From Fashion to Tech – Here’s My Startup Story

I’m Jessica Sprinkel and I’m not one of those people who set out to build a software company.

I don’t know how to code. I’ve never worked in venture capital. And during my McKinsey interviews, I cringed — I’ve never felt the need to prove I’m the smartest person in the room.

My career started in merchandising at QVC. I did the grunt work and loved it. I met with designers, schmoozed with celebrities, and took home plenty of free swag — what more could I want?

Back then, I dreamed of becoming a Buyer. Maybe even opening my own store — a beautiful space where people could shop, reconnect, and feel great about themselves.

>> Related: What Is Revenue Driven Marketing? <<

And while I thirsted for the fantasy, it turns out I didn’t really fit in the fashion world. Over time, I started to feel like Andy Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada – I was smart, but I didn’t follow the trends. I knew Excel, but I had a limited sense of personal style. I was ambitious, while most of my peers seemed happy where they were. Everyone around me started to feel like a character – from Miranda to the clackers – and I belonged in a different movie altogether.

Having realized that I hadn’t found my calling, I did what any self-respecting millennial does and went to grad school – in my case, as a PhD student in economics at the University of Chicago. While I was still fascinated with fashion, it didn’t resonate with my core in the same way as economics. During grad school, I was inspired by professors like Gary Becker, Kevin Murphy, and James Schrager who taught me how to think and how to question. I became a part of an intellectual culture that spanned decades, where ideas mattered and everyone was empowered to have a voice.

More than anything, I learned how economics affects every aspect of our lives – from why we are altruistic to the effect of legal abortions on crime. I fell in love with economics as a framework, and began to see the world differently.

And yet, while I loved the classes, I felt that nagging suspicion that I didn’t belong. Everyone around me was clamoring to do research with department heads and discussing which universities they wanted to end up at while I had no intention of becoming a professor. They seemed to know what they were doing, while I struggled to understand econometrics and STATA. In grad school you’re forced to figure things out on your own, and I was falling behind.

Had I known then that pretty much every PhD student has a crisis of confidence and feeling of total misplacement, I may have tried to stick it out. As it was, I felt unique in my struggle and reacted quickly. Feeling like failure, I transferred to the MBA program, and that’s when I found marketing.

To me, marketing is the practical application of the microeconomics theories I’d adopted as my worldview. Crafting the right pitch, matching features to user needs, and anticipating how someone will respond to different offers are all grounded in the economic theories of utility and scarcity. As I sat in my first marketing classes and learned about brand, go-to-market strategy, and revenue optimization, I realized I had stumbled upon a rare discipline that combines art and science that I’d been searching for all along. As a marketer, I could be a dreamer who craved relationships and creativity, yet still hack around in Excel and do math all day. I felt liberated having finally found my purpose.

After business school, my now-husband got a job in DC, so that’s where we moved. I looked for a job for months while fighting off fears of being trapped as a 1950s housewife before finally connecting with the VP of Sales at a software startup via Craigslist. I started working there a week later. Given that I had zero marketing experience, I still find it amazing that I was given any responsibility at a VC-backed software company growing 70% year over year, I jumped at the opportunity and didn’t look back.

At that point, “marketing” consisted of AdWords, a website, and a few case studies. I started out doing a little of everything – webinars, social media, marketing automation. Despite how ugly our hodgepodge of systems was, it was working, and the company was growing.

It’s been six years since then, and last week I left that company to start my own. In that time, I launched programs across email, online advertising, telemarketing, content syndication, social media, and PR. My team generated 20,000 leads per year and supported 92% of the sales pipeline, and, true to my roots, we planned for growth using an Excel model instead of relying on wildly inaccurate assumptions like many marketers are forced to do. We grew to a team of 11, and I found I loved managing people to help them get better, take on new projects, and develop into leaders themselves.

It was an amazing ride, and I learned a ton. But after six years, I was ready for something new.

I kept thinking about the marketing challenges that came with rapid growth. Planning was painful. We used an Excel model to work backward from revenue goals and calculate lead and opportunity targets. Each year, I built multiple versions to model different scenarios. Comparing them was messy, and even managing one plan was hard because everything kept changing.

Still, the disciplined approach resonated. I presented the model at a few events, and people loved it. It gave teams a logical way to set targets and align with sales on ownership. I still get one or two emails a week asking for a copy of that Excel model.

At the same time, as we hired more people it became difficult to manage campaigns across different channels. We’d talk about running a healthcare campaign and immediately the social person would go off do one thing, the email person would go off and do another, and the online advertising person would do something else entirely. No one knew what everyone else was doing, and when the CEO asked what was happening in healthcare, it was hard for me to answer.

Measuring results against those fragmented campaign plans was also a soul-crushing feat that tested my love for Excel every.freaking.day. Why that information is not readily accessible in Salesforce boggles my mind. But Salesforce was made for sales people, not marketers. And even in marketing automation tools like Marketo, Hubspot, and Eloqua, the reporting is still so basic. While you can get a full picture of a single opportunity, it’s still tough to attribute success to different campaigns at an aggregate level.

I kept thinking about how to make the process easier. I didn’t want to duplicate marketing automation tools, but I saw room to improve what happens before the plan is built — and after campaigns are measured.

So I started experimenting. At 5am, before work, I opened PowerPoint and began mocking things up.

Over a month of one-hour bursts, I built out a rough version. I shared the deck with other marketers, got strong feedback, and kept iterating. I reviewed other tools, mocked up a fake UI, and used the name Sponge.io as a placeholder — it stuck.

The more people I showed it to, the more it resonated. They said it felt like I’d been sitting in their conference rooms, facing the same problems. That’s when I realized this wasn’t a one-company issue — it was a real market opportunity.

I did the MBA homework: market size, competitors, pricing. Once I believed it could be a business, I went to talk to my boss.

Man, I was so naive during that conversation. I basically said I was working on a startup idea on the side, and was thinking of pursuing it full-time. He said as an entrepreneur himself, he’d have a hard time telling me not to pursue it.

He asked if it was really the right time to start a company. I’d just had a baby and wanted more kids.

He said I didn’t know how to build a product, raise money, or manage a board. In the last 10 years, he’d learned how to scale a 100-person company to $100 million — instead of starting from a garage.

And in that moment I thought, wait a second – I like the idea of working out of my garage, and making something out of nothing.

Of course it’s not the perfect time — but it’s not getting any easier, and life is short.

I don’t have all the experience I need. Then again, I didn’t six years ago either, and I figured it out.

Will I scale a company to $100 million? I’m not sure. What I do know is that I’ve found something I’m passionate about — and for now, that’s enough.

Over the next few weeks I felt more and more sure, but I still couldn’t make the leap. And then my husband pointed out that the worst case scenario was I worked on Sponge.io for a year and it was an epic disaster. I had picked up a couple consulting contracts so I was still making money. And if I spent 12 months meeting new people and learning new things, and it still failed? Well then I could always get another job. Plain and simple.

I’m not betting on the worst-case scenario, but it helped me decide to go for it.

Now, as I step into life as an entrepreneur, I see a big opportunity to help marketers build better growth plans.

To give them a framework to have tough conversations and move forward in a direction that everyone is confident in. To make it so much easier to see what’s working and what’s not.