Do you listen to your gut?
What I mean by that is how you feel about a big decision you need to make, not what you think about it.
Rachel Koretsky will illustrate what happened to the development of her business when she listened to her gut and when she didn’t.
She’s the founder of upace, an app to help increase engagement and retention for at recreation centers like university gyms and the YMCA.
Lot of great nuggets in our conversation including:
- The value of targeting niche opportunities.
- How she’s monetizing her app by offering it for free to consumers without selling advertising.
- How mentors and listening to her gut helped her develop her app.
- How she landed her first client from an information interview.
Life Skills That Matter In This Episode
- Understand your tolerance for risk.
- Build community.
- Self-directed learning.
How Rachel Works and Thinks
- Wake up time: Around 8:00am.
- Core work activities + habits: 1) Follow up with any sales leads. 2) Keep track of developers on development timelines and schedules. 3) Building a really good, inspiring community and culture with the team.
- Ideal work environment: In a coffee shop on the weekend with a hot chocolate and headphones on.
- Superpower: Team building and building a group around her that wants to be involved in what they’re developing.
- Favorite productivity tool: Hubspot CRM.
- Unproductive habits to improve on: Hearing about other people’s stories and getting wrapped up in comparison.
- 90-day goal: Scaling the business through expanding into more YMCAs and building out more requested feature functions.
Inspirational Quotes
“It’s been very inspiring to see how people have been able to utilize the app for what works best for them.”
“Once you see someone’s using pen and paper for any type of data collection, you know that’s a pain point and something that there’s a solution you could most likely build for it.”
“People love being on the journey with you.”
“Entrepreneurship is hard. You’re gonna fail and the most important part is the way that you pick yourself back up.”
Coaching Advice
To start building your own community, Rachel suggests these actions:
1) Talk to your potential customers. Go out and talk to real people who are going to use your product.
2) Don’t be afraid to reach out to new people and ask for advice; you never know who will become a champion of you or your product.
3) Listen to ideas and learn from people you’re talking to that may be opening up new avenues for you.