iFundWomen — A New Crowdfunding Platform That Offers Advice and Funds Businesses Exclusively for Women Entrepreneurs.

Karen Cahn, the founder of iFundWomen and formerly worked at Google and AOL, came up with this idea due to the hardship she went through upon raising funds for a passionate project she was working on.

The project that Cahn and her co-workers at VProud Labs (a women-centered video company she founded in 2014 after leaving AOL) had been working on was a stand-up comedy show about mental health and in order to get enough funding for the project, they launched it on Kickstarter thinking it would be the best way to gather funds.

Cahn told Business Insider that she really thought that things were going smoothly but then she realised that it’s not that simple at all. “We went into it totally blind,” she said.

She experienced rough roads during the crowdfunding campaign for the project so she took alternative action just to make it happen. She used all the tactics that she acquired from her past experiences like cold-calling people she knew and simply asking friends for favours.

The campaign was successful, but Cahn has a realisation — the ones who are profiting from her hard-earned sales are mostly guys. She wanted women to step-up and into the scene. This led to the birth of iFundWomen — the crowdfunding platform she started in order to help female entrepreneurs with crowdfunding campaigns for their businesses on something they desired.

iFundWomen has three major qualities that separate it from all other crowdfunding platforms.

First, iFundWomen gives free crowdfunding training and coaching for female entrepreneurs as a solution to what Cahn called “confidence gap” that female entrepreneurs face.

Second is the advantage of having VProud, for it provides promotional videos for each campaign.

Third quality — 20% of the fees they get from each campaign is reinvested into other campaigns on the site.

This so-called “confidence gap” is one of the reasons why Cahn created iFundWomen. She believes that it is one factor that prevents female entrepreneurs from succeeding. She said that women by nature don’t like to promote themselves and that’s a problem. “If we can’t sell ourselves and our businesses, no one’s buying,” Cahn said.

The “white boys and their toys” description of Cahn on her experience with other crowdfunding platforms is due to the fact that not all companies involved are legitimate and it gives off an “unapproachable” environment for women. They are also not as strict as iFundWomen when it comes to their evaluation process.

In iFundWomen, each company will be evaluated personally by the platform before introducing it on the platform. This is to determine whether the company is prepared for the crowdfunding phase, have a solid business model, and its website is ready. According to Cahn, iFundWomen receives around 200 applications a month for about 20 spots on the site.

After helping companies with a successful crowdfunding campaign from the platform, iFundWomen then helps these companies in undergoing the next phase of funding — introducing themselves to potential investors.

Cahn said that their job is to provide the minimum feasible product and proving a product market fit. “You come and raise just enough money, and if you can make your goal, what a great proof point for an investor.”