Three Takeaways: Business Tips for Entrepreneurs from Christina York of Spellbound

As CEO and founder of Spellbound, Christina York leads a team engineering a healthcare platform embedded in immersive augmented reality. Christina shares 3 takeaways that every entrepreneur should know before starting a business.

Christina York is pioneering a new patient experience that increases patient cooperation, education and simulation. As CEO and founder of Spellbound, she leads a team engineering a healthcare platform embedded in immersive augmented reality that adds imagination and wonder to medical processes to make them less intimidating.

Supported by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation’s Entrepreneurship & Innovation Initiative, Spellbound is now used by child life specialists, rehabilitation engineers and nurses across the United States and around the world in countries like Kenya and Japan.

In the following video, Christina shares three takeaways for starting a company.

In addition to her three takeaways, Christina provided a few additional tips for aspiring entrepreneurs:

1. You must be able to bounce back. You will get all kinds of “no’s”—hundreds and hundreds of “no’s” from investors to customers—but you have got to work toward that “yes.” Always have an eye on the value of that “yes” and how that “yes” has potential to grow.
2. Before starting my business, I wish I had known there’s a different standard for “good enough.” I had a long career in technology, primarily at bigger companies, which really taught me that perfection is the enemy of progress. Rather, you must do “good enough” and do it quickly, so you can keep the company moving.
3. You’re going to face all kinds of challenges when you’re starting up a company, and it is not just about building the company, it’s about building community. Building community around a company takes a long time, so I’d advise investing in building the community early, whether that be with the investors you’re going to need in the future, the customers, the advisers or your workplace talent pool.
4. Your team is everything. The founder or the CEO can be the biggest bottleneck to the company, as they’re not always accessible—which I’ve certainly learned the hard way. Finding talented, scrappy people that are willing to come along the journey with you is the most important thing you can invest time in.
5. You’re not building a product; you’re building a company. Working on your business processes, and what a sales process—or marketing strategy—might look like, even before you have a product, is really important.

If you’ve got a high-tech start-up idea you’d like to explore further and don’t know where to start, contact the Michigan Economic Development Corporation’s Entrepreneurship & Innovation Initiative at 888-522-0103 or visit https://www.michiganbusiness.org/entrepreneurship.

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