A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 19

This is the 9th year in a row I’ve run this series in April.

Today’s story: These Women Entrepreneurs Created A Fake Male Cofounder To Dodge Startup Sexism.

When Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer decided to start their own online marketplace for weird art, they didn’t expect it to be easy. After all, the L.A.-based duo of artists were bootstrapping the project with a few thousand dollars of their own money and minimal tech skills. But it wasn’t just a tight budget that added friction to the slow crawl toward launching; the pair also faced their share of doubt from outsiders, spanning from the condescending to the outright sexist.

“When we were getting started, we were immediately faced with ‘Are you sure? Does this sound like a good idea?’,” says Dwyer. “I think because we’re young women, a lot of people looked at what we were doing like, ‘What a cute hobby!’ or ‘That’s a cute idea.’”

Regardless, the concept seems to be paying off. Witchsy, the alternative, curated marketplace for bizarre, culturally aware, and dark-humored art, celebrated its one-year anniversary this summer. The site, born out of frustration with the excessive clutter and limitations of bigger creative marketplaces like Etsy, peddles enamel pins, shirts, zines, art prints, handmade crafts and other wares from a stable of hand-selected artists. Witchsy eschews the “Live Laugh Love” vibe of knickknacks commonly found on sites like Etsy in favor of art that is at once darkly nihilistic and lightheartedly funny, ranging in spirit from fiercely feminist to obscene just for the fun of it.

In its first year, Witchsy has sold about $200,000 worth of this art, paying its creators 80% of each transaction and managing to turn what Dwyer says is a small profit. Earlier this year, they received a small investment from Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland and are working with him on creating some Witchsy-exclusive products. Gazin and Dwyer aren’t gunning for massive scale or fortune, but rather just want to offer a sustainable platform for artists to sell their work without censorship or too much extra noise. So far, it seems to be going well.

But along the way, Gazin and Dwyer had to come up with clever ways to overcome some of the more unexpected obstacles they faced. Some hurdles were overt: Early on a web developer they brought on to help build the site tried to stealthily delete everything after Gazin declined to go on a date with him. But most of the obstacles were much more subtle.

After setting out to build Witchsy, it didn’t take long for them to notice a pattern: In many cases, the outside developers and graphic designers they enlisted to help often took a condescending tone over email. These collaborators, who were almost always male, were often short, slow to respond, and vaguely disrespectful in correspondence. In response to one request, a developer started an email with the words “Okay, girls…”

That’s when Gazin and Dwyer introduced a third cofounder: Keith Mann, an aptly named fictional character who could communicate with outsiders over email.

“It was like night and day,” says Dwyer. “It would take me days to get a response, but Keith could not only get a response and a status update, but also be asked if he wanted anything else or if there was anything else that Keith needed help with.”

Dwyer and Gazin continued to deploy Keith regularly when interacting with outsiders and found that the change in tone wasn’t just an anomaly. In exchange after exchange, the perceived involvement of a man seemed to have an effect on people’s assumptions about Witchsy and colored how they interacted with the budding business. One developer in particular seemed to show more deference to Keith than he did to Dwyer or Gazin, right down to the basics of human interaction.

“Whenever he spoke to Keith, he always addressed Keith by name,” says Gazin. “Whenever he spoke to us, he never used our names.”

There’s a long history in stories whereby characters create a false persona or someone presents themselves with a false identity: Jacob and Esau in the Old Testament, Viola in “Twelfth Night” and Rosalind in “As You Like It”, “Cyrano de Bergerac”, “The Prince and the Pauper”, and on and on.

In that vein, let’s set this story in Silicon Valley. Two young women have come up with a strong high tech business plan based on their expertise as programmers, but cannot get any traction with the venture capital crowd, victims of overt misogyny.

This is not an uncommon reality witness, here, here, here, and here.

So our dynamic duo — let’s call them Sydney and Loretha — create a third member of their team: Vilad, a tech genius. Sydney does a pretty good job with her low-register, stilted-English impersonation, at least sufficient enough on teleconferences that they manage to break through male resistance… or rather Vilad does… to get some seed money for a start-up.

Great news, right? Well, now they have to keep up the ruse which gets increasingly more challenging to the point where they have to do a face-to-face meeting with the mysterious Vilad — no more excuses about Vilad getting sick, Vilad’s parents getting sick, Vilad’s cat getting sick. The money people need to meet Vilad or else full funding for the project will not happen.

Plus, there’s this: If they cannot produce Vilad and their charade gets exposed, Sydney and Loretha will be facing possible jail time for fraud.

The only option: Finding Vilad. In fact, that’s the title of the movie. They need to find someone who fits Vilad’s ethnic background, who has the same mad tech skills the fictional Vilad purported to have, who will go along with the ruse, and not blow the whistle on them. Oh, and they have to find this dude within 48 hours, train him and school him up for the Big Meeting.

Clearly this is a setup for a comedy. It can go dark, however, because of this fact: Once they bring ‘Vilad’ on board and he becomes essential to the business enterprise, he has an ace in the hole over Sydney and Loretha: At any point, he can drop the hammer on them by telling the truth. Well, his version of the truth, claiming innocence regarding his role in things, he was mislead, he didn’t understand what they were asking, using his most halting English to sell how it’s entirely possible the young women fleeced the poor, vulnerable immigrant from the Third World.

There you go, my nineteenth story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!

Here are links for all the previous posts in this year’s series:

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18

Each day this month, I invite you to click on RESPONSES and join me to do some further brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when you play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in comments. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.