Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Addison Caldwell & Liza Tarakanova. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Addison and Liza – thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard
One of our founding beliefs at neucrew is that we want to create educational content by sharing our journey, rather than creating prescriptive ‘how-to’ content. What does that really mean though? To us, it means that we avoid saying “you have to do this” or “we know”. There’s a lot of content out there that already does that, and while there’s nothing wrong with it, it didn’t align with our goals! Instead, we opt to share our experiences (or the experiences of our mentors). We create “Do it With Us” videos where we walk through the steps of doing something, like filing for an LLC, and folks are welcome to follow along, or take inspiration from our video and do it differently!
We hope that by sharing our journey – being honest and transparent about our and our mentors’ experiences starting companies – we can build a community of fellow entrepreneurs that share together, learn together, and ultimately, grow together!
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
A lot of people don’t think they have what it takes to start a business. it can feel really intimidating… Being afraid of failing, not knowing where to start, or being scared to leave the security of a 9-5 job are all reasons we’ve experienced – so we get it!
In high school, we both started our first businesses as a part of a school district sponsored entrepreneurship program. Through this program we experienced the challenges of starting a business, but we were lucky to have the support of business owners in our community who empowered and mentored us. years later, we felt excited to do exactly that for others through neucrew.
That’s why our mission is to make starting a company more accessible to all. We do this by creating content (Youtube videos, social media posts, etc.) about all that goes into starting a business! We want to showcase, through our own journey, that starting a company isn’t as inaccessible as it seems.
Our ultimate goal? We hope to enable people’s ideas to meet reality, just as our ideas were enabled to meet reality back in high school. We think anyone and everyone is capable of starting a business. We don’t think we’re the magic potion to help someone start a successful business, but we do hope to be the catalyst that helps someone try!
Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?
We are fully bootstrapped here at neucrew! We pay for things as needed, but quite honestly, our biggest investment in neucrew has been our time. We’ve put countless hours into planning videos, filming, editing, promoting our videos, and more.
Due to the nature of what we’re doing here, our overhead is very minimal – we pay for google workspace storage, our neucrew.io domain, filming equipment, gifts for mentors who film with us, andd… that’s about it! Random charges come up here and there, but we do as much as we can to stay low budget, since we haven’t yet started making money on our content. However, when that day comes, we’ll definitely plan to think about how we can reinvest our income into leveling up everything that we do!
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
In the process of starting neucrew, we undertook multiple major pivots, learning from each one.
However, one pivot in particular stands out. We had started neucrew with a plan to “maximize our content!” We planned to release every youtube video as a video and with a longer form podcast version, too! This was great (in theory) but considering we were balancing full time jobs, neucrew, and more, we realized that although it may be ideal, releasing as much content as possible was a little unrealistic for us. After trying it a few times, we decided that someday we’d revisit the idea of a podcast, but for now would plan to stick with just video creation, and attempt to get really good at it before adding a different medium of content onto our plates.
We also wanted to share a little story from each of us on our personal experiences pivoting.
Addison’s Story:
I have made my fair share of career pivots. And, funny enough, they led to one major mental pivot that has made me feel a sense of purpose in my historically shallow but wide professional experience.
I have known one thing for a long time: I want to start my own business. In order to get experience in this, I thought, I need to work for a business, of course, but in what role? Does it matter? I wasn’t sure.
In 2018 I got offered a part-time marketing gig with a startup in Houston, TX. After ensuring that the founders knew that I did not yet have any marketing experience, I excitedly accepted the role. I wasn’t yet sure which role at a company felt the most exciting to me, but I went into the experience with the perspective that I would see how one side of a business works (the marketing side) and at the same time get to observe how all the other parts work from afar! It felt like a no-brainer to say yes!
4 to 5 months later, I realized that marketing was, in fact, not my cup of tea. So, I asked to pivot into a customer success role. Did I know if I was going to like it? No. I thought I could be good at it though, and so did the CEO, so we tried it! And, I loved it! For about a year and a half… Although still generally enjoying myself, I saw another part of the business that I felt I could contribute to and learn about – Account Management/Sales. So, eventually I pivoted!
I loved it! For about a year… then I saw another part of the organization that I felt I could contribute to and learn about – Product. And, you guessed it, I was happy! For about a year…
Long story short, through all of this, I learned SO much about businesses – different ways teams can function together and independently, different ways to project manage, task manage, and people manage, different ways to train & onboard people, different philosophies about communication, etc., etc.. But through it all, I struggled with internal and external pressures to “really commit to one thing,” “to be satisfied in one role for longer,” and that “everyone gets bored – just fight it!” I felt guilty for “bouncing around the organization.”
Looking back, it’s clear to me that I was committed to one thing – learning as much as I could about the business that I worked for at the time. And, I continue that effort every day at the new company that I work for!
Through advice from mentors, as well as through personal experience, I realized that, although my career path has been non-traditional, it has been uniquely valuable and purposeful for me, and that when someone is able to align their work with helping them to accomplish their long term goals, then there’s nothing wrong with that! Moreover, there’s everything right with that!
Liza’s Story:
I love the idea of pivoting because I think it means embracing change, instead of sticking to an idea that may not be working. It can be really hard to actually make a pivot though, or hear what someone is telling you!
For example – when Addison and I were in our high school entrepreneurship program, I had a business idea for a lightbulb that turned on and off with several different sensors. I was doing my market research, drawing up sketches of the product, and gearing up to start working on it, when I was introduced to a (potential) mentor. This mentor had given me some initial advice when we first met, so we set up some time to meet in person and further talk through my idea.
After walking him through all my thoughts, he started grilling me with questions. “Does something like this already exist?” “What makes your product special?” and more. After struggling through answering them… this mentor basically told me that I shouldn’t run with this business idea because it wasn’t viable, there were other products like it, and I would probably fail. I didn’t want to listen to him – because it was pretty harsh feedback – and my first reaction was to be defensive. I definitely had to fight that feeling and think through the logic of the advice I was hearing.
I ended up taking the advice, and pivoting to a different business idea (still kept the sensor theme going though!). And pivoting to that new idea ended up becoming a project/business that I was really excited and passionate about, and provided so much more learning along the way. My biggest learning was that it’s easy to “dig your heels in” when you hear something that may force you to change course (and you don’t always have to listen to that advice), but I found it really helpful to try to fight that feeling, and step back and examine the logic behind it. And then make your next move!
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