#YesWeCode Chat 31: How To Share Your Creative & Professional Self on Social Media
Sunday 11/8/15 at 8pmCT
Follow me on Twitter @uchechi_writes
Blending two career paths and/or interests online can be tricky. My husband and I both know several musicians/coders and I constantly see fellow entrepreneurs sharing their creativity on social media. As a poet, startup founder and entrepreneur, I’ve discovered that it has a lot to do with what your goals are on social media. Are you sharing one part of yourself for you career and the other is just fun? Do you want to grow and monetize both selves? Knowing your audience is important, but so is figuring out how you can engage, inform, learn, inspire, educate?
If you’re interested in maximizing what what you get out of social media sharing, while also giving yourself freedom to explore your creativity, this is a chat topic you’ll want to join.
During the next #yeswecode chat, we’ll explore this topic because and I look forward to learning from other entrepreneurs and creatives.
I’ve chosen to focus on doing these things and letting go of the rest. This is you, and it’s an important part of you. People want to share that, especially if they can learn something for their own lives.
Questions To Think About:
1. Should we have to be one dimensional online? We aren’t in real life?
2. How can we bring together all the essential parts of our work?
3. Do we have to create separate social accounts for all the different parts of ourselves?
4. Can we just be “creatives” and what does that even mean?
5. What are ways you’ve integrated the two? What’s worked? What hasn’t worked?
#YesWeCode Chat 30 Topic: How To Go From Startup Idea To MVP
Sunday October 25th at 8pm CT
Connect with me @uchechi_writes
Going from your startup idea to MVP can be challenging, especially if you’re not quite sure how to validate your idea.
Over the last year, I’ve spoken to several startup entrepreneurs who are bootstrapping their product development, and want to know how to do so in a way that maximizes the time and money they do have. How do you know if there’s a need for your product? What counts as market validation? What are some low cost ways to test the market? These are all important questions you should ask yourself to help you get to your MVP. Often times, entrepreneurs don’t always know how to go about doing this effectively, and end up wasting a lot of time and resources.
I think it’s time we used the #yeswecode chat as a platform to help you figure this out and to help you get there with as little stress as possible.
During the chat, here are some questions to think about:
1. What does it meant to validate your idea?
2. Do you think you have to have lots of startup capital to do this?
3. If you’re a founder, how did you go about getting to your MVP?
4. Are there ways to use social media to help us get to our MVP?
5. For non technical founders, what has been the biggest hurdle you’ve had to overcome?
6. With varying ideas of what it means to “validate” your idea, how do we find a plan of action that gets us there with very little waste of time and/or money?
During this year’s Emmy Awards, Viola Davis gave a speech that was both moving and personally resonated with me. After winning the award for best actress in a television drama, she said: the only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity. You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there. Oh, that last line struck a chord!
For me, her words struck a chord. I have always been openly passionate about why I believe diversity in technology is not only good for business (more global creativity leads to products that serve a global world), but also good for shaping the conversation around opportunity and access in the tech world.
During her speech, I was also struck by the talent of the women nominated beside her, especially Taraji P. Henson in her short clip from Empire, her hit show. I decided to see f binge watching Empire, the new hit show featuring Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard. And I’m hooked. The show centers around the story of Howard and Henson, an ex married couple who also run a record label empire together. What I found most astounding was how riveted I was by both of their performances. They’ve always been great actors, but the opportunity to be featured in roles where they can shine really allowed me to see their gifts.
Does Viola Davis have a point? As a tech entrepreneur who’s been bootstrapping my company, I am left wondering how much of the difficulty for underrepresented communities in technology has to do with access to opportunity. After teaching tech skills, how do we create opportunities for all of us to show those skills?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I believe we each have a personal responsibility to handle our business and that luck is about being ready when an opportunity comes, but what happens when we’ve prepared ourselves as much as we can and we just need an opportunity to break through?
A few questions to think about:
What are some missing opportunities for underrepresented tech entrepreneurs?
After you’ve done as much as you can to prepare for opportunities, what can you do to move forward?
What can tech cities do to create more opportunities?
How can we address this issue without being accused of wanting special treatment?
If you found your way to this page, you’re probably wondering why the topic for this chat seems identical to the last topic. Well, it is. I really believe global user experience is part of the future of tech innovation and will impact who we design for and how we design great products.
During the last chat, the attendance was pretty low. I get it! Everyone is really busy, and sometimes can’t make it. That’s why we’re revisiting the conversation. Thank you to everyone who messaged me on Twitter to let me know that you’re sorry you missed it and that you’d be answering the questions anyway. I want to give all of us another opportunity to delve into this rich, complex and topic.
I could post the same blog post from the last chat, but I thought I’d just share the link from the last chat and let you find out more about it from there.
This week, Apple announced the new iPhone release for later this month. Around the world, customers will line up in Mexico City, Lagos, Lisbon and Manila to purchase Apples latest artistic release.In a world that has more mobile phones than toilets, it’s clear that global ad diverse customers make our products more profitable and valuable.
Isn’t it time we represent our world not just as consumers, but also as creators?
As tech innovators, how do we create user experiences that factor in the needs, desires and worldviews of global population?
Do we have a responsibility to innovate with a focus on global user experiences?
I think we do! As a UX Designer, I’m always thinking about how my Nigerian, American, Swedish, Mexican and Jewish family engages with the products I create.
How do I factor them into my design process?
The conversation about diversity in technology often centers around bringing diverse ideas to the table for the sake of inclusion, but the need for inclusion goes beyond fairness and equality. It also allows for better user experience, better design and more innovative products.
Stepping outside our comfort zone is not only necessary for self growth, it’s also good (no great) for business. The future of technology will focus on creating products for the more than 7 billion people in the world (4.5 billion have mobile technology) who look like less like the 19 year old white male Stanford grad and more like a kaleidoscope of ethnicities, languages and cultural contexts.
We are the answer to the question, “who will be best positioned to come up with products and services that will win in the global market.”
I think it’s time we make sure global centered UX is at the core of our tech diversity conversations and design innovation.
Questions to think about:
What does global UX mean to you?
Do you practice it?
How has it impacted your design experience and perspective?
As consumers, how would global centered design impact your user experience of a product?
As creators, do we have a responsibility to “think globally?”
As outsiders, do people of color have an advantage in the global market of tech products?
When it comes to building and sustaining a company, culture is key. From startups like Amazon to Airbnb, startup culture conversations are at the center of current conversations.
Discussing startup culture might be a key part of engaging the issue of tech diversity.
Recently, President Obama hosted the first ever Demo Day at The White House. This event generated a conversation around tech diversity and the lack of it as a cultural issue. Regardless of what you believe on this topic, company culture does shape what is accepted and acknowledged as appropriate within a tech company.
I think it’s really important to ask ourselves about the cultures we’re trying to create and what roles we as founders play in supporting or dismantling certain assumptions and behaviors within our companies.
How does the culture we create impact the future of our companies? Does it matter? How do we make room for all of us? The single mothers, the full time parents/techies and everyone and anyone who might not be seen as a cultural fit in an industry that lacks diversity in almost every way.
Join us for the next #yeswecode chat to discuss startups, company culture and the tech culture we’re trying to create.
