Heather Shoup

I attribute my success to my determination. I don't like quitting. It's not an option for me. I'm a sole custody single mom, so I am a true rags-to-riches kind of story. I remember I worked 3 part-time tech jobs while going to school, and I went to school and got 3 different degrees now. I started with our first partnership with the company, and it was very difficult as a single mom. I'm still a single mom today, but I didn't give up. I saw that's something that I always wanted to do, and I was gonna do whatever it takes to make it happen.

The best career advice I've received is that if you believe in what you want to do, do it with all your heart, and don't give up. There will always be people that say you can't do it, or why are you doing it, or it's a waste of time to be doing it. But if you feel it in your heart, then don't look back and do it. Do what your heart tells you to.

It's a very male-driven industry in tech, even today. I think the last numbers was only like 15% of people in the tech industry that are developers are women, so it can be very challenging. I do find that in order for me to compete with the male counterparts, I have to have more certifications, more education, and more documented experience. So my advice is to go get those certifications, and go get those reviews, and get the people to give you your recommendations, and use the people around you. Because that's what really helped me become successful through word of mouth. There's a lot of women out there that feel intimidated by the industry, or because they become parents and moms, they feel like they can't get back out there. I want them to know that you can, and you can achieve it.

Marketing is changing on its head every day, it seems like. Generative AI has disrupted that, and even though I went back and got my certifications and my post-grad in AI, it's still changing at exponential speed. So it's kind of everyone in the marketing and growth marketing sector, even in web development, you know, AI is building websites now. You can just do a prompt, right? Are they good websites? Maybe not. You have a lot of people right now that are trying to put all their work into AI and LLMs, putting their whole entire workflow and work inside of those. You got security issues. There was just a hack recently in the last month that API keys were visible. So you got a lot of security issues, the speed, the changes happening in the marketing and tech realm right now is kind of hard to keep up with. It's almost a full-time job, and I don't think anybody really knows what direction it's going in. Everyone can kind of guess. Some people are going all-in on AI, some people are anti-AI, but it is disrupting the industry, and it's disrupting it quick. The change most that's happening right now is definitely the technology that's changing our industry and keeping up.

Honesty, transparency, and teamwork are most important to me. I have a wonderful team, and my team's all over the world. They're ranging from South Africa, Canada, Philippines, Albania, Germany. I've worked with my team for many years, and we are an asynchronous company, and everybody has a voice at my company. A lot of changes have happened because of wonderful ideas that the team has had. One of the beautiful things that we also do is every year we pick a spot, and I pay for the whole team, and we all meet for a week every year. Last year, we actually all went to the Philippines. I do believe that teamwork and respect is awesome and very important.