Christy Laurence is Founder of Plann, an Instagram management tool. Having won both our 2016 Best Boostrapped Startup AND Startup Founder of the Year award, she’s now accelerated her startup into Silicon Valley. We caught up with Christy to see what she’s been up to since StartCon!
Can you please tell us a bit about Plann, and how you got started?
Plann is a complete Instagram management and visual planning app, it’s a beautiful productivity tool that really understands how Instagram works for growing a business!
Instagram is such a highly visual channel – Plann helps by getting you organised, dragging and dropping images, filters everything consistently and helps you create a thoughtful posting strategy, all before you post live! (yes, including Instagram Stories).
I had the idea for Plann while I was literally lying on the floor of my apartment painting. I had been using Instagram to sell artwork and I hated that I couldn’t have the exact control I wanted over thebranding of my gallery, being able to check my analytics and have somewhere I could easily store my hashtag sets. I knew all of my friends were having the same problem!
I figured – hey! Someone is actually going to make this app – why can’t it be me!
How has winning StartCon’s Best Bootstrapped and Startup Founder of the Year awards helped you accelerate Plann?
As a solo-founder it can be really hard to take a step back and acknowledge the work you’re doing, there’s no-one else to high-five (or freak out with when things go wrong!) so winning the two awards at the event was a huge personal validation for me.Winning Best Bootstrapped award created interest from investors, however Plann had only been alive for 3 months when we won and I felt funding was a little too premature at that exact time, so I had a few initial conversations and then decided to bootstrap a little longer and wait to see what happened.
Comparing to where you were a year ago to now, what have been the biggest turning points that have taken you to Silicon Valley?
Since last year, Plann has grown a significantly higher user-base and is now in over 50 countries (mostly from the US), we’re still bootstrapped and have spent $0 on advertising.
I’ve built out a very small international team to work with and we’re all really excited to work together every day!As a first time founder I needed to extend my skillset so I put myself through a ‘Pitch Ready’ night school with ELEVACAO to make sure I knew my business, numbers and tech inside out before having big conversations.
They say the harder you work the luckier you get, and Pitch Ready indirectly led me to a mentorship with Julia Wells from Founders for Founders. Julia has an indescribable amount of knowledge after working in startups (including Dropbox & WhatsApp) and invited me to San Francisco to experience the eco-system here, to form partnerships with other founders in similar spaces and absorb knowledge like a sponge!One of the highlights so far was definitely a meeting she set up for me at Instagram HQ! They actually have a wall dedicated to cats!
What is in the future for Plann?
Being in Social Media AND Tech, things move very quickly however our mission hasn’t changed.We’re aiming by mid 2018 to have helped over 200,000 people understand how to build, grow and flourish an online business, and we’ll be building our platform into something that really helps bridge the knowledge gap between brands and how to use social media strategically to stop so many failing.
Do you have any tips for anyone in the early stages of their Startup?
The amount of grit, determination and ability to talk about what you do all day is going to require some serious passion, make sure you really love what you do and who you are doing it for!
Startups – especially in the early stage! – are stressful, and scary (there’s always a fire to put out!) but it’s also an amazing adventure of personal growth.
Do your APPsolute best to find the fun in the journey, and stay insatiably curious.
Our 2017 Australasian Startup Awards are now open for public voting! Vote for the entrepreneur, startup & company you think deserves to be recognised this year.
You can vote once a day until Nov 17!
