Hi! Leap is spinning out of YC today as an independent company called Elpha. I'm the CEO and Co-Founder of Elpha and am here to answer questions. Thanks!!
I attempted to sign up a long time ago, when the only authentication was through FB, which I don't have. So, the email address is in your system but I'm not a member. I cannot sign in or up. Is this something you can fix? I would contact you directly for support.
Congratulations! Do you have a policy regarding non-binary or genderqueer people? And are there any steps you're planning to take to keep your community free of TERF transphobia? I'm curious about building a gender-based community in 2019.
I've used leap for a while and have seen multiple posts from people wanting to learn how to be more inclusive towards trans people, but absolutely nothing that appears to push any sort of transphobia. Remember this is a forum for professionals. Every professional knows that preaching homophobia, racism, transphobia or whatever is wildly inappropriate and uncivil behavior.
I suppose it's something that would get addressed if a problem arises. But for now, why bother creating a whole plan to solve a problem that doesn't actually exist?
It's not transphobic to question whether a women-only organization should include transwomen. It's a legitimately hard question with no 100% correct answer. You have to deal with the possibility of people who identify as female according to their own standards, which you might consider dishonest or confused.
> Do you have a policy regarding non-binary or genderqueer people?
According to the sign-up pitch that appears shortly after you start reading an AMA there: "Elpha is for anyone who identifies as a woman and/or non-binary."
Woah! Even after so long on HN, I'm surprised by multiple downvotes for even a question that merely implies an interest in inclusivity for non-cis people.
Agree to disagree in this case, wherein I believe two or more people's gestures do communicate something real regardless of the eventual balancing out. Thanks for the reminder.
> It's just plain noisy and you don't know what someone is objecting to.
Then why does it rate limit the poster who might have spurred a discussion and wants to find out? They can't even post anymore until hours after the discussion died down even though little can be gleaned from the reason anyone downvoted them? There is some conflicting logic going around
Hi Cadran, congrats on Elpha and this new birth! I'm Marie and I also created a place to support women in this industry, Women Make. I was wondering, why did you change the name?
We landed on Elpha by riffing on the word alpha and the notion that we want to create a place where women come first. We combined alpha with the French word for she (“Elle”) to create ellepha and then shortened it to elpha from there.
Did you have any concerns over brand confusion with Elfa, the shelving system owned by the Container Store, which markets itself heavily to women (and yes, I see the rich irony in that :) ).
Ha, we chose the name Elpha by riffing on the word alpha and the idea that we wanted to create a place where women come first. We combined alpha with the French word for she (“Elle”) to create ellepha. We shortened it to elpha from there. Plus, the .com was available. :)
Thank you! And yes, many of our members are based outside of the US, and we'd love to have more international members to broaden the perspective and discussion topics.
This looks to be a really great resource. I'm curious to know what your business plan is; I'm very interested in how to make a community platform like this sustainable without compromising user privacy. This is especially important when the community is focused on disadvantaged or minority groups, and I'm always on the lookout for the Right Answer. Have you written on this topic before?
Really good point and question! We don't have all the answers and it's something we're actively thinking about. Our goal is to focus on providing access and opportunities and use that as our guiding light. I think especially as members of those underrepresented groups, it makes it a bit easier to reason about what kind of products members will feel comfortable with. We are building for ourselves after all!
You can definitely join - you can put in your website, or anything other link that we can verify your identity. Let us know if you run into any trouble hi@elpha.com
Its always good to see more communities like this spin up. I am actually the CTO of https://fairygodboss.com a company that is also a community, content resource, and job search platform but targeted at all professional women. I am a guy (the founders are female) but join this company because I saw the lack of women in this space...especially in the leadership/management level and wanted to help in this mission. If you're ever interested in speaking with me or one of our founders we always try to keep in close contact with those in this space.
The literary typeface for a UGC site is a bold design choice. On its own it suggests static content and lack of community, but then that's balanced by all the social flair on the AMA cards so I think it works. But very tricky to pull off. :-)
It's interesting in general that the design language for signaling "for women" (and "exclusive") is so incongruous with the design language of UGC.
Hi, designer/cofounder of Elpha here. Thank you for the comment! It is tricky to design a UGC site for women, and we aim for friendliness/neutral than feminine. Glad you like Chiswick!
Yeah I think neutral has gotten a lot easier to pull off in the last five years just because of all the design resources put out by Google, Apple, and MS. Even though I don't like Material as a strict design language, just the fact that it's clearly explained and all the resources behind it are free is a much better starting point than being more limited to reverse engineering existing sites and picking up their biases along the way.