Gather Interviews Terryn Lawrence and Kristen Womack, Co-Founders of Mina Families
“Mina is a platform for birth workers to run their businesses with an organized marketplace to facilitate the discovery and connection between parents and providers of services focused on fertility through postpartum care.” They serve a national audience for their Guidance appointments, and they’re in their first market for Mina’s marketplace. The Gather Birth team is among many local founding members, and we’re so happy to be part of the family.
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Tell us about your journey as a entrepreneurs. How did you get started?
We come from different backgrounds, but we always knew that we wanted to build a company like Mina. We were introduced through a mutual friend over coffee at Anelace in NE Minneapolis. We had an immediate connection and shared passion around birth and health outcomes. The potential for working together was clear. After “founder-dating” for several months, we made it official, quit our jobs, and launched Mina.
Kristen, Mina’s co-founder and CEO, is an award-winning product leader, team builder, and technologist. She created a text message app called Hello Mom and co-founded and built a hackathon company for women and non-binary people called Hack the Gap. She also serves as an advisor to the Everyday Miracles board of directors. She is an entrepreneur at heart but has worked with large organizations such as Boston Scientific, Best Buy, Be the Match, and has consulted with many startups and nonprofits. She is a passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion in the tech world and gender justice everywhere.
Terryn, Mina’s co-founder and COO, is a business executive with years of leadership and healthcare experience. After earning her MBA from the University of Arkansas (go Hogs!), she worked in sales, operations, and marketing with Fortune 500 companies. Through her volunteer work and by constant exposure to her physician-heavy family (mother, father, sister, and brother), Terryn was naturally drawn to healthcare which led her to join a Minneapolis-based mental health startup. That early-stage startup experience allowed her to help shape the company from the ground up and work with organizations across the healthcare ecosystem including payers, providers, and self-insured employers. Terryn is passionate about increasing access to healthcare and improving outcomes, especially in underserved or underrepresented communities.
Our complementary skill sets, common values, and shared passion for improving outcomes for birthing people, parents, and babies makes us a fantastic co-founding team. We count our lucky stars daily to have found one another.
What are some of the roadblocks you faced prior to getting to this point in your career?
We’ve both faced various obstacles over the years. Although our careers started in very different industries, we both faced a significant amount of gender inequality which was challenging to navigate.
Kristen: Being a woman in tech, I often found that I was the only woman in the room. I was told to smile more and was overlooked for promotions despite superior performance in comparison to my male peers who were receiving promotions. Feeling like I could only progress in my career if I went out on my own, I launched my own company to work directly with clients: building websites, app prototypes, marketing architectures, business automation and writing about technology. I did this work because I loved building solutions for people, and of course to pay the bills, while building Hello Mom (the seeds of what Mina is today) on the side. I ran both my technology company and Hack the Gap (the first company I co-founded) and dedicated as much time as I could to developing Hello Mom and getting traction. Then I got pregnant with my second baby -- which we were thrilled about since we had tried for well over a year, with fertility issues, surgery, and a miscarriage. Without a salaried job, I lost a lot of income in the first trimester due to morning sickness. And I did not have paid maternity leave. It was a significant setback financially, especially postpartum. My first week back to work, daycare cost more than I made that week. It was devastating. It took a few months to fill up with enough client work. There were many points that I felt like giving up. But the Hello Mom / Mina idea wouldn’t leave me. At one point I was so fractured mentally and emotionally that my body just said no. I got really sick for about six weeks. I knew that I couldn’t do it all. I was close to folding everything and going back to a traditional job, but day-by-day I made it through and only now feel more conviction toward paid parental leave for all parents and caregivers.
Terryn: A large portion of my early career was spent in male-dominated roles and industries, so I’ve dealt with an array of gender-based challenges. I was paid less than my male peers even though I was often producing better results. I dealt with unpaid maternity leave and pumped in closets and shared bathrooms. I also dealt with harassment at almost every company where I worked. I tolerated the inappropriate conversations, comments and physical contact for years - because I thought I had to. One of the hardest, but most rewarding, things I’ve ever done in my career was to confront a man (who was a leader of the company and several levels above me) about this directly. I was so nervous that I was physically ill, but I walked into his office and didn’t break eye contact as I confronted him. That conversation taught me a lot about power, and how to take mine back. It wasn’t the first time I had been harassed. But it was the first time I had stood up for myself -- and the last time I tolerated that kind of behavior.
The benefit of living through those experiences is that they taught me how to advocate for myself, and for anyone else who doesn’t feel comfortable speaking up for themselves. Harassment, bias, and discrimination (for any reason) have no place in business. I hope to raise my daughters to know that they deserve better, and they don’t have to be apologetic about establishing boundaries.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to get started as an entrepreneur, but doesn't know where to begin?
Find a problem that exists, and build the right team to solve it. Define your mission and then test, learn and pivot (rinse + repeat). Build your network in that space, industry, or problem area. So often it’s about who you know and how to pull in people to help you in the areas where you need more knowledge, skill, credibility or resources.
What's something you're most proud of professionally?
Having our first investor write the first check to Mina. Only 2% of venture capital money goes to women, so we faced an uphill battle before we even started. We heard a lot of “no’s”, but rather than focus on the frustration, we chose to learn and grow from every conversation. That first “yes” -- we can’t quite describe the feeling -- but it was so validating, humbling, and exciting.
And from pitching so many investors, we also found out who we wanted to work with, and that we also had the power and agency to say no to bad capital. That was a huge shift for us.
What's the most valuable advice you've ever received, either professionally or personally?
Surround yourself with diverse people who inspire you and challenge your way of thinking. Diverse perspectives create more inclusive products, services, and companies. This also centers us to keep learning and improving personally as fellow humans in this vast world.
What's something about this work that shocked you the most, that you wish you'd known before you got started?
We thought we knew birthwork, but the breadth and depth of our providers’ skills and specialties continue to surprise us. These professionals are incredible. And the work that they do helps families achieve their goals and grow through challenges. They hold sacred space for families and are uniquely qualified to educate new or hopeful parents.
What are your thoughts on life-work balance as a birth worker? Is it achievable?
Work-life balance is a challenge no matter what kind of work you do. But the challenge is even greater with birth work. Birth work is not like any other kind of work because birth and babies, as we know, have no regard for plans or schedules. It takes a lot of effort and creativity to have the necessary “planned flexibility” to support the unpredictable arrival of babies but also stay healthy as birth workers. To stay in balance, creative partnerships and on-call trade-offs seem to be one of the best ways to achieve a life-work balance. For example, we really admire the free-standing midwifery practices where families rotate through seeing all of the providers, but then the on-call shifts are set. The intimacy of the relationship between the parents and provider exists across all of the providers, so trust exists when baby arrives.
Mina is a platform in service of working toward achieving more life-work balance for birth workers. We are building a one-stop-shop for birth workers to run their businesses and be found by families. Birth workers are caregivers by nature, and they often undervalue or give away their services. To complicate matters further, there is often friction in payment. Who wants to ask a mom who’s in tears one week postpartum for payment at the end of an appointment? No one. It’s uncomfortable. We want to make that process seamless. When birth workers have more support and are earning the sustainable incomes that they deserve, our hope is that they can achieve more of a life-work balance.
What is missing in your local birth community? What's a need that isn't being met yet?
We’re a little biased here. We deeply feel that what is missing in our local birth community (and birth communities everywhere) is one centralized place for families to learn, discover fertility through postpartum services, book services with birth workers, and be supported. That’s why we’re building Mina.
We often hear parents say, “I didn’t know there was a you,” when talking to birth professionals. We don’t ever want a family to be unsupported when incredible support is available but often unfound. Parents and babies deserve better. And so do birth workers. We want to lessen the work of business management and marketing for birth workers and enable them to do what they do best -- care for families who need them.
What advice do you have for someone who wants to have a positive and empowered birth experience?
Learn as much as you can to make informed choices. We’ve never heard anyone say, “I wish I’d read, asked, or learned less prior to my birth experience.” Learning on the fly, in the middle of labor, reduces the choices you have available to you. It’s similar to painting yourself into a corner. The biggest thing you can do is research the place you decide to birth. What are their surgical birth rates? What are their birth injury rates? The second biggest thing you can do is surround yourself with the right team to support your choices and preferences. It’s your birth -- birth your way.
What are some of your favorite birth accounts/blogs/podcasts/etc right now?
The Birth Hour
After the Baby Bump
Flor Cruz - Badass Motherbirther
Gather Birth Cooperative (obviously!) {ed note: BLUSHES}
What are three things you can't live without lately?
Coffee, collaboration, and laughter.
1) We need coffee (all the coffee) because we’re entrepreneurs and both parents of two rowdy kiddos.
2) Collaboration, because we bring different experiences and skills to the table. We riff off of and build on each other’s ideas constantly. We value teamwork above all else -- it’s foundational to our company and culture.
3) And finally laughter. Starting a company is hard work. Having the ability to laugh (even during the hard times) is such a gift.
What's next for you/your business?
We are in growth mode. We’ll be reopening up our platform soon to invite more birth workers to join (we currently have a waitlist, and we’ll be focused helping parents find the right support for where they are in their journey.
