The Non-Tech Founders' Podcast

Laura: Hello, and welcome to the Non-Tech Founders podcast, fortnightly conversations about running a business as a non-technical founder. I'm Laura. And I'm Nathan. Join us as we navigate the developer dominated world of entrepreneurship, bootstrapping and beyond. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about risk versus reward.

So how much are you willing to risk to make? Idea or business work. Um, but first it's been quite a while since we've done an update on us. Do you wanna talk a little bit about, cause you've had a lot of stuff going on lately.

Nathan: What? You I've got too much stuff going on. . Way too much stuff going on. My stress levels have gone through the roof this week.

I was gonna use the word interesting. It hasn't been interesting. It's been a really hard week. Um, but yeah, I mean there has been some positive stuff. I was able to get my. Guest post out for feature flux. So I was debating whether to put the initial post up on, on the blog for feature flux, you know, and get content, draw people along so they can, you know, that kind of thing.

Start finding the, uh, the product. But then I thought, well, you know, it's kind of six of one and half dozen of the other at the moment. I think it's. So I think it's kind of irrelevant whether I, I try and increase my domain rating by, you know, guest posting out onto, uh, domains that have a, a decent rating or writing content on my blog as well.

So in this case, I chose to. Uh, sent out to a guest, uh, guest blog, which was, uh, it was good. I was, uh, I was happy with that and I was able to get the, the post done as well, like from one day to the next Nice. Which when I say from one day to the next, might sound like a long time, but we're talking, you know, maybe two or three hours in my previous writing life, we're talking.

Days and days and days of just umming and ing and coming back to it and being stumped and, uh, yeah. So that was, that was good. That was a good thing. Yeah.

Laura: That's really good. I would've chosen the guest post route too. It's, it's so, it's such a difficult question to know which one to do first, but Yeah.

Especially when you're first starting out. I think guest posting is more valuable

Nathan: for sure. Yeah, I mean the, I I actually , I, I kind of half cheated, so this was actually published on, on the new C blog cuz it was my easy in, wasn't it, you know, my, my ex ex co-founder. Um, and he said to me, oh great. Yeah. He said, you just need another 20 of these now and you'll be sorted.

Laura: Yeah. Well I, everyone has an unfair advantage. Everyone,

Nathan: of course. Yeah. Yeah. You've got, you've gotta use it. You've gotta use it where you've got it, you know? So that was, you'd be mad not to Completely. Yeah. What

Laura: about yourself? So I have, uh, well, I'm trying to think if I've had a stressful week. It's not actually been too bad.

I feel like I should have had a stressful week because I'm going away for basically the whole month tomorrow, uh, in two days. And usually I'm super stressed the week before I go. Um, but surprisingly, I'm not. Yeah, I feel like I should be, but I'm not. So it's been pretty good. I've, um, the big thing for me is I finally launched the redesigned homepage of client portal, I think, as we said in a different episode.

I started it in January. It's now November. Um, so I'm not sure when this will be live. Actually. Hopefully it'll still be November, but yeah, I. Really happy to get that launched. It's not the full website, so I haven't done a big promotion for it or anything because half the website is still using the old design, so it just looks odd.

It does. It's like, I try not to think about it because there's really, there's nothing I can do about it at this point. But no, I've done the homepage and the features page and the rest is sort of okay enough. But when I think about the website before, I'm like, even with that, this is just like a. It's just such a big improvement and I'm, it's too early to tell, but I think it's already increasing sales, but I don't know because it's, hasn't been that long.

It's only been a few weeks. Mm-hmm. and

Nathan: I, some have, have you seen an, have you seen an upturn in in sales?

Laura: Yeah, but the thing is, it. It happens quite a lot. So I get these little bursts of, um, random things when like, I get good weeks, good weeks, bad weeks, you know, that kind of thing. So it might just that nice to the podcast

Yeah, it could be anything. I mean, it's, yeah, like I say, it's too early to tell. I've written down the, I've got the date, what the redesign went live, the date of the first podcast, which is actually, is fairly similar, but yeah, it will be, I'm gonna. A few months to really see, but I'm really optimistic. I think it's, I think it's going to do really well, so I'm so happy about that, and I think that's probably why I'm not so stressed about going away, because the really, really important thing was getting that live.

And it's live and it works, and

Nathan: yeah. That's awesome though. It's awesome that you have that confidence as well and that like, I really think it's gonna do really well. I think it's, you know, a really positive thing because oftentimes, you know, when we release something or we publish something, we are always like, oh, I dunno.

Is is, you know, are people gonna like it? You know, is, is is this gonna work? So that's awesome to hear that you're confident in that. Yeah,

Laura: it's, it's a nice feeling. I think it's partly because the old website was just, Dated, and I'm not changing, I'm not drastically changing the messaging. So I'd already changed the copy on the old website a long time ago.

Um, so I, like, I think I said before, I had a copywriter come in and do a review of the copy, and I made all these changes. So the copy's been live for a while, so I had chance to see whether that was gonna work or not. And, um, you know, it's, it didn't seem to change an awful lot to be honest, but it did. The copy changes that were made has decreased the amount of people who are confused about what client portal.

Which is really good. So it's less email support. Um, so really it's just the design that's changed and, um, so I'm not too worried because it's definitely better. Like, I don't think there's anyone who would say, it doesn't look as good as the old one.

Nathan: I know it looks amazing. I, and I said to you, it really, really, I mean, I'm quite jealous.

It looks really, really good. Sorry. You've

Laura: done a really good job. I like it. I like going onto the website and being like, yes. Now when someone asks me what I do and I say, you know, you Google client portal, it'll come up. I, I'm not embarrassed anymore about the website, which is huge, so I'm very happy.

Nathan: Cool. Yeah. I've got an, I've got one more thing to, to comment about, to talk about really before we dive into this week's, uh, topic. So when you were doing more freelance, Typically, would your clients, uh, be aware that they needed your service services before they found you? Like did they know that they needed, you know, a redesign that their work, you know, their website wasn't particularly great or,

Laura: yeah, I think they, people always came to me asking for a website redesign.

Nathan: Yeah. Yeah. They were aware of the problem. Yeah, so something that has kind of been brought to my attention this week after I'm in, um, a private Slack group, uh, that I've been in for a few years, and there's, there's loads of really great people in there and they've been really helping me out this week as, uh, I try and sort of carve an immediate future out for myself.

Um, and one of the things that somebody pointed out, in fact, again, it was Michelle Hanson from Deploy Empathy, um, said that most people. Uh, a lot of people, a lot of businesses don't even know what UX is, and even worse than that is that they don't typically know they have a problem. Um, typically a, a business needs to get to a really, um, to a really high point of growth after many years when.

Things might possibly start collapsing in on them from a, from a usability point of view. You know, when they start tacking on features and just adding this feature and that feature, um, so many businesses aren't aware that they even have a problem. So I found myself in this continual, um, loop of, I'm almost having to educate people about the fact that they even have a problem.

And from a freelance consulting point of view, that is just death. Because if you think about most of the UX roles in SaaS businesses, they're all full time and they're all full time for a reason because they are there from the beginning. You know, it's to design a system from the beginning and it's there.

It's probably a joint role, UX and ui. You know, we're always so often grouped into one designer, but I think surviving as a freelance UX consultant is very hard because, uh, like I said, there is that there is that issue. Like most people don't even realize they have a problem, uh, or not considered enough of a a problem.

So I've definitely had to have a bit of a think this week about what I'm gonna do moving forward, um, with regards to freelance consulting work. So have you had any

Laura: idea.

Nathan: Yeah, I had a couple. So one of the things that was suggested was that, so while UX isn't necessarily something that people are aware of, um, accessibility, uh, which is obviously closely related, is something that's gaining more and more traction and especially as the laws have been changing and the us uh, the EU in Australia.

So more and more businesses are, are now being sued, um, in federal courts in the US I think in, in. 2020, there were nearly 11,000 businesses that were sued just because of, uh, lack of accessibility, compliance. And in 2021 there were, I was a 14% increase on that. So these are things that people, whether they're aware of or not, are gonna be are gonna be made to be aware of.

So I think it's, I'm looking into it at the moment, I'm doing some research and, and trying to see what the, what the exact laws are around it and the compliance needs, and then also trying to gauge whether. Again, people are even aware of these things. Um, it's difficult, but I think it seems potentially like an easier sell than, uh, than ux.

Yeah. I need to do a lot of.

Laura: Yeah, I can see that. And it's, it, it's all types of companies that will need that. I mean, every company really

Nathan: any, any, all ones, any private or public facing software business, but they have a website or an app. They're all in the, um, what's the word? In, in the target, you know?

Yeah. They're all up for potentially having problems, um, because it's is, um, terms is discrimination obviously. So, so you've got

Laura: options. Options. You can go low touch high volume, or you can go high touch, low volume or a mixture of.

Nathan: I think, yeah, it's, it's gonna be interesting. Like I said, I literally just the last two days started researching the whole thing, so I just need to see what needs to be done there.

And then, yeah, this, uh, the UX thing has been a challenge. It really has been, as a freelance consultant is a challenge.

Laura: Yeah, it is difficult cuz yeah, you don't wanna have to be educating and then selling, it's too much. The only option is potentially retainer based work where you're doing, actually a company I know is doing, they've highly consulting agency to get their app into Figma, like, Reusable components cuz Figma is pretty advanced with what you can do.

Yeah, it's actually crazy. I didn't realize how advanced it was. Um, but they're getting everything into there and then using a retainer to just make these small UX changes constantly because they can't do, you know, Big redesigns because that's gonna throw off all their users. It needs to be small changes that are done incre.

Yeah. So I think with ux, like you say, people work for these companies full time and there's a reason for, that's cuz it, it's not just a one and done. Hey, your UX is fixed. Magic

Nathan: wand, typically. Yeah. Yeah. The businesses that are doing it well or it's ongoing, obviously. And as I mention. Mostly, unless you're in a seriously big business, they do tend to mix the roles all up, you know?

So UX and UI generally tend to be sort of lumped together. So, oh, one thing as well, I got my first bit of code back from the MVP for feature flu, so Wow. You can now, you can now create an account. You can log in , you can invite team. And that's it. So . Cool. . Yeah. So I was super excited about

Laura: that. Oh, that is exciting.

Wow. Yeah, that's usually the stuff that's like, oh, oh crap, I forgot to do the account. Stuff like that. You on the end

Nathan: completely. And even stuff is, stuff has even come up already, like. I hadn't done a, a logout hadn't done a sign out. Yeah. Because I thought mvp, you know, the sign out. And he was like, well, you probably need the sign out.

So, yeah. That's So he's really been very,

Laura: yeah. Completely the amount of SaaS website I've seen who forget to put a log on their website and they're like, and then they get people email, Hey, how do I log in? You're like, oh, yeah,

Nathan: yeah, yeah. But you see that a lot. Yeah. See that a lot. Oh, well,

Laura: congrats. That's, Yeah, thanks.

Fighting.

Nathan: You've got a lot going on. That sounds good to finally, I've got a lot going on. I've got too much going on. I've got too much worry going on, is what I've got. But, um, I so slowly sifting my way through it, I think.

Laura: Cool. Well, let's, uh, it's kind of a good segue really into what we're talking about today, risk versus reward because you are in the situation where you are trying to.

How much you can, yeah, how much to risk and how much potential reward and which route to go down completely. Yeah. So how are you finding that? So with all your different, you are basically, Back to square one at the minute. You um,

Nathan: I've got loads of square ones going on at

Laura: the minute. . Yeah. But is like, so all these different things that you're doing with the freelance work with feature flus, would you consider some are more high risk than others, or some are potentially high reward?

How are you deciding why are you doing so many different things?

Nathan: Why am I doing so many things? That's a very good. Probably, I dunno, maybe you should talk to my therapist. I don't know. But, um, so I think the reason there are so many fronts open at the moment is I have been very prone to the excitement of a new project and thinking that there is always a possibility for something to work forward, to work towards.

So that's, that's one real, real reason. The other one as well is that as I've begin to move forward as I, as I have moved forward and seen now with the UX thing, I mean I, I've been doing the UX thing for ages, but. It's, it's now what I'm trying to go full time again on, on freelance is that I'm seeing that, you know, there are potential issues.

So I could keep flogging myself with the UX thing and I could keep pushing the book even, and I could keep doing all these things, but if it's not gonna move me forward, I'm just wasting more and more time. And as I think I mentioned on the previous podcast, I mean, I have a very serious deadline of April to get money coming in.

Um, so, you know, does it make sense for me. Beating away on, on the UX drum when most people, you know, are not even aware that they have an issue. I don't have time to educate and for them to be able to bring them in, you know? So I think I am definitely treating them differently, but it's good now that I'm at the point that I'm able to put some kind of limit on them, you know, because maybe in the past I would not necessarily put a limit on it.

So, for example, now with this accessibility thing, I've said to myself that I'm, and I'm being very strict with this now. I'm given myself. So I started researching yesterday. I'm given myself until the end of tomorrow to see whether there's anything here. And then if I decide there is, then from next week I can start basically trying to morph what I already have.

So that's, you know, the, the freelance portfolio, uh, and the book and the course all into one. This is Nathan and this is what he can do, kind. because, and there are definite, there's definitely a value to having separate properties. And I know that you've done this and you've seen value in that, but I think in this particular instance, I think I need to somehow solidify and for people to be able to say, okay, this is, this is Nathan and this is what he can do.

And these are all different areas. And look, yes, he does have expertise in, in UX and writing the book and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, it's gone to the point now where I need, need to make a decision. The reward versus the risk of everything they've put into it so far is kind of hasn't balanced out.

So,

Laura: okay. So you've got feature flu, you've got freelancing, and then I'm gonna put your book and courses separate to that. So you've got these three different things, right? That's correct, yeah. Yeah. Do you see, out of those three, which do you think would, has the potential to have the biggest.

Nathan: Yeah, so I, I think the biggest upside or the biggest place to see a reward would definitely be on feature flu because getting a SaaS to a point of, uh, what's the word to a point of where it is, uh, profitable and, you know, growing, then I think that's an amazing place to be.

Whether that is. You know that that could be different for everyone. We could be talking five grand a month, 10, 20, 50, or you know, it could just go crazy and it could, could grow into something completely unexpected. Yeah. So of course the, the risk is also bigger as

Laura: well. . Well, that's what I'm getting at. So you, I would say, so for you, feature looks, has the biggest potential reward probably followed by booking course.

Followed by freelancing. Right? Yeah. And then the risk, would you say that mirrored, so the highest risk is also feature flu. The second highest risk is the book, and the third highest risk is the freelance?

Nathan: I think so, yeah, because I can pretty much say that. Okay. Well the, even though the out the, the risk of the freelancing not working out is, is very high as well.

But I think that's probably quite a unique situation as well. It's more a time thing. You know, I'm, I'm investing time in the freelancing in trying. create something for myself trying to generate business. It's time I'm investing in the book, you know, but I'm actually financially invest investing and heavily investing in, in, in feature flu.

You know, it's not a cheap thing to get an MVP built these days, and even if it is successful, should we say in air quotes as an mvp. It's not gonna stop there. It's need to have continual development. So that means the costs will be ongoing as I'm a non-tech founder and I don't have a technical co-founder.

So it's all, there's a lot of risk there. A lot. I mean, there's a lot of risk there in in, in every sense. You know, it could completely fail and it, and it's taken all my savings, which is. Which it will do. So by the time MVP is finished, it will have emptied my bank .

Laura: So how are you, how are you setting, how are you managing that?

Are you setting limits on, okay, if feature flu, if it's by this date and fleet flu isn't at this much, I'm killing it and or your other stuff? Or are you just. Waiting and just seeing what happens.

Nathan: I've been very prudent with the whole feature flux thing so far with regards to research and making sure that there is a problem and that there's a need, et cetera, all that good stuff.

It hasn't gone past MVP unfortunately. That kind of analytical thinking, so, which it should be, obviously, because I need to, I need to be planning for that very near future. Getting actually people in there to start testing it as soon as it's in a place to be tested. And then from there, continue to bring in potential customers because it obviously, it doesn't make anything, then I need to think about it.

So it's not something that I've put a plan in place for, like I need to have. You know, XR or X number of customers by a particular date? I probably should, but I, to be honest, I haven't been able to think that far forward. Yeah, I need to, I need to think about that because obviously I can't just, you know, invest and invest and invest and, and see that there, there is nothing, uh, on the horizon.

It's a

Laura: difficult topic really because I found when I was launching client portal and really everything. Done that has been successful? Well, I'd say pretty much everything I've done that I'm proud of, I've done and released really quickly and been okay with the fact that it might fail. But I would say I'm actually not.

I'm very conservative in the amount I want to risk, so I always want to make sure I have enough income coming. That I'll be fine. My expenses, I try and keep my expenses fairly low, which allows me to then take risks and I don't feel like I'm taking as big a risk. It's obviously the risk for me is more the risk of feeling like a failure rather than the risk of not being able to pay my bills.

So that works for me cuz I'm very risk averse. I do not like taking risk, but I sort of think as an entrepreneur, a business owner, you have to take risks because if you didn't. Everyone would be doing it. You know, if it was like, if it was just guaranteed you do this 10 steps and you will be rewarded with all this stuff, yeah, everyone would do it.

But you have to take a risk and be willing for it to fail. So for me, my baseline has always been make sure I'm okay, make sure I can afford, you know, it bills and stuff and that makes me a better product owner, sales person. I don't know what, how I would. because I'm not desperate for this to work. It's more of a, I really want this to work because I wanna feel good about myself.

Not really. What a nice place to be. Well, exactly. But it's, yeah, it's a place that I've always made sure I was in. So. So

Nathan: what about when you, because you, obviously you hired a developer for client portal, cuz I, you mentioned, I think that you had originally done the HTML template yourself, right? Mm-hmm. . But then you need to obviously take it further and turn into a business.

Was client portal already profitable when, when you hired the, your develop.

Laura: Yeah. Um, but there was a little bit of risk involved there because I pre-sold client portal and said, the reason I'm pre-selling this is this HTML template that really you can have, but it's not very usable. You're probably not gonna want to use it, is because I want to raise money to hire a developer to help me build this product cuz I can't do it myself.

And that was a really good selling point because I did it for. Super low price. I think it was, I don't know how much it was. It might have been $99. It might have even been less. I'm not really sure how much it was for life that funded the developer. The risk there was if I had like three sales, that wouldn't pay for the developer and I would have to make that choice as to whether to take money out of my savings.

And pay for the developer. If I really believed that the product would go far or kill it and refund people, which would be embarrassing, really. There would be no issue in refunding people. But it would just be really embarrassing.

Nathan: Have to do that. So did you have a, uh, a predefined budget then had the developer told you, well, it's gonna cost you X so therefore you knew that if you were able to pre-sale this amount, then you were pretty much safe and covered,

Laura: or, I don't think I did, but only because I had to sell it very quickly because it was Black Friday in like three days.

So I had to. Go for it and hope. Really just hope for the best. However, if it wasn't that, if that wasn't the case, I would have tried to get a price for it beforehand, just so I know what I'm up against. Cuz that was a little bit scary for me. But it was a simple product, so I knew that it wasn't gonna be a crazy amount of money.

It wasn't a SAS product, it's, it was a WordPress plugin, I think. And it was a simple one at that, like I didn't. A ton of like account management. I just used easy digital downloads and that kind of stuff. So I knew it wouldn't be, I knew it wouldn't break the

Nathan: bank. Yeah, and I think what you're saying as well that you know, if you do have enough money coming in from other services and whether that's consulting or other products, then I think that risk level or that perception of risk can, can.

Decreased significantly, I think because like you said, you, you're covered, you know, you're not gonna, you're not gonna lose the house, you're not gonna be you, you know, you're not gonna be, uh, having problems, paying bills and stuff like that. So I think it is, it is obviously a good place to be. There's obviously a better place to be and I think my situation would change as well if I can, you know, get the consulting thing to a place where I'm.

Where I'm happy. Yeah. Then I think that would also, that would also change the risk reward concept with, with feature flu as well. So I think it's dependent on, on where you are financially, and I think probably why funding on, particularly on SaaS businesses is such a, such a big thing. You know, so many people want funding and I can.

I can, I can understand that now. You know, I mean, previously with Newi, it was something that I was No, no, no, no. Bootstrap, bootstrapped, we , you know, we're not interested in this world. We are solopreneurs, you know, bootstrap founders, blah, blah, blah. But I can definitely understand, you know, why so many people want to go down that route, because there is risk to that, obviously.

I think it, it lessens your own personal risk. Yeah. Least

Laura: financially. Yeah. I mean I think there is a bit of a, oh, I dunno what the word is, but if you are bootstrapped and you haven't got funding, it's almost like you are, you, you're a bit better than people. You belong

Nathan: to you, you belong to the cool club.

I mean,

Laura: yeah, exactly. So there is that. I, I love things like tiny seed where you can get. Funding for a project. I, I was actually tempted to do it for client portal, honestly, not that I particularly needed it, but more for the mentorship that they have, and I thought, well, with the money I could just invest it and get the whole thing like redone.

Quickly cuz at the minute it's slow. Like we have to bring out new features slowly and we're sort of making UX changes slowly. You know what we were talking about and part of me just wants to just get it all done and just do it in one go. Mm. Um, I didn't end up going for it because I thought I don't really need to, to be honest, I think there are more people out there who need it more

Nathan: than me.

Yeah. I think if speed is not a concern, you know, if you are financially stable, Then speed isn't, for some people, speed is, is an issue. Um, I actually heard a really good interview this week with Marie from Lama Life, uh, on her podcast. And they were talking, uh, I think the weekly build and they were talking about.

Her funding. How, because if you think of Lama life, I didn't even know it was funded. You know, I think about her being a tiny little bootstraps project that is really, really popular and doing really, really well, but I didn't imagine that it'd been funded. And during the interview I actually, it was a real eye, eye opener because she was talking about the whole funding route and exactly what she'd been through and, and, and then raising, raising money and then waiting for the next round and stuff.

And it's, it really is a completely different way of approaching building a business. I mean, I think. Taken on $780,000 on the precede round, which I thought was a huge amount of money. Wow. For what I would consider to be a bootstrap business. So it's a completely different world. I think it's

Laura: great, like if you can get funding for your business, it just takes the pressure off.

But the, you do also have to be a self-starter if you don't. Some people need the risk in order to give them a. To get going to do something. So they need the pressure of a deadline or some external circumstances because the problem that can happen is if you get funding, okay, the risk is lower because the risk is really on someone else.

Are you still self-motivated enough to get. Stuff done. I think it's a lot of it's just personality traits and some people do really well with these, like high risk. I, I need this amount of money by like Tuesday, so I'm gonna really hustle and just get it done. And they, like, they thrive under the pressure and some people don't like that kind of pressure, but they're quite good at getting the work done for their own personal, just

Nathan: which, which are you of the two of the two groups, which do you fall?

Definitely

Laura: the second. Um, right. I don't like risk. I, I, I, sometimes I need deadlines like this trip where I'm going away. Um, you know, I had to get it done by then. I had to get the website redesigned by then. It's nice having a deadline cuz things can drag on like it has been dragging on for too long.

Although, to be honest, a lot of that was out of my control cuz I was using different, I was using developers to, um, to do it and there was some issues. If I feel like I'm safe in the sense that I can afford to pay my bills, then I'm pretty happy to put the work in and I think I do a better job because I'm not frazzled and I'm not scared, whereas some people are the opposite.

I don't know. Which do you think you fall into?

Nathan: Yeah, I think being self-motivated is, is huge. I would love to be in that group. I would love to fall into that group . I need, I need that, that whip. I think, um, it's not that I enjoy having that whip there at all. It's just, it's really the only way I can, I can get anything done, which is kind of what's happening to me now.

All of a sudden I can, you know, the kind of the clouds have lifted and stuff for reasons we haven't gone into yet, but we will talk about someday. So I kind of am trying to sort my life out now and because I. I have that, that deadline ahead of me. So it's, I don't like the stress of having to work under a deadline, but I feel it.

When I do my best work, I'm hoping that, I'm hoping I can change that a bit as well. And I think that does obviously vary according to, you know, if you are working on a project that means a lot to you and excites you, then you know, it's different. It's a lot easier to sit down and get that stuff done.

Yeah. I think I hadn't even considered the fact that, you know what, if you take on funding and then you lose, you lose that sort of, that edge, that desire to, to get this going. Yeah. That's interesting. I, I hadn't occurred to me cuz I have thought about things like tiny seed and, and calm and these, these kind of.

Types of funding.

Laura: I think some people just, yeah, they need that motivation of that, of some kind of deadline. So, you know, you'd get the funding. It's not to say you wouldn't do it, but you'd get the funding and then maybe relax a bit and then the funding would be close to running out and you'd be like, okay, I gotta focus.

And sometimes that can be a really good way to focus, because I mean, as you know, there's so many things you could be doing. There's like an infinite amount of things. That you could do or you feel like you should be doing or that other people are doing and all this stuff, and you're like, maybe this is the way.

Maybe this is the way. Should I do this? Should I guess post? Or should I write on my own blog? Should I write at all? Should I do a podcast like all this stuff when a deadline's approaching. It's sort of do or die. So you have to be like, okay, what is the thing that is, gives me the biggest chance of this being a success?

Sort of like

Nathan: No, completely. It helps you to focus on, on what counts. You can be, oh, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this. It's like suddenly, all of a sudden tomorrow, right? This is the thing, , like this is the thing. This is the thing. This is the thing, and nothing else even. You know, the blinkers, go

Laura: on.

And that's it. I mean, I notice it even with, I mean it might be a silly example, but even with my upcoming trip, I had a list of things that I wanted to do before I go personal and professional, that kind of stuff. Um, and as the days go on, I'm take taking things off that list cuz I'm like, Nope, that doesn't need to be done.

No, you can do that when you get back. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. And then, so I wrote a note on my phone. Okay, what are the three things that need to be done before I. And it was the client portal, website redesign. Um, then a couple of other things. I can't actually remember. The rest of it is just secondary.

Nice to have. So I had to force myself to just get rid of all that stuff and it was hard cuz I wanna do everything. But yeah, deadlines can be, can be really good for

Nathan: that. I, I feel that we could kind of just go on and on about different, different aspects of this, but I guess we should probably wrap it up and try and keep to our, uh, what is it, 30 minutes.

Episode run, right?

Laura: Yep. Indeed. Yeah, I think, I mean, I feel like we've sort of covered different aspects of risk versus reward. You know, for me, I think you do need to be able to take risks, but everyone has their different level and it's just about, a lot of it is about knowing. Your own personality and what gets you motivated.

And like we said right at the start, everyone's got their unfair advantage in using that. Maybe your unfair advantage, you could even call it an unfair advantage, is that you can be worked super hard when you're really close to a deadline. Maybe your unfair advantage is you can pace yourself a bit more.

What it like both of those things. Work in different scenarios unless you're the doing the opposite thing of what you're historically good at. So,

Nathan: and I think the other big thing as well is that context is. It dictates everything else around us. You know, if all of a sudden you're gonna be out of a job by the end of the month, then your focus and how much you're willing to risk is, is gonna probably change dramatically from, uh, another circumstance where you might have 12 months of work ahead of you and, and that kind of thing.

Yeah. So it's very contextual, I think, and um, very depend on the situation.

Laura: Or even if you've got a family, you've got kids versus. Living at home with your parents, you know, that changes things as well. So Yes. Probably so much easier. I know. Yeah. That's how I started as well. It was, it was great. ,

Nathan: oh, before I forget, and before we go, um, so we were, we were given out the, the email address if people wanted to get in touch and with any questions or any feedback.

But we figured it might be a lot easier just to give out, uh, a Twitter handle. If you do have any feedback on the episodes or if you'd like us to talk about anything in particular, any questions at all, then you can, you can grab us over at Non-tech podcast on Twitter. Couldn't get a better one. Couldn't get anything closer.

Unbelievable. I thought we would've been able to get, you know, the non-tech founders podcast, but even that was gone. So it's at non-tech podcast. Feel free to just send us any comments and uh, we'll definitely get back to.

Laura: Perfect. Sounds good. All right. Well thank Nathan. It was good to chatting as always.

Likewise. And Ill see you, uh, see you in a couple of weeks and have a great trip. Thank you, .

Nathan: All right, Laura.

Laura: Bye-bye. Bye.