I wrote this in order to gain access to David Seah’s Patterns, Ideas & Empowerment forum in September 2006. You can view it at the forum too.

The reason a background story is necessary is “1. You have to want to participate, which leads to a higher quality of communication & 2. We get to know a bit about you coming in, which helps build community rapport”.

Jump to:

• What am I doing now?
• How did I get here?
• Where do I want to go?

I’m Kathleen Bright. I’m a feminist, web designer & developer and entrepreneur. I’m learning a lot and just starting out with entrepreneurship; finding it really exciting (and scary).

What am I doing now?

I’m building up my profile online and just starting out with my business, Ethical Beads.

All Things Bright (inspirewithhope.com) is my personal site & the platform from which I publish my thoughts on various aspects of what’s important to me; topics change & develop accordingly. For example, my projects, web design & development, blogging, personal development etc.

Ethical Beads is my first real business (I had a hand-crafted jewellery hobby-business for a year): EthicalBeads.org to give people information about where, how & why to buy ethical beads & jewellery and EthicalBeads.com to make it even easier for people to buy ethical beads & jewellery, as well as enabling people to buy ethical jewellery designed & handcrafted by me.

I’m also working for a business technology consultancy startup and (part-time) in the fashion retail industry. I’ll be a postgraduate by this time next week.

How did I get here?

I started off wanting to be an author, from as early as I can remember. I developed an interest in Philosophy of Religion as a teenager and started to really love learning new things & being an intellectual.

I fell in love with the Internet, taught myself how to write HTML and loved that so much I decided I wanted to be a web designer & developer instead of a writer. Having developed many websites, I got in to blogging for a variety of reasons, partly the ease of updating, partly the functionality, partly because it’s ‘cool’.

I created All Things Bright to write about whatever I like, to help me focus my ideas & learning and to keep a public record of what I’m up to. Recently, I’ve started thinking about how I might be able to make money from this whole blogging enterprise.

Where do I want to go?

I’ve managed to unite my past dreams of being a writer, intellectual & web designer, being creative, passionate & intelligent. I’m an empire-building (bootstrapped) entrepreneur, with a penchant for some social entrepreneurship too (i.e. starting businesses & building resources that help people). Now I just need to keep doing that and start making money from it.