🖥️ How to build community and career as a woman in tech

Interview with Claudia Cafeo and curated resources to boost your career.

Author

Sofia Terlesky
March 08, 2023

Hey there 👋

Today is international women's day, and this newsletter edition is here to celebrate women in community and tech. But also to provide resources for you to build a career and community from scratch.

So, in this newsletter edition, we share the journey of Claudia Cafeo, an inspiring community manager and UX designer that founded Floxies and manage the NoCodeOps community.

She started a community for UX/UI women developers using Webflow and no code from her own experience of needing space for support, mentorship, and peer learning.

Claudia didn't though Floxies was going to almost double the member base in less than a year, and had to learn how to become a community manager in no time.

Keep reading to explore:

  • Top profiles of women founders and community managers

  • Interview with Claudia Cafeo, with insights on how to build and grow online communities

  • Latest tweets about starting a career as a woman in tech

  • Best resources for founders

  • Top communities for women in tech

This edition is brought by Hivebrite.

📣Top profiles of women founders and community managers

She worked for huge companies such as Shopify, Open Space AI, and HubSpot and shares insights and resources on community building and marketing.

If you're building a community around a startup, her profile is definitely a must to follow.

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She's a UX developer and community manager at Hashnode and writes about content creation in tech, along with programming tips and insights.

For those looking to grow a network in the Twitter tech community, she has a great profile to engage with. Also, she always includes her community in content planning for her blog, which is a great strategy to understand what readers actually need to read.

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I have to mention Areej in my list of community managers because she's running Women in tech SEO, one of my favorite communities out there.

It's amazing to see how real interest and commitment to your work can help online communities thrive. And Areej's community is the real proof of the value behind women-only communities. If you're into SEO, you NEED to join this community!

🏆 Featured Tweet

📣 Asking for a founder: How to start and grow a community?

We asked Claudia Cafeo about the starting of Floxies, a community for women in UX and no code, and No Code Ops, a paid community.

Why did you start Floxies and No Code Ops?

I’ve always been a curious, creative individual though and as a result I started looking back at those skills that I had put in a drawer during my studies. I started studying UX/UI design and Webflow development as a self-taught in the evenings after work and to me it felt like that was the light at the end of the tunnel that I needed in order to get out of school.

I soon realised how many of my teaching skills were easily transferable in those required for designers (and even more, community managers after that) so I found the transition to be very smooth and almost natural I would say.

Even though my studies were super exciting and I wanted to learn more and more every day, I also felt lonely. I felt like I was embarking on a huge journey by myself so I started outreaching for mentors and senior designers online.

Although I had some absolutely great experiences with communities like Bring You Own Laptop by Daniel Walter Scott and landed an internship with UXBeginners with Oz Chen, I also had some pretty bad interactions where some mentors that I wanted to receive help from were asking inappropriate, personal questions in return.

That put me off a little bit, to be honest with you.

I also worked for another internship for a month and never got paid for it.

Now I was also very angry.

Instead of throwing in the towel, though, that feeling of injustice and just overall resentment towards those experiences pushed me to seek out for other women who were possibly living a similar experience to mine.

I posted a message in a design group on social media asking if, in fact, there were other women out there who wanted to form a group to study design and Webflow together.

The positive response was HUGE and totally unexpected. I received about 70 responses to that message and what I thought was going to initially be a simple WhatsApp group turned out to be a beautiful Discord server that I built up from scratch.

What were your first steps in getting the first members?

I used Discord because I’m also an avid gamer and I knew that platform and knew how to use it and I also knew that it would have been able to easily accommodate 70 people in.

I did not know that that initial group would grow to over 1300 members in one year.

I did not know that I would have become a Community Manager.

Looking back now, that was definitely the best decision of my life.

I grew the community with the input from all the people in there and using my people-centered approach that I carried over from school, I was able to establish solid relationships with some of my founding members, people that I’m happy to today call friends.

The word Floxies itself comes from my Latin studies too, as the word “phlox” in Latin means flower or flame and it’s also the scientific name of a flowery bush that grows even during tough meteorological conditions - is there a better metaphor to represent women growing in tech? I don’t think so. 🙂

To this day, Floxies keeps growing beautifully and I’ve hosting live events for our members from the very beginning - these events are not only an opportunity for us all to learn from influential guest speakers from the design and Webflow space, but also an opportunity for us to bond even more and continue empowering and supporting one another along our tech journeys.

✨ Latest tweets about career and community building

💬 Best resources to start a career in tech and grow a community

🤝 Must-join communities