectively spend over $2 trillion per year on household-related goods and services), female entrepreneurs are still not getting funded. Many “mom-focused” online companies – from social networks for moms to e-commerce companies targeting women – were started by and are run by men, often men who don’t have children. We believe that a company like SkinnyScoop, where authenticity and trust are key, could only be founded by two women. To that end, being female entrepreneurs is an advantage.
Q. Ninety percent of venture money flows to men. What advice do you have for women seeking capital?
A. Most of our advice applies to men as well as women – find a good co-founder, implement a lean approach, iterate quickly, leverage your network, raise more rather than less money, etc. There are definitely unique challenges we female entrepreneurs face when raising capital. First, most angels or VC partners are male and tend to fund entrepreneurs like them or companies they understand. Second, women (in general) tend to present with less confidence and do a poorer job of selling the vision and opportunity even when its big. To overcome these obstacles, we heavily leveraged the network we had developed over the years of working in Silicon Valley and while going to Stanford Business School. We built this network up over 15 years and we highly recommend doing the same well in advance of starting a company. We also took a very confident and “this is big” approach from the get-go. You need to put your business into tangible terms like revenue potential and exit strategy. It’s still a man’s world but that doesn’t need to stop us.
Q. What has been the funniest, most surprising or most outrageous question asked on The SkinnyScoop?
A. Here are some of our favorites:
Funny: Would you want to look like Madonna at 50 years old?
Surprising: Have you ever spanked your child?
Risque: Are you sometimes afraid to cuddle as it will lead to sex?
Practical: Are you happy with your work-life balance?
Pop over to SkinnyScoop and answer our question: Do you think a woman will be elected president in your lifetime?
Tuesday on my lunch break I bought a pair of navy BCBG ballet flats at DSW. Originally $98 they were marked down to $25. And then I threw them in the trunk of my car. And I left them there until later that night, after everyone in the house had gone to sleep. Then I snuck them inside and slid them into the closet next to my brown, grey and leopard ballet flats.
