S2E12: Journalism to Creating Tech Ladies with Allison Esposito

Laurence:
Hey, it's Laurence Bradford. Welcome to Season 2 of the Learn to Code With Me podcast, where I'm chatting with people who taught themselves how to code and are now doing amazing things with their newly found skills.

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Hey everyone, welcome to the Learn to Code With Me podcast. I am your host, Laurence Bradford. In today’s episode, I talk with Allison Esposito. Allison is the founder of Tech Ladies. However, she started her career as a journalist. Allison later transitioned into copywriting and marketing roles at startups, and ultimately took on a position at Google. While working, she began the group Tech Ladies. Today, she runs Tech Ladies full time. In our conversation we chat about how Allison got into the world of tech, what it was like working and then quitting her job at Google, how she started Tech Ladies, and much more. Our conversation is especially relevant for those who love to write and do digital marketing, but also want to work in tech. Remember, you can get Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript, at learntocodewith.me/podcast. Enjoy our conversation!

Hey Allison, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Allison:
Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Laurence:
Yes, of course. So real quick, could you introduce yourself to the audience?

Allison:
Sure. My name is Allison Esposito and I’m the founder of Tech Ladies.

Laurence:
Awesome. I want to go back, I guess maybe towards the beginning of your career, because you weren’t always working in tech, right?

Allison:
That’s right, yeah. I started my career in journalism actually. I always knew I wanted to be a writer. I just wasn’t sure where I was going to do that. I started my career in journalism, I actually worked for the New York State Assembly for a short time. I also worked in government before switching over to tech. I’ve been in tech for almost six years now.

Laurence:
Wow. So how did you get your first job in tech? Were you specifically looking for jobs in tech or was it just kind of one of those serendipitous things that just happened?

Allison:
Yeah. I was talking to my friend who’s an engineer actually and I said, “Hey I’m thinking about learning to code.” And he gave me some really good advice, which actually is going to sort of sound like bad advice. He was like, “Why do you want to learn to code? You are a writer and that’s what you’re really good at.” I was like, “Well I just really want to get involved in tech. I think there’s a lot of exciting things happening and I want to build products and all this stuff.” He basically said, “What you do is also needed in tech.” It’s not as much of an obvious career path to be a writer or a copywriter or content person or marketer in tech, but I sort of forged a path there. Doubled down on that instead of learning to code. I did try to code a little and I was super terrible at it, but I think it turned out to be good advice for me because I don’t think I would have been good at it anyway.

Laurence:
At the time when you decided, “Oh I want to learn to code,” you were talking to your friend, what were you doing then when you made this decision?

Allison:
I was working in a marketing department and doing primarily digital marketing. I was mainly building up my marketing chops which was good, because I’ve used that in every startup I’ve worked at since. I knew I wanted to do it a little bit more in tech. I started working with some friends on some side projects where we would launch an app. I had a friend who was a designer, a friend who was an engineer, and myself and we would put together whole concepts for apps. Put them together, put them out. Have tons of failures and just learn from all the little things we were building on the side. I would definitely work on that a lot in addition to my marketing job during the day. That’s sort of how I learned before I actually started working in tech full time. At my first real tech job, other than digital type of work I was doing, I worked at Foursquare. I was the copywriter there a few years ago.

Laurence:
Yeah, that’s really cool. So you went from being, you were working in marketing, did you say agency or a marketing department at a company?

Allison:
I was working in a marketing department. A small marketing department, and handing all the digital, everything on the digital side. And then yes, transitioned into doing more of the UX copy. I had done writing in all of my marketing jobs in the past but I decided that I want to do that full time in tech. There was a copywriter role open at Foursquare which was a great opportunity because Foursquare has such a strong brand voice. They had had that since the beginning, it attracted a lot of people to their product. I got to learn a lot about how to maintain a voice for a brand and develop a voice for a brand and grow with your audience and things like that.

Laurence:
Yeah, so I'm so interested. You were a copywriter at Foursquare, and then you also mentioned this term, UX copy, which, for the listeners out there, I have talked to Allison before on the phone and we actually had a conversation about this because a lot of what I do at my new job here at Teachable definitely relates to UX copy or product copy, as I like to call it. Could you kind of dive into that just a little bit for some of the listeners who may not be familiar?

Allison:
Sure. I think what's going to happen to a lot of people is they get some kind of copywriter title at a startup, whether it's a five person startup or a 150 person startup. Some smaller sized company, it's likely that you will work between the product teams and the marketing team. That way you can just be the writer on staff and be in both areas. For product and UX copy, you would be doing something like working with developers and working with designers on product flows and wireframes and figuring out what the message will be. That's everything from what does the screen say to what does the button copy say. How do you keep people engaged in the flow so they keep tapping to get to the next step. It's a really important, underutilized and underappreciated part of product. Could even be considered part of design.

At different places most startups don't have a copywriter on staff so either designers or sometimes the engineers are just writing, sticking copy in there. I think a lot of people will notice a huge improvement in their product and in how many people are using and relating to their product if they actually put somebody on that team who knows how to write and engage people and keep people in the flow.

Laurence:
Yeah, I 100% agree. I feel like a lot of what I do here relates to UX copy or product copy. Copywriting, working across teams, so with people in the product team and with people even on customer care and the marketing team. So really kind of touching all those different sides. It's funny, you don't really think about it, but all of the copy, whether it's emails, whether it's in the product itself, you mentioned things like buttons or sidebar titles, and then of course there's other things like when you make an update to the product and they have to send out an email to the user. So like what is the messaging going to be like. There's so many things that writing, where writing and communication skills are important.

Allison:
Oh definitely. It's overlooked at a lot of places. I think that companies really suffer for it. Just sometimes having a writer on your team, that affects open rates. That affects how many people are stay and use your app and open it every day and all that type of stuff. I think a lot of people think of it as window dressing, but it's really as important as design. I'm hoping that in the next couple years, this continues to be something that people are hiring out for just because I'm really passionate about it. Brand and voice in companies. I went on to do that at the next company I was at. I was at a smaller startup called Oyster after I was at Foursquare. Much smaller team, like 30 people. I was doing a lot more actual full stack marketing type of work but I got to do a lot of copywriting on the side as well.

Laurence:
Yeah. I'm looking at your LinkedIn now that you were, your title, a marketing manager at Oyster.

Allison:
So I got to do pretty much everything related to marketing and copy and creating a brand voice and I worked with our design team on that.

Laurence:
Yeah, I love the term full stack marketing. I've heard it before, but only since I moved to New York. I'm not sure if I actually heard that phrase. Of course we think of full stack development. Could you just explain that to the listeners as well? What you mean when you say full stack marketing?

Allison:
Sure. I don't know if it's a great term or if we should take it away from developers or anything like that. I have no strong feelings about that so I apologize to anyone listening if they feel strongly against that for any reason. Basically what I mean when I say it is just that obviously there's two sides to being really good at marketing. One is understanding people and being able to communicate really well with them. The other side is really analytical and being able to pore over numbers and look at your user growth and figure out growth strategies. What I mean by full stack marketing is really somebody who can do both and all of that and switch tasks and just be a marketing person that handles it all. I think that at startups if you work on a marketing team you're likely going to have to do it all.

Laurence:
Yeah, we actually had a job posting up several months ago. I think we called it, I don't think the actual title was full stack marketer, but that was one of the keywords that we were using in there because, exactly as you said, we wanted someone that had both the communication skills but also the analytical and could analyze different sets of data and make marketing decisions based on that. That's super awesome. You were at Oyster, and then you kind of, it was acquired by Google.

Allison:
Yeah, so then I joined Google and I was with Google for about a year, and I just left recently to run Tech Ladies full time.

Laurence:
That was one of the things that I jotted down that I wanted to ask you before we started recording, but I wanted to save it. I wanted to ask how things have been since you quit your full time job. I know there's so many people listening right now who want to work in tech and they want to have a full time job, but then there's also a ton of people listening who are learning tech skills so they can either start their own business or do consulting or freelancing or whatever you'd like to call it. So how has that switch been?

Allison:
The switch has been great. I think I was really ready for it, but I think more importantly, Tech Ladies was ready for it. By that I mean what we're doing has enough momentum to warrant me working on it full time. I definitely have enough to do every single day and most days it feels like there's actually not enough hours in the day to do everything we want to do. I think that's a really important thing if you're thinking about either going freelance full time or leaving your full time job for your side hustle.

Something I've learned a lot and thought a lot about in the months preceding leaving my job, it's how do you really validate this idea. You have to validate several things. You have to validate your idea for your company or whatever you're going to work on, figure out how sustainable it can be and figure out personally how much, how risk averse you are and how open you are to changing course. I was 100% ready for that personally so that's been, it feels like there's a real match for me to be running my own company, and community. It's been really fun, working out really well so far.

Laurence:
I'm super curious because before I had a full time job, I actually never had a real full time job. This is my first real full time job and I know personally the transition my first month was definitely challenging. Not necessarily in a bad way, but it was a very big life change for me. Especially, on top of that, moving to New York. So I moved to a new city so there's a few changes happening at once. How was it in your day to day? Have you been loving it or are you missing the whole work environment that you were in before, especially at such a large company like Google.

Allison:
Yeah, I'm not missing it at all. The only thing I'll say is that I really miss the Google food, which everybody knows is incredible. That was such an incredible perk that they had, I miss that, but I've adapted. I started cooking more, I'm taking care of myself so it's fine. That's the hardest thing if you're leaving a really great tech company is to be without these perks and you're just going at working alone at home.

How you adapt to that, for me, the hardest thing has been creating structure to my day. I've almost got it down pat. It's only been about 4 1/2 weeks since I left and in the beginning I was still in this schedule of, I was working on Tech Ladies from six to midnight every night, after work, and most weekends. I was a real workaholic for the months leading up to it. Tech Ladies was just so lively and happening that I wanted to keep putting time and energy into it. It was so fun that I was working a lot and had no life and that's not healthy because you can reach burnout status really quickly. When I first left I was like, "Oh, this is going to be so great I'm going to have all these new hours in my day," but I just filled them up with too many things the first week or two. I started to really realize that I have to create a structure for my day. My new goal is start my day at 7am and end it at 7pm.

So that's been working well. It doesn't have to be straight work all the way through. Maybe I go grocery shopping or cook dinner somewhere in there so I'm doing something normal with my day other than just starting at a laptop and working. I'm finding some balance. It's slow going, but I'm getting there.

Laurence:
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Yeah, that's a really great point, creating structure. I can't imagine because I haven't done this, but I can only imagine going from having a full time job and a side project and working so much, trying to make the most of every minute, and just never really relaxing, to almost feeling like you have, not so much time, but I feel like going from having a full time job and the side hustle to just the one thing. It must feel awesome at the same time because you put all your focus in one place, right?

Allison:
Yeah, I think it feels so awesome because I'm so excited to be working on Tech Ladies and it's like a, it's cheesy to say but it's like a real dream come true. It's this thing that started as a coffee meetup for women in tech in New York and has since grown to be this really robust community of 5,000 women who live everywhere. There's just so much help that happens everyday in our online group. We're helping women find jobs which feels really good and we're helping companies find women who work in tech and helping them solve this sort of pipeline problem of being able to increase their diversity efforts in one really easy, simple way. That's been super rewarding. It all kind of grew naturally. Yeah, it's the most fun thing I've ever worked on.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's so awesome. I know you gave some advice before about people making the decision to quit their full time job to pursue their freelance career, side business, whatever you want to call it. Is there anything else you can say? You did say validate the idea and make sure it's sustainable and make sure you're 100% ready, which I think is great advice. Is there anything else you can think of on that topic before we move on?

Allison:
Sure, yeah. I would say you're never going to be 100% ready, so what you need to ask yourself is, is what you built on the side growing faster than you can even keep up with it on the side? If you can still get it done in 2 or 3 hours after work and you have those 2 or 3 hours, if you're lucky enough to have 2 or 3 hours after work where you're not taking care of a child or someone else, then that's amazing and you can do that fine, you can fit it in your schedule.

If you can't, you have to figure out, can I really schedule eight hours or more a day with clients or whatever it is. I think it's risky to do it if you're not sure you can fill it up to a degree, get where you need to be do a degree. On the other hand, you can't wait until it's 100% because it's never going to be 100%. It's always going to be risky and it's always going to be scary, and I don't think you should wait for that feeling to go away.

If you can get traction, picture it as if it were a graph. If the graph is just going up, that's a good sign that if you were to leave and put your full attention on what you're working on, it's going to keep going up. If the graph keeps going up and down, the graph could be anything. It could be clients it could be the amount of money you're making. For Tech Ladies the main thing I look at is how many people are joining, are people still interested in this, and that was just going up like crazy. The question became how can I still serve this community and provide value to them and it got to the point where I couldn't do that part time anymore. I think that's one way you can validate it. Be analytical about it in one sense, but you're still going to have to be brave and go with your gut.

I'd say the other thing, really important thing to do if you're thinking of making the jump, is to get buy in from people who are closest to you. Often what I think happens to people who have also left their jobs to do their startup company or freelance full time or whatever their side project is, a lot of people know very early, "My business is there.' And they tend to know, "And I'm there, I'm ready for this, I'm ready for uncertainty." The thing that can hold people out for months and even sometimes years to actually going and doing this is they're simply too afraid to ask those closest to them. So maybe it's a partner or husband or wife. Could even be a parent or something. Oftentimes people are just too afraid to have that conversation and say, "Hey, I'm thinking about doing this full time. How will that affect our family or how will that affect your view of me," or anything. You just need to know that other people are along for that journey with you because you don't exist in a vacuum. I think that's something important that a lot of people don't realize about making that switch. It's not just all about you.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's such awesome advice, thank you so much for sharing. You mentioned in your answer about getting traction. I'm just curious, you then also said one of the things you look at is how many users you're getting every day and if people are still signing up and that the graph and the curve has been going up ever since you started. I'm sure when you first started Tech Ladies and it was just a coffee group meetup, maybe you didn't feel that way necessarily. I know at least speaking for myself with Learn to Code With Me and the blog and the podcast, it took me months to feel like I was getting anywhere at all. Early on I felt like no one was paying attention. That mostly was the case, it took a lot of time to build up, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Did you feel that way with Tech Ladies or did it seem to grow really fast pretty quickly?

Allison:
I think, I can't remember who said this, but somebody said this about business, that things that look like they happen very quickly, when you look at the backstory, it turns out that they're actually happening for a very long time, and that's true of Tech Ladies too. The coffee meetup has been happening for two years. It started two years ago. I started it when I was early on at Oyster. I've had two jobs since then. So this was awhile ago we were building this. It wasn't something that I put a lot of time and effort into until about 6 or 7 months ago and only left about a month ago to work on it full time. I think it was one of those things where, on its own it was growing. As soon as I started to water the plant a little bit, it started to grow a lot. Then I realized that if I water and feed this plant a lot, it's growing like crazy. So yeah, I think that's one way to look at it.

Laurence:
Yeah, so you started the coffee meetup about two ago you said. I love that, you said that you've had two jobs since starting the meetup group. You said about 6 to 7 months ago, so maybe about 1 1/2 years or a little more after starting Tech Ladies, you got really serious about it.

Allison:
Yeah. What happened was a few things. It was growing on its own for sure. At first we were just a New York based meetup. I started looking around and thinking for all of my friends who moved to San Francisco that are engineers that are also in tech, they'd be great to keep in the group. They would drop out when they moved to San Francisco. It become clear, what am I doing? Why is this just a New York thing? This is something that women need everywhere. The first thing I did was open up Tech Ladies everywhere. That's when we started growing really fast.

I put out a Medium post a few months ago and said if anybody has, we'd grown the list to however big it was then, I think Tech Ladies was only maybe a 1000 or 2000 members at the time. I said if anybody would like to post jobs in this community that I built, we're a bunch of really smart women in tech and I think that these are great women for somebody to get in front of if people are looking to post jobs. I put that out on Medium and my original idea was just to put about six jobs in a newsletter every week. There was so much response that I started not being able to fill out the newsletter, it would have just been a giant newsletter of jobs.

That's when I decided to create a website for it. Which was something we needed for awhile. That's where we got an application process, for joining Tech Ladies you have to apply. We have that all set up now. That's kind of phase one of Tech Ladies becoming a real company.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's great. I'm a member on the website, hireltechladies.com. You create an account and it gets approved and then you get access to a private job board that is password protected.

Allison:
Yep. And we have a weekly newsletter and we have an online group, a facebook group, with about 4,000 members in that group. We have things we discuss and it's really active. The women in that group are so awesome and so helpful.

Laurence:
Yeah, it's a great group. Side note, I love the way that you structure it with the hashtags. Like #intro, #ask, #offer, right? There's a few of those, it's really structured. I think that's so wise. This is completely self-fulfilling, but did you do that from the beginning or was that something introduced later on?

Allison:
That was something I just was learning. The bigger we got and continue to get, we constantly have to think of ways to make the community relevant to everybody in there. In the early days, it was just everything, you could post anything. It was a small enough group, there were only a few posts coming in a day so it wouldn't overwhelm anyone. We do it for two reasons. One, to keep the flow of information readable and useful. Two, to just encourage people and give people a guideline for what to talk about and how to use the group. That's worked really well for us.

Laurence:
Yeah, I think it's such a smart idea. I wonder why, because I'm in a lot of Facebook groups and across industries, not just tech, and I wonder why not more people do something like that or other ways to find structure within a Facebook group.

Allison:
Yeah, I think it depends on the community manager. For us, our community is everything in Tech Ladies, so it's worth it for us to think, 'How do we organize this, how is this useful to people.' We have an extra moderator now who's administering the group alongside me. For awhile I was just doing that alone in addition to everything else. It's good because the bigger we get the more admins we need to get to make sure that it stays a really useful, active community. That takes time and effort and I think a lot of people who run Facebook groups, even if they're really large Facebook groups, they put it up there for discussion but they don't really maintain it. With the community you really have to be in there, it's really time consuming, but that's something that's really important to us with what we're building with Tech Ladies so it's worth it for us to spend that time on it.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's fantastic. So looking ahead now, what things are you most excited about with Tech Ladies?

Allison:
There's a product road map for Tech Ladies now that I'm excited about. There's so much we could do and the way I refine it is sort of like, what does the community seem like they need and then I'll just ask people in the community, "What do you want Tech Ladies to do next?" The next few months, we're sort of heads down on just really improving the job hunting experience. We're building out a way to search by marketing, to search by engineering, and have those roles surface based on that. Down the line we want to do, there's just simple stuff we don't have.

First, I created this site myself and I told you earlier that I'm not good at coding, so this is based on a template. Now I have a web developer who's working with me and helping me build something a lot more functional. So that's the next thing we're really looking to, to really improve the job hunting experience for folks because so many people come to us for that. Then we're also just really busy planning incredible events.

Our big event cities where we do New York and San Francisco where our large Tech Ladies organizer events are, but also members can organize their own smaller meetups at whatever city they're in. So we're figuring out how to support those so we have online and offline interaction with each other.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's so wonderful, I'm so excited to see the new job hunting experience that you're building and then the way that you're going to continue to organize and grow these events across the US and hey, even international, right?

Allison:
Yeah, we have international people in the group. It's very US based just because we have never spent a dime on marketing. Everything we do is word of mouth so it's mostly people who know people and then it becomes US based or maybe somebody reads an article. We've been getting more and more people. We have members from Africa, a lot of European members coming in, they're really everywhere, Singapore. We're seeing little groups pop up within the group so I'm really excited to see that grow. As we get really big I'm really excited to see that. I also want excuses to travel. So having Tech Ladies organize meetups in cool cities that I've never been to, I'm always hoping that they'll have, "Let's do a Paris meetup, let's do Dublin, let's do Singapore." Make it happen.

Laurence:
That's so awesome, I've never even considered that. That's a great way to travel, right? Have the international community and get to go visit in the different international hubs of the world.

Allison:
Yeah, I would love to. It hasn't happened yet, but I think it very well may. I get emails from women all over the world who want to organize meetups, so just kind of waiting for it all to come together.

Laurence:
Nice. Alright Allison, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Where can people find you online?

Allison:
Sure. People can go to www.hiretechladies.com, fill out an application to join us. Once you're approved you'll get into our secret jobs page and you'll have an invite for a Facebook group and all that good stuff, so I would love for people to join.

Laurence:
Yes, definitely. We'll include all the links you mentioned in the Show Notes to this podcast. Thank you again so much for coming on the show.

Allison:
Thanks so much for having me.

Laurence:
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Allison. Again, the Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript, can be found at learntocodewith.me/podcast. All you have to do is type in Allison's name in the search bar at the top, and her episode should appear first in the results list. If you enjoyed this episode, head on over to my website, Learn to Code With Me, where you can find even more awesome code related content, like my 10 Free Tips for Teaching Yourself How to Code. Thank you so much and I'll see you next week!

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