Driving Change for Good with Jessica Wilson

Within the first few moments of meeting Jessica Wilson, you can’t help but take note of her energetic, collaborative spirit and unwavering focus. As CEO and Co-Founder of Women Making Waves (WMW), it’s no surprise Jessica has a natural knack for identifying critical gaps for women in business and going beyond the call for change by actively paving the way forward through programs like WMW Swell Club.

In this week’s yarn, we get a peek into moments of Jessica’s career which led her into tech, empowering women, and enabling corporations to deliver valuable impact for the next generation.

Fuel Your Own Fire

For Jessica, the entrepreneurial flame has burned bright from an early age. At eight, she was already finding ways to create value for people through the Christmas season, successfully selling bags of fertiliser to nearby farmers, even scouting nearby competitors to ensure she offered a competitive price.

“I grew up on a farm and the first thing I sold was cow poo,” she says. “I would use that money to buy baby chickens to own. By year 12, I was hosting and running events for local school formal afterparties in the paddock on our farm which did quite well.”

At university, Jessica’s ambitions were momentarily halted by a career advisor who told her she wasn’t cut out for work in the fashion industry. Defying expectations, she began working throughout Australia, New York, and Paris Fashion Week by the time she was 21. While preparing various runway show logistics, Jessica keenly observed the changes in industry behaviour toward online stores and emerging influencers.

“What I noticed was the slow shift in these arrangements as online stores were moving toward the front row, and similarly bloggers and influencers were on the rise,” says Jessica. “My 21-year-old brain was starting to see the future of fashion first-hand and I could see everything moving online.”

“So I took a chance to begin again and booked a one-way ticket to Silicon Valley. I didn’t know anybody and I stayed in a hostel for three months. But I landed meetings with people from Google, Yahoo, Facebook and they taught me things like what an MVP is and how to actually start a tech business.”

Seizing the opportunity, Jessica dove headfirst into the world of tech entrepreneurship. It was a time when there were very few women in the Fishburners space, but she found herself among two fellow female founders, Holly Cardew who went on to start Carted and Annie Slattery, Founder of ConX. By 22, Jessica launched StashD, an e-commerce app.

Be Prepared to Pivot

Throughout her career, Jess has encountered obstacles that would have deflated and deterred most. One such example was the opportunity for her to feature in the grand finals of a popular TV show in China called “The Next Unicorn” which aired to 15 million people.

Given the exposure of her product pitch to millions, the expectations were high. But much to her surprise, it garnered very little initial response.

“We're all sitting there watching our analytics, so excited and thinking that we've just hit a gold mine and we got fifteen downloads. Fifteen. And I'm thinking, what on earth has happened? Obviously something has gone wrong. And I remember having this moment thinking about two choices.

“One, I can either give up and take it as an interesting learning experience, or I can dig into this business and look at what happened. I chose the latter and we reworked our strategy so by the time the third episode aired, we were trending in the biggest app store in China.”

“Sometimes the first thing you start, you think will fly out of the park but you need those little iterations as you go, and that's totally fine and completely normal. What’s important is to stay ready and pivot when necessary.”

Meet People Where They Are

When it comes to startups, Jessica understands the challenge of limited resources and identifying opportunities. It was during the Sydney Covid-19 lockdowns that she and Co-Founder Hayley Evans met as neighbours, quickly establishing a friendship grounded in shared values and a desire to harness technology for impact.

With restaurants shut, offices closed – the two had time to brainstorm and quickly realised their skills, connections and background crossover was perfectly complementary.

“Two key things you need to make a company successful are resources and focus. Understand what you currently have and what you've got the capacity to focus on, then find external opportunities that will actually move the needle forward,” she says. “What Hayley and I have done well is meet consumers where they are so they can get involved and get around what we stand for through our NFTs.

“It isn't overly complex and allows people to mint our NFTs with a credit card as opposed to only MetaMask and Ethereum. It also plugs in with their ESG goals and serves as an innovative way to engage their leadership teams.

“We look at this as a new revenue stream to people who know how to change women's rights laws because they're spending a large majority of their time fundraising. And our whole hypothesis is what would happen if we took away a large part of their need to go and fundraise for themselves? They are skilled at changing laws, so they could spend more time on that and what would that actually mean on a global level? Impacting potentially hundreds of millions of people.”

This Wednesday, July 5, Women Making Waves will be joined by Airbnb and TikTok in Sydney for an event centred on tech for good, featuring a panel sharing the ways technology has been applied to create a positive impact in the world. To attend, book in your spot today at womenmakingwaves.io/events.

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About Women Making Waves

Jessica Wilson and Hayley Evans are Co-Founders of Women Making Waves, an Australian Web3 Education company which uses smart digital membership and token gating to educate and activate a community to support, fund and raise awareness on gender rights law reform and policy in Australia and the United States. Connect with Jessica via LinkedIn or Twitter.