Meet ELLE's 2016 Women in Tech
Marcela Sapone, 30, spent spring break of her first year at Harvard Business School in 2013 on "start-up lockdown," a project she'd thought up that involved her and four other students testing five business ideas over five days. The concept that seemed least feasible, conceived by her classmate Jessica Beck, was a subscription service that allowed busy professionals to outsource household tasks such as grocery shopping and cleaning. "We couldn't get the economics to work," Sapone says. But she and Beck knew there had to be a market, particularly after calling high-powered businesswomen (Sapone, who grew up in Copenhagen and Paris, had previously done a two-year stint at consulting firm McKinsey) and discovering almost all had live-in nannies or housekeepers. "But if you're 26, how can you afford that?" Sapone says. "We wanted to solve the problem for us."
Hello Alfred-named after Bruce Wayne's valet-was their answer. At first, Sapone and Beck collected customers with old-school flyers tacked up around Boston and hired employees through Craigslist-or did the errands themselves. But after graduating, they raised $2 million, launched HelloAlfred.com at the 2014 Tech Crunch Disrupt conference, and became the first all-female team to win the event's start-up competition (and its $50,000 prize).