Some key concepts that I found very helpful to apply to my entrepreneurial journey in my chosen field of exploration with my blog include audience engagement and audience analysis whether one is an entrepreneur or intrapreneur. According to Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship, “[i]t’s not enough to build a startup. An entrepreneur must find ways to engage a target audience to become successful.” The focus of my blog is to highlight Black women podcasters and my target audience is women of color.

To better engage with my audience, I’ve embedded links to my social media profiles, Facebook and Instagram, and links to my email in case some people don’t have social media accounts.  

Inspired by KING 5’s audience engagement model, as I launch my subsequent blog posts, I also plan to write short and creative blurbs on different social media platforms and link those to my blog posts for users to read a more detailed story on my page. Following Eric Reis’s Lean Startup Methodology, as the book states, through multiple platforms, I can measure audience engagement, gain feedback, and learn to persevere or pivot. As an added bonus (I found this in the book!), the Facebook’s “Insights” feature would enable me to analyze my audience demographics and find better ways to serve them.  

In addition to this, I found the concept of “Pitching Ideas” very helpful in my understanding of multimedia entrepreneurship. I’ve learned that pitching ideas is one of the prime skills “that can attract advisors or investors to a startup.” In fact, as I am developing my business pitch, I am constantly pitching ideas to my friends and professors. For example, I learned that women of color, especially Black women podcasters often lack a large following on digital platforms. But I can further develop my blog and create a podcast where I can engage these disadvantaged women podcasters in dialogue with those who are more popular to help increase their visibility. My podcast could also help other aspiring young women of color to start their own podcasts with the skills they learn on this platform from successful women podcasters.

Moreover, I was surprised to learn the range of startup funding options and the differences among self-funding, crowdfunding, angel investors, venture capital, and nontraditional funding.

On top of that, I found it helpful to brainstorm answers to questions like why we need funding, what unique services we offer, or what “rewards” we may offer to our investors in exchange for funding.

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Finally, I learned that being innovative and resilient helps us grow, prepares us for the changing media landscape, and helps us better serve our customer needs. Coming up with “What if” scenarios, answering questions like “Is the idea desirable, feasible, and viable?” followed by a SWOT analysis during ideation phase is the key to identifying the problem or need, doing the research, analyzing the audience, and creating prototype (beta-testing) solutions.