Why We Need More Women Founders

An article we liked from Thought Leader Jerome Knyszewski of his interview with Inbal Claudio:

Inbal Claudio of Like Minded Collective: Why We Need More Women Founders & Here Is What We Are Doing To Make That Happen

An Interview With Jerome Knyszewski 

Empower your daughters to know that anything is possible! I grew up with a father that always told me I would succeed in any field I chose. Being a software engineer, he always encouraged me to do programming, science, math problems, but always made it fun for me. We actually used to do math problems for fun while on road trips!

As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Inbal Claudio, an entrepreneur, military spouse, and mom from Southern California. In 2019, Inbal started researching influencer marketing tactics for her small business, but the platforms she discovered were completely out of her budget. Inbal’s own experiences lead her to decide to do the next best thing which is to create a platform where everyone is welcome.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

Before my husband and I got married in November 2017, I knew that I wanted to start my own company prior to moving across the country for his job. After about 6 months of prep and getting everything together, I launched my candle company, GOLDWICK. The company was doing very well. I was in retail stores, doing tons of shows a year, and then when I had my daughter in 2019, I realized that I had to cut down on in-person events and focus more on the company’s social media presence and online sales.

I started looking into influencer marketing but quickly realized that it was something that I couldn’t afford to do. The platforms I was looking into required a few hundred dollars a month to utilize their database and some of them wouldn’t allow me to join because my business wasn’t large enough. I decided to use Facebook and Instagram to search for influencers myself, but the search function is not user-friendly and I couldn’t search for specifics (location, industry, follower count, etc.)

I came up with the idea for Like Minded Collective in November of 2019, a few months before my husband deployed (he’s in the Marine Corps), and immediately started brainstorming and talking to influencers, small business owners, and brands that I knew. The response was incredible, which motivated me to make this a reality.

My husband deployed in February 2020, so my 6-month old daughter and I went back to California to stay with my parents and I started working on Like Minded full time. I found developers, hired a branding agency, and got the ball rolling!

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

I don’t know if it’s interesting, or sad, but I had to fire my first developers and it took me about 3 months to find a replacement. They outsourced the work, which wouldn’t have been an issue, but I didn’t know that from the beginning. The project manager/owner of the company was the middle man between me and the actual developer, but he had no experience with programming, so he was unable to answer any question I had. Every question took 3 days to get a response since the developer was...

Read the rest of this article at medium.com...

Thanks for this article excerpt and its graphics to Jerome Knyszewski.

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