Tunisian-born Mouna Aouri Langendorf remembers the Arab Spring well. Her first child was born three days before the outbreak of the Tunisian Revolution in January 2011.
“I was lucky to get to a hospital and within days of delivery, we were trapped in our house. There was a curfew and my husband had to cut little squares of cheese to feed our baby. It was a strange time.”
Three months after what is now called the Jasmine Revolution, Mouna and her family moved to Singapore. And that’s when she found the transition from career woman to stay-at-home mum even more challenging.
“I had always worked and I found it extremely difficult that because of my gender and because of where I was, I was expected to stay home. Working and being entrepreneurial is part of my identity.”
Mouna Aouri Langendorf, Founder of Woomentum
Mouna, a civil engineer specialising in bridge design, studied in Japan on a scholarship programme and worked in the country for seven years. She speaks Japanese as a result. “I forced myself to pick up the language and Japanese people really appreciate it.”
She then returned to Tunisia to set up her own consultancy for foreign companies doing construction work in the country.
The challenges she faced in Singapore led her to think other women entrepreneurs must face the same problems and that’s when the idea of Woomentum took root.
So for the last two years, Mouna has invested her own funds and time in building up Woomentum, a platform and community for women entrepreneurs, linking them up with mentors, experts and funding through live events and Woomentum.fund, a service similar to the likes of Kickstarter and Indiegogo.
A founder goes on the site and submits her business idea. After Woomentum gives it the green light, the community decides whether to support it or not.
She sees Woomentum as sitting at the intersection of sites like Quora, Kickstarter and LinkedIn – where members can ask questions of each other, raise funds through the community and get referrals and leads from each other.
“Let’s face it, it’s still a male dominated world, women entrepreneurs face challenges raising funds and women need to support and mentor each other. We also have men among our mentors and experts – because men realise they need diversity to run successful businesses,” said Mouna.
On April 22, 2014, she ran her first CrowdFundHerLive, a crowdfunding evening event where women startups are selected to pitch and the audience makes a pledge on the spot. “We attracted 145 people then and it was encouraging, showing there was a need for such an event.”
The fourth CrowdFundHerLive will be held this June 16 at the Bloomberg offices in Singapore and up to five women entrepreneurs will be pitching, one of which is in travel.
A total of $9,000 was raised at the first three events. “While the sum is not huge, what was encouraging was the contributions were not big individual sums but people were pledging $50 or $100. So there was true crowdfunding,” said Mouna.
Startups selected to pitch must have a Minimum Viable Product and must have at least six months of operations behind them. Every startup is coached by Woomentum’s mentors. Woomentum gets 4% of funds raised, “the standard percentage”, she said.
She estimated the audience at these events was about 10-15% men and her goal is to expand that ratio.
“We need men as well as women to give momentum to Woomentum – it needs to be inclusive,” she said.
Her community numbers about 3,000 – “highly educated and motivated women professionals” – 40% of whom are from Singapore and she’s building up quite a following in Malaysia and India. Mouna wants to scale this to at least 5,000 by year end.
Currently membership is free but Mouna believes that as the community scales, she will move to a premium model, offering members a bundle of services that would empower women entrepreneurs to realise their dreams through the new kind of bridge she’s building.
