I Was Never a Mom Without Being an Entrepreneur: A Conversation with Paulina Walkowiak

Most founders will tell you building a startup is hard. Paulina Walkowiak did it as a digital nomad, with her husband and kids, moving between Berlin, a cabin in the Polish woods, Madeira, and now Lisbon.

Paulina is the CEO and co-founder of CUX, a UX analytics tool that helps e-commerce companies eliminate conversion blockages, in a space dominated by Hotjar, Mixpanel, and FullStory. Before founding it in 2019, she spent five years at Kantar doing market research for banks and telecoms. She's a TEDx speaker, teaches at four universities, and proudly calls herself a mompreneur, a term many founders reject and she embraces.

Never a mom without being an entrepreneur

Paulina started the company while pregnant, and her son was born a few months later, so she was never a mother without also being a founder, and never a founder without being a mother. She's clear the two are entangled: if the company had come first, she doesn't think they'd have decided to have kids, and if the kids had come first, they'd have been too occupied to start the company. Doing both at once is exactly why the term fits her reality.

She embraces "mompreneur" as part of her authenticity. Her kids were always around, watching business talks, investor pitches, and video recordings, naming their dolls after coworkers and investors, playing "calling the clients." Which meant she couldn't perform some fake boss persona, she wanted her children to see the real her. And that human part of business, she argues, is how a small company wins against the big ones, because customers need a human on the other side. She tells the anecdote of trying to sound like a composed expert on a business call while breastfeeding off-screen, praying the baby stayed quiet, until he didn't, and it became an ice-breaker rather than a disaster.

Why they left the corporate world

Paulina hit a glass ceiling at Kantar, and not because she was a woman, because she was "too young." She'd been a junior researcher for a long time, felt ready to own whole projects as a manager, asked, and was told to put in more years first. So she looked elsewhere. A move to Berlin "to chill" led to pregnancy, and the fear of losing her career and interests for a year or two, plus her husband's fear of missing the baby to work travel, became the trigger: start a business together, combining both their passions, backed by Germany's support for new parents. The perfect moment to risk everything.

Consultancy beat content

CUX exists because the existing tools frustrated her. Running a software house, she found Mixpanel too complicated (you basically need to be an analyst, with heavy implementation and configuration) and Hotjar too simple (you see points of the journey but not the whole journey). Her market-research background made full context essential, so they built a tool to let product people see the entire user journey without weeks of setup.

The competitive edge, though, turned out to be support and consultancy. When CUX gets implemented, customers usually already have similar tools nobody uses, no time, no resources, no understanding. CUX motivates them, shows them how to work the data, and once they see the first insights the adventure begins. She spent a year and a half chasing the fast-scaling, cheap, self-serve SaaS dream through content marketing, and it didn't work for them, because starting takes motivation and energy people don't have. Consultancy changed everything and let them work with the biggest clients.

Having data isn't the same as using it

Paulina pushes back on the premise that big corporations with tons of data make terrible UX decisions, they often make great ones. The real problem is that having access to data isn't the same as using it, because there's too much of it. A product specialist who needs a quick call can't wait three weeks for an analyst report he won't understand, so he falls back on gut feeling. CUX focuses on insight, not raw metrics, and much of the work is helping companies actually implement those insights, teaching them to start with a small quick win, then another, until, in one real case, conversion climbed from 27% to 57% over three years. It's a long process that has to get into the company's bloodstream.

Her favorite conversion blocker to catch is the mobile one: fifteen years into mobile, every single customer still has mobile problems, because teams don't think of the journey across devices and channels. And the mobile app's goal, she reminds clients, isn't to make you buy, it's connection and loyalty. You sell on the website, so expecting the same conversion on the app is the wrong model.

Everything she dreamed of, and happiness wasn't there

The most striking moment is Paulina's honesty about ambition. She's careful about sleep, aiming for eight hours, and admits a tendency to take too much on her shoulders that she's actively working on with better boundaries. This year she realized she has everything she once imagined for a happy life, the company, healthy happy kids, a healthy happy marriage, padel twice a week, dance classes, a great city, and happiness still wasn't there. The realization was that she has too much, her boundaries aren't where they should be, and she needs new goals, maybe smaller ones, maybe to slow down. A structured life, it turns out, isn't the same as a happy one.

She doesn't romanticize the legacy for her kids either: "at some point they will hate me, better to acknowledge that." Maybe they'll speak four languages from all the moving, and maybe they'll need therapy for identity questions. What matters to her is living to the fullest and not regretting the risks she didn't take.

How she survived six years

Startups mostly fail in the first three years; CUX is six-plus in. What almost killed it was familiar: hiring too many people too fast after an investment, and trying to do too many things at once until focus, and sales, suffered. What kept it alive was determination, and outside help. From the corporate-to-startup transition on, she and her co-founder worked with a business coach, and every two or three years they run mentoring sessions with someone external to name their current problems and grow their leadership and finance skills. Therapy and mental-health work, she says, are just as crucial to surviving.

Key takeaways

Authenticity is the small company's edge. Customers need a human on the other side. Being genuinely yourself is how you win against the giants.

Consultancy can beat content. For a tool that requires motivation to adopt, hand-holding and insight delivery unlocked the biggest clients where marketing content didn't.

Having data isn't using it. Corporations drown in data. Deliver real-time insight to the person making the decision, and teach them to bank small wins.

Boundaries are a growth skill. Taking on everything helped her grow, then became too much. Ambition without boundaries doesn't equal happiness.

Survive with outside help. A business coach, periodic mentoring, and therapy were what carried the company and the founder through six years.

Frameworks worth stealing

Small quick wins into the bloodstream

Don't hand an overwhelmed team a giant analytics platform and a three-week report. Start with one small, fast win from the data, then another, and let momentum build until acting on insight becomes habitual. One CUX customer went from 27% to 57% conversion over three years that way, it's a long process, not an overnight fix.

Periodic outside eyes

Every couple of years, bring in someone external, a coach or mentor, to name your current problems and stretch your leadership and finance skills. Founders lose perspective on their own limits, and self-awareness about those limits is what lets you keep growing. Pair it with real mental-health work.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

I was never a mom without being an entrepreneur. I started the company while pregnant.

Having access to the data is not equal to using it.

I have everything I ever dreamed of, but happiness is not there.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. Quick questions, quick answers.

Best advice you've ever received? Hire slowly, fire quickly. And when hiring, fit to the team's culture matters most, she flatly rejects the idea that you don't have to like the people you work with.

Advice you ignored and wish you'd listened to? To focus on enterprises from the very beginning. She didn't have the courage then, and followed the classic scale-a-SaaS advice instead.

What would you tell your younger self? Know your boundaries. Don't say yes to everything, don't carry everything, and don't try to be perfect at everything.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? Cash flow.

Favorite spot? A pizzeria in Lisbon she calls one of the best in Europe, her comfort place, since she cooks seafood well at home but can't make pizza like that.

Tool you can't live without? Half-joking, her Dyson dryer, and seriously, Google Calendar, for both personal and business order.

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Paulina Walkowiak is the CEO and co-founder of CUX, a UX analytics tool helping e-commerce companies eliminate conversion blockages. Before founding it in 2019 she spent five years in market research at Kantar. She's a TEDx speaker, teaches at four universities, and has built the company as a digital nomad across Berlin, Poland, Madeira, and Lisbon. Find her on LinkedIn.