Our Program Lead, Crystal McGregor, is in conversation with founder Rachel Worsley to talk about her startup Neurodiversity Media. Neurodiversity Media is a library that hosts evidence-based resources for people who are neurodivergent and their employers.

The idea for Neurodiversity Media came about from personal experience Rachel herself had been diagnosed with autism and ADHD. When she wanted to disclose her diagnosis to her employer, she came across a dire lack of accessible resources. The resources she did find were either not evidence based, or too academic and filled with jargon to be usable, and thus Neurodiversity Media was born.

Rachel harnessed her background in medical journalism and marketing to create a resource library that provides information in easy to understand ways, including articles in simplified English, and infographics. This approach helps people with differing learning styles to get a better understanding of the material.

The biggest challenge Rachel faced in the startup journey was trying to engage with the corporate market, especially having worked mostly with small and medium sized businesses. She did not know how to approach them and how to pitch her business and that was a “massive challenge” before she entered the Tech Ready Women program. Aside from this, Rachel also struggled with growing her freemium service platform. 

Joining the Tech Ready Women program really helped Rachel overcome both of these challenges. She was able to figure out the best way to reach out to corporates, and also find a focus when she met so many people who gave varying advice about how to go about with the business. The program helped her focus on a couple of achievable goals at a time, and that focus helped her come to an important realisation of being able to come up with a value proposition and stick to it, and also figure out different types of revenue streams.

After the program, Rachel focused on reaching out to more people and more content creation. She found that a lot of people were hesitant around this because it was such a new area of research, and this was important to build trust and relationships and eventually make a sale in a fairly new area of study.

Of challenges she faced as a woman in tech entrepreneurship, Rachel says she often found pitches difficult and especially so as a neurodivergent female–and in a way this only validates the need for a resource like Neurodiversity Media. 

Despite this, Rachel perseveres–and her major win has been a revamped website that really allows people to access content more easily. For what’s next: Rachel is focusing on putting out more good content and as a result, Neurodiversity Media already has an international client interested in coaching and training opportunities. For the time being, Rachel is working on nurturing those leads for when the time is right. 

From the Tech Ready Women community, Rachel would like to ask for connections in the corporate world who would be interested in hiring her as a speaker or for training opportunities. If this is you or your workspace, please reach out to Rachel via her LinkedIn or website!