Leading Ladies In Tech: Lindsay Tabas

We interviewed Lindsay Tabas, the founder of The Lady Engineer’s Secret Advantage, about her experience in the business and tech industry. Lindsay Tabas describes herself as a “creative engineer”. She feels this title is necessary as most engineers are seen to be focusing on just 1’s and 0’s, but do not take into consideration the more abstract needs of people. It often leads to differences between what a customer needs and what the systems offer. She works to fix just that. She likes to work with “fluffy things like feelings” which usually tend to scare the other engineers, but implements this in her system engineering to make the customer user experience as smooth as possible.

Not only is Lindsay Tabas an engineer, but she is also an entrepreneur who founded her online apparel store “One Squat Shop” in August 2013. Talking about how she came about starting this company, Lindsay goes back to the time she was in San Francisco, where founder and entrepreneur were two different things. She thought that she wasn’t allowed to call herself that unless she owned her own business, even though she participated in start-ups and pitch contests. It was around 2012 when she was getting more and more frustrated with the fact that she didn’t have her own business yet. During that time, she was working with a career coach who gave her the advice that if she was an entrepreneur, then she shouldn’t put in so much thought into her first business because she would inevitably start other businesses. That was when she started thinking about One Squat Shop in earnestness. Having grown up over-weight, Lindsay had always been interested in fitness, so opening an online store that sold fitness apparel seemed to be a natural progression for her. This was also around the same time that many fitness stores were selling their clothing online, but there were no place that sold different brands in one place. That is what she aimed to do with One Squat Shop. She started doing freelance work as a designer so that she could pay for the e-commerce store, but around mid 2015 she realized that she was making way more money doing freelance work than she was through her e-commerce store. She decided to shut down One Squat Shop. By having a successful e-commerce store that was all about smart digital marketing strategies, and knowing exactly how the customer to come to you, Lindsay found her true passion.

Lindsay Tabas comes across as a very calm and composed person, with a very sunny personality. This interview is full of great advice from Lindsay on how to run your own company, things to keep in mind when you’re about to start one, and also fun anecdotes of the myriad experiences she has had on her journey to where she is now, and where she wants to go from here.