Editorial Policy
A great deal of founder coverage in India is shaped by press releases. Women Can Startup takes a different approach: independent, fact-led reporting anchored in the public record.
What we publish
- Founder stories. Long-form, fact-led profiles of women founders in India.
- Case studies. Analytical reads of how a company built its moat — anchored only in the public record.
- The Setback Files. Honest accounts of the difficult periods companies came through, drawn only from publicly reported events.
Our standard
If we cannot support a claim with a primary or verifiable secondary source, we do not publish it. Where the public record is limited, we say so — every article includes a “What we don’t know” section.
How we verify directory companies
The Women-Led Startups Directory holds two kinds of entries, and both clear the same bar before they go live:
- Profiled companies are added automatically when we publish a researched founder story. The story itself is the verification.
- Curated companies are added by hand only when the woman-founder or co-founder status is confirmed and the industry, city, funding stage and founding year are corroborated across multiple independent, reputable sources — the company’s own site, Crunchbase or Tracxn, and credible press such as Inc42, YourStory, Entrackr, the Economic Times or Mint.
When sources conflict or the record is thin, we leave the company out rather than guess a founder or a fact. Funding stage reflects the latest publicly reported round and is marked as indicative. We never publish a personal founder email or phone number — only a generic public business contact, and a phone number only with explicit consent.
Corrections
We correct errors quickly and publicly. Send corrections to [email protected]. We log every correction with the original date and a short note on what changed. If a detail in a directory listing is wrong or out of date, tell us through the same address or the contact page and we’ll fix it.
How we’re funded, and how we disclose it
Women Can Startup is funded in part by paid founder features and partnerships. We’re upfront about that, and we keep a clear line between what is paid and what is not:
- Sponsored founder stories. Founders and companies can pay for a guaranteed, scheduled founder feature through our pitch a story page. Every sponsored feature carries a clear, inline sponsored / partnership label, in line with ASCI guidelines, so readers always know when a story is paid for.
- Editorial features are chosen by our team, on our own timeline. They are not paid for and cannot be bought — payment is never a condition of editorial selection.
- Sponsorships and partnerships — newsletter sponsorships, brand collaborations, events and editorial partnerships — are labelled clearly as such wherever they appear.
What payment never buys is the facts. Sponsored or editorial, every story is researched and anchored in the public record, and held to the same standard set out above. Paying for a feature buys guaranteed inclusion and a publish date — never a distorted fact, a buried negative, or a claim we can’t support.