20 years without a 'proper job'
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:01
Yeah, so good morning everyone, um, I'm really happy to introduce our first keynote speaker Rachel Wollmer who She will tell you about she's a wife 20 years without having a real job. And yeah, so please give a big hand for Rachel
00:41
That is the end of my Spanish Okay, so as my talk title implies I'm gonna tell you how I have survived 20 years without having had a proper job by which I mean
01:01
I've obviously I've been working but I haven't had a salary that somebody else hasn't supplied to me for 21 years now So what I'm hoping to do with this talk is to teach to tell you some of the lessons that I've learned Over these last couple of decades and to potentially give you some ideas about things you might want to think about yourself
01:22
So this talk is really Aimed at people who Are in a job, but would rather not be Because I have the pleasure that almost every day I get up and go to work. I
01:43
Look forward to it and I look forward to it because I've built the work life that I want doing the kind of work that I want and sometimes that's made me a fair bit of money and sometimes it hasn't but nothing compares to the pleasure of Actually looking forward to going to work
02:00
so this is for you if you're in a job and you'd rather not be at all or If you would just like to perhaps make some money out of the side project that you've been working on. I Have some thoughts to share with both of those types of people But who am I now?
02:22
It may be hard to imagine but that person on the photograph is me 20 Years ago, and if you think oh god Rachel what happened to you? I have to tell you I didn't look like that then either It's amazing what a professional photographer can do
02:42
but that was To an extent that summed up where I'd got to with my my.com company, but I'm gonna start at the beginning I Graduated 30 odd years ago as an engineering student It was the end of a recession which made it hard for most people to to get jobs
03:03
But I was lucky because I was an engineering student and I had learned to code It was very easy to get get a job because there weren't many programmers around at the time So I started off working for an engineering company writing software Lasted there a couple of years and I went to a research institute, which is where I first discovered the internet
03:25
So I've actually been on the internet for 30 years, which is I think longer than some of you have been alive But I can remember the days before the internet So I lost it a couple of years doing that I'd learned a lot of interesting technology related stuff
03:40
But then I thought well no this working for other people, you know, it's not doing it for me So I made my first foray into Self-employment I left that company to be a freelance contractor Again back then it was very easy to be a contractor because my basic pitch to anybody that was thinking of hiring me was
04:00
No, I don't know how to do it. Give me a week. Let's see how far I get and that works every time But I was not content with just being a contractor Even though it was a very easy way to make a fair bit of money at the time I had got the idea that at some point I wanted to do something bigger than that
04:22
So I started working on The skills and the tools that I'd need to make a success out of that It occurred to me that if I was going to start a company and start writing business plans Then I would need to know about money not just spending it but what it meant in a business plan Context so I did an accounting diploma
04:43
Part time in the evening and at the end of that year But more importantly I could write a business plan and I could understand the figures in other people's Which turned out to be really interesting and useful later on
05:01
But I didn't start that company just then I kept contracting and then my plan fell slightly awry because one of the companies I went to work for as a contractor was a company called spider systems, and they were wonderful. It was a terrific company But after a while, they said you know Rachel. We like you. We don't like your contracting rates come work for us
05:22
so I did five years I spent there as a Programmer manager engineering manager sales support person and that was that was all terrific fun We were working internet related stuff in the early 90s And it was just a ball because everything was was taking off and then in the mid 90s
05:44
The internet became more of a public property and it went Now about that time spider this brilliant company I was working for got taken over by an American company So I thought this is the time to leave this is the time. I'm gonna set up my own do my own thing So so I left and I had an interest at the time in digital cash
06:05
So I started a digital cash company in the mid 90s Which in some respect was a great idea because it was People thought it was very interesting as a concept, but as a business idea. I have to tell you it was a
06:20
Dreadful idea it was 20 years ahead of its time if I'd had that idea two years ago I'd be a gazillion air by now, but 20 years ago. They just wasn't the market for it but anyway, I started this company and The company was called into trader if you look them up on the website now the domain is used by spread betting company But that's not my company mine. My idea was to have a a digital cash exchange server. So no matter what?
06:47
Digital cash you were paying with whether it was e gold or digi gold or cyber cash or mondex or any of the other Things that were floating around then but my cash box would take your money and exchanged into something more solid like pounds or dollars
07:02
So because that was a concept that seemed to attract some attention I raised money. I got a board of directors I had a team of great staff to work with me on that and I got a lot of press Partly because my concept was a was an interesting one that was in Scotland at the time. We had a really good dot-com
07:23
Scene going on, but we didn't have very many women doing it so just by that chance I stood out a fair bit which is why I ended up on the cover of this magazine It wasn't because they particularly wanted to write a huge article about me the if you looked inside the magazine. It's one column But they wanted to stand out on the on the on the shell
07:43
So what easy way to do that put a woman on a cover? So I'm very grateful for that because I got this lovely photo to show for it But that kind of thing was fun but it was distracting from the Main job of actually finding customers that wanted what I did and making money from it
08:01
So those of you who remember the dot boom? Dot-com boom times you'll remember it was wild people were raising money for really crazy ideas and then suddenly around the 2000 year mark the crash happened and Suddenly the dot-com boom became a dot-com bust. I still had stuff. I still have an office
08:26
We managed to keep that idea running for another three years after the crash, which I was pretty proud of But in the end I just had to admit defeat It was not going to be possible to turn my brilliant idea and my fantastic customer base into a viable business
08:41
So sadly I closed it down Which was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do Meant I was free to go off and do other things. So this is takes us to about 2003 Now what I did after that was I licked my wounds about six months when you put your heart and soul into building a business
09:03
It's difficult to just walk away from it It's like a divorce or a death So it took about six months before I felt capable of doing pretty much anything else after that But then I went back to doing a bit of freelancing I went back to doing working some fascinating projects One of them was an open source project
09:21
Which I got paid for and I can talk about that a little later if you're interested in that business model I knew it was going to come back to this idea, but I actually wanted to build something again And this time it happened more by chance Because I was trying
09:41
various side projects as a way of Reskilling myself because the problem I had at the time was I'd worked on two big projects. One of them was covered by NDA's so I couldn't talk about it To anybody which has made it hard to use on a CV The second one I was working on this open source project which was open PGP SDK
10:05
Phenomena, which is cryptography so I could talk about it all I wanted to but nobody would understand So I needed to put something on my CV that I could show What it was I did and in fact what ended up happening as the side projects became the CV
10:21
I haven't actually written a CV since 1986 and I'm hoping I never will have to again So I wrote side projects I wrote little I did a website called how safe is your money dot co dot UK which made it easier to understand one of the government websites Find out whether your money was safe in the banks. I wrote a website
10:42
There was a price checker for the Wii Fit when it came out I wrote lots of small things like that But one of my big loves is ebooks And so I wrote a little ebook price checker and I made it into a website and it was the worst name I have ever heard in my life. It was called ebook price dot info, which it did what it said on the tin
11:03
But oh my god, that's an awful name and it didn't look very good either. It was really ugly I'm not good at design. I'm good at computer system design. I'm just not good at graphic design, but people started using it and I thought that's interesting and Then one day when I was doing I was working on a contract for somebody
11:20
I got a got an approach from one of the five biggest publishers in the world saying we want to buy your software Oh, that's interesting. And then my second reaction was hell no Nobody's looking at that code. It's not in a sellable condition. It's just stuff I've hacked together
11:42
But being an entrepreneur I didn't say hell no I said hmm. That's very interesting I can't study the software. But what I'll do is license you the data that you need which turned out to be a Great answer because for the next 18 months, I think it was I supplied this publisher
12:01
Data that they needed to use for their own strategic purposes about what price movements were doing in the e-book Market and they were paying me handsomely for it. So I was working full-time on a contract for the BBC I was working full-time on this it was it was a very financially rewarding time in my my life and to a large extent the money that I
12:22
Took in from that period is what I'm still using to fund and invest in myself for what I'm trying to do with that site now So this is the the site as it stands now and this is what I'm trying to make a full-time viable business It's got sites called loves me calm. It's an e-book price comparison site
12:42
I encourage you to check it out. If you do it, you'll see it doesn't actually look like this at the moment This is the new version that's coming up But what I'm trying to do with this is different to what I did with inter trader because inter trader was an the old Style venture backed model of growing a business where I had to write a business plan
13:03
I had to convince other people of the merits of that plan. I then had to Get the office, but I find the staff Get a board of directors all those all those joyous things With this I'm trying to do it a different way. What I want to do is not go down that road of funding it
13:23
Through other people's money until I am convinced I've got a scalable model because if I do that It means I'll get a much better price on the valuation when I raise the money the next time But also it means I'm giving myself the luxury of trying things out I'm allowing myself to try and fail with the various ideas. I'm using in this in this project
13:45
Before I have other people to tell me I can't do that, but that's enough about me. I Want to now talk about you and what you could do? because I think we as technologists are
14:01
extraordinary lucky to be here at this time because of the Internet because of the globalization that's going along we have the opportunity to build stuff in our back bedroom by ourselves and Turn it into profitable businesses which can replace a full-time job or just enhance the
14:24
Life that you have by doing it part-time because we don't need to hire Staff because we can build it ourselves. We don't have to have an office because you can Use a virtual server on Amazon or on Google or wherever I think this is a terrific opportunity
14:44
And it's one of the things I would like for people to to start Contemplating what they will do because to my mind we're at a change in the way We do work the future of work is not going to be what it was in the past We don't have the likelihood of having a full-time job even if we wanted one for the rest of our lives
15:04
The nature of it all is becoming much more a portfolio career where you do one job Followed by another Contracts that you take on maybe for a day or a week not for years or decades so
15:20
Assuming that you have some technical knowledge about a thing or you have an idea These are some of the things that you can do with it now the big choice you need to make is are you Going to build a product or are you going to run a service? And they both have merits it's a very good idea I believe if you're not familiar with the idea of running a business or having
15:46
Something that you are building that you are making and you are selling Starting with a one-off product is a much better idea than trying to run a service from day one You can write an e-book in a week
16:01
In fact one of the books I'm going to recommend later and was written over the course of a weekend The reason why it's better is it means that you can go through the whole process of having the idea building the thing Going out there marketing it and getting somebody to pay for it without having to put in place the support costs of running it thereafter and
16:26
It's in really important that if you're going to go down this route that you experience the whole Journey from idea through to sale and ongoing support because it is so easy To have the idea have the fun of building it and then go
16:43
That's the important bit if you don't make the step of finding somebody that wants to buy it Preferably before you've built it and then selling it to them. You don't have a business. You've got a hobby and That's perfectly valid thing to do as long as you realize that that's what you're doing
17:02
If you think that you're trying to run a business, but you are in fact Having a hobby it you're not gonna have an enjoyable experience because you will run out of money So the one-off things you can do is product you could write an e-book I've got an example of somebody that's made a lot of money out of doing that later. You could write a course
17:22
So if for example, you happen to be the expert in I don't know. Jango pipes or whatever. That's a terrific idea It's new technology that people will want to know about somebody should be writing that book or that course Offering the online training So this is a product is great for a side project or first project
17:45
but where the bigger more long-term money Seems to be in is in service Related businesses because then you get the holy grail of the recurring revenue that every month a customer is going to pay you money
18:01
every month The nature of that though is you're likely to get support costs it's a bit it's a bigger operation that you need to think about and You have to Commit to being available to do that support 24 by 7 365 days a week. So if you're a solo founder like me
18:23
you might not want to do that because Because you might want to go on holiday or come to conferences But the idea that you have a service or a website that's sitting there making money whilst you do things you want to do Is one as an idea that works for me very well
18:41
And then the other thing that you can do is to publish now publishing used to mean writing a book or writing a blog But now it also means doing a video blog doing a YouTube Doing podcasts on that on the subject Now and this is great be not just because you can potentially monetize it to make to make money out of what you're doing
19:03
But by doing that publishing by producing that podcast what you do is position yourself as an authority You may be an expert. You may be the world-class expert in a particular field, but if nobody knows about it Why will they? Contract with you. Why would they ask you for the consulting? Why would they ask you to fix their problems?
19:28
So and there's various ways to monetize and I could do an entire session just on the question of monetization But here's it's just a few headings direct sale Writing a book used to be
19:41
Something you did through an official publisher like a Riley now. It's becoming much more common that people self publish the technical books For many reasons one of which is you don't have to ask permission You don't have to convince anybody else. It's a good idea. You can just get out there and do it But also the time to market is much faster. I I have a friend who's written a book who?
20:03
Completed it last year. It's ready to go, but the Traditional publisher isn't actually going to release it till the book fair next year now That's two years of no income from that book that is ready Self-published he'd be able to he'd be earning from it right now
20:22
Affiliate Commission is something which can work well if you do it in a way, which is not cheesy So if you buy a book through my site, for example, then I get an affiliate commission from Amazon from Apple It doesn't cost you anymore, but I make the money for connecting you with that with that vendor Okay, if it's done, well, it can work nicely some sites tend to just push things at you whether they're good
20:47
Whether you want them or not, and then I I find that cheesy. I don't like that same with advertising advertising can be a very good way of monetizing a website or service a But only when it's done. Well, you don't want to have the advertising become the point
21:02
It's supposed to match the offering of what you're trying to to sell And try to make it useful Sponsorship is something that's happening a lot with podcasts at the moment. So if you are writing for example Meteor is a subject I'm going to come to later that they do a podcast where it's sponsored by the kind of company that would host a meteor website
21:27
so What you're doing by providing that podcast is finding them the audience that they want so they can do a very targeted advert in the Form of sponsorship on that podcast to people who exactly the target audience for who they want to reach
21:44
And then the other thing which you can package up and sell which is what I've also made some money from with the the book side is data analytics So because I have this website I have a lot of data about what people actually do when they're buying an e-book and that data by itself is a valuable
22:01
product Now I will say to anybody that's suddenly thinking I use loves me. What about the privacy aspect? I don't sell individual data. I sell bulk aggregated data so I can say for example This book that you've never heard of is racing up through people's wish lists But I want to give you some real examples of people that like you who have gone down this path and made some
22:29
Serious money from it. So people think you can't make money out of writing a book this example for me says otherwise
22:43
Meteor is a web framework for doing real-time data The documentation that came with it wasn't particularly good, although the technology was fantastic So these two people Sasha grief and Tom Coleman decided to write a book and a website to support that
23:00
They packaged it such that you could choose what level of book you wanted to buy So I think there was a $29 option which was just the book there was a $59 book Which was the which was the version of the book with some training videos and then there was the the high-end Option where you got customized support or something like that
23:21
So there's a case study that they did with gum road, which was the company they were selling it through $300,000 in 18 months from a book It's gonna be more than that now because that the book is still necessary to understand how to use meteor It's also if you're thinking of writing a book I would recommend you check out their website because it is the best example I have found of how to write a technical book
23:46
it's it's just beautiful and It's the framework that I would choose to use if I were writing one but $300,000 one book self-published people say you can't start a business a real business if you're just a solo founder
24:04
Well, does anybody here use Balsamiq? Yeah peldi started that in his back bedroom Last time I've seen some public figures on this Annual profits running at two million. He's got a staff about 26 now and they all work remotely
24:21
and This is a beautiful example of how somebody Found a sweet spot in the market Built something that he wanted to use himself started selling it listen to his customer base and developed it He's had at least one offer to buy that business which he's chosen not to take because he
24:42
Thinks he can do better for his customer base by staying as an independent company But it shows what you can do one person two million dollars Unless you live in the USA well, I have to say I Can say that that's wrong because my biggest customer when I was doing the the book data service was in New York
25:05
Publisher he was an American publisher I've never even met them and yet I made I think about a hundred thousand dollars from that contract With company I've never met If you follow Packing news you might have heard of a guy called patio 11 Patrick McKenzie
25:24
He has run a number of businesses. He's awesome by the way if you get a chance to follow anything He says he really knows his stuff He was running a successful small business self-started called bingo card creator. He lives in Japan He then started doing some he discovered that he had a real talent for marketing
25:46
Software products and so he was being hired by people at Fog Creek software and major u.s. companies to help them sort out what their strategy should be whilst living in Japan and Here's the thing when when people start to think about trying to build something for themselves and make money from it
26:07
The most common reaction is but I can't I can't do that. I can't do that because oh Whatever list of excuses reasons you may have I don't believe that I believe that anybody in this room could if they wanted to I'm not saying that you should
26:24
I'm just saying that if you wanted to you have the skills To be able to do that, and it doesn't matter how introverted you are it doesn't matter how? Busy you are it doesn't matter what your reason for Oh, no You can yes, you can and I want to show you an example here, which somebody I find totally inspiring John Morrow
26:47
Is paralyzed from the neck down? He has to have 24x7 support to do the basic things of living and yet Despite being paralyzed with muscular atrophy from from the neck down. He has managed to build a successful business
27:04
He's his particular talent is in copywriting So and blogging so he runs courses he writes a data Write services about how to be a better blogger, and he runs that company from his wheelchair He in all normal
27:24
Forms of business people would say he was probably unemployable and yet He's employed himself, and he's made a really good business in a terrific life from from that So don't think you can't do it if he can do it you can So I have a few final thoughts which
27:45
Don't really fit into a particular category But it's okay to start small In fact I'd encourage it because what you need to do is to learn the business of being in business You need to understand what it means
28:01
To file your tax returns on time because if you're doing a corporate business The rules are different than if you're self-employed if you're registered It's different than if you're not if you're doing business in if you're in it say in the UK You know do dealing business dealing with businesses in the rest of the EU You've got a whole different level of bureaucracy to to cope with those things
28:24
Matter as much as being as good as you can for the thing you are trying to sell So start small, but finish One of the books that that I recommend is by a woman called Amy Hoy, I don't know if you've heard of her Amazing woman her book is called
28:42
Just ship Because what you learn by shipping a product to completion and having a happy customer is something you cannot buy In a book you can only learn that experience by doing it and the only way you do it is by doing it To actually finishing the job
29:03
And it's okay to fail Now I had a business in trader the dot-com that would be a failure by anybody's Anybody's criterion Eight years. I think I raised about half a million pounds for that in that eight years. We made profit in two months
29:25
That's not a successful business However the business failed the idea failed But I did not fail. I am NOT a failure because I had a business which did not work What I had was a learning experience Most businesses don't get it right the first time and this is one of the things we especially technology related
29:46
business founders sometimes struggle with Because we're used to getting everything right, you know The nature of coming through the exam system at school when you do science related subjects is you expect to be able to get 90-100% on the exams because you know how to do the math question the physics question and
30:04
Suddenly the real world is not like that The real world you have to do experiments that don't work to find the ways through that do work So it is okay to fail. Just don't make the same mistake twice And It's okay to think big you may just want to start writing little wordpress plug-in just to try that experience. That's fine
30:28
But always having it in back of your mind thinking well Where could I take this if I was going to try and do this ten times bigger? What would the next step be to do that? How do I get ten times bigger a hundred times bigger? Because there's usually a way and as a small nimble tech related company
30:45
You have the ability to move much faster than some of the behemoths of the corporate world So you can take advantage of that if you have a choice between B to B and B to C Which means business to business or business to consumer?
31:02
Choose business to business every time and I'll tell you why because they are used to spending money Whereas most consumers don't like spending money In the e-book world if you try to sell an e-book that's a fiction We're now conditioned to understand that an e-book on Kindle should be 99 pence
31:22
$2 cheap cheap cheap if you're doing a business related book and you're selling directly It is perfectly acceptable to be to be selling it for $29 $59 $200 The most expensive book has ever been sold through my website was 1250
31:40
It was I think it was a set of building regulations And the other thing about when you when you're starting up you get to decide what it is you're doing Nobody's going to tell you you decide What kind of business you want which means choose the customers you want and price accordingly? So if you make the choice to have high-end
32:04
Expensive customers are willing to spend large amounts of money with you Don't price cheap Because if you price cheap you'll get cheap customers And charge more this is thing that Patrick McKenzie has taught me over the years. He has this mantra charge charge more
32:24
first of all You have to charge because until you've taken somebody's money, but it's not your friend your mother you saw your sister Whatever a person that you do not know has handed over their credit card online to you And you've taken their money until you've done that you don't know whether anybody actually wants what you've got So you must charge because that's the only way of validating your idea and then charge more
32:45
Because nobody charges enough to start with because you think how can I have built something? That's worth? this amount of money double your prices Triple your prices ten times your prices see what happens I got taught when I was out on the sales trips with
33:00
Spider by a salesman if he didn't lose 50% of his sales Deals on price it wasn't charging enough And I found a really interesting idea that it's okay not to win the sales deal to make that work You have to have enough of a pipeline that you can try out that experiment But the higher you can put your prices the better service you can deliver to your customers
33:22
And you'd be surprised what they can pay When I did the book deal with the publisher I hadn't got a clue how much to charge and So when we agreed what I was going to deliver he'd asked me for the price I was umming and erring about it. I said I really don't know how to how to price for this and he went so I left it to him
33:41
Inadvertently and he said look we need to get this sorted How about I I pay you what I pay the adwords people so and then he named a price Which was like at least three times what I would have thought of charging So I thought great. Yep. I can work with that Showed if I left it to myself. I would have totally underpriced what I was doing and
34:03
My final thought well, I have actually one other thought which isn't on this which is If you've got any idea about going into business whether it's a side project or a big big startup practice presentation skills You're gonna need them and this is one of the common things that we as techies feel very unhappy about doing standing up here
34:24
Speaking to a room full of people is really it's scary But it's also fun and you can learn how to do this. I mean I am a very Shy person I'm a very introverted person But most people who know me don't think that because they think I stand on a stage by myself
34:44
Talking to an audience of hundreds. It must be an outgoing extrovert I've just taught myself how to do this And so I would thoroughly encourage you if you've never spoken in public before start now It doesn't have to be a talk like this go to a local meetup. We won one in Scotland
35:03
We're always trying to encourage people to a five minute ten minute talk Sign up for Harold's lightning talks if you've never done one before it's a brilliant way to start because what can go wrong You know five minutes anybody can talk about something they care about for five minutes Give it a go and then you learn how to solve the problems of actually doing a presentation like for example
35:24
I know my knees get nervous So my my knees my knees shake quite a lot when I'm feeling uncomfortable But then I wear loose trousers, so you don't know that because you can't see them shaking Things like that you learn by doing and this is the common thing about being in business you only learn by doing
35:43
So get out there and start doing it My final thought start a mailing list. This is the single most useful business tool that you have got whether it's Even a technical book whether you're doing a service-based startup You want to have a mailing list of the people who have shown any interest at all in what you're doing So you can continue to have the conversation with them. I have a had a whole load of other things
36:10
I want to say, but I think I'm out of time so what I shall do is move it in over to questions But what I'd like to say is that for people who are in the other room who I believe are watching through the video link
36:20
If you don't have the opportunity to put your question to me now But you do want to you can find me on Twitter. You can find me in a telegram app I'll be around till Wednesday, so just come and have a chat with me if you've got enough interest I can set up a session in the open spaces And if anybody's watching this on YouTube that offer goes to you to just get in touch
36:42
Our Wilma on Twitter our Wilma. I think on the telegram app and I If you if I have said anything here That touches a nerve that makes you go and try something. I'd love to know about it Please let me know what you do And do something
37:00
Thank you very much Yeah, thank you very much Rachel