Assiye Süer and Jitte Sjösäter - Bridge to Women's Safety

It's super important that we aren't too similar. I would only say we are each other's differences and that's super good to have. I'm very like, oh let's do this, let's do that, let's do this, whereas she is more thinking about things and being yeah maybe we should wait with that thing right now and I'm all over the place all the time and she's way more organized than I am

And that's just good that we are different in that way so we can weigh each other out.

Our featured guests today are the co -founders of Sphere, an impact tech company founded around the mission of realizing a world where women can be safe. Yitta and Asi, it's a great pleasure to have you returning as our featured guest today. Thank you so much for sharing this leg of your journey with us.

No, thank you for allowing us to come on mic and sharing our journey. We're super excited.

We really appreciate it. I realized we haven't spoken since August 2022. So I know that's a lot to catch us up on, but I was wondering, what are some of the biggest success points and biggest barriers in your journey that kind of stick out to you? And you can obviously answer that however it makes sense to you.

Yeah. Do you want to go ahead, Astrid, or should I?

Well, we can start with, well, we have encountered many barriers and so on. For instance, we've changed the CTO. So we have a new one, which is awesome, but we had trouble with finding one from the beginning and keeping the old CTO in the team to leave for several reasons. But now we have a new CTO and we are developing the app. We have a beta app now and people are testing it and we're going through the bugs and so on. Still, the app is still buggy and we're just glad that we found a CTO in the end. So

The biggest variables for us has been the team construction. and probably doing this all without any investments and so on and so forth has been more challenging than we ever expected. If we look back, all the things we set out to do was way more complicated than we initially thought. And that has led us to changing up the team, actually a few times since last time we spoke. I would say what really set everything off was that we had an investor who signed a deal with us, promised us money, and so on and so forth. That led to our former CTO, he wanted to quit his part -time job. So he did so, and then the investor never really fulfilled his promise. He never wired us any money, which took a huge toll on us. And that myth for our CTO went into what we call the small depression and decided to leave the team, which was in a very unfortunate event because we were about to launch our first version of the app at that very point. In all this, he lost the keys to our code, so we literally had to rebuild the entire app from scratch when he left the team, which was, sorry English, but shit show, to be honest. That was just a slippery slope all that year.

And then last year, we built the app, we launched the beta, but we realized our CTO or the person leading it was not mature enough to lead an actual organization. He was a super good programmer, a super lovely person, but he wasn't really ready to manage other people and that's what we needed. So was it two, three days, we signed a new contract with a new CTO who's been working in a public traded company before and has built startups before. So we learned so much in just failing with a lot of things. I mean, I would say the biggest success for us is that we still hear me and Asli, we still live in this dream, we still work tirelessly day and night just to make sure that we will be able to launch this app this summer.

So I think that's the biggest success that we realized that we two together can go through thick and thin and still come out being positive. And that's what I'm super happy for because I know that if we could get through this, we can get through anything in the future as well.

Yeah, definitely.

That's so interesting. Thank you so much for sharing all that. I can't imagine the difficulties of having to go through those changes, including the founding team. That's incredibly draining emotionally and intellectually and everything. That's so, so hard.

You got to find that motivation again when that happens and it can be difficult when you have so much so many things to do the company needs to be running yeah losing

the keys to the code as well unbelievably hard i guess you guys just knew what you're working on is so important that you couldn't just give up you couldn't just stop right and i think that's phenomenal and i think It shows the strength that you have to be able to have worked through that scenario. Could I ask, because it's such a senior position, CTO, how do you go about recruiting someone into that kind of role?

Actually, this is the first time we did it the right way. We are lucky that we have had so many volunteers working for us, building various things, or at least they have done the UX design and all that for the app. Since we have recruited so many volunteers, some have been super good. A lot of them has been not that good. It's not that they're not good in the sense that they can't do the things that they're asked to do. It's rather that they sign up for doing things and then they kind of leave because they got something other more interesting. So we learned a lot from that and Minas said this time when we recruit someone, let's be smart about it.

let's not just go for a 25 -year -old guy or girl just fresh from university. Let's go for someone who can actually build a team, who can actually manage, who has proven himself being a good communicator within other tech teams. Because for us, the most important thing for a CTO in this early stage is that he or she can walk us through what they are doing on the tech side since well, I'm not a techie, Asi is a half techie, but none of us writes code that much. So we really needed someone who could communicate. We also needed someone who was bold enough to actually make the people that we will hire in the future feel comfortable, but also help them develop themselves. And in order to do that, you kind of need to have hold a similar position before. So we basically went out on LinkedIn and a tech startup job application site here in Scandinavia with the Nordics and said that we were looking for CV and we

emphasized just the communication part. Then we just went through all these interviews, share the code with them. We really wanted them to explain to us what they wanted to do, because if they can't explain the things that they want to do and how they want to do it, we were like, okay, we can't work with them because we've seen that before. Amazing coders, but not without the ability to explain things. So that was the biggest focus throughout the interview process. So do you want to add something?

You covered everything. So yeah, and also we were searching for someone who can communicate, it, which is very important because we have had that problem before, common amongst tech people to not be that good with communication, maybe. I've heard it, yeah.

At least in our

experience.

Yeah, exactly. Being able to kind of set the standards for, you know, how does your company communicate, you know, set the standards for the company culture that you're hoping to create. It sounds like you guys have gone through some of the throws of that. And that's amazing that you've come out realizing that the two of you are such a good team. And I'm sure, you know, it's not just anyone that can kind of enter into that fold at this point. I know we talked a little bit about this last time, but I have a feeling that you're going to have somewhat of a different answer. Like, what do you think are the key ingredients of a good founding team? Are there certain characteristics that, you know, someone that is part of the co -founding team really needs to have.

Yeah, we can all say communication. That's the first. But I also think it's super important that we aren't too similar. Because me and Asi are very, I would only say we are each other's differences sometimes. And that's super good to have. I'm very like, oh, let's do this, let's do that, let's do this, whereas she is more thinking about things and being, yeah, maybe we should wait through that thing right now. And I'm all over the place all the time. And she's way more organized than I am. And that's just good that we are different in that way. So we can weigh each other out. And what else? What else do we need in the team?

I think you're more of an extrovert than I am. Yes. I'm more of the quiet one who just does the website and things in the dark and Peter's the one who is talking to the team and yeah, so that's good to have someone like that as

a co -founder. And as we said, it's just important that we all want the same thing for the company, which we kind of failed in our last person who was running the tech. I'm not sure that we really what what's the name manifested

that what we wanted all together. So we I would say we may we may not have communicated the long goals to him, which may have been one of the reasons to why it didn't work out in the end. Building a company is not a sprint like a marathon. And if you don't understand that at the get -go, it will never work.

Yeah, absolutely. Creating a founding team is something that feels so easy at the beginning when you're like, this is an idea and no one's had to put in years of work yet and everyone's excited by the passion of the concept and so everyone seems like a good option then. But then, as you say, like, down the road when you've got people needing to actually have put in literal years of work, and you need people, some people who are extroverted, some people who are more introverted, some people who are more, you know, careful planning, thinking things through deeply, and then you need some people who are willing to be like spark of the moment kind of thing.

And it's that variety that is super powerful. but at the same time, the more unified your vision, as you guys said, the better, especially when you're looking at long -term sort of things. I think that's incredibly, incredibly well said. And on that topic of sort of the long -term vision, can you tell us what you see as sort of the short -term and the long -term vision for Sphere and what the ideal universe you're trying to create is, if that makes sense? Yeah,

so the long -term version is, of course, being an international company. We want to conquer our domain. That's why we're in here. None of us are really motivated by the idea of having a small local business.

That's not why we do this. We need to be a global force. Otherwise, the whole idea of changing the status quo in how women perceive the cities and how safety is planned for them can be attained if we aren't big enough. A short -term goal right now is to launch it, getting out in the UK and maybe even Sweden, then just grow it from there, country by country, for really the English -speaking countries first, with the exception of the United States. We will not go into the United States. Then we focus on the Latin American market, since that is a market that has shown a lot of interest and said that this is really, really needed. But yeah, the end goal is, of course, in the best worlds, our app wouldn't be needed, or at least a few parts of our app wouldn't be needed. But we are no idealists in any way. And we understand that this end goal will be really hard to achieve, where women feel as safe in the cities as I do or other men do. We, of course, are to work towards that, making women feel that at least I have a say in my safety. I can voice my concerns, the cities are listening to what I am saying or what my group of friends are saying. They're actually taking actions on the information we have given the cities and they see a slight change. It's basically what we're striving for. I know it's like fluffy and not very concise, but it's really hard to make this thing concise. is easy like if we just build an app for football players then we can say yeah we want every football player to be in the app but now it's not about them being in the app it's about change actually happens. Cities and well other stakeholders within the city are feeling the force of the app pushing them to do the things that is necessary because and we don't believe that people will us change. We think that we need to have data statistics and shitloads of people in the app saying this is wrong in order for them to feel like oh shit this may hurt my business hence I need to change the way I conduct my business because too many people will not well let's say come to my nightclub if I don't do the things that women in my target area is actually saying that I need to do.

In the end, we want to have an app with a community of women that can help each other, talk about important topics, meet up, take a cab together, everything, and just be there for each other. And yeah, that's one of the reasons why I'm here and with Meet and developing this. I just, I look forward to that final app. So yeah.

Yeah.

I was so excited to see that you had a beta version that I could download, and I am in the US,

but I was able to take a look at it. And I appreciate what you said at the end there, Yuta, too, about wanting this to evoke change. Hello, all. I hope you are enjoying this episode. I wanted to ask you, our listeners, if you could give us a review in your podcasting platform of choice. We don't have sponsors and we don't run ads, but we are looking to grow. So if you feel we bring value to your listening experience, please drop us a review when you get a chance. Thanks so much.

Now on with the show. I'm definitely an optimist. Like in my mind's eye I can understand how someone could use this along with you to kind of make change in their community perhaps. And, you know, if you allowed them to understand the data that you're collecting, they could probably make a case to their local politician. I don't know that that would go anywhere, but, you know, like if they feel like certain areas of the city aren't safe for a particular reason. Going off of, you know, what you said about choosing not to enter the U .S., what sort of markets do you feel like this best fits into? And if you don't mind my asking, I'm not sure I remember, where did you decide to actually launch your beta?

Right now it's open all over. We're just trying to get a few testers. We're not pushing any marketing or anything. We're just trying to get testers to get into the app, leave some comments so that we understand what works, what doesn't work. The markets we're looking into, I mean I wouldn't say there is a specific place in the world that this app would work better or worse. I would say go out and ask any woman between 18 to 30 if they have felt unsafe while walking home at night or if they have felt that they are attacked on social media, maybe not attacked but like harassed on social media from other men. most people would say that they have had either of these two things or even both those things.

So what we're saying is like for us, we're looking into the markets that are easy for us to enter. For example, English speaking markets are easy because then you can hire people from literally all over the world because everyone speaks English. If we're going into the Scandinavian market. We have four different languages up here, or the Nordic markets. Four different languages and very few people living here, so it makes no sense to enter these markets right now. We will of course allow people to download it if they are living in Scandinavia or Nordics. The same thing with the US, people will still be able to download it in the US. The reason why we won't go into the US is because the market is so huge and it will take so much money to actually penetrate the market. And also, it's very expensive to go into the US and we don't see that it will be worth it in the long run. Whereas it's easier to go into markets such as Latin America or Spanish -speaking South Latin America due to the fact that they really crave this. They have more issues, I would say, with femicide and women's safety. They have a culture, whereas they are much more in touch with their family. A lot of them live together. They already do these things where they share their location when they're going out so that the parents can know where they are. We've basically been looking at that, which are the markets where we can go into with one language and not have to translate the app into several different languages and hiring a lot of new people, yeah, so that they can do marketing in these countries. So yeah, that's what we've been looking at.

Thank you.

I think it's interesting to learn about the different markets and how you've gone about the choices for where to sort of target and where to focus yourself. That's really, really fascinating. On that topic, can you talk about the sort of market research you've conducted to find your product market fit? Did you learn anything that surprised you? And if you're comfortable with it, can you talk about any of the unique challenges that you've faced in that market?

The hard thing is to actually understand what they want us to build. Because like, if I ask Cassie, have you ever felt unsafe while walking home? She will say, yes, of course, that happened to me.

Okay, so how do we solve that? Like, that was the biggest problem for us. We understood that women felt this way. There's so many research. You can literally Google people unsafe in UK and you have five news articles about it the last month. You can do that in any country. But feeling unsafe and being unsafe are two different things. How do we tackle this? Because as we say, we will never ever promise women that we will make them more safe because that is so hard to measure. What we are saying is that we promise women that we will advocate for their voices to be heard. We won't change. That is way easier for us to prove that we have changed things and that we made you feel safe. Of course, when we asked, like, we went out, asked a thousand women, then we did, like, deep studies on, I think, 110 women I interviewed, just to understand how can we do things. And what it really boiled down to, even though there were so many different answers was that most of them felt that we are not heard. That's the biggest problem for them. People do not listen to us and it's impossible for us to, for example, if there's a sketchy park where they have to go through during the night, like it's impossible for them to actually notify anyone about this because you don't want to send an email to your PM or the one who's elected in your neighborhood.

It's just no way for them to do it. So that's what we single in on at first. But also realized, and I think Asi was one of, Asi was saying that it's good if people have someone like have this app where you can track and trace, but we also need a community where people can share the stories with each other, be there for each other. That's when we realized that our app needs to have this community to enable women to feel free to talk about things that may be taboo. You may not want to talk about certain topics with your mother or your family or your friends, but in a group, you may be able to talk through things that have happened to you and find other people who have been through the same things. So, in that way, our app is a bit, I don't know how to put it, like, we put the empowerment aspect into the whole safety thing. So yeah, in essence, we focus more on empowerment and change than safety in a way, since it's so hard to know what is safety, to be honest.

Yeah, I think that made a lot of sense, like the way that you explained it. You're more a movement platform, to me anyway, I guess, in the way that I think of things than just a check -in. You know, like how people can check in after a storm on Facebook and say that they're safe. Because that is more probably how I had pictured it the last time that we spoke, and maybe Maybe it was that I didn't ask the right questions or maybe it's that your scope has expanded as you've worked on this.

I think our scope has expanded, as you said. I somewhere we understood this check -in is it will not cut it. You may feel more safe, but it will not change status quo just to check in or having your friends tracking you. Status quo is only changed when women can come together and their concerns will actually be voiced and advocated for and yeah when we will fight for what the thousands of women have said about this park, when we can actually do that, gather that data and calling up the mayor or anyone else like hey this is the data, do something about it, that's when women in the long term will feel safer in the cities. It's not when they are tracked, when they walk from place A to place B and having their mom and boyfriend or best friend following them, they just feel a bit more safe for the moment. But if that app wouldn't work or if they had lost their phone or something else like that, they will go back to feeling unsafe again. But if we can change things, then they will feel more safe on a daily basis. And that's what we out for, as you said, a movement to change things. and the positive outcome of it is that women will feel more safe within cities.

Absolutely. And you really hit it on the head too, like from what I understand about behavior change, that perception is just as important as the physical elements changing. Because you can actually make a situation completely safe for someone. And I will just give a totally left -field example, like, you know, hearing about people using VR for things and saying that, when they did the VR skydiving, it was just as terrifying for them. Clearly, they're very safe. The risk level of them dying is very low, but they don't

feel safe at all. Yes, community is definitely part of that. And I'm sure you will discover or other elements that you can figure out how to coach people to as part of this. So it sounds like a fascinating journey. I'm really excited for you. Going a little bit back to the business side of this, I realized we didn't get to this question last time. So the way we met, Spencer and I, and some of the other people that join us in this community

was through MIT's entrepreneurial bootcamp programs, which is based on Bill Aulet's 24 steps of disciplined entrepreneurship. So that was like the building blocks for a lot of us of what we think of as an entrepreneurial framework, or it at least contributed to that. So I was wondering if there's any sort of framework or anything else that was really instrumental in shaping your perspective like as a team on entrepreneurship that really guided the direction of your company?

I was enrolled to one of the best schools for entrepreneurs in Europe for my master's so we had a lot of thinking about entrepreneurship and well I did my master in management with a minor in finance. So for me, it has always been there, at least throughout my degrees. But also I think as a Swede, it has been super easy to get into this entrepreneurship thing because we've been basically force fed by our school system with entrepreneurialism. We, for example, when we are in our final year at high school, we need to, everyone need to set up their own company. It's mandatory. So you set up your own company, run it for a year and then you close it down. That's like one of the things that has been in our curriculums. Also in our school, we've always been taught like, my classmates are German. We compare the school system a lot with each other. And when, for example, when they had painting class, The teacher told them you have to make a house. It has one door, four windows and a chimney. It should be a two -story house. Whereas in Sweden, the teachers were saying rather paint something you can live in and motivate why you can live in it. So if you draw an apple and say this is my apple house, it was okay. You still could get the highest smart for it, as long as you can explain why you could live in it. In that sense, you really foster this entrepreneurial things since we were young kids in Sweden. Also, since we're such a small country and I've had a lot of success when it comes to startups, I mean, we have Spotify here. We Skype was from Sweden. We have all these big unicorns who came out of Sweden. So we always heard that as well in Sweden, in school. My parents have been talking about it.

So that was like the first time when you actually felt, well, you can do a lot of things just because you are from Sweden. So yes, that courage, I think was the first thing, but also being in startups, I've been in startups, I've been in startups before we launched this, you realize that how messy it is. When you look at these startups that have succeeded, if you just look at Spotify, everyone thinks like, oh shit, they were an overnight success. Everything must have been working so smooth within the company. And then I was working for another unicorn and I realized that this is so messy. Nothing really works. You can't plan anything. Everything, all the plans just go down to drain the day after you plan them. So what you need to do is like put your head down and work hard and just work, work, work. And it's more important to move the needle than to make it right. And that's one of the learnings I got and brought into this thing. We have done so many things that was not good. And but we have moved the needle every day. And And this is why we still are at it and still feeling motivated to do new things. Because we have learned from the bad things. We will still do a lot of wrongdoings in this company. But at least it's okay to do it because we're moving the needle.

Just let me just jump in. I have a completely different background. So I haven't studied business at all. I studied space engineering. We had one course in business management. It was a small one. I started NGOs here in Sweden and I've always been in school boards and all of that. So I've always been active in the startup world, if you want to put it that way. Original plan was to start something when I'm 50, around 50 years old. That was my plan. But then one day my husband saw an ad on Facebook and he asked me, why don't you try to start your own business? And I was like, okay, let's give it a try. So I tried many different projects before I met Jitte. I was trying solar panels with Space Tech. I was trying smartware and all of that. So I learned a lot by doing mistakes and I read a lot, tried everything, wrote business plans. And so I'm basically self -taught, I would say. But yeah, it has been an interesting journey.

Absolutely. I think that's so interesting. I love the idea of, like, you're both Yite through your education and Asi through your, you know, experience. You've sort of just had to do things and then they haven't worked or they have worked and you've learnt a little bit from it. There's a story I heard a while ago about, like, if you want to make the perfect pot out of clay, you make a hundred pots out of clay. You don't look at and try and think about and plan and plan and plan and plan one pot. You trial and error and you experiment. And that's how you really gain the experience you need. I that's so interesting. I like you've both explained that.

You have to also be a person that is positive and just don't give up easily because then it's a tough word. The start up word is not easy at all.

That is absolutely true. I can't disagree with that at all.

In regards to Sphere, I was wondering if you could take us through a little bit about other people who sort of have an impact, such as like volunteers, what capacity do they serve? Or are there groups of people that you guys can bring in as like advocates or things like that? How have you set up those sorts of systems?

Yeah, so we do have a lot of support from mainly other Instagram accounts, so on and so forth. The problem has been that we We haven't really activated them yet, given that our app is not out yet. As soon as it's out, we will activate them. So our plan right now is to email activate them by reaching out to them, telling them, hey, our app will be launching this date. And we actually have a community aspect in the app where you as a person can own your very own group. We believe that that will help us spending way less in marketing because all these people already have 1000 to 20 ,000 followers on Instagram and if they can bring all, well, if they can bring one percentage of their followers into our app, that will help us tremendously in growing. We also have these volunteers that we have mentioning, he's helping us with everything, basically from business development to developing. We set up a Slack for all these people that has been interested in helping us. We been that active lately, but when we get closer to the launch, we will get way more active there. It's so cool just having them sharing us on, supporting us, texting us like, hey, how's it going? And so on and so forward seeing how excited they are to to see this app release.

Yeah I was just thinking about how awesome it has been to have these volunteers you know helping us design the app and so on. I just imagine that there are people out there who are doing this for free and because of because they believe in the idea and the startup so yeah we have some awesome yeah people here in the team

That's really great, and I just found you on Instagram too, so I'll make sure that I share that out as well. I was wondering if there were some words of wisdom that you might each want to leave us with today. So it could even be something as simple as a favorite quote that helps you, advice someone gave you or you know it could be a lesson or take away from your personal or professional journey.

Yeah I would say find the person who's as crazy as you are because you need to have that with you along startup journey otherwise it will never work. If that person isn't as passionate and willing to sacrifice as much and not even more for the company then you shouldn't be in distance with that person. So basically ask the person at the get go, how much are you willing to sacrifice before you start the company?

Yeah, for me, I mean, I have had a famous NASA quote that has followed me since I was a teenager. Failure is not an option, which I see it as you should try your best failure is only if you give up when you don't want to give up. So you continue with what you're doing if you believe in it. Or not give up, but just leave it and continue with something else.

Sometimes the best path we can take is to realize the goal we've set maybe doesn't make sense, but now that we've learned there's another goal we can focus on. I think that from both of you, brilliant quotes. Thank you so much. I really, really appreciate that. And obviously thank you for coming on and sharing your thoughts with us and teaching us and and all the things that you've shared with us today. Do you have a preferred way for, if our listeners wanna ask any questions or follow you along, do you have a preferred way for them to reach out to you or follow you?

No, just reach out, Instagram, mail, whatever, even here at Discord, cause I got notifications in my mail when someone reaches out. And so I have no preferred way.

It's just cool if people are interested, wants to talk with us, we're always open for a conversation, at least I am.

Yes, same here. Awesome. Thank you very much. Thank you as well to everyone who joined us today. We always appreciate people coming in, listening and sharing their energy for the discussions. Nancy and I and the team behind Founders Voyage feel fortunate to be part of this community with you all and for the opportunity to bring this cooperative learning experience to you each week. We'd love to hear any future nominations from anyone in the community. Obviously, if either of you two have any recommendations or nominations for people that we should talk to, we'd love to have them on. So you know, if you have any thoughts, please let us know. You can listen to our edited podcast under Founders Voyage on whatever favorite podcast platform you use or on our website, which is founders voyage .org. Right now we're trying to get some reviews on Spotify and all the different podcast platforms. So if anyone listens to one and really enjoys it, please leave us a review, five stars or less, if you think that's appropriate. And of course, if there's any ways that we can help you test out your app to try out different things, talk to different people, please let us know. I think everyone in the Founders Voyage team is incredibly passionate about the goal you guys are trying to achieve and I'm hopeful will achieve. I think it's incredible what you guys are doing. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on. And of course, now that we're at the hour, have a lovely, depending where you are, I think you're pretty very similar time zone to me, so evening ahead

of you. For everyone else, have a lovely morning, afternoon, night, wherever you are. Thank you. Have a good one now.

Bye bye, everyone.

You've just finished another episode of Founders Voyage, the podcast for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. The team at Founders Voyage wants to thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We hope you enjoyed your time with us, and if so, please share this with someone else who might enjoy this podcast. You can also support us by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and by donating to our Patreon. Outdoor music today is Something for Nothing by Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band.