Feminist Business Prototyping: Tips You Need to Apply

“Feminism can help build a different way of entrepreneurship.” That’s how Patricia Araque, Executive Director of Santander X Explorer, kicked off a workshop on feminist business prototyping held on International Women’s Day (March 8th).

This type of entrepreneurship proposes a restorative framework that puts people at the center, in contrast to the hegemonic model, which puts money at the center (and leads to toxic startups). How can we avoid falling into these practices? How to prototype our business from a feminist point of view? Take a look at these tips (and here we leave the session):

1. Practice self-care. Feminist prototyping is an ongoing process that needs to be constantly renewed and revisited. It’s like a spiral staircase: you can go up or down, it’s cyclical, and there’s nothing definitive. This allows us not to feel anxious.
2. Place importance on the reproductive dimension of your project from the start: periods of listening to customers, calmness, and reflection that lead to working less, flowing, self-care, and caring for others, to well-being. This is as important as productive tasks, those directly generating revenue. Both are necessary in the company.
3. Remember: you are not your business and your business is not you. This will help you respect the reproductive dimension of your project.
4. Avoid the inertia of turbo-productivism, which overemphasizes the productive dimension. This will put your project and your health at risk.
5.  Undertake your venture based on what gives you pleasure, what makes you enjoy the project. Otherwise, instead of connecting with your own desires, you will connect with those of others, and their narrative will usually be hegemonic and not resonate with you.
6.  Redefine your concept of success and find out what it means to you. Your model of success is the only one that will be valid for you. Ask yourself if you want to live to undertake or undertake to live.
7. Don’t lose sight of yourself in the process of solving your customers’ problems.
8.  Try to make the right decisions at the beginning, in the early years of your business. And remember that you can always go back on them.

Ready to apply this restorative model to your venture? Get support from the Santander X Explorer community and validate your idea in a safe environment!