Hi everyone. My name is Patrick Akil. And for today's episode, we cover how to go from ideas to actual applications, where to start, which ideas to pick and all the work involved to a point where you have a full-fledged mobile game. For example, my guest Rosemary, low cost is the CEO and founder of Story by Studio where they do all of that. And more, I'll put all our socials in the description below. Check her out. And with that being said, enjoy the episode. Take space in Switzerland
because I have no clue. Actually pretty good. I mean, the penetration of technology and so it's, um, it's pretty high and that's why there is a bunch of tech companies here because, you know, the customers here actually use a lot of technology and also we have, you know, a couple of really, really large International companies like Novartis of my love of UBS and Credit Suisse. And so they they account for a lot of the tech market.
And that means that there's also a lot of people delivering Tech to them here. Yeah. Okay. Just Swiss people do like to innovate a little bit, even though that that's not really what they're known for worldwide, but they like doing that. And so, for example, where I live in, zook there's a bunch of blockchain companies and crypto companies that have sort of saddles here and they call this, they like to call themselves crypto Valley around here.
Yeah, yeah, they can get incentives and tax incentives and stuff like that. So there's there's a over 200 small companies that are in that space. Of crypto blockchain, you know, metaverse stuff here, just in this small little town that I live in. Wow. That's, that's incredible. When so, when a company really wants to innovate, I mean they come to you pretty often as well. But how did they find you? How did they get to your doorstep? Is a lot of networking.
Some of it is, I mean usually it's Word of Mouth other people that that refer me from projects that I've done. So I've been really lucky in the last 34 years. I've only gotten Projects through referrals. Well which is, you know, I don't really have very up-to-date websites or anything like that because of usually we're very small, right? And we're pretty, pretty booked
out for quite a while. So we usually have like only one larger project that we do and then at the same time that the other projects we do is just smaller things. So we would take on like, let's say one startup where we really help them with their technology and their idea of what they want
to do overall, where we help. I'm with the production of the software, the applications that we want to do and then we take on in parallel a couple of smaller projects, like maybe helping the people with the storyline or only with the concept of what they want to do or you know it's certain workshops or doing some quality assurance but really just like punctual Consulting where we're good at and then one larger
project. So that way, you know it really is, it's nice, we get to see still a lot of stuff that's going on and a lot of different new managers and at the same time, we have some security Tea with one of our bigger project. So this is the current one where on probably runs through to at least end of next year. Yeah. And then you know, apart from that I just take on stuff that I find is. It's just interesting and that, our team can bite its teeth into that's pretty cool.
That's pretty cool. Can you give an example of one of the kind of longer projects that have been running or that? Maybe it's ready the larger one that we did in the last couple of years with a an application or game called Shadows Edge? Each and it was a serious game, meaning that the game, had a purpose Beyond, just entertainment. Yeah. So that was a mental health game where we took contents from a book that an offer had written.
And then we digitize those and turn that into an actual game of a city that's been hit by a storm. Just like, you know, when something bad has happened in your life and with different types of psychological influences and exercises in the game, we then helped players Realize you know what was happening to them help them build tools for resilience to be able to understand what they're going through and how they're doing things and to be able to
then to handle those basically. And so, in the game you had artistic expression, exercises cognitive behavioral therapy exercises, as well as also expression, through journaling, and through prompted general questions, if you will. Yeah, that's a lot. Did the client. So I'm assuming a client has an idea before they come to you to kind of execute it. Did they already have this in mind or did it kind of grow organically in that way? This one grew kind of organically.
I mean, they be asked, was, can you help us digitize the book that we have? And, yeah, we have our general audiences kids. Because they had a really cool book that use prompted journaling questions to help kids understand what they were going through when they're dealing with a chronic illness and they Wanted to reach an audience, that was more in the teen young adults face. And so, therefore, we then looked at, you know, what were
the options? Can we use like audio books or, you know, Kindle books or things like that, or do we want to really make it more interactive? And as soon as we knew we wanted to make it interactive, then we popped up with the idea of well, why don't you try and make a game of it? Because that's where the kids are. Let's see if we can get the psychological content to a medium that they like doing that provides some stickiness and that Helps them adhere to a longer-term program.
And so that's that's why we came up with the game. So it was kind of a team effort. Yeah. That's pretty cool. And then, I mean the game creating a game is very specialized work. I would assume I've never done it and I built all the software but never in a game sense is that also? What you what you specialize in or like, what your team specializing in? Yeah, so with my team, what we do is we look at what is around and we see we try to help the customer. Figure out what is the best
medium that they could use? Sometimes that is a gamified application. Sometimes we take mechanisms from gaming or storytelling parts from gaming and just build it into an application. Sometimes it's really a game, a full-on game. So at the moment, for example, I'm Consulting on a weight-loss application where we use gamified elements to help people understand why they're not losing weight and help them really understand. How wait. This happens and also then give
them exercises. So one of the things about weight loss, for example, is that a lot of that happens in your brain and it happens already before you even know it happens. And what you can do is you can help retrain your brain and we use a our exercises or vented reality exercises to help people. Let's say desensitize against food, right? It's the same methods that are used for addiction because eating is also some kind of addiction.
And so therefore that kind of mechanism from gaming to really use the Technologies and to build up different levels, basically, right to make it from easy, going to look through learning to make it more interesting and more, and more challenging. That's all mechanisms that we use from gaming, but it is a proper application with psychological content, you know, verified by doctors, we're doing
clinical trials. And they're basically what my company does is really advises on how structurally, how we could build this up. How you can create the levels, the content making the Content from taking it from a psychological perspective and making it more user-friendly, if
you will, you know? Yeah. It said before for people to understand and really divide them up into small design Loops so that you can have a little bit of a, a feeling of having achieved something in smaller steps before you then take the next step. And those are mechanisms from gaming that we bring in, but we don't develop the game or that the application, there's a different company that does that we just advise on, you know, the
methods. Puts from gaming and inputs from storytelling that you can do. And that's that's what I mean with you know the smaller projects that we take on on the side whereas with shadows Edge. For example, we did all of it, right? The whole production, we were the ones that hired the get the development Studio, oversaw the development. Yeah. Also do the whole project management bringing the game to market doing all the interviews and and the pr for it and
marketing for it gets etcetera. That's incredible. Because just for my idea and also for the audience's idea, when it comes to your team, how many people are we talking about? Kind of with, in this case it goes, it scales up in the scales down, six, we only have three people. Okay, B, we have.
I have a about 20 Freelancers that I work with on a regular basis and that come in depending on expertise and what you have to think about there is if you go into a project like this, a lot of times companies, don't know how big the project is going to get until they understand what their needs are and what they want to do, right? And so, Don't want a full-on team yet with everything going on.
So what we do is basically we have this sort of ascent mechanism of doing a workshop that gets them through this idea finding into like a base concept and those base concept. Usually we have like two or three varieties that's Workshop that takes about two to three days of with the client and then about two weeks work to prepare the concept ideas so that they can visualize it so that they know what kind of a budget is
there at cetera. That's one of my my core team and I that's what we what we started on what we do and then within that we pull in people from, let's say development. So we have people that really know how to code very well, we have front-end coders back and coders we know people in AR and VR that we pull in, you know, for a very specific advice.
For example, I also work with psychologists and user research people, so that we understand what we're trying to achieve in that we know how to set up the measurements because it's one, Thing to build a game for mental health. But how do you measure that, right? How do you know that the game is successful? And you have to think of that before you actually build the game you can't just build it and then afterwards saying, let's look at this one. Exactly.
Especially since a lot of times these larger projects have a big budget and so therefore the I think the reason why clients come to me is because they don't have to lock into a full project at the beginning. We can do this kind of concept work with, you know, getting various specialists in for a very very short periods of time to really nail things down. And then from there, sometimes they do things in house.
Like I did a concept for a beverage company that had the issue in Latin America that they had these kiosks, and Mom and Pop shops, these little cafes come up with young people, starting their own little company and of course they had no education or anything. So they didn't really know how
to handle those. And then they basically go bankrupt within a couple of months and that's not good for the People obviously, but it's also not good for the beverage company because they lose inventory, they have a new customer, they have to, you know, go after again, then again
and again and again. And so we came up with this sort of SimCity like game, but really for a small kiosk in a small business to simulate, how they would run inventory, how, you know, to simulate managing their money, for example, and how they would get customers in. And if they played that game and leveled up, they would get real life benefits from the beverage company. Like these Council drinks free.
Merchandise, for example, you know, free furniture, B, those kind of things just to help them get through. So, this is again, a serious game. The idea is to help people get a little bit of an education around being an entrepreneur and what they're doing. But it also brings benefits to the company because their losses went down and having to come up with new customers.
Every like two to three months basically, and so there, we only help with the concept and then they decided to build the thing in house. And we just periodically, you know, Steering committee to work to check our progress is going. Yeah, I think that that flexibility is worth a lot for, I mean, customers or clients, whatever you want to call them,
right. If they want to do it in-house and they have the capabilities to do so they can and otherwise scaling up with people that you trust people within your network. Probably people you've worked with before is a huge benefit because when it actually has to ramp up when you know, a lot of things need to get done and you just need to do it. It.
That's when you actually need people that do that work and before that, it's a lot of ideation and that has to do with okay, talking with the stakeholders also, knowing, probably what technically is possible and what is not possible and be able to challenge the ideas. But when you want to ramp up the option to do, so I think is, is
very valuable. My question there is I mean, it takes a lot of trust right to work with a lot of Freelancers people that you trust people that you've worked with before, but before you can work with people that you've worked with before, there's always that first time in building up that trust or having that first dialogue, getting to know each
other. How did you get your network to a point where you confidently can say we can ramp up whenever we need to because I have a network of people that I trust and that can get this done. Yeah, I think that's that's just happening over time. I mean, that's not something.
Can rush into you have to have done a few projects with people, you know, I mean for for some of the games we did we did rfps and we really reached out and saw what those people can do and we looked at what they've done in other other customer projects and reach out to those those customer projects. Yeah but a lot of it is really is really again word of mouth,
right? If I work with some Freelancers and they want to pull somebody in then I know that that's somebody they trust otherwise they wouldn't bring them into the project and so Therefore, a lot of the network that we have comes through working with people who then again, work with people Etc. And that's just something you
build up over time. The idea to do this was not really born as a business concept saying, okay, I want to, you know, only work with freelances from now on, but it was actually really more personally for me because I've been in startups and I'd actually just, you know, given 18 hours a day to those startups, and I was quite tired and I said, look, I want to downsize a little bit.
And so I wanted to Take some time off and really kind of feed my the creative side, again, the creative, passive passion, and therefore, I eat, I scaled down basically, right? And luckily, I was able to put some of the team that I had into other projects, which is great, right? And then some of the team I knew I wanted to get back or retain and and basically hired them out for certain projects for a
limited time. And then I notice, well while I was taking some time off for myself, I actually kept Being involved in some Concepts and some concept work and some ideation as you say and I started seeing that that's actually something that people need. And I don't really, you know, after 30 years in this kind of business, I don't really feel the need to build up huge company anymore. I just want to do work, that's
fun, right? Yeah. People always ask for hauling, you know, are you successful? And what is success for you? All success for me is having to wake up, being able to wake up every morning, do something that you think is really fun and being able to make Good, living off its right now. Does that mean I need to have 100 employees or 200 or 500? Because that's for me, more of a status symbol than actually doing a good job.
And I really love being able to be involved in all these kinds of different projects and learning something new every single time. And that's why, you know, this balance works for us to do to bring a little bit of security because if you have employees, they want some security to. So bring a little bit security with longer-term projects right
now. For example, I'm working on an Esports. Any where I'm getting into the company, also on an investment level, if you will, and we're doing some activations in the Esports industry and that's, that's a very early start up, but that's a longer-term. You know, there's we're going to look for for larger investment and really build that company up. So I'm staying involved with that and that gives us a little bit of long-term leeway for the people in my team.
And it allows me to do applications on the side that Just really interesting and helpful. Also, for serious gaming such as the weight loss app, or, you know, simulation applications in smart, CD areas, for example. Yeah, I love that. I love that. I can be exactly, but it doesn't have to be complex, right?
A lot of people make, whatever success means make a very complex, but it can be. I mean, smaller, kind of can give it this Justice. I guess I wouldn't call it smaller in a negative sense but it can be simpler, right? It doesn't have to be complex if you wake up, and You love what you're doing? You can make a good living off of it. Then why can't that be enough, right? That should be enough.
I mean, it doesn't have to be depends on your yourself obviously, but if that's enough, that's really great.
So I love ya. She has a different meaning of success, I think for them and for me, it's really being able to, you know, if I feel like the weather is nice and I live 20 minutes from the mountains, and I want to take an afternoon off, yeah, Frank because I know that everything is sorted and and I have a great team behind me and I Do those kind of things and I offer that also to the people that work with me. You know, we always take care of each other.
We always make sure that if we need to do something privately, always make sure that that's possible. And we always make sure that everybody is happy with the work that we're jointly doing. And that's just for me a lot more fun, you know, I get up now and it's every day is just really a fun day and we figure out what we can do and we figure out what's possible with technology. I mean that's that's awesome to be able to say that and to be able to experiment with that. Yeah.
For sure, one of the one of the questions I still had was I mean when a client comes to you and they have a certain problem with the have a certain domain. I'm assuming you don't really are specialized in that domain yet but you feel confident enough to take ownership of that. Right? Whether it's the psychological aspect in the empathy of the game that you mentioned before or it's kind of the Esports kind of venture you're going into.
Now those are very opposites in domain and sure they might have gamified Elements which kind of a line there but still you have Have to be confident enough to say. Okay, we can do this. How do you get that confidence up there to where you can say okay we can do this and when a client comes to you, maybe you can also say we can't really do this. How do you go about up? Yeah, it's sometimes you do say we can't do this or we say, you
know, this is possible. However, we might need a partner for that because we don't do that, or we sometimes even say, well, you know, probably it's not even possible and we have to actually figure out, is it possible which I have one of those cases? The moment that I'm working on, We're just trying to see. Is it even really possible that they want to do yet, right? At some point. Everything will be possible anyways, because it's technology, but, but, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, the first thing that I, that, that I do, when I customer comes to me with a, with a problem or with with a fun challenge, that they want to want to do, is I just listened to them and I tell them. Okay, that's your domain, you know, exactly what works there. Here's the ideas of what we can add to it, and how we could add to that.
So, an example, we have a music customer that were working with now to see how can we turn their meeting grades with musicians into the metaverse into a fun environment and attach like gaming areas with it. Yeah. So that's kind of Esports and Jason because they're same mechanisms in there, but I'm not, you know, I don't know, music except from consuming it, right?
And so therefore we need their specialist but the the part I think that's really We sometimes difficult for people who are more in the coding side is to translate other people's business into what is possible. Technology from a technology perspective and I think that's why we're really good. And that's why customers come to us.
Because we don't say, we know everything, every single thing, like the psychology of weight loss, I didn't know anything before I started with this application, right? But the doctor that wants to make that application. He's been doing that feel and he's been working in that field for 35 years. So he knows how to do this.
So then it's a matter of taking his content and translating that into different smaller stories and helping him, kind of make it into chunks that are understandable and from those chunks and also helping him see what technologically is possible. And then we have the discussion, you know, like, for example, one of the exercises that that will go in, there is about food and restraint being able to handle,
you know. Having to put in front of you and say no to it or stop after a couple of bites, it's a very tricky thing for somebody to do just like, you know, if you put a pack of smokes in front of somebody and then tell them what you don't have to take it. I mean it's not really it's not really an option for exactly. And so you know, then we looked
at okay, how can we do that? Would a our help because you're putting them exactly into that situation where they are, you can put them into their own living room with the foods. They like right? Yeah. Except in the first step, it's not real. So it's a little bit easier to resist, right? But you can train, you can see what can be done and things like that and so helping them understand helping a doctor understand. You know what the potential of
it is? Usually I find that that expertise of what can actually really be done with it. That comes from the business themselves, we just need to be able to really take all that out of them asking the right questions and usually the businesses don't know where this start and asking those questions, right? What do they really want to achieve? Where is the pain Point really of A customer.
And why do they want to do this? So that's I think is the I think that's the little the unfair Advantage if you will, you know, we've done. We've been in so many different types of projects that we know the questions to ask to understand the project. Yeah, I can imagine, I mean, finding out what is actually going to be valuable down the long run, or how this is going to be in a practical sense.
It takes a lot of good listening and asking the right questions before you can get that from the stakeholder side, right? And then you still have kind of these chunks of works and they might be digestible, but they're still assumptions, right? Do you then test them with users or do you implement them? And then give them to the users as fast as possible? Or what is the next step there? Absolutely getting feedback.
Is that starts from day one? I mean, yes, starts from just even, you know, if we had a conversation I then go back to my network and say okay is anybody have or if I already know obviously that I know who to ask but even if Don't know how to ask, I go back to my network and said, well here's a case. Yeah do it. Does anybody have expertise in this area? Can they give us a second opinion?
And then once we create the concept with the customer, we already then asked test test users as well after the concert like which of these Concepts will work for you. What are the things that work and don't work? And then we have a list of questions depending on what we want to know about the outcome. There's different types of questions as an example, for Shadows, Edge, for the mental
health game. We did an impact study with that last At six weeks, when we had the first proof of concept and we will even before that, we already had people look at drawings at the concept that everything, but then we did like a proper design study after the first proof of concept after version 1. If you will, where we looked at 6 weeks, we did a baseline study and study what we asked them. How playing the game made me feel?
We looked with a university, we develop with the university and with the, actually, the Dutch government for him for health for digital health, We developed a questionnaire that looked at what makes a person more resilient and how do you, how do you ask the right questions? And then we turned that into a baseline study that we asked before they started playing the
game. We asked them to play the game for six weeks, 20 minutes, three times a week and then we did the study again at the end we asked them to fill in the survey again. We also did interviews with psychologists in the meantime and we asked them to create what we call it player diary to really after after a session of played just right now. Now, how did playing make you feel based? Yeah. Like a little journal and that's, that's pretty early on
in the project already. So that's after a few months already, right? And then ideally, the way that you develop things is to take shorter chunks. Make something small and then slowly, but surely turn it into a bigger project over time. While each step is being tested so that you can really get to the the, the errors if you will very early on, yeah, I can imagine That if it comes to.
So there's a lot of ideas packed in there and some actually made it into the game as well, but it starts with ideas, right? Even the part of journaling and creating that empathy mean, it probably has some psychological theory behind it. Why that is effective. But wait, which ideas get picked up and which get actually implemented because I'm assuming
it starts with a lot of ideas. Then you you pick a few and I don't know based on which requirements may be like a foundation within the theory behind it. It. But then you actually Implement them and you test them. How do you get from that? Ideation step to actually, that's a good question and everything comes back. I think from the, what we call
the design question. So what do you want to achieve with the product and that's in that case, you know, was how do we build a product that will help people mentally improve or improve, how they deal with their mental health patients, right? How they build resilience? And everything goes back to that. And so we looked You up with our psychologists we checked, what are the things that help with resilience? One of them is narrative therapy, for example, right?
So that's where the journaling idea came from. One of them is artistic expression, which is where art comes from because it uses different sides of the brain different inputs, you know, plus also art, can be a way to vent, right? Yeah. And then with those two combined we looked at, okay, well, how can we then combine that into something that makes sense? And so the idea was born to create a world, a city called Shadows Edge, Where, in the city you can paint and you can write.
So you have to find the pages of a missing journal and answer the questions that are on them. That's the prompted journaling. And those questions would be about sort of the stage of the of grieving, or of reworking your issues that you're in. So the game's levels actually follow a psychological process. That happens when something bad happens in your life and each of those levels. Bowles has different types of questions associated with it, that you would also get in
therapy. And so we use those and reformulate them to fit into the world. But with that same kind of content, like for example it will ask you one of the, my favorite questions is, have you ever thought that you you're wearing a mask and people only see that mask? They don't see the real you. Okay, what's that? Like, how does that make you feel? What does the mask look like? And what's the difference between the mask and the I'll youth, for example, right? So, there's follow-up questions
that we can ask. That's, that's one of the prompted questions that we have in there that people Journal about, and the artistic expression can be great to vent and because it was a city, we then, use graffiti has artistic method of expression because it doesn't have to be pretty, you know, people don't have to know how to paint, beautiful murals. They can just add text, they can add, you know, anything, because it doesn't matter. Right? Still looks cool. And so that's how you kind of
narrow. These ideas down, you take the big Sexual things that work in the application for weight loss. It's a it's a tested and proven method that this particular doctor has used over the last 30 years and then we see how can we visualize that, how can we really make sure that people can internalize it and make it playful enough? That it turns into practicing this method over time and that's I think where gaming can help as well.
That's pretty cool. I mean, you mentioned this kind of design question which is This is my assumption basic kind of the emphasis of what your problem statement is or pretty much pretty much, right? Yeah, it's pretty much you take the problem. And then you say, okay, how Wordperfect. What is the perfect outcome? If I were to solve this problem. What do I want? What I want to happen afterwards, right? We want, we want, for example. Let's take the Esports world.
We want people to have a more interactive experience when they go watch Esports. Yeah. And feel more connected to that Esports events afterwards, even when they leave, have more of a community around it and family around it, if you can so that it becomes less Spectators thing, but more of an interactive event for them that lasts longer. So the design question is, then how do we make that status
happen, right? What do we what can we design to create a situation and an events that people will want to belong to wants to keep alive for longer and can feel that they are active, actively participating in knots? That would be your design question. That's really Because I think, I mean, from talking to a lot of people, when you really have a dedicated team is also, when your purpose is really crystal clear, right?
This is our team. We aim to solve this, or we work to contribute towards this, and when you have that, you kind of have that step on the horizon. And any kind of question or any ideas you can challenge with that step of the Horizon, right? With the example of Esports, right? Gaining a better sense of connectivity and interaction whatever you implement needs to. Contribute towards that goal. If it doesn't yet, then it's not really discussable in this
sense. So then the things that actually contribute to those, those are the things you work on. Thanks. Yeah. There's the ideas that automatically the other ideas are automatically filter out if it doesn't meet the criteria of interactive and we also have the word positive in there somewhere. You know, because we wanted a positive Community like a sense of belonging. Yeah. And so anything that doesn't serve that then has to go. Right? Yeah. Yeah that's pretty cool.
Earlier you mentioned this kind of three. He's has a client project, might fit into right things, you can do things you've done, which are two and things that have never been done before, which means you are really really trailblazing that way as well. And I mean, from talking to you earlier, I know you do projects like that as well. And it's really, I mean, from a business sense, you need to know
what's possible. But then from a technological perspective you don't know what's been established yet. So how do you bring those two then together? Because when the technology is established, you know what's possible and what's not, but Your trailblazing. It's kind of a whole different story there.
Yeah, it is. And again, that takes a lot of trust, you have to find the customer that's willing to to try something out and then that understands that they're not coming to you because, you know everything because if it's trailblazing, you don't write. But they have to understand that that you are somebody that can guide them, and that can help them make decisions on that trail, that your blazing, and that has your best interest at heart.
And so there becomes Much more about the relationship and, and seeing how far you want to go, you have to also be very clear than in setting boundaries and say, okay, here's what we're willing to experiment on. Here's what?
We're not. So ideally, those kind of trailblazing projects would have a baseline of things that we can do so that it could still be successful and then you have like, sort of these these yeah, that these these how can you call them is out Liars, if you will, you know, that could be the ones that are making things spectacular versus just good. And so, therefore, it has again, be a little bit of a balance so that the client can still get a good solid project from it.
And then there are certain things that we say, okay look, that's what we aim for. And again, this is why certain process is actually help because if you start with the Prototype and then already start testing things, you can see doesn't even make sense, for example, that's number one, right? Yeah. But then also technologically you start seeing okay, where the Or the issues, you know what, other things we can do? What are the things that we that
we just can't solve, right Ami? Let's take an example from From Shadows Edge. Again, one of the things at the beginning, that that we knew was going to be a little bit. Tricky, was creating graffiti on a mobile phone in a game and really also make that meaningful. And so those are the things that you have to really be careful for what we wanted to trailblaze. Also was to be able for people to share things. There aren't with other people. So they felt in a community that
they're not alone. Alone. So, in the game you have something called Shadow G, which is kind of like an Instagram, but we also knew that just from an organization perspective. Technologically, there's a lot more that's possible than what we did. But from an organizational perspective, we have to be careful because depending on what you can share, that also means you have to monitor. It has to, you have to have processes in place for like suicide, prevention and things
like that. And so we just had to make sure that we limit some of the things that are technologically possible to Sure, that the environment and the project still really remained that Baseline remain. Something that is really positive for the community and for the users. So it's not always about technology sometimes sometimes. Yes, the technology is new and we don't know what we can do with it. I love those kind of things because it's fun to experiment
with, right? But you have to find the right customer. That's willing to try that out and a lot of times it takes money, so it's not always easy. Yeah, but also, you have to really keep in mind that if you are trailblazing, are you just doing it to show? Something cool? Or are you doing it? Because that which is cool is actually trying to solve
something. Yeah, I can imagine it can be quite challenging when there's a really cool idea, but it doesn't actually deliver that value that you think it will, or it's kind of opposed to kind of the goal, or the mission that you're going for, and being like, okay, we know this is really cool, we know, we can do a lot of things with this, but it's either going to be, we're going to put a pin on this and we're gonna do it later or we can't do it because of these reasons, right, if it
doesn't make sense, don't do it. Even though it's a really cool idea, I think you can actually lose yourself and just focus on really neat ideas and cool ideas but then you won't be as effective as when you focus on what you actually want to achieve. Yeah, very true. Very true. And there, I mean, there's no easy solution for that, right? We'll still, I mean, we also still do stuff where then think, well, it was really cool, but part of doing business, you know?
You make mistakes. Hopefully. You make mistakes quick. I mean they always say feel fast-fill often, right? Yes. And we learn from those and it gives us a little bit more expertise for the next time. And that also does mean that I as an entrepreneur take risks because I can't always have the customer stick up for things. We want to try out so So I take risks to with that but you know, as long as I can afford to do that, it can still be a lot of fun too.
Yeah. How difficult is it from from your position to say, no to clients in either ideas they have or wishes they have and be like, Oh either we can't do this or this is not possible or I don't think we should do it because of X y&z. Yeah, it's very difficult especially because, you know, I really some of the ideas that come up I love those ideas and I really want to do them.
I think you know there's we just have this case just like a week or so ago as a new customers coming to us with the project that would be just so amazing but I know technologically, it's just not really going to turn out the way that they expect because that what they expect is not really possible yet. And so now it's about, you know, what can we do?
So in that first meeting we had to have a conversation with them and say, well here's what's possible, here's what we think is possible is, what could be possible but there is no guarantee Guarantee. Right?
We can we can try but there's no guarantee and that's just something we have to work through and see you know see what we can do that happens regularly you know I mean there's several several customers where that happens with oftentimes we then settle on as we said before you know we take like sort of the what's the what's a good solid base that that has like a nice stretch goal that works and then you know can we set aside like some kind of a risk?
Jet to see if that other thing is possible. And if we can do it and then over time, you know, we figure out if because the other thing is also this, the audience one, that right, is the customers customer, is that the person they're doing this for? Is that wanted? Yeah, needed. If you are exactly. I mean, that's the, that's the end user in that sense, but I like that you mention, right? You don't just say no, that's
that, that's final. Give the customer in this case, the kind of project older, I guess. Us give them options. You say well these are these are some of the options and we're going to we're going to figure out which option. We liked the most which few of the options we liked the most and we're going to pick and choose and either we're going to deviate from them and pick another option. But at least you get to choose,
right? Because the worst thing you have is to have one option because then you you have to do that one choosing allows allows people to think about whatever options they have and then pick accordingly And sometimes that means referring them to somebody else, you know, because we just really can't do it but we can at least help them still then figure out, you know, who is the best to refer it to who has done this, or who is doing it, or who could do it, basically, and then
referring them, and sometimes it does mean that there's no business in it for me. But it also means that again, as we, as we said really early on, you know, that there's a network that I'm building up of knowing who can do which parts. And building that Collective Network to be able to involve the right people and projects. Yeah, yeah. Really cool. I really enjoyed this conversation. Rosemary. I'm going to round it off here. Is there anything you'd still
like to share with our audience? I think. Maybe just just one thing, you know, I know I'm kind of an odd one out because I'm not trying to build a huge business. I'm consciously very consciously, staying small. So, I maybe just want to say, you know, success is what you make it to be, what you think works for. Or you. And that's something to figure out and really go after I can honestly say that, you know, I'm happier now that I'm doing small stuff than I've ever been.
When I was doing large, super, large projects and so therefore, it just depends on what people want to do, right. What do you want to wake up doing? Because if you're an entrepreneur, it out odds. Are that you're going to spend 10 to 12 hours a day doing it. So you may as well do something that's really fun. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. I mean the only way you can realize that is with time and experience right here. It's in the past kind of allowed you to realize.
This is actually what you want to do and this is what brings you happiness. And the only way to do that is to stay experience, a trying figure out, okay? What do you like? And what don't you like and eventually you'll end up in a happy place as well. Awesome. I'm going to round it off here. Rosemary, look horse. I'm going to put all her socials in the description below. Check her out. Let her know you came from our show. And with that being said, thank you for listening.
See you on the next one. Thank you very much.