Startups & Brown Girls are Meant to be

When I was in my first year of college, I told my dad that I wanted to help house old people on the streets. My dad responded “Do it. I’ll help create an NGO for you”. Now the fact of the matter is that neither the NGO came into existence, nor did I follow through (weakness that I’ve worked on ever since) but what it sparked was the idea of creation. Before this moment, I didn’t think you could just think of something and bring it into existence (except a kid) and my dad’s casual remark changed everything — now I was capable of visualizing creation than just ideation and that changed everything.

I gave this “ideation to creation” a real shot when I moved to Australia. I wanted to create a platform wherein students and young professionals could outsource ad-hoc and inexplicable tasks like having someone else find parking before you arrived or buy a muffin while you had a jam-packed day and this came about when I really wanted someone to record a lecture for me while I was out of town and couldn’t find some one to do it. Essentially, it was an extension of the gig economy wherein people could choose to do menial tasks at their convenience while meeting new people around. I prepared a pitch deck for this (Google’d pitch decks) and started applying to accelerator programs. I got selected for one which forced me to develop the skills to present a pitch deck to a room full of Australian investors — I got rejected but came back undefeated for I contracted an app developer in India to develop the app while I picked up yet another skill of designing the app and we developed it in 2 months. Now I had picked up the skills of negotiating and product design. I didn’t know how to market this app so I posted about this on a few job groups on Facebook and stuck a poster on my room’s glass windows (since my building was facing another apartment building). I also designed brochures for my app and started distributing it at my building’s reception to anyone who walked past. Now I had developed the skills for shameless marketing (not sure if they work till date). I got a few sign ups, had some people run some jobs then realized it couldn’t be scaled due to competition from Uber Eats and other gig economy movers. I shut it down after 2 months of experimentation but it taught me way more than 12+ years of schooling. I learned skills, put them to test, failed with data supporting future learning and came out strong to build it anew. Fast forward to today, Amigos’ second iteration is a community engagement platform for student communities which is running in a student accommodation in Australia with over 800+ students and MIND-BLOWING data on the engagement for students.

I pitched Amigos part 2 to investors, businesses, my co-founder even and got them on-board to create an early stage/early revenue startup that’s doing beautifully in a community of inspired students. You know why brown girls and startups do so well together? Because they both challenge the status quo. We spent so much of our time complying that once our soul says “FUCK THIS” we unlock all that energy to use on new adventures. I started dreaming and creating when I saw how that translated into empowerment for me. I didn’t even think I had the resources to be employed in a job where I felt empowered, much less create a business. Who cares if it’s successful or not, if it fails miserably even. The beauty is in the fact that we believed we could SO WE DID. We questioned the traditional way of doing things. We peeked into the problem deep enough that it started speaking to our souls and then we took it a step further to resolve it in a way we saw fit. We dared to dream. We dared to create. There’s something so precious about a brown girl creating for me — instantly, I can resonate with her energy and know that she’s capable of conquering the god damn world.

There’s so much more to this story but the main point I wanted to bring home was that whatever it is that you want to create, BLOODY DO IT. You don’t even know the reservoir of energy that resides within you waiting to be unleashed — be it through a startup, a project at work, a small business, whatever it is you’ve been thinking about and never had the courage to pursue. This energy is contagious — once you get it done, you’ll never stop. Once you fail, there’s nothing you would be afraid of and once you become fearless, gosh, the world comes alive!

Link to my startup’s website for any one remotely interested in seeing that I really pushed through this time — https://amigos.community/