Jessica Hische and Chris Shiflett: Designing business tools that support how creatives actually work

25:27They might think, I have to figure this out, either do client work or build my own product. And now with all the capabilities that AI is giving us and the small team that you have able to create this product, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about having your background and skills as a designer, which certainly help in the obvious things like designing a landing page or designing your logo, content, etc. But what are the non-obvious things that we as designers might bring to a more entrepreneurial venture? One of the biggest things is actually building for an audience that you really care about.

25:59I think that a lot of people now, especially with the AI landscape of just being like, how do I make the thing that is going to make all the money? They tend to just follow the success of other things. They feel for the wind in the air and they go, that thing seems to be successful. I bet I could make a better version of that thing. But if you don't care about what the product is or who the audience is, and you don't want to like throw all of your passion behind that, it's really hard to make something successful. I've actually been joking with my husband. We have a lot of friends who are serial entrepreneurs, and people will ask me to help with logo stuff.

26:38And sometimes I like to do things for equity and things like that. But I have kind of a rule where I'm just like, if you're already rich, I probably shouldn't do an equity trade because you don't need to make money from this thing that you're doing. It's really hard to do everything on your own. You know, now there's a lot of like, there's going to be so many one and two person AI driven companies. You need people. You can't do things on your own. And even with us having four people, we would benefit by having a couple extra people to help with customer service and marketing and sales and all that kind of jazz that you can't really let AI do because it's inhuman and people don't react well to it.

27:15But yeah, you have to really want that thing to be real and to happen and to have the worst case scenario for it to be a thing that you personally would love to have in the world. And don't work with people that are already rich because they don't need it to be successful. I've made that mistake before. Yeah, they can just kind of faff about and be like, this is a cool friend project. Everybody has to have a lot of skin in the game financially. If someone does not need it to succeed financially, it will not succeed. So you need to make sure that everyone on the team needs it to succeed. Designers bring a lot of observation skills to problems that are through practice or their orientation or whatever that help identify weak points in a lot of experiences, particularly like for their clients or any experience that they care a lot about.

28:05So the embarrassment of the reminder going to your client that we spoke about, or I've had illustrators tell me how line items don't really work for them on invoices because they'll put three times 500 or something. And an accounting department at a big company thinks that's a very high hourly rate for something. and they flag it. And I think there are lots of these little details that other companies just would never really bother addressing, not because they can't or because they're hard, but because they literally just don't notice. I think designers are really good at noticing things because anything that's not quite right really stands out like a sore thumb.

28:47Yeah, it is a burden being a designer and seeing all the flaws. We can't help it. Yeah. One thing is definitely keep your eyes open, look for problems that you want to solve. I think another thing is entrepreneur as a term feels loaded because it feels like it's more connected with growth and raising money and all kinds of stuff versus just being a small business owner. One of our goals with StudioWorks is to show that you could make a sustainable small business and that it doesn't all have to follow the venture capital growth above all model. That's one thing that designers are not very knowledgeable about is how that world works.

29:32Because what they do is they see these success stories of, oh, now that I have AI, I can make my own company and I'll raise money and blah, blah, blah, and I'll get rich. But basically anything within the venture capital fundraising world is not about let's make the best thing. It's about let's make the most money or let's have the most growth just because there's an expectation for that to be what the investors get. They want a 50x return. And so I just know plenty of people who have set out to build a thing and then fundraised for that thing and were basically forced to pivot just because the thing that they were making was not 10xing fast enough.

30:12And then you end up in this world in which you're building a thing that you don't really care about because you're doing it because you need to make money and you need to make money for other people, not even for yourself. That's the one red flag that I would raise to designers that are starting down this entrepreneurial path is first and foremost, start by trying to make a modest small business, whether that's making your own creative studio into a modest small business. Keep your overhead low, downsize as best you can so that you don't need a lot of capital to make it work. And then try to get that going because if you do need money eventually to grow just because you need more staff than you can get to be a part of your founding team or whatever, it's way easier if you have something that has some momentum behind it.

30:55So definitely try to do it as light as possible from the jump.

31:02We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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35:28And now, back to the show.

35:35You know, I can't help but see some of the spirit of your origin stories that we talked about earlier. The spirit of Studio Mates, the spirit of Brooklyn Beta, which was about community and sharing and creativity and connection. And Studio Works out of the gate, like the early versions of what you've built, which is quite wonderful. You know, education and resources and community, those things are baked into what you're making. What's the vision that you have for how this could not only help designers solve the day-to-day problems, but also allow them to realize their potential? We are just in this really wonderful, rare position of having four people on our team that have these deep skill sets that are passionate about the thing.

36:28So community really is at the core of what we've built and how we don't take for granted the fact that we were all surrounded by talented, passionate people starting out. That's the thing that's really rare in building a company is being able to have everyone be as bought in. But in terms of actually supporting the community, what our goal is, is like there's just four of us. We don't have any funding. We all have families and stuff that we have to support and things like that. But beyond that, our vision is to really make Studio Works into this generosity machine for the community. So we're doing that in ways that we can now by building educational stuff into the product.

37:08I'm building like a really wild resource library that's going to be just open and available to everyone. But then we're hosting workshops and talks. We have a weekly design entrepreneur meetup that's a support group for folks. We do co-working sessions, and those are just all part of being a Studio Works member. And so we really do want it to be this very wonderful, closed-knit community where other people can find their people in that way, because we do feel so lucky that we've been able to do that. And Chris, we talk a lot about the sort of pandemic pizza place where pizza places became everyone's backbone during the pandemic just because you were stuck at home and couldn't even necessarily go to the grocery store all the time or whatever.

37:52And the pizza place became this thing that you could really rely on to sustain you and be a backup. And we know that because of AI and all the disruptions that are happening, just because of the economy and all kinds of things, there's going to be a lot of people that are forced into freelance that maybe never had it as their dream. And we want to build a safe landing spot for them. They won't know how weird and not great a lot of the other things that they could have used are because they're going to have this thing to start that was built just for them. and to have all these things that can help guide them into that way so they don't have to make the mistakes that we all made early in our career.

38:31I think that's something that Chris and I and everyone on the team really has in common is that we do not believe in the whole, because I went through a hard thing, you have to go through a hard thing. We definitely stood on the shoulders of other people. Other people helped us in our path. And all we want to do is make something that can help other people on their path. I don't think that you have to put in your dues. Yes, of course, experience is very helpful in terms of learning and making mistakes is helpful, but I don't want to force people into making mistakes because I feel like it's part of the educational process.

39:01I want to help them not make those mistakes. Jessica, can you talk a little bit about the resources that are built in? Yeah, totally. So currently we have a network, a social network that is not meant to be like a you're there all the time social network because we're all spread very thin already. It's meant to be sort of this asynchronous chat room that you could go in and have a pricing question and within a few hours to a day or two, someone comes in and answers it for you. Right now it's on Mighty, but we'll be migrating over to Circle. And within that community, I put a ton of resources for all kinds of vendors of things.

39:37Our members have been really good at sharing resources when they find them. So we have type designers and illustrators and web people and photographers that have all been sharing like, this is my favorite thing here. If you need to do this, go to here. And so people are actively working on building a resource library within our social network. But then also I'm working on a separate resource library, which has all of the things that you casually end up having to look up as a designer or creative, like color conversions, paper sizes, screen dimensions, safe areas on social media, all the things that are hard to find.

40:14We're consolidating them into one place. And then the other thing that we're building as a part of that is an actual resource for your clients so that when clients have questions about something or they don't understand what a file format is, you don't have to be the one educating them. You can send them to this page that shows them, here's why we sent you an SVG instead of a JPEG and also don't scale the JPEG in this way. Here's what RGB color space means and why it looks different on my screen versus your screen. giving our studios that are on there the resources for their clients. Because everyone that I've talked to does this on their own already.

40:53They basically just have a bucket of PDFs that they send to clients to explain stuff to them. And wouldn't it be nice if there was a continually updated place that had all the things that you ever need to clarify with your clients? So Chris, I'm curious, I know we're bouncing back and forth between your product and then your sort of story as founders. But talk to us a little bit more about what someone might look for in either a partner or co-founder. I know Aaron and I were lucky that we were able to work together for many years before we started off on this venture. And we shared the same goals.

41:26We have great overlapping skills and complementary skills. So those are certainly things. But what, in your experience, are some things to look out for? I feel like I've been very fortunate to work with a lot of really good people in my career. Like, really, really lucky. The things that I think work really well are when people are really good at what they do, but they haven't gotten to that point where they feel like they've made it. So they're no longer willing to work hard or they feel like maybe their opinion should carry more weight. Opinions need to be independent from the people who hold them.

42:01They need to win or lose on their own merits. And I feel like that happens if people are just trying to make a good thing and do some good work. If you really focus on the work as being this separate entity, it's not your identity, and everyone's just shaping it and trying to make it as good as it can be, those relationships tend to work really well. People take pushback better. You don't try to have your idea win unless you genuinely think it's the best idea. Maybe it's actually a really good sign if no one really remembers whose idea certain things were, or everyone remembers it as their own idea.

42:39That's probably a good sign of a healthy culture. I've been really fortunate to work with a lot of people like that in my career, and a lot of it was just luck. Being at Studio Mates during that time, I got to meet a lot of really great people. And I think what Jessica was alluding to earlier, you know, with the community stuff that we're doing and things like that, it is a lot more than a product that we're building. And I think it's because even though, yes, we've both suffered in the sense that we've suffered bad tools and learning a lot of things the hard way, we've also both benefited from a lot of support from other people and know what that's like as well.

43:18You know, people that you can ask, hey, I've got this tricky client situation. You know, they paid for this, but now they want this other thing. Or what do you do for health insurance? Or like, you know, all these kind of questions that come up. And honestly, a lot of the mechanics of running a business feel really intimidating to people in ways that I think dissuade people from starting their own businesses. And it would make me feel really proud if StudioWorks could help change that, democratize the business side of running a creative business and make it feel a bit more accessible to more of these types of folks.

43:54Chris and I talked a lot early on when we were building StudioWorks about how if we suddenly had 20 ,000 customers, it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. Because what we love about our people is that everyone gets it. The people that have joined and have been with us from the start, they believe in the holistic vision of it. Yes, they're using the product and really loving it. But the thing that's really lovely about it growing in a more organic way is that everybody that's in is in. When people have to leave, if people have to cancel their subscriptions, they send these lovely apologetic emails of like, I'm so sorry, but I got a full time job.

44:37And I'm like, congratulations. You know, so everybody that ends up in our universe, I feel like are people that really get it. And to go back to the studio mates time, I had this really silly internet project at the time called the internet sends me cake. What I did was I made a Tumblr and people would send me cake in the mail or deliver it to me and I would judge their cake and then link people to their portfolio website because people were asking me all the time to help promote their businesses. And I was like, we need to make this into something fun and weird. So I'm like, I'm only going to judge you on your cake.

45:12And if your cake is inventive and good, then I will promote your portfolio. Because obviously, if you care about cake, you care about your portfolio. And Tina and a bunch of the folks in the studio were just like, are you not afraid someone will poison you? You know, they were very concerned about strangers sending me food that I would then eat. And I was like, no, because anyone that is doing this, they get it. you attract the energy that you put out into the world. If you put out trust, if you put out generosity, if you put out the things that you want reflected back to you, that's what you get.

45:47And the thing that has been so cool about StudioWorks so far is our community is so supportive. I now have a group chat with everybody that comes to our design entrepreneur thing, and we were all sending each other turkey pics on Thanksgiving and stuff. And these are people from all over the country that have never had an excuse to know each other in the past. If you build the thing that has the energy that you want, the people come to it that have that energy as well. I feel like the internet has gotten so impersonal over time. We've been trained that there's not a way to actually have a human interaction with people anymore.

46:23Just because algorithms have really shifted how we behave online. There's not an intimate space that's not created in a way that becomes too insular. It's really hard to find that balance of making something that feels open and accessible and human, but that doesn't get immediately taken over by bad actors. And so we just want to show people that there's people on the internet and that relationships and the people are the thing that are the most important thing. And so we're really building to help encourage people to foster those relationships, not just with their peers and with each other, but with their clients, that really that's the way forward.

47:02Even with all these technological innovations, it's just all about the people and the people connections. Speaking of just getting it, one thing that caught my attention is how StudioWorks is beautifully designed. It feels like a product that is designed by designers, people who do care about this. And you've gone to the trouble of partnering with TypeFoundries to have a variety of fonts available for your customers, your users to be able to design their identity to their clients and present themselves well. And that, ironically, is something that with most products that are in this category, that's just not even considered.

47:43Can you talk a little bit about the design process of the product and how you think about things like this? The reason why other companies don't do it is they perceive anyone that touches their product as a potential customer, they take every opportunity to basically advertise themselves to the people that are interacting with their product. And they're not trying to advertise you as a customer to other potential customers. And we just take the opposite approach where we know that the clients that our people are interacting with are probably not potential customers. Even if they are, I don't think we're doing our company a disservice by highlighting our people behind it.

48:21So we just really wanted to make it feel like a white-labeled, fancy-pants, custom-developed thing for each of the studios because it's something that's not accessible to them. If you think about larger design studios, they can hire a development agency to build a crazy custom backend for file management and all kinds of stuff. But independent creatives and really small studios just never have that ability. And it feels like you're just kind of scotch-taping a bunch of different products together that are serving a purpose, but not creating this cohesive whole that makes you look more professional in the eyes of your clients.

48:57And one of the things that both Chris and I believe in is that design is very meaningful in the success of anything. If you've ever sold a house, you know that staging matters a lot. If you have a well-designed house with good staging, you will get 10, 20 % more than if you don't. Design is the same thing with even just the paperwork and stuff that we share with clients. If it looks professional, you can justify higher prices. If it looks professional and is streamlined, you can get paid faster because you look like a person who's on top of that kind of stuff. Anybody who looks like they might have a legal team is someone who's going to get paid faster.

49:40What we want is for our studios that use our software to look so professional that if they're chasing down a check from a client, even if it's for not that much money, that accounting studio firm looks at everything that's come their way and said, oh, these guys are the real deal. We should probably make that happen. And also look how easy they made it. So with the overall design, Chris and I work really well together. The thing that makes the team so amazing is that we're all very polymathic. I am, of course, a designer, but I also can do HTML and CSS and PHP writing and all kinds of stuff, which allows me to communicate really clearly with Nick because he's doing all our front end stuff.

50:20And I can understand how to design for limitations and different modalities of building versus if you're a designer that doesn't have any experience with UI design or development, you might design something that's quite difficult to accomplish instead of focusing on the thing that is the most streamlined approach. And Chris is incredible at making a thing that is the most streamlined way of doing the thing. Anytime I design a thing, Chris looks at it and goes, what if we made it this and just take things away? And I'm like, oh, that is better. You're right. I love those type of people. Yeah. But then whenever he does writing or things like that for the site, I'm like, we need to jazz this up a little bit.

51:04So he's really good at getting to the core of it. And then I'm good at adding a little bit of warmth to it. And so we're able to really work together. We co-work a lot. I'll be in Figma with him on Zoom and we're talking through how we want to do things. So we really do co-design quite a bit because for me, the UI design and the experience design is not about skinning the product and making it look pretty. It's about how do we make this interaction so easy and seamless and straightforward that it's like you didn't even notice that you were doing work. How do we make that experience so quick and straightforward that you're in and out, you're doing your thing, and then you have to log into your QuickBooks after six months of using us, and you're like, oh my God, how did I deal with this for years of my life?

51:55The hours lost. We wanted to be shocking about how easy and straightforward and delightful it is to do basic stuff. Yeah, one of our core tenets is simplicity, which is easy to say and really hard to pull off. But it's because we see so many people, I think ourselves included, who feel intimidated by a lot of the complex business tools out there. And it makes running a business feel complicated and even time consuming. We want creative people to spend most of their time doing the work that they want to be doing, not running their business. So we almost want to be provocative with how simple we make these tools.

52:33Like, wait, is that all I need to do? Is that all the bookkeeping I need to do? Don't I need some charts and graphs to think about things? We really scrutinize everything that we add so that we can make this product richer and richer over time without falling into the trap of so many other companies that just continue adding features and features and features until the thing feels overwhelming again. We are really trying hard to keep it simple and to make everything the bare essentials of what you need to run a business so that you can spend most of your time running your business. Some people question how diligently we pursue this goal and how we care about things like design and why it should really matter.

53:18And an analogy I used with a friend of mine recently was that back when TSA PreCheck was first coming out, I eagerly signed up. And for a while, lines at the airport were much shorter. And that was great. And then I remember recommending it to someone who said, well, the TSA PreCheck lines are just as long as the regular lines. Why would I get it? And to me, that was an absurd question because I was like, well, you get to go through security with your dignity. It's not the shorter line. that's a side benefit, you know? And I think for Studio Works, the lower fees or something like that, that's kind of like our example of the shorter lines.

53:56We're really trying to give designers their dignity. We don't want you to feel embarrassed that you're not businessy enough because you feel overwhelmed by your tools. We want you to love your tools, to send an invoice and feel proud of how you're presenting yourself. And so we've gone through great pains, not only to make it simple, but to make it beautiful, to make the whole client experience is very your brand forward. It's not us trying to, you know, impress our brand upon your clients. And we think those things matter. A secret mission that we have is also convincing people they don't need to use bookkeeping software because we have a lot of customers that are like, I really love what you're doing, but my accountant uses QuickBooks.

54:37And to me, there's a lot of software, not just bookkeeping software, but a lot of software that's solving a problem that's not a real problem. And I have a lot of expenses. I have technically four businesses because I have two brick and mortar shops. I've got StudioWorks. I've got my own business. I sell books. I do all kinds of things. And I do my bookkeeping once a year. It takes me four hours. I just export my CSVs. My accountant also uses QuickBooks. I can send him CSVs or I can export my CSVs as QuickBooks format. And I used to use Mint and I used to do all those things that auto import your expenses.

55:16And it's hours per week correcting the auto import. This is my Roman empire now is how do I convince people that actually some of these tools, while you feel more professional because you're paying 60 bucks a month for this thing that's attached to your bank account, it's actually making you do more work. A big thing for Studio Works is, you know, the simplicity on purpose, but also really explaining to people the most straightforward way to do the things that they need to do for their business and what things matter and what things don't. The bookkeeping hill is a hill that I'm on right now just because we had debated on whether we were going to build a complex bookkeeping product as a part of Studio Works.

55:55But ultimately, we would just be making more work for people like all these other things do. So we're focusing on the things that other things don't do well. Like if you're just a person that loves to do two to three hours of bookkeeping a week and that's organizing your sock drawer and you enjoy that, I'm not going to take that away from you. You do that. That's a special type of person. It's a special type of person. But where we're going to take Studio Works, which has always been on our roadmap, is dealing with the onboarding side of working with a client. So sending proposals and scope of works that then can automatically feed into an MSA that can then automatically feed into your invoicing.

56:32So then it just becomes one streamlined pipeline of moving things forward. And so that's really where we're at. The way that a lot of other platforms handle proposals is that they treat it more like a sales pitch. So it's meant to be basically like a fancy PDF on the internet that is like, here are our skills. Here's why you should hire us. Whereas the way that we're approaching proposals is more like how independent businesses do it, which is to send a scope of work that becomes a light contract. We want to make it flexible to how different people do business, but ultimately most people that are working for smaller clients can get by with a proposal and an invoice.

57:09And so we want to make sure that we can scale to how everybody does business, but we want to really make it so that it's super straightforward. You can request edits and co-sign and all kinds of things online so that you don't need to download a PDF, open it in preview, sign it with whatever, you know, how do we make the thing so that you're not having to jankily put together all of the things that you do to get a project started. What do each of you like about being independent? I love the flexibility to work on things that I'm passionate about when I'm passionate about them. That's a big thing for me, which has been a bit of a pain point with the team sometimes where I'm like, okay, well, this week Studio Works is happening for me from 8 p.m.

57:54until 2 a.m. because I'm doing this other thing during the day. My day job can flip into a night job. And I love that because if I'm suddenly really passionate about a thing that's best done during the day, because I have access to the resources that I need to during the day versus when I can be in like a solo hole at nighttime, I have the ability to do that. So I love that. And also the flexibility to be able to have my business map to my family rather than having my family map to my business. On Mondays, I pick my son up at 220 and he does drum lessons before I do drum lessons. And every Monday, he starts his day off going, Monday's my favorite day of the week.

58:35And I'm like, me too, man, me too. That's great. If I wasn't working for myself, that's not something I'd be able to do. Even with the whole work from home flexibility that a lot of people have now, you're still on the hook for Zooms and meetings and all kinds of stuff throughout the day. And I think when you can manage your own time and your own life, you get to actually build the life that you want, not just build the career that you want. My answer would echo a lot of what Jessica said, especially about trying to shape your work to your family and not the other way around. I think that's pretty important.

59:07But there's also like this emotional part of it that's the feeling of freedom. I don't know why, but that's always felt really important to me. And I'm happiest when I feel free. I can even think of analogies that also kind of reinforce this about myself. So, for example, when I lived in New York, I biked everywhere to get around. Not all the time. I would hop on the subway sometimes. But whenever City Bike was first launched, you know, this bike share program in New York, I started using it. And a lot of people didn't really understand that because, like, I had my own bike and it was better. But what I really loved about City Bike was hopping on a bike, going somewhere, docking it.

59:45you wash your hands of that whole situation. You're free again. Let's see where the day takes me. You might go back to that same station to go home later, but you might not. You're not really tied to that. And the other thing that I do a lot is I love to go backpacking. So it's just like camping, but you have everything you need on your back. And there's something about being deep in the wilderness. I always have a plan. There's somewhere that I'm going that I plan to like camp over by this lake or something. But that mountain to the east, you could just go there instead. You feel this complete freedom that you have everything you need right there with you.

1:00:22The entrepreneurial spirit to me is kind of that. It's people that are seeking that kind of freedom. It shapes a lot of your life if you can get there, how you're able to live your life and the sort of life you're able to design for you and your family. I think a thing that's important to remember, though, is that the entrepreneurial spirit is not natural to most people. It is a thing that you get thrust into or that you have to embrace just because of the nature of the things that you want to do because there is not a sustainable full-time thing for the thing that you are passionate about. And I think a lot of us that start off as independent creatives or entrepreneurs.

1:01:03At first, we're operating out of a place of fear in terms of diversifying yourself. Yes, it's easier to get clients if you have a specialty, but you also have to have your finger in a lot of pies just because that thing doesn't always work out at this time. So you end up kind of splinting yourself into a lot of different places just because you're trying to survive and you're trying to make sure that you have something going on if this other thing doesn't work out. So it starts out of this survival mechanism and a little bit out of a fear-based thing. But eventually, once you can kind of prove to yourself that things will work out because you just keep going and you care and you're passionate about it, there's this ceramic dish.

1:01:50I need to track down the artist of it, but it keeps popping up in my feed. And it says, I will succeed because I am insane. And I love it so much because there's this thing of just kind of at some point, you just believe that it's all going to work out because you're like, no matter what, I'll have something to do. I've got my backup plan. I've done this a million times. I have doomsday prepped my career 400 million times. And then instead of operating out of a place of fear, you can just operate out of a place of curiosity and passion. And when that switches over, It's incredible. It's just an incredible thing where you know that something financially will be okay.

1:02:32Worst case scenario, I'm barista. You know, like whatever. Like I'll figure it out. It doesn't matter. And no shame in that. That's a great gig. I'm a big believer in you keep your day job to sustain whatever it is that you want to do. I gave this talk once that was called I Am Batman and You Can Be Too. and it was this idea that Batman only exists because of Bruce Wayne. Batman's cool and doing all kinds of cool stuff, but he is incapable of doing that stuff without the financial benefactor of Bruce Wayne. So you figure out what your Bruce Wayne is, whatever it is. If it's a day job or some version of a thing that's not creativity at all, that's your Bruce Wayne so that you can be Batman.

1:03:14And if Batman can take up more of your life, amazing. but that only happens when Bruce Wayne is really killing it. It rules when Bruce Wayne becomes something that is a little sustainable and like it's not a grind because it just gives you more space to be curious and try things and pursue those passions. And if it happens at a time in your life where normally we start getting locked down and stone brick mindset instead of growth mindset, all the better because you can actually keep that vitality mentally and creatively going instead of getting into that really static place that a lot of us get into in our 40s and 50s and stuff.

1:03:54I love the Batman Bruce Wayne metaphor. Chris, I also like what you said about bikes. And I try to go and I'm in a different city to grab a bike. The cities that have bike shares. Word of caution though, Aaron and I a number of years ago were in Sydney and we decided to grab some bikes and ride around and didn't realize how draconian their helmet laws are. We got pulled over by the cops and we had to return the bikes because you're not allowed. We almost got arrested. Yeah, that's right. We had been on the ground for maybe an hour in Sydney and almost got arrested. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I actually have heard that about.

1:04:25I think it's the U.S. and Australia are the most pro-helmet cultures. Yeah. And both have, of course, the highest incidence. Right, right. Well, let's ask our wrap question here, which we often ask of our guests. And before we started recording, we were talking about the Stranger Things shirt that I'm wearing, which is kind of inspiring me. It's a collab between Stranger Things and Santa Cruz Skate and Surf. And last time we were chatting, we talked about Antiques Roadshow, which is a great show. What for both of you is just inspiring you in your off time right now? I'm inspired by everyone that's pursuing something that they really want to, even though it's hard.

1:05:05I think that's especially true these days because a lot of things are hard, you know, with AI uncertainty, economic weirdness, global political instability, all the things. There's injustice everywhere you look, and it feels like it's either way more prevalent these days or it's way more in your face. So it can be really hard to kind of pursue something for joy or to try to contribute something positive to the world. But I think those who are, it's really important. It reminds me a little bit of the Fred Rogers quote where his mom told him in times of strife or a great tragedy, look for the helpers.

1:05:42People interpret that in lots of different ways. My way of interpreting it was just that she was trying to give him something to focus on that is positive when a lot of things aren't. So if you're one of those people out there doing something positive, no matter how small, you're inspiring a bunch of us and it really does matter. So thank you. I'll piggyback on that just in that with doing a lot of public speaking and things like that. I've talked during some very stressy times for people to students that are graduating into a very unknown workforce and all that kind of thing. And also lived through a few of these iterations of there being a lot of upheaval and a lot of bad stuff going on and people being like, I don't know how to be a person in the world during this.

1:06:27I feel like I should quit everything and just be a volunteer or do whatever. And the thing that I have told folks, which I really believe in and really echoes what you said, Chris, is that there are certainly people that are born to change the world. They want to be on the ground. They want to be a nurse. They want to be doing the hard stuff in person, and they are passionate about that. But artists and creatives, their job is to remind those people why the world is worth saving. We need to create joy and beauty because if all you can focus on is the negative and the bad stuff that's going on, you burn out really fast in those roles.

1:07:09That's really one of the main functions of art is just to show what humans are capable of and the beauty in the world so that when you go through the hard times, you can be like, this is worth doing because this is worth saving. But the thing that's lighting me up right now is doing stained glass, you know? Nice. I have felt very alive in the last couple of years pursuing a bunch of different mediums and interests that in a former life I felt I was too intimidated to do or that it didn't contribute directly to my financial success or my life as a designer. And it feels incredible to want to make things just because you like to do it, even if it goes nowhere.

1:07:56There's stained glass things that I'm baking just for my house that I will never share a picture of on the internet. That feels incredible coming out of this space of social media where everything you make and every moment that you have should be shared and maximized and monetized just to be able to like find a way to create without the eye of Sauron on you is really nice. That's wonderful. Well, Jessica and Chris, thank you so much for what you're doing with StudioWorks, where can people learn more about it and sign up and start operating their business more effectively? Yeah, we actually set up a special page just for your listeners.

1:08:35If you sign up before the end of the year, you're going to get basically a lifetime discount, which is the same thing that we offered the people who we call founding members, those lovely souls who signed up before we even had a product. And that is at join.studioworks.app slash design better. So it will be$29 a month for you for as long as you're a customer. And again, that's if you sign up before the end of the year. We think this is a special time where maybe you're open to trying something new, start the new year fresh, and we'd love to show you a simpler, more beautiful way of running your business.

1:09:14Yeah, and our current subscription cost is$39 a month. And our goal, you know, we've talked a lot about the goals of the business over time, is that we not only don't want to raise our prices, even as the product gets richer and richer and richer, but if there's a world in which we can sustain ourselves, we'll talk about lowering the prices for everyone, including folks that have these sort of deals. So what we want to do is just figure out how to get this thing really rocking and rolling so that we can make it even more accessible to folks. And there's no seats, There's no gotchas. Yeah, there's one plan, everything that we have, no feature gatekeeping.

1:09:52And we try to make everyone look as pro as everyone else. I love that. Well, Chris and Jessica, thank you so much for joining us on Design Better. Yeah, thanks so much for having us. Yeah, thanks so much. This was great.

1:10:08This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter. with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel, designbetterpodcast.com. It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.

1:10:43Thank you.