How This Entrepreneur
Raised $28,000 Using Airbnb to Fund Her Startup
Original post by Mark Suster via BI
Tracy DiNunzio isn’t your typical Silicon Valley startup founder. She’s a painter and a self-proclaimed Bohemian. She did her first tech startup after the age of 30. And she didn’t start her company in Northern California.
Tracy built her company, Recycled Media, out of necessity. She hasn’t raised any venture capital. She drove her company to profitability before paying herself a modest salary.
She leveraged herself and even sold many of her possessions to get started. And when her assets were tapped she rented out her bedroom and even her couch on Airbnb to afford her year-one operations. More on that later.
She actually IS the prototypical entrepreneur. Just not the kind you would initially read about on TechCrunch. That may soon change. And that’s what I love about her narrative. It represents the great majority of entrepreneurship and eschews the fairytale rags-to-VC-riches stories we so often read about in the press.
Here’s what I learned about Tracy:
1. She started her business from a personal need
Tracy was an artist throughout her 20′s but she watched her then husband found a tech startup. She learned at the kitchen table as so many spouses do. After some encouragement from him she decided to launch her own website – Recycled Bride. This was the first in her string of web properties.
The idea came from having been recently married herself and seeing how expensive it can be to buy a new wedding dress. So many women aspire to wear Vera Wang, but few can really afford the dresses. Weddings are a bit like college degrees – they often set you back financially for many years after the event.
