Inkpot Creative Streamlined to Scale with Jessie Andrew

TL;DR

Jessie Andrew of Inkpot Creative is our guest this week!

Jessie is one half of Inkpot Creative’s full-time team. They’re a branding and web design studio for photographers who’ve really nailed down their offerings to enable streamlined scheduling, clear packages and pricing, hiring two part time employees, and selling even during slow seasons.

We touched on 4 main topics:

• Streamlining your service offerings
• Hiring part time employees
• Traveling as an entrepreneur
• Trial and Error

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Transcript

Disclaimer: Jessie’s mic unplugged halfway through our recording so the time stamps start back at zero in the middle of this transcript – sorry about that!

Rachel Meltzer (00:00.646) All right, Jessie from Inkpot Creative. Welcome to the show. Can you introduce yourself for our listeners who don't know who you are?

Jessie (she/her) (00:11.202) Absolutely. So my name is Jessie. I am one half of the duo behind Inkpot Creative and we are a brand and web design studio that primarily focuses on photographers and working with photographers who want to stand out and be fun and be bold and do things differently. So that's kind of our space of the online world and we absolutely love it.

Rachel Meltzer (00:37.33) Perfect, yeah. I came across you guys on threads, I think, for the first time. And when I landed on your website, I was like, what the heck? This is so cute. Like your website, obviously, because it's what you do, so it's good to see. You're not like the carpenter who buys a fixer upper house and then never fixes it up. Like you guys, you did the thing. And it looks so good. It's so bold and like...

Jessie (she/her) (00:51.718) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (01:03.29) You can just feel the brand like oozing out of it. I just love it so much.

Jessie (she/her) (01:05.958) Mm hmm. Yeah, I have to give people credit for design the site. I didn't design any of it, but it is it is one of the things it's so hard to not try and redo it so many times because, know, it's the thing you're doing it all the time and you're like, now I absolutely hate this entire thing. But I think the current site that we have is really like one of the strongest ones we've had. And it's so fun. And it's, know, one of my like favorite things to look at and are.

everyone, know, all our clients like it and it's, it's attracting the right people. So that's what we want. Right.

Rachel Meltzer (01:37.52) Yeah, totally, totally. I feel that. think that that is one of the main things that I struggle with with web, like having a website is like, just, right now I have a to-do list of like 12 things I want to do to it. And it feels like it's never done, right? It's always a work in progress.

Jessie (she/her) (01:57.254) Yeah, it is. I sometimes have to be the like, OK, we can't redesign our site every, you know, three weeks. We need to like stick, stick to it. But it is really hard to like look at it. And I feel like in our own businesses, we always kind of pick apart little things that like when we're talking to other people or like about their businesses, we like, oh, this looks amazing. And we're like, this is terrible. I need to update every single thing about my business right now.

Rachel Meltzer (02:22.554) It's like, you don't notice every little thing that I am noticing that is horrible. Yeah, totally. well, you're like the media person behind all of this. What is your role at Inkpot and how does that translate to like what you do every day?

Jessie (she/her) (02:28.29) Exactly.

Jessie (she/her) (02:35.142) Mm-hmm.

Jessie (she/her) (02:43.495) So I am the media operations manager. So we have just recently kind of expanded our team and it's been really exciting because we got to the point where it was, know, KP and I were getting a little too overwhelmed and Inkpot was growing, which was amazing. And we didn't want to like slow it down. So right now what I do, which I love, I do all of our podcasts. We are jumping into YouTube more this year. We said we wanted to do it last year and then

Rachel Meltzer (03:02.684) Mm.

Jessie (she/her) (03:12.666) just completely basically ignored it for most of the year besides putting our podcasts. Yeah, it wasn't great. So we're really focusing on YouTube this year and I'm really excited about that. I'm not a like professional video editor by any means, but KP and I actually also travel a lot and we studied abroad and we made travel videos when we were abroad. So it's fun to kind of bring these two worlds together and get to do that.

Rachel Meltzer (03:15.258) I did the exact same thing. Yep.

Jessie (she/her) (03:38.608) And then I'm also still kind of overseeing the development of our sites. That was my role before we kind of expanded things. so kind of keeping an eye on that, making sure that everything is amazing and, you know, our clients have the best site possible. Everything works. Everything looks great and kind of managing all of that. But it's been an interesting step to kind of shift positions after, you know, being, joined Inkpot about two years into when it was started. So

It's a little interesting now, like two years later, to completely shift everything that I've been doing and be in this little bit of a different space, but it's really exciting too.

Rachel Meltzer (04:16.176) Yeah, I love that. That's so cool. It's, it's one of those things that like, you can't really do every channel all the time, all at once, the best that you possibly can, because like, that's why people are specialists. There are people who like exclusively focus on YouTube as a marketer and like, you cannot be that if you're also focusing on seven other channels. And so it's kind of one of those things that I noticed for me, at least it helps to just do stepping stones. Like

Jessie (she/her) (04:24.165) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (04:43.398) whatever the channel is that's easiest for you to market on, learn it, learn it well, build a following on it, and then add onto it once that thing feels routine. I've been struggling with marketing my business, the coaching side of my business, for so long. Because the thing with service-based clients, the digital marketing clients I have, you can just get them from cold pitching, direct outreach, LinkedIn, connection requests, and DMs. You cannot do that for coaching. You really do have to do attraction-based marketing.

Jessie (she/her) (05:06.275) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (05:13.294) inbound marketing. And so I was like trying to be on Instagram because I knew my clients were there. But what I didn't realize is my clients were not on Instagram to learn how to be a freelancer. They were on Instagram to like look at pretty backpacking videos and like find destinations and like dream about the life they could have. what I really when I landed on, I mean, I've been using LinkedIn for so long, but I didn't start content marketing on LinkedIn until last year. And when I started doing that, I was like, shit, this is so easy. I can just write. I don't even

have to post an image. I don't have to post a gif. I don't have to make a carousel, make a reel, whatever. And I can just, like my brand aesthetic, it matters, but it doesn't matter as much as it does for like a photographer or web designer, right? And then I was able to master that truly. And now it feels like it's so easy. It's on autopilot. I can do it in like 15 minutes a day. And now I can add YouTube and like really do a better job on YouTube. And that's the difference, right? Like you guys are on...

Jessie (she/her) (05:42.351) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (06:10.576) other platforms where you have kind of almost mastered it, right? Like you feel good about it and like same with the podcast, right? And then now you can add YouTube.

Jessie (she/her) (06:13.862) Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. And I, I totally agree. And I think there's this like pressure. Everyone's like, you have to be on Instagram and TikTok and who knows what's going to happen to TikTok. And you got to be, you know, on, on YouTube and you have to be doing a podcast and emailing people and like all of these different things. And really you need to be like, okay, but where are people actually going to like, can yeah, like where are they going to connect? Where are they actually looking for me? Because we can spend hours marketing on Facebook. Our clients aren't on Facebook.

Rachel Meltzer (06:36.508) Where is anyone coming from? Yes.

Rachel Meltzer (06:44.592) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jessie (she/her) (06:46.446) Our clients are on Instagram, our clients are on TikTok. Like that's where the people that we work with tend to be. So like it took us a little bit to be like, okay, let's bring this back. Let's figure out where things are actually coming from, where the people that we really love working with are coming from and like figure out how to lean into that and use that to our advantage. And I think it makes such a difference with the quality of people that are coming in, but it also

Rachel Meltzer (06:53.266) Mm.

Jessie (she/her) (07:13.924) makes it so much easier on you because you're not like, now I'm not trying to post on 17 different platforms in eight different ways every single day of the week.

Rachel Meltzer (07:21.466) You don't need to spend 14 hours a week on marketing. You don't. Nobody does. That's ridiculous. Like, unless you're, I mean, obviously, as a small company who has less than 10 employees, you do not need to be doing that. It's hard to step out of the shoulds in business, I think, because it seems as though there is a right way to do everything, and everybody else knows it but you when you are new to business and you don't have a lot of like training and education about it.

Jessie (she/her) (07:24.688) Now.

Jessie (she/her) (07:39.078) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (07:49.606) When in reality, it's just like you have to figure out what works for you and you have to start with one or two things and then slowly build.

Jessie (she/her) (07:57.348) Yeah, it's all trial and error. Everything is testing out and seeing what works and what doesn't.

Rachel Meltzer (07:59.456) do I?

Rachel Meltzer (08:02.93) It's so hard to believe that that is true, but like even large companies are doing like A B testing on their email like No, even even the best marketers in world don't know what works like you even with paid ads You have an option to do A B testing so like obviously everything's a fucking experiment like let's just treat it like one

Jessie (she/her) (08:23.544) No apps. had like a corporate ish job before this and the amount of like A B testing with different marketing strategies with different price points like they're they were doing it left and right. The you know, whole almost two years that I was I was there. So I think sometimes we're like, I don't want to be corporate. So I don't want to do all the things that corporations are doing. And like that's true in some senses. But in other senses, you kind of it might be beneficial to adopt some of the things that they're doing, because it can still relate to you and what you're doing.

Rachel Meltzer (08:41.126) Mm.

Rachel Meltzer (08:52.818) Yeah, I think there's an importance in getting to know your data, which I didn't really start doing until 2024. I was just kind of like willy-nilly. Like, it seems like this is working. It seems like this is happening. Like, the only data I really paid attention to was my email marketing because the platform I was using gave me reports automatically. So I didn't have to like go and get the information. Like LinkedIn doesn't really do that very well. But now that I'm armed with this data, I feel so much more empowered to...

Jessie (she/her) (09:02.63) Mm-hmm.

Jessie (she/her) (09:11.11) Hey

Rachel Meltzer (09:20.966) do things more efficiently and to make decisions that are better for me. And it feels almost relieving that I kind of know the answer because I have numbers that I can use as evidence that something is working and I should continue to do it or something isn't working and I can shift it. Like, what? It's mind blowing. And I definitely could have been doing this all along. I just had no idea that I needed to or even how to do it before.

Jessie (she/her) (09:46.778) Yeah, that's something that we have like really leaned into and even looking like when specific because we have a couple different offers because we have our brand and website, but then we also do blogging and kind of looking at like when we tend to book clients and the like cycles that go through and, know, with wedding photographers, we see like a little bit of slump over the summer and like bookings and people, you know, talking to us and reach out because their summers are, you know, really full of.

all of the different weddings and stuff. work with a lot of East Coast people. So East Coast summer is like super popular time to get married. So we have kind of like looked over that past couple of years. And this year over the summer, when we knew it was going to be a little slower for our rebrand edit, we pushed blogging and were able to kind of bump that up and bring that up to an entirely different level because people were interested in and paying attention to that and doing like, OK, I'm super busy right now. I need to market in a different way.

Rachel Meltzer (10:20.902) Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (10:42.32) but I don't have time to do it. So what can I do? here's blogging. Someone else can completely do it for me. This takes off my plate. This is perfect. So I think taking the time to like look at everything is like so important. Give you so many things to make it so that you're not wasting your time in the future with like whatever you're doing.

Rachel Meltzer (10:42.578) Mm.

Rachel Meltzer (10:50.396) That's so smart.

Rachel Meltzer (10:58.758) Yeah. Yeah, that's huge. I did that as well. I mean, it kind of changes your tier for me just because the industry changes so much. But like, I know I'm not going to get paid from December 14th to January 14th now. Like I've learned that lesson the hard way so many times. I know that if I don't have clients in October,

I am going to have a really hard time. It is possible to get freelance clients in October, November, December, January. It is, but it is definitely much harder and you have to like put out more effort to get it when in July, if you did the same thing, it would be much easier. it's like these little trends that you notice, but again, like you said, it depends on the industry. Like for my industry, it's like the best time to get work is best time to get clients. It's, and it depends on what you're offering.

just like you said, so that's like, those trends are huge. But I really wanna like shift into talking about, so I thought about starting an agency last year with one of my friends. It fell through, she decided to do grad school, I moved to another state, we were like, this is not gonna work out for us, this is probably a bad idea. But it was like.

Really fun to hypothesize and I think someday I will do it, but I was so scared of the responsibility of being responsible for other people's income and schedule and livelihood really. Sometimes even though I'm 30, I feel like I can barely take care of myself in my business. So you guys hired people and you have, looking at your about page, you have four people on your team. What was it like to hire new people?

Jessie (she/her) (12:21.67) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (12:42.854) How did it feel? Like, what was the process like? How did you find these people? Was it scary? All the goodies.

Jessie (she/her) (12:48.326) It was, I'm not gonna lie, it felt terrifying. I mean, I'm gonna be honest with you, we both graduated in 2020 in COVID. And honestly, in a way it feels like we're still stuck at that like 22, 23 years old and we're like not really adults yet. So getting to the point where we're doing this thing, we have the business, great. But now like we're hiring people, it feels very...

Rachel Meltzer (13:09.01) Mm-hmm.

Jessie (she/her) (13:17.062) adult. like sometimes we all hit like we don't always feel like adults. So it's a little, you know, it was it was a big change. It was a lot of conversations that KP and I had and looking at like our own mental health and what we were going through and being consistently burned out for I'm not gonna lie, probably a year, a year and a half and just like keep going. And it got to the point where we wanted to grow Inkpot. We

Rachel Meltzer (13:18.3) Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (13:47.076) We don't ever really seen it be this like massive studio. We don't want it to be really big. We want it to be small. So there were lot of conversations that we had of like, what would the team look like? What, what, you know, what do we need? What could we do? What could we hand other people off to? What could we do better if we weren't worrying about all of these other things that we had other people to go through it? So, it was hard to in a way give up a little bit of that control and

be able to trust that the standard and the level of all of the products that we've been putting out is going to continue with a team. And so it was a little scary to begin with. We did end up basically putting out applications for employee positions for part-time employees. So that was also a little bit of a weight off when it comes to the responsibility of

Rachel Meltzer (14:25.308) Mm.

Jessie (she/her) (14:44.708) you know, other people's livelihood because that was another big thing of like, what happens if things slow down? Like what happens if we stop booking or like all of that stuff? So having part-time employees, it's a little better because they like all of our employees kind of work on other things and have other things, but we still, you know, have them here and on the team and are giving them work and they're part of our, you know, team coach now and everything. So it kind of made us feel a little bit better.

Rachel Meltzer (14:50.726) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (14:54.578) Mm.

Jessie (she/her) (15:12.442) doing that and having that kind of setup. But we put out just applications and we did interviews and it was a little, I feel like at the beginning we were probably as nervous as the people we were interviewing because we had never interviewed people. Like KB had done a couple interviews early on when we were looking for jobs right out of college. I probably applied for a hundred jobs out of college and literally got one interview. And thankfully I got hired at that company. So

Rachel Meltzer (15:13.714) Hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (15:25.188) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (15:41.602) my gosh. You guys graduated in the worst economy too.

Jessie (she/her) (15:42.178) I've basically had. It was it was the most difficult thing, and it was I mean, obviously it wasn't a personally a great time for us. Everything that we knew had got canceled. We got sent home from school. Our senior season of the cross got canceled. Our graduation got canceled. It was we were not thriving at that time. So the fact that either of us found jobs that like made it so that we could kind of get ourselves out of it was was great. But like.

That was basically the extent of my interview experience was doing one interview myself and KP had a couple. And so I was like calling my mom. was like, mom, how do I do? Like, you know how to do this. You interview people all the time. How do I do this? Like, what do we ask? What do we look for? And thankfully, we worked with an incredible HR team that like held our hand through the entire process. And I would 100 % suggest like if you're making this transition, finding people like that.

Rachel Meltzer (16:32.067) nice.

Jessie (she/her) (16:37.296) to help and work through it. And we worked with Paradigm. They were incredible. So having that kind of backup of also being able to lean on people who specialize in this and can help get everything set up, there was a lot of like, even like, and the back end too of like getting set up in different states and like insurances and being an employer in these states and like there was.

Rachel Meltzer (16:49.269) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (16:53.562) I never thought about that. Like that's so smart.

Jessie (she/her) (17:05.878) so much to go through. having someone who's like, fill out this form, here's what you need to do. Here's what you need to do. Here's your job description. Here's the, you know, offer letter. Here's all of this stuff. So it was that was a huge weight off of our chest, having people like that who we knew we trusted. They, you know, had everything that we needed. So it was a lot of kind of learning and figuring out how much actually goes into.

Rachel Meltzer (17:07.548) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (17:11.698) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (17:20.711) Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (17:34.714) having employees and like building something like this, but it was, it was very scary. We, thankfully we have some incredible people on the team. had amazing people apply. Like it was very difficult for us to, make decisions on, who to actually bring onto the team. But I think it's been amazing so far. We're just about three months in with everyone on the team. So it's been very fun and amazing. And you know, we absolutely love.

everyone that's kind of a part of Inkpot now. And it's been nice for us to be able to take a step back a little bit so we can focus on some more of the like bigger picture things to make sure that we are bringing in those clients. are still marketing, we're putting our best foot forward, and still trusting that everything that's going out with the Inkpot name on it is to the standard that it's been at for the past four years.

Rachel Meltzer (18:14.226) Mm.

Rachel Meltzer (18:27.428) Yeah, yeah, that's huge. Wow. I didn't even think about outsourcing the HR part. That's such a good idea. And it actually just like clicked for me. I work with Uncompany. They are like a freelance bridge agency. they don't like do the content production themselves or whatever their freelancers are providing as deliverables. They just connect you with a larger corporation who wants to hire a freelancer, requires

Jessie (she/her) (18:40.922) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (18:56.37) the contractor to have insurance or whatever. Most freelancers don't. So they just make it easy to work with larger Fortune 500 type companies. And I never even thought of, we were talking about working with freelancers at the agency, and I was like, we're going to have to vet them, we're going have to hire them, we're going have to do all these tests. We could just work with uncompany or something like that. I didn't even think about, some things can be so much easier if you just know where to look, who to ask for help, right?

Jessie (she/her) (19:00.557) Mm-hmm.

Jessie (she/her) (19:22.638) Yeah. And there's so many things like employee handbooks and different depending on different states. have to have like, obviously when you walk in, you have like an in-person job, you see all the little posters and the employment posters up in the break room or whatever. That's still a thing, even if people work online. So like creating an online place for that. was honestly, I don't think we would have made it through without them. And they helped.

Rachel Meltzer (19:27.655) Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (19:48.494) walk through all of that. They helped us create a culture guide so that we were able to kind of set it up and figure out how we wanted to do this and how to be a leader, how to manage people, because that's something that's new to both of us and absolutely something that we're still learning with and growing and trying to get better at. the idea of like, let's just hire a part-time employee is like, it's great. then

Rachel Meltzer (20:03.186) Mm.

Jessie (she/her) (20:14.746) You have to look at everything that's that's involved with it. It's it's not a a quick thing to do. I think we were like almost three months in before we really even started like putting. The job out and like hiring people like it took that long to to get everything on the back end set up and ready, so it was it was a lot of work. It was a lot of going back and forth. It was a lot of KP making sure that Inkpot was set up in all these places and.

Rachel Meltzer (20:29.404) The job app's out there, yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (20:44.314) and everything that was there, but now it's absolutely worth it. And I don't think we would want anything different than this.

Rachel Meltzer (20:50.79) Yeah, that's amazing. It's nice when it works out at the end and it pays off. I would suck if it didn't. Okay, guess like foundationally I should have asked this earlier, but how did you and KP meet?

Jessie (she/her) (20:53.818) Mm-hmm. Exactly.

Jessie (she/her) (21:05.062) So we actually met freshman year of college. I mean, guess technically you could say senior year of high school. We went to the same school and there was a like freshman Facebook group where you could like meet all their freshmen in the class. And we ended up connecting on Facebook and we met at one of the like perspective student weekends and we were like, you know what? You seem okay. This is good. Do you want to be roommates? And so we were roommates all four years through college.

We've actually lived together since college. So was really some, the random, you know, class of 2020 Facebook page that we connected over like superheroes and how I met your mother. And it kind of, you know, turned into what it is now. So it was a very chance encounter that we ended up meeting. But it was probably one of the best things that happened. I'm so

Rachel Meltzer (21:37.607) Ha ha ha

Jessie (she/her) (21:59.79) So happy that we both ended up going to the same school. We had the same interests, like we connected. It was, it's amazing.

Rachel Meltzer (22:02.779) Yeah.

That's so serendipitous. What did you guys, what did you major in in college?

Jessie (she/her) (22:07.525) Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (22:12.646) So I actually majored in psychology. goal was I was going to go back to school and get a PhD and become a psychologist. That's like what I expected to do. So I have a degree. have a major. BA was in psychology. I did also get a double minor in media arts and graphic design because I wanted to take some classes with KP and she was a graphic design major. So that was like my way to kind of do that. And I ended up just

Rachel Meltzer (22:15.541) Rachel Meltzer (22:35.27) Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (22:41.19) coincidentally having enough credits to get minors in them. But yeah, I was fully planning on going back to school, getting my PhD, COVID kind of prevention that, and I was like, I don't wanna do school anymore. This is too much and kind of shifted from there, but very different path now than I expected to be on when I was, if you'd asked me junior year of college, I would have said something completely different.

Rachel Meltzer (22:53.542) Yeah, yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (23:04.932) Yeah, I feel like the theme of life is just like, you can't predict the future, you know, we all think we can, you can set up all these grandiose plans. And sometimes, sometimes they work out, sometimes you follow through. But I feel like a lot of times we get into the thing that we thought was going to be the thing. And then you realize you don't want it. And it is so much better to walk out of that room and say, actually, I don't want that. Than it is to get stuck in.

Jessie (she/her) (23:10.052) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (23:34.278) whatever the thing is that you didn't want until you burn out and end up leaving anyway, you know? It's such a, I think it's like a brave thing to be able to just say, actually, I don't want that.

Jessie (she/her) (23:45.572) Yeah, now I'm looking back and like, can't imagine going through like seven more years of school to then start out and getting more debt than I already am with my student loans. Like, I'm good. I'm good doing this now. This is perfect.

Rachel Meltzer (23:57.874) you

Yeah, totally.

Rachel Meltzer (00:01.291) For the listener, Jesse's mic just unplugged. So we just plugged it back in. hence the break, but I had been using Riverside for over a year now and I never realized the power of Riverside. was like thinking I needed to like have Final Cut Pro and I had started the podcast with GarageBand. So I would still do some stuff in GarageBand cause I was just used to it. And yesterday,

I finished my work projects early, shocking. And I was like, what should I do at this time? I've been meaning to make a new intro for the podcast with royalty free music that I like buy a license to music. So I know I can use it on YouTube. And I just didn't want like the decision fatigue of having to like scroll through all this music and like pick something. Finally picked new music, recorded the new intro yesterday in Riverside. And I was like, there are so many things I could have been doing in Riverside that would have been so great. Like I've been paying for

a loom subscription this whole time. And I used to work for loom. it makes sense. And I love loom. But like, actually, I don't really need loom because I could just do all that in Riverside still. Like, there are so many things you can do the power of the $40 membership that I didn't know I had.

Jessie (she/her) (01:02.958) Mm-hmm.

Jessie (she/her) (01:16.568) I know we use it too. And I think it when we first started there, they've added a whole bunch of features since we first joined. And it was only like a year, year and a half ago, something like that. So we used to use podcast. But there's so many things that you can do now. And they've made it way easier to like edit on here. It was a little difficult to begin with. But now it's it's it's much more like what you would see in, you know, Final Cut or Premiere Pro or stuff like that.

Rachel Meltzer (01:22.925) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (01:36.108) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (01:42.571) It's come so far. The fact that you can do music now and fade in and fade out and like, it's so nice. And then I used Canva to make like a ending screen where like the logo pops up and it says like, like subscribe the bell. And you just put that at the end and Riverside with some music. And I'm like, what? You could just do that. It was so easy. And I feel like in the past, like when I was thinking about doing it two years ago, it definitely would not have been this easy, you know?

Jessie (she/her) (01:46.812) Mm-hmm.

Jessie (she/her) (01:54.839) Yep.

Jessie (she/her) (02:01.517) you

Jessie (she/her) (02:11.04) No, not at all. Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (02:12.363) Things have come so far. So tell me more about like how you guys sort of offer your services at Inkpot for the service, well, for obviously for people who want to work with you, but also for the service provider. feel like it's nice to see how other people are offering their services and what they're doing, you know.

Jessie (she/her) (02:33.494) Yeah, so we actually have gone back and forth a lot with how we do our service, what we offer, what it what it kind of looks like. But last year we like really honed in and spent a lot of time figuring out what was what was really going to work. So for us, we've always liked shorter timelines. I think when it comes to especially the like design world, there's so many like horror stories we've heard from clients who are like.

I started and I didn't hear from my designer for six months and I had no idea what was going to happen and when my website was going to come out or anything like that. So we have always been really big fans of shorter timelines and kind of quicker turnarounds. So our entire process is four weeks, which is kind of like the sweet spot that we found. Our rebrand edit is a full new rebrand. So all new branding and then using that branding to create an all new website.

Rachel Meltzer (03:03.872) my god.

Jessie (she/her) (03:30.552) So it's two weeks of branding, two weeks of website, really quick. We also have a ton of stuff set up on the background to make sure that we get everything from our clients, which I feel like is always the biggest thing as like a service provider. The like biggest struggle is getting things for your clients on time and getting everything that you need. It sometimes it feels like pulling teeth and we're like, no, we just need like, can you just give us this? and so we use notion for all of our like client dashboards.

Rachel Meltzer (03:43.915) Mm-hmm.

I know. Totally.

Rachel Meltzer (03:54.145) Yeah, yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (04:00.07) And it's been amazing. think I've been using it for like maybe three years now. Like it's been pretty solid. And it's so nice to stay organized. Like if you don't have something consistent that you're using for your clients, that is go do it right now because it's so easy to stay organized. Everyone gets the same stuff. Everyone gets the same information. We've played around a little bit on like how to collect it, whether they're putting it right in there. Now we have like Dubsado forms that

Rachel Meltzer (04:00.299) I freaking love notion obsessed.

Rachel Meltzer (04:17.816) Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (04:28.792) they fill out and it makes it really easy for us to kind of see everything and pull everything. But we have everything they basically give everything to us upfront, which is really nice. And we make it very clear with them since we do have faster timelines of like when things are due, when feedback is due, when we're going to get things to them. I think that's one of the things that we're very

One of the things we like hold really important to us is making sure that we're meeting deadlines and we're very clear and transparent on when people are going to get things because they are like, this isn't an investment and we don't want you to feel like it's not worth the investment or it wasn't a great investment or you're just kind of sitting there like, I have no idea what's going on. We always want to have people know what's going on. So we do a lot of pre-work and stuff with them. do.

Rachel Meltzer (05:02.307) Hmm.

Jessie (she/her) (05:18.542) calls with them at the beginning to kind of go over the vision and kind of meet them. I think sometimes it's hard depending on the person to like write things out and kind of get everything that they're thinking down on paper. So we do have questionnaires that we have them fill out. But I think meeting with people and getting to hear they're just like stream of consciousness of like what they're thinking to kind of pull it out has been really big and really helpful. That's something that we added in.

Rachel Meltzer (05:32.611) Mm.

Rachel Meltzer (05:38.123) It gets the juices flowing. Yes.

Jessie (she/her) (05:48.61) Maybe like two years ago, originally we weren't doing, you know, strategy vision calls with, with people, but that's been a huge help in making it so that we kind of understand them a little bit better. Their voice is heard. feels like a little bit more of a collaborative process, which we love. And then we're very, you know, once it starts, we're very good about getting everything done, getting the brand done. And in two weeks, getting the website done in the second two weeks and, and making sure that everything is, you know, ready to launch and.

Rachel Meltzer (06:02.531) Mm.

Jessie (she/her) (06:18.862) By that fourth Friday, they know that their new website's ready to go live and everything's going to be great, giving them a little launch graphics, helping them celebrate all of the new stuff. So I think it was a bit of a learning curve in trying to figure out what works the best for us and even how we wanted to offer things. We used to have different packages. We used to have multiple packages. This year we scaled it all back. And the only thing that we offer design wise is

rebranded it. And if you work with us, you get a new brand and new website. And that's been really nice to not have to like almost context switch between who's doing what. And even like scheduling out timelines. It's so easy because we're like, okay, every Monday, we can start a new client because everyone's on the same four week period. And it's spaced out and it works perfectly. And I think, you know, before we were doing website or brand and website or brand only and trying to

Rachel Meltzer (06:58.413) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (07:08.342) Yeah.

That's nice.

Jessie (she/her) (07:17.454) schedule that out and like overlap. It's, it got it got a little difficult. And then people are on different payment plans. You're not things are a little like unexpected. Now we're like, okay, we know when money's coming in, we know when things are going to end, we know when new projects are going to start, like it, it just made the entire business side of everything so much easier to kind of manage.

Rachel Meltzer (07:18.829) so much harder.

Rachel Meltzer (07:39.809) Yeah, I feel like the simplification is the name of the game for everything, you know? And I keep, I'm like, people would love this service. People would love this service. Somebody asked for this. And then I go to make the service or I think about incorporating in my business. And I'm like, I don't have time for that. Why am I doing this? Like, this isn't going to be helpful. Like stop trying to be everything. Just like, do the thing you know, you're good at, do it well, make it fit. It'll be good. know, simpler is pretty much always better in my opinion.

Jessie (she/her) (07:43.32) Mm-hmm.

Jessie (she/her) (08:08.236) Yeah, yeah, we learned that lesson and it made everything so much better for us.

Rachel Meltzer (08:13.547) Yeah, yeah, for real. It's less stressful too. But you guys also have resources on your website for like using Notion for client dashboards and like what it means to do your branding, do your web design, do your blogging. And I think that's really nice because it's like everything you offer, you have a corresponding resource so people can like feel like they know what they're getting into, what they're talking about. Maybe do some of it themselves if they aren't ready to commit to like your package pricing and things like that too.

Jessie (she/her) (08:43.905) Yeah, we're super big on education. I think regardless of if someone's going to work with you or not, like we want people to kind of understand the importance of things. We want people to understand what's going on, why it's going to make a difference, the, you know, why you should be doing X, Y, and Z. And obviously people are going to be at different stages in, you know, their business and what they can invest in. And we don't necessarily think that like you shouldn't have a good brand and website if you can't afford to, you know, hire a designer right now.

Rachel Meltzer (09:02.509) Hmm.

Jessie (she/her) (09:13.74) So we're always big on putting, we don't really gatekeep a lot of things. We'll basically tell you anything and it helps people because when they do work with us, they kind of understand the thoughts behind it and why we're doing what we're doing, which is really nice. so you don't have that kind of any sort of like questioning they come to us and like, understand that you're the expert and that's what I want. And I want someone who can take this.

Rachel Meltzer (09:13.793) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (09:19.267) You

you

Jessie (she/her) (09:42.228) abstract vision that I have and bring it to life and someone that I trust is going to handle it really well.

Rachel Meltzer (09:47.777) Yeah, totally. And it's nice to be able to also just look at your services page and see this is what we offer, this is how long it takes, this is how much it's gonna cost you. On that one page, I don't have to click through a bunch of things, I don't have to look at the app Ikea, I don't have to do a discovery call with you to find out how much it costs. It just is what it is. And that neat, clear package makes it so much easier for me to be like,

Jessie (she/her) (10:06.542) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (10:14.991) yeah, I would book that. I mean, you do have, obviously learn more, like you can learn more, but I don't feel like I need to. And it's nice that it's so simple. And like, you're, mean, in my opinion, your pricing is spot on for like what you're offering in your experience and, and how predictable the timeline is, I think is the most like that is huge. I have had two website redesigns in my career done by professionals that I hired that were off.

fucking awful. Like I'm at the point where it was just such a bad experience and Squarespace. I love what Squarespace can do if you know what you're doing, but it just gets more complicated every year. And I just got to the point where I was like, I just want to be able to fix everything myself. So I ended up using Notion and Super to make my website. And I love it because I'm obsessed with Notion. I use it every day. It's so easy for me to edit. It makes sense for me, but it's not like pretty as much as

Jessie (she/her) (10:54.303) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (11:10.593) like it could have been on Squarespace or something like that. And it's nice to see like just a clear understanding of what you're getting. I feel like so few service providers do that well. And in the beginning, it's hard to do it well, right? You're experimenting, you're trying to figure out what you're doing. You can't always offer it in the way that you guys do, but that clarity on your website can be really nice for people who are just like, should I hire you? Should I not? And it rules out the people who can't afford it or...

Jessie (she/her) (11:25.634) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (11:39.819) like know that that's not what they want. Like you don't want to have a discovery call with somebody who can't afford to, you know, it's just a waste of everybody's time.

Jessie (she/her) (11:44.918) Yeah. Yeah, I think honestly, that's what it kind of came down to because we've played around with so many things over the years and having pricing, not having pricing, having a pricing guide behind like an email sign up and, and all of these things. But ultimately, when it comes down to it, like if we can make it so that people can filter themselves into different buckets when they're on the site without even having to, you know, reach out and ask us questions and do all of that, like the power of answering everyone's questions right off the bat in the moment when they have them is

incredible and you know, it makes it easier for them. It makes it easier for us. We're not necessarily feeling like we're answering the same questions over and over and over again and are, you know, spending a lot of our time that we could be doing something else, emailing people, doing, you know, calls, doing all of these things that we're like, well, we actually could have just put that on the website and then no one would have asked. Then you don't have that awkward, like someone gets on a discovery call and yeah. And then, and then you have that and like, or like,

Rachel Meltzer (12:39.437) Well, they won't pay. Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (12:44.46) the price shock and they're like, well, I can't afford this. But like now I don't know how to end this conversation without feeling like I need to tell you that I can't invest in this right now. And so I think having all of that out there has has really helped us kind of cater to the people that we want to cater to when we're getting on discovery calls. People are, you know, basically already sold, which is the best thing when they're like, no, like I just.

Rachel Meltzer (12:50.328) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (13:09.251) Mm.

Jessie (she/her) (13:10.776) Had a question. I wanted to talk to you a little bit, make sure we vibed and like, I'm good. I'm excited. Let's do this. So I know there's a lot of back and forth on what you should have on a website, what you shouldn't have on a website, which honestly like.

Rachel Meltzer (13:16.023) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (13:20.137) I know. I literally have an episode of this podcast. If you scroll back, that tells you not to put your pricing on your website. And I really want to like caveat that I might actually delete that episode and remake it with the caveats that I have learned. The thing is it really depends on what you're offering and how you want to structure your business. Like if you're, you're offering two services, you have a very clear structure. You know what you want to do. You know what you don't want to do. And you've learned that from experience, but.

Jessie (she/her) (13:38.668) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (13:49.675) I don't know, for me, I hesitate to put my pricing on my website because it really depends. Like if an outdoor industry, small business comes to me, they have less than 10 employees. They just need help with email marketing. Can you set this up? Happy to do it. I will give you my lowest possible rate because I know that like you're on a mission and you can't afford what my other clients pay. But if like a fortune 500 tech company comes to me and they're like, we want you to do

12 blogs and we want you to do this social media marketing and we want you to use your audience's leverage, I'm going to charge you the most. So I can't just put $500 a blog on my website or $700 a blog on my website or this email package costs this much because it just depends on the client and the project and what they're giving me and how much they know about what they're doing. So for me, it doesn't make sense and it removes a lot of my power to be able to cater to the different issues I'm working in and the companies I'm working with.

Jessie (she/her) (14:31.694) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (14:44.791) But if you know what you want to offer and you have specific parameters, you know what you want to earn for it, you have a process, you have a dashboard, you've basically created something that you could sell in a box on a shelf, definitely put your prices on your website. Like my coaching prices are on my website because it is in a box, it is an offer, you know what I mean? There is a dashboard, I can sell it, it's like the same. So it's kind of dependent, right?

Jessie (she/her) (14:47.256) Mm-hmm.

Jessie (she/her) (15:11.574) Yeah, I think it breaks down for us a lot to the like custom ability of your packages. For us, we offer that's like every single client that works with us is going to get the same exact thing. So we're going to charge you the same exact price. We're not going to charge someone more because we, you know, think that their photography business might be making a little more than this other one. Everyone's getting the same product. They're getting the same timeline. They're getting the same deliverables. So it's all the same. But, you know, we work with a lot of photographers who

Rachel Meltzer (15:18.594) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (15:23.811) Mm-hmm.

Jessie (she/her) (15:41.614) work in the higher end industry and basically every single one of their packages is custom. They listen to the couple, they figure out what they want and they give them a package based on that. So for them, it might not make sense having pricing on it because it could be $10,000, it could be $60,000. Like, I don't know, it depends on, know, do you want four hours or do you want an entire weekend? Those are two completely different prices. So, you know, I think

Rachel Meltzer (15:47.075) you

Rachel Meltzer (15:58.561) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (16:04.739) Totally.

Jessie (she/her) (16:07.19) Looking at how customizable your packages are, if you're offering the same exact thing, like you said, off the shelf, if everything's the same, that's one thing. But like when you have those variances and those differences, it makes sense to not have set pricing because it doesn't give you the flexibility to kind of move. And you might get people who are like, well, actually, I want can I do like this and this and this? And then you're like, let me try to like figure out what that package would look like. And, know, it's it's it's a little all over the place. So.

Rachel Meltzer (16:32.969) Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (16:36.664) Trying to figure out what works best and how you want to offer things and how you want to run it before, you know, maybe putting the pricing straight up on there. I know a lot of the people we work with to even just put like starting pricing so that it gets rid of that a little bit of that sticker shock. If they're like, OK, if it's starting at 10,000, is that where my budget is or is it a little lower? If it's starting at five thousand, you know, where where do I think I fit in that? But yeah, it's it's a hard thing to kind of figure out where you.

Rachel Meltzer (16:48.397) Mm.

Jessie (she/her) (17:04.84) sit and what you want to do and you'll get, mean, I feel like if you ask a hundred people, you get a hundred different opinions on it. So it's, it's really that again, that like trial and error.

Rachel Meltzer (17:06.465) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (17:10.403) Totally. think this is another, yeah, it's trial and error. It's the other example of like, it's your business, run it your way. Figure out what works for you, do that. Yeah, totally. So I guess, well, this is really switching gears, but you guys always talk about how you travel a lot. How are you fitting that into being business owners now with part-time employees and also just like,

Jessie (she/her) (17:20.636) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (17:39.491) You know, in general, like running an agency, running a business, how are you figuring out where to travel, how much to spend, when to travel, you know?

Jessie (she/her) (17:50.118) It this this past year in 2024 was our biggest year travel wise and it was a bit of a balance of kind of figuring out what works for us. I think in some cases we definitely want to get better now that we like have a team to have like trying to completely disconnect and like actually take time off. We really struggle not working on the business, not doing things, not checking our emails, not reaching out like.

Rachel Meltzer (18:08.899) Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (18:18.474) It's very hard for us to just not read like I, we take around two weeks off around the holidays and we actually took those two weeks off and it was probably the first two week period that we have not done any work in like a few years. Like it was.

Rachel Meltzer (18:18.569) Sam.

Rachel Meltzer (18:27.939) Mm.

Rachel Meltzer (18:37.603) This was my first in 2024 of my entire career that I actually genuinely took the two weeks off. Life changing. It's so much different. And it's only two weeks, you know? It's not, but it feels like a big deal.

Jessie (she/her) (18:48.322) I And I, I think we realized how much time we haven't taken off because that two weeks felt so fast. And I was like, that was a long time, but like, I feel like it was two days. So I think we've kind of had to try to find the balance between where we want to go and doing some longer travel. So over the summer we were in Europe and we

Rachel Meltzer (18:56.589) Yeah

Rachel Meltzer (19:00.173) Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (19:14.186) stayed there for the full three months that we could and kind of stayed in places for entire months instead of doing the kind of quicker trips that we like to. And then the other half of it, I think, is balancing where we want to go and what we can do and how we can work in different time zones. And it's a little beneficial when we're in Europe because we're kind of on an opposite time zone in the sense that at night in Europe, it's kind of our like working hours here.

Rachel Meltzer (19:21.367) Yeah. Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (19:44.034) So we did a three week trip right around the holidays through like Thanksgiving and the beginning of December. we still worked the whole, like Inkpot was still running. We were still having client things. Everything was still working, but it was nice because we were able to be like, okay, we're going to take time during the day and go see things, go explore things, go do all the fun things, go to the Christmas markets, whatever it might be. And then we know like once 6 PM it hits, that's our starting time of 9 AM PSD, which

Rachel Meltzer (19:44.227) you

Jessie (she/her) (20:12.448) Also being in Pacific time kind of works out a little bit because you get those extra three hours and it gives you that little more flexibility, but kind of balancing when we do want to work and be available and, you know, be on for our team and our clients and all of that with, when we want to take like fully. Yeah. Yeah. Actually sleep, not, you know, stay up till two o'clock in the morning and then wake up at seven to go do things and burn ourselves out that way. But.

Rachel Meltzer (20:13.975) you

Yeah. Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (20:29.837) Getting enough sleep, adventuring, yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (20:38.476) Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (20:41.324) I think it's also like doing the things that you love to like not just taking a vacation or like going to a place because you feel like you should be going there. Like everyone says that this is great. We like going back to Europe, obviously we'd spent three months over the summer, but there were some some of the times weren't like the the best, the best. It was was fun. But there were also times where we, you know, felt a little. I won't say miserable, but like it wasn't as good as we had maybe.

Rachel Meltzer (21:01.251) Mm.

Jessie (she/her) (21:10.446) thought of it in our head and built it up on of what it was going to be. And I think two part of that was not going out and actually taking advantage of everything that was around us. And we spent a lot of the time like there were, you know, times where the entire week we just spent in the Airbnb and we didn't leave at all. And I'm like, now you get that kind of like, well, now I'm beating myself up because it feels like a waste because I'm in Portugal and I'm not doing anything like what I should have just sat in my apartment back in Vegas and that like it now this feels like a waste. So

Rachel Meltzer (21:24.609) Yeah. Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (21:30.295) Yes.

Jessie (she/her) (21:39.406) kind of giving yourself that grace and giving yourself being like, look, let me go try and see, you know, one new thing every day or try one new restaurant or do stuff like that. And just kind of doing the things you always want to do. We like stayed in the cabin in Toronto when we went up in November. And it was so much fun to just like be out in the middle of nowhere and be a nice change up from from Vegas, even though Vegas is a city. But it's like if you're not on the strip, it's not like that overwhelming.

Rachel Meltzer (21:46.339) Mm.

Rachel Meltzer (21:52.098) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (22:05.855) It's different. Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (22:08.162) But I think just kind of figuring out your goals and what you want to do and what you love, you know, seeing and exploring and then actually taking legitimate time off sometimes. I think it's easy since we can work from anywhere to work from anywhere. And I think that's the hole we fell into a lot over the past couple of years. And so trying to be like, OK, when can I work from anywhere and when should I actually just put the computer away and, you know, spend this time and actually enjoy where I am?

Rachel Meltzer (22:19.704) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (22:23.875) Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (22:38.155) Yeah, but blending work and travel was way harder than I thought it was going to be. And I felt like I did a lot of research and I watched a lot of like YouTubers and I followed all people on Instagram that were full time traveling or traveling and freelancing at the same time. And when I got into full time traveling, I was like. Dying. I got burnt out so fast because I felt like I needed to do a big thing every single day. I needed to see the sites. I couldn't just like.

Jessie (she/her) (23:03.256) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (23:05.399) take a nap or relax or just be in one place for three days and like be calm. It felt like I needed to like be in a new place every two weeks. And in reality, it got much more fun. I remember the first time I stayed somewhere longer than two weeks. I stayed in Montana for like 21 days. And the whole time I was like, okay, I'll leave tomorrow. Okay, I'll leave next week. Like it just, kept like thinking I needed to be leaving and like apologizing to my friend who was like letting me park in his driveway. And he was like, I really don't give a shit. Like I'm glad you're here.

like be a normal person for five seconds, you know? We put all this pressure on ourselves to like be this big adventurer and do all these things. And in reality, like the things you see on YouTube, the things you see on Instagram, like yes, people are working, but their job is literally to show you these sites. like, don't expect yourself to be on that level. It's okay. And like, we all need rest. We all need to sleep. We all need times when we're not actively adventuring or actively working.

Jessie (she/her) (23:50.957) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (24:03.329) And it's hard to make that time when you're guilting yourself because you think you should be doing something like do it for yourself. No one else gives a fuck what you're doing unless you're like a full time YouTube vlogger. Just do what feels good. have, it has taken me years to work on my body and work with a therapist.

Jessie (she/her) (24:16.162) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (24:25.207) to actually listen to my body and figure out what I actually want. Like when I settled down and moved back into a house and I don't really, I still travel but not like I used to, it has, every time I got free time I was like, okay, I make the most of it, what am gonna do, where am I gonna go, I should go on an adventure. And I like make these like lists of like all these things I wanna do, all these places I wanna go. And it feels like so anxiety, like awful, cringy, like I gotta use my free time. And in reality, like you can just sit and watch.

Jessie (she/her) (24:50.157) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (24:52.691) You can just sit and play Mario Kart. You can take a nap. You can walk around your neighborhood. You could just be in your house. Did you know you could just like be at home? And it's so like, I feel like especially if you're active on social media, it's really difficult to like get rid of those, I don't know, shoulds, the pressures that you think are on you that you just decided to adopt for yourself that you didn't realize you adopted, you know?

Jessie (she/her) (25:13.518) Mm-hmm.

Jessie (she/her) (25:18.456) Yeah. And I really think it's the same thing with like everything else in business. You got to figure out what works for you and what works for somebody might not work for another person. And I think, you know, we realized we loved being in Europe this summer, but we were also like, maybe a month is too long. Like maybe a month in a single place is too long for us or, you know, a month in one single spot. And when we went back over

the holiday break, we probably went to like five or six different countries in like a three week period. And we stayed for a couple of days in each place, which was nice. We had, you we were able to kind of settle in. We could do what we want to do. We could relax if we wanted to. We weren't like, I have one night in this place. And if I don't do these 47 things, I'm going to be mad at myself because I didn't check them all off my list. But it gave us a time to kind of enjoy it. We wanted to and like relax when we when we wanted to.

Rachel Meltzer (26:05.388) Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (26:14.382) And I think we realize that we're kind of the. I it's like a mix between fast travel and slow travel. We're not the people who if we stay in a place for too long, we're to get to the point where we don't actually leave the apartment or wherever we're staying. And then we don't see anything. then like the last two days, we're like, oh, my God, we have to go see all this. Like when we when we studied abroad, we were in Dublin and there were some very basic things like going to the Guinness Storehouse and like.

Rachel Meltzer (26:26.091) Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (26:33.43) Hahaha

Rachel Meltzer (26:42.467) Mm.

Jessie (she/her) (26:42.89) seen some of the churches that we passed every single day that we literally did the last two days of a like six month study abroad experience because we were like, it's there. Like we could we're here for a while. We can do it whenever. And then we just never do it. And it's the same place. Even when we moved from Denver, we were like, what are we going to go check all these things off? Because now we're leaving and we're going to Vegas and we still haven't done all these very basic things in Colorado. And so I think we.

Rachel Meltzer (26:48.61) Mm.

you

Rachel Meltzer (26:54.595) another time.

Mm.

Rachel Meltzer (27:06.465) Yeah, yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (27:10.098) finding that mix of like what works for you, what you want to do, what makes you happiest is is great because if it's, you know, staying in place for three months and and doing that great, if you're getting everything done that you want to do awesome. If you want to spend a single day somewhere, go spend a single day somewhere like that's that's totally up to you. But I think, yeah, we see all the like pressure from all the influencers who their full time job is to travel and.

Odds are they have a team that's editing their videos and a team that's doing all of their marketing. And basically they're just making the videos where they're not paying for any of these experiences. And, you know, it's, fine and dandy and they're fine business class in between all of these countries and they're well rested. And, you know, for most of us, that's not the reality. So we kind of have to figure out what that reality looks like for us.

Rachel Meltzer (27:38.808) Yep.

Rachel Meltzer (27:45.879) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (27:58.403) Yeah, totally, totally. It's so nice and useful to like, talk to other people who have had this experience because I thought I was completely crazy when I lived in my van and I didn't want to go do something. I was like, I must be nuts. I'm finally in Utah and I don't want to go to a single national park. I don't give a flying fuck about these national parks right now. I'm so tired. That was the moment where I was like, I don't think I've been doing this the way that I...

Jessie (she/her) (28:06.786) Mm-hmm.

Jessie (she/her) (28:16.483) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (28:27.427) would actually like too. And it's hard to admit it, you know? It was hard for me to be like, actually don't want to do that in my full time anymore. Like you identify with these things, you know? I also were, we got to wrap up soon, but I dealt with like getting a lot of new health diagnoses this year because I finally got to slow down and like live in a house and like go to a doctor that I live near consistently and like deal with my health problems.

Jessie (she/her) (28:36.888) Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (28:51.118) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (28:56.311) And I was like, my God, it makes so much sense why I've been so tired and why all these things have been so hard for me. I cannot believe I just forced myself through all of that. But you just don't know what you don't know until you figure it out and you can't beat yourself up and you can't identify too hard with things because then you have to go through the part where you have to mourn that identity instead of just being like, I'm not a rock climber right now, but maybe I will be again in the future. You know, it's like, no, I'm not a rock climber now. It's totally.

Jessie (she/her) (29:01.443) Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (29:21.676) Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (29:25.304) Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (29:26.583) different experiences.

Jessie (she/her) (29:28.686) It's hard to not feel like a failure, even when literally no one is asking you to do anything. like we felt we literally moved out of our apartment, put everything in storage and we're like, OK, we're going to do three months in Europe. We're going to come back. We're going to do a road trip through Canada. We're going to go back for three months. And like this is going to be our life. We're going to go back and forth as much as we can, stay in the Schengen zone for for 90 days and then leave and go somewhere else. And we were in our second we were probably six weeks in and KP was like,

Rachel Meltzer (29:48.683) We're gonna love it.

Rachel Meltzer (29:56.343) Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (29:58.26) I don't know if I want to do this anymore. And I was like, I don't know if I do either. And immediately started looking at apartments. But there was that sense of like, did we fail at this because we're going to go and we're going to get an apartment? And like, the answer is no, literally no one cares where you are. Like our families are probably happier to have us back in the U.S. because they're not worried about us being here and everywhere in Europe where they can't, you know, semi easily get to us. And like no one's going to judge us for moving back to.

Rachel Meltzer (30:08.279) Yes. Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (30:17.475) Totally.

Yeah.

Jessie (she/her) (30:27.01) Vegas. It's all in our heads.

Rachel Meltzer (30:29.601) Yeah, totally. No one asked anything when I moved out of my van into a house. They were like, wow, that's a really cute house. Love that for you. know? I wasn't like, my old roommate was like, hey, if you need a place to stay while you find an apartment, let me know. And I was like, yes, please. Thank you. She was never like, you're such a failure. I went to buy that van with you. You know I mean? Like no one cares. Also, my dad went on a road trip to Mexico with his brother this year. I mean, to Montana. Why did I say Mexico?

Jessie (she/her) (30:33.72) Mm-hmm.

Jessie (she/her) (30:44.214) I'm

Jessie (she/her) (30:49.046) Mm-hmm. No.

Rachel Meltzer (30:58.079) I'm going to Mexico in February. I think it's just on my mind. My dad went on a road trip to Montana with his brother this year and went to a lot of the places I had been in the van and I never stayed in a hotel in Montana. I stayed with a friend for like a week. But other than that, like I was just like on BLM land in my van or at a campground, whatever. And my dad was like, thank God I did not do this road trip before you did van life or I

Jessie (she/her) (31:24.3) Ha ha!

Rachel Meltzer (31:26.115) I would have been up all night every night while you lived in your van. I cannot believe you did the shit you did. I came home with like bald tires because I didn't want to pay for new tires. I knew I was going to get rid of the van and I went down like the snowiest road and everything worked out fine because the van was so heavy it couldn't even spin out and my dad saw those tires and I got home and he was like, I cannot believe I let you do this. It's just such a like.

Jessie (she/her) (31:43.64) Mm-hmm.

Jessie (she/her) (31:50.066) Our our parents say that all the time. And there's so many places where, know, we we delayed letting them know as long as possible that we were going to go to Prague when we were in Vienna, because they're not they were a little worried about us. But I was like, literally the day before we left, I was like, hey, we're going to Prague for the weekend. And my dad was like, were you ever going to tell me this? And I was like, no, I wasn't. But it is not like that kind of trying to like get over the.

Rachel Meltzer (32:01.987) Jessie (she/her) (32:18.454) No matter how old you are, your parents are still going to like worry about you and be like, I can't believe you just did that and and everything. But honestly, it makes it makes for good stories. We got to see great things. We got to fall in love with new places and, you know, just taking that leap. As long as you're doing it, we're very safe. We do a lot of research. We make sure it's safe for us. We make sure it's, you know, safer, you know, queer people. And we're not going to get into trouble or anything like that. So it's it's a lot of stuff that we do on the back end. But sometimes when people are looking at it, they're like, I can't believe we just did that.

Rachel Meltzer (32:30.669) You're fine.

Yeah.

Rachel Meltzer (32:48.003) Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I think about having kids now, like we've talked about it and I'm like, so I feel like I'm so much more okay with them doing things that my parents would have been so scared for me to do because I've done them and I'm like, you'll be fine. Don't be stupid, but you'll be fine.

Jessie (she/her) (33:03.534) Mm-hmm.

Jessie (she/her) (33:08.91) It actually isn't that scary. And like these places actually aren't as bad as as you. And honestly, I think a big part of it, too, is people growing up in different generations. And when you're looking at travel abroad, the world back when my parents were kids was a very different place than the world is right now. So like, I understand when they're nervous about certain places that maybe didn't have the best reputation in the like 60s and 70s. But we're in 2024 now, 2025 there.

Rachel Meltzer (33:17.187) totally.

Rachel Meltzer (33:23.906) Yes.

Rachel Meltzer (33:32.898) Mm-hmm.

Rachel Meltzer (33:36.353) Yeah

Jessie (she/her) (33:37.784) They progress some, it's a little different and, you know, it's not as bad as it was built up in their heads, you know, when they were kids.

Rachel Meltzer (33:45.879) Yeah, yeah. Well, I feel like the moral of this whole episode has just been you gotta do you and you gotta experiment and you'll figure it out. Everything's gonna be fine. Truly the school of trial and error. Who needs university? All right, well, the last question I have for you is where can people find you on the internet?

Jessie (she/her) (33:55.448) Trial and error, whole life is just trial and error.

Jessie (she/her) (34:08.108) Yes. So our website is inkpotcreative.com. We are also at Inkpot Creative on everything, Instagram, threads, YouTube, TikTok, all of that stuff. And then we have our podcast, which is called the Unexpected Entrepreneur podcast that you can listen wherever you listen to the podcast. But feel free if you have any questions, if there's anything you want to know, if there's anything you want to talk about, whether it's stuff that we do in business or travel, we love talking about it. So

Feel free to DM us and we'd love to chat.

Rachel Meltzer (34:39.777) Yeah, heck yeah. I was just on the unexpected entrepreneur. Well, as of this recording, it was last week, but it will be two weeks ago when this episode comes out. So if you need an episode to start with and you like me, I hope you do. If you're listening to this, go listen to unexpected entrepreneur. There's some really juicy episodes. I feel like there's a lot to learn from your podcast and you guys are such great personalities. If you haven't seen the ink pod creative website yet and you need some inspiration, like go see it. It's nice. It's.

lovely, you will just feel embraced by the brand. And that's kind of how your podcast feels too, I feel like.

Jessie (she/her) (35:16.61) Thank you. was so much fun having you on. We've been able to have some great people on. So it's always fun kind of hearing new perspectives and, seeing everyone's thoughts on, the world and on business and how they're literally is no answer to anything, but it's, we're all just working through it.

Rachel Meltzer (35:30.115) We're all just trying to find our way awesome. Well, thanks for coming on the show, Jesse

Jessie (she/her) (35:37.506) Thank you so much.