How To Build A Multi-Million Dollar Empire In Your 20s - Grace Beverley
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We all have an obligation to make money. The large majority of us have an obligation to make money. And whenever you attach obligation to anything you love, there's always going to be an element of it feeling like a chore. I think probably what's been slightly missold is this idea that you're going to have a big passion, something you love. It's going to be monetizable.

and you're never going to hate it or burn out. Like, we need to preserve the fact that, and we need to understand the fact that you can love what you do and feel incredibly privileged to do what you do and still not wake up every morning and be like, skipping out the door.

Hello and welcome back to Deep Dive, the ongoing podcast where every week I get the chance to speak to entrepreneurs, authors, creators and other inspiring people. And we find out how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools that we can learn from them to apply to help live our best lives. And today what you're about to hear is a conversation between me and Grace Beverly. Grace is an entrepreneur and author of this podcast.

excellent book working hard hardly working grace is interesting because she's like an og influencer from like back in the day and for i think three years she grew to a fitness fitness account on instagram and on youtube to like stupidly high proportions but then she actually decided to kind of scrap the being an influencer lifestyle in favor of starting two businesses while she was studying full-time at oxford university one of them is called a tala which is a sustainable activewear brand

And the other one is called Shreddy, which is like this workout app for working out and fitness and like sells physical products. And these two are like incredibly interesting businesses, which Grace has managed to create in her early 20s. And I think she's now just 25 years old, having written a book. It's a bestseller, just crushing it across all these different fields of life. And so we talk a lot about the idea of entrepreneurship. We talk a lot about productivity and the balance between productivity and self

care and we kind of dig into a little bit of grace's history as to how she started doing the influencer thing and posting fitness videos on instagram and why she ultimately decided that that was not the life for her so incredibly enjoyable conversation uh super nice of grace to hop on the podcast and for us to have a conversation in person and yeah the book is sick i've read it recently and i'm just like blown away by how many interesting ideas she's got in the book

you know, this idea of productivity and the idea of self-care and how we can kind of balance this theoretical fine line between the two. So I hope you enjoy this conversation between me and Grace Beverly. It seems like you're just doing a ton of stuff. I kind of wanted to talk about all of the things that you're doing, but I thought the place we could start was your background as a chorister. Oh, he's gone way back. Yeah. Cause like reset. So what,

When I was year seven to nine, I was in the South End Boys Choir in my school. Were you? And then my voice broke and then suddenly I was a bass. Yeah, then they kick you out. And I didn't really like singing the bass lines and I couldn't really read the music. And it's not the tune. And so it's a lot harder. But my understanding is that you and all of your sisters as well were like big into choir stuff. And I wanted to ask, what is that like being in that kind of world? Well, I actually think that if you traced like...

my almost manic obsession with being busy all the time. Not intentionally, I know it's a bad thing. I know I don't actually want it, but like, I will shamelessly say that my like self-worth is entirely like kind of probably like related to my like productivity slash how busy I am. I know it's wrong, it's still the case, we're working on it. But I would say actually, I went to Salisbury, which is where I was a chorister when I was, I auditioned when I was eight, I went when I was nine.

And so you're doing that alongside school, which means you're rehearsing for two hours in the morning and every other day about, it's about four to five hours in the evening. Oh wow. Because it's rehearsal and service. This was Salisbury Cathedral. This is Salisbury Cathedral. So every day and then on the weekends you do either Saturday night and Sunday night or you do Friday night and Sunday morning.

That's pretty intense. So, yeah. So it's about 20 hours on top of your schoolwork. So from the age of nine, I was doing... Yeah, you get up early, you do your two hours before school, your 45 hours after school, and then your weekends. And you also don't have school holidays. You don't have school holidays. It's starting to sound a bit...

Yeah, it does. Almost like child labor or something. Well, it was by choice. And also you go to the private school for...

hugely discounted so because you have to go to that school to be part of the choir anyway that's kind of what I did from when I was nine to when I was 13 and then left but was always a music scholar after that so always had kind of what's a music scholar essentially would get a huge percentage of money off and go to for the school I was at but in return for doing lots of music things so

concerts, helping younger students, like lots of things. Basically you pay your dues. So was it like singing or musical instruments as well? What was your jam? My instrument ranking was first instrument was voice, then violin, then piano and then I actually played the drums for a while. And then you got a choral scholarship to Oxford is my understanding. Yes, yeah. And then that would have been pretty intense as well because everyone I know who was in choir just like all of their evenings seemed to be gone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Choral scholarship to Oxford and then

I actually gave up my scholarship after first year because I had also started my first business. And you're not really meant to be doing that anyway. Oh yeah, because they don't allow you to technically work. There's a rule that you're not allowed to. I think they judge it... Well, I tried to give them no excuse to ever think that it was compromising anything. Like, I did not miss a single deadline throughout my whole time there. Not even like...

due date deadlines, like the weekly essays. Like I didn't, I just made it a point to not miss anything. Yeah. Because otherwise I knew they'd have an excuse to be like,

why are you doing this? So yeah, that was kind of... Yeah. Yeah. On my end, I just didn't ask for permission. I just did the thing. I imagine that's how you started off. Or did you email your director of studies and be like, hey, can I have permission to launch ready? Oh, no, no, no. Because when I started the first business, it was because I'd had an email from the bursar saying that my student finance hadn't come through. And if it wasn't paid by a month later, then I'd be expelled from the university. So I was like...

suspended that was my suspension email and so that's how i originally started it yeah because i needed some money i wasn't going to email and be like hey you're about to kick me out but can i have permission to work please yes quite yeah emails from the birth are never a fun no they're always a bit mean i i yeah that was really cause for so are you doing any of the music stuff these days or is everything else in your life sort of taken over that

I don't do nearly as much as I should. Should? In terms of, I love it. Yeah. And it was my entire life from, so obviously did the chorister thing, then I did the music scholarship thing, and then I went to Royal Academy of Music alongside secondary school. Oh, you did that as well? Damn, I didn't know that. That's cool. So...

So that, like, as in my whole life revolved around it for a very long time. And so it's so, it was such a huge part of my life. So I would love to do more of it, but I don't prioritize it. So when I say should, not in terms of obligation, but in terms of you should spend time doing things you love. My housemates know I'm really stressed if I'm playing the piano. They're like, do you know what I'm doing?

which will be because I'm yeah very stressed so it's good to de-stress that but I should do it more so the reason I ask about the music stuff is that in your book and I was listening to your interview with Stephen as well you kind of talk about the idea of

and like passion. And those are like difficult things to find that sort of intersection of the Venn diagram for. I remember you saying something that like you found that your kind of passion purpose wasn't in the influencer GraceFit UK life. It was more in the branding marketing side. Yeah. And I was kind of thinking, but like, if you're like, where does music come into this, if at all?

amongst the sort of Grace Beverly entrepreneur, podcaster, author scene? So I don't think that I necessarily do many things for fun now that don't make me money. And I feel like that's inherently problematic and not something I agree with. And I feel like music to me was always something that actually, I mean, it kind of made money from when I was like nine. But

It was so part of my life and it never made, it was never kind of like what was making me money, if that made sense. And it never evolved into something that was my career in that way. And I think that's what maintains my love of it so much. And I don't know if that's slightly strange because obviously we do encourage like, I don't know. I feel like, and I talk about this in the book too. I feel like we talk a lot about this idea of some big passion and big purpose that you have.

that almost if you're coming into the workforce and you don't have something like that, you feel in some way inferior. And I actually think that my big passion, which probably was music,

I love more as being a big passion rather than being something, something to monetize. And the thing that I'm passionate about that I do monetize is all of the kind of like branding, marketing, that type of stuff. I guess they're, they're separate. And for some reason in my head, that's always really made sense to me. And that's kept the joy of it. I also think I probably burnt out in it quite a lot for,

for you know when i was younger yeah because i was doing so much of it and then just thought this is probably not going to be yes the rest of my life absolutely definitely want to put a bookmark on the burnout conversation i've been doing a bunch of research into for my book and into intrinsic extrinsic motivation and stuff and there seems to be a lot of scientific and anecdotal evidence from everyone that when you have something that's fun and you add money to it

even if you really enjoy the thing, there's some aspect of it of like now doing it for money, which sort of takes a little bit or a lot of the joy out of it. What's been your experience with that with the sort of entrepreneurship podcasty? Because you said everything you do is for money. I think it's kind of the same for me. Almost everything I do is monetized in some way or another. Yeah. And I often feel that like,

I feel like I don't have anything that I do purely for fun anymore. Which is, like, it's such a huge privilege to be able to monetize anything that you love. Like, I think that we talk about it a lot when we almost see it as, like, kind of, like, wishy-washy. But it is very much like a, it's a, like, very middle class kind of concept. Because you're essentially expecting people to be able to, like, monetize something that is...

you know, that's not something they have to do to make money. And I kind of think that obviously whenever we all have an obligation to make money, the large majority of us have an obligation to make money. And whenever you attach obligation to anything you love, there's always going to be an element of it feeling like a chore. I think probably what's been slightly missold is

is this idea that you're going to have a big passion, something you love, it's going to be monetizable and you're never going to hate it or burn out. Like we need to preserve the fact that, and we need to understand the fact that you can love what you do and feel incredibly privileged to do what you do and still not wake up every morning and be like skipping out the door. So excited to go to it. And I think when we have this idea that you do have to do that, it,

is inevitably going to cause us both like anxiety because we feel ungrateful and we feel like it's not feeling right and all of that and also going to come with this kind of constantly feeling like we're doing it wrong because ultimately if you're doing something every day and there's any element of obligation in there you're going to not always want to do it even if it's just based on your mood

Yeah, and it seems like a lot of people that comment on this feel that this is a fairly modern phenomenon. Where back in the day, like our parents' generation, it was just a given that, oh, you go to work, it's a thing you have to do, everyone's got to work kind of vibe.

And sometimes when I talk to my mom and she's like, because, you know, I left medicine to do this YouTubery stuff. Often she'll say something like, you know, you've got to grow up sometime. We all have to work and work. Almost like work and fun are like different things. But I feel like millennial Gen Z, the whole vibe is, oh, I don't just want to go to work to make money. If I have the option, of course, all the privilege conversation aside, if I have the option, I would like to go to work to have fun, to have purpose, to be passionate about it.

Yeah, I completely agree. I also think that part of what's been tied into this is the fact that actually for our parents' generation, the whole concept that actually if you worked hard for 10 years, not even 10 years, the expectation was less than that. If you worked hard for a number of years, you'd be able to feed yourself, clothe yourself, feed your children, clothe your children and buy a house. Oh yeah. And none of that actually is the reality anymore.

what the first home buyer is now, mid thirties, mid to late thirties, I believe. So I think there's also part of this conversation that's kind of tying into it that's saying, actually, even if I hate what I do and I do it for 20, 30 years, I'm not even guaranteed to be able to pay my bills. So there's part of that that's kind of tying into and being like, well, I might as well try and do something I love. And actually what we're very much being sold online as well and what is probably interesting

quite a lot of it is true, is actually the fact that if you're doing something alongside that that's not necessarily a traditional role,

that you know something online some sort of side hustle some drop shipping some whatever actually those are the routes that are making people enough money to be able to do that and so there's this kind of twisted and like new perception of actually well if we if we play by all the rules and we don't even get the reward that we were kind of promised this like social construct that you'll be able to do all of that and provide for yourself then we might as well

be doing something that we love, this kind of like working for yourself thing as well. And I do think that kind of ties in quite heavily too. I love the idea that we now believe that we can do something we love and make money. I also think that it, you know, as we've talked about, it can be quite toxic too. Yeah. But I do think that definitely ties into it. It's a very different...

social environment. Yeah, the whole side hustle thing. So from when I was 17 and I read the four hour work week, I was like, all right, cool. Side hustle is the way forward, passive income, blah, blah, blah. I spoke to a bunch of doctors who I knew and I was like, you know, how much do you really enjoy your job? If you won the lottery, would you still do medicine? And half of them were like, I would quit immediately. And the other half were like, I'd go part time.

And I was like, why don't you go part time? And they were like, well, because I need to pay the bills, mortgage, kids, etc, etc. And so in my mind, I was like, cool. Clearly, the answer here is that, like, I want to be able to do medicine for fun. And I want to have enough streams of passive income on the side to be able to

be able to kind of clothe myself, feed myself and buy a house and do all those things. Because it seems like medicine in the UK is not necessarily the path to that right now. But then there's some, it is somewhat unfashionable to suggest the whole side hustle thing these days. And given that you were, I guess, when I was at university, you were like one of the OG influencer side hustler type people. And certainly in the book, you kind of talk about that a little bit. How do you think about this balance between

People could have side hustles if they want to make streams of income, to become financially free, etc. vs the kind of backlash to that of like, "Oh, but now you're telling people to work a second job in the evenings and that's bad." Yeah, so I think that it's exactly that. It's not black and white. And I think that when we present it online as black and white, and actually if you're using any hours in the evening to relax rather than using those three hours to be building your own Shopify page and making this much money, then you don't like time, you just like discipline, like all of these things.

I think that it can both be true that you can make lots through that and create a great life for yourself through that. And that also be really kind of this kind of toxic tie that I admit very much myself that I kind of have in my own like head between your productivity and your self-worth and your ability to monetize every single moment of your time. I think that I will be the first to say that side hustles will be, are an incredible way to monetize

make money outside of your main job or for me it was when I was a student or even before that I was babysitting every night or doing music tutoring like all of these things I kind of when I got into making money it was actually because I became obsessed with the fact that you know if I get 20 pounds a month from my parents I can make

£25 a night from babysitting. So I've already doubled my technical income for the month and just got completely obsessed with that idea. And then when I worked at IBM, I was doing the kind of Instagram stuff on the side and selling stuff and that kind of just snowballed. And so I can't sit here and say like, oh no, side-classing is really toxic.

I think that it's marketed very toxically and I think this, we do need to kind of question the idea that actually the amount of money we can make is capped only by our time. Or yeah.

And I also think that we can acknowledge that actually creating separate passive streams of income is a really important and really effective way to make more money. And I also think that now we're in an era where that, you know, privilege is more important to talk about than ever. But also at the same time, the online space is...

has hugely democratized starting a business in the way that the barriers to entry to starting a business are way, way, way lower. And so it's kind of, I just think that as long as we talk about it with the nuance of the whole conversation, then great. I think when we sell it as this kind of like, you're relaxing in the evening, oh,

that's why you don't have a house and that's why you're not driving a Lamborghini. I think that's kind of, I mean, it just, it sells on Instagram, doesn't it? Yeah, no, absolutely. Like there's always a middle way with these sorts of things. You mentioned that your ability to monetize your free time is not really capped by time necessarily these days. What, like, what are the other factors do you think that kind of go into this? And I guess I'm asking because I often come at this because I teach a course teaching people how to be part-time YouTubers.

And there's always this tension between wanting to be encouraging that, hey, anyone can succeed on YouTube because technically they can. But also this recognition that like, I succeeded on YouTube because I had Cambridge Medical School as my brand hashtag for like three freaking years. And there's loads of unfair advantages and privileges that play into it. And at the same time, yes, theoretically, someone in any position could succeed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean...

I don't think I've ever cracked that. I try to probably, to an annoying extent, contextualize everything I do with my privilege. Like I, you know, like all the huge list of, I mean, I have a whole chapter on it. So it's like, I try and contextualize that probably to the point of like virtue signaling. Beyond that, what I can do is share my journey. I can't be unborn.

Like that's my, that's obviously like, you know, I can't be unborn and I can't change that background. What I can do is fiercely contextualize so that I'm not saying, you know,

actually you over there, the only reason you're not in my position is because you didn't work hard enough. I think that beyond privilege as well, I was in the right place at the right time with social media. I went to Oxford again, as you said, like a huge, like put that on a YouTube video. So many people are gonna watch it. Like still my content had to be entertaining. It had to be informative. It had to take planning. I was uploading three times a week, every week at university and all of these things. So it's like,

Again, as long as you include the whole conversation and it contextualize the whole conversation, I think there is this tendency online to just see things as one way or another. And that's a really easy way to call people out and cancel people and all of these things. Whereas actually, if you're able to talk about the whole conversation, as long as I'm not sitting here saying like,

Exactly that. Like, if you look at you, the only reason you're not where I am is because you didn't work hard enough. Like, that's obviously not true. Yeah, I think the whole thing is about enabling actual conversations on social media rather than stunted conversations based on a one-sided way we want to see things.

I'd love to talk a little bit about the sort of GraceFit UK saga. Oh, yes. If you're open to talking about that. Because, yeah, like at university, everyone, like when I was at university, everyone knew who you were. And when I started on YouTube, they were like, oh, so you're trying to be like GraceFit UK? I was like,

No, because I am a complete the opposite of kind of fitness influencer kind of vibes. What was it that made you decide to start? And like, I guess, what was the story of the original, the early days of your kind of influencer career? And then I'd love to talk about why that seems to have taken a pause and you deleted the channel and the arc of GraceFit UK. So let's sketch a timeline. Yeah.

February 22nd, 2015, my Instagram account starts. At this stage, it's a jumble of letters is the name. I don't post my face. I didn't post my face until I had 10,000 followers, I think it was. How old were you at the time?

Just turned 18. Okay. And the whole concept of that was that I consistently tried to start a fitness journey and consistently failed. And so the whole idea is that was that I would be tracking my journey online. And just like, as you see now, accounts of people being like, this is what I had for lunch today. This is how I went to the gym. Like, this is what I did at the gym. Like all of these various different things.

So that was how the account started and continued that way probably about for about two years, year and a half. Okay, so just purely a personal thing. Yeah, I actually changed my name to my name about seven months, eight months in.

And started showing my face. It was a terribly kept secret at school. I got a lot of shit for that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so I... That's when I started working at IBM. My first monetization of anything was that when in about November, I believe it was, I was every single weekend when I was at IBM, I would... Because I was posting content in the week, I would...

like the Saturday cooking up about 15 recipes and I'd spend the Sunday filming a load of workout videos. Like that was, so I'd spend a huge amount of time creating content in the weekend and then I post it throughout the week because that way, because I was going into work at what, like some stupid corporate hour, like 5am and coming home after dark as well in the winter in the UK, it gets, you know, you can't take any content. That's kind of how I was doing it.

And then, so I realized that that kind of wasn't maintainable. So I turned some of those, the first product I ever made was a recipe PDF. So it was all of my recipes. So healthy versions of unhealthy recipes, the ones that I'd kind of used, put them into two different PDFs, sold them five pounds each on my Shopify store that I literally just built with a theme and

made a logo on Canva and just kind of did all of that. Super simple, put a digital downloads thing on so someone would check out and it would get sent to their email. Really easy. Side hustle pro. How many followers were you on at the time? When I started that, probably about 30,000. So you got from zero to 30,000 just kind of posting workout recipes? Yeah, just like...

almost like a diary of my journey, workout recipes. And I also think that very much golden age of Instagram at the time, think of TikTok now, algorithms very different, pushing out to a lot more audiences and also influencers were people

were usually like singers, models, actresses. Like there was, they weren't digital first. There was a reason you knew them. And then you followed them on social media. There weren't as many and there would have been like Zoella and a few others, but there weren't as many kind of creative first, digital first. And so I think that like mine was very unpolished. Like it was probably the most aggressively un-aesthetic Instagram page you could possibly imagine. We've never transitioned out of that. And essentially that was kind of what I did.

Then I went to university. So went to Oxford 2016, a year after working at IBM. I think I had nearly 100,000 followers at that point. And I started to have dribs and drabs of like first brand deals. But at the time you would have to, like now you're, you know, you might have a few thousand followers. You'll be able to get gifting for, you know, won't have to post for it. Like all of these things. At the time you'd have to,

beg a company to even send you gifting to do like 23 posts. It was like a very different, so like the money wasn't as much there or at least they weren't paying me. So,

Then when I made my second PDFs, which was when I really started making a lot of money, was when I got that email from the bursar at Oxford saying, "You have been suspended from the university because you haven't paid your fees." And I was obviously just relying on student finance to go from the student finance into the Oxford bank account. Like I wasn't going to have any say in that. And so I completely freaked out and that I was out at dinner when I got that email.

That night, I basically wrote a workout guide. Okay. Until like 5 a.m. Okay. Because I was completely freaked out. And because I'd sold...

I'd say probably like a few hundred copies of the five pound eBooks. I was like, if I sell a few hundred copies of this 35 pound eight week workout guide, that's gonna be a good few thousand pounds. That could even get me to nine grand potentially with double the following, like all of this. So that was in my mind. Like I had a month essentially, either student finance comes in or you're gone. They were nice about it. They were really nice about it.

But I was quite freaked out, as I'm sure you can imagine. And so did that and then said, hey, guys, I'm selling this workout guide on January. The something classic fitness culture and the fitness industry, I'd say, was very different at the time. Starting that in January and it's going to be on sale on 26th of December. I used some sort of restricted time.

I was like, it's only going to be available to this many people or like you get the extra thing for this many people. So then on the day, I remember it was insane. I remember on the day I checked the like dashboard and it was, I think I'd made like 15 grand that day. And I was like, whoa. And I remember I was at the theater with my family because it was like, it was boxing day. And so it was, this was our like Christmas family thing.

And I remember like looking down at my phone and seeing that dashboard and like hide it, like just like putting it away. So I was like, that is an obscene amount of money. And I remember my sister looks over and goes like, is that how much you've made from Instagram this year or from your like PDFs this year? And I was like, no, that's actually the one I like put on sale today. And she goes to my mum, she was like, Grace has made 15 grand today. And my mum goes, well, Grace can buy the ice creams at the interval. Wow.

This was my, this was my baps of a fire into the kind of like Instagram monetization, all of this world. I had never seen, like, that was insane to me. That was my entire, my salary at IBM for that internship was 18 grand. It's a school leaver scheme. Anyone can apply. It's called the future scheme. And I then basically made that in a day with profit margin, a hundred percent because it's a PDF. So there's no marginal cost. Anyway, fast forward, cause you don't need to hear it in that much detail.

That I'd then around that time I'd also started a YouTube channel and the only reason I'd started a YouTube channel was because on Instagram at the time you could only do 50 15 second videos and I was doing lots of workout videos and so to have a put a whole workout into 15 seconds Impossible, I would be like doing one hip thrust and then you'd be on to the next video and so I

Literally started a YouTube, my first few vlogs, you can't see them anymore, I'm afraid. But they were literally, I'd be like, "Hey guys, I'm going to the gym." Then you'd see my feet.

stomp, stomp, stomp, walking to the gym. Then you'd see my workout and then, and it would just have like music over it and then it'd be like, okay guys, bye. And that would be the whole, I thought that's how vlogs worked because I didn't actually watch YouTube. And then, so that kind of grew from that when I started at Oxford to, because I couldn't record content a lot of the time, I was kind of like, well, my content's going to have to pivot. It's essentially going to have to just be what I'm doing. And so that's how it started for the next three years.

all of my content three days a week was me sitting in the same like university dorm room being like, I'm writing an essay again. And that was the entire genre of content because it was like, this is what I'm doing. And I feel like that was probably quite a blessing as well because I think if you get successful on YouTube,

lots of people quit their jobs or, you know, move into a super fancy apartment or any of this. Three years, the initial three years of my content, growing up to however many subscribers or whatever, was always just me sitting in the same place being like, guys, I'm doing an essay and here's the yogurt I'm having from my fridge as my dinner. And so it was quite, yeah, that was kind of my whole brand. And then we come to the transition. A few questions on this before the transition. Even now where the sort of

influencer culture is like way more of a thing than it was six seven years ago yeah it would still be weird for someone in sixth form to be like you know what i'm gonna start posting workout videos yeah and they'd be like like one of my friends like it's it's weird enough for someone to make videos on youtube teaching educational topics yeah yeah and yet posting i had no purpose yeah so there was i was adding value to no one okay but like how did you get over the fear i guess i

That seems to be a thing that holds a lot of people back from, I guess, putting themselves out there. So probably worth noting that I had about a year of, on Instagram before I started on the YouTube. Yeah, like with the Instagram stuff. Well, so even that, that wasn't,

I was basically using it as a diary. It was like, I've done this workout today. This is what I'm eating today. I went shopping today. Like, it was like a diary. So it wasn't necessarily, it was weird. Like, it was definitely weird. And I got a lot of shit from it at school. Yeah, like, how did people at school react? Not very well.

Not very well. I... Yeah. I mean, not necessarily to my face. I heard a lot about it. We laugh about it now. Okay. It's a strange thing to do. And yeah, that's kind of how it started. But then I had like... I was kind of eased into it with that year of Instagram and then Instagram.

YouTube was just not really even vlogs. I would say two words and then move on to the next thing. And then by that stage, I probably had enough external validation from what I was doing that it made sense to kind of transition into vlogs and that type of content that had, again, I used to look at my vlogs and I'd be like, even now I look at my vlogs and it's what?

I'd say three and a half years now since I was on YouTube. And now I'll post a vlog and it will still, you know, still 100,000 people will watch it, which was kind of what my vlog, I don't know how many views my vlogs were doing kind of back then. But even that is like, I'm adding no value to your life.

Like, as in, it's such a privilege to have people be so supportive and love to kind of watch that when genuinely, as you say, it's not educational content. It's not tuition. It's not anything. It's terrible angles of a camera and like, yeah, whatever is happening that day. So you had like, I know a bunch of YouTube, I feel this myself where when I post a vlog,

I kind of can't believe people are watching it. I'm like, oh, I mean, whatever. I'm finding this boring. So you are definitely finding this boring. So I guess you...

So you said it was several months before you showed your face on Instagram? Yeah. And then you changed your name? To Gracefit, yeah. What was that transition like where you suddenly started showing your face? Oh, I just thought, all I thought was, well, people know now, I'm getting shit for it anyway. It's not helping. At this stage, when I started to gain a bit of traction, I was like, well, it's going to be much easier for me to continue doing this and continue gaining traction if it's also not a selfie with my head cut off. Yeah.

Okay. So it sounds like that was the time when you sort of realized the quick business value of the page? Yeah, kind of business value. But also I think we forget that like at the beginning of Instagram, because there was no digital first talent, even having like...

I remember, I don't know, even having like 50 likes on Facebook was like huge. Like it was like enormous. It's probably like shameless actual external validation based on like that. It wasn't monetized for a long time after. I would say it was probably being like, oh my God, this is so cool. Look how cool I look. Yeah, that was probably just some shameless vanity. And did you start getting, so it sounds like people at school were like less supportive than would have been ideal.

Yeah, but I was only at school for like two months after I'd even started at before A-levels. Did you get any kind of hate from strangers on the internet at the time? Oh, you will always get hate from strangers at the internet. What was that like in the early days? I mean, in the early days, it was all mainly like body shaming. And I think it was all just kind of like body shaming and being like, oh, you're ugly. Yeah.

Like, it wasn't very inventive. It's become more and more inventive. I'm very lucky to, like, because I don't put out a lot of content now, usually a hater would get bored before. So they'll just... They'll just leave you be, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I don't get much hate at all that, which is amazing. Like, how did you deal with it at the time? And again, I ask because about, like, 80% of the students that I teach YouTube to are just like, oh my god, haters, and, like, struggling with that. I think I was...

So I think probably I can't remember that much how I dealt with it. I think it probably hurt more the things that were in real life. But then actually the ones on like, they were so uninventive that like calling me ugly, like as in that's fine, you know, like it's not nice to hear, but it's also like not the end of the world. And then I think it would move on. It would get more inventive as I was putting more content out because you can actually see my personality. Yeah.

Inventive as in? Well, just as in like it would be, you know, just like more depth to the insults. But then it's kind of just like, I don't know, there was definitely a period of time where I was obsessed with checking kind of like gossip forums. Like I've always been, and I've talked about this in my move off YouTube. I'm a people pleaser in a lot of ways, just like personality wise. A lot of us are. And I am definitely. And I...

being a people pleaser whilst broadcasting to millions of people quite incompatible because if as a percentage of people you're always going to for example like

20% of people aren't going to like you or maybe more I don't know then if like the high obviously if that's then a million people then 200,000 people are not going you know like that's quite a lot of people so it's quite incompatible I'd say in like terms of personality types and I think that actually one part of that was that I was so obsessed with checking these gossip forums when I was I'd say my first few years at university because I thought originally because

because I was, you know, I would always look at which thumbnails did well, which types of content did well. I was doing it very strategically as well as sharing content, you know, like sharing blogs and all of those things that like fit into my schedule. I would obviously do more of the things that worked and do less of the things that didn't work. And so originally when I started checking gossip forums, it was very much how can I make my content better? But obviously

making my content better by changing my entire personality, probably not that preferable. - Yeah. - Like it's not gonna end well. Yeah, I just think I got to a point where, I actually got to a point where it would bring me down so much and on these bad, I'd have a bad day, so I'd get like a bad mark in an essay or whatever and I'd be like, well, I'm already having a terrible day, so I might as well check these gossip forums.

But ultimately at the end, like I realized that actually no matter what I was doing in the direction of what these people wanted or against it, it wasn't changing. So it was kind of like this content is going to be out there anyway. I might as well not feel violently sick every time I, you know, search my name up. And so I've just, you know, I think also as you mature, you realize not to scratch itches that are going to hurt you. And I've matured in a way that I like,

And if I spent my entire life caring what other people thought, then it's not going to change anyone else's life. The only life it's going to change is mine in a negative way. So at this point in the journey, you've started the YouTube channel. What sort of ballpark of money were you making from those PDFs at the time, beyond kind of day one, if you're ever sharing? Well, actually, to be fair, the reason I ever shared in the beginning was because people would look at my house and be like,

must be nice having rich parents. Like I come from a very privileged background and have been open about that. But also at the same time when I've publicly sold hundreds of thousands of PDFs for 35 pounds, like do the maths, you know, like as in like, I was kind of just like,

Like you have a calculator for free on your phone. It's like, it's not that hard to like, I will be the first to say that all of these other things helped me and being like white and like pretty privileged and all of the like slim and able-bodied and all of these things, of course they're gonna help.

And of course, like my background as well will hugely help. And I'll be the first to say that. But when you also add up literally what happened from when I wrote something, paid my friend 50 quid to put it into a PDF, built a Shopify site and put it on sale, you can also do that maths. So ballpark figure. I think that we sold in total around 300,000, 300 to 350,000 of those products.

- Bloody hell. - Yes. - Incredible. - So that was where the, that always has been where the bulk of my income came from. And then I invested that money into the businesses that I then started.

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Or alternatively, if I've read a book in the past or whatever, and I want to revisit the ideas from that, firstly, I look at my Kindle highlights, and then I look at the short form summary. And it really helps when I'm creating content around like book summaries and stuff on my website for my YouTube channel. So short form is great. If you want to check it out, then head over to short form.com forward slash deep dive or hit the link in the video description. And that will give you 20% off the annual premium subscription. So thank you so much short form for sponsoring this episode. What was the best thing and what was the worst thing about suddenly making stupid amounts of money while you're at uni?

Best thing was that I suddenly had a lot of freedom. I did not obviously worry about money at all. I was able to do amazing things with my friends. Just like these fun things. It's not like I was like, I've never been on a private jet. I've never, you know, like all of it. It's not like I was renting yachts and stuff. That freedom, 100%, one of the biggest benefits.

I was able to rent a flat in the holidays rather than moving home because where I was at home, it wasn't an environment that I could film in and all of these various different things. But I wouldn't... Yeah, that was kind of the parameters. But at the same time, I was still at uni. I was still doing the same things. It couldn't buy me good grades, you know, all of that. So I think that really, for the first three years that I was earning that, I really... I was also the same as...

other than the huge amount of money I was making, I was also kind of still doing the same thing. Yeah, it's the same life as everyone else. Yeah, it didn't kind of like change everything all in one. I'd say the worst part about it, I don't think I could possibly say that there was an awful part about it other than probably working harder and harder and harder because I suddenly had this infinite ability to essentially at one stage almost felt like print money by just working harder, like doing more content. Yeah.

being more inventive, looking more at stats, hiring more people, starting businesses, like all of this, that was the multiplier effect of doing any of those things was just so huge that I just, I did not stop at any time. I just, yeah.

Balls to the walls. Yeah, I think it's one of the... So for me, the kind of passive income journey was less stark, but it's like from my second year, I started a business tutoring kids to get into medical school and

And from that point, you know, that year I made like 10K and I was like, oh my God, yeah, don't worry about the price of a meal at a restaurant. And the next year it was like 40K and I'm like, bloody hell, I'm making as much as a junior doctor is and I'm in my third year of med school. And then it sort of like escalated very slowly until the YouTube thing started. But like that was a few years later. So I had that sort of experience of the sort of the middle ground experience.

But even then, I remember there were times where I was almost doing an ROI calculation of like, okay, I want to watch an episode of The Vampire Diaries. That's an hour I could be spending marking these freaking BMAT essays and like if it's 20 quid an hour. And all these kind of things where that then started to filter into my life. Yeah. And I wouldn't change that for the world. I'm not saying like, oh my God, I wouldn't want to have started the businesses or the YouTube channel or anything. But it does sort of change your relationship with time in a weird way. Yeah. And I think pre-making money, if I had...

If I'd known what my future would look like, I would have said, oh, of course, once you're making above, I don't know, 50k a year, at that point it's enough and you don't need to make any more money. Yeah. But then as the numbers go up, then it's like, oh, but then the desire to make even more money keeps them going up. At least for me. What was that like for you? No, no, no. I completely agree with that. I also would say that I'm very much, I'm a planner and I was very aware of the fact that what I was doing was probably in a golden age at a golden time with a golden product. Like I literally struck gold. And so my...

What I then did, obviously, to create longevity was invest those into separate businesses that have built themselves beyond that. But so I would say that even at that stage when, you know, I'd say I'd go to the library from...

eight, nine, two, five, six, come home, film videos/edit videos. And then the whole of one day a week, I just do back-to-back filming. Like whatever it would be like, I get ready with me, a Q and A, like any of those things, just like back-to-back. And as you say, it was uncapped. It was, well, it was literally only capped by my time. And then the more I put into it, the multiplier effect for how much time I was spending on it was just so much bigger. All of these things. I would say that I,

was also really conscious of the fact that it's not a career with a lot of longevity and I wanted to set myself up for my future and I'm an anxious person and creating

I would say from the instant I started that, I'd say it probably took a month until I was like, right, how do I make sure this lasts and sets me up for my future? So that if this comes crashing and burnt, like comes down one day, I have investments and a business and all of these things. Yeah, this is the thing that I think about a lot as well. Like the career of an online influencer or whatever you want to call it.

I think it's so interesting. It's almost like being an athlete where you know you have a small amount of time in the limelight to make all the hay while the sun shines. Well, even like, say even my financial advisor covers both those areas. It's like media, sport, and it's those particular things because you know you have a maximum 10-year career window.

And that's a huge privilege in certain ways, because if you can make enough money in 10 years to set you up for the rest of your life, you are leaps and bounds like luckier than the rest of the population. But also, I was really clear on that from the beginning. And I also think that because in my head, success had previously been like being a lawyer or working in an investment bank or any of these things. I had this real kind of...

or like worry of the fact that I was really successful at that point in time. And there was going to be a point 15 years later around that people are making partner at their law firm and like doing all of these things. And if I have...

So then I'm going to be like, oh shit. So yeah, I was really conscious of that. It's interesting that, well, like what your timeline was for this, because, and I'm not sure how sort of plugged in you are to the sort of creator economy these days, but the conversations that I have with anyone sort of from 500K to like 10 million subscribers is this level of like, okay, cool.

I'm succeeding as an individual, but I need to figure out how to diversify and try and build a business and a brand that's separate from me so that it doesn't rely on me showing up being like, what's up guys, every single day to the camera. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that is an unsustainable way of living. Yeah, of course. And in a way, it's like the... I think the arc is people start off with a job or being students where they basically have very little autonomy to then becoming creators where they're like, ooh, autonomy. But then you become a creator and you're like, oh, actually...

I am kind of a slave to the algorithm. I have to keep a slave to consistency in a way, a slave to the audience, I might say. And therefore then kind of the golden end bit is the thing that you did ages ago before it was cool, which is set up separate businesses, which can then theoretically run without you, hire a team and build those brands as their own thing. So like, were there examples of people doing that? Or did you just kind of know that, okay, this is obviously the next step. I think I knew about a year into making this,

No, probably a year and a half to two years into making quite a lot of money. I think I knew that I loved making the money, like completely transparent. Of course I did. But it wasn't with each marginal breakthrough in how much money I was making. It wasn't bringing me marginal happiness. In fact, I think it was a career that was entirely incompatible with my

my personality in some ways or like the reward systems like in my head. So although it was a career that was compatible in terms of my personality in the way that, you know, thankfully people seem to like my content, it was incompatible in the way that, as I've said, like I'm a people pleaser. I don't want to have to care about what people think in order to make my money. I think that was one of the really big things. And also I have other passions.

And this, like what I loved doing was the like really assessing the algorithm, strategically working out what types of content I should be doing, looking at what types of, you know, every time I'd work on a brand with a brand deal, I'd be like, you should really make this. I was like, people would absolutely love this. And I'd be,

trying to go above and beyond, say like I was working with, say now I'm obviously have an activewear company. So I was working with an activewear company at the time, it'd be like, you should really make these leggings 'cause like these ones just like fall down in this way and like people really want it to be like this and feel like this and you should try this type of marketing instead

because like actually people in my audience, people who are my age really want to see, you know, more body types or more like diverse models or, you know, any of these things. And I'd really be trying to kind of like backseat drive in that way. And that wasn't my role. My role was sitting there and like wearing the stuff and looking nice and all of that. And I was like, this doesn't bring me fulfillment on a daily basis. What does bring me fulfillment is, you know, doing the strategy and it working, but that like working on it was probably the happiest I felt versus like,

I was doing really well and it wasn't necessarily that that was making me any happier. And so I think I noticed probably luckily quite early on, because I think what we're seeing at the moment is this kind of like second phase of like creator economy where we're seeing people, we're seeing the ends of lots of people's careers and we're seeing them pivot at that stage to creating a business. But actually ultimately you need more influence to have a business and to sell things than you do to do brand deals. Like you, because you've got to put cash down, you've got to,

have staff, you've got to like all of these things, you actually need more sway. And so it, I don't think it hugely works as an end of career thing, unless you're starting it with some real business acumen that you're not using yourself as the marketing budget. And you're going to do that all separately because obviously anyone can start up a business. But I think that because, and because I had the freedom to do so, because it wasn't the, well, I was,

making an obscene amount of money and I didn't need to, you know, there was, I could slow down at paces and it wouldn't slow down and all of that. And I just kind of realized that the most joy I ever got was talking to the brat, either like strongly collaborating with things in terms of their actual product, like their actual marketing, like the strategy in terms of like my types of audience, exactly how to reach them, exactly what they care about, like all of these things. That was what I enjoyed. And doing that for my first business, Shreddy, which was

what started five and a half years ago now, and then setting up my second business, Tala, which was set up, it would have been like four and a half years ago now, but actually launched three and a half years ago, was like, that was where I got like joy. And now I'm sitting in an office five days a week, making far less money than I ever made before. Because as in, you know, because it's all for the longterm, like it's all in the businesses. It's all to hopefully, you know, create something amazing. And that makes me happy.

a lot less, but it makes me far happier. And I'm sure in the long term, you know, we'll have its rewards. It's like value of a company is different, but. Yeah. I think, I think this is one of those things that people don't often talk about with the creator stuff, which is that if you look at different creators, like they become successful, like doing the thing, like whatever it is, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, et cetera, et cetera. But for different people, there's different parts of the thing that are particularly fun. Like for me, my thing of like, I often think

if I won the lottery, if I decided that I'm not allowed, if someone said that you aren't allowed to make a penny anymore in your life.

what would I do with my time it would mostly be probably continuing to make educational YouTube videos because I just love teaching yeah and that was my jam and I couldn't really care less about the editing side of things and I couldn't really care less about brand deals no offense to whoever's sponsoring this episode but the thing that I vibe with is just like oh let's take this complicated thing let's read a paper let's break it down into like a little diagram sorted similarly we've got friends who just freaking love the editing the creative craft it sounds like for you is like the business side of things the entrepreneurialism the marketing the branding that

- Yeah, just finding out exactly what would resonate with my audience that week and like why and why that exact, you know, if I was working with a company, why that thing was just like slightly, or like which areas of that product to really lean on 'cause I knew it would speak to my audience or which to steer away from or which to, you know, talk to the company about maybe considering doing. And I had so little, they were like, "Yeah, cool."

do your video. Like as in that, and that, you know, for me, I was lucky enough to be in the position that actually I could not put out any content for, you know, a good few years now it's really been. And at that stage had A, made enough for myself to set myself up to be fine and also to set my businesses up to be fine and to actually do what I love every day, which is, believe it or not, working in an office. Yeah.

back to the OG job, Jays. Peak influencer career, you're making stupid amounts of money on the internet. What was it that changed? And like, what was the sort of the winding down of the influencer brand? So I think it all, I knew I'd wanted to do it for a while. Just again, exact same thing. I knew I wanted to move more towards creating brands and working on like the backend side rather than the creating content. I also think that

I think it's, I mean, I didn't know that this was gonna happen, but I think in part that what's been amazing for me as part of this is like the creator economy now is focused on amazing content and I never made amazing content. Like I never made content that was really high end or that was really succinct or that was any of, like I would spend a lot of time on why I was, and I did that for a reason. I don't, you know, I don't think my audience wanted polished content, but actually now on the algorithms, like God knows how I would have fared. And I think that,

you know, I'd got to that stage and I'd also started moving. I'd started setting up Tala kind of behind the scenes. And that was what I was, I was so, and still am so, so, so passionate about that because to me, that was what the industry needed. And I'd worked in this fitness activewear industry for a few years at that point. And that was like what was needed. And so I was so excited about that because of like concept, even if I was studying it

completely unrelated to myself as an influencer or any of those things was so exciting. And I think I just got so much more excited by that, that I was like, huh, maybe it's time to like say, you know, this has been amazing and kind of, you know, cut myself off from that income in a way and just pivot into something else. I was also coming up to when I launched Tala,

It was the month before my finals. I'd already said at that stage, like, guys, just FYI, I'm not going to be creating as much content. I'm doing my finals. I did a bit of content. I still did probably like one YouTube video a week, which is insane. But usually I'd been doing three a week. And then I just never really went back. I never really went back. I moved back to, I moved to London and I was so in love with growing Tala and Shreddy that I was just like,

No one expects anyone to make their full career choice and stick to it at 18, which is when I made mine. No one would be surprised if someone worked at something throughout their time at uni and worked to something else from when they graduated. That's literally exactly what I did. It just happened that mine was relatively more high profile. Obviously that comes with a pivot that, you know,

obviously some people aren't going to understand but ultimately at the end of the day i think i really prioritized that for a long time because of online opinion and also because of how much money it was making me and got to a point where i was like well is the end goal money or is the end goal happiness and fulfillment and ultimately ideally i'd have both but ultimately if you're getting if you're in that point of privilege that you're getting more money

that you'd assume would lead to more happiness rather than just getting a roof over your head then if that is not getting you happiness then then pivoted pivoting seemed the right thing to do so i kind of did it quite abruptly and never really went back i mean i tried to put i tried to do some consistent things that put out good content that are almost too

thank the really loyal people who've stuck around and watched my journey and supported my journey for a long time. I assume that most of

my following is actually from back then and actually the large majority of people I meet now are like, "Oh, I didn't know you did YouTube." And I'm like, "Really?" So I think it's more just like crossed over in the past three and a half years really or three years probably since I've created a lot of content that following has just like lots of people will have left and lots of people will have joined. Lots of people from the fitness side and uni side would have left and lots of people from the like business and work and like

all of that will have joined. And so it's been quite a nice pivot. Hey friends, hope you're enjoying the podcast so far. Just interrupting the podcast episode to give you a little message from our sponsor, which happens to be Shopify. Shopify is freaking incredible. It is the world's best all-in-one platform for managing any kind of e-commerce store. And it's just fantastic for anyone who wants to start and grow and manage an online business. Shopify is great because it lets you sell in person and also online and also across all the major social platforms. And actually we've been personally using Shopify for over a year to sell our

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stuff. Very excitingly, Shopify has just partnered with YouTube. So now you can connect your Shopify store to your YouTube channel. And so what we are in the process of doing is connecting our Shopify store on shop.aliabdaal.com over to the YouTube channel so that people will be able to buy products directly from the YouTube channel for Ali Abdaal and for the Ali Abdaal Vlogs channel and for the Deep Dive podcast YouTube channel. That's going to be sick and we're super excited about

- It's not unusual for people to make career changes. You know, I went out of medicine to become a YouTuber.

But if I was making 10 times as much money doing medicine as I would have done through YouTube, at that point, people start with... And especially to the... Like, externally, it sort of looks like, my God, you're living the dream. You can literally post whatever you want. You're making stupid amounts of money. Like, why would you want to take a hit on all those fronts? So you can post whatever you want, yes. But if you don't want to post, no.

So it's like, it's not a, it's a, it's a whole change rather than a, like I now don't, you know, you're lucky if you get a shit mirror selfie from me. Like that, that's kind of the reality. Unfortunately, my poor manager cries every day. I will not do a reel. But I think the thing is, is because actually, yes, I could post everything I want and I can make a huge amount of money. And I understand that's a hugely privileged position to be in. And actually, yeah,

But the one thing I couldn't do within that is stop posting and disappear, or I could just then live off them. But ultimately, the idea was that to pivot that into something where I could stop posting and still make money. And I also think that everyone knows there's a threshold above that point. You're not going to be any more happy by earning any more money. I was earning millions a year and I just, it wasn't like...

Of course it was amazing, but it wasn't necessarily the marginal happiness between that wasn't there. So I've been lucky to be able to have a position as well that I've changed into that has also, you know, I'm not going to say now that I don't make a lot of money. I do, but it's, it's a very different, it's very different. The work proportion to the money proportion, very different. And also the amount, but I'm also a lot happier and more fulfilled. And I use my brain on a daily basis, which was not compatible with,

Yeah, quite. Yeah, I guess this is a place where, I guess in the business world, everyone gets to...

like within the context of running a business where let's say you've got multiple projects on the go and you know that actually this one is really profitable, but actually it's not contributing to the wider goal of the business. It's not contributing to the happiness of you or the team. And it's a big decision to shut down the project. But usually when people do it, they're like, oh, breath of fresh air. Best thing I ever did. Did you have that kind of approach when you decided to abruptly wind down the influencer career? One of my biggest mottos that I think in business and in life,

that I do not listen to, but absolutely try to every day is do less better. And I think that that really, really had an impact at that stage. I could do, and also the most lucrative option would have been to continue posting as I was while doing this pivot. That would have been a lot safer, a lot less risky, would have made a lot of people kind of probably stay and follow the journey.

But I literally had enough. Like I was literally like, this is not what I want to do. And I want to change my career. And I'm lucky enough to be in the position where I can. And I have the freedom to and I have the money to all of that. There was, I think, probably like a month or so into... Because it wasn't necessarily a conscious cutoff point. It more being that I'd wound down the content because of something else. And then there was a few months in that I was like, I'm not going back to this. Like I'd paid, you know, deposits on...

that I was doing with videographers. I'd, you know, obviously didn't like ask for any of that back, but it was, it was like, there was stuff, a huge amount of stuff planned, a huge amount of work gone into a lot of things. And I just, that was that. I definitely want to dig into the logistics of running a physical goods business. Yes. But like, I wonder if we can start with Shreddy. Yes. What was the kind of origin story for Shreddy and why not just keep selling PDFs?

Yeah. So why not keep selling PDFs? We continued selling PDFs for a good bit of time after we pivoted to an app and pivoted to physical products. So timeline was PDFs, nine months later, first physical products, a year and a half later. So, and the PDFs only went a few months after the...

app was launched so they're still like keeping security it's not good to jump ship all the time but I think what's really really really important is evolution and I think that what's very very true is the industry and things like PDFs aren't

you know the industry's moved on like in this it doesn't work as a business model in the way that people can airdrop them now they can screenshot them and send them like all of these things whereas with an app you're getting a service um and so it's a subscription service and a subscription business model as well it's a lot easier to run so the pivot for that was slow i think that people think with businesses you know they'll be the way

you come up with some big concept and it works. The concept, you know, came about after the business even existed and grew based on... The concept came about after the business existed. Well,

Well, because the business started as these PDFs. So like just workout guides essentially that people would all do together. I guess that's the loose concept, but it's not like a big, you know, find your why type golden circle idea that's like going to change the world, right? It's talking to the same audience you're going to go for. It's essentially a minimum viable product.

Helps you learn a lot of things We try we've tried products that don't work We tried you know and all it's about is trying things and doing more of what does work and less of what doesn't work but so the concept then came about that was the When people would talk about the guides the PDF guides they'd say like oh, I just love this because I've never trained this way and I

thought that I had to hate working out. Okay. And I really like this and it was, you know, it was probably the beginning of the time that lifting was even, lifting weights was even kind of encouraged, started to be encouraged for women. It was right at the beginning of that. And so it was lifting weights, but it was in quite a high intensity way. So women who were used to wanting to sweat during their workouts quite a lot were doing that through lifting. And that was like the type of training. And then

people would ask me they'd be like oh well I like to do HIIT workouts so I can't stick to the guide I'd be like well don't do that like genuinely don't buy the guide like this isn't for you and then people will be like well I like running and then people will be like well I like working out from home working out from home is a huge thing now it wasn't at the time I'm not saying that was us that made it but it was just like the industry was different and so the concept for Shreddy the

app came about half based on the fact that the PDF model we kind of foresaw in probably a year or so was going to completely die out based on it being completely shareable it

quite expensive versus what people are paying for subscriptions, it being completely static, you can't update it that easily. And if you do, people expect the new version rather than buying another one, all of these various different things. So it's part of the business model that we knew we needed to evolve. And the other part of it was we thought we could add a huge amount more value. So the concept behind Shreddy was that we don't believe you should do workouts you hate to get results you love. So it's all about putting in all your preferences, how long you like to work out a day, home or gym, what type of, do you want yoga workouts

in there too. Do you want HIIT workouts? Do you want strength workouts? Do you want body weight? Like all of these things, putting in all of your preferences and then it creates you your goals as well, because that's really important. And then it creates you your perfect workout plan based on your preferences with your goals in mind. 'Cause the whole idea is that actually you're never gonna stick to something you hate. You might stick to it for eight weeks, but you're not gonna have any lasting change. So the whole idea of Shreddy has always been around getting people

an action plan that matches their preferences. And again, over time, as soon as we were able to start it up on the app, having a team of personal trainers, nutritionists, trainers on the app, all of these things, those people are far better at that job than I am. And if Shreddy was ever going to be kind of beyond me and reach its full potential, even in terms of personal training, in terms of nutrition, in terms of any of these things, it was not going to be me

I couldn't run the business, but what I can't do, you know, the business potential was capped at myself and people who want to do my types of workouts and people who, you know, just all of that. And there was so much more potential that we could apply it to. And so that's what we did. Who's we back in the day? So initially, so my first ever PDFs I did completely on my own. So I built the Shopify site on a theme.

put a digital plugin and all of that that I said before. And then when I was right before I was releasing the guide, so I'd written the guides, I'd planned to sell it on my, the website that I'd already set up for the PDFs the year before. And then I'd been approached by a company that was just starting up at the time. And they said like, Hey, we can do it for you. And we'll do all your customer service just for a profit split. And I was like, well,

I don't need customer service. It's a digital download. The worst that can happen is someone either doesn't like it, doesn't think they've got what they want or never got the thing. I can deal with those. And so I was quite resistant and they came back and they were like, hey, we're starting up our business working with influencers and we can do your customer service. And we also have an app. We can upload these onto an app so people can have an app functionality. And I was like, wow, that's cool.

you know, that's enticing. And they were like, also, this is gonna sell a lot more than your original PDFs and you will need customer service, like you should not be doing that. And so I, at that stage, I basically, they paid me a sign on bonus. They were starting up at the time and obviously it was gonna get some traction. So I signed on with them.

did obviously better than we ever would have expected. So they ran, they built me a new site, they ran the customer service. And from then onwards, I was partnering with them for manufacturing, the conceptualization of the business moving forward, and also building a team within that infrastructure to run what Shreddy has become. Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah. I guess, how popular are those sorts of companies? Are there lots of people doing that? Yeah. And how many haven't really explored from this business? I mean, it's essentially licensing providers. So that happens hugely within the influencer marketing industry. So if you think of any influencer can set up a brand and is unlikely to be an expert in setting up a brand or talking to suppliers or any of these things, but...

has a huge amount of selling power. So if you plug in all of those other things and do it for an exchange for a percentage of the revenue, then great. It's slightly different the way we work together because we both kind of started at the same time. So we've worked as a licensing provider in a lot of ways, but we've also built a Shreddy team together. So essentially the company that's been built is it's not kind of a, yeah, there's lots of like turnkey influencer solutions.

and they're incredible. It's so smart. If you think about it, if you think of like your favorite fashion blogger and they want to start up a line, if they're being paid 5,000 pounds for an Instagram post,

Is it worth their time to spend three days a week on the phone with suppliers, tweaking designs, all of these things? No, it's not. It's actually much better for them to have someone doing all of these different things. It's building a team 101. It's building a business 101. And there are people who can plug that in and people who can do the creative direction, the marketing, all of that, which is the influencer. Yeah.

yeah because we've been kind of toying with the idea that oh it would be cool to maybe make a productivity app but i've heard it's like oh it costs like 100k plus yeah or it would be cool i i really like the idea of making my own like mechanical keyboard yeah that'd be sick or like a laptop bag because i think i'd use it and it would sell because the audience i'll put you in touch that would be amazing yeah okay yeah i didn't know these sorts of companies existed they exist and there's so many different types of them as well i think there's a lot of

It's a very hot industry. So there's lots of good and lots of, I'd say, some sharkiness because there's so much money in it. But I'd say there's some really, really great people in it. It makes a lot of sense in the same way as like if, you know, Ed Sheeran wants to make some amazing merch or a tracksuit line or whatever. It's...

Ed Sheeran. It does not make sense. And actually, it would be a bad decision on his front to be the person on the phone to the suppliers. So, it's actually really smart from the influencer as well to be able to do that. And yeah, 100%. There are so many people in the industry and that's how a lot of influencer businesses are started. So, Shreddy has a team with them, essentially. So, we've built a team. So, we have, you know, normal roles. We've got

CRM managers and influencer marketing managers and all of those things that kind of sit entirely in a Shreddy team. But the manufacturing side is backed up from that side. And Tala is standalone, was actually like had a licensing partnership at one point and all is in-house now. All is in-house as in...

physically like owned by you. So manufacture, as in like we have our own entire product team manufacturing like all of that. And is that also in partnership with this other company? No, no, no. That's like a you thing. Yeah, that's completely standalone. Tala is its own entity. So for Shreddy, you partnered up with this company. You've sort of built it together over time. Yeah, exactly. And then for Tala, you were like, cool, I want to do my own thing. Like, well, what was the origin story there? So Shreddy...

I'm still the solo founder. So I founded it because it kind of started before that point. But the team has been built up with these amazing people who do their job far better, especially at the time when I was at university. There was no, you know, if I wanted to suddenly start manufacturing resistance bands in the same way as you, you'd probably bring in like a CTO if you wanted to build an app.

It was essentially that. So the difference was that they can, you know, often say like, it completely depends from model to model, but say if I'm like, oh, we could potentially do this product. Usually you'd have to invest £20,000 into buying the stock, for example. And if you can guarantee that you're likely going to sell it, then there are like,

there's also even arrangements that you can make that someone can essentially foot the cash flow because you know it's going to sell. So that's a really important part of the model. With Tala, it made sense at essentially based on the business I wanted to build, it made sense for it to be completely standalone.

And that's, well, I'd started it as a solo founder. I'd partnered with some factories and factory partners to essentially make the amazing product and the whole idea of creating seamless, sustainable activewear.

at a price point that was competitive with non-sustainable act where everyone was like no way like fuck off like you can't do that and was lucky to have amazing partners who had the manufacturing facilities who wanted to make that happen so we spent a year trying to essentially make that happen and launching from that the way the business wanted to the way I wanted the business to grow beyond that in terms of like really maintaining its ethics really maintaining all the all the kind of

points that I believe are essential to Tala's growth. Also moving away from me, all of these things made sense to kind of have everything in-house and now it's been built up to a team where every department is essentially completely in-house. We'll use, you know, a paid search agency and, you know, all of these different things that are third party, but everything, the whole team is in-house. So you were doing this, so were you on the phone with factories when you were at university?

Or like, what did that look like? Yeah, no, so it's a very good question. So this is why I would, so say for Shreddy, when we did our first ever physical product, which were resistance bands at the time, this would be partnering with amazing people who know far better than me in terms of like suppliers. We'd be like, oh, we should make this product. And that kind of partnership was essentially like, they would be able to go, okay, in the same way as if you hired a head of,

head of production, for example, or head of merchandising, they'd go out and like find the stuff, you get the product, you know, your buyer would look at it and you'd like work out. And so they were doing a lot of that. I had a lot of conversations with a lot of factories for a lot of different products. So for, I did...

Notebooks at one stage did with Tala. I cannot tell you how many different people we spoke to. And so it kind of depends on the product. It depends on the time. Okay. Let's say someone listening to this decides that they also want to start an activewear brand. Right, yes. What are the steps involved in figuring this out? How much of a faff is it? How easy is it to get a business like this off the ground if you were doing it today? It is a huge faff. Right. An enormous faff. You also have to have...

money to put into it. It's definitely not like, it was very different with the, you know, the PDFs, for example, where they, you didn't need a lot of, there weren't a lot of like sunk costs or marginal costs to be making the product. So you were able to kind of make the money essentially straight up and then put that into things like we did with the app. Say for clothing, obviously you need to be able to foot the, even just buying the stock, but even before then paying for samples, like,

if you have no like credit history or your business doesn't have any credit history, usually say you pay for stock, it will completely depend on your payment terms. But some of them you'll have to pay 50% upfront and then 50%, 30 days after it's exited the factory or something. It completely depends. But actually when you're at the beginning of your journey, if you don't have a lot to prove, you'll probably be able to do that. The way most people start will be then either if they have cash of their own or getting a loan,

or whatever it might be. There are loads of trade shows you can go to in terms of finding the right fabrics, in terms of finding the fits and all of this. I had an absolute baptism of fire because I thought things like, okay, you think that making a t-shirt is gonna be pretty self-explanatory, right? - How often do you just Google it, right? - Yeah, like just like, I'll make a t-shirt. There was this for our first collection, I really just wanted like an oversized black t-shirt as part of the collection, but I wanted like some detailing on it.

We ended up having to scrap... No, we had the t-shirt for, I think it was, like, the second launch. The first restock, the second launch. This t-shirt, every time it would come from the factory, it would, like... This one time it came and, like, the whole body was tight and then the arms were, like, this, like, oversized t-shirt. Like, enormous sleeves, whereas, like, the rest of it would be tight. Like, everything is...

like you can send you can send a t-shirt to someone and be like oh yeah this is the type of like shape I want all of this it also like you will learn over time how much it depends on like the materials how much it depends on the factory you're working with in terms of communication and all of this um but yeah I had no experience in buying in which is like the role that people play at fashion at fashion companies if they're like you know talking to the supplier getting the stock all of these various different things and kind of yeah talking to the

yeah essentially I had absolutely no experience with that so that was an absolute back to Simifier because I'd like receive this t-shirt and be like

I just want a t-shirt. But then again, some things were much easier to get. So sports bra was absolutely impossible. I just couldn't understand why every time it came, it looked like a sock. It was just like so bad. But then you, and that's why it took so long to launch. We kind of conceptualized the idea for Tala in second, end of second year. And we didn't launch until May of third year. And there were just certain things that would come back and you'd be like,

Like, surely this makes sense. But then I'd say that's one of the biggest things that is like, you'll get these samples back and you'll be like,

okay. Whereas now the way the business works is, you know, every Wednesday morning we have three, two to three hours of fit sessions, which is essentially like all the samples that have come from factories. We have a fit model in there and we go over and do like, Oh, take two inches off the waist. Or actually the, the way the wrap is sitting is like skewing a bit to the left, or it's like pulling a bit in this way. So it doesn't look as high quality, like all of these things. That's how you do it now. Whereas like back on the day, I'd be trying it on and then I'd be doing the fit comments on myself. I'm also not a fit model in a

fit model is essentially something that's essentially like a human mannequin okay fine so you do everything graded on particular sizes okay because that's like and you'll do it for each side so like extra small small medium large extra large upwards it

is all based on like average proportions. - Okay, so you hire, there are freelancers who are like, I am an average medium or something. - Yeah, exactly. So like for example, like yesterday we had a 4XL fit session, which will be someone who's 4XL to be fitting

essentially for Excel, Actiflow will have an Excel fit session. We'll have a, you know, yesterday morning, was it Wednesday? Yeah, it was Wednesday. Yesterday morning we had a small fit session that will be like the stuff we were fitting on that. So it completely depends, but it obviously the more fit sessions you do with more different sizes, the more accurate it would be and like in terms of different sizes. But again, everyone's unique. So like, it's always, you always, you know how clothes fit differently on you, but even like I'd be trying them and I have like nowhere near fit model proportions. And I'd be like, no, no,

it has to be like in this much and I just learned over time like actually I can't do things to my proportions we have to do like this because you can't base an entire company based on that but yeah it's it's so complicated and actually I had no knowledge of you know how fashion companies worked at all which made it a lot longer process but I talked to so many of my friends now who also kind of like started fashion companies and all of that you just look at like some of the samples that came back and you're just like what that like

I thought you wouldn't be able to get a t-shirt wrong. Like, yeah, I was also probably giving terrible instructions because I had no experience in fashion. So you're in your third year of uni, you're dealing with all this faff of trying to start an activewear brand while also doing the influencer stuff on the side. A, how did you manage your time? That classic question. And B, why did you not, like, what made you just not give up with the whole faff of, you know, screw it, I'll just sell PDFs and continue to make millions?

So I was continuing to sell PDFs still at this stage, but I think I was really looking, I was like, there's a maximum amount of time more that I'm going to really want to be doing what I'm doing now. So it was an investment in my future. It was respecting kind of like my future self and my, I could have said that I could have still been doing that now. And there would have been a lot of merit in it. And I'm sure I would have made a lot of money and like all of that, but it wasn't what I wanted to do. So all of this was like this long term in the same way as you like, you'll make a, you

maybe like a five-year plan now and be like, by the time I'm 27, I wanna live by myself or like I wanna, you know, like all of these various different things.

So that was kind of like part of my plan. The reason I started this, even had the original idea for Tala was that I'd been working with activewear companies for years at this point. And as I said before, there would be some really clear things that I'd be like, this is, we should really do this. Like, trust me, people will love this. And obviously it doesn't, it doesn't work that way. I was the influencer. I was there to be, you know, to look nice and try things on and make content entertaining. And I,

I had personally moved away from, you know, back in the day, I very embarrassingly did like PLT halls. I did like lots of stuff with fast fashion. It was... Why is that embarrassing? Because PLT is like a pretty little thing. Like their ethics are...

Oh, yes. I saw some of that in the Molly Mae scandal stuff that PLT is a bad company. I'd never heard of them before. But fast fashion in general, like their ethics are awful. Like the amount they're paying their suppliers, the amount, you know, just like all of it. It's killing everything. Anyway, that was like, you know, back when I was doing that, that was how I made a lot of my money. I was, you know, promoting a lot of fast fashion. I think, you know, from affiliate links, I'd be making tens of thousands a month and from literally just linking my outfits and like all of these things. And I...

I remember I cut one of my big fast fashion contracts and was like, I actually... It just doesn't work in my head. I don't want to be doing this anymore. And I moved away kind of mostly, and I still wouldn't say that I fully moved away in terms of doing exactly what's in line with...

what I, you know, you know, that kind of cognitive dissonance of being like, oh, I really shouldn't buy this. But like, you know, I wouldn't say I'm perfect in any way, but I generally moved away from shopping fast fashion for sure. And just to more things that I were kind of more transparent. And I realized about six months after doing that and cutting all my fast fashion contracts and any fast fashion brand deals that I had, um,

just completely left activewear out of that because it was fitness and you kind of see it as necessary like you can't work out in your jeans so you're like well I need some leggings and it needs to have certain performance qualities and all of these things and so I'd actually just like not looked at it in the same way and then so I started while still partnered with you know with activewear companies and all of this I started like

sustainable activewear companies. There literally was nothing in the UK, first of all. But if you think of sustainable fashion as a whole, it's

pre-owned sustainable fabrics. That's like, I'd say the three ways that, and small business. I'd say probably the four ways you get more sustainable fashion, I think for sustainable fashion is an oxymoron, but more sustainable. Sorry, why sustainable fashion oxymoron? Because fashion as a whole is one of the most polluting industries in the world. And, you know, we're not talking about people who are,

putting clothes on their back we're talking about holes of tens of pieces that you don't need we have a huge consumerism problem in terms of like how much fashion we consume so fashion as a whole based on trends is always going to be slightly oxymoronic in the fact that actually you can I believe that we can do it more sustainably and we can do it better with the fabrics we choose our entire production process the factories we partner with like all of these different things but I don't think you can have fully sustainable fashion I think that's very important to acknowledge but I

Those are like the four pillars of sustainable fashion. But like rental and pre-owned, you don't really want to do with activewear because you don't want to rent someone sweaty activewear. You don't really want to... There is a pre-owned market for activewear, but like personally, I don't think it's a...

full alternative. If people are happy with it, great, do it. But I would happily buy a pre-owned bag or some trainers or a blazer or whatever, but I wouldn't happily have a pre-owned sports bra. And then sustainable fabrics and small business. So there weren't, I'd say in general, there aren't as many small businesses within the activewear space. It's not like kind of like homeware or any of these things. There still are there, but in terms of like the bigger activewear industry, sustainable fabrics. So

looking at businesses that were doing sustainable fabrics and activewear first of all there was almost nothing in the uk and genuinely there is still so little there are people who use sustainable fabrics but they don't talk about the rest of their production process their packaging their dyeing processes their sampling processes all of these things that actually come into sustainability that's not just using a recycled fabric otherwise boohoo using a recycled fabric would be fine or like considered sustainable i looked into those and i remember

Because the way I made money, or one of the ways I made money was partnering with brands. I was looking for sustainable activewear brands that I could partner with. And when I looked them up, I was like, oh, I can't partner with these guys. The ones who've done amazing things, and we were by no means the first, and they've done incredible things, were like £100 for a pair of leggings, which I had a student audience. I would never partner with brands where the RRP of...

you know, in things were that expensive. It wouldn't work for me. I don't think it would convert for my audience. That's not who I was speaking to. So I remember thinking like, oh, like I can't partner with those people. So there was either double the price, sustainable active wear or,

non-sustainably made activewear that was at a price point that my audience would like. And then I was like, well, why isn't there a middle ground? Like, why is there not sustainable activewear at a price point that's competitive to this? Is

Is it because it can't be done? Is it because people think because some people will pay double for sustainability because it's, you know, people expect it. They expect to have to pay more. They expect to, you know, take that cost somewhere. Is it because there's not enough interest? Like all of these various different things. It seemed insane though, that the generation that cared so much about sustainability and, you know, conscious production, all of these things,

Also, say if there's like sustainability and like conscious shopping, there's activewear. The thing that joins these two together, the people who care most about both of these categories are millennial Gen Z, I'd say. Like they were the ones who pioneered activewear as like a thing that you wear outside of the gym. Like they were the ones who really cared about sustainability, all of these things. It was like a sweet spot in the middle, but no one was doing it. And still...

no one is really creating sustainable. I would love to find more brands doing sustainable activewear at a price point that's competitive. And so that was the whole concept. And I got obsessed with the idea that this would be possible, especially because I had money to put into it. And I also had an audience that I could, if I would persuade a factory to make me something for a certain amount and be like, I will, we will get this much money from it because I know it will, I know people want this. Like I really know people want this. So kind of took the,

two and a half years probably that I'd had working with activewear brands being really clear with exactly what product people liked, why they liked them, all of that. So entirely like casual expertise. It wasn't, you know, traditional training at all. And then a passion for probably like selfishly wanting to be able to have activewear and promote activewear, which was so inherent to my brand, but wanting to do that at a point that...

was both accessible and made better. So it sounds like for this, you had that, you know, the whole start with why thing. There was a purpose behind this that you genuinely cared about. Big old why, yeah. That went way beyond posting workout photos of yourself or whatever the influencing thing it was.

And I guess when you have that level of motivational strength behind the thing, it's like easy enough to almost unsustainably run yourself for a while to get it off the ground. Yes. Yeah, 100%. And also like, if you think at the same time, I also wanted longevity. And I also wanted to work in like brand building and all of these things. I was applying for jobs. I was literally applying, like when I was at,

in my final year, I applied for loads of grad roles because I was like, I don't want to do social media. And so I was willing to be like, I made this much up to this date. And then I just, I was willing to genuinely disappear off the face of the earth. I then found something that enabled me to do both and have since kind of done both, but take away the,

Yeah. So it was very much a why moment and very much a like, wow, there's some real product market fit here. And you've just launched a new line. Yeah, as in the way it works now is, you know, like most activewear companies you'll see, you know, there'll be a new color, there'll be a new line, there'll be all of these things. And we try and be like, that's exactly what we're doing.

in terms of like the, it's taken a long time to really work out where we are within the industry. And my pinpoint that I, you know, when we're talking as a team, like what products should we create? What box are we really trying to tick here? The way we do that is really looking at the fact that like,

Actually, our competitors aren't other sustainable brands. We're not competing against people that are double the price or small businesses that are making these beautiful, incredible products that are probably a lot more expensive, but you should definitely, definitely be supporting them and do amazing things. What we're competing against is people deciding not to make their next purchase from XYZ activewear brand that I'm not going to name. Yeah.

Or like there are lots of them. We want that person to decide to make a better purchase. So important as well, like as I said, the kind of sustainable fashion oxymoron thing as well. Our transparency lies in the fact that like we want to be really clear about the fact that we're well aware we're not the most sustainable option. The most sustainable option is

is not consuming. But if you have this world where it's like fast fashion, which still I'd say a lot of the Gen Z millennial crossover is sitting in and deciding to purchase, like even the fact that people don't know why fast fashion is bad, like it or, you know, bad blanket word, but like, yeah, what the negatives of fast fashion are, that's kind of over here, most sustainable, not consuming, only buying secondhand,

really amazing, like, you know, high technology, really like sustainable things that I'd say only a few brands are really getting right, which would be like Patagonia, like a lot of these things that like, if you need to buy, buy and buy from these things. There's so much middle ground that I really think if we don't address, we're basically saying, no, these people can never be better. Because if I had had to go from this to this, I would have pretended I didn't care and I would have stayed here.

What we're trying to do is create a place within the market where actually you can just decide to make a better decision. If that better decision is not buying at all, great, we will applaud you for that. And we also will stick with you at every part of your sustainability journey. But actually, if we can get all of these people to try...

more sustainably and more consciously made stuff once, then we can, our data shows that they repeat. And that is hopefully showing that rather than just necessarily like buy more, they're deciding to move away from this bit by bit because it's actually showing them that they don't need

It's, there's no different. We're not making them compromise. We're not making them compromise on quality, on color, on fit, on style, on price. We're just saying- So they might as well just be like, yeah, okay, cool. These are what the things we care about. This is how we care about them. This is our, this is what we're showing. Make, like-

Just a little bit, just like a little bit in that direction. And we, you know, there's always, there's going to be people who are here that we're not the right brand for. There's going to be people who are here that haven't quite been persuaded yet, but our job is to persuade these people to start to make better decisions. That sounds great. I would guess that some people will hate on you because you're not quite all the way to Patagonia levels. Oh yeah. Like what other like criticism do you get? I go, or hate you get for, or does the brand get like, well,

Well, I think that what's really, again, when anything's black and white online and anything's like, say, sustainable fashion. So say, we've had a lot of things within the past year that actually I've kind of been like, actually, I don't like this messaging. So say we, like, there's, yeah, there's just like so many things where it's,

if you say something that's like black and white, it's going to be perceived in a black and white way. For example, saying sustainably made versus sustainable. One is a descriptor, one is a label.

Like one is a, you've come to a conclusion, sustainable. Sustainably made is just describing it. Okay, got it. So we like using, made using sustainable fabrics, made using, so people can make based a decision based on the reality rather than a conclusion that we've stamped on something. Okay, got it. And I think that's a real- And you're careful to use the descriptor rather than the moral judgment of this is sustainable. And there'll be so many times where we make a mistake or we're not really clear on that messaging or we'll say like, shop with a sustainable brand versus, and then someone will say, actually, there's no such thing as sustainable fashion. We'll be like, you know what? We've

completely agree. What we are saying that you can't refute the fact that this is made from 95% recycled plastic bottles or like any of these things. What you can refute is whether you should buy it anyway. Or say like...

So say active wear, a lot of it has to be made from synthetic fibers, which versus plant-based fibers are still going to take a long time to decompose. Whereas if they're made from 96% recycled synthetic fibers, that stuff was going to go to landfill anyway. So we'd rather make it into something that has a new life. Of course, there's still problems with that synthetic fabric, but...

if the plant-based fabric we could have as a substitute would only last you half a year, that's not sustainable either. And also you're not going to continue buying that because you're gonna be like, well, I'm only gonna have that for six months. So it's a very complex and...

And I would say that's probably one of the big reasons as well that A, influencers don't talk about sustainability because as soon as you do, you're going to get an absolute shit show piled at you. And because we as humans are constantly hypocritical in what we do and our cognitive dissonance and we think some ways and we act other ways and all of this, that's a reality. I'm opposed to girl for that. I...

think that there's like the whole industry, the reason why people, you know, the reason why a big activewear brand, if there's so much opportunity in sustainable activewear, why wouldn't they go there? Because people are still buying it. And like, because people are still happy to buy that. And yet if you're a sustainable brand or a more sustainable brand and you're talking about those decisions, you're always going to be slightly oxymoronic and people don't like that contradiction. And so it's going to be easier to criticize, whereas actually the same time you're criticizing that whilst also wearing clothes

ex fast fashion brand. So it's like people don't like the fact that something isn't easily describable. And I'd say fast fashion, sustainable fashion isn't easily describable because you have to have like asterix, asterix, asterix. Yeah.

draw your own conclusions like all of these things what we can do is be as transparent as possible and also be as vocal as possible on what we think and what we don't think and all of these things to try and help people make their own decisions but i also think that there was you know when i first started up the business for example i i probably like there there's so much like change in some of the ways we like talk about things and all of these things in the same way as any single business

But I think it takes refined messaging over time. And I think that I'm really, really happy with where it is now in the way that the business is. So it's based on creating active wear that you can feel good in and good about. It's based on creating sustainable active wear that's at a competitive price point. Whether that's for you or not, completely up to you. There are things I'm sure we can always do better. There are things that we...

You know, do amazingly well. And lots of them, I would say. But, you know, it's a journey. And if I wanted... Like, the easier route would have been not saying anything to do with sustainability at any point. Because people love a fashion brand. The second it's a fashion brand that ties itself to something, there are stakes. There's also benefits. But there are... I'd say there are much higher stakes. We get a lot more... Yeah, it is just...

It doesn't fit into a box and that's really hard. But we're figuring it out every day and I'm more intent on disrupting the industry with a more sustainable solution than I am on... Avoiding negative comments on stuff. Yeah, as in like it's natural. Like it's going to happen and I'm constantly so excited by the concept of Tala and I can't wait to see, you know, how and where it like goes. And I think that that's, you know...

that fulfills me. We have an amazing team that are super excited all the time and work so hard because they believe in it too. And I kind of hope that shows. I'd have to talk about some book stuff. Working Hard, Hardly Working. There's a few things in here which I found super interesting that I'd love to get your take on. And the

The first one was kind of very early on in a way. When I saw the title, my editor at Penguin actually sent me an advance copy of it. I think I did a thing for it or something. And I saw the title, I thought it was going to be like, oh, here's how you can work hard while also being chill about the thing. Oh, like a four-hour work week. That kind of vibe. And then I read the book. I was like, oh, okay, it's like this...

but also not this contrast between productivity and self-care, kind of. So I would love to hear your take on that. I know you've kind of really written a whole book about it, but what are your current thoughts on productivity versus self-care and that?

theoretical dividing line between the two? So I began to write the book right at the beginning of the pandemic because there was kind of a stage where there were these two big different kind of parties online. Yeah. One was like team productivity and one was like team self-care. Yeah. And the team productivity one was like hustle 24 hours, like sleep when you're dead, like all of these things, like big lions in the background of like a big graphic being like,

Yeah, that kind of like sleep while you're dead, all of those types of things. And it was just like hustle, hustle, hustle, like side hustle culture, like Forex traders, like you can make all of this money, but also like a more subtle version of that, which was like very like girl boss culture, like a lot of this stuff, which I will have benefited hugely from. And then there was this other side, which was like self-care. And that was like, no, like do what you need to do. Cancel that job that you've got for your wellbeing. Like,

Quit your job. Go into something you love. Like take a bath. Put on a candle. Like well-being. And then it was like... There was like nothing in between. So like if I post something being like... Oh, one of my big productivity tips is X. I'd get like an influx of like... It's like pandemic...

pandemic not a productivity contest and like how dare you say I should watch a TED talk at lunch like I should be out in the park and it's like yeah great like if that works for you at the same time I post something being like I decided not to work late today and to do this instead and like the productivity people would be like well like you can do that because of x y and z and actually we all need to do this and like all of that and there was like there's no like middle ground

And actually there was no acknowledgement of the fact that actually we all need productivity and we all need self-care. And that was the kind of like working hard, hardly working thing. The book split into working hard, which is filled with productivity tips. A lot of talk about the, you know, generational kind of like passion paradoxes and like all of these things, managing your time, defining success, goal setting, like all of these things, a lot very much like within this kind of like social media world.

And then the hardly working side is kind of essentially the complete opposite. But the whole idea is to create a productivity blueprint that doesn't completely negate the idea that we actually need rest or relaxation or sleep. And I think that a lot of productivity books and a lot of books have done really well in the kind of like self-help book

businessy worky improve your life way are types of books that you can like stick to for you get really inspired by and stick to for about two weeks after

And then you're like, you completely burn out because it's not sustainable because it's not based on the fact that actually we're all human as well. And then on the opposite side, there's like all of these wellbeing books that are like, do this and do this and do this. And then after two weeks, you're like, well, now I've lost my job. So it's like, there was none of this middle ground. And the whole idea was to create a productivity blueprint for this generation that would

actually acknowledged the reality of social media, the 24-hour news cycle, the even things like house prices, the fact that we actually have to work for x amount of time to be able to do x, the fact that we can do whatever online, the fact that we are bombarded with all types of success whether it's like a friend from school's marriage or someone's promotion or

you know, like a baby or like any of these things. We're bombarded with those things all the time. So it's like very different from just seeing who's the last to leave the office, all of these different things. And yeah, the whole idea was to create this kind of blueprint and also take what you need type thing that would be really actionable, but also was baked into today's culture rather than being

like the stuff from back in the 2000s that tells you to work X amount. Yeah, I love it. Make some money. One of the lines that I was listening to the audiobook and you said, sometimes productivity can be self-care. Yeah. And I was like, oh, that's interesting.

What's going on with that? - So I think that's one of the main triggers for the book was actually the fact that people would be like, "Oh, self-care, relax." And I'd be like, "Actually, sometimes self-care is meeting that deadline that you're currently not on track to meet, but actually respecting your future self and your goals

getting the fuck up and doing the work that you need to do for that. And like, we cannot market self-care as always like doing nothing. Sometimes self-care is working harder because you're currently not working in line with what you want to make happen. And I think that again, the internet hates that because it's like,

fit into this idea of like well-being versus productivity it's the actual understanding of the fact that both are one and the other like self-care isn't always running a bath if you're running a bath and you're about to miss three deadlines and that's your paycheck for the week self-care is not running a bath I refuse to believe that self-care is running a bath so that was

a lot of the stuff in the book is around how to action actual self-care and like how to know at what point something will be self-care and some versus self-sabotage or any of these things to create a life that revolves around you know your boundaries and where you need to be more productive and where you probably need to stop being so harsh on yourself

What are your two different types of doing nothing? Yeah. Because I thought that was a super interesting distinction. And I had one of those over the weekend. It was a Saturday. No one else in the house. I was like, I'm going to make all this book progress. And I made zero book progress. Just browsed YouTube all day. Yeah.

And I was listening to the audiobook last night. I was like, oh, if I had this terminology of like, fuck it, nothing, I would have called it, I would have just like written the day off, but I didn't. And so I felt guilty for the whole day. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And it's like, ugh, nightmare. - So I think that's really, really important. And I think that when we're taught so much how to work,

and we're not taught that well how to take time and know when we're probably a little bit burnt out and all of these different things that actually if we took rest, we would be much better tomorrow. The idea of planned nothing and fuck it nothing are the fact that actually I believe wholeheartedly in time management.

I believe that time management is stress management. For some people, you're gonna be very like type A and it's gonna be like, of course you're time managing. Like of course at the beginning of your week, you know what your whole week looks like and all of this. Other people are gonna be like, no, I won't know till the day. I do believe though that if you want to fit a certain amount of things in, you have to be good at time management and you have to do your 10,000 hours and make yourself good at time management.

You don't have to want to, fine. But I think that it's really important to also give a bit of tough love and be like, if you want to do X, Y and Z, you have to plan. It's not going to happen without you planning it. So whether that's starting to go to the gym, whether that's starting a new side hustle or a new hobby or any of those things, if you're not planning those things in, in the same way as if you don't plan in the gym or, you know, if you don't put your doctor's appointment in your diary, it's not going to happen.

So the idea of like plan nothing and fuck it nothing is when you're looking at your week plan and you're doing all your day plan and you're doing your plan for yourself, I think it's really important to have enough planned nothing in there. And I don't think we do that because planning nothing, again, seems quite oxymoronic. It doesn't make sense.

But knowing your boundaries and getting to know how you're most productive and how you're happiest is really, really important. And that all comes then into your time management. So for me, for example, I know that from a Monday to Thursday, so weekdays, I'm probably going to want to do something two nights and do nothing two nights. And that's my limit usually. So like this week, I've had something every single night.

And I hate it. I feel dead. I've started every day feeling like an absolute zombie. I don't have any thinking time. I don't have time to stare at the ceiling. Like I don't, you know, I'm not able to kind of process things in the same way. And so I get anxious about things and I get stressed and I don't feel like I'm my best self. The way we mitigate that is by understanding those boundaries. And for me, usually...

If I look at next week, for example, and I've got something in on Wednesday and Thursday, and someone says, are you free on Tuesday? I'm not. I'm actually not free on Tuesday. It might look, if you look to my diary, like I'm free, but I'm not. These are my non-negotiables. And this is how I manage myself to be able to be my best self for my goals, whether those are personal life, whether those are work. Fuck it, nothing is understanding that we can plan as much as we want. We can...

by those rules. We can, you know, I can know that I'm going out Wednesday and Thursday next week for dinner and I can know that I'm doing Tuesday, Monday and Tuesday in and then whatever the weekend I've got it all planned and I can get to Wednesday and I can be like, I actually, I actually,

either don't want to or I can't or I'm feeling really burnt out or my mental health isn't there or any of those things and understanding that we can plan for absolutely everything and we can't plan for the fact that we're human and so fuck it nothing is essentially being able to be like fuck it not doing that and I think important distinction again is like you get a real dopamine hit when you think you had to do something and then you don't have to do something so you have a plan with some someone and then you you cancel that plan you get that dopamine hit

But then also you can get into the habit of doing that because you think you need that. And actually what you needed was to push yourself out there and go out to dinner and have a good laugh with someone you haven't caught up within a while. But it feels like a chore when you're at the end of that day and you're like, that's the last thing I want to do. So I think understanding as well, the boundaries of fuck it, nothing too are really important. But I do think that if we don't have fuck it, nothing, say your Saturday night where you were going to make a huge amount of progress with the book,

and you decide not to, what you really needed in that time was fuck it, nothing. You needed to be like, fuck it, I'm doing absolutely nothing. Instead, you probably sat on the sofa being like, I'm meant to be doing something and then felt probably, you probably didn't get the benefit of doing nothing and you didn't get the benefit of doing work.

And so I think understanding our human limits and our boundaries and being able to just say, I'm not going to do that. And I know I'm not going to do that. And I'm okay with not doing that is one of the most important things you can do for your productivity and your time management and your self-care. What's your process for setting goals? I feel like this is a test on my book material. I'm not sure if it's in the book. It is. It's in chapter four. Damn. Defining success. Shit. It's proof that I did write the book. People are always like, you had a ghostwriter. I'm like, the problem with a ghostwriter is...

is the fact that, and there's nothing against having ghostwriter. For so many people, it doesn't make sense for them to write something. But if it's really bad, I don't want to take credit for writing it because I don't want you to think it's really bad. And if it's really good, I don't want to take credit for writing it because I didn't do it. So I was like, instantly they were like, ghostwriter. And I was like,

I spent my uni doing 10,000 words a week. This is my bag. I can do this. I can sit down and write and half of it will be shit, but at least like the bit that will end up in the end will hopefully be good. And hopefully that's been proved by the fact that, you know, it's still selling well and all of this and I'm not posting about it and all that. Anyway, the defining success thing, I think that goal setting, again, really, really, really important. It's kind of like long-term time management. It's like,

setting we probably have in our head these destinations that we want to get to and somewhere along the way that destination will change but if we don't acknowledge it's changed we're probably like autopiloting towards that and we're actually like

ah, that's actually not what I want to do anymore. And I think goal setting, as much as it comes across quite woo-woo and wishy-washy, it's literally like the steering wheel to make sure you're going in the right direction. Yeah, I think it can come across woo-woo and wishy-washy, but there's also another side of it, which is very much smart goal, like 25% by two weeks from now and all that shit. So I like mine to be somewhere in between. I like to have my smart goals, which...

Do we need to go through them? What a smart goal is? You can Google what a smart goal is. So like a smart goal, I like to have those because I think it's really important. So I'll say, I want to, you know, have X amount more revenue based on like last year from this or whatever by this time. But actually a lot of my things, because I'm,

because you know we're reporting every week and I do so much stuff that is like measurable I try and do more floaty goals too which I think is important weirdly so what's a floaty goal well just you know like I want to by this time I want to feel like I've made more progress towards this or I want to feel more fulfilled in my everyday because I am including more hobbies or any of these things goal setting wise I usually do I'll do key points in the year

I'll do yearly goal setting, quarterly goal setting, monthly goal setting, and weekly goal setting, and daily goal setting. Which sounds like I probably sit there for like five hours a day being like, what do I want my goals to be? And never actually doing the work. And I think that if we spent half as much time worrying about how like woo-woo doing that much goal setting

we'd be getting to our goals a lot quicker. I think that goal setting can be as small as writing down three non-negotiables that you're gonna do that day. You're setting those three goals for your day. So I think that we don't need to think of it as doing a scrap work like vision board every day. But I think some direction is really, really, really important. So yearly goals that will be split into kind of work goals, personal goals, and I'll have some smart goals in there and I'll also have some like

I just want to feel generally more like this. Whereas like down to daily goals, every single day I will write three non-negotiable things I'll do that day. Like a year is literally just three, six, five days. And I know that's so, it's obvious, but it's also that accumulation. Say if you're setting monthly goals, you need to do things in that month that's going to get towards those goals.

And the, I mean, it's all the atomic habit stuff. Like the first thing that you can do to get to those are the small minute changes make the biggest result. So every single day I'll have three non-negotiable things that I am doing that day without fail. And at the same time, you know, in my weeks, it will be a bit broader. In my months, it will be a bit broader. But again, I don't spend more than, you know, probably 20 minutes on a monthly. Yearly, I might spend an hour and have a bit of a think about it and all of that. But daily, I don't.

writing down my non-negotiable goals. But I think it's really, really, really important. I think an example of that would be, you know, when we were talking about my career, my big goal when I was probably in second year at university would be to have like a big collaboration with a fast fashion brand. So,

So that was what was happening. Like the most successful kind of YouTubers and all of that were having these collaborations with Pretty Little Thing, Boohoo, all of that. And that was my like big goal. I was kind of just like aimlessly working, doing as much as I could, like all of these things. And I kind of realized like about nine months into the year before goal setting for the next year, I was like, not only is that not a goal anymore.

I also actually wouldn't take it if I was offered that. Like it's so out of line. And for those changes to happen that, you know, there'll be years where we have bigger shifts in mindset than others. Like I don't have that every year. But I think actually acknowledging and writing those things down is it takes two seconds and it's so, so, so important. And I think a lot of the time, especially as we grow up, our priorities shift and we realize that actually we don't want to make changes.

10 grand extra. We want to spend three more days a week with our friends, you know, all of those different things. So I think that my goal setting is quite granular. I don't think it always looks like goal setting. Often it will just be about, you know, good planning. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, I think my approach to goal setting is similar where sometimes I'll benefit from a smart goal.

And sometimes I won't. I'll just be like, you know, I got a full body DEXA scan the other day where it's like for the first time I'm seeing like my body fat percentage muscle mass. And I found that like ridiculously like liberating and empowering and like, yes, motivating to take gym more seriously. But I know so many people who would like that would be the last thing on earth that they would want because they don't want like working out to be a numerical thing. Yeah. For me, it's like, oh, that's kind of fun. Oh no, I do. Because I judge myself entirely based on like, I need to be able to attribute progress to some sort of measurable way in

In terms of like, rather than, you know, the healthy thing to do would probably be say, I'm going to make sure I go to the gym four days a week. Whereas if the aim of going to the gym four days a week is to lose weight, for example, it's like not a current goal of mine, but like say if that was the thing, I'd rather judge it based on that. So it will be, I'm really probably like, I think a lot of type A people are,

are really concentrated on numbers. So I think for me, it's often good to move things away from that. Because while it's a better way to reach a goal, it's, I'd say, you probably know if you're a more obsessive person. And I know I am. What's your balance between, I guess, striving for goals versus being satisfied and enjoying the present moment? Yeah.

So I'm really good at one of them and really bad at the other. And I know that and I work very hard to change that perception. As a person, I'm not good at sitting down and enjoying the moment. But I also think that it's

most to blame for when I am unhappy or feeling unfulfilled or feeling lost or any of those things. So I really, really consciously try not to. I think that you're always going to lean one way or the other and therefore you know you always need to push yourself in one way or the other. So I don't need to push myself to make goals. I need to push myself to calm the fuck down and enjoy the day or like...

let this month be this month and you know because I'm always always always looking to the next thing while I can do better all of these things at the same time you'll know if you know say someone who will reply to a story being like how do you get motivated you're probably going to need yourself to like go more towards goal setting you're probably quite good at enjoying the moment and I just think that it the balance there's no one balance and I also think that like

it's a hugely privileged thing to say oh yeah you need balance between work and life like there's

there's no balance between work and life if you're working you know three jobs to put food on the table for your kids there's also no balance for you know if I sat there being like work-life balance and like I've got a VC funded startup and actually there's not a lot of work-life balance I've got to be realistic about that my work-life balance is knowing that there's not that at the moment but there you know hopefully will be in the future and I can enjoy the fact that it's not that in the moment because I in an incredibly lucky position to be able to do that

And so, yeah, there's, I think that work-life balance, again, is one of those things that it's like so individual and you just need to know which way you need to push yourself. I guess final question on this productivity front and we'll put links to the book in all the things. People can check it out. It's genuinely very good. Thank you. What are your personal signs and symptoms of burnout? Like how do you know when you're like encroaching burnout territory or you're in burnout territory? And I guess like, what does the word even mean to you? Because people seem to have different...

So I talk about it a lot in the book and I do think that there's this difference between clinical burnout, which is a really serious thing that you get signed off work for, that is a medical term, that is hugely debilitating all of this. And I also think that there is this kind of idea of mini burnout. And I would say that a lot of people...

have mini burnout because you don't leave work at the office if you have an office. You definitely don't leave work at the office if you work from home.

You also, even if you then think you do, going on social media, say every time I go on social media, I'll probably see five different activewear competitors. I'll probably see 50 different influencers who are doing better content than I do. I will probably see 10 different friends who have more successful relationships, fashion senses, like all of these things. We are working in some way all the time.

And I think that it's like, that's why these older generations look at us and they're like, oh, fucking boo-hoo. Like you've got access to social media and it's burning you out because you're looking at other people's clothes. But I do think it's really, it's the same as talking about the 24 hour news cycle. It is our brains are never fully relaxed and therefore they never get full respite in order to reset and, you know, go again. Like if you're swiping through TikTok every night before bed,

your brain is not going to rest in the same way and you're fatiguing yourself. And I do think that a lot of, and that's not to say that, you know, I don't do that sometimes. And I will be the first to say that I have so much advice and I take absolutely none of it. But I also think that we as a generation are increasingly burnt out based on the fact that work doesn't just look like work. Emails just aren't just on a computer. Your office isn't just on an office. Your phone isn't just a phone. Like all of these things

And I think that, you know, the aim of the book was to give also a certain amount of tools to deal with that. I think my signs in particular of burnout are, I think I've been slightly burnt out for a very long time now. I think I've probably been slightly burnt out as soon as I even started slowing down the social media stuff, which was originally, I think I only realized that when I did slow it down and I was like, oh my God.

this time it's not like feeling like I've got a lot of time back, it's just feeling like a bit of a breath of fresh air. Just because I was also doing the degree at the same time and also bombarded with so many opinions, positive, negative, all the same.

And I think that I've never actually fully recovered from that. And I think that it's also part of the fact that we don't talk about one of the downfalls of passions is that if you're working on your passion, you're probably not going to realize when you're burnt out because there's this like necessity, whether internal or external, because it's a business that you put into a lot of money into or internal because you believe in it so much and you love it and you really want to succeed.

It's like when you're working for ages and you don't realise until you look up how long you've been working for and you're really like, your whole brain's just zapped. And I think that we don't talk about how

exhausting working on something you're passionate about can be because you exert yourself that much more now that's not to say that it's as like I've mentioned it's not to say that it's not a hugely privileged position because it is but I also think that when we're encouraging like work on your passion like all of this also remembering the fact that if you're there every day so trying to make this idea into a business and so trying to make this work and so trying to get your side hustle off the ground and all of these things you're also allowed to feel

burnt out and like it's a lot and I think giving myself permission to do that has been a big learning curve I don't think I'm quite there yet but actually acknowledging that especially because a lot of my job is online burnout is not necessarily just going to be mitigated by working less first of all I often can't do that because first of all you know we have VC investors I'm contracted to things I want to make things happen like all of these different things

But also, I think that even if I worked less, you know, at any one time for a week,

I'm still going to probably be in some way on social media or consuming people's opinions or seeing people's like active wear on the street, whatever it might be. One of the most valuable things I've implemented for myself is just really, really understanding where my boundaries are and understanding where they shift as well, because my boundaries from one year to the next aren't going to be the same. My boundaries from winter to summer aren't going to be the same. I'm going to be able to work a lot harder and not feel like I'm missing out in winter than I am in summer. And just giving myself the respect to know that...

Of course I need to work hard and I do work incredibly hard and I don't think I need pushing in that direction. I think that anyone who knows me knows that. And...

actually knowing that I probably more the way I need to mother myself is just be like no get in the bath you want and also not on your phone like reading is one of the biggest ways I relax and not non-fiction books don't buy my book it's a fiction books and you know reading novels because you can't concentrate on anything else and finding those things that take you completely away from the reality of like work and life and everything I think is so important

Grace, thank you so much. This has been a fantastic conversation. I'd love to get some fiction book recommendations. Or can I actually get up my list? Yes, I would love that. I'm huge on fantasy these days, but I'm keen to explore other genres as well. So for anyone watching, this is my succinct novel list for the best summer of your life. Sick. These are the gripping or life-changing ones. Educated by Tara Westover. The Nightingale by Kirsten Hanna.

Small Great Things by Jodie Pickholt. The Storyteller, also by Jodie Pickholt. I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes. And Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman. I think those are really good books that none of them are a chore to read. Okay, girly and fun. I assume you're very much into this genre. Very much so. We've got Twilight over there somewhere. Great. One Direction's Autobot. These are all fantastic. Okay.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones and the Six, Grown Ups, Malibu Rising, The Flat Share, The Break, and Seven Days in June. I've read The Flat Share. Have you? I really enjoyed that. So good. I don't know how I came across it, but I read it in one sitting. Really good. All of those ones are like that. They're kind of like... The sensation you have is similar to watching a really good TV series. It's fun. It's funny. It's not a chore. And it just makes sense. Really important. And then I'd say...

thrillers sharp objects behind closed doors and the night she disappeared that was just the summer reading list I wrote for my Instagram amazing but I genuinely think that a lot of those things are so they're such good books and I think that everyone should are you audible or kindle or physical book which camp are you

If I have the book, then physical book. Or if I go, I love like secondhand bookstores and all of that. Kindle though, most of the time, because portable. Any nonfiction books you'd recommend other than potentially? Oh yeah. Again, I actually have a huge nonfiction reading list in the back of my book. So you can probably go into a bookstore, not even buy it and get all my recommendations. You're welcome. We'll put it all in the show notes as well. Oh wow, that's a big list. Yeah, and it's categorized as well because that's how I live my life. Oh, business memoirs. Oh, hello.

Podcasts, online resources, Tim Ferriss show, yes. Oh, there's a lot of stuff here. Okay, if you had to pick like three nonfiction books. I'm kind of looking for stuff I wouldn't have read potentially. So obviously Atomic Habits. I assume you've read that. I would say Black Box Thinking. Oh, I haven't read that. Okay.

There's also a really good murky book series, which is like mini books. They're like a how-to series. They have like how to build it for like building your brand, how to change it for activism, how to write it with like books, how to calm it, like how to move it, like all of these things. Really good. How to fix your finances, all of those things. Rework, I think is really good. Oh, by the Basecamp guys. The ones who used to be Google. DHH and...

- Jason Fried. - Oh yeah, yes. - So yeah, really good. I think particularly if you have a company in terms of the way things work, obviously start with why. For our work week, I say in this book, I don't agree with everything it says, but I think it's really important to read. The Working Woman's Handbook. - Oh, never heard of it. - I think incredibly important, especially for creatives and freelancers.

That's Phoebe Lovatt. Trick Mirror by Gia Tolentino. Oh my god, that is one of my favourite books ever, I will happily. It's a series of essays which sounds like the most boring thing ever. If anyone tells me anything's essays I'm like goodbye and then I read them and they're amazing. But that one is like a series of essays on modern culture and they are both hilarious and so observant and written in a way that I didn't even know could be written.

Oh my God, I'm actually rework was not what I was thinking it was. That's work rules. Yeah, work rules is the Google one. I would say those are the main ones. Thank you so much. Those are great. That's okay. All right. So that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast.

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