Keynote: 23 Years Without A Proper Job

Speaker 1: Good morning. Buenos días. Bom dia. Good morgen. Can you hear me at the back? Fantastic. So it's absolutely delightful to be here. Thank you very much to the DjangoCon people for inviting me. This is my first ever DjangoCon, which is a bit of a surprise to me because I've been using it since it was written. Probably 10 years or more. I'm absolutely knocked out by the fact they are doing live subtitling. I shall try to talk slow enough that they can understand what I say. So I I I do tend to talk very

Speaker 1: fast as you will find out when you meet me in person later Um I'm going to have to try to talk. Talk slowly. Anyway, here I am. And here is my talk 23 years without a proper job. It's almost exactly 23 years since I last had a salaried job, or what my mum and dad would have called a proper job. And in that time I have enjoyed myself enormously doing tech work and getting paid for it without having a salary So to start with, I I I ran my own company. I had this crazy idea about

Speaker 1: this was the early days of the internet becoming famous and po wor widespread And I had the idea that maybe digital cash would be the next big thing. So I started a digital cash company in 1995. And it didn't quite work out because the world wasn't really ready for it. So after eight years of running my digital cash company, um I went back to more conventional self-employment So since since then I've been freelancing, I've been self-employed, I'm currently contracted into the Scottish Government to help with some of their infrastructure. work. What I want to share with you is some of the lessons that I've learned along the way

Speaker 1: so that you can avoid making the mistakes that I've made. So this talk is for you if you've ever thought about ditching the day job, about trying to make your working life work for you rather than you working for it We are amongst the most lucky people in the world because we tech people who do coding for a living. We have the opportunity to frame the way we work to suit us. We can work anywhere. We can work at any time of the day that suits us.

Speaker 1: Not all jobs let you do that. If you are a bus driver, for example, you have to show up when the bus timetable says so. But we, we can work, as long as we have our laptops and we have an internet connection, we can work from anywhere. What we have to do is to work out how we get a job. But lets us do that, how our employer will be happy to have you working remotely The easiest way I've found of making that possible is to work for yourself because then you are your own employer and you can set your own rules. So who am I? That might not look like me, but that was me many years ago

Speaker 1: when I had the digital cash company Intertrader. It's a classic bit of indirect benefit from being female. The reason I'm on the cover of this magazine was not because I was hugely successful, because I wasn't at the time. I was just odd. I was a female doing a tech startup when there weren't many startups around at all and there were very, very few women. So i if you actually looked at this magazine that I'm on the cover of The actual article is a single column about page 23. But just because I was female, they put me on the cover. Fantastic. Doesn't look much like me. Um I I I I took that that home to my dad and said, Oh, what do you think of this?

Speaker 1: And he went, Well what? I go This? What what that what do you think of it? What what am I looking at? I said, It's me He couldn't recognise me I didn't actually look like that then either. They dare brushed out all the freckles. They done lots of clever stuff. But it was me. So this talk isn't going to be all about me. But I will just quickly tell you who I am. I am a freelancer, I do DevOps, I do full stack. I am next going to be available in the autumn, should that be of interest. I like doing conferences. I enjoy speaking at them, even though I'm terrified by doing it.

Speaker 1: I'm going to co-host the engineering track on Edinburgh's Turing Festival. So if you are coming to Edinburgh for either EuroPython or for the Turing Festival, come say hello. I'll be there For some reason I don't quite understand. People keep asking me to do keynotes. So I've done EuroPython, I've done Now DjangoCon Europe and um PyCon Web last last year. I want to do a shout out for PyCon Web by the way because it's only about 200 kilometres down the road from here. Really good conference if you're interested in doing web type of Python and Django stuff is good good comments to go to. And I founded LUSME. As well as the digital cash company, I have a habit of starting things.

Speaker 1: I'm good at starting. Not so good at finishing, really good at starting stuff ThusMe is my side project. It's an e-book search site. And if you like ebooks and you want to buy them cheap, it's really good. But it's not really done as a side project to make money. What it is is somewhere I can p learn all the technical stuff that I need to be able to do when I go and pitch myself to do the paid work. It's a fantastic technical playground where I can play with whatever technology I feel like looking into at the time. And doing with with a real project as opposed to testing exercises helps me understand the technology much, much better.

Speaker 1: than if I was just going to buy a book and learn the code the easy way. Trying to actually get it new technology to do something real. is absolutely a fantastic thing to do with a side project. Don't do it. I mean you can do it for the money, but don't you don't have to the money might come because you have had the side project. And in this case, I've been I've been running this now for I think it's eight years and I've made quite a lot of money from it. Indirectly. Because I'm doing this, I've got to play with real-time data, which got me into Firebase, which got me to become a Google developer expert. Because I'm interested in real-time data, I started getting into Django channels.

Speaker 1: I don't know if Andrew Godwin is in the room, but if you are, thank you for Django channels. Yes. So I think as technical people we need to explore what we do all the time. to play with stuff. It's not just about work, it's about play. Find out what it is that you want to do and learn. Because if you're not learning in this industry This is one of the the single biggest things I've learned after working in tech for three decades now. If you're not learning and you're bored at what you do, it's your fault. Because there's so much out there to learn to do that is new. That's where the fun is to me. And working should be fun.

Speaker 1: But it's not about me. It's about you. Presumably some of you are here because you like the sound of the talk about how do you make money from what you do. Now the classic idea is you have a you have a blind-ented idea. Say, for example, you you think it's a digital cash startup might be a great idea. So you leave your job, you raise some money, you hire some staff, you get investors, board of directors, all of that stuff That is one way of doing it. You may end up being the next Facebook or the next sky scanner or the next name the company that you you think you would like to have been in early adopter with or early starter with.

Speaker 1: But you don't have to make that big jump. And one of the things that I have learned is that it's a really good idea to start smaller Even if you have the idea that you want to start a big company, you don't have to do that as your first step into the unknown. What you can do is learn how to run a company. Now in my case I knew I was always wanted to run a company. So the preparation I did for it, apart from the technical knowledge I was learning was I thinking, well if I want to run a big company, I better understand accounting. So I took myself off and did a diploma in accounting and finance as a as an evening class, which was

Speaker 1: fantastically useful when I actually did start the company and I wanted to make sure that the accountants worked for me not me for them. When they were t giving me um how can I put it f politely, nonsense and telling me what I had to do and I'd go, No, that's not right because you don't understand that figure. I do So if you want to do a big company and you want to be the boss, understand what it is that you need to have as well as the technology and the great idea to make that successful And you can start really small. You don't have to run a big SaaS service. One of the things in the startup world that I circulate around

Speaker 1: is we we do this this idea that you can start with the smallest possible thing. It doesn't have to be a service. It could be a book. It could be a course it could be a um A tiny little ebook that shares knowledge and gets you through the process of learning how to sell to people. Because for most of us Yeah, w as tech people, we are famous for being introverts. The idea of being somebody that goes and says, I've done this, pay me for it. That's that's quite a hard thing for us to do. So you have to get used to doing it. You have to get used to practicing those things that are hard so that you can get better at it

Speaker 1: So a small thing like if you do WordPress for example, a small plug-in could be the start of your self-employed career. You don't have to think of it as a long-term investment. If you do something like a book, there is no support cost. If you do something like an online on online training course, you might choose to offer that support as a part of the offering, but you don't have to But what it does get you to do is something you can do it in your spare time whilst you're still being salaried. But it gets you on the road to being that person that controls their working life.

Speaker 1: You could do a you could do a service. Um the great thing about having a service offering is it's recurring revenue, which is the kind of thing that accountants get very happy about. They like recurring revenue because it means you can forecast what next month's income is likely to be in a way that if you're selling single one-off books, you just don't know. People might buy the book and never talk to you again. But a service, once they've signed up, if you're doing something useful, then They will keep paying you month after month. But the downside is you have to keep showing up month after month after month and doing the support. And quite often what people

Speaker 1: do is to forget that support costs money. If it's yourself that's running the business, you might say, but that's okay, because my time is free. That's the wrong way to look at it. Your time is your most valuable resource. So you really need to think how you're going to spend that time well. And what I suggest to people who who talk to me about business ideas is even if you are going to do the whole thing yourself, as I tend to do with my project. You can code it, you can support it, you can promote it, you can sell it. Even if you are doing it yourself and you are therefore not charging yourself any money

Speaker 1: because you are free. Cost it as though you were paying somebody to do that. Because if you're going to scale the idea beyond just you somebody else is going to want to be paid for their time. So you may as well get that in the model from the outset so that you can understand whether it is a profit profit profitable idea or not. You can publish stuff now. A lot of people make money from indirect methods. They they publish V blogs and Vlogs, video

Speaker 1: blogs, um, and then they monetize it through the advertising mechanism This is something I have not actually done yet, so I can't really talk about it, but I I have seen people being very successful at it So there are many ways in which you can make money from it what the accountants call monetization It doesn't have to be a straightforward sell. I don't have to give you a book and you give me $10. It doesn't have to be that. Although that can work very well. Affiliate commission is how I make money at the moment through LUSME. If you buy a book through my site

Speaker 1: I've signed up with Amazon, with Kobo, with Apple, so that when I send traffic to them and that they b people buy through that connection, I will get a small percentage of it And it doesn't cost the person buying the book any more that because because Apple and Amazon ex take that as a cost of doing business. They they expect to have to pay something for the traffic that they get. So that can work quite well. It doesn't work so well when your your your service is cheap ebooks, which is what my site does, because When I tell you about a book being on sale for a dollar and you buy it, I get six cents.

Speaker 2: So fantastic.

Speaker 1: That's not going to keep me in beer. But i i it it adds up But you can also sell advertising because what you you do, if you're serving a particular targeted market, somebody else wants to get to that market. So advertising can be done. Well, and it can make money. It doesn't have to be the awful experience that we all know when you go to a site and you're just bombarded with buy, bye, bye sites. But a a more a better way perhaps of doing that kind of advertising revenue is to go for sponsorship Which is if you've listened to podcasts quite often, they'll have a a message from our sponsor.

Speaker 1: So you don't actually have an advertising break as such. But they they they the sponsor is paying for the podcast to be produced and they get a mention because of it. So it's kind of like advertising but it's a bit more um formal of a relationship. But data analytics, this is where I've made the most money. And it's not by doing anything creepy like the Facebook kind of selling on data. But through my website, the book site, I've got an awful lot of data about what people are buying and what prices they're buying at. Now that is really valuable information if you are a book publisher. So I make my six cents when you buy the book through my site.

Speaker 1: I actually made about £100,000. through selling data about what p people are doing. That's much more interesting number to to be thinking about. So if you are doing anything where your project is capable of collecting the data, not The personal data that we are being warned about through GDPR. That doesn't have to be what you're selling. It can be very honest sale of people are buying more crime at this price than they're buying romance at that price. Or in the US their expectation is that they will pay ten dollars for book whereas in the UK

Speaker 1: It's two pounds. That sort of information is hugely valuable, so do not underestimate it. I'm going to give you a few examples. People always say to me, oh, you can't make money out of writing an ebook But yes you can. I don't know if anybody here has tried the meteor um real-time data system It's it's it's pretty good. I've moved away from it now. I prefer Django channels and Firebase, but the story here is that two guys, Sasha Grief and Tom Coleman. Coleman

Speaker 1: wrote a book about this new technology. Because the documentation that came with the technology was not as good as the actual software was So, because they wrote a very good book, and it's an absolute classic example of how to write a technical educational book. Lots of code examples, lots of GitHub repositories to say this is exactly what you need to do and this is how you do that particular thing. Everybody who wanted to do anything with Meteor bought this book. So when I looked at the stats a couple of years ago, they'd made three hundred thousand dollars from it over eighteen months.

Speaker 1: I think they've made a lot more since. And this was a self-published book. They didn't have to get a contract from a publishing house. They didn't have to Pitch it to anybody. They just wrote it and started selling it and started making money. People say, but you can't make money as a solo founder. Well, again, I don't know if you any of you use Balsamic. It's an absolute fantastic wireframing tool. That was started as a solo business by Peldi who is now when I when I did this talk a couple of years ago he was talking about profits of annual profits of two million. I I checked a couple of days ago it's now annual profits of six million

Speaker 1: He's not doing it by himself anymore, there's about 20 people, but still, that's a solo founder started a hugely successful business. People say, oh, but uh you can do this in the USA, but you can't do it here. Nonsense. We're seeing so many great companies. Where I live in Edinburgh in Scotland, we have a very successful company called Skyscanner. That was started by three people on a kitchen table to do travel pricing comparison. And it just got sold for I can't remember two billion quid. A lot of money. Most quite a lot of people know um Patio eleven. He Patrick Mackenzie, he's a great speaker if you ever get a chance to see him.

Speaker 1: He has made a very successful business out of Being the kind of tech person who can talk tech to management and management to tech and above all make money from it and not being afraid. To charge. His his common mantras, charge more. No, more. Even more. Charge more. If you're doing something that's useful and people want it, they will pay for it. Be happy to accept that what you do is worthwhile There's always a reason why we go, but yes, Rachel, y yeah y you're you're you're talking great, but I can't do it. No, no, not me. Well you can, you can. Anybody, if they want to, they can do it.

Speaker 1: John Morrow is somebody that I 've never yet met in public in person, but I would love to. He has made a successful business out of tech and he cannot move from the neck down. So if he can do it, I can do it and you can do it. He runs um a company about blogging. His particular craft is words. He does fantastically good writing and teaching people how to. write good words and make money from it through his blogging site. So you can You can do it. You can start small. I encourage you to start small, but don't stop there. Think big, but learn your craft.

Speaker 1: Because in the same way as we have to learn how to code, from a starting point which is hello world we need if we're going to work for ourselves to learn all the extra skills bit by bit at small steps And you have to be prepared to fail. You have to be prepared to make an utter ass of yourself and get it wrong. And that's part of the job. Because if you don't fail, you're not pushing yourself hard enough. Now, one of the many things that I've learned over the years is I actually like being a beginner at things. Uh my my hobby is music, my my hobby is jazz. I am now learning my third jazz instrument because I like that step of going from

Speaker 1: I don't even know how to hold a bass to, hey, I'm playing music now with other people, fantastic. You can learn how to learn. And no matter how old you are, you might go, but I'm too old to start. Rubbish. I was 50 when I took up the double base. By the time I'm 60, I'll probably be on the trumpet. But you know, you you can learn anything. You can start. The only thing that stops you is the fear of failure. So learn to get past that by failing. Doing something you know you can't do. Learn to deal with it. It's it's it's exhilarating So when it comes to doing tech work, there is a common thing which people say.

Speaker 1: Don't do B2C, which is business to consumer. It's too hard. You work have to work too hard for the money. People who are spending their own money don't like the spending it. Sell to businesses. Businesses expect to pay for things. That's B2B. B2B. They are used to spending money and it's not their money they're spending. So they are much happier to spend it. If you are selling to somebody on an expense account, the most important thing you need to know is A, what are you going to deliver them that they will value, that will make their life better, but also What's their budget? If they've got a ability to sign off without authorization from anybody else at five hundred dollars That's where below that is where your your your pitch should be to them.

Speaker 1: Because then you can take their money and deliver the service they want without having to go through the death by committee stage. And you can choose the customers you want. It's a common problem we all have when we start out in business. You think, I am so desperate for money, I will do anything for anyone. Just pay me. A sign of maturity as a business person is when you go, no, thank you, but no, I don't want your business, I don't want your money. You are the one customer for me. you would be better served by somebody else. Because when you do that, what you're doing is addressing the customers you want. And as soon as you start being able to describe the customers that you want, this is actually

Speaker 1: what I have found to people told me this, and I didn't believe it until I started doing it. When you say I don't want those customers paying that money, I want the big customers who are going to be prepared to pay me a lot of money for doing very little work Once you start pitching what what it is that you can do for that kind of customer, you are much more likely to get that kind of customer than when you start out going anything for anybody at any price You you have to define what the customers you want. So you need to work out who they are, what they are going to need from you, and how you deliver it to them that makes them delighted. And then you can be prepared to

Speaker 1: charge more because you're giving them something that's valuable. The biggest problem that most people have with doing that is themselves. Because they're going, why should anybody want what I do? The imposter syndrome is huge in everybody who starts a company. And you have to get past it. And the most important thing you can do with any kind of startup that you do as a tech person, you need to start growing the mailing list from the first time you think about the idea because those people who you can attract to be on your mailing list are going to be your early adopters, your early customers. And you don't have to have the finished product before you start the mailing list. So, first thing, start the mailing list. Now, I've got a few other lessons

Speaker 1: that I have learned There are four things. This book, this is a great book, by the way, it's a crime book. I love crime fiction. This one is it's setting in Quebec, in Canada. And it's got it's got a main character who is the chief inspector who's got a really good view about life. These four things are what he teaches his raw graduate recruits who he gets sent. And and it is y you have to s learn to say these things. I don't know. I no so I've been working in the industry for 30 years. I say I don't know when people ask me things because I don't know everything. Sometimes people think I ought to, but I don't. That's good. I'm I'm willing to accept the fact I do not know, but I can find out.

Speaker 1: I can say, I need help. This isn't working. I need help with this. Because it's okay to ask for help. We all do it all the time. And I when I start working with with young graduates, they're surprised when I ask them for help because they go, Aren't you supposed to be mentoring me? And I go, that's not the way it works. In this industry we all help each other all the time. We always have questions. We always need help. We just have to share it around. Need but say, I was wrong No, I remember the first time I ha I said this in a work context, it was my first job. I was twenty two I had spent six months working on

Speaker 1: site for my my my my the company I was working for. We'd been doing porting some horrible Fortran code onto this horrible machine. Six months work. The last thing I had to do before we could get it signed off and I could go back to working at home in back in Nottingham was To archive it all, to clear up that what I've done. By mistake, I deleted the whole damn lot. Six months work, gone And I'm 200 miles away from home, my boss is there to sign it off and to take me back. And I've just deleted the whole thing I just go, Oh my God, what am I gonna do? So is he gonna fire me before he gets me back to Nottingham or will he fire me after he's driven me home?

Speaker 1: So I went to my boss and said, Steve I've done something stupid. I'm really sorry. I was I shouldn't have done it. I was wrong. I shouldn't have done it. But I've just deleted everything and he just looked at me and went Yeah, that's interesting. What are you gonna do about it? So he didn't follow me. He put back in my mind the fact I could do something about it. And after thinking for a few minutes went, oh, yeah, we could restore it from the backup, couldn't we? We could restore it from the backup. I could uh make those two changes again. Well it's fine, we're good. I'm not fired. Fantastic. I was wrong. It was I needed to say it. Because otherwise I I wouldn't have been able to be told how to fix it. And I'm sorry. This is something that we do not say enough in the in the tech industry that I've seen

Speaker 1: We should admit when we've made mistakes and we should say to the people that we've hurt by those mistakes, I'm sorry, I got that wrong, I apologize. And I'm gonna add in my take on those a couple of those things. You can change the meaning of those words by adding the small word yet. I don't know. Can be negative. I don't know yet is a much more positive way of looking at it. I can't play bass well But I I can't play bass well yet is what I'm working towards. I want to be able to do it.

Speaker 1: I'm in that I'm I'm in that journey. I can't write Groovy yet. But I know how to learn, so next week when I'm doing that project I will be able to It's a different mindset. You can change what you do and how you approach problems by reframing them. Yet is a great word. So, I have time for questions. But first of all, I want to say thank you So how does this work? Do I just point at ask if there are questions?

Speaker 3: Right, uh for everybody who wasn't here yesterday, we have a microphone right in the middle of the seats. So if you have any questions, just Step up there and Rachel can answer them from up here so everybody can hear them.

Speaker 1: Thank you. Oh and I've actually before questions I have one more thing I want to say which is to emphasize what Tobias said in the uh opening things You have to practice doing these kind of things like talking. So use the opportunity to do a lightning talk, even if you've never done it before, especially if you've never done it before. Get up here and do a talk. Thank you.

Speaker 4: Okay. Hello. Yeah, hello. Thank you for the great talk. I walked a comparable path, so Uh yeah. Yeah. And uh my question is uh what you said about learning I agree, but how what do you think about the pace? So how how to fit this with the all the other things you have to do and especially because of the At least from my point of view, the learning pace in the IT uh community is uh always uh increasing. So you have to learn more and more and more because more technologies evolve, especially in the web environment. So what do you think about that and what's your opinion on that?

Speaker 1: Okay, that's a great question. Um so when I started um 30 years ago it was very possible to know pretty much everything about e everything because there wasn't much going on at the time We didn't have uh the internet as a as a public um service, we didn't have desktop computers, we had mini computers. Um it was a it was very small and focused. And over the over the years as you're saying that everything has expanded. So it is not now possible to know everything I think what you need to decide is what you want to focus on, what what your interest is. Now for me, because I am interested I'm actually interested in everything, but I know I can't do it

Speaker 1: all. I care about being able to deliver I s I describe myself as a full stack developer. I want to be able to do everything from the front end. through to the back end and the deployment, which means I have to choose a stack to be able to do that on. Now that stack changes all the time When I started up LUSME, it was initially it was MySQL on a Apache on a single computer. Now it is 30 machines using Celery as a message queue. with Django behind it and Django channels and React on the front end and whatever. So I've made my choice about this th those things. I wanted to learn one of the new JavaScript framework, so that's why I chose React. I could have chosen Vue, I could have chosen any of the others

Speaker 1: around. You have to focus. I think. And then learn how to deliver something with that that training. It's not enough to read the book. You have to actually build something. So depending on what your interests are, I would say accept that you can't do everything, make some choices and then build with with that restricted set of technology. But the important thing is to choose to do anything And then you can always choose to do something different. But if you choose to do nothing and not learn, then you're restricting your your horizons so so greatly that um that the there's a problem.

Speaker 5: Continuing on that thought, um yes you've got to do something, but Doing something, there's an opportunity cost in all the other things that you couldn't do. I might you might have a million ideas of the book you could write, the course you could write, whatever. You have to pick one. How do you pick that one when you've got the got this audience and you don't know what it is an audience is actually going to be interested in? What's how any suggestions for how to narrow down what's what's worth fake focusing on?

Speaker 1: So so yeah, again, great question. Um The the way which people I respect would answer that question, um I don't have a good answer myself, so I shall channel other people 's uh is the first thing is to get the audience, to get the mailing list, so that you have an a way of finding out what people are crying out for. For example, in the Python world A thing that you hear people complaining about having pain and problems with is packaging. Because there are so many different ways to do it. A new way comes along every week. People have a common problem there. You might choose to build a course or a book on that single pain point. And what I'm trying to do at the moment, I

Speaker 1: I I suffer from the problem that I have too many ideas, not in not few. And so for me it's trying to niche it down. I am trying to find a problem that people have with spreadsheets. This is my new idea. I think spreadsheets are the scourge of the world. They cause lots of problems. People have problems with spreadsheets. So I need to f get get myself an audience of people who have problems with spreadsheets and then I'm listen to them and find out w one thing that they have in common that they complain about and fix it for them. So that will be my next project is fixing a spreadsheet problem. Um I don't know what the problem will be yet. I can think of a list of things that might be. But I have to get the audience. It's not a question of tele t telepathically going, oh, I believe that they will want this

Speaker 1: You don't know that. You don't have to even think about it. What you have to do is listen to the people who is the audience you want to serve. they 'll tell you what they want. And if you can find a small thing that you can deliver to them that makes their life better, you can build from it. Um so that's that's that would be my answer channeling other people, which is Don't try to make it up yourself. Find the audience first and listen to them. Because they will be howling in pain if there's a real problem that they've got that you can help with. Anymore?

Speaker 6: You uh said that in general it's better to have like businesses as your customers, right? Um how would you suggest, especially if you're just starting out, to find these people or these businesses and to convince them that you're serious? That you're not just uh

Speaker 1: So the th first thing is Try because you you you can w when I had my digital cash company, I was phoning up people in the banks. Now I was 30 at the time I think. I didn't know anything. I didn't look like I knew anything. And I was female. I mean God, women don't do tech. The I found it amazingly simple actually to get to the person I wanted to talk to, even if they were like the V Vice President of D of digitalization or whatever. Glorious job title Because I w was able to just pick up the phone and go, I would like to talk to the person in charge of this. Could you put me through They they actually did to my amazement and then I had a meeting and then I tried to sell them stuff. The the the thing you have to do

Speaker 1: is a believe that you can do it and f and find out from rejection that you can't, don't assume that you can't, but have a very clear o what it is that you're trying to sell to them or or what is the problem that they have that you can help with. Because if they have got a problem you and you can help and you you can either save them time or make them money, they will listen to you. So I don't know for an individual person how you would address it, but I do know that just giving it a go is a good way to start. So give it a go. Don't yeah, and and just Don't waste their time. That's the thing. Once you get in, if your foot in the door, be very clear. Say, I've got five minutes with you, I want to

Speaker 1: persuade you that this is something I can help with. Am I right? They may go, no. They may go, fantastic, we've been waiting for somebody to tell us this. They don't care. Once you're actually in business, i as a as an employee, people do care about you things like experience and job titles and and past record. In business they don't. All they care about is they have this problem. Can you help? That's all they care about.

Speaker 7: Thank you very much for your uh for your talk. One question if it's possible. Maybe some kind of similar question to the uh the one before. Um You had some two statements which are very important to me also uh the one I need help and uh I don't know And uh but what's I mean if you say something like that you need to address the all also the right people Uh what's your advice on uh finding the right uh mentors or advisors, you know Um

Speaker 1: I guess it depends on what context are you talking about? Uh uh like is it technical or is it business or

Speaker 7: Yeah it could could could could be both. Uh So for example you might be a great advisor for if you want to uh get something running, if you want to build up a startup, you have the uh experience and knowledge. I could ask you m almost everything. Uh how do you start What's what do I need? What do I know? What's do you know some kind of approach?

Speaker 1: Um that's a very good question. Um oh so in the specific um context about the startup stuff, just f following on what you just said, if anybody does want to come and talk to me about that kind of thing, I'm here till Friday, come and talk. Um If I was going to look for somebody in, say for example, when I was taking my startup to the next level and I needed to find people who 'd help me with finding investors. or a a a a director that was going to help with a particular problem. I would spend a bit of time framing the problem and focusing on what it was I actually wanted because I would have wanted a partic particular person for a particular problem and the closer I could define it the better chance I would have

Speaker 1: then getting that And then I would having having done that description to myself, I would just ask people I knew Uh so networking is is hugely important, which is why this kind of conference is great because you get to meet people. Um in terms of like for the for the business side side We in Edinburgh have a very good ecosystem of meetups that and and um investors, bankers, etc. Who who there's a kind of like a little industry going on. So what all you need to do is find somebody who knows somebody in it and then they can recommend somebody else. down the down the line. And the the important thing is to recognize where you get to meet one of those people and then not waste their time.

Speaker 1: This is this is a this is a a thing which I I feel people Do a lot. They waste time. Time is our most valuable resource. We should not waste it. And we definitely should not waste other people's if they're giving it, if they're sharing stuff with us. So if you can focus what you actually want Find somebody that's b near. If you don't know anybody that has exactly what you're look you're looking for, find somebody that's near it and then ask them t who they would advise about getting to the next stage. And it might be that you go through three or four hoops and jumps to get to the person you actually want. But you start with the person that you know and ask them to get you closer. That works well for me.

Speaker 7: Thank you

Speaker 8: Uh thanks Rachel for the great talk. Um you talked a lot about uh product based businesses. So so how would you say uh does freelancing, contracting, like directly working for people? fit into into that?

Speaker 1: So I do two types of freelancing. Um one I'm doing at the moment is the straightforward contracting where I do five days a week in somebody else's office. And uh this is a bit of a novelty for me. It's been many years since I've done this. Uh it fits into my plan because it's basically making me money so that I can invest in my next idea Uh the other kind of freelancing that I have done which fits better with the building a business idea is you're not selling just straightforward time for hours, time for money. What you're selling is a solution to a problem. that that you can build in whatever hours you like. Um that that kind of freelancing works better for the for the build building a business.

Speaker 1: Um but then you don't tend I I haven't found that it's It ends up being a business in its own right, so you have to then decide how do you use your time to focus on this business or that that one Um it it's basically uh you make it up as you go along. You know, this is what I'm doing. Uh there is no single answer, there is no right way, it's whatever works for you. I know I know people that have started and doing the the five day a week contracting that's then turned into the project based stuff because they've developed the trust with the customer that they can deliver. Um other people choose to just do s six months on, six months off, six months doing m money earning, six months doing their own projects. Um I I don't have an answer. It's make it up as you go along. Thanks.

Speaker 1: Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.