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. :)
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 [email protected]
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.
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!
