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Hello and welcome to Biz Your Work Life Sorted. I'm m Burnham and today we're diving into something that both our career coaches, Michelle Batisby and Sophurst, are unpacking the real, unfiltered truth about what it's actually like to build something from scratch. So you know those moments when you're scrolling through Instagram and you see all of these founders living their best lives making it look super easy. Well, today
we're pulling back the curtain on all of that. Michelle sharing her business mantras that she's learned the hard way, and when I say the hard way, I mean dealing with everything from employees stealing your money to having to completely rebuild products from scratch. Meanwhile, Soph's bringing her experience from Google to help us understand what these lessons look
like in both a startup and corporate environment. Plus, if you've ever thought about starting your own, they're both going to break down exactly how to know if an idea is worth pursuing, and more importantly, how to avoid the mistakes that they wish someone had worn them about.
I launched my business with twenty thousand dollars and I made nothing.
I feel like everyone's tiktoks every article. It's all like, launched this business with fifteen grand.
And now look at me being a millionaire, and it's just fucking bullshit.
I'm just going to sit here and be so open and honest.
I thought I would be in a much better position than I am this year.
Well.
I love the transparency of founders on socials, specifically when people are really open and vulnerable about the mistakes that they've made, because I think often we see the shiny and there definitely has been that history of romanticizing entrepreneurship and really glorifying what it's like, but in my experience, it has been mountain after mountain, definitely with wins in there that kind of keep you going.
You're so right about the sort of transparency because I think you see people running these successful businesses online and you think it's a certain way, and then you do it yourself. You make heap some mistakes, and then you realize that some of those traps are actually avoidable. And I think what people love about your style and listening to you, because you share a lot on social as well, you just like cut the crap and give people the
good stuff. You're also very young for a founder, and you're a female in a pretty male dominated space, like you have a tech startup, still male dominated space, and I'd just like, look at what you've done.
When I first started out being a founder, or maybe my approach as an individual had always been the mistakes are bad, like must do good work, must succeed, must win,
can't lose. And I think what I've realized is I'm actually quite proud of every mistake that I've made, and like riding these like mantras, they're all derived from real life mistakes, and I think one of the biggest lessons you have to learn as a business owner, but it can serve anyone throughout their career, is just like redefining what failure actually looks like, because with every mistake, it's kind of not a dead end, it's not the end
of the road. It's actually an opportunity to strike again, but with a little bit more accuracy and taking a little bit more of an informed shot. So I'm actually quite proud of all these mistakes because they've made me and my business much stronger, and they've also made my story much stronger.
I had to peek at some of your notes, and regardless of whether you're own a business or not, or have ambitions of only a business, like, most of your points are so relevant to anyone, like people working in an office job, like people who run a startup small business whatever. So yeah, I'm really excited about it. I'm excited to learn from you.
Okay, So number one, Reid Hoffman, who is the founder of LinkedIn, said, if you're not a little embarrassed by your product, you've launched too late. This was my co
founder and my first mistake. We felt like we had to launch a squeaky clean product that had all the bells and whistles, something that we felt really proud to put out into the world, and it ended up taking us a year to build our app, which is too slow in the world of tech, and it's because we just couldn't let our standards down and our perfectionist tendencies down.
And if we just got it out the door, we would have saved a lot of time and money, and we also would have been able to get real feedback back and get a bit of a sense on like if we're on the money in a faster kind of feedback loop, then going out with a product that at the end of the day was actually over engineered and ended up having features that people just didn't need.
There's this line from a movie We Bought a Zoo. I just really like the quote, all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage, and then it talks about this idea of embarrassing bravery, and I like think about that all the time as I'm trying to do things.
I think just that thing that you said, Michelle around waiting too late, and this idea we have of trying to make something that's perfect, and it's that feeling of you'll have sort of a spark of an idea, you'll kind of be trying to make it perfect, and you kind of never do anything with it. And then you see someone else comes out with something the same kind of idea and it's way less good than how you would have done it. They did it and they've been successful,
and you see this all the time. I was just talking to a friend about it. So yeah, just trying to get out the smallest, simplest version of your thing, just to get that feedback loop.
Number two definitely ties into the first one, and it's don't assume because a competitor has a feature that it actually works or people use it. So when we were founding Sunroom and coming up with our feature set, we spent a lot of time doing product teardowns of our competitors, and we started working on features that we assumed people would want or people would use because our competitors had them.
And there was one feature in particular spent a lot of time building and it was so poorly adopted, and that was a huge.
Learning curve for us.
Interesting, sometimes you will interview your consumers and everyone will tell you that they'll use something, but when push comes to shove, they actually won't. And sometimes it can be really hard to get honest answers, especially if you've built relationships with your users. Sometimes they don't want to offend you.
And then in a work context, I think there's almost the same principle. So we would often talk at Google about landings, not launchers, and you'd see other teams, like from other countries, and they have this amazing launch and they'd send this amazing launch email, and like you're just kind of sitting there with so much time. We were thinking, oh my god, we should be doing this, so it's a very loud launch and then there would be this
very quiet you know. Actually that didn't really work that well. It was actually kind of average. You never really hear about it. Yeah, we would always kind of say to ourselves landings, not launchers, and don't just pay attention to this big, glossy loud launch email.
Yeah, I love that, love that saying.
Okay.
The third one, still on the competitor train of thought, is it's always nice to know who you're up against and be aware of their strengths and weaknesses, but stay focused on your differences. This one kind of hurt me to learn because it was something that I already knew. I already knew like keep your head in your boat, you know, like, don't look around. It slows you down.
But I think sometimes when you're doing something for the first time, sometimes you'll trust in yourself and your instincts can become a little bit rattled, and so you do start to look around a little bit, and I think
that's when you can lose focus. And we definitely went through a period of that at sun Room, where we just started paying too much attention to how our competitors were growing, and we started trying to copy some of their acquisition strategies and it just ended up being a complete waste of time, and we would have been better off focusing on what was working for us and just continuing to double down on that or think about new innovative ways to keep targeting that same niche of creator for us.
How did you get out of that phase then if you were kind of just looking at what your competitors were doing and that was shaping the decisions you were making, and then what did you start doing differently instead?
Well, we ended up losing quite a bit of money. So that was a pretty big wake up call when there was kind of something that we knew was working really well for our competitor is but we never wanted to do it, but we reached this point of desperation at one time and so we felt like, all right, this is our only option. Let's give this a crack. And it was hands down the worst thing I think we did in the history of a sun Room and
lost us considerable amounts of time and money. And so that was just a slap across the face, like wake up call in terms of, you know what, let's go back to the drawing board, we actually ended up going back to what our go to market strategy had been and how we initially built a lot of hype and had a lot of success. And I think sometimes you might set really aggressive growth targets, so you think that what you were doing a year or two ago wasn't
that successful. But then as you've learned and as you've tried a lot of other things, you have a bit more of an understanding of the market, the industry, maybe what a reasonable pace is, and you're able with the benefit of hindsight to look back and realize, oh, actually, that was quite successful. We just didn't really have like the wisdom to understand that at the time.
I think that's really interesting that you sort of did something, maybe it wasn't as successful, and then at a different time it was, Yeah, how much time would you spend in your day actually talking.
To your customers and your users if I'm working.
For eight hours seven hours.
Out of the area.
From what I've heard, I've never run a startup, but sometimes founders get into this trap where they don't want to talk to their customers or they feel like it's so time consuming. But especially in the early phases, most of your time should just be spent hanging out with them and learning from them.
One hundred percent. It's that saying, like, do things that don't scale. I think that's really really important at the start because it builds a lot of brand loyalty and that's something that has always paid off for us and worked really well. That's always meant that our retention is good and we've kind of got these people that are willing to advocate for us.
Yeah. I always love that.
Whenever I'm signing up for new products and it's like a very techy you know, you just think it's kind of like this faceless software and then the email you'll get once you, you know, sign up for it. Sometimes I'll get emails like three days later from the founder and they're like, hey, just checking in how you're finding the product, And you're like, well, I thought this was this massive software company and now it just feels very human and very personal.
That's such an easy way to stand out if you have a tech company, because we're also used to existing on these giant platforms where there's no way we're ever going to directly hear from anyone from like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok you lose your account and like it's really impossible to get in touch with someone. So I think if you're building a tech product, like people really appreciate that personal touch and being able to speak to a real
human on the end of a line. Number four is when you're building features, people don't care about the feature, they care about the benefit. So if you're going to speak about it to your consumers, you need to focus
on that. I think when you work at a tech company, there are so many smart people that are able to solve these really tough problems through you know, like engineering, critical thinking, coming up with like innovative ways to get people to connect on a product, whatever it is, and then there can be a tendency to get really excited about certain features that actually the consumer doesn't really care about.
I think that's that friction, that tension point that can often exist between engineering teams and marketing teams, which is something that I also experienced when I work at Bumble. You know, you get given a feature, you have to market it, and you're thinking, no one is going to care about this, But I think it's really in how you communicate it. So not talking about what the feature is or kind of how it exists, but what the benefit is for the user.
So true.
We lived by this at Google. The way we did marketing at Google is no, the user know the magic and connect to the two. And the magic is nothing to do with the product or the feature. It's about the transformation that it creates in someone or like the joy that it sparks, or the time it saved them, whatever, But it's nothing to do with the product of the feature. I mean, obviously it's to do with the product of the feature, but it's like not about the product or
the feature. Yeah, so yeah, I think about that all the time. There's that really famous quote which whenever someone says it to me, I never understand. I have to like process it slowly. My brain is slow. But it's people don't want the drill, they want the whole. The thing is, they want the change, right, they want the thing it's making. They don't actually want the benefit of the product, so they want the change.
Number five. This is a great one, and this came from one of Sunroom's investors. Actually who fun fact, he is the creator of Little Mikayla, which was that first like avatar Ai influencer. Yeah, that's his company. And he said something to Lucy, my co founder and I which just really stuck one day. He said, if you want advice, ask for money, And if you want money, ask for advice. And when you're raising capital, it's just the best way to go about it. Like hit people up and bring
them in on your journey. Talk to them about what you're building, talk to them about the problem, talk about the product, talk about the wins, talk about your challenges, and if they end up loving your product and believing in you, they'll just offer to invest or. They'll offer to intro you to someone else who might be that first check. And it's just a really smart way to go about raising money as opposed to just outright asking for it.
Why do you think that works?
Oh, Like people have also done this to me before, where like they come with a product and they want advice, and I'm like, oh, this is good. I believe in it, Like I actually want to give them a bit of cash for it. I think it probably helps the individual in how they tell the story, to be honest, like it removes that pressure of I'm about to kind of stand up and pitch to someone with the goal of
like getting cash at the end. Of the conversation, so I think you end up sharing the story in a different way, And people also liked talking about themselves and kind of having their egos stroke a little bit. So reaching out to investors or angels or other founders in your space and sharing your struggles and then asking for their advice in return, it's just a very good way to build relationships.
Do you have any advice for someone who like, we're in Australia right and a lot of.
The money is in not Australia, in the US. I guess, so for.
Someone sitting here being like I kind of want to start talking to people and networking and maybe following this kind of thing around asking for advice and hopefully getting money, how did you get started getting connected to people? And do you have any advice for other people?
Yeah?
So it did definitely help that my co founder and I had backgrounds in tech. So I first went out to my own network, which was people i'd worked with when I was at Bumble, and was able to get the founder and CEO of Bumble to invest in some room. That then made it much easier to kind of start reaching out to people that we didn't have relationships with. Because you've already got these checks committed, and it shows this level of belief in you as a founder.
I suppose.
I've also had a lot of people working in corporate jobs who leave and want to start their own company, and they do go and hit up all the execs because they know that a lot of the execs probably have a spare ten k, yeah, and they already know that this person is good, and so they kind of like, I believe in you. I think I know that what you're building has potential. And sometimes they'll get their first little small checks through that.
I think it's smart, yeah, exactly, and then they will introduce you to their networks and it kind of just goes from there. And once someone that's worked with you is out there then speaking to their network saying hey, you know this person's building X and I've invested, it just creates this snowball effect where you kind of trust your network and then you might end up investing as well. But I also think it is a really good strategy to get on socials and talk about what you're doing.
There's that saying, you know, build in public, and that ended up achieving a lot for Lucy and I and I was really surprised with just who was watching, and so I wouldn't be afraid, And I mean, you don't need to have followers to pull that off.
Can you give this an example?
Because I heard this, I love it, I want to do it, and I found it it's actually harder to do than I thought, just because it feels so unnatural to be like, what do you think my business model should be?
Whatever?
I'm finding it actually really hard even though I want to do it. So can you give some examples of what building in public actually looks like?
Yeah, so it's probably going to feel uncomfortable and it's probably going to feel a bit icky, but it's not self promotion. It's idea promotion. Like that's how I like to think about it. And it kind of breaks down that like where you feel a bit gross because you're taking talking about your own work or you're talking about yourself, You're actually not You're talking about your ideas. It's like, hey, I've been working on this problem. Does anyone else have
this problem? I'm working on solutions for this that i'd really like to share with others, and just start talking about it in whatever way comes naturally to you as well, like it doesn't really have to be on TikTok, But I do think TikTok is good if you don't have an existing audience, because anything can go viral, anything can get eyeballs. I found that investors started reaching out to me once I started just speaking about what we were working on on socials. Don't be afraid to do that.
I think sometimes there's a little bit of fear around will someone steal my idea? And I don't think you need to give away your secret source or if you're working on a really innovative solution to something, you don't need to give that away in this information. But there's definitely no risk talking about the problem, what you're working on,
how you're thinking about doing it. I am of the view if someone could take it and copy it, then it was probably not going to be that great or defensible anyway.
So true, I love.
It, Okay number six and I definitely learned this one the hard way. Culture is what you punish and what you celebrate, So one rotten apple will spoil the bunch. And I really feel like that truth is exaggerated when you're in a small team and you really can't settle for bad attitudes. So you've probably heard the saying higher, slow, fire fast, But when you have a startup, I think unfortunately your brain is more geared to higher, fast, as fast as possible, Like you're just trying to grow, you're
trying to scale. It's that move fast and break things mentality, and it can really end up hurting you. I also think there's that level of excitement, like yay, I'm finding people that actually also believe in this thing I'm doing, and I just want to get them in the room.
I speak to so many leaders, owners of companies things like that, and I am so surprised. I'll always say to them, what are the qualities you're looking for in young people that you hire? And I'm so surprised by how many people say number one attitude. So many other things can be learned, but if you have a bad attitude, it just undermines everything. Back to the point Michelle around, I really liked that thing you said around what was it punish?
Culture is what you punish and what you celebrate.
Do you have any examples of like what that looks like or how you actually do that as a leader a business owner.
I think with the culture as what you punish. It's like at the start, Lucy and I were quite scared to be a bit ruthless, Like you kind of hear that in business you need to like flex that muscle a little bit. You're going to have to have difficult conversations and conversations, and we we had so much fucked up stuff happened to us, like what employees stealing from us? It's like stealing our money, not how are they even
doing that? Yeah, like on company cards or we had test versions of the product where you actually could make money through the app, and we realized that some members of our team were sending each other like thousands of our coins on Sunroom to kind of get each other's earnings up when they were linked to sunroom accounts.
And is that just an immediate fire?
Ah, yes, yes. But I kept a journal at the start of like the major thing that would occur every week, and it was just blow after blow, like engineers taking your ip and trying to sell it on the side, like just wild stories.
I'm sitting there thinking, like people complaining too much, but like that's serious.
Yeah, it honestly was laughable times, Like yeah, you kind of just got to roll with the punches. Yeah, I also think what you celebrate, So this kind of happened at Bumble. Actually, there was this culture of loads of emojis, lots of exclamation marks, getting really excited, almost by the bare minimum, getting really excited by someone just kind of
meeting expectations. It kind of had to be overhauled because it meant that once someone actually wasn't performing, they were really shocked because they'd been met with so much joy and excitement at all these other points along the way.
So I think in terms of what you celebrate as well, just being aware of things as simple as that, like how exclamation marks and emojis can actually lead someone to feel like they're doing an incredible job when maybe they're just kind of average, and then if you have to start performance managing that person, there's a bit of a disconnect.
A lot of people love complaining about gen z and about how entitled they are, and sometimes I see that exact problem where companies sort of started celebrating the wrong behaviors or they're just like over celebrating things, and then people get used to that and it's sort of not their fault, and then the leaders want something to change because the company's growing, and then they expect people to just understand number seven.
So this also kind of comes back to performance. Steve Jobs said, a's higher a's and b's higher c's, So a's will help you maintain a high performing culture, and you need to refine your recruitment process to.
Find the a's.
This is kind of what we started to learn or witness whilst we were working on Sunroom. We ended up hiring this absolute gun of an engineer who was nineteen at the time and he's still to this day our head of engineering and he has two patents. I think
he's twenty two now. Yeah, and he is so smart, and as we began to grow the engineering team around him, we realized that he just helped maintain this very high performing culture and that these genius types won't really settle with working for people who are underperforming or not really willing to put the work in to level up. You know, that doesn't mean there's not opportunity to expand upon your skill set and to learn and to be coached by
great people. There's definitely that, but there also needs to be that element of wanting to do better. We definitely lean more towards you don't really need to have the experience, but do you have the right attitude? Are you displaying a level of like hunger, commitment, competitiveness, what do you work hard for those sorts of things trying to identify that.
Is there anything around like the amount of time you spend with someone before you actually hire them, or like having some kind of probation period that has helped. Is it like, you know, I went out and went for a hike with this person and then after that time I knew they were good.
Is there any advice you have around that.
We actually did do a trial period with someone once, and it was someone that we were going to be moving over to the States, So that allowed us to set something up where we could actually trial working with the person over a two month period, and that was
a really good strategy. Definitely like getting out of an office situation and like going for a drink with them, or going to dinner with them, or starting to like jam on the side like casually with someone if you can, depending on like what sort of a relationship you have, Like can you just start texting about like tiktoks that you're seeing whatever is relevant to get a little bit more insight into their brain.
I got this advice as well.
If you are even thinking about maybe if you want to start a business with someone, don't sit down and be like, should we start a business together? Just start talking about ideas, constantly sharing voice notes whatever, sharing stuff that you're into, and then just start like doing the thing and then you know at some point, yeah, you sit down and you have a conversation around and a contract around the business, but like, just start.
Actually something we can put in the show notes. Which is kind of off topic, but similar for anyone who actually is looking for a co founder. Lucy and I did a seventy five question questionnaire before we founded Sunroom. We'd never met in real life. We founded Sunroom through COVID, so it was all virtual. So we were really trying to get an understanding of like do we like each other?
Can we work together? And she had done a fellowship called on Deck for tech entrepreneurs, well people wanting to become tech entrepreneurs, and they gave a seventy five question questionnaire and it gets into a lot about your values, your struggles, what your mindset is like under pressure, asks you questions like you know, would you prefer to own one percent of it a billion dollar company or like ten percent of one hundred million. How many years do
you want to work on this? Like what financial sacrifices are you willing to make? It kind of gets into tougher questions that you might struggle to actually bring up with someone.
I'll get a.
Version of it and we can put it in the show notes for anyone looking for a co founder.
We're gonna have a really good newsletter for this, and we'll definitely put all this helpful stuff in the newsletter, and the newsletter you can find through the show notes as well.
Epic.
Okay, last one, This is a good one to end on when hiring. If it's not a fuck, yes.
It's a no.
And sometimes that means like you do, let some candidates go that same really strong, but I think, yeah, you've got a trust your gut on that one.
Every hiring mistake I've ever made, I think back, and I convinced myself into it because on paper or the brand or the skill that you think they have that you need at that time, and it's never worked out. So yeah, I think it goes back to that your gut is actually your second brain, and there's tons of signals that you're picking up when you spend time with someone that you don't actually consciously know what they are. But it's so hard though, because it's also like, do
you keep holding off to find the fuck? Yes? And I guess there's probably no one answer, but I definitely know what you just said is very true. I just honestly, I don't know about anyone listening, but I am personally so excited about some of the stuff that I just learned. And I think the interesting thing is, like whether you even planned to start a business or not, it's just career advice, life advice, work advice in this, So yeah,
thank you, Michelle. I also just think it's so funny, like you're so low key about you just like, oh, yeah, I run like a startup, but then when you actually share the shit you've had to deal with, it just completely blows me away.
I'm sitting there in my like.
Cushy corporate office job, just like I've never had to deal with things like that before.
So that was a lot, Michelle, and amazing. I just learned so much.
Every single one of these points is going to be in the newsletter, and you can get that in the show notes. Thank you so much.
My mind is absolutely blown by some of the stories Michelle and So share today. For anyone who wants to dive deeper into this, our newsletter this week has Michelle's full seventy five question co founder questionnaire, plus a breakdown of all the mantras you've heard with real examples on how to apply them. We will link that in our show notes, and while you're there, make sure you're following us at biz by Mama Mia on Instagram for daily career tips and some behind the scenes content from Mish
and So and the entire biz team. We will see you on Thursday for our Biz Inbox episode, where we'll be answering all of your career dilemmas. Bye, Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on