I am always excited to meet with inspiring and successful bloggers. I have had the pleasure of interviewing Anna May from Cityloque. A city blogging platform, where you can subscribe to cities to see what’s going on where you live or where you travel to. Anna lives in London and I in Sydney so we did the interview via email and we still keeping in touch. Enjoy it!
Cityloque aims to be the place to centralise city blogging and help the insiders’ knowledge reach the audience.
Interview With Anna May From Cityloque A City Blog
Can you give us a little background on your career to date?
I am a Polish girl, who came to London 11 years ago to study arts and fashion. I was a skilled Illustrator and a painter. I did freelance work for advertising, designed packaging and illustrated a couple of books, however, I decided against furthering my art education. At 21 I read “HTML for Dummies” and learned the basics of coding. I set up my first blog and fell in love with technology. I loved how creative designing pages and blogging were. After returning to university to study branding I won space at London Accelerator, where I ran my first business, a London online lifestyle magazine- MyChicCity. Sadly the business did not succeed, but in late 2013 I started designing Cityloque.com, a platform dedicated to city blogging. My business partner, Ivan Brewis, and I have been working on Cityloque ever since.
Tell us about your company
I am the CEO of Cityloque.com. The platform is my brainchild.
Cityloque is the place where people can post, read and share great things about their cities; from food reviews to art events and everything in between.
I focus on marketing and design. My colleague Ivan, who is our CTO, and I are a great team as our skills are so different. He is a tech genius and I am obsessed with UX.
We integrated Cityloque with Twitter, which means you can @tag Twitter users in your articles, which is great for staying in touch and letting people know they’ve been written about.
What makes you aim your site at women?
We’re very visual and beautiful. We felt that a lot of users, especially women are often scared of programming and would worry that posting articles is too difficult. We made sure that Cityloque is easy, quick and fun to use. Women dominate Pinterest and Instagram- visual, inspirational social media. We aim to address the same market and encourage more women to blog.
Have you met some major technology problems when you were creating your business?
Building a blogging platform from scratch is a never-ending technology problem. We are using the technology to provide a great experience.
At the moment we are working on a cross-platform mobile app, which is complicated. Saying that, we don’t view tech problems as problems, they are opportunities to learn new things and think outside the box.
Would you call yourself a techno-savvy woman? and why?
I am walking talking proof that somebody who was born in a post-communist country in a poor family, spent all her life with easels and pencils, and didn’t own a computer until she was 20, can end up as the CEO of an exciting tech startup. Although I do not code for Cityloque I have a very good understanding of what’s going on behind the curtain.
What kind of smartphone do you have?
HTC. I am not into smartphones, they are for work and testing Cityloque only. I actually “stole” my current phone from a dear friend of mine, when my Nexus died a horrible death. No comment. #ThugLife
Name 3 apps you use every day
Cityloque, Instagram, Twitter.
What is your last tweet?
Nothing overly exciting, but I once shared words of wisdom from the infamous American politician Pat Robertson… on feminism. He claims that feminists are communist witches and abortionists who worship the devil. Now, where is my broom?
The last picture you pinned on Pinterest?
An amazing Copenhagen apartment found on Cityloque.
What is your last Facebook status update?
Oh god, I can’t tell you. It involved all the things a green living vegan London cyclist yogi CEO should not be known for…
