Startup AMA with Emtrain Founder Janine Yancey

Earlier this month, during Global Entrepreneurship Week, we held our 20th StartupSac Happy hour event. Once again we had a great veteran entrepreneur come out to share her experience and expertise with the audience. Emtrain founder Janine Yancey, fielded a range of startup questions from the audience and we recorded it once again to share with a broader community.

After providing a background about the inspiration and origins of her startup, Janine opened it up to field questions from the audience.

Some of the insights include:

The journey and deciding to bootstrap vs looking for funding
Advice for non-technical founders
It’s all about the team – finding good people with experience who can understand the vision
Using outside capital to scale and grow vs outside capital to build the product
Advise on how to build something without outside capital or before getting investment capital
Finding the talent – waiting for technical partner who understands the vision and building from there
Focusing on product-market fit to the point that VCs came to them. She has said no to top-level VCs and now requires that any VC they take money from be a woman VC
Figuring out the pricing model
Advice to earlier self – reach out earlier for help, leveraging her network, identifying who could be helpful
To really accelerate, sometimes you have to get out of the trenches of the day to day and force yourself to look at the bigger strategic picture
Deciding to stay in Sacramento vs moving to San Francisco
Advice on nurturing and growing your network
Spending the time and money up front to build your MVP so that you have a product that can then attract a quality team, because “without a team, you’re no one”