Black founder tech company Chloédigital helps content developers with technical support and growth strategies
Black women are under-represented in the tech space and one women who is helping to change that fact is Chloé Watts, the founder and CEO of chloédigital, a leading tech support membership platform for content creators. Chloé is a self-taught coder, who launched the business in 2014 when she saw a real need for content creators to have access to technical support and growth strategy, in order to not only maintain their websites but also accelerate and grow them as a business.
They now have more than 300 global influencers on their membership programme, helping to grow their digital empires. Even though 2020 was a disastrous year for many, Chloe remarks that it was an interesting year to see how content creators and influencers, mainly female, were able to pivot and not only maintain their businesses but actually thrive throughout the difficult year.
Chloé is passionate about helping women use technology to create the life and career of their dreams, and she is most proud when she sees clients supporting their families with flexibility, they didn’t think was possible and reaching milestones, like buying houses or going full time into self-employment, because of the freedom a well-run blog and business gives them.
Also, as a young black female in tech, Chloé is particularly passionate about showing younger women and girls that a career in tech is achievable and accessible to them, breaking the pattern of under-representation in this space.
Our mission is to help women live the life of their dreams through technology. We have hundreds of millennial women on our membership who have built growing and sustainable businesses through their blogs.
Chloé Watts
We catch up with Chloé to discover more about her company...
Can you tell us about your business
Chloédigital is the leading tech support membership for content creators. I launched the business in 2014 when I saw a need for content creators to have access to technical support and growth strategy, in order to not only maintain their websites but also accelerate and grow them as a business.
We now have more than 300 global influencers on our membership programme. We have tiered options for members from basic and consistent tech support through to growth strategy, road mapping and website and app development.
Our mission is to help women live the life of their dreams through technology. We have hundreds of millennial women on our membership who have built growing and sustainable businesses through their blogs.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
I was always into tech growing up. When I was 15, I had a Myspace page, and you had to code to make your page look cute, so I taught myself. From there I started to help up and coming bands and artists to create their pages. I then went on to start designing websites for friends and small businesses.
With this knowledge and skill set I had been offering my services to influencers I knew for a while. I soon built a reputation and more and more influencers would contact me and ask to pay for me to fix issues on their site.
I also started to see that influencers didn’t really have a partner to help guide them strategically around increasing traffic, ways of managing their campaigns to drive sales for brands and also how to start looking ahead at new ideas and opportunities. I then saw a real gap for an efficient service, through a subscription model, where we could offer packages that worked for each influencer.
What advice would you give to other aspiring female entrepreneurs?
Feel the fear and do it anyway. Stand in your power and see what you are made of.
What can we hope to see from chloédigital in the future?
As our customer evolves so does our product. Ecommerce has been a huge focus for us, and we have been guiding our members to think ahead and develop services that they own on their own sites. This means thinking beyond brand partnerships and delivering something to their audience through the knowledge they have. Whether that is selling apparel or a much-needed course to their audience.
2021 will see this growing even more and this is really exciting for me as it is totally in-line with our mission. I want to help women build the life of their dreams and that requires building and developing long-term strategy and products they can control and own.