“Just Be Yourself” Isn’t Advice: It’s a Business Strategy
How Meredith Bailey Turned Every Disadvantage into Fuel for Building Her Creative Workflow Platform Streamwork
Written by: Brianne Garrett
Summary
- Built during pandemic with 3-month-old baby after leaving Frame.io director role.
- Ukrainian team works through war zones—engineers taking up arms against tanks, then joining Zoom calls next morning
- Bootstrapped with angel funding only, refusing traditional VC path to prove sustainable revenue generation
- "Just be yourself" as a business strategy: Being authentic in investor meetings helped secure funding as first-time female founder
- Expanded beyond video to education sector, with Arizona State professors using platform for classroom peer review
Introduction
StreamWork isn’t an everyday startup. To build her bootstrapped proofing and approval platform (during a global pandemic, no less) Meredith Bailey relied minimally on outside funding and heavily on the small team she assembled from the ground up. A significant portion of that team lives in Ukraine.
Just a week before this interview, a Kyiv-based employee admitted she hadn’t slept through the night in anticipation of fresh strikes.
The irony isn’t lost on Bailey. As her colleagues passionately work to grow StreamWork into a leading creative workflow platform, many are simultaneously witnessing their cities crumble under attack. As the company bulks up its customer base, Russia has only intensified its cadence of drone strikes.
“I can't even fathom what they're actually living through,” says Bailey. “What they're sharing with me on the Zoom call is a very contained version of what is actually going on.”
The Perfect Storm of "Wrong" Timing
That capacity to build under near-impossible circumstances mirrors how the company itself began, during another global crisis. In 2020, with the world shut down and a 3-month-old baby, Bailey walked away from a product marketing director role at Frame.io, a one-year gig that followed a decade-long tech career at companies including Apple, Google, YouTube, and Warner Bros.
Bailey was intent on solving a problem that had hair-ripplingly frustrated her: the tedious, disorganized, and lengthy process of creative approvals.
“This was before ChatGPT, or anything like that to help you with brainstorming,” says Bailey. “I sat down for months and I wrote hundreds of product specs.”
The goal was to create a viable service for automated approval workflows: a hub where every single deliverable of a campaign can be managed in one place—including task management, feedback, and approvals from all stakeholders—to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
As a first-time female founder, raising funding was challenging. However, unfazed, Bailey persisted and raised a few million dollars from angel investors. “We haven't taken the normal path in a way,” says Bailey. “A lot of the reason for that was I wanted to prove to myself and our team that we can do this; that we can build a revenue-generating product that customers love and scale it in a way that we're not getting ahead of our skis.”
When Supporting Your Team Means Supporting Them Through War
As is the case for Bailey, the same is true for her team: money isn’t the north star.
Finances are a lower priority in a warzone. Some male employees are forbidden from leaving the country due to potential conscription; one product manager’s husband is actively fighting on the frontlines. “We have an engineer who took up arms in his town when Russian tanks were rolling through,” says Bailey. And the team member in Kyiv who hadn’t slept through the night joined Bailey on a routine Zoom call the very next morning, still eager to work, eager to build.
Since Russia’s invasion began in February of 2022, Bailey has tried to offer as much support as possible to her Ukraine-based development team, including paid time off for relocation, encouraging sabbaticals for mental health, and making flexibility a core part of the culture.
The north star has been a dedication to StreamWork and a belief in what they’re building (many of these engineers have been present from the start). StreamWork provides them a sense of purpose and normalcy amid turbulent times.
"Over time, as the war progressed, many of the team members came back to me and asked to return to work," says Bailey. "They're waking up in the middle of night to address customer questions. That’s not a requirement. They're just jumping on because they love it.”
The Power of Refusing to Conform
As much as she herself is fueled by scaling StreamWork, Bailey sets firm boundaries to ensure family time isn’t compromised. Motherhood and business will always be inevitably linked. Currently pregnant with her third child, she says reserving mornings and evenings to spend time with her kids does wonders to maintain her sanity.
She shares that sometimes it can be challenging for women in this industry. “I’ve tried to thicken my skin,” she says. She also tries to show up unapologetically herself; be it in investor meetings or with the PTA at her children’s schools (they’re more similar than she imagined). “That’s a difficult thing to do,” says Bailey, “to bring your own authentic self to the table and to really voice what you feel. But I think it's incredibly important.”
It’s helped that she’s had inspiration: “I often am in rooms where badass women walk in and they own the room,” says Bailey. “And one of the reasons they can own the room is because they are themselves. They are exactly who they're projecting, exactly who they are and, in a lot of ways, the attention shifts to them over anyone else in the room. To succeed, you need to think like yourself."
There’s a strong business case for embracing diverse perspectives, she firmly believes; it allows innovation to flourish, and it creates solutions that homogeneous thinking would never uncover. "A diverse perspective needs to be in the room. If you're molding yourself, if you’re changing yourself, that's a disservice to the discussion at hand.”
The Business of Being Yourself
Thus, Bailey refused to mold. She made gut-rooted choices to scale her business sustainably and carefully hired people, diverse in thought and expertise, that could match her ambition (she interviewed 27 different engineers before hiring StreamWork’s first).
A keen mission required a skillful team. The support enabled Bailey to lock in on automating the typical manual DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributor, and Informed) framework that tech behemoths have historically adapted to shape roles and responsibilities for their workflows.
“A lot of the players in our sector have older technology,” says Bailey. “They're built on older stacks. Many of them are not innovating at a fast pace, and a lot of their customers are getting upset by that.”
Plus, Bailey says, while most workflow platforms are focused primarily on the review of video, StreamWork offers a full-suite creative workflow management solution. “So not only do we allow review or feedback on video, we also allow for the collection of feedback on all types of creative assets in a single place,” she says. StreamWork also integrates easily with apps like Slack, Asana, and Monday.com.
The novel take on project management has attracted customers in unlikely sectors, including education. "We had professors approach us from Arizona State University,” says Bailey. “They saw the product and were like, 'Hey, this actually could be really cool in the classroom.’” StreamWork’s development team worked fast to build out custom integrations compatible with classroom learning and peer review.
Feature requests like these pour in daily. Bailey says, “We're always [exploring], ‘What can we do? How can we build that? How can we make it happen? Not only for that customer, but all of our customers and future customers.”
Streamwork’s steady expansion into new industries, ongoing product innovation, and retention of talent through turbulent times paint an equally compelling picture of long-term resilience and growth.
“At the end of the day, we need to be sustainable and thoughtful about how we’re hiring and how we’re growing, especially when we’re navigating headwinds,” says Bailey, whose team members span the U.S., Netherlands, Canada, Poland, and the Ukraine.
The key, she believes, is focus. “You figure out what you’re really good at, and you ramp that up,” says Bailey. “For us, that’s approval.”
Looking ahead, Bailey sees massive opportunity where AI and workflows intersect. And she’s eager to see how far StreamWork can fly.
The New Playbook
The startup world glorifies those who “move fast and break things.” And while Bailey doesn’t shy away from bold risks—“You’re going to make a ton of mistakes,” she admits—she’s found that moving thoughtfully builds stronger foundations. It also creates the kind of resilience and loyalty money can’t buy.
By many standards, the way she’s built StreamWork goes against the grain. She chose bootstrapping over venture capital, launched her company as a new mother during a global pandemic, and leaned on a distributed team navigating a war. Yet StreamWork continues to scale, innovate, and win customers from tech-giant competitors.
“One million doors are going to close on you, but there’s always a door that’s open,” Bailey says. “Your job is to find that door.”
For every founder who was told they don’t fit the mold, Bailey’s story is proof that supposed “disadvantages” can become superpowers.
Meredith with David Pondell, StreamWork Director of Sales
Author: Brianne Garrett
Brianne Garrett is a journalist, editor, and producer focused on entrepreneurship, lifestyle, and food. Before pivoting to freelancing, she held editorial roles at brands including Sweet July, Forbes, and Wine Spectator. She’s also the founder of Stella, a newsletter, podcast, and community platform that champions and connects Black women in media. A dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom, she splits her time between London and New York. She’s both a tiramisu lover and a Chardonnay hater.
