Introducing Hone Club: A support network for succeeding in BizTech
My co-founder Diana and I have known each other for over a decade, and despite starting out in completely different majors in college (Diana in Economics and myself in Mechanical Engineering), we found ourselves on the business side of tech companies (“BizTech”) facing similar challenges when trying to build our careers. There are many blog posts and platforms out there teaching the technicalities of how to succeed in various BizTech roles, but very few of them offer one of the best ways to learn a craft — learning it from someone else. That’s why my co-founder Diana and I decided to start Hone Club, a support network where BizTech talent can come to share their expertise and learn from one another.
In this post, we’d like to share with you what it means to be in BizTech, as well as why we think BizTech needs resources built specifically for them to help them build their careers and skills. We’ll end the post with an explanation of our vision for Hone Club.
We’d love your feedback, as well as your support, so please sign up and share with your peers if our message resonates with you. You can always contact us with suggestions!
So, what exactly is BizTech?
At a high level, we view anyone outside of the engineering and internal operating roles as falling under BizTech. This includes Sales, Marketing, Product, Customer Success, Design, among many others. What ties these groups together is that they don’t spend the majority of their time directly building and coding the product, but rather focus on providing a bridge that brings a bundle of code to actual users. Writing out “business talent in technology companies” got a bit tedious, so we came up with “BizTech” as shorthand for the new generation of business people working at tech companies.
BizTech is largely context-driven, which is why we are building a community that focuses on relevance and context
Unlike engineers who can measure their success by whether or not their code runs, how many bugs they encounter, or how quickly their code runs, BizTech talent drives success using equal parts art and science. This means that a lot of skills are learned through peer mentorship. Both Diana and I can list numerous people who taught us more about how to do our jobs than any blog post or textbook. However, we didn’t always have the resources we needed to get that mentorship. For example, when Diana was the only PM at Cockroach Labs, she had to go outside of the company to find a community of PMs who could help her hone her craft. That community she was looking for is what we want to provide through Hone Club.
What is Hone Club?
Hone Club is a community just for BizTech talent focused on helping members succeed in BizTech. As a member of Hone Club, we hope to offer you:
Relevant Community & Advice
If you’re like us, you’re probably part of more communities than you can count. But how many of them do you go back to to get the information you need to succeed in your job? The problem with a lot of communities today is that they require you to use their platform actively and are filled with noise. Our goal with Hone Club is to prioritize relevance by getting to know each and every member of our community — so that you can get the answers you need from the people most likely to give you relevant answers.
Understand and build your market value
We might not always know the best way to do it, but we all know it’s important to build your brand. Not only does it help you find new opportunities, but it also propels your career forward by offering you a positive channel to showcase your achievements. Our goal is to highlight your achievements and share your successes with the community by allowing you to leverage our platform to share your expertise with the members of our community.
Global Community with Local Cohorts
Although we are building a global community, we also want to support local micro-communities. With the growing number of remote workers world-wide, it’s hard to find the right people to connect with locally. As more people join our community, we want to enable them to find others like them within their local region.
How you can get involved
It’s really easy to become part of our community. As long as you are actively in BizTech, you can join! As we focus on relevance, we plan to release additional products only when your cohort (people with similar roles and experience) is large enough. For now though, we are focused on working on a new COVID-19 initiative (read more below!).
How COVID-19 has changed our launch plan
All around the world, people have had their daily lives disrupted by COVID-19. Both Diana and I are blessed to be able to WFH, and we were struggling to figure out how we could give back. We decided that what we could do is offer our time to help those displaced by COVID-19 who have transferrable skills relevant in tech learn more about what it would take to pivot into the tech industry. If you are already in BizTech and would like to help, please sign up for Hone Club and we will reach out to request you to opt in to this volunteering-based initiative.
Read more about our COVID-19 initiative here.
To get started, sign up today.
