Fitting Your Business Around Your Life
People will tell you that the early days of your startup will require 80-hour work weeks, that you won’t see your friends and family. But here’s the thing: You always have a choice.
If there’s 80 hours-worth of work to be done, you can slice that up into two weeks. Or rather than doing it all by yourself, two or three people can work together.
Laura Roeder founded her startup, Meet Edgar, while she was pregnant. She took three months off during Edgar’s first year—and came back part-time for the first year of her son’s life. Laura chose entrepreneurship because of the freedom and flexibility it affords her to choose sane work hours and make time for her family.
Today, Laura joins me to share her parallel parenting and startup journey. She explains why she chose to self-fund Meet Edgar and the benefits of the SaaS model. I ask Laura about her company’s parental leave policy, and she describes the boundaries around work hours she has set for herself AND her team. Listen in as Laura gets real about how parenting didn’t come naturally to her and get her advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.
The Startup Pregnant Podcast Episode #055
Some quotes from the episode
- “I’ve always been very set with my work hours: I’ve never worked evenings or weekends. I like to travel a lot. I work for myself to have that freedom and flexibility.”
- “[Software as a service is] a super-amazing business model because your cashflow is really predictable.”
- “For me, the pregnancy journey and startup journey are very closely intertwined because I was pregnant when Edgar launched. I knew I was going to be on maternity leave within the first year of my startup.”
- “Being pregnant at launch was this incredible blessing because it forced me to level up how I was running the business, and … I gave the other people on my team full decision-making power.”
- “I had to have a really clear separation between mom time and work time.”
- “The value that [my employee on parental leave] brings to the company long-term is so worth the struggle that we’re experiencing for these two months.”
- “[Parenting] is so much harder than running a startup.”
- “Work is such a luxury compared to parenting a small child every day—which obviously has its beautiful moments, but it’s very taxing.”
LEARN MORE ABOUT LAURA ROEDER
Laura Roeder is the founder and CEO of the social media automation tool Meet Edgar. Laura started freelancing at 22, and she founded LKR Social Media in 2009 to teach business owners how to harness the power of social media marketing. She was named one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under 30 three times—in 2011, 2013 and 2014. Laura launched Edgar in 2014, and the startup hit $1M in revenue within 11 months. Today, Edgar helps thousands of subscribers share their best evergreen content on social, and the company is worth $4M. She’s now working on a new product for coaches and virtual consultants, called Paperbell.
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
THE STARTUP PREGNANT PODCAST & HOST
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EPISODE SPONSOR & SPECIAL OFFER
Thank you to the sponsor of this episode: Acuity Scheduling. Acuity functions as an online assistant, helping to organize your schedule and collect client information. Take advantage of Acuity’s 45-day free trial for Startup Pregnant listeners at https://acuityscheduling.com/startuppregnant.
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