Jayne Ronayne is the co founder and CEO in KonnectAgain, a software system which helps Universities to connect with and keep track of alumni with fundraising in mind. It is her second start-up after Your Yearbook, an online yearbook system she set up while still studying at University College Cork and sold to universities around Ireland.
In her own words:
Describe 2 decisions you took that highly impacted the trajectory of your career
=> "Turned down investment, jumped on a plane to go to San Francisco"
"Tell us about your journey in few words"
=> "emotional, exciting, unexpected, hangovers, coffee addiction, happy, lonely"
We have some amazing angel investors who were selected not only for their financial capacity but more importantly for what they could bring to the table as advisors and mentors. It is important to round out your portfolio of investors according to what type of skill-sets and networks your company needs access to. Money is flush at the moment; so choose wisely.
We offered customers the opportunity to come on as a beta customer for a much lower price as we respected that they were taking a risk coming on with an early-stage company. We also made sure that for every early customer that we understood their goals for our product and we set milestones from the get-go. If these milestones were achieved, they agreed to become full customers as they saw the value we were providing. We also hired a former Alumni Director as our Director of Biz Dev who has a great network and a great story: she was inspired to leave her job in order to help us revolutionize the alumni relations industry!