Ellie Windle, a St. Petersburg-based entrepreneur, has launched a startup with the gathered wisdom of more than a decade working for tech startups across New York City.
Her newly launched platform, Persist, seeks to help manage people’s lives. Windle, alongside co-founder and adviser Claire Wasserman, has spent the past year building the startup after moving to the area in 2022. She has raised more than $175,000 from friends and family, and the app is finding users organically, she said.
“That [funding] has gotten us very far,” Windle said. “We now have four business customers, a sizable amount of app users, and we’re well-positioned to go to scale.”
Windle’s background includes eight years and several leadership roles at adtech startup MediaMath, which pioneered a space and grew into a $1 billion valuation only to fall into bankruptcy, according to reporting from Business Insider.
“It was a master class in understanding how a startup scales, and it basically felt like a different company at each one of those [growth phases],” Windle said.
After leaving MediaMath in 2020, Windle worked for New York cybersecurity firm Human, a Goldman Sachs portfolio company. Around the same time, Windle purchased a 30-acre fixer-upper in upstate New York and started having children.
When she returned from pregnancy leave to her leadership role at Human, the company had grown and changed as all startups do, she said. She faced the additional amount of catch-up work, familial administrative work and life planning that was now required, she said.
“I have never felt, personally, a lot of gender discrimination. I’ve been promoted and fairly successful in male-dominated areas,” Windle said. “But after having my second baby, I thought, ‘Now I get it, I get why women dropped out. It is not sustainable. I am carrying more than I can manage.’”
Windle points to the sociological concept of the “motherhood penalty,” which identifies how mothers in the workforce experience “additional disadvantages compared to women who are not mothers, including a per-child wage penalty,” according to an American Journal of Sociology research study.
It’s why Windle wanted to create a platform that can be leveraged as a support tool for individuals and businesses looking to manage their lives. Today, Persist seeks to offer organizational tools, coaching, management services and communication outlets.
Less than a year after returning, she decided to quit her job, move to St. Petersburg and create the solution she needed at that time, she said.
In doing so, Windle has maintained tight operating expenses, she said. She works out of a St. Pete Beach mixed-use alternative medicine coworking space called The Centre SPB for $60 monthly. Thanks to no-code apps like Glide, she’s built the platform and expanded organically to 600 families. Now, she’s pursuing marketing, onboarding pilot programs, finalizing consumer-facing products and seeking formal investments, she said.
“The next six months are really make or break,” Windle said. “We’re spending essentially the rest of our money on getting this [business to consumer] marketing set up. Right now, nobody knows we exist, so we need to do some level of awareness. I’m thinking some scrappy influencers and social media campaigns to get people knowing about us, that will hopefully set the stage for a really compelling investor story.”
