Episode 63: Find Calm empowering entrepreneurs with Anne Cocquyt

In this episode, Anne Cocquyt shares her experience in building, launching, and growing a Mighty Network to over 1,300 members, creating cohorts, and designing connections between her members inside this online community for female entrepreneurs.  

Inside the GUILD Academy, she offers members templates, practical tips, and proven methods to accelerate first-time entrepreneurs on their journey to launch. Together, we figure out the best fundraising strategy.

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Transcript

Okay, okay. Hi there and welcome to the fine calm here community strategy podcast. I'm your host, Deb Schell. I share conversations I have with community builders who offer tips on what's worked for them and resources that have helped them find calm in the community building process. If you're a new community builder or you're just considering a community to connect your clients, customers and audience together, I'd be happy to help you during a 90 minute clarity call to uh tell you more about how that community strategy might come about. You can grab a link to the strategy call in the website to find calm here dot com website. Also, if you want to learn more about community building the newsletter, you can also grab and sign up for on fine. Come here dot com. Um each week I release new resources that I'm using inside then come here and lots of really cool um activities that we do inside then come here, you can learn about on the newsletter. Um if you need support, maybe you are a community builder that's just starting out building your online community and you want to be surrounded with some other people in the community of community builders.

I'd like to invite you to join the fun. Come here community, you'll receive support tools and resources and and all the things that you need to have a successful launch, grow your membership in tackling the challenges with the support of peers in a safe space. That's affordable and enjoyable. We got tons of awesome things happening inside the fine. Come here community including including the column guides, which holds the step by step process to help you in supporting you in any stage of community building? I'm excited to introduce today's guest and I forgot to ask you how to say your last name, I'm gonna guess it's cork yet. Uh She is a serial entrepreneur innovator and founder of Guild Academy, a unique entrepreneurship program that helps first time female entrepreneurs launch their businesses, a Silicon Valley style to date. She's helped over 150 uh First time entrepreneurs launched successful businesses, bringing together leaders from over 50 countries into an online community which is on the Money Networks platform, which we're gonna talk about today uh and combines her Silicon Valley startup experience with proven coaching methods to help her members unlock their full potential transitioning from the U.

S. After working in the UK and Switzerland. Her experience spans from consumer products to digital health and Ai Inside the Guild Academy, she offers members templates, practical tips and proven methods to accelerate. First time entrepreneurs on their journey to launch uh Together we figure out the best fundraising strategies and all the kinds of good stuff that entrepreneurs need to start out in their business. So welcome and to the fine, come here podcast. Thanks so much for having me Deb and that was quite a mouthful, wasn't it? It was I was, I was, I got to say I was super impressed, but your your bio and all that I read about you, I am like so excited about learning more about your backstory. Um did I get your last name right? Yeah, it's coquette coquette. I love it. It's kind of like, it reminds me of Arquette, like Patricia Arquette, have you ever heard of her as an actress? Yeah, that's what it reminded me of, what they saw it anyhow. So yeah, tell me a little bit, I know I read a little bit about like your experience and things like that, but like give me a little bit of a scoop of like how did you get to leading this amazing community um the guild?

Yes. And you know, kudos to you for creating space for community builders like me and like so many of my colleagues who are building communities and mighty networks or other platforms and you know, at the core and at the heart my passion is really about bringing people together and whenever I meet somebody or see somebody and they're working on something interesting or exciting or novel and I have somebody else in my mind, I really want to connect them. And that's sort of where that passion comes from, where, why I started to create communities and then ultimately why I started to create educational communities specifically for first time entrepreneurs in the guild. So, so yeah, that's kind of, you know, and and sometimes people ask me, you know, where does that passion come from? And it's hard to go back right sometimes as a community builder to really pinpoint what is it in my life that made me that person that wants to bring people together and to gather and to to, you know, hopefully make that equation of one plus one equals more than two really happening.

And I think when I'm really honest, it goes back to my grandmother and my grandmother, she was a refugee, actually a german refugee in World War Two. And when she arrived in the place where ultimately I grew up around stood guard the south west of Germany, she she didn't have something that she called home, right? She lost her home, like so many people in World War Two. And so she started to create community pretty much out of her religious faith and and the church and that whenever I met and I saw my grandma, she was that she was at center of community in her, in her little town and I think that's kind of if I had to put my finger on it, that's kind of where it comes from why I really want to bring people together and where I learned that that beautiful, warm um you know, the feeling of bringing people together and creating something have something bigger.

So I hope that wasn't too gooey Oh no, I love, oh that was amazing, I loved, I loved loved loved it, it was fantastic just you know, sharing this like deeper purpose and meaning is what so many community builders can resonate with, I'm sure we all have, like, stories, so, thank you for sharing that one, That was amazing. Yeah, and I think it's always like, this pain point, like, for my grandma, it was like creating community and friends and and re finding home and for female entrepreneurs, it's it's finding those peers, because we don't see each other necessarily represented in the communities that already exist around entrepreneurship, right? Like when we see the Youtube videos and the N. B. A classes and the accelerators, they're 90% male, white male in most cases, and then we feel like we're the only ones in those communities, so while we connect on a certain level in those communities by, you know, learning how to build businesses, fundraising, etcetera, we don't necessarily connect on that human level, and that's where that pinpoint comes from, which then makes this community builders create spaces and places for us to connect so that we can, you know, um, solve that pain point.

Yeah. Oh, so true. It's it's amazing. Um you know, I was just talking with somebody about how the pandemic has really propelled female entrepreneurs, I don't know if you've seen that with your community, Do you notice as, as somebody who, who leads entrepreneur programs with helping females in become an entrepreneur, have you seen, like, an increase in that in the last two years? Yes, absolutely. And so it's interesting, we started the guilt academy, which is an eight week program where we take entrepreneurs through the steps to launch. We started that in January 2020 and in March the pandemic hit in the us, right. And so at that point a lot of people all of a sudden, you know, felt so on rooted and started to think about work and purpose in life and a lot of women found themselves at home with the kids and and asking themselves is this really the kind of work I want to have and this is the kind of purpose I want to have in life.

And a lot of them answered the question with no, you know, actually, I think it is time for me to do something that I've always been thinking about, um maybe people get laid off and then had to innovate and also were given the space to start to innovate and create something out of nothing. And that pushed a lot of entrepreneurs into our programs because they're like, well I have a great idea, I don't know how to get started, where I know a part of how to do this, but what about business models and what about the finances and what about the fundraising part, right. Or we have people that have great ideas and they don't have the technical, technical lot of knowledge to actually make this happen. And so so all these people came to us and we're looking at the guild and the community and the resources that we have free resources in the community. But then they were also looking at that particular program and said, you know what? I'm going to take eight weeks and I go through this program, I'm going to learn how to take these steps to launch my business and to monetize these ideas.

And we've definitely seen like the pandemic and what happened during the pandemic, especially with women in the work workforce and so many women dropping out of the workforce, um pushing more into entrepreneurship. And then I would say, and the I mean that's the positive, I think that's wonderful. And that means also we see more female focused solutions coming into the market then at the same time, venture funding really exploded. I don't know if she saw the numbers, but it's something crazy, like it went It doubled last year alone and in the year before 2020, I think it doubled again from 2019. And I think we have 10 x the amount of funding and private equity right now that we had in 2012 and and that really gave so many people that opportunity that start capital to to launch something. But When you look at the numbers and only 2% of that venture capital went to female founded startups.

So those are startups that are led by a female founder or multiple, female founders and that's really like mind boggling that number and you know, while we see so many people come into the space and really want to start businesses and bring amazing ideas. My heart bleeds when I see that number, because it means there's there's so much potential, that's just not and it's unfulfilled, right? There's so many ideas out there that should get funding and they don't, and it's not a pipeline problem. I mean, there's so many great female entrepreneurs out there that are pitching and you hear that from the funds as well, the funds that are really focused on female entrepreneurs, they have no issues of getting thousands of applications of great ideas. But um, the investment world is still very biased and very male centric and it's all about trust in that ecosystem, right? It's about community and which people in the community do you trust and if those are male and they're predominantly male and they come from these programs from stanford etcetera, etcetera.

And then, you know, you end up with a more male focused funding landscape as well. And that's something I'm really passionate about and I'd like to change as well by offering these programs and by offering the female entrepreneurs that pitch at the end of the programs to get to the point where they have just as strong of a pitch and a strong of a connection to other investors to actually make it happen. So yeah, I think there's positive and negative that's happening there right now. It's very, it's very interesting. I did not know that about, and, and as soon as I saw you had some background with fundraising and like that's interesting. I want to know more about that because, um, and NBC because honestly, I think there's, you know, first of all, there's a stigma at least I, I feel like, um, you know, maybe it's not appropriate. I don't know, I don't know, like, I don't know what, I don't know. It's basically what I'm kind of trying to say is I don't know anything about financing or fundraising or how to get money.

All I know is how, you know, I'm working on, how to charge for my services or my business or my community and um, guiding, you know, my clients around that, but um, to have additional funding I think is so helpful to know that there's resources out there and I think it's, you know, I don't know where even to start. Um, do you, I guess that's maybe something you help with inside the community too. Yes, exactly, exactly. That question, You are not alone at all. Like there's, there's no education built into our current education system in the United States and abroad as well that really teaches people how to start businesses and what are the funding options to do, so. Right. And so if you don't know that if that's not part of the curriculum that you learned during your lifelong education, then you are exactly at the point where you are, you're like, okay, where do I start? I don't know what I don't know. Right. And so that's why we created the guild academy and the guilt community where we give you tons of resources and templates and You know, not resources that are like 50 page write papers about the methodologies of agile software development, right?

But really more tangible things. Where it's like, okay, the first step you need to do is you need to hone in on your idea. You need to make that very concrete and there's a nice matrix we created where you can put in little scores like how do you score on these things. Is that a unique idea doesn't have market potential. Do you know anything about that market? Do you need people to come in those kinds of questions and that helps you then you know, sort through your ideas and come up with one idea you want to test. That doesn't mean that that's gonna be your business for the next 20 years. But it's one idea to test and then you take incremental steps of testing that idea. You you create a user interviews, you start talking to people, right? You don't start building something in your basement or in your garage but you actually talk to people and try to understand that. What we talked about, what is their pain point? What is the problem? And then you have to fall in love with that problem, right? Like, and then you need to see, okay, can I know create something that is, that is better than all the other things that are out there in the market, Same for communities, right?

Like why should I join your community versus all these other communities that are happening in entrepreneurship, in and FTS in parenting or whatever, Right? And then that unique value proposition is something you start to test and built with and I'm sure that's exactly how, how you build your community to write, you take these incremental steps and then at some point you ask yourself, hey, how big can this be? How big of an opportunity is this? And is is it something that I want to create in that space at an exponential growth rate? And if the answer is yes, and if the answer is, hey, I have the skill set and I have to team and I do think there is a unique opportunity here, then maybe you are a good candidate for venture funding, right? And if the answer is no, there might still be a lot of other funding options like grants or angel investors, a revenue shared types of investments that could be a good way for you to get this solution off the ground and to build exactly the business you hope to build and not put you on a, on a track to some sort of, you know, velocity of creating that business, that is not really what you want to do, right?

Because if you go after venture funding, you have to grow exponentially, you have to go real fast, you have to Like work really hard, you have to put more than 40 hours probably into the business, if you wanted to be successful, at least that's sort of the hustle mentality in Silicon valley and it's something that a lot of people are looking for, so if that's not you, if that's not what you want, then you can build their business in a different way, but if that's what you want, then, you know, we help you in the guild academy understand like all the steps, how you get to the point where you can get that funding and then grow, grow, grow and build, build a really big company that's you know, gonna touch millions of people's lives. That's so amazing. What a what a what a journey you've been on and um just offering all of these amazing things. I know you and I met through my Diy Network's um I've been following you and then joining your community and um excited to learn more as I I did dive more into your your space, um was there a process you did with with reviewing or you know, different platforms that like how did you decide on mighty Yeah, that's a great question.

So we actually did what a lot of people do, We build our own platform first and um the key feature that we thought is most valuable to our community was the connection making part, so we thought it would be really cool if we suggested who should meet within a network on a weekly basis, so it was an algorithm that said Deb and then you should have a conversation, why don't you meet for coffee or a glass of champagne or a video chat on thursday at noon? And that was basically the initial tech platform we built for the guild, we ran about 150,000 matches on the platform from people all over the world. It was, it was just business women in the beginning and that showed us that we were too broad, you know, like people didn't know why they joined the community and then business people got connected to each other based on their profiles, which was great and all, but you know, the intent wasn't clear and I think that was something I really learned, like when building communities, you have to be crystal clear in the intent of what you're trying to do within that community because as we said, right, there's so many other communities around there and why should people join yours?

And then we thought, okay, now we have the connections now, we need to build the platform and we spend a lot of time on bio frames and reviewing a lot of platforms more from a competitive perspective and at some point and it had to be somebody outside the company. This person came to me and said and are you sure this is the smartest bay because there's a lot of really good technology platforms already out there and they're offering really great features and they do all the hosting, they do all the product development and what you really want to do is create community and content and help the founders in the community and hone in more on the first time entrepreneurs and the educational program. So why don't you just use one of these pay 100 bucks a month and not tens of thousands of dollars a month for your developer team and then basically build it on top of someone else's infrastructure and because I'm somebody who also studied computer science and I'm you know kind of minority sometimes in my own ways I thought no we have to build it ourselves and you know there are certain features I want that I know none of these communities have.

I let them convince me and we tested it out and I have to say I'm very happy that we went down that road and that really helped us focus more on the content side of things in our educational programs rather than the bits and bytes that power the the platforms and so yeah we reviewed a ton of platforms and you know in the very early days when mobilized was just founded one of the people who was closely involved there. She was part of the guild and she, she showed us the platform and we felt back then, you know, this is like 5, 6 years ago, it was very clunky. And then, you know, all these platforms really, really um accelerated and came to a point where I think they're pretty, pretty good, right? Like you can upload video, you can do lives, you can do events and resource pages and all these things. And um when I reviewed my Diy Network's again two years ago, I was convinced that we should merge our community onto mighty Networks and and here we are.

Yeah, it's amazing journey and um building it is, it's got its its own Ballgame, it's its own whole show and um yeah, when you're a community builder, you know, you're already thinking about yeah, what's the competition and who's out there? Um and who do I really want to bring into the community and why? And I think those are the foundational things like you're saying is um, a lot of people miss that. Um they don't necessarily a line or do a lot of Discovery, which is kind of what you mentioned earlier with interviews with business, but when their community building, they don't, they maybe they don't have a business or they're not, they don't have a program that proceeds what they're doing and then they want to bring people together, but they don't do the discovery. So I think that that is a, is a great point to really nail um, you know, understand like who is it I am bringing together and why and what is this community and how is it different? Um, so there's a great points too to suggest to people listening here that might be like, maybe I should really re evaluate or I am really dialed in like, I'm glad I'm on the right page, you know, either way?

Uh great, great suggestions and what other platforms can you just name a few that you did review um, did you look at like circle or we looked at circle, we looked at Haif Bride, we looked at um, Salesforce has a, as a platform to, this is a few years back um, I'm not quite sure what it's called um, and then mobilize mighty networks and then we also reviewed things like facebook groups and linkedin groups and even WhatsApp groups to understand if they could be the vehicle for what we wanted to do. And I'm always torn between those that users automatically already have access to and visit on their phones or desktops everyday versus those that you have to download. And then, you know, you, you have to sort of prompt the community to open that app and it's not necessarily on the front screen on their phones.

And so it's much harder to create engagement I think on those platforms compared to you know, putting something on a facebook group where people open facebook every day multiple times anyways. Right. And so um we also reviewed a platform out of Portugal, there was a Portuguese founder who started it um, but at that point we had already moved on to major networks and um what else? There were some interesting ones. Yeah, I have to think about that. That's okay. It's no that's okay, it's just interesting. Um and I like the question I was then going to go towards this. So what was the decision maker for Mighty? Like what was the thing that sealed the deal with Mighty and um said you know this is this is it is there a feature you can remember? So there is a multitude of features that I think we're were the features that we're on our mouse half list.

Right. I think as a community ability you have to have this must have a nice to have list and we be quite um strict what you put on the mask half and then and then see what, what community platform matches that. Um, it was really important for us to have events on there and to an events with something that Mighty Networks was working on and put out a new version of it relatively soon after we joined and we put our virtual summits on Mighty Networks and that worked pretty well. And then we also wanted to host courses and classes and our programs on the platform and that's more of a learning tool and management system. Of course management system. And so you can do that on K. Javi and you can do that on the course platforms which also have a community element, but it's, it's not driven as the core from the community, but more from the course. And so what I liked about Mighty is that it's a community front and center, but then it also has courses and then in our universe makes a lot of sense because we are a community at the core and we have conversations and discussions and share content, ask questions and help each other.

But then we also really have these paid offerings like the courses, a few free courses and the groups and that was important to us. I know that other people um have for instance job boards and Mighty Network might not be the best platform to have a job board on your community platform as well. So those were considerations you're looking at and then um, and it's compared to other platforms, I think the usability is really important. And in the beginning from my perspective, Mighty Networks wasn't the most user friendly interface and I think when I reviewed it again after this person was like, hey, you should review this again and not build your own. I reviewed it and I felt like they had really made improvements to the usability, so people, you know, didn't get lost in the platform, which I think happened before. So, you know, the interface and, and the design I think are also really important features for our community.

And then of course you can charge on it. A lot of platforms didn't have that feature just yet when we decided on Mighty Networks. So now you can charge for plans, you can charge different pricing on IOS and android, I think because, you know, IOS apple takes quite a bit big cut when you charge through the app. Um, and, and you can charge for the courses and that was a game changer for us where we said, okay, it's easy enough. People came by the course on the platform and then it's all in one In one sort of box. So yeah, I would say those were the main, the main reasons. And I think um looking at the platforms to, you know, it's a, it's a female founder company and Gina is the female founder of Mighty Networks, which, you know, I like to support other female founders. So there's that and I know she's well funded and she's not going to, you know, shut down the platform tomorrow.

So I think that's another, that's another, you know, so something you should review when, when maybe testing out a new platform and it's just got a little bit of funding and it's starting out, there's always a risk that that happens and that if your, your community is really built on that platform right then it's not decentralized, it's centralized and so um if that's center goes away, then you're, you're offering your business model might go away as well and that's a risk. Yeah, owning, owning the, the content is a big deal. You know, facebook owns a lot of content. Facebook, there's a lot of challenge with people on facebook right now and and there's distractions with facebook, whereas my is really intentional, like you, you know, when I go to the guilt, you know, if I'm in your community, I'm in your community, I'm not like being distracted by other community people and I think that that's something new for a lot of people that are not in this world to understand and it does take a little bit of this, you know, some on boarding and building those habits or creating the understanding around how to navigate and all of those things.

Um, but you create, you know, you create systems and then people, you know, they'll get it and and they, when they see that like the value that you're providing inside whether it's the people, you bring together the content or a combination of the two. Um it's just a magical experience that I think that people are just discovering more and more each day. Um and yeah, my D networks is is pretty well funded in the last year. They got a lot of VC funding themselves, so um I think we'll see continue to see upgrades and improvements on the use of the functionality of the platform as you know, as we just saw in the last year the mighty Networks platform introduced a lot of new features like the lives that they just launched, they, you know, the zoom integration, a lot of new things that are really cool inside might be happening, so um yeah, lots of stuff to look forward to as well. Um how did your first, you know, how did your first two years ago? Like how did the, so so since you've been on monday, how how has it been your experience there?

Yeah, so it was hard to transition from our own platform and the membership to the new platform and that's just inherent to anything if you want your users to do something to take extra steps to sign up again. Right, that was hard. Um and we lost a lot of our members in the transition from our own platform to the new platform. Now, the question is where those members still active on the old platform or was it actually a good, you know, sort of what happens when you move, you know, you sort out all all the things that you need to give, give away and so was that a good thing for the community or not? I don't know the numbers definitely went down, but we also attracted a lot of new members because we had the new platform. So that was a challenge in the beginning. Um and then I would say it's been really awesome for our programs and the courses. And there's a lot of engagement within those, and they're kind of like in little boxes within the community, and and the beauty of that is that it's not like thousands of people trying to connect two topics that they all want to say something about, and basically there's too much noise, but it's it's very small communities within the community that are very focused on one goal, and that's been really awesome to see.

And a lot of fun and uh and kind of interesting that you would think that the more people on the platform the better, but it's actually the reverse the less people and the more intimate and more curated the groups within the community, the more interaction happens and the more magic happens in those, at least for us. And so that was kind of an eye opening experience, and um I love the fact that you can do that on the platform, Right? So it's not just one big feed, and there's there's topics about the latest N. F. T. S. And there's topics about fundraising, and there's topics about serious d fundraising, and questions about how to find your first co founder, right? Because that would be it's not relevant to everybody in the community. And so I think the fact that we could do that and that we could really bring it down to okay here is this group for first time female entrepreneurs who are precede are starting to build a company and are putting together an M.

V. P. And they are across industries that has been really awesome and game changing and and just to go back to the different platforms we reviewed very quickly we reviewed slack as well. And the slack also has the ability to have you know the channels and then to create conversations within the channels. But it's sort of this ongoing flow versus more of a you know a feed where you can go back and see resources which mighty facilitates in the different groups and in the different courses as well. And then I think a new one to review and to think about is discord and write like discord is big in the N. F. T. And crypto community and people are starting to create communities that are decentralized and they have to discord servers and then the channels there to have conversations. So I think it's something to keep in mind and to to look at to see how that evolves over time and then to see if there is a use case for the community as well or not.

Right. Right. Yeah. So interesting. Um And what you're talking about with organization with topics inside if if somebody's not familiar with muddy networks platform. They have topics that, that you can create as a community builder to organize content. And then, and if you're community plan then you can also have groups and so you can have cohorts or groups that are like smaller connections of people and then you could have courses if you're on the business plan where you have the ability to then structure the content like um, chronologically. Um, the topics are a way to organize content, but it's not or chronological order. It's, it's in the order that uh, that's popular. So like if it's a new uh, new post or if it's an old post and whatever people, if people are commenting on something that was three years ago, it pops it back up to the top of your, your activity feed, which is the money networks main feed there.

But, and then it has its own other spaces. So it's just, it's a very cool way to organize different kinds of connections and how, how you can structure it differently. Which leads to a little bit of confusion because of having all of these features and abilities for creators can sometimes be like, well that's a lot of stuff. Now. How do I even, where do I start? Like how do I, it's, you know, it's not the whole thing, but I'm like how you're, so I'm interested. So how many people are in your overall network? So we have about 20,000 in our network overall. And then we have about 1500 on mighty networks I would say. Yeah. And then you're saying the best thing that you found with your strategy is you have an open door so your community is free, Is that right? Like the main network? Yeah, there's different plans. So there's the free plan and then there's a pro plan and then there's the courses. Yeah. Yeah. So you have now what, what's the appropriate and like what? So that's the groups that you're talking about in the activity. A lot of the activity is happening in these smaller groups.

Is that what you're talking about with the pro? Yeah. Mhm. And then the courses is like an instructional in it. Do you have? Um, it's like a eight week courses. It is that right? That's our signature. Of course. We also have a self um uh Yeah, exactly. Self study. Of course. We recommend four weeks for that, but people can take as much time as they want. We also give access to the eight week course for lifetime. So it's not like even if you drop out of the course, you still have access to the materials forever. And then we give a one year pro membership with our courses. So if you buy the course, you also get the pro membership and that means if we have new templates or new guides or you know, there's a new template coming out about co founder checklists or you know, what's the latest and greatest pitch deck or an investor list or you know, all these evolving documents that we put a lot of time and energy into in terms of creating them, researching them and building proprietary like templates and materials.

They are, you know, ongoing, they're going to be updated and, and so that, you know, is also access to the pro membership And the courses. Yeah, the eight week course is kind of a signature course. Is that run multiple times a year then? Yeah, we run that in cohorts. We run it four times a year. And um, Yeah, the next one is actually starting up on February 24 four. Nice. Um, great. So thank you so much for sharing. There's so much there. Like I could talk for a long more time, but I know we have a hard stop here. So I wanted to just respect your time and and ask you if you could share, um, if anybody is interested in joining your community or learning more about what you do, where's the best place for them to go to do that? Yeah, great question. So please go to let's killed dot com. So that's L E T S G U I L D dot com and you find all the different avenues there.

So one is the community. So you can join the community for free or you can get a pro plan and get access to our startup templates and lots and lots of goodies. Also a lot of perks from our partners. So, you know, if you sign up to pro, you get access to a really great deal on stripe or any of the software platforms that already pays for itself many times over. And then we also have the, the platinum plan there, you can check that one out that includes access to me as an advisor as well. So I don't take equity for advising, but I do charge for it. And so you can buy a plan there and that's um, that's another way to engage with the community and with me. And then you can also um, find my book that's coming out on let's scale dot com slash there to launch. So the book's called there to launch many NBA for first time entrepreneurs and it summarizes all the learnings from the 150 entrepreneurs that I've taken through the program so far and from my own startups and from advising and mentoring other startup ecosystems, like the german accelerator or spice mix or, you know, multiple different ecosystems and universities in the United States.

And so there was our, the main areas where you can get access to the guild, the guild community and then if you want to see how to engage with me personally or if you're interested in booking me for speaking engagement or workshop, you can go to an coquette dot com. So that's just my name dot com. Very good, wow so much there. Oh my goodness, thank you. Can I ask you one real quick question, What's the guild? Where did that name come from? Did you have a back story behind the name? Yes, thank you for asking. So we thought about the guild as a medieval guild and in the medieval times in europe, people came together, craftsmen usually came together to form guilt where there were novices, but also masters and they all kind of taught each other um, the trade and then they also advocated for each other and lobbied for for their rights and um, and policies within the towns that they were established.

And so we thought that was a beautiful concept that we like to bring to our community where there are novices and there are masters and we all help each other in inserting businesses and growing our businesses and also in advocating for female entrepreneurs in the ecosystem. That's still, as I mentioned, unfortunately very biased towards male founders. And so that was the, the story of why we started the guild and why we called it the guild. Mm I love that. Thank you for sharing. And yeah, it is. But I think in the next couple of years we're gonna see limit on female entrepreneurs explode honestly, because of your work and of so many others that are just stepping up and saying, you know, I want to be a leader and why can't I do this? Like what, you know, why aren't we represented? Because I think that's going to be big in the next couple of years for sure. Um, so I'm glad you're a part of that and the work you're doing is super important to bring females into the entrepreneurial world. So thank you.

Absolutely. Well thank you for all the great work you do, creating communities. Yeah, I love community and I'm so glad you're here. Uh, so thank you again. If everybody's listening, there will be some show notes with links in to check out all of the amazing resources and mentioned until the next time. I hope you're finding calm in this day, evening, morning, afternoon, wherever it is, whenever it is for you find calm, take care and I'll talk to you the next time. Bye. Yeah.