How to Eliminate Options and Find Opportunities
My guest today is a Canadian supermom of five, personal development coach, public speaker and the author of What You Focus On Grows.
Between 1995 and 2005, my guest was the Founder and President of Upward Motion and created the web-based assessment tool, Real Estate Simulator.
She is now the President and Founder of Frame of Mind Coaching and owner of JournalEngine Software. My guest designed the Frame of Mind Coaching program to provide her clients with a powerful foundation, which enables them to develop and apply the skill of deliberate thought directly to achieving higher levels of success.
Now, let’s hack …
Kim Ades.
In this 34-minute episode Kim Ades and I discuss:
- Why you need to keep trying and never give up on your passion
- The power of adding new spokes to an old wheel
- How and why to pilot an idea before jumping in
- Becoming okay with not being right
The Show Notes
How to Eliminate Options and Find Opportunities
Jonny Nastor: Hack the Entrepreneur is part of Rainmaker.FM, the digital business podcast network. Find more great shows and education at Rainmaker.FM.
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Voiceover: Welcome to Hack the Entrepreneur, the show which reveals the fears, habits, and inner battles behind big name entrepreneurs and those on their way to joining them. Now, here is your host, Jon Nastor.
Jonny Nastor: Hey, hey. Welcome back to another episode of Hack the Entrepreneur. It’s so very cool of you to join me again today. I am your host, Jon Nastor, but you can call me Jonny.
My guest today is a Canadian super mom of five, personal development coach, public speaker, and the author of What You Focus on Grows.
Between 1995 and 2005, my guest was the co-founder and president of Upward Motion and created the web assessment tool called Real Estate Simulator. She is now the president and founder of Frame of Mind Coaching and the owner and creator of JournalEngine software.
My guest designed the Frame of Mind Coaching program to provide her clients with the powerful foundation which enables them to develop and apply the skills of deliberate thought directly to achieving higher levels of success.
Now, let’s hack Kim Ades.
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Welcome back to another episode of Hack the Entrepreneur. Today, we not only have an extra special guest, but we have another extra special Canadian guest. I love this. Kim, welcome to the show.
Kim Ades: Thank you. I’m really looking forward to this call.
Jonny Nastor: Excellent. Me too. Let’s jump straight into it. Kim, as an entrepreneur, can you tell me what is the one thing that you do that you feel has been the biggest contributor to your successes so far?
Why You Need to Keep Trying and Never Give Up on Your Passion
Kim Ades: I think the biggest thing I do that has contributed to my success is that I keep trying. Honestly, as much as I’ve been kicked, as much as I fall, I just keep getting up. I keep reinventing a different wheel, a better wheel, a wheel with more spokes, a wheel with bigger tires. I just keep trying.
Jonny Nastor: I love it. Have you always had that within you that just totally something doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, yet you’re just, “I’m going to try again”?
Kim Ades: Historically, I used to own another company in the past, many years ago. I was responsible for sales and marketing, and I used to be called ‘The Bulldog.’ I would latch on to a person’s pant leg and not let go until I got what I wanted. I was known for that. My style has changed. I’m not as aggressive. I’m a little kinder.
Jonny Nastor: It’s probably good.
Kim Ades: But I’m just as persistent until I find something that works.
Jonny Nastor: Nice. How do we know when something works? How do we know when something doesn’t work? Do we?
The Power of Adding New Spokes to an Old Wheel
Kim Ades: Yeah, of course. When something doesn’t work, you’re frustrated. You look at the results, and you go, “This should be better. I’m putting so much effort into this, and my ROI doesn’t add up.” That could be with a new program you’re launching. It could be with training you’re developing. It could be with advertising you’re trying. It could be with anything. It could be simply with how you’re spending your time day, by day, by day, by day. It could be who you’re talking to, who your prospects are, and whether or not they buy and if they’re the right target market.
After you do what you’re doing for a little bit, you have to step back and evaluate it and decide if that makes sense. “Is that working? If not, what do I need to tweak? What do I need to change? What do I need to make better? What do I need to stop doing? What do I need to keep doing? What do I need to try that’s different?” At the end of the day, that is entrepreneurship as far as I’m concerned.
Jonny Nastor: I think you’re right.
Kim Ades: Yes.
Jonny Nastor: All right. You run a great coaching company now, coaching business, and you had businesses prior, but I want to go back a little bit further than that if we can. There seems to be this time in every entrepreneur’s life when they realize one of two things. Either they have calling to change the world in some big way or, as mostly seems to be the case, they find they simply cannot work for somebody else. Kim, can you tell me which side of the fence you fall on, and when you discovered this about yourself?
Kim Ades: Honestly, I sit right in the middle.
Jonny Nastor: Nice.
Kim Ades: I’ve sat right in the middle since the get-go. When I was young, I used to dream about moving to South Africa or Ethiopia and starting a school. Those kinds of things. I always has that desire to change the world. Having said that, certainly, what had me starting this company was working for someone else and feeling like I couldn’t breathe.
I was hired by a coaching company. I was in there, and I thought, “This is going to be the most perfect thing. Their values are a complete match for me,” but when I got in, stated values and executed values were two different things. I just clashed with everything. What do you call it? A bull in a China shop — I just did not fit. It was awful.
Finally, at the end, I sat down with one of the partners in the company, and he said, “I’d like to talk about your future with the company.” I said, “Is it over yet?” That was my reaction. You can’t imagine the relief I felt when I left. I am an entrepreneur through and through. It’s in my blood. It’s in my history. It’s in my genes. It’s everywhere, and I am not designed to work for others.
Jonny Nastor: Wow. I love it. “Is it over yet?” I love that, but then you’re walking out. Your final day as an employee, and now you have to go make it on your own. Was there any reluctance in you, or was it just pure joy?
Kim Ades: Honestly, I didn’t think in that moment, “Here’s what I’m going to do next.” It wasn’t that well-planned out, but for me, the relief I felt leaving that place was enormous — physical relief, mental relief, every kind of relief you could think of. I was just free of the shackles. One of the things, I had to be there eight in the morning. I have two kids, so that meant I had to bring my kids to day care for 7:30. I was a single mom at the time. Trying to get those kids up to daycare for that time of the day and getting myself to work, it was just no fun. “I’m not enjoying my life here.” Just the reduction of that stress alone was a huge relief. Huge.
Jonny Nastor: Nice. I love it. I think a lot of people can probably relate to that. Especially then having the two kids, being a single mom, most people would think that they can’t make that leap at that point, so I’m really glad to hear that you did. It seems like you’ve made the right choice.
Kim Ades: I felt like there’s no other option. If you want me to die an early death, keep me here. There was no other option for me. I just had to go. I had to go.
Jonny Nastor: Awesome. I love it. All right. Your one thing that you do is you keep trying. You can get kicked. You can fall, and you’ll just get back up. You’ll reinvent the wheel. You’ll add more spokes if you need to. Now, every blog post, every expert talks about 80/20 rule. I’m sure you’ve heard this. Do 20 percent. Get 80 percent of the results. Do what you’re good at, and delegate the rest. Kim, can you tell me something that you’re absolutely not good at in your business?
How Self-Awareness Helps You Move Forward
Kim Ades: Anything administrative. I give away everything related to accounting, bookkeeping, invoicing, collecting money. Anything like that, it’s out of my hands, out of my office. I get my monthly reports. Very much that’s it. That’s one thing for sure. The other thing is technology issues. I own a software company, and I outsource. In other words, I have someone here who takes care of it. I don’t look at it at all.
The other thing is more and more now, when I look at sales and marketing, there are bits and pieces where I clearly am the voice of the company. Nobody, at this point, can quite step into those shoes, but there are lots of other bits and pieces where lots of other people can easily take over. I am really determined to give away as much as I can.
Jonny Nastor: Nice. I love it. I love owning a software company and not knowing the technology side and not having that stop you from owning a software company.
Kim Ades: Yes.
Jonny Nastor: That’s brilliant. I love it.
Kim Ades: It’s my second round at that. The first time, I sold my company and did quite well.
Jonny Nastor: Wow. There was so no hesitation. Anything administrative, you are not good at.
Kim Ades: No.
Jonny Nastor: Do you feel like maybe you realized this too late in your business?
Kim Ades: No.
Jonny Nastor: Because I find that lots of times, we hold on to things. We think, “No, I’m really good at this.” Then, it really takes something to just show us. That self-awareness is hard, right?
Kim Ades: For me, personally, I could work from home. The minute I decided to be in business is the minute I found that admin person, the minute I had an office space and put that admin person in the office right beside mine. In my mind, I had so many doubts about my ability to do admin that I wouldn’t actually have taken the action to do anything from a business perspective without an admin.
Jonny Nastor: Wow. That’s great. That self-awareness is key to know those things about yourself.
Kim Ades: I don’t know if that’s self-awareness, or self-doubt, or fear, or terror, to be honest.
Jonny Nastor: I guess so. From the outside, it seems like, to know those things … I feel like our egos get a hold of it.
Kim Ades: Yes. No, for me, it was like, “I can’t do this. I need someone to help me,” right from the beginning.
Jonny Nastor: That’s excellent. Then, the technology I guess was the same way. You wanted to create software, and you realized you couldn’t do it.
Kim Ades: Oh, I knew. Again, from the get-go, I hired a good friend who helped me find a software developer. How do you interview a software developer when you don’t even know what question to ask? How do you know if they’re good? I didn’t know. I had no idea.
Jonny Nastor: Nice. Did you at all think that maybe you should find a co-founder to do software other than just hiring someone?
Kim Ades: No. No. No. No. No.
Jonny Nastor: No?
Kim Ades: No.
Jonny Nastor: You’re not of that sort of frame of mind?
Kim Ades: I had partners in my past business. I had two partners. One of them is my ex-husband, so this time around, I didn’t want a co-owner. I really didn’t, and I was pretty clear about that.
Jonny Nastor: Nice. All right. If we can, let’s move into projects. ‘Projects’ is a loose term. It can be the software you wanted to create or just a new direction you want to take your business in. Can you walk me through, is there a process that you have now to decide whether or not you should take on a new project within your business?
How and Why to Pilot an Idea Before Jumping In
Kim Ades: At the beginning, I think that I took on all kinds of things that weren’t necessarily all good fits. I experimented a lot. I still experiment a lot. I’m by nature an experimenter. However, now, I’m a lot more scrupulous. I’m able to see something and say, “This fits or does not fit with our market, our future, our goals, our intentions,” and I’m able to eliminate a lot of the potential projects from my field of vision — which is super important. Otherwise, my eyes could be everywhere.
Eliminating a lot of options is important, surprisingly enough. Oftentimes, when you tell someone, “Eliminate your options,” you think about eliminating opportunities. I think it’s very important. What I’ve learned over time is focus on those opportunities or projects that are a match for where you are heading. Otherwise, you just spend a lot of time, resources, money, and you end up being scattered. You end up doing nothing well. That’s number one.
Number two is, even as I evaluate projects and look at them, a very important strategy I have used since the very beginning is to pilot an idea, so try it. Try it on a small scale. See what works. See what doesn’t work. Lower your risk. Experiment. Learn. Come back to the drawing table. Fix. Adjust, and then decide whether or not to move forward.
That has always been my strategy — even when it comes to partnerships. We have lots of partnerships, but they don’t all get established from the very, very beginning. I usually experiment first, test out smaller ideas, and see what it’s like to work with someone else. If it does work, then I want to step it up a notch, and then another notch, and then another notch.
Jonny Nastor: Nice. I really like that. Do you feel that it’s just a natural progression to go from jumping on ideas really quickly at the start to, as you say, becoming more scrupulous now with your ideas and your time? Can you start a business, or start in entrepreneurship even like your first business, and not be like that?
Kim Ades: Yeah.
Jonny Nastor: You know what I mean? It just seems like such a natural progression, that, as we grow as entrepreneurs and our businesses grow, that we become more scrupulous. But where’s the cart? Where’s the horse?
Kim Ades: Yes. Honestly, I think it’s a character issue. It’s a personality issue. Some people are very open to new ideas. Other people are not. Some people have an idea, and they just have tunnel vision. They are not even lifting their heads up to see the opportunity that is a great fit right in front of their nose. Other people are just turning their heads every five minutes that they cannot focus.
I have one client, probably the most intelligent client I’ve ever had. He’s trying to run three businesses at a time and not really gaining a substantial traction given the effort he’s putting in. My conversation with him quite repeatedly is, “Pick one. Just pick one.” Finally, he’s come to a place where he’s able to put the others on a back burner, and he’s starting to see some much greater traction. To answer your question, is really an individual characteristic or personality trait that you see in terms of being open or more focused when it comes to opportunity.
Jonny Nastor: Nice. Then, an extension of projects, and you found the way to be scrupulous and to come up with the right directions to have the right projects to decide to put your resources into, yet things still go wrong.
As entrepreneurs, as human beings in general, one of our greatest struggles is the fear of being wrong, making a mistake, deciding to go into a project, and then failing, in front of your employees possibly. Kim, could you walk me through how to be wrong?
Becoming Okay with Not Being Right
Kim Ades: I love being wrong. One of my favorite kinds of conversations is when someone says, “I don’t think you’re making the right decision. Here’s why, and here’s a better decision.” I get excited because someone suddenly has clarity. All I want is that. That’s all I want, so I’m very, very okay with not being right. I’d much rather have that clarity instead of being right or accurate.
As far as being wrong in public, oh, man, I’m the queen of being wrong in public. Honestly, it’s truly not an issue for me. I own it. Again, people see me experimenting and failing all the time. I work with a team of coaches, and what I do with that is I say, “Here’s what we tried. Here’s what didn’t work. Here’s why it didn’t work. Here’s what we’re going to try instead.”
They see that falling and getting up over and over again publicly. Honestly, what I’m truly modeling is a little bit of emotional resilience. Even if it’s hard sometimes, even if I’ve fallen — I just want to crawl into a hole — eventually, my head pops out of the hole. I am able to share that experience, so I’m okay to be wrong. I’m okay to fail. I’m not okay to stay in that hole forever. That’s not where I want to be.
Jonny Nastor: When you say that you love when someone finally has clarity, so you have an idea. You’re saying, “We’re running with this.”
Kim Ades: Yes.
Jonny Nastor: Immediately, somebody brings you what looks like clarity. At what point do you, Kim, as the founder and the creator of this, be like, “No. Actually, this is what we’re doing.” How much proof do they need to show you? You know what I mean?
Kim Ades: Yes.
Jonny Nastor: Is stubbornness in you that you’re like, “No. This is actually what we’re doing.”
Why Passion and Conviction Can Quiet the Naysayers
Kim Ades: Let me tell you a quick story. Let me give you a little history. We coach highly driven leaders, entrepreneurs, executives, etcetera. What we do is we look at how they think and how their thinking impacts their outcomes.
When I first started to coach, I made a decision. The decision was that, in order to get into people’s minds and understand their patterns of thinking, I was going to have them journal every day in an online journal. That’s why we created JournalEngine. We would give them a question. They would journal. Their journal would go to me at the time.
I was the only coach, and I would read and respond to the journal so that there was daily dialogue in between coaching calls. It was an intimate, very, very rich experience. I would get to the emotions, the heart, the soul, the center point of their thinking, and we would make great progress together.
That was my idea originally. I hired this guy to help me. Really, this is in the first few months that I launched this coaching idea. I hired this guy to help me create a business plan. I had met him. We had been talking for months. I thought he was probably the smartest guy I ever met in my life, and I thought to myself, “Maybe someday he’ll be a partner with me. Who knows?” I thought it’s a good idea to experiment. “Let’s try this out.” So I hired him. Again, piloting the idea, testing out what it was going to be like to work together to help me with that business plan.
Week one, he came into my office, and he asked me a bunch of questions — how journaling works, why coach people, why coach this way, etcetera, etcetera. Week two, he came back to my office. Then, he said, “Kim, I’ve done some research.” Remember, this is 10 years ago. “I’ve done some research, and there’s no evidence to suggest that journaling has any impact on the coaching process. I think you’re selling snake oil.”
Jonny Nastor: Ouch.
Kim Ades: Well, I could feel my heart racing. This was supposed to be the most intelligent guy I ever met, so I looked at him. I said, “So you’re questioning my integrity.” I said, “I guess we’re done then. We can’t work together.” I literally got up and walked him to the door. I went back, and I’m like, “Oh, my god. There’s no evidence to suggest the journaling is effective!” I started to do my own research.
Jonny Nastor: And you proved it.
Kim Ades: I panicked. I panicked, and I started to look it up. At the time, really, there was very little evidence to suggest that journaling works. Now, it’s all over the place. It’s really quite evident, and I’m part of the research to be honest. I had to make a decision right there and then and decide whether or not I was going to back up and create a new coaching model because this guy was smart, and he knew what he was talking about. What would I do with this? Find the proof. What was I going to do with it?
Honestly, I had to really dig down and say, “What? Forget about the evidence. Forget about this guy.” And I was a journaler. “What do I truly, honestly believe?” I had been coaching, let’s say, 20 people up until that point. Like, “What’s it been like?”
At that point, I really made a decision not only is this a center piece of my business, but really, truly, it’s the magic potion that allows the transformation to take place for a client during the coaching experience. So I totally stood behind it. That wasn’t from me being stubborn. That was me really tuning into my intuition and my deep personal conviction to decide whether this is truly a good path for me or not.
Jonny Nastor: Yes. Okay. So ‘stubborn’ was the wrong word. You’re right. As Canadians, I don’t think we’re allowed to be stubborn.
Kim Ades: No, we’re not.
Jonny Nastor: We’re too nice, but I love that. I love that. You have to be in tune with your intuition, your gut. You have to know what it is you stand for and what you’re pushing for, and you do have to push back sometimes.
Kim Ades: Yes, and you know your business. You know when something sounds like a good fit, a good plan, accurate, smart, or when it just totally screams “No.”
Jonny Nastor: Right. Exactly. Excellent. All right, Kim, we’re going to wrap up on something I’ve been calling ‘the entrepreneurial gap.’ You will probably have a lot of experience with this as you deal with entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurial gap, I find that entrepreneurs, what we’re doing is we’re always, always, always pushing forward, always looking ahead. Setting goals one week, a month, three months, six months, a year, five years, 10 years out. We’re always setting goals and pushing ourselves.
“When my business is doing this in six months, I’ll be successful. When I’m there in a year, I’ll be success.” Yet before we even hit those goals, we set five or 10 loftier ones into the future. We’re always in this state of not being successful. It’s always in the future. I find that we oftentimes fail to even stop and look at where we’ve come from, what we’ve learned, what we’ve done, and reflect on it and appreciate it.
I would love, Kim, if you could right now stop, look around, look behind you, and tell me how you feel about everything you’ve done, everything you’ve learned, and how you’ve grown as an entrepreneur.
Kim Ades: Great question. For me, I get to live a really extraordinary life. A large part of that is due to the fact that I get to coach extraordinary people who are reaching extraordinary goals. Now, when you think of a coach, it’s always about a coach giving somebody else something. It’s a giving profession. The truth of the matter is, every time I coach somebody, I’m the receiver. They happen to be the beneficiaries of my receiving, so I truly coach some of the most interesting, engaging, accomplished, challenged, tortured people in the world.
For me, even if maybe my revenue goals aren’t always where I want them to be — and I do feel that feeling that you’re describing sometimes, like, “I’m not quite there yet. I’m not quite there yet. I’m not quite there yet” — the impact that I have experienced and, as a result, have left on my client has been tremendous. Our testimonials, our referrals all speak to the fact that we deliver outstanding coaching.
When I look at my business, I think, “There are so many things we can be improving. We can be improving our marketing, our sales, our outreach.” So many things we can be improving, but fundamentally, my proudest thing is that we deliver just amazing coaching consistently, from client to client, coach to coach. That’s it. That’s what I feel.
Jonny Nastor: Beautiful answer. Okay. We’ve got to talk about your business in passing, Kim, throughout this conversation, and I would love it if you would specifically tell the listener where they could find out more about you and more about your business.
Kim Ades: Yes. It’s FrameofMindCoaching.com. Everything is there, and whoever is listening and is interested, on that site, on the website, there’s an invitation to take an assessment. It’s not a typical or an ordinary assessment. There are a bunch of questions, and there are journaling questions. Go on there. Answer the questions like you would journal in your own personal journal. Those questions will go to a coach, and you will get the opportunity to have a Frame of Mind Coaching experience based on your journals. It’s amazing. Just that one call. I encourage everybody to try that.
Jonny Nastor: Excellent. Are you on Twitter?
Kim Ades: Of course. @KimAdes.
Jonny Nastor: @KimAdes. Please, if you’ve enjoyed this conversation as much as I have, then go follow up with any questions you have or just tell Kim that you heard her on the show. I’m sure she would love to hear from you. Kim, thank you again so much for this conversation. It’s been a lot of fun, and just please keep doing what you’re doing because it’s awesome and inspiring to watch.
Kim Ades: Thank you for having me on your show. It’s been fun.
Jonny Nastor: You’re welcome.
Kim, thank you. Thank you so much. I don’t know if you know it, but I know that you out there listening know that I have the soft spot for Canadians. I guess that’s because I’m Canadian. We got to stick together. Sorry. I love you guys down in the States. I really, really, really, truly do, but as Canadians, we just have to. That was a lot of fun. I do thank you, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
Before we get into anything further, a couple episodes ago, I had an amazing sponsor. They’re called ChargeOver, and they gave out a free guide. Lots of you out there listening went and downloaded that guide and said it helped you a lot. You actually emailed me and told me about it, so I do just want to make sure that, if you didn’t get a chance to do it, you can make your life easier and download ChargerOver’s free guide, Seven Amazing Hacks for Recurring Billing Companies at ChargeOver.com/Hack.
ChargeOver.com/Hack will get you that guide. If you aren’t a recurring billing company yet, you should really think about it. Recurring billing is really the essential business aspect now and the way you want to get paid. Rather than just getting paid once and having to find new customers, get paid over and over again. Thank you, again, ChargeOver.
I go back to this conversation. Kim said a lot of cool things, a lot of smart things. I wanted to go back to the very, very, very beginning because she said something that was really, really, really smart. You probably heard that, but that wasn’t the one thing.
That wasn’t the one thing that, as I went through the whole conversation again, then I had this thing circled. It was at two minutes into the conversation, and I thought that was the one thing. Maybe you did, too. But then later in the conversation, Kim really hit home on something.
It was really, really, really impressive, and it really, really made me think. It sparked these ideas in my head. I think you know what I’m talking about. Don’t you? Did you get it? Did you hear it? Let’s do it. Let’s find the hack.
Kim Ades: Even as I evaluate projects and look at them, a very important strategy I have used since the very beginning is to pilot an idea, so try it. Try it on a small scale. See what works. See what doesn’t work. Lower your risk. Experiment. Learn. Come back to the drawing table. Fix. Adjust, and then decide whether or not to move forward.
Jonny Nastor: And that’s the hack.
Kim. Kim. Kim. Yes. Six months ago, maybe seven months ago, if I had, had this conversation with Kim, I would have skipped right over this part of the conversation. It wouldn’t have made as much sense to me, but if you know or if you don’t know, over the course of launching Hack the Entrepreneur, then I started to work with Rainmaker.FM, which is part of Copyblogger Media.
Copyblogger Media then, around January, asked if I would like to create a podcasting course and lay out everything — every PDF, every email, everything I did — in a very step-by-step form for creating Hack the Entrepreneur before launch, during launch, and to build this audience of you out of nothing basically. So we did.
When we started creating it, we didn’t know exactly what people would want. So their thing — this is what they’ve always done, and I had never done it — was we created and launched a pilot version of the course. It seemed weird to me, but it made perfect sense because we got a bunch of people in, a hundred people or something signed up, and it was amazing. The feedback allowed us to go back in and make the course exactly what it needed to be rather than completely assuming that people wanted this, or that people would want it the way we’ve made it. It was brilliant.
Then we did one more small pilot launch, and actually right now, as you’re listening to this, if you’re listening to this on Tuesday when it comes out until Friday, actually, the course is open only until Friday. Then we’re closing it down possibly until the end of the year, but this is the full official launch now. This is after two pilots to decide what works. I guess I should tell you if you did want to check out the course, ShowrunnerCourse.FM is the website. You can just check up the sales page and see if you did want to start a podcast — but that’s not what this is about.
This is about piloting stuff, piloting ideas, piloting with partners, piloting everything to lower your risk, as Kim says, and then also to fix, adjust, and move forward or decide even if it’s worth moving forward, right? If we’re stopped and we haven’t actually executed on an idea yet, we could have lots of ideas, and these ideas get big. These ideas can spiral into massive things that are daunting and overwhelming for us when we’re stopped.
The idea of launching a pilot, that small, little idea, whether it’s an ebook, a course you wanted to do, or a software project, it’s like when I did VelocityPage. We did version 0.9, which I didn’t really realize was a pilot, but it was. For software, that was a pilot launch. Normally, you launch a version 1.0 in case you’re not in a software world, but we launched it as 0.9 because we didn’t feel like we were ready, but we didn’t know where else to go until we let it out into the wild, into the world to get feedback from people and to see where that should go.
Kim, this is brilliant. You are a very, very, very smart lady and a very, very smart business coach, so you know this. I’m just so happy I got to have this conversation with you. Now, I finally understand. I don’t think I’d launch anything now without it being a pilot first. It’s a brilliant way to do it, and it really lowers your risk. It lowers even your barrier to getting started and getting a product out or a service out into the world.
Really, really think about this. Just think about how you can execute a pilot launch of your own. It doesn’t need to be launch as in a whole bunch of people, but you get five or 10 people in to give you feedback on an idea. This is brilliant. This helps you create a better product and to get word out about your project. Kim, thank you again so much. That was a lot of fun, and I hope you out there enjoyed this conversation as much as I did.
All right. This has been fun. Again, just in passing, I haven’t mentioned it once, and I probably should have, but The Showrunner Podcasting Course is available right now for the next couple of days if you’re listening to this when it was published, ShowrunnerCourse.FM, or Showrunner.FM is the podcast. I have another show on Rainmaker and with my co-host, Jerod Morris. It’s all about podcasting, and you could learn about it if you are interested in that at all.
Otherwise, it’s been fun. Thank you so much again, and please, until next time, keep hacking the entrepreneur.