Pitch perfect: how female founders can turn doubt into deals

Founder of Mane Hook-Up, Jade Buffong-Phillips, shares how female founders can redirect conversations with investors from risk to opportunity

Deeply passionate about purpose-led tech and struggling to find a stylist that would take good care of her natural hair, Jade Buffong-Phillips founded Mane Hook-Up in 2022. Since then, she has been on a mission to digitise the $275 billion textured hair industry and has been featured in British Vogue for the work she has done across two continents.

With much of the textured hair industry operating like the Wild West, Mane Hook-Up offers security and peace of mind. The online booking platform allows people with textured hair to find and book appointments with trusted and reviewed stylists.

But when it was time to seek funding, it came as a surprise to Jade that conversations with investors were often focused on the risks of her model, despite numerous successful beauty booking platforms thriving in today’s market. It became apparent that serving a marginalised group as a female founder was classified as niche and risky.

‘You can have a fantastic product, you can be an incredible founder, you can have the best team in the world and the best solution, but if you are not able to present your product or service in a way that allows the investors to assess it, you are never going to be able to convince them it’s worth the investment’

Jade Buffong-Phillips
Mane Hook-Up

Underrepresented ≠ niche

When talking to investors about Mane Hook-Up, Jade noticed that she was being forced to jump through hoops reserved for female founders: despite existing evidence, investors will always pivot the conversation towards risk rather than opportunity. Although every founder must be prepared to address and mitigate the risks of their business model, investors seem to reserve growth-oriented conversations to male founders. Jade’s experience was that she was often met with the question ‘how can this fail?’.

There is no one single cause for this. Not only is Jade a Black female founder, but she is also serving a market that is stereotypically assumed to be ‘niche’. Additionally, female founders of beauty-related businesses struggle to present their idea as robust and cutting-edge, as their venture is wrongly categorised under ‘lifestyle’ rather than ‘tech’ for example. This leads to a self-perpetuating cycle, where a lack of textured hair solutions and platforms lead to low visibility of the issue and demand, making it in turn seem niche and therefore underfunded.

Pitch perfect

To redirect back to opportunity, Jade suggests to always address the following questions in your pitch and deck:

1. Are you serving a sizeable problem?

Jade herself experienced a lack of access to textured hair stylists even in a city as diverse as London. This was further compounded by the lack of guaranteed quality. Unlike most restaurants or businesses, textured hair stylists don’t always have Google reviews so knowing who is good and who isn’t is sometimes just down to word-of-mouth. She could quantify the size of the opportunity, but she could also talk from personal experience.

2. Is the market big enough?

The textured hair market is 58% of the world’s population. And while Mane Hook-Up doesn’t spread to all four corners of the globe, it does operate in two of the most diverse and densely packed cities in the world – London and New York. For Jade, the total addressable market is any individual with textured hair in two major metropoles.

3. Is the market ready to adopt your solution?

Beauty booking platforms and e-beauty services are growing at an astronomical rate. The UK alone has the sixth largest online beauty industry in the world and the global demand grows by 12% per year on average. The market is ready, and the rate of adoption is clear.

Key considerations

Two-and-a-bit years into her business, Jade has developed a robust formula that leaves ‘investors wanting more’.

• Constantly update your deck and pitch to address recurring questions

This saves time and pivots the conversation to ‘here’s proof that the risk can be avoided and here are the ways that we can enter other parts of the market.

• Lead with a healthy mix of data and anecdotal evidence

Jade gets ahead of risk-oriented conversations through ‘eliminating risk by comparison’. This includes data and statistics describing the size of her market and how applicable her solutions are, with anecdotal reference to existing similar solutions and their success rate.

• Never walk into the room expecting a frustrating conversation

It is always safe to assume that the investor will know very little about your industry, solution, and the basis of your business model. Jade stresses ‘we cannot change people’s behaviours, but we can present them with facts’.

• Speak to investors in their language

Outline how you can minimise your costs while still growing. The founder often simplifies financials in the interest of making them accessible to the rest of the team, but investors want to see details. The same amount of time and effort should go into presenting your financial model as it does into your value proposition.

‘It is better for investors to ask you to scale back, than to not have enough details – this leads them to make assumptions about your business. Don’t fall through the cracks because a document is not up to the standards of everything else’.

Jade Buffong-Phillips
Mane Hook-Up

Looking ahead

Jade is passionate about using her experience to create value by mentoring other female founders on fundraising, leadership, and resilience. She stresses that it is crucial to ‘find your tribe’ of people that you look up to and can relate to. As Jade embarks on her journey of scaling Mane Hook-Up, her priorities will be ensuring her pitch and deck are up to speed and address all recurring and anticipated questions, with a handful of facts, figures and anecdotes. She will also enter every room with the mindset that ‘every conversation has the potential to result in something great, so what can I do to get closer to the end of the funnel?’.

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