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A civil engineer’s startup is building bridges for women entrepreneurs in Asia

woomentum - mouna aouri langendorf
woomentum - mouna aouri langendorf

Woomentum founder Mouna Aouri Langendorf

It’s hard for Woomentum founder Mouna Aouri Langendorf to hide her enthusiasm when talking about her new startup – not that she’s trying to. Woomentum is nothing less than a passion project for the Tunisian-born civil engineer and entrepreneur. Just as its inception carried her out of a particularly difficult period of her life, she hopes that it will do the same for millions of female entrepreneurs out there.

Singapore-based Woomentum is a community-cum-crowdfunding platform for women who are founders and entrepreneurs. It aims to foster communication, resource sharing, mentoring, and early-stage funding among their startups. The site started out 18 months ago as an online community with a Quora-like set-up, where members can post questions and have others answer them or offer discussion. “Event”-type posts such as AMAs (Ask Me Anything) are also hosted on the site by members of Singapore’s startup community such as Zimplistic’s Pranoti Nagarkar.

“It’s very easy to build a crowdfunding platform nowadays,” Aouri Langendorf tells Tech in Asia. “What’s really difficult is to build a community [around it].” Woomentum’s first stage was meant to do just that. In addition, she organized a couple of crowdfunding events in Singapore to drum up support and raise awareness for her community. Startups pitched in front of an audience, which then pitched in money for the startups.

See: 12 women entrepreneurs who smashed the glass ceiling in Southeast Asia

The events didn’t rake in spectacular amounts of funding, but they proved the idea could work – which was the point. “It’s kind of a validation of the concept, of how it works when you create that spirit of support and community – you can actually raise real money, even over an event,” Aouri Langendorf points out.

Journey to the East

A civil engineer specializing in bridge design, Aouri Langendorf left Tunisia for Japan to enhance her studies, and worked for local and international construction companies there. After seven years, she returned to Tunisia, where she set up her own consultancy for foreign companies doing construction work in the country. But the Tunisian Revolution, which set off the Arab Spring of the early 2010s, drove her and her young family away in 2011. That was when she, her husband, and her infant daughter came to Singapore.

That was the beginning of a tough period for her. Depending on her husband for a long-term visa in the city-state and stuck at home with no job, she started doubting herself and her abilities. “I really went crazy because to me, working and being entrepreneurial is part of my identity,” she says. “I never thought my gender would cause me to slow down just because I’m a mom and because it was expected of me to be the one staying at home.”

Aouri Langendorf started to think she couldn’t possibly be the only one facing these problems. Reading up on the challenges female entrepreneurs face, she thought about creating an initiative to help provide solutions. Working out of The Hub Singapore co-working space, she received mentorship from industry figures like Golden Gate Ventures’ Vinnie Lauria and Jungle Ventures’ Jayesh Parekh. The feedback she got helped her take the plunge into Woomentum. “In that sense, my personal story and my passion for what I do led people to feel that passion and believe in [it], and really give me the feedback I needed,” she says.

Beyond Kickstarter

The crowdfunding aspect of the site is a recent addition, having come online just last week. Located on a separate address, Woomentum.fund is a service similar to the likes of Kickstarter and Indiegogo. The idea is, a founder goes on the site and submits her business idea as a crowdfunding campaign. After Woomentum approves and posts the campaign, it’s up to the community to decide whether it will support the project or not. Even the page layout will seem familiar to anyone whose browser landed them on a major crowdfunding site before.

Woomentum adds a few twists to that formula. On the user interface side, it features two additional call-to-action buttons that encourage users to engage in more ways than just the typical “Fund” button. Users can elect to simply “Follow” a project or company and receive updates on it, or they can “Influence”, in terms of giving feedback, sharing insights, or dispensing advice.

“There is at least 25 percent of people who visit [crowdfunding] sites to check out projects, but they don’t fund,” Aouri Langendorf says. “So what happens to this 25 percent? You need to capture them in one way or another. So that’s really something I believe is going to help a lot.” In her view, crowdfunding isn’t just about the funding part, but also about market validation and creating brand ambassadors for the businesses featured on the site.

woomentum memom crowdfunding campaign
woomentum memom crowdfunding campaign

The startup is not meant to be a place where founders will just post their campaigns and wait for the cash to roll in. “Woomentum has more an approach of support,” Aouri Langendorf says. The service involves consulting services, advice on crowdfunding campaigns, the viability of a particular campaign, education via webinars, and so on. The site is currently host to two campaigns. One of them, a photo-journal app for new mothers called Memom, is already past the 25 percent mark of its target amount.

Boosting the signal

A serial entrepreneur herself, Aouri Langendorf wants to create a thriving community of female founders and their supporters. The aim is to encourage and empower women who want to try their hand at starting a business, but either lack the specific know-how or the confidence to take that extra step. As evidenced by testimonies from a recent Female Founders event in Singapore, it’s not uncommon for a perfectly qualified entrepreneur to be held back by social pressure and disproportionate scrutiny – particularly in certain Asian societies.

Early-stage funding is a particularly important part of the equation here. Research shows that less than 5 percent of venture capital funding goes to women-founded businesses. About 5 percent of technology startups in Singapore are founded by women. Aouri Langendorf wants those numbers to rise, and her mission is to give them as much of a nudge as she can.

And she isn’t the only one who thinks crowdfunding is a good early-stage funding solution for women entrepreneurs. There seem to be several reasons why platforms like Indiegogo work better than venture capital – one of which is the fact that women seem to have a better success rate than men in their campaigns by about 10 percent, according to research.

Forging ahead

The startup’s sole founder, Aouri Langendorf has relied on outsourcing in order to get the site up and running. Woomentum is currently fundraising, which should allow Aouri Langendorf to bring aboard new talent and grow the business – she mentions Malaysia and India as territories for expansion. Currently, social entrepreneur Loring Harkness is lending his crowdfunding expertise as consultant.

See: Fundraise with finesse: 5 crowdfunding best practices for the budding entrepreneur

Much like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, Woomentum plans to monetize by charging a commission on the campaigns it hosts. Other possibilities, according to Aouri Langendorf, include advertising and premium subscriptions, but those are further down the line. Partnerships will also be a big part of the business going forward, as a means of reaching a broader audience and growing the site’s user base.

“Woomentum is really targeting an audience of 20 million highly educated women all over Asia,” Aouri Langendorf says. “We believe our addressable market is about 5 million women – these are the women who convert into entrepreneurs and would be our exact target market.” The startup is working on partnerships with the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, as well as government agencies, while other possible partners include co-working spaces, incubators, universities, and female-focused communities in the region.

woomentum home page
woomentum home page

The founder expects challenges ahead, but she thinks the biggest one is finding the right talent to hire for her startup. “Having the right people on board to really execute the vision is crucial for the success for any startup,” she says. While a number of crowdfunding platforms for women entrepreneurs already exist, such as MoolaHoop, Plum Alley, and MYMFunding, Woomentum seems to be the first of its kind in Asia.

The startup’s efforts are already getting positive feedback from women in the region. “What they really appreciate, and I feel it’s really encouraging, is that they feel Woomentum is not just a platform out there for them to just upload campaigns like Indiegogo and Kickstarter,” she says. “So the response is really overwhelming, we have a really strong following of people who believe in what we do and think it’s going to generate impact and growth.”

This post A civil engineer’s startup is building bridges for women entrepreneurs in Asia appeared first on Tech in Asia.