A fintech founder kept pivoting her product based on investor advice until a mentor told her to trust her different perspective as a woman. She started daily mirror affirmations calling herself CEO, and learned that gut instinct isn't guessing—it's checking decisions against your actual values and why you started.
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I used to be wake up every day and be like, I can't do this basically. Like and I'm insecure to even say that out loud, but I did. I got a lot of opinions, which I feel like as a female founder, it's really easy to listen to a lot of people and a lot of opinions from Wall Street tech because I was new to starting a fintech app. So I would just listen to everyone and I'd be like, oh well, this investor said I should do this, so I'm going to do that. And then someone else would tell me something different and I'd completely pivot. And then one of my mentors was like. your advantage as a female founder is that you think differently than all of these people. That's true. You know? And so like you really need to trust your intuition. Yeah. And like trust yourself a little bit. So I would actually look in the mirror in the morning and be like, I'm a founder, I'm a CEO. Like, Marianne Pippen's going to the moon. I would literally say that in the mirror every day. And I felt so corny doing it.
Like a poster with, you know, a little kitten hanging. Yeah, exactly.
I was like, oh my gosh, this is embarrassing. But it actually transformed my confidence.
Looking back at my own career, the stupidest decisions I made, every single time, it's because I thought somebody was smarter than me. I better listen to them because they know more and I'm dumb. And even though it doesn't feel right, they know more than me. And close to 100% of the time, I wish I trusted my gut. Because your gut isn't telling you what to do. Your gut is checking your values. And so, you might get advice that you may or may not agree with, but your gut is saying, this aligns with your value.
