035 - Solocast vol. 6 - Scaling Beyond Solopreneurship

Speaker A: Hello. Hello. Welcome to PX Espresso Hour. Not um, talking of these for a while. Both normal recording and also solo cast. So getting back into the flow we can talk a little bit about what I've been doing, why I've taken a break, um, as part of today's, today's show. But um, yeah, cool to be back recording. Welcome. Um, as ever this is the show generally for people, people who think like product people. So all about the adoption of product led practices, GTM marketing, ux, uh, design, all of that, the application of those product LED fields, um, in the world of people and people ops. So that's what we generally talk about here. Today I am doing a solo cast which is where I talk a little bit about my business um, Stapion X as a business, my experience as a um, solopreneur entrepreneur founder, certainly first time founder trying to scale to uh, a million annual revenue bootstrapped with which is not easy. Um, so we can talk a little bit about some of that stuff as we go through. This is going to be a bit of a download feedback um, I've had from people is that they quite enjoy listening to these. So both those that are on their own um, path to building something, be that solopreneur entrepreneur, whatever it might be, um, and also for regular listeners that um, tune in for the product insights because to be honest they're one in the same. You know everything I learned building Sapienx as a business I feed right back into my content and my structure frameworks, models for people teams and people leaders within lean people teams to use. Um, because the concepts are exactly the same. That's the whole point about being you know, product led and using product principles is that naturally as I'm researching and trying to get better at building for my community, there's so much gold that can be packaged and put into the context of how people teams operate and how to deliver more impact and more value. So I find them one and the same. Um, I'll share stuff that will be directly translatable, some stuff will be much more focused on um, my business and be very more niche down. But hey, um, I hope what I share today is useful. Um, I guess just kick it off with a bit of a half year update. I haven't released a podcast since maybe January, February time. Why is that? I think just prioritization. You know, I talk a lot about the importance of prioritization. Um, and sometimes when there's lots going on the podcast is the first thing that I have to put down. I think reflecting on it, I think part of the, part of the problem with that is, and something that I need to resolve is that I don't have any real systematized process around the um, around the podcast, how it's recorded, when it's recorded. Um, I still do all of the um edit production, post production, I do all of that which is not very sensible really. Certainly not very scalable. So one of the things that I want to do is m get back to having this podcast as a regular occurrence. Um which means getting, getting back to um my core principles of systematizing and creating uh scalable ops around the podcast. Which probably means bringing in um uh some sort of fractional project producer to uh, whip the podcast up and possibly also leaning on some external um marketing support just to do all of the general promotion and push um whilst I'm focused on other things. So there'll be more of these podcasts to come short term, they'll still be produced by me, um uh midterm, they'll be produced by someone else and you'll probably see a noticeable increase in quality as a result. But that's all part of the journey. All right, so half year, um very good all told. So revenue is at the half year. We've already exceeded last year's calendar year revenue at ah the half year. So I mean very little to be upset about on, on that front. Um I always say never tells the full picture because the more you grow the more you spend. Certainly that's the case as I've experienced it. Um, we've, we've you know expanded our live experiences to Amsterdam. Um so we did it with the first non UK um immersive PX learning experience in Amsterdam in June. Um that comes with cost and risk. Um we, we obviously continue to invest in um our tech stack. We continue to invest in fractional um support where it's needed, there's, there's lots where money leaves the business. Um so yeah great, great to be in the revenue position we are. I would look, I'm still working on um profitability in all areas of the business but that's again just learning isn't it? I mean I'm human. Um this is the first time founding a business, running a business so there's lots to learn on that, lots to be improved I think in terms of our general operational backend, how we execute, lots to be improved in terms of profitability um, and lots of opportunity quite frankly opportunity both from a product perspective but also from a um lean operating perspective. So all in all, I'm happy, um, and one of the biggest changes for the business this year is that many of you follow my content regularly. Will know that my wife Nish joined me in the business. Um, I'm hoping that she'll join me on one of these podcasts at some point. It's not really where she would say it's her natural position, um, to be on a podcast or to be sort of center retention. Unlike me, I play that role. I'm quite happy to be center retention. Um, love to get Nish on one of these reflective solo casts at some point just so that I can talk to her um, about her experience joining the business and we can talk together about the experience of uh, now scaling this business together, um, as a married couple, husband and wife, as parents to our, ah, two beautiful children, um, and yeah, now as business partners. So a lot going on there. But really, really cool to be able to have Nish join the business full time because it was one of our ambitions was to make this a business that works for both of us and that can support both of us and that we can then start to make decisions where we are not bound by commitments to external employers. So the only bind we have now, which is a good buying to have by the way, I say that sort of tongue in cheek, is our children. So, uh, our uh, only restriction to what we do and how we choose to use our time, where we go, um, is our children now, which is an awesome, awesome place to be, to be honest. So very happy about that. Um, and I think the milestone or the flagship so far, achievement of the year outside of NIST joining the business is definitely delivering um, immersive PX in Amsterdam. So it took a little bit of um, bravery I guess, um, to just commit to that. There was good indications that there was um, a fertile sort of community that wanted us there. Uh, I spent a good chunk of time in the Netherlands last year, spent a lot of time with um, Ingeborg and Sunna and the seven people team. Felt like there was a big demand for bringing um, PX Espresso Live, which is our format that we launched last year and delivering that in Amsterdam. So some learnings there. We didn't know enough about local market, local conditions, local culture and we got tripped up by some of that. So we'd originally planned to do our full three day Ps espresso live format which was two days of immersive learning and one bigger celebration day of panels, live podcast recordings, more of a celebration day, Bigger, um, capacity uh, and it became obvious to be honest that that wasn't going to be possible, um, due to you know, a little bit of difficulty with, with ticket sales for very understandable reasons once we started to get under the, under the Bonne, um, the local culture within the Netherlands, um, so the bigger event was going to be on a Wednesday. We learned that, um, we learned too late but you know, early enough to make a decision, um, that it's uh, a half day uh, for schools in the Netherlands on a Wednesday. So most schools are closed on a Wednesday for the half day. Which means that of course many parents and in particular uh, mothers, um, have time off on a Wednesday to be with their children. Which is culturally awesome. Um, a little bit complex when you're trying to uh, organize an all day event on a Wednesday, um, with a largely female audience. Um, but awesome culture. I love that, I love that Netherlands do that. And now we know. Um, so we won't plan an event on a Wednesday next time. Uh, and then I think the other point, ah, uh, of learning was price point. I think we went in a little bit too expensive. Um, we took our learnings from London which we massively underpriced and I think we overcorrected and I think we're a little bit outside of um, a comfortable spend zone. I think we originally had the tickets about €1500, something like that, um, which seemed to be a bit of a hurdle for some. We managed to sell um, a chunk of those tickets at full price and a few uh, at a slightly reduced rate and then we had to really think about well price is now a barrier to entry. So we made some last minute decisions to make it more accessible and we ended up with the most amazing group of progressive people, leaders that joined us. Again always blown away by this by the way. We go to Netherlands and we think it's going to be mostly Amsterdam, mostly Netherlands based people that join us. And yet we have people join us from across mainland Europe, from Australia, from America. Um, it just always blows my mind that we get such a, such a willingness to travel for these events, um, especially as they're in their relative infancy. So very um, cool. And we had just the best two and a half days. So what we did is we stripped it back, we got rid of the larger format on the Wednesday and we made that a half day to fit in with the local school structure. Um, so we had two and a half days of immersive learning and then what we did is we capped that off in the evening of the Wednesday. With a bigger uh, sort of community meetup, uh more informal. We opened that up to the wider PX community in Amsterdam uh and it was a lot of fun. We just had a few drinks, had some pizza, reflected on what had been a really amazing amazing couple of days and um, it was beautiful, honestly absolutely beautiful. So very happy with the experience that we created. Um we compromised where we had to. I was strong in keeping some things that I thought were really important from an experience perspective in um uh but ultimately was was not a profitable event for us because we have had over. We'd over committed on a number of areas of spend thinking that we were doing a much bigger um event and we had expected um, uh more um ease of sale which obviously just didn't, didn't happen for the reasons that I mentioned. Um so hey it is what it is but we took a ton of learnings uh and we've immediately put those into um London which coming up in October so which is sold out um which is quite amazing considering what I've just described. London sold out within about four weeks of U.S. actually formally announcing it. There were some, there's probably about five or six like really early bird sales from earlier in the year but majority of the seats were sold um when we announced after, after after Amsterdam that we were running London again in October. So blown away by the level of um ah appetite for that event. Really cool. We didn't have to do any discounting at all. Um but I'll talk to you about how we structured it in a moment from a price perspective to make it accessible um but very very very cool to have taken the learnings from Immersive PX uh in London last year translated that into a really amazing um immersive learning experience in Amsterdam. And what we've done now is we've split out the two formats because we realized one is an event, it's espresso live and one is an immersive learning experience which is a different thing altogether. So now we have Immersive PX which we've carved out as its own product if you like um which is a two. We're sticking to a two day format, maybe it'll extend over time but a two day immersive learning experience of workshops, masterclasses, really focused, intimate discussions, highly practical, highly tactical, um, getting those that want to those that are at that point of right I want to take this product led um practice and put it into action in my Lean team, my standalone role in my startup scale up and we're making it um, a high touch, high value learning experience. So that's really cool. So the first pure immersive PX that has, you know, been that from the start will be London in October. Um, and then next year we're going to do London again, we're going to do Amsterdam again. Uh, and we're also going to add Barcelona to the roster which is very exciting from my perspective, not least because Nish and I love Barcelona as a city but it has an amazing startup culture there. Um, it's a, another step forward for us adding a third location um, to our immersive PX series. So very excited for that. And happily as it stands, um, with Niche's massive hard um, work and diligence we've created a much more profitable model for those which means we can scale them and scale them profitably, which is awesome. And part of that is Nish's work on the operational backend to strip back cost that wasn't actually adding to the learner experience and the attendee experience. Uh, I've written recently about the concept of killing your darlings, getting things, other things that you love as the creator but that don't actually add um, a comparable amount of M value to your end user. Um, and it's a practice that we had to put into place so stripping back some of the non value creating or non high value creating but costly experiential elements and making sure that we've got a really lean but very, very good high value experience to put on. Which means that we can um, definitely save a lot of money in terms of spend and then in terms of revenue generation from those events we have two forms of revenue. So we have sponsorship revenue and we have uh, ticket revenue, attendee revenue. With the attendee revenue. What we have done is it was quite obvious to us from looking at um, trend from buyer behavior that as soon as you go over £1,000, a thousand euros, as soon as you go over that 1000 mark in whatever currency, we seem to hit a bit of a drop off in terms of people's ability to fund that either self fund or secure budget from an L and D pot to attend. So what we did is we sort of anchored to that and said, right, we want to make sure that our price is under a thousand pounds. Um, so we did a, I guess a classic three tier pricing system. So full price actually was uh, I think it was 12, uh, 98, something like that, 1297, so about 1300 pounds. But our hypothesis was that we would never get to that. We Sell out before we got there, which was proved to be correct, which is cool. Um, the early bird price was like 997 or 987, something like that, just under a thousand pounds. And then what we decided to do was to have a community only price. So obviously we've got our um, closed uh, application membership community which is getting on to about 900 members now which is also very cool. Um we decided to have a membership only price which was I think897. So again bringing that cost down even further, making it more accessible, uh, uh, two hypotheses. One was that that would be the rate that we sold most at because our community are likely to be the most highly engaged and ready to, to spend money to attend such an event. And also that those that weren't already in the community but wanted to attend would join the community in order to access the uh, lowest rate which also proves to be correct. So we did two things there. One created a price structure that was accessible to our icp, uh which are largely heads of people in startups and scale ups and um, standalone or lean people teams with very limited budget. Often if there is a budget it is capped at a thousand pounds. So we wanted to make sure that it was accessible um there. But we also managed to um, create a way of increasing um membership community by making it an attractive proposition to, to enter the community in order to access that rate. So um, yeah, very cool. I mean it is at the moment it is a free uh community um and I'll talk a little bit about what the plans are for the community. So it wasn't like there was a um, um additional revenue uh interest on our parts to get people into community. But it's great to have more people in the community because of network effects in general. So the more people in the community means that there's more value for everyone within the community. So great to be able to increase community membership as well. Um, but delighted, you know sold out very quickly. Just a few posts and a few targeted um, uh email campaigns delivered through kit and um, we managed to sell all of the positions so fully sold out which is awesome. The cohort just looks incredible, I have to say, like ridiculous. So, so cool. I literally cannot wait to be in that room. It's like I think 46 sort of practicing participating attendees and then we've got obviously 10 um, facilitators uh, and also a handful of additional speakers that are going to contribute to fireside panels and stuff. So there'll be about 60 of us um in the room enjoying the immersive experience across the two days. So cannot, cannot wait for that. So that's learnings there and then we will like I say we, we split the two formats out. So we're going to have the three immersive PX next year. London, Amsterdam, Barcelona. And then our plan is to relaunch PX Espresso Live as a standalone single day event which will be in London initially. Um, which will be again more traditional in the sense that it'll be a single stage. Panels, fireside discussions, live podcast, recordings, community, um, uh, across one day. More of a celebration, more of a get together to really celebrate the progressive PX community. Um, and that'll be sort of our ah, annual flagship event is what we're thinking. So more on that as it evolves. Um, I've mentioned profitability so going back to that pricing model that I just mentioned, I think the reason why that, that worked is because the price point was more accessible being under that 1,000 pound mark, that sort of cutoff mark for where we, we find that our ICP can spend too comfortably, well, comfortably without, without too much discomfort. It's probably fairer. Um, I think positioning, I think we've just done a much better job or a better job. It's just more of a, that process of iteration. Like we're just, we're just better at communicating who this is for the value that they're going to get out of it. We've got obviously increasing amounts of testimonials, um, proof of value, um, you know the video content and the photo content that we get created off the back of each event I think just further adds to the rigor. Uh, we tend to generate quite a lot of FOMO on the back, back of um, uh the events because people that weren't in the room want to be in the room next time. That certainly helped with our sales for London because immediately off the back of Amsterdam, um, there was a lot of interest in what we were doing and they could get, those that were really motivated could immediately buy a ticket to be in London. And obviously you know Europe is fairly small from a travel perspective. So no matter where you are in Europe, you know, London, Amsterdam, it's much of a likeness in terms of travel. Um, so that helped think positioning then just the flywheel, like the general compounding effect of creating value, showing value, sharing value, um, I think is really working. Those of you that listen to me regularly know how much I love flywheels and the flywheel concept, it's been very Intentional from day one in Sapienx and in my own content, um, creation is to build flywheels of value. And um, I think definitely what we're seeing from our ability to sell out more quickly and to increase profitability is a combination of pricing, positioning and those flywheels taking their, taking their effect. So loads of learnings, um, and lots that seems to be validating strategy as we go and things that are breaking as we go. We're able to then learn correct, um, uh, and make some logical hypotheses about what we should test next time um, which you know is moving us in the right direction. So very, very, very cool. What else is exciting from this half of the year? Well we just um, I guess it falls into half H2 really but we um, we, we just moved into our first official office. So I um, was very pleased to find that Spaces had found their way to Leicester. Leicester is not the most um, progressive startup, um, part of uk. For anyone who's listening who doesn't know Leicester or doesn't know the uk, Leicester's kind of bang in the middle of the uk. It's great, got great connections to London, great connections to Nottingham, Manchester, Liverpool, to Birmingham. Um, like it's really well connected but it's more known historically for sort of manufacturing and industry. But there is an emerging I guess startup culture but it's not, it's certainly not established or mature. So hence why I spend more time in London when it comes to meetups and engaging community because there just isn't, there isn't one here to be engaged. Um, so we've struggled to be honest for good co working space and for environments that feel inspiring to be in um, when it comes to sort of having your own office and feeling startupy within a non startup center. So I was very happy when Spaces, when I realized Spaces had opened up the site here and um, I came to check it out with Nish, um, we within an hour had agreed um, a rolling uh, contract for one of their smallest offices. Like I said, it's like literally I'm calling it, it's an office. Right. That's what it is. I'm proud of that. But the reality is it's a small room. It's a small room but it's ours. Right. You know, uh, it's our room to be. Yeah. And I am proud, I'm proud of it. I've been talking to my brother about this stuff and just tend to have a habit of like putting down our, our achievements and belittling our milestones but the reality is this is our first office and that's the milestone. And whilst it might be the smallest office available in this building, it's ours and I'm very proud of that. So uh, very cool to be now in a space. It's definitely helped me with my focus, my productivity. It's one of the reasons why I'm recording this again. It's because I've sort of created the space and time to be able to do that now that I've got a space to go to and work that's not the coffee shop or my house, you know, makes a big difference. Um, but you know, it comes with its own challenges. Now there's, now there's a commute, right? If I'm going to the office I have to get here. Which means that that has to fit around school drop offs and pickups and nursery, all of that sort of stuff that all of us working parents are contending with. So it creates, creates different challenges. But uh, for me it's been a real blessing to have um, access to a space where I can now fully call our own, my own, um, get comfortable here, work, be productive, shut myself off from distractions um, and get focused. Very, very happy to be in Cool. I think that's generally updates on the year so far and what we've been up to in terms of looking ahead. One of the things I've been really obsessed with recently is user discovery and trying to get better at user discovery because there's a temptation for all of us that are creative and thinking about product in any capacity, whether that's PX as a product, work product, whether that's features and programs that we're building and deploying internally within companies or pure product in my sense in terms of a product of value that I can take to market uh, and monetize in some way uh, or that is consumed in a way that creates value even if it's not monetized, still is product. So I think I've been guilty like most of being a little bit excited by my own ideas sometimes, right? Which means that my user discovery has sometimes not been very good uh, despite best intentions. So a lot of the time um, my user discovery has been hey, here's my idea, here's my thing, I'm planning to do this. What do you think? And the problem with that, as I've learned from a great uh, framework called the Mum Test, um, by Rob Fitzpatrick. Great read, really short book, highly recommended. Lisa, my advisor put it on my map and she did so exactly the right time. I'd messaged her really excitedly about, right, I'm going to do X, Y and Z. Well, basically what I said to her was, right, I'm going to build out a full learning library. I'm going to get loads of, um, my network to come and build courses of Insana. I'm going to build out this big, you know, learning library and rather than having a digital course, we'll have a, um, learning library, a platform to access, which will evolve over time. And you know, got very like, this is what I'm going to do, this is how long it's going to take and all of that stuff. And Lisa quite rightly was like, okay, well just slow down a little bit. Um, before you do that, um, maybe just validate and check that that is what your community want, what your, what your customers want. Um, and um, at that point she said, hey, I've just read this great book. Give it a read. So I read it, uh, and it's completely transformed how I think about user discovery and generally how I have conversations. I tend to, I feel like I ask much better questions now in general conversation as a result. But essentially the premise is, rather than asking about, um, customers, about future hypotheticals, I would you use this? If. Would. What would make this better? Um, if I did X, would you do Y? Like, which are really leading. And the problem with that is most people want to make you happy, right? So they're going to say, oh yeah, I would use that. And even if it's a bit of a soft touch, um, most of that data is going to be useless because they're largely just going to not want to disappoint you because you've come excited to them with your thing, right? So generally it's not a good idea to go to your intended user base and say, um, if I do X, would you do Y? Because it's, it's hypothetical, um, and pretty poor in terms of informing what's actually going on. So rather than that, the idea is to speak to your end users about their lived experiences, right? So ground your user discovery in real lived experiences, past experiences that can be spoken about and discussed and examined, not future hypotheticals. So that's the key distinction right out of the gate. If you feel like you are having user discovery, which is tell, um, us what you want, what do you need? How can we make this better? Um, all of that stuff, um, if we build this, will you use it? All of those sorts of user discovery questions are pretty useless, um, and misleading and dangerous. Actually, because they're going to send you down the wrong path often. Um, and so if I remember this rightly, forgive me, please, um, do go and read the book or just have a chat with ChatGPT about the mom test by Rob Fitzpatrick. Um, there are three bits of data in user discoveries which are useless. Uh, I think future hypotheticals were one. So statements about the future, um, are pretty useless, compliments of the other. So if anyone's telling you, um, we love it or it's great, it's the best thing I've ever had. Um, yeah, worth noting, but not great, um, in terms of data because again, most people want to please you. Um, and the other was, has escaped me, but you get, you get the theme of where we're going here. They're asking much better questions about real problems that exist, real frictions, real challenges. Um, if you're trying to solve, let's say an onboarding problem, it's better to speak to the affected users about their actual experience of onboarding, not just starting the conversation with if we were to redesign onboarding, what would you want to see? Or you know, those sorts of questions which aren't great. It's actually what happened, what was good about it? Um, where did you meet, where did you meet friction? What was, you know, what were some of the things that really prevented you from achieving the goal that you had intended to achieve. You know, all of those sorts of things like really getting into the granular of people's lived experience. So been doing a lot of that. Which means that in my own business I need to go through a phase of customer discovery or continuous, to be honest, user discovery, customer discovery. I need to be doing a lot more of it. I think I used to have conversations every day with customers about what they were experiencing work. I don't, I don't have enough now, honestly. I just don't have enough of those conversations anymore. So I need to go back to that. Um, I am in the process of creating a database of user discovery insights, um, in notion, which I'll tag up so that it can just keep building on that, um, building that out and getting a really much clearer picture about what's happening in the world of heads of people and ops within startup scale ups. And any future product iteration or future, um, products that I think about launching and building will be grounded in real problems that exist and the solution will be oriented to solve those, not building a solution and then convincing, uh, people. For example, the learning library. Yeah, maybe it's amazing and maybe I'll end up back there at some point. But to assume that that's what people want when. One of the problems I've had with my digital course is that feedback has been that people don't necessarily want a course, um, in the traditional sense. And although you know, I've built my digital course out on Sarno and it's very um, intuitive, AI enabled and very flexible for that reason you can, you can actually tailor the experience quite strongly to your, your context. It's still wrapped up as a course which means that people have to commit time which means that if they're committing time to complete a course that means that's time they're not executing. And when you're very busy, um, and time poor then that becomes a problem. So maybe a digital learning library is a solution or maybe it's not. I'll find out through user discovery and some testing in the coming months. M so that's one thing, a little reminder whether you're building a product, um, whether you're uh, applying product principles within px then just bear that in mind. User discovery is really important and make sure that your user discovery is grounded in lived experiences and real problems and not in future hypotheticals. Cool. On the digital course. So I'm just about to start, um, this one semi I've just, just told you about not doing this but this one is validated to the point that the people that have been through the course end to end and there have been many, have loved it. But the problem is there's been quite a big drop off if I'm being honest. So with people starting it and not completing it. And when I've spoken to those people they've basically told me look, it's time, we don't have the time. And to go through it end to end. It's amazing what I've seen of it's really good but I just can't get through it all because there's so much there. And uh, if I do it I want to really immerse myself in it but I don't have time. So very m common bit of feedback for those that haven't completed the course end to end is that. And so I think that's fair because I have to be honest, absolutely loaded it. There's too much in there, way too much in there. Um, I get excited the truth is. So when I learn something I want you to know it too. So I'm like oh, you should know this thing. So really what happened in, in the digital course in its current format is A lot of feature creep is what you'd call it in product where it was just constantly adding more and more and more and more and more until the thing got a little bit too bloated. So for those that have had time to go through it end to end, they've taken so much value from it and they've really enjoyed it. But for the worst. And uh, this is a piece of advice I give often designed for the worst affected user. Um, the worst affected user, uh, is the one that is time poor, needs quick answers and needs to get from 0 to 1 as quickly as possible. So get from I don't know to action in as quickly as possible. Like speeding up that loop from I don't know to I'm taking action is what that call should do. Um, and at the moment it doesn't do that. So that's what I'm going to do in the next rebuild is strip it right back, um, focus on that core ICP and that worst affected user of the time, poor head of people in the startup scale up in a standalone or lean people team that does not have time to go through an end to end course who just needs answers to the problems that they have right now. So it's stripping it, stripping it back, um, expanding on the things that need expanding on, uh, and massively reducing the things that aren't adding value because they can all be honest. You know, the way Sauna is, I can build out an extensive knowledge data set which you can then engage with using, you know, the generative AI interface without that being part of the core course program. Right. So that's what I'll do. Strip it out, make that stuff available, all that extra content available in a different way. But the core, you know, navigation of the course will be really streamlined and it will be literally aimed at going right. I want to adopt people products, uh, product principles for my people team or in my personal individual contributor role within a lean people team. And this course will get me there really quickly. So the idea from sort of lesson one, you'll be into it, you'll be putting things into action. A lot more frameworks and tools, a lot more like immediately, um, actionable things rather than um, too much theory front ended and then with a practical tool towards the end, which is how some of the modules are if uh, I'm being brutally honest. So hey, the other great thing about Sana is that to be honest, it doesn't really matter. Like um, how I, how I built it does matter. I'm saying the wrong thing Here, it matters how I build it, but the, the point with Sana is that you can, you can still make that experience bespoke. So any user, any learner can log on there, go into the course, uh, and then have a conversation with, um, uh, Sana's A.I. and you can extract what you want immediately. Actually, here's the context, um, of the situation that I'm in. Here's my team size, here's the challenge I'm trying to overcome here. Give it as much context as you can in your prompt, ask it to extract and give you an action plan. It's going to do that. So it's going to draw from the most relevant parts of the course and extended content library and it's going to give you immediate solutions anyway. So very cool, exciting. Um, still blessed to be, um, a partner of Saunas. And for some of you, um, will have seen that Sauna, uh, have just this week, just yesterday in fact, as I record this 17th of September today. So on the 16th of September 2025, um, it was announced that Sarna are being acquired by workday for $1.1 billion. So, whoa. Um, I'm not sure what that means, to be honest. Um, on one thing, it's like, first and foremost, I'm like, so proud of everyone at Sarna. They're incredible people. I've partnered with them for the last two years. I've been involved in, um, a number of really awesome experiences and conversations with the team there. Um, what they've built is phenomenal. Their mission is incredible. Um, I'm so, so proud of Joel and the whole team over there for what they've done. Um, and I think going from zero to a unicorn in less than 10 years in any sector is phenomenal. But to do it in people in work tech, I think is even more incredible. And it's a massive win for the HR people, learning tech, um, ecosystem within Europe. I mean, it's huge. So first and foremost, massive congratulations to everyone at Sauna. Um, there is, you know, the cynic in me that's like, uh, now Workday have got their hands on it. Is Asana that we know and love going to exist in two years from now? I don't know. Um, I'm desperately hoping that their culture is, and I know this generally to be true because they're amazing people. I'm hoping that their culture and their core ethos and their everything they're about is strong enough to withstand Workday's full influence. Because there's every risk as we've seen time and time again when workday acquire a, um, more innovative, faster moving, complementary um, platform that they get swallowed and stifled and the innovation runs out. So I'm desperately hoping that doesn't happen because I love sauna, I love the people, I love the products. So anyway, that was a bit of a riff, so. But overall I think it's a good news story for the, for the HR people tech, um, you know, ecosystem because it shows that there's still unicorns to be made in a sector that is notoriously difficult to raise, notoriously difficult to survive in. Um, HR and people tech is very crowded. Um, they obviously as an AI company were massively in the right lane, um, at the right time and that's not enough. But you know, the people there made that happen. It's incredible. So anyway, very interesting. Um, I continue to partner with Sana, which is also very cool. I see. If this acquisition changes that at some point when our partnership's up for renewal, it might, um, I don't know. But right now, very blessed to be able to use the platform to host my course and leverage their full AI capabilities for both my experience as a designer, but also from your experience as a learner. So yeah, what a wonderful, wonderful platform they've built. Um, and the sauna agents, by the way, if you've not checked that out, bloody awesome. Um, knowledge access tool. Cool. That's that. So digital course will be rebuilt and reshipped in the next few weeks. Um, I always find it, to be honest, I find it really difficult when I'm, when I'm doing the course because it took so much out of me, I'm not even joking. Like the first build, going through like 12 rounds of cohorts, live cohorts, they were delivered workshops, live virtual cohorts to then put that into a digital course that I beta tested, um, in a sort of bootstrapped makeshift notion digital course that I created to then put that into its current form in Sarna. The amount of work that took over what was an 18 month period took a lot out of me. So every time I go back to rebuild and re engineer the course I do get this sense of dread. But I'm not starting from the same place of course course I'm starting with a brilliant um, you know, framework, uh, in place to build from. So I will get that done. Just a case of pulling up my, um, pulling up my socks and cracking on, um, um, and then beyond that, the, with all of this in mind, I think there's um, there's a Bit of a brand refresh coming from Sapienx because I started out um, as a solopreneur, right I've been very vocal about that and Solopreneur as a model got me amazingly far, amazingly quick, right. So I was able to go from an audience of basically zero to an audience of nearly 24,000 people now uh, on LinkedIn in a very short space of time. Um, and I think it was exactly the right model for me for the last two and a half, three years. But things have changed. Uh, I honestly don't want to be a solopreneur anymore. Uh, I've just kind of like run, run that race. I've realized in doing so whilst it has been able to, been able to accelerate my personal positioning and my personal brand within our epilops and progressive PX space. Um, I like working with people, I like working with other people, I like collaborating and whilst I've done a lot of collaboration with other solopreneurs and other um, scrappy startups in, in our space, the, the reality is I actually want to scale something that goes beyond me. So Sapienx should be and I want it to be something that scales beyond Luke the person. So there's a little bit of a brand refresh and, and that will be coming and a bit of a repositioning that will be coming. Um, you know, not drastic repositioning and not a drastic, it's not a rebrand, it's a refresh. But what's really interesting, I was speaking to Lisa about the need to do this and she sort of was pushing like why do you think that's the case? And was asking the right questions to get me to think about whether it was something that did need to happen or something that I was leading. But one of the things that I said to uh, her I think is really interesting, quite cool. Um, it's a number of things but the two years ago, I think it was about two years ago when we launched Sapienx as a brand properly obviously there was about a year and a half before that that were me experimenting and it taking different forms but it was about two years ago when we launched Sapienx the brand as is now. And what's really interesting is a lot of the language framework around people experience as a product, PX as a product, product led practices within the people space didn't exist and that's quite cool because we've actually created a, a marketplace almost we've created a demand for something that didn't really exist before that point. So, and when I say we, I'm not talking, you know, I'm not talking about me and Sapienx. I'm talking about the community of people like Jessica Swan of course, like Juby, like Marie Krebs and uh, Lauren two, um, like Adam, uh, and John at openorg doing their thing. There's, there's so many of us that have been contributing to the development of this um, what I call the post HR generation. And actually I've seen a few people recently using um, post HR generation in posts and not referencing back to me, uh, which I think is really cool by the way. Um, it's so fun. It's awesome. That's like really caught on. Um, and even, even product LED PX is a, is a phrase that really I introduced um, and Lean PX as well, like as a general phrase. It's not. They're not. Come on. These are not, they're not unique phrases in the sense that people can come up with them and they're just leveraging existing language to put in a new context. But it's quite cool that the phrases that I've been using to support my brand and that I sort of coined two and a half, three years ago as part of the transition are now sort of part of the vernacular of progressive people, people. So that's honestly very cool, very humbling. Um, and like I say, I'm part of what has been an incredible movement of people over the last two and a half, three years. Um, you know, really, really sparked by Jessica Swan, uh, uh, her initial people ops as a product blog and then um, built for People, the book really sparked by that. I think that put it on the map. I think, you know, several of us were talking about this stuff in and around the same time. Um, but without Jesse's breakthrough, I don't think this would have been possible. So all credit has to go to Jesse, um, for creating the platform. But it's been really cool to take that platform and build on it, uh, bring my own ideas to it, um, create my own community around it. Um, and so that's why a brand refresh is needed. Because a lot of the language, a lot of the framing, um, a lot of the positioning and the market maturity didn't exist two years ago when we launched. I think now we can realign with um, our community voice. I've spoken about the importance of um, uh, not just product market fit, but Matt Learner's idea of language market fit, uh, and using the language of your customers, um, and in this case creating language for customers to use which has become embedded um, in the way people discuss this stuff. So there'll be a bit of a brand refresh before the year's out, um, which will include you know, streamlining of the product proposition as well and making all of that much more clear, probably expanding the B2B proposition which at the moment I don't talk too much about, don't m, don't do too much in. I turn down more than I accept because um, project delivery takes up a lot of time. But yeah, I think we're at the point now where my network is such and there's enough of us that are in the same space that we can pull resources I think and deliver really amazing projects and um, transformations for people, teams uh, and businesses, um, with product principles at their core. So yeah, there'll probably be a bit of a launch, um, and a repositioning of B2B as well. Um, and I think that brings us yeah full, full circle. There's not much more for me to share today. Um, I've talked about my sort of five year bootstrap plan. So year one was about experimentation, finding out where I could add value, uh, trying a few things. Lots of free workshops, lots of free content, lots of reading. Um, the signals of what resonated. That was year one. Year two was then positioning. That was me building myself. That was the start of the solopreneur piece. Building my audience through content, creating a niche and a space for myself. So positioning was year two. Year three, which was last year was about product. So uh, the digital course, the live uh, events, um, monetizing uh content as a product. Um, and this year was all about, and is all about growth. So so far revenue numbers indicate a good indication that growth is happening. Um, the followership is going up, is continuing to go up, subscriber numbers are going up. So there's growth in all right areas. A lot of it can be accelerated and will be accelerated but growth is happening and we're also obviously growth in terms of team. We've got niche full time, um, we actually not yet announced but we have a, we have someone um, on a project, a rolling project as a community program manager which I'll talk more about probably on the next update and in some of my content, her uh, focus for the next few weeks actually helping us with our operational backend, um as she's a, a project program manager by profession. So we're just setting up our rigor around how we deliver projects and making sure that we've got good Sows and um, documentation around our own project delivery. But then her main focus is going to be on setting the uh, program activities up within the membership community which is currently in Slack, um, for our nearly 900 members now getting a program of regular activity in place, reorganizing the community, engaging local um, community reps to start hosting things regionally. So really getting a load of energy and effort into scaling the value proposition of that community ultimately with the view to have free, uh, obviously free entry point but also then to be able to move to some pay tiers if you want to get, get increasing value from that um community and increasing um, access to myself and others in a variety of different ways. We'll look at the tiered, the tiered paid community model too because that's the last thing I've probably not mentioned today is that whilst revenue um, you know, doubling last year so far is great, it's transactional, right? So we're talking about sponsorship, we're talking about um, tickets for live events and experiences, we're talking about digital courses. It's all transactional, right? Which means you can't rely on it. Um, you know, the better you get at uh, building your conversion funnels and all the rest of it, yes, you can start to predict it but you can't rely on it. So um, getting some paid tiers uh, into, into the community is going to be really important for building out our uh, monthly and annual recurring revenue which is what, what we need in order to establish um, a base. Which means that we're not then always looking at where's revenue coming from. Which means we can make better decisions when it comes to how, when and where we spend time and money in developing the business further. So that's another thing to come. Very exciting. So growth in terms of people too. So we've got um, more people that are contributing fractionally. So more people that are, are um, you know, project based and doing things. There's more people basically now working on Sapienx um, when I'm not, which wasn't the case even you know, 12 months ago. So that's also a great indication of growth and um, hopefully a sign of more things to come. All right, cool. I've talked for longer than I plan to. I'm going to wrap this up. Um, thank you so much for listening in. Um, if anything that I've shared resonates with you, um, both in role as a head of people or um, in your lean people team, however you're operating, if anything's resonated on that front, would love to hear from m you, um, if anything's sticking with you, if you're a bootstrapped, uh, solopreneur entrepreneur like me and uh, you want to pick my brains on any of that side, honestly, I love it. I'm actually obsessed by this stuff. So always ping me a note, ask me any questions. Um, and if for those interested, uh, there is a waitlist now, now open for 2026 immersive PX in, like I say, London, Amsterdam and Barcelona. Uh, and yeah, I think that's it. Keep listening. Um, feel free to share this with anything would find value. Uh, and now I'm going to kick start the guest series again, um, very soon. Uh, I've got a couple of recordings that I haven't yet released from earlier in the year which I'll push out soon. Um, and then I'll start booking back in some regular chats with some of the most awesome people, leaders in our profession that are doing some of the coolest work. So. All right with that. I wish you, uh, good vibes and, and, and good love and I hope to speak to you all very soon. Take care.