How I clawed my way out of failure
NIKKI Durkin was Australia’s start-up golden girl, launching a successful fashion app at just 18 and snapping up investors on whirlwind trips to New York and San Francisco.
It all came crashing down in 2014, when the 22-year-old bared her soul in a heartwrenching blog post about the company’s painful failure.
Two years on, she says that disaster propelled her to a different kind of success, with a new business teaching kids to code and some tough life-lessons under her belt.
It wasn’t an easy ride, but at the grand old age of 25, Nikki says she wouldn’t change the hell she went through to get here.
“It was this massive rollercoaster and I was really, young, I didn’t have that much experience with volatility,” she told news.com.au. “I let that get to me and I would spiral.
“When the big and bad would happen, I’d be torn up.”
Life had been pretty smooth sailing until then. At 15, the schoolgirl from Berry, NSW, was designing and selling T-shirts online, and turning over the idea for clothes-swapping app 99dresses, starting work on it on the day of her last HSC exam.
She secured $1.2 million in seed funding, was taken in by Silicon Valley’s top start-up incubator Y Combinator and was a huge hit with the press, who adored the young, pretty, female entrepreneur.
But while captivating readers with her inspiring story, Nikki’s dream was falling apart behind the scenes.
“It took off really well, it was only after the first year that I started coming up against problems and having to deal with them,” she says. “I’d had a very comfortable life. I didn’t know business was supposed to be hard.
“Not many people talk about it. All my friends, publicly it looked like they were killing it.”
On the day she closed the company she had poured her heart and soul into, she sat down and wrote down her raw, emotional story and posted it online. “This is what failure feels like,” she wrote. “Failure f**king sucks.”
It went viral.
Nikki, who now owns a businesses called codemakers.com.au and is a guest speaker at Friday’s Vogue Codes Summit, said there was no positive spin for the “excruciating pain” she felt at the time after everything seemed to go wrong.
She described “crying for what seemed like an entire week” at her parents’ home in the countryside. “I felt like I was drowning in a black ocean, and I couldn’t see any light at the surface. I didn’t know which way to swim.”
She experienced the downside to being female, with investors occasionally asking if she knew what an “angel” was, if she also modelled because of her height, or some other unintentionally patronising comment.
Investment rounds fell through, huge technology issues brought sales to a halt and her co-founders abandoned her. She had problems with work visas, cashflow, traction, her team and the product-market fit.
“I was grateful to have a curtain of long dark hair to hide my bloodshot eyes behind as I walked through our co-working space. I felt physically sick all day, and my stomach wouldn’t let me keep any food down.”
Nikki took responsibility for it all, and her confession was not only “cathartic”, it gained her respect.
Now, having fun and “enjoying the journey” has become one of the most important things.
She started meditating, and every morning, takes some time over a coffee to remember what matters and read over her notes on what she really loves.
“I didn’t have the wisdom or the control to pay attention to my emotional state and how it was affecting my experience.
“What really happened in those low times, and there were many, is I’d remember the vision of what I wanted to create. When I thought of that, I couldn’t give up.
“I’ve got much better at picking myself up and getting on with things. It’s like a muscle.”
Nikki says she’s learnt many things about how to run a start-up, but the most valuable lessons were about “what I like and what I don’t like, my skillset, finding people to complement those skills and managing my headspace.”
She dropped out of the University of Technology Sydney, and while she thinks university is right for some entrepreneurs, it wasn’t the right fit for her, as someone who prefers to learn on demand and use new skills straight away.
The Vogue Codes Summit is focused on encouraging women to be empowered by technology in an effort to see more women pursue careers in tech-related industries and be the creators of the digital future.
Nikki believes women need to seize the opportunities and exploit gaps in the experience of the male-dominated sector, combining their passions for sport or fashion with technology.
“I know it’s controversial, should we have gender ratios, but I’m a pragmatist,” she says. “When it comes to getting attention from the press, being asked to speak at panels ... I will take what I can get and use it to my advantage rather than complaining about the advantages men get.”
In 2014, only 17 per cent of IT graduates were women even though women made up 59.9 per cent of higher education graduates, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
The proportion of women working in IT and computer-related fields has dropped from 50.3 per cent in 1990, to 26.4 per cent in 2015. Only one in 20 girls are considering a career in science, technology, maths or engineering.
Nikki hopes her new business will encourage young people, particularly girls, learn to code to bring their ideas to life.
“It’s about perspective,” she says. “You might be standing in the right place looking at it the wrong way.”
Originally published as How I clawed my way back