Pip Jamieson | IWD Special | The Power of Dyslexia

27:16And I can't tell you how good of a kind of community it is. And they do these like run events. I mean, it's like four times a week, right? And the guys that run this, I'm like, this must be close to a full time job. Like it's kind of crazy that you put in. I'm so appreciative of it. And one of the big problems they get is like, I mean, honestly, the tickets for the track sessions sell out in like 10 minutes but they don't i'm not even sure sell out is the right phrase because we're all free and i've said to them but i think you should just you should just charge a pound or something just to like even if it's for you guys to go and have drinks afterwards or whatever like by all means and they they absolutely kind of like refuse to do it and i get it i totally get why they're doing it but i also just think like i just want them to be kind of sustainable and you know all this stuff you know like it does cost like to run these things and whatever yeah and it's very kind they do it out of the generosity of their own hearts but i just yeah like how you make these things sustainable i think is really like here's a kind of key question for these things because this thing is like genuinely it was like one run a week and now you can be doing something every night of the week with these guys and it's i mean it's it's brilliant it's such a good kind of thing that's what i've loved about collaborating with our partners because we have two tiers in our apps you can be on a vip tier or non-vip tier so some of the partners have leveraged it so that they've got freemium members on there that then use the product to upsell because you're right if you love something and you value something you will pay for it and so but you also want to make it accessible and you also want to show them the benefit of paying you know and so yeah i mean i'm you know i was i'm part of a entrepreneur's community called ice which is where we first met um it was you know really it was really cheap in the early days or was it even free when i joined anyway um they ranked up the prices i continue to pay you know because i get value um why because no one understands a founder like another founder um if i need advice i want to go to another founder and that's why i'm loving powering uh business a small business community because that is amazing i totally are you doing the I'm not there.

29:24No, they can't afford me, Jimmy. The feet aren't that high. God, could you cut that? Ice, I love you. No, I think we should talk about Ice Brothers. I mean, that is community and that is entrepreneur. But what do you, give us an idea. What do your prices start at? So we start at£3 ,900 a month and we go up from there. And it depends on the complexity of integration. So, you know, some of our partners have incredibly complex technology stacks. So we don't do, for example, their CRM, so where they own their membership. Our partners, that continues to sit on their side because they should own their membership, not us.

30:10So we overlay on to partners CRM, say it could be Salesforce, and then we then integrate all their different revenue streams. So the more integrations, the more we cost. And also every member app that we do, you get up to 1 ,000 members as free as part of that core package. But we then start charging from over 1 ,000 members per member. So, yeah. So you can use it via Salesforce for free then up to 1 ,000 people. So for the paid members, up to 1 ,000. So anyone on that VIP tier. Right, yeah. And so they can add as many free members. So technically, you can have a community of a million people and only a thousand people are paying and I'm not getting extra money for the amount of members.

30:50But really, that's there to incentivize us to help our partners make more money. But what's been and it's funny going back to your original point, Jimmy, you're right. Again, no one's going to download an app if they're not getting value for it. But if you join a community and pay for that community, you're getting value for it already. We just overlay and connect between those activations. yeah i can see that um so coming back to a live mentoring session i often think about this with jimmy's jobs right because like we've got a sort of like we do have a community but like when we get a guest on like i like it partly in terms of like we've got like a couple of like informal whatsapp groups and whatever um but we don't we don't really use it or harness it as well as we could occasionally i'll be like oh we've got this guest coming on have you got any questions or anything like that and actually it's really useful but sometimes we put that on linkedin as well like because that's part of a community as well like a little bit and yeah and i'm always i'm always worried about like putting real effort into the community in terms of like creating a separate thing because i think oh it's gonna be another thing to manage it's another thing to deal with um and so on so i'm just sort of slightly rumbling now i i do i do like firmly believe in this i think it's really interesting and actually having that paid membership thing is really interesting but i think the most important thing and funnily enough there's a lot of brands on our wait list that are in your sort of position they're thinking about it but they're not there right if i get on call with them i will say you are not ready for us yet yes the best way to work out if you have a community is to do stuff in the real world first start doing actual live mentoring start bringing together people and see if there is that stickiness if there is then overlay onto that stickiness so we look after another a member club without a club called a dorium which is um entrepreneurs investors and friends of they've been going for maybe six seven years they've been doing supper clubs, bringing everyone together.

33:02It's really great biz dev for everyone. That was going before we overlaid. We just overlay onto the magic that was already happening. So I would never say go, never go to a digital solution for a community first. You need to work out if you actually have a community first, and then you can overlay a digital solution. The advantage of a digital solution, it then can make your community scalable. So one of the key things that we kind to train our partners in is we have a dashboard that shows you the most engaged members of your community so the ones that are engaging with the app most often those are the ones you can then empower to lead the community for you they're the ones that can start doing events for you they're the ones that can start running groups for you so with that data it allows you to take a community from say a hundred people to a thousand to ten thousand because you're actually the best communities i work with are communities that are built from the bottom up not from the top down you can't be scalable you know you can't they can't you can't have you know 100 jimmies looking after all the regions around the world you have to find those advocates in your community that can do what you're doing for you and that's where data and digital comes in but you still first have to prove you have a community in the first place so what else do you talk people through Let's get this so we can scale pips.

34:26Like, what else are the things that you say to people? Because that is genuinely, because we've done some live events, and, like, you, it's, it does sort of bring it together. Like, that is a very good test, actually, to kind of do it and so on. Well, I think the live events is really interesting because you also need to tune in. Are they coming to see you talk and the person? or where the indication of a community is, are they talking to each other before and after? And can you just not get them out because they want to network so much? That's a community. A community talks to each other, right?

35:02And that's the power of then overlaying a digital solution because all the things they're trying to do in a room, you know, meet interesting people, get help, get advice, build those relationships. That can then be translated digitally. But we actually, as I said, we do white glove with all our partners. So we have a playbook that we have created that really takes everyone from the beginning to the end. Actually, the most important bit before you even go live with the product is the first couple of months preceding it. And this is something I learned from the amazing Nick Jones at Soar House, but building a group of founding members who can basically help seed the act before it goes live.

35:40But also, Jimmy, I made every single mistake you could possibly make building a digital community on the dots. It's like, honestly, it was, so I'd say this playbook is part everything I've learned from the partners that I work with, part everything I've learned from the books I've read and everything like that. But actually, it's also everything I mucked up at the dots that wasn't scalable, that was the wrong solution. So, for example, when I launched the dots, I launched with a load of influencers thinking this would be really great. We'll get all these really influential people on the platform.

36:15And wouldn't that be brilliant? biggest disaster influencers don't care about engaging like they want to look good but if someone dms them they're not going to get back to them so i re-engineered with our partners going your founding members should be people that are passionate about your brand that you can trust to actually do the things you want who will get back to the people if they dm will help answer questions in those early days to fuel that early engagement yeah celebrity is the worst person possible because they are busy they have not got time to reply to someone in their dms you want those rising stars not the those those people will get more value by being on instagram so yeah i think the other really important thing for us is vetting that the partners we work with it's right for them so we we don't work with people unless they're ready for us because it's going to be a waste of money for you if it's not a real community yet and what makes good traits in the companies that you work for what makes a good community manager do you know we funny enough right at the beginning we train them to think about themselves as community curators not managers so community manager is someone who it feels like you should be managing everything across the community.

37:35And that is the opposite way. A community curator should be listening to the community. What do they need? What do they need help with? And empower them to build the community for you. So going back to the kind of So How So Works example, I learned so much from that first white label, because they were doing this already before we work with, but actually the vast majority's events at SohoWorks are not run by the SohoWorks team. It's run by their members. So for example, they had a monthly write club event where writers would come together. It was led by a writer at SohoWorks and they were doing it on a monthly basis.

38:19And then that has now translated to they run the group in the app. And so, but what you need, going back to your question of community manager or community curator you need someone who listens and sees what the community is doing and empowers them to do that kind of stuff a community manager what i what i find so funny because there's there are other products obviously competing us but they've i've been doing this for so long because of the dots i can see them making all the mistakes i made like six years ago i'm like oh bless you um but they are training people to create content and blast their community all the time.

38:54That is fine if you've got great content, but the problem is that's not scalable. And so what we suggest to our community, to our community curators, yes, if you have great content, you want to share it. But at the same time, you need your community to become content creators. You need them to be running group chats, asking questions, hosting events for you, because that just leads to more engagement, which means then when you post content, you reach bigger audience. So yeah, it's all about sort of re-engineering that. It's not an Insta just share everything as much content as possible situation.

39:31It's quality content over quantity content and let the community become the creators with you. Yeah, I completely agree with that. So what are some of the best communities that you're part of? Because you mentioned as well, we met through a community group. well two it was silicon valley comes to uk and then ice sort of embedded our friendship do you know what i if they're still two of my favorite i would love to wear it with both um yesterday i was literally at the london partners yeah and i i was just and i janet coil is like almost my favorite human on this entire planet um and janet you know i really when i first started the dots i was probably a couple of years in, I was part of one of their early growth summits.

40:20And we went over to the Valley and had this amazing kind of three days of going and meeting Cal, who's the founder of Slack and going to Meta and et cetera, et cetera. But the friends going back to community, the women I met on that bus have become my closest, closest friends. And they're the ones I back phone if I've got a problem. So it's like the amazing Ella Golding who runs Zinc. So Zinc obviously is a or not if you've never heard of zinc it's a entrepreneurs first um that's all about uh helping solve the world's biggest problems bringing founders together to help solve the world's biggest problems so ella was on that bus with me um and so you know those women have become so fundamental to my life so funnily enough it wasn't i mean it was great to go and meet calot slack and what a legend but actually none no value came from that for my business the value came from that trip was the the women i met on it and how we've supported each other over the years and we actually had dinner together about um a month ago uh and it was at the kenton the new kenton roof garden so it was just wonderful getting us all together so that's one of my favorite networks is london partners um and then ice which is yeah is just amazing as well um i've I try probably every founder network, I think, in Britain.

41:42Maybe there's a few I haven't heard. I bet you have, yeah. But I've churned out of most of them. I think what I found valuable about ICE, it's slightly later stage founders. Yeah. So you're back to that kind of, you know, we're all in the same boat, but I'm, you know, I'm busy. I wish I had more time to give to other people, but I'm, you know, I'm busy. So being in a peer-to-peer group where you can help each other is very useful. and so yeah ICE has been I think my favourite community I just need to power their blooming community now any sponsors who want to power the ICE community you get access to all the entrepreneurs, top entrepreneurs in the UK and what jobs have you hired for building this and just generally what changes you seeing in the job market because it was very interesting when you came on uh four years ago you're talking about like you don't need to be a techie to work in technology companies they were hiring lots of copywriters producers etc all right obviously now everyone talks about ai so let's touch on that a little bit but i'd be interested in your thoughts on ai and the future of jobs Yeah, I think it's really fascinating for us.

43:04So the whole growth of my team has come through the engineering team because of the white labeling. So all of that expansion has come through there. And so, but in terms of what has been interesting in terms of AI is things like starting to reduce some of the mundane tasks they were doing. So every time we build a new feature, we have to build tests around that feature to make sure when you click here, it doesn't break. which is very complex when you have multiple apps and you're deploying a new feature to multiple apps because you can't break it across anywhere. But the team use AI now to do the initial write of the test.

43:44They still have to check it. And that was always the bit my developers hate most, right? It's the really mundane bit. And there's this whole thing in tech, that last 5 % is the worst because it's so boring. so it's helped with that that kind of cycle yeah um we also have now a language model that sits behind the dots that removes um offensive language which is now got a lot more ai based in there to really stop any abusive because a big fear of some of my partners is you get people being awful and you suddenly got a facebook on your hands um sorry i'm really laying into meta i should start saying x but i think it's because i deleted x from my phone so i kind of forget x exists apart from when elon sort of pops up when i re-listened to the episodes earlier this week i did find it funny because it was literally before the 2020 us presidential election and here we are recording two days after the 24 presidential election our whole week has felt like deja vu in lots of different ways it's like let's let's not go over i haven't processed it all yet no i haven't I processed it.

44:53I'm an interesting person. Oh, yeah, I didn't sleep much that night. But yeah, so I, what was I saying? Where were we at? We're talking about jobs, AI impacts. So in terms of my own business, it's definitely, you know, made a massive impact, but from tools to help our communities, like AI that removes offensive language and learns as it goes, because it's amazing how, you know, words evolve. But I think in terms of, we've done loads of sit-downs of like, what more could we do in AI? But we're like almost the opposite product. It's a community. It's got to be human. Like we can't have AI like writing back to other people.

45:40You'd end up just having the bots chat to the bots. So it's been more from an operational efficiency level than from a... And then the same with just efficiency across the board, like the Dots help desk, for example, just being able to just make that whole thing a lot more efficient. So it's been more operational efficiency. I think of where, I mean, it's tough, right? Because it's really hard to disentangle what's happening now with AI, with the fact we've gone through COVID and a flat economy. So, you know, you're looking at the tech industry has shaved at least 30 % off its workforce. And, you know, one of the only tech, mega tech companies that hasn't cut jobs is Apple, but they did a hiring freeze, but they did protect their teams.

46:37so you know is this what's coming or is this just because of the economic stagnation that we're currently sitting in i think for the roles that you were just talking about like in terms of copywriting and production the ones that are doing really well are the ones that are adopting ai to augment what they're doing the ones that don't it will be left out because you can become so much more efficient but with that efficiency means it's more competitive to the ones that aren't it is nuts how much content we're able to churn out now it's changed so much in the last four years what do you use it for?

47:19me personally I'm dyslexic Jimmy, it's changing my life let's talk about dyslexia though because it was interesting I keep banging on about it, go back and listen to the episode like it was interesting because you basically talked about all the problems dyslexia brought for people yeah i'm dyslexic as well yeah you embrace it more than i do um and you talk about it being a superpower but you basically talk about all the negatives of dyslexia and you don't actually say in the episode what are the benefits of being a dyslexic entrepreneur yeah oh god that was massive oversight like i if someone gave me a one tomorrow and said they could take away my dyslexia i would just break that wand and run a mile um so 35 of entrepreneurs are dyslexic and 40 of self-made millionaires and there is a reason for that is because we think differently so there was this brilliant piece of harvard research that basically said that we if you think of humans as the most sophisticated robots to date we just take an information and we synthesize that into problem solving creative thinking um dyslexics are just we take in actually more data we see more of the world which means we can get burnout quicker because we're just taking in all this information but that then means that we're better at connecting dots and we're better at problem solving and that's why dyslexia correlates with creativity because i can see solutions incredibly fast um and i thought that was normal until i sort of started getting older and realize it's not.

48:58The other thing that dyslexia correlates with is perseverance. And they're not really sure why. Maybe it's because we had challenges when we were young and we had to work really hard to operate in a neurotypical world, to finish exams, get to university. And so that was that very young training of perseverance. And perseverance, obviously, probably the most important trait when it comes to entrepreneurship. so yeah I absolutely and empathy is another correlation with dyslexia which I found really interesting and maybe interesting because people would often think of neurodiverse people as probably lacking that as a kind of like dyslexia no yeah but it depends which neurodiverse traits you have um so dyslexia no that very much correlates with empathy um but with all like you know autism can be more blunt it doesn't mean there isn't you know deep kindness there at all it's just it's it's more i love working with autistic people it's amazing you just always know where you stand and there's no politics it's just great let's just get stuff done um but yeah so it's it's got its superpowers but you know i mean i work in tech i mean i'd say we're more autistic than not in terms of the makeup of the tech industry um so it's great but i do think it's interesting like so much of what i and you try and do i think in different ways is like talent maximization right like and it's the thing that like quite a good question i sometimes think and like to ask politicians and talk to them about it's like what makes you angry and i've always thought if people not maximizing their talent like infuriates me um and it is interesting this sort of like neurodiversity has become such a bigger issue in the last we've become so much more aware of it but i also think like you know particularly as a country you know we really need to get back at the races a little bit and like if we can learn how to harness that different neurodiversity like it really will make us like a superpower etc and so it's so interesting to talk to you about it because i still think there is quite a lot of Britishness about sort of awkward topic etc yeah and it's funny you see I even now sometimes because I'm so open about it I sort of almost forget that people have this stigma about it even now you'll say oh yeah and I'm dyslexic you'll see someone's face like you know or oh they'll just be really blunt oh you poor thing and you're like okay no right recompute um but you know I mean hey when we were like cave people you know it was definitely an autistic child who worked out how to rub sticks together to make fire you know like this is i think where we've evolved to is probably down yeah to a lot of that different minds that did look at things differently and and helped us so the most famous is obviously um richard branson and massive thanks to him to being so open about it because no one i don't think before richard really was but steve jobs was dyslexic autistic adhd and they think einstein was even though wasn't really those sort of um tools back then but you've got people like anita broderick um you've got people like joe malone and the amazing holly tucker so um the black farmer it just all these brilliant people with dyslexic um dyslexic brains but i mean i think if you walk around a room of founders and asked are you dyslexic or not, the majority will probably be somewhere on the neurodiverse spectrum.

52:40ADHD is another great one for entrepreneurship because I have learned a lot about neurodiversity since I've become really open about it. And I always thought ADHD was like, you know, they used to call it naughty boy syndrome. You know, they distracted and everything like that. But actually ADHD, when you're interested in a subject matter, can manifest into hyperfocus. so you know people who are very driven can also have adhd and so yeah it's been a it's been a really interesting journey watching about how those things can interlock and you tend not to just have one um so my my husband's convinced i also have adhd i've just never been diagnosed because i if i'm what i focus on i'm focused on but i can't see the pool of clothes on the floor or maybe that's just my excuse.

53:27Yeah. Yeah, I definitely think I have more traits of ADHD as the years go. Right, yeah. Yeah, I wonder what my wife would say. She'll never get this far into a podcast, so it's fine. Never, never find it. Do you know what was so sweet? My husband last night when I came back for the awards, he suddenly got the guilt and he goes, should I have been there? And I was like, oh, bless you. I was like, he hates that stuff. So I was like, I'll never force you to go. And he suddenly got this guilt that actually his wife got an award. Maybe he should have been there to celebrate. We've also done the Squiggly Careers podcast together.

54:08And we're big fans of what Helen and Sarah are doing at Squiggly. But tell us about your Squiggly career. It is so insanely squiggly. So dyslexic. Didn't ever think I'd finish school. Madly finished school. and worked very, very hard. No one in my family had ever been to uni, so no one ever thought I'd go to uni, but madly I got into uni. And I did economics and maths. And so I was a very strange graduate because I did actually become an economist. So I became an economist for the Fast Stream Civil Service. So I developed a very dodgy algorithm that measured drug harm, which they still use today.

54:47So when they say, like, drugs cost the economy like 1.8 billion or whatever, I'm sure it's much more than that. That's actually the algorithm I developed way back then. Anyway, so government wasn't for me. I'm way too fast moving. So I jumped ship and I joined the Brit Awards as an event coordinator. Actually, my job at the Brit Awards was to organize their goodie bags, which was one of the funnest jobs ever because I just called people around and anything I loved, I just phoned them up. So, for example, wellies at festivals are really in there and I got these Union Jack wellies made for everyone.

55:31So, yeah, that was a fun, not a future facing necessarily career. And then I moved to Australia and I got a job at MTV, but in a business strategy role. So they realized no one at MTV could do maths. And I'd been working at the Brittle Woods on economics and maths degree. So they put them together. And so, madly, I must have been about 23. And they asked me to develop the business model to launch MTV in New Zealand. And so I developed the business model to launch a new channel into a new region while we're in Australia. And then I applied for the head of marketing role, never done marketing in my life.

56:13And very long story short, they didn't give it to me, but then the person they did hire was terrible. And so they gave it to me. So I was then head of marketing for MTV in New Zealand. I had to move to the country reading a dummy's guard to marketing. But this is our social media hit. I had no budget. I had no marketing knowledge. So I just started hacking Facebook, which had really just launched around there. So then that was my first hurrah into sort of digital media and working around tech. And so we were doing stuff on Facebook and MySpace when MySpace was big. And then I started my first tech company.

56:48Again, had no idea what I was doing. didn't have a computer science degree how naive was i of course i can start a tech company uh so i founded my first tech company in australia uh which um i learned a lot at um i managed to get a tiny little exit um that exit then funded seed funded the capital for the dots and the rest is history and obviously dots has also evolved so we were b2c community and now we're b2b and oh my god it's so much easier amazing and yeah i just once convinced the head of air new zealand to give me an aeroplane and do an in-flight concert from new zealand to australia uh and then i also convinced dizzy rascal to fly to new zealand to perform on that gig so and you had dizzy rascal performing above, I should know what that piece of sea is called, the dinghy strait, the Australian New Zealand strait.

57:52Tasman. Hey? Tasman. That's Tasman. Oh, my God, I'm not very good at geography. You can see my ADHD brain. So you got Dizzy Varsical. Yeah. Flying Australia to New Zealand, performing in the air. Yeah. And so literally, Dizzy flew to New Zealand. We had to do a rehearsal in a grounded airplane in an airport hangar. We didn't have enough power to power the bass speakers on the plane. So the head of Air New Zealand, who I was collaborating with on the project, he phoned the then Prime Minister of Australia and convinced him, because his private jet had a battery pack that was strong enough to loan us that battery pack to then be able to put the sort of sound properly in that.

58:43So that was John Howard, was it? I can't remember. And so, yeah, so they flew the battery pack to New Zealand and, yeah, we did an in-flight gig with Dizzy. Halfway through, one of the speakers did blow up, so there is actually footage online of the plane filling a smoke. And I remember sitting next to this amazing guy, Stephen Jones, who was head of Air New Zealand. and we just looked at each other and go, oh my God, we're just gonna die on the Malay gig. And we called it the Malay gig, obviously. So yeah, that was, that was, that was my, my, you know, one and only rock and roll moment. That's so cool.

59:23Excellent.