Still, the support of my parents — and the curiosity of the internet — didn’t mean ManServants had made it. Jo and I had both quit our jobs to devote ourselves full-time to ManServants, but we needed reinforcements. I convinced my friend Annie, who was studying to be a diplomat at the time, to pause her studies in order to head up client operations and join me in San Francisco, where we made my tiny studio apartment our office. We put our lives — professional and personal — on hold as we figured out what bootstrapping meant. For three girls — Jo, Annie, and myself — who were running a supposedly glamorous company, our lives could not have been further from it. The Steve Harvey Show invited us to be on a special segment about millionaire entrepreneurs during a time when we thought daily iced lattes were too much of a luxury. Plus, we didn’t exactly fit in in Silicon Valley, which isn’t the most playful place in the world. We took our laptops to coffee shops filled with tech bros, and then there’d be us with ManServant abs on full display saying things like, “She wants a man who’s assertive and kind, with sales-force capabilities. Bilingual is a plus.”