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Chloé Watts on chloédigital, plans for 2021 and advice for young girls who want to get into tech
Words Sandra Edmund
Founder and CEO of chloédigital, Chloé Watts a self taught coder who launched a premier tech support and digital strategy membership for influencers in 2014, saw a niche for content creators to have access to technical support and digital strategy so that they can accelerate and grow themselves as a business. Being tech savvy from a young age, she realised that the technology industry was where her passion was and as she progressed through her journey, she has triumphed to create a business such as chloédigital. Chloé spoke to WOTC about chloédigital, her plans for 2021, how she got into the technology industry and her advice for young girls who want to get into technology. For Chloé, her interest in technology started when she was young as she loved maths and gadgets. She would always get the Carphone Warehouse magazine and let her friends know of the latest devices that were out at the time. She believed that her love for gadgets especially was heritable as her father worked at Ford and loved gadgets as much as herself. Mathematics gave her an insight to how her brain worked in a systemised way which led her to acknowledge her technical ability.
“At school, we had no idea that the jobs we have now are the things that we could be.”
When she was younger, she thought that she would either be a teacher or work in TV. However, at home and school she was unaware of the prospect of having a career such as web development. At age 15, Chloé had access to the school computers where she was able to research and watch “how-to” videos on website building.
“Coding is creative because I can code and create something beautiful.”
Chloé loved being able to write something such as code with the intention of it coming to life. To her, coding is extremely creative however others did not see it as a creative build which shocked her. Creative field has been classed as design, creative writing etc. whereas the technical field has been classed as coding. However, Chloé feels like coding is creative as she said “I could code and create something beautiful. So I realised that I was between someone who loved technical infrastructure and someone who loved things to be beautiful, branding and aesthetically pleasing.” She noticed that she had an interest in two aspects which was being creative and technology, so she wanted to start her own business. Her parents enlightened her about financial freedom and her father explained that financial freedom is when you create your own game, your own business and your own infrastructure. At the time, she was not sure what her business was going to be but as she started to code more and leave university it became more apparent.
Chloé went to the university of Sunderland where she studied TV and New Media (new media was disguised as web design). However she realised these opportunities when started university as she has many family members in the media industry such as her auntie who is the floor manager for BBC and is in TV production and her cousin who works at Sky. As these were her influences within her family, she thought that she would take the same route because she wanted to do something that she found interesting and be able to find a job.
Her original course was TV and radio however when she got to university she found out that there was a course called TV and new media and in that course she was able to code. At the time, she didn’t know that was a course such as Computer Science but knowing there was a course such as TV and new media where her dissertation was a website she knew that the course was for her. So on the first day, she switched course and that gave her the revelation that people actually code for a career.
In her early 20’s, bloggers arrived on the scene and they enjoyed creating content and blogging but they didn’t see it as a full time career. They would start their blogs to be a stylist or as a resume, yet they would need help with their blog because it would either be running slowly or it would be broken. So they would need help and as Chloé had a lot of blogger friends she would use her technical ability to solve the issues that they were having on their site which would have taken them 3 weeks to solve. It was years later that she realised the niche in the market for tech support and considered to create a business around it.
The idea of chloédigital started when Chloé started working at a variety of agencies after university. One of the companies that she worked for was a nightclub where she built all their websites. During that time she was going to start her business as the blogging industry was rising however she was nervous and someone told her that 22 was too young for her to start and that she should go and gain more experience by working in other agencies. She went to gain more experience by working at another agency which unfortunately let her go after her 3 month probation. It worked in her favour being there as she had gained a mass of information and networks to take the leap to start her business.
In 2012, Chloé started to freelance by creating people’s websites and polishing her skills but she knew that freelancing was not tangible. In the blogging space, she was well known so during her 2 years of freelancing she networked with a variety of people in that space that she was asked to go to conferences and at the time had her own newsletter. In 2014, after 2 years of freelancing, she decided to turn the help that she was giving to her blogger friends into a monthly subscription where individuals will pay per month to receive unlimited tech support at the time and that is how her company grew.
The chloédigital mission is to empower women to live the life of their dreams through technology. With this in mind, the idea of creating tech support arose and so from there it grew into giving strategic support. Business owners needed a strategy that included email marketing, SEO and audience development.
“Your website is the foundation of your business, you have to think about you cultivating your own audience on your website and driving people to it.”
As the company grew, they then began to offer site designs and actually build websites for clients. During 2020 and the movement, Chloé started to think how she can impact more people and that is where CD World sparked from to be a free content hub for any influencer who wants to scale their business, whether they were on the company’s pay product or not. This included tactical knowledge from the chloédigital strategic team and perks to recommended tools and services.
There is a stigma against influencers that they are just talented individuals that make a lot of mistakes however Chloé’s client base is full of incredible entrepreneurs who have built scalable content based businesses. Hence the creation of the CD world community, to give those access to tools and resources to have the ability to grow.
The success of chloédigital could not have been possible without a powerful team to back the powerful CEO. She has a global remote based team who work in the UK, Portugal, USA, South Africa, Paraguay, Brazil and now the Philippines. Her team is cultivated with people who share the vision of empowering women and want to give them the resources to help scale their business. Luckily, she has a team that has an enormous passion for supporting their clients and giving them excellent service. The remote based team of 16 people are built of developers, designers, strategists and project managers. As their offering is quite unique, chloédigital are able to work and partner with other companies who share the same goals as themselves, so they are always open to working with other agencies.
Chloé’s plans for 2021 is to reverse engineer what the CD world is today and launch it to be available to any content creator. They are also looking to launch their own WordPress theme that bloggers are able to purchase if they are new to the blogging space or if they are not ready to make a larger investment in website design. Chloé also expressed that the company will also be having a course coming soon so they have a few different products coming soon. The end of year goal is to have a technical suite of products offering so that influencers know that they are the number one place to come and scale their business.
Finally we asked Chloé what advice would you give to a young girl that wants to get into the industry, but doesn’t know where to begin? What would you say to her?
Chloé: My advice would be just to play, have fun, research different types of roles in technology and start to read job descriptions. Job descriptions are always helpful for you to see what companies are looking for and what roles are out there. By doing that you can see what you have an interest in. You may not have the prerequisites yet because you’re just starting out but you have the interest in learning. Then you can think to yourself, what can I do in order to get these skills? Is it online courses I should be taking? Is it by further education? Is it via YouTube or is it just by me Googling and finding the best resources? Do I want to learn to code?
For me, I find coding to be super important, you don't necessarily need to get to a point where you're going to build the next Facebook. But I feel like having those fundamental technical skills are super important because we are more and more in a digital landscape. So even if you don't have a technical role or you're not looking to become a full time developer, I think having that type of understanding of how things work is important, because that's when you put yourself in the driving seat of being a producer in this world versus just a consumer.
Make sure to check YouTube as a lot of people are producing a lot of amazing content now around like their tech journeys and how they started and how they got to where they are. Follow people on social media who are on those journeys because people really want to share, especially women in tech, like we want to share our stories because we knew it was hard. I would say that is very important because I would have loved to have had some kind of technical role model when I was younger. So if you are a young girl, influencer, someone transitioning into tech or looking for some inspiration, connect with Chloé Watts and chloédigital on social media and her website to learn more about chloédigital.