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Sponsored by the 4-Step Guide to Delivering Extraordinary Software Demos that Win Deals – Click here and because we had such good response we have opened it up to make the eBook, Audiobook, and online course, more accessible by offering it all for only 5$

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Kellen McCarvel is the founder of Joybees Footwear and an entrepreneurial leader with an expansive experience in total business management roles who’s focused on profitable growth and product development.  Kellen shares startup lessons that could easily be the foundation of a great business leadership and business building course. We talk about building products on customer need, the challenges and advantages of entering an existing market, and crowdfunding as a platform to launch with key lessons on what to do right and what to avoid.  

Thanks to Kellan for this great conversation and the open sharing of great learnings for anyone who’s in business or looking to start something themselves.  

Photo by Andrea Peperom on Unsplash

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Sponsored by the 4-Step Guide to Delivering Extraordinary Software Demos that Win Deals – Click here and because we had such good response we have opened it up to make the eBook, Audiobook, and online course, more accessible by offering it all for only 5$

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Aditya Nagrath is the founder of Elephant Learning Academy and shares a heartfelt story of how our school system and the math learning programs are not doing what they need to do.  You are hearing the story about how this project is the pinnacle of Aditya’s life’s work as a mathematician, software engineer & technologist, and entrepreneur.

The lessons he shares are amazing and the numbers and statistics that we discuss about the effect of mathematics on the entire future of a child’s learning may be frightening, but the fact that Aditya is doing something to change that is something you will thoroughly enjoy out of a great conversation.  Great lessons on being a founder, and doing good with technology which is something I think we all need to learn from.

Photo by kyo azuma on Unsplash

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This is a really interesting opportunity and I’m excited about this conversation. I’ve been a

Kind of subscribe to way too much information, sometimes in the world. And one of the reasons I do so as I I kind of look to my myself as being a lifelong learner.

And as a result of a lot of stuff I’ve done around mentoring and teaching and engaging folks in the community in the tech space and in and out of, you know, tech and startups and such.

I’m always excited when I meet other folks who are in the industry who very much see the value of learning and what it means to further, you know,

Your own life in being a teacher, as well as connecting people to something that can really kind of foundational to change what they do in their day to day

And I’m here with Dr. Aditya mcgrath’s I always love the doctor because it reminds me that you are you are literally a lifetime learner. You’ve, you’ve you’ve gone the distance on on a set of learning yourself and I wanted to talk to you a ditty about Let’s quickly talk about you.

how folks can get ahold of you online if they want to. And then we’re going to talk about elephant learning and the story behind it.

Okay, great. I’m looking forward to it. So how do you want me to start

Let’s start with

Your own background so

How

How did you get into the learning space. Obviously. Again, you’re, you’re well educated. So what was your background that actually and whether that actually brought you to where you are today as as being the founder of elephant learning

Perfect, yeah. So I, as you mentioned, got a PhD in math and computer science 2008 so it’s kind of a joint degree, but the focus was mathematics.

And that was kind of longer story. But from there. I actually went into contract software engineering. So while I was getting my degree I had also been working full time part time at different

Contract firms or software development shops and so I started a contract software engineering firm in 2009 called elephant head software and from 2009 to 2016 we put out 35 different product lines and that’s over 50 different applications.

To market and

In 2016 I joined entrepreneur organization. So EO Colorado and basically as I was joining this organization. There was a lot of people talking about triple bottom line companies. So the idea kind of is.

Can you build a company where there’s a measurable environmental impact a measurable social impact and then a miserable. Bottom line, and this idea really interested me so from 2016 after I joined do

I had really been thinking about how can I build a company like that. And that’s when I started talking to one of my ex professors from the University of Denver about particularly this project. And that’s kind of when I came on board with elephant learning that’s really

That’s really interesting. And it’s, it sounds obviously that you started very much in in the sense of you aimed immediately towards doing doing good.

By what you could do in developing your business. And how did that come into play. Do you have kind of a studied background in in

The impact of of what we do. And, you know, sort of environmental and and suicidal or how did that come to be an important aspect of of how you build Ellison learning

Sure, I’m happy to talk about that. So one of the first EO events. I went to

There was a gentleman there, who was the co founder of plastic bank and he told his story and his story was that he was watching the news.

And he saw that there was this piece of plastic out in the Pacific Ocean. That’s the size of Texas. And he said to himself, there’s no way that’s not worth a lot of money. I just kind of got to figure out how to monetize it.

And what he did was he devised a system where people in India would pick up the plastic from the shore and deposit it into the plastic bank for which they would receive

I believe his two cents a pound. And then he would turn around and recycling at nine cents a pound and it just turned out that the amount that he was paying that people to pick up the plastic from the shores.

Was actually more than they were earning in the shops at that time. So he had a measurable impact on the environment in that he he’s measuring exactly how many pounds of plastic. He’s taking out he had a measurable impact on

The society there because he had a measurable financial gain for the people doing this work.

And then on top of that he had his bottom line has profit and this thing grew to $200 million company.

And what I realized was that that was that the rules of the game the way that the business operated right the rules of the game. We’re kind of set up for everyone to win.

And and that’s what it kind of boiled down to was that as long as the rules of the business are sort of set up so that everything is winning you kind of create something that

What a government would typically do right where most people would pass it off and say, well, this is government’s problem, right.

But whereas there’s also a bottom line of profit motivation that then pushes out that good. So becomes an organization that’s not only self sustaining

But also profitable that then doing that, that quote unquote good for the world. So basically when it came to elephant learning. That’s what we had to do as well as we just have to set up the rules of the game so that we can get everyone to win.

In this is it’s really neat because there are so many ways that we can impact the world in a positive way.

We’re and it can be everything like the plastic bank stories, really. I love that one. Actually, it’s, it’s funny. I talked with another fellow column Macintosh founded a company called sheets and giggles. Aside from being one of the funniest

You know, names of the companies that are based in Denver and he is also a member of the CEO.

And he had introduced me to the to that and it was funny, those, those stories kind of carry around and they’re very meaningful.

So, but that it doesn’t literally have to be, you know, physically interacting with a

An Earth, saving you know activity. It can be something that we can do to empower people, and it was

Interesting that you know in the plastic bank story of courses, like you said, what, what seems like a to a North American

Person probably it’s almost like a pittance of a wage, but not realizing that in in that in the other parts of the world $2

A pound to collect something can be an incredible boost and what they can earn relative to the local wages now.

What I’m really excited about what you’re doing is bringing what I feel is such a future focused and profound concept is

Bringing mathematics and and the true, you know, advanced mathematics learning and just common, common mathematics to children.

Which because it feels to me like one of the biggest challenges I’ve found in the in the general school system is that

It’s, it’s just fallen off like there’s been so many incredible advancements in science and mathematics, but the curriculum doesn’t feel like it’s caught up.

In traditional schooling. And so let’s just get into elephant learning. I’d love to hear what was your story and what you’re solving with with your approach to the entire platform.

Okay, well, I’m just going to tell it to you, just the way it happened because it makes more sense that way.

And then, you know, in that you’re going to hear all the stats. So, you know, I was having a conversation with my next professor. As I had mentioned

And really I was trying to move away from the contract software engineering business. I was looking to move into something more of a product

And we were kind of failing with an IoT product. We had an IoT product that was going out there and it just wasn’t working for us. So

My professor had met with me and he had an NSF grant that we were applying for

And NSF grant was to take research done by the National Science Foundation and try to make a company out of it. So,

Immediately, I’m asking me. And so, like, tell me about this company because like, you know, if you’re going to put me in charge of the company.

I’m not the guy who’s just going to do it for the grant money, I’m going to have to take it seriously and he’s trying to pitch me these math games that you that you put into school and I had a lot of problems with that. I said, One, we don’t have any relationships in the school to

I don’t know, like math games, right, like whether kids even really want to play it. So if I’m not going to the school if I’m trying to pitch it to kids. I just don’t know if there’s a real market for it.

And three, I was a TA over at the University of Denver for six or seven years as I got my graduate degree and to be honest with you in math class.

Not many people really wanted to be there. There was there’s only like a handful of kids that actually wanted to be there and the rest were just kind of there because it was a requirement.

And so I said, you know, like I’m having a real hard time with this. And so what he tells me is that four out of five children start kindergarten unprepared for the Guinean kindergarten curriculum now immediately. I’m like, well, Alberto that’s that’s really difficult to believe because

Where does the kindergarten curriculum even start. He says the curriculum starts at counting to 10

I said, so you’re sorry accounting to 20. So I’m saying. So you’re telling me that these students can’t count to 20 says no, they can’t count to 10 because it starts accounting to 20 the prerequisite is that they can count to 10

Say, that’s also extremely difficult to believe, can you can you explain to me why this disparity exists. And he says, well,

For the common parent. If the child says the numbers 12345 through 10

That’s a thumbs up. That’s good to go. But when the kindergarten says counting to 10 what they mean is, can you give me 10 things the child slides over 10 things and stops at 10

So, okay, well, the second one’s definitely much harder than the first. I can see the difference in the first. It could be just saying the numbers. The second one, they actually have to understand what tenants.

And that ends up being the basis for the entire system. It turns out that the preschool math scores predict fifth grade.

Overall scores and that preschool math scores predict third grade reading scores better than preschool reading scores. So all of the metrics that

The education system is using right now as a means of, you know, how is the student doing third grade reading being probably one of the most important seems to stem from the preschool math. Now, if you look at it from the students perspective.

What we’re really saying is that they have a they have a miss comprehension, if you will, a misunderstanding. They don’t understand what the numbers mean but they’re sitting in class and they’re being taught that

A similar situation, where would be me or you went into a third year bio chem class, right. So on average, children about three years behind depending on what neighborhood they come from and what income bracket. They’re in

So if we meet you went to third your bio chem class, we would hear the professor. It sounds like he’s speaking English.

But we wouldn’t understand much of what he was saying, because we missed about three years of jargon.

Well, it just turns out that this jargon of mathematics is so fundamental that is considered vocabulary.

But more than that, mathematics, happens to be very visual very light touch and feel right. So,

It’s kind of like the color red. I can’t teach a very young child, what the color red is unless I show them read things

In the same way, right. I can’t teach them what the numbers mean I can’t teach them what addition or subtraction is I can’t use the multiplication, unless I really show them what’s happening. So

You know, going from fifth grade, eighth grade math scores predict whether you drop out of high school only 75% only 25% of high school students are proficient in high school mathematics that the NAACP stat any ACP and

69% of STEM majors switch to a major with glass map. So we’re, we’re not graduating number of technologies that we could graduate

And now because society is so data driven with computers being everywhere, even businesses. So statistically driven that the defenses are having a hard time reaching the students

And the business students are switching majors to a major plus path. And what that really means is that the majority of our students are going into humanities, which in itself is not a bad thing, except for that the economic impact is that, you know,

A yearly salary is kept in the humanities around 50 $60,000 per year. So when we look at, for example, Elizabeth Warren trying to forgive the student debt.

This is what that’s around. We have an entire generation of children.

That we told you can grow up to be anything you want to be, they tried to become scientists technologists engineers mathematicians, they tried to become business people.

And they ended up in the humanities, which is kind of a devastating story every time I encounter one of these people like I wanted to be a physics major

Because because I didn’t want to be doing math, physics is all differential equations I became an English major, it’s a completely different life. Yeah.

And this isn’t the interesting

Thing that did he is the

This sort of the, the breakdown. As you reach each gate effectively strips off a percentage of potential students who can excel or even participate at that level and

It’s we had this challenge in STEM, STEM is probably, you know, reach the most

Like sort of highly visible state of, you know, being a challenge. Part of the industry because like you you laid out is this idea that

We have, we have first a pipeline problem and the quite the so that’s what we say. People always say like, Oh, it’s a pipeline problem well

That’s great, but what is the pipe. Now let’s break down the pipeline problem and you effectively have done this and

And like you said jargon is incredibly important. Like, I can go and I can listen to

I can, I can listen to Dr. Michio Kaku and and listen to folks like Bryan Callen and talk to these people and learn about things like

You know, differential mathematics little if the point of like understanding what spinners are learning, like what

You get through these incredible things about, you know, reading Hawking and you can read it and it makes sense, while you’re reading it, because I’ve had a level of understanding of the jargon, but

It, you know, an hour and a half later, most of it sort of falls off because it’s not a part of my vernacular is not a part of my continuous learning

And so if I read it every day. If I studied it every day. It ultimately would lead to me knowing more. So here’s the trick, right, you go into the school system. And like you said.

When children struggle. They hear the words and they can maybe pull off enough to kind of get a passing grade to get through that the just enough

To get through it and then we kind of move them through the system and and really don’t go back and kind of revisit how we can make that either is it interactive learning and like you said.

Counting to 10 counting from the other than going through the numerals of one to 10 for, you know, a child can can be done. It’s, it’s done by rote its effect it’s memorization.

But then the abstract concept of finding 10 items and collecting them together. It’s

It seems easy for you and I and people that are listening to this, but it’s like

That’s no different than me asking any one of our listeners right now. Okay. I want you to go and study the idea of you know spinner theory and and how is it different than than than other quantum theories and they’ll just be like,

It doesn’t

It’s so abstract like I have no relationship to that thing that

You just asked me, like, but if I explain it to you, but only

Complete anyone with a three year old honestly should should be able to understand this, right, I have a three and a half year old at home and I mean

He’s using some words, I’m not sure. He knows what they mean. You know, you’re not using them correctly, it’s just they’re learning the language at that age.

I was thinking this morning. I have a four year old son and he says, Daddy, I need you for one second. She has no idea what it means to say that, but he knows it and get me like he knows that that will make me stop and he knows that it

Like he’s he’s in it for the long haul.

It says no, there’s no one second. In his mind.

He’s like

I need you to sit down beside me until I’m done with you.

But he knows to use the words I need you for one second.

So my my three year old can’t understand later on, like, I’ll do that. I’ll do that in a little bit later. And you won’t get it.

Well, and this is

Eating and time.

It’s, it’s

It’s an abstract concepts that are

This is the the really also the tough part when we talk about Sam. We talked about the pipeline problem. We talked about learning and schooling and the change in the sort of what the net.

Effect is of these things when you shade, you know you you shape people’s futures at all these different gates.

And then the problem we’ve got is you go on Twitter and you talk to people in amongst our peer group.

And we generally collect with other peers who are alike. And so that’s a natural, natural thing, it’s, it’s what we do is we grouped together.

In communities of people that are like minded. And so, especially if you go online and you get to the people they’re talking about stuff.

And he realized like, hey, if you’re on Twitter. Number one, you’re probably in 1% of the population of the world.

Because you’re a subset of people, you’re a subset of people that has access to the Internet.

And most likely, is also on a mobile phone so STRIP, STRIP, STRIP down the sub nets and the subsets and you are now in sort of a somewhat elite group of people. And so the tough part is

The peers have these conversations. And then when you try to explain to them like you did. It did. It is okay, well, I’ve got a I need to have a three year old.

Taken that simple abstract concept of counting 10 items and and most kids can’t do it. And it’s just for many people who are listening to this, it’s unfathomable but it’s the truth. And the numbers have been borne out that that’s the case. So now,

You You’ve Got a you you laid a big bet right that you you wanted to be able to now go in and and and affect the situation, how did, how did you suddenly say, I think I can help to close this gap.

That’s a great question. So basically, after, after I received all of this information and understood it, I

I immediately began to think, okay, well, so what you’re telling me there’s a big enough of a problem here that

That that there’s a market and I might not be able to approach the schools, but I can certainly approach the parents with this story. Right. I mean, if this is true, they’re going to have to resonate with the story and so

There’s that the second part of it is, I also realized that there cannot be anything else on the market that was effective.

Because if there was something on the market that was effective. The schools would be using it and we wouldn’t be looking at the statistics we were looking at. I mean, as soon as you are able to digitize something effectively right i mean it’s copy paste after that.

So at that point, I asked Alberto about the game that he had already built and he had built some games for Preschoolers and kindergarteners and

I asked him, Well, how effective are these games like what are we talking about here. And he said, Well, the problem is, is there’s no standards for preschoolers. The kindergarteners so I can’t really say that

And I said, okay, but you’ve already told me today what the average three year old knows what they are his four year old knows what the average five year old knows what the average six year old knows

How like how would you say that progressing and he says we use it in a classroom 10 minutes a day, five days a week.

And they gained a year of math in three months, on average, and that’s when I said, Okay, well if that’s true, then I definitely have something that I can take and and and work with

We ultimately had to rebuild the entire system from scratch. So we, we started all over again. And one of the main things was was we were focusing on math.

So like, whereas most games are trying to make math fun. What we’re trying to do is trying to make math as the fun

So the research that Albert was quoted to me said that many children if they understand the math feel like it’s a puzzle. So it’s like a puzzle game.

Right, and many of the activities that the early age, education, researchers that we’re putting out, which is actually what Oliver was taking to to create these games.

Were were activities that could be game a fight. So we turned into a gamification of a proven curriculum and after stripping away some of the stuff that the game that we felt were less

Valuable to both the child and the parent, we were able to increase the average to one and a half years, over three months and they only use it about 25 minutes a week on average.

And so we said okay if we guarantee that your child will learn one year of math and three months using a 30 minutes per week we’ve increased the amount of time.

That they’re using it by eight minutes a week we’ve increased the amount of usage from 10 weeks to three months.

And we’re guaranteeing a lot less than what averages, so this should be from an actuarial a preset perspective, a bet that easy to win right so

That’s why we now guarantee that your child will learn a year of mass in three months.

We’ve seen children do a lot more than that, especially young children because they haven’t developed the math anxiety. Yet, if you can imagine what’s actually happening in our classrooms is pretty close to torture.

What it is the strategy is here. Add until you understand what edition is or multiply until you understand what multiplication is memorizing stuff. It doesn’t make any sense to them. They’re literally asking out loud when am I going to use this

And worse than that were basically putting their future. We’re saying, hey, you’re not gonna be able to get a job in this you can understand this, you still have to pass the test.

But no one’s going back to help them at the level where they do understand and that’s what our system does so.

Beyond the gamification of the proven curriculum, we have these advanced algorithms that are quickly able to determine what your child understands and doesn’t understand

And then meet them at their level. So if you’ve got a third grader who’s having problems with counting, we will actually meet them accounting and build them up from counting

Back up to multiplication, division, where they should be in the third grade. These children that are catching up in our system.

They’re reporting increased confidence because they can go into the classroom. They can now understand the teacher at the level that the teachers teaching and they can now participate in class.

With this is the the thing that

You’ve really pulled together some of the most fundamental concepts and done it for all of the right reasons. And this is why I was extremely excited when I

Knew that I had a chance to have this discussion with you because

We today have so many apps and games and things that are obviously aimed towards children and their aim towards utilizing the very simplest core functions of behavioral psychology gamification is a nice way but you know people say about keeping people engaged and and

Performing behavioral imprints and and changing behaviors through gamification and rewards.

Now this it can sound either very dark, which is how most of these most applications are built like apps game, you know, aimed towards kids are always around like

Will reach you, to a certain point and then you have to unlock a thing to unlock a thing you have to do another thing. Oh, you could get there faster if you put a couple of dollars.

Towards this right and it’s it’s this unfortunate, you know,

All of these people that learn from the foundations of, like, stuff like what BJ Fogg brought to the world and who BJ Fogg himself is very aggressively going out to sort of

stave off the negative use of behavioral psychology and persuasive computing. So what I love is that you have very much gone and exactly the positive use of behavioral rewards towards something that can vary literally change the path of somebody’s future

It on a daily basis, just by small incremental learning small incremental, you know, behavioral help and and really bringing kids who are something that

You know, let’s put it in the context that matters to them and then the outcomes are are what we get. So I’d love to hear about that. Did he have what

What did your early work and sort of early use of the platform, get you. I’d love to hear some of the stories and what people said when they put their kids into into the platform.

Well, yeah, so

So so early on we we we even started with some pretty heart wrenching stories, but the one that that’s memorable is one of the first stories that came out was there was a child in our system. I think his first thing was Ethan and Ethan

I he was, if I remember correctly, four or five years of age, and he was doing multiplication, division.

Three months in, so he had picked up two or three years with the math. So again, with the young students right because they didn’t develop that anxiety towards math is yet. Well, they, they don’t even know that this is two or three years ahead, they’re just playing the game.

Since then, we’ve we’ve had a lot of stories. Another one that’s really memorable is

I was just reading a scholarship application, the other day, and apparently enrolled in that they have a 12 year old daughter and the daughter.

Was operating at the third grade level. So this is before they even came into the system and basically at the end. She’s like, You have to help me please help me so we we do offer a scholarship program where

Where

If you’re a low income family. You can get it at an extremely discounted rate, even if you’re if you’re having troubles affording it at $35 a month, we can discount the rate. It’s an application process. Though to be honest with you. Many people will receive some funds so

Anyway, so she you know like please help me and I just like this was a marketing exercise we weren’t looking at the data, but I read this thing and I was just

Kind of so heartbroken by what she was writing. I mean, I think she said the father passed away when the child was in first grade. So the child repeated first grade and

Has been lost in the second grade and is operating right now at the third grade level. And I just had to go look. Look, this person up. And what we found was that

Her student did actually catch up to age she got to an elephant age of 12 and a half, which is our, our math age. So that’s all. And yes, those are the

Those are the. Those are the reasons that we we do the things like obviously there are people that you’re probably bringing within a within a band or a range.

But the fact that you can also have those stories that very, you know, very profound effect that you’ve had on that just that child in that family, ultimately, who

You know, and, and also I applaud you for forgiving the, you know, given the opportunity to get people into the platform that may not have had access to it because of the, the, the money impact. It’s this also is

You know, when you talk about the three, the three pillars approach of doing good and sustainability and in creating this platform is you know your

Those kids are going to remember, you know, in one way or another, what got them there. And those parents are probably very much, you know,

They’re, they’re looking to the sky thinking somebody what they should be doing is looking to look into the SAS platforms and thanking you, and the team for for introducing their kids to this. Now, what’s the

What’s the impact for you in how you look at this and scale, you know this because obviously there’s

You know, you can get access to certain pool of kids who are ready to use the system, what are you looking to as the next phases. Did he had to kind of like get this into a broader audience and get more more folks in to help them through this, this process.

Sure. Well, part of it is is doing things like this. So what we what we found out pretty quickly is that Facebook is sort of losing its numbers.

It’s not the party that it used to be in that the audience that they’re telling us that we’re having is not the same as the size of the audience that we end up reaching

That is what it is. I mean, no one can make people use Facebook if they’re not using it so

Really the next step for us is to start to communicate with people that maybe aren’t on Facebook or stop using Facebook or

Anything of that nature. So, you know, the expansion of audience in that manner. We also do have a classroom product that’s currently in beta. It’s being piloting two or three

Classrooms around the country right now very selectively and we’ve piloted before. So this is the second one of the tests and it’s really about can we put a process around

For the teacher to use the tool more effectively, right, because in a classroom setting, they’re really at a disadvantage. The big problem happens to be that you have 30 students there. There’s no way to work with them one on one.

In any realistic fashion big especially you know as classroom size of even getting bigger right 30 to 40 to 50. And so what our system is able to do they able to

Maybe mitigate some of that one on one, one on one work we’re able to then tell the teacher that well this student is in third grade, but they’re operating at the first grade level.

So giving them the typical lecture that you’d give the rest of the third graders.

Probably is not the best thing to do, and ultimately come up with cohorts, you know, so where

75 to 80% of the classrooms behind at least the teacher can know it and then lecture to them and then catch them up. Right. I mean, the system will also help catch them up.

And then catch them up to where they’re supposed to be which honestly happens very quickly then

We’ve seen even catch ups like 234 or five years with the math happened in three or four months. So it’s just a matter of usage and then noticing where

The hiccups may be and then a little bit of coaching, we don’t really want to give students the answer.

Because we don’t want them to revert back to memorization, but we want to give them a hint, where they can get that aha moment that that clicking the head that they get it. And then from there, their, their progress speeds right back up.

The

The unlocking have that capability.

And there they create their own reward system by doing it because like you said, If you created in this in a way that it becomes a puzzle.

We, as humans, just by nature. We door completing puzzles and getting through these sort of discovery.

You know phases as we do a thing and it’s it’s a beautiful feeling that you can create and it’s literally, you know,

lighting up dopamine receptors like it is a neurological effect that you can create ends, then

If you do that, then, like you said, you can get the acceleration and it’s neat that you talk about the classes because that’s it. It’s a very different thing individually association is one thing, but going out into the classroom.

Effectively means that you’ve got a range of capabilities and learning levels and to be able to create a greater cohort of kids that are in the

The same level is is really, really difficult especially you know teachers have math. You know, science, you know English humanities, social sciences like all these different things.

They generally don’t have time to put extra time towards any one single thing because we’re really kind of cramming a lot of stuff into our kids heads that just too and also trying to make them not hate school. So we have to

If there’s a way that you can create

Do things and make learning enjoyable and have them discover the rewards themselves so so cool. Now you have young kids. So this is probably meaningful to you.

I’m curious if you do when you founded this and you decided what you were going to build how how young was your family or did you approach it with the idea like you had a personal story yourself that brought you towards this.

Absolutely, yeah. So actually when I was young.

My mother would actually go to the school every year in the summer and try to get the books for the following year, so they should find my next teacher she’d find out, she go find that teachers say, What books are you going to use

And back then the they would just, you know, they use that card in the book, right, and just put your name on it.

So they just give me my book at the beginning of the summer and my mom would sit down and make us do the math for the following year. And I remember that, you know, like there was there was sometimes, there was tears. I wasn’t always the one crying them. But sometimes there was tears and

I just remember how intense that was and then the impact that had on my life because I mean to get where I am. To understand what I understand, to do what I do at the level that I do it.

To be honest with you, I think math for that. Right. Like, if you look at computer science. It’s the division of mathematics.

Especially in Europe, like if you go to a European university, the math department. There’s the computer science department is within the applied mathematics department within that that housing and it just turns out that like

Through abstraction, you can really get the computer to do more with less. And so I I kind of look back at my history how I got here. How did I build that software firm. How did we put out so many products so quickly.

And so effectively and it was it was the abstraction. It was the skills that I learned through mathematics. So I thank her for that. And now back into the context of, you know, that conversation with my professor

The real context there was my wife was about six months pregnant when when this went down five or six months and and I was sitting there thinking, well, gosh.

What he’s really telling me is that I can’t really depend on the school system to to handle this problem for me right handle the problems education handle the problem of passing on the math that was given to me by my parents and my responsibilities sort of his

His education is my responsibilities, what I was thinking is education part of my responsibility. So how am I going to handle this.

And as soon as I was started talking to me about what the solution was and how these how he got these activities and how he did the same thing with his daughters and what he had to do to go through it.

And say, well, all we really need to do is push that information straight to the parent right at the level that the child is working at

Right, if you just did that. If you could just tell me where my kid was and and and how was the effective method of teaching this concept I would be able to take that I would be able to use that and and

And and do what you did.

Even if the activities in work, but the activities do work. So overall this is a win, right. So, like, even if the child gets stuck. And that’s what our dashboard does is we help you figure out where’s the child stuck. If we detect that there’s some

Some, some failures, some some missing questions we will start to flag it like hey you should take a look at this subject and in there, we give the parent games.

Advice, if you will, game that they can play with their child outside of the system. A good example is board games. If your child is learning to count or, you know, basketball,

If your child is learning to skip count or right even if you’re trying to build fluency with like, you know, speed of addition speed of multiplication.

You could play blackjack, you could play. You can play war with with flashcards, and we just try to give you these tips.

At the right time. So, like, hey, the child can now understand enough to do this. So if you did this, it wouldn’t it wouldn’t be an exercise memorization wouldn’t be scary to them.

They’re totally going to understand what you’re saying. You could totally play this game. And that’s kind of the idea at the end of the day.

We just like with the plastic bank. We tried to build the mission and the game around the mission to just be good. So the mission is empower children map the vision is can we change the way the world teaches mathematics. How do we do that well we power.

attics that the world have to turn and look and say, hey, wait a second. What’s going on over here.

We’re taking children that said they couldn’t do it. And now they’re saying they can do it. And that is a shift.

That is a true impact. And the thing that we also have the problem that you know the parents often don’t have a way in which they feel that they can impact.

The outcomes with their kids because they may not have their own math skills or they don’t know how to move

Back down to the level because once you learn those abstractions. It’s really difficult to separate yourself from the right. So you’re

Trying to teach a four year old or a three year old how to, you know, count 11 read items.

You know, it’s, it just makes complete sense to the parents and so sometimes it’s hard to

Slow down and teach them like, Okay, here’s one. Which ones read, which would like there’s all of these things that we just we already get so it’s hard to detach yourself from what’s already known.

And and this is where where it’s good. And like you said, as you get further on those kids every says, Well, I want my kids to get into

Programming or get into, you know, gaming, whatever or computers is math, like you said, all the way up to the highest level is math is requires computers computers requires math.

You know, any comp side grad has to do a significant amount of statistical analysis and understanding of mathematical concepts and algebraic concepts and

It’s not necessarily that they’re doing, like, you know, high levels of calculus and physics, but there’s there’s got to be a foundation there in order to do the exercise that you’re doing in computers.

And then the reverse is also true. Anybody that’s doing serious, you know, mathematics are doing psychology

Guess what you need to know statistics, you need to learn how to, you know, programming are to do

All of this analysis work on on large data sets and stuff. It’s like you, we cannot detach these things from each other and the fact that we know that we get impacted at the ground floor.

Is I think we all have a responsibility to do it and and I’m glad that you’re you’re doing something. What now let’s talk about the business view. I’m at allow. How did you

How did you choose to approach you know getting getting things rolling and taking your first, your first product to market and and how are you looking at how you’re going to be able to scale this company.

Sure, yeah. So again, right, mainly mainly our attraction is Facebook and it’s difficult because

So many people go to Facebook and they have a hard time there and and there’s so many different

Things out there that are telling you to do XYZ at the end of the day, the place where Facebook’s really good is they have these algorithms.

And because of, you know, my background when they started talking about these algorithms and and how you can juggle the system in order to get it to work that’s ultimately what we did. And the real trick is just, you know,

There’s this debate between, like, do you want to hit more people or do you want to get more qualified people right so like

Immediately what happened when we got three to 500 sales is Facebook brought us in to a call and said, what you want to do is you want to create a 1% look alike audience if you create this 1% look alike audience.

Will get you 2 million people. That looks like the 500 people that purchased. But when I found out soon after creating that 1% audience with that.

Some of my friends who had children that were well beyond what we taught at the time.

We’re getting the ads and they were coming to me like Hey man, we’re seeing Elton learning on Facebook. Congratulations and must be blowing up.

And I’m sitting there thinking the. Why are you even seeing my ads. There’s no potential way for you to even buy. So we went back to Facebook and we narrowed down that 1% audience.

To say, hey, they should be in your 1% audience Facebook but they should also be a parent of a child is between two and 12 it’s standard demographic information that’s that’s in Facebook and that cut our audience by a third. So like we went down to like 500 600,000 people and

It wasn’t advised, but the the ratio of convert went high enough for the algorithms to start tuning in at some point.

The pixel is so trained that we can literally tell Facebook target everyone in the United States and and we’re and we’re making sales that basically the same level. And we target. So at this point, Facebook knows who our customer is and they’re able to bring them to us.

And again, it’s about can we get them the right message, but then after that, it’s about

Can we expand our audience beyond that, right, because again, if the eyeballs have moved to Instagram or Pinterest or detect talk or maybe back to TV right we’re missing the people that could be benefiting from this, but just don’t know because they’re not on Facebook.

If this is the interesting problem that you you brought up and

Using the tuning and tightening of your audience is really challenging because the price to do so, can be vastly more and obviously as they look at said

The more you tighten the audience, the more of the algorithm, you’re leveraging they you know like basically almost an exponential increase in the price to do so. So because they

They, they have to do a lot of work, you know, and there you’re figuring out, you know, the effectiveness of it and it’s it’s always tough to when you

Like you said, Facebook, you know, Google, you name the platforms there there’s bound to be Miss targeted recipients and it’s it’s neat when we actually hear about it because then you can say like I

I, I know that these people shouldn’t be seeing my advertisement what’s what’s going on. And it’s this is probably one of the

You could probably give a class on this alone. I think that’s your that’ll be your next startup identity is like

A effective ad targeting you know platforms and how to actually get the most out of them, because I think this is a problem that a lot of founders are facing is

How do I make sure that I’m effectively targeting to bring new new eyes to my platform. And it’s, it can be inexpensive set of lessons, how

How did you approach like did you use another tool or another you know sort of a coach to learn how to use some of the targeting mechanisms inside Facebook.

Well, so the the targeting mechanisms in Facebook.

They’re, they’re not terribly hard to us, it’s just

There’s a lot of categories was the issue and this is before Cambridge analytica and they they removed the whole ton of categories. So when we got started like you start opening up the categories on on on things and like

I mean, gosh you you can select people that follow a page and how many pages are out on Facebook, right. So, like it’s kind of this big hodgepodge

And ultimately right it does come down to like their pixel. Right. So the first thing is getting your pixel hooked up properly right for us. I think the main mistake I made originally was we we call the purchase.

We called it registration completed because I was like, Oh, that’s a cool thing to call it right registration completed.

But, and you can have these books Elton tuned to anything but the default reports they report how many purchases have been made so

You know, about six months in, I said, You know what, we’re going to have to change this to purchases. We’re going to lose that past data. I mean, we’re not going to lose it lose it, but like this just like now whenever I show it to

To a to a potential vendor whenever I show them my Facebook, they look at and they go, well, it looks like you had zero purchases before this date, and I’m like, no, no.

That was the date that we switched it to purchases. Before that it was it was registration completed and then they’ll go, oh, OK, now you see right so so there’s that problem, but now

You know, like now I can open up the data and I can see it. I think scoreboards are very important. It’s one of the things that we use.

Internally as a team. It’s one of the things that, you know, for example, EOS traction says that you should be using the square the data component

It’s also something we leveraged within elephant learning. It’s why we came up with the elven age. It’s a one number metric that I can put in front of the parent or I can put in front of the child and it becomes a motivator. Because as they play it goes up, so

I think that’s very important. So as long as you have your key numbers in front of you, like, you’re going to start to be successful. Another thing that we ended up using that, I think, like, I mean these guys aren’t paying but they should be about to say.

Mr r.io app, Mr r.io it hooks into my stripe and it gives me a dashboard with almost every single KPI I could think of as important. My Mr are how much I actually collected from that Mr are what the refunds. What’s the number of refunds, what’s our customer churn rate what’s

Our lifetime value. What’s our. I mean, gosh, they have like

Maybe 15 things on there. I can’t remember them all off hand but like

You just go to this page, and all of them are right there. And that’s what it is. Every day I would just, I literally have it open on my phone. I just hit refresh in the morning and I know exactly where I’m at from top level perspective.

And then, of course, from there, right, we have to keep the scorecards for how efficient Facebook’s doing how efficient our websites doing

I mean, we’ve really built up an operation around marketing. From there, but like that’s that’s the key like knowing your numbers.

Being able to affect those numbers and then having some people around you that can help you bringing it back to Facebook yeah i mean it’s it’s

It’s basically a text entry and as you start entering in all the categories drop down and you can just I want to filter. More specifically, or I want to exclude a set of people

So it’s basically you’re and or set dynamics, right. Like, if, if you think of it as set theory. Right. And that’s how I think of it is like what are the set of the people in my target market.

And then what does the sense that I’m able to target using the Facebook demographics and then what’s that overlap and I want that overlap to be as big as possible. Right. I don’t want to have too many people in the set outside of my target market, but also who Facebook’s targeting

And this is the it’s

It’s neat that you highlighted, you know the the Mr folks in it because that is exactly it. It’s like if you’re

If you’re not tracking across the entire lifecycle of your engagement, then it can really, really change the way that you’re doing projections and application development. And so it’s it’s so important.

And I’ve. You just spoke with somebody, he talks about, we call it the smile curve, especially when you get, you know, stuff that has a network effect is that it’s the smile curve is that you get this very strong immediate use and then

It will sort of potentially trail.

And then those people will then re engage with the platform. And then you see them so they

And if when you see that it then becomes the second half of the smile. And in fact, that’s the best user because you’ve got them in

Then they found a reason to reengage and being able to see that measurement and that effect.

Gives you you know that predictability. So you can say, hey, this is how I’m going to scale, my, my underlying platform. If I bring a new feature. This is how I can measure the effectiveness and you’ll know especially with this like

It’s difficult to know how to measure the duration of effectiveness, you know, if you’ve got kids that go in

You can’t measure across five days here is it 30 days. Is it 90 days is 120 days like there are, you have to learn about how your engagement in the platform and

Can create an outcome that is both measurable for the person using it so that they’re getting the benefit and then also that you can say

Alright, so I know as i if i want to get 200 more kids in this platform or 2000 and then 20,000 I know what what my back end scaling needs to look like to support that.

Right yeah I all that’s important. Now,

Your, your background. And so I just

Realized we’re, we’re getting towards the end. And I don’t want to. I don’t want to have you suddenly have to run if you got a couple more moments we can i just want to explore. One more thing, if you don’t mind. Aditya

Oh, I don’t mind.

Perfect. So

This is I’d love to get your advice. You know what, what’s the most challenging thing that you faced in building elephant learning that you could you’d love to share with with new founders who are thinking about, you know, putting a platform into into the marketplace.

Well, for me, it was the marketing. I mean, I think where I’d be able to help other founders is like through advice on technology because that was my background.

But you got to remember, like, I came into this and I had zero marketing. I went from a PhD program where I was a software developer

To now. I’m a software developer for someone else. Now I’m managing people who are software developers to okay now I want to build a product and

Ultimately, like when I started here and just like you said like, Did I have any help. I was consulting with a with a marketer, he wanted to do Google AdWords, we weren’t seeing much traction there either. And

A lot of the people actually that he was bringing in for learning. They were extremely helpful. We had a we had a brand manager come in and and we ultimately ended up paying him to come in and align the team around the brand ideas being effective.

And

We had a customer experience. Gentlemen, Joey Coleman. I mean, he’s been a lot of help as well. And like just at every step of the way, trying to figure out, like, okay, well here’s where we are.

Here’s what we can afford to do to better ourselves or better the platform to the point where we are now, where it’s well

We we we qualify for yield. Again, we’re hiring people we’re going to try to put team in place to solve.

These problems right as a machine, right. Like, can we look at reasons why people cancel. Can we figure out what the underlying problem is and design a solution that’s where I have a lot of experience. I think we can do that right but for example from the marketing side.

Some of these problems people have seen before. I’ve never seen before, and now I’m learning for the first time, how can I overcome this, and the problem is is every time it kind of has been you because the typical marketing.

Advice that might be out there. It just, it just goes away so fast, right. It’s like, for example, at one point it was like, Oh, you guys should be doing webinars. That’s what’s the hot thing these days.

Or then just as soon as everyone’s got a webinar, no one’s watching webinars anymore because no one’s getting information from these webinars. So now that that strategy is different. Yeah. The good news is you you

caught on to the wave. The bad news is you’re caught on to the back end of the wave

Exactly so. So that’s the hard part about marketing is that you always got to be inventing you always got to be creative and

I’ll just be honest for like someone that’s new to it sort of exhausting because it’s like, just as soon as I figured out the problem is solved. Gosh, I got another problem 610 months down the road that I just didn’t know was going to happen.

With this is the think also where folks can leverage other platforms and luckily in this this economy in this day and age, we’ve got access to

You know products that are out there that are services that are SAS that we can get access to

So I think luckily at this phase in in business building. There’s so many good options but like you said, the best thing you can do is find somebody else who’s in your

Ecosystem or or meet new peers who have gone through and and lived, these, these lessons you know they’re not always going to play out the same way for you and your platform necessarily relative to their experience, but

Entrepreneurs organization is a great example of folks that you can literally get in there in this they’ve reached a certain phase of growth.

Because there’s revenue requirements in order to be part of it and membership. So people very much have a vested interest in the outcomes from this and that’s a great

GREAT ORGANIZATION. There’s even, you know, simple as meetups and looking to other mentoring teams, I would, you know, I would encourage people to I’ve got a whole host of

Resources. I’m about to put up on the podcast sites just because

There’s been so many good lessons that have I been able to share through these stories for folks. So, and Aditya you’re going to be on that list.

Of great people that these are our solid lessons and and just, I applaud you again for number one, congratulations on the fact that you’ve, you’ve reached revenue in order to get to eat. Oh.

And and more than anything, just congratulations on building a sustainable business and a platform that can truly change the future for somebody

And and to do so at scale, which is which is pretty cool that so big, big plans 2020 years here.

Have you, have you got. What’s your sort of next big target for for yourself and the team.

Well, that’s a great question. Yes. No for us in the team. It’s actually to to to to try to slow down a little bit. I’ve got an advice from multiple people including some of my

By your network that I’m just moving way too fast. So like, to your point, that of what you just said.

I think right now is probably the best time ever in the history of mankind to be an entrepreneur, because of all the SAS solutions that are out there because of

How much you can leverage computers to help you to get this done without people we’ve managed to make it this far with just very, very small amount of team.

And now what we’re trying to do is put some heads into some roles, because like I can’t

I can’t honestly say that this is a business that was intended them to go out and change the world, so long as it depends on me doing the work. So it’s time to put it in the hands of people and have those people drive the company.

To some degree, I’m so obviously going to you know point the ship in the right direction, but until I’m kind of fully out of operations. This doesn’t fulfill the mission of empowering children with mathematics.

Well, and that’s that’s actually a very difficult thing to to discover and embrace and. And also, again, it’s

It’s so hard as a founder, you just get in such a mode where you’re like,

I gotta be Go go go all the time. And this this sort of like hustle porn, you know, lifestyles that you hear, but like, you know, I

I enjoy listening to some of the incredible motivational people just because it’s funny to me because I know. Look, I’ve lived the life I work in a start up

And like, it’s, it’s always there to be done. Like, if I were to 24 hours a day I’d find a reason to need for more. But if I work eight hours a day.

And 10 hours a day.

And do it effectively, you know, I’ve started to change my patterns of work to be more effective and create things that I can do that are scalable beyond me.

And it took a while. So again, a duty of the fact that you’ve reached this point where number one you’ve created a business that can now be

You know, can be into put into the hands of somebody else to help to keep it driving and growing. And that’s, that’s going to be a great chance for you because you’ve, you’ve got so much to bring to it. And hey, you deserve a break. You’ve done

You’ve done good things take a breather.

Spend some time with with your son. And, you know, so it won’t just be it won’t be apt time that we spend with our kids. It’s the fact that you’ll finally have a break and be able to spend some real family time and it’ll be well deserved so

I did, yeah. I want to thank you very much for for sharing some of these great lessons today and just congratulations again on on your

Growth and I wish you all the success. We’ll catch up again to in the future because I really do want to explore a bit more of like kind of them.

Your experiences. Again, going through EO and some of the mentoring opportunities because I think

I’d love to get folks introduced to you as well who who are are getting started, you sounds like you will be a good match what’s the best way. If folks want to reach you, and and sort of get in contact entity, if they if they do so desire.

Sure. I mean, typically it via email. It’s just my first name in my lap first letter of my person in my last name that elephant head soft calm a monograph that ELEPHANT HAVE SOFT calm. That’s really the best way to get ahold of me and

I really appreciate it. I’m always happy to chat. Again, I mean, this was this was great.

You know, like if I can tell my story and helps people. It makes me feel honored because I mean I got so much listening to other people’s stories over the last three or four years and learning from them.

That’s it. It’s

It’s an amazing thing.

And it’s I’ve always been surprised when I hear you know people and the more that we do this too is we become connectors to other things because

You ultimately will get in front of more podcasters and more audiences and then you’ll have someone to say like, hey,

The way you tell the story reminds me of somebody else who I talked to and you know you find yourself in a pure

You know matchup now to somebody else who was also a podcast guest or hostess, and like that. So it’s, it’s an amazing thing that the network effect is so positive on this stuff, and it’s

I feel like it’s like striver in the idea that it’s all positive thing. No one says like, oh, you know,

Let me introduce you to somebody who’s going to tell you, horror stories like no, no, it’s like we are all here to kind of coach each other through to the next phase.

And sometimes we have a difficult run or a difficult ride, but you’re there’s always someone there to say like, Ah, cool, you know, and just most more than anything.

It’s just good to hear stories of folks that are that are in the in that grind with you and unable to

Reach these neat milestones together and again for folks that want to get hear more great stories like this, please do subscribe to the podcast, you can do so through iTunes also through Stitcher. If you read it. It’s also very advantageous for us.

So I recommend folks.

Go in, give us a rating leave

Leave a review, it’s, it’s always

welcome and appreciated.

With that Aditya. Thank you very much.

I look forward to

Using the platform myself.

And

And really seeing, you know how I can

I can share this with the world, and I’ll

Make sure to evangelize what you’re doing for for kids everywhere.

I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Sponsored by the 4-Step Guide to Delivering Extraordinary Software Demos that Win Deals – Click here and because we had such good response we have opened it up to make the eBook, Audiobook, and online course, more accessible by offering it all for only 5$

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Ellie Dailey is founder and CEO of an innovative online recruiting platform— Intro30.com. The platform allows job seekers to record an online video introduction as part of a shareable profile including a resume.  Ellie shares insightful lessons in how to differentiate yourself from the pack during the recruiting process, how empathy in hiring and in tech companies in general is game-changing for growth and retention, plus more. 

This is also an early listen to the very cool initiative called Job Prep Global which is creating coaching and advisory for folks who need help getting into and succeeding at being hired.  Thank you to Ellie for sharing very important lessons and stories that are a must-listen for anyone who’s in tech, recruiting, or in any role in business at all.

Photo by mentatdgt from Pexels

Sponsored by the 4-Step Guide to Delivering Extraordinary Software Demos that Win Deals – Click here and because we had such good response we have opened it up to make the eBook, Audiobook, and online course, more accessible by offering it all for only 5$

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Missy Young is the CIO of Switch, and someone who has proven herself as a leader both in business and in the community.  We discuss the challenges of diversity and inclusion in STEAM, mentoring within the community and at work, and explore how we can all do something for ourselves and others in small ways every day.  Missy truly lives a life to bring good to her community and her team through strong leadership and giving back.  

This is an inspirational discussion and really opens up your eyes as to how great organizations like Opportunity Village and FIRST Robotics are creating opportunities and what we can do to amplify the good they are doing.

Opportunity Village:  https://www.opportunityvillage.org 

FIRST Robotics:  https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc 

Photo by NEXT Academy on Unsplash

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So the what I love about what we’ve talked about before, you and I, missy. And what we as an industry are starting to tackle is the

The real neat opportunity where we can we’ve gotten ourselves to a point where we can do stuff that’s more than just getting through our own day

And you’ve been a really, really strong part of the community, both directly and just like it community and really opening people’s eyes to what you and the team are doing

But so much more than that is to really like bring people forward into our industry and even just into anything I found you’ve just got such a beautiful sense of

Opening doors and opening up opportunities in such a good way for people, but I’ll let let’s do you can just do your full sort of intro on on who you are, how you got here and

Talk about, first of all, being the leader, you know, a CIO, a well earned opportunity and what it feels like.

You know, I’m not gonna say you’re, you’re a female, you’re not a woman who became a CIO, or a CEO, because you’re a woman that’s such a that’s part of the problem I think right there. Just the fact that I never know what the right statement is you are an amazing person and amazing CIO

You happen to also be an amazing woman, a mother, all of these things right. How do you approach, just that thing like just being you. How would you describe you

Uh, well, I guess I would describe myself as it’s an interesting thing I was challenged at a workshop one time to describe myself about using my title or my job in any way. And I discovered how much of our identity is usually wrapped up in what do we do for a living. Right.

Yeah, so I am a mother. I am a wife. I am a friend. I am a daughter. I am a sister and I am also a CIO of a tech company called switch that I have been with for

About 15 years and I was one of the original employee number nine. So I’ve been with the company for quite some time, through its most of its history.

And it’s been an incredible journey. And I would say that I grew into the role of CIO over time.

Having worn all the hats and done all the jobs and you know when you’re in start up mode over those years. That’s what you do as a team. Is everyone pitches in and does whatever needs to be done in order to make the company successful

So most of the core team is all still here. So we have this incredible environment that that really functions well with all the individual members helping out

Assignments and acts as a team is not be a bunch of people who work together a team is a group of people who trust each other.

And over the years. That’s what we built here so it’s it’s been a fantastic place to be for me to grow professionally and also to have a mentor, like our CEO and founder rod Roy, who has helped me

Not just, you know, be excellent at my job, but to transform into a CIO, because that’s a that’s an evolution that has to take place within yourself. You have to be willing to do that work.

On the inside to learn what is empathy and how can I wield empathy, to the benefit of my team and how do I, how do I show confidence to my team in order to inspire them, but without it looking like you’re cocky.

You know, how do you, how do you do all these things in a way that helps your team be better because at the end of the day, a good leader is a good servant. You have to put the needs of your team above your own

And this is the it’s a this is what makes you know you’re arriving into this role so appropriate and again so well deserved because

Very a lot of people see this and they said like, Oh, well, anybody who’s been

In a role for so long. It’s kind of these natural progressive things you are you know you are an individual contributor. Then you’re a manager then you’re a director than your maybe a VP or a VP, and you kind of like track your way up.

But it’s, it’s very interesting that there are many levels are many types of roles that are not ladder paths or there they shouldn’t be.

Because there’s not just functional requirements and skills that are needed to do it but empathy.

Is such a powerful part of so many different parts of what we do. But I would say like you described, more so as a CIO, because it’s not just

You know, CIO, said the old joke, right. See, I used to stand for careers over like that back in the 80s, he would say like, Oh yeah, they are. That was like you’re on special projects.

You hear they’re like, what do we do with Pete, I don’t know. Let’s make him the CIO, and that’ll that’ll push them out in 18 months.

Right.

But then it became a transformative part of how companies operate and survive and thrive in this new sort of it oriented and tech driven field. So the change in that transformation becoming a thing means like, how do you transform. If you don’t have empathy.

And I’ll be straight up. I didn’t have it.

we’ve ever taken the the color code testflight. It’s one of the many different versions of personality tests out there, but so red is the color of power and my test came out 77% read

If anybody saw your office that we just described as being dominant we read

Favorite color. And so it’s a color of my office is the color of the inside of my car and so on. But it means that it much more overshadows the other colors of blue, which are which is emotions and yellow, which is fun and white, which is details that kind of thing.

So I had to work on empathy. It’s something I had to learn, you know, there would be times when my CEO would come into who’s my CEO is very gifted with empathy.

And he would come into my office and say, Do you know how you sounded in that meeting. Just know, and I would say home. I mean just completely abuse and clueless as to

The effects that had the way I had delivered my sentences had impacted a certain person in the room.

And just just no clue. And so I had to. I had to read a lot of books and really work hard on that and, you know, our senior team here is also really good at.

You know, I can ping something off of them say, hey, this happened and I i think i want to handle it this way. What do you think, how do you think this is going to be taken and we all help each other because I think

To build a company like this over time, like we have, you have to have a lot of people with red and their personality. To do that, you have to be a strong team.

But the empathy is also super important for all the people that you’re bringing with you along the way, because they look at you and they see your title and there’s a certain amount of intimidation that comes with that whether you mean it to or not.

Whatever my intentions were I didn’t intend to hurt anybody’s feelings, but they got hurt anyway. And so it’s not

Your intentions that matter. It’s your actions that matter because that’s what’s going to create a result that’s what’s going to create an impact.

So I did. I did have to learn empathy and I will happily confess that I’m a work in progress. I don’t know if there’s ever a point where you say, I’ve reached the pinnacle of empathy.

Maybe Mother Teresa could have said that maybe her but she’s like the only person maybe Maya Angelou. She’s another one who’s really good at that.

Um, but yeah. So I have to always say there’s always a another step I can take to be better.

So the great thing that was because I studied it, I worked hard at it and I’m still working hard at it. I can coach other people in the company who also want to be leaders.

And who are on that same journey of self transformation as well to help them take whatever those steps are the so that they can they can achieve that next level of professional excellence and it just helps you in your personal life too.

Yeah, well it’s the one of the books that I recommend most often to people. There’s one called The Four Agreements and it’s

A neat one is sort of a it’s spiritual, but not religious and and The Four Agreements are very simple.

I recommend it to many people. And one of my favorite things in it is one where it’s and the rule is simply don’t take it personally.

And what’s different about this. It’s a very sort of stoic thing that I use out of it. It’s not just don’t take a person like hey, you know, missy. You are amazing. And you’re like,

I’m pretty I feel pretty good about that right now. You’re like,

No, you can’t. So it’s not just like I I’m very disappointed in you and you feel down, obviously. So you’re not. You’re supposed to not take it personally. So we all do that were like oh no you know shut out the bad

Well, we also have to eliminate the good in a way, or it really very strong peaks of where people are heaping praise.

I recommend I just I dread when people keep praise on me because I’m like, No, no, I gotta, like, I gotta get this on to somebody else. I have to share this I have

This is not me. This is not me. This is a thing. Who else deserve to be here in this moment with me to share this and spread it out. So I’m very mindful of. I call it shaving off the edges.

That I want to stay centered so that I don’t feel because the higher you feel the easier it is to feel the trough.

And when you go about go to baseline. If you’ve been told, like you’re amazing. You’ve done. This is the best day I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen a presentation like this.

And then an hour later people like, hey, so the document you did definitely needs a lot of work. You feel like it if you would just come into work and said, hey, so the document you did needs a little work, but let’s work on it together.

But now that you came off this high, you’re at baseline and you feel like shit.

Like you’re here. There’s, like, oh God, because you’ve got this big delta from where you feel so that’s

Sort of the long way to say like when they say don’t take it personally. That means both the the incredible praise and the incredible negativity.

Because you’ve got to sort of shake some of that stuff out and empathy is is definitely something more people need dude. And so if you ever heard of Chris Voss

Oh yeah, I’m actually teaching his book.

Oh, nice. I’ve never seen.

A difference

Oh, yeah.

You should to our sales team and I highly recommend that book. By the way, for anyone in sales, because the techniques that he teaches really work.

My sales team has gone out and implemented these tools as they’ve learned them and they’re experiencing amazing results. Almost immediately, it’s been phenomenal. Yeah. Chris boss was awesome.

Yeah, the yeah i i every time I give 70 the book. Third is, like, wait a second, like high know or you get all your stuff from like

Yes, yes, exactly narratives never split the difference phenomenal and for folks that have got access to master class I masterclass the online and sort of

Tool are really, really neat and Chris does one of the one of the program so it’s it’s effectively a repeat of a lot of the content in the book, but it’s

Neat literally see him, you know, by face. I did the audio book as well. And I was like I was kind of disappointed. It wasn’t him because he’s got just this beautiful delivery.

But tactical empathy is the way that he describes what he does, because it’s very much

You know there’s pure empathy, where somebody falls down on their hurt you want to help them right so your children or have a bad day at school, you want to help them.

Tactical empathy is day to day navigating the the perils of running an organization or negotiating a sale or or whatever it happens to be. That’s, that’s a neat thing. How did you

How did you come about this. It sounds like this is something that you said that you kind of got you, got you found out that you needed a little help. How did it come to to that point where you decided this was it. I’m ready to look around.

I it was it I don’t know if there was a certain one certain point, but there were definitely

A few incidents where you know my my CEO and founder, who’s also my mentor Rob Roy, you know, just brought it to my attention. He’s like, hey, this

You know, if you want to be effective as a leader, you have to change this and I, you know, studied him because he is so good at empathy.

And it helping to build consensus and he never criticizes in public, you know,

He takes you into the room and talks and, you know, how do we, and, you know, it’s very, it’s always very constructive and

Because of that people are just so incredibly loyal to him and want to do their best for him because he’s so good at that. And so I

I said, Okay, that’s a good model for me because I can see in our own team, the effect that he has

On everyone in it and how he helps everyone to be them their best selves. Well, I can’t let that stop with me. I need to

Turn around and do that for everyone else. Also, but because it doesn’t come naturally to me.

I have to, I have to learn it. And so I went and started searching out books on that to learn how to be better at it and but

Transformation doesn’t happen unless you can self actualize meaning. Okay, I’m going to do an honest analysis of myself.

And say, Okay, these are the things that I need to work on and then actually take that into action and and do it in real life. You know, one of the great things about Chris bosses book never split the difference

Is these these conversational techniques like mirroring and labeling. I started using them at home with my husband.

Hahaha

And it works. And so he now thinks I’m like the most attentive best listening wife in the world.

Because I’ve learned how to practice these skills, how to be a better listener and how to make the other person feel like they matter to you and that you’re not just sitting there waiting for your turn to talk.

So these are techniques that anybody can learn, but you have to be number one willing to make the change. And then to actually do the work over and over and over again in order to unseat some of those deep seated habits that you already have.

And it’s like a muscle memory as well. It’s a, it’s a neuro muscular memory that you have to create and it’s it’s so funny because that’s

So much of what I learned in that book and and other things and how I’ve like kind of become used to

talking to strangers. Now a lot of times, and when I’m on a podcast with them a little get introduced to them. And that’s it. We record like 90 minutes of really enjoyable conversational content.

And they were like, how did you, how did you know about my business. I’m like, why I read about, about nine minutes before we got on the call, but

You just did such a great job of telling the story and I just helps to pull you through it. And that’s really what it was is and at home. It’s such a powerful thing because

Like you said, it’s, you can just do the simple things, and you feel bad when you’re learning it because you’re like, Whoa. All right, time for some earring. Time for some labeling

But after a while if you practice it enough. It does, it does start to come natural

And it makes sense, it, it actually legitimately creates a true engagement. It really pulls us you together with the person you’re talking to and gives them a incredible comfort.

To share much more of it and some of the early some of the longer really long form podcasts. I did with one fellow, I said, like he was asked. My question is, what’s the, you know, hardest. What’s the most difficult thing that’s ever happened to you that you’re most thankful for.

Hmm.

You know, and so one of those like weird questions. I think it’s like a Tim Ferriss question, whatever.

And it was neat that instead of having like just a gut reaction to it. There’s just this incredible long pause. And that was another sort of vorticism I’ll say is, like, just let let silence rain and and then after like 40 seconds. He says,

No, it’s good question. You know, the day that I and it was like this incredible thing just happened in front of me, from that moment forward and fights cut them off for like tried to make the conversation flow, it would have totally changed the dynamic

And those are those are so magical when you get those. And that’s why I love. So you go and you’re you’re sharing this as well. You’re mentoring other folks in the industry, you talked about mentoring and Rob being one of your mentors.

What do you do in order to create that mentoring relationship as well with some of either peers or folks in the organization. I’m curious how you make that come into play as part of your day to day

So I don’t think you can force that I don’t think you can sort of declare, hey, I’m going to be your mentor now.

But you can start to show a lot of interest in someone’s work and their day to day activities and call them more and

stop and say, Hey, who you’re rooting for in the Super Bowl. You know, things that don’t necessarily have to do with work build that relationship.

And I always laugh because I have a bit of a snarky sarcastic sense of humor.

But if I haven’t known someone here at the company for at least five years, they don’t get they don’t get to see that side of my personality, because I’m not 100% sure how they’ll take it.

I’m not 100% sure if they would be offended or or feelings hurt or not sure if they think I’m being mean whatever

Now of course the people I’ve been working with for 10 years they all know you know How what how my sense of humor works. And a lot of them are the same way anyway. And so we have a ton of fun with that banter.

But i i sheath that sword when I’m around people that I don’t know how they can handle it. And so I think you have to build that relationship. First, get to know each other and build that trust.

I think it’s, it’s different if you, you know, I’ve done the the mentoring programs where you’re mentoring young college students and so on. And that’s a diff very different dynamic.

They’re coming to you for mentorship, they’re coming to you with questions and they want to know, how do I do this, and how do I do that.

And it’s interesting, a lot of them want to, how do I become CIO, right. They want to know, how do I get to the sea level. And I kind of stopped them. I’m like, Well, I, I never had a plan to get to a sea level position. I never wanted to work in a data center when I was

This

This wasn’t in the plan.

Because it didn’t exist right a job that I have did not exist when I was a kid and a lot of the people who are coming out of high school and college now are going to have jobs in the future that don’t exist yet.

And so my goal every day. I really just wanted to earn a living. My goal when I became a network engineer. Well, you know, I got some certifications and became a network technician to start out

And I just, I wanted to make a decent living. But my the way that I approached work every day was how can I be how can I be excellent today.

How can I be my most amazing self today because I can’t do anything about tomorrow because tomorrow is not here yet.

And so that was really my, my focus as I you know worked all over the years was just be my best self today because it’s the only thing I can control.

And that was a great way to try to keep stress.

Off of my back because I can’t you know a lot of people spend a lot of times, worrying about what are we going to do and

Next month and how is next quarter going to go and this and that. I can’t control any of those things. I can only control what I’m doing today.

And so if I go home at the end of the day and go. Yep. I was excellent today than I did a great job and that will take care of itself. And so I kind of backup these younger kids and say, well, hold on a second.

You know, that’s that path forward, you may, you may lay out some path. Now, I guarantee you, I bet you a million dollars that that path is going to change.

Either you’re going to evolve it or life is going to happen to you or new opportunities are going to come up and you’re going to make different decisions.

I don’t I don’t I think it’s very difficult to set some massive goal out into the future in front of you.

And then have that be your be all end all and then if that doesn’t work out, you’ve experienced this huge disappointment or let down

So I just say, do your best. Today, in order to go into tomorrow, knowing that you can do the same thing again. And if you do experience a setback.

Oh. Well, that’s life. I don’t know if you ever saw. The Incredibles the Mr. Incredible would say, you know, every time I turn around the world is in jeopardy again and we can’t just stay saved.

You know the setbacks will happen. They happen to the best of us. And just, that’s okay. That’s life. It doesn’t mean your life’s over the best part about life is Tomorrow’s a new day and you can try again.

Yeah, there’s a there’s a reboot every night, in a sense, right and and i i like the

I described it often is like sort of local optimization. You know, there’s a certain I’ve got a 24 hour optimization window. There’s certain things I can affect within 24 hours and truthfully. It’s really 16

You know, even if you’re getting a short amount of sleep you’re looking at 20

So what can you effects during that period of time. And like you said if if it, if you have a terrible 20 hours, you have a little bit of a of a nap, you come back you like okay

Let’s kind of reset the clock a bit and reset the baseline. So it’s, it’s a good it’s something I wish we would teach

Earlier, I think that’s the thing. I tried to give with when I speak, especially with kids and students especially like teens.

You know, it’s that whole sense of like it’s going to get better, which is like kind of like the around suicide prevention. There’s a whole big Crux like if you remember when you were

12 years old and I lose a girlfriend like, that’s it. I’m done. I’m never there’s nothing in life that could make me happy ever again.

You know, I knew, like so.

But I say this, jokingly now because I was able to survive some some those moments right in and

And so sometimes when you’re in those periods of your life you have that experience, they can feel like that’s it. This is the cliff that I’ve that I’m not going to get on the other side of

And when you get through people and you get into jobs and you get into more senior roles you find out that it’s much more like Mr. Incredibly, like, all right, what do we need to sort it today. Good stuffs, not on fire.

We’re good till tomorrow and then it’ll burn again but

Yeah, we’ll talk about the kids, I think, you know, with the stress of figuring out their future. I think that there’s a lot of disservice done to kids when people ask them, What do you want to be when you grow up.

Because they it’ll and you and I, being Gen Xers, you know, we definitely experienced this as kids. We were expected

To have our entire future mapped out we were expected to know what we wanted to be to know. We wanted to go to college and

And all those things. But in today’s world, and everything is changing as fast as it is. And these kids are going to have jobs and haven’t even been invented yet.

I’m a huge fan of the technical and vocational fields, you know, if you’re going to be a nurse or a doctor or a lawyer or some other career where

You have to have a college degree, awesome. I get it. Go to college and get that degree and go down that path.

But if you’re not sure the technical certifications or vocational programs are excellent ways to get into the workforce.

And try it out for a while. Right. You know, and see where it takes you because you don’t know where it’s going to take you. I had no idea.

That getting a few tech certifications and starting out as a network technician in the early, mid 90s was going to lead to where I am today.

How would I could never have known that. And I didn’t have a plan.

I just said, Hey, I’m good with computers. Let’s give this a shot. You know, this was in the.com days, and it was it was a thing and

You know, I said well you know I can. I can do this. I know I can, you know, learn the language of computers because that’s really all it is is a language.

And you know, I already was pretty good with languages. And so I figured this sounds like a natural thing for me and it led me where I am, but I would never been able to predict it ever

Now, the other thing that I was talking about the the thing you’ve created, which is, you know, we talk about you know the past the CIO, people think, oh, that’s amazing this wondrous there’s no possible like they just can’t even imagine. Sometimes what it must be like

Another thing that people don’t necessarily know what it must be like is when you you’re exposed to.

People you know especially you know peer to peer level in high up in organizations. It’s a very different sort of interaction you have with other CIOs and CTOs and CEOs.

You’re very prominent in public service and and doing things with charity.

You know, we’ve talked in the past, but some of the folks here on your, you know, I always joked about, you know, sort of like my my dream magician friends near like I good friends with them good friends with them and if

You are

You know, talk about did you know when you were not yet network certified that you would someday be, you know, on a charity board with maybe the folks who are and let’s talk about some of the work that you do in that area.

Sure, and no i i didn’t even envision, you know, this was in Southern California. So I never even thought I would ever live in Las Vegas. That was not on my bucket list. And I don’t know if it’s on anyone’s bucket list but yeah

Well, I’ve lived in Las Vegas now for 15 years and I moved here from Huntington Beach to join switch when it was a very small company. And it was a huge risk to move here.

And I still have a lot of people today going, how could you leave Huntington Beach. Don’t you miss it. And I always say, Well, no, it’s right there. Like, I can go visit it anytime I want from Vegas. It’s super easy.

But I don’t have to pay the taxes. I don’t have to deal with the traffic and the pollution, etc, etc. I love living in Nevada. I think it’s a great place to be.

And Nevada as a state is really a big small town. Everyone knows everybody. And so when you serve on boards here. There’s actually a lot of change. You can affect, which is really a cool thing.

So I serve on the boards of FIRST Robotics, which is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done is to work with FIRST Robotics. It was founded by Dean Cayman

Who invented the segway and whole bunch of other things. I don’t know how many patents. He has now.

BUT FIRST Robotics enables and they have LEGO League for elementary school kids, AND SO FIRST Robotics enables kids to get this kit of parts and they they can create a robot and has specific weight restrictions and

You know, specific limitations that built around to make sure that all the robots are competing in the same arena.

With a theme every year. So this year, Mark Hamill from, you know, Star Wars LAUNCHED THE FIRST Robotics Competition.

And we have our regional competition here in Vegas. And we last year we had teams from Turkey and Brazil and just all over the world.

But so the kids have to learn mechanical engineering and programming and electrical engineering and the kids have to be able to write a business plan.

They have to go and source funding. So they have to go and basically sell this concept of people to get money in order to fund their

Their company or buying the kit of parts and traveling to the competitions. So they essentially have to create a small business around this robot.

So a friend of mine who is an executive at circus Olay kept encouraging encouraging me to come to the FIRST Robotics Competition. He wasn’t selling it very well. He just kept saying the robotics contest.

Oh, okay, fine. You know, so I went down there and they were holding it in the Thomas and Mack arena, which is a pretty big space and I go in there and it was like NASCAR.

It was high energies.

Huge stuff.

Out music and all the teams have like their own machine shops where they have all their parts and they’re working on stuff and the kids.

I’ll have all the teams have created their own theme. So like one of the team was a Harry Potter theme and

And so they’re all running around. But the great thing is not just are not only are they being judged on how the robot.

competes but each team has to compete in collaboration with a couple of other teams and then every single team gets judged on their gracious professionalism.

So they all have to be kind to each other. So these are not mean, nasty, you know, terrible competitions, where the kids are all

fighting it out know if one kids in one teams robot has a problem. Other teams will offer parts to help and that is gracious professionalism.

So they’re also being taught to be kind and to be professional and to be well mannered adults, while competing with this robot is the most fantastic thing I’ve ever seen. So we were talking to a young lady.

At the Vegas competition. A couple years ago, and as a freshman in high school. She envisioned her her life after high school as she was just going to work and fast food.

Because that’s what her parents did and her parents were barely legal in the US and there is no American dream for her. That does not exist in her eyes.

She has a very different upbringing very different life very different experience and very different hopes and dreams that people who

You know, their families are born and raised in this country and have different options.

So she just figured, I’ll just work in fast food because there’s no money for me to go to college or do anything else. And so as a freshman in high school. Another girl encouraged her to join FIRST Robotics.

Because of how much fun. She was having so she said, Why not, and she gave it a try. And she discovered. You know what I’m really good at this.

I can learn the language of the computer because I already know two languages. I know English and Spanish. And so this is just another language to learn

And so she discovered that she was very good at programming. And by the time she graduated high school she had received a full ride scholarship to Cal Poly.

Because of how FIRST Robotics not not only changed her as a student, but opened her eyes to the possibilities that were in front of her.

That if she could just take hold of them that they were real, and they were available.

SO FIRST Robotics is just an absolutely incredible organization and anyone anywhere can start a team and in your kids school

First Robotics makes it very easy for people to start teams. They have all those pathways and programs laid out and training and all that so that I do that I’m on the board of opportunity village which helps to provide jobs for people with physical and intellectual disabilities.

Yeah, this is a really good one. I, I had gotten turned on to opportunity village years ago pen gelatinous I caught on to it because it was one of

The that was actually when he was on the apprentice. I think that was what the his, his charity money went towards and I’d already kind of known about that so so big shout out to opportunity village in particular I’m a fan of

Oh, well, they give back and all that you do for that as well.

Yeah, it’s a pretty neat thing that a lot of city. I think there, it should be implemented in every city across America because of how many people are out there with intellectual disabilities.

And when you turn the day you turn 22 the school bus does not come for you anymore.

And so at that at that moment, you are not too old to partake in any programs that are offered by the public school system for people with intellectual disabilities, meaning autism. Down syndrome. It’s about brain injuries, all those kinds of things. So what happens to them, then

What do they do, what do they do for the rest of their lives. What do their parents do with them.

And so opportunity village has a team of people that goes out and finds work that these folks can do so great example is I came out to opportunity village one day and they had all these huge pallets of cereal boxes.

And so, Costco had been selling a three pack of Rice Krispies. So it was like Cocoa Krispies Rice Krispies and frosted Krispies all in this shrink wrap three pack.

And at the end of the promotion all the boxes that didn’t sell all those shrink wrap packages were sent over to the warehouse that opportunity village.

And the OH VIP. That’s what we call these folks with the intellectual disabilities. Oh, VIP package them and then repackage all the frosted Christmas together all the Cocoa Krispies together and all the rice krispies together for shipment to stores for individual sale.

Oh, wow.

So yeah, but so that’s a job that like you and I will lose our minds doing that over and over again for hours and hours and hours people intellectual disabilities can do that and they can receive private purpose and a paycheck.

For doing this work that needs to be done. So they’re also the, I think the third largest paper shredder for the state of Nevada.

Like Nellis Air Force bases is opportunity village to do all their documents reading because none of the OB IPS can read the documents.

This is the the thing of

Like you said, it’s things that we assume you know you see people especially elementary school programs and even high school programs.

Then that’s it once, once they’re out of that age system they’re aged out of all these programs.

Because, for whatever reason, people think, like, Well, like I said, it’s kind of like, why do people eat so much chicken. The world.

Not because baby chickens are cute because adult chickens aren’t like they’re ugly awful things see very easily. Like, I’m good, I’m good with eating that. But if every, every chicken look like a baby chicken. We would never eat chicken.

And so what do we do with all of these programs as we create these beautiful opportunities and beautiful programs to help people through but at some point we lose sight of the fact that they will age out of those programs.

And not just what happens to them, what happens to their parents, you know, for the parents have someone with an intellectual disability or a brain injury, their job never ends. That is it. It’s another

Responsibility forever. And for that, that parent and they didn’t, you know, and those kids. Nobody signed up for that it happened to them and we need to help them all of them you know and and that’s an incredible way to do it.

I can also tell you one other VIP. She was a normal functioning adult and she was in a terrible car accident terrible brain injury and she forgot everything

Through the accident, how to talk on a walk and cetera but the one thing that she did. Remember that wasn’t damaged from the accident was how to do embroidery.

And

So she now makes him because opportunity village has a whole big Art Center. And so she makes embroidered works of art that patrons in Las Vegas will pay big money for

And then the money goes into an account that opportunity village manages and then at a time that comes where she needs a new wheelchair, whatever it is.

They take money out of this account for her.

To pack to buy the new wheelchair but they don’t give it directly to her because then she would lose Medicaid, she would lose those types of programs and funding that she gets because of her status, but the money is still there and reserve for her.

And so this is just, it’s just the coolest program. And then one of the other ones that I’m involved in is I’m on the board of Nevada School of the Arts.

Which phenomenal program for kids who play the violin sing. They’re an orchestra all the art side of the house. It’s a really fantastic program here.

They, they have great programs for kids who have any kind of musical abilities whatsoever. And they partner with all the schools across the valley to deliver these programs Valley wide.

And I’m a huge fan of keeping the A in steam because them without the arts has no soul.

We have to keep the arts involved in these steam programs, not STEM programs because the arts is what keeps us in touch with our humanity and if we don’t support these arts programs, kids are going to lose out on a very vital part of their development, in my opinion, so

There’s a surprising crossover to have just the, the actual neurological patterns of people that are in creative in all forms, they tend to work together the best pro programmers. I know come from psychology degrees.

More so than coming from com site degrees because they understand how humans interact with systems, not how systems interact with systems.

So they they tend to build differently than a pure program or which is a phenomenal and challenging trade into itself, but it’s like he said, so the creative mind.

extends into pushes into the arts and those arts need to be part of, you know, everything like he said look at the robotics program robots programs, they’re teaching incredible systems thinking but write a business plan.

Teach them how to do marketing teach them how to empathy have empathy for each other you know and and competition with empathy. Good golly,

You know, there’s not an organization on the on this earth that couldn’t use that to come into their, you know, org for a couple of days and get people to think that way between

So true.

Now, how did you, how did you decide that that was an area that you wanted to put your own personal focus to because you

You talked about just two and three there, but there’s there’s many more. I know that you you help to contribute to and you promote

Like did. Was that a calling for you or did it just you saw it happening. And you said, I finally have an opportunity to to create something with these programs and I want to help.

I think that, you know, Uncle Ben and spider man said it best. With great power comes great responsibility.

And I think that if you are lucky and blessed enough to get to a position of power and influence. Then if you are given the chance to help make the world a better place you you have to do it.

You are obligated to do it i mean i am i’m really blessed that I got to achieve this, this level of of a career, but so that means I need to take that influence and help

help make the world better. You know what, what can I do to influence others to help make things

Help their world improve because you know I can’t turn a blind eye to the fact that there are children in their girls in middle school right now who is attention is being diverted away.

From science, technology, engineering, arts and math.

That’s, you know, site. The data shows that, you know, boys and girls have the exact same interest and compassion and capacity for

All of those subjects in elementary school, middle school is where it diverts you know girls seem to lose interest, are they

Is it teachers that are that are steering them away is that their parents. Is it culture. Is it social media is it hormones. Is it just the differences between boys and girls at that age. I don’t know the answer.

But we can’t sit by and let the young girls not feel like they can do with the boys can do in these fields.

And I I’m a huge fan of making sure we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, you know I am.

I am always going to be a proponent of women not being Victims, victims of any kind of abuse, but I also don’t want anybody to think that men are the enemy.

Because I’ve definitely experienced that in my lifetime in my, in my career of, you know, for every one man who was a bit of a stumbling block for me. There were 10 who wanted to help

And so, Mr. Rogers was right when he says look for the helpers, they’re always there. And I found that to be 100% true

In every situation. There’s always people who want to help you if you just open your eyes and look or or open your mouth and ask for the help

That’s a lot of time. I think our pride gets in the way of us taking that next step is admitting that we that we need the help and then asking for the help

From the right person. And so, yeah, I definitely feel very obligated to to work in these in these fields because I i got put into a position where I could do that. And then this state in Nevada.

You can affect change here because everyone knows everyone, which is just one of the coolest things ever

You know, might someone asked me, you know, later on if you retire, will you move away from Nevada. I said, Well, I definitely travel but I’m never going to leave without it, because

I can, I can make things be better in this state. There are things I can do to impact the communities that I live in. And that’s just, that’s awesome. And I love that.

That’s very rare.

There is a rare treat to be able to feel and see the impact and. And I think that’s what I think a lot of people lose faith.

In their ability to affect change because they don’t see the outcomes in the impact directly or even indirectly, they, they lose sight of of what it can do.

So it’s it’s challenging you brought up a really good points and an interesting point about sort of like a 10 to one, like if we if you seek hey if you seek negativity, you’ll find it in spades.

But if you keep positive positivity negativity won’t go away but it becomes less of the focus of what you’re finding and I think

You know, have you been able to bring other people and you know through that mindset change of, like, Hey, I know you’ve had a tough time and you had a bad really difficult experience. But, you know, have you seen people you’ve been able to bring through that turn to that that mindset.

Ah,

There have been people in my private life yes that I absolutely have helped to bring through that mindset at work. It’s an interesting thing, because

I think everyone who has gotten

To work in the tech field has experienced some sort of hardship to get there. And I mean, male or female. I think everybody who works. It’s sort of a non traditional thing, right.

I mean, I know my, my parents still don’t understand what I do. I mean, I don’t know if any of you.

Out there have ever tried to explain cloud to your mom, you know, it’s not it’s not an easy task. And so when I meet people who aren’t in the tech industry. They say, Well, what do you do for living. And they’ll say, Oh, I’m in tech and they go, oh, you know,

Bed.

Please, please, that’s the nice smile that says, Please don’t say

Anymore.

And so I drop it. But if they go, oh, what do you do, and then. Okay, cool. Now I’ve met I’ve met a comrade. Right. Someone who gets it. So then you go into all the details and it’s fun.

But we we work in something that wasn’t really a thing when when we were kids, especially if you’re in the data center industry or if you’re a programmer and all that. And so I think that

Every one of us here has endured some sort of a challenge to get here. So you can either let those challenges become a blockade to you being happy.

Or you can go. Cool. I overcame that. That’s awesome. And I think the majority of the people that I meet are like that. And I will say here at switch. We’re huge fans of positivity.

We always talking about put good in get good back that sort of our mod our logo, the karma wheel. You know what goes around comes around, but that and that’s a sort of more of a negative way to say it, but we like to say put get in, get good back

Yeah, no good effort brings good result, you know, whether it’s inside your heart or on the people around you.

So we we don’t tolerate negativity here, you know, we’re going to try to help you be, you know, focus on the positive and, you know, not, not like it rose colored glasses on. But if you look for the good. You will find it always

I and so we’re not going to let a poison pill. Bring the rest of us down.

I think the society needs a little bit of a boost on on that reminder. Sometimes, especially with just the the advent of social media and the hyper awareness of everything.

It brings the noisiest bits forwards to the top and unfortunately the noisiest bits are usually the more negative bits.

That’s right, when I posted it was a few several weeks back with something about how

I took a photo of the sunrise. Hey beautiful sunrise de Las Vegas. And then one of my friends commented yeah until Trump starts World War three. I was like, Okay, this was

This was a post about his sunrise, not about anything else but that’s that’s a person, and I know this person in real life is definitely always focused on how can I find the negatives in any situation. And that’s just, that’s just not a good way to live in my opinion.

Now the the thing that I’m looking to do better at and you touched on it here. We can only create that opportunity for somebody when they know they need it.

And first of all, is your, your, your own immediate network reaches is x, right, so we’ve got a network reach of

peer network immediate is one and two and you get into the sort of third third you know network. It’s a pretty broad set of people, but when we see people you know in your Twitter timeline, who are negative, and I’ve got lots of friends were like this. And there’s a point where I’m just

You know, just like my

bow my head, I’m like,

Oh no, not again like

You know,

And and sometimes I’ve tried to reach out and said like, Hey, uh, I know things must be must be pretty heavy right now you got a lot going on there’s anything I can do to help you know

And but when that doesn’t get anything like when, when does my empathy. Just need to like when, when am I no longer is it valuable for me to be able to help that person. I’m curious in your thoughts on

That because you’re probably

You probably bumped into that a lot, especially

When

I don’t think that you can win a single battle by arguing on social media. I mean I name one like you’ve ever seen on Facebook or whatever you see two people just going at it.

And each one is just digging their heels and further and further and sniping and being snarky and, you know, back and forth. And, oh, I’m going to get the last word. And I’m going to up you want you know all that stuff. You just go

Okay, this is completely in a non constructive argument. This is complete waste of your time. THIS IS LIKE WATCHING DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES or you know something, you know, they’re just

It and it always devolves into name calling and insulting and it’s so it’s just not worth it. And the interesting thing is when I post up on social media. I know that I have very far right friends and I have very far left friends. These people should never meet.

Ever

But occasionally they might start to converse with each other on one of my posts and so I don’t shut it down, just depending on what it is because

I don’t want to waste my time dealing with that negativity, especially when it’s completely not constructive neither one of them are going to change the others mind.

So I’m not going to entertain it sometimes if somebody post something that you know like the sunrise pick and then they say something about Trump. Well, my post wasn’t about Trump

So I’ll hide the comment or delete it, because I know it’s not worth it to me.

You know, and if you want to go on your page and post about whatever political. I don’t care. But my post was not about that as my page and so

You know, I just kind of look at it that way. But I’m not going to entertain. I’m not going to get drawn in to any battle on social media. It is just not worth that you’re not going to change anyone’s mind not worth it.

Yeah, and I think that, then this translates to how we can do you know better outreach in general is we have to go into the forums where it’s welcomed and known.

And it’s i just i get frustrated when smile, I think, how can I reach people that don’t know they need help. And I guess the real answer is you can’t

Can’t. It’s no different than an addict who hasn’t hit rock, rock bottom, and admitted their need for

Treatment of rehab or whatever, if. And that goes back to my earlier comment about being able to self actualize if you cannot do an honest internal assessment of the work that you need to do on yourself.

And then actually take steps take. Do you know make choices and create actions and activity in your life to make those changes consistently over time, then you can’t you can’t be helped.

I mean, I know several people where I go. Okay. They cannot self actualize they cannot see the impact that their choices that have made on themselves and the people around them. They just think that they’re a victim and everyone else’s fault. And so I go, Okay, I can’t help you.

But there’s a lot of people that I can help. And so I’m going to go focus on them because maybe person hasn’t hit

That, you know, and maybe they never will. Some people just walk through their entire lives without ever thinking that anything they did requires any improvement. Okay.

But there’s a whole lot of people who who can change. And who wants to change and want to be better and want to do that work. Those are the people that I would rather work with

You. I think

Like

We have to we have to direct our activity to where it’s going to have the most benefit. You know, it’s like the Twitter battle, whatever. I’m not going to get into that. I’m going to go and raise millions of dollars for opportunity Village. I’m going to go to that.

Raise money for the Nevada School of the Arts. I’m going to go concentrate on you know getting more people involved in FIRST Robotics. Why would I waste. The next 20 minutes of my life on some Twitter battle. I won’t do it.

Yeah, I watched it just just watching the commercials for anything on like musty Thursdays and NBC there’s like this one show called a million little things.

And I’m like this is a million little horrifying things like it really is just like everybody’s like got 18 brands of cancer and then they got

They got

Their cancer on their cancer and then their cancer got aids and then someone

Cheated On somebody

These are the most horrible, but it’s, you can see why it’s mesmerizing to the psyche, because

People just want to detach into this very surreal world and it will pull you through it’s it’s like any good Shonda Rhimes, you know, drama, it is meant

To really pull you into these stories and these things and but I watch it and it’s, it makes me ill, because I’m like this is not what we should be putting our efforts into watching like there’s like get masterclass all buy it for you don’t want to just

I would much rather read a book then watch TV. These days, I mean, because I don’t think that

I don’t feel like now not I am a huge movie buff, especially sci fi movies, but I am not necessarily wanting to get all wrapped up in the latest next Netflix series or whatever that is, except it’s great. I do love me some ships.

And rightly so, but for the most part, I would much rather read a book and come out a better person on the other side. I mean, this is I just constantly feel like I’m working progress and I feel very deeply the responsibility that

I have 800 employees all looking to me to do the right thing, whatever that is.

I should know what that is. I should be constantly working on myself to try to figure out how do I

How do I do right by them. How do I show them the respect by constantly trying to get better so that I can serve them well because being a good leader means being a servant and

It’s not about having power. It’s not about having control. It’s not about having money if you want to accept the mantle of leadership. You have to get right with the fact that you are now a servant to whoever looks at you as the leader.

You got 100 years on this, on this earth if things go particularly well, many of which are not usable. This is a rare moment.

Of clarity that people need to listen to. I’ve i i door every opportunity we get a chance to talk. Just because you You inspire me to always do more on the other side of every conversation.

What’s, what’s your, what’s your big thing for for this year we’ve officially entered a new decade or depending on how people count. They think it’s a year, but that’s

A different story.

What, what do you feel that you want to get done this year that you didn’t know that you could do last year.

I would say my role as a public speaker has evolved quite a bit for the company so that that’s a little bit of a

More of a another part of my evolution in my career to be on stage, a lot more. So I want to look at how can I help

How can I help women see their influence and see that they are leaders and see, you know, see themselves differently, but then take those steps to involve themselves and to become better leaders and to wield that influence and have more empathy and so on.

And to also to do the same to say you know this, we can have such a divide between the men and the women, you know, yes. Men have had much more advantages and technology and many

Many fields, you know, I watched my mother beating her head against the glass ceiling in the banking industry for years. When I was a kid. So I grew up watching that.

But men are not the enemy. And so how can we all work together to create this awesome future, you know, because, you know, for every one bad apple. There’s a million great ones. And that goes true for men and women, you know, it’s not like all women are super nice. Some of us aren’t

So, you know, let’s, let’s just not forget that. And then how do I help kids who don’t think that they are part of the American dream or kids who

Aren’t cut out for a four year college or kids who came from a broken home kids who

You know, were born in the inner city of of a terrible, you know, in the slums into a drug addicted mother and they’ll never know who their father is how can we show them that they have opportunities and they don’t have to go down that same path.

You know, how do we make sure that the kid who has a talent for playing the violin gets the right training.

You know, how do we reach into those problems and create solutions and actually put them into place so that we can change lives.

You know, those are the things that I want to focus on. And I’m very blessed to work at a company that enables me to go in and do those things, you know, because we have

We have the ability to make change and to spread that change far and wide. So yeah, those are those are all things that are that are on the docket for this year and the years coming

It’s a good year.

It’s a good year, and also the other thing is getting my youngest son. He’s a junior, and so he wants to go to West Point. And so we’re doing all the preparation for that is a lot of work and getting your kids ready for college, good grief.

My older son went the vocational route. And so it was actually much, much simpler. So I have not prepared for all the stuff that we’re going through to help get my younger son ready to go to West Point. So that’s a, that’s an interesting thing.

And not a, not a simple school to just jump into so

As a mom, I would, of course, prefer that my son, not be in some sort of combat. However, it’s been his dream forever. And so I have to support his dream. You know, I have to do everything I can to help him achieve it. Otherwise, you know, I’m talking about one side of my mouth right that’s it.

That’s it.

Well for folks that want to get ahold you Missy and sort of follow along with what you’re doing.

Where’s the best place to reach you online and how would people be able to find out where you’re going to be at heading into this amazing year

Sure. So on social media ON TWITTER, AND INSTAGRAM. I’M AT Missy bite. Am I SS, why be y te by was my avatar name when switch was an earlier when we were a younger company. We had a comic book artist on staff.

Who would draw all of us and create comic books with our characters and action sort of saving the internet. And so because of my

Sense of humor, my superpower was sarcasm. And so that’s where the name bite created for the carrot was created for the character so

All of us who were here in the early days, our license plates are our avatar names and so on. So, but Missy bite is where you find me on social media and anyone is free to email me anytime Missy at switch calm.

And I’m always happy to be contacted

And we will be updating my speaking schedule on our website. As soon as we have things finalized for this year, but yes.

Excellent. I hope to be putting a couple of items on that list. I’ve got some things coming up in the fall, especially at interrupt. We’re in Austin and September, so I’ll reach out to

Boston. So it’s in this is definitely I would, I would be honoured to have your voice there to be able to tell some of these stories and share these experiences because it’s, it’s something that you know we need more. We need more. We need more Missy in the world. So

That’s so kind. I appreciate that.

It’s been an honor to

Be here. Thanks for asking me

Excellent. Well, thank you very much.

My pleasure. Eric, have a great one.

Sponsored by the 4-Step Guide to Delivering Extraordinary Software Demos that Win Deals – Click here and because we had such good response we have opened it up to make the eBook, Audiobook, and online course, more accessible by offering it all for only 5$

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Ed Vincent founder of Festival Pass, the world’s first festival and live events subscription service providing access to music, film, food and wine, and tech and innovation.  We explore how to create positive experiences in both business and life and the benefits of being absolutely focused on customer experience.  Ed shares great insights into how the Festival Pass program was designed, the challenges of past experiences, and great lessons for founders and business builders in our discussion.  

Visit Festival Pass to see the events you can experience yourself and big thanks to Ed for such a deep and interesting conversation that provides strong lessons and learnings for anyone in business. 

Photo by Aditya Chinchure on Unsplash

Sponsored by the 4-Step Guide to Delivering Extraordinary Software Demos that Win Deals – Click here and because we had such good response we have opened it up to make the eBook, Audiobook, and online course, more accessible by offering it all for only 5$

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Cody Barbo is the co-founder of Trust and Will.  Cody brings a heartfelt discussion to the podcast about hard lessons learned through difficult early startup experiences that shaped how he build Trust and Will.  The conversation includes a broad set of lessons for every startup founder that shows how to set yourself up for success and building a successful culture as you grow your team.

Bonus code for DiscoPosse Podcast listeners!  When you got to TrustAndWill.com and use the code DISCOPOSSE at checkout then you get a 10% discount on the purchase.  Big thanks to Cody for such a great conversation and make sure that you use the discount code for yourself to let the Trust and Will team know you’re a listener! 

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

Sponsored by the 4-Step Guide to Delivering Extraordinary Software Demos that Win Deals – Click here and because we had such good response we have opened it up to make the eBook, Audiobook, and online course, more accessible by offering it all for only 5$

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Happy 100th podcast!!  Rob Hirschfeld is the founder and CEO of RackN.  Rob has been along for many podcasts with Eric and is also a premiere podcaster himself at the L8ist Sh9y Podcast. This show introduces the freshly minted Edge Lab which is finally a way to do bare-metal provisioning for an edge scenario with the magic (and science) of Digital Rebar, K3s, and most importantly, this is a reference build to help you experiment with PxE booting and much more.  

• Check out the Edge Lab at https://edgelab.digital 
• Check out Digital Rebar at https://rebar.digital 

If you want to participate in the Edge Lab but cannot afford to purchase the gear, please reach out on Twitter as we are working on grant programs and discount opportunities to help those folks who are underrepresented in technology and who can benefit from access to these resources. 

Photo by Rod Long on Unsplash

Sponsored by the 4-Step Guide to Delivering Extraordinary Software Demos that Win Deals – Click here and because we had such good response we have opened it up to make the eBook, Audiobook, and online course, more accessible by offering it all for only 5$

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Tyler Kemp is the founder of RollSocial.co and LeadRoll.co,  Tyler works with small businesses, influencers, and sales/service professionals to help you cut through the noise and own the attention of your market.  Our conversation covers everything from the fundamentals of effective social strategy, creating empathy through social media outreach, and building a sustainable business with a bootstrap funding model.  Tyler brings a wealth on knowledge and lessons on systematizing life and business.  A truly enjoyable conversation.

Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash

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Colin is Founder & CEO of Sheets & Giggles, a Denver-based, fast-growing brand in the $12B US bedding space. Launched on Indiegogo in 2018 with a $284,000 crowdfunding campaign.  Colin brings an incredible amount of passion and knowledge to the discussion which covers what could be the foundations of a top-level business course including creating successful growth strategy, building a business founded on sustainability, and maintaining a sustainable and successful culture in the organization. 

There is a bonus for anyone who is keen on the idea of crowdfunding as Colin shares his proven methods that led to Sheets & Giggles being one of the most successful crowdfunded campaigns on Indiegogo.  

Thank you to Colin for this amazing conversation and so many great lessons!

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Hey, everyone. This is Eric Wright and the host for the show. You’re going to be listening to a really cool conversation with Colin McIntosh. Colin is the founder of a company called Sheets & Giggles. Not only is it a really wicked cool pun, but this Denver-based company is in fact one of the coolest and fastest growing brands around US bedding.

I know. That’s crazy. You’re thinking, “What does this have to do with the DiscoPosse Podcast?”

It actually is an amazing founder story. It’s a story about growth, how to scale. We’re going to talk about crowdfunding and really what it takes to run a company that’s based and founded in sustainability. This is for people, for products, and the earth. Really, really cool. So, great story. Enjoy the show.

All right, and we’re live, or as live you can get, live to tape, live to video, live to whatever. No, not even live to anything. I say live to tape, but I don’t think tape exists anymore, at least not in this century.

So extremely happy. This is going to be a fun one. I’ve got Colin McIntosh here.

Maybe.

That’s right. We can only hope so.

Colin, you’ve done something really neat in a variety of ways. There’s so much that I’d love to explore. I could literally put aside seven hours, and I’m sure that I would still run out of time in the stuff that I’d love to share with my listeners.

But you are founder and CEO of Sheets & Giggles. We’re going to talk about what that is, how it got started. First of all, A++ for the best possible name. I always love a play on words.

Thank you.

Colin, quickly, how did you get started? Where did you come from before? What’s the elevator pitch on Sheets & Giggles?

Well, I guess those are three different questions, and thanks for having me by the way, Eric. I’m really appreciative of you spending the time talking to me.

First and foremost, Sheets & Giggles is not just a pun. It is admittedly good pun, but it is also the name of my bedding company. Basically, we sell bedsheets, duvet covers, pillowcases, comforters, made not out of cotton, out of bamboo or polyester, but rather out of eucalyptus trees.

So we sell eucalyptus the sheets. The technical name for the product is called lyocell, which is a form of cellulosic rayon, which means that it’s made from wood pulp that’s dried out and turned into a fiber, which is then turned into a yarn, which is then turned into the softest fabric you’ve ever felt in your life.

We started the company in October, 2017. We began shipping. It took us a whole year to get to the point where we were shipping in October, 2018. So we’ve only been shipping for about a year and a half. Since then we’ve shipped tens of thousands of units. We grew in 2019 three X from 2018. Four X almost.

We only sell on our website, sheetsgiggles.com, on Amazon, and we have over 2,000 reviews now, 4.8 stars. Really thrilled by the public perceptions of the brands and the company. It’s been a wild ride and it’s been a pretty fast upswing. I just kind of find myself holding on for dear life.

The beauty of the product itself, just to touch on that very briefly in the beginning, so people understand about the eucalyptus lyocell, is that not only is it softer and more breathable than cotton, so it’s the best fabric for hot sleepers, but it’s also going to be very sustainable.

Our sheets use up to 96% less water than cotton sheets, no insecticides, no pesticides, about 30% less energy. Each sheet set, estimated, saves about five years worth of the average person’s drinking water compared to cotton sheets. We’ve estimated that we’ve saved literally hundreds of thousands of years of drinking water in just such a short period of time. We’re really excited to turn that into millions of years and we’re excited to kind of show people that there’s a really sustainable, amazing, high-quality replacement to cotton bedsheets.

This is always the fun one. I’ve talked to a few different folks who’ve come from different backgrounds, far as how they chose their startup and the venture that they wanted to take on. Some of them almost happened like, “I was just solving this problem.”

Quite often, especially in software … That’s an easy one. It’s like, “I had a problem so I built a platform because I needed to solve that problem.”

Choosing a physical implementation of something is always interesting because there’s way more skin in the game in getting it started. I can build software. It’s immediately super high margin, pretty easy to kind of map costs to lifetime value of a customer.

You got it, yep.

But you started building a physical thing.

Yeah, bedsheets.

Yeah, You’re not going to Oberlo and drop-shipping stuff. You’re legitimately building it from ground up.

Yep.

How did the idea come to you? I’m always curious on that one.

It’s funny. Truth be told, I did actually look at Oberlo in the very beginning, but it’s just all cheap. No offense to Oberlo. Interesting company. It’s just it’s a lot of cheap, packaged goods straight from China. That’s just not what you want to do if you want to actually build a brand and build a company.

We actually have partnerships with great contract manufacturers that bring everything to life for us, large volumes and minimum-order quantities. It’s really fantastic to build your own product and have it from the ground up be completely yours.

In terms of how we got started and the idea, I think you’re exactly right in the sense that, a lot of entrepreneurs, they’re like, “I have this problem. Let me build a solution,” and they spend years of their life and hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars building the solution that’s in their head.

They may find that, when they finally released it to the market, the market says, “No thanks,” or more insidiously the market says, “We’d love the pay for this product but we don’t want to pay that price. We want to pay a price that doesn’t allow you to make a profitable margin.”

It’s super, I think, difficult for a lot of people to do what I did, in the sense of I built a business model that I felt was extremely sustainable, profitable, scalable. I knew I wanted to do a sustainable good because sustainability is a really huge issue for me.

I kind of backed my way into what sustainable product … And truth be told, I said, “That doesn’t require software engineers, doesn’t require Bluetooth firmware, industrial design, tooling, plastics. What product can I build that,” and this is my exact business model, “is in a massive commodities market with zero brand differentiation or loyalty, that is a highly fragmented marketplace, that has no market leader that I have to chip away at their market share, low switching costs so I can steal customers, high repeat buy rates, so that way I have a new chance every year to steal other company’s customers, and that is largely attritionally physical retail play, so I can bring it online with a direct to consumer model?”

I wrote that down on a piece of paper, all these different things, and I learned kind of what I wanted that model to look like from my past experiences, and then I started doing research on different categories. This is the honest to God truth. I owned a bunch of domains. I’m a serial domain buyer.

I have that fault. I also … “Hello. My name is Eric and I’m a serial domain buyer as well.”

We need a support group to be honest.

So I own sheetsgiggles.com because I thought it’d be a funny name for a bedsheets company way back when. I thought, “Does betting fit my criteria?” and it fit it perfectly. A $12 billion market, highly fragmented, no market leader, no loyalty.

Every single brand in the space is like, “This is the best cotton you’ve ever felt,” and it’s the white sheets with the white walls, the white comforter. There’s always a French-pressed coffee place somewhere on the bed, which I think is a really bad place for a French-pressed coffee.

Their marketing materials are all the same. It bores me to tears, and I realized how unsustainable cotton was. Cotton, by itself, uses, per t-shirt, about 2,500 liters of water. Per bed sheet, about 4,000 liters of water. It uses, as a crop, about 16 to 24% of the world’s insecticides, just by itself, as a crop.

These are real issues with cotton as a crop, and we use so much of it in this world, so I was really excited to kind of find out about this new material. I was kind of off to the races after it kind of hit me that this was the perfect brand that I was looking for.

I’m going to immediately pull back on the thing that you said, of course, as serial domain buyer myself. The reason is usually because you’re swimming with ideas.

How long have you been …

Doodling on this one?

Yeah, is this something that happened early?

Actually, I was so viscerally attached to the idea of starting a company based off of this pun, Sheets & Giggles, that I actually bought the domain in, I think, June or May, 2017, and I incorporated the company in October, 2017. So it wasn’t a huge lag, but that’s why you buy them, right? I usually write a business plan for an idea when I have it.

I was watching … This is going to sound so lame. Have you ever seen War Dogs with Miles Teller and Jonah Hill?

Oh! No, I have not seen that movie.

It’s an okay movie. It’s fine.

But there’s a scene in it where Miles Teller’s character is … An opening scene. He’s selling bedsheets. He’s going door-to-door to these retirement communities. I got so frustrated because he couldn’t make any sales. I’m a sales guy by trade, partnerships and that sort of thing, and I was really upset with his strategy.

I told my now ex-girlfriend because who does this? I said, “This is ridiculous. He didn’t do a business plan. He doesn’t understand his core customer. He bought all his inventory, had no pricing research, doesn’t understand his consumer. You know what? Pause the movie,” and I wrote a business plan for a bedsheets company that night.

Whenever I write a business plan, I always buy a domain for it, and I usually gravitate towards funny names. I said, “What’s a funny name for bedsheets company? Sheets & Giggles. That’s a funny name,” so I bought the domain that night, sheetsgiggles.com. I just kind of kept it in my back pocket. I grabbed a few social handles. Finally, it just was the right time to do it about five or six months later.

The one thing I also want to go to the start of things, you actually launched, as well, through a crowdfunding. You used Indiegogo. Talk about that experience. Is that something that you immediately thought, “This is how I can launch as an MVP”? Did it come as you were developing the business plan? When did it come into play that Indiegogo would be a way that you would do your initial go to market?

It was interesting. There was basically a kind of diversion in terms of how you … I should say there’s a diverting path in terms of how you’re going to found a company. There’s different ways to fund it.

For me, I just knew right off the bat that I wasn’t going to raise venture capital, at least right away. My last company that I was a part of … I wasn’t the CEO. I was just on the founding team. We raised millions of dollars and were on that kind of boom or bust type of timeline and unfortunately ended up being a bust. We all got laid off at 1:00 PM on a Monday, which was very emotionally difficult.

I knew right away that I didn’t want to get on the VC treadmill again. I didn’t want to a have to commit years and years of my life, chasing a massive exit, in order to get somebody a large multiple on their money.

I also was acutely aware that I was starting a company based off a pun, and I didn’t think a lot of investors would take it very seriously, so I ended up deciding that the best way to do it was to really put my head down and do a crowdfund, sure that people would respond really positively to the sustainability of the lyocell and the brand voice itself.

I pushed really hard. I gathered about 11,000 emails, I think, in eight weeks, ahead of our Indiegogo crowdfund on May 1st, 2018. I did that very strategically. I can go into kind of goal setting for crowdfunding and why we chose the goals that we did and how we achieved them. I think we raised $284,000. Proudest achievement of my entire life is convincing thousands of people to wait five months for bedsheets on a crowdfunding platform.

We got a ton of interest from investors after that, and that was great. It’s not like that was the goal. The goal was to go to market completely revenue funded. But from the start, from day one, I knew I wanted this to be a revenue-funded venture and revenue-funded business, not a venture capital backed startup that just burns cash.

Especially because you’re getting into physical manufacturing. Being able to bootstrap, you still need that initial outlay.

Again, if you talk about startups or small apps or something like that, you can literally go on Upwork and you can get it built by a team somewhere for a handful of dollars, relative to the cost of … This is the two things that really jump out at me. Number one, I’m going to pull apart your successful crowdfunding checklist, because I’d love to hear that. I’ve had a couple of other folks on as well and they talked about the winds and challenges of going through crowdfunding.

But I want to talk about the moment, 1:01 on that Monday, you get laid off. Is your mindset, “I’ve got to go do this again but do it differently”? Did you think, “I never want to do this again. I want to go work for a company and get a paycheck”?

You’d been through a failing startup, which is normal, sadly. You’re literally part of 90% of companies that don’t make it, especially venture funded, because there’s an incredible requirement to do this hockey-stick growth.

Most of the times the revenues are way upside down to the injection of input and the valuations don’t line up. If you don’t continue to hockey-stick, your next round of funding suddenly isn’t there. You’re like, “But wait! We’re sustainable!”

“I don’t want sustainable. I want hockey stick.”

It’s a great question. I think the baseline question is that I knew I wanted to do this again right away or what was I thinking when I got laid off.

When I got laid off at 1:00 PM on a Monday from a company that I had … I had written the original business plan for that company in 2013. I had watched it kind of incubate and go from my friend’s idea to a Denver Startup Week winner to a Techstars company to then joining it and raising millions of dollars, going nationwide retail.

I was really proud of that company, so getting laid off at 1:00 PM on a Monday was extremely emotionally draining. The first thing we did, to be completely honest, I had to wrap up three years worth of partnerships in three hours, which sucked. But then, at 4:00 PM, we all left the office and we went next door to the bar and got pretty tanked to be totally honest. That was kind of the first thing that we did.

That night the Marlins were in town. I’m from South Florida. I’m a Marlins fan, unfortunately, and they were in town to play the Rockies. Me and a few of my ex-coworkers went to the game. I was sitting there. We were drinking beers. There was probably about 10 of us, and I just kept telling them, “I got this idea that I’ve had for a few months about this bedding company. It’s called Sheets & Giggles.”

I kept telling them about it and they thought I was nuts. I probably lost my mind a little bit, to be honest, when I started this company. The considerations were I’m going to do one of two things.

I moved to Denver, from Seattle, for my last company. I had a great life in Seattle. I loved living out there. I loved my friends out there. I thought, “I’m going to move back to Seattle. I’m going to go work for Amazon. I’m going to get a very stable job, with good healthcare, with a good salary. I’m going to put some money away. I’m going to forget this startup dream and the startup lifestyle. I’m just going to do the normal career trajectory thing and maybe I’ll start a company in 10 years.”

The other option was all the way on the polar opposite, which is start my own company that I owned 100% of. I decided that there was never going to be a middle ground for me ever after that. There was never going to be a work for somebody else’s startup type middle ground because you don’t really get meaningful equity. You don’t control the outcomes. You don’t control the exit. You don’t control the negotiations, the investing. You may not control the strategy.

You’re being asked, generally speaking, at a start up, to take a lower than market salary with lower than market benefits for the potential equity upside, but it’s all a crapshoot. I don’t like the founders that dangle the equity options in front of people as this big, big potential hook. I like founders that are a little more honest about it.

I tell my employees, “Your options in this company” … Everybody has equity in S&G, but I tell them, “You may or may not see a return on this. Here’s how your options work and here’s what you should expect,” and I make sure that everybody’s paid market rate and that we have good benefits.

For me it was going to be one or the other. I just decided that, at this point in my life, I had a really good mentor network, really good investor network. I knew people in Colorado. That’s where my most of my professional network was at that point. I had a really good cabal of retail partners that, if I wanted to end up branching out into physical retail, I could always approach them. I had consultants that I had worked with at my last company on product and marketing and PR side.

I kind of put all the pieces together from my last company, where I wasn’t the CEO and I was just head of biz dev, to now being my own CEO. The question that I just had was if, “I could do it all over again, what would I do differently?”

The number one thing was start with a business plan that you felt very, very, very strongly about, build a financial model that showed profitable, scalable margins, and then go from there and build the product and sell it before you ever end up building.

Did the fact that you were watching the Rockies decide where you’re going to plant this company? It was funny when you pick the team. I’m like, “That’s purely a coincidence, I’m sure, but …”

I don’t know. I think that it was just one of those serendipitous things where it all kind of came together to be a Colorado company. We love it out here. We’re a Pledge 1% company. I would encourage anybody listening, who has their own company, to be a Pledge 1% company. We Pledge 1% of our equity, our profits, our time, and our products, to local Colorado charities that we choose. If we get an exit, then Colorado charities get 1% of that exit, which is awesome.

Also, we donate sheets to homeless shelters in the Denver area. We try to employ mostly folks that are in Colorado and in the Denver area, local people. We buy local. We warehoused locally for most of our beginning.

It’s been a lot of fun to be a Colorado company. This community out here is just so damn supportive. Everybody out here is so helpful. It’s not a cutthroat startup community like a New York or a San Francisco or a Seattle. Very, very collaborative out here.

They’re sort of very stylistic. Not that every business that starts in each region is like that, but it’s funny. We’ve got this vision of the Silicon Valley. It’s all monstrously venture back, aiming to be unicorns.

My company is a Boston-based startup, built for profitability from day one. The east coast startups tend to be much more around stability and building a sustainable company. Colorado, same thing. I know a few companies that are based in Denver and in the area. They are very much focused on that beauty of this west coast, relaxed lifestyle, but aim for sustainability and running a good business. You’re close enough to the Seattle crowd that you can pick up some really smart people and developers and stuff.

I love the freedom of that west coast thinking, but the sustainable approach of the east coast mentality. It’s funny that Colorado tends to just have that perfect landing. Maybe it’s the altitude. Something really cool there. I love the lifestyle.

It all comes together, and the lifestyle part of it’s good.

I will say people in Denver … And this is no knock on my team at all, because my team is definitely the hardest working team in Colorado, but I had other companies I’ve met and looked at. I will say a lot of people do move here for that lifestyle. You’re close to the mountains, ski weekends. They want to shove off at 4:00 on a Friday and work from home a couple of days a week.

We have a totally free, remote, work-from-home policy at Sheets & Giggles. We let people work from home any day of the week they want, and it’s unlimited. You can travel and work from Rome if you want. We say, “Why I work from home and you can work from Rome?”

There you go.

I think it’s just a really progressive place. With the younger employees and audience as well, people just kind of have this expectation for a certain work life balance. Hell, as long as everybody’s doing their job, I really could care less, but it’s definitely a more laid back place.

You’re obviously driving the outcomes and you wanted to make sure that you were sort of leading the ship. Clearly you wanted to have the most sort of equity, value, and also the equity responsibility in what you were doing, which is good. It’s a beautiful pairing, and a lot of people don’t get that. They’re like, “Oh wow. So you get the biggest buyout.”

They think that everybody’s like Zuckerberg. They want to own it for control. Well, they also own the responsibility. A lot of people don’t get that. This is a very challenging responsibility. You’re building a company to sustain other people and their lifestyle and their healthcare and their things. Based on the fact that you had this founding team at your previous startup, and now here you are, how important was how you create the team environment for new people when you-

That’s a great question. It’s actually interesting because, at my last company, I was, like I said, not president and not CEO. I wasn’t responsible for any of the culture pieces or anything like that, so I learned a little bit about what I liked and what I didn’t like about what the culture was at that company.

I will say that one of my weaknesses as a CEO, I think, is that organizational piece around … Now that I’m responsible for other human beings, working 40 or 50 hours a week on my idea and my company, I haven’t done a very good job, I think, of transitioning into that more managerial, deliberator, assigner, type of CEO. I’m still much more of a hands-on CEO. I drive a lot of value, at least I try to. I do all of our brand work, a lot of our marketing work around the brand voice, around the creative and the content.

We just hired a full-time content manager, so I’m working with him on making sure that our brand voice evolves and moves in the right direction from where I started it. I think that’s the piece that is the most challenging for me.

I will say that the biggest things that I’ve taken from my last company are reward people for doing good work without them asking. We give raises and bonuses to people without them ever having to lift a voice for that. I think that people feel extremely validated in their work when they’re financially rewarded without having to ask for it.

We have a very transparent culture. Everybody knows our revenues. Everybody knows our costs. Everybody knows our profitability, or lack thereof, from month to month. They know the money that we have in the bank and the runway in front of us and why our goals are what they are, in order to make sure that the company continues to succeed and grow and grow profitably. That transparency, that openness, is really important to me.

I’d say the last piece that I really took from my last company is … There was a story that I tell that I’ll never forget.

I was working probably about 16 hours a day at my last company. I would get in at about 10:00 AM, and I would just work until probably 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning in the office. I lived right across the street, so I would walk across the street and I’d just pass out for seven or six hours, and then I would wake up at 9:00 AM, shower, get dressed, come in at 10:00, do it again. I’m not a morning person. I’m a night owl.

My CEO sat down with me. She was my manager and she said, “Some of the people on the team are complaining that it seems you have a special privilege where you’re getting in later than they are.”

I said, “Did you tell them to shove it up your ass?

She said, “No. I told them I understood the complaint, because we require everybody to get in at 8:30 and you’re getting in at 10:00. We need you to come in at 8:30.”

I said, “I’m not a big morning person. I’m working till 2:00 AM every night.”

I said, “Why don’t you invite them to come join me in the office after 5:00 PM? Because they sure as shit are leaving at 5:15 every single day.”

We got into a big fight. Finally, I said, “Okay. I’ll be in at 8:30,” and from then on I was in at 8:30 and I was out at 5:00 PM on the dot, every single day, so they lost about seven hours of productivity from me every single day.

I’m one of those people that can work 12 to 16 hours without losing much productivity. That was really frustrating and emotional for me, but I followed my orders and it cost the company, I think, a lot in productivity.

I think that that type of narrow focus, where you’re more concerned about perception than reality, and you’re more concerned about having the appearance that people are equal or on the same footing or whatever it is in the company, instead of being more direct with people and telling them, “Look. He can come in whenever the hell he wants because he’s literally doing work until midnight at the office, every single night” … So I try to do that with my own employees.

I’ll never chide anybody for coming in late. I’ll never chide anybody for leaving early. If they got to go take their dog to the vet or fly home to see their family or take a vacation or whatever it is, totally good, as long as the work is getting done and they’re being productive.

It’s interesting. I had a really good friend, Phil, that I worked with. We were roommates for years, and then I got a corporate gig. I finally got a real job. I think I may have sort of connected him for an interview. He definitely earned his gig, got in there.

I watched him work at this other small startup, and he had the sort of same thing. He would roll in at like 11:00, but he would work and he would stay there really late.

Yeah, work on the weekends. You’re killing yourself.

Sadly, I even kind of had a go at him a couple of times. I’m like, “Dude, you got to you got to be careful because, when I get you into this corporate gig, they’re a 9:00 to 5:00 type of shop.”

I said, “They won’t get it.”

He was able to do it very well. I, mistakenly, really kind of set him up as, “This is not good, what you’re doing.”

It’s funny. Years later, now he has his own company. He’s got like 20 employees. They just hired their first CEO, doing amazing. Inevitably, he’s probably working way more hours than he ever did in any single day at any other gig.

I failed to recognize and support what he was doing because I was kind of wrapped into the, “I’ve been told this is how I kind of need to be when I’m at this joint,” and then realizing, “No.”

From that point on, when I sort of listened more to what was being successful with other companies and other people that were changing the roles inside organizations, I became much more like that. I was still there at 8:00, but I would work in the evenings differently and I started to change my approach, learning from him. I hope I ever thanked him for teaching me that the hours that you’re in the office are the hours that you’re working.

As a result of me choosing a very startup and entrepreneurial mentality, my job changed incredibly. My teamwork can change it. I changed roles and got upgraded and raises. It was phenomenal. From that point on it changed the way that I approached everything. It was a good lesson, but, sadly, if I had stuck to that, “Sorry. You should be working. Other people are noticing you’re not here till 11:00. His stuff is getting done,” and whatever … It’s a tough balance.

The corollary of that is that you give people as much work as you can give them and you watch how they respond to it. When I was 23 years old, I was a tech recruiter. Actually, I started my career at a company called Bridgewater Associates, which is the world’s largest hedge fund.

Oh my goodness. Going to say I know it very, very well. As a 12-time reader of principles, I studied Dalio’s methods for a long time.

He’s an interesting guy. That’s a whole nother podcast. I could talk to you about Bridgewater.

I got fired from there in like six months because I was terrible at my job and the culture was just not for me, at least in the practice of it. In theory it sounds great.

I was kind of up a creek without a paddle. First job out of school. I thought I had made it, the world’s largest hedge fund. I ended up becoming a recruiter at the company that hired me there, ironically.

Within my first year as a recruiter, I had 15 accounts. Some of them were the biggest banks in the world, that you’d recognize. Can’t say who they are. Some of them were venture capital backed startups that are now doing great. Others of them were small businesses.

I was mostly hiring software engineers. I knew nothing about software, nothing about banking software or why they would need a C# candidate versus a C++ candidate, or anything like that. I basically had to teach myself all the background information about the different tools and why they were powerful for this and not so much for that and understand how to talk in different styles to talk to different types of engineers.

My boss at the time, a guy named Michael … Who I love. He’s one of my good mentors. He didn’t see a 23-year-old kid who had never done recruiting and who had gotten fired from his first job in six months. He saw someone who was really hungry to prove themselves and who was upset at how their first job went and had, at least, the ability and the work ethic to apply himself and become a good recruiter.

Within six months I was managing five other people at the recruiting firm. I had 15 clients that I was all the direct account manager for. I was hiring multiple software engineers every single month. It was not because I was blanket emailing a thousand people at a time on LinkedIn, but because I was taking calls from candidates at midnight and because I was sourcing people on LinkedIn at 2:00 AM and I was sending them messages at 4:00 AM, knowing that it would be the first thing in their inbox when they woke up in the morning.

I was doing all these things that were just insane. My colleagues would call me the recruiting vampire. They’d have so many emails in their inbox when they woke up from me.

I wasn’t doing it to impress anybody. I was doing it to make sure I was successful at my second job. I ended up catching the eye of one of my clients, and that was the first startup that ever hired me. They said, “We’ve got this biz dev role. We love working with you, and we think you’d be great in the biz dev role. Do you want to leave recruiting and come work for us in Seattle?”

I moved from Connecticut to Seattle in 2014 for that position. I think a big, momentous change in my career and life trajectory was applying myself in a role that is now no longer super relevant for what I do. Although, as a CEO, the fact that I’ve got hiring experience and recruiting experience is super crucial.

It’s also the fact of the amount of work that was given to me as a 23-year-old with no discernible skills and was told to me to just figure it out. People will respond in different ways to that. Some people will shut down, and they’ll say, “I don’t know what I’m doing and I need help.”

That’s just fine. It’s not a bad thing, and then other people will just respond and go into a different mode. That’s what I love to see from my coworkers and my employees. Who’s actually responding positively to being overworked and who is actively complaining about being overworked. Luckily, it’s mostly the former.

You have a choice. You can avoid the situation or … It’s how you deal with it. You can’t avoid conflict. You can choose the way in which you deal with it.

It’s funny. I had a recent situation where somebody had difficulty at an organization I was at and I said, “I can understand why.”

Really got sort of a tough bit of a browbeating in front of like 10 people in the room. It was a tough thing to watch. As it’s going on I’m thinking of a thousand ways it could have been dealt with better and why it shouldn’t happen in that way, but it did.

It was funny. Talking with somebody and I said, “I can understand. I haven’t been in that position.”

The fellow that I worked with, he’s like, “Dude, you have been. It’s a matter of how you chose to deal with it that changed your outlook.”

I was like, “Oh,” and then you look back in your mind. You’re like, “Oh boy. I do remember having difficult situations, was given complete freedom, and thus complete responsibility, and I made a choice in how I dealt with it.”

It’s good that, at 23, people just drop it on you. In a way it’s a lot of a test. Building your team as well, as you build S&G, it’s about, “Look. I’m going to give you a lot of responsibility.”

I’m assuming that you effectively treat them like you would want to be treated, and then you watch how they react. You support them in how they need to.

Right. I’m not trying to kill anybody with overwork. I think that there is no risk to giving people more work than they can handle. The only risk is that you have to hire somebody else.

The the downside of idle time much, much, much outweighs the downside of somebody feeling a little bit stretched too thin. You tell people, “When you feel like you’re stretched way too thin, you got to let me know and we’ll hire somebody else,” ut I love people that just will be so comfortable with a to-do list of a thousand things and have the autonomy and the gumption to really take it on themselves. Those are the type of people that I want to work with and people that are comfortable with ambiguity, people that are goal oriented.

To pivot into one of Bridgewater’s core principles of task orientation versus goal orientation, so many people have goal-task confusion. I think that that’s the thing that killed me the most about my last company. Again, not to speak ill of anybody I worked with. I loved all my coworkers, but we had such task-goal confusion sometimes, where people would get so attached to a certain way of doing things or a certain feature or a certain strategy or whatever it was.

My whole thing was the goal is to make X million dollars of revenue this year. It’s completely irrelevant how we achieve that goal. Those are all just tasks.

If you want to tell me halfway through training 100 stores that, actually, my time is better spent hiring 10 interns and then training them and having them go out and train 10 stores, I’m not going to get emotionally attached to the fact that I’ve got this sunk cost in the 50 stores that I’ve already trained and I’m going to need to spend the time on this new version of it. I’m not just going to keep chugging along. I’m going to say, “That makes sense. Let me go do that.”

If one feature doesn’t make sense for our audience and another feature ends up building us into a new channel, into a new audience, and opening up a new line of business, then maybe we should build that feature even though it’s not part of our core feature set, or whatever it is, and it’s something slightly different.

I think that that’s also a thing that really drives me crazy with people, is task-goal confusion, so I’ve really tried to really beat it in to my coworkers at S&G that the goal is to build a successful, longterm company that lasts a long time, that makes many, many thousands of people happy, and however we do that is completely irrelevant.

We can pivot into a new category tomorrow and I’d be happy with it if it achieved our goal better. There’s obviously limits to that. There’s realistic limits to that.

We were going to move forward with some new product lines this year, for example, and we had spun up a few different manufacturing partners around those lines. About a month ago I decided, “You know what? It’s actually not the best decision for us to pivot into these new product lines as quickly because we’ve got too small of a team. We’re going to split focus too much. Let’s go ahead and bring it back and really focus on our core products and make sure that we’re really excelling in this specific space.”

What I loved about it is that I didn’t get one peep from my team about the work that they had already done in that other direction, about the content and the manufacturing relationships and customer service prep, and all the other things that we had done. Instead, they said, “You know what? That actually makes sense. We like the focus. Let’s pull back and do this.”

I love that because it was completely unemotional, even though it could have been really ugly, in terms of, “You wasted all this time going in this other direction.” That’s not a productive conversation.

It’s the interesting challenge of choosing it as sort of a stoic approach to it. It’s like don’t get attached to the task, but to the goal, and the goal is the company goal, and the company goal is to create a sustainable business using sustainable products and sustainable approaches. Spreading yourself too thin, not sustainable.

If you go back to the core vision, it plays out that way.

Exactly.

Speaking of tasks, I don’t mean to pull you into a task. I don’t mean to give an immediate Indiegogo lesson, but I’d love to hear … You talked about the email list. People who are about to start up and they say, “I’ve got an idea for a product. I’m firing up my Kickstarter tonight.”

It’s like, “No, no, no, no, no. Before you’re ready to launch, you have this huge runway.”

What were some of the steps that you had that made it so that, when you launched, you were actually ready to go?

I think you’re going to want to bookmark this minute and tell people to skip all the other fluff and nonsense because this is my favorite thing to talk about.

Basically, you’re exactly right. Everybody and their mother thinks that they’re going to do a Kickstarter. They’re going to put it online. “This is such a great idea. It’s so obvious. Why has nobody done this before? We’re going to make a million dollars. I’ve seen people make a million dollars on Kickstarter. Let’s go do this.”

8,000 other projects launched that day. Nobody ever sees your project. You make $35. Your friends and family didn’t buy it. Even if they did, what are you going to have? 50 friends and family, maximum, spend $100 each for $5,000? You can’t start a company like that. People don’t understand the mechanics of a crowdfunding campaign.

Thankfully, I had crowdfunding experience at my last job. That was my first time, at my last job, with my coworkers at that place, and that was kind of a disaster. We had like 30 people working on the crowdfund, and we ended up doing like $150,000 in a crowdfunding campaign. We ended up doubling that with a team of two for Sheets & Giggles.

What we learned was a number of things. First and foremost, working backwards from goal setting. Let’s say that you want to do a $100,000 Kickstarter or Indiegogo. That is literally just a function of the price per perk multiplied by the amount of people that ended up buying it.

If you want to do $100,000 and your average unit price is $70, which was what our average unit price was at the time, and you assume that people are going to buy 1.5 units on average, that means the average order value is going to be $100, give or take.

If you want a $100,000 goal … And generally speaking, with crowdfunding math, you need to get 30% of your entire goal in the first 24 hours. That’s how the math works. Huge boost in the first 24 hours, discoverability, homepage, that sort of thing, and then it tails off, and then you have a little bit of a boost at the end.

If we want to do $100,000, and we want $30,000 in the first day to get 30% of that, and we know our average unit price or average order value is going to be about 100 bucks, then that means that, on the first day, we need 300 customers. We know that, for a crowdfunding campaign, almost all of your day-one customers are going to come from your email list and then people discovering you organically on kickstarter.com or indiegogo.com.

I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. I said, “I’m going to assume that nobody discovers us on those websites.”

If we want 300 customers on day-one, an email list reasonably converts at about 3%. 2% if you’re doing a bad job, 4% if you’re doing a good job, and then 1% if your terrible, 5% if your amazing.

I said, “If we want 300 customers day one, that means we need 10,000 emails of interested, qualified leads, period. End of story. Blinders on. That’s what we’re going to go get.”

Starting in February, 2018 … January, we spend a lot of time building the site and the logos and the visuals and that sort of thing. February, we did our photo shoot, and then ,starting in late February, we put up a really simple landing page with a company called KickoffLabs. Super cheap.

We had a Shopify store set up, linked to it, Google analytics, so we could track everything, and we literally ran a few hundred dollars for the Facebook ads to see how many emails we could gather out out of a thousand visitors and what type of percentage email capture would get, what our cost per lead was.

Once you got your cost per lead, you can work backwards to your cost of acquisition at a 3% conversion rate. We ended up capturing emails in that first week at a 38% clip, which is absolutely crazy for a consumer company. Anything over 10% is good. Anything over 20% is kind of unheard of.

We ended up, over the course of eight weeks, captured 11,000 emails at like a 46% conversion rate. Optimize all of our landing pages, did a bunch of A/B testing and improvements. We ended up spending less than $10,000 to get those leads, which was great.

Day one, sure enough … Our email lists, we had prepped them a couple of weeks ahead of time, given them a couple of teasers. Day one, we pushed it live. We got our first orders before we ever sent it live because we had people refreshing the page, waiting on it.

It was great. It was amazing. We ended up converting our email list, day one. Sure enough, at about 4%, we got 450 backers day won. It was like clockwork. It was incredible. We ended up getting $45,000 day one, and then $284,000 over the course of the campaign, so a slightly higher multiple than that 30% type of take, because we had some press boosts. But, overall, it was exactly the way we wanted day one to go.

The funny thing is the percentages work out and the numbers are there. These are core lessons. The more you go through this with people who’ve started these ideas and companies and do email lists and everything, I just want to tell them, “These numbers work, fundamentally.”

Like you said, if you do 5% on an email conversion, it’s like, “Holy heck! What did you do? That’s awesome!”

Most people will look at you. “Wait, what? You mean 95 people didn’t even open it?” or whatever.

You’re like, “No, no, no. You get 30% open rate, you get 5% conversion, and you’ve done something amazing.”

If you do 3%, you’re on the money. That’s average. If you do 1%, something’s wrong. Maybe change your opener, do some A/B testing.

It’s funny that you … Sorry. Interesting. Funny, peculiar. Not funny, ha ha. It’s funny.

How am I funny to you, like a clown? What am I?

To have approached it with the science and the business behind it, instead of, like you said, “I’ve got this amazing idea. I’m going to fire up a logo and people are going to sign up. All I got to do is get my first hundred backers and life is good.”

First of all, when you ask people, “How many backers do you plan to get?”

“Well, I’m going to put it at 12,000.”

“What are your perk layouts? Okay, good.”

Like you said, what’s your cost per person, per perk? Work the averages. Know what your first day-

We could do multiple podcasts on … There’s perks strategy. There’s pricing strategy. There’s content strategy, site layout, mobile optimization. There are a couple of different things around brand validity and borrower validity and how you’re going to make sure people think that you’re a real company and not some charlatan. There are different strategies and theories around shipping and around international orders versus domestic.

A crowdfunding campaign is a huge endeavor. I think that people need, minimum, eight weeks of prep, and probably 10 to 12 is the sweet spot. Most people don’t give it that amount of time. There’s entire blog posts you can read around which day of the week to launch it, which day of the month, which month of the year. When are you going to be shipping? People are going to be willing to wait in this category six months, but in this category 12 months, or in this category three months.

There’s so much that goes into a crowdfunding campaign. I think that there’s people that really excel at it.

One of my good buddies, I’ll give him a shout out. His name is Tommy. He’s the CEO of a company called Secret Hitler. I’m not sure if you’ve ever played that board game, but they did a million dollar plus Kickstarter. He does board games on Kickstarter for a living. He loves it, and he makes new board games all the time. Secret Hitler is probably the most famous one.

He and I, we collaborated a little bit on this, in the sense of he gave me some feedback, a couple of nights before we went live, about our page structure and layout and that sort of thing.

Everything is so, so crucial when it comes to that conversion rate. We ended up converting on Indiegogo about three times the average Indiegogo campaign, in terms of the conversion rate. I was really, really proud to see that. I think that that was one of the reasons we knew we were on to something.

I always love to do is for the closing. I would ask you top books you read, all sorts of lightning-round things.

One of the things I like to ask, totally stolen, it’s like a Tim Ferriss question or something, is what’s the worst thing that’s happened to you that you’re most thankful for? I was going to say 1:00 on that Monday was probably pretty close on the list, but what else prepared you for what you knew to be your future successes, whether you felt it at that time or not?

Oh man. Worse things happened to me, not in the context of the business, that I’m thankful for, is, I think, when I was 24, 25, living in Seattle, I had a four-year, five-year relationship end. At the time it was fairly devastating.

I flew to Florida for, I think, holidays that year. I met up with my ex. We had only been broken up for a couple of months. I basically told her that I wanted to get back together and I wanted to move to Florida and be with my family and get a job at … My big plan was he had a job at Citrix and Fort Lauderdale.

Nice.

Yeah. Jesus.

She said no. We’re still good friends to this day. We stay in touch. I am so freaking glad she said no. I was devastated at the time. I was just beside myself. But now, looking back, that was such a formative, important moment for me because it forced me to stay in Seattle, finish some unfinished business, put a chip on my shoulder. I said, “Okay. If I’m going to go through this heartbreak, then I’m going to make it worthwhile.”

The original breakup was so that way we could focus on our career goals. She got into dental school. I had my startup career. I ended up taking the chance, moving to Denver for this other company, going through Techstars. My salary was like $1,600 a month when I started, learning a huge, huge amount.

Eventually, directly led into me founding my own company and being where I am now, which is still far away from what I would consider a “success,” but it’s definitely a dramatically different path than I would have taken if she had simply said, “You know what? Yeah. Let’s get back together.”

It was a very, I think, close coin flip between one of those two directions. Definitely one of those things, super life-changing in retrospect.

I love the $1,600 a month. I always thought, when you tell people, “I work for a startup,” they’re like, “Wow. It must be-

That was before taxes.

I know. “He must be living the dream.”

“Oh yeah. Living the dream.”

You don’t understand. Equity is worthless, until you’re on the other side of an exit.

I worked on S&G without a paycheck for 15 months. I started in October, 2017, and I was on COBRA for 18 months. COBRA sucks by the way. I can go on a tirade about the healthcare system in this country.

But I was on COBRA for 18 months. I didn’t take a paycheck 15 months. I started paying myself in February, 2018. That was really special, when I finally got to do that.

There’s a persistence that you’ve taught yourself that most people could take lessons on. Truthfully, like I said, at the start of the call, I could literally talk all day to you, as somebody who’s dabbled with the, “I’m preparing for a Kickstarter campaign and I’m taking the advice you gave, amongst others that I’ve gotten, which is I’m ready to go now, which means I’m actually going to launch in six to seven months because there’s a lot to do.”

I hope that people listen to what we just said and literally could have a notepad beside them, whether it’s in the startup, whether it’s in the relationship, whatever they want to do next. [crosstalk 00:55:12] lessons.

Funny enough, I’m actually writing a white paper. Not a white paper. It’s probably like going to be five pages about the front-to-back crowdfunding strategy and all the common mistakes and different kind of strategies that we discussed about, everything from how do you set your original goal to pricing strategy, to content, to a customer engagement, and preparation and execution, and then delivery.

I’m about to start that, so I’d love to share it with you and get your feedback on it when it’s done, in probably a few weeks or a month.

Nice. We should start a crowdfunding campaign to fund that.

I don’t know when I’m going to find the time to do it, but it’s one of my New Year’s resolutions, because I keep getting people asking me for crowdfunding advice. I give it to them freely, but it’s not scalable to have the one-on-one conversation, so I wanted to just get it all out on paper and share it with the world.

Well, you’ve got a lot of profound lessons that you’ve sunken into a young soul. You’ve done a lot. Colin, for that, thank you for sharing the time with me today.

For folks that want to get ahold of you, want to learn more about you, with Sheets & Giggles and the rest of your story, what’s the best place to send people if they wanted to get out and get in touch with you?

I’m easy to find. I chose a brand name, in Sheets & Giggles, that is the easiest thing possible for SEO. If you look for Colin Sheets & Giggles, you’ll find me, Colin McIntosh. I’m on LinkedIn.

I can’t promise I’ll answer emails. I’ve got 2,500 unread right now, but I’m happy to lend advice whenever I have free time. Sheetsgiggles.com is the website. We’re on Amazon as well. I think we’ve got 300 plus reviews on Amazon now, four and a half stars.

If anybody’s looking for some bedsheets Sheets & Giggles Eucalyptus Bedsheets would love for you to try them out yourself. If I can ever be helpful to anybody in the audience, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or via email.

Hopefully, you’ll be among my first set of sponsors. I’d be happy to evangelize the brand, man.

That’d be great.

Again, I appreciate what you’re doing. Sustainability is obviously … It’s a profound benefit, the fact that you’re giving back. We didn’t even get into Good Business Colorado. There’s a ton more-

Quick plug, if you don’t mind. The Australian wildfires, really, really bad for koalas. We donated about 20 grand to the World Wildlife Fund. There’s a lot of really great organizations in Australia. We don’t harvest our eucalyptus trees from Australia. We have them on bio-diverse farms in India and South Africa and a few other countries.

In terms of what’s actually happening in Australia right now, definitely near and dear to our hearts, just from an environmental perspective and from a ecological impact perspective. A lot of animals. I think last check was something like half a billion animals have died in the fires.

World Wildlife Fund, really awesome charity. We’ve donated like $17,000 at the final tally through our community. We’d love if anybody else in the audience was to contribute. Definitely consider throwing in 20 bucks or 50 bucks or something. I think 50 bucks is the cost that it takes to save a koala, so you can make a really tangible difference.

Nice. Definitely. For folks that are out there, that want to catch up on this, we’ll stay connected on a bunch of things. We’ll do a follow-up because I want to dive a bit more into some of these sort of … We had some good tangents I would love to have pulled another hour out of. We’ll do that in future.

For the folks, of course, if you want to hear this and more, please do go to iTunes, give us a rating. Stars are always welcome, especially if they’re five at a time. If you love it, great. You don’t, send us an email. You can always reach me. I’m @discoposse on Twitter. My DMS are open. Always good to get feedback.

For folks, again, follow the story of Colin, Sheets & Giggles. We’ll have lots of links in the show notes and look forward to getting a chance to chat again soon.

Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. This was really fun.

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Kristin Rulon is the founder of the Mind Star App and the self-care community and programs that led to its creation.  Kristin joins us and shares heartfelt lessons in the challenges of postpartum depression, PTSD, life as a busy family, and how she turned her situation into a startup.

This show teaches us both how health and wellness are challenging and absolutely necessary, plus Kristin gives some incredible lessons in how she is building Mind Star and how you can take these lessons to create your own app.  One thing I loved about this conversation is that Kristin reminds us all that challenges and limits are everywhere and it’s all about how we choose to deal with them.

Resources from the show
Kristin Rulon Twitter
Mind Star on Twitter
Mind Star App

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My name is Kristin Rulon. I am the founder and CEO of Mind Star Health, and you’re listening to the DiscoPosse Podcast.

Hey everyone, this is Eric Wright, I’m the host here of the DiscoPosse Podcast. As we head into this amazing episode, you’re going to hear from Kristin Rulon. She’s a founder of Mind Star and describes the world’s first self-care app that pays you back. This is not just about an app, this is not just about self-care, it’s a really incredible story.

Kristin talks a lot about her journey through postpartum depression, through anxiety, her husband dealing with PTSD, and the way that she attacked this problem personally, and how she chose to actually build an app and start a business wrapped around it. So this an incredible story, one that everyone should listen to, it’s inspiring. We went long because there was no reason to stop. I would’ve gone for hours if I could with Kristin’s amazing conversation with that. Enjoy the show.

All right. We’re live or alive. We’re together, we’re here. Kristin Rulon. Kristin, thank you very much. This is something that I’ve been extremely excited about. I looked over what you are doing, what you’re building. I want to introduce my audience to, to what you’re building with Mind Star and why you’re doing it because this is really cool. Was really great for folks that are listening and I definitely recommend you can go to mindstarapp.com, check it out.

I will talk a lot about it today, more than that we’ll talk about how it got started, what it’s been like for you through this journey. But I’d love to actually, if you would quickly say where people can find you if they want to contact you online and talk about your journey to building Mind Star, just your personal journey is so compelling, and I’d love to actually hear it in your own voice.

Well, thank you so much Eric for this opportunity. I’m excited. I’ve haven’t done too many of these yet, but there’s more coming and I actually have a goal of doing 12 podcasts this year, so I’ve already got one off my list, so we’re good.

Nice.

All right. I am Kristin Rulon, I’m the founder and CEO of Mind Star Health. As you mentioned, you can go to mindstarapp.com to learn more about our website. It is a one pager at this point. Hopefully soon we’ll have a little sticker that says you can download the app. In fact I have a version I need to test out after this conversation actually, so it goes.

My story, let’s go back… I’m going to try to keep this as concise as possible because I do, I light up about my story because it’s essentially something that is really terrible that I turned into something incredible, and I think in life that’s how it works. And we hate… I hate to say that and hate to admit it, but sometimes the worst possible things that could happen to us if we can find the silver lining, whatever that may be, it can actually become a turning point for us and turn into something absolutely incredible.

If you were to tell me a couple of years ago that I was going to be in technology and develop an app, I would have asked you to go get your head checked. Maybe you need 

Exactly.

My background is journalism, I’m a writer through and through. I’m currently working on two novels because I’m just that crazy, I won’t say ambitious, although they go hand in hand.

A couple of years ago, that’s actually about four and a half, I was diagnosed with severe postpartum depression and anxiety from the birth control shot. Now, quick little backstory, this is my third child and my husband and I just wanted to make sure things were covered because we were done having children, and so they asked me, they said, “Okay, well, if you get the shot, if you have a little bit of the baby blues, this could exacerbate it and give you severe postpartum depression.”

And my husband had actually just come home from Afghanistan because he’s in the military getting ready to retire soon at 20 years, I’m so excited.

Wow.

I’m counting down. I know, he signed at 17 and we’ve had one overseas deployment and several state side, so I’m pretty excited. Any major hurricane, my husband’s pretty much went to for cleanup.

Wow. Your family’s just surrounded by craziness.

It is.

I love it.

Yeah, it is coordinated chaos, everyone will call it. It is something else. So essentially he had come home and then we were playing with our daughter, we had our daughter, and then they asked me this and I just thought, I raised two small children by myself when my husband was at war. I essentially was at war trying to keep things with a full time job and two small children at the time. At the time, three and four months old when he left.

I was like, “I’ve got this. This is just me adjusting to having a third child.” And a week later everything changed. I like to tell people that essentially I was just this mere, this person that was just very much okay with just, I’ve got a good job, I’ve got a husband who loves me. I’ve got my kids, I’ve got my friends, I’ve got a house, I don’t want to make any waves in my life.

Yes, I’m an author, I’d love to have something published as far as a book, go to the bookstore and there’s my book. But other than that, I didn’t really have any bigger aspirations than that and I was okay with that. A week after that shot was the turning point and sent me into this whole journey I’m into now, and that is not easy to say like I mentioned, going through something absolutely terrible.

I tell people, “Essentially, I’ve been to hell and back internally.” Because what happened was I’m a naturally optimistic person, a lot of people tell me they can feel my energy over the phone. This is how I was before, but my purpose has changed slightly since then. What happened was that I was looking for my daughter’s social security card. I couldn’t find it, have to get updated on the insurance.

I’m panicking, anxiety, sweats, everything, thinking, where the heck is this? And forgive me if my cuss, I don’t know ig

I just realized I forgot to give you a heads up. We’re cool. I strapped the old XL signature on here just in case we’ve had a couple that have gone over, so I don’t mind. It’s fine.

Okay. I don’t cuss a whole lot, but essentially there will be a few h-bombs here and there. Okay, good. But essentially I was just like, “Where the hell is this?” And my self talk just changed and I don’t know who was talking up there, what was going on, but she was… as I laugh about now, she was very angsty, very emo, very much like just hateful, and I was calling myself certain words that I wouldn’t even say out loud. I don’t even use in my vernacular now. Some of them, I don’t even think I’ve actually said out loud except to my therapist.

It was like, whoa. And thank goodness I had enough emotional intelligence then because a lot of times our self talk can sneak up on us and we don’t realize what we’re saying to ourselves, and so we start really listening to what we’re saying to ourselves and we’re thinking, oh my gosh, I’m just a total rip to myself. I’m supposed to be my best friend and here I am saying all these terrible things. I wouldn’t say this to anybody, even when someone that I loathed.

I went to the doctor and they just said, “Oh sorry, we warned you. Here’s some pills and best of luck. Your body could take up to two years for the hormones and the chemicals that were just injected in you from the shot to regulate.” And then that’s what started my essentially two years of hell, and that essentially taught me how strong I am, how much the human spirit is strong and how much of a fighter we are. And we don’t talk about our resiliency, but my goodness, we are resilient creatures.

And so I just started researching the mind from various aspects. I have a journalism degree. I’ve worked in the publishing and still in publishing now for more than 12 years, and so I thought, Kristin, you have this researcher part of your brain because essentially if you’re in the media, if you’re a journalist, you’re essentially taking… you have to take information, you have to regurgitate it at a sixth grade reading level. It used to be eighth grade, now sixth grade.

Yeah, that’s correct. And to have a critical eye and a critical thought process on as you’re doing it, it’s that like, “Hey, while I’m delivering the sixth grade level, do I stand behind the words that I’m saying too?” And it really makes you… that critical thought process is interesting that sometimes people forget versus they’re just like, “Read it and say it.” Like, oh, I can repeat it back, but you’re responsible for the words because you’re a journalist.

It’s a different overhead that you’ve got when you’re actually writing it down versus other folks that that may just be like, “Oh yeah, I read this thing on the internet and that’s what I believe now.”

Absolutely. And then especially with TV and radio, they talk about overall… the way we receive information is more than just words. It’s the tone, it’s how the words are annunciated, and so there’s a whole thing behind that that’s intriguing, but the point is I just started using this. I’m like, “You have this researcher brain that’s really interested and likes to know things, use it.”

So I started researching the mind from various aspects. I’ve read probably more than 100 different books at least now. At least I read about two or three a month. Most of them are audio books now and I usually do it while I’m working because I’m not proud of it, but I am a multitasker, and so I try to condense things and chunk things into time. Did more to be proficient in order to get things done.

So I just started researching the mind from various aspects, and every time I was in a bit of a funk, which back then was very often because they go through the process of this is happening to me and I have no control. There are so many things that happen to us, especially when it happens medically. I’m not going to say that it’s the same as someone that goes through a traumatic injury that’s a physical injury, but there are similarities in the fact that when you’re in recovery, your body, your mind, for me, my mind betrayed me.

And so you’re going through this process of just like, “What the hell is this? This is not going to happen because for me,” and I’m not going to say a whole lot about all the experience because I know it can be a trigger for some, but what I will say is that it was a lot of anxiety and I basically lost trust in myself.

I could not watch the news because I didn’t trust myself because I became a hypochondriac of what if I go outside and get the Zika virus? Or what if I do this? But essentially, I knew I was a good person, I knew I was a mother and I wasn’t going to… Speaking of the media, a lot of times it irritates me now when they talk about these tragedies, and they talk about someone’s mental health, they’re like, “Well, she did this terrible act, but years ago she had postpartum depression.”

And so it really irks me when they try to correlate the two. And because everyone’s case is different, but there’s so many of us. Now they say that it’s one in four of us will experience depression in our lifetime. I like to say everybody does and I like to just call it bouts of sadness, the clinical depression, I think it’s two weeks basically of feeling not yourself and out of it and this fog or however you want to describe it.

But I just call it bouts of sadness because I’m a human being and damn it, if it’s not hard sometimes to be a human and allowed to be sad. So I really started exploring the mind, and every time I would get in a funk, which back then was often, I had a 40 minute commute to work and I would just listen to audio books.

Something I could listen to and I could think about, but I would still pay attention while I was driving and not get too enamored into the story. But I would just essentially journaling and writing, I started a blog. We have three children and one of our children is autistic, he’s on the spectrum.

And so talking about that and how to navigate that and then making me so aware of how people respond to him and how he honestly doesn’t give a shit, which is incredible. I love that about my son, that he does not care at all. And so he’s actually taught me a lot. So what happened was, is I’m researching, I’m getting better, I’m going to therapy. I am on medication.

I’m thinking… At first, I tried to fight it naturally and then I realized where my daughter’s first birthday that if I refuse to let this take over, and then this just this thing where my daughter’s early years are fog. So I got on medication, I said, “I need bigger guns,” found the right med, start talking to an incredible therapist.

She’s never allowed to retire. She’s 70 years old 

She’s locked in now.

She’s locked in. Trust me, she wants to invest in Mind Star, but ethically she can’t. So she’s always like, “I really wish I could, but I ethically can’t.” I’m like, “Well, I’m sorry you are locked in forever. When I’m a millionaire and,” because my insurance does not cover talk through the form, I’m like, “I’ll be able to afford your rates to actually talk to you over the phone and I’ll just be talking to you in airports or wherever I’m going and we’ll still do sessions, but I’ll have the money to cover it instead of relying on my insurance.”

So essentially about 18 months ago is when all… I’m doing all this work, I’m starting blogging more, I started putting some of my personal work as writing out there, so now I can see how I was recovering in different ways and how putting myself out there and doing more brave things, these little steps.

Everyone talks about taking this big move and big moves can do big things, but it’s those little things that we do that can actually make the most impact. And if I hadn’t have made the choice to step up and say, “I deserve better than this, this is crap. I can’t help this has happening to me, but what I’m going to do is I’m just basically going to flood my brain with all the science about the mind, and the spiritual aspects, and psychological aspects about the brain and how it works and just really start annoying my friends with all these random facts now I have bout the brain.”

It’s so funny that that’s… it’s so true that we… As you learn this stuff, one of the best things is like proselytizing as some would call it or there’s evangelizing this idea like, “Oh my God, I’ve got this amazing thing and I’ve learned.” And part of it is just you have to do that as… as you share that information, it helps you to cement, you’re like, “Am I thinking about this right?

And it is neat to bounce it off, but it’s funny. I’ve got a lot of friends who are like, “Yeah, that’s interesting.” Like, “No, aren’t you excited by this?”

Great. They’re like, “So where do you want to go for dinner?” “Well hang on, I’m not finished.” And they’re like, “Yeah, that’s great.” And my husband is great for that. He is different. He’s not… Well, we’re all creative in some way. He’s creative more in the kitchen and gardening, all those things and I’m creative in various aspects. I paint, I write, I do all kinds of things and stuff, excerpts.

So yeah, he was the brunt of that and he’s used to me being so creative kind of like, “Okay, I have this idea.” And he’s like, “Okay, let’s hear it.” And then he talks me down, so to speak. I like to tell people that he is my rock essentially and I’m this balloon up in the sky with this string and I need my rock, otherwise this balloon’s going to go everywhere.

So 18 months ago, I remember it like it was just, gosh, it was yesterday. I came home from working out, I was working on some dinner and my husband has gone for his work often, so it was just me and my children. And my oldest handed me this worksheet that he had done for summer school and it had a star on it. And he’s like, “Look.” And it was something to do with not just about his academics, it was also by his behavior. Like, “Oh, I did this and this, and then I got this for good behavior.”

And I looked at it and said, “Where the hell is my star for being an adult?”

Yes.

And that question changed everything because from then my brain just went and I saw… I used to get makeup, like a monthly subscription in the mail and I saw this pink packaging, it just stuck out to me on my dining room table. And then that’s when it hit me of, “Couldn’t businesses do more to celebrate us in our personal development journey?”

And so I just got my… I do, I have a journal, I call it the million dollar idea journal. It should more like billion dollar now, but I’m still happy with a million. So I’ll just write down random things, and now that I see that I’ve been doing this since I was teenager, I’ve essentially been in an entrepreneurial mindset my entire life, I just didn’t know it.

And so I just thought I was just solving problems like how to keep your socks together, or-

That’s It just seemed like… That’s the most hilarious thing is that I talk to so many folks and that’s the thing, and they’re like, “You do realize that you’ve effectively started like 19 small businesses. They didn’t seem that way when you were doing it.”

No.

They’re like, “Oh yeah, I guess.”

Right. Yeah, I know, before that it was this whole thing, it was this magnetic carrier that carried your makeup and so it kept it altogether in your pass, so then you could just roll out this negative strip and it had all your makeup there. But if you needed to go do your… And I tried making that and that was interesting, that’s a whole different thing, but… And that failed horribly because I have no idea about the science, about how magnets work, but I know that they work.

Anyways, the point is, yes. So yeah, I had this and so I just started going with it, thinking about our personal development journey and looking at different apps that were out there. And what I did, this is the Cinderella part that I’m going to turn it into a children’s book, instead of getting a man, she got a company instead. I put it on Instagram, so those things, as a writer, as a creative, I feel like you automatically get this badge like you’re afraid to share, like you’re very hesitant to expose yourself to the world, and that was social media.

It’s like we all want to digest everyone’s creativity, and it’s like you need to keep some of it for yourself. Not all of it’s meant to be out there for everyone to enjoy-

Everybody is living their best timeline. Right?

Right. So I did, I took that risk. I was like, “Okay, you know what? I really liked this idea of some sort of reward incentive app.” I had this limiting belief that I was like, “I’m a writer, a creative, I’m not an app developer, so I’m going to put this on Instagram, I’m going to put it out into the universe and somebody will tell me it already exists. I’ll download the app, I’ll use it, I’ll get free stuff. It’ll be amazing.”

I did and nothing. I reached out to a couple of other people. At this point I had been doing this personal development so I had formed a community, or had Facebook groups, or a lot of my friends are therapists now. And so I was just like, “Okay, what about this?” And they had never heard of it. They had heard of similar apps but nothing specifically from what I was doing.

And it had been a couple months and then this company in Silicon Valley found me through the hashtag app idea, and now I can picture everyone else to taking their app ideas and using that hashtag.

I’s going to be littered all over the place now.

The hashtag app idea is going to blow up now. But I really honestly thought that it existed, and there are similarities out there, but I think that people need to understand is a lot of people won’t do something because it already exists. They think that they have to be the first and they don’t realize how many billions of people are on this earth and we can’t just have one app.

A lot of people tell me now, “Well I found an app just like yours, but is not quite a bit similar.” They’re like, “I hope that’s okay?” I’m like, “That’s great. Who are they? I want to know what they’re doing. I want to talk to them.” Because especially with like a lot of things, we can’t do this all on our own. And I’d say a lot of times to people and people get really tired of me hearing it.

I tell people, “It’s not your mental health, it’s not mine, it’s ours. And whenever you approach with our mental health, you realize that we all have to do our part if that’s what you want to advocate for.” I tell a lot of my friends who are very passionate about the environment and this and that. I’m like, “That’s great, but pick one to focus on or you going to .

And so I chose this from my own experience. So had this idea, this company finds it on the hashtag. They DM me, they go into my DMs. This is the best DMs was actual business deals and not something else. I think it was even on a Sunday, my oldest had bronchitis so I was at this clinic and I was just… I ignored it. I was like, “I don’t know, this is a scam. This is the next taken-

Yeah. You’re just thinking like, my dearest friend, I have some money from gold from a Prince in LA. No, no, no.

Totally. Exactly. Give me $200 or whatever, what it is and I will set you up with this thing. Or I’m thinking it’s just like taken for where they like… they promise you something and then you meet them and they take… I don’t know, my brain just kind of like whatever. I think it was about a day or two later they messaged again and they were just like, “We’re serious.” I’m like, “All right. I’ve got time now, let’s just see what this is about.”

So I look them up and what it was is that, this particular person that works there, this was her job was to look for different pp ideas, and so she really loved mine and kind of love… she read my blog and loved my vibe on… excuse me, on Instagram. And so I agreed to the phone call. I’m thinking, again, I’m giving my number to a complete stranger and now I give my number all the time, it’s like whatever.

But at the time I was just like, no idea about entrepreneurship, had no idea really. I essentially had the entrepreneurial mindset already instilled in me and we all do, it was just untapped. And so I decided to just talk to him. And it was the longest pitch of my life. I did not know, pitches were like 30 seconds.

No one had told you what an elevator pitch is, but-

No, no. I knew nothing. I knew nothing about elevator pitches, I knew nothing. And so we talked for 45 minutes, and God bless him for giving me 45 minutes of his time. Even now when we talk, I think he knows that he has to carve out about an hour for me. But we talked and I was like, “Oh my gosh, we could actually do this.”

And so kind of became this, “Holy shit. Am I really doing this? If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this.” Then that came into talking to my husband and… To show that we were serious, we flew to Silicon Valley, we flew to California to meet them, to sign a contract.

Wow. Looked at that.

I wanted to meet them face to face. Again, I was like, “Make sure you’re legitimate and I want you to know that I’m legitimate too.” So my first time to California, this Midwest girl from North of Casey. Grew up in a tiny town of 200 people is now flying to Silicon Valley to meet developers to talk about an app idea. It still blows my mind.

We did it in like 24 hours. We came in, we went and did Halloween with my family and we all dress up for Halloween themes. Last year my family of five, we were the Incredibles.

Nice.

One of my children, he’s always the villain, so he actually was the underminer, but it worked out because Jack-Jack, I think his power is invisible so it worked out, so we just said, “Jack-Jack, you couldn’t see him.” Anyway, so we’re all dressed up, get up, do that, go to bed. Get up early the next morning, get on a flight, go from there to Vegas, Vegas to San Francisco.

And then check into our Airbnb, go see stuff, have dinner with them, do a little sightseeing and then turn around the next morning by 7:00 AM we’re back in the airport on our way back home because with three kids and we were just like, “We would love to explore, but we can’t.” That was my first official business trip.

We did that, signed it and then we began the creative process. If you look on the website, you can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram at some at Mind Star App. You can see with the name Mind Star, we use a lot of space photos, sometimes I’ll do space facts and turn them into life questions or personal development stuff essentially. And it comes to things as far as planets and things of this nature and pull out a little bit of fun science facts just from my oldest actually. He’s kind of a science nerd and I love it because he’s been great.

You had me at space. My wife and I are fanatics of space.

Oh, pretty good.

We’ve been to rocket launches and we recently actually did a trip to Orlando first for business and swung around and went to add the actual by the space X build site and got to see the big rocket they’re building, which was pretty well known.

That sounds incredible. It’s on my list.

I’ve got high confidence you’re going to get to your list. Even to this point, the story that you tell is something that a lot of people are already nodding their head with and it’s a really, really difficult thing that a lot of people don’t even know that they’re facing. And I find that the hardest part is introducing people to themselves. And that’s really like you. You talked about… I’ll pick the one thing that you said that was really… I love and I feel it’s profound.

People don’t realize when they say these things, it’s like, well I wanted to reach out to this person but I wasn’t sure. And just that moment, you’re like, “Am I going to give my phone number to this person who’s a venture capitalist, or an investor, or whatever it is? You’re like you have a natural set of distrust, which is normal. That’s what you should have. That’s what keeps us from getting kidnapped regularly.

Very good.

But what you have to have with yourself when you hear that thought, that voice in your mind that says something, you have to have a natural, healthy distrust of what your mind tells you because that’s what protects you from some of the darkest parts of your own mind, which you don’t even… But you’re always there but they generally don’t come out or you don’t have access to It, or you have a greater access to the positive thing that says like, “Oh yeah, I’m good.”

But there are moments when you stub your toe and you’re just like, “Of course you did that.” And it’s like, “Oh.” 

We all have an inner critic and to think that we’re going to get rid of that critic is a fallacy. That’s never going to happen. Because in a way the inner critic can say this. And actually, historically through the evolution of man, there’s a reason why the inner critic was there because for a very long time, if you think about as far as technology and industry and how much we’ve evolved, a lot has happened in the last 100 years. If you think about the evolution of man.

Before that it was all like, think about it, they could get a common cold and die. Just a common cold, or whatever it may be. And then even 100 years before that, they were being chased by wild creatures. And so we have instinctive, have this kind of spidey sense as I like to say of we have our fight and our flights, and we have our freeze. And so it’s now we’re having to deal with that, but we don’t have anyone chasing us most of the time.

And so it’s like… And we can just… If we’re sick or allergies, we just pop a pill, or do some home remedies, whatever we want to do to take care of ourselves. And so our brain sometimes does… It’s almost like you have to show your inner critic compassion and it takes a lot of work. I will say I’m a big meditator. Now, I know that there’s a lot of people probably thinking I’m trying to levitate. 3I have not levitated yet, but when I do, I’ll let you know.

The good point it is that it’s quieting the mind and spending time with that inner critic. And there’s a lot of things and techniques that I’ve learned through therapy, and I’ve read, and I’ve watched, and then I’ve taken it into my own, but yeah. People ask me about fear, I’m like “Fear is supposed to be there. 

It’s a good thing.

It’s a good thing. And you can do it, you just have to make that choice. And again, I think a lot of people think that it’s just, oh, she just woke up like this. No, this is years of progress and I’m still progressing. This is just how it works with life and this is what my company’s about, is about self-care for all minds.

That’s our mission statement because I’ve seen through the work that I’ve done, people I’ve talked to that so many people have such misconceptions about self-care and mental health. And when you go down to the low-hanging fruit of mental health in general, it all comes down to self-care and how we take care of ourselves. No one’s going to take care of you for you.

So if you want to get rid of this limiting belief like I had that I could not develop an app, I knew I had to work on that. That means it’s not going to happen overnight, even a week or two weeks. There’s where times everyone like, “What the hell am I doing?” We’re getting really close to launching, I’m just like, “Okay. Oh my gosh, it’s go time.” But it’s one of those things where you just have to make a choice and it’s just choosing yourself a little bit every day.

Again, a lot of people that I talked to, I do a little self-care coaching on the side, and so if anybody wanted to reach out to me about self-care coaching, you can find me at Mind Star App on Facebook or Instagram and message, and then my team will send that to me. But when I work with people, we walk about the misconceptions of self-care and one of them is trust and how you trust in yourself.

Because essentially I lost trust in myself because I didn’t know who the heck I was, and whatever these dark thoughts were swirling and all this fear and stuff. I would write myself letters, I still have the very first other to myself. I did it, I wrote myself love letters and it was, “I trust you.” And just saying that to yourself is so… it’s loaded. Like, “I trust you. I trust the intuition, I trust what’s going on and you either win or you learn and you never fail.”

So it’s getting into that mindset of this is going to be a win or is this is going to be a learning experience because again, unfortunately, we learn through the things that don’t work. Then this past year has just been developing the app, beta testing through different groups. So essentially what our app is and what has turned out to be we would like to tell people essentially our app is hope.

Mind Star is the app that I needed in my darkest moments, and what it is, is that you track your self-care over time, so you essentially build a self-care plan in the app. And we have about 16 curated suggestions to put in your self-care routine from a team of mental health advisers. I’ve been very, very fortunate that I’ve been able to keep my team small and affordable, because 

Not an insignificant problem. The people just think like, oh you just do this like, oh, all I got to do is put out hashtag app idea and I’m going to start my own company there’s a couple of steps in between.

Right, yeah. I’m thinking because this is all self funded and it’s ours, and I should say essentially it’s mine, I don’t have my husband on the… he doesn’t own any of the company yet, which I didn’t think about that when I set it all up, but he was my first investor because we took out a business loan and thinking three kids, do we have the money to do this? And I even went to… I started doing my research.

I took the contract and I took it to… and I talked to parts of it that we were allowed to disclose to other IT people in Kansas city and was just like, “Okay, I have this idea. I don’t want to get scammed.” And so I just basically came to a mentor and you’ll be amazed if people who will give you your thought… They might give you… And this person gave me an hour. He didn’t have to give me an hour. He was nice to give me an hour of his time.

He said it was his way of giving back for the month, for the week or whatever, but he gave me his insight about it and made sure it was legitimate, and I had friends of mine who were journalists. I’m like, “Look up, this company.” Well, the company is inventive by the way, I will give them that. They’ve been great, and so I’m like, “Look, find all the dirt you can on them and do all this back…” Well-

Your journalist’s mind kicked in right away on that.

Well, it did. But I’m thinking, and this is what’s interesting is a lot of people think that, okay, you’re doing less now you’re developing an app, and you’re a mental health advocate, and you’re a writer and you’re a speaker and all these things. And I’m like, “But you don’t realize some of the life skills that have come in handy that actually…” The puzzle starts fitting in like, oh, this is why I learned this skill.

I didn’t think skill was going to be that useful at the time, but now it’s actually quite useful, which is being able to do interviews, or knowing the other side of the media, or knowing what the media wants to see or hear and what makes my story interesting and be able to tell my story. Because a lot of people I’ve talked to have a great business, they have no idea how to market it, they have no idea how to present themselves.

It’s a rare talent surprisingly because the problem is that the people we hear the most, or we read the most are the ones that are already there.

Right.

 There because they’ve already built their thing and you realize there’s however many percentage of people that can’t do that. There’s a reason why we all know Larry King and these names as far as how important is the app. They get these funny, we’d sort of joke about these standard ways to ask a question. They’re actually founded in incredible history of behavioral psychology the way that you approach questions and discussing things with people.

And then you realize like, yeah, people can have an amazing ideas and that’s amazing, but they don’t have all the rest of the stuff wrapped around it. So you-

No.

… I can tell you, Kristin are a rare treat in the world because of your ability to glue it all together.

Right. And it’s just been so interesting, people are, okay, well, you’re… And I get it, a lot of people have this mindset of you must’ve went to business school or you must be a coder and all these things, and it’s like, “No, I’m not. I’m somebody who has made the choice to believe in herself a little bit more every day.” Not every day, I would like to note that.

Just because I’ve cracked this code and had been through recovery, I still have bad days, we all have bad days and moments or even weeks where you’re just like, “Nothing is working, nothing is going my way. What am I doing? I should just sell the app now, what I have.” And it’s like, “Okay I see you, I see you inner critic. You need to go to the back seat of the car and quit trying to drive.” And in giving yourself that self-care.

So essentially that’s what you know Mind Star is, is giving people this hope of they can set up their own self-care routine because everyone’s routine is different and then they get rewarded for it. They check in every day double-tap, boom, they earn 500 points or 100 points per task that they check off that they’ve done for themselves. And when they reach so many points, they’re like a milestone.

And what sets us apart is that we partner with small businesses. We’re allowing small businesses, I have  companies, I have life coaches, I have a couple of gyms that I’ve already signed up, and then the user is emailed a reward from that business. So what it’s doing, it’s also helping small businesses get their name out there and get their amazing products because there’s amazing Kindles and shirts and things of this nature that are out there that people don’t know about because it’s incredibly hard to put yourself out there in marketing.

And I know that SEO is a big thing right now, but even with knowing that knowledge of getting your website to the top of the list of the Google search, it’s hard because we have so many options, which is great. And I do believe that again, we can’t have just one T-shirt company, can’t have one self-care app out there. And there are apps out there that are similar as far as goal tracking apps, insurance apps are very similar, which is fine.

Differentiating is an interesting thing in that it’s another challenge that people don’t necessarily realize that you face and that that folks would face. And the joke about SEOs is that an SEO expert walks into a bar, tavern, restaurant, restaurant for families, restaurant with great children’s meals.

Yeah.

But when you’re building a page or an app, getting discovered and moving to the top of those lists is incredibly helpful especially for those early days and that kind of, not necessarily viral but just to get you out and separating the wheat from the chaff so to speak, versus like as a blogger, you… People always ask me like, “Were you a blogger? How do you deal with SEO?”

I’m like, “I am SEO. That’s it. Every word I write is SEO. I don’t care about… I’m not going to change the way that I write.” But that’s different versus standing of a page, or putting an app in an app store. When you look up self like motivation, or whatever it is, or mindfulness, you’re going to be number 78. How do you make sure that you can get found amongst all of those things that are out there?

I know. It is difficult. In fact, we’re talking about that with our website now. I do a weekly self-care newsletter that I send out self-care tips and insights and that’s a great way for people to see. They get some advice from me and then the see what it’s like to… I am a transparent person.

I have found that one of my greatest superpowers is my vulnerability, and I wish that more people realize that when you’re putting your business out there, I’m not saying you need to tell us what you ate for breakfast and you need to be that much candor, but you do need to decide that you need to put some vulnerability in your business because people are going to notice that, and that’s authentic.

Because how many times do we get messages now as, “Hey, love what you’re doing.” And then automatically you get pitched, they want you to buy something. I know some [inaudible 00:41:09] now with a small business, I get pitched probably at least three times a day from someone, whether it’s LinkedIn or Instagram. My favorite is, “Hey girl, love what you’re posted.” Like, “Who are you? What do you do?”

That’s my favorite, “Hey girl.” Heys are hilarious almost like… And I just politely tell them, “No.” And that comes down to… And I tell people, “If you want to work on your personal, if you will work on your limiting beliefs, think of the biggest dream you have, whether that’s starting a business, sign up for that class, going for that promotion, start working towards it and every limiting belief about yourself will come to the forefront, I guarantee it.”

Because it seems like every single one I’ve heard of, “I can’t develop an app. I’m not good at this. I’m not a coder.” Well, it turns out you can’t be good at everything. For me, it was just finding… I was fortunate to find a team to work with that honestly that I could afford to build it. I’m like, “I have the idea, I designed it in InDesign, now, here, you build it. I made it look pretty, now you bring it to life.”

For me, I tell people too is don’t always think you have to pay people. Think about your skillset. Really there’s a lot of… And I think with owning a business, you have to look at yourself and really be honest like, “Okay, I’m not so great. I won’t say suck, but I’m not so great at this.”

Because there are some things you are going to suck at. I used to think I would suck at being on camera. In fact, in college they wanted me to be on camera, they wanted me to be a news anchor. And I had to go on there and report, I was the managing editor the college newspaper and I had to go on there every week and put a little microphone on and I had to read the prompter about what’s coming in the Northwest Missouri and make sure you pick it up, but the common’s on Thursday, yada, yada. And I thought I was terrible.

Now I’m all like, “Put me on TV. Give me five minutes.” And so think about the evolution of that, of give me the opportunity to share my message or inspire people in some way that if I can do it, anyone can do it. And there’s people that have way more trauma and issues, and I encourage people to listen to… Pay attention to what you’re listening to.

I listened to a lot of books of just whether they’re autobiographical, or whether they’re just overall just self-help books. And some people I know I’m sure rolling their eyes at that. I’m not saying everyone, but find an author that you like. Gary Bishop is great if you just want a straight shooter.

Yeah.

He’s no bullshit, he’s great. But if you want a little more fluff, or you want something a little bit different about creativity, you can go to… there’s a bunch of them. But-

I was laughing because I was actually thinking as we were talking at the start, I’m like, “I got to remember to find…” I couldn’t remember Gary’s last name and I was like, “He is the mode…” First of all, his audio books are incredibly hilarious because-

Yes.

… he’s just classically Scottish-

Yes.

… ladies and gentlemen. And you’re like, “Here we go, here’s the XL tag, unfuck yourself, whatever. He’s an F-star or whatever yourself, and his way of just like, “You think if you’ve got a problem? Yeah, you do. Get over that.” And it’s like, oh.

It’s so funny that you were thinking that and then I brought that up, but this is how the universe works, but… I tell people all the time that this isn’t something that it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to start a business and everything’s going to fall into place and it’s going to be fine.” The truth is that things are going to fall in place where they’re supposed to, but sometimes things are not going to be fine, but they have their ways of always working out, but not the way you always anticipated.

We were supposed to be launched in like November, but then this thing, this links networking, and then Apple changed… As I found out with my first app, Apple changed some of their compliance things that they’re required when you… You just think, okay, I have an app. It’s all ready to go, I’m upload it to Apple and they’re going to put it on their store. Well, no, they have a process. They have a screening that’s pretty expensive.

And so we’ve had to work through that and then last minute changes and add ups, and so. I tell people all the time too, “When you start a business and you’re working on your limiting beliefs or let’s say you’re keeping your current job and you just want to become more aware and really explore yourself.” Because I’ve had people come to me and say, “How did you know that you wanted to do this?”

I’m like, “I didn’t want to do this. I tried to talk out myself out of this several times and it was all like, ‘whatever you believe in, God, universe, something was telling me like…” Because I had the idea and then this company coming to me was basically like a smack in the face like you are supposed to do this, you’re supposed to go down this road, whatever it may lead to where…

I left my desk job in March to pursue… just putting together a small magazine, just basically doing freelance work just so I could focus more on Mind Star, which I actually enjoyed it because that was a job I was doing. I was doing conversations with people on the way to work, doing them all my lunch hour. I come home, to bed-

Releasing it in amongst everything else.

Releasing it in, yes. And then in the evenings I would lay there with my kids and my music, my biggest inspiration, and I like to joke is because they’re all cuddling with me so the love hormone is very eminent it’s very big because I’ve got three little heaters keeping me warm. I’ve got my laptop sitting above them on the stand and they’re just all around me.

After they go to bed and I would work, and that’s how I came up with Mind Star was my son has a solar system in his room and I was thinking of something that is universal because a lot of apps out there which are perfectly fine, I’m not putting them down, but they’re geared towards women because women are more open to talking about things, especially comes to self-care, which I have to admit it really irks me when I see a commercial about treating yourself and it’s like some $50 moisturizer. It really me.

Oh God, yeah.

Because I see the commercialism, how they’ve tapped into self-care already. And so now my company, we say that we’re more than just an app. Right now I’ve actually got a course, it’s called self-care one-on-one, and it’s basically a self-care wheel. And you-

Just as you say that, I’m imagining the woman putting some cream on her-

Right.

… upper cheekbone.

Because that’s

Self-care is about taking care of you, and you’re like, “No, that’s not self-care, that’s skincare.

Exactly. Yes, exactly. I’m like, “And lady, that’s great your wrinkles are going to go away and your skin’s going to look very luminous, but the issue that you need to work on or whatever, that’s not going to go away. The issue in your relationship, issue with your mom, or your dad, or your best friend, or fighting, that’s not going to go away because you put some skincare, but you’ve slapped on some stuff.”

And trust me, I love the good face mask, I do, but yeah, it-

What you’ve talked about in the what people should listen to very strongly in approaching this and why I’ll encourage them to get involved, and I’m excited for when the launch hits and when we can get people in here. And we’ll catch up again too is as we keep rolling because I definitely want to follow you and the whole story as it evolves.

It’s small daily affirmations, and it’s what can we do to give ourselves ways to reward ourselves. And also when we slip, which is normal and we have to accept and survive. And I say survive, it sounds like, “What do you mean survive? It’s not like you’re laying on a landmine.” You’re like, “No, it could be the difference…” Like I said, I joked at the beginning, you stub your toe and you just say to yourself, “Of course you did that you…”

That’s kind of a Gary Bishop thing too, is like the words that you say to yourself define how you feel, and you’re going to have those moments again. And what you’ve got to do is to sort of step back away from it and say, “Okay, all right, bad moment, bad day. All right, what can we do to just like level it off, take off the edges and now let’s get back on it.” Whether it’s some journaling and morning pages and stuff you can do through the app and using those rewards.

And it’s funny that gamification becomes the way we… and this is what’s sad, this will will drive you nuts. I’m involved in apps, and technology, and VCs and stuff, so I’m like, “All right, what’s the gamification aspect of it?” Well-

Yes.

There’s a reason it’s there because it’s a behavioral psychology. In fact, if you go back and you study BJ Fogg and this idea of persuasive computing, and it’s who… I might have read enough BJ Fogg, it’s like, “No, stop. Seriously, people stop doing what you’re doing. I taught you how to do a thing and now you’re using it for the most awful purposes.” Zuckerberg and such.

And so he in fact is talking about ethical persuasive computing now, and there’s Tristan Harris and other great authors and writers and speakers who are tackling that. So you are doing the right thing of how can I do a thing where I can do gentle continuous steps on a daily basis that if I slip, I got another day ahead and we’re good instead of like, “All right, I’m going to start a business that’s going to grow to $1 million in revenue.” And you set this monstrous giant goal and even worse, even worse.

And you know this one, Kristin, you probably step on your back in day. On new year’s eve, you say, “That’s it. All right, from now on, I’m going to the gym every day.” Or whatever it is, and day three, the wheels come off the bus and then you say to yourself, as you look in the mirror, “Of course you failed and no one’s going anyways.” And we try to convince ourselves that it’s okay to be bad and just forget it.

And that’s it, you’re off your track and you don’t have a way to get back on because you didn’t set a daily goal. You didn’t understand that you could have a bad day and you can get back on the bus thing.

How did you approach the idea… Obviously, you discovered some it yourself. When did you know that you had like a program that you were building internally that would be able to be put into a program that you could help other people with?

It’s funny that you say that because I’ve been thinking about essentially Mind Star is the app that I needed in my darkest moments because in my darkest moments, I actually wrote down my routine, so I was kind of actually developing this app before I knew I was developing an app. And one of the things was that got me excited… Again, I have a supportive husband, I have great friends, at the time I had a stable job that I knew it was going to be there for me.

I had all these things and unfortunately, depression does not discriminate and only thing I could think of was, well, tomorrow I get my gummy vitamins, that’s something to look forward to. And I thought, that’s what you’re hanging onto is gummy vitamins? Of all the things, but that’s what God knows. I was all like, “Well, tomorrow I’m going to wake…” I went down to the basics of the basics of, well, I get up in the morning, I’ll get my gummy vitamins, I’m going to give my kids at kiss goodbye, get them dressed for school.

Get them all prepped for the day because I’m not also trying to get myself in the right mindset so I can go out and be about the day, but also my children and helping them realizing things and being aware of their emotions and stuff like this. But when I knew I kind of had something, it was probably… I think it was the night that I actually came up with Mind Star because before I think we were just calling it gold star.

I didn’t have Mind star, I just like, “I have this idea for this app.” I have no idea what I’m going to call it, but I really think that… And again, using behavioral psychology, knowing that we’re addicted to our phones, why not be addicted to something that actually rewards you a little bit and makes you feel good about yourself instead of the opposite. And so I was laying there, I think it was cuddling with my oldest, he’s a big cuddler.

He’s 10 so the cuddle days are almost gone, so I’m stopping 

Yeah, they’re winding down, enjoy them 

They’re winding down when and I am just soaking them up. We were cuddling, he was asleep. Okay, he’s asleep, cue, pull out the laptop. I get the laptop out, I’m thinking about this and that’s… I was looking up at his solar system and his favorite planet is Saturn. And so I was particularly… I remember staring at Saturn and then I got thinking about just what’s universally intriguing? What is something… Could we pull gender out of the equation completely and build something that’s inclusive essentially for minds?

And this is the time I hadn’t done as much research… excuse me, about app development and gamification and things of this nature. I was like, “I have this idea.” And then I start mapping it out of what it would look like and how we would do it and I was very fortunate. I haven’t really read any books about app development.

I have a great team and so I would say probably… that was the point where I was just like, “Okay, I think I really have something and I think I can really help people.” And I didn’t sleep that night. That night I was just like… It was just a breakthrough. I had my idea for the name of my company with Mind Star Health, with the Mind Star App.

And then I’m thinking overall, how we’re going to do this? How you’re going to build a routine and how that works with the milestones? And you have the dashboard so you can actually… it’s actually a line chart, you can actually see yourself go over time, which is great because actually we’re working with healthcare professionals to get them to use the app as a tool with their patients.

So essentially the idea is that there will be able to suggest, so obviously they cannot force, suggest the app to their patients to use to track their self-care. And then when they come in to do their regular checkups and they’re talking about they’ve got their cars on fire, their dog died, and like all these things that happened in life. And I’m like, “Well, how has your self-care been?

And we can look to see, have they been using the app because we literally made it simple as can be. The curious suggestions you pick, you add your own things, you double tap green check mark, boom, there’s points in a little bank account. You’ve done that for yourself there is your little star for the day knowing that you’ve done something for yourself.

The day might have been complete crap, but you know what? You drank your water, you wore your favorite color, you listen to your book. You watched your favorite show and maybe you took some time and if maybe you couldn’t go to the gym, maybe you went and just did some pushups or whatever it may be, like 10 of them or something like that.

Because the research shows, and there’s different. It depends on who you talk to as far as when a habit actually sinks in. Some say 21, some say 30, some say 60. I think it depends on the person, but I just know that it’s that consistency, and it’s not honestly how many times you fall down, it’s how many times you get back up.

And so it’s like people think, oh, I fell down again. And so there’s one thing about with my personal accounts and with Mind Star stuff, we’d like to put that encouragement and remind people that we all fall, we all make mistakes. I made a ton of mistakes my first year thinking people would do.

People come in making promises and we’re going to help you do this. You just pay us this much money and you’re just like, “Oh my gosh, I only have a lot of this much, but do I really take that risk?” And we took some risk and didn’t work out, took some risk and it worked. And so I’m sorry. As you can tell I get going about this and I can just go away.

Good. I was just about to ask-

Do you have any other questions about it because I will just keep going?

If we can keep going a bit, I got a couple of questions. I do want to keep going.

Sure. That’s right.

There’s reason why I’m listening and everybody else’s too because this is something that… it resonates, and this is why these kind of stories are important and it helps to understand where the stuff comes from. And it’s funny, you do more research than most people. I am also a weird sort of research nerd.

Sorry, I said that and I immediately attached you to being a weird researcher. I am a weird research nerd-

That’s okay.

… but-

I am, I own that title. That’s fine.

The idea of why is this thing working? Why me? And people always like, “Oh, it must be so great. You have such a great outlook and you’ve always got a pause.” I’m like, “No. No, it’s terrifying. Most of the time I’m actually filled with self-hatred.” It’s tough to get yourself out of that mode sometimes.

My wife will… She’ll check me or wants a smile, she’ll be like, “Hey, you’re not really good lately. You’re really down on yourself, you really seem like something’s up.” And it’s good because you have to have that nice wife, an app, a thing, a habit, those things are good to have.

And what we really forget to do as people is just recognize the tough moments that we get through. And it could be that that gummy vitamin can be enough to get somebody to step back off the edge of a bridge.

Right. And it’s just crazy but that’s… I remember thinking about that, was laying in bed and it was all like, okay, what am excited about tomorrow? Well, there’s my kids, but I thought that was obvious. There was just like… because it was, it was just like in those… I’m thinking, that’s what I’m excited about is a gummy vitamin? I still love my gummy vitamin, but it was all like-

As you should, they’re amazing.

They are.

Best things ever.

Best thing, I’m like, “Thank goodness I don’t have to take those big ass because I can be gummy, I can be a kid.” There’s some of the there.” I tell you, that’s what it came down to was just like, “Oh, gummy vitamins, check, I drink my water, check.”

And I tell people too, and unfortunately, the recent news has proven this that exercising and eating healthy is not enough when it comes to self-care. And what I talk about in my self-care one-on-one course is the self-care wheel and I break this down to it’s spiritual, emotional, mental, practical and physical.

And we always saying the physical part, especially this time of year because everyone’s all of a sudden in this mindset of they’re going to lose weight, which is great, but I always tell people, “Who are you losing the weight for?” And to question… this is what it comes down I think too is you have to question everything.

Now, I will say I have a terrible habit of questioning too much. I think about my thinking too much I’m like, “Why did I have that thought? Oh my gosh, does that thought have some weird significance and now I need to go look up this book on Freud to figure out what the hell it meant.” And then I agree with everything before. Like with dreams for instance or whatever weird thing.

I’m interested with when it comes to the ego, but everything else is kind of woo. Anyways. The point is that when you start to become aware of your thoughts… I tell people all the time, “When you start becoming aware, you’ve got to figure out how much crap you tell yourself.” And I have friends that messaged me that start meditation and that’s a great way to get started as a writer, I always tell people to journal.

And I actually have a technique I’ll share with you if you have a minute that’s a good I have found to whatever the current situation, whatever you’re stressing out about to get, within five minutes you can get to the limiting belief that that’s the trigger, you can get all the way down to the root.

And so what I do is that I… Okay. So let’s say like right now, I’m in my office, I’ve got all these stickers and these notes of things that have to do well, pretty much the rest of the month. And so I’m looking at it, obviously looking at it and look at all of them, step back as a whole, it can be overwhelming because I have this interview, and this interview, and I have to write this story and yada, yada, yada.

The feeling of overwhelmed, okay, I am overwhelmed. I can literally ask myself, and I love to do it with a pen and paper because I feel like there’s people don’t understand the power of the written word, and writing out, and getting things out of your mind onto paper, but asking yourself why? Why am I overwhelmed? And then no censoring, no one’s going to see this.

I tell people to always… And I do self-care coaching, I say, “Have a journal and label it something super boring so no one’s going to read it.” They think it’s like cooking recipe-

That’s right.

… or something. Or I tell people, “Take a piece of paper, journal for the day and then rip it up and throw it away.” And then basically you’re saying you’re brain dumping. I love that phrase of dumping stuff out on because you can get such clarity when you write it all out and you realize, this is bullshit, I don’t believe this. 

So essentially you asked yourself why. Okay, so I’ll do the example, why am I overwhelmed? I’m overwhelmed because I have too much to do. Why? Because there’s so much I have to get done, because I have a business and I want it to be successful. Why? Because I want my work to matter. Why? Because I want to matter.

And automatically I went in just a couple of why from overwhelmed to this limiting belief that I have to do something grand, I have to do some big thing. But we don’t realize those overnight successes are really 10 years of work.

That’s right. It takes a long time to become an overnight success.

Yes. But our society has told us that, right? So there’s that limiting belief of I have to matter and I have to do something significant in society. That means that I have to do something huge and all of a sudden have five million followers, and I have to make $1 million or $1 billion. That’s what success is tied to in society, but I tell people, “Everyone’s definition of success is different.”

That you can make an impact and have a profitable business and it can just be in your state, just in your city, just your region. No one says you have to go global, no one says you have to go national.

It can be a farm stand at the end of the driveway. If that’s your definition of success, then bloody good, you’ve done it.

Exactly. You’ve done it, you’ve got… And people have good produce and things of this nature, and if you want to take a step further, that’s fine, but everyone’s success, they think of the big celebrity status and whatever. But I’ve gone to asking myself why. There’s so much power of asking yourself why you feel something, and then just trusting yourself to explore it and just write it out, excuse me, whatever it may be and just no judgment.

And then just keep asking yourself why and you will get to limiting belief within four or five whys. I’ve told people… I was in a business accelerator here recently and we were talking about self-care and I actually suggested this actually in the course, and the next week, three people out of 10 were all like, “Hey, we did it and holy crap, it made me realize I have this limiting belief.”

And then I tell people, “Okay, so now you’ve found this living belief out.” So mine is that I feel, let’s just say this one for example is that I have to do something big and grander to matter. Okay, so I’m aware of it now. Well, guess what? My to do list is still there. I don’t have time to solely do the personal work. Everyone thinks that when you become aware… When you become aware of your shit, people think they have to attack it all at once, “Well, now I must lay this, like it’s a dragon.’

Give yourself some freaking self-compassion. I’m 33 years old, if I just now realized this at 33, this is 33 years in the making.

So you’ve been planting 33 years of really unfortunately unknown habits. You can’t just rip them down in a day.

No, rip them down in a day or even 33 days, you have to… Okay. Sometimes I tell people, “Basically put a pin in it.” Like, “Okay.” You know what? Later tonight I’m going to journal about this or I’m going to wait till tomorrow and process of it. Yes, I obviously got this belief, now I’m aware of my belief, now what action can I take now?

I can take action and say, “I’m going to deal with it later.” I’m going to take action and I’m going to set a timer and I’m going to let myself write about how that makes me feel for five minutes. Or I can take some action with it and get up and move because movement is incredible. A lot of people think… I love to kickbox, that’s a great thing when you’re frustrated, and if I don’t go to the gym, I literally I can feel myself like wanting to get a punching bag or something

You start to tighten up.

I do, I’m all like… One of my kids is really annoying, like toys, I want to like punch it right now and just tell him that it just fell down the stairs and broke or whatever. But it’s like just putting some action and some accountability and trust in yourself like okay, all right, I’ve got this belief, but you know what? I’ve got all this crap I got to do and this is what I’m going to do. Or taking the time to meditate on it five minutes, two minutes, a minute.

I tell people when they’re doing tasks and stuff and they get overwhelmed to just take a little one minute break and do several deep breaths and see how those feel. And there’s so much power in that. There’s so much power in ourselves but we give our power away to everything else instead of trusting ourselves to know what we need to nurture ourselves, and that’s essentially what self-care is.

Essentially self-care is the act that we take to express self-love, and you are nurturing in loving yourself. And that’s what I tell my kids when they do something for themselves and they… whether they create art or. My son’s just got Nintendo Switch for Christmas and so he’s onto all these new games or whatever and he needs to get all his other work done before he can do that, but sometimes I’ll see him with a pen and paper and he’s actually drawing out some of the characters, and then he’ll play.

And he’s all like, “Is it okay if I draw?” “Yeah, you’re using your imagination, yeah, you’re playing a video game, but also you’re drawing, you’re reading, you’re doing things, you’re learning and you’re nurturing a part of yourself.” There’s so much of ourselves that we don’t nurture because we just think that we have to… Everything has to be about making money.

And I always tell people that there’s some things, especially as a creative, you have to keep for yourself like painting. I grew up in a very small town so I don’t want people to think that I definitely did not come from money. My family was well off where they were at, but definitely we were through a few just like everyone else.

You were comfortable enough that it wasn’t concerning that the mortgage was going to be able to get paid-

Right.

… but not that you were like vacationing in… had a summer home or whatever. It’s just sort of natural middle-class level of comfort, which-

Absolutely, which I think a lot of people don’t appreciate. And unless you’ve been… My husband and I had definitely been at the lowest of low. We’re like, “Okay, how are we going to pay the mortgage next month? Okay, that means what’s a priority, what’s not? Cut this, cut that.” I’ve cut my own hair to cut costs. And so yeah, I’ve experienced it all over the place. But-

It’s funny that one of the things that I used to always love and ask people at the end of a good discussion, and the funny thing I think we opened with it was what’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you that you’re the most thankful for? And it’s funny, it feels like we’ve just talked about so much of being on the other side of the darkest moments that you’ve turned into a successful understanding of.

That in itself is I think incredible because most people don’t have that. There’s a lot of people you can read and talk about, psychology and managing yourself. You don’t have to be reading like Plato and Aristotle and all this crazy stuff. You don’t have to go buy that that deep but to understand the dark moments and to recognize when they’re happening and to be able to get on the other side of it and learn compensating factors.

An interesting fellow to read and listen to, well, maybe controversial for some is Dr. Jordan Peterson who’s made the news for an unfortunate set of reasons, but he’s a clinical psychologist in Toronto and really rencing… and my favorite thing, he has this thing called 12 rules of life is his book. A very simple, I forget which rule it is, but it says like, “Aim lower.” That’s it.

You’re having a rough day? Aim lower. You set a goal and he’s so like profoundly Canadian. It’s classic to hear his East Coast accent or mid Midwest accent in Canada. He’s like, “Make your damn. That’s it. If that’s the thing you do and you succeed at, good you’ve done it. Make your damn bed every day. Just start with a completed goal.”

I agree. We get so big into these like big things, like I said, I did the whole why thing and I have to be significant, and I’m thinking some days it is just, “Hey, I got out of bed, I made my bed, I got dressed and I got out the door, and that’s enough for today and I should celebrate that in itself.

And the thing of like why meditation and why a lot of these like mindfulness exercises are good, mindfulness with the purpose of like, oh boy, I’m going to meditate 12 minutes a day or whatever, it’s going to be like, “No, no, no, no.” The goal is not to do 12 minutes a day, or 20 minutes a day, or hit transcendental, this level of calm.

There’s all these things, obviously there are states and mind states and you can study it and go deep into when it works and why it works, how it works. But in the end, you just have to get to a point where your mind just pauses for a second. Like you said, it’s that when you’re stuck on something and you’re overwhelmed, you stop, take a few deep breaths, walk away. Get up, walk around, go out, take the garbage out.

Garbage is half full. It doesn’t matter, take it out anyways, take it out. And as you’re on the way back, you’re like, “Oh I got it, I got it.” Then you’re sprinting back to your desk going like, “That was it.” Because it’s why we go in the shower and we suddenly get inspired by things in the shower because you’re physically doing something that’s separating you from any other activity.

Right. I could go into the depths of the research behind brainwaves like for instance, in the shower, you’re calming, so usually when relaxed state, which is theta, which theta waves typically is when we get the most creative, which is why we have those ideas in the shower is because we’ve actually calmed ourselves down for the most part, not every shower.

Some showers you are just like, “Okay, hurry up, got to get out, got to go.”

That’s right, rather purposeful, but-

Right. But when we take the time to like… and I tell a lot of people to do a little aroma therapy in the shower to add a little whether eucalyptus, or lavender may be, and just taking some time in there many times. Then that’s essentially why is because we’re slowing things down a little bit.

And I tell people too dealing with mindfulness and stuff, a lot of times they think that it’s just… like there’s mindful eating. If you don’t have time to meditate, maybe slow down on your eating and pay attention to what you’re eating. Maybe try mindful eating for the day, or I tell a lot of people because I work from home, so I have to do this myself is… So I’m actually talking to an adult, but today I’m supposed to get to talk to someone about this, but go talk to your neighbor.

Just find a way… Well, that’s why we used to have like church and community, and regardless of what it is, it was really just a way to as a group with a collective goal of just celebrating something together on a weekly basis or a monthly basis where you meet up with people, whether it’s a book group or whatever.

If it’s an online group, if there’s any kind of way to have an interaction which is separated from your day-to-day and it becomes that thing that you look forward to and it gets you to separate your mind from all the stuff that’s overwhelming you, which I always laugh. We chat about overwhelm and underwhelm, I’m like, “What is whelm? I want to get to a state of whelm.” I’m going to call that my next book is like the state of whelm? How to achieve normalcy.

Make it a bumper sticker, do it. I love it. Do it, do it for sure.

And I tell you, if you study some of this stuff too, it’s wild, it’s a harsh topic, but like people with drug addictions and stuff and this. They’re not chasing high, they’re chasing normal. And once you go off the edge, finding normal is one of the most difficult things to do and it’s this balance and imbalance problem that they’ve gotten. And ultimately, it leads to continuously chasing a state of where you’re swinging so hard and you can’t find it.

It’s surprising that the more and more people you read about and talk to on that subject is like, “Did you like getting high?” Is like, “No, I hated it. I just wanted to find normal and it was somewhere in between when I woke up and when I was off, really out of my head. I’m like somewhere in the middle was where I needed to be, but you can’t stop there.” And that’s where there’s a very interesting chasing of a state, which is difficult to recognize and calming apps and mindfulness as a practice is…

You’ll kill me too, but one of the most stressful things I find is trying to meditate. I’m like the worst person because me like, “Oh, just sit here for seven minutes. It’s going to…” But what it does, it at least it… so I don’t meditate, but I’m a distance cyclist and I do running just because it’s hard to bike everywhere you go.

And so the moment that I’m running, I’m immediately just like my mind just goes in a beautiful state like, ah, okay. And I start to think about things and I get very introspective and is very, very helpful. That’s my calm. I can’t sit with my legs crossed and try and levitate, but-

The thing is that you took the time to find what works for you. A lot of people think that yes, I should be here with my incense. And my kids, I shot video of my kids, they make this weird cow sound that they think that I make and they go [inaudible 01:16:38]. I don’t even make that sound, but they walk around, “Oh, that’s mum meditating again.”

There’s a lot of times though I’m literally just laying in bed, and I will just lay on top of sheets and I will just lay there. And there’s different types of meditation and I will tell you YouTube is great for that. You have lots of meditation music or just calming music. My kids listen to ocean music every night, my husband hates it, he wants a quiet, but I want my kids to listen to ocean music.

The thing is that you’ve found what works for you… Aa lot of people think, yeah, meditation. That’s why I say to do maybe just slow down and just become aware of what you’re doing. Walking’s great, you can on your lunch break go for a walk. And don’t take your phone, figure out a path, know how you’re going to get back to your house or your office, and then just pay attention to the wind, the leaves around you, your steps and you’ll be surprised how much of going back into our bodies and out of our heads, how much it clears our mind.

It really is all beautiful how it’s all connected in that way, and I will say with my anxiety and mindfulness has helped. And meditation has helped a ton to the point now I can meditate with my kids screaming in the other room because I know that my kids are okay because no one’s bleeding or whatever. And I’m not saying I’m sitting for like 20 minutes and ignoring them, but I could take a couple minutes and breathe in.

I do, I have a playlist, music therapy. Music is huge to me, so as far as getting me pumped up. So I have a morning playlist and I will put my ear buds in and it’ll get me going to go help this or then. Obviously, if my kids say something I’ll be like, “Okay, what is it?” But usually that’s after they leave to get me in this mindset. A lot of it I’ll admit it’s epic rock. It’s very much like very big and loud-

Nice.

… but it just makes so pumped up. Oh, my kids love queen and so we built our queen like no other in the car, so a lot of it’s that, and so we’re just in that moment. But then other thing too is that there’s so much positivity and well, I’m all for that. I feel like there’s forced positivity and that we have to identify all our emotions, know what they are, and to come to them without judgment.

This is where the self-compassion works, and really if you’re ever familiar with that, Dr. Kristin Neff is phenomenal and the center of self-compassion. I even have her workbook, but you can get it at the library, you can listen to her and it’s phenomenal about how much compassion we give to everyone else but ourselves.

And we have this like weird thought, well, I shouldn’t have that? Well, your brain is going to think weird shit.

That’s right, I got bad news. It just going to happen.

It’s just going to happen because of all the information that goes to our brain and our brain has to sort it out, and our brains are naturally the type that just like, “Oh this puzzle goes here,” and immediately wants to paint a picture, which is why we judge people right away because we want to figure things out. We’re essentially these little computers in a way in some aspects that just have a ball of complexity, of emotions on top of it.

We’re always trying to like, “Okay, well, this is why they did this and we’re always trying to solve something. And there’s such beauty in just being, just be and not trying to solve anything from it. Like for a minute, I’m not going to be a solver for the solution, but I’m just going to be here in my body and go for a run, I’m going to be in my body, I’m going to go kickbox, I’m going to be in my body, I’m just going to sit here and enjoy my burger and not think about anything else but enjoying this burger or whatever it may be.

Or it can be, I’m going to go talk to my neighbor, or I’m going to go talk to my coworker. And yes, it might be about some show that we have no interest in and they do, but I’m going to have the intention to just be there in that moment. And it’s interesting when we make those intentions and just take those little leaps, some really incredible things can happen. We figured out that solution or we just overall feel better.

There’ve been many times where I’ve been up in my head and then I will go up to get the mail and talk to my neighbor for about 10, 20 minutes, whatever it may be, and then come back and it’s like I feel better. One of the things I is because we’re made for connection as humans.

When I talk about in my self-care one-on-one course, I talk about spiritual self-care, and I actually put social underneath that because some people can be religious and then be spiritual. Some people are both, some people are spiritual and are religious, or they’re not religious, whatever it may be, but essentially we’re all here for connection.

And so talking about addiction, for me, addiction, I think it all comes down to the lack of connection. There’s a limiting belief there, whether it’s needing this need to feel loved or… because all comes back down to love and loving ourselves and being loved. And so they’re seeking that in some way. Their addiction is a coping mechanism for a limiting belief they have that they’re not good enough, or they don’t deserve love, or they don’t deserve connection because unfortunately a lot of our limiting beliefs were set, not set in stone, but they were pretty much set in our brains by the time were seven.

Zero to seven, most of those are already instilled, so you’re like, “Well crap, I’ve got all these limiting beliefs I’ve had since I was like five.” You can rewire it and do it, but just know it’s not going to happen in a day and it’s not going to… And here’s the thing, I feel like in a way, we’re all kind of addicts, we all have something, whether we are emotional eaters.

I was one of those that did the retail therapy, every time my husband pissed me off, I’d go to my Amazon wishlist and I buy a shirt. I totally did. And then when I became aware of that and I do it too now. We’ll get in a fight and I’m all like, “You know what? I’m going to go to my wishlist, but what I’m going to do is actually I have a separate list that’s actually… this is how I’m manifesting my book to be written that I’m working on about spiritual self-care is I will go look at outfits I want to wear on my book tour.

I will like, “Okay, well, I’m going to look on my vision board and other stuff and try to channel that. Earlier today I actually found myself relying on some old coping mechanisms. I posted a photo and all of a sudden I could feel myself getting excited of all the likes and follows on it. I’m like, “Ooh, I’ve got more followers and I got some more likes.” I’m like, Okay. There’s that limiting belief of looking to others for validation,” which I won’t get into, but which is instilled in my mother growing up because she’s that way.

She’s a people pleaser and a seeker, and so she instilled that in me, so that’s something I’m constantly working on is getting rid of the people pleaser in me, learning to say no and being respectful of boundaries and time and respecting myself in that way. But yeah, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I totally…” When my husband takes me out, I totally buy something under 10 bucks, so it flies under the radar and then it comes in when he’s not here usually, so he doesn’t even know I bought this new shirt or this new face mask I want to try or whatever it may be.

Because we all have some sort of coping mechanism that is unhealthy, and unfortunately those that are really, really relying on that addiction, whatever it may be, alcohol, food, drugs, I do, it’s like they’re all wanting to be loved. They’re all wanting… They don’t want to do what they’re doing-

It’s a validation regardless of what it is and-

Right.

Can be. And the interesting thing, especially when we talked about Gary Bishop, his discussions on these ones, he’s very frank on the approach to it, which is… Sometimes it’s kind of good as a bit of a punch in the face of like, yeah, you want more love from your parents? Well, No. No you know you’re not going to get it, but what do you actually want? Finding yourself.

And that’s why I’m a fan of stoicism as a practice of like… I call it shaving off the edges. Like let’s get closer to a center line, so if you get rid of the lows and you understand how to escape. Some stuff is out of your control, so therefore I shouldn’t get angered about the inability to… When something happens, it’s out of your control. You have to recognize and accept that it’s out of your control.

And then what do you do as a result of it? And that’s why it’s how you deal with it.

Right.

But at the same time, I also hate when somebody heaps praise because I’m like, “Ah, no, no, no, no, no.” Because I don’t want that. I’m like, “No, no, no, I…” Because that up means that I’ve got way farther to fall just to go to normal. Now I’ve got this plummet from this incredibly high feeling, so I do my best to actually stop people from saying good things because I don’t want this incredibly heaped on praise for stuff that…

I just want to be like, “Is it good? All right. Are you happy with that? Excellent. Thank you. I’m glad. That’s good. That’s all I need to hear. Thank you.” That is just cool, don’t go over and above that because-

That’s interesting.

… that means that I’ve now got this big thing. But then what’s funny, and I love this, Kristin, you probably have all these people and you tell them and you’re like, “This is how I deal with it.” And they must be like, “Oh, you’re like one of those people that like…” And like, “No.” When I talk about stoicism as a practice and why it’s good, people are like, “It’s so scientific and unemotional.” I’m like, “No. No, no, no. In fact, it’s the most emotionally rewarding thing you can do because you’re really recognizing when you’re on a swing and that you can pull yourself back to center.”

And it’s one of the most beautiful things, and that’s why when I cycle… When I run, I listen to music because it’s relatively safe, I have one earphone in. When I cycle, I have no headphones or no nothing. And people always ask me like, “What do you listen to when you ride?” I’m like, “The sound of my pedals turning and the rubber on the road. They’re like, “Well, don’t you get bored?”

I’m like, “Oh kid, if you could be in my head for six hours, trust me, boredom is not an issue.”

No, it’s not. Feel you on that. Absolutely. Yeah, I get it. People, they don’t understand how I can like, okay, so you’re working on this novel and you write 1,500 words a day, that’s your goal. And then you do this for whatever this time and this night, and they are just amazed.

I’m all like, “But if you just became aware of how much time you waste on social media or you waste in a phone call, or a conversation that’s going nowhere like if you’re in an argument or whatever and you just keep repeating yourself and you’re like, ‘okay,’ you know you need to take a break from that.” When you start to become aware of that stuff or you become aware of what clears your mind, it’s like you do become an addict to it.

I admit I’m addicted to when it comes to the mind, like when I found out that when they’re doing scans of people, the same part of the brain lights up and scans, whether it’s emotional pain or physical pain. Your brain does not know the difference pain is pain, which is why depression hurts, which is why anxiety the way where you feel like, oh my God, I’m dying, it’s because your brain doesn’t know the difference.

And so when I found that out, yeah I was the annoying person and I still preach about that. When people talk about their pain and it hurts, and I say, “Oh, it’s all in your mind.” And they get upset, I’m like, “No, there is science that says it really is all in your mind.” That is not to shame people, that’s to enlighten them and realize that how much power and how much they need to trust themselves and know what they know.

Like the idea of me cycling, that sounds terrible. That just sounds like-

Exactly.

But kickboxing to you, I love to kickbox and I’m smashing things and flipping tires. You’re probably thinking like, okay. Whatever you may think I’m a gym rat or whatever that may be.

But whatever it is, it’s finding that thing, and [inaudible 01:28:24] also my favorite one that people always asking me is like, “Oh, you’re like one of those fitness people.” I’m like, “You mean those people that don’t want to die in their 40s? Yeah, one of those ones.” I’m genetically destined for like serious bodily issues. I’m like living on borrowed time.

My dad had a near fatal heart attack in his early 40s. Thankfully he’s still alive today thanks to good medicine. However, I had to suddenly adjust my lifestyle early in life to be ready so that I didn’t let that occur, and it was both psychological and physical stuff.

And it’s wild the hard part, and I see this all the time too with especially weight management and health stuff, and mindfulness is you just, when you’re surrounding yourself with people, especially with social media because I’ve got a lot of friends who are like… my Twitter friends are my friends. I’ve got all these people that I meet at events and we’re in the same community all the time.

And you watch them in the throws of a really negative moment and you want to like sort of pull them out. And I’ve tried sometimes and there’s this weird an unfortunate acceptance of the fact that I can’t, and having to like, “Hey look, I’ve offered myself to be able to like, ‘Hey, man, that thread is getting a little crazy. You good? Is there anything I can help with or are you recommending?'”

And at some point sometimes you just like, “The best I can do is put myself in front of that person and say, ‘Hey, if you need help with something?'” Or can I distract them into something else that’s more positive? We all need a Mind Star, and so I’m excited by what we’ve got. I unfortunately have to get ready to catch a flight. Otherwise, I would literally spend the rest of the day talking with you, Kristin. This has been phenomenal.

Oh, well, good. I’m glad. I know I get on tangents and I talk fast, but I hope that that just lets people know that if I’m passionate about this that you can find something you’re just as passionate about that you’re going to ramble on about and you will take risk for and do things for. People hate when you say the power of mindset, but when you start doing work on yourself, you’ll be amazed. I almost surprise myself like every day like wow, I literally just did that.

Put this way, Deepak Chopra came here and I was actually able at random actually for the university able to go hear him speak, front row.

Wow. Very good.

My friend had an extra ticket. Mind Star, so we have got some national attention. We went to the Forbes Under 30 Summit and we were invited to come as an exhibitor, which you have to apply for then they interview you, so I was pretty excited that we got to go. I was getting ready for that, I just came home from another conference in Nebraska, I got three days to prep for my think in Detroit. My friend calls me and says, “I have an extra ticket to Deepak Chopra tonight.” I’m like, “I didn’t know who was in town. He’s on my bucket list to meet.”

And so front row, I got to do that, and I got to be… he was right there in front of me and he led a meditation at the end, so I crossed that off my bucket list.

Nice.

And then I had the tenacity to give him my business card. I went and had the book because he gave his book, Metahuman and you could do a signing. And I thought, oh my God, I mean I was. I thought I was dying. The anxiety was there, I could feel it all in my body like okay, this is clearly anxiety because I’m about to give somebody who has a lot of connections and maybe he’ll look at my card and maybe he’ll throw it away.

But here’s this opportunity and I have to take this risk even though I feel the fear and I can definitely feel my breath and taking that risk. So I hope people listen to this and realize that they can take some risks, they need to start taking more risks. Life is not meant to be mediocre, you only have one, we’re meant to take risk.

Responsible risk obviously, and we need to take that into consideration. But I did, I gave him my business card, my friend took a photo and after I was like, “I just surprised the hell out of myself. I cannot believe I had the tenacity to have him sign it.” I had like 10 second pitch, and he took my business card and put it in his pocket like-

Nice.

Does that happen? And I’m thinking, Kristin, if you can do that, if you can basically pitch to Deepak Chopra, which he was not I’m sure anticipating. He’s like, “Who is this crazy lady?” I’m sure. I look at her like, who does she think she is? Little does he know. And so, I hope people take out of this that they’re not alone, that there are people out there trying to do good things.

Yes, there’s the money aspect of this, but I won’t get into that. The app essentially going to be free, and then how we make this profitable is our healthcare marketplace. We’re having healthcare professionals essentially advertise their services on the list so people can find healthcare professionals easier. So they want to take their self-care to the next level, there’s actually a healthcare marketplace there for them.

We want to keep this free and we want this for people to know that they deserve to be celebrated and that all minds deserve that no matter whatever state. And we’re all essentially one mind and it’s our mental health, and when we come at that, that’s when we can really make some change and we can start saving lives because self-care is how you save life. Because at the end of the day, we want it or not, it’s how we take care of ourselves.

We need have full responsibility of how we treat ourselves and how we treat others. And so I hope people get that out of this conversation that we’ve had, that they realize that they can take some risk and that they deserve to take risks for their dreams. They deserve it, they’re worthy of it.

They are. And thank you for sharing this, and thank you for all your you’re doing. And one day when you’re on stage and Deepak Chopra is the second keynote, he’s going to say, “Wait a minute, I remember you. You gave me your business card.”

Lady that gave… You’re the crazy lady. Yeah, that is me. That is that-

The moment will come for you, I can assure you that, Kristin, and it’s earned and deserved. How do folks get ahold of you if they want to reach out? Obviously, we talked about the website. I’ll put the links in the show notes as well, so if they want to make sure they go, they can go to mindstarapp.com. We’ve got lots of good stuff that’s to coming up.

If they want to reach out on social or contact, what’s the best way for folks to get ahold of you?

Okay. I am an open book. I’m actually going to give one of my emails. I have several emails, but this is an email that’s actually great if people have questions, if they want to talk a little bit more, if they’re interested and they’re crazy enough to make me their coach in self-care and they want to work on their limiting beliefs, or even they want a suggestion for a good book.

I’m always about doing what I can to give back, because when you give back I believe it comes back to you tenfold. On social media, Facebook and Instagram. It’s at Mind Star App. Of course, the website is mindstarapp.com. You can sign up for a weekly newsletter there and that can go right into your inbox.

If you want to shoot me a little more personal question, which I understand, mindstarhealth@gmail is actually a good email that you can actually reach me directly and you won’t have to really go through a whole lot of people to get to me with that email. That’s another one of my business cards put that way. So that’s a good one.

If you feel inclined to reach out, if I’ve inspired you, if you want just an idea of a good book, or you want to get started on this and you don’t know where to start, I can surely help guide people in the right direction. I don’t know it all. I’m not saying that at all. I really hate the word I’m saying that I’m an expert in a thing of this nature. I just know I have enough knowledge that I can help people to make themselves start feeling better because we all deserve to feel good.

Well, thank you. You are an inspiration and I wish you all the best. We will be getting in touch, we will stay in touch as we go through this and we watch the next part of the journey, and most importantly tell people, “Take your damn vitamins. Go get that going.” If there’s not a gummy vitamin somewhere in this app, I’m going to be angry, Kristin.

I’m coming for this, somewhere in there, that top lower word, it better be a gummy vitamin because-

Maybe I need to get a vitamin company to sponsor or [inaudible 01:37:07] an offer like a coupon or something like that essentially on the incentive side and get that-

We should.

I should get a gummy company now to be on the pp.

Next on the to do list. Excellent. Well, thank you very much for taking the time and of course for folks that want to keep in touch, you can go to discopossepodcast.com. We’re actually ramping up the site. I’ve just moved stuff over, of course, it’s on my blog. But please do go into iTunes and give us a rating and a review. Every star rating is a bonus. If you like it, five glorious stars is great, if you don’t, be honest and please do reach out.

You can always find me, I’m on Twitter, I’m @discoposse. DMS are open, so if you want to slide up into DMS, I welcome all feedback. Kristin, thank you very much for spending the time and looking forward to seeing what’s coming up next for you and the team.

Thank you so much, Eric. I really appreciate this time. Thank you.

Photo by Med Badr Chemmaoui on Unsplash