Today is Topknot’s 1st birthday! We wanted to have a big party with cake and ice cream, but since that’s clearly not possible, we’ve decided to celebrate by naming our wins over the past year.
Big Win 1: We built a world class founding team 🌍
We set out to work with the best, and we are. We were floored when Daphne agreed to join us last summer as our Founding Engineer. Someone would leave working on Apple’s literal best app of 2020 to work with us? 😮 Wild.
But it’s only gotten sweeter since then. In October, we reached out another exceptionally talented friend, Sarah Filman, to see if she would consider contracting with us part time. We thought it was a long shot. Sarah was a dream candidate:
▹ Pursuing a coaching credential? ✅
▹ Experience building product and developing teams? ✅
▹ The literal embodiment of our pillars of equity, intentionality, and growth? ✅
Not only did she say yes to contracting, but Sarah is joining us full time to work on Product and People. 🎉
On top of all of this, we’re pretty sure we snagged the best engineering intern ever in Miah Sanchez, who joined us this January and will be back again in the summer. 🙌 This team is exactly who we want to be doing this work with.
Big Win 2: We fundraised our way 💰
The last time we checked in we told you that we raised $650K from vision and values aligned backers. Real talk: This wasn’t a banner year for fundraising and women-led teams. Despite our total conviction, this reality shook our confidence at times. But we trusted our process, and we made it. 💪 We love who’s on this journey with us, and they’re already pushing us to the next level.
Big Win 3: We’re developing our product with our community 🛠
On the product front, this past year has been an exercise in balancing urgent action with purposeful planning. We committed to building Topknot with, not for, our users, which required us to form avenues for… actually learning from others. We are proud to have built processes that created space and time to deeply consider what we hear from our users, rather than doing everything off of instinct and research alone. Thanks to the feedback of hundreds of women through surveys, interviews, pilots, and ongoing user input, we have confidence that the Topknot we are building today serves a real need in a totally novel way.
We cannot wait to see what we’ll do in our 2nd year. Join the journey — head over to Topknot.
