As a creative entrepreneur, experimentation is important in finding a balance between your desires and those of your community. Rachael and Lauren discuss times that they’ve taken risks on new offerings in their business and the lessons learned from their experiences. How can we find profitable pathways for growth without abandoning our core purposes or interests? They also discuss low-effort ways to identify and test ideas on how to expand your business in a way that aligns with your missions and goals.
As a creative entrepreneur, experimentation is important in finding a balance between your desires and those of your community. Rachael and Lauren discuss times that they’ve taken risks on new offerings in their business and the lessons learned from their experiences. How can we find profitable pathways for growth without abandoning our core purposes or interests? They also discuss low-effort ways to identify and test ideas on how to expand your business in a way that aligns with your missions and goals.
Episode Mentions:
The transcript for this episode can be found here!
Lauren: I would be making myself something and my brother would be like, "Can I have one?" And I'd be like, "Give me a nickel," and he would go to his piggy bank and give me a nickel. And some people might be like, "That is horrible," but my parents were just like, "Whatever."
Rachael: Yeah, "She's an entrepreneur." I mean, people let their kids sell lemonade and-
Lauren: To strangers.
Rachael: Yeah.
Lauren: We're keeping the money in the family.
Rachael: In the family.
Lauren: This is actually very Chinese.
Rachael: I love that.
[Intro Music]
Rachael: Hello. Welcome back to Chaotic Creatives, a show about embracing the chaos that comes from living a creative life.
Lauren: We are your hosts, two self-proclaimed chaotic creative gals. I am Lauren Hom, better known as Hom Sweet Hom on the internet. I am a designer, letterer, muralist, and most recently, chef.
Rachael: And I'm Rachael Renae. I'm your internet hype gal. I am here to encourage you to play, to live a more confident, fulfilling, and creative life. Welcome back.
Lauren: Cool. What are we talking about today?
Rachael: Well, the audience doesn't know this, but I'm about to clue them in that we recorded an episode last week and we got through it and I was like, "That was so bad. We have to do that again."
Lauren: We were coming in fresh off of you were on a trip and we hadn't caught up in a couple of weeks and so we were simultaneously trying to sync back up while making something helpful for people.
Rachael: Yeah, and we didn't have time to do a prep for it. And we were just like, "All right, we can just roll into it."
Lauren: "We're pros."
Rachael: And you know, we tried. And then it was like, "Maybe that's better if we just take a beat."
Lauren: And you know, I feel like one of the themes we've talked about on this podcast is good enough is good enough. No perfectionism here. But on the flip side, there is a bar to clear, I guess, in terms of quality that everyone has. It's different for everybody. And yes, don't be so hard on yourself, but when you know it's not quite up to par, it's okay to redo it. There's no rush.
Rachael: Yeah, yep. No shame. So we're here and we're talking about reflecting on spending time and energy creating an offering, and then knowing when to say goodbye to it or shift it or modify it for a better outcome.
Lauren: Yes, specifically with business.
Rachael: Yes.
Lauren: So you've heard us talk about, "Everything's an experiment, just give it a try" when it comes to personal projects, when it comes to hobbies, and I think the same thing does apply to business, but the one thing that's different when it comes to business is we are trying to make money from this thing.
And that being a factor, we wanted to talk about some experiments that we've run in our own businesses, different offerings we've made, services we've tried to pitch, and share some lessons that we've learned because it can feel very vulnerable to put a new thing out there not knowing how it's going to perform. You're really taking your best guess at what you're going to enjoy, what's going to make money, and what people are going to be excited about. And then after you try it, you just have to evaluate and go, "Did that make money? Did I have fun?" If it made no money, it's probably not a good direction to go hard in with your business, but if you broke even or made a little bit of profit, you could tinker with it and try it a different way.
Rachael: Absolutely. And I think something that we've talked about in terms of creative hobbies or creative passion projects is not comparing yourself to other people, and I think this also applies here too.
Lauren: Oh, even more.
Rachael: You and I have different offerings, and of course we talk about things and you're ahead of me as far as establishing your business, and so there are things that I may try to mimic from you or other people who, "Okay, this creativity coach offers this. Maybe I should consider what's my version of that?" And it doesn't always mean that it's going to work. There is no set template for owning a creative business, and we can use that as a baseline and then customize, but then not being hard on ourselves and being like, "Oh, why does that work for that person and not for me?" Maybe because not as excited about it.
Lauren: Yeah, or there's so many factors.
Rachael: There's so many reasons.
Lauren: And I think it's easy to go, "Okay, that worked for that person. I tried it. It didn't work for me. Clearly I'm the one who's bad. I'm the bad variable."
Rachael: Internalizing it, yeah.
Lauren: When that's not necessarily the case, because like you were saying, you'll see creative people you follow online who seem to be doing well, and they'll say, "Here are the things I did to grow my business," or, "I tried this and I make this much passive income per month," or you'll see so many claims online that make for such sticky social media content, but I always tell people that everything works for somebody. Whether it means they got in early, whether it means it just was the perfect product-market fit, whether they got lucky, all these things, maybe it's specific to their niche or their demographic, or even geographic location can be a factor too.
Rachael: True.
Lauren: I was just talking to my dad on the phone this morning about how-
Rachael: Hi, Dad.
Lauren: Hi, Dad. What's up? How, after living in the Midwest for almost eight years now, which is so wild, I now realize, which obviously, duh, but I now realize, oh, it's much different building a... It would've been harder for me to get my career started in a smaller, less-dense city than me starting in New York.
And so that's a real thing of if you do want to move to one of the bigger cities, the LA, Chicago, San Francisco, New Yorks, cool, but if you don't and your life is here and you want to stay by your family, whatever it might be, you can still make it. There are just different avenues for you to do that.
Rachael: Absolutely, yeah. And I think that's something because I've lived in Detroit for 10 years now, which is so much bigger than where I grew up, but it still doesn't feel like... It's definitely not a New York or Chicago if we want to compare to another Midwest city. And I think I've just assumed that I would have to build mostly virtually. And I did do, when I was doing my stationary business, I taught lettering workshops, and I know you've taught lettering workshops, and that was great, but then the market, you can only do it for so long here because there's only so many people interested in paying for a skill like that in a smaller city.
Lauren: Or you take the show on the road, but that requires a heavier lift, right?
Rachael: Totally.
Lauren: You're planning out a little tour instead. And I know there are things you can do when you live in a smaller city than a New York or LA where you do plan something like, "Okay, I'm going to go to New York in October. I'm going to go to LA in February," whatever it might be. And you just have to do a little bit more planning.
I remember a couple, more than a couple years ago, you drove to New York to vend at the stationary-
Rachael: Yeah, National Stationery Show. Yeah, yep. So understanding that there are opportunities like that, and I think you just went to New York a couple months ago and taught workshops all day, or hosted creative coaching sessions. What did you call them?
Lauren: One-on-one creative sessions, yeah.
Rachael: Okay. It was close.
Lauren: Creative consulting.
Rachael: Consulting, great. And so it's like we can still tap into those audiences in different cities, and it's cool that, for example, Instagram shows you what your top five cities are so you can see where people are the most engaged with what you're creating. And Chicago, New York, LA, London, and Mexico City are usually mine.
Lauren: Very cool.
Rachael: So that gives me confidence that I could go to those cities and, with enough planning, coordinate something.
Lauren: Yeah. My good friend, Andy J. Pizza, who I've mentioned so many times on this podcast-
Rachael: We love Andy J. Pizza.
Lauren: We love Andy! He has talked publicly about how he knew his life was going to be in Ohio. He was going to raise a family there. And starting his career, he knew, since he wasn't going to be in a bigger city, he's like, "Okay, I just got to harness the power of the internet." He started podcasting. He started doing most of his networking and relationship building online, and he would fly for conferences or do some stuff occasionally, but again, planned out in the future versus just being plugged in right away. And so I understand how something like teaching in-person workshops works better in a denser, more highly populated city.
Rachael: Yeah, you just have more people that could potentially be interested. The pool is just bigger of potential, yeah, registrants.
Lauren: Yes, totally. And so much... We talked earlier this season about art kid versus CEO, balancing those two things. And I think in the online course, online coaching world that I was immersed in maybe five years ago, there are lots of people, especially in that space, selling you courses or coaching programs on how to scale or how to grow your income or do high-ticket offers. And they're like, "I do this to make a million dollars a year." And you're like, "Oh, okay, maybe I could do this or this." You're picking, à la carte, what feels good to me?
So for example, Kristle and I were talking about this the other day, because of my business, the base being a freelancer service provider for commercial clients, that's where my high-ticket income comes from. Like the bigger, let's say, over-$10,000 projects, that's where that comes from, versus... And because of that, I don't do high-ticket courses or coaching because I have that covered in another area, and I have an emotionally harder time asking a peer for $10,000 than a company. And that's a me thing.
I think most people feel that way just because of the scale, but you have to figure out what feels good to you too. Maybe you're a super introvert, but you hear, "Oh, Lauren teaches in-person workshops," but that makes you cringe, don't do it.
Rachael: Yeah, yeah. And I think in our next episode, we're going to talk about the emotional connection with asking for money for what you're offering, so we will talk about that soon.
But yeah, I think I can use my Chicago workshop as an example. I was like, "Okay, I do want to travel for this work. Chicago's not too far away. I can stay with one of my friends and I can partner up with some local folks to find a venue and do the coordination," and we did all that. And it was definitely a lesson learned. I had a good time with everyone who showed up. It just felt like I felt very fulfilled after teaching, I was tired, but very fulfilled.
And I think one of the biggest lessons is just like, "Oh, I need more time to promote that and I need to work on being comfortable selling my offerings," which again, we will talk about it the next episode, because I think that that is something that I would like to do is visit other cities, host meetups. Yeah, I get really jazzed being able to feel like the energy of a crowd of us that are all interested in learning and talking about the same thing.
And also, I really value my free time, and that's one of the reasons that I have pursued a creative life is just the flexibility, which I know we've talked about previously. And I think that I do really like teaching, and I like the option of having some courses that are one-and-done from my perspective, like I've recorded them. I know you have some that you... Do you have any evergreen courses?
Lauren: They're all technically evergreen right now.
Rachael: Oh, okay.
Lauren: I'm reworking some stuff.
Rachael: Okay. Yeah, we're in a flex phase. Yeah, so I think being able to create something that I put all the work in and I'm excited about, and then having that be there, if people are asking me questions, I can direct them to that, so that I can really refuel that emotional battery and then be able to show up 100% for those in-person things. So it can't just be all the time in person.
Lauren: Totally.
Rachael: I would never be able to do a speaking circuit that I'm traveling to a different city every other day. That would be really energetically draining for me, but I am interested in speaking, and I think I love that perspective of it's easier to charge a company than a person.
Lauren: Yeah, and there are some people out there who have no problem charging high-ticket prices to individuals, and-
Rachael: I mean, I've paid some of those high-ticket prices, yeah.
Lauren: Totally. I have too. It really depends on what you feel called to offer, and also, what your business model is because for anyone who has followed a similar career path to me where it's like, okay, you went to design school or some creative program and you have a creative portfolio and you're trying to figure out how to make money, maybe you just started dabbling in freelance, when people talk about diversifying income streams, the first place that my mind went to, that a lot of young designers minds go to is like, "Okay, I have my portfolio. I guess I should open a shop." Especially now with print-on-demand or a Society6 or something that fulfills it for you, it's like, "Okay, cool. I'm going to make totes, tees, and mugs with my designs on them, and that's going to be another income stream."
But when you're younger and don't really have an audience or client base yet, no one's shopping on your shop. It's maybe you get one sale a month, at least that was the case for me. But I saw all of my favorite designers who were 10-plus years ahead of me, they had online shops, and I'm like, "But it works for them. It seems to work for them." And it took me a long time to realize that, "Oh, I'm not passionate about totes, tees, and mugs with my work on it, so that means I'm going to have a harder time selling them or getting excited to promote it." And also, that just... They were so much further ahead of me and already had clients and audiences that were there to buy what they made, and they had refined their messaging and their niche.
And so it took me a years to be like, "Oh, I actually don't want to do any physical products." And to this day, I still do not myself sell any physical products because mailing a package is such a slog to me for some reason. And you and Kristle, so many of my other friends don't mind mailing things or packing days. I have friends who run full retail productions who just put on a podcast and pack their orders and love it. I cannot for the life of me for whatever reason.
Rachael: Yeah. We're shifting gears into the "does it excite you?" realm because-
Lauren: Yeah, which is a big factor.
Rachael: I think so. I think if you are not excited about something and you're forcing yourself to do it because you think that's what you "should do," I don't think that... You're subconsciously inhibiting your own success. Yeah. Also, you're just not a stuff person. And I really am a stuff person.
Lauren: Granted, maybe if it was making me a lot of money at the time, I would've been into it. I have friends who make like $10,000 tabling at conferences, and I'm like, "Oh, that seems kind of cool," but it just wasn't my thing.
Rachael: Yeah, yeah. And back to one of the points that we make in many episodes is try it, and if it doesn't work... I mean, I've talked in so many episodes about tabling at craft shows and how I did the stationary show, and that was like a, "Oh, I should do this." And I spent $15,000 on that show, renting a van, building a booth, staying in New York for a week. And then I was like, "I don't ever want to do that again." I would rather spend $15,000 in marketing and reaching out to people online than traveling to New York for that.
And that was a good lesson. I mean, it sucked that it cost that much, but it was something that I had saved for and planned for and was devastating in the moment. And I was like, "I'm ready to quit." And I remember making a big post being like, "This isn't for me." And then I kept doing it because it felt like, "Okay, well, I have my local established clients and I have my wholesale clients." And then I remember I closed my Faire store last year. It felt so good and freeing because I love making products, but I like making products that are exciting me in the moment and are one-and-done. I don't want to sell wholesale. I don't want to-
Lauren: To cater to the general market.
Rachael: Yeah. I just want to make weird little things that are in my brain, like I've made a custom Yahtzee thing and I curated the dice collection that went with it, I've made hats. I'm really into the idea of making a bumper sticker right now. I just keep thinking about making a run of a hundred stickers.
Lauren: Right, and that's pretty low-risk to do. Yeah.
Rachael: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
Lauren: And I think that's one thing. We were talking about this at dinner the other night. It's good if you are trying to figure out a new direction or a new offering to run low-effort, low-risk experiments, even if you have a grand vision for it, do... In traditional business and marketing, this is what's called an MVP.
Rachael: Okay, Jess, Jess Bezos.
Lauren: I'm here to make business and marketing information accessible.
Rachael: I like it because I do not know any of it.
Lauren: And listen, this is just stuff I've picked up over the years. I don't have an MBA. I have always had a savviness for selling. I was like, "Oh, should I share this?" I am going to share it.
Growing up, I used to charge my little brother a nickel to make him a snack.
Rachael: Oh, yeah.
Lauren: And it wasn't like it was a chore for me or my parents were like, "Make your brother food." It would be like I would be making myself something and my brother would be like, "Can I have one?" And I'd be like, "Give me a nickel." And he would go to his piggy pink and give me a nickel. And some people might be like, "That is horrible," but my parents were just like, "Whatever."
Rachael: Yeah, "She's an entrepreneur." I mean, people let their kids sell lemonade-
Lauren: To strangers.
Rachael: Yeah.
Lauren: We're keeping the money in the family.
Rachael: In the family.
Lauren: This is actually very Chinese.
Rachael: I love that.
Lauren: But I say this to say, I have absorbed a lot of business and marketing advice, and I feel like one of my purposes here on earth is to metabolize that and then spit it out to artists and creative people in a way they can understand that doesn't sound condescending. Because I was talking with my friend Katie, who is one-half of the duo that runs Goodtype. I just spoke at their conference. And we were talking about, "Ooh, this is actually where a lot of us feel a tension."
A lot of the entrepreneur books that you'll read and the entrepreneur advice you read is specifically for just business owners. They leave out the art part and the creative part so they don't really care about your fulfillment. They don't really care about how you feel. It's all about finding a market fit and seeing a gap in the market. You operate market-first and then you fill that.
And with art, with art stuff, you actually have to, it's counterintuitive, you have to operate you-first and then the business has to follow because ultimately, if you're not creatively fulfilled or interested or excited or growing, you will start to, like you said, subconsciously push that thing away, resent it, which is why I took my foot off the gas with promoting my online courses because I just fell out of love with it. I went through this not-great period of consuming a lot of podcasts and YouTube videos about how the coaching industry is manipulative and toxic, and my knee-jerk reaction was, "Okay, let me stop doing that," when the true answer was really like, "Okay, how do I tweak this and make it my own?" And I wasn't doing any of that stuff.
Rachael: Of course not, not.
Lauren: But it's easy. My, I think, lizard brain was just like, "Ah, I don't want to be bad, so let me not touch it."
Rachael: Yeah, absolutely.
Lauren: When it's a much more like, "No, you're fine. Keep going at your own speed and you're not manipulating people."
Rachael: Yeah, you're doing it from an ethical way. Like you said, I think one of your missions as a human in this lifetime, in this soul-body connection-
Lauren: Hard pivot.
Rachael: Oh, by the way, we're a woo-woo podcast now.
Lauren: Rachael's pulling her crystals out of her pockets right now.
Rachael: I'm about to hypnotize you. No, I think one of your purposes is to do exactly as you said, help creative business owners digest marketing information that many of us, it doesn't come as innately as it does to you. And I think that's, I feel like, one of my purposes is to help people take their lives back for themselves and recognize that they all have creativity. We have these things that are through lines to our businesses-
Lauren: Totally.
Rachael: ... and I think that's what you do, and you're sharing that information. And this is something we can talk about more in the next episode, but I've been talking to my therapist about charging for my offerings because I'm like, "I don't want to be unethical and I don't want to be making people feel like they can't afford my work." And she was like, "But it's a reciprocal exchange. You're giving information that they want from you, and you are getting money back to pay your bills," and that is what you've done. You are not running, "Two-hour-only flash sale, now's your only chance to buy it," capitalizing on that urgency, all the marketing tactics.
There are some, you and I both need a little urgency because I bet the collective library of the courses that we've bought and not done because we have-
Lauren: Woof.
Rachael: ... lifetime access is probably... I bet I don't even have the links to those courses that I've purchased and never finished.
Lauren: Yeah, and I think that's a takeaway from this conversation that people can walk away with is when you make an offering, especially let's say you find something that works, like something that you enjoyed, the Venn diagram of you enjoy doing it and it makes money, great. One thing that's so infuriating or stressful about creative entrepreneurship is that nothing is... It feels comfy, but nothing is set in stone. It's a blessing and a curse because if you find something that works, it might not work five years later because of algorithm changes, because of consumer tastes-
Rachael: A global pandemic.
Lauren: ... because of a global pandemic, because of the personal growth you've experienced. I always liken it to, if you look at your eighth-grade yearbook photo, we usually just make fun of ourselves because you would never wear that now, but tastes change. Tastes get refined. You're exploring different parts of who you are.
Rachael: Oh, man.
Lauren: And so you will outgrow parts of your business if you plan on being in business for 10, 15, 20 years, which is what we all hope for. And you can always pivot and do something else, but I'm trying to stay on the path, stay in a creative business for my entire career, and you can make an offering and you might outgrow it, but you can maybe rework it and make it fit you better.
And I say all this to say with the lifetime access that we were talking about with online courses, as I've come out of my mind spiral about, "Okay, the online education world, is that bad?" It's not. It has a place. I think there's a place for online education. There's accessibility, right? Because people can't always physically go to where you are. However, the online or the lifetime access is no longer helpful for me, and I used to think it was providing more value by letting it be lifetime access. But do you actually do the thing?
Rachael: Never, no.
Lauren: Yeah.
Rachael: But if every one of those course providers that I've purchased emailed me tomorrow and we're like, "We're revoking access," you better believe I would do it.
So I think that's such a good topic, like once it doesn't work for you, it's okay to change it. You don't have to completely scrap it. You can go back to the drawing board and say, "Okay, I have this baseline of this course," like I want to refilm my Dress for Yourself course because as I was preparing for my Chicago workshop, which actually in the course, I suggest that folks go and look back at their junior-high selves because like you said, our tendency is to mock that, but we were exploring, and I think we can identify what our personal trends are, even from a young age. I've liked color. I remember I thrifted this Boy Scouts button-up, which I still have stuff like that. I wear bowling shirts with patches. That's still very much my style.
Lauren: With Ron on the name patch.
Rachael: Love that. When it's chain-stitched, ugh. I have a Hazel, I have a... I think I wore one on a previous episode. Anyway, love those.
And I remember I wore one for picture day and everyone was like, "Are you wearing that? Why would you wear that?" And luckily, sassy, bratty Rachael was like, "Yeah, I'm fucking wearing it," and I did. And it's one of my favorite childhood pictures because I was drawn to the same things that I'm drawn to now and maybe didn't have the tools to articulate that or to get really clear on that, but I think, yeah, being nice to your younger self.
But yeah, going back to the drawing board, I don't have to completely redo the Dress for Yourself course. The baseline messaging is there. There are just some things that I've changed my mind on, like I talk about sourcing your clothes secondhand and resellers and vintage sellers, and some of the language that I used, I was like, "I actually don't agree with that anymore," that there is a finite amount of clothes out there available. We have more clothes than we know what to do with.
Lauren: Yeah, you can update your language. Language is beautiful because it's always evolving, and it's collaborative, and then you change your mind on, like, "That doesn't sound like me anymore. I don't talk like that anymore."
Rachael: Yeah, yeah. Or I feel like when I made that course, I was going through a lot of personal growth, which I always want to be, but yeah, some of the things I was really harping in on, I'm like, "Okay, you can relax on some of those topics and maybe shift to a broader perspective." So I'm just rambling about my course and reworking it, but I think-
Lauren: No, it's great. How long ago did you film that first draft?
Rachael: I think the original course, I think I launched it February of 2023. So it's been about two years, yeah.
Lauren: Yeah, you can always... I think so much of running experiments in your business as a creative person are putting things out there and then constantly iterating and tweaking, and maybe it's with the scientific method, you isolate one variable. I'm getting so nerdy here.
Rachael: Love it.
Lauren: What people don't know is even though I'm a full-time designer now, I was a mathlete and a spelling bee champion. I was such a little dork.
Rachael: That doesn't surprise me at all, and I love that so much. You as a mathlete, but your Big Dogs T-shirt is underneath.
Lauren: Oh, yeah. And then by the time I won on the spelling bee, I was decked out in Limited Too. I begged my parents, like, "Please."
Rachael: Oh, I loved Limited Too.
Lauren: I was wearing discount rack Limited Too, just the worst stuff they had.
Rachael: Yeah.
Lauren: But I felt so cool. I had my little butterfly clips in my hair.
Rachael: Oh, yeah. Did you have short hair when you were a kid?
Lauren: I did. I had a little... In between a bob and a bowl cut.
Rachael: Okay.
Lauren: You have the photo of me?
Rachael: I do, yeah.
Lauren: Yeah. That was my hair for most of my-
Rachael: Okay, love that. One of my favorite things to do, just side note, side quest, is, you know this, but I'm telling everyone listening/watching, I ask my friends and basically anyone that I am in communication with regularly, so Kristle, I'm going to need this from you, is a childhood photo as their contact photo. So I have at least 20 people in my phone with childhood photos.
Lauren: It looks like all your friends are children.
Rachael: And my parents too. I have old pictures for my parents. That makes it sound creepy.
Lauren: I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that. That was an inside thought.
Rachael: No, it's okay. No, you can tell because it's like nerdy '90s for most of us. Yeah.
Lauren: Of course.
Rachael: Yeah, it was like the Lifetouch background, you know?
Lauren: Yeah. To get us back on track, I don't know-
Rachael: Yeah, sorry.
Lauren: Don't, don't apologize. This is what people are here for.
Rachael: Are they?
Lauren: This is a feature, not a bug.
Rachael: Yeah.
Lauren: In talking about making adjustments, shifting, one thing that's recent for me is I think a lot of times too, we make decisions in our business for different seasons where when I was really ramping up the online education and that was a bigger income stream, and I was freelancing, I remember I set up guardrails for myself just so I wasn't like... It's easy to say yes to something, to everything, and then get overwhelmed. And so I was like, "Okay, I am not going to take any freelance work under $5,000 so I can not overload myself." That was just an easy rule because the courses were making enough of my other income that it made sense to do that.
And this year, we've been talking about how to navigate seasons of slower work. Work is not as good this year freelance-wise, and because I took my foot off the pedal of online courses, I'm like, "Oh, shit, I need money." And I'm sharing this to say that if your circumstances change, which that's life, right?
Rachael: Yeah.
Lauren: Don't internalize it. It's not because you're bad. Circumstances will change. Unfortunately, in a capitalist society, whether you're full-time or freelance, you got to just stay on your toes, which kind of sucks, but now in 2024, I'm saying yes to types of projects like editorial or book covers or things that are smaller that I had typically passed on to other people before where I'm like, "Yeah, I'll do that." I have the space now in my schedule to take on that work, and if one income stream starts to dry up or you take your foot off the gas, you can always rev up another one. That is the gift, the beauty of freelancing is you really get to à-la-carte it.
But I say all this to say it's okay to say yes to opportunities that you might not have taken on before. It's almost like, I don't know, when circumstances change, you might just... There's an opening to try something new. Even in-person workshops, I wasn't doing a lot of those for most of the years that I was doing a lot of online courses because they didn't make as much money. But then I burnt out of online courses, and so I'm back to in-person as a way to fall back in love with teaching because I really do like it, and I think this will be the inroad to finding more harmony with in-person and online and how I balance those offerings.
Rachael: Absolutely. And I think on a much smaller scale, you can think about, just as you were talking, I was thinking about things that I've tried, like I make the seasonal play lists. And I was like, "Oh, I'll try to make a template," because I like doodling and I like-
Lauren: Yeah, low-effort experiment.
Rachael: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I did that, and then-
Lauren: It was a PDF, right?
Rachael: It was a PDF download so people could print out. There were five seasonal templates that they could print out and write their list on. And then I found that people were not necessarily interested in the templates. People wanted the play ideas, which makes sense. I stopped doing stationery and I started talking about play and doing more creative coaching, and so that's what people want from me.
And I was like, "Okay, I'm not going to have this be a paid download anymore." I mean, it's still available if people want the templates, but I removed the meat of it, which is the play ideas, and just offered that as a freebie because I think just because something is not making you money, you've talked about this before, is it helping you provide value and build trust with your audience? Sometimes if it's low-effort, like a list of play ideas just to help people get their brain churning on like, "Oh, what is my idea of play?" that is still valuable because then you're nurturing your audience that you have.
Lauren: Yeah, absolutely.
Rachael: And then maybe getting them ramped up for investing in a bigger-price-point offering that you may have. And that's what I'm reminding myself as I'm experimenting with, "Oh, okay, what about this idea? What about this?" Yeah, it's all an experiment and it's okay to change and keep growing and adapt as needed.
Lauren: Absolutely. I think I wanted to piggyback off of my last story of I think sharing some flops-
Rachael: Oh, yeah.
Lauren: It's demonizing because we were talking about this before we started recording, and I mentioned it briefly, I think, in season one, season two, I don't know, about-
Rachael: What is time?
Lauren: Who knows? It's all made up.
Rachael: I get my crystals out again. What is time?
Lauren: And because I was like, "Okay, I want to get back into teaching," and I thought that in-person would be a tangible, grounding experience... This also sounds like I'm about to pull out crystals.
Rachael: I love it and it's fun because I bet we put Kristle on her toes every time we're saying the word crystals. To be clear, I love sort of mindset, spiritual work, and if crystals are what helps you channel your work, I'm here to support you. You're not hurting anybody.
Lauren: Yeah, whatever gets you in the zone.
Rachael: Yeah. I got all kinds of shiny rocks in my house.
Lauren: But I decided to teach a workshop. I was like, "What would be fun for me to teach right now? What skills do I currently have that I could test out?" And I wanted it to test out new workshops. So I taught a... I called it Pantry As Palette. It was a food lettering workshop where we were going to create phrases and designs using different pantry items. And then I also taught a separate workshop that was going to be Pom-Pom earring making because one piece of advice I've given to you in the past is like, "Oh, what do people comment on the most or ask you in DMs?" That's a good place to start to noodle on what you could offer and charge for. If people are like, "What's the recipe? How did you make that? What would your advice be here?" It just is gathering information.
And so I went to go teach those workshops in New York, which is pretty densely populated. However, I didn't have a super long lead time. I think I promoted it with 10 days lead time, which is very risky. Most people, I would not advise anyone to do that.
Rachael: Sure.
Lauren: Because I started my career there, I have a network of people, so I was like, "It'll be fine." Plus, the goal was to just get me out of inertia and back into the ring in terms of teaching.
Rachael: Just out there again, yeah.
Lauren: 100%. Ooh, I'll use the analogy in our flop episode that we recorded that we didn't end up using. I likened it to if you boil a pot of water, you have to crank the heat to get the cold water to boil. Once it's at a rolling boil, you turn the heat down to low, it'll still keep the water boiling, and so all the energy is spent bringing the water up to the boil.
So I was working from a cold pot when I was not teaching, just at a standstill, and I was like, "I just got to turn the heat on. Let's just get back to a boil, get back to a simmer, at least turn the heat back on. It'll get me a little bit closer."
Rachael: Absolutely. One step.
Lauren: One step. Because inertia is so powerful. You get stuck in not doing anything. And the factor for me in not doing anything was like, "Oh, yeah, I'm running a business. I forgot, and I have payroll to run. If I stand still, sure, no one can criticize me, I can't fail, but I will not be able to pay my employees at some point."
And so I started teaching these workshops and the food lettering one did well, but the Pom-Pom earring one, which was only $75, which is the lowest I've ever charged for a workshop, but for what it was, I guess people weren't willing to pay. I only had three signups, and then I just got a bunch of girlfriends to come and fill out the class. And it was still fun. I had all the materials. I did a little bit better than break even, but it wasn't like a big moneymaker, but that wasn't the point.
But it confirmed a intuition I had had in the past of I never taught any craft workshops because I assumed what people wanted from me and what people had been paying for from me was career-adjacent products, things that were going to help their portfolio, like my Portfolio Procrastinator class or my Passion to Paid passion project class about creative marketing. The Pom-Pom class just bombed. And I was like, "Oh, that's actually enough information for me to never do this again, and when people ask, I'll just tell them to look on YouTube because that's how I learned."
Rachael: Yeah. And I think, I mean, I want to ask you, what was your excitement level for each of those courses or workshops that you taught?
Lauren: Okay. If I'm speaking candidly, and I think a lot of creative entrepreneurs will relate to this, when I first got the sales pages up, I was equally excited about both of them. And as the date got closer and I saw the sales for both side by side... The food lettering class was like 200 bucks too, it wasn't cheap. And I was like, "Oh, the $200 one versus the $75 one, clearly the $75 one should sell twice as many tickets because it's less than half the price." Not the case. That is not how people make purchasing decisions, but you never know until you try.
When I saw that I had only sold a couple of the Pom-Pom workshop tickets, I was bummed. I think it's a normal human response, and I was less excited about it, but it's not like I wasn't going to do it. I was excited enough about it to do it.
And what I was going to say before too is me only selling a handful of $75 Pom-Pom workshop tickets was enough information for me to never do it again. If I was really passionate about Pom-Pom earrings, which I'm not, I like it, but I'm not like, "This is my life's purpose," you had suggested to me, you were like, "Do you think you would try it again at a lower price point? Would you offer it at $50 or $40?" And when you asked me that, my gut instinct was no. And that's okay. You get to decide what is worth your time and how much you want to do something and how much you're willing to charge.
Rachael: Yep. And I think that that's a really good example of us not being influenced by what people tell us they want because people ask you about that all the time. And I have watched you make, in several days, those earrings, and they take you a really long time because you're really precise. And I think that's a personal project for you. That's not something that you need to share with people. And you tried it because people... You were experimenting. You were like, "What can I offer?"
But yeah, I think it's a really good reflection that you had. And also, I'm glad you still did it.
Lauren: Me too.
Rachael: And I think I felt a little bit of the same way with the Chicago workshop as far as the signups. I thought like, "Oh my gosh, I'm visiting another city. It's going to be a smashing success." It was a success. I had a great time. I just had quite a few less people than I had hoped, and I think part of that was just the short marketing time, also the time of the year. It was the week after the election, so it was just information. You got the information that, "I will never do this again." I got the information of like, "Okay, here's some things I would tweak. I'll give myself a lot longer to sell this. I'll continue to tap into the local networks a little bit more," and examples of similar sort of... I wasn't bummed, but I was like, "Oh, I was hoping that this would've just been an automatic success financially."
Lauren: Yeah. Of course. And again, what makes this episode different than any of the other ones we've done around experiments, trying, playing is the business edge, and I think there are only so many, I guess technically based on the word, you can really only have one main priority when it comes to what is the purpose of this thing that I'm doing? Is it for fun? There are also other benefits to doing things, but in business, the deciding factor for me is, was it profitable? Because you never want to... If you take a loss on all your projects, it's not a business. You're paying. It's a hobby, and that's okay too.
So similar to the Pom-Poms, I took a loss on the Pom-Poms and I was like, "Okay, it's a hobby." Whereas I think if you're really jazzed about something, obviously you should get paid, but if you have enough jazzed-ness, it can give you the energy to keep trying, whereas only you know if you have it or not.
I recently got a inquiry for a project that shall remain unnamed because who knows if I got it at this point, but it was so aligned and so exciting for me that I turned... Kristle was here in the studio when I got the email. I was like, "I would do this project at cost. I would do it for no profit." I'm not going to tell them that.
Rachael: No.
Lauren: But I was so excited about it that I was willing, I was like, "I just want my name on this. I want to get it in my portfolio." We all have that reaction in different ways. And I actually was just thinking about, I don't know if I told you, but over the summer when you had that friend yard sale and I decided to just, on a whim, bring over some cheesy buns that I made and-
Rachael: Yeah, and sell them.
Lauren: Well, because at first, we were just going to... I brought them for the gals to eat.
Rachael: For us to eat, yeah.
Lauren: And I don't know how we decided that maybe I should put them out for sale?
Rachael: Well, I think because we were all sitting and the only table was the checkout table, and you had just set them there. And then someone was like, "Are those for sale?" And you were like, "Sure."
Lauren: Yeah, and we put a little piece of tape out that was like, "Cheesy onion buns, $5." I probably made 30 bucks on those buns, and that $30 that I made from that was so much more exciting than the, what is 75 times three, $225 I made from the Pom-Pom earring workshop. And so you get to decide was the juice worth the squeeze? Selling those buns really gave me a boost, like an emotional boost.
Rachael: Yeah, yeah.
Lauren: It's validating.
Rachael: And I think that's how I feel about the hats and if I do stickers-
Lauren: Yes, you're so excited about the hats.
Rachael: Yeah, because the hats are like... They're not super lucrative. They cost a lot to make and-
Lauren: And you're not going to take a loss on them.
Rachael: I'm not going to take a loss. I make a little bit of money, but when you factor in like, okay, I'm buying boxes, I'm spending time packaging, which like you said earlier, I don't mind that process, but I don't want to do it all the time. I can handle it in little launches. And I like creating, getting colorful tissue paper and making a cute-
Lauren: Yeah, you're such a gift gal.
Rachael: I love and I want it to feel like a gift when you're opening it. So that is something that I will continue to do because it's fun for me and making little things like that, like I want to make patches, I want to make bumper stickers. Stuff like that is so fun, and maybe I'll break even or maybe I'll make a little bit of money. It's not going to be one of my regular income streams that's helping me pay for things, but it's inspiring and it can be a little supplement to maintain itself.
Lauren: I think that doing things with our eyes open, knowing the realistic, having realistic expectations of like, "Okay, this is a labor of love," I've been thinking the same thing about food. I love food. I went to school, I'm passionate about it, but in terms of integrating it into my business, I don't love it enough to break my back for significantly less money than I'm making now.
And I've told myself that, "Oh, okay. It doesn't have to be I don't monetize food." It's just that let's say I host a biannual or quarterly dinner party that is paid that I will make a little bit of money, but like you said, it's not going to be a cash cow. I'm going to be realistic about, okay, maybe I'll make a couple hundred bucks or whatnot. It'll be fun. I'll get photos. It'll be like a boost, like a creative boost for me because it is validating when someone gives you money for the thing you love to do.
I was just thinking about the old-school... Have you ever been into a small local business where they frame their first dollar or first $20 or something?
Rachael: Yeah!
Lauren: It is very validating, and I think that there used to be that advice that goes around Instagram that's like, "Don't seek validation anywhere else. It should be all internal." I think that we're relational creatures and it's okay to get some external validation. It can't all come from there.
Rachael: Well, and creativity is emotional too. That's why we all are pursuing this because we feel called to create. If we were in it for money, we would be tech bros. You know?
Lauren: Exactly. And so just being realistic about, "Okay, here's what I'm going to make from this. How often do I want to do it, knowing that I'm only going to make this much from it?" Or the flip side of like, Ooh, I found a cash cow. Cool. How much am I going to milk it?"
Rachael: Yeah. You using that analogy reminded me that in the flop episode, in the episode that will remain nameless, I think I called out that I wanted to start keeping a scoreboard of the number of times you use food analogies. So I do want us to do that, and by us, I mean Kristle. Hi, sorry.
But I say that a little bit to tease you, but a good-natured teasing, but mostly because the way that you feel about food, like you're talking about culinary school, yeah, you're not going to go work in the traditional career path of go to culinary school, be a chef, but the way that you use food to share information, your food analogies make it really easy to understand, like the boiling water one you used a little bit ago, it makes it really easy to understand these concepts.
So you've integrated food into your creative process and your educational process. So you had the food, the Pantry as Palette workshop. You maybe would've still done that, but now you have all this educational information that you can apply too. It's just like it was continuing education for you. It wasn't a career shift.
Lauren: Yes. And we've said this before in earlier episodes, but when you were mentioning the playlist and the worksheet that you designed, your stationary background is what allows you to create your own graphics now easily, seamlessly, and joyfully.
And we've talked about this, but everything is a learning experience. There are no wasted skills. Everything will come back around at some point. Even I was talking with Kristle this weekend, and she was talking about how much she loves to match and frame prints and photos. And I was like, "Oh, I forgot you had that skillset." But she did it a lot in one of her photo classes-
Rachael: Cool.
Lauren: ... because her professor was a stickler for perfectly cut mats, and that is not my zone of genius by any means.
Rachael: Oh, I hated learning how to do that when I took art class. We had to do it in a watercolor painting class that I took and using that dull-ass matte cutter and slice it, trying to get the perfect angles, yeah, that's not... Precision is not something that I care about, and so I try not to do things that require precision.
Lauren: And that's so helpful to know. And I also think that's one of the benefits of, like you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, I'm "further ahead" only because I've been doing this full time for so much longer.
Rachael: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Lauren: But sometimes I look back and think, "Oh, it would've been nice to have known myself a little better before punching blindly into all these different creative arenas and trying things." Granted, I had the naivete of a 21-year-old on my side, and so maybe that's one of the benefits there. I think there's nothing... It's not better or worse, it's just different phases.
Rachael: Exactly. Different.
Lauren: But if anyone's listening who is in their 30s, like Rachael and I, or maybe even older and you're feeling like, "Oh, I'm behind," or, "I wish I had started my creative journey sooner," because maybe you've been consuming a lot of Rachael's Instagram and you're like, "Wait, I am creative"-
Rachael: Yeah! I hope so.
Lauren: And I just want to tell you that if you're starting now, there's so much to be gained too. You have a leg up in terms of self-awareness, in terms of just knowing more about yourself, knowing more about what you like, what don't like, knowing more about sustainability in terms of not biting off more than you can chew. You have a life already too. And so your creativity can really complement that, and you figure out how to plug that in versus what a lot of my peers and I did when we were 21 in design school where it was like we had no other lives besides design is everything, like art school, art school, art school, and then drinking.
Rachael: Yeah, yeah. Obviously. And I feel like you had to, as a 21-year-old, you used that enthusiasm and cast a wide net and tried a lot of stuff. And then anyone in my position is like maybe I've tried a lot of things, we've tried a lot of things as hobbies, and now I have the clarity to be able to pursue something that is really exciting to me.
Lauren: Absolutely.
Rachael: And you've just had to get to that same point through evolution of your own business instead of it being more personal growth, and obviously, that's happening too.
Lauren: Different inroads.
Rachael: Yeah, yeah. And it's like the braid analogy that I use of maybe you braided really fast to get to a certain point and your braid's super tight, and mine was kind of all over the place and it's loosey-goosey. And now as you're getting to the end of my hair, it's getting streamlined and it's messy up here because I started off trying a bunch of different things and yours is just one thick braid that's just continuing to grow.
Lauren: This is making me laugh so much because I-
Rachael: You're not a braid gal.
Lauren: I'm not a braid gal. When I had longer hair, I was doing lettering for this Gatorade, no, Propel, that sports drink.
Rachael: Oh, yeah.
Lauren: I was doing-
Rachael: Oh, man. Side note, when Propel came out, I was in junior high and I was doing a lot of basketball camps and three-on-three. My parents would drive me to hours and hours away to do these Gus Macker basketball competitions. And I remember the first time that... Because of course I had a crush every time I went somewhere and still do. And I remember I was hanging out with this group of cool boys and I took a drink thinking that it was going to be water and it was lemon Propel. And I was like, "What is this magical juice?"
Lauren: Oh, because it was clear. That was the whole thing.
Rachael: It was clear, yeah. And so I have a very vivid memory of tasting Propel for the first time.
Lauren: Propel, please sponsor us.
Rachael: Sponsor us.
Lauren: But I was doing live lettering there-
Rachael: Sorry. Sorry to interrupt you with that story.
Lauren: It's okay. On tote bags. And they had, since it was a fitness event, they had someone on site to French braid people's hair into like... You know how people do their hair in braids for workouts?
Rachael: Yeah.
Lauren: And I was like, "Ah, when in Rome." And so I went to get my hair braided and I was like... I immediately took it out. The second I left, I was like... Because it doesn't feel like me to have braids.
Rachael: Yeah, yeah. I actually really can't picture that. And I know, I think-
Lauren: It's upsetting.
Rachael: ... mine's long enough now to do the hairstyle that you first met me in, which is like the milkmaid braids.
Lauren: The milkmaid braids, yeah.
Rachael: Yeah, yeah.
Lauren: It looks like your face should be on a butter package or something.
Rachael: I would love that. I would... Butter, sponsor us. Let me model for your packages.
Lauren: Okay, we got to wrap up.
Rachael: Okay.
Lauren: Is there anything else we need to share? We've shared some stories about some flops, some experiments, some hopefully helpful stories and advice from our creative journeys on how to navigate what you should offer, not being afraid to make offers. Again, low-effort. Don't sink three months of your life into something that you're not sure about yet. Test it out. What's the simplest way you could put it out there to gauge interest?
And when we say, "Put it out there," not just putting up a poll on Instagram because like Rachael said, what people say they want isn't what they're actually going to open their wallets for. Anyone who makes physical products or prints will know that if you post a piece of artwork and people go in the comments, "Oh my God, do you sell this as a print? I'd love to buy it," and then you spend your weekend producing a bunch of them, and when you go to post it next week, crickets. No one actually wants to buy it.
Rachael: Literally always.
Lauren: Always. It's like such a cursed cycle. And so to avoid that disappointment and that trap, just test out the minimum you could do. And so what I mean by that is maybe you love this print so much that you launch it in a run of a limited edition of three and see if people buy that, or maybe you do pre-orders to validate if people actually will put their credit card numbers in or hand over a $20 bill to you because then you have the actual information, not what people say they want. It's what they actually bought.
Rachael: Absolutely, yeah. And I think the thing that I'm trying right now is finding, and you mentioned this earlier, finding the Venn diagram of what am I excited about, what does my audience need and/or want, and what is going to feel like a low-energy lift to try things, to open up a path? And then if, all of a sudden, it's taking off and people really like this $20 download that gives them some insight, okay, maybe I'll turn this into a larger, longer-format workshop. And just, I mean, the theme of our podcast, besides food, is reflecting. Just making your own path.
Lauren: Wow. I was also just thinking, because we did an episode on dating, maybe we can end on this, it's very much going on a first date with somebody. You don't spend... Well, sometimes you spend eight hours on a first date if it's really good.
Rachael: Cute.
Lauren: But you don't want to sink all of your time and energy into this first date. It's just like you're just feeling each other out and then you can decide if you want to go on a second date and a third and maybe that-
Rachael: And just because you went on the first does not mean that you're obligated to continue down that path.
Lauren: Exactly. The whole point of dating is to test things out and maybe you go on three dates and then you call it, maybe you go on five dates and then you call it, maybe you end up getting married. It's really one date at a time to figure out what to really invest in.
Rachael: Absolutely. Love that. Tying it back.
Okay. Well, stay tuned for our next episode where we expand on this and talk about being comfy charging for these offerings that we're creating.
Lauren: Yeah, because we're still on the beginning of the new year, and I think this is the time to start to get yourself in the right mindset to try new things and make new offers and charge money for your work because you deserve to give yourself a chance.
Rachael: Yeah, yeah. Thanks for listening.
Lauren: Bye!
Rachael: Bye!