Start Up Life with Jon Smith
Graham Allcott 0:11
This is Beyond Busy. I'm Graham Allcott. I'm the author of a number of books, including the global bestseller How To Be a Productivity Ninja, and I'm the founder of Think Productive. We work with some of the world's leading companies to help them get stuff done, but more importantly, to help their people to make space for what matters. Beyond busy is where I explore the often messy trues and contradictory relationships around topics like work life, balance, happiness and success, and explore with interesting people what makes them tick. In short, this is where we ask the bigger questions about work. My guest today is Jon Smith. John is co-founder of pebble a tech startup helping children in schools to get more engaged in creative writing. And problem has grown massively during COVID as a tool to help with homeschooling. So in this episode, we talked about the growing pains of startups, productivity while managing a fully remote team, the work life balance benefits of being based in Cornwall and how that helps him to get beyond busy. And there are some brilliant perspectives on success, people management, and much more. This is Jon Smith.
Jon Smith, how are you doing? Hi, very good. Thanks. Yeah. So really good to have you on beyond busy and you're down in Cornwall, right? Yeah, that's right. So you were just telling me before we press record that you moved a year or so ago, so just pre pandemic, you made the decision to abstain from London and up in Cornwall? So that turned out pretty well, right.
Jon Smith 1:49
Yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean, I grew up in Cornwall. So I've always known that cotton was a lovely place to live and things. And then after university, I travelled around, I lived abroad in the Middle East in America for a little while. And then we spent about five, six years in London. But we had two small children. So by the time we moved, I think we had a two and a four-year-old and we were living in a flat in central London, we've no garden, a tiny balcony, right? And yeah, pretty much once we sort of decided that we wanted to live in a different place, partly driven by my four-year-old daughter's was beginning to develop asthma, and the doctors probably related to living in quite a polluted area of Canada. Okay. And so anyway, about 18 months ago, we took the plunge and move to a house with a garden down in Truro in Cornwall. And to be honest, we haven't really looked back a few people thought we were a bit crazy at the time. But yeah, with everything that's happened since I think probably validated that as not a bad decision. Yeah,
Graham Allcott 2:39
I really fell in love with Cornwall this summer, when I went down for a holiday for a couple of weeks with my family and drove around to a few places. And one of the things that made me fall in love with it was how cut off it seems from the rest of England and the UK, right? Yeah, like it just feels really far away. It's a bit like when you're in Australia on a global scale, you kind of get the sense when you're in Australia that you're just so far away from everywhere else. Do you think you had that sense growing up? And I'm really interested what that meant for your kind of psyche, and kind of like the whole kind of self identity versus sort of Cornish identity and so on?
Jon Smith 3:12
Yeah, it's it's quite interesting. I mean, as I was growing up, you kind of loved going to beaches and lovely walks and Cliff walks and things, but you kind of took it for granted, I didn't really realise how special Cornwall was until I left. So I suppose as a young person growing up, you see, perhaps the lack of opportunity, or the lack of excitement of being part of the city. And I think also 30 years ago, call was very different. You had all of the nature as it is now. But you also didn't have the restaurants or the places to go out or the kind of the development of the infrastructure that you have now. So even still is feels isolated in a way relative to some areas of the UK, but it was even more so you know, 30 years ago. Yeah. But I think having left Cornwall is interesting, the number of people that leave young people leave, because they kind of perceive that there are other opportunities and bigger cities and new exciting things to explore and discover. And then so many people come back. And it's interesting, lots of my friends who grew up in Cornwall, have gone away, gone to university, got jobs, and then headed back to Cornwall. And I think it's a lot because they recognise how much fantastic it can be for children. Yeah, having a lifestyle where they're going out to beaches every week, and after school being picked up and going to wonderful to the parks and things so easily accessible. I think it's just really good draw for parents makes life a lot easier for us. You can have kids on the beach all day, and they can feel completely engaged in sort of excited by what they're doing and how they're playing and things. So yeah, that's ideal for Barrett.
Graham Allcott 4:38
Absolutely. And we're going to talk about your work and Pablo, which is an education based tech startup, but just before we do that, so yeah, I'm in Brighton and Brighton is kind of arguably a city but it's it's really a small town. But we're sort of connected into London I find myself sometimes missing the kind of startup bars of London and so when you're in startup phase when you're in that phase of wanting to network and see what the other technology companies are doing around education and stuff, do you miss that buzz? Like, Is there much of a sort of startup tech scene in Cornwall? Or do you have to go back to London together?
Jon Smith 5:13
Well, it's quite interesting. Before the pandemic, I used to go back up to London relatively regularly, probably once or twice a month for two or three days. And that was quite important at that point to kind of stake connected with everyone, whether that's investors or partners, or whatever else. Yeah. Interestingly, a lot of education startups aren't actually in London, partly because London's really expensive to grow a startup talents are very expensive, because you're competing with people like Google and Amazon and that sort of thing. Yeah. So we had an office in central London for a while. And it was great fun, there were a lot of really cool things. We were part of the Microsoft accelerator, which was great, right in the kind of middle of, you know, we're in more gate. And we were totally in amongst the kind of startup sort of thing. But I think as we sort of grew and you know, moved a little bit past the very early stage, we sort of didn't need that sort of ecosystem as much, we learned a lot of lessons, we kind of, you know, it was a lot more like right now we need to actually execute and deliver on all our kind of plans. And interestingly, when we went when we arrived in Cornwall, I didn't really expect any sort of ecosystem at all for anything. And what I found is actually there are a lot a good number of particularly socially focused entrepreneurs down here, doing really interesting things, things like food or new packaging methods. And there's also a lot of new industries, things like the space industry, oh, wow, there's a lot of space development happening out of Nuki airport, you know, this is where they're going to be launching Britain's satellites from is from Cornwall. And so there's a lot of money, a lot of investment going into developing startup and more established sort of companies in that area. Yeah. And for example, there's, you know, Koi sip is the core ml analysis city investment fund. This is backed by the British business bank, it's basically a VC with 40 million pounds to invest in high growth businesses in Cornwall. And so as soon as we arrived in Cornwall, suddenly, we were able to be exposed to those sorts of funding sources. And the fact is in London, you're talking about hundreds of funds, but you're talking about 1000s of startups looking for those funds. Yeah. Whereas in Cornwall, we are a lot less high growth businesses that have kind of international ambitions. So suddenly, actually, we were able to access better grants, different funding sources, and the network is small here. So as an example, we've been working a bit with Microsoft. And we found that one of the very senior Microsoft executives has a second home in Korea. Again, very easy to be able to connect with that person. And yeah, actually have some kind of FaceTime with him, which I think that would have been very, very difficult to do, because the competitive nature of London so yeah, pluses and minuses, I would say, but it was surprising how much is going on in the
Graham Allcott 7:42
area. And I suppose that's sort of the other thing about being a big fish in a slightly smaller pool, isn't it is that once you're known, then people know you, they pass that information on and so you become known to a much wider network than you would if you're just kind of drowning as a new kid on the block in London kind of thing.
Jon Smith 7:57
I think that's right. And I think the industry is key as well, in London, things like FinTech commerce, there are a lot of like really fast growth, high risk, but also high potential return businesses. And they dominate what's going on property tech, for example, whereas Ed Tech is just by its nature, a much slower growing sort of industry, particularly if you're selling in schools and that sort of thing. Yeah, you know, and you don't, you don't have that kind of incredible sort of energy and momentum around some of those startups, it takes a bit longer. So I think in some ways, a lot of really successful edtech companies, pretty much most of them are based outside of London, right, which is just quite interesting.
Graham Allcott 8:33
And I guess, because their main client base is schools and parents. Yeah, a lot of them would be so far from being household names, right? So this is like a whole area of tech. That is almost the stories aren't so well known. People aren't talking about those companies as much as they are the big kind of FinTech, consumer facing brands and so on.
Jon Smith 8:52
Yeah, I think I would say that's probably right. It's a very, very fragmented market, because all schools can make their own decisions about what products they use. And so what that means is you can't grow really fast. The fastest growing companies in the UK and education are relatively slow growing government. Yeah, right. Now in the US, it's slightly different, because they have different business models, they give away a lot more for free, and you have much bigger markets, they buy in districts, that type of thing for multiple schools. Whereas here, you're beginning to get some of that kind of element because you've got multi Academy trusts, which obviously means that schools can work together maybe in 10, or up to sort of 5070 schools. Yeah. And they might purchase particular solutions. But that's a relatively new thing in the last few years. And so that's kind of growing, but not really established as much as will be useful. Think.
Graham Allcott 9:38
So let's talk about your company puzzle. So do you want to start with the problem that it solves? Let's start there.
Jon Smith 9:45
Yeah. So I was working in the Middle East as an engineer. That's what I did before. I got a call from my brother who was an English leader in a primary school, and a sort of passionate teacher loves writing and things and he basically said, Look, I'm working on this thing with a friend of mine, who's the deputy head teacher. And really what we're trying to do is get kids more excited to write, because what we find is that children, particularly as you get into kind of the high years of primary school are really reluctant to write. And the challenge as a teacher is if they weren't, right, and it's very hard to teach them anything, because they don't practice etc. And they'd worked out, there were a couple of things that they were kind of playing with this concept that were making a big difference. One of which was, if you can show children real examples of other children's writing, handwritten work, this is really motivating for kids, they kind of see, okay, if Billy who's sort of a 10 year old from over here can write a subordinate clause, you know, maybe I can as well. And so what Henry my brother used to do was photocopy good examples of children's work, put them in a box. So when they repeated the sort of subject the following year, say they're teaching about the Roman Rite, pull out his Romans example from the box, put it on the visualizer, and use that as his kind of model text. And previously, teachers would write their own model text, so they would write a subordinate clause and to show an example. So that was kind of one thing that he realised makes a big difference. The other thing that Simon, the deputy head teacher been doing a lot of work around was blogging. So blogging is really the idea of encouraging children to write things to be published online, the idea that if you give children purpose and audience for their work, they try that bit harder. They're quite excited by you know, putting things live on the internet, that sort of thing. But managing a blog is a lot of work as a classroom teacher. And so he was trying to think about, well, if you did this at scale for multiple classrooms, how could you make this whole process far more effective and easy for classroom teachers. And of course, if you've got a load of people that are publishing their writing online, those examples can then be used as a means for planning lessons so that you can show children what good writing looks like. Yeah. And that was really the first idea for Pablo was like, Okay, how can we create an online repository for bits of writing? How can we categorise them by age, by genre by topic? And then how do we make those available for teachers as a really useful teaching planning resource? And then of course, once people have done their writing, they can publish to this website? And that's going to give them that sort of purpose and audience. Yeah. And so and of course, that builds that builds the number of pieces of work you have making this sort of collection better.
Graham Allcott 12:13
So that's an interesting origin story, because so you're in the Middle East, and your brother phones, you and he's a teacher. And you're an engineer. So were you a software engineer. Sounds like you were doing other engineering. Yeah.
Jon Smith 12:26
So there were a couple of elements. I mean, so one, I did a general engineering degree. So I knew how to do some basic kind of coding and things. But I had been talking to Henry, my brother for a while about how I was keen to get out and what I was doing, I was building mega projects in the Middle East. Yeah. Which was interesting, in a way. Yeah. But it sort of didn't really align with kind of much purpose in my life as well, you know, why do we want to spend a lot of money made from oil on bigger airports and bigger ports for the Middle East, you know, what's the sort of goal in that? So I've been sort of looking for a while I'd really wanted to do something entrepreneurial, always had that kind of drive. And my brother knew that. And initially, he just called me for some advice. And it was funny, because at the time, I kind of did what I know how to do best. I took all of the information that he gave me, I built a PowerPoint, I then had a call with him. And Simon said, You know what, these are the 10 things I'd be thinking about next, if I was doing this. Yeah. And on the back of that conversation, they're like, john, why don't you just help us? with teachers, we don't know how to write business plans, or market or anything else. But what we do know is what works in the classroom. So if we focus on that, that perhaps you could work out how we potentially build a business out of this, or how we build the platform. And there was a former founder, Tom, who was it was again, involved in one of the schools and he had been doing a lot of ICT and things. So between us all, he basically bought a WordPress manual. And that's how we coded the first version of the website, we literally sat down and sort of collective effort worked out. Okay, well, we need to build this and use these sorts of templates, etc. And that's how it got bill.
Graham Allcott 13:54
So it sounds like there wasn't a sort of one definite moment in time. That was the lightbulb moment, it was like just slowly went from dim to brilliant light over that period. Is that fair to say?
Jon Smith 14:05
Yeah, I think so. There was definitely though, one moment when I sort of realised that this was what I wanted to kind of do. Henry and Simon came over to Abu Dhabi, where I was living, and partly so Henry could visit, but also partly to talk about people in the sort of early stages. And I'd managed to arrange I used to sing with I did a lot of singing in the Middle East, and shows and things and I sang with a lot of teachers. Of course, I asked them, Well, you know, what do you think would this be useful? And what was fascinating was it doesn't matter what culture you go to whether China, Australia, the Middle East, everyone has the same struggle about engaging children in writing. Yeah. So they were like, well, if you've got something to my work, like come into our school, and so when Henry and Simon came over, we ran writing workshops in lots of schools in Abu Dhabi. And I think that for me like seeing put, first of all, it was interesting to see my brother Henry. You know, I've never seen him teach To perform standing at the back of the room, and so the Henry walks in, and he's like, becomes this sort of children's TV present. Hilarious. I had so much fun just watching. But I remember distinctly the moment that he sort of said to the children, like, you know, look on the board, like, what is this? And it's a world map. And it's like, great. And what are all these dots? Do you think? No, I don't know. And they're like, well, these are people that have visited our website in the last month. And did you know what today your writing is going to be published on this website for the world to see, there was like this huge collective gasp from the whole, every child in that room is like rk okay. And so anyway, and then they run this workshop, they produced a piece of writing and all the children got published that day. And the teacher came to me afterwards and said, that was the most incredible lesson we've ever seen that we've never seen our children as engaged as at this moment. Yeah. And I for me, I remember that kind of day was the moment that I realised this was something I needed to pretty much give up my entire life for and move back to London back in my job and career and actually go back and yeah, work on this full time and see if we can make it into into something. So that
Graham Allcott 16:09
flicked the switch. Yeah. And then I saw a video where you were talking about having famous authors coming on the site, and actually critiquing some of the children's writing and, you know, giving people praise for the work they've done, and so on. So there's something really powerful in motivational about the idea of other people consuming your writing, consuming your work, rather than it just being something that you're doing as a, you know, almost as a kind of classroom exercise to get through to When the bell goes or whatever. So it just makes a huge difference. So I think that's the energy that really sort of Powerball and powers the work that you do, I think early days, that definitely had a huge impact. I mean, the fact that people are Michael Morpurgo would go onto pebble and leave comments, children, I mean, that makes the schools a year and you know, famous author, you know, Joe Craig or Anthony Horowitz was funny. Anthony Horowitz was in Dubai and just happened to be there. And there was a school I think the ranch's private school would publish and writing based on one of his books, okay, that morning on pobol. And actually how it saw it because of course, they tweeted us we treated Anthony Horowitz. And again, Twitter's wonderful, because you can engage with people like that,
Jon Smith 17:17
as Anthony Horowitz got in the car in Dubai, drove to that school, and just showed up at the school, and then went and spoke to those children. And that, you know, they had a sort of wonderful afternoon. And again, it was just all it was, was being ability to make that connection. Yeah, kind of show him the writing that was being produced in the school. It's obviously about his books and his character. So he said to us, well, I love talking to children about what they would write about based on my characters, because that gives me lots of ideas for my writing, and what things are going to be interesting for the children. So you know, there's countless examples of people that authors that have engaged in pible. And as a result of schools, that have had just these wonderful experiences, or children have gone from being really reluctant writers to being really sort of excited and engaged. And now I think we've got a lot more of a kind of stable ecosystem. So we don't rely on the authors, you know, still, they jump in, which is wonderful. But now it's a lot more about that kind of peer to peer feedback. Yeah, actually having a child in the UK write about elephants, and then have a child in South Africa, who's seen elephants be able to kind of comments and engage on each other's work, of course, in a safe moderated way, that's a key element to problem. Yeah, that's really quite unique. There aren't any platforms that are safe for children to do that, from six years old. And when you ask children, what they get from mobile, they all talk about what they love, the fact that their writing is being read, it's being sort of fed back on their parents can engage as well, you know, even something as simple as having their mom and dad, you know, comment on their, their piece of writing that fills them with a lot of pride. So yeah, so that community piece is, is really, really important from authors right down to you know, moms and dads and cousins and aunts and uncles.
Graham Allcott 18:54
I think that when he talks about the writing about elephants, and then someone who has elephants on their doorstep, commenting on it, so when we were at school, that would have been pen pals, right, yeah. And so this is like the tech equivalent of pen pals. And so I suppose leads me on to just the question about education, and it's ripe for disruption and new technology. So why do you think education hasn't been more disrupted or advanced by technology so far?
Jon Smith 19:21
Yeah, that's a good question. I think prior to the pandemic, with everything being so fragmented, it was really hard to kind of get us sort of to basically make progress. You know, when we first started, schools, were just had absolutely no experience of buying software. So in order to sell people, what we would do is we would run writing workshops, and we would sell those to schools. And then during the workshops, we would introduce people as a concept, okay. And then on the back of that schools would sort of say, Oh, this is quite interesting. Could we use it? We're like, yes, you can. And that's why we're here. Yeah, that was kind of our way in and then over time, it's become a little bit easier. But you can imagine when we are ordered a school we would visit every single school to go and train them. Yeah. And that is incredibly labour intensive, you know, you cut schools all over the world. I mean, it didn't mean some of our team members got to, you know, we've flown to the Seychelles to Hong Kong to China, we've had some pretty incredible trips as a result. But you know, it's not very scalable, your ability to scale is exactly just obviously massively hampered by that. And without the ability to scale, you can't get funding, you know, we have a lot of fantastic angels that support bubble and a couple of school groups that have put money behind bubble, but I've spoken to lots of VCs and in the end, it always comes down to the fact that it's really hard to see how this can scale fast enough to make it worthwhile investment for a VC. Yeah. And then what happened with the pandemic, which was just kind of staggering was suddenly every single school in the country and potentially worldwide had to figure out how they could deliver lessons online, or, you know, remotely, let's say, and, of course, outlines the way to do that. And so they say that they had sort of five years worth of disruption in about two weeks, right. And I think that's probably about right. If I reflect on the last week, we had 2025 schools, new schools come on board with pible. And of course, we didn't visit any one of them. In fact, we ran webinars, and we have well over 100 teachers on a single webinar being trained, and we run three or four webinars a day now. So it's so much more scalable, so much more effective, as I think you've just gone from a situation where tech was just so far from being you know, the sort of present thing in schools, you know, there obviously, there was some schools that were quite tech savvy, but now every school is trying to kind of make that transformation of being a little bit more tech enabled. And I think that's obviously really positive for the industry, because now companies like pible, are able to move forward much quicker and achieve a lot more Yeah, therefore, we can get more funding so we can build a better product. So kind of everything is a sort of has a knock on positive effect.
Graham Allcott 21:54
Have there been pains within that growth? So just suddenly being thrown 1000 opportunities in your face in a day? I mean, that that there's a downside to that too, presumably?
Jon Smith 22:04
Yeah, it's been a really tough year. I mean, that sounds really bad. Because, of course, it's great to have lots of demand. But it has been really, really challenging to work out exactly who needs what so probably was set up for being used in schools. And you know, February last year, we had to very quickly make a switch to work out, well, how could we make lessons available online, so that parents could access or schools could share links to lessons very easily? Yeah. So it has been a huge amount of product development that's gone on behind the scenes just to enable people to use pebble in the sort of new situation. But to give you an idea, we had a surge of something like seven times the number of users in the first week of lockdown than we did two weeks before. So you can imagine like that's a huge increase. Normally, you might grow your users 50% a year or something like that, we're talking about seven times. And so we luckily had last September just launched a kind of new version of pebble built on sort of the latest infrastructure, very scalable, or cloud based servers. And so actually, we really, really good position to kind of grow that quickly. But actually, that element of it went very smoothly. But of course, then you have lots more questions lots more, you know, you have to be able to onboard people basically, fully online. So we had to develop a lot of kind of training, webinars and videos, we had to work on our user experience to make sure that any teacher anywhere in the world could sign up and be using mobile within few minutes. And so yeah, there's a lot of operational challenges as well, that went along with that, too.
Graham Allcott 23:32
Yeah. Were there times where it felt like you were just too far behind the curve of way needs to be like, were there times this year where it just felt like, please let this just stop for a while.
Jon Smith 23:43
It most days is probably accurate answers. Yeah. I mean, to give you an idea, now we have we have about 300 new teachers signing up and activating free trials every single day. Wow, though. I mean, that's fantastic. That means it's just relentless. Yeah. And it doesn't add, you know, even over the summer, but we had a lot of people concerned about their children's progress over the last term a year, lots of schools were looking at, lots of schools knew that writing was going to be particularly hard hit by home learning, right? Partly because, you know, reading, you can read books with your children. So as parents, that's an easy one, maths, there's lots of apps out there to help but also you can do basic arithmetic with your children. Writing is a much harder thing to really teach at home. You know, you can encourage your children to write but parents are not just naturally going to be able to pick up the teaching of writing. So we found that schools were really looking specifically for writing solutions to help in their sort of catch up attempt. So yeah, that's been really really busy for the last eight months, and it's been pretty much without let up so we're getting Yeah, in a good way, but it's definitely tiring. Yeah.
Graham Allcott 24:51
So obviously, this podcast is called Beyond busy. Yeah. And you've been in the middle of busy for that period. What's been your kind of buisiness survival. It's tactics, what are the things that have helped to keep you sane?
Jon Smith 25:02
Well, I think we were in a very fortunate position coming into the pandemic, because we were already a fully remote team. So I was the last person to leave the office when we moved from London to cumulated months ago. Yeah. And that meant that in terms of actually running the business, and we have 14 people in the business, that was straightforward, we knew how to communicate online. Well, we had all our processes set up well, so that was a great sort of starting point. And then I think in terms of, you know, sort of Personally, I mean, living down in Cornwall is wonderful from the perspective that this last Sunday, it was a beautiful day. So we literally took the kids and we spent the whole day at the beach aquarium beach, we at aquarium beach cafe. And it was just, it was just a wonderful, totally switched off day from work where all we did was Focus on the Family or the important things watching the sea. Yeah. And I think for me, that balance of being able to switch off, you know, we bought a paddle board this year, I've loved paddle boarding, it's just no paddle boarding up the creeks when the tides kind of just coming in or you know, just changing. So really still really calming. It's finding those moments where you're able to kind of switch off from the buisiness of work. And so I think, yes, it has been busy, but we've coped with it well, because we had a lot of things in place already that we'd sort of worked on. And we've been trying to design the organisation and our lifestyle in order to make it possible to cope with very challenging circumstances like this year has been.
Graham Allcott 26:29
Yeah, you mentioned the idea of being a fully remote team there and think productive, my business is kind of similar, you know, so we, we gave up our office, actually, similar to you guys, just before the pandemic, we gave up our final piece of office space and went fully remote. I'd love to know more about what those processes are some of the geeky conversations about the technology that you're using, like what's the glue that holds it together for you guys as a remote team?
Jon Smith 26:55
It was funny actually reading yesterday that slack has just been acquired by Salesforce for something like $37 billion. Right now I was describing to my wife because she asked me I what slack is she's you know, not even I'm like Slack, slack is like everything. You know, it's it's like far better than email. And you know, but but yes, slack has been absolutely key, I think slack and Google Hangouts and Google meet, yeah, they have been central to problem for the last two years, you know, we do all of our communication through Slack, we very rarely email one another. And there are various rules. So I remember when my CTO, Matt first pitched to me that we should become a fully remote team, or at least a partially remote team. And there were lots of potential benefits, we say it'd be much easier to recruit and retain people. This is the way that it's going anyway, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, at the time, I was incredibly sceptical as heck, I'm sure this won't work, you know, you need to be together for that kind of creativity. But I have to say, I've been proven completely wrong, I think it's, for us, it's become a far more productive way to work now. And there was a book called remote. I don't even know who it's by, but it's just called remote. And it is, in a way, our Bible for how we tackle remote working. And always, whenever anyone asks about, should we be switching to a remote scenario? Or how do I personally manage working remotely? I always recommend this book because it's a brilliant guide for what to do.
Graham Allcott 28:17
We'll put that in the show notes, by the way, so that people can reference that one.
Jon Smith 28:20
Yeah, it's definitely good. And I know that when we first moved to Korea, when I first started working remotely, I found it really hard. It was a really hard adjustment to make. But simple things, simple things that are laid out in the book, like getting dressed properly each day and actually treating it like going to the office. Yeah, having your room that is the office and that being separate to the rest of the house and out of bounds for kids. There are various things like that that sort of made it much easier to kind of manage, I would say.
Graham Allcott 28:46
So think about space there. Think about getting dressed and having the rituals to transition from home mindset into work mode and work mindset. Yeah, things actually, I
Jon Smith 28:55
learned you Inbox Zero, those sorts of things. Yeah, absolutely critical. I don't know how I would manage without basically just finishing everything's getting to the end of the day. Yeah, whenever that time is I tend to work in the evenings as well. Sometimes I don't quite have flexible approach because I'm quite productive in the evenings. But getting to the end of the day and making sure you have your to do lists clear. Yeah, obviously I've got a board behind me with all the kind of ideas and workings on I love whiteboarding and kind of getting stuff out there. And then we found our team meetups to be really important. So what you end up doing is you work on a lot of the kind of delivery of the projects while you're remote. And then you come together normally without a pandemic, once every two to six weeks, two months, and that's where you have two or three intense days of really creative work sketching things out making the next set of Sprint's clear, and we found out to be we got into really good kind of method of instead of routine of doing that, and it's nice because you can select new places to visit. You know, we've got people in Belgium, Slovakia, Ukraine, and so you know, our next meetup, we're going to go to Portugal and get an Arab Be on the coast in Portugal. Wow. Okay, because you know, why not? That's a perfectly reasonable place to go and meet up. Yeah. And that's what you can do, I think if you start to get a bit more creative about those sorts of things and make those a bit more special,
Graham Allcott 30:11
so everyone goes to Portugal or goes to London, or wherever it's going to be, and then three days, so presumably, day one is kind of check in and review progress and that kind of stuff. And then you spend a couple of days really just looking at what you want to do next. That's
Jon Smith 30:25
right with the product is that Yeah, pretty, pretty much it. And a lot of it is about just kind of reconnecting and re just establishing all those sort of things that sort of make the whole team, you know, the proper team. Yeah, I think it's hard if in a way, our mission pablos mission is an easy one to get behind. You know, it's all about inspiring children, you know, the future and try to help people express themselves and be creative, and a lot of us are parents. So there's a real sense of kind of camaraderie within the team. And all of most of the team used to work in an office together, you know, one of the devs is now in Belgium, and us and the two in Slovakia, you know, they were in London, they just moved back. So again, that's really hard, because we all have kind of established relationships. But we have brought on a couple of new people recently. And again, they've been able to set him really nicely, but it's in those team events where you really get to know one another, you might go to the pub, you know, in the sort of evening and socialise a lot more that way. And so I think you really build a very family type kind of attitudes to the way that work is. That's at least what we've sort of managed to do. And it seems to work
Graham Allcott 31:28
that feels to me like the future of work, but you're talking about it in a more exaggerated form, right. So being away from each other for a set few weeks, and then you come together every six weeks or so, I guess for most people listen to this. They may be in that place of being back in an office, but a couple of days a week, and then maybe from home three days a week. But that's sort of like the interplay, isn't it? It's like when you're in the office together, it's about that kind of social communication and understanding and creativity. And then when you're back on your own at home and working remotely, it's much more about heads down, focus, deliver and execute on the things that you've been setting out.
Jon Smith 32:04
Yeah, and we talk a lot we always have like, at the beginning of the week, our kind of stand up and on the Monday morning huddle. And that's everybody in the team. And we talk about how last week how people feeling what's the plan for this week, yeah. And then I was actually thinking the other day about kind of one to ones almost have one to ones in my team pretty much every day, you know, I'm pretty much someone collaborating on something. So we are very, very fluid in the amount of time we spend talking to each other or sharing a doc to kind of work out something. And then at the end of the week, we have our show and tell and that's a lovely way where everyone gets a kind of minute or a couple of minutes each. And they get to share, you know, a little video or a slide of something that they've been working on that week that I want to share with the team. So I think getting into good routines about how you're going to collaborate and share and communicate not just the sort of operational stuff you need to do, but also the stuff you're proud of, you know, people show and tell that they built a new set of steps for their house or something, you know, be anything, but it's nice, because you get that real sort of sense of what's important to people and what people like to share. So I think Yeah, communication is obviously really, really important in success of a remote situation.
Graham Allcott 33:12
Yeah, one thing I wanted to just come back on was slack. So you mentioned inbox zero there. Yeah. How does that apply to slack in terms of sort of Slack channel zero. And just managing slack in terms of sometimes it can be a really noisy place
Jon Smith 33:27
actually, that like slack is not as ideal for inbox zero as email? inbox?
Graham Allcott 33:33
Yeah, for sure. So do you have rules about how you use slack? I'd love to just know more about like how you've made it work to actually no,
Jon Smith 33:39
we don't have specific rules about it that I find quite a lot that all because I have slack on my phone, I'll be having lunch. And I'll kind of still be in the conversation. And I might see things. What I normally do, at least at the end of the day is just go through all of the channels and just make sure there's no kind of actions that I missed. Yeah. So I think it's about again, having some kind of process where you can make sure that you're kind of cleaning off what's important that you need to actually do, but I agree, actually, it's that that's one area you could possibly work on. It's like how do you create that kind of Inbox Zero type approach and methodology in slack? Because it is a lot harder to miss things.
Graham Allcott 34:13
Yeah. And just you just find something that's just been buried in? Yeah. 15 other channels and you don't see it? I've been trying to do it on my weekly review with WhatsApp as well. I've just really noticed that WhatsApp and chats on WhatsApp is so prevalent now. Yeah, for me that like one of my new things on my weekly review is just to trawl through WhatsApp, at least a week behind and just make sure that there's nothing lurking in there from four days ago. And there usually is, usually there's a Graham, can you do this? Or can you email me that or there's this thing and it was four days ago and I've just forgotten. So just having that safety net in the weekly review for me is sort of, I guess the key thing but yeah, doing that every day as a close down the phone close down the laptop kind of ritual at the end of the day is probably a good approach, I
Jon Smith 34:54
think. Yeah. And I think actually, we moved from WhatsApp to slack. And that was was instrumental because we used to have what we call the staff room. And it was just one WhatsApp channel for everyone in the business, right? Yeah, it was just Carnage, you could wake up and have 100 messages about something and you just have no chance of kind of following. So obviously, with Slack, you can kind of divide out channels and conversations. And so it makes it much better for and you can search and all those sorts of things and attach files a bit more structured way. So we definitely find that works a lot better for us than what we were doing before on WhatsApp. Yeah. Interesting.
Graham Allcott 35:29
We got a few more minutes left. And one of the topics that I like to talk about on this podcast is just how people define happiness and success in their work. I mean, it just strikes me talking to you, there's a real sense of purpose in the business that you're engaged in, like you say, it's very difficult, pretty difficult not to feel engaged in the work that you're doing. So I'm just wondering, do you have those kind of plan? Or what an end game of success looks like for you within the business? Or is it just a case of just enjoying the process of building it in the day to day?
Jon Smith 36:00
Yeah, I very much tried to enjoy the journey and try to think, look, because there's so many ups and downs, and entrepreneurship is short, you know, it's, you know, it's crazy, sometimes that sort of highs and lows. But I think if you can try to enjoy the journey, and each step you're taking, that's a really good start. I do know, for me, one thing I really find hard is feeling of not having control. And it was good example, this when the when the pandemic hit, there was some, particularly some investors and some people that says, Look, guys, you should be doing something around parents. This is where the opportunity is, yeah, how could you package people up to work for parents. And so we gave it a try that, you know, we took the ideas, that seemed like a sensible thing, we created a landing page, and we got 1000s of parents signups in a couple of weeks, it was pretty staggering. And, you know, even we were like, Well, okay, and we surveyed them as well. And some of like a third of these parents said, they would pay for something that would help their children to write. And so what we did, we tried to kind of package up the product in a slightly different way. And in the end, it basically didn't work because ABA was built for teachers, it's not a parent product. Yeah. And if you were going to build something for parents to help support, the teaching of writing at home, you would build something different, you know, would be a independent app or set of games or something that children could work with independently. And that's not how poverty is built. And it really like that really annoyed me, you know, making that mistake, because it reminded me that actually, when you're living and breathing this business day in day out, you know, you really know what you need to do. And I kind of fundamentally knew that it was the wrong thing to try to kind of play around with this sort of parent proposition. And I should have kind of trusted my instincts. But when you have investors on board, you know, no disrespect to them, of course, they're trying to make public as successful as possible, but you lose an element of control, you start having to consider their views. And some of them may not really know anything about the business you're in. And so for me happiness, I will feel, you know, happy, I think when I have sort of complete control of my destiny, essentially, Simon and I are the two kind of main directors and problems I was the deputy head who co founded it. And I feel like the sort of success for us would be to run pebble for a long time, we absolutely love what we do, we love the impact that we have. And we're super excited by the potential growth all over the world for working with children and creating impact. But what I really want to do is do that on our terms, and not have to answer to you know, I've spoken to lots of VCs who've offered us terms before where essentially you give over complete control of your business to the point that they could find you as CEO if they wanted to. And clearly, if I'm not doing a good job that, you know, that's fine. But the point is here that I think, for me having real control over what we do and the choices that we make, even if that means that we have to be a little less ambitious as to how quickly we grow or how fast the team, we don't need a huge team, I see these couple of education companies right now I've raised money and they're hiring, you know, 50 positions, and that I can't think of anything worse, hiring people is really hard. Anyone who's ever hired anyone and failed at that, which I'm sure most people have, will realise that's really tricky, and very stressful and very much out of your control. And so I really like situations where I can kind of be in control and go at my pace. And that's what makes me feel happy and sort of calm and comfortable in what we're doing. And so I think for that reason, the pandemic, though, it feels like that's a really good thing for online education, it's actually been hard because suddenly you're subject to a lot of external forces that you can't control. And I have to consciously calm myself and say, Look, you can't do anything about that. All we can do is focus on our game and doing what we do. Well, if we do that, that's what makes me feel calm and happy and kind of grounded, I think.
Graham Allcott 39:43
Yeah. And I guess it's like, you can't stop the bus, right? You've got investors saying, do this or try that. And there's such momentum behind it because of the pandemic and everything else that's happening. Yeah. Then just naturally, you're just less in control.
Jon Smith 39:55
Yeah, absolutely. And you feel a sort of obligation. You know, they've given us their money for us to Try to grow that money. So you definitely rightly feel an obligation to try to support their views and ideas. But I do know when we've been most successful when we've focused really internally and try, basically just try to work out what the customer needs. I mean, that's pretty much for any startup, can you figure out a need, that is big enough, fell by enough people that people were then going to adopt or buy your solution. And if you keep things really simple, that's where I'm kind of biassed and happiness is thinking about those things. Not trying to kind of force something on that may or may not be quite aligned with what we're trying to do.
Graham Allcott 40:33
Yeah, a couple of years ago, went through a process of writing down my core values, which is really useful exercise. And one of them was freedom on autonomy. Yeah, which I think really talks to what you're describing there. And I think on reflection, because that's such a sort of core value. For me, that's probably one of the reasons that I've always resisted the idea of setting up a board for my company. And I've always resisted the idea of even looking for investment and sort, you know, turning that down if people have approached me as well, do you have any advice? For me, it sounds like you have a similar core value there any advice for me on how to make that work and how to maintain either actual control, or at least the feeling of control? When it's, you know, everybody else has their own sort of sense of ownership, presumably over people and wants to sort of take it in perhaps different directions to you?
Jon Smith 41:19
Yeah, so we don't have a board. Interestingly, we have an advisory board, some really, really good advisors that help, but I like to take advice from lots of different people, I just feel that the executive team probably know what's best to do. We haven't really had any situation that's been so complicated, that we've been unable to have a pretty good idea about how to proceed with it. Yeah, maybe as you start to get into real scale up situations where you're like picking between Okay, do we go to the Middle East or Southeast Asia? Okay, there are lots of factors. And having people with experience can definitely help. But I found just random coffee chats with people if I want to move into a state that example. So we want to do more in the Middle East, if we can find someone who has some experience in the Middle Eastern Market that we can have a quick sit down with. I found, yeah, everyone's so happy to have conversations, pretty much you can reach out to anyone now on LinkedIn, and pretty much you can get a conversation with them, particularly if you're not asking for money. I found that a lot harder when we were fundraising, because you'd always have this agenda of like, Hey, can you offer me advice? And you know, somebody will ask you for some money? You know, that's a very different thing to say, hey, you've got this great experience. Yeah, we really could do with half hour chat about this, you know, can we have a quick call? And and that's even easier. Now. It's remote. I think, you know, you don't even have to meet for coffee, you can literally just have a zoom chat. And so I think yeah, it doesn't really answer your question, really. But I think the biggest challenge for us is that we need to be basically a cash breakeven, if we're a cash breakeven, we are in control of our destiny, because we don't need to go and raise more money, right? Yeah, that's where I would focus. If I was rebuilding this startup from scratch or doing a second one, there would be no other like thing more important than product market fit. That's obviously one. The second thing then is getting to cash flow, breakeven. So you don't need to rely on having to raise more money, because that's when you give away control when you're desperate. And you have to raise more money, we're lucky that we've managed to secure ways forward, we've got some great grants this year. That mean, we're well sustained. But I just know from being close to situations where we've run out of money that that is where you basically make compromises on things like control, which I think then in the long term, create difficulties in the business. Yeah, for sure. If you can kind of avoid those pinch points. If you have to make redundancies at any point or reduce cost base, like do that early, you know, give yourself enough room so that you can stay afloat and stay sustainable. And then you'll always have the freedom of choice, because you kind of choose what you want to do. And you're not really answerable to other people.
Graham Allcott 43:43
Yeah. And there's almost like a systematic relationship between bootstrapping, or just controlling cost and having control, right, like, the more you need to spend, the more you need to look for people to give you that money to spend, and therefore sort of take on the investment and like, the more as you go through a process, you can just bootstrap and be at breakeven or a little bit more, just the more control you have, right.
Jon Smith 44:05
Yeah. And it's amazing how much you can do pub four years ago, we thought we needed to ramp up sales. And so we hired some sales people very experienced in the education sector. It was the most thing we did, we unfortunately had to make all three of them redundant three months later, four months later. And because they weren't able to sell what we were doing, as well as the founders. And so in a way it just didn't really work out. And what was interesting was at that point, in order to kind of justify the decision that I pretty much made unilaterally the team there was quite a lot of uncertainty as to whether it was the right call, but I was I was really sure that this was the right thing to do. So what I did then is I stepped into the head of sales role and I've never really done sales in my life before. And it was brutal at the first six months was so hard like no one taking calls, no one interested but then over time you started to work out okay, well, this is how you get past gatekeeper number one, and this is how you start to qualify whether a school might even be interested in buying you product, this is then how you start to sell to those people in over the course of 18 months and went from, you know, selling absolutely nothing to we had a kind of record year driven by the founders selling. And I was kind of leading on that, because I'd sort of chosen to. And what that meant is that I realised we don't need sales people, we can do this online, there's actually ways to automate this. And and so by learning how to do it myself, I was then able to kind of identify what is the most scalable, cost effective way to drive this process forward? Rather than hiring an expensive other person to design a process that may not even work anyway? Yeah. So we always now have this philosophy where essentially, if we haven't done this thing ourselves, as founders, we don't hire someone else to do it, like no consultant know anything. Like, we have to have done it ourselves in order to understand how to get the help we need in order to do that. And in most cases, you end up not hiring anyone anyway, because you figure out how to do it in a very effective way. And then you can build a sort of scalable piece into your business. Yeah. So that's another thing. I typically after we raise money the first time, we're like, Great, let's hire some people who know what they're doing. And it just doesn't work like that no one comes into a business and can immediately deliver things. And so pretty much that's your job, as a founder, I think, is to
Graham Allcott 46:15
work out all those things. And I think that's the thing is mapping those processes, and really just getting under the skin of how something works. I've done it so many times myself, where the easiest reaction when you're drowning in so many different projects is let's find a capable person, I can at least just hand some of those projects to but often the real benefit of the work of a founder is to do that mapping, work it all out. Yeah. And then it becomes clearer who you need and what you need. Yeah, to take other things on if you need to hire at all.
Jon Smith 46:46
Yeah, absolutely. Right. That's definitely what we found.
Graham Allcott 46:49
Yeah. So just before we finish, I guess I have one final question is you have over the last year been dealing with the education sector, and that going through just such a rapid series of changes through the year. So I'd love to just know how you think the education sector is coming out of the pandemic? And what do you think is going to be the lasting impact in 20 years time when we look back and say, this is the thing that really changed in education as a result? Well, I
Jon Smith 47:14
think there are a few themes, I think, unfortunately, you're going to have a sort of generation of children who lost a lot of education. And in those children, you're going to have the ones that were able to be kind of educated at home and had very engaged parents or parents or even had the ability or the time and the ability to help do homeschooling, they're sort of loss will be a lot less unfortunately, you will have people that had less books or less things at home to help to educate or less space or less devices or whatever it was, yeah, they unfortunately are going to be much, much further behind. And the research coming out at the moment is pretty staggering, you know, saying that people have lost years worth of education, you know, terms of just that relatively small period of time, sweetie, I'm just on a conversation. Can we do it in five minutes time? Is that okay?
Graham Allcott 48:05
You can do in five minutes. Sorry. Is this your daughter has a better answer the new john that's this is my daughter Alexia. And yeah, she probably knows a lot. In your screen, I can see it's it's very smart. Alexia, how have you found the year of school where you've been in lockdown and COVID-19 and everything what's changed for you?
Unknown Speaker 48:31
Well, I can never were allowed to bring in our Christmas campaign. Okay. Well, school uniforms and Guinea for me. Next week, on the following Friday, we are going to make been asked to bring in a big orange adult so we're going to like put a candle in the middle would be offering free steaks, but may be sweet is our respects. They'll say then we're going to put a red ribbon around the dough.
Graham Allcott 49:08
I think I remember doing that myself.
Unknown Speaker 49:10
Red Ribbon is, I think, to say that God sadly died. And also the candle a for God's love and adore Saudi and the four seasons. I go so god oh, I mean is the
Graham Allcott 49:33
well, there we go. There you go. So we've learned a lot, john and Alexia as well.
Jon Smith 49:39
And I think that that nicely explains why school is so important for you know, Alexis six, and she loved it when she was able to go back to school because teachers and schools know how to put together activities and interesting things that get children excited and engaged like this next school year That's right. And you found home learning quite tricky, didn't you? You didn't like doing learning at home? No, because I think having children in school is an important. Yeah, unless you're younger, obviously, lots of home schoolers, you know, do great job and everything else, but they're planning for that, you know, they're they're set up to do that. And if you're not, I think that's really, really tricky thing for any parent to figure out. For sure. We're just gonna say goodbye. Now. You want to say goodbye to Graeme. And then I'll come through in five minutes.
Say love school.
Graham Allcott 50:31
It was lovely to meet you. I don't know whether you know, but you've just been on my podcast. There you go. That's exciting.
Jon Smith 50:38
early times. Yeah. You just go through that. And I'll be in five minutes later.
Graham Allcott 50:45
There you go. So we are a podcast all about work life balance. Yeah, as well as productivity. So I think that's a lovely note to bring it to a close. So john, john, if people want to find out more about popper and connect with you, how do they find out more?
Jon Smith 50:57
Yeah, absolutely. So you can just go to the pub website, you can sign up if you want, if you're a teacher, or a homeschooler, or tutor or anything like that you can sign up for a free trial and have a look around problem and the tools and the content that we kind of provide. And you can always reach out to me, I'm just john J. n@paypal.com. Yeah. And we're always, always excited to hear from people and a lot of the current scenario around the pandemic means that we're always encouraging conversations with anyone in any kind of situation, that they're really looking to improve writing with their children, whether that's parents or teachers or anything else. So yeah, feel free to reach out, we'd love to talk with you.
Graham Allcott 51:32
Great stuff. Well, thanks for being on Beyond Busy, both of you. I know we'll put a link to all of that in the show notes as well. So yeah, if you want to connect with john, you can do that at to get beyond busy.com. So yeah, thanks again. And yeah, lovely to talk to you today. Thanks, Greg. Really good story. So there you go, john smith, and a shout out and thanks to my business partner, Elena Kerrigan, Managing Director of thing productive for putting us in touch and I would set it up, we are also the sponsors of this podcast that thing productive. So if you're interested in productivity, if you want to help your people to do their best work, then head to thinkproductive.com. And from that page, you'll find all the different countries that we're in, and you can find your local think productive office, it's just think productive co.uk, if you're listening to this in the UK, as well as our standard stuff around how to be a Productivity Ninja, getting your inbox zero and all that we've got a whole bunch of other stuff that we do now. So helping with stuff like project management, helping with diversity, inclusion, a whole range of other stuff. So head to thinkproductive.com and find your country and get in touch. Thanks also to Emilie, who is my assistant and has just been incredible. Over the last few weeks, we've been going through a bit of a transition in terms of the producers of this podcast. So just want to say a massive thanks to Emilie for just taking on the burden of all of that, and recruiting a new producer, doing a lot of the social media stuff for us in the interim as well. So it's just given me the confidence to just get my head down and do what I need to be doing, which is writing this new book on kindness and leadership. And I just couldn't have done that without you, Emilie. So just want to say a massive thank you and just place that on the record. And yeah, I hope everyone is Well, I hope you're doing okay, I had some really lovely feedback already on my new book, how to fix meetings, which has just come out. If you haven't got a copy of that, then we'll put the link to that in the show notes as well. If you're a regular listener to be on busy, you probably already know this, because we've just had Sally watts and the legend Jacki Weaver on previous episodes talking about meetings. So by now you should be aware that I've got this book out how to fix meetings, but I'd love you to go buy a copy. It really matters that people buy books in the first month or so that they come out. Because that is the time where Amazon really starts to get its head around, get its algorithm around, like how big is this book going to be? So if you get it off to a good start, then the chances are you end up standing in good stead. So please don't delay, please go and buy a copy of how to fix meetings. And that would make me very happy. And feel free to share it on social media. So tag me in just add Graham Allcott on Instagram, tag me in on LinkedIn if you want. And you can also tag us in on Twitter too. So yeah, let me just go buy a copy of How to Fix Meetings. As I said before, generally I don't like putting sponsorship on the podcast. So we keep the sponsorship very much in house and very low key. I don't like having advertising and you know all that like by Squarespace and buy mattresses and stuff. But what that means is we put a lot of our own money into this podcast and when it comes to putting a new book out there, you buying a copy of the book for a tenner. It's just a nice way to support what we're doing here at beyond busy so if you get value from these episodes, please go buy a copy of how to fix meetings, even if you never read it. Just think of it as a little token of appreciation. So again, buy a copy of How to Fix eetings.
That is all for this week. We'll be back next week with another episode. We got some really good ones booked in over the next next few weeks and really excited to be sharing these we're going to take a break over the summer holidays and we'll be going right up until July until then so until then, enjoy the sunshine.
Take care Bye for now.
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