Meet Emily He and Shazia Makhdumi, Co-founders of ColorfulStories
I had the opportunity to catch-up with Emily He and Shazia Makhdumi, Co-founders of ColorfulStories. They just launched their fabulous new site for creating personalized children's books. Here's their story.
1. What’s the best part about being an Entrepreneur/Mompreneur? What’s the dark side?
The best part about being an entrepreneur is being able to pursue ideas that you feel passionate about and having the flexibility to do what you want on your own schedule. It’s also exciting to see your own ideas come to fruition and have control over which direction you want the company to grow.
The dark side of being an entrepreneur is the uncertainty about the future, which is exciting but unnerving at the same time. And everything always takes so much longer than you planned!
2. Tell me about your business
At ColorfulStories, we are dedicated to inspiring children to learn, making them feel special and preserving your memories forever. www.ColorfulStories.com is the premier destination for quickly and easily creating personalized children’s books, be they learning books, story books, or photo books. With our broad array of design elements and easy-to-use online tools, you can customize traditional learning concepts and classic children’s stories with your own words and pictures. Or you can create photo books and digital scrapbooks documenting your baby’s key growth milestones and significant events in his or her life. Once you’re done, we’ll turn your stories into professionally-printed and beautifully-bound coffee table books that will enchant your child and wow your family and friends every time you open them.
3. Did you become an entrepreneur before or after you had kids? What was the primary reason you started your own business and did being a mom play into your decision?
We both started the business before we had kids. After working in large technology companies for many years, we felt that it was time to pursue our own dreams. As we both feel passionate about education and family, we looked for market opportunities that combined these two elements. While being a mom didn’t play into the decision to start a company or the specific idea, it has been very helpful in terms of understanding our target market (parents), and therefore providing our customers with solutions that are tailored to their needs.
4. How important is networking to you? Do you network more online or offline? Do you belong to any social networks?
Networking is very important both from a professional and a personal perspective. When you are an entrepreneur, not only do you need professional advice for day-to-day business decisions, but you also need the support and encouragement from other entrepreneurs who have gone through the same process. We both network both online and offline and belong to numerous professional social networks.
5. Do you have a mentor and if so what value have they provided?
We don’t have a mentor per se, but we do rely on a strong group of advisors from whom we regularly seek counsel. In particular, we find it helpful to talk to people who have either started their own ventures or have experience in our industry. The advice from people who have been “in the trenches” is simply invaluable.
6. Are there any entrepreneur tools you wish you had better access to?
It would be nice to have an online forum where we can exchange ideas and discuss issues with other entrepreneurs who are either in the same industry or at a similar start-up phase. It would also be helpful to have an online platform that will allow us to post questions and seek professional help from accounting, legal, finance, and human resource professionals.
7. What has been your biggest challenge since launching your business? If your best friend was going to take the dive and start her own business, what 3 tips would you give her?
Since launching our business, our biggest challenge has been balancing between expanding our product offering to meet demand from existing customers and marketing to new customers. Before our launch, our focus was product development, so that’s where we spent our money and resources. Now that we’ve launched, our priority is new customer acquisition although we still continue to fine-tune our product to address new requirements from our customers.
If our best friend was going to start her own business, we would tell her to: 1) Go to market with a less-than-perfect product and get customers as early as possible; 2) If you are starting a technology company, closely scrutinize your product development team upfront and make sure they have the capability, skills, and experiences to deliver what you want; 3) Plan everything to take twice as long and cost twice as much. It’s a cliché, but it’s so true!
8. Do you have a business partner? What are the pros/cons of having a partner?
Yes, we started the business together and have been equal partners since day one. The pro of having a partner is that you can have candid discussion about all the important decisions and bounce ideas off each other. Also, when one person feels down and despondent, you can always count on the other person for encouragement and strength. Lastly, going through the ups and downs of starting a business together gives you an opportunity to get to know each other really well, and as a result, you become better friends over time.
The con is that when two people work together, there are the inevitable disagreements. However, we find that by airing out our disagreements and being completely honest each other, we surface issues that we may not have considered and therefore end up making better decisions
9. Anything else you want to share?
We are always looking for feedback and suggestions for our products, so please visit www.colorfulstories.com and let us know what you think. And do spread the word to your friends and family who would enjoy making personalized children’s books—whether it’s to introduce their toddler to the alphabet, portray their kindergartner as a heroic character, or preserve memories from their baby’s first year.