Artificial intelligence (AI) has been changing our lives for decades, but never has it felt more ubiquitous than now. From Siri to self-driving cars, AI is progressing rapidly and is becoming embedded in our everyday lives.
Susie Sheldrick works with technology consultants Silverpond, who are empowering 7-Eleven, Powercor and Australia Post with AI. Susie reveals that we don’t know how AI makes decisions and that’s what makes it such an exciting field to be working in.
Mark Chatterton is co-founder of inGenious AI, who are using Natural Language Programming (NLP) to create chatbots with a human feel. Mark’s goal is to eliminate interfaces with AI so that we can talk to them in the same way we talk with friends and family.
This episode of Masters Series provides an excellent introduction to the latest developments in AI with some simple advice on how to incorporate AI into your business.
About Masters Series by WeTeachMe
Masters Series is a show about inspiring entrepreneurs, creative thinkers, and visionary dreamers, and the stories behind how they built their companies.
Marketing your brand online is not as simple as setting up a profile in cyberspace – it requires strategic social impact activities that highlight your competitive advantages.
Simon Mathonnet says forget about your logo, strapline and team colours. While those things are important, your brand is how your customers perceive your business.
As head of digital strategy with digital marketers Splashbox, Simon works with hundreds of businesses to build powerhouse brands.
In this podcast he highlights the 3 layers of a brand and how to use content and marketing to leverage them.
About Masters Series by WeTeachMe
Masters Series is a show about inspiring entrepreneurs, creative thinkers, and visionary dreamers, and the stories behind how they built their companies.
The first five years of your business are the most crucial. They can make you or break you – and your business!
Ruby Lee established Tribe9 to help funded startups, scale-up. She says founders should get their hands dirty but know when to delegate as the business grows. Ruby outlines 3 key things that all startups should be aware of in the first 5 years.
Adam Stone is the founder and CEO of Speedlancer – the world’s fastest freelance marketplace. Adam blew his pitch to Coastal Ventures in Silicon Valley and lived to tell the tale. At 23 he’s got plenty of time to recover and he describes how adjusting the pricing model quadrupled Speedlancer’s revenue in 2 months.
Disclaimer: Transcripts may contain a few typos. Similar sounding words can lead to them being deciphered wrongly and hence transcribed likewise.
Interviewing Public: It’s an amazing journey which is up and down like every startup. And I made the silliest mistakes at the beginning. I still make a lot of mistakes, but I learned from them. I laugh at my mistakes afterward and move forward. So it’s like an ongoing growth.
Interviewing Public: I think it’s cashflow probably just this constant big thing happening nothing happening, big thing happening, nothing happening. Keeping that steady is really difficult.
Serpil Senelmis: For WeTeachMe, this is the Masters Series where industry professionals share their secrets to success. I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded. The first five years of any business involves many challenges, rewards, highs, and lows. And once the business concept is tested, it’s important to respond to the market to meet and exceed expectations. That requires systems, processes that enable the business to function grow and succeed. It can take a lot of hard work, and we’ve got to experts in harnessing people’s power. Adam Stone is the founder and CEO of Speedlancer. It’s the world’s fastest freelance marketplace delivering work in just four hours. Adam says the key to successful navigation of the early years of business is to be a straw, not a sponge.
Adam Stone: It wasn’t my quote all but it was be a straw, not a sponge. So instead of trying to absorb all the knowledge that’s coming, just pick and choose the advice that you feel is relevant because you’ve got some understanding of your target market so you know where you’re headed in for the most part and where your vision is. So it’s important to be able to pick and choose the adversity or listen to.
Serpil Senelmis: We’ll hear from Adam soon, but first, a professional startup grow up. Ruby Lee co-founded Tribe9 to help fund startups to scale up and achieve their potential after a decade working in HR and recruitment, Ruby is passionate about helping fledgling businesses to hire well. Ruby says in the initial phases of your business, you should do a bit of everything before you start outsourcing.
Ruby Lee: So awesome to be here. That’s really exciting to see future of work staring right back at me. Those of you that are really wanting to either launch a startup, start a business, you might already have a business, been in it for a couple of years. So hopefully today I can impart some knowledge. A little bit of background about me, so I’m a bit of a corporate misfit. I’ve been definitely in corporate for almost 12 years, I was an accountant. Then I moved into HR and recruitment. And then from there, my startup journey began. I also funded my entire business, my first startup while still being employed. So I’m a big, big advocate for the side hustle. My startup journey actually started three years ago, and I call it hustling and love it love that word. I’m aware of the actual meaning of it, but I still embrace it. 2006-2014 was in the corporate world. And then in 2015, I had my first son and I got super bored during maternity leave. And I thought I would start a recruiting blog. And so I started writing to a community of people who wanted to hear about tips and tricks on how to find a job and I thought it was just a really fun way to stay active in the market. What happened was at the time, I called my business, That Recruitment Chick, which is terrible, so don’t judge me for that name. It just sounded really good at the time. But I started the business and my employer at the time, it was not too happy with it. So there’s a lot of employers who don’t love the side hustle, they feel very threatened by it. They are not very accustomed to having a side hustle actually happened within the business. So I decided it was a values misfit and I moved on. I was on the hunt to find an employer that would 100% support me and my side hustle and In effect, I was actually also trying to find someone to fund the business. So it’s a very different funding model. I wanted to go down the self-funding path my business is very much focused on consultancy and a lot of it was sold off my brand. So I didn’t really need huge amounts of funding. I didn’t have a big like tech stack to manage or anything like that. Didn’t need a warehouse. It was purely just me and my laptop, and just something to keep me funded whilst I grew income in what was my side hustle. So I found my employer, I started working with a business called Cogent, which is a ventures based incubator in Melbourne. It was in the software, tech startup space, and we got to work with some amazing founders all around Melbourne, purely Melbourne based. So because of that, I’ve been able to really help a lot of founders scale up with their people strategy with a hiring strategy with how they thought about their next or their first five years in business, and it became my world. And so I got to really interact with a lot of brand new startup founders who were anywhere from, you know, $100,000 worth of funding up to five mil. So it was really cool to kind of be up on that spectrum. And at the same time be building my side hustle, which cost me less than $1,000 to start up. So I kind of had that really nice perspective across the board. Long story short, I’ve got some tips for you, top four lessons that I’ve learned in my own startup journey, but also for lessons that I see over and over and over again, with startup founders who I partner with today. So let’s dive into it. funding through a side hustle, I definitely do talk a lot on panels where we focus on the future of work, we focus on the gig economy, where it’s going, and my entire stance is that the side hustle is the way to go. But you can do that very elegantly in partnership with your employer. The three pillars for me in terms of starting a side hustle was financial stability, so wanting to have an income source to actually help grow your business. Secondly, It’s that creative satisfaction that often we yearn for when we’re in a full-time role. And we can’t expect our employees to tick all the boxes. So for me personally, I wanted to launch my business, my startup, my side hustle, because I didn’t really have that creative avenue in my current role. So I was a recruiter, I loved it. But I was really missing that element. And I think it was that creativity. And thirdly, it’s being completely always intellectually stimulated, wanting to learn. And definitely that’s been one of the things. Since I started my business. I’ve learned so many things like every single day, I’m constantly learning my strengths. Being an accountant is in finance, business operations strategy, and putting together a business plan and the lean canvas. When it comes to creativity like design, UI, UX, building a website, I am so bad at that I’m so bad at that. So I’ve had to really learn and it’s been really fun because it’s ticked boxes for me around creativity and being able to actually excel there as well. So So the first five years are critical, as generally, your cash flow is going to be lumpy. And you’re testing pretty much all elements of your business. I’d say even today, I’m three and a half, almost four years in, I’m still testing every single day with new technology that’s coming in. So be just really mindful about how you’re going to fund that. And then starting your business as a side hustle, I feel ultimately does reduce risk. Employers out there are starting to actually approach me to coach them on how to help them engage with side hustlers and help them keep more engaged in their current role. So there is a shift happening out there. It is happening very, very quickly. And these are large employers before banks before audit firms, it starts from the top but I’m super excited to be sharing that with you. And I’m a massive mascot for the side hustle. So secondly, it’s all about your best customer. So attract only profitable clients that received the greatest benefit from your product or service. Obviously, you want to attract your best client. But can I just say, and this is a question for you, I modeled my business of the type of client that I would want to attract? And therefore I asked myself, am I my best client? So for me, especially with rubylee.co, I really wanted to build a business because I was a side hustler, and I couldn’t go anywhere for that support. I mean, there were business coaches, and there were career coaches, but there wasn’t anyone that I could find in that intermediate bit. So I identified a gap in the market, but I also built the entire business around the type of coach that I’d want to engage right. So what I do now is I’ve got a couple of thousand people in my client list. I use HubSpot to capture all of my customers, my clients. And so quite recently, I went through it and literally line by line how to look at who are my most profitable clients because we all know that as soon as customers and clients buy from you, they will continue to buy from you unless you significantly fuck up. Can I help you?
Ruby Lee: Okay, yeah, so seriously, I’m like podcast. But seriously, I do feel that it is such an important exercise to do no matter which part of the business cycle you’re in, to continuously check in on who are your mad, crazy fans who basically want to buy all of your shit, and you guys will be able to identify that very early on in your business journey. Think about the cheerleaders that you have on social media, those that stalk you that follow you on LinkedIn, that want to share all your content. They’re the people that will refer others in their social network to you. They’re the people that will be like screaming to send you a testimonial because they’ve loved your product or your service. So identify your best customer and basically summarize that into a concise statement. What makes your best customer awesome. And then that becomes your core messaging for everything you do. It goes into all of your social media posts, it goes into your brochures, it goes on to your website, think about it in reverse. What are your testimonial saying? And how do you repurpose that content? There’s no point sitting there scratching your head going, oh, you know, how do I talk about my business, your customers are already doing that for you just bring that to light a little bit more. This is me with my people head-on, and my HR head on and I have to talk about this because a bunch of you are hitting that four to five-year mark, in your business journey. And usually, at this point in time, you’d know your customer base, you’re ready to grow, you’re ready to scale. And then you think they’ve got to actually employ people if you haven’t already. And so the most common roles that I would say come to me would be sales, definitely on the developer side of things and design and UI. These people are so hard to find. So this is why I think it’s really important to start thinking about not just your consumer brand, but your employer brand as you scale and grow and as you want to visualize where your business is going to go in the next five to 10 years, think about how you want to talk about yourself as a boss because quite seriously, that’s the one differentiator in market to help you scale your business. You need people to scale. You don’t need tech, you don’t need money. You need good people in your team. And you’re only going to attract great people. If you can get your culture down path, you get your message down path. Employer value proposition is really about knowing what an employee would want for you. So for those of you that are in current jobs or in current roles, what keeps you at your employer? That’s what an EVP is, what attracted you to work with them? That’s what an EVP is. And so in reverse, as you’re thinking to hire, why would someone want to come and work for you? They want to know what kind of boss you’re going to be one of the founding members of your business actually saying about you and how is it going to help you grow? So I just had a little point in here about building communities and doing that early doing that through your social media, going to meetups. creating groups online. So I started a Facebook group. And it has transformed my business because I built a community around side hustlers. And it has really, really helped me understand my customer, obviously rented business from it, draw an income from it, but also be able to support a community and understand what they need from me. So think about how you’re going to build communities and branding.
Ruby Lee: And lastly, getting your hands dirty. In my very early days, and I just talked about that I’m really great at the financials of my business, I’m a numbers girl. But I immediately thought, okay, there’s no way I can build a website, I’m just going to outsource it. I’m just going to get someone else to do it. Might go to Fiverr or Feelancer, someone who can do it for me, junior developer, whoever it was, and then it dawned on me, it’s like no, actually, I kind of want to give it a go and I want to learn and I’ve got some time because I funded my business from a side hustle so I had income coming in. And so I thought, you know, bigger opportunity to learn and I ended up learning how build a very simple website, learning how to do like very basic CSS coding, HTML coding. And it was great, I loved it. But what that actually did for me was helped me put a value on how awesome it was to get outsource help, and be able to sort of say, hey, this is what I want out of my website, I know that it does take time, I’ve given it a go. So I understand what I’m asking from you is going to be quite tricky. And it just gives you that one step more savvy and a little bit closer as you’re building your business around how to negotiate where you place value, what services you actually need, and where your strengths are. But there comes a point where you do need to let go. And you know, I know a bunch of us with founders with startup founders, and you just kind of have this like control freak quality. I call it a quality because it is but you know, you kind of want to be able to go right like where is now my time best spent? So as you start to move through that first five years, like if you’re hitting the two to three-year mark, and you still doing your accounting and finance and you’re not using someone like an MYOB to help you automate your financials, then you really should be thinking about how you’re going to be doing that. So I say this with get your hands dirty in the early stages. If you are heading towards the three to five-year mark, start to think about how you’ll outsource. That’s it for me. Thanks, guys.
Serpil Senelmis: So it’s pretty simple. If you’re new to the startup game, start with a side hustle because cash flow is going to be a bit lumpy. Thanks, Ruby. In a moment, we’ll meet Adam Stone who founded the world’s fastest freelance marketplace.
Ad Guy: In its first five years, WeTeachMe has grown dramatically. They’ve helped many businesses to provide training workshops while reducing costs and they’ve given even more people access to those workshops to learn the skills they need. Every week WeTeachMe’s Masters Series podcast connects you with industry professionals to help your startup to take off. Find more classes near you at weteachme.com. The Masters Series podcast is recorded, edited, and lovingly presented to you by Written and Recorded. Journalists for hire, Written and Recorded create content strategies that support your first five years in business. From blogs to podcasts, social media to feature articles, Written and Recorded create effective content that customers enjoy. Find out how content can support your business at writtenandrecorded.com. And now, back to the podcast.
Serpil Senelmis: Adam Stone got started early as an entrepreneur at the age of just 12. Since then he’s one student Entrepreneur of the Year and founded Speedlancer, the world’s fastest freelance marketplace. Adam believes the key to startup success is having affordable people power available when you need it. That’s where Speedlancer comes in.
Adam Stone: Thank you a bit about me and why the obsession with freelances? Yeah, so I’m 23. So on the younger end of the solar spectrum, I started an eBay business selling BB guns on eBay and then progressed from there to the wonderful world of mobile phone unlocking super furnace with one network and you want to take it overseas, you could go through us. That one did decently well. So it became the number one retail and walking provider online and we had over 100,000 paying customers. I started Speedlancer in 2014 as a side hustle while I was studying in university, and the idea was I had a lot of experience hiring freelancers through my previous business. So we had a team in India and the Philippines. And that’s how we ran the whole business. So about 10 of us at some point, developers, customer support reps, and like enterprise customer relations as well. And that’s when I realized through, you know, using every platform out there, Elance and oDesk, which became Upwork. And then fiverr.com, I realized that there are all these problems using freelancing platforms. And that’s when I decided to sort of do something about it. And that’s where Speedlancer’s came from. There was a bit of serendipity involved because it was a side project. And we were doing like 100 bucks a month at the time. And in December 2014, I met Dave McClure, who was the founder of 500 Startups, and that’s where the company became a real company. I’ll share an interesting story. I got asked to pitch to Khosla Ventures, which is one of the most respected VC firms in Silicon Valley. They do all this med tech stuff, and it was a partner that asked to meet with me and everyone from the team of 500 Startups was so excited, like oh, you know, you’re going to Khosla ventures. I was like, I don’t even know who they are. I don’t know how to pitch in there. Like I’ll just do a demo day pitch and I said demo days in three months’ time now like, oh, you’ve got a draft pitch deck, don’t you? I said, yeah. And it was like, just some text with different fonts that I’d put it together. It was about five slides in two and a half minutes. So I went in two-hour train ride to Silicon Valley, Sand Hill Road, entrepreneurs dream, and I went to go pitch. And yeah, two and a half minutes later, I was out the door. And then I went back to 500. And I would like, so how it to go? So yeah, I think I went I think it went really well.
Adam Stone: And they said, they said, so tell us about it. I was like, Well, you know, I practice my demo day pitch. And they said, what the two and a half minute one? I said, Yeah. Like, and then what said, that’s it? Is it all right? It didn’t go very well. That’s okay, keep trying. So from there, where we’ve come, we’ve had 1600 clients to date, people during 500 Startups would say, Oh, I’m never going to use a platform like this because I need to be able to choose my freelancers. And I’m very proud that we’ve achieved 94% satisfaction on every single task. So it’s a four out of five rating or above. So what happen is Speedlancer instead of hiring a freelancer, the whole premise of what we do is that we’re an outcomes-based kind of platform. So instead of choosing someone, you sort of rely on us, we’ve got a network of 500 curated freelances routers from Inc, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Y Adventure, someone from Oprah Winfrey’s network designers who credit directors are from around the world. Data Entry, people hope we’d like lead generation sales stuff, and also some front end or back end developers for your common WordPress type things. So how are we different is we’ve got two products, one called tasks and one called bundles. And of course, there’s been a number of setbacks along the way. So I had a visa rejection for good two and a half years, which led to failed fundraisings right off to 500 Startups. I had an investor offering 500K, right after the program, and they said, can you fly to San Francisco to you know, sign the cheque? I was like, nope, not allowed there, sorry. And so that one fell through pretty quickly. So for two and a half years, I wasn’t even allowed back, which meant I had to raise some money from Australia. So raise the small amount of money from the Murdoch’s Venture Fund, which is really exciting and some other angel investors. You know, after pitching to 100 people, eventually, you get one finally got the visa sorted about six months ago. So it’s been really helpful. The other setback, well not really setback, but advice was listening to the well-intentioned advice of others who don’t really understand your vision. So sometimes when you’re trying to break things, you know, you’re trying to innovate in an area, people just don’t understand it and that’s fine. It’s not their job to understand it, it’s your job to have a product that actually makes sense to them if they’re a potential customer. So sometimes when you have mentors, you know, their job is to provide advice based on their background, but that’s not necessarily going to apply when your business actually comes in. Because you’re working on different things, you’re trying to break rules. And when that happens, you kind of have to choose so I heard a quote the other day, which actually MYOB quoted me on the other day as well. It wasn’t my quote at all. But it is be a straw, not a sponge. So instead of trying to absorb all the knowledge that’s coming, just pick and choose the advice that you feel is relevant because you’ve got some understanding of your target market. So you know where you’re headed in for the most part and where your vision is. So it’s important to be able to pick and choose the advice that you want to listen to. The other one is lack of distribution models. And then the extension of that is matching your pricing models with your distribution models. So distribution is how you get your product out there, be it marketing or sales, inbound, outbound, paid acquisition, free SEO, cold email, PR, all these things. And then the part that people don’t talk about very often and took me a good two years to actually figure this out, was that pricing has to actually fit into your distribution strategy. So walk through that in a minute things we’ve done well over time. So I come from a like a bootstrapping background, if you want to call it that says self-funding as opposed to fundraising. My habit is and I think it’s important to be able to at least stop through breakeven, if not profitability points whenever you can. So just the fact that you have, you know, a month in your profit and loss statement that shows what the numbers could look like. If you were to break even, it sort of proves to investors that you can prove to yourself that you can do that as well. So people will always ask you to how much runway do you expect this fundraising will have? And they always hate it when I say or, you know, okay, let’s say 12 months, but realistically, I’m not going to let the company die, sorry. Even though that’s sometimes what investors want, because they’re aiming for 10 to one odds, so that, you know, they like to see you break everything in the worst case. But I think it’s important to be able to stop through breakeven, also having a process-oriented company, because I have used freelances, to run my previous business. That’s something that I had to do innately. But it’s something that I found a lot of people don’t do so they run their businesses as people focus companies, which is fine. But as long as you as a founder are not relying on that one person, if they have to leave or if they quit, or if they’re underperforming. If someone wants to work for me, I make it clear from the very first engagements that they have to document everything they do. And that helps them because if we do really well or they do really well, then I can promote them in a second and then could hire someone really quickly under them and maintain a process. And that also means that we can effectively use that combination of in-house outsourced, and obviously speedline to type talent and fit that into the processes. Rather than not having a process and you don’t know where everyone fits together with freelancers probably work out.
Adam Stone: I’ve got here sales is actually all down to its pricing models. That’s something that people don’t often think about. So we started off with $50 tasks. That is where one person submits one task on Speedlancer and one freelancer delivers it normally within four hours. And that’s what we call like a $50 task. That’s like a token amount between 50 to 150 bucks typically, few typical four-hour task, some freelancers deliver their work in 10 to 20 minutes. So you know, they can do a bunch of these and actually earn some decent income as a gap filler as well. But what we realized was that weren’t really getting much traction because our sales model was cold email, and if you’re doing cold email, then surprise you have to follow up with the call. If you do a call and then some of them say one to 10 are actually converting onto a 50 dollar product doesn’t really make much sense, made sense to everyone else just not me, I was a bit late to that game. And that’s when we thought to develop the bundles product, which is what is so different about Speedlancer. So without bundles instead of hiring one freelancer, or instead of getting one task done, what we do is we string together a bunch of tasks. And we’ve got a paid and pending platform, a workflow-based platform. What does this approach so we got a pending platform called bundles. And it’s a workflow-based system, meaning that we can string together multiple tasks in a certain order. So let’s say you want a sales development campaign. We’ll do the lead generation, sales, copywriting, the lead enrichment, the email sending, and the follow-up. And then we actually have a sales development rep who sits on the inbox and monitors every day to check the inbox and nurture these people into warm leads. Or it could be a content marketing campaign where we do the planning 20 topic ideas, then the research then the writing then design. So it’s what we call bundles and funnily enough it’s 10 times the price so it’s actually an upsell from just a straight two bundles, but it actually adds more value to our customers. So I’d say that it’s more than 10 times the value, because instead of having to manage all these different types of talent, and somehow create a workflow, we just do that automatically. So that’s something that our customers have really enjoyed. And then we got to the concierge plan, which is $6,000. And we had to do that because it didn’t make sense to sell a $500 product with a cold email and then a phone call, only made sense to jump on the phone for like a $500 a month plan. And that actually helped us engage new customers and excite them because they were so used to dealing with freelancers, working with them long term and maintaining that relationship and that point person. So I said, okay, why don’t we give you that point person as a concierge, we add them onto Slack, which is the live chat platform. And they can actually, you know, stay engaged with us long term, surprised that actually helped us score new customers and increase the lifetime value and then some customers end up upgrading and referring other customers as well. So upselling cross-selling And now it makes a lot more sense to fit in with our distribution strategy, which we already knew about, which is called email, and retrofitted the products to fit that. So that happened to work well for us. And that correlated with our growth. So during 500 Startups, we’re doing a few thousand dollars monthly recurring revenue wasn’t actually recurring at all, that 18 months ago, we launched the bundles, and that doubled it. But within two months of launching the concierge plan last year, we grew four times just by having that pricing model fit the distribution model. And it also helped close new sales. So within two months, we’d only gotten two months of revenue out of them. But I think it doubled the sales rate as well. So that’s probably how we got to four times. Actually, I learned from one of our advisors a few years ago, and it just took me a while to actually learn this, the importance of having three tiers of pricing. And it’s we almost have three tiers, in a sense, you’ve got the task bundles and the concierge. And the idea is to add value that doesn’t actually cost you as a company anymore. So with the concierge plan, that’s just our support team that we add on Slack. So we found a way to engage our customers and provide additional support to them, and provide additional guarantees like double revisions and task replacements. We’re so sure that it will be right that task replacements aren’t really an issue, especially after the revision. So, freelancers, we encourage them to provide more revisions anyway to have a bit of rating. So those are pretty easy guarantees for us to provide. But that is still valuable for the customers. Yes, so that’s us.
Serpil Senelmis: Wow, what an impressive 23-year-old, when I grow up, I want to be just like him. Thanks, Adam. And thanks also to Ruby. I’m feeling a lot better about my first five years in business now. Although there’s plenty of work still to be done. Next week, building a powerhouse brand. Does your friends some of your business in a way that your preferred customers will understand? We’ve got two marketing heavyweights joining us that will help focus your brand’s message. Until then, I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded, and for WeTeachMe, this is the Masters Series.
Adam Stone: And there’s also product-market fit which some of you probably more familiar with, which is how your product and your market have to fit. I deserve a Ph.D. for that one.
About Masters Series by WeTeachMe
Masters Series is a show about inspiring entrepreneurs, creative thinkers, and visionary dreamers, and the stories behind how they built their companies.
The first five years of your business are the most crucial. They can make you or break you – and your business!
Ruby Lee established Tribe9 to help funded startups, scale up. She says founders should get their hands dirty, but know when to delegate as the business grows. Ruby outlines 3 key things that all startups should be aware of in the first 5 years.
Adam Stone is the founder and CEO of Speedlancer –Â the world’s fastest freelance marketplace. Adam blew his pitch to Coastal Ventures in Silicon Valley and lived to tell the tale. At 23 he’s got plenty of time to recover and he describes how adjusting the pricing model quadrupled Speedlancer’s revenue in 2 months.
About Masters Series by WeTeachMe
Masters Series is a show about inspiring entrepreneurs, creative thinkers, and visionary dreamers, and the stories behind how they built their companies.
Most startup founders build their business around their passion. While that may fuel you to start your own venture, it takes a bit more to sustain your business and keep it going.
Vanessa Vanderhaven is an illustrator who launched her own business a year ago and says don’t be afraid to put yourself out there – you might just like the results.
Sheree Rubinstein co-founded the women-led co-working space One Roof and recommends building a board of advisors around you – even if they don’t realise that they’re your advisors!
Disclaimer: Transcripts may contain a few typos. Similar sounding words can lead to them being deciphered wrongly and hence transcribed likewise.
Serpil Senelmis: Hi there. Are you here because you’d like to turn your passion into a business?
Interviewing Public: I have a few passions and one of my main passion right now in my focus is travel and wine. And I am looking to combine those two into an opportunity.
Serpil Senelmis: I love your passions.
Interviewing Public: So recently, I’ve got an interest in crafts, I do origami and glass bubbles and I guess I’m studying at markets and I just want to see how I can try to market myself.
Serpil Senelmis: For WeTeachMe this is the Masters Series where industry professionals share their secrets to success. I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded and it’s not long since I turned my passion for writing and making podcasts into a business. So I can say with feelings, it’s not easy, but it’s very rewarding. I think the trick is to prepare yourself for the challenges that threaten to put your passion back in its box. Sheree Rubinstein is co-founder of One Roof, a co-working space that helps women start and succeed in business. The former lawyer is passionate about supporting the sisterhood. And says you should surround yourself with people who will elevate you.
Sheree Rubinstein: Surrounding yourself with people who will elevate you and who are in a similar boat. This is why co-working spaces are really valuable is hugely important. And having almost a personal board of advisors that you can call on so people who you trust, who you can reach out to is key. And I know when I’m in situations where I have no idea what I’m doing or feel completely lost or feel completely overwhelmed. It’s the people around me who I trust who are incredibly supportive and helpful.
Serpil Senelmis: We’ll hear from Sheree soon, but first someone who turned their own passion into a business. Vanessa Vanderhaven is an illustrator and graphic designer who spends most of her days drawing faces and flowers and drinking peppermint tea. Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? She grew up free-range in a small business household. And after launching herself into the world of fashion, and failing miserably at it, she found her feet in illustration.
Vanessa Vanderhaven: So I want to start off with a story about my dad. My dad growing up was my best friend. We used to go bushwalking every single weekend and we’d go for hours and we would talk about all the ideas ever so my dad was a big ideas man, he’d always kind of fantasize about what we could do. And what if this what if that, you know, he was a big project man, so I’d run through all my ideas with my dad and he was kind of like my soundboard. And I don’t know if dad realized he was doing this at the time, but he was kind of giving me permission to think in a fantastical kind of way. So I guess that kind of really came through my whole upbringing. I always have these grandiose ideas and my mum was the same. She was very flamboyant Polish lady. She was a fashion designer say she used to make custom made wedding gowns. So my sense of creativity really came from my mum. And my dad was a good source of ideas, I guess. So both my parents were, you know, small business owners. My dad is a electronics engineer so he repairs will check controllers, not that kind of exciting I guess to me, but it was really good business for him. He really supported our family and he did really well and he did it all by himself. And then my mom, fashion designer, you know, dad really helped her out and those always fashion shows and no joke, like I grew up going to fabric stores and playing with the little rubber bands on the floor and you know, hiding behind the fabric rolls. So I had a really kind of unique upbringing. In that sense, where dad was always home and working in the backyard, we had like a granny flat. And mum was always, like, really chill about me not going to school and just going to fabric stores instead because she was just like, you know, I had there were no rules at home, it was very kind of whatever. So I guess I got my entrepreneurial streak from my parents, I didn’t have any sense of going to work or like having a boss or I never heard this stuff from my parents, they both work for themselves. So this is kind of embarrassing, but this is my first foray into entrepreneurship and I thought it was top dog. This is my first business when I was about 15. It’s called pink fork and I I got into screen printing. I wanted to actually be fashion design. I did mention that my mum was a huge influence in that way. And you know, she was a woman doing fashion so I guess I was just like, yeah, that’s me too. So this is my first brand. I probably sold like $500 with one of the popular girls at school bought one of them and I just thought that was the coolest thing ever. Kind of like an influencer like reposting something that you’ve done. It was the same thing. So I was really into this and I thought I’m going to be fashion designer. This is it. So I applied fashion school I got in, it was really selective humblebrag it just had to add that in. And what I didn’t predict was the technicalities and kind of the full scope of being a designer. My mum you know, she’s very flamboyant and I think she just made it seem like oh, it’s fine, you can do anything and I was like, sweet okay, like this is I had no plan base. I was I’m a plan a person and it was I’ve never been taught to have a plan base. So fashion it was and I realized really quickly that maybe it wasn’t for me.
Vanessa Vanderhaven: Oh my god, it was so bad. It was awful. If you don’t know how to patent make, forget it. If you don’t like reading about textile fabrics, forget it. If you don’t like studying or like going to school, forget it. So I didn’t like any of those things. I basically just wanted to scrapbooking collage and imagine the dresses, you know, I had no draw. I didn’t draw it all before this, I was just like cutting fabric making little skirts and whatever like that was my background. So one of our subjects was fashion illustration. And this was the only subject I got any positivity from. Even I didn’t draw it all before. It was just my first like, try at drawing one of our teachers who’s notoriously evil, what pass and was like, that’s not bad. And I was like, oh my God. And I was drawing the shoe actually, remember the moment like this literally just changed my whole mind about life. I was like, okay, maybe I’m not awful. And I really enjoyed it. I love working with pencil. So I left fashion school and you know, I didn’t know illustration was a job. So this is just like this cool thing I could do. And I went traveling to go discover myself for like five months. It was crap. I hated every minute of it. I was so I basically broke up with fashion, like you’d break up with a boyfriend and I went traveling to just be sad about it. So I was so depressed. I was like, Who am I? My whole identity was wrapped around being this fashion designer. You know, I was told by my parents. Oh, yeah, go do it. It’ll be great. My mum’s all like, you know, what a great idea. My dad’s all like, what a great idea. So, my whole life was Vanessa as a fashion designer. So, you know, fast forward, you know, I had a lot of jobs, I got fired or managed out for a lot of jobs because I couldn’t fake enthusiasm. I was very black and white. If I don’t love it, I’m not gonna do it. I just can’t, like, fall asleep at my desk, can’t do it. And I guess I worked as a really good filter for my career because I couldn’t fake a job I didn’t love. And it was very painful and very challenging. And getting fired from every job is not a good time. Actually, I got into graphic design, because I was like, it was the most obvious option. I did that for a little bit. And that was really handy. I learned a lot. And from my graphic design-ish jobs. I mean, there was like reception kind of graphic designer. I’d like to get a receptionist job and be like, some graphic designer, right? And they’re like, sure, you can do some you know I just, I just put it on every resume that I did all this graphic design stuff and answer telephones. I mean, I just completely, like fudged, my whole resume doesn’t matter. Graphic design was great, but I was like, you know, I really want to be an illustrator, I’m getting better at it. I’m getting more attention from people, people wanting to pay me for this. And I was doing a lot of commissioned jobs on the side for my friends. And I thought, okay, this is another filter. This is another me giving up on another thing, and I’m like, this is the end. I mean, if illustration does not work. I don’t know what will because it’s the only thing that I feel naturally like I want to do. So we moved to Melbourne and I decided to go full time with my career with my illustration career. It’s been a year full time and it’s going alright. As soon as I got here, actually, I started working in spy nine and I won a mural competition. So that was a really good result. I mean, I was kind of like, hit the road running and I was like, I emailed every single person on the planet, anybody. I would be like, I’m an illustrator. Do you know anyone and it actually worked. I think of All the things that I’ve ever done, emailing every single person without feeling stupid was the best thing I’ve ever done. You know, you just got to drop ego, you just got to drop feeling stupid. So yeah, I won this competition. So that was awesome. And actually the guy that ran this competition, he owns colourspace. And now he’s my client. So I guess that was a really cool way to get a job, you know, clients. So I wanted to delve away from portrait stuff, I wanted to kind of become a bit more commercial, so I can get a larger variety of clients. So portrait works really hard to get work for but what’s really easy to get work for all these flowers. So it was kind of a strategic move, but also I really enjoyed it. So out of that. I also did a collaboration. So for me just posting about flowers, she contact me to do work for her. And then we also did a collaboration on top of that. So that was a really cool result. Another one is Heidi so I was actually on like-minded bitches drinking wine. Does anyone in that Facebook group? Yeah, I’m sure a lot of you are. So some late In there said something like, oh, you know, big win. And now the editor of women’s weekly or something. And like, I don’t know who this person is, I just sent her a message and I’m like, Oh my god, yay. Like congratulations. Like, if you need an illustrator like, sir, not relevant. It turns out that one of our clients is Heidi. And she’s actually one of my clients would loves your drawings and would love to do a collaboration. I was like, what and then I looked her up, and I’m like, big following. And then we ended up doing a collaboration, which is really fun. If I never reached out and just put myself out there, then this would never have happened. And then now she’s my client for some other stuff. So she’s got a really big project coming up. It’s been hush hush and a lot of thing, which is really cool. It was a collaboration which was free, but then I got her as a client afterwards. So it’s kind of like building a rapport with people. And now out of all this, I’ve done this really crazy thing in my mind where I’m like, Who am I like imposter syndrome. So now I’m teaching illustration, which is totally crazy to my 15-year-old self where I was like failing, failing, failing. It’s crazy to think that I’m now teaching people this thing that I stumbled upon. So this is where I’m at now, I’ve actually taught this upstairs. I’m doing an online course as well. That’s something I’m really proud of at the moment. So that is the end.
Serpil Senelmis: Do you find it hard to fake enthusiasm like Vanessa did? Remember to fluff yourself up and strap yourself in the entrepreneurial ride can get bumpy. In a moment, we’ll meet Sheree Rubinstein, her passion for helping women to have a meaningful career became a co-working space, an incubator for female entrepreneurs.
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Serpil Senelmis: Sheree Rubinstein’s mission is turning your passion into your business. The free-spirited former lawyer tend to challenge old ways of thinking when she co-founded the co-working space, One Roof in an Airbnb mansion. It’s now home to over 80 startups and spread across 1000 square meters of the modern office building. Sheree’s aim is to put Australia on the map as the home of female entrepreneurs.
Sheree Rubinstein: All right. I want to share with you a little story about nearly five years ago, right here in Melbourne, there was a very important business meeting taking place. There were three men and myself and I was getting ready to pitch to a potential client. I was an ambitious corporate lawyer who worked ridiculously long hours and took these meeting incredibly seriously, as all lawyers do, take everything incredibly seriously. And as I sat down to the table, one of the men turned to me and he said in front of everyone. So Sheree, are you here to take notes? Exactly. And so I wasn’t there just to take notes. But in that moment, he really succeeded in making me feel incredibly small. Didn’t matter how ambitious I was, how hard I worked, whether I was successful or not. In that moment, I felt completely diminished, simply because I was the woman in the room. So as you can imagine, it was a bit of a turning point moment in my life. I walked out of that mania, and I wondered, what does success look like for me as a woman in business, I felt frustrated. I had this like fire in my belly and this passion and determination to make a difference and to ensure that no woman ever felt diminished simply because she was the woman in the room. So I mustered up a lot of courage and with incredible amount of naivety, I quit my corporate stable, well-paid job. And I dived headfirst into the crazy world of entrepreneurship and wanted to pursue this passion that I’d found for supporting women to really succeed in business. But I had no idea how to actually do that. So I started going to lots of events like this. I started meeting lots of people having lots of coffees, I just wanted to be surrounded by really inspiring interesting people. And I just wanted to learn and absorb a lot of information. And I started running networking events for women. So I was creating these platforms, bringing women together to learn, connect, and feel inspired. And then I started leveraging from those networking events to run focus groups and to garner insight from women around what they feel, hold them back in business and what they feel they need in order to succeed. Through the research and the insights that I uncovered. I came up with a concept called One Roof. The idea was I’m going to create this physical hub provides everything that women need to succeed all under one roof. I had no idea whether this was the best idea in the world or the most stupid idea in the world. I had no idea whether anyone would buy into it and I had no funding to make it happen. So I decided to test the concept. And what I did was I took over an Airbnb home. So imagine a beautiful two storey mansion on Grey Street in St Kilda, and for one week, I turned it into a pop up co-working space. So I converted the woman’s bedroom into a meeting room, the kitchen into a workshop space, the living room into a hot-desking space, and use the outdoor area for events and gatherings. I partnered with organizations like y-gap and Accenture and I so bind one giant mind and I got sponsorship from corporates like NAB and partners. And it wasn’t just about bringing people into the house and working from the space. I also curated and design the entire week. So every morning there was meditation sessions. Every afternoon, there was a workshop with a different expert. And every evening there was a different event whether it was a conversation with investors or different kinds of networking events. In one week, 400 people came through the doors and engaged with the offering. The landlord has absolutely no idea then or now how many people came through her house. And so I knew that I was onto something I it was deemed a success and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. I then continue testing the idea. I had a business partner at the time, she was based in the US and so I tested this concept in Melbourne, Sydney, LA and New York over a year and a half, which yes was totally crazy. And we would find unique underutilized spaces and take short term leases. So we got really good deals and discounts on rent and activate those spaces and turn them into hubs of activity and co-working and events. I then just over two years ago landed the current space that we’re in in Southbank. And so my business partner and I split up and we left all the different markets that we’ve been testing and I focused on Melbourne. In two years, we’ve become the leading co working space dedicated to women-led businesses. So we’ve got about 1200 square meters of space, and we are home to about 85 women led businesses. The space is light, it’s bright, it’s really welcoming. It’s got a mix of private offices, hot-desking and event space meeting rooms. So we have a really large event space we host four or so events a week and our clients range from corporates to startups to universities government, so on. So in terms of the members that we have in the space, as I said, there’s about 85 businesses, they are all either women lead with a female founder, co-founder or CEO or the businesses subscribe to the mission and vision of what we’re all about. I think it’s important to note we are not a female-only space. We are gender-inclusive and have lots of different types of businesses. So they range from small business, high growth startups across social enterprises, not for profits, and across all different kinds of industries, whether that’s fintech, like Finch, you know, they’ve been voted top 10 startups in Australia to watch in 2018. We’ve got businesses like Sheba, which is the all-female rideshare service, block grain blockchain technology in agriculture, and even know what they do. We have recruitment agencies health care, which is a health tech startup, so real variety of businesses and members working in the space. But the most important thing about One Roof that it was born out of a problem. And the problem is that there’s a persisting gap in entrepreneurship and persisting gender gap in entrepreneurship and wonder if exists to close that gap. And obviously, it was born out of a very strong passion of mine to say more women start and grow successful businesses. So we are much more than a co-working space. We do everything that we can to ensure that the businesses that come through our co-working space have the greatest chances of success. So how do we do that? We run a pilot incubator program, we sit down with every single member we understand their needs, their challenges, what industry they’re in, are they looking for funding? How can we help them? Who can we connect them to? So we regularly touch base with them and make those connections and design workshops and programs around their needs. We run a whole range of community engagement events so every single week we do this coffee on us, where we buy all our member’s coffee. Yes, because everybody will get up off their desk if you buy them a coffee and we’ll come and network.
Sheree Rubinstein: And so we constantly create these opportunities for people to get together network. And we’re always thinking about who can we introduce our members to how can we best support them. We do wine down every Friday. So that’s wine and cheese and a great opportunity for our members to chat. We like to shake it up. So a couple of weeks ago, we did a one woof wine down where all our members brought their dogs along and I don’t know who was more excited out of the members in the dogs but you know, we’re always again, thinking of opportunities to bring members together to network doesn’t always have to be about business just an a great opportunity to chat. We make meaningful introductions for our members, to experts, to mentors to investors, we help them get more clients were really conscious about helping them overcome key challenges that they might have in their business and supporting them to grow and we’re always tracking that. We introduce them to professional services and subject matter experts. So we have lawyers, accountants, social media experts, marketing investors, and so on. We run networking events and partner with organizations like Startup Victoria and Business Chicks and the League of Extraordinary women. We do a dinner series where we connect founders to each other, we connect founders to investors. And we bring in experts to talk on topics that our members have said they want to learn about whether that’s startup growth, capital raising, or pitching or so on. Where to in the next five years? So the vision is to create One Roof hubs in every major city around Australia and just a small vision, and to put Australia on the map as the number one destination in the world to be a female entrepreneur. I want to go through just three key takeaways that I think have been really important for me in my journey and that I’ve seen a really important to many of the startup founders and small business founders in our community. So the first one is networks. And Vanessa said it so well before where she said, she just emailed people and put herself out there, ask for what she needed. That’s huge. And building a network is the most powerful thing that you can do. I would say, think about building your networks as long term investments. So it’s not about going up to somebody at a networking event and pitching your idea to them before you’ve probably met them. It’s about building a relationship, nurturing that relationship building rapport, and over time, opportunities and doors open. By the same token, know what you want and have a clear ask. So if somebody says, how can I help you have a clear answer of how that person can help you in terms of how I found that with One Roof, so we got a great deal on the space that we’re in at the moment. Central Equity are our landlords and their property developers and they gave us a discount on the rent. And I never thought in a million years, a massive property developer would give a shit about One Roof and what we’re doing. But, you know, I asked, and I think it really counts for a lot. So surrounding yourself with people who will elevate you and who were in a similar boat. This is why co-working spaces are really valuable is hugely important. And having almost a personal board of advisors that you can call on so people who you trust, who you can reach out to, to ask them different questions, and they might have different levels of expertise. They might not even know that they’re an advisor to you. But I think that that is key. And I know when I’m in situations where I have no idea what I’m doing or feel completely lost or feel completely overwhelmed. It’s the people around me who I trust who are incredibly supportive and helpful. Test and learn. If you have an idea, think of the cheapest, quickest, easiest, most economical way to test that concept. Exactly as I’ve told you with one roof, I didn’t have funding and I couldn’t go out and sign a lease a long-term lease and put down a security deposit. I just couldn’t do it. And so I found other ways of making it work. Even in the space that we’re in now, I’ve painted many of the walls myself with friends. We got desks donated, the artwork kind of sits on consignment and gets rotated, you can find ways of making it work. So constantly test and learn. constantly talk to who you think your customers are, and ask them questions, get feedback from them continually all the time. It’s really important. The final thing I would say is never lose sight of your passion and your why. Entrepreneurship and building a business is really hard and it’s a lot harder than anyone even says it is. I know it and of all the founders and people that I talk to I see it over and over again, the struggles that they face the fear, the feeling of you know, I might run out of funding in three months time and what am I gonna tell my staff, I’m going into an investor meeting, and I’m freaking out, it is so hard. And if you don’t maintain that passion, and if you don’t know why you’re getting out of bed every day to build that business, you’re going to struggle in the hard times, and there’ll be plenty of them, so really stick to that. That idea of winging it again, you also do on imposter syndrome, we can often have a lot of self-doubt, we can often feel like we’re not good enough. And so talking yourself up a little bit more. It’s important when you build your business. And the last thing I have there is you will fuck up, and it’s not even necessarily that you make these massive mistakes. It’s just there will be a lot of learnings along the way. I’ve had some massive ones. I had a business partner, we had to buy around. I had co-working spaces in Sydney, LA, New York, I don’t have that anymore. I’m going through quite an interesting phase right now with One Roof where it’s kind of feels like a bit of a make or break and I’ve really kind of got to take it to the next level and it’s scary and it’s full-on. And so it’s all part of the journey. And it’s all part of the learning and you know, goes back to that kind of test and learn and fail fast concept with the lean methodology. So just know it’s all part of the journey. Thank you.
Serpil Senelmis: And what a journey Sheree’s taken us on. From feeling diminished to growing a successful business, she’s gone through all the growing pains. But as she says, never lose sight of your passion, and your why. So what are you waiting for? Is it time you turned your passion into your business? Sheree and Vanessa had some great advice to get you started. Next week, we’ll tell you how to handle what comes next in navigating your startups in critical years. Will things go to plan? Do you scale up? Until then, I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded, and for WeTeachMe, this is the Masters Series.
About Masters Series by WeTeachMe
Masters Series is a show about inspiring entrepreneurs, creative thinkers, and visionary dreamers, and the stories behind how they built their companies.
My life goal is to make a lastÂing and posÂiÂtive conÂtriÂbuÂtion to this world by always lisÂtenÂing, always learnÂing and helpÂing peoÂple reach out and touch and inspire the lives of othÂers from all corÂners of the globe. Continue reading biography.
