In 2018 I was invited to speak at MicroConf Starter in Las Vegas, my “dream” speaking opportunity.

When I attended MicroConf for the first time in 2016, I had my mind blown. I learned so much from both the speakers and the attendees, and realized how little I knew about growing a software business.

The speakers were ridiculously smart and successful people who had been in the trenches and had massive value to offer.

I remember thinking that speaking on that stage would mean, wow, I’ve made it.

I had been working up the courage to submit an attendee talk (a short 12-min talk delivered by attendees between speaker sessions) when I received an invitation to speak at MicroConf Starter.

This was an opportunity that was too good to pass up, but the terror was real. I agreed to do the talk before I had time to talk myself out of it.

Fast forward through 4 months of anxiety and sleepless nights preparing for my talk…

“You obviously do a lot of speaking”

One of the attendees approached me at the after party and said something along the lines of “You obviously do a lot of speaking…” and I laughed and had to admit to him that:

1. It was my first time delivering the talk
2. This was one of my first big speaking gigs

It got me thinking about just how far I have come, and everything I had invested in myself and my personal development to get there.

It’s way too easy to watch people on stage and see the polished finished product without the full context for what it took to make happen.

How did I go from being totally terrified of public speaking to accepting an offer to speak at my favourite conference?

I spent 5 years actively pursuing the mastery of skills I knew I would need to get there.

It wasn’t easy. It took a lot of time, exploration, and practice. I want to share with you everything that has gone into the process of working through my fear of being on stage, and what it took to land my dream speaking gig.

Maybe you’ll be inspired to take a step toward the stage, even if you’re too scared, or think it’s just not possible for you.

Anxious beginnings

As a young child I used to win public speaking competitions at school. Then middle school happened and I shrunk into a tiny shell of a human. I was made fun of for being flat-chested (I was a late bloomer on so many levels), and decided that I just didn’t ever want to stand in front of a group of people.

Being in front of my peers or being the centre of attention became the thing I hated most.

I avoided walking down the aisles of buses or planes, because I hated the feeling of eyes on me. (I wouldn’t even go to the bathroom on the plane because I hated this feeling.) Yep, it was a crippling anxiety that was holding me back.

The thing I envied most about others? Unflappable confidence. I hated that I didn’t have it.

I’m just not a “speaker”

Public speaking is not a thing I ever believed was possible for me, because “I’m just not one of ‘those people.’”

You know the ones: the “naturals.” The extroverts. The people who exude self confidence, charisma, and poise. There’s “speakers” and then there’s “the rest of us,” I thought.

The fear was strong. Very strong.

And yet, I had a hunch that I was majorly holding myself back professionally by letting my fear prevent me from trying to learn this new skill.

I realized that I envied those who could stand on stage and look so natural, while delivering a great story with powerful takeaways. Despite my fear, there was obviously a longing.

What if I could be that person for someone else?
Is stage fright really a thing I can conquer?
Could I learn how to be a good story teller?
Did I really have anything of value to offer?

All the questions.

I didn’t know the answer(s), but I knew I had to try.

Speaking isn’t really just speaking

There are so many skills involved in delivering a great talk: Body language, voice, delivery, pacing, content, story-telling, working the stage, assembling a slide deck, etc.

As a business owner, I have worked on some of these skills in different ways, all of which have helped me in building a signature talk.

Here are some of the specific things that I believe have helped me in the journey:

Running Tiny Workshops

I ran my first “build your website” workshops from my shared office space in Toronto, with a small group of 8 people. I had never done any formal teaching, but I brought along some friends who needed help getting their websites up and running, and charged a low price. It was a really positive experience.

+1 Experience teaching in a small group

Live Webinars + Podcasts

Since 2014 I’ve done podcast interviews for anyone who asks.

True story: I burst into tears immediately after one of my first interviews.

It was an interview with a pretty big name in the online marketing space, and I had so much nervous energy I crashed immediately afterward.

During the interview I felt myself fumbling over my words and blurted out “I’m sorry, I’m so nervous!” and thought I’d botched it. He was cool as a cucumber and brushed it off, saying there was no reason to be and he was very interested in my story, and we just continued talking. Of course they simply edited that out, and the interview itself was fine. I was blown away by his professionalism and compassion.

I felt SO silly about having been so nervous, and refused to let my fear get the best of me.

I tend to do a podcast interview 1–3x monthly, so inevitably, they get better and better each time as I hone my message, get practice communicating it, and figure out what really matters to me. THESE ARE STILL NERVE WRACKING. It’s not like these are easy, but I refuse to be held back by perfectionism or fear.

The point is, interviewing well is a skill that you can work on. It’s not something you’re simply good or bad at.

• +1 Podcast Interviews and Webinars give you practice honing your message, speaking to many listeners, and building your authority & trust.

Small Conferences

✦ Gather North
In 2015 I was invited to speak at Gather North, a small conference (~35–40 people) for Women of the Web. The organizers had seen one of my blog posts, and wondered if I might build on it to create a talk. They didn’t know I hadn’t done any formal speaking before… but they seemed to trust in my capacity to do it (I’m guessing podcast interviews were part of this trust building).

This is when I panicked and hired a speech coach because I had no idea how to prepare for a “real” talk.

I purchased a small digital coaching program from Michelle Mazur that included 2 coaching calls to help me narrow in on my core message, find my supporting points, and organize my story structurally. Both her training resource library and coaching helped me understand speech basics, and feel like I had a strong direction.

I won’t lie, I barely slept the 2 nights before. It was physically and emotionally exhausting, and I questioned whether this made sense for me to pursue because it just took so much out of me. It helped that the women in the audience were amazing people, and I got a chance to chat and make friends with them in the day before my talk. These folks are STILL good friends, 5 years later.

• +1 Speech Coach
• +1 Speaking to attendees before you do your talk

✦ Starting Point Student Entrepreneurship Conference
In 2016 I was invited to speak at the SPSU conference in Nova Scotia. They asked for 2 presentations, and I adapted one of my presentations from a virtual conference to this audience.

It was a lot of work to create two presentations, and I wouldn’t do this again! One presentation at a time. I also felt like I really didn’t know the audience very well and what their needs were, so it was stressful to create content for this audience without more context. I might have asked the organizers more questions looking back.

The talks were given in small university classrooms with 30–40 people.

I barely slept the 2 nights before in anticipation. The stress was unnecessarily high for this one.

• - 1 Preparing more than one talk
• - 1 Not being intimately familiar with your audience’s needs/experience

Virtual Conferences

I’ve been invited to do a number of virtual conferences for a number of different audiences, and in a number of different formats. Some were pre-recorded, some had slide presentations, some were interview-style, and some had live audience Q+A.

It’s important to try out a few different formats to figure out what’s comfortable for you. I much prefer when they’re led by someone who I can see, and I get to interact with the audience.

• +1 Virtual Events help you get practice being in front of an audience, sharing your expertise, without being in front of a sea of faces
• pro tip: Don’t agree to do virtual events that don’t make sense for your business or message. I wasted a ton of time agreeing to be a guest for events that didn’t really make sense (the audience attendees were never going to be potential customers or super fans, and it just wasn’t an obvious “heck yes” connection).
• I have also turned down events when I received really poor or awkward questions that I knew wouldn’t allow me to shine.

Panels

Panels can be a great way to practice being on stage without being the center of attention. I accepted any offers to be on a panel, even though my legs and voice would shake. I never waited for it to feel comfortable, because I knew that would never come.

Oddballs

• Personal therapy. I had a chance to talk through some of my stage fright and hangups around “being seen.” This was immensely helpful work.
• 100 Day Challenge. I made a video every day for 100 days. This was seriously painful and uncomfortable, and definitely made the idea of talking about my ideas less intimidating.
• The East Van Pillow Fight Club. Yes, I actually joined a pillow fight league in Vancouver. I saw them fight at a talent show, and I thought it was one of the coolest and funniest things I’d ever seen. I had to come up with a persona and a wrestling-style intro, and had to fight another woman in a match up at a bar where patrons could bet on winners, with proceeds going to a rape relief shelter. Marie Slamtoinette won her first match, btw.

• Acting Classes (Meisner Technique). Ok, nothing could possibly compare to this experience. This was definitely one of the most personally challenging and rewarding things I’ve EVER done. EVER. This was seriously a life-changing experience for me on so many levels, beyond “speaking experience.”
  I started by signing up for the Supernaturally Shy Intro to Acting, and I was terrified. By the second class we had to spontaneous sing a few verses of a song on stage and I thought I could feel my internal organs shutting down. “Oh so this is what death feels like?”
  This class stretched me so far beyond my comfort zone I couldn’t even see it anymore. I did these classes weekly for a year, and I am forever changed, and so grateful to my teacher. This was personal development on steroids.
  (A topic for another post…)

Books

The following books have been really helpful in my own learning journey:

• Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller
• Public Speaking by Lara Hogan
• Steal the Show by Michael Port

Courses

Creative Live has some really great courses around storytelling and public speaking. These in particular have been helpful:

• Power Your Podcast with Storytelling by Alex Blumberg
• Heroic Public Speaking
• Master The Art of Teaching by Michael Port

Shine Bootcamp

I had the privilege of being in the pilot group of Shine Bootcamp, an immersive 3-day incubator for womxn in technology, marketing and startup environments who want to share their stories, become respected thought leaders in their industries and, ultimately, secure large-scale professional speaking gigs. This experience was life-changing, and any woman who wants to get into public speaking NEEDS to do this bootcamp!

Speakers and coaches included Joanna Wiebe, Oli Gardner, and Michael Aagard.

The best part about the bootcamp was getting a recording of your talk in order to submit for future speaking opportunities.

Personal Coaching

• Michael Aagard. After my incredible experience with Shine bootcamp, I hired Michael Aagard for some personal coaching in preparation for my talk. These was invaluable! It was so helpful to get an outside perspective on what makes for a strong angle/story, and talking my concepts out loud was incredibly helpful.
  Michael really helped me think through the different elements from Content, Concept, Idea, Structure, and Introduction/Conclusion.
• Tanya Geisler. Tanya is a masterful coach who specializes in the imposter complex. My work with her years earlier was invaluable. This work was what helped me realize that I had some deeper work to do in therapy to get to the root of some very deep fear that was holding me back.

Getting to MicroConf

While I hired a speaking coach to help me get ready for the big talk, I realized that there had truly been a mountain of learning, preparation, practice, and people that have gone into making this personal life achievement happen.

The entirety of my professional career has been an exercise in learning to get more comfortable in the discomfort of being seen.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that speaking is not something you can achieve because you’re “not a natural.”

If I can do it, anyone can do it.

I even wore my cardigan inside-out while on stage. And I laughed about while answering questions after my talk.

And I didn’t die.

I had done my first big keynote at MicroConf Starter the year before, and here I was at the Growth/Starter mixer party; the after party for the Growth folks combined with the welcome party for the Starter folks.

It’s a really great event that gets people of all stages of their business together in one room.

My role as community ambassador? Make the Starter folks feel welcome.

(My secondary role was to keep an eye of pulse of the conference, and look for constructive ways to improve the conference based on feedback and input from attendees)

I remember vividly how intimidated I was when I first attended MicroConf 4 years ago. I was one of only a handful of women in a room full of mostly male developers.

There were people with businesses at all stages of size and scale.

I met people who had spent years working on their alpha product without talking to a single customer, people who had sold their successful software and were looking for a new idea to pursue, and people who were looking for opportunities to buy and grow an existing SaaS businesses.

My mind was blown.

I was being exposed to a completely different world than the one I had been so comfortably familiar with (design, systems, women-led entrepreneur groups).

New jargon. New faces. New ideas. I felt like I’d been let in to a secret society.

It was scary and exciting, because I realized just how little I knew about product development, onboarding, product demos, sales, etc.

I was already well out of my comfort zone, and was in a room full of smarty-pants developers, so I decided that I was going to go for it. I was going to say hello to everyone, and find out what other people were doing.

What are they working on?

• Did they launch their beta yet?
• How did they get their first X users?
• What marketing channels have been working for them?
• What is something they wish they knew before they started?
• What advice would they give folks new to this space?

I knew I needed to make the most of this experience.

It wasn’t easy or comfortable, but very quickly I realized that this was a place where people were willing to be honest and share what they’d learned. I also never once felt excluded, “othered,” or isolated being a women in a mostly male-dominated space.

I was, however, self conscious because I knew virtually nothing about “growing a software product,” but it wasn’t long before I realized that my own unique experience and insights carried its own value.

I had launched a mastermind program for designers (several times over several years) that made enough revenue that we decided to use that revenue to bootstrap the creation of our own software product.

I had an ebook, a online courses, online community, retreats, design work, and consulting, and it was all providing healthy revenue and helping fund our product development. It was fun, exciting work, and I loved what I was doing.

I had been a service provider for over a decade, and it was my sweet spot. I was only recently starting to dip my toe into digital products, productized services, and “leveraged” income.

Today our business is well diversified with different types of revenue, and this works really well for us.

We also know it works really well for other people too.

We’ve been lucky enough to get to see behind the scenes of different types of online businesses, with business owners who have really well leveraged income via online courses, online communities, digital products, coaching, etc.

Those that have the most success have great product-service ecosystems.

Back to the Growth/Starter mixer

I’m 5 minutes into the evening, getting a drink at the bar when a fellow attendee asks me what I do. I tell him that I have a software product, but that the majority of our revenue comes from our client services.

“But that doesn’t scale,”

he says.

I have to say I was immediately fascinated by his dismissiveness. His judgement.

His… lack of social tact?

But mostly, I suppose, by his lack of curiosity.

1. Who says “scalable” is what I’m seeking?
2. Who says services can’t scale?

The truth is, Marie of 4 years ago might have been quite rattled by this comment, as it carried a whiff of condescension:

Why on earth would you want to be doing something that doesn’t scale?

Why would anyone waste their time on services when you can build software and sit back and make that sweet, sweet recurring monthly revenue?

His comment and the idea that services can’t scale was rattling around in my head after the conference. I decided to run this idea by a few online communities to find out (A private facebook group, as well as the paid What Works Network run by Tara Gentile):

• Can services scale? How do you feel about the idea that services-based businesses are inherently “not scalable”?
• Can a business be successful or profitable if it isn’t built to scale?
• What are some ways your services business is able to scale?
• Was this person being as rude as I thought he was being?

Some GREAT discussions emerged out of my post.

I think the idea of “scale” has been really blown out of proportion. Services can absolutely scale — they just scale differently than software. Scale doesn’t have to equal serving millions of people and ignoring customers. Scale can mean thoughtful systems that allow you to serve more people by employing more people. Anything that helps you build towards both efficiency and serving people better is scale.

— Tara Gentile

People say you can’t scale service-based businesses because THEY don’t know how, not because it can’t be done. There’s more than one way to scale. I know first-hand. I’m so tired of the “services aren’t scalable” trope. It’s very 2004. Over the past 10 years, I’ve scaled several ways: price, group, and concierge.

— Lena West

I stopped having convos with people who focus on scale. Not because as Tara mentions, it’s not a thing to do, but because the conversation, for me, is about the wrong thing. Profit (again, for me) is an indicator that signals an opportunity to draw the circle bigger. Some might see that as scale. When I draw the circle bigger, it means more people served, more people paid, and more money made. It’s a tool, not the end goal.

lol there are people who actually think that?? Actually really surprises me. Groups, train the trainer, membership, live events, associations just to name a few (yes my model is scalable — coaching and training)

— Christine Gallagher

I also think a lot of people define “service business differently” Seeing as how we coach agencies and service providers on how to be more scalable (in order to scale — note it’s not a destination like people make it seem to be) so much of what what makes services scalable is in the productization of the service and where the leverage is created within the delivery process. For example, a full service agency that does everything done for you and all projects are custom is not that scalable.

Remember by definition “scale” as it relates to business means — a noun that means “proportional growth especially of production or profit” and/or “a large market position.”So back to the example of the full service done for you agency — (and having been in 7 and 7 figure agencies as well as small agencies) revenues can grow but usually expenses grow equally thus while you can be an 8 figure agency you may still have little profit to show for it… So by definition that is not scalable.

Scalability = ability grow in a profitable way. So, for services, delivering mostly standardized, repeatable offerings for specific avatars leads to scalability both in sales and marketing as well as delivery. Now, on the delivery side, leverage is obtained really in 2 ways. 1) Build a delivery team. These are people that can deliver the parts of the process over and over and over. This is typical more on the agency style, done for you front. 2) Build a team that delivers your IP — this is more the consulting/coaching angle. The delivery team consists of other coaches and consultants teaching IP that was defined previously by the owner/company.

— Greg Hickman

There are plenty of billion dollar service companies. The example I always use because I used to work there is Gensler, the largest architecture firm in the world. Founded by Art Gensler out of his garage in San Francisco in 1965, the firm is now doing $1.2 billion in annual revenue. And that’s a small company. Deloitte does $42 billion.

Also, what I’ve found is products, online ones anyway, may take less time and resources to deliver but they take more time and resources to market and sell. Again, to each their own but I prefer to spend more time on delivery.

— Alethea Cheng Fitzpatrick

I also decided to post a Twitter tweetstorm (280 characters was not going to cut it) and got some great replies here too:

marie poulin on Twitter

There's a dangerous misconception in SaaS that "products" are the only business models that can scale.

Nathan Allotey on Twitter

@mariepoulin I believe people forget that for EVERY product scale is a function of how well you are to provide service for the product. If you scale and there's no scaling of a service then you will eventually plateau.

marie poulin on Twitter

What I found fascinating about the interaction was that with ZERO context or information, a stranger felt they knew my business better than me. He had no idea how much revenue I bring in, what my goals are, and whether or not *scalability* is even my focus.

Shane Harter on Twitter

@mariepoulin @mijustin I think you're 💯 on this. Jason Lemkin has written that you should be selling professional services alongside your SaaS, they should be ~20% of your revenue, that your customers want this integration/onboarding/support and not offering will hurt your product sell thru.

marie poulin on Twitter

@shaneharter @mijustin Not to mention the things you learn when you work *alongside* your SaaS users... It's basically getting paid for customer research; total win-win. Our product amplified our services in ways we never expected...

This tweetstorm ended up being one of my most viewed + engaged posts I might have ever posted. Clearly, this idea struck a nerve, and I’m not the only one who sees a problem with this misconception that software is the only scalable business model.

What I know to be true:

Scalable does not necessarily mean PROFITABLE.

I have seen many people spend years building and tinkering on products that haven’t taken off. They never reached the point that the effort going in was worth the results. Sure, the model is “scalable,” but that doesn’t mean the product itself is actually profitable.

I have been a services provider for over a decade — I know how to earn money by helping other people grow and scale their online business. My personal bias leans toward hybrid product-service business models, because I’ve seen that it works.

• If my immediate goal is to maximize my cashflow, then I know services will always deliver as the quickest way to get cash.
• If my long-term goal is to create more leveraged assets or “passive revenue”, then I need financial runway to do so. SERVICES and consulting can give you that immediate financial runway.

What if the profit I make currently across all areas of my business is already really healthy? What if I am not interested in, nor have the capacity for managing the increased demands that come along with scaling (time, energy, resources, skills)?

What if staying small is actually one our competitive advantages?

Paul Jarvis talks about this in his latest book, Company of One:

If you’re a company of one, your mind-set is to build your business around your life, not the other way around. For me, being a company of one means not having to bother with infinite growth, since that was never the purpose of my working. Instead, I just focus on maximizing work in way that works for me, which can sometimes mean doing less.

What a treat it was to read this book and realize that I’m not alone in seeing the huge advantages of staying small.

Profit doesn’t always increase when you scale up your operations.

Scalable does not necessarily mean ENJOYABLE.

No one else knows what my goals are, life circumstances, habits, experience, revenue, strengths, or even what makes me happy.

I have to admit that I love working with people more than I love working on products. I still enjoy creating products, but not enough to go all in.

I have a pretty good idea of the activities I would need to be doing if I wanted to 10x the software side of my business, and the truth is that I don’t want to do them.

Could I hire out those activities? Sure. Probably.

Do I want to? Is that the best move for our business or our lives? I’m not so sure.

Do I wish we had a software product that printed money while we slept? Sure.

But neither Ben nor I would be 100% satisfied to double down on only one product. Maybe we’ll feel different with another product, I don’t know. For now, we take on activities we want to do! That’s the whole point of being self-employed: we have the freedom and capacity to choose.

Our life is pretty chill here in the woods of the Sunshine Coast. We’ve designed our lives to minimize stress and maximize enjoyability.

Enjoyable + profitable will always trump “the potential to get bigger” everyday.

Scalable does not necessarily mean IMPACTFUL.

Many people are perfectly happy to build products that make money. Full stop.

Scaling a product doesn’t necessarily mean you’re leaving the world a better place than you found it. And that’s fine; there’s room for so many different types of creators in the market.

Business is personal. We all have different motivations for wanting to run and grow our own businesses.

Freedom. Flexibility. Earning potential. Creative challenge. Capacity for impact. Independence.

Impact matters to me. Just because a business is scalable, doesn’t make it impactful.

I believe that I have more impact through my consulting services than I do through products simply because of the nature of my strengths.

Is “SCALE” really the ultimate goal?

I am not as interested in scale as much as I am in building something that is sustainable, enjoyable, profitable, and impactful.

If studying design thinking and permaculture has taught me anything, you have to start with the end in mind.

What is my goal for my business and my life?

I want to live well while doing work that shapes people’s lives and positively impacts communities.

I’ve done a TON of personal and leadership development around my values and strengths, and I know what I need to thrive. My “Brand of Joy” as Tanya Geisler puts it, is Connection. This is the underpinning desire in everything that I do, and it’s underpinned by intimacy, generosity and innovation.

These values guide the way I operate, how I design my business, and the services I choose to offer. Ben is motivated by different values, and so are each of us.

No one knows your business better than you do.

Now look, I’ll be the first to admit that my own bias is toward services because of my experience, my skills, and my strengths. But I’m certainly not about to tell another developer that his model is broken because he’s not working with people one-on-one, or isn’t doubling his rates.

Justin Jackson recently challenged the blanket advice we often give in the software world to “just charge more” in a really excellent Twitter thread and blog post:

Justin Jackson on Twitter

Should we always charge more?" Exploring how we price software. 🌶️ (Lots of folks seem to like this one) https://t.co/eMa6fIWsPc

It’s tempting to give the same advice over and over and think it applies to everyone, but we forget that every business has its own unique market, strengths, brand equity, quirks, and idiosyncrasies that give something a certain “je ne sais quoi” that is impossible to replicate.

We can learn so much from other businesses if we stay curious and ask better questions.

• Oh, tell me more about that?
• How did you know to make that decision?
• What’s been working for you so far?
• What have you learned?
• What would you do differently?

We all have different motivations, and there is room in the market for different types of founders.

This whole conversation of software, services and scalability was the very topic of my MicroConf keynote last year (The Sustainable SaaS), where I spoke about how doubling down on high-touch services totally changed both the product AND services side of our business.

We (Ben and I) look at our lives and business as an integrated ecosystem. We factor in the health, energy, inputs, outputs of all parts of the ecosystem when we are making decisions, because it’s all connected.

We stopped worrying about what we thought we needed to be, and focused on what was already working for us.

We’re at peace with being a small, lean company that’s focused on sustainability over scale.

“But That Doesn’t Scale” was originally published in Oki Doki on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the past I’ve gotten quite granular and categorized with my yearly reviews. These days I’m trying to simplify, so I’m moving this simple format: what went well, what didn’t go well, and what I’m planning for in 2019.

What went well

MicroConf Starter

It was pretty darn exciting to speak at one of my favourite conferences earlier this year. I managed to combine my love + knowledge of permaculture with my experience and insights into growing a software product as a tiny two-person company.

Christian Genko wrote a great recap here.

I also did a guest panel at the welcome reception for Shine Bootcamp to reflect on my experience as a participant of the speaking bootcamp the year before. Shine Bootcamp (previously CentHer Stage) was an incredible weekend speaker training that helped me get the guts and experience needed to accept that speaking invitation for MicroConf.

Travel + Vacation

We managed to squeeze in some travel with a trip to Belgium to visit our business friend Natasha Vorompiova.

I signed up for one of Natasha’s Systems programs years ago when I needed help getting my systems in order, and she’s been a wonderful mentor and friend ever since.

We’d talked about making this happen for 3–4 years now, so this was a definite highlight for me. We got to be neighbours for a week! We made meals together, and her husband took us on a few tours of Belgium to make sure we were well acquainted with Belgian beer.

Website relaunch

This was an effort and a half, but once we finally relaunched our website, things really started to fall into place with more ease. We had an easier time speaking to our strengths, attracted top-notch clients, and felt more confident in where we were heading as a company.

It probably took about 8 months from the time we first acknowledged that we needed to make a change to the time we actually launched. It was a struggle to achieve clarity and felt like it took forever, but the struggle was worth it.

Our redesign led to a ton of great momentum and incredible clients, and we’re continuing to see the ripple effect of this major change!

Personal Finances

I’d read Shannon Lee Simmons book Worry Free Money (cannot recommend enough) at the end of 2017, so 2018 started off with a really effective personal finance plan and budget. I went full frugal in 2018, and went hard on crushing my debts. Things were tight, but I was forced to get really creative!

I sold clothing, traded items, and found all sorts of amazing things second hand (even plants!).

I reduced my clothing consumption massively, and made a major effort to shift my buying habits toward a more ethical closet (and house).

Part of this experience reopened my love of sewing and mending.

While I’m really proud of the changes I’ve made in my personal spending, I got my hands on an advance copy of Shannon’s latest book Living Debt Free, and realized that I might have been going a little too frugal, which wasn’t really sustainable long term.

While it was a great experiment… and I know just how frugal I can go and still be happy, we decided to give ourselves a big raise in 2019 :)

Relationship

Couples counselling was a real highlight this year (yes, really!).

Living and working together from home means we rely on excellent communication in order to thrive both in business and in our home life.

We spend so much time together — and know each other so well — that it can be a little too easy make assumptions about what we’re each experiencing on a day-to-day basis.

Working on our company website together was a challenge. It brought up lots of questions for us both about what kind of work we wanted to be doing, where we see the business going, and how to make sure that both of our needs are being met professionally and personally.

It was incredible to be able to have a safe space to work through all of our thoughts, desires, fear, and insecurities. I feel like the insights, perspective, and tools we encountered through this process have had a lasting positive impact on our relationship, and I cannot recommend therapy enough, no matter how awesome your relationship is!

Friendships

I look back fondly on some of the amazing times I’ve had with friends this year, both old and new. I feel really grateful for amazing friends, both online and off!

Learning + Education

Permaculture
In 2018 I completed a 16-month Permaculture Design Certificate. I fell in love with the whole experience; the teachers, locations, learning, insights, reading, and the general sense that nature has so much wisdom for us if we are listening.

I signed up for an intense 5-day retreat — Cultural Emergence Effective Design — that was absolutely incredible and nurturing.

I couldn’t get enough, and decided to start a Permaculture Diploma with my incredibly inspiring teacher Delvin. This multi-year process will have me designing a number of projects that explore and apply the principles of permaculture in the context of business, life, home, and community.

Joining this community has led to so many wonderful in-person connections and friendships for which I am so grateful.

CTA Conference

I attended CTAConf for the 4th year in a row. I always learn something new at this conference, and it’s a fantastic opportunity to see old friends from out of town!

New Systems

We finally got some much needed clarity on our systems, and moved over to using Notion.so. We wrote about that more here.

I started to really clean up my processes behind the scenes, and standardize my offers, which led to a signature offer of sorts: the Strategic Roadmap.

This offer has really helped me double down on the parts of projects I love, while leveraging my strengths: diving into customer research, optimizing messaging, and offering strategic insights on product/service design + delivery.

Space for extracurricular activities

• I learned how to knit + crochet (thank you Skillshare!)
• Picked up sewing again, and made Ben this awesome housecoat:

• Continued to learn about gardening, and keeping houseplants alive!
• Became a Girl Guide Leader. I started volunteering as a Girl Guide Leader with Pathfinders (age 12–14). Talk about a learning curve! This has been a seriously challenging but rewarding experience that is stretching me on so many levels.

A fun little gig

Ben and I did a small acting gig for the YMCA on the Sunshine Coast. We basically got paid to have fun at camp for a few days, rock climbing, kayaking, learning archery, playing charades, and toasting marshmallows around the campfire! Our friends were the videographers ;)

See all the promo videos they made that weekend:
YMCA Elphinstone Rentals and Retreats

Reading + Learning

Books:

• Designing Your Life
• Atomic Habits
• Thinking Fast and Slow
• 7 Habits of Highly affective people (re-read)
• 6 pillars of Self Esteem
• Boundaries
• The Now Habit
• Nudge
• The Productivity Project
• Urban Lot
• Steal Like an Artist
• The Obstacle is the way
• Service Design for Business
• Talk like Ted
• Demystifying Public Speaking
• Permaculture: A Designers Manual
• Gaia’s Garden
• Year Round Vegetable Gardener

Courses:

• Copy School
• Make it Stick Habit School

Shows

We made a big change in late 2018 to stop watching Netflix during the week (which you can read more about here), which has been such a great change for us, opening up a lot more time for hobbies, extracurricular activities, books, and learning.

This has forced us to be really choosy about what shows we do end up watching.

Here are some of my favourite shows that I watched in 2018:

• Mr. Robot
• Maniac
• Wanderlust
• Handmaid’s Tale
• Ugly Delicious
• Black Mirror
• Altered Carbon
• Hilda
• Schitt’s Creek
• Haunting of Hill House
• Outlander

What didn’t go well?

In the lead up to our website launch, we were feeling unclear about our positioning, direction, and goals. We felt like we were in limbo, not sure if we were both playing to our strengths.

We avoided marketing because we weren’t super clear on what we were doing and who we were serving. The first half of the year felt really hard; it was one of the most challenging seasons of our business, and I think a big part of it was the lack of clarity and alignment of where we should be spending out time and effort. (That and I spent a LOT of time pulling my talk together for MicroConf, so most of my energy in Q1 went toward that, to the exclusion of everything else.)

The clarity that came toward the end of the summer made it all worth it, and it felt like we needed to hit a wall before we could really press the reset button and get clear.

Growth can be super messy and awkward, and it always gives me so much more compassion for my own clients’ journeys. I don’t let my clients beat themselves up because of the emotions and challenges that come up along the way when they are levelling up (growing pains).

Physical Activity

I got a bit lazy this year, and often put physical activity on the backburner for other projects. The truth is, I know I’m much happier when I’m physically active, so I want to change this currently neglected part of my life.

I have a membership at the climbing gym and recently signed up for some Cardio Cabaret classes, which are absolutely hilarious and enjoyable.

I know that I’m highly motivated when I have some kind of external accountability, so having a place to go vs relying on my own will power to work out is helpful.

Boundaries + Scope Creep

Good ‘ol healthy boundaries are something I’ve struggled with my entire life, both personally and professionally, and is a big part of why I continue to do therapy.

My desire to be helpful and useful can often trump my own needs and well-being. This is a big reason for me finally reading Boundaries at the end of 2018 (which was incredibly helpful!).

It’s important for me to be generous in my life and work. This can sometimes mean that I have struggled to know where to set boundaries around what is generosity… and what is self-sabotage.

Every now and then I need to press the reset button and revisit how good, healthy boundaries are important not just for me, but for my clients as well!

One of the ways I’ve been able to do this is to get clients on standardized maintenance + support retainers, so that I don’t have to figure out where any fuzzy boundaries are about what is and isn’t included in our work. After a project is complete, they get a “Next Steps” document outlining a few recommended ways of moving forward. Referring to this standardized document has made money conversations much easier.

Boundary hiccups are a good reminder that, as your products and services change and evolve, sometimes new documentation needs to be created, and/or new processes to ensure things are still working as intended.

What’s next in 2019?

• Building my body of work around sustainability and exploring what it means to build a well-integrated business and life that creates positive change for individuals, communities, and the planet.
• Continuing to grow Doki users and ship features which include feedback loops for coaches/teachers and their students.
• Refining my signature services and accompanying processes.
• Relaunching Digital Strategy School materials on Doki as well as making small group masterminds available.
• Streamlining product + service offerings.
• Being more consistent and intentional about our marketing.
• Continuing to go deep on client projects, helping people scale up their programs and communities.
• Collaborate and co-create with more like-minded businesses.

Marie is the co-founder of Oki Doki, a creative digital agency helping business owners plan, design, and optimize their digital products and services.

UPDATE Jan 2021: A lot has changed since I first posted this 😂. I went all in, created a Notion Mastery, hosted Notion’s office hours for over a year, and started a YouTube channel to help fill in the gaps and help people make the most of it. You could say I fell hard.

I confess that I’ve been in productivity limbo for years.

You know that awful grey area where you’re in-between systems and tools; you haven’t quite committed to a single one yet.

Or you did commit, but the system isn’t quite what you need, so you kind of use it, but not consistently enough to be useful.

• It’s having Asana or Trello alongside half-filled paper planners, notebooks, digital to-dos, Evernote files, etc.
• It’s hoarding empty notebooks because you’re waiting for the perfect time to use the one with the dot grid.
• It’s trying out several planners at the same time because you’re trying to find the one that “works.”
• It’s downloading new productivity and habit tracking apps in batches while you try to find the “right” one.

As a tiny business consisting of two co-founders who handle all of the day to day operations (yes, it’s just us!), we rely on strong systems to help us keep projects humming along. We’ve both experimented with many different technologies to help us manage our client workload, our software bug tracking and feature requests, and even house projects.

The Problem

One of the biggest issues for me personally was that I didn’t have one place where I could get both a 10,000 foot view of my goals and vision, while also managing day-to-day to-dos AND ideas. I was struggling to translate the big vision into the daily action required to make it happen.

I was managing client work in Asana, but struggled to use it for managing our internal “marketing to-dos.”

I had a paper weekly planner to manage + plan my week, but found myself relying more on Google calendar to do time-blocking and planning.

I was tracking client meeting notes and marketing ideas in Evernote, but wasn’t going back to review my notes once I’d created them.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was wrong.

Each system was powerful on its own, but I didn’t have a master process that pulled them all together in a cohesive, consistent way. I was in limbo, and I knew it was affecting my ability to focus and plan properly.

I didn’t have an easy way to visualize my long and short-term plans in a way that would help me turn them into action.

The closest thing I found was the Neu Year Week Dominator.

I’d make my yearly and 90-day plans, but unless I pasted them on the wall in front of me, they’d sort of sit in a planning folder on my desktop that wasn’t really getting reviewed regularly.

Sometimes the issue is habitual (📝 Why we said goodbye to Netflix during weekdays), but sometimes it’s the system.

Deep in the rabbit role

Finally after the fourth abandoned cart check-out on Agendio — realizing that the damn paper planner was going to cost about $90 after shipping (and who knows how much after customs) — I decided, I’ll make my own! (😐)

I took all of the best parts of all my favourite half-used planners and started designing my own ULTIMATE PLANNER.

A few weeks into designing said ULTIMATE PLANNER, I realized the ugly truth:

I am not someone who can plan on paper.

I didn’t want it to be true. I don’t even know why?

Ok, this is probably why:

(That, and it almost felt like I didn’t want my reliance on digital systems to be so… omnipresent.)

I wanted to get on the bullet journal bandwagon, but the sheer inefficiency of hand-drawing the same lines, shapes, numbers, and tasks week after week, and month after month made me twitchy.

Looking at some of those bullet journal masterpieces made me wonder, how much of bullet journaling is just…productivity porn? Are people creating entirely separate accounts for their bullet journaling as a creative outlet, or to distract themselves from actually getting shit done?

I didn’t know the answer, but I decided to swallow my envy of those beautiful bullet journal masters and resist the urge to get distracted by a new shiny thing that was certainly going to be more of creative outlet than a functional productivity tool.

Side-note: This is not a knock on bullet journaling itself; I know it’s a system that works for so many friends and clients!

I rely so heavily on the efficiency of digital systems and tools, that I decided to stop fighting it, and to simply refine my digital processes to make better use of my existing tools.

The Catalyst

After completing my Permaculture Design Certificate, I became even more enthralled with systems, and looking at everything as a functioning ecosystem. I was so inspired by permaculture systems thinking that I did a talk about this at MicroConf in the spring.

Ecosystems and sustainability were the threads of meaning running through my work that I hadn’t quite named or pinpointed.

In late 2018 I decided to pursue my Permaculture Diploma and take my learning to the next level.

This is a pretty documentation-heavy process that would unfold over the coming years. My teacher/mentor is highly creative, and encouraging of using mixed media to express my learnings using plenty of visuals, video, etc.

I’d dabbled with Notion* before, and it seemed like the perfect tool to track my vision and ideas in a creative non-linear way that would allow me to embed links, video, scrawl quick notes, store my ideas, make reading lists, to-dos, etc. It was the perfect way to blend creative thinking with documentation and action items.

Previously, I’d been relying on Asana for my high level planning, but it was clunky.

Sure, it can be done (I’ve probably watched all of Paul Minors’ Asana videos), but I realized that I was pigeonholing all of my planning and thinking into “to-dos.”

I watched them all, I swear!

Asana was great for tracking things that simply needed to get done and were time-sensitive, but what about idea storage, percolations, references, and things to consider over time? To me, Asana didn’t feel like the right place for this.

The system has to work for *you*.

So I got to work using Notion to start documenting and giving structure to my diploma project.

Before long, my creative projects were now becoming part of my workspace (like sewing, house projects, etc). And then I started using it as a habit tracker. Then I started outlining my personal philosophy and vision.

I was suddenly thinking more about my legacy than my daily to-dos.

I became inspired to build success rituals into place. I started researching morning routines, habits, and bigger goal planning.

I built a weekly digital planner that helped me better see my goals, milestones, tasks, reflections, and habits in one place.

Working on my diploma documentation inspired me to get better about documenting my life and business in a more holistic way.

What’s been working (for us)

The new system that has made all the difference is a combination of the right tool with the accompanying habits and routines.

No one tool can help you if you don’t have good habits in place, but certainly having a tool that’s easy and delightful to use can make a world of difference, and for us it has.

It took some serious discussions as I was moving deeper into Notion and starting to neglect Asana (which meant any to-dos that Ben was assigning to me were simmering on the backburner). I knew that me using Notion while Ben continued using Asana wasn’t really going to cut it. I had to get buy-in from Ben so that I wouldn’t be split across two different tools trying to do the same thing.

Given that Ben manages our software features and bug tracking (and probably had thousands of tiny tagged tasks living inside Asana) I personally felt that it was essential that Ben have a say in our primary systems. Truthfully, I’d already dragged Ben from Teamwork to Asana years ago, and didn’t just want this to be a shiny new tool. Ben initially hated Asana as well, but grew to love it when he discovered custom fields, so I was confident I could convince him to love Notion too.

I showed him how I was using it, and made the case for my improved productivity. We spent a few weeks playing with the possibilities, setting up workspaces, and transferring tasks over to see if it would be feasible. Changing systems is no joke!

We debated the pros and cons of the different tools, and really hammered out how we might need to make major changes to our workflow in order to both feel like we could be happy and productive.

The beauty of Notion is that it allows for database-style information to be combined with very different content styles. It’s incredibly open-ended, which was initially frustrating for Ben, as he had gotten so used to the ease of Asana’s to-do list creation. This meant we had to create our own systems within the tool. I was a little more excited about this than Ben. I finally felt like I found a tool that worked with how my brain worked.

In the end we realized how much more powerful it was, because it helped us bridge the gap between our two very different ways of thinking, planning, and doing.

Cue music. Throw confetti.

The Magic

As you know, changing systems is damn time-consuming, so we wanted to share what has worked for us as we’ve gotten to know the features and what’s possible. You know a tool is good when you want to find more reasons to use it.

Here’s what we’ve found works:

A space for big picture planning/visioning

A weekly template

This template has evolved every week for the last 2 months while I’ve figured out what to track, and the best way to track it.

This one template alone has completely changed my productivity habits. It’s the one singular place where at a glance I can see:

• What my week looks like energetically (how heavy is the workload?)
• The top 3 most important things I need to do each day
• What general tasks need to get done
• What I eat, how much I exercise, and how much water I’m drinking
• What I’m grateful for every day
• What I’m learning or reading from week to week
• Whether or not I keep overbooking myself
• My reflections on the week
• Important notes or links
• Things that were planned but didn’t get done

Every Sunday, I duplicate the weekly template, and begin filling in the upcoming weeks’ known tasks, to-dos, and meetings.

To-do items are added with the client shortcode.

Meetings are marked in pink so I can easily see time-sensitive events, and also get a sense of my energy requirements for the day/week.

To-do items that don’t get completed are duplicated into the following day, and then get crossed out like so. This helps me to see at a glance how often I miss the mark with my planning (overbooking, overcommitting, or not leaving enough time), and allows me to better gauge my time the next week. It’s a way to be more mindful, and also to set better boundaries for myself.

The key is that this becomes the place that you check every morning. I keep Notion open throughout the day, and add notes, to-dos, and keep things updated daily.

Master tasks database

It took us a while to decide on the best way to do this, but we ended up creating a large master task list that contains ALL of our tasks. We then filter views of this database where we need them. (You can embed filtered Database views into any other pages).

Ben likes to note how this was a real adoption hurdle for him, as Notion doesn’t have a standardized top-level view of all your date-based tasks in multiple database-views. The master task list was his workaround.

Templates for client projects

The beauty here is that client templates, notes, and to-dos now all live in the same place.

A the top of each Client template is an embedded database that pulls all tasks from our master task database filtered by Client.

This allows me to see at a glance all of the to-dos with dates and status (waiting on feedback, complete, in-progress, etc), and also allows me an area below where I can store notes, resources, thoughts, links, etc. We also use it to track our estimated time and revenue per client.

Other super fun ways we’re using Notion:

MARIE

Studies

I’m tracking all of the courses I’ve purchased and completed over the years, along with notes as I go through each course.

Marketing

I store links and inspiration, tasks and to-dos, and swipe files of email marketing campaigns and sales pages to name a few.

We store links to all of our branding elements, bios, headshots, etc. for easy access.

I write my blog posts in Notion, export as Markdown, Ben uploads to the website. SO easy.

Girl Guides

I store my notes, forms, schedule, to-dos, and everything else related to my role as a guider.

Revenue Projections

We have spreadsheets set up to help us estimate our yearly revenue based on projected revenue and outgoing invoices.

Creative Ideas

I track and document my creative projects: learning to knit, fixing up furniture, sewing projects, etc.

BEN

Emergency Preparedness

Ben has been putting together lists of things we have and things we need in order to be ready for various kinds of emergencies. Let’s be real here, this was never going to happen on my to-do list…

House Projects

Ben has started using Notion to keep track of upcoming house projects and things we need to budget for over time.

Outreach, Research, Studies

Ben uses the light database views to track outreach, companies he might like to work with, and tracking statuses of his studies in firefighting and programming.

These are just a few of the ways we’ve integrated Notion into our daily routines. Because the tool is so flexible and adaptable, you really need to put the time in to make it work for you. Once you’ve got your workspaces in place, the next step is building the routine of using it as your daily launchpad.

Fair warning, you may lose a few days/weeks as you start playing with the possibilities.

I promise it’s worth it.

I can honestly say that even with all the time investing in setting it up for our needs, I feel like it has easily doubled my productivity. Now instead of Netflixing in the evenings, I’m playing in Notion; catching up on reading, taking all those the courses I’ve paid for because it’s all so easily VISIBLE.

It’s much harder to lose track of ideas in this space.

I’m not saying Notion is necessarily your best solution, but I can say that after years of procrasti-productivity and trying to find “that one system that finally works,” I’ve been blown away by this tool.

NOTHING else has quite compared to new habits I’ve been able to develop now that I’ve found a piece of tech that works the way my brain works.

It’s the best of Evernote + Asana + Trello + Google Spreadsheets.

Oh, and it was less than a third of the cost of what we were paying Asana. :)

Feel free to play around with these templates. I can guarantee they’ll evolve, but hopefully they give you a starting point if you’re thinking about giving Notion a try. Enjoy!

Originally published at weareokidoki.com.

One Tool To Rule Them All was originally published in Oki Doki on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you’ve done any reading on productivity and habits, you’ve probably come across the concept of Keystone Habits. Both Charles Duhigg and James Clear have talked extensively about the power of Keystone habits before.

Keystone Habits: The Simple Way to Improve All Aspects of Your Life

“The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns.”

The idea is that some habits carry more influence into other areas of our lives. Habits like exercise and food journaling have been shown to be some of the most powerful keystone habits.

From Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit:

“When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly.”

“Exercise spills over,” said James Prochaska, a University of Rhode Island researcher. “There’s something about it that makes other good habits easier.” p109

So we know that keystone habits are highly correlated with other good habits. Daily exercise, meditation, and even making your bed are some of the most notable keystone habits.

Both Ben and I have done much reading on the power of habits, including The Power of Habit (Charles Duhigg) and Atomic Habits (James Clear), and we carefully take note and review our individual routines, habits, and rituals. We tend to do this even more toward the end of the year as we look back at what we achieved, and what we want to do as we plan our year ahead.

Disrupting unhelpful patterns

After yet another argument about the state of the kitchen (very messy after Chef Marie was done with it), Ben and I discovered what we realized was something of a negative keystone habit that was impacting other areas of our lives in a way we didn’t like:

We were eating dinner while watching Netflix.

Now, in itself this habit might seem innocent enough. Very quickly this became our pattern: one of us would make food (usually myself), and when dinner was ready we would start flipping through shows to watch.

We’d eat our food during our chosen show. One show would often lead to a second show… and a third show… and before long we found ourselves vegged out on the couch, tired, tapped out, and procrastinating on kitchen clean up.

“We’ll do it in the morning.”

Inevitably, Ben would wake up in the morning to face a messy kitchen with crusty, dried dishes that would have been much easier to clean if they’d been done the night before.

This one habit was having a negative impact on many other areas of our lives:

Added anxiety

Not only would a dirty kitchen add time to Ben’s morning, since he gets up first, but it would add to his anxiety. Nobody enjoys waking up to a dirty kitchen every morning! It starts the day off on a bad note.

Poor meal choices

If Ben didn’t clean the kitchen in the morning, we’d both get lazy about making a proper breakfast or lunch because the kitchen was still messy/dirty. It was more effort to make good, healthy food choices. The impact of this could easily trickle into other days of the week.

We also tended to drink more alcohol when we were watching shows, having a beer or cocktail, sometimes two.

Wasted time

We looked at just how much time we were spending consuming media, and it was a lot. As two people who spend almost all of their work hours on the internet, we weren’t really leaving much time to unplug.

You might think that watching Netflix is relaxing, and it’s a great way to unwind, and it very much can be. But we were consuming it mindlessly out of habit.

One night after 15–20 minutes of scrolling through shows to find something to watch, it really hit me just how much time we were spending consuming vs creating.

We were often done with our meal by the time we had chosen a show, and even then we were often watching something that we weren’t even that excited to watch (because you know, we’d binged all the good stuff!)

Energy sucking

Watching Netflix might seem like a low-impact activity, but our brains were being passively engaged after having been fully engaged all day long.

Somehow, having lazy Netflix binges was making us feel more tired (and guilty from feeling like we were being lazy). Once our shows were done, we’d grab our phones and start scrolling.

We were completely de-motivated to do anything once we’d sunk down into couch-mode.

Should we give up Netflix?

One night after a gathering with friends where everyone was talking about the shows they’d been watching and sharing recommendations, it hit us just how much TV we’d been watching as of late, and we weren’t proud of it.

We asked ourselves… could we give up Netflix? What would our lives look like without it? What would we do in the evenings?

We decided to try giving up Netflix during the week, and gave ourselves permission to watch a movie or show on weekends.

Making this one change has made huge improvements in other parts of our lives.

We were less likely to bicker about the mess in the kitchen… because we weren’t waking up to a messy kitchen. We’d actually clean the kitchen together after dinner.

We were more productive. We felt prouder of how we were spending our days.

And most notably, we were getting more projects done around the house:

• We fixed up an old cabinet together.
• I picked up sewing again, and made a housecoat for Ben.
• I started actually making time for all the courses I’ve bought over the last few years, including a new one on Sustainability.
• I started my Permaculture Diploma.
• I learned how to knit, loom, and weave.
• We invested time into a new planning software that has helped us better organize our daily/weekly routines, for both work and home (which has led to some really positive keystone habits, but this is a post for another day).

We were crossing things off the list of things we’d been meaning to do forever but never seemed to find time for.

I started doing more research on routines and rituals, and began integrating meditation into my daily routine, along with a simple 7-min workout that I used to help me wake up in the morning.

Changing this one bad habit made me want to get even more more intentional with other life habits.

I was equating Netflix with self-care and downtime, but the truth is that creativity is a much more powerful form of self-care.

Sewing and other “maker” projects are so rejuvenating, and involve more creative parts of the brain without being draining or tiring. I was less tired when I stayed up until midnight working on a sewing project than I was when I watched an evening of Netflix.

I was more creative, inspired, grateful, and generally happier. I was more excited on all fronts, not just with house projects.

I was prouder of where my time was going, and could feel how much more time I had gained by changing this one habit that was having a negative impact on other parts of my life and daily routines. I actually had something to show for my time!

Sewing and making may not be your form of self-care, but I urge you to look at what creative activities you’ve been putting on the backburner because you may have fallen into a cycle of consumption that has snatched up your time and motivation.

Sometimes disrupting unhelpful patterns can be just as powerful (if not more) as integrating new ones.

Do you know what your unhealthy and healthy keystone habits are? The ones that impact the rest of your day in positive and negative ways?

Consider what current (unhealthy) habits may be stealing time or joy from you.

Work on changing just one of those bad habits, and see what shifts for you. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Originally published at weareokidoki.com.

Why We Said Goodbye To Netflix during weeknights was originally published in Oki Doki on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 2014, when we built the first version of our website, we decided we were going to be “the course people.” We had a software for course builders, and many of our clients were course builders, so we had to claim the space, we thought.

With all the advice about the importance of niching and only “doing one thing”, and being known for that “one thing,” we felt the pressure to structure all our services around online courses, because that was the software we had chosen to build…so that’s what we had to do, right?

So we built a site that said: hey, we help people launch courses!

And while it wasn’t untrue, the problem was we had stopped talking about user experience design, digital strategy, service design, content planning, launch support, web design, web development, mobile apps…(all of the work that we’d done for years that was where the majority of our revenue came from).

We repositioned overnight. We wanted our SaaS to work so badly, that we simply shifted all of our services to support it. This made sense in theory…but it didn’t take us long to realize that it was actually much easier for us to sell $5k coaching agreements or $20k development projects than to sell $29/mo subscriptions.

Why were we working so hard to send people to the lowest priced way to work with us??

We are high-touch people who do services well. It’s where we shine!

We get invested in people and their projects. We love long-term deep dive work; it didn’t make sense for us to build our whole business around a low-touch offer.

We were caught up in what we thought we needed to offer in order to grow the software side of our business, and we weren’t necessarily playing to our strengths (or our interests!).

We had niched our services so narrowly that we were losing out on projects that were fun, challenging, executable, and profitable. We loved our web design and strategy work, our cool development projects, and mentoring and teaching.

Identity Crisis

I went from feeling totally “in my element”, to really struggling to find my professional identity as I tried to pigeonhole my services into “online courses.” I felt like a beginner all over again.

Having done web design for years, I had those processes nailed, and I knew how to approach those challenges. With people launching coaching programs, online courses, and masterminds, there were new and unique challenges; each client was wildly different from the last, and the same approach didn’t work for each client.

Ben himself was going through a similar identity crisis, but with different challenges; his strengths as a programmer were somewhat written off in this new “business.” Sure he was building our software, but he was working on fewer client projects that sharpened his development chops and challenged him in new and interesting ways.

We’d both sacrificed so much to grow our software, and realized that we needed to re-evaluate our priorities.

The problem with (niching on) online courses

1. It was way too limiting

We both found “online courses” way too limiting to describe what it was that we really help our clients do.

Certainly our combined years of expertise and amassed knowledge amounted to more than just “online courses.” I knew there was so much more that my Design Thinking and Agile background could offer.

We collectively agreed that we wanted to work on projects that:

• Made the best use of our natural skills
• Brought in good revenue
• Were fun + creatively challenging

*When we were honest about the projects we enjoyed most, many of them had nothing to do with online courses! *

Some were web application design projects, others involved designing cross-platform customer experiences, while others involved sales page copywriting, branding, and marketing integrations.

The underlying through-line between these projects was a love for creating memorable user experiences, and helping our clients to do it more sustainably: with less effort, more ease, and less stress.

The other aspect of feeling limited by “online courses” was that the majority of our clients were running coaching programs, and “online course” has a much different connotation than “coaching program,” “immersion,” “online community, ” or “mastermind program.” We were seeing opportunities for helping people manage and streamline much higher value offers than just courses.

2. We were constantly myth-busting

I started seeing first hand how brand new business owners were expecting to create online courses with very little experience, expecting to make completely passive revenue. Not only that, but people were taking out big loans to build the course of their dreams before really testing their ideas in a smaller way first.

Building a successful business around online courses is the exception, not the rule.

People would sign up for Doki before they had any course material created, and would churn quickly when they realized that an online course was going to take them much longer to build than they initially thought.

The technology solved one tiny aspect of the process, but most people weren’t even aware of what the process involved. There was a lot of education and support that needed to happen behind the scenes (regardless of what someone was launching!)

3. It wasn’t sustainable

Around this time I had also begun studying permaculture, and was working toward my certification. There’s no doubt that immersing myself in these studies was influencing the way I was starting to think about our business.

What is permaculture?

There are so many different ways to define permaculture, but I like Toby Hemenway’s explanation:

A set of techniques and principles for designing sustainable human settlements

As well as this one:

“Permaculture is the design of beneficial relationships”

Permaculture felt like an ecologically influenced offshoot of my design thinking studies, but instead of striving for innovation, we were striving for sustainability and resilience in both life and business.

The permaculture process is not unlike many other design projects.

In permaculture we start by asking:

What is your goal, and what do you want to get out of your land?

• Do you just want to grow some herbs, fruits, and veg for the kitchen?
• Do you want your backyard to be a therapeutic oasis of calm?
• Do you want to live entirely off the land?
• Do you want to provide small-scale farming?

There is no right or wrong answer; there is only designing for the existing challenge.

And so we went back to first principles, and we asked ourselves:

• What is our goal, and what do we want to get out of our SaaS?
• Is it a creative side hustle?
• Do we want it to replace our full-time income
• Do we want to build it to sell?
• What role did we want our SaaS to play in our overall business?

If we were designing our business intentionally from scratch today, what would it look like?

We built our software (naively) out of personal necessity, but we never really stopped to ask ourselves about what we wanted it to look like long-term.

We certainly didn’t mean to turn our whole business upside down to try to grow such a narrow part of our business, when we were already successful with services + training.

We decided to “un-niche.”

An opportunity

When we built Doki, we had focused on solving the technical challenge of course launching, but it quickly became clear that there were so many other challenges around the process of launching, and these were mostly human challenges (not technical ones).

These challenges were similar whether someone was launching a new service, new product, website, online course, or coaching program, the biggest of which were uncertainty, self doubt, imposter complex, perfectionism, and fear.

Of course, having a strategy (+ cheerleader) in place helps to alleviate many of those fears.

I began to look at activities I was already doing, and asked myself how I could help bridge the gap between our low-end SaaS subscription, and our higher-end, high-touch services.

I started offering coaching engagements that were centered around helping people launch their ideas, regardless of whether or not the format was an online course.

I offered one-off sessions, three month sessions, and even longer engagements while I got to know as many scenarios as I could, and figured out who I could best serve. I was taking my digital strategy experience and focusing it on aspects of launching.

I also spent months casually interviewing people who had online communities, digital products, coaching programs, interesting service-based business models, masterminds, and online courses in order to gather more insights outside of my limited network.

A new set of services emerged that provided the bridge, and allowed me to work in a more hands-on way with clients.

I took what I was doing 1:1 with my clients, and the insights I’d gathered from partnering with instructional designer Stacey Howe-Lott, and built Run Your Learning Launch, a small mastermind program to help people launch their very first online course.

It was a chance to work intimately with people, teach, collaborate with an instructional designer, and help people launch their ideas — and it was FUN.

One of the most interesting observations from running the course was that 50% of the students decided NOT to launch a course in the end, but they were grateful and still had raving testimonials! People were grateful that they didn’t waste time trying to create a course when the truth was they needed to get more experience with clients 1:1.

It was awesome to know that people still felt that they’d gotten value, even if it meant taking a step back on their original idea.

Getting back to services that feel good

It took some time to feel like I was “in my element,” have standard processes, a track record of successful clients, and pricing that felt good, and a big part of that was no longer feeling limited by a niche we’d chosen.

Ben landed a few fun development projects that reinvigorated his passion for new technologies, got him using some languages and processes he’d been meaning to explore (and working with interesting clients again).

We dipped our toes in the water and called ourselves the course people for a while. We thought we needed to be the course software people. We still love our product and will continue to grow Doki, but not at the expense of our client work.

That’s where the real learning and growth happens.

The truth is, we’re so much more interested in working with people than software!

Originally published at weareokidoki.com.

Why we “un-niched” was originally published in Oki Doki on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you’ve ever gone through a rebrand or redesign, you might be able to relate to the special kind of pain and stress that this process can provoke.

Redesigning and repositioning your own business and brand is not for the faint of heart.

Especially so when your job is helping others clarify their messaging and offers, and communicate their brilliance online. I’ve worked with many clients over the years, helping them clarify their messaging, their brand voice, and their offers, and the process almost inevitably involves some level of personal or existential crisis.

In order to represent yourself with any kind of accuracy and attract your ideal clients and customers, you have to have ruthless clarity about what you do, what value you provide for people, and how you can help them. Before you hire that copywriter, photographer, or designer, it helps to know your process inside and out, and you’ve got to be keenly aware of your strengths and weaknesses.

It’s nearly impossible to redesign your online presence without some seriously deep introspection, both personally and professionally.

As a collaborative couple, going through this process together, we were asking these questions of both ourselves and our business:

• What value are we providing for others?
• What projects are an ideal use of our time?
• Are we playing to our strengths?
• Are there services we should stop offering?
• Are our systems and processes streamlined and ready to scale?
• What does growth look like for us; as individual people? As a business? As a couple?

Ben and I are a husband-wife duo running a digital creative agency. I handle the majority of the strategic planning, design, and consulting, while Ben handles technical strategy and programming. Together we help people plan, design, and launch new products and services, courses, web apps, etc.

In 2014 we merged our two freelance businesses under one umbrella, Oki Doki. We each had successful solo consultancies, long-standing clients, and a large body of work.

We also had an idea to build a course delivery platform to help us with our client work, and figured this was a good time to build it under a new joint business.

When we started building our software, Doki, we had no idea what would become of it. We knew services. Services were easy for both of us. We relied on word of mouth referrals, and neither of us had ever had any kind of marketing engine. Running software was a completely different beast.

We quickly assembled a very placeholder website while we were figuring out our new position, our services, our software, etc.

And then we didn’t touch it for three+ years.

What happens when you’re in transition, or you’ve outgrown your current online presence, but don’t quite know where you’re heading?

This was the predicament in which we found ourselves, and so we delayed updating our website until we had a better sense of where we were heading.

Being in that grey area was tremendously challenging for both of us, personally and professionally.

So much had shifted for us in those three years. We:

• Bought a house (in the woods, in a place we’d never been before)
• Got married
• Launched our software
• Niched our services to support our software
• Took on new hobbies:
  - Ben joined a fire department as a volunteer
  - I started my permaculture studies
• Launched a new online program (Run Your Learning Launch)

Our website became painfully outdated in terms of how to work with us, what we did, and what value we could deliver for our clients. Back then, we simply took our best guess at where we were heading, and gave ourselves permission to figure it out as we went along.

I was moving my design services into mentorship and teaching, and launched a successful online mentorship school that helped bring in enough revenue to sustain us both while Ben focused on building our idea: a software platform for people who run courses and mentorship/coaching programs (Doki).

Once Doki started getting some traction, we quickly realized that we couldn’t rely on Ben alone to “handle” the Doki side of things while I was running my program and working with clients.

We had to make difficult decisions over the years, and being two ambitious people with very different strengths, goals, and perspectives, we didn’t always arrive at the same conclusions.

We made several pivots to our services over the years, including strategy, design, and marketing support for those who were launching online courses.

Building a software company together was and continues to be the ultimate learning experience (on every level).

Now enter one of the most challenging experiences we’ve ever encountered as a couple: redesigning our website.

Why was this process so damn hard? This is what we do for a living!

After so many adjustments and pivots to our services, we were both struggling to articulate what we did as a company. It was a personal/professional identity crisis (you can read more about that here).

Ben and I, while working together under the same umbrella brand, have typically worked with our clients separately. We each have our own ideal client, and types of projects that we attract, and our ideal clients are suited to our skills individually. Once in a blue moon, we work together on the same project, but typically we’ve operated as two individuals within our business.

How do we abide by the Rule of One when we maybe-sort-of have different audiences and ideal clients between the two of us?

The process of reworking our website was the beginning of us — both individually and as a partnership — working through our fears, insecurities, goals and dreams, and getting on the same page about our services and vision of the business.

It wasn’t easy. It was the first time we were facing this level of tension and resistance. We found ourselves bickering and getting heated. Resentful. Misunderstood. There was clearly more to this process than just “redoing our website.”

It was personal, and it was business. We work together from our home; there’s no way our business decisions wouldn’t impact our relationship and our partnership at home.

So how did we finally move forward and get traction with such a PITA client like ourselves? There were a few things that helped us get on the same page…

👩‍⚕️ Getting outside perspective

We made the decision to reach out to a couples counsellor. (I half wondered if there wasn’t a therapist out there who specializes in couples who run SaaS business together, which seems like a lucrative niche, but alas…)

I wrote her and said something along the lines of:

We live + run a home-based business together, and we recognize that in order for us to be healthy/happy at home, AND at work, we may need to put better strategies in place to make sure both of our needs are being met :)

We began a powerful process over the next six weeks which helped us on so many levels.

While our therapist wasn’t going to help us write our website copy, she could certainly help us understand our default patterns that we go to when we’re stressed, scared, or not feeling seen.

It’s no coincidence that we finished our final session with our therapist the same week that we finally launched our website.

The work we did together in those sessions was invaluable to us getting the project done. Not only were we able to build more awareness of our default patterns, but we had a chance to really develop a deeper appreciation of our different ways of being; both in life and our work.

Seriously, if you’re a couple that works together, I can’t recommend it enough!

🎯 Getting clear on our offers

Once we finally started moving out of the grey area (our identity crisis) and let go of what we thought we needed to do/be, we started to have more clarity.

• What were our best projects/clients?
• Where was the majority of our revenue coming from?
• Where do we feel the most excitement and energy in our work?
• Where was there market potential and unmet needs in the market?
• Where do we naturally excel?

We did some tough digging into these questions, and got really honest about the kind of work we should be doing.

We realized that we were spending way too much energy to grow our lowest priced, lowest touch offer! The truth is, we are high-touch people who do services well. It’s where we shine! We get invested in people and their projects. We love long-term, deep-dive work. It didn’t make sense for us to build our whole business around such a low-touch offer.

We acknowledged that we both love projects that involve all parts of the process, from initial strategy and planning, to design, all the way through to development, and beyond, including marketing automation and sales funnels. Yes, it’s a lot, but it’s all work we love doing.

You can read more about how we “un-niched” here.

🤝 Working collaboratively

This seems like a big obvious one, but having operated mostly as two individuals, we were used to doing things on our own. We each had different contracts, different ways of communicating, and different types of projects. This project required us to get aligned and work together.

One of our biggest a-ha moments was when I finally showed Ben my client proposals. When he finally saw how I’d been structuring my proposals, he was like, “THIS. THIS IS IT. This needs to be our web copy!” I’d already done so much work to carefully describe my process, ethos, and expectations to my existing clients, but we weren’t doing that anywhere on our website. I’d already written tons of documentation for current clients; I didn’t really have to start from scratch (at least on this piece).

We’d also each tried working on the design and copy separately, to show the other what we were envisioning. We both spent time going down rabbit holes, exploring ideas…but it was only once we started working collaboratively on both the copy, structure, and design that we were able to start making serious progress.

Surprise! We’re stronger working together than when we work in a silo.

🔥 Starting from scratch

We knew we had slapped together our first website. Now that we were starting fresh, we asked ourselves, what would it look like if we took the time to design it properly, from the “first principles” of our business?

We initially tried iterating on our existing placeholder website, and, in truth, that kept us stalled. There are times to iterate, and there are times to burn it all to the ground. It was time to start with a clean slate.

Ben iterated on the site first, and I wasn’t feeling the direction. It felt too technical and serious, and perhaps spoke more to the agency audience Ben was accustomed to, but I could see what he was trying to do, and it gave me a great starting point.

It took some time to find our groove, but starting fresh was actually easier than trying to fix something that wasn’t really working in the first place.

It’s been an epic journey to level up our online presence and feel like our online communication matches up with what’s really happening behind the scenes.

It took niching too hard on “online courses” for us to realize that we were missing out on projects we really love.

Our previous site was designed to support a software product, when really, we’re a services duo who happens to also have a software product.

We don’t just provide course software, we design sustainable business ecosystems that support our clients through numerous types of launches and span multiple customer touch-points.

Whether it’s a yoga teacher taking their online program to the next level, a chiropractor creating a seamless digital to in-person patient experience, or an industry leader transforming her in-person certifications into a location-independent digital experience, we know how to create memorable online experiences.

Originally published at weareokidoki.com.

Lessons learned from working with our toughest client yet was originally published in Oki Doki on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of our guests told me that our wedding had helped her open her mind as to what a wedding could be. It got me thinking that I should probably share some of the things we experienced and learned in the process of doing our very DIY, intimate, semi-casual low-waste wedding.

I’m sharing our experience, our learnings, and even our budget, in case it helps any others out there who might be trying to decide whether or not having a DIY wedding is right for them.

A background

My partner had been married once before, and I wasn’t certain that having a wedding was something that was really important to me. We had talked about the possibility of having a wedding on several occasions, but because we both very much felt married, neither of us really felt the inclination to take it very seriously.

I also don’t have a relationship with my immediate family (parents), and I wondered what was the point? We already had a common law union, and in Canada, that’s pretty much the legal equivalent of being married. We were already business married; if anything, we more legally intertwined than most married couples. So why get married?

It started when we moved to the Sunshine Coast in January 2017. We bought a house on the coast, and we were falling in love with it more each day. We had a huge yard, and began talking about doing some kind of house-warming party.

More and more we loved the idea of doing something here in our backyard where we could bring our closest friends and family. We started toying with the idea of a housewarming, which evolved into talk about a low-key wedding. I knew that if my sister and her kiddos were going to make it, that I was going to have to give her plenty of notice.

Talk became action when I finally sent Ben a Google calendar invite that said “Get married in backyard?” and he accepted the invite.

I figured we could do something small and intimate that would feel like a party without the stuffiness or serious vibe of many traditional or religious weddings.

DIY vs Planner

This effectively gave us just over 4 months to pull everything together.

Our original vision was to have a small reception/party, but no ceremony. This evolved into a small ceremony without rings, and then eventually into a real ceremony with rings. It’s not that we were necessarily opposed, but we didn’t want it to feel too formal or traditional.

As more and more people began to RSVP, we realized that our initial numbers were greater than we expected, and wondered if we should look into hiring a planner to help us with some basics. This quickly got thrown out when we got a quote that started at $6k for 30 guests that included all sorts of fancy-pants stuff that we didn’t want or need (bridal hair and makeup, boutonnieres, music, marriage commissioner, etc). Our actual numbers would have brought the costs closer to $10k.

We realized that no one else could really envision the casual garden party vibe that we were going for, so we decided to DIY it, getting lots of pointers and suggestions from friends who had been there before.

Please note: This is not a knock against wedding planners. The value of the wedding package was actually quite reasonable given how our costs broke down, but it simply felt overkill for what we were looking for.

We thrifted, DIY’d, borrowed, and rented wherever possible, and made a conscious effort not to create more waste through the entire process.

The whole process was a lot of work, but I feel it was absolutely worth it to get the vibe that we wanted. Here’s how things worked out with our DIY low-waste backyard wedding:

What we did

ATTIRE

I REALLY wanted to make my own dress, but my sewing skills were rusty, and I didn’t trust that I would have enough time to pull it off. I scoured many second-hand wedding dress websites and thrift stores, but unfortunately didn’t find anything in my size.

I ended up buying my dress online for ~$400, which was much more than I wanted to pay, but after a few months of searching relentlessly, I decided that I would splurge on one I loved and resell it afterward.

I figured there were so many other ways that I could save money and material that I would make it work.

My shoes were $20, I made my own necklace and earrings, and made a flower crown from flowers in the backyard. I did my own makeup and hair, and got eyelash extensions the day before which meant I wouldn’t have to worry too much about mascara running down my face in case I got teary-eyed, haha. I stained my lips using blackberries from the garden so I wouldn’t have to buy another lipstick. (I only have 1 colour of lipstick and it’s hot pink, and I wanted a more natural look for this occasion.)

Ben bought his suit through Indochino; it was a great deal and allowed him to customize every aspect of the suit, so it fit perfectly and was exactly what he wanted. He wore his favourite pair of shoes.

TOTAL COST: ~$1250

FOOD + DRINK

We looked into several catering options on the coast, and came *this* close to hiring one. Before confirming anything, however, I checked in with my good friend Brigitte (a personal chef now living in Sonoma) to see if there was any way she could help prepare the food for us (I also really wanted her to come!). We ended up deciding that we would cover her travel and expenses along with groceries and labour time, and that we could make it work.

This was an extremely generous gift from her (we paid her, but not nearly as much as the time she put in!), and we feel so lucky that this worked out the way it did. It allowed us to spend time with Brigitte and Carl in the days before the wedding, and they fit in like family. Brigitte put together an incredible vegetarian taco bar for us, complete with queso fresco and salsa appetizers.

The Menu:

• Mexican Rice
• Frijoles Borrachos (Beans with Cilantro, Jalapenos and Beer)
• Sweet Potato and Black Beans
• Chili-Lime Tofu
• Zucchini-Corn Poblano
• along with an absurd variety of salsas, sauces, and toppings

We ended up with a total of 55 guests, a handful of which were last minute RSVPs. We likely couldn’t have accommodated for the extra guests if we had booked caterers, so DIYing the food in our kitchen worked out really well.

Brigitte + Carl prepared all the food in our kitchen in the days leading up to the event which allowed us to keep in close communication about any grocery or supplies needed.

I hired a friend of a friend and her daughter to help us tap kegs, pour drinks, set up glasses, tidy food plates, and keep water jugs full. I also got help the day before with 5 hours of food chopping and prep to help our chef, and this was immensely valuable.

Our in-laws graciously purchased the wine and beer for our guests, and the liquor store gave us a wholesale discount of 10% on the wine.

We ordered:

• 8 bottles of champagne
• 10 bottles of red
• 10 bottles of white
• 2 mini-kegs of beer
• 1 mini-keg of cider
• 6 large bottles of watermelon lemon juice

We had a bit of beer and red wine left over, though we ran out of white wine before dinner had begun, so friends ran to the store to pick up more bottles!

We ordered 60 assorted cupcakes and 24 mini-cupcakes which didn’t last long! I would probably have ordered more of these, as they were clearly a hit.

Food, chef, helpers, servers, cleaners: ~$2,500
Dessert: $300
Drink costs: $150 (~$600 gifted)

VENUE + RENTALS

Our venue was our backyard which made things pretty easy (and cheap), and allowed us to accommodate a large group easily.

We rented plates and cutlery so we didn’t have any disposables. We took our best guess with the order regarding quantities, and we updated our order closer to the date.

We rented:

• tables
• chairs
• glassware
• linens
• 10x10 tent

These were delivered on the morning of the wedding, which meant a lot of running around. I wish we could have received these the evening before, as it would have reduced some of the stress on the morning of the wedding.

Our friend Constance was our wing-woman in the days leading up to, during, and after the wedding with setup, decorations, and clean-up. It takes a village!!

After some panic in the morning about how we would get everything set up in time, we called in the troops (friends and family) to help us. Since we didn’t really have any instructions, we relied on everyone to make executive decisions to set things up while we were both getting ready.

Total rental + delivery cost: $900

PHOTOGRAPHY

We originally weren’t going to hire a photographer, because we weren’t even going to have a ceremony; it seemed a bit overkill and we thought it might blow the budget.

Of course if you talk to ANYONE they will tell you that it’s the one thing not to skimp on, and I would have to agree on this one. I’m SO GLAD we decided to do this!

My good friend and neighbour Leah introduced me to Lindyn (who I’d already been following on Instagram!), and ran the idea by her of photographing a slightly non-traditional wedding. Lindyn doesn’t typically do weddings, but she made a special exception for us because she thinks we’re cool. 😀

I immediately wanted to be friends with Lindyn, having her there on the day not just as our photographer, but as our friend. I knew she would fit in well with many of the other self-employed heart-centered guests who would be there!

She included a preliminary couples photo shoot for us which gave us a chance to get to know her and feel comfortable in front of the camera. She blew us away with these photos; the whole experience was incredible, and she even sneakily ordered us celebratory champagne at the restaurant that we went to after our session with her.

She spent more than the promised time taking photos, and really helped us capture the whole vibe of the day. Within days she had provided all of the glorious edited photographs, allowing us to download as many as we wanted, and use them as we wish. This is a cost that I was more than happy to pay, and cannot believe the value we got here. I’ll definitely be hiring her for a future business shoot!

Cost: $1500

BORROWED + THRIFTED + GIFTED

• 75 mason jars. We used sticky chalkboard paper and chalk markers to make reusable labels.
• linens for tables and napkins
• battery powered tea lights
• multiple threads of hanging lights
• glass jars and vases for tea lights and flowers
• wedding arch
• disco ball
• bouquets (my aunt bought several bouquets, and our photographer purchased some from a local woman who grows wild flowers in her garden)
• chairs
• mixing bowls, baking sheets, baskets
• extension cords
• balloons for signage
• driftwood for decorations
• Giant Jenga

OTHER COSTS

• Guestbook, wedding album, thank you cards — $200
• Misc decorations + supplies — $200
• Rings — $140
• Coolers + Buckets — $100
• Chalkboard — $35
• Bench — $50

Total: $700

We used The Knot to make our wedding website for free, and Honeyfund to collect optional wedding gifts.

Reflections / Observations / Learnings / Challenges

Guests

We did have some challenges around choosing our guests, as I am sure most people do. How do you decide where to cut it off? As I hadn’t been in communication with either of my parents for years, and we wanted to keep it small (and drama-free), we decided that we wouldn’t invite my parents. In order to not further alienate them, we decided to keep our invites to mostly immediate family, with the exception of a few family members. Yes, we did offend some family along the way, which I learned through the grapevine.

I’m not sure there’s any way around offending some family or friends along the way, especially if you choose to go small.

Music + Dancing

Ben originally didn’t want to do a dance floor, but enough of our guests had inquired, that I suspected our guests would make one happen whether there was a dance floor or not. We made some playlists, but decided to give our guests free reign to play some of their desired songs later in the evening. This ended up causing a bit of tension toward the end of the evening when people had different ideas about what they considered “danceable” music.

I wish I’d had more time to add some of my favourite songs to the list, but I ran out of time as we got closer to the date! I also wish we’d created our own dance playlist, but overall, I think this went pretty well, and the dancing was more than a little entertaining.

Receiving

One of the most challenging parts of the experience was accepting help, generosity, and generally having people fuss over you.

I hadn’t really picked up any flowers, and was going to cut some from my garden. My aunt ran out and bought some big beautiful bouquets, and I immediately felt guilty and struggled to accept/receive. I was thinking of how I would say “I will pay you back for those!” and decided that I wouldn’t worry about it, and would find a way to express my gratitude at another time.

Family and friends showed up on the morning of to help us out, but I just didn’t know how or what to delegate. I called in a friend to help me delegate and get shit done on the morning/afternoon of the wedding. Everyone did an amazing job at making executive decisions, and helping me figure out what to put where, but it was a bit stressful not having a specific “plan” or vision I could share with people.

Luckily I wasn’t too attached to the outcome, so I was able to just let it happen, and was grateful for the decision-making.

I wish we’d enlisted a few more helpers first thing in the morning to help us set up the party rental supplies; we were sweating all morning running around to unfold tables, chairs, plates, etc., and this was something that a few more hands could easily have helped us with.

Challenging my perception of weddings

As I think about my friends words, and how our wedding changed her perception of what a wedding could be, I realize that my own wedding had the same effect on me.

We had both played down our wedding for so long, making sure people knew it “wasn’t that big of a deal,” and that it was just a simple party. But it was so much more than a simple party.

I have never before experienced the kind of high that comes from having all of the most important friends and family in your life in one room (or backyard to be specific), beaming love at you. It was one of the most incredible and beautiful things I’ve ever experienced. It’s indescribable. It is probably one of the only days in your life where you may experience that level and intensity of love, community, and connection.

There was not a single person who attended that we didn’t hand-pick. We were so thrilled for each person to finally have a chance to meet the other important people in our lives.

Going through that experience together as a couple is such a special experience, there’s probably no other time you’ll experience something like it.

Hopefully sharing our experience leaves you with some insights and take-aways, whether you’re planning your own wedding or not!

It seems like everyone and their grandma has an online course. Hasn’t it all been said and done before? Are online courses dead?

No, online courses aren’t dead. Bad online courses are dead (or at least dying).

Not all online courses are created equal. Did you know that on AVERAGE, online courses have a 3% completion rate? OUCH! (See Seth Godin’s interview on the Tim Ferris podcast: http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/02/10/seth-godin/)

There’s no shortage online courses out there, and you may have already started noticing a plethora of courses in your particular niche. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. (In fact, if you can’t find a single other person who has tried to do something similar, you might want to rethink your topic! Yes, honestly.)

As online courses become more mainstream, and more people offer them as a natural part of their products and services, consumers are becoming more discerning. We may be in the information age, but information alone does not create transformation.

“Online courses right now remind me of where SEO was 10 or 12 years ago. Where it’s growing really fast, everyone knows they need it, tons of consumer demand, but so many consumers are getting burned, and realizing, ‘I thought this was going to be better than it was,’ that you’re going to start to have people being skeptical of an entire industry” — Jay Baer, Convince & Convert

Courses aren’t going anywhere, but consumers will expect more for their money, and expectations will be higher. To stand out, you’re going to have to bring your A-game. and that means not just sitting back and delivering “passive” evergreen courses.

They will simply be more common, and the need to differentiate, engage, and connect will be more important than ever. Nobody needs more information, they simply need a way to solve specific problems.

Working with everyday business owners (and having launched my own) I’ve seen first-hand how well-positioned and well-executed online courses can improve not only your business, but your lifestyle. Those that succeed (both in terms of revenue and in terms of completion rates) solve a very specific problem for a very specific niche.

Let’s get into the benefits of having an online course as part of your larger business strategy.

The no-brainer reasons to create an online course:

• Create an asset that you can sell again and again that isn’t limited by your time.
• Build authority, credibility, and experience; people trust businesses that teach others (use this power for good!).
• Reach more people than you could work with 1:1.
• Offer a lower-touch and more affordable way for people to get familiar with your work.
• Diversify your offerings, not depending on one type of revenue stream to support your business (say, client services).
• Provide value on autopilot.
• Use as an upsell or downsell with other products and services.

Those are all excellent and compelling reasons to create a course. But how do you know if you specifically are ready to take the leap?

You *should* create a course if…

You have at least a few of the following:

• You have a proven system. You’ve nailed your process, and you’re comfortable working with people 1:1 or even in a group. (This isn’t new for you!)
• You’re reached your client capacity. If you are at maximum capacity and are turning down clients, I can almost guarantee that you’ve got a course waiting to be created.
• You find yourself giving the same advice over and over again, or you have shared assets across many clients/customers. If you are delivering the same advice, resources, homework, links, etc to your clients and customers, there’s room to streamline your offerings. One wonderful way to do this is to turn your client workbooks/process into an asset. (You can even bundle these assets with 1:1 time, reviews, support, etc.)
• You have people asking (sometimes begging) you to create “the thing.” Always a good sign when your audience is hungry for something specific!
• You have a large audience in a specific niche. Chances are if you have a large audience, you’ve already been actively sharing value in some capacity. Why not create an asset that directly solves a problem this audience has?

Now, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. I have on occasion tried to dissuade people from creating online courses where I didn’t believe it made sense for their business model and goals. In some cases, a smaller asset like an ebook might make more sense, or a book. Or a blog series.

Not all good ideas have hungry markets.

You should *NOT* create a course if…

More than a few of these apply to you:

• You don’t have good cash flow. Online courses can take time to build, and you’ll want to experiment with your content and format. It often takes a number of launches to truly be profitable. They are often a much longer return on investment than say, client services. If you’re struggling to bring in revenue now, an online course will only exacerbate the issue. Similarly:
• You’re looking for a quick financial fix. The dirty truth about online courses is this: the number of courses that become a runaway success are few and far between. That doesn’t mean courses can’t be delightfully profitable, but you’ll want to make sure your financial future isn’t riding on a pipe dream!
• You don’t have a lot of experience with the thing you want to teach. Have you been doing this over and over again? Do you have a track record, testimonials, case studies, and social proof? Make sure you feel very comfortable speaking to what you’re teaching. Ideally you’ve been working one on one with clients or teaching this material in some other capacity before turning to online courses.
• You can’t think of 10 people who would buy it from you. You should be able to come up with a list of names of people who your course would be perfect for (and are likely to buy). If you can’t come up with 10, how will you sell 20, 50, 100, 1000?
• You have no previous experience creating content (blog, email, social), building a list, or sharing your expertise. On average, 2% of people on your email list will convert (purchase your product). Online courses are about leveraging your time and scaling your offerings to more people, so if you haven’t been regularly sharing your message with the world in some capacity, you’re going to have a tough time marketing your new course. You’re going to want to start building your audience and sharing your value long before you have a product to sell.
• You can’t find anyone talking about your idea. It’s rare that a highly marketable idea hasn’t been explored in some capacity before. Can you find books on Amazon? Podcasts? Blog posts? If you can’t find anything, it might be time to rethink your course concept. (“Feed a starving crowd”)

We haven’t reached market saturation yet, and customers are expecting more from their online course dollars. Don’t just create a course because you think you’re supposed to or you’re strapped for cash. Do it because it makes sense for your goals and your business model.

And whatever you do, make sure to run a learning launch first before you pour weeks, months, and years into something nobody wants or is willing to pay for.

https://learn.weareokidoki.com/launch/

Should you create an online course? was originally published in Oki Doki on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You’re busy, I’m busy, we’re all busy — but not too busy to make customer research a habit.

We know that business is really about people.

If you want to create a product that really resonates with your people, or want to improve an existing product/service, start with a conversation (or virtual coffee dates, as I like to call ‘em). They’re so simple, cost nothing, and provide a metric ton of unexpected insights, regardless of whether you’re in idea mode or have already launched multiple products/services.

Many of us already have these conversations organically; I’m proposing that you bake these into your process in an intentional way.

The Virtual Coffee Date

Having virtual coffee dates (or informal interviews or discussions) can offer new product/service insights, help you test your assumptions, and build valuable connections.

A virtual coffee date is simply a virtual meeting (Skype, or any other video chat service) with someone you’ve pre-selected, with the intention of learning about their experience, opinions, and insights around a particular area.

Call them whatever you want: a virtual coffee date (VCD), “pick your brain,” discussion, conversation, interview, etc.; the key is to get into the habit of listening (without a pre-conceived notion of what your participant wants).

Whether you are in idea mode, are testing your products, or already have products in the market, everyone can benefit from more customer conversations.

The benefits of virtual coffee dates

Integrating virtual coffee dates regularly into your schedule as an ongoing business activity provides endless benefits:

• Strengthen and grow your personal and professional network
• Test your assumptions and biases
• Hear people’s struggles in their own words
• Better understand people’s motivations, concerns, struggles
• Shape your products & services around real needs
• Improve your observation skills
• Reduce risk in your product development
• Get more comfortable talking to potential customers
• Achieve more resonance with your products & services

Many people are uncomfortable with the idea of “selling” other people directly. The beauty of the virtual coffee date is that it’s focus is on research and understanding, not sales. Once my clients realize that I’m not asking them to pitch their ideas or products, but merely ask questions, they relax a little and even enjoy the process.

1. Create a challenge statement

Start with a challenge statement: a sentence that summarizes what you want to learn and explore. When we were in the early stages of research for our software concept, our challenge statement was:

Understand the challenges involved in the creation and delivery of online courses.

Notice that the challenge statement is open-ended and non-prescriptive. It makes no assumptions about the best way to solve the challenge.

This challenge statement helped me narrow down my participants to those who were thinking about or were in the process of creating online courses. I wanted to understand both the tactical and emotional challenges that come along with creating online courses.

We had an alpha version of our software, but we wanted to ensure that we understood the full customer journey from “I have an idea” to successfully selling an online course, so that our marketing and services could complement our software in a holistic way.

2. Connect with your people

Your Immediate Network

It can be intimidating to reach out to those you don’t know very well, so start by connecting with people from your immediate network, including friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Make a list of people you’d like to gather insights from.

What if you can’t think of anyone in your immediate network? You may want to reconsider your challenge statement.

If you can’t think of 10 people in your immediate network who would pay for your new product/service, how are you going to find 100s?

Keep it simple: send a personal email or message that explains that you’re doing some research around [your challenge topic], and asks if they might they be willing to have a quick (recorded video) chat.

Your Extended Network

You can also begin to grow your network by asking friends and acquaintances if they might know anyone who could offer insight into your research challenge. Always make sure this a personal email (or direct message), sent to one individual at a time.

Where else can you find people willing to have a conversation?

• Facebook Groups
• LinkedIn Groups
• Slack Groups
• Online Forums + Communities
• Twitter
• Friends/Colleagues of your friends
• Your email list

Where are people already talking about your challenge or topic? Join in on the conversation, make some connections, and reach out to those who are already engaged. I will often reach out and send a direct message to those who engage with me in a forum or online community.

I might say something like:

“Hey [Name],

I saw your comment about [topic] in [forum/conversation/group] and thought it was interesting because [mention my research topic as it relates to them].

I’d love to learn a bit more about how you handle this specifically; might you be willing to hop on a video chat? I’d love to ask you a few questions if you’re open to it!”

So far I haven’t had anyone turn me down, and I’ve made some great new connections. I’ve been able to gather some really specific and valuable insights that have helped shape both our products and services by hearing some consistent pains mentioned over and over again.

Optionally, you may want to create a small questionnaire to narrow down those who might be a best fit for a conversation.

As an example, I received an email from a good friend and colleague this week that looked like this:

“Hey Marie, how was your weekend?

When we chatted you mentioned that you might know some people who ___.

I’m researching the topic of how executives of growth-oriented tech companies balance the need to improve exceptional software with the necessity to build strong teams. Do you know any SaaS owners that might be willing to have a conversation with me?
If so, I’m attaching a short questionnaire…”

Super simple, friendly, and specific, which made it easy for me to share with my network.

3. Run the calls

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to doing these conversations. I much prefer a casual conversation to a formal interview, but you may find that you prefer something more structured. The key is to stick to what works for you, because you want to make your participant as comfortable as possible.

I offer my person a link to book a 20–30min call in my calendar using an automated scheduling tool like Calendly.

• Use video wherever possible; you can learn so much from people’s facial expressions and body language than you can from audio alone. You want to see how and when people light up, furrow their brows, fidget, etc.
• Have a list of questions that you want to ask, while leaving lots of room for flexibility. Avoid any yes/no questions: keep them open-ended. “Tell me about a time when” can be a really great question to get you started. (Sample discussion guide)
• Take notes. Record the session if possible, and make notes of any insights along the way. Document these in Evernote, or a spreadsheet.
• Follow up and thank them for their time!

4. Record your insights

What did you learn from the call(s)? Remember to summarize your takeaways.

In some cases I’ll even translate takeaways into specific to-dos in Asana. These calls can often lead to content ideas, better documentation, or even new product ideas entirely.

While it may not always feel like there are specific take-aways from each call, these calls can simply be a way to make sure that you’re not getting stuck in your own expert head. Often when we achieve a certain level of expertise, it can be a challenge to truly understand other people’s struggles, concerns or fears around a topic.

In the case of my course development research, I learned that perfectionism, self doubt, procrastination, overwhelm, and fear of launching were very real (and common) emotional challenges that were preventing people from launching their online courses.

These conversations with course builders (along with my clients) led me to develop a virtual bootcamp called “Run Your Learning Launch”, a program entirely focused on getting your rough draft version one online course launched.

Sure, I could have called this course “how to create an online course”, but by learning more about people’s underlying fears and motivations, I was able to focus the curriculum on what I knew was resonating with my audience. Knowing that momentum is contagious, I focused the whole course content on boosting their confidence with a quick win. In the end, these conversations led to language and wording that appeared on both the sales page and within the program itself.

Your audience is always telling you what they want if you’re listening carefully enough.

5. Repeat

I leave two hours per month minimum to do these research calls (often more). You could book one morning each month, a 30min time-slot each week, or something else entirely. It doesn’t matter, as long as you’re making an effort to have conversations with real people in an ongoing way as part of your process.

The most common mistake that I see product creators making is not engaging in enough conversations with their people, and in some cases avoiding it altogether.

Commit to making customer research a habit, and you’ll always create products that resonate.

Ready to start booking virtual coffee dates?

Grab my sample discussion guide.

Struggling to get your course idea launched?

Check out Run Your Learning Launch.

Run Your Learning Launch

Marie helps people translate their wisdom and experience into profitable digital products and online course experiences. Learn more at Doki.io.

Conversations: the ultimate bootstrapped customer research that anyone can do was originally published in Oki Doki on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.