Tiffany Pham

@tifftpham · Founder & CEO, MOGUL

@caprihiggins Thanks so much for the question! My advice to young entrepreneurs is to, early on, identify what you want to build and figure out where your weak spots are. Develop skillsets in this area through collaborations (such as side projects, until you launch), or else onboard advisors who can help provide guidance here over time. Then, as you launch, be resilient. you will hear no's -- but know that they are "not right now's." Keep going until you hear a yes.

11 share tweet・a year ago

Capri Galaska

@caprihiggins · Co-Founder @anchorxyz

@tifftpham thank you so much, that is great feedback and encouraging to hear!

Sarim Haq

@sarim_haq · AI Whisperer @ caspy.com

Hi Tiffany. thanks for the AMA. I have a couple of questions: 1. What was has been your most successful growth hack, to date, that drove insane amount of traffic to mogul? 2. So mogul has many features: lynda.com typed online courses, buzzfeed styled content and a Q/A community similar to quora/reddit etc. At Mogul's launch, were you planning to cover all of these domains or did you have one area in mind to excel at? What is Moguls UVP? Thanks! Sarim

4 share tweet・a year ago

@tifftpham · Founder & CEO, MOGUL

@sarim_haq Hi Sarim, those are great questions: 1. The most successful growth hack was to be super-users on the platform ourselves. Being so present on the platform creates an aura of care and passion. Since launch, I would submit posts about my own life and career, share those amongst my networks, and build up a following such that other users would attempt to do the same on Mogul. In other words, this accelerated our growth as more and more users would find Mogul through the content we ourselves shared. 2. At launch, we put over 60 categories out there for users to post about. Over time, users would submit more about some topics, less about others. Over time, we honed in on the 5 they post most on: Growth, Love, Style, World, and Culture -- and made these the main categories. We let the community decide the rest, and move with them to service their needs best so long as it is aligned with our goals for our ultimate vision: (1) providing information access, (2) enabling economic opportunities, and (3) impacting girls' education.

5 share tweet・a year ago

Sydney Liu

@sydney_liu_sl · Co-Founder of Commaful

Hey Tiffany!! So awesome to see you here and so excited to see Mogul continuing to grow rapidly!!! Had a couple of questions: 1) Not everybody is a "creator" or "writer", most people aren't. Have you found any patterns around which women were more likely to want to write things? How did you find them, especially early on? 2) Do you have a strategy to retain writers and readers? How do you keep people coming back to the site? Thanks and hope to see you soon! P.S, your story on Comma continues to do really well :D Sydney Liu https://commaful.com

@tifftpham · Founder & CEO, MOGUL

@sydney_liu_sl Hi Sydney! So good to see you on here! We need to catch up. (1) What I find is that we all have stories, journeys, and learnings to share. We don't have to be writers as long as we are authentic and true to ourselves. Early on, I built our initial user base through the young girls around the world who were already contacting me for advice. They were asking me questions about life and career. I built the platform for them initially; so when we launched, they were our natural first adopters. (2) Having built a community around a mission, we have an organic way of retaining users who are also passionate about this: enabling women to share information and access knowledge from each other. From our super users, we then built programs called Mogul Influencers (www.onmogul.com/iamamogul) & Mogul Ambassadors (www.onmogul.com/global_ambassador) to better service their needs and further amplify their voices amongst our millions of users.

@tifftpham · Founder & CEO, MOGUL

@sydney_liu_sl Also, I do see that the story of Mogul on Comma still does very well! Constant tweets from your readers saying they enjoyed it. :) We really appreciate it!

Thomas Stöcklein

@tomstocklein · FoundersFundersFuture.com

Hi Tiffany, Great to have you on ProductHunt! It's so awesome that you taught yourself how to code to build the first version of Mogul! I'm curious what programming languages, frameworks, etc. you used to build V1.0 of Mogul. Also, what is the current version of Mogul build on in terms of the front-end and back-end of the platform?

@tifftpham · Founder & CEO, MOGUL

@tomstocklein I taught myself Ruby on Rails & Bootstrap, and built V1.0 of Mogul through that initially. The first version was quite simple. I have our CTO David Pham here beside me, and to address your second question, he says that the current version of Mogul is built on top of Ruby on Rails & React/HTML/SASS/JavaScript.

Alisha Ramos

@alishalisha · Product Design Director @ Vox Media

Hi Tiffany. Your story is so inspiring, thanks for taking the time to answer questions. I find it so impressive that Mogul was able to reach so many women in the first week. Did you have a strategy/specific plan in mind going into that, in terms of marketing the product? Or was that mostly organic growth? EDIT: Woops, I see that you actually answered this question already. My other question is: What are some of the big challenges or opportunities you see moving forward with Mogul?

@tifftpham · Founder & CEO, MOGUL

@alishalisha Thanks so much Alisha! Yes, it was organic growth! I did not ever expect it. The biggest challenges and opportunities are (both) to continue servicing our international users, which means further orienting our programs Mogul Influencers & Mogul Ambassadors around international leaders and college students, respectively, for example. It means introducing further translation features and mobile capabilities given that over 80% of our audience accesses use via mobile.

Kris Shkodrani

@kris_shkodrani

Hi Tiffany, thank you for taking questions. Mogul had a fantastic launch, as you mentioned more than 1MM women in the first week. What advice would you give to startups that are about to launch their product? What did you get right?

Justin Wilson

@jawhster

@kris_shkodrani I 2nd that question. Thank you

@tifftpham · Founder & CEO, MOGUL

@kris_shkodrani Great question. It was about: content, product, and mission. Initially, as I was working in the media industry (aiming to ultimately honor my grandmother, who had worked to provide information access to those around her in need throughout her life), I was contacted by young women who would ask me for advice. As I received their letters, I realized there was a need for a platform like Mogul out there whereby millions of women could share their insights from the ground level -- their lives, their careers, their journeys. As it launched to these women, we had immediate traction because it was already servicing a specific group of people's needs. I observed what content they liked to share on Mogul, and aimed to bring more women who could share such content. Then I made the product extremely shareable through widgets that incentivized sharing. Finally, I reinforced our mission over and over again, in every conversation, every communication.

4 share tweet・a year ago

@tifftpham · Founder & CEO, MOGUL

@jawhster I agree! Let me know if there was anything else you wanted to ask on top of that question.

Dale Clareburt

@daleclareburt · Co-Founder, CEO @weirdlyhub

Hi Tiffany, Thanks for taking questions today. I'm really interested in the diversity of workplaces. Not just gender and ethnicity, although these are super important. But also diversity of thinking, beliefs and approaches to work. I see Mogul as being an awesome and informative platform for this. So thanks for that. What do you believe is key to increasing and encouraging diversity in the workplace? What practices have you put in place at Mogul that is delivering on this? Cheers Dale

@tifftpham · Founder & CEO, MOGUL

@daleclareburt Thanks so much for this important question. I could discuss this topic for a long time. 1. STORIES: To start, we have to increase and encourage diversity in the workplace by supporting women and minorities to speak up early at the earliest stages in their lives; it starts even before the workplace. Right now, women represent just 15% of share of voice on op-eds and boards. Mogul is aiming to accelerate this rate by encouraging women very early on in their lives to speak up and share their voice, by having our community support one another, provide each other courage. 2. JOBS: We must also encourage those in hiring positions to seek top talent, beyond sometimes what they may be used to or comfortable with. For this reason, Mogul enables users to post jobs (www.onmogul.com/jobs) and tap top female talent on our platform. We see large companies such as Procter & Gamble & Verizon as well as top tech startups posting jobs to accelerate the rate at which women are being placed into their workforce. Otherwise, women represent just 20% of top leadership positions in the US. 3. MENTORSHIP & COURSES: Finally, we have Mentorship & Courses (www.onmogul.com/courses), which we offer at the enterprise level to provide companies & startups with resources to attract, retain, and advance diverse talent in their workplace. Let me know if you want an introduction to our Head of Mentorship & Courses, Natasha Birnbaum!

5 share tweet・a year ago

Dale Clareburt

@daleclareburt · Co-Founder, CEO @weirdlyhub

@tifftpham Thanks for your answers. I could talk about diversity for ages too! I would love an introduction to Natasha re to hear more about the mentorship courses. It's great to hear that Mogul is really leading by example in the diversity space.

@tifftpham · Founder & CEO, MOGUL

@daleclareburt Wonderful! Her email is Natasha@Onmogul.com. Let her know I wanted you two to connect!

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Andrew Ettinger

@andrewett · Product Marketing, Twitter (ex-PH)

What has been most exciting about growing Mogul to such a massive scale?

@tifftpham · Founder & CEO, MOGUL

@andrewett Thanks for this fun question. Looking back at the days when I was first a one-person team working out of my bedroom -- it's been so amazing to build a world-class team across our offices in San Francisco, New York, and Paris, whereby everyone is so passionate about transforming the lives of women around the world. We now have over 5,000 people working with Mogul in different capacities across 196 countries and 30,470. I am so proud to be working with such talents.

Emily Hodgins

@ems_hodge · Community and Marketing, Product Hunt

What are your trop growth secrets for early community founders? 🙊

@tifftpham · Founder & CEO, MOGUL

@ems_hodge Great question! And cute emoticon. :) Product features that encourage users or makes it easier for the to sign up or share to their networks are key. For example, in the earliest days of Mogul, when you scrolled to the bottom of a post or else finished watching a video, we would enable a widget to pop up that encouraged you to share back to your networks across other platforms. Such features were essential to our acceleration early on.