Coding Lady | “It’s nice and comfortable to work in tech.”
After two degrees, one in Linguistics, another in Economics, Katya was working investment, international trade, and other non-technical businesses. Though she felt it was too easy and not tangible enough.
Summary
Ekaterina Gorbacheva “I knew I wanted to create a pet adoption app, but I just didn’t have a clear path or the tools on how to accomplish it. With Le Wagon, I got the opportunity to turn my idea into reality and learned how to code within 2 months. During this time I built DOGether, the pet adoption platform, that today has over 10k users and helps pets find homes all over China. I wouldn’t be able to do this without Le Wagon.”
A year and a half ago, I joined Spare Leash - a pet sitting company, as a Co-Founder and CTO. At that moment Spare Leash was operating from an excel spreadsheet and had just joined the China Accelerator program.
I knew to survive they needed a full operating booking platform, so my first challenge was to build and launch a platform before CA demo day - which was 2 months away.
It was really challenging to launch since the company already had a good following so aside from introducing a completely new platform to the company we also had to teach the pet owners and pet sitters how to use the platform. A new platform also comes with bugs, so we had to be 100% hands-on making the transition for users as smooth as possible.
Spare Leash Fast forward to today and Spare Leash is a fully functional pet-sitting platform that connects pet owners to verified pet sitters.
The main challenge for us now, like with any startup is how to scale and how to scale fast. We will be raising funds this Summer and also always looking for strategic partnerships. We want to grow but in a safe and responsible way that we are able to handle.
A lot of people perceive coding and tech as male dominated industries, however, Katya believes that the tech community is the most welcoming and supportive.
I am so happy that I took that leap into the tech world.
I feel so comfortable in the tech community and never have experienced any sexism or negativity making me feel like I don’t belong. In my opinion, no one is encouraging women not to work in tech. If any female is afraid of stepping into the tech world, I think it’s more of personal fear.
The tech community is one of the most welcoming and supportive communities to work in today and I am happy to be apart of it.
