Jess Lee: Building texting tools for car dealerships

Jess Lee is the founder and CEO of Bitesize, a startup helping car dealerships communicate with thousands of customers at once. Jess is also an active angel investor working with the Hustle Fund.

In our conversation, we talk about how Jess got the idea to build texting tools through immigrant activism at college, and how she ended up translating her experience to a completely different space, which is the automotive industry.

Jess discusses why she decided to build software for car dealerships and what’s the business rationale behind Bitesize. She also shares why she decided to go it alone and grow her company as a solo founder. We talk about the pros and cons of being a solo founder and why investors are more likely to fund startups with multiple founders.

We also discuss how the industry has changed over the last couple of years with regard to female founders and women working in venture capital firms.

Jess also takes us back to the early days of Bitesize and shares how she got her first customer literally driving around car dealerships with coffee and donuts.