Starter Story interview is live!
by Danielle JohnsonI sat down, and wrote about the entire journey to get where I am now. From the very beginning and my own personal history, to leaving the UK 3 years ago to go remote, including all of the setbacks, mistakes, and failures, that have lead to Leave Me Alone being the successful, open, and, user-driven product it is today.
A few weeks ago @thepatwalls asked if I would like to share my story on Starter Story. I said yes, but I was nervous.
Most of the founders he interviews are more successful than me; they are making more money, they have super detailed marketing strategies, they use lots of acronyms to determine advertising returns, and have great advice to give. I experienced a big ole' chunk of imposter syndrome and was really worried that I didn't have anything worth sharing alongside these successful people.
After a couple of weeks procrastination and talking to people about my concerns I realised I didn't need to be measuring my success against other people. What I define as success is different, and that's ok.
I found my angle for Starter Story, and I ran away with it! I realised I had plenty of knowledge and insight to share, and I was super excited for everyone to read it. I shared a lot of personal stuff about my journey getting into software development, previous project failures and how they helped shape the direction of Leave Me Alone, and my own struggles with imposter syndrome. Honestly, when I finished it was grinning ear-to-ear and pestered James to read the all 5,000 words immediately!
I talk a lot about how important it is to share failure and concerns. It really has made a huge difference to me being able to share how I got to today. I can't wait to look back in a year and see how far I have come - next time I get offered a big interview like this I don't think I'll be nervous as I am starting to realise that people are interested in the way I do things, the way I view the world, and how I got here.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this. If anyone wants to talk or needs advice about anything I've talked about send me a message! 💛
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Thanks for the amazing interview Danielle!
Crazy to hear you had this impostor syndrome going in... you guys are doing amazing things and should be 100x proud of what you've done so far!
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Thank you so much for inviting me to tell my story!
That means so much Pat, really, thank you :). Imposter syndrome is something I am always figuring out ways to tackle, and the best technique that's working for me is sharing all of the times it happened - like this!
I went in an imposter, but I came out super proud of everything I have achieved!
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I loved listening to you on the IH podcast and am sure the information you share on Starter Stories will be just as valuable. Thankyou for sharing your journey in the open, it's super encouraging to see other female devs creating their own products.
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Thank you for your kind comment! This interview for Starter Story is much more in-depth than the podcast since I had a lot more time hehe.
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Reading this story - looks like I have a lot of similarities in my path, so it'll be cool to read.
What do you think about publishing some of your stories at Hackernoon? I'm sure it will be pretty useful for a lot of Makers-
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Oh that's really cool to hear! What are you working on right now?
I used to publish quite a lot on Hackernoon! But, since they moved away from Medium I have found their platform difficult to use. It takes me a long time to copy content there since I don't think they have an import feature, and copy pasting doesn't retain formatting like links :(
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For the last few years, I'm trying to grow my project related to food. i want to create a platform that will help foodies to start their projects quickly and without worrying about pressing tech-related questions. And I started to write at medium in order to not go crazy :) And 2nd published article was picked up by David. soon it will be 3 years
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I understand that HN story editor is not the best thing yet, but their team is small - so they doing the best what they can.
Actually, after migration from Medium, a lot of authors decide to move out all articles into HN. as part of the support. and my articles always get the valuable amount of traffic and clicks from HN community - this is why i'm advocating for it. but UI should be improved - i'm totally agree on that.
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