Month 5 of Building Sanza
A big decision
The word for month 5 of Sanza is commitment.
It was the first time I was speaking on behalf of Sanza: through the AI at Work podcast (episode coming soon), a start up panel at the Precision Digital Therapeutics Summer School in Zurich, and through social media.
When August came around, I was 22 days into a ‘post every day for 30 days’ challenge on my Instagram and TikTok (follow if you’d like raw updates on our start up journey). Emma, Astrid and I had just decided to take a dedicated break to reset before an intense few months. A full week, with no work and no social media, nothing. This also meant I had to make the decision to commit to rest, despite a previous challenge I had set myself.
And boy was it a good rest (see me and my friends at a chateau in Loire valley):
I used to think that commitment meant that you upheld everything that a past you said you would do, regardless of whether those things still align with your values. One of my biggest learnings as a founder so far is that commitment is about being honest enough with yourself to change direction when needed.
Cognitive leadership research backs this up: founders who succeed over the long term are those who actively decide what not to pursue. Research shows that holding on to too many competing goals increases cognative load and leads to decision fatigue.
As decision scientist Annie Duke writes in Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away:
“Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.”
This sentiment was echoed when we got to our founders’ retreat in the South of France at the end of August, but with higher stakes.
The retreat started with a hopeful energy, where we all connected deeply to our intuition and got real about where we were at currently. Then some tensions emerged.
We had the typical ‘chicken and egg’ problem of:
Wanting more users and/or funding but not having the perfect product
Wanting to improve the product but not having the time or funds to do so
In my head, this translated to two competing needs:
1. We need more signal that this is working
We have some early traction since the Sanza app release (download here) in April and collaborate with a set of dedicated beta testers who get us and our vision.
We have a usable MVP with cycle prediction, energy summaries, free-text search to understand which dates most align to certain tasks, and phase-aligned task/habit planning tools.
BUT
We have not truly validated whether anyone would actually pay for this (because quite simply we haven’t asked!).
If you would - please buy us a coffee here.
2. We need the product to be closer to the vision
We have not yet released Sanza 2.0, and this is what our community is most excited about.
Sanza 2.0, or Thought Cloud, seamlessly takes a jumbled set of thoughts and creates a clear set of tasks and habits that are planned in alignment with your cycle and calendar. It’s the next big step for Sanza, and what we always envisioned, but with our whole tech function working other jobs to pay the bills, it would take 2-3 years to build what our users deserve via bootstrap only.
This is where funding comes in.
Emma had previously gone for funding based on a story. Now, we have an MVP - three talented and passionate cofounders and a community of users who believe in us.
After a day or two of thinking through this deeply, and hearing advice from our mentors, we’ve made the decision to start a funding round this week. Because we are committed to Sanza 2.0 and want to make it happen for our users.
The decision: focus on funding and community
Hard decisions are part of being a founder. So we are deciding to dedicate our focus to this funding round with Emma full time and Astrid and I continuing engagement and collaboration with our community in the meantime.
This means no more build, for now.
Our founders’ retreat gave us space to look deeply into how people are using Sanza - we saw that people who used our ‘Find Your Best Dates’ feature were planning across the following themes:
Creation: social media, blog posts, podcasts
Vitality: exercise, meal prepping, rest
Entrepeneurship: starting a business, going for funding, industry events
We’ve hypothesised that the early adopters of Sanza are ambitious founders, creators and builders. They have some agency over their schedule (either through freelancing or being a business owner) and perhaps already track their period. We want Sanza to be for female entrepeneurs and entrepeneurs who menstruate, who know that they are the number one asset to their businesses - so why would you not listen to your body and plan accordingly?
This funding round will allow us to collaboratively build Sanza 2.0 in a way that works for entrepeneurs. Providing seamless productivity workflows to over ~5M entrepeneurs who already track their period, in a way that’s evidence-based and honouring menstrual cycles instead of ignoring them.
Our month, and founders’ retreat ended with Astrid and Emma driving me to the airport, sitting in comfortable silence. We had renewed energy and a knowing that September would be our best month yet.
If you know values-aligned angels or VCs that are interested in Femtech or Responsible AI, let us know.
 | A guest post by
|