The Bootstrapped Founder

Arvid Kahl
Hello everyone and welcome to The Bootstrapped Founder. Today, I'm talking to Laura Elizabeth. She co-hosts the Non-Tech Founders' Podcast and runs several products as a non technical founder. We will talk about outsourcing, building trust and building an audience around your business. Here's Laura. So you're co hosting the Non-Tech Founders' Podcast. And that is something that I find amazing because in our developer centric, indie hackers community, I think there are far too few voices for the non technical founders. And I am glad you're doing this. And I'm glad you're talking about these topics. Is it hard for a non technical founder to even like communicate to technical people? How do you find this like, has this been something that has been troubling you before that caused you to start this podcast?

Laura Elizabeth
Sort of yes or no. So I feel like most people I know in this space are developers. And I don't know if that's just luck, or if that's just how it is, or if there's just more developers who were, you know, building software products, more indie kind of software product, so. And that there wasn't really many people like me who didn't have that technical knowledge that was building something. So my friend, Nathan, I think we became friends because we were like the only people that we know, who aren't developers doing something like this. So we thought, presumably there are other people who aren't developers that want to do what we're doing. So it would be really good to be able to talk to them. But also, I feel like it's really helpful to developers because we're not gonna be talking about things that typical developer podcasts are gonna be talking about. We're not gonna be focusing on the technology as such and all that kind of stuff. So we're gonna be talking more about marketing and design and all that kind of stuff. So I feel like it could speak to a lot of different people. It's really early days with it though so it's hard to know, you know, I feel like we're still finding our feet with it. But I'm optimistic.

Arvid Kahl
Well, I think you can be because I listened to the podcast, a couple episodes. And it's really nice. It's actually quite a breath of fresh air in a field where people quite quickly derail into these kinds of tech SEC conversations where they are, oh, JavaScript, Python, whatnot, right? Where you as a listener, if you're technical, it's not even interesting for technical people to listen to. Because it's just, you know, these kind of in fights between technologists where they have their preferences and they just argue pointlessly about the benefits of a particular technology, where all the benefits of this tech are usually in how you apply it to the problem. And if it fits, right? So it's these weird kind of almost religion style conversations that people are having. And I found none of these in the non tech founders podcast. So I'm really, really glad that you're doing this. Do you feel this is benefiting you on a business level to have somebody to talk to that is coming from the same background as you are?

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, I think so. I think I tend to, I'm very so low in what I do. So I don't talk to many people to be honest, day to day. And it's actually been really nice being able to speak to someone every week. So the episodes come out every two weeks, but we talk every week. So we've got a bit of a backlog about what's going on and what's going on with him, what's going on with me. And I find it's quite motivating. Because well first off, because I get new ideas. So he's given me some ideas of things that I've been noodling around with in my head. But secondly, there's the accountability aspect. So if I show up every single week with the same problem that I'm having over and over again and I haven't fixed it yet, it's a little bit embarrassing. So it kind of pushes me to have a different update. Because, you know, I'm thinking about, oh, what am I gonna update this week? Well, I actually haven't done anything different. And then it makes me think, well, why haven't I why? What have I actually been doing and stuff like that? So I do think it's helpful. It's kind of like a mastermind, in a way.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah, it's an interesting accountability setup, right? You kind of force yourself to show up and you force yourself to have something to provide. It kind of reminds me of and that's one thing that I see a lot in like solopreneurs, like imitating things that they would do in the bigger team, or building structures that are similar to what they would be doing if they were employed. You know, like, if you have any programming environment, you have these sprint meetings. And you have like retrospectives, where you look into what you've done, what you're gonna be doing. You're gonna estimate how long it will take. You don't really have that if you're a solopreneur or in any regard, if you run your own business, you have nobody that will tell you how long this should be taking other than yourself. So it's really nice to have somebody to talk to about this. I've seen this work for a lot of people. That is really interesting. With Nathan being a non technical founder as well, do you sometimes wish there would be more technical insight into your stuff? I'm not saying this is a bad idea for one non tech founder to talk to other non tech founder. But do you get some kind of technical insight from other sources into your, you know, the decision making process that you have to be doing for your business?

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, so I'm quite lucky. So my husband is a developer and he has his own software stuff. So if I ever have a question, I can go to him. But I also have a developer who obviously builds client portals. So my product is a, it's a WordPress plugin. I don't build it myself, because I can't. So I have a developer who's been with me from the start. And she's great. I really feel like I just struggled with her because she thinks of everything. She, I go to her if I have any things that I can't figure out. And she always has, in my opinion, the correct answer. So I've got those two people, which is quite good. And also my audience is very developer heavy. So I also teach a design course for developers. And I got to know a few people on the course. And I know that if I ever really needed some different opinions, I could go there. I tend not to though, because I find, if you ask if I ask a developer, or multiple developers the same question, they're gonna give me completely different answers. And I'm gonna get so confused. I like to just ask one person a question and just get feedback that way. Because anytime I've like, let it out to a few different developers, kind of like what we were talking about earlier. They tend to, there may be a bit of like fighting internally, which is the right way. Oh, no, he's so stupid. This is shouldn't be this way. And because I don't know. So I'm like, gosh, who do I go with? And, yeah, it gets a bit overwhelming. So I tend to just take the tech stuff. And I just, I don't think about it to be honest. Because I've, and I am lucky, because I can do that. Because I've got such a good developer on my team already.

Arvid Kahl
Oh, that's really cool. Well, I'm really happy for you to have found this person. Because I think that is hard. I mean, it's not hard to find a developer. And it's probably not even hard to find a good developer. But finding a developer that is good and you can trust, that makes decisions like not because they think they're right. But because they understand the good for you. That's a pretty lucky situation to be in. How did you develop that trust with her? Because I feel that is probably the hardest part for any tech, non tech relationship is to establish this baseline trust. How did that work for you?

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, so I hired her back when I think five or six years ago, when Client Portal was just an idea. And I needed someone to develop the product. And I put some feelers out. I said, what I was looking for. I got loads of responses. I got prices. I got everything. But she was the first one who connected with me more personally, and had said, oh, hey, you know, I've actually been following you for quite a while. I really liked this, this and this that you've done. And she, you know, just you could tell that she knew a little bit about me. And she wasn't just jumping to like the project and what she would do specifically. And there was just something about her that I thought, okay, that's just a bit different. So you always remember the people that are a bit different. And my gut just told me just to go with her. And what I really liked about her is that she doesn't jump on new things too quickly so she doesn't always want to change everything. She's somewhat cautious. If something biggest kind of coming, she will research it. And only do it with Client Portal, if she feels like it's at a point where it's stable enough and it's not gonna cause any problems. Some developers I know can be a bit quick to jump from thing to thing to thing, and then they have to backtrack and it's just a bit messy and confusing. That works with me. I think some people might like that. But it was just to be honest with hiring her, it was honestly, a bit of luck. I just trusted my gut and it was right. And it's just been that way ever since. So I feel like it was a little bit of a fluke in that respect. I don't know if I could recreate it.

Yeah, it sounds hard to kind of generalize this as advice for people. But where did you find her? Was there a particular place you went to?

Well, we were both in a Slack group for freelancers because before I did Client Portal, I ran a service based business. And yeah, we were both in the same slack group and I posted the job in there. And yeah, I found her through that. So I didn't do any job boards or anything like that. If I were to do it again today, I'd probably do a similar thing to be honest and just see what networks I'm currently part of and reach out there and see what comes back.

Arvid Kahl
I had the exact same experience, like from a business owner perspective. I'm a software engineer, right? So I wasn't on Elixir, which is a programming language slack group somewhere. And when we sold our business, my girlfriend and I, Feedback Panda the business that we built together and then sold a couple years ago. We needed to find a replacement for both of our roles. So she was to see all of the business. So she needed to find somebody to take over her responsibilities. And she found someone and I needed to find a technical person to take over mine. And I went to my slack group, my elixir slack. And there were a couple of guys that are, well, yeah, it was actually just a couple of guys. So we have the whole gender imbalance thing there. But you know, it was just a couple people in the group that were interested because I posted the job there first, and we had a conversation with like, 10 of them. And the one that was the best match ended up to be from that slack group as well. So what this tells me your experience now and my experience, or I guess your experience was prior to mind, but both of them suggest to me that if you wanna find the right people to hire you and you wanna find the right people to hire, just be in communities where people care about the stuff that they do, right? Yeah,

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, exactly.

Arvid Kahl
It sounds a lot like an audience centric approach to finding clients, customers or employees.

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, because if you're both a member of the same community, you're automatically going to have something in common, whether it's ideologies or whatever that specific community brings and why you chose it and why you participate in that one over other ones. You might not even know the reasons yourself, but you know, you're just gonna naturally prefer some to others. So there's already a bit of similarities there, which you don't get when you try marketplaces like Upwork or something like that.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah, that's true. That's this kind of pre established, like lukewarm connection, right? You may not have chatted much, but you know each other. You know that you're both in there, you know. You have some sort of alignment to begin with. It's kind of like at a party, when you wanna talk to somebody and they're standing next to your friend. You have a prior connection. So that makes it much easier to just engage each other. Yeah, that is so cool. And it strikes me as something that I always had trouble with, that the first thing that you did was to hire somebody, look for somebody to do work for you that you don't, we're not at that point capable of doing yourself. Because in my engineering mindset, I could do everything. That's kind of what we've been taught in school and you know, university and stuff, or even just on the job that we were doing, what I was doing when I started in the industry, as a coder. You can learn everything, just try to do everything. That is not the same for a non technical founder, I would assume, so. Did you make that choice like initially, from the beginning that you would hire as soon as possible? Or did you dabble in I don't know, no code or trying to do some stuff for yourself to set up the thing that you wanted to build?

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, so back then I don't know if no code was really much of a thing.

Arvid Kahl
Right

Laura Elizabeth
So it was, I feel like it's fairly new. So that wasn't an option. But I think even if it was, well, I don't know, to be honest. I think if I could have maybe got something together myself, I probably would have done it that way as well, with the same mentality. Well, if I can do it, I should do it. I get to learn about it. It's my product. No one else will understand it the way I do and all that kind of stuff. In the same way, I am a designer by trade. And I don't hire designers because I can do it myself. Maybe I should hire designers. But it would be really hard. It would be so difficult because I would want it done this way. And if a designer does it slightly differently, I think why are you doing it that way? That's clearly wrong. I'm clearly right. And so I would have not hired if I could have done this myself. But I'm so looking back, I'm so glad I did. I'm so glad I had to because I think for non technical founder, it's a lot harder to get started. Because you need a bit of investment, whether it's you know, something like tiny seed or whether you do what I did, which is I pre sold the product, kind of like a Kickstarter type thing. And you need and you have the risk of having to pay someone to build it, which is kind of scary. But once you've done that and once you've got some traction and once it's going, it's really nice not having to worry about the development of the product and not have to worry about support tickets and bugs and all that kind of stuff. Because that I think would be the problem for me. If I could have cobbled something together myself when someone had a problem, I wouldn't know how to help them. And it's really nice I can go away and do you know my marketing stuff, my design stuff or whatever else I'm doing. And I know that the product is being constantly worked on. And anyone who has a support ticket, I know that it's gonna be taken care of and I don't have to think about it. And I don't think I'd have been able to build Client Portal to where it is now if I was doing all of that myself because there's just not enough hours in the day. And the other thing is, I would have added so many more features than it has right now, which isn't a good thing.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah. Oh, no, that's the problem.

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, I'd have been there's so many things that I'm tempted to do. And I'm like, well, I can't so I don't, that's actually a blessing in disguise.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah, that is so nice that you have the separation of concerns, like even separation of capacity and capability. That is super helpful. I think that is the bane of all indie hackers is their capacity to do everything kind of well enough that this has no limitation really. And no code probably makes this even worse for people who, oh, let's just slap this Savior integration in there as well. And then it becomes this candidness of a Frankenstein kind of product. Yeah. Interesting that your lack of immediate capacity to do it kept the product straightforward and specific. Since you started this whole thing, have you developed an interest in being able to do this? Or are you perfectly fine with somebody else doing this for you forever?

Laura Elizabeth
I am perfectly fine with somebody else doing it. I think, I honestly think it's just the best thing for me because I need to focus on the marketing side more than anything and talking to customers. I do have someone who handles my support, but I keep an eye on the inbox. And just so I know, like what people are thinking and all that kind of stuff. And that is a full time job in itself. You know, it's a lot of work. And yeah, I don't at one point, I did think gosh and sometimes I still do. I get these moments where I think, you know, I might think of like a new idea of something that might be really cool to build. And it kind of sucks that I can't just do it just to throw it out there and see if something sticks. That would be a really nice superpower to have. If I could keep this knowledge that okay, once you've just built that MVP and you've seen if it's gonna and you've got an idea whether it's gonna grow, then get rid of doing the development of it and get rid of doing the support as quickly as possible. If I could do that, then I would say yes, I would like the superpower of being a developer. I don't trust myself, though, because I think I just wanna keep doing it all myself.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah, it's quite alluring. It is really a superpower. I feel it kind of, to me being able to do everything is both awesome and frightening like both definitions of the word awesome, right? That is the

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah

Arvid Kahl
Good and the bad kind. Because if you are able of doing it, you kind of have to. Like it doesn't make fiscal sense to outsource this to somebody else if it just takes an hour of your time, right? It's like that's a problem. And very interesting. I'm super impressed by the fact that you can stay like this. You can say no, that's not for me. I'm a designer. I do these things well. I don't need to do everything. Because I'm certainly not the same way. And I always had trouble delegating work to somebody else that I could either do myself, or could learn how to do myself or thought I could learn, you know. How do you deal with this? Because you were just saying you wouldn't hire a designer? And I find this very relatable because that's how I felt for the longest time in terms of hiring a developer. Do you struggle with this right now? Are you at a point where you should be hiring somebody else but are not?

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, so what I sort of found a little bit of a middle ground with this. And I've been using one of those unlimited design services. And I think the one I use as many pixels and basically what they do is they get so I give them if I need something, I give them the content and what I need, and they've got all my brand assets there. And they pull together something and it's never honestly that polished. Like it's not I wouldn't really put it out there without me doing it. But I then take that and I tweak it and I make it more polished. And that's sort of working quite well for me because it just takes a bit of the time away from me designing. It just gets me, it gets the blank canvas thing out of the way. And I can tweak it. I can polish it and do all that. But that said, I do wonder if it makes sense for me to even be doing that. I don't know. I just I can't imagine. I can't imagine hiring a designer. I think it would be really hard to do and I love designing as well which is probably like you. You love doing all the different things that you do. It's not like it's a slog. It's enjoyable. And I love it when I get a day where I can just design, it's really nice. I've recently read on the Client Portal website. And I get so much joy every time I look at it now because I'm like I did that and I'm really proud of it. It looks really good. And it took a really long time. And I don't know how I'd feel if someone else did it. But yeah, I don't know. It's a difficult question because I don't know the answer to it.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah, I wish I knew the answer or anybody knew the answer to this. But I think it's really just a matter of like either experimenting with like delegating parts of it or experimenting with different modes of it. Because I very much relate to this, like for this podcast in particular. I still do all the editing myself. I do all the captioning myself. If there is stuff to caption and all the kind of the work on the administrative stuff. And as much as it's kind of boring to do these things, I still find a lot of enjoyment in this because you start with just a video. And you end up with a polished or somewhat polished video. And, you know, an accessibility angle to it where people can read it. So they don't have to listen and all of these things. That's wonderful. And I love doing this. And I have such a hard time giving this to somebody else. Because even I tried this a couple times before. I gave this stuff to somebody else. And there were mistakes. Mistakes that I wouldn't make. And I think you can relate to this as a designer, right? You see ah, that whitespace over there. That's just a little bit off, right? It's just a couple pixels or whatever it might be, but you see it. You feel it because you know what it should be like. And delegating both margin for error seems so hard. Like do you feel the same way?

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, I think the hard part is you wanna hire someone who's going to treat the podcast, like it's their own podcast, like it's their face and their voice on it. And they're the ones that are promoting it. So if they were doing it for themselves, then they maybe wouldn't make those mistakes. But because they're doing it for someone else, they're like, oh, that's good enough. They might not notice or something like that. So when you're doing it yourself you like you put so much more care and time and all this stuff into it. And I think that's what makes the biggest difference because it's so frustrating when you do hire something out and you get it back. And you then have to go through and say, can you change this? Or can you change that? Can you change that? I've noticed this. I've noticed that and you're frustrated because you think, how have you not noticed it? You surely must have. And I think yeah, I think that's really hard. It's sort of like we had someone come round. We wanted to get some shelves in our living room made. And we had a carpenter come round and have a look. And he was asking us, you know, what do you want? Do you want this? Or were just basically saying, what do you want? And we were saying we weren't really sure because we were like, you know, with this type of shelf look good. But should it be a floating shelf? Should it not be? And he was like whatever you want. Just do what you want. What do you want? And we said, well, if it was your house, what would you do? Like you're the professional you see this all the time. You should know everything about shelves and to advise me on what kind of shelves, looking at our space and what we've said we wanted, what should we do? But he wouldn't do that. And I find that with them. Other people you hire as well, you want. You want them to know everything about editing a podcast and be able to do all those things that you know you would do yourself. But that's the difficult part. And you can find those people like I think my developer is that person. I have a support person now who I've gone through loads of support people and the one I have now is super is just really thorough way more thorough than actually I was. And I'm so happy with it. So I think it's worth persevering with delegating because it really is important because you can only get so far doing everything yourself. And you never know what unexpected things might crop up in your life. So you might get sick, for example. You might wanna go on holiday. You might get burnt out. Anything could happen. And you want to know, that's not the time that you wanna be hiring. So you want to know that you've got enough in place that if any of those things should happen, everything will be okay. So I do think it's worth persevering with, if possible. But it's hard. It's the hardest thing I've done.

Arvid Kahl
Do you have any kind of standard operating procedures, some kind of internal documentation that makes this kind of process easier? Well, like once you have something to get the delegates to people.

Laura Elizabeth
Sort of. I've tried being super, like documenting everything. And sometimes that backfires on me because if you're really thorough with your documentation, then sometimes the people you hire will follow that to a tee. But they won't think for themselves at any point because they're so used to getting everything laid out for them. And so then if something crops up that is slightly out of what was written, they'll just say ask you and you'll have to you know write more documentation or something like that. So it can I found if you're too thorough with that, it can backfire. So I tend what I try to do now is I try to get the person I delegate to create their own document tation for them. So I'll give them, I'll say, you know, you can use Trello or a Google Doc or whatever you want, but I have to also be able to see it. And just put this in whatever format works for you. And that's part of their job. I'll also do things to help, you know, like, I'm really good with my email. I do a lot of saved replies. So I use HelpScout. And you can just have the little templated replies for a lot of the common questions. I write things down a lot. I take notes. It's nothing fancy, honestly, it's like a Google spreadsheet. And it looks hideous. It's horrible. But you can find things in it. And that's another thing that I do to help but yeah, I'm not overly processed with it at this point.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah, I guess that's also something you need to establish. And I've been, like, in our software service business, we established that at some point because we were just two people, my girlfriend and I, running the thing. We had a couple outside people doing content for the blog and stuff. But we had nobody inside the business. We had no customer service people like that was us. And for at the end was probably 5000 customers. But at the same time before we sold, that was a lot of work. So we had to establish this internal process, which then surprisingly, but also in a very good way made selling the business way easier. Because everything was already in place. Do you? And that's kind of what I wonder, like, do you intend to establish this over time? Or are you just gonna go with what works for people whatever they need?

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, I mean, we're, I definitely have more in place now than I did before. And I would honestly love to get to the stage where I had something in place. So if I hired someone, I could onboard them really well. And they could have everything they need. Yeah, I would absolutely love that. I don't feel like I'm very close to having that in all honesty. But I sort of get by whether I will or not, I don't know, because I am. I quite like being a small business. I didn't have many plans to grow too big. So these people that I'm talking about that I hired, they're not actually my employees. They're all contractors, which is the way I prefer it personally. Yeah, so I don't know, I might just keep it as it is. And because the problem is, sometimes when I've gone in like maybe use a new tool or something, I've spent so much time and it's not actually been worth it. And I still go back to just the really basic stuff that works, but isn't pretty. And it works for me but

Arvid Kahl
I just had this thought too like when you were talking about your hideous Google spreadsheet is like my thought was oh, there's probably a software as a service business out there doing exactly this for you. But that was like, ah, come on, like, you're gonna integrate yet another solution into an existing workflow. Like, is that that important to you? Apparently not. So at least not at this point. That's the thing. And I like what you were saying, because of the it's kind of spicy if you think about it the whole I wanna keep it small. That's why I don't put a lot of structure into it. That's how I hear it. It's not what you necessarily said. But it's kind of the underlying, the undercurrent of this phrase that you just said. And I wonder, do you think this might be a self limiting thought here? That small means unorganized?

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, quite possibly. It's probably an excuse to be honest, more than anything. But yeah, I don't know. There it is. I've, I do struggle with time at the moment. And so I have like way too many things going on. I think we were talking about it on Twitter earlier, but yeah, too much things going on. And I actually love being organized usually. I'm usually quite an organized person, like in my personal life. And well, actually, compared to some people, I am super organized. But yeah, I think it probably is a bit self limiting. And there's no reason I couldn't be a small business that just runs things really smoothly. And I think to be honest, if I ever wanted to get to the stage, which I do, where I would be doing even less than my business and delegating more. I think I do need to have some more processes and some more just well maintained documentation in place. When will that happen though? I'm not sure.

Arvid Kahl
I feel the exact same way because I didn't wanna put you on the spot. It's more or less, I feel the same way. And I had these thoughts and I just wanted to share them with you because I feel that I'm limiting myself as well. Because I also want a lifestyle business right and lifestyle doesn't necessarily mean an organized. Lifestyle just means the way I want it. And if I want it small yet well organized that is also a lifestyle business. And I think that that would be perfectly fine, right? It's just kind of how we phrase things. How we talk about things is how they end up being in reality. So yeah I just wanted to share my own reservations. It's comforting to know that I'm not the only one having these kind of issues, to be honest.

Laura Elizabeth
Definitely not. And it always feels like you are the only one. It seems like everyone else is way more put together. But then I had people talk to me and they say, gosh, you're so organized. How do you manage it? And I'm thinking, spend a day with me, you'll see.

Arvid Kahl
I think this is becoming more and more obvious as people are building in public and sharing their journeys because you can see kind of that there are cracks in the veneer of everything is going great. Which there should be, there should not be this veneer, right? There shouldn't be just a surface anyway. But it's nice to see that more and more people choose to be more vulnerable and showing mistakes that they make. And the fact that they are to a certain degree not optimally running their business. It's just reality for everyone out there, which is why it's kind of why I'm putting this into this conversation so much because I feel if people notice that, oh, yeah, everyone is struggling, then their struggle becomes less of a you know, aimless wandering and more of okay, this is apparently how it is. Fine, let's just keep doing what we're doing, right? Let's just keep going. Let's just keep trying to find a solution to this, even if it's an ugly Google spreadsheet or just a Notion document that you kind of share back and forth and people edit and comment. If that's enough for you at this point, then that's perfectly fine, right? That you seem to be running a business that is doing well enough. And mine is doing good too. So can't be that bad. It's kind of how I feel. It's just balances the perception out there.

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, and I do speak to a lot of people actually, who are trying to start their own businesses. And sometimes being super organized and polished, I would say is their fallback. Because they're putting everything together and their business as if they're running a much bigger company than they are. When bear in mind, they haven't started yet. So you know, all these things, you're not in a big software company. You don't need to do like we were talking about the stand up meetings and all the things that people in those companies do. But they're documenting it as if they are. And it, I can see that thought process in the sense that well, it's good to do it as you go. Because when you need it, it's gonna be there, which I think is definitely very true. But I think you can take it a little bit too far. Because as well, when you start to when your business starts to grow, your processes will just naturally change because you'll realize that you had it wrong, or you need to do this. Your ticketing system is in this software. And that doesn't work for you because of XYZ, so you need to move it to something that will work for you that you could never have known beforehand. So I think when you start out if you can be like as nimble as possible and open to change and maybe move a little bit faster, but then just try to somehow don't know how to just document the things that you're not gonna change. And I think that's easier said than done. I'm making it sound really easy but it's not. But I do you see a lot of people get stuck trying to perfect their processes before they move forward.

Yeah, some kind of procrastination at this point, too.

Yeah

Arvid Kahl
Because you're just like you're building process, but you're not building.

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah

Arvid Kahl
A little bit of a problem there. I find one approach that I've found work for me is to think of the process of how I deal with process as a process in itself. Like how am I going to approach documentation, right? Like, am I gonna document everything? Or is just a couple of bullet points and a link enough for now. And over time, with more people involved, well, it's not enough anymore. So I have to change my meta process. And that trickles down into the rest of all the documentation that you have. You start like making things more approachable for people who you need to onboard or for other people who give little tiny tasks that give them the opportunity to have a step by step for their specific tasks. But the general thing is still nebulous because it's more for me than for them. Like you change your process of how you deal with process over time. Again, sounds easy but change what does it mean? Like what is changing a process? In the end, it's a very unique thing, very specific to your unique situation that you're in. So yeah, I guess I don't have advice either. It's just I liked your nimble first approach because it just means you have more time to spend on actually doing the experiments that lead to more business success down the line instead of just

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah

Arvid Kahl
Wasting, it's documenting.

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, exactly. It's a difficult balance for sure.

Arvid Kahl
Like anything in business, right? The fact that you don't know the outcome before you see the outcome with everything you do. That kind of makes it hard and that's I think why people tracked into this, let's do the documentation first because that's something tangible. You know that in the end, you're gonna end up with documentation and you end up with really nice looking stuff. So you don't have to face the uncertainty of doing things that you're not sure if they're gonna work or not. And I think that for me and I don't wanna like, steal anything away from you here. But for me, that's why I don't hire because I don't know. I'm so afraid that there might be a mistake somewhere in me hiring a person that I'm not even gonna try and see if there might not be a mistake down the line. I think that's kind of why I'm so reluctant here.

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, that is really tough. It's just, it's the hardest thing because you have to like you said about you changing the process, but you have to time it right. You have to change it before you need to change it, if that makes any sense.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah

Laura Elizabeth
So if you are at the point where you've hired someone, but you don't have the things in place to hire them, which I've done before. I've hired someone when I've been desperate and I didn't have the processes in place. And I thought, well, I'm gonna do the processes. Now that I've hired them, I'm gonna start them and it didn't work. It was probably my worst hire that I've ever had because I hadn't done it before. So I needed to have done it just a little bit earlier. But not too early because if I did it too early, then half the things would have changed. And I'd have been redoing it. So it's just yeah, it's definitely the hardest thing. And I think especially if you're so low, it's even harder because you've got no one to bounce those ideas off. And you've got no one to give you different advice. And, you know, we were talking earlier about having the mastermind, which is actually a podcast. But just having someone to talk to about these things, I think is really helpful because they can maybe advise you, okay, I think you're not hiring because XYZ and I think you should do this because reason. And then yeah, it kind of gives you that extra push that you need.

Arvid Kahl
I think it's like I said, a great accountability tool. And I think the wonderful thing about a podcast is that you are doing this in front of other people. So if the potential not just to have somebody be your sounding board for ideas or your mirror if you need them to be or you know, the feedback generator that you need at that point to get motivation to do something, but you're also building an audience at the same time. And you building an audience from a place of authenticity and genuine vulnerability because everything you talk about where you're not sure gives people insight into your decision making process and how you approach not just winning but how you approach building and how you approach experimenting. And that I feel makes built such connection with people. And you've been an audience builder for a while. It's not the first time you dabble in creating a bigger audience around yourself. So let's kind of talk about that because I think audience building is on everybody's mind, right? Everybody and their dog is building an audience at that point, almost, quite literally if you go to Instagram. Has that been a choice that you consciously made when you went into the Non-Tech Founders' Podcast with Nathan, to build an audience around that particular aspect of yours?

Laura Elizabeth
So for me, it wasn't so much. I think for Nathan, it was more because he's starting more from scratch. So he went away for a while. And now he's building his audience again. I feel like I have an audience that I'm pretty okay with. It's growing steadily. For me, the reason that I'm doing it is a lot of it honestly, for fun because I've always wanted to do a podcast and to see where it takes us. If the audience growth happens, which I hope it does, that's can only be a benefit. But yeah, I basically started it more just to, just because I wanted to. It seemed like a good idea. But yeah, audience building is something that, that's how I got my start really because I was a freelancer before. And but I didn't really like freelancing that much because I didn't like the time, exchanging time for money kind of thing. I didn't really feel like I had a lifestyle business, which is what I wanted. And I was looking at people with products and courses and all that stuff. And I thought that looks more like what I want to do. But I didn't have anything to sell. And I always knew that if I even if I did have something to sell, who would I sell it to? So to me building an audience first was the more logical step. And you get people who disagree with that. Some people agree with it. Say audience first, absolutely. Some people say product first, absolutely. I think you can do kind of either. If you've got a great product idea or a great product or something to sell definitely start with that and build your audience. If you don't, I don't think there's any harm in building your audience first. The way I chose my audience was pretty simple. It was I mostly worked with developers. And I felt like I could talk to them quite well. I enjoyed talking to them. I had lots of developers around me. And I knew what struggles they had. So I knew that it was going to be around that. So I just went on lots of different podcasts that were targeting developers. I did guest posts mostly about design because that's what I knew about. And it was more like just to see where it would take me while I was doing my freelancing on the side. And that was really valuable because I could. I never really asked people what they wanted. Because I don't necessarily think that's the right way to go about things. And also, it's not their job to tell me what they want, it's my job to figure out what they could need. But I'd always like really analyze the things that they were saying to me and try to figure out where I could help. And then I started doing a design course for developers. And Client Portal ended up being this thing on the side that just came out of nowhere that I had made for myself. That my audience, I sort of shared it with my audience without any intention to sell it. And they were like, oh, wait, this is exactly what I need. And I thought, oh, wow. Okay, that was a bit of a stroke of luck. But if I hadn't had that audience already, I wouldn't have known that. And I wouldn't have ended up selling Client Portal. So all these things kind of happened. And it seems like a lot of luck involved. And I always think that, wow, I got really lucky with this. And I say it all the time. Oh, I got really lucky with that. But I was doing things to increase the likelihood of that look happening. So I was always focused on building an audience. And if I were to go back, I think I would do the same again and just try to build an audience as soon as possible.

Arvid Kahl
Very much agreed. And I love that you bring up this opportunity to surface that the concept of like providing the fertile ground for luck to strike. That is something you can work on, right? You can't work on where the luck is gonna strike or when it's gonna strike. But you can open up the opportunities by just being present, by building relationships, building connection and that is what audience building is about. So I love that. I love the fact that you can phrase it that way. Because I was just gonna ask you because you mentioned luck a couple of times. That was exactly what I was gonna go for. Do you think you're making your own luck or you're providing a way for it to strike? But that is what you do by building an audience. And I wanna talk to you about guest posting because that is something that I've never done before. Because I've always had my own blog and I just post it there. But I wonder, would you still do this today? If you were to build an audience, would you still go into guest posting or yeah, would you do that?

Laura Elizabeth
I think so. So I don't know. I would definitely do it to try it. I don't know how blogs have changed. Because this was quite a long, it seems like quite a long time ago that I was doing guest posting. And I know I myself subscribed to a lot more blogs than I do now. And I would definitely do it again. And the reason is, I think guest posting actually was the thing that accelerated what I do now the most. Because what I did was I had my own blog and I'd write articles for it. And I wrote an article that I thought, oh, wow, this is really good. Humble, as always. And I thought I don't wanna just put this on my blog because I don't really have much of an audience like this is such a good article. This needs to go elsewhere. So I went to my favorite blog, which is the blog that I always wanted to be published on, which was Smashing Magazine at the time. And I just Googled Smashing Magazine, right for us to see if they even accepted guest posts. They did. And I submitted it to them. And I just forgot about it. And I thought, well, if they take it amazing. If they don't, I'll just publish it on my own. And maybe I can just get some traction myself manually. And they ended up really liking it and they published it and it ended up being their number one read article for like a year, a really, really long time. Like I had so many screenshots. I kept going back. It's not there anymore. This was years ago. But then from that, I then ended up speaking at different conferences so like smashing conference. I did a different guest post elsewhere on a website called SitePoint. And I got picked up from there. They liked my article to speak at a conference in London and then other conferences then picked me up from that and it was, it just sort of spiraled and guest posting out of everything that I did was the thing that launched it much faster than anything else. So I would definitely do it again. But again, I don't know how much it's changed. So it would be more of an experiment than anything.

Arvid Kahl
Well, I know that Smashing Magazine is still around, not so sure about SitePoint. But you know, that definitely is still there. I always read that like when probably when I started coding. I was very interested in the front end design phase of it as well so I was a regular reader of that too because they also had a great design on their own website, which was very indicative of their capacity to provide me with adequate design information. So yeah, I'm impressed that you got there and that you got such good results. The one thing that I'm impressed most with here is that you overcame your inner demon to actually submit it. I think that's the hardest part, like writing a great post is already hard. But then thinking that it is great and being humble, like you are and then still submitting it to somebody else, that I feel that is the hardest part at all. Can you take me to your internal monologue or your internal dialogue, I guess, and how you convinced yourself to actually submit it?

Laura Elizabeth
The way I managed to do this, and I've done it for other things that I felt like I am not good enough to do is I don't tell anyone that I'm doing it. And that makes me feel better. Because I'm like, if this doesn't happen, then nobody's then gonna ask me oh, hey, that thing that you were really excited about that you submitted? Did you get it? And I, because that's the worst part for me is having to say no and then feel a bit embarrassed. So I would submit it but I didn't tell anyone. And then I've done it other times at conferences that I've particularly wanted to speak out. And I don't tell anyone and that just makes me feel better. Because it's like, well, if it doesn't go the way I want, then I'm the only one who knows. But if you don't do it, then you'd never know. Like, it's worth a try. And to be honest, I tend to do it on more of a whim tends to be like in the evening for some reason. And I just think let's do it. And then I just do it really quickly. And then it's done. And I forget about it, honestly. And I really do forget that I did it. And that's definitely helped me.

Arvid Kahl
That's cool. That the fact that you know when in the day you're gonna have this energy level that you can actually do it. That's just being really smart about yourself, like knowing your body, knowing your physical state. I think we could all benefit from having a bit more introspection, understanding how we work and then leveraging that to get results like that, right? To overcome our inhibitions like silenced imposter syndrome for a minute, just to hit submit. I think that's

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah

Arvid Kahl
That level of just reflection, that is something you need to work on. That's a muscle almost, that you need to train. I think this is cool. I think this is, as much as it's antithetical to my build in public approach to everything, not talking about it until you get a result perfectly fine. If that works for you, if that allows you to do the thing that you need to do to make progress. Absolutely, okay. That is cool. Yeah, would you? Are you building your audience in different ways beyond the podcast at this point? And beyond that the guest posts that you probably still benefit from a little bit, right? Like, there's probably still some traffic coming in from these older things.

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, so it's changed a little bit now in that with Client Portals my main thing that I do and my audience comes mostly just straight from Google organic search. And it's because people are searching for specifically for a Client Portal for WordPress. And that's another stroke of luck that I had as I named it Client Portal, which was super lucky because apparently people were searching for that. Yeah. And there wasn't a lot of competition. There's more competition now. But I sort of

Arvid Kahl
That was not intentional? That was not an intentional choice?

Laura Elizabeth
No it was just, I had to sell it. You know, when I said earlier that I had this I mentioned this product and people said they wanted to buy it, I sort of jumped on that really quickly. And I didn't have time to think about a name. And I think if I had had time to think about a name, I would have named it something really cool but like not useful at all. I don't know like there'll be some four letter name that the domain would be really expensive. But I was like, It's like a it's a portal for your clients. It's Client Portal. And that's just how the name came about. And that ended up being like a really good, a really good name for it. And you know, I always I feel like my gut instinct can. And I think everyone's as well, not just mine, but I think your gut instinct if you listen to it and if you're in tune to it, it's right a lot of the time. If you don't overthink things. I think anytime I've overthought anything it's probably not completely true. But a lot of the time when I overthink it ends up not being as good as I would have thought. So yeah, that was really fortunate that I named it Client Portal, but yeah, so most of my traffic can now come straight from Google search. And I'm actually at this point, I'm having to pivot a little bit because I was originally targeting freelancers and agencies. But because it's not necessarily freelancers and agencies that are finding Client Portal, it's you know, law firms and accountants and marine biologists and furniture salesmen like all these different things. I'm in a little bit of a tricky stage now where I don't, I feel like I'm pivoting. But I don't exactly know what I'm gonna do next to continue to build my audience or even who my audience is anymore because my audiences now so many different people. So that's the struggle I have. I think I still focus on freelancers agencies and I still try to write. I still go on podcasts. I still do all that stuff that's historically worked for me. Because I enjoy talking to those people. And I feel like I can help them. I'm not sure how much I could help a law firm, to be honest, maybe a little bit with the project management side. But I've got experience in these other areas. So I feel like I can be helpful there. And I just sort of tried to stay on the radar somewhere just because I enjoy it. And I think that I should be. But yeah, it's an interesting time at the minute actually, for the audience building.

Arvid Kahl
It's super interesting. Like you have lawyers on the one side and marine biologists on the other one, so you have the coolest people and the least cool people. But that doesn't reflect on the actual product as well. Like, do you see this being problematic that you have so many very divergent audiences that might need different things from one product that you offer?

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, so it is difficult because a lot of the terminology that I use is for is speaking to freelancers and agencies. And it makes things difficult like if I have certain lead magnets, for example, to get people on my email list. They're targeting freelancers and agencies. And it's difficult to find something that could speak to everyone in the same way. So I'm sort of picking my top, the biggest five different industries that I've got and I'm gonna be trying to create different like email courses and different lead magnets and all this stuff, case studies for those different five. And I think the five that I've chosen are varied enough or different enough that other people outside of those industries could still benefit. It's gonna take a lot of time, though, to get all that set up because it's even just doing one industry is quite a lot of work. But that's my plan at the minute and then using website personalization to try to infer who they are and try to push them more down the route that I think they would most benefit from.

Arvid Kahl
I guess you have an expert for website personalization somewhere pretty close to you, right?

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, I should everyone says though, I should be much better at it than I am. Because I had people. I've had people like look at my website, not my new website, but my old website. And they're like, you know who you're married to, right? Like, why aren't you doing this? This is like the number one thing you should be doing. But yeah, it's kind of embarrassing how far behind I am with that. But that is my plan. And I'm very lucky that I have like a consultant on tap for that.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah, that I think it's a great approach. And that's I remember this from my own journey with the Feedback Panda, we kind of looked into it, but we decided against it because the market we were in was just exploding size wise. So we didn't need to look into alternative niches. But we had a couple on our radar. And we thought we would have to do all these things like build funnels for these specific people that are in a completely different medium than our online teacher said we were serving with our product, right? If you like nurses need documentation tool and Feedback Panda was a documentation tool. But nurses don't necessarily hang out in the closed community that our teachers hang out, right? We would have to go to Facebook or Instagram or whatnot and develop a whole new distribution channels or funnels for this. I don't envy you the work that is ahead of you. But I think it's awesome that you have understood where your potential customer segments are and that you're going after them. Like each of them with a specific approach. I think that is the way to have to funnel them to a product. There is no way that you can have one message that fits everybody. It's quite the opposite of what personalization is about, right? Like to think that you have this generic way of reaching people. So yeah, I really really liked this as an audience building move. That is a professional audience around your business, though. Who your personal audience like for you as a person. Are you gonna keep building that out as well in public? Or is it just business audience for you?

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah, so I think that's where I would be growing my audience really is like, I wanna. I do want to have a bit more of a personal brand, I just don't know. Because I have so many different things going on. And people know me from different places. It's all a little bit. It's all a little bit everywhere. So I'm not exactly sure at this point who I really want to target for my own personal brand. I think it tends to be freelancers, agencies, and still honestly, mostly developers, to be honest. But again, there's just so many different people. This is more difficult for me in a way, because I don't wanna leave anyone out. But like you said, you end up diluting the message if you talk to too many people at the same time. And then splitting things out is so much work. Like it's just if you don't do it right, you might as well have not done it at all, I think so. Yeah, my personal brand that is a little bit more tricky. And I'm not focused too much on it to be honest, other than doing the things that I'm already doing, you know, like, just staying, trying to connect with people. I'm staying, hopefully trying to stay relevant and that kind of thing. And I guess I'm kind of waiting for something to make sense. I feel like it well, I feel like there'll be some kind of answer as to what I do at some point. But yeah, right now I'm just kind of, I'm just enjoying it. And yeah, I've got that. I think, yeah, freelancers, agencies, developers, is sort of my niche I would say, for my personal brand.

Arvid Kahl
I think it's a fun niche where a lot of interesting things intersect. I'd like you as a founder, as a non tech founder too like playing that angle as well. It just everybody wants to have success doing the things that they do well. And I think you're a person that shows that with perseverance and setting up things that work for you, you can get there over time. And hey, even if you don't know right now what it is, I'm gonna be following you along the journey to see where you'll end up. And I think this is a great opportunity to just ask you, where can everybody else? People who are listening to this podcast follow you along that journey? Where would you like them to connect with you?

Laura Elizabeth
Yeah so I think the best place is probably Twitter. So that's where I spend most of my time online when I'm not working. So you can find me @laurium, which is LAURIUM. And if you wanna check out the Non-Tech Founders' Podcast, we're still early days, but we're just about to record a bunch of new episodes, you can find it. It's the nontechfounderspodcast.com. I think, feel like I should know that URL, but I don't. And, yeah, I'm really excited about that. Because actually, just to go back on my whole audience thing. The new set of people that I'm really enjoying talking to are people who want to do something similar to what I do, which is maybe go from services to products or like build a product business. I really enjoy talking about that things like audience building and seeing what people are up to and that kind of thing. So yeah, you can check out the podcast there. But yeah, just say hi on Twitter. I'm pretty, pretty personable.

Arvid Kahl
I recommend both following you on Twitter and subscribing to the podcast because I do both. And it's been quite an interesting journey. Like your podcast is amazing. It's in my rotation already, like my dog walking rotation where I take the puppy out and I listen to people talk about their problems. It's always interesting. So that is a great podcast. I hope that you get a lot of subscribers over the next couple of months and years, hopefully for a long, long time.

Laura Elizabeth
Thank you!

Arvid Kahl
So yeah, thank you so much for sharing everything you share today, sharing your journey, sharing your insights. That was really nice. And I wish you the very best. Thanks so much.

Laura Elizabeth
Cool. Thank you so much.

Arvid Kahl
And that's it for today. Thank you for listening to The Bootstrapped Founder. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl and you'll find my books and my Twitter course there as well. If you wanna support me on the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, get to the podcast in your podcast player of choice and leave a rating and a review by going to (http://ratethispodcast.com/founder). Any of this will help the show. So thank you very much for listening and have a wonderful day. Bye bye.