Inspired Creative Hub is an agency that helps small businesses find their place in the market and thrive. It’s also a publishing agency that gives Black and other minority authors a platform to tell their stories. And it’s finally, but not least an agency that helps entrepreneurs and creatives create unique brands that help them stand out.

Tell us about who you are and what you do.

I’m a mum of 3 boys. A children’s book author, a certified confidence coach, a motivational speaker, and most recently founder of a creative digital agency. I bet you are probably wondering how on earth could I possibly be all the above right? Well, it’s simple, being a mum made me a superhuman, and now I feel like there’s nothing I can’t do if I put my mind to it.

No, on a serious note, I honestly believe that we are such complex and creative beings that we can be many things at a time if we figure out how to manage it all. I believe we are living at a time in history were to survive, we have to be/do more than just one thing. We millennials and Gen z’s have learned that it’s crucial for our survival.

Tell us how you created this brand and what was the sole idea behind it.

Many people dream of having their businesses and right from when I was a young girl that had been one of my biggest dreams. My background is in management.

Along the way, I realized I had a strong passion to encourage and motivate others so I went on to qualify as a life coach. I still run my coaching practice because it’ll always be one of my biggest passions.

Necessity, as they say, breeds innovation, and Inspired Creative Hub is a birth child of necessity. I could sense there was a demand for all my passions so decided to merge them into one. So, ICH is a branding, publishing, and social media agency.

I’m passionate about helping small businesses with small marketing budgets find their space and thrive & that’s where the branding comes in.

I’m passionate about helping Black and other minority authors tell their story and that’s the publishing side of the business.

I love the power social media wields in helping nobodies to become somebodies and I want to use it for exactly that especially for small businesses. So yup inspired creative hub is our baby and we are watching her grow.

One of the growing trends of the pandemic was seeing businesses move away from the office working, to working remotely. I must say in foresight that deciding to start a creative digital agency was genius on our part #timingiseverything

Explain the challenges you went through while you were working on brand creation. What are the challenges you go through on an everyday basis?

The number one challenge I faced in the beginning and still face daily is being a mum and running a business at the same time. It’s meant I’ve had to put in lots of late nights and early mornings. I always say being a mumpreneur is not for the faint-hearted.

Another challenge, in the beginning, was finding good people to work with…so glad that no longer is the case. We work with some amazing young men & women from whom I’m learning so much.

How do you manage your finances through the services you offer. Any fundings etc received?

Yeah, this. All 100% self-funded and because we are still at the early stages of our growth, I’m happy to say so far so good.

Tell us your future vision about the brand. How far do you want to take it? What is your dream about taking it to the next level?

The vision from day one was to create a global presence and help as many small businesses and creatives as possible. It is also important to us that we empower our fellow brothers and sisters on the continent and we are so humbled to be doing this already, we know we can do more so we will continue to push.

What message would you like to give to anybody who has a plan of creating something of their own and making a living through it?

It all starts with self-belief! Believe so much in yourself that others will have no choice but to believe in you. If you do, you will find a way to push through your doubts and fears and get started on your idea. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, no one will guess your needs simply by looking at you. Promote your business like your livelihood depends on it because it does. 

If you are in the process of starting, then I wish you all the success you deserve. Come over on IG and connect with me @kamapala_c 

Get in touch with Inspired Creative Hub on

Website: www.inspiredcreativehub.com

Instagram: @inspiredcreative.hub

The post Kamapala Chukwuka: Believe in Yourself & Go After Your Dreams Boldly appeared first on CEO Medium.

She belongs to Karachi, Pakistan where she spent her entire childhood and teenage. She opted for Computational Finance as her professional field, but couldn’t practice it as a career.

Got married 4 years back and moved to Khobar, Saudi Arabia.

Living as an expatriate, she never applied for any job since her priority was her home and family yet at the same time she was passionate to do something on her own.

Food had always been her weakness. She loved creating new recipes, experimenting with flavors, discovering new cuisines, and trying out different eateries in town.

Hence it was a perfect idea to turn her passion into a career. 

Her food blog was started in August 2020, which caters to creative and easy recipes, kitchen hacks, food science, and eateries reviews. 

When she stepped into the kitchen in her initial days, she faced a lot of hurdles in cooking. Since marrying at a young age then moving abroad doesn’t seem fascinating when you don’t know how to cook. Hence this idea clicked her and she felt the urge to share her experiences with the audience. 

According to her, cooking is not a chore, but an art, in which every day you learn something new,  you fail but u try again and succeed. This process goes on until you feel accomplished even with one compliment that comes from the dining table. 

Talking particularly about Aamna Saad’s food blog, it has her heart and soul in it. Whatever her audience finds there, it is something related to her. The problems that she faced as an amateur cook before, she doesn’t want others to go through. Hence her basic target is to create easy hassle-free recipes with minimum ingredients yet with a promising taste. Be it the main course, appetizer, beverage, or dessert, her blog has everything for you to try out. 

Her contentment is when her audience shares their recreations with her, she feels honored to have put a smile on someone’s face who had been struggling in something and she made it easy for them. 

Not just home-cooked food, she also posts food reviews to help people in her town in selecting the best restaurant for them. She photographs the food and ambiance and uploads with all the necessary details like the menu, prices just to make it easy for her followers to explore it through her feed. 

Blogging never is an easy job. It’s not just a person behind a laptop creating content. It is a tiring process.

You never know that one food picture that you see on your Instagram feed takes the whole day of the blogger. At first creating the recipe after multiple trials to make it perfect, shooting it nicely, photographing it to make it look out of the world, editing it to look more appealing, typing in the whole recipe procedure in the caption, and then finally uploading it with suitable hashtags! 

Hence it requires a lot of patience and hard work

Making your blogging a career requires double the hard work mentioned above. You need to build good connections, network with different people to make your blog famous, and expand its audience. The more exposure the blog gets, the more chances there are to have brands approaching you. This certainly means giving more and more time to your workspace to reach thousands of people and get acknowledgment from related brands. Consistency, hard work, creative content, and networking surely leads to the positive growth of a blog through which you can earn as well. 

As a blogger, after all the hard work that is involved in the process, she craves some appreciation from her followers. One like comment, save, or share simply makes her day. This in turn also contributes to increase her reach. Hence, as an audience, we all should uplift and support everyone who is putting in a lot of effort in creating valuable content. 

At the moment, she isn’t earning through her blog, in fact inputting all that she has got and would certainly be doing that until she achieves something more from this. 

She wishes to see this space as a huge recipe sharing and food review platform where people would be trying out her recommendations and execute all the recipes without having the fear of wasting their ingredients. 

Anyone who is at the same stage as her, her guidance for you is to stay consistent, be genuine, and never give up. At times it seems so depressing when you are putting in so much effort but still not reaping the reward, but remember everyone gets what they deserve someday or the other. 

She would like to wrap it up with the basic motive behind this journey: 

Food is a basic necessity, hence try to ‘love’ it and not just ‘make it.

For more information contact: amytamy19@gmail.com

Instagram: www.instagram.com/appetizing.aromas

The post A Student who Started Studying Finance but Ended up Being a Food Blogger appeared first on CEO Medium.

What is your entrepreneur’s story? How did you come about building your business?

I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and started SelfieMark right after having my second child, I was in a dressing room and had no idea what to wear or what looked good on me after having a baby and it was hard to know what shapes or styles look good because my body completely changed. Then it just clicked and I decided to start an app where shoppers could decide in a comparison what to wear and get feedback from a pro or their friends and family. I always loved empowering women and I feel there is a big disconnect in stores and online where shoppers need a lot more help and salespeople won’t provide unbiased advice.

What is your business model — how were you able to grow so fast?

Our consumer app SelfieMark is FREE for shoppers. Now we just launched 6 months ago our b2b with e-commerce solutions that help retailers sell and engage more and we charge them in a subscription model based on how big they are.

https://www.selfiemarkbiz.com/compare-plans/

Can you give me an overview of who you are, what is your educational or overall background? What are some of your achievements?

Finished college degree in Marketing and Advertising. I also had a store for many years in San Francisco at the Westfield Mall with a high-end line of handbags and accessories designed by me and my sister.

What have you learned through your experiences as an entrepreneur that can be used by aspiring business individuals?

Never stop pushing even small milestones will contribute to a bigger goal. And don’t listen to others, people will try to stop you from reaching your dreams so just stop listening to people and get surrounded with mentors who can help you achieve those goals.

What makes your business so unique and successful?

We help shoppers decide when undecided. Last year 76% of shoppers online and also in stores dropped their shopping carts of left the store because they didn’t know what to buy. With our solutions, we are helping both shoppers and retailers get those missing sales. We have no competitors who do exactly what we do and we have 2 patents pending to protect our concept.

What have you learned through your journey as an entrepreneur?

That is never too late to start. Believing in your dream if you don’t believe in it nobody will.

What skills and attributes make you as successful as you are?

Being independent, stubborn, and not afraid about what others will say or think about you.

Why is online business, marketing, etc important?

Nowadays the way people shop online and in stores have changed. New generations don’t like to be sold out and they need a better approach to make purchase decisions. We can help with that.

SelfieMark

Read more about SelfieMark including Market Opportunity, Business Model, Unique Advantage, Growth Roadmap, Investment…www.fundable.com

Social Media :

Facebook: www.facebook.com/selfiemarkapp/

Instagram: www.instagram.com/selfiemarkapp/

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/paulaestewart/

Business Website: http://www.selfiemarkbiz.com/

The post Meet Paula Stewart a Latina Mom that Created a Startup to Help Shoppers Decide appeared first on CEO Medium.