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Dear Reader,
It's pretty fun when your competitive advantage has arisen out of a commonly-held bias that you know is wrong. Your business model is quite simple: do what you believe and prove them wrong.
Knowing your why helps. I read a quote last week that explained so much about me as a founder and Odetta as a company: "Being underestimated is a gift. You don't have to find motivation." My own story as the only girl in a set of quadruplets helped me become attuned to the social norms impacting women and made me motivated to prove myself. There are millions of women who are underestimated and devalued because of their gender, especially in the workplace, and we built Odetta as a way to help them realize their dreams.
Be true to your mission, and the business will follow. People often ask me about the inherent trade-offs of being a for-profit company with a social mission. I believe our business objectives are in complete alignment with our social mission, and this is what so excited me about starting Odetta in the first place. While we could have sourced talent from the “all too common places" we would not be working towards our mission" of delivering flexible work in regions where it's needed most." It is our mission that has powered so much of our business innovation and traction.
Know who comes first, and your true fans will power your success. By being clear about your stakeholder priorities, you can create a virtuous loop of believers. At Odetta, our Odettians come first, then our Clients and this prioritization ensures that our happy workforce of Odettians (yes, we measure this monthly) are intrinsically motivated to delight our Clients. Whenever a new opportunity arises, we assess whether this makes sense in the longer-term view of our mission, and this mindset drives our long-term profitability. By building exclusively for the Odettians, we are clearly defining our minimum viable audience and building for our "one thousand true fans.'' It will be our first one thousand true fan Odettians who help us become the work platform of choice for high achieving female MBAs and PhDs in developing economies, and in so doing, help us modernize the antiquated Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry.
The power of intrinsic motivation. We hire twenty new Odettians every month, and it is by far the most important thing we do. We ask all of our Odettian applicants about their own stories of adversity, and we hire specifically for "grit." When Odettians first join our community, our message boards fill with posts like, "Thank you for helping me make my dreams come true." So many applicants show up to Odetta because they are pregnant (and they lost their job due to that), or they have had enough of workplace discrimination and harassment, or they got their masters in the city, and are now back home where there are fewer jobs. We know that our mission is simple: build an environment that supports Odettians to be their full selves and the magic will happen. Our asynchronous flexible work platform is centered around this concept of intrinsic motivation, recognizing that we’re all driven by Autonomy (the urge to direct our own lives), Mastery (the desire to get better at something that matters), and Purpose (the yearning to do work in the service of something larger than ourselves).
We are all underdogs. Most of our clients know about our social mission, but many do not. These clients often have heard that Odetta is offering high-quality teams of MBAs at $10-15 an hour and our clients need to grow fast and extend their runway. In a sense, we see ourselves in our clients, and we believe they see themselves in us. Anyone who is in the business of change, or building something new is working because they want to see a different world.
Thanks for being part of our story,
Katharine
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Monthly Spotlight: Equity Documentation & Carta Clean-up
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We can handle projects managing the repetitive tasks related to investment reporting in platforms like Carta. Our research teams will assist with data clean-up, valuation activities, and quarterly monthly tracking. This is relevant for professional investors or networks who may receive investment documents from portfolio companies in various platforms.
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Customer Spotlight: Consistent Quality as a Service
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Just keep showing up. We had a client who booked $900 a month with us for 2 years, and our big breakthrough happened as a company when that client, who realized that we were just so consistently good, decided to offer us a $100K contract. Then from there, it felt like everyone else started doing the same.
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"Odetta has helped us scale greatly in the last two years, and I'd highly recommend them for any company needing to find an extra team. We onboarded them for a one-time launch project, but were so impressed by their quality that we deepened our partnership to be longer term, spanning multiple teams at the company. From copy translations to audit reviews and quality analysis, their team's gone above and beyond in ensuring that our specific requirements for outsourced work are consistently met.”
—Toby L., Major Social Media Brand
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When you build a company centered around kindness and empathy, you allow your team to bring their full selves to work. About one month ago, an Odettian wrote to me:
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"Dear Odetta, thank you for giving me the chance to live this moment of empowerment at my deepest despair."
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A reminder that every day is someone's moment to rise, and that vulnerability is our greatest strength.
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"I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else."
— Toni Morrison
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