287: Entrepreneurial Balance - An Honest Conversation about Life and Business with Russ and Natalie Monson

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Hello.

Hello and welcome to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Alexa and I'm part of the Food Blogger Pro team. We are so excited that you decided to join and tune into the podcast today. Today's episode actually features a conversation about life and business. And we know that sometimes it's really hard to find balance in life and business, especially when you're grow your business and getting more and more responsibilities. And that's exactly what Russ and Natalie from the Food Blog, Super Healthy Kids and the app Prepare are here today to talk about. So you'll learn more about how they started working together, how they started focusing on their blog full time, and then how they came up with the idea for Prepare and then how they had to find a balance and a healthy relationship with their work. It's a really interesting episode and I think there are a lot of takeaways from this episode that you're going to feel very familiar with, if that makes sense. So without any further ado, Bjork, take it away.

Russ, Natalie, welcome to the podcast. I just made the guarantee that I'm going to direct questions or comments at each of you individually. And so you don't do a dual welcome talk over each other, I'll individually welcome you to the podcast. Russ, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Bjork. Great to be here. We've been listening to the podcast for a long time and it's fun to be on.

It's always great when people are familiar with it, know it. Natalie, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Bjork. I mean, I've known you for a long time and like Russ said, we've listened for a long time. So it's fun and exciting and also we feel a little bit honored to be here because it's just your podcast is amazing.

Well, thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate it. Usually what happens when I have a guest on is that we'll like connect and we'll have a conversation. It'll be one of the first conversations we have. And then moving forward, it's like, great. We have a connection and we stay connected. Sometimes we continue those conversations. It kind of kicks things off. This is really different. Where we've had hours of conversation hours and hours before this, and now we're officially pressing record. So it feels a little bit different even for me. Like there's just like, there's like 150%. I kind of talk a little bit different. Like my, my energy is a little bit different and you guys can, you guys can sniff that out.

Well, hopefully everybody listening can just feel like they're hanging out with a couple of friends.

Yes. Good. That's. That's what it's all about. And that's what our hope is, is kind of listening in on a conversation with friends who do things kind of in the similar world that we do. And you guys would be examples of that. Very much so. Similar mindset, similar work ethic to a lot of people that listen to this podcast. I would say to the way that we view the world and work within the world. Because you have multiple different businesses and both of you are entrepreneurs, I think that's kind of a rare thing between a couple to share that. Has that always been the case for you? When you first started dating Natalie, were you like, hey, this was going to work out really well because we're both entrepreneurs and we're going to build businesses together 100%.

Like, we both went into marriage knowing that about each other in different ways. And I remember when we first got married, Russ is like, okay, I have this goal. I want to own, like, a bunch of real estate, all these apartment complexes and all these things. And I was like, what the heck? Like, okay, that's your dream. Let's do it. You know, mine was very different, and you just don't know where you're going to end up. But it's cool to start with, you know, at least a shared goal in mind of, like, let's build something.

Yeah. What was your dream? Did you have one that you can look back on and say, like, hey, I kind of had an entrepreneurial spirit. I knew this is what I wanted to do.

So I don't. I. My dreams were definitely less specific than Russ's, but I knew two things. I knew, number one, I've always been interested in nutrition and food. It's like a strong passion of mine. And number two, I've always liked to sell things, and so I didn't really have any expectations of what that would look like in my life at that point, but I just knew I like those two things. So I'm going to go forward and.

See what happens, figure out something in that world, and eventually that was Super Healthy Kids, which we can talk about in a little bit. But Russ leading with Super Healthy Kids, you know, online blog, in the food and recipe space around nutrition for kids is very different than apartment complexes.

Yes.

Was that. Was that something that you were kind of at the same time saying, like, hey, I'm entrepreneurial. You have a background as a cpa, so you understand numbers. Were you kind of saying, hey, I'm going to dabble in the. In my own area, my own passion, kind of my own dream. Also kind of dabble in this area with online businesses or was. Was there a clear cut line? Were you kind of doing a little bit Both. What does your kind of entrepreneurial journey look like as it relates to the different businesses you guys have had?

Yeah, I actually had no interest in online businesses. Food logging at all. Not even a little bit. In fact, like, when I. When Natalie's like, what are your goals? Like, my whole goal is I was working a corporate job and I was buying up real estate to try and build up an income stream so that I could quit my job and do real estate full time.

Yeah, it was going well. When you say real estate full time, that's like as a building owning real estate.

Yeah. Not as a realtor or anything like that.

Cash flowing apartments, like reading bigger pockets, like. Yes.

Developing land into multifamily buildings, building, doing those sorts of things. That's totally what I wanted to do.

And you done some of that. Like you were in the middle of doing it, right?

Quite a bit. Yeah. So when we. I knew that right out of the gate, like, that was what I wanted to do straight out of before I was in college. Like, I've been getting ready to do that forever. And so we had gotten to where we had quite a bit of real estate and Natalie had met one of our neighbors and started this super healthy kids thing together with her. And I was just excited for her to have a project to work on. And I had like, didn't even want anything to do with it. Like, it just. This is great. I don't know food. I don't know any of this stuff. But I'm glad you're having fun.

Except for the accounting side of things. Because Russ is a cpa.

Yeah. As soon as there started to be accounting side of things, then you're like.

Maybe I am interested in this.

Yes. And then it started to, like, it started to infect me online business bug a little bit. And I loved the idea of kind of what I wanted to do with real estate is I like to go into things and find a situation where there's a building or a circumstance that's not ideal and make it more ideal. And when I looked at Natalie's business, I thought, well, you know what, if you did this, this could happen and that would be amazing. And so then once I started getting that bug, to me it was like I had thought I wanted to do real estate, but what I really wanted to do was be involved in business where you can go in and take a creative idea of a way to improve it and make that happen. And I started seeing that outlet there.

It's like, you think about one of the things that people love most about business, I would say entrepreneurs, is autonomy, like the ability to operate freely within the realm of your area of focus and to have an impact. And I think that would be true even for, like, if you have a team, if you work with people, if you have a job where you have autonomy to some extent, man, what an awesome thing that is. A lot of times in a corporate setting, you don't. And so the draws, like, I, for me, would feel that I worked at a nonprofit and did have some of that autonomy, but still, it's like you have these kind of set parameters. Was that was the realization for you, Russ? Like, hey, I want autonomy. I want the ability to build things, to create things, to play the game.

So I would say now I like the idea of the autonomy, but at the time, I was far more ambitious than I am now. I guess I've been beaten down over the years by a lot of hard things. It wasn't even like that I wanted autonomy. I almost kind of looked at that entrepreneurship idea of autonomy as a fiction because everybody I knew who was a successful entrepreneur was working harder than anybody who had a regular. And so I like, to me, I already had blown through the idea that entrepreneurship is this magic American dream and that it just makes life harder. And I wanted to make life harder. Like I wanted. To me, it was like, oh, this is a bigger challenge. I've kind of got this real estate thing figured out. I could do this 30 more times. But let's go into this other thing because it's a learning opportunity. And frankly, as we started to work on it, Natalie was just more successful than I was. And it was probably a combination of both of us, but, like, we were just making a lot of money doing blogging thing. And so it pulled me over into that from the real estate thing.

It's interesting. I don't follow super closely with Chip and Joanna Gaines, but Chip Lindsay showed me this thing. There's like an editorial piece in Magnolia magazine or something like that. And he told this story about how in HGTV is that the channel they were originally on? When they came to him, he kind of envisioned himself being the star, and he's like, hey, this thing's going to be great because I have this big personality and I'm going to be awesome. And Then he had this realization of, like, oh, my gosh, Joanna's just incredible at this thing. And I feel like, in some sense, when people talk about Pinch of Yum, when they talk about Lindsey, when they talk about the work that we've done, there's this interesting reality of, like, well, gosh, I can't. I definitely can't take credit for it. Like, it's not my thing. And I think what Lindsey would say is, like, well, it's kind of her thing, but also it's like, she can't take 100% credit for it. So there's this probably really good reality that, like, it's. It's. It's a shared thing, but. But it's also kind of hard for somebody to. To share with somebody the thing that you are working on.

It's like a level of intimacy in your marriage. When you're married.

Yeah, for sure.

Between our businesses here, how do we deal with it? We screw up in this world. How do we handle all?

So in what was there a point, Natalie, when you're looking back on it, where you're like. You can remember being like, wait, Russ, like, this is. This is my thing, or was it kind of like, hey, can you come and help me with this? Maybe it depended on the day.

No, I think from the very start, I was, like, so grateful for all his help, because when you're first starting something, and, I mean, I had no business experience. Like, I minored in business in college, which is basically like, giving you book experience. Right. Like, I had no idea what I was doing. And so I saw Russ as someone who knew how to do business. And so for me, I was like, yeah, like, come help as much as you can.

There's a sense of relief to have somebody come in to focus on some stuff that you knew probably needed to have some attention on it that you maybe didn't want to do.

Absolutely. Yeah. So that's kind of how it's all started for us, and then it's just kind of ebbed and flowed, you know, I'm sure you and Lindsey have experienced the same thing. Like, okay, what's your role? What are you working on? What are you taking over? What should I do? And that changes a lot over the years as your business changes.

Did you have any official conversations around that? Like, did you sit down and say, like, here's what I'm responsible for? I don't think Lindsay and I have ever had that conversation. And it's not because we don't have things. It's almost Just like, naturally, we've. It's like we've also never had a conversation of like, I'm always doing the dishes after dinner. It's just like, that's just how it works out. And it's always how it's been. And it's like I'm also. We've never had the conversation about Lindsay making dinner, primarily because she's 1000 times more capable than I am at doing that. But did you have official conversations, like, here's what you're going to do, here's what I'm going to do. Or was it kind of like you knew where you fit in and you just filled those roles?

We never had, correct me if I'm wrong, Russ, but we never had those conversations until we decided to start taking VC money with prepare and we can go more into that later. But then we had to because we had to have official titles.

Yeah. You're presenting to investors.

Yeah.

Having conversations. And people are like, who are you? What do you do within the company? Yep.

Right. And so then at that point, we did. We did have those conversations very specifically, and we had real roles that we were trying to fill.

Yeah.

Prior to that, I think we just naturally, kind of like you described, we just naturally divided on the lines of what we both thought we were good at. And so we would just take on, like, it was obvious I was never going to do content. I was, I would say the screen and the food would look terrible. All of those things were just obvious. And it was obvious that Natalie wasn't going to be running the books or figuring out how to design our next sales program or like, that just wasn't what she was going to do. And so just naturally happened.

Yeah, that makes sense. When, at what point, Russ, did you leave your full, like your corporate job? When was that?

I left there in 2015. So it's been six years.

And was that related to the success of Super Healthy Kids? And how did you have that conversation, Natalie? You had always been kind of working on it part time. Ish. Full time. Ish. Like that was your main focus, Is that right? Or was there a point where you said, hey, I have this job, I'm going to leave this job and focus on Super Healthy Kids. Or is that just you, Russ?

So I, before I started doing Super Healthy Kids, I was working as a dietitian with people who have kidney failure. And then I was doing like a couple other online things as a dietitian. And once I started, actually started doing Super Healthy Kids, that was my full time job. Thing from then on. Like, I quit everything else. Everything else was done. That was my only sole focus. And I specifically remember in 2015, having the discussion with Russ, like, okay, Russ wanted to start making his exit plan for his corporate job. So was it going to be his stuff or my stuff?

Yeah.

And he had a few options with all his stuff. And I just. I remember having these conversations over months, you know, because it's kind of a big jump, and then finally ending up on, like, okay, let's put all of our eggs in my business's basket, because it's going well, it's up and to the right. Like, let's do this. And so we conscientiously made that decision.

And that means what, that you focus your time on that more or. Russ, did you drop all real estate pursuits at that time?

Yeah. I mean, it meant we put all our eggs in that basket. Like, over time, I ended up selling all of my real estate to fund what we were doing with super healthy kids and prepare all of it. I mean, we put every egg in that basket. And that's partially just because that was. I was super ambitious about it. In fact, I told Natalie, like, I want to come here, but I don't want to, like, grow a food blog. I want to build something bigger than the food blog. And I want. I think this is a really cool platform for it. And are you down with that? If we try to do something, something, not that it needed to be, like, better than a food blog, it's just we wanted to do something, and so much so. This is probably not my best husbanding moment ever, but I said, I think it's going to be hard, and I think it's going to be so hard that you're going to want to quit. And so I want you to commit that you're not gonna quit for at least this amount of time. And she's like, no, I won't. And so I actually made her sign a paper saying, I won't quit until after this date.

It was a contract, but it was a very simple one. Just like, I will not quit.

Sign it in blood.

It's probably not my best husbanding move of all time, Bjork. But I knew at least, like, intellectually, that what we were going into was not the same thing as what we had done before, that we were going to try and do something that was going to be so hard. I knew we would both want to quit. And that's the kind of ambition that I had is like, I just want to try big, hard Things. And I just, it almost like it was like an addiction or an obsession. Not particularly in a healthy way, not to like make our lives better, but because it's like, you know, somebody who's like into a sport so much that you're like, should you really be exercising nine hours a day instead of hanging out with kids? Like, it was too far for me for sure.

So to understand that. So there's the phase of like real estate investing, corporate early stage, Super Healthy Kids, and then there's the stage of like, hey, Super Healthy Kids is going well. We should probably both focus on this. Let's put all of our energy there. That's kind of the midterm. And then there's like kind of what we're in right now, maybe like the tail end of chapter, which is like, what about creating a platform that isn't a food blog, but it's something that could have the potential to scale at a really large, that could have a lot of reach in a way that like creating content maybe can't. Is that in terms of the chap general chapters, is that dividing that up correctly? And maybe this. We're at the start of kind of a new chapter.

Yeah, I think that's correct. So we, I don't think we've talked much about like what we decided to do with prepare, but like when I quit and went into Super Healthy Kids with this big ambition, I had in the back of my mind that there would be something like a platform there. And that was because as we had been working on Super Healthy Kids and growing it, we grew it to do a lot of like, for what for us was a lot of revenue. We got it to where on its own, it was doing about $900,000 a year in top line revenue. And that was from a bunch of different businesses that we had built. We built a physical products business inside of it. We had the food blog, we also had the meal planning business. And we looked at all that and said, which of these things has the potential to scale? And all of our subscribers to our meal planning subscription were asking us for all these things. And a bunch of other food blogs were starting meal plan subscription services. And like, their pricing was our pricing. And we could see that people were watching what we were doing and doing it. And it was kind of obvious to us that like, okay, other people want to do this and our readers want this to be better than it is, but for it to be better than it is, it's going to cost us literally millions of dollars to build the kinds of things that they're asking for. No, we. We can get this to make some amount of money, but we didn't feel like we would be able to get it to make that amount of money to justify anything. And that, like, morphed into this. That's what our thing is, is to build this platform that solves the super healthy kids problem, makes our meal plan subscribers happy, gives us a thing to grow, but then extends that ability to build that subscription to every other food blogger.

Yeah, and I remember. Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

Well, go finish that thought. Yep.

I was just gonna say one of the things is, like, when you come up with an idea, it's influenced, right. By a lot of different things. But I remember specifically one year I spoke at, like, a breakout session, the everything Food conference, and I was talking about building a meal plan subscription. And so everyone that was attending the session was asking all these different questions, and I, you know, I was giving my experience. But the thing that. Cape. Cape. The question that kept coming up over and over again was like, okay, I understand all these things, but how do I. Where. How do I do it?

Like, where.

What technology do I use? How do I actually do this? You know? And I didn't have a good answer for that, because everything we'd done, we custom built, and it's really expensive and it's hard to do. And even though we poured a ton of money in it, our technology solution wasn't even that great, you know?

Yeah.

And so then it's like, okay, that's another thing that's like, okay, well, we could. We could build this, because then there's a place for people who want to do this to do that.

And it's interesting. You know, it's a lot of how we recommend people look for opportunities is like, what are the things that you keep hearing? And it's almost like, I think it's in big magic. I only know big magic through what Lindsey's told me. So it's like telephone game of the book, big magic. But I think there's something that she talks about in there of, like, the muse. And, like, once it visits you, it'll be there for a little bit. Eventually it goes to somebody else. But this idea of, like, hey, I kind of feel like there's something here. There's an idea, there's inspiration, there's potential traction that could come from this. It sounds like that's what prepare was. And you knew that there was opportunity there because you heard people saying it. You were creating an income from this category. And type of product. And you said, hey, if we can create something that allows people to do that and that addresses this problem, maybe we could scale this in a really big way. Russ, is that an accurate analysis of kind of the early stage ideas of prepare and how it came about?

Oh, yeah, that's exactly how it came about. It was just seeing that opportunity all over the place, just seeing it repeatedly come up and over and over and over again, and then saying, well, this is something unique and this is something that has potential. And then for me, in my mind, saying, well, it has some real potential. Let's go try it. Let's go do it. I can always do 50 real estate deals later. You know, if this doesn't work or does work, like, I can always come back to that. But it just felt like this opportunity was just there and it was surfacing and it felt like we had to do it.

Yeah. So here's the question that I think a lot of people will ask. You're making revenue of 900,000, right. On a generally high margin type of business. It's not like it's a grocery store. Right. So you are able to have what is a very comfortable lifestyle. And what would, for a lot of people would say, like, hey, we've made it. This is something that we could continue doing this and we'd be extremely happy and have an abundance of money. But, hey, we're going to put all the chips on the table and pursue this new thing at a really high level. Can you talk through and Natalie, I'd be interested for you to start. Can you talk through the psychology of where you are at at that point? And this is. I'm going to try and communicate this because I think there's something to be learned about the reality of never really arriving somewhere. And the true gift of what you do is the work itself. And I think I've seen that in different instances where people have a certain level of success, they exit a business, they get $3 million. You could kind of, you know, if you're strategic about that, you could retire on it. And they talk about it being the most depressing year of their life after. What have you learned about getting to that point of success, doubling down to try and reach a new level through kind of VC funding? And we can talk about that. And then in some ways, this is foreshadowing a little bit, resetting a little bit and scaling back and saying, maybe what that was, was, was a good thing. There was a lot in there. But I'm going to let you Unpack it and talk through that.

Yeah, no, I think this. I think it's actually a super important thing to think about as an entrepreneur. And we've actually had this conversation a little bit Bjork, about like the end part of your question. So. So we're at this point, and for me personally, I grew up in a family where the culture is work is play, play is work. Right. So if you have that mindset, then it's like, it doesn't. The money doesn't matter as much as what you're doing. And it was like, so fulfilling for both Russ and I to work more and harder and longer. And it was like, this is what we love. Like, we love doing all this work. And so at the time, that's the mindset we were in. We're like, ok, we are here, but we want more. Like, we want more work. We want it to be harder, we want it to be more challenging. Like, that is what is exhilarating to us. And I imagine people who have the goal of hiking Everest feeling maybe some of that. You know, it's like, yeah, well, I've hiked K2 and I've hiked Cotopaxi and all these things and. But I want more, like, harder, bigger and more dangerous and all these things. So that's the energy we had at that time.

Yeah.

So that's why we did what we did. And we're like, we don't care about a comfortable lifestyle. We don't care about having all this money. We don't care about any of that. Like, this is what we care about. And I think that's fine. I do. I do think it's okay for some people to be like that. But what we've realized over the years is that it's actually not okay for us to be like that.

Yeah. What do you mean? What do you mean by that?

I mean that, like, we having. Growing this, growing a business wasn't our only goals in life. Like, we had four kids and we just had our fourth kid and we had a marriage and a relationship and we had all these other things that are actually really, truly important to us. And once we are started entering this world of, I'm just going to call it a startup world, it's like that becomes an obsession and other things don't matter. And so we got to a point where we're like, actually, like these other things do matter. So we've got to figure this out. Like, we've got to figure out this obsession. And what I've learned is like, I think for some people, it's a really good thing, and they just can do that and go with it their whole lives, and it's fulfilling and it's amazing. But as like, a mother and a woman who wants a family and a marriage and a relationship, like, I actually don't think it's a good thing.

Yeah.

And I. Maybe you can do both. I couldn't. I can't.

Yeah.

Like, I. I can't do both of those very, you know, intense things.

Yeah, I was just having conversion. Yeah, I think so. I think a couple different pieces. And then. Russ, I'd be interested to hear your additional thoughts around that. I was having a conversation with our nanny this morning, and she was talking about real estate, and she's like, if you were us right now, would you buy a condo, a townhouse, duplex, and house hack, or what would you do? And so we were talking about it, and she was talking about her husband who's a real estate agent, and. And we have a friend who's a real estate agent, and she's like, yeah, I actually heard he's kind of scaled back since two years ago because he realized the only thing he was thinking about was selling houses. And he was doing really well because of it, but had this realization of, like, wow, that's who I am is, like, selling houses. And like you said, it's not bad if that's who you want to be, but if there's other people, other versions of yourself or other parts of yourself that are getting neglected because of that, probably worth stepping back and looking at. And one of the other pieces that I can relate to and maybe ties into this is, you know, we have our newborn daughter, Lena, and I was up at, you know, 2:35am Trying to settle her and eventually did. And then I was holding her and rocking her and, like, kind of able to, like, do stuff, but not really. So it's like, what's the type of things that I can read right now that are, like, require 20% of my brain capacity. And one of them was a story about Elon Musk, and it was written. It was his wife who wrote this story about what it was like to be married to him and their eventual divorce. And there's these realizations of, like, man, there's. Especially for the ultimate example of somebody like Elon Musk, like, there's sacrifice that's made that impacts your wife, your kids. And we all know that. But then to read her piece on what that looked like is like, wow, that's heart wrenching in a lot of ways. And we can link to that in the show notes. I don't remember. It was like Vanity Fair or something like that. I don't remember where it was published. But do you feel like, Russ, that part of the addiction obsession was that the things you were doing were working? And so there's this positive feedback loop of like, we love this thing because, like, every time I tap three times, an M and M comes out and it's like, this is actually really fun. And then it's like, wait a minute, I'm tapping 10 times and the only thing I'm getting is like, you know. Yeah. Like, so it's like, maybe it's not as fun when the grind isn't connected to the reward as much.

Yeah, that's. That is totally accurate. And how I'm going to respond to this, just to be clear, is colored by the context of, like, hindsight. This isn't how I was feeling at the time. We were going, after all, be more ambitious, be more ambitious. But with, like, marriage counseling and therapy and like, thinking through where I. How I got to where I was, where I was obsessed with a thing that wasn't necessarily good for me. For me, it wasn't so much like I was enjoying the high of that. I actually had some, like, significant self esteem issues that were like, I was doing things to be successful because I could succeed in an area and it would make me feel good about myself. But then whenever I got to there, it's like, well, that wasn't the problem. I have these other internal problems that I had to resolve with Natalie and with myself to be able to feel good about myself all the time. So, like, when I'm winning on that stuff, it covers it up till I get to the next win. Right? And so then it's kind of like a. It's kind of like a drug cycle. And anybody who's had any amount of, like, depression or experience with something like that, you can start to understand, like, well, I feel good when I do this, but not. Not regularly. And I've got to, like, prove myself that I feel good. So I was in a cycle of, like, I was really competent. And so when I would do things, I would win and I would get that win and that win and that win, but I would never have to address my real internal problems because I was winning so much. And like, when we started prepare, it was so freaking hard and we didn't win all the time. And so I wasn't having those feelings. And it, like, it's the best thing we ever did because it uncovered that, like, oh, I'm not doing this because I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I'm doing this to prove to myself that I'm something of value in the world.

When did you realize that? I feel like that's a monumental thing to uncover. And was it in a moment, or was it, like, peeling back the layers and you're like, wait a minute, this thing is starting to take shape, and I come into focus and I think I know what it is. Or was there a moment of, like, oh, my goodness, now I can see clearly?

Well, I think it was both. Like, I think, like, when you do something that's really hard and you don't succeed, it starts to, like, wear down your. Your ego and your outer self, you know? And I think that had to be worn down. But totally I had a moment of realization where it's like, I'm not doing this just for the love of this. You know, I can still do this, but I'm doing this to cover up this other problem. And I don't even remember what the trigger was for that, but I think it was. It was something along the lines with our relationship and our engagement with our kids and thinking, like, I'm working all the time and sacrificing health and all these other things to make myself feel better about myself. And, like, I'm literally making myself feel worse about myself in an attempt to make myself, for sure, tearing apart all the things that I actually need to build here in pursuit of a thing that it's. In pursuit of a thing that won't ever resolve that. And, like, once I had that realization, that made it super easy to kind of dismantle our lives and say, okay, I got to rebuild a set of beliefs here, which I can still continue to do this thing because I actually do love doing the thing. I love building the software. I love helping the food blogging community. I love working on all those things. But I've got to reassemble my life in such a way that I'm not doing it to cover anything up. And I'm building things in my life that actually fulfill those problems that I have. And that reconstruction process is what, like, reset everything for us. And we would not have had it had we had, like, the next rocket ship had taken off. You know, it didn't take off, and it made us have that. And that's right.

So you're sitting. You're sitting on the launch pad looking at it, and you're like, why didn't this thing take off, like, what it. What are the. And you start to take it apart and you dismantle it and you. And you start to look inside and you're like, oh, maybe, you know, this is apple juice in here, not rocket fuel. Weird analogy, but yeah.

And it was interesting because, like, the harder it got, the harder it got. Like, Prepare was going along fine and we were building things well. And, you know, we had bloggers that were being successful on it, and we had all of these things. But, like, as I was having that realization, it was like one hard thing was happening after another. Like, right as I'm having that realization, like, Covid hits and ad revenue collapses and Super Healthy kids is supporting Prepare and it's like, oh, crap, now we've got to lay off team members because we can't survive. And then right after that, we get noticed that, like, oh, the largest company in the world is suing us and we've got to figure out how to deal with this. And then right after that, we have, like, some, like, things with how we handle content that we had made some mistakes on that we had to fix. And it was just like all these things were compounding and we were. It got us to a point where, like, we gotta figure something out here to do this differently. And that feeling of when you. When you look at it and say, oh, I can do it differently and then you can start to rebuild, it's like the best. And I feel so happy having come through that. Like, we've restructured our whole business and our life and our team and the way we approach all of this to support the things that really matter instead of to support our addiction to entrepreneurship or whatever it was that was. And it's been like, everything has changed, like, in six months since we've been really going through that work. Like, literally everything's changed. Not only is our life not focused on that, it's. Our life is working in terms of our own life and our own psychology and our own mental health and our relationship with our kids and our business actually is taking off. Like, it was. Like, now that we're doing it for different reasons, everything is working. And it's just so interesting that that's what it took to get there.

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. The story of Gumroad. I don't. I'm not going to remember the founder's name and I'm not going to attempt to pull it up, but we can link to that in the show notes. He wrote a blog post on Medium, something along the lines of like, you know, my billion dollar failed startup or something like that. But he talks about how he was, I think he was employee number two at Pinterest and he left in order to start Gumroad. And he talked about having this ambition of building this billion dollar company and how it all kind of collapsed around him and how he's had this kind of, you know, resurrection of this business in a completely different way. He just published a blog post recently that talks about how now their culture is no meetings, no due dates and no employees. Like it's all contracted team members that he works with. So it's like he's come out of it. It's like everything burns down and then there's this little flower that pokes out and you're like, oh, wait a minute, there's this thing that's kind of growing out of this that wouldn't have happened if not for the thing kind of burning down. One thing I do want to mention that I think is important to point out, and you mentioned this, Prepare. It's a successful business, it's profitable, it's growing, but the version of it is different than what it intended to be. So for those who aren't familiar with that idea of like we say VC and it's like for inside baseball, it's.

Like.

If you were to say like slugging percentage and somebody who's really into baseball, they'd be like, yeah, I actually don't even know what slugging percentage is, but I know the term. We know VC because we talk about venture capital. We know bootstrap because it's a kind of a term that we use. Can you talk about your. Those two terms, Natalie? And then how that's the kind of roller coaster ride that you've been on in regards to how you're going to go about doing business and where you're at right now.

Yeah. So I had no idea what any of that meant. Probably what, three years ago, four years ago. And as we got going into doing prepare and when you're building something, like, I guess, okay, so for me, I kind of classify things into two terms. And I know it's not necessarily this way, but this is how I do it. So I think of like businesses as a lifestyle business, meaning you are growing your business on your own terms, your own dime, your own pace and that, like, you're growing your business that way. And then the other one is a startup. And a startup is like you have this idea that's really, really big. You need it to grow fast. It's very expensive. It's difficult. And so you don't have enough resources to grow it on your own. So you need outside funding. And so that's where all these other terms come in. And so VC is venture capital. So basically what that is is an outside. And there's different. There's all different types of vc, right? Like, it's investment. So a venture capital company is more of, like, an organized company who does this for businesses. They're looking for startups to invest in, and they have certain expectations that come with that investment. And then you have angel funding. So there's people who just have a lot of money who want to invest in companies that are starting up like this, and there's those all different sorts of outside investment. But it's a thing like taking outside investment changes your business in a big way.

How does it change? How did it change your business?

Okay, well, first, let me get to. Yeah, why we. So I remember specifically we were trying to make this decision because Russ and I had a lot of personal resources that we were able to dump into the business to take it a long way. But at the time when you're. When you have this idea and you're like, okay, how do we want it to grow really fast? Because if we do, we should probably take outside funding to make it grow faster than we can support. And so I remember meeting with Vlada from Marco Polo. Like, we went to brunch, and we had this conversation. Like, I told her where we were and what we were thinking, and I just wanted to know all of the things about taking investment and her experience and what she thought and all of these things. And she is so passionate about her business and about Marco Polo that she's like, I remember her saying, I took funding because I don't care if I own the business. I just want it to exist in the world. Like, yeah. And I know she's like, I knew I had to take funding in order for it to exist. I didn't care. She didn't care if she gave away 80% of the business to investors. She just wanted it to exist in the world. And that was really impactful for me because I'm like, oh, okay. Like, I can get behind that, because I felt the same way at the time. I'm like, I don't care about the money or the theme or the owning the business. Like, we're going to be fine. We'll be able to provide for our family. I just want this to exist in the world. So I remember leaving that Meeting with her, and I'm like, I felt so excited, like, so on fire. Like, okay, we've got to do this. We got to take outside funding. But as far as your question of how that changes things, you no longer are the only driver of your business. Like, you're making decisions to not just, like, what you want to do and where you want it to go. You're making decisions to appease your investors. Like, okay, they need to see returns. We have to make this work or else they're losing all their money. And I don't think anybody wants to feel, you know, feel the pain of that. Like, we told these people we were going to do this thing, and if we don't make it happen, we will be really letting them down.

One thing I would add there is it's. It changes your business in this way fundamentally. They don't just need a return. If you take money from a venture investor, they're expecting, fully expecting, 90% of the businesses they invest in to totally fail. And in order for the math to work, they need some of those things to not just succeed. They need them to be the next Pinterest. So once you take their money, you have to design your business in such a way that it's capable of enormous scale. There is no venture capital company that wants to invest in a company that's like, we're going to grow slow and steady and, you know, in 10 years, it's going to be worth, you know, something. Like, they want it to grow like a rocket ship or else. And so you do have to readjust everything you think to, if I'm going to take this money, I'm committing to designing that type of a business.

Yeah, it's analogy on the fly warning. But love to, love to do this. It's like 10 rocket ships and they're all lined up and they say, we need to go to the moon, and we need to get there in five to seven hours. Venture capital might be five to seven years. Five to 10 years. And they say, we've got $10 million. We're going to put a million dollars into each one of these. And we know nine of you are going to blow up on the way, but there's a pretty good chance one of you is going to get to the moon. And so then they all take off and nine blow up. And it's like, nobody cries as long as one gets to the moon. But for you as the business owner, you have to strap into that rocket and be like, my only option is to go to the Moon. And there's a really good chance that I'm going to blow up. And to contrast that with lifestyle business, hey, I just need to ride my bike to the library, and if I get there, it's going to be really successful and I might enjoy it along the way. Um, and it doesn't have to be that. I think there's an in between. Like, I think you can still have the ambition of growing quickly, but the point is, it's a lot less dangerous from a business failure perspective. Now, if you know. If you know the risk, if you know that's what you're getting into, great. It's just going to feel a lot different in terms of the intensity around it. Um, Russ, I'm interested in, if you were to go back and have a conversation with yourself, what would that conversation look like? Because I feel like probably for both of you, but especially for you, Russ, personally, it seems like there was a pretty big transformation that's happened over a relatively short period of time.

Yeah. What would I say to myself? I would say this just in terms of this venture capital discussion. We were not a typical startup for them. Like, a typical startup that they invest in is like, you know, a couple of guys are quitting their job and starting a business, and the venture capitalist is putting in all the money. Like, we invested as much or more than the total amount of investment we took from other people ourselves. So, like, we're getting on a rocket ship, and I'm going to make dang sure that rocket ship is not going to blow up because I'm all in on it. And, like, for other people who are doing entrepreneurship with venture money, it's venture money and they're taking the risk. But, like, we had.

None of their money is in.

Yeah, exactly. And we had put every egg in that basket. And because of that, like, we were not aware enough of the risks of designing a business that's on that rocket ship ride. And I think we should have had some balance. Like, if all of our eggs are in that basket, that rocket ship needs to fly, whether it's to the moon or whether it's to the grocery store. Like, it's gotta fly, because every egg is in that basket. And we should have been, I think, a lot more conscious of how to design that business, given that family Monson was all in and more in than any investor we have.

Yeah. It's interesting. A lot of times you'll see people who have exited a business, you know, they're worth 25 million. They'll start a new Startup and it's like, why don't you just like self fund it? Like, why didn't you just use your own money? And to your point, it's like there's this risk analysis that they probably do where they're like, hey, we might be one of these nine rocket ships that blows up on the way up. One of the things that you had mentioned that I don't want to get too far away from in what was a difficult year for everybody, especially difficult for business owners, especially different for people, difficult for anybody building a startup is this. You had talked about getting sued by the biggest company in the world. Not an ideal situation for a small business or a startup. I know a little bit of that backstory. But, Natalie, can you talk about what happened when that happened and what that was like to navigate a pretty bizarre, difficult situation.

So for anyone who doesn't know, the company we're talking about is Apple and.

Little company called Apple, some of you might have heard of them.

Yeah, they sell some phones and things, but hardware. It's interesting because it's not the first time we've been sued before. And so we had a little bit of experience with it. Definitely not anything this scale, but. And we're still going through it, just so everyone knows. And so there's some things we can't say. But I just remember the whole dispute, basically, to sum it up in a quick way, is when you are going to register a logo or your name, you have to go through this process where you submit it to the patent office and then there's a certain amount of time where it's open to other companies to dispute it. And so we had, we are trying to register the pair, like the actual icon of the pair for Prepare, and we'd submitted it all as well. It was going to close the next day. Literally the next day the period was shutting down or was closing, and then it was going to be registered and all as well. And so the day before it closed, Apple opposed the trademark, meaning they said, your pair is too close to our Apple. You cannot have this logo. And so, and to be clear, it's hard.

On a podcast, it really doesn't look like the Apple logo. Like, they're not close.

No, like, and if you can, if you search up, search up. If you look on Google, Apple versus Prepare, you'll see, if you do an image search, you'll see exactly what we're talking about. And it's funny, like, I wanted to do this experiment, so I got the pictures of both and I asked my 4 year old. I'm like, okay, what is this? And so he looked at the apple and he's like, it's an apple.

Yeah.

And then I'm like, okay, and what is this one? And he's like, it's an avocado. Like, he didn't think it was a pear or an apple.

It's like, not even a fruit.

No, it's just, it's. It's actually really pretty funny to us because it's so almost. I don't know the word. It's so frivolous that it's just. It's. You just have to laugh, right? Anyways, and so people have been like, well, why don't you just change your logo? And the problem is, it's not that easy. Like, when you're dealing with a company like Apple, changing your logo isn't. It's not what they want. And so even if we were like, okay, we'll change it, and they couldn't even tell us what we could change it to that would be satisfactory to them. And so if we went down that path, all we're setting ourselves up for is hours and hours and hours of work with no resolution. And then they could come back and say, oh, well, yeah, you changed your logo. But we actually found it on this spot on this site, and so that's a violation. So now we're going to see you again. It's just so complicated. So we just knew. We're like, okay, number one, we are not going to do that because of all these complications. And number two, we felt like it was the right thing to do to stand up to them, even though we're like, we are an ant standing up to a elephant, you know, because they done this to dozens and dozens and dozens of other companies in our same situation.

Yeah, it's interesting. Even I think of Basecamp and their product, hey. Which is an email product, and Apple kind of boxing them out in certain ways. I haven't followed super closely, but kind of feels like bullying behavior a little bit. And it feels like this is an example of that. Like, hey, we know we're a huge company. We know you're a small company. We're going to be really nitpicky about the smallest of things in order to protect ourselves. And you're like, no, that's not right.

Yeah, we're not definitely not doing anything that would harm or compete with them. And truly, every claim they made about what we were doing, that why our logo would infringe, was totally false. And like, this went super viral because we had planned a PR campaign because it's ant versus elephant. We needed to find some way to even up the playing field if we were not going to be totally taken advantage of. And that PR campaign was enormously successful and highlighted, like globally, all over the place, how dysfunctional some of these big tech companies are and the sorts of things they're putting all of this energy into. And all of that happened at the same time as the antitrust hearings and we prepare or a company that is building tech for people so they don't have to rely on the big tech companies for, you know, so food bloggers don't have to rely on the big tech companies for all their revenue. And then to have a big tech company coming after us for totally frivolous things when they're already testifying for Congress for all the awful things they were doing. It was just a perfect storm of like, here's an example of a semi truck of a tech company running over a puppy dog on the street. And that's how it looked to everyone in the world. And they are totally doing that. And it's really. It was shocking to us how disgusting it was because we thought for sure, like, this is so absurd. When we have a phone call with these guys, this is like a quick, what do you guys not like what's going on here? And for real, it's as dumb as it looks. And we just couldn't, we almost just couldn't even wrap our head around that somebody is really willing to commit enormous resources to destroying something like we have for I'm sure What is some PowerPoint slide agenda item in some meeting at Apple some time ago about fight for the leaf or something, you know?

Right, right, right.

It's just, it's amazing.

Yeah, it's interesting. I remember the day after you posted about it, or maybe it's two days after I looked the change.org petition and it was like 75,000. What? And then now it's like almost 270,000. When we're recording this episode, people who have signed this petition saying, like, this is outrageous. So it was interesting to see that develop all of that wrapped into, you know, it's like this is going on at the same time as global pandemic is going on at the same time as in a lot of ways, shifting the business model and saying, maybe we shouldn't take venture money, we should scale way back. We have to reduce staff. We want to get to profitability. Is there anything that you learned about. I'm going to rephrase that, what did you learn about yourself? Starting with you, Natalie, in regards to how you get through a really challenging and difficult time and maybe things that you've set up in your life to, if possible, to hedge against some of those things. Is that possible to do? Obviously, you can't not have Apple sue you, but are there ways like a version of, like, you know, protecting yourself against some of the patent kind of like padding that you're able to put on so things aren't as impactful coming out of this? What is the version of you that you feel like you are right now? And what did you learn?

So a couple of things come to mind, and I actually, I feel super grateful for 2020 because even though all these hard things happened, one thing that actually happened that was more impactful than anything else, any of these other major things, is it gave us the ability to slow down. And I think that's actually a gift. Because if you're talking about padding or what you can do to protect yourself from all these hard things happening is if able to slow down enough where you can just be present with your thoughts and, and just actually be able to be present, then I feel like you really can deal with anything. And if you can't get there, then it's like you're just, you're, you're just doggy paddling, trying not to drown. And I don't even know if that makes sense, but, like, we were just able to slow down enough to kind of step back. And instead of being like in the slog of our life, like dealing with all this stuff, it's like we could step back and look at it as almost like a neutral person and say, okay, we have this issue, like, how are we going to deal with this? And we have this. How are we going to deal with this? And we only were able to do that by truly being able to slow down so we could step back and have that perspective.

And then is that a function of time? Is that more time or is it a mindset or both?

I think it's a little bit of both. Because you were kind of talking about, you know, before the podcast, like, you're in sleep deprived new baby mode and.

Four hours is luxury mode.

Yeah. And. And honestly, I don't think when you're in these places in your life, I don't think it's possible. Like, it's almost like you have to create mental space in order to do that. And there's certain situations in your life where I don't know if you can. Like, I know when I was in your situation, like, up all night with all these babies, and they constantly need you, and you have toddlers, and you're like, I don't. I can't create that mental space to even do anything except for survive.

Yeah.

And so I do.

I literally, just the other day, if you were to look through my messages, as I was sitting upstairs in our bedroom holding our daughter and Lindsay was downstairs, one of the texts was, I think I'm just going to give up on a few things for a few months. Like, it's like, exactly what you're saying. I just need to let it go. I need to give up. Because I said, I'm just in this season. I'm really tired about getting to the end of the day and feeling like I failed because I had these ambitions of what I want to do that aren't achieved. And it feels different mentally. That's the mindset piece. I don't have any more time, but I've kind of released some of those things, and some of them are, like, really good things. Like, I should be working out an hour a day. I should be eating less sugar. I should be, like, you know, consistently reading. And it's like, I'm just not. I just can't do all of this.

Yeah. And it's not like. It's like all of us, like, the things we're filling our time with, we mostly truly believe they're good things. Right. Or, like, when your kids get older, you're like, oh, yeah, they need to be in soccer and they should be in dance. Like, all these things are good for them. Or like, we should be getting together with these friends once a week because we're building relationships and we should be doing all these things. And, you know, like, you're filling your time with good things, but if you're not able to slow it down enough where you can create that space, it's like you can't get there. You can't see your life from that perspective because you don't have, whether it's time or whatever that, you know, whatever that thing is.

But I think an important distinction to make here, too, is most people listening are fairly ambitious, I'm sure, and we're super ambitious. And one of the things is, no matter what you choose, life is going to throw a bunch of things your way. So we have this tendency to go out and choose as big of a challenge as we think we can handle, and that's because we're ambitious, and so we Go choose as big a challenge as we can handle. And by choosing as big a challenge as we can handle, we don't leave space for what life is going to throw our way. So if I had a way to look back at it, I would say I want to be choosing challenges, but I want to make sure I'm carefully choosing my challenges so there's enough slack in my life that when the universe throws those next unplannable, unpredictable things into our world, we have something left to give to handle those two. And I think there's a level of ambition that's healthy and gives you growth. And there's a level of ambition where you take on as much as you can when you're not in a tough time, and then when the tough times come, there's. You have nothing left for it.

Yeah. Point being, like, to have planned reserves to access. You know, if you're scuba diving, analogy on the fly warning. If you're, if you're scuba diving, it's like, you don't want to plan this, the dive until the end of the tank. Like, leave 25% in there so you can get where you need to go without being like, oh, shoot, there's.

It's so easy to always say, but I can do more. Because you can do more until things come up that take away that.

And I also think so. We have these friends who travel all over the world and they were in the Netherlands, I think, and they went on this, like, guided kayak tour. And their tour guide was incredible. Like, he gave them the best tour they've ever, ever had. And he, he worked for this company, this tour guide company. So they were talking to him and they're like, well, you are so good at this. Like, why don't you go out on your own and do it? Like, you could make more money. You could do all these things, you know, you could grow your own business. And he was like, why would I want to do that? He's like, the company I work for, the owner's my friend, and he's like, I live with my wife in this house on the hill, and we're so happy. Like, why would I trade that to do this ambition that would give me maybe more money or a bigger business or whatever. And it was like, oh my gosh, like, that contentment is very valuable.

Yeah. And I think that therein lies the daily challenge that we're presented with as. And I'm speaking to you guys as well as podcast listeners. The ever present balance between gratitude, contentment, presence and ambition. And drive and hustle, and it's not an easy thing to figure out where that balance. Where that balance is. And for me, it's like, do I try and fit in some email on my phone when I'm rocking Lena to sleep, or do I just hold her and look at her? And sometimes it's doing email and sometimes it's not. And I think more than anything, my guess is for those who can relate to what we're talking about, there's some sense of understanding and kind of a shared struggle in that reality, because I think we all feel that in some way. I want to.

Really quick. Sorry.

Yeah, no, that's great.

The future of being in the online content business is that it literally never ends. You can do as much as you can forever, and it will keep growing your business. And so I think you're right. Like, you're making those kinds of decisions all the time. Do I play with my child or do I keep answering comments? Do I do this or do that? And I don't think it has to be cut and dry and black and white. I think it's. It's just important to recognize that it's okay to do both. Sometimes you're going to answer the emails, and sometimes you're just going to rock your baby and love it, and you have to make space for both.

Yeah. Yes. That's awesome. And I feel like it's super important stuff to talk about. One of the things that I so appreciate about the two of you, this conversation, the conversations that we've had before for, is your willingness to go there to talk about this stuff. I think a lot of people come on and it's a facade of, you know, here's the 10%, the 25%, the 30%, 50%, whatever it is, of things that are going really well. But it's really helpful to see the entire reel. Right? It's like if you're. I have a friend who does wedding shoots. He's a videographer. And it's like the trailer he puts together that's three minutes, looks a lot different than the entire collection of footage that he gets from the day. And I think as entrepreneurs, as creators, as consumers of content on the Internet, what we're seeing often is the trailer, and we don't see the entire reel that was shot. And I feel like today you guys offered that, which I really appreciate, and I'm sure other people do as well. One thing we didn't talk a lot about is prepare as the. As the platform and as the product and as the solution. It's something that I'm really excited about. You know, have a very small role as advisor in the Prepare, as an advisor for the company, which I'm honored to be a part of and it's been really fun to be a part of that journey with you. But if people want to learn more about Prepare, if they're interested in kind of discovering more about it, it's an area that I'm interested in because I've thought a lot about how do we be strategic, not about just creating more content, but maximizing the content in the assets that we already have. The example might be if you have a book, you have it come out on Kindle, you have a physical copy that you can buy, you have the audio version of it. It's one single asset, but you're wrapping it up in different ways. I feel like Prepare is doing a version of that for people who are creating content in the recipe space. Obviously this is a longer conversation than we usually have, so we can't dive deep on it. Russ, can you give a high level overview of how Prepare works? Correct me if I was wrong in any of those high level assumptions of what that looks like and where people can find out more.

Yeah, for sure. So basically you described it correctly. Prepare is a way for you to package your existing content in a way that provides a valuable subscription service to your readers. So your readers can subscribe to your content on Prepare and they get content in the form of meal plans, digital cookbooks that you make all of your recipes ad free. And Prepare takes care of building all of the technology that drives that, the apps. You don't have to do any of that. And we take care of the customer service, the payment management, we handle the whole subscription business. You're just giving your readers a way to access your content in a much more user friendly way than is available. When you have to support your business via ads and you have to support it via other mechanisms to make money that we want to allow you to give your readers the chance to just pay you directly and have the best experience possible.

And to your point, doing that on your own is really difficult. And so much like other places I think of teachable, you know, it's this place where, hey, they saw this opportunity. A lot of people are doing courses. How do we make that as easy as possible? Hey, meal plans, wrapping up your content, allowing it to be purchased, really hard to do on your own. How do we create a solution that allows people to do that more easily? I think it's A great opportunity and something that people should explore. Pre and then pair as in the fruit is a great domain name. We've never talked about this, but was that hard to get or was it available or.

Oh, nothing is easy to get Bjork going down this path. No prepare.

I love domain names and that was one of the things. When I saw that you guys launched it, I was like, hey, right, like, great domain name, great brand name. And it's the end. It's the.com TLB.

Yes. We thought it would be easy to get because it was. It was an old site that was not being used for anything for ever, but turned out to be a little bit more challenging to get than we thought it would be. And we. It took us almost a year to get it. It used to be pretty preparapp.com and we worked on negotiations and helping the person who owned it.

Can you share general. Can you share like guide post numbers of what.

It was someone who was a therapist that had come up with this model for therapy that was based on the acronym P E A R and it was her whole model. And so she had this. PREPARE was her therapy thing.

Interesting.

She. She was just passionate about it and she loved it, but she wasn't doing anything. So it wasn't a situation where you can come in and just buy this domain name because.

Yeah, it was letting somebody. Somebody giving up an idea in some ways. Yeah.

And so we had a lot of discussions with her over the course of a year of. Are you ever going to use this?

Yeah.

What can we do to make it so that, you know, if you're never going to use it, we can use it and things work out. We got it done. But good for you guys.

They talk about that with hey.com when they did the email and sumo.com was an interesting story. They paid like 800,000 for sumo.com, obviously a little bit different, but domain names, man, it's a big deal as much as you don't want it to be.

But never know until you're there.

Yeah. Russ, Natalie, really great to connect. Really great to talk to you guys and appreciate your willingness to be so transparent and open. And I know it will resonate with a lot of people. People. So if people want to reach out to you individually, what would be the best way to do that? Online email?

Yeah, if they want to. If they're interested in finding out more about prepare, they can go to prepare.com, p R E P E-A-R.com food bloggers and I'm sure we can link to that in the show notes or they can send me an email@russprepaire.com Cool, that's great.

Thanks for coming on like I did in the beginning. Each of you individually. Natalie, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Thanks, Bjork. This was fun. And I just one last thing I want to say is you mentioned you've been an advisor and I think it's important for everyone to know, and probably everyone listening to this already does know that. I just think you just have a really great way of thinking things and you've just provided a lot of valuable insight and advice and things over the years. And so I think, I hope your readers know that and keep listening because you, you've got a valuable brain in there.

So hopefully you can start getting running at 25 capacity.

Yes. But we just.

Super nice. Thank you. So thank you. That, that really, really means a lot. Yeah, thanks, Natalie. Russ, your turn to give me a really nice compliment. No, just kidding. Russ, thanks for coming on the podcast as well. Really great to talk with you and thanks for your sharing your stories.

Well, this is a ton of fun.

Yeah, thanks, guys. And next time we talk, it'll be nice because we won't have to record it and the pressure will be off. But thanks for coming on and excited to stay connected and thanks for sharing your story.

Thanks.

And that's a wrap on this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Thanks again for tuning in today. Again, if you want to check out Prepare and how that works and how you could potentially work with Prepare, you can go to Prepare. That's P R E p e a r.com food food bloggers. I also wanted to let you know that WP Tasty, our sister brand for WordPress plugins, is running their first ever sale and it's happening this week until January 14th, which is this Thursday. And it gets you 20% off all new subscriptions to Tasty Recipes, Tasty Pins, and Tasty Links. So if you're interested in learning more about these awesome products for food bloggers and for website owners in general, you can go to wptasty.com sale we're super excited for our wptasty teammates for this new sale. So if you again want to learn more, you can go to wptasty.com sale all right, that does it for us this week, my friend. We're so thankful that you decided to join us today and learn and get a little bit better every day. That's our 1% infinity philosophy. Here at Food Blogger Pro, we're always striving to just get a little bit better each day forever. And so this is a really great way tuning into the podcast to do that. So we'll see you next time next Tuesday. And until then, make it a great week.

Sa.