What Women Want: Startups Targeting Females
A word to the wise, if you're going to say your service is targeted at women, it's not the best idea to leave your public audience with the final words, "Guys, if you show our site to your girlfriends, I guarantee you're going to get laid." While most of the female TC50 attendees are thick skinned from being surrounded by tech men, it's always best to leave your sexism at the door - even if it's tongue-in-cheek.
I didn't want to like Cocodot simply because of the sexist presentation remarks but the service actually has its merits. While there are a huge number of invitation and guest management platforms, none of them seem to have the aesthetics suitable for a design-savvy event planner. Very few of us would pay for an Evite-like subscription service but when we're planning a camping trip or house party, we're generally fine with the folksy default designs of Evite. Most of us just want invite tracking functionality. Cocodot's strength is that the designs are slightly more elegant than your average email invitation designs but with the same functionality. Essentially Cocodot is a cross between hip invite site Crush3r and made-to-order stationery site Minted.
Learnvest is another service targeting women. The site offers checklists, budget tools and action items for women to tackle their debt and increase their credit ratings. Through a point system and a number of survey-style questions, the site determines a path for improving your financial future. The only problem is that a collection of points is less interesting than the things you can buy with it - for both women and men. In the future the company plans on integrating affiliate and ad-based monetization. If they can find a way to equate tangible items (vacations, mortgages etc) to points, the service is more likely to catch on.
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I'm never sure what to think of products and/or services aimed at women. On the one hand, at least the needs are being addressed. On the other hand, if both male and female needs were factored in to begin with, there would be no need to have separate products or services targeted towards the "other" or nonnormative group.
I read this article and I can say that, I'd like to be targeted also for things that aren't typically for females only.
Curious - were these the only sites geared towards women?
These are the only 2 sites that I saw that openly targeted women as their primary audience.
Dana-Thanks so much for the article! You're absolutely right about equating tangible reward to points-that is really what will make our point system fun and engaging. We're excited to get all this feedback and start making the site better and as helpful as possible for our users!
Nice post.
According to the Institute of Engineering and Technology, just 7% of the IT workforces in the UK are women.
So I started my own female friendly IT training website www.ctrlaltdeltraining.com
have a nice weekend
You're right that Cocodot is only slightly better than Evite ect (at least from what we've seen so far) but I think you're wrong that there's nothing out there for "a design-savvy event planner." check out www.paperlesspost.com - I love it.
I enjoyed the LearnVest presentation, but did not see Cocodot. Are they on Ustream?