Hi, Ellen!
My name is Jennifer Edmon and I am a 30-year-old mom of 3 amazing and hilarious kids, ages 3, 5 and 6. My husband Alex and I have been married for nearly 9 years. He is a hard-working California Highway Patrol motor officer, and just took 19th in the state of California on the Sergeant’s exam (super proud wifey). He has been my rock in this incredible and scary tech startup journey that I embarked on nearly two years ago. Working 90 hour weeks to make up for my lack of income so I can pursue my dream, Alex is everything to me and our babes.
I have been a wedding planner and florist for 8 years, running my own business. I saw so many holes in the wedding industry: lack of transparency in how things work and how much things cost, couples don’t know what to do and are stressed the entire time. And wedding vendors have an average lifespan of only 5 years in the industry, before they fail or burn out. I knew the only way to fix all the problems both vendors and couples experience was to create an online marketplace and allow couples to shop for services and vendors in a simple way.
I am a doer. I just go, and I don’t look back and am known to leap before looking. I decided to take this on, knowing only a wedding planner would know how to build something like this that would truly benefit the people in the long term. So I hired a computer engineer to create the platform I had in my head, while I built the business that is known as Event Hollow. I had no knowledge of startups or that I was even starting one. I just looked at Event Hollow as a solution to our problems and that it needed to be done.
About 4 months in, I started creating the financial projections and that’s when the realization set in that I was on to something big--life changing for thousands of businesses and millions of couples. I pitched my company to an investor friend, and he saw potential in my new baby, and referred me to an accelerator and incubator program in San Francisco. I learned an overwhelming amount there, as I navigated what it meant to run a startup--something worlds apart from my small business (which I was still managing full time, planning and designing 50 weddings that year, and taking care of my tiny children-ages 18 months, 3 and 4 at the time).
After experiencing our first outsourced dev company try to steal our IP by holding it hostage until I found enough cash to pay them off, I knew I had something valuable. Valuable enough for me and my family to dive into debt to save it. Seeing as I am not a technical resource, I of course have to figure out ways to pay for engineers. I took out loans, my parents gave what they had, a couple friends came through and we got our IP.
With a half-baked MVP, we still had a long way to go before launching. I needed more money, so I started pitching investors, and anyone else who would listen. Turns out, it’s not that easy to get some old men to jump at the idea of weddings or take more than a glance at my pink pitch deck. I’m solving problems that just don’t resonate with 99% of investors (there needs to be more female leaders in the investment community by the way! A lot more.)
The most common response I hear is, “Wow, I see how this will work and change the industry. But I don’t know anything about weddings. Good luck to you”. And honestly, more than my idea, I think I was the component where male investors would feel uneasy. I’m a young woman, and a mom on top of it… I have been asked to give insurance to investors for if my “life were to change suddenly and my goals shift”... not knowing I had already birthed three kids, insinuating that if I get pregnant, I would need to have special insurance to de-risk myself as a founder.
I have been interrupted countless times during my pitches, by men saying “have you thought of…?” “do you know that…?” “you probably haven’t considered…” And the most common interjection of all is a joke--stopping me in my pitch or breaking up serious Q&A with this: “haha, wait, does this work for divorce too?!” With the most outlandish derivation of: “can I book an orgy on here?”
I’ve been told many times that women are riskier, and “we don’t invest in women-focused companies”. I have finally had a little luck with some smaller female angels as of recent but still have a long way to go before my round is full, and before I can draw my first paycheck in 2 years, and before my husband can stop working overtime.
I believe in Event Hollow with every fiber in my being, as does my small and loyal team, who are all working for free because they believe in it that much. This is the solution to the fragmented wedding industry. And I am the best woman to bring it to life. Help me tell the world about it.
You can see our pitch deck here to learn more about the company and what we’re doing:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JWvIGX2Ja-_OoZLnabI4-L0LK8SoMpesgj7jqzmxwJQ/edit?usp=sharing
Our website: https://www.eventhollow.com/
With love,
Jen