Sophia Wennstedt

The initial spark came from a problem I’ve experienced personally. Since I moved out of my parents house, I have always lived in apartments or multi unit buildings. When the power goes out, I have no backup energy option. Energy product innovation so far has taken commercial and industrial solutions and have scaled them down to work for houses. I saw two problems with this solution. One - commercial and industry needs may differ from the needs of a house. Two - only about half of the people in the US actually own a home. So I asked myself, “what about people who rent their homes or live in apartments? How can we address their energy needs?” On top of that, I read how people were suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning by running generators in their houses or garages. This made me realize that this isn’t just an inconvenience, but people are dying because we don’t have energy innovation to meet our needs. People want flexible power security, so we wanted to design an energy product that fits in any home.

One challenge with building a physical product, such as a battery, is you have to make a number of large financial decisions up front. You have to make sure the product is safe and fully functional before you can start putting it in people’s houses. Unlike a software product or an app, it is more challenging to do high-fidelity testing in the earliest stages. Learning to fundraise has also been a challenge. I didn’t have a lot of experience with fundraising before I became a founder. I had to learn how to have those conversations with investors and how to ask others for money to go from idea to revenue. It can be unsettling, demoralizing, and at times feels like your fate is out of your hands. One reason why GET Cities and other partners in the ecosystem are so important is because they connect founders in the space, which helps build a community where we can talk with one another about these challenges and brainstorm with each other to find solutions.

As humans we tend to be drawn to people who we can relate to. I see myself doing this. For example, when we have a female intern who is interested in STEM, I’m drawn to her because she reminds me of a younger version of myself. This human behavior presents challenges for women in the entrepreneurial space because many investors are men, so as a woman founder, it is harder to make those connections with investors on a deeper level. On the flip side, I find women to be more empathetic. This can help build better products because we are putting ourselves in the shoes of our customers rather than building something that we think they need.

I find that in this stage the benchmarks are more fluid. For example, metrics are a moving target at the seed stage, so if you put all your energy into one metric, you can spend a lot of resources chasing a metric that isn’t actually going to move the needle for you. The seed stage is also an exciting time where you have more freedom and flexibility to try new things and take some risks to figure out what is going to be best for your customers and business.

Building a stronger network and ecosystem in the start-up space was the driving force behind my choice to join the cohort. Before joining the cohort, I didn’t realize how much I was missing a community of women founders who understand and can relate to the problems that I’m going through.[c] Building a company is such a different kind of journey that can be difficult for my non-founder friends to relate to. Also, I strongly believe in GET’s mission, and to be honest, I never really considered saying no.

The reputational aspect of being in the cohort has been helpful. GET Cities is a reputable organization so being part of the cohort has been a signal to Chicago's tech ecosystem that Blip Energy is worthy of attention and investment. This isn’t why I joined the cohort, but I believe that being part of the cohort has brought recognition and attention to Blip Energy from those who may not have known us otherwise. Another valuable part of being in the cohort is the sponsorship to attend conferences outside of Chicago, and the opportunity to travel to these conferences with other founders in the cohort. Conferences can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate, especially for early stage founders, so taking the cohort community to a conference has made the conference a more effective and enjoyable experience for me. Also, conferences are expensive, and as early stage founders, it can be difficult to justify spending so much on a conference without a guarantee that it’s a worthwhile business opportunity. Therefore, having the Tech Equity Working Group and GET Cities sponsor these conferences has been immensely beneficial.