resurgo.app founder Laurel Anne Stark was featured on the Inventors Helping Inventors Podcast.
The interviewer is Alan Beckley
The interviewed is Laurel Anne Stark
Alan: Welcome to episode number 212. Today I interview Laurel Anne Stark. Laurel Anne Stark is an acclaimed business consultant, multiple Entrepreneur-of-the-Year nominee, and founder of resurgo.app. A long time mental health advocate, Laurel is passionate about creating a world where entrepreneurial women thrive in business, life and everywhere in between. In 2019, she founded resurgo.app, the only technology designed to support entrepreneurial women. She shares:“We do it all, and now there's a tool that does too.” Resurgo.app provides entrepreneurial women with the accountability partners, mastermind groups, business and wellbeing events and workshops, co-working sessions, a business directory, and productivity programming. Stark says: “Women no longer have to choose between taking care of themselves and taking care of business.” Her vision is to get resurgo.app in the hands of 1 million self-employed women by 2030. When she's not working on her multiple businesses, you can find her learning to surf, learning Spanish, and hula hooping. Laurel splits her time between Mexico and Canada. You’ll wanna listen to this entire interview to learn why women entrepreneurs face obstacles that are different from, and more challenging than those faced by men. Also learn how resrugo.app helps women entrepreneurs to address and overcome three main obstacles to success. And finally, you don't wanna miss out, listen for the coupon code to gain 30 days access to the resurgo app for free, just for our podcast listeners. Now let's get right to our interview with Laurel Anne Stark. Laurel Anne Stark, It's a pleasure to have you on the podcast with us today.
Laurel: Thank you so much for having me Alan, I'm really excited to be here as well.
Alan: That's really great. I'd like to start with a question that I periodically ask people and that is, can you tell us something interesting about yourself that most people don't know?
Laurel: Yes, I definitely can. So I'm a complex PTSD survivor and I'm in recovery from alcoholism and I've been sober almost 11 years
Alan: So, Laurel, what did you do before you became an inventor? Can you tell us a little bit about your background? Where did you grow up? Where'd you go to school?
Laurel: Sure. Yeah, I'm originally from just outside Toronto in Canada. I am a University of Calgary dropout, I'm a third generation entrepreneur and salesperson, and I have been in sales, basically my entire life. I used to sell uh, vacuums and knives and perfume and all kinds of stuff. And from there I went on to selling websites, and then that's how I got into tech, working at an agency selling website. So then we moved into search engine optimization and software development. And I started my own agency in 2006, doing online marketing, full suite of services for clients, and that morphed into consulting and assisting entrepreneurs with everything to do with their marketing and their operations and their mindset, and helping folks basically face all of the obstacles that come with entrepreneurship and hopefully give them a bit of a shortcut to success. And I've been self-employed now since 2006. So yeah, it's been a while.
Alan: That's an amazingly diverse background. And I see this a lot in the podcast. In other words, you are the prototypical sales person, right? Because I know when you briefly mention selling vacuums, vacuum cleaners, my sister did that for like about maybe 15 years for Kirby vacuums in Rawlins, Wyoming, which you wouldn't think of as being the hub of a great place to sell. And she did really well doing that. And that's a tough business. So clearly if you can sell that as well as websites, sales and business are just right up your alley, so to speak.
Laurel: That's hilarious. You mentioned Kirby vacuums. That's the exact same brand that I sold. And I'll never forget that vacuum has two horsepower. <laugh>
Alan: Wow!
Laurel: Definitely unexpected.
Alan: The thing that struck me, ‘cause I went on a couple of her rounds with her, and she went to do three appointments, and she sold two women, and I said, that's amazing, I said, do you always do that? She goes: “Oh yeah, that's pretty typical for me.” I thought, wow!
Laurel: It takes a lot of mindset work, and to stay really positive, and to keep your eye on the prize and not take any objections personally or not take any obstacles personally and just continue to present the value of the product and reiterate that, and show it in as many ways as possible. And that's one of the most valuable things I learned from selling vacuums and all those other things is, one of the old clichés in sales is the, the more nos you get, the closer you are to a yes. So just keep on going.
Alan: It's definitely cliché, but it's also accurate and it's very true of the inventing business as well. And so from selling websites and then your SEO and your agency, what then led you to become an inventor? Can you share that with our listeners?
Laurel: Sure. I'd love to. As I mentioned previously, I was consulting with entrepreneurs for a number of years, assisting them with reducing their assert-learning curve. And one thing that I started to notice was that the obstacles that female entrepreneurs were facing tended to be more complicated and more substantial and prevent women from selling and marketing and things like that much more frequently than my male clients. And I was just noticing that it seemed to be that the obstacles were different. And at the same time, at the time I was married with three step kids, I had the stereotypical golden retriever dog, and I was really trying to juggle between my business which was booming, I've been on the news a lot and I've been asked to speak in front of hundreds of people regularly. So juggling a booming business, as well as being a stepmom and household duties and what it meant to be a wife and things. I was really struggling with all these sort of competing expectations and the additional workload that came with being married, which I didn't expect. And I was finding that my own mental health was suffering because of it. And then what happened was, I read this study by dr. Michael Freeman out of Berkeley University, which stated that entrepreneurs have a three times greater risk of experiencing mental health concerns than everyone else. And that just blew the top right off my head. As I mentioned earlier in this interview, I'm recovering from alcoholism and complex PTSDs. I've had my share of mental health struggles and I thought, oh my gosh, this is more common with entrepreneurs. Maybe this explains what I'm seeing in my clients and in myself, because at the time I was having pretty bad mental health stuff going on, just like lots of negative self talk, crippling anxiety, lots of imposter syndromes, panic attacks. And that was happening regularly for me. And I thought maybe this doctor Michael Freeman guy knows what to do. So I sent him an email and I asked him if we could chat and he graciously accepted. And I got on the phone with him and I said: “looks like entrepreneurs are suffering here. And what do we do? What do they need? Do they need sandwiches or hugs, or…?” And being a scholar and an academic and a consummate professional, he said: “I can't speak to that until we do another study. And so I need you to get back to me in four years.” And I thought wow, four years, that's a long time for people to suffer without answers. So I started to dig into more research around mental health and entrepreneurs. And I started to look for solutions and to see if there were any mental health specific supports for entrepreneurs. And I looked for about 20 hours. My assistant looked for about 20 hours and we found nothing. So I thought I guess I better do something about this.
Alan: And from there you became an inventress. That's such an amazing story. I’d love to, just to recap for our listeners, a couple of points you made regarding mental health for entrepreneurs written large, and especially for women entrepreneurs, that there's three times as much mental health issues amongst entrepreneurs, as the population as a whole. Did I get that right?
Laurel: It's pretty close. It's three times greater risk of being affected by. So one thing that the study that dr. Michael Freeman shared with us is that there's a genetic component to both entrepreneurship, and mental health issues. So often folks who are entrepreneurs right now will be dealing with potentially a parent or a spouse or a sibling that has mental health issues, which can then exacerbate their own. So it's not necessarily that they themselves would be having mental health stuff, but being affected by, which then can of course create a reduced quality of life.
Alan: That makes so much sense. And I think part of the whole entrepreneurship game -I've been an entrepreneur for about 12 years or a full-time entrepreneur- is there's no paycheck and sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not so good, and the ups and downs and the roller coaster of working with, and dealing with clients and all the rest of it. I wanted to go to what I know our listeners are really interested in, and that is: You’ve invented an app called Resurgo and a suite of services that are scientifically designed to help entrepreneurial women to thrive. Can you describe for our listeners the key problems Resurgo addresses so that women can thrive? And another question: are there other competitive services or apps out there for women entrepreneurs that you found?
Laurel: Great, great questions. So I'll start off with the competitive services or apps for women entrepreneurs. One thing that in my research I found was that there's not specific mental health support for entrepreneurs, period. After I discovered dr. Michael Friedman's study, I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole and got a bit obsessed with the data. And in 2020, we published “The State of Female Entrepreneur Mental Health '', which is the only report of its kind ever been done. And it looks at over 200 different research reports, both peer-reviewed and informal web polls. It's co-authored by a therapist. And in there we found that what typically happens is women are treated like tiny men in the system. So there's not a lot of that we know about the female body. There's like less than 38% of studies or medical studies that have been done on women, even when the medication is specifically for women. So there's a lot of factors that are in the way for entrepreneurial women specifically, that there is not support for either. In terms of competitors, what we typically see is that you can get support for your mental health from one app, and you can get support from your business from another app. But what they fail to do is, because they're siloed, they're not looking at how your personal wellbeing can affect your productivity. And that's what Resurgo does, and I think does extremely well because for women, what we found, business is deeply personal and often women start their own businesses for personal reasons. You mentioned the glass ceiling, for example, often harassment and the inability to earn more money are factors, and women tend to start their own businesses, so that way they can pay their own way, they can make their own hours and balance a lot of the unpaid care labor that women tend to perform in the household. So whether it's taking care of kids or elders, et cetera. So a lot of the supports for entrepreneurs tend to deal with things that are pretty cut and dry, like your cash flow statement and your business plan. They don't talk about how are you going to juggle the fact that you're working 14 hours a day between the kids, the house, the school, runs, et cetera, plus your business, plus trying to show up as a partner and how are you gonna stay well during that. So that way you can show up in your business. So that's what Resurgo does quite differently, I would say, and is the reason that we started the app, because we saw the gap in the marketplace where entrepreneurial women are just not being met where they're at, and they're not being treated as if they do have a unique series of life experiences.
Alan: You made some really great points there. I especially like the phrase -And unfortunately it's obviously very true- that, uh, women are treated as tiny men in the system. That doesn't serve them at all. And I can believe that would be true largely because there's a bias in the way these studies tend to be set up. Unfortunately I'm biased towards men, it seems. But also that when you looked at other competitive services out there, what you found is yes, there were things that perhaps would address mental health, and there was other things that would address working with a business as an entrepreneur, but there they were siloed and there wasn't any comprehensive connection between the one and the other. And that what you've done is you've built a comprehensive system that works and considers and works with both.
Laurel: Yeah, absolutely. I tend not to use the word holistic because I feel like it has the type of connotation where one would not take anything holistic seriously, but it is absolutely a holistic support. So it looks at your personal factors, your lifestyle choices, what's going on with your business, how much you're earning, how long you've been in business for, and a number of other factors to give you a sustainability factor. There's a pretty significant intake form. And then we give you a number between 200 and 65. Then that's your sustainability factor. Now if you're at 200, it's time to go to the hospital, we cannot help you, you have severe mental health issues. If you have 65, then you're doing extremely well, and I would like some life tips from you. But in that number, we also give you a personalized success plan, which will give you information on some of the factors that might be in your way. So those factors could be anything from the fact that if you're on birth control for over seven years that increases your risk of suicide by 30%. Now that's not something that you're gonna get from any sort of business support. You're not gonna get information like that. And, and what's problematic is a lot of women don't know these types of information that could be absolutely affecting their business, because if you're depressed and suicidal, you're not gonna be able to show up to your full capacity or your full potential. The personalized success plan is I think, one of our most differentiating factors. And then you sit down and you speak with a licensed practical nurse about what the outcome of this intake form is. She gives you recommendations as to what areas in the app to engage in, and potential things that you can watch out for in your personal and your professional life. So that's probably the best part of our app. But I think most women really appreciate the in-depth level of human service, which is not common in apps to actually be able to talk to someone. And then also, to get information on things that they may not have been aware of, that are actually in their way. So technically the three main obstacles that we seek to solve are overwhelm, stress and isolation. These three factors are shown to impact women specifically, and a lot more than their male counterparts. Isolation is problematic for a number of reasons. First of all, it's obviously bad for your mental health, as we all learned through COVID and quarantining and staying home, that it's better to be around people. So that's one factor, but also in terms of creating a network, it's not what you know, it's who you know. Typically your network is your source of referrals, of leads, of people to hire. And the more people, you know, the more successful your business will be. And this is statistically backed. So by solving overwhelm and providing community, this is one of the ways that we enhance both the mental health and the productivity and performance of our users. So we have a 24/7 community available on the app that you can access anytime. There are networking groups. We provide you with an accountability partner, which I'll touch on in a second. And essentially there's ongoing events happening at least, at least every single week where women can attend and build and grow their network, as well as there's a business directory where they can pitch their services and promote whatever offers they have going on. So that's how we address isolation in terms of addressing stress. We look at how women are working and their workload. And one of the things that we provide them with is an accountability partner. Now, the accountability partner is fantastic for a number of reasons. I did mention isolation's a factor, talking to someone once a week helps a lot. But also research shows that an accountability partner can help you achieve your goals at a rate of 95%. So if you're sitting down, you're creating your goals and you're working with your accountability partner, you're basically working a lot smarter, not harder, and that helps improve productivity and performance. So that's one of the other features that we deal with. Let's see here, in terms of other stress managing parts of the application, we do also have a hypnotist come in and we do tapping. We also have support groups where you can come in and just talk about your feelings. And those are some of the ways that we manage the stress and the isolation. And then in terms of the overwhelm component, I've seen and I've experienced it in myself as well, that sometimes you can just get so overwhelmed, you just freeze and you can't do anything. So we do lead facilitated co-working sessions, which again, enable you to grow your network and essentially you get more done and you have more fun at the same time. So these are just some of the features that we offer in the app, and we're always looking to build more, depending on our user feedback. But essentially we assist with minimizing isolation, stress, and overwhelm, and increase productivity and performance, mental and emotional wellbeing and stress resilience.
Alan: Thank you so much for sharing that. I have, it happens I have a lot of medical people in my family, doctors and nurses amongst various ones. And I never realized I knew there were a lot of side effects from birth control and long-term usage. But I had no idea that long-term usage of birth control can result in a 30% greater chance of suicide. That's an amazing, very negative statistic, for sure.
Laurel: Yeah. And this is just one of the pieces of information that I dug up in my research report. I spent four years working on it. And I just started to look at well, okay, so I learned that it's really hard to be an entrepreneur with this three X greater risk of being affected by mental health concerns. And then I looked at how hard is it to be a woman in our society. And then I looked at some of the obstacles that might be in the way were, are like common obstacles in the way of just your day to day women's experience. And then I looked at what's it like to be a female entrepreneur. And then what happens is, it's compound effect. So we have the three X greater risk of mental health concerns, which is nontrivial. That's incredibly alarming in terms of a statistic. Then we look at the fact that your average woman is spending two and a half hours every single day on free labor, whether basically care and domestic work. Then you look at the fact that women have a pay gap. Then when it gets into self-employment, the pay gap actually increases. So women are earning even less. Then you look at the beauty labor. So there's this, the notion of being professionally pretty has been enshrined in US law since the seventies. And so a lot of women, the majority in fact, don't feel as if they will be perceived as professionally competent, if they just roll out of bed, have a shower and jump on Zoom. They feel the need to do their hair, do their makeup, do their clothes, and that takes about an hour a day and costs the average woman $250,000 in their lifetime. And so all of these things, they start to add up. And, uh, that's the main message that I have for entrepreneurial women, is that a lot of us tend to have this sort of internal dialogue that we're not good enough and that we should be working harder, et cetera. And what I really wanna point out is there's a lot of systemic obstacles, including potentially birth control that are stopping us from getting to where we wanna get to. And by designing and executing a platform that's designed specifically on, based on the lived experience of women, we believe that we'll be able to reduce that harmful self-talk and basically provide the support infrastructure and community that's required to help women succeed, based on the way that they live.
Alan: Once again, thanks for sharing, sharing all that. And especially four years of research, it's an amazing, clear dedication to mission here that you've embarked upon. And I'm sure thousands and hopefully millions of women are going to be benefiting from the results of what you've created, which kind of leads me to my next question and that is, can you share with our listeners, what were, what would you say were your biggest challenges in doing the research and then developing, and then launching Resurgo?
Laurel: I didn't find too many challenges doing the research necessarily. It was, to be honest, I got obsessed with it, so it was, it became something that I just did. I just did it all the time after working with clients and on the weekends and things like that. So I didn't find it to be too difficult. It was almost like every study that I came across, shocked me so much that I thought, oh my gosh, is there more? And it would lead me to the next one. So no obstacles really with research. In terms of developing the product there's tons of obstacles that I experienced, because that Rogain commercial says: “I'm not just the president, I'm a customer too.” I'm experiencing all these obstacles while trying to develop a solution to address them. Under-resourcing, I think. Men receive 97% of venture capital funding and women only get 3%. So in terms of being able to get funding to build a project, et cetera, that's, there's systemic bias there as well. We were thank goodness able to get an innovation grant from the government of Canada, which helped with their prototyping, which is fabulous. And then we showed women our prototypes and worked on them. And what's interesting is, there's a couple things: one is just testing your assumptions, thinking, okay, if this is the problem, I think that this solution will work. And then you show the target market or the potential customer, and they're like, yeah, I don't like that at all. Continuing to iterate what the solution looks like, and just try to figure out what it is like, how we're gonna solve these problems in a way that women are really gonna resonate with. And then the other interesting thing is that often people don't know. They'll give you feedback on what they would or would not do. And then what they actually do is completely different. So learning that is interesting. And then, I've never built an app or anything like this before. So learning about just that it's a lot more expensive than I thought it was gonna be. We got a quote for one feature and it was like $130,000. And I think along with the rest of the public, just thought apps were cheap. I was like, we have nine features, so this is gonna get really expensive. So we crowd-funded. In 2020 as well, we were able to raise 10 K US, which was helpful. But other than that, I'm bootstrapping it. So revenue from my business has basically supported all the development of Resurgo. So yeah, just balancing the time and the money going into it has been a little bit challenging. And then also I would say another piece that's challenging, is getting negative feedback, is something that I've really had to grow as a founder and grow as an adventurer and grow as just a person to be able to accept it and receive it and figure out what it means. Because sometimes feedback is coming from someone who's not in a great place and is not necessarily useful. But sometimes the feedback is useful and needing to incorporate that, and not taking it personally is something that I found to be not as easy as I would have expected.
Alan: Well, thanks for sharing that. I think one thing I just highlight off your last statement you just made is, I think is inventors and creators, our product, our service becomes related directly to us as a person in our mind, we think of ourselves as one and the other and we don't have that ideally kind of healthy separation between here's my product, I certainly feel passionate about it, but on the other hand, it is separate from me and if somebody's criticizing it, they're not really criticizing me, they're criticizing their perception of the product. But it's hard to get to that sort of intellectual way of looking at it because the immediate emotion is: they're attacking my baby, they're attacking my product, they're attacking me. At least that's been my perception.
Laurel: Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It felt like a personal attack the first couple times. And yeah, it's taken a lot of sort of emotional and mental work and boundaries and things like that to, to get it to a place where I'm much more detached. But yeah, at first it's like,I was talking to a friend about it and I was like, as if someone's calling my child ugly, I just wanna react in a non-helpful way. <laugh> So it's definitely been trying to look at challenges, like opportunities for growth, like how can I transform into the kind of person that can handle this in a different way. And I found that that's been a really good way to approach it. Like it's not a challenge, it's an opportunity for growth, I just keep telling myself.
Alan: So I'd like to ask a little different question, but where can our women listeners go to get Resurgo for themselves? And I understand that you have a special offer for our podcast listeners.
Laurel: Yeah, absolutely. So right now it's just a web app. So you can't have it on your phone. We are working on that, but you can go to Resurgo, R-E-S-U-R-G-O dot app, and click the join us button. And if you would like to try it for 30 days free, just use the coupon code VIP30 at checkout. And you can check out a month for free. And we'd love to have the listeners of the Inventors Helping Inventors podcast in the app, and in the founding members community. We would love to have you there and see how we can support you achieve your dream goals, and for your business and your life.
Alan: Well, that's just fantastic. I'm certain that you're going to be hearing from some of our listeners for that, and especially the 30 days for free. So if I just repeat this back correctly, it's resugo.app, is it A-P-P?
Laurel: Yeah, that's right.
Alan: So resurgo.app. And then there's a link where they can join basically and use the code VIP30 and they get a month free. Is it, did I get all that right?
Laurel: Yes, you absolutely did.
Alan: Oh, so great news. So yeah, that's exciting. I really appreciate you offering that to our listeners. So what advice would you give to a new inventor, just starting out based upon the various journeys and experiences you've had?
Laurel: I would say that you really have to be grounded in your reason for doing it because the obstacles are gonna come and it's gonna get tough and you are gonna need to find within yourself some well of strength and some well of motivation and some well of commitment to continue going. And that's gonna be your touchstone going forward. And if you don't have a big enough why, the how is gonna be really difficult, knowing that probably the number one ingredient for success out there is grit and tenacity, and just the commitment to keep going and know that it might take a little bit longer than, or maybe a lot longer than you expected, but to be prepared for that and resource yourself accordingly, make sure you have the right support, cuz it can be really hard.
Alan: As we wind towards a close, are there any parting words you'd like to leave us with?
Laurel: I'd just like to say that for every single entrepreneurial woman or man out there, that my hat is off to you, it's a really tough gig. And I think that societally entrepreneurs don't get enough credit. We typically are innovating the world's most incredible solutions. We're providing jobs, we're contributing to the economy, we're contributing to the evolution of humanity, and yet we have very little support. And I just wanna say to everybody listening out there, who's an inventor or an entrepreneur, I see you, I see how hard it is, I see how little support we have. And I just wanna thank you for your service in innovation and contributing to humanity and all the tireless days and nights work. And yeah, I don't think we get enough credit. And I just wanna say thank you to every single inventor and every single entrepreneur out there for everything that you do for us.
Alan: Thanks, that's such a great mindset and I 100% agree that entrepreneurs and inventors in particular are not typically highlighted in the media per se as a whole. And yet we do nothing but bring value to society. And you don't have to be per se college educated or anything else, if you just got a good idea, good concept, and you're willing to be persistent, persevere and patient a great deal and do what you have to do to make it happen. It just is huge value to society. My last question for you then is, how can our listeners reach you if they have other questions?
Laurel: I'm all over the Internet personally. My handle is Laurel Anne Stark. I'm on all the social media platforms: LinkedIn, Instagram, et cetera. Resurgo.app is also on all of the platforms: Instagram, Facebook. You can go to my website laurelannestark.com, if you wanna know about me personally, and some of the services I offer on my other businesses, and I'd be happy to hear from you on any of those platforms.
Alan: That's excellent. And just for our listeners, it's Laurel: L-A-U-R-E-L, and Anne with an e: A-N-N-E, and then stark: S-T-A-R-K. So Laurel Anne Stark, like that. So they get the spelling, right?
Laurel: Yes. Thank you for that.
Alan: Oh, sure. And then we already talked about resurgo.app, A-P-P. So it sounds like it’s very easy for them to get in touch with you.
Laurel: Yep. That's the hope. <laugh>
Alan: That's right. All right. I just want to really thank you, Laurel, for spending some time with our podcast here and sharing your, your journey, your adventure, and the exciting business that you're building, as well as an app that is very much needed. And uh, I just would like to have the opportunity to maybe follow up with you in six months or a year, and find out where you are at that time and what you're up to then. So again, thank you so much for being on the podcast with us today.
Laurel: Thanks so much for having me Alan, thanks so much for everyone listening and I hope you have a great rest of your day.
