The Sustainable SaaS: What Permaculture Can Teach Us About Building Software – Marie Poulin

0:00I know Bonjour thank you for the introduction I'm so so honored to be here the very first time I came to micro conf was three years ago and this is kind of gonna be a bit of a masterclass and what not to do or what to do what happens if you don't follow the advice of microcon so I really wish I'd been exposed to this community a lot earlier than I was so this is going to be a very honest behind the scenes of what has happened since we launched and our journey to sustainability so this is my partner Ben Ben and I run a company

0:45called okie-dokie we also have a software called Doki at Doki IO where we help people launch online courses mentorship programs coaching programs masterminds productized services this is mochi she's head of customer happiness she also has an Instagram account by the way mochi Chan Chiba so back in 20 2016 Ben and I asked ourselves why are we living in the most expensive city in Canada while trying to bootstrap our SS and so we did what any bootstrapping entrepreneurs would do that can't afford real estate in Vancouver and we bought a house in the woods in a town that we'd never been before so we bought this half acre

1:27property in the sunshine coast of Canada and this is where things kind of slowed down because up until this point we'd been working a lot on our sass now that we had all this land and all this new responsibility while also working on our sass I had no idea how to maintain our land our gardens I had to learn how to chop wood had to learn how to drive a standard it's a bit of an adventure a friend of mine told me you should check out permaculture I had no idea what permaculture was I'm curious how many people here know or have heard of permaculture a couple hands is pretty

2:05cool so my friend said you got to sign up for these classes had no idea what I was getting into and conveniently there was also a program launching I think a few months after we'd moved in this was the first email that I got from the program and it said become a more conscious designer of your life landscape relationships and work while learning how to save time energy and money that sounds pretty compelling and because there was this amazing picture of cats hanging out in a field I had I just had a feeling this was going to be good so a permaculture if you don't know

2:43it's a set of techniques and principles for designing sustainable human settlements what does that mean so permaculture has us look at what do you want to get out of your land what is your goal and what do you want to get out of it do you just want to grow a few herbs vegetables for your garden do you want to be totally self-sustaining or do you just want a therapeutic oasis of calm and obviously there's no right answer but everything starts with knowing what do you actually want to get out of your land and the deeper I drove into permaculture I started to realize how many parallels there were with

3:18software what is your goal and what do you want to get out of your SAS you know Justin talked about this a little bit yesterday is it just a creative challenge for you is that a side hustle are you trying to replace your full-time income do you want to build it to sell and again there's no right answer to this but I wish that we had done the work to ask ourselves these questions before we started building so what would your SAS look like if you designed it on purpose us we kind of stumbled into it took on a life of its own never really stopped to ask ourselves

3:54what would it require to grow so I'm gonna take you through the process how we launched our idea got it to a point that it's sustainable some of the things we got wrong and right along the way what permaculture can teach us about software and what it means for you so some concrete takeaways these are the permaculture principles don't worry I won't go into detail about every single one of these I'm going to focus on a few that I think are the most relevant and give you some example takeaways from our own experience and what learned in 2014 Ben and I teamed up to form okie-dokie I was handling mostly

4:33web design and strategy Ben was a technical co-founder handling development projects so we teamed up under one roof but we were still operating like two separate companies our own clients our own processes everything was completely separate but most of my clients at the time were people who had online courses membership programs productized services and these were also the people had money that pay for web design services I was taking a lot of time to do this custom integration linking up PayPal MailChimp a lot of moving parts obviously if any of you have worked with online courses and memberships so I said this is taking a really long time like surely there's

5:14got to be an easier way to do this I was using a whole bunch of WordPress plugins to make this happen and Ben said we should build our own and so we started tinkering and did the first commit in mid-2014 notice that there's no customer research happening around this time just gonna throw that up around the same time I had an idea to develop a program of my own and I've been working in the web design community for a very long time I was in conversation with web designers constantly I knew this market so well and I created a program called digital strategy school that was a four month

5:51mentorship program that helped web designers transition into a role of digital strategist I did an alpha which is basically pre-selling like Adam mentioned yesterday and pre selling it and just to just a bit of a sidebar because I know Justin talked about validating your idea by getting 500 people on the list I didn't have a list from when I sold this and it brought in $10,000 I did it does it pay what you can it was kind of an interesting experiment but once it brought in $10,000 I thought okay there's something here I know this market I love working with these people there's there's an opportunity here I

6:28launched a beta and the beta brought in $50,000 I don't even think I have 300 people on my list at the time that I did this so if you ever want to chat after her about how to do a lot with a really small audio that's certainly something that we've been been really good at so then we go all-in and we'll think well Ben will work full-time on our app now we've got money we've got some funding to do this let's have been work full-time on our application and this is really where we missed out on the first and most important rule of permaculture which is

6:59to observe and interact and this is really about customer research observing the market paying attention to the patterns before you start building anything so in permaculture the example is you're paying attention to what's happening with the Sun with the shade you know like you're getting all of the data about your land what's fertile how moist is the soil you're not going to go planting some incredible permaculture oasis before you know what you're working with what are the temperatures like do you have predators on your land we didn't really do much of this observation it didn't take very long to learn that anything that isn't covered my fence line

7:45enclosure is basically an all-you-can-eat buffet for the deer painful learning all of the alpine strawberries gone so we had to adapt but we didn't know this until we observed so in permaculture you're spending a year up to a year often observing your land before you make any major decisions why did we think software was going to be any different so on the software side you've got things like founder skills like what do we have to work with it that's actually analyze do we have access to this market we didn't do any customer interviews you know we had a handful of people that we knew that had

8:22this problem but we weren't really digging deep to make sure we really really understood the landscape before we went all in we also didn't really do the work to see what would our lives look like if the SAS does succeed how much of our time and our energy is this going to require didn't really do this work definitely did not do enough customer research I know you guys are probably hearing that over and over again it might be boring but really I wish this is something that I had really understood before we started building our product so I was doing all this customer research and market research on the one

8:56side of our business digital strategy school was going really well we're like funneling all that money into our SAS it was awesome and on the dokie side we had already committed to the idea and we were basically solving a problem for five people that we knew you know we'd only had a few key conversations and it can take three or five and you're like yes I know that we've got that idea where we're going all in I feel like we could have learned so much even from 20 interviews hundred interviews so permaculture principle observe and interact make sure you really really truly deeply understand the landscape before you touch a line of

9:30code that means more customer interviews more why questions to understand the sort of underlying context of what's happening and gathering qualitative and quantitative data as well hearing people's stories tell me about a time when so at this point I'm full-time on digital strategy school in general strategy school is mostly replacing my client income awesome meanwhile Ben is working full-time on the app and we've just gone all-in before we've hit a dime so we kind of skipped you know it's funny rob walling and I when we were talking about the title for this talk we were thinking maybe you know how we've funded our SAS with a six-figure course

10:13which in a way feels really misleading because the problem is we didn't put any pressure on our SAS to bring in revenue from the beginning so because we sort of treated it like playtime I thought I've got enough revenue coming in over here we don't need to get paid customers yet let's just play for a year which is insane so we kind of skip through some of these permaculture principles use small and slow solutions and when I say slow I don't mean not getting to market quickly I mean being slow to make permanent decisions so some of the decisions we made we locked in our infrastructure so

10:50early on we sort of over engineered it that by the time we'd had those customer conversations it was a lot harder to make those changes I'm not going to go and build this magical Oasis overnight I don't know anything about gardening right I would love my backyard to look like this the transform it from a lawn into this tropical oasis that would be really amazing but there's still lots of information and data I don't have about how our yard works and so you got to start small and slow the smallest thing I can do right now is build a raised garden bed just start with the smallest

11:25little piece be slow to make permanent decisions I'm going to be doing hand watering instead of installing some crazy irrigation system that's likely gonna change in a year or two once I know more about the land so this is a brand new endeavor with a brand new technology that Ben had never used it could be cool to learn a new tech really complex functionality multiple layers of user permissions because we're selling to other people who are selling to other people like there's multiple levels and so I don't think we even understood the full scope of what we were building which was probably in some ways was a

12:01good idea there would have been insanity so a sort of new to us market yeah I'd work with people on the web design side but I wasn't talking to course creators directly I wasn't talking to instructional designers I didn't have a really good sense of what were the challenges that course creators were facing so we kind of committed before we really had any revenue starting small might have just been interviewing twenty people like what is the smallest step that we could take if we had asked ourselves what challenges our course creators creating some of the solutions it may not have even been a software because there were ways to do this

12:38before with WordPress plugins might have designed some prototypes instead of over engineering this crazy you know built to scale thing before we had those customers landing page with sign ups right you've had heard people talk about this already writing some blog posts and see what resonates we weren't really the people in that space people knew me as a web designer in the digital strategist and I had a program well suddenly we have this new endeavor and we don't have the audience to to go along with it I might have even been doing just some simple consultations with people we did not start small we went right to big we

13:16did our first demo once the product was already built please don't do this I really really wish that we had brought in someone from the very beginning and it's rough-and-ready state I mean even even our friends we would have benefit from having our friends who were course creators too to play with it and just to see how they were using it product demos are so so humbling and even just watching someone use your tool logging in don't say anything watch somebody use your tool things that you think are intuitive are not intuitive you are not your audience so please please don't wait to show your demo it

13:55doesn't matter if you're embarrassed you're gonna have to get more comfortable doing this kind of work and we also built it in secret we weren't really telling our friends about it we weren't really public about it and I think because we had spent so much effort in time building it behind the scenes we were afraid to fail so really if we don't talk about it we'll just kind of work on it behind the scenes you know it'll be fine you have to tell people what you're working on you have to be in conversation constantly we had friends say this oh sorry I didn't even know you guys had a thing I I already

14:29signed up for we won't name our competitors it's heartbreaking it was and kind of ridiculous because we had an audience of people we had access to from other parts of our business but we weren't really in touch with people your friends should not be the last to know when you're working on a reality check was that we were also letting our competitors lead our innovation and that meant that we sort of felt like if a competitor offered a feature we needed to catch up and also offer that feature we were listening to them more so than watching how our customers were using the platform we really wish we had done

15:08that awkward learning on a smaller product so use small and slow solutions and very small imperfect progress and your customers really really do have the most to teach you I promise you you cannot go wrong you cannot do too much customer research so share those early concepts do not wait till it's Polish to show it do things right the first time and be honest about your limitations 20:16 i attended microcon for the first time how many first-timers mostly first-timers amazing how many people went in 2016 cool well obviously the conference totally blew my mind I was more in the online marketing maybe info product space but I

15:57didn't know anything about software and I was kind of bummed that Ben didn't come with me I think he was at ember conf at the time so I'm going to micro comp and I'm having my mind blown and just realizing how little I knew about software I didn't know about churn em are are all these terms I felt like such a noob it was kind of amazing i guy was it was really exciting but it was also the beginning of realizing just how little how little I knew and how much work we had to do to catch up the interesting thing too is at this point

16:30at the beginning of 2016 we'd managed to get to 1,000 M RR from mostly our immediate network but we didn't know how to move beyond the people that we already knew so this next principle is designing from patterns to details I think it's really easy to focus on the small details the features we get really zoomed in and we weren't really noticing the underlying patterns that were happening and the permaculture side of things I love this quote perverse planning is everywhere obvious houses face not the Sun but rather the road lawns replace Gardens trees are planted to be pruned and intended lawns are the most inefficient things we can

17:10possibly do that require so much work of us and so permaculture is intended to kind of work with the natural patterns of nature and not create more work we had really focused in on the details what technical stack do we use you know building specific features creating a course selling of course delivering a course these were kind of the things we were so focused on this is what people want to do and this is how we think it's going to be we weren't really noticing some of these really interesting underlying patterns that started to surface once we had people using the product and once we were just in

17:41conversation with people people just wanted a way to diversify their offers how do I turn my one-on-one into raining how do i bundle different offers together a lot of our customers are people who have a services based business that want to integrate some kind of online course there's also course fatigue people being tired of all you need an online course everyone in their grandma has an online course those are some interesting objections to here our customers say things like training versus course versus program masterminds there's different language that people are using and what's going to resonate with the people that make the most sense for us

18:19impostor complex procrastination so we would notice people sign up for the platform and then request an extension of their trial for like another month another month another month than when we reached out to them like oh man I just I didn't realize how long it was going to take me to build an online course they were kind of expecting that the platform would kind of magically help them create that course so we were full so focused on the details of execution that we were kind of missing out on these larger patterns our ideal customers were entrepreneurs who had high-touch coaching programs again this is not something we necessarily knew in the

18:55beginning but the more people that were attracted to our platform tended to be these people so again the customers were extending their trial courses were taking them way longer than they expected and this was a really interesting piece of data so the time to value to get the value out of our platform was a lot longer than we expected how we close that gap a really great question to ask yourself when you're trying to zoom out and make sure you're not getting too into the details this also relates to Patrick's question of what should we build is to say how might we so we might have asked these

19:29questions how might we improve the experience of online teaching how might we make it easier to distribute training these are some of the things that we're really trying to do at the end of the day instead of how might we build a course platform how do we help people sell their courses this one's a lot more prescriptive so design generally before specifically and make sure that you understand the underlying patterns that are happening what's the emotional context that's happening around the process of creating a course zoom out make sure you understand the problem from all angles and all people who are involved in that process as well why were we not talking

20:05to instructional designers why were we not looking at it from different angles teachers that teach in in classrooms 2016-2017 so we're getting people asking us well you're the course people can you help me launch my course like I'll crap like I'm running digital strategy school and Ben's building this platform so suddenly I'm realizing like we need to close this gap but we need to be able to help people actually launch their online courses so we start offering these launch consulting services and for the next two years is basically going back to the customer research that we should have done much much earlier and closing the gap meant building for us building a

20:48coaching program which I'll get into a little bit more run your learning launch is basically a course to help people launch the very first version of their online course a beta a learning launch so I ran it in alpha and beta and so this is really the beginning of integrating the different parts of our business and realizing poor Ben couldn't build and sell dokey on his own I was going to have to help with that process we were gonna have to integrate the different parts of our businesses some other things were happening around the same time bought a house bought a car got married some next-level adult thing

21:24going on so this was the beginning of bringing different parts of our lives together as well and asking ourselves what kind of life do we want for ourselves how can we make this sustainable how can we make sure we're not working like crazy people so integrating rather than segregating is an important permaculture principle so a great example of this is say an herb spiral garden so you're you're picking the herbs you're using them in the kitchen you're using the compost to feed the herb spiral so everything is kind of working together which builds resilience you're doing function stacking it's all about creating less work for yourself so

22:00on the south side like what do we each want to get out of the business even in terms of how many hours were spending doing things how can we collaborate and make better use of our skill set I'm on the front end I'm working with people Ben's on the back end working with the tech why are we not working together in a better way to grow this thing together how can we make things easier so a reality check is it's way easier for us to sell a $2,000 a month coaching retainer than a $49 a month subscription it's way easier to sell $1,000 coaching program than a $49 a

22:32month SAS subscription you might recognize this the slide from Adams talk I swear I already had this in my talk when he had this but even even bred and done sort of experienced a similar thing you know similarly breaking some rules about starting over with a new audience right it can be a lot easier to make courses than to sell subscriptions how we work with that so I was going through a bit of my own existential crisis because all of our revenue is coming in from something that is not necessarily related to our product so a hired an instructional designer and I got her to take a look at my course can I rip it to

23:11shreds log in even talked to students she actually interviewed students who had taken my program to get feedback from them when deeper on the customer research now my plan initially was to put digital strategy school on hold and kind of turn it into an evergreen product because it was a coaching program so I mentioned that we did this course consulting and we really started to shift our company's positioning toward being the people that helped you launch your courses this is around the time that Ben asked me this question he asked he's asked me this question more than once I really don't hate money I loved working on digital strategy school I

23:50loved it was probably some of the easiest and most fun revenue that I was able to bring in but I knew that something had to give and the effort it was going to take to make that ready to go evergreen it was too much I knew we needed to build a bridge between our our new services and product and so we went back to what we knew how to do best which is working with clients one-on-one this is where we shine we know how to close the sale when we get on a call with someone so some of the things that we noticed people were spending way too

24:24long building their courses and programs before validating an idea similar to what we had done with Joe key people were signing up for the platform long before they actually had their content created they would procrastinate on it amateur course creators were fire hosing people with way too much information and people were also expecting that they were gonna build an online course and it was just gonna replace their revenue overnight and so this led to a new coaching program run your learning lunch don't procrastinate and get stuck for months and years I'd seen people procrastinate for years fire hose their learners with information don't assume that more content equals more value

25:01these were all things that we had noticed working one-on-one with people so now we had this little ecosystem we've got consulting we've got coaching we've got online courses we've got custom projects we're still doing some web design clients at the same time so run your learning launch ended up leading people into our platform because teaches you how to get your course ready now we have a platform for that still doing custom web projects of course consulting and so our demos of dokey have actually now been leading to coaching and consulting projects so it's been a lead generation tool for us we finally finally had an integrated

25:40product services ecosystem all the revenue wasn't coming from where we expected it to come from all right we put all this pressure on our SAS to pull in that income but the truth is we're a services based company that built a product that took on a life of its own but really our strengths is in the services so on demand demos have become a lead generation tool for our services that's a thing we didn't expect to have happen so integration rather than segregation is a really important principle all of the elements should work collectively toward a stronger whole where could we overlap our the energy that we're putting into things a

26:16new for us that needed to be reducing the number of services that we were offering that were outside of the product ecosystem leverage your existing skills and assets again for us we know how to sell to a tiny group of people right selling a $50,000 program before we had 500 people on our list email is just a tool for connection but we had different ways of connecting with people Facebook groups forums Instagram Twitter etc so how might you integrate services into your SAS you know it doesn't work for everyone and if some of you have mentioned like I want to do consulting and that's totally fine but for us

26:51that's where we shine and it's also in a way you're getting paid to do that customer development so the next phase is about creatively using and responding to change in permaculture we say you don't have an aphid problem you have a ladybug deficiency it's idea that the problem is the solution so we had to adapt in a way that made sense for the way we already work with people right we knew that we didn't want to be the build your six figure passive income course people there's plenty of other people out there making that promise like we don't really want to do that so two years of working with course

27:29creators and coaches finally gave us those insights that we were looking for finally stop worrying about what our competitors were doing and focused on what our customers needed we adapted the copy that we we learned from people in the coaching program and in our consulting and we double down on go beyond courses there's so much you can do beyond courses training programs masterminds because we're dealing with a coaching audience we needed to use slightly different language with them and integrated this into our pages not sure if you guys can can see this but evergreen courses dripped courses resource libraries mentorship programs training hubs we started using different

28:14language than just say build your online course we're gonna attract a different audience a more high-touch audience so we had to adapt our language and our features to our best customers and really this was kind of our scrappy advantage like we knew how to use the language to create that resonance with people because we knew we couldn't compete on features anyone who went to a growth like we are not teachable we are not going to be pulling in 10 million mr are and that's not that's not us that's not what we want that's not sustainable for us so everything became easier when we kind of let go of what we thought we needed

28:46to be and just focus on the customers that we knew we could serve really well so better copy creates that resonance which can help you stay competitive so even if you have feature pair with someone else the right copy resonating with the right people can make a huge huge difference when life gives you lemons make lemonade change is inevitable competitors are inevitable how are you going to deal with that it can be slightly demotivating when every week you see a new competitor that's doing something similar you're going to have to find your differentiator you know there's always going to be new competitors so these are the

29:27permaculture principles observe and interact use small and slow solutions design from patterns to details integrate rather than segregate creatively use and respond to change which translates to these make sure that you are deeply understanding the people and the problem first favor small progress and share iterations first design for generalities before specifics think of everything as a functioning hole and embrace change and adapt so it took us three years to find our groove and finally become sustainable is your SAS part of your business or is it your whole business I think we had sort of expected almost overnight we were going to build a product and you know it was

30:11going to replace our full time income and for us that hasn't been the case our SAS brings in the equivalent of an underpaid employee and it's wonderful it pays our mortgage it pays our car it's on autopilot even if we don't work on it for a month it brings in that recurring revenue not a full-time revenue but that's okay for us that works for us we're happy being small so why would we hustle so damn hard for a life that we already have we've got great clients we've got a functioning SAS I've got hobbies I can play in the garden I caught all these things so once

30:44we let go of the shoulds and the FOMO and you know we need to keep up with these competitors and we kind of let it go we realized that we can make a great living as a small company and still love our life so what do you want to get out of your SAS and how hard are you willing to work for it there's no right answer but I think it's really important to take a step back and ask yourself what are you building and why what do you want to get out of it we've made a conscious choice to grow slowly with less stress and less FOMO

31:16yes sometimes we are the bottleneck in our business absolutely we're not going to grow as fast as some other companies might be happy with but it works for us we're okay with a nice trickle of growth that's a decision that we've made thank you don't hesitate to say hello if you want any more resources here too if you're curious about permaculture check out guy's garden our program run your learning launches at learned that we are okey dokey comm slash launch there is a free course there too if you are thinking of creating your own course and just want to get it out rough-and-ready you can sign up there should have put

31:56Mochis Instagram account on there because she's pretty awesome who has a question for Murray anyone have a question we have a time for some questions if anyone does any questions about oh right over here today one else notice my shirts inside out so the question I've got is related to you and Ben is running a business can I assume you're married to each other just got married in August yeah congratulations so obviously here we a lot about you know co-founders and problems and now we're getting to a married couple of being co-founders yeah have you said I asked this because I'm sort of helping my wife do some stuff as well have you

32:59set ground rules with like powers of veto if necessary or do you know the just in case scenarios I think what works for us is being very very clear about what our different strengths and responsibilities are and being really honest about that like knowing where your limitations are and kind of I think what let's say product features or things like that if there's something that we're not seeing eye-to-eye on and like that does happen there are times where I'm like no actually I don't think that's the right direction to go and you know we can disagree on that sometimes I'll say let's take it to our mastermind

33:30group right let's run it by some other people and make sure that we're not being too insular with the way we're making that decision so I think what works is we treat each other like equals and we give each other a ton of autonomy which can sometimes prove other other challenges like we've found that we have to have a meeting every week to get on the same page because otherwise we kind of trust that we reach you got this I got this we're kind of going off in different directions and we're like wait well we need to get back on the same page so that's been something that's

33:58really important the weekly meetings and weekly check-ins being honest about your strengths and your limitations and if you're if you're really kind of not in the same page about something just getting a an outside perspective hi Marie thank you for the talk and back here but yeah so you mentioned that copy and having the right copy can create resonance and using your customers words in order to do that but are there any other ways that you use to know if you're creating residents with new copy or to be able to find out if you are creating resonance when even if you're using customer get your get

34:39your friends and your customers to describe what you do that's an interesting one when someone one of your friends tries to introduce you to someone else oh yeah Marine Ben they do they like whatever that like what words are they using that's always kind of an interesting one like how do outside people perceive you yeah like running it by friends running it by other people in the industry we do a lot of mastermind ders with with other software people and I think it's just really good to make sure you're getting out of your head and testing it and if you're really close I mean we are close

35:07with our customers we know a lot of them personally they're in communities that we're in so sometimes someone will just hey I love that change that you made or like you know those questions that they're asking so we try to be in touch with people as much as possible to to really be listening for that to see if that resonance is there and honestly experimentation always tweaking it and testing it and just seeing what what works so not sure that that answers but all right we have another question middle and back here I'm Maria thanks for the talk I was curious when you first launched the

35:44platform and then as your ecosystem as you put it sort of evolved to include more services how did the competitive landscape factor into your decision making there so the e-learning industry seems to have lots of different options in it I'm not sure how old that is maybe you guys were one of the early players in the scenes but how did that influence your decisions did that push you towards services towards a platform how did that work yeah I mean and honestly that insight also came from a mastermind group where people said well it sounds like you guys are so high-touch like why fight it like maybe you should actually

36:18even adjust your your sass signup page to like it actually includes a one-hour call like why don't you double down on that if that's something that already is working for you why not do that so in a way we kind of had to lean on the that's our strategic advantage is that we were personable like you know I've said to some of you in the calls like I love making friends with strangers on the internet I love talking to people I make time for virtual coffee dates I'm always doing that stuff and that's our strength and so I'm not the person that's gonna be driving SEO traffic and and doing all

36:50these tactics I'm the people person and so let's use that to our advantage and we you know we had someone who had used a competitor and then did a demo with us and they said you know what it doesn't bother me that you're just a two-person team I actually like that I'm talking to a human right now because the other guys used a bot and they tricked me I thought they were real human and so they really like that we were they were able to speak with us directly and it's maybe not scalable you know at a huge scale but also we don't need that many

37:19customers to be profitable so it's just kind of leaning on the stuff that you that you know already works ok we'll do one more question over on your right over here great talk thank you the I'm into permaculture it's very interesting and so this is a great thing thank you for connecting those dots in my brain it's now a new concept that I'm going to try and use as a framework but we were at the roundtable yesterday and I think was very interesting and I might be beneficial for the audience here to describe your varied audience and your customer base that is not technical and like what like walks of life and the

38:00people that are out there to expose to generally a technical audience what type of customers are out there looking for solutions Oh like I mean my audience is 98% women entrepreneurs and I was just kind of encouraging people that I think it's really easy to get stuck in your bubble right especially if kind of the majority of the audience is building products for other developers but my gosh there are so many other very valuable markets and even Patrick talked about this too like who are the underserved markets and who are the people that have money women are very very willing to spend money on their business like I'm always buying like

38:36really getting into the core space it was kind of as a course taker like whether you call that impostor complex or whatever like not good enough I got to take all the courses and learn all the things so women are very willing to pay for help and to get involved in communities so just be mindful that there are so many bubbles that you know we are not aware of and you got to step out of your own your own little bubble to expose yourself to just other people who are doing interesting things right nice to see a few more ladies at my career club this year yeah great thanks so much

39:08Marie [Applause]