Founder’s Friday featuring Stephen Eddy @ Foresyte

Please provide a brief description about your company.

Foresyte is a premier travel and event planning app that makes it easy to coordinate leisure activities with friends — like vacations, weddings, bachelor(ette) parties, concerts, festivals, special occasions, and social gatherings. With over 17,000 installs and a patent pending, Foresyte’s user-friendly interface offers arefreshing new way to plan with groups and financially prepare for costly experiences.

Two hashtags that best describe you 
#problemsolver #tenacious

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Running with the tank on empty and our backs against the wall, my scrappy team defied all odds and rallied in a do-or-die StartEngine community raise to extend our dwindling runway by 8 months, while also attracting the interest of Advisors / Angel Investors who are helping us reach the next milestone.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always had a burning desire to solve problems and build things that make the lives of everyone around me just a little bit easier. To me, perfect happiness is to look back on my life and know that I made something that positively impacted the world.

While the pursuit is still in progress – this mindset has opened quite a few interesting doors throughout my career before Foresyte, and is the key reason I’ve persevered through a challenging year of trying to get a product off the ground.

What is your greatest fear?
The fear of letting down my team and investors. I lose sleep over that thought.

Whom do you most admire?
I most admire my husband (as of last month!). He’s helped me traverse some of the darkest places I’ve ever been over this past year as I learned the hard way what it meant to be an entrepreneur. I would’ve driven straight over a cliff had he not been by my side each step of the way, keeping me centered and grounded when I’d start to veer off course. Despite all the hardships my decision to start a business has inflicted on our lives, his support has never once wavered as I’ve attempted to pursue the un-pursuable.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
When I get overwhelmingly stressed – which has happened frequently over the past year – I tend to go into an overdrive mode that makes me feel like I need to fix every problem all at once. While it’s my greatest strength as an entrepreneur, I know it tends to cause added stress among my team and other stakeholders when I fall into this crisis mode. I could use a healthy balance of empathy when navigating these stretches.

What are your top tips for balancing work and life?
Define two priorities in your personal life that are non-negotiable and don’t compromise. For me, it’s going to the gym 3-4 times per week and spending at least an hour with my husband before bed. I’m guilty of letting these priorities slip when the road gets bumpy, but it’s important to give yourself these routine windows of reprieve.

What is something new that you learned about running a business this year?
Be careful about expectation setting. The road to success is a painful one and setting overly optimistic expectations and/or trivializing serious problems can make the lows feel lower. I’ve learned that it’s important to be honest with myself and my team about the trials that sit around each corner, so that nobody feels blindsided when things get turbulent or when commitments take longer than expected to come to fruition.

What is your most marked characteristic?
I’m persistent (or stubborn) to the point of irrationality. This has been my key ingredient in keeping our train on the tracks, particularly since attempting to build a consumer mobile tech platform is considered to be insane / infeasible by conventional wisdom.

What is your greatest regret?
I regret not having found an advisor sooner. Having sound counsel is so important when jumping over a cliff while trying to build a plane that flies. We’ve had a razor thin margin of error since Day 1, so knowing which missteps to avoid before they happen is crucial.

What is your motto?
Keep grinding away and good things will happen.

What is a legal mistake you wish someone warned you about?

Never engage with a social media affiliate before signing a professionally drafted service agreement into place. There’s no predicting what may happen several months down the road, so having brand protections in place to from the start is crucial.

When running your business, what do you struggle with most?
I struggle with overcommitting to things with a self-imposed deadline. I’ve also been wired as a project manager type and I love to set stretch goals for delivering new features or completing big projects. While this mindset leads to high-productivity, it can also lead to upset stakeholders and a burnt out team when deadlines are unrealistic.

What advice would you give to yourself at 25 years old?

I used to be self-conscious about displaying my best talents as a professional — such as challenging the status quo — out of fear of coming off as abrasive to my peers. I’d tell myself to not hold back and have more confidence in expressing candid opinions and pushing for change.