Sunroom Co-Founders on Surviving the Notorious “Trough of Sorrow” in Tech Start-Ups

POPSUGAR Australia has partnered with Her Black Book and Samsung Galaxy to create The Flipside, a podcast dedicated to helping your tech business thrive. It’s time to unfold your world with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold4 and Z Flip4. Available now at Samsung.com

Though Sunroom has been compared to the likes of Instagram and Facebook, it isn’t a social media app. 

What Sunroom is, is a platform dedicated to supporting women in securing their fortunes and futures. The reason it’s called Sunroom? Because being in the app feels like one: warm, safe, and a place for baring it all. In the app, this looks like women and nonbinary creators sharing public and paid-for content that does everything from offering career advice to one-on-one advice from a sexologist (and everything in between). This week, in episode two of The Flipside podcast, co-founders Michelle Battersby and Lucy Mort join hosts, Sali Sasi and Julie Stevanja, to unpack what it’s really like to launch a tech start-up in the US market in 2022. 

According to Battersby, the comparisons to social media behemoths have been one of the toughest challenges to overcome. “We’re not a social media app, we’re not here to help you go viral or amass a huge following. We’re really a vessel for creators to come along and monetise the audience they’ve already built on another platform,” she says. “So, if people think we’re a social network, they’ll probably be disappointed when they get on Sunroom.”

They never intended it to be a platform for bulk views and social clout, but rather, a way for women and nonbinary creators to meaningfully connect with their audiences, free from the overbearing moderation that often comes with social media apps. And crucially, they want their creators to make money — on Sunroom, wealth is not a dirty word. What would be more accurate, Battersby says, is drawing a comparison to OnlyFans and Patreon (though there are plenty of unique differences from those platforms, too). 

Mort and Battersby explain that launching a tech start-up doesn’t get any easier once the product is out in the world. In fact, in the seven months since Sunroom launched, the app has changed a lot — it’s almost unrecognisable, thanks to the types of creators on the platform, as well as the new features on the app. 

Mort explains that when Sunroom launched in February 2022, the discovery page was filled with random posts and it was easy for creators to assume it would be best to produce free, feed-posts to try and hit that discovery page, Mort explains, adding that that’s not really what Sunroom is for. “In the discovery feed, we introduced a profile post, which is like a really short, snappy sort of trailer for someone’s account, so instead of looking through random posts in the discovery feed, you look through somebody’s trailer.”

With hindsight, the pair have more clarity on the types of creators that are naturally gravitating towards the app, which is quite different from who they thought would use and love Sunroom before launching. “Our go-to-market strategy was one that I still feel really passionate about. It was the right thing to do, but maybe the creators [we onboarded to the platform] weren’t quite right,” says Battersby. 

“It saw us launching with 100 founding creators and we targeted people who were great, they were credible, they’d amassed a following, had cult-like audiences, aligned with the brand and ticked every box. But we quickly realised that it’s hard to manage an audience online — it’s a job, it’s a small business — and you kind of need to have the time, put in the work and really want to connect with the people who are there to support you. And that has actually favoured more micro-creators and people, specifically, who might not be the kinds of people that get brand deals all the time, but they have an audience.”

The most refreshing thing about Mort and Battersby is their brutal honesty about the realities of moving across the world (the pair are both based in Los Angeles) to launch a tech start-up.

“LA is a very confronting place, to be honest. It’s a place of extremes — extreme glamour on one side, but also extreme poverty on the other. It was much more of a culture shock than I thought it would be [because] I’d been here a lot for work and I didn’t expect to struggle to adjust that much, but I actually did,” says Battersby. 

“Lucy and I really battled in 2021. We now call it ‘The Trough of Sorrow’, there’s a start-up graph that we refer to a lot, which is basically a trend line of all the different waves and phases of a start-up’s life that you go through, and we were definitely in the Trough of Sorrow through 2021. It felt hard, to be honest. . . I feel like if life is a game, then LA is one of the hardest levels, so if we can make this work, then we’ll be exceptionally proud and we’ll have done something pretty huge.”

You can listen to The Flipside wherever you listen to your podcasts, with episodes dropping every Thursday — each with an exclusive offer from one of the Her Black Book brand partners. In this episode (which you can listen to below) leak-proof underwear brand, Modibodi, is offering 15% off, sitewide, when you shop via the Her Black Book app. You have until midnight on Sunday 11 September to take advantage of the discount, so be quick! To unlock even more exclusive deals and offers, download the Her Black Book app now.