DIARY OF A MAD BLACK WOMAN CODE
DIARY OF A MAD BLACK WOMAN TV

Beta customers are expecting us to have the same infrastructure as Netflix like yesterday. And the last 12 months have been the lowest points in my life as an entrepreneur. Hell, there have been times when I’ve questioned whether to continue when things have gotten really difficult. Everyone’s not cut out to keep pushing when the going gets tough. I simply can’t read a job description and “swipe right.” I need to “date” them for a while to see if they’re serious about a long-term relationship. He just never bothered to tell me.Īll of those incidents taught me a valuable lesson: finding a CTO (or any team member) is like finding a spouse. I literally thought he had gotten hurt since we had a great working relationship. And a previous CTO didn’t showed up to an important scheduled meeting and I never heard from him again.

DIARY OF A MAD BLACK WOMAN CODE

Another one left us with an incomplete product with a lot of tech glitches and code errors that made it impossible to make the tweaks along the way. He never delivered after I paid him thousands of dollars. One developer stopped working mid-way saying he needed double the pay even though we were under contract. In the early days, I was too quick to settle down, especially with tech people who did not share the same passion and drive that I have. First, it took about a year and a half to put together my rock star team. My 12-month map had lots of detours, bumpy trails and roadblocks. You read the stories on social media about the 20-something who starts his company in a garage and sells it for millions or the Ivy League dropout who’s able to get his first $1 million investment with just an idea written on a napkin. In the real world, most entrepreneurs fail and those who don’t go broke, lose relationships, sleep and their sanity before they hit success. Honestly, looking back on myself in January 2015, I was naïve. If there were some crystal ball that would have shown me that two years after getting the initial grant we would still be in beta and bootstrapping by a thread, I would be shocked.

Of course absolutely nothing went as planned. I was so excited about what I was building - that the few hours I did slept - I would dream about riding off into the sunset with my dope team and my dope business into a successful bliss. The $20K grant was a great boost for the start of the year.

DIARY OF A MAD BLACK WOMAN TV

I opened my laptop and mapped out a simple, 12-month plan for kweliTV with the funds I just received: I would recruit a rock-star executive team (a CTO and CMO to start), we would launch a solid beta web app by Spring 2015, get feedback and make tweaks along the way, gain enough traction for a seed investment by the end of 2015 and then introduce our kickass 1.0 platform with mobile and TV apps to boot in 2016. I had just left my local bank to create a business account and deposit the $20,000 business grant I had just received a week prior from Unity Journalists.

Diary of a mad black woman