PODCAST SHOWNOTES

Nicole Otchy: Welcome to the Six Figure Personal Stylist Podcast, the ultimate no-BS business podcast for ambitious personal stylists ready to build a six-figure and beyond personal styling business.

You won't hear the typical snoozefest business advice that most personal stylists get told all of the time. Nope. Instead, I'll be sharing business-building strategies that will help you create a killer personal brand, a cult following of loyal personal styling clients, and make a ton of cash while creating lasting style transformations for your clients.

I'm Nicole Otchy, your host and a former personal stylist of 14 years who built a lucrative styling business in three major cities, but only after spending years trying to crack the six-figure styling business code without burning out. And now I'm here to tell you how to do exactly the same. Let's get into it.

Welcome to a fresh episode of the podcast. Today, I am diving into a conversation with Megan Wright and Kaitlin Oran, the innovative founders of Nove, a really exciting new platform revolutionizing how stylists run their businesses.

In this episode, we’ll explore how two tech industry veterans became passionate about solving stylist pain points, the game-changing features Nove integrates into the platform, including analytics tools and retention strategies, how stylists can diversify their income with guides and subscriptions, the power of personalization in an age of overwhelming choice when it comes to personal style, and why AI will not replace personal stylists. In fact, it might help them.

You do not want to miss this episode. This conversation is packed with insights that can transform how you think about your styling business. I am not joking. Sit back, grab a notebook, and get ready to level up what is possible for you and your client experience just from listening in. Let's dive into the episode.

I'm so excited to have my first dual guest podcast today. I'm super, super, super stoked for you guys to learn more about Nove. It is a styling platform that you are all going to love. Today we're here with the founders, Megan Wright and Kaitlin Oren. Welcome, ladies.

Kaitlin Oran: Thanks, we're super excited to be here.

Nicole Otchy: How did two very, very intelligent women like yourselves break into this world? Tell us a little bit about how you ever became founders of styling so far.

Megan Wright: Yeah, it's a great question, because our background is not in fashion and neither one of us are stylists. Kaitlin and I have been working together for close to a decade, which is crazy. But we both worked with stylists during transition periods in our lives.

I was taking on a more senior role. Kaitlin was coming back from maternity leave. I would say we both approached those sessions similarly, and that we knew what we wore had an impact on our emotions and our presence, and we were seeking really intentional pieces, filling gaps to reflect this new point in life.

We both had really great experiences with those stylists, but realized they were spending so much time building their deliverables and chasing us and other clients. Not only while we were working together, but also afterward, never heard from them again to work together a second time.

We just ended up having conversations with many stylists over eight months like the ones we worked with and then folks they introduced us to or that we found on Instagram and just learning about their pain points, their aspirations, what things they wanted to try but felt too hard and Nove came out of those conversations.

It's really a result of the feedback that they gave, the things that they wanted, ways to diversify their revenue. They really inspired us to build Nove and it is completely correlated to those conversations.

Nicole Otchy: What are both of your backgrounds? Because tons of people work for stylists, tons of people experience places where that experience could be better, but they don't necessarily think, "Hmm, you know what I need? Styling software is my next move." Share a little bit about that because it's a really interesting story.

Kaitlin Oran: Yeah. I love to say Megan and I are two halves of the same brain, which I'm realizing now means we're both half a brain, which is not right, but my background is in building technology.

I started as a software engineer and switched over to the product management side, so really spend a lot of time talking to users, understanding what problems they face, and what they want in a platform. Then Megan's background is in implementation and customer success.

So working with users before and after they started using a platform. I guess I should say, to take a step back, we met working at Vimeo. We worked on a product that helped video creators think someone like Megan Roup Sculpt Society-type platforms build subscription businesses.

Both of our backgrounds are rooted in working with creators, again, me from the tech side, and Megan from the customer success side. So to Megan's point, the second we started having these conversations, our brains just started going off like, “We know what it can look like when a software works for their users and helps make them successful.”

These creators are doing a million different things a day. It shouldn't be so painful to get your job done. It's really just a passion of ours to help technology work for creators.

Nicole Otchy: Amazing. How lucky are we that you guys hired a stylist. I don't think that's how a lot of this often starts in the industry, which is why I'm so excited to share your sort of background. I think that it's such an important part of the conversation that you already knew the challenges that people who ran online businesses and creators had.

It wasn't just like it was style-specific, so you can bring all of that knowledge into the platform. What were you specifically hoping that Nove would do that was going to fill the gaps in your own experience as the client, but also in the industry as a whole?

Megan Wright: Yeah. I think that's where the ways we've thought about differentiating come into play. Obviously, there's the toolset that is really important. The virtual closet, the ability to build Lookbooks, onboarding your clients, things like that. But what we felt was missing was the business component.

The tools to really understand the business that you are running and how to grow it because I think that's something that was clear to us, but sometimes we felt wasn't always clear to the folks we were working with which is like you are running a very real business and you need tools that help you do that.

Analytics, like what's performing well? What isn't? What are your clients liking? What aren't they? Leveraging retention tools like managing your customers, reaching back out to them, and letting them know what new offers you have available.

Then also being able to diversify your revenue, I think that's one thing that Kaitlin and I feel really strongly about, based on our experience at Vimeo, is what are ways that you can take these amazing skills that you have and leverage them in creative ways that work best for your clients.

Nicole Otchy: Way beyond just the client stylist's experience, also the stylist's own experience of their business. So important.

Megan Wright: Yeah, exactly.

Nicole Otchy: I just want to back up a little for a second because you both worked with stylists so I assume they were different stylists.

Megan Wright: Yeah.

Nicole Otchy: Okay. I just wanted to make sure [inaudible]. When you were on the other side of the experience, where were the gaps? Nothing personal to say. I'm sure they were wonderful. We all have them. I think it's important for the audience to hear from a client's perspective, what were the gaps in your experience that you wish were better and that informed what you just mentioned you're trying to do with the platform?

Kaitlin Oran: Yeah. I think we have slightly different answers. I can say I think the biggest thing for me was that back-and-forth piece. We all miss emails. We all forget to answer emails. Then all of a sudden, you're digging through. You can't find where the last thing was and who's meant to respond to who.

I think for me, the biggest thing was it was hard to keep everything that was happening in one place and to understand, “Was I supposed to respond? Were they supposed to respond? Where were we at in this process?”

I often felt like I was making their lives more complicated by not answering. Then I feel like she said she would replace this piece with another piece, then I never got that follow-up when I was expecting it. Really that back-and-forth piece just felt painful on both sides.

I can answer for Megan too. Megan received quite a bit of bitly length, not visual, and not easy to track down. This is such an aesthetic industry. It feels like it deserves an aesthetic output and an aesthetic tool.

So to go back a little bit into how we're thinking about building this, we really want it to feel like something you're excited to use and that feels beautiful and something you're proud of. I guess, as stylists, you shouldn't be like, which is what happened with us, like, “I'm so sorry about this output. This is the best thing that's at my disposal at the moment."

Nicole Otchy: Thank you so much for helping us be more proud of ourselves. I just want to say thank you. This is one of the reasons why I really was attracted to these two founders on this platform because everything they said was about not just me and the client's experience, [inaudible] business side better, but me helping us be proud of being businesswomen and couple men that are listening.

I think that is such a gift to this community that goes beyond just creating something for the market and, obviously creating income, no shame in that. That's the game we're all in. But also how often is not as thoughtfully entered into as it could be.

What a gift that we are dealing with two founders who have experienced the other side of this to make us even better. I just want to make sure that I am saying that at this point because I am very grateful.

Megan Wright: I was going to say, I think one thing you said, Nicole, that resonates with us is that it is about making income. You need to do that to be able to take on this role. I think one thing that we also learned as we explored more about this industry, and did more market research, is that there is still a huge pay gap in the creator economy, which is like men still make 1.88 times, almost double what their female counterparts do.

We felt that was because there are all these tools in male-dominated industries, tools at their disposal to allow them to monetize more and we just didn't feel like there were tools that did the same in industries where there are more women and so that was something that we felt really passionate about was like building something that allows women to make as much and maybe even more than men one day. That's continually how we’ve approached Nove is how can we help our clients make more doing what they love?

Nicole Otchy: That's a fascinating stat. I would not have instinctually thought it was still that behind. I think there's also some identity work that is involved in that, just when men and women perceive themselves and in the market in general, but that is so fascinating to hear.

What are the aspects of the tool that you think differentiate yourself, but also—aside from just the way you guys have built this and the way you've looked at it, which is huge—but you're most excited about what you want people to understand and learn more about.

Kaitlin Oran: I would say two pieces, the analytics portion, which we said is just huge. You should understand how much revenue you're making per service. You should understand the breakdown of how much time you're spending to how much revenue is coming in. I think that's a huge gray area of like, “Okay, great. You're making X amount of money from this, but you're spending 20 hours per client. When you do that math out, it's just not making sense anymore.”

We really want to build out this analytics dashboard to help you make smarter decisions about your business. Then I would say the second piece we're super excited about as a differentiator is the retention piece. Like we said, for me in that back and forth with the stylist I worked with, people who forget to answer emails.

We forget things. We all have a million things going on. If Nove is a platform that can help you remember when your client's birthday is or remember to follow up three days after you sent the lookbook if you haven't heard back, if we can handle all of that for you so you don't have to think about it, that's a huge win for us.

I think we get really excited because, to Megan's point, that's allowing you to make more money, doing what you're already doing. I think those two pieces really align with our ethos of we are a business platform, we want to help you run a smart business. Those two feature sets are going to see a lot of development over the next year for us.

Nicole Otchy: That's so exciting. Also, you will spend less time and earn more with that, which I think is an important point because many people enter this industry to have a life in the business.

Yet, when we get into it, we realize, whoops, as you said, it's taking 20 hours to complete something that I may have charged $500 for. That's a lot of time that if I was more efficient, I could be living my best life. That is incredible. What are the plans for the rollout? What stage are you guys in? Talk us through where you are now and where we're kind of going with this platform.

Megan Wright: We're still on private beta, which I'll let Kaitlin jump in and chat about that, but our plan for launch is we're still very much in the learning phase and we're loving working with our beta users. Big shout out to them. They are so wonderful. I will say if anyone is interested in joining the private beta, DM us on Instagram. We'd love to chat with you.

Nicole Otchy: I’ll put your contact and all that stuff in the show notes. That's amazing.

Megan Wright: Thank you. We appreciate that. We're planning to launch officially later this year and we're actually planning to launch with two plans. We'll have an invite-only tier for stylists that has access to that advanced toolset like much of the features we've been talking about today.

Then we'll also be launching a free tier for those wanting to get started by building guides. It won't have the advanced one-to-one styling tool set, but it'll still be a way to start familiarizing and monetizing, just really get started in their styling career.

Nicole Otchy: That is so cool that you're having two different tiers. I'm very excited about this.

Kaitlin Oran: Us too. Yeah, the guide say, I don't know if we've jumped into that yet, but one thing we noticed, and just going back to what we were talking about, about doing so much work and not getting the revenue you deserve from it, one thing we noticed a lot and one thing we heard a lot in our conversations where people were interested in creating those one-to-many guides, is what we're calling them.

Nicole's Top Picks for Fall, you see women spending so much time putting these links up on Instagram, but if people don't see your story or the commission, someone we all know about the pains with commission links, they don't get the revenue from that. So one thing, this guide functionality that we're really excited about is the ability to create those guides, put that behind a paywall, or put it up for free and start to collect emails from people you know are interested in what you have to say, maybe aren't ready or don't think that they can commit to one-on-one styling yet.

We think that's a really interesting lead-generation tool. Just generally, we're really excited about leaning into that for people entering the styling industry or established stylists who are just trying to increase their reach.

Nicole Otchy: What are you thinking in terms of just timeline? I feel like you guys mentioned a couple of things, but I know people are going to be like, “When can I get my hands on that?” Can you just lay that out for them? Because I know people are dying to get in on this.

Megan Wright: I mean, they can get in on it now by messaging us and then hopefully by the time this product is live, they can request access.

Nicole Otchy: Okay, so we're not live yet. We are in beta. What are the things you're kind of learning from your beta users that have been super informative? Because I think you guys are a great example outside of the industry of how your user or client should always be informing the process, the product, the end goal.

Often business owners that are outside of your industry, I think lots of us sit in our house, imagine what people want, put it out there, and then get no feedback or bad feedback about it and are surprised when this is actually what it looks like to create a client-led business.

I'm sure you guys would say a user experience is probably the better way to say it in your example, but this is how the majority of businesses run. It's not how a lot of creative entrepreneurs run their business and so what you guys are sharing is really important for the audience to hear because this is what it looks like to be a client-led business.

I talk about it, but I don't necessarily always have the best examples outside of the industry and this is how you know when you're in something like a beta, what people want. What are people sharing with you that's helping inform the future product?

Kaitlin Oran: I love that whole thing. That's our biggest goal in this beta. It's funny, I feel like as we were deciding to launch the beta, we were like, “Okay, we just want to build three more things and then it'll be perfect.” Finally, we were like, “You know what? It's not about us anymore. We need to get it in the hands of these users and then we'll know.”

We keep saying it. It feels like putting our baby out into the world, but I'm glad we did it when we did. I would say that the range of feedback we've gotten from tiny things and we say to our beta users all the time, “No feedback is too small. DM us, email us, text us. Anything you are thinking in the moment, let us know,” so it's things from wanting onboarding forms to look a little bit different or wanting the customer login flow.

That's something we've been talking about this morning, just making that a little bit more straightforward when you first start working with a customer. Things on Lookbooks. We're really excited about our Lookbook creation. It's like a Canva-esque editor. Really blank slate lets you do what you want, which is exciting, but some people like a little bit more, trying to think of a good example, you can set a background color in a font.

One thing a stylist said was, “Hey, I'd love it if I just set that at the account level so every time I created a Lookbook, I didn't have to set the same color.” Super small, super easy to implement, we turn that around the next day. That just makes her life a little bit easier.

Then I would say what's been the most rewarding and the bigger feedback we've gotten is, as we've had conversations with these users, really talking about what motivates them and what scares them about this journey and what excites them, and that's what gives us the fuel to keep going and building. There's this deep feeling of we're all in this together and entrepreneurship is really hard. We have good days and we have bad days.

We released a big feature last week, released our Chrome extension to help you make tagging items to your inventory easier. I knew nothing about Chrome extensions before a month ago. We built it, we released it, and on to the next.

One of the stylists in our beta reached out and she was like, "I really hope that you guys are celebrating. I really hope you guys are taking a minute." So very long-winded answer, but I would say we are getting the nitty-gritty of the product and how to make it better, and then we're also really getting to understand this industry in a way that even eight months of conversations, I don't think, could have done this deeply.

Megan Wright: I totally agree with that. Yeah. I'll add two things. One is that Kaitlin is building the platform and she is so fast and creative and learning new coding languages. It's true, someone will give us feedback. Then the next day, she will turn around and update, which is just amazing.

Then one thing I think you said in an earlier podcast, Nicole, was that you can't get something right until you get it wrong. I feel like that's something we have really tried to adopt, and hopefully, we're getting more right than wrong, but it's true. I feel like we've learned that we had to get it out.

We had to get Nove out into the world and have folks using it, and we're just learning so much from them. Every time, we're learning the things that they don't want and that they do want and how to make the product better and better every single day.

Nicole Otchy: I'm so glad you're sharing something behind the scenes because we rarely see this and it's very easy, especially one of the things people say to me a lot is, “Well, I'm a creative, I don't work in the same way as tech, science, or whatever.” But it allows us to be over here and you guys over there, but in reality, the human experience of running the business is the same for all of us.

It's just the tools with which we do it are different and so that experience of having to fail over and over, having to learn new things, this is probably one of the things that I feel like we talk about the least because we think a lot about when we start a business what we're good at.

We don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about all the things that we're going to have to get good at to be successful. When you do have those days where things don't go as planned, or you get bad feedback, or you're not in a week of win streaks, what do you guys do to keep your head up and keep going? Any good little tactics, tips, insider knowledge on this? Because I feel like that's pretty common in tech, in science.

Megan Wright: That's so true. I think one thing that is nice to have someone on your team, I think that Kaitlin and I feel lucky because, of course, there are two of us, we can bounce off of each other, and so often, when one of us is like, "Oh my gosh. What did we do?" the other one is like, "Wait, this is awesome. We got feedback. That's amazing. How great." So that has been really nice.

Then I think the other thing is also how amazing it is to have tried. I think that goes for all the stylists as well is like how amazing that you're putting yourself out there and doing something that you really love and really just trying to shift that mindset.

For us, Nove has been live for one month and how amazing that there are people using it. So I think it's the same for a stylist. It's like how amazing that even that one person has purchased this brand new larger service that you're offering, that you're taking a chance on. So I think just continuing to shift that mindset of reminding yourself how far you've come rather than the pitfalls once you get there.

Nicole Otchy: I love that you said, “We got feedback, that's a win.” If that is such a great way of reprogramming your brain, someone actually was willing to tell me, maybe in not the nicest tone, but still how to make something better. Then I got to win because of that feedback and I love that. That's so good.

One of the things, I think what Kaitlin said is that you've had all these conversations and it's really in the refinement that you're learning about the industry even more deeply. We've had several conversations over the last eight or nine months. One of the things I'm curious about, because you have talked to so many stylists, it is wild how many people are like, "Oh, I just got phoned, I just got phoned."

My gosh, it feels like we're all on the phone call pattern that's the same. Everyone's talking to you before they're talking to me or vice versa. One of the things I'm curious about is what you see as being in the industry, but a little bit outside of it as the trends or the changes internally, the way it's viewed, or the future of it, because you guys also sit obviously in the technology space. What do you think the possibilities are for this field? What do you think would need to change? What do you think we're doing well? Kind of like an overview of the styling industry would be fascinating if you could indulge me.

Megan Wright: Yeah, that's a meaty one. I would say in terms of the trends that we're seeing that became clear to us right away. Well, one, the pros and cons of social media, it's amazing for discovery, but I think Kaitlin mentioned this earlier, you're so at the whim of algorithms and so really learning how to harness that to your benefit and so that's where we think the things like guides or memberships, like lower-tier memberships could be really interesting for stylists to take advantage of because even if not every person that follows you on Instagram is going to be the type of person who can pay for a full one-on-one service, but there might be lower tiers of entry for them that just start getting them into your sphere.

We think continuing to expand on that by offering different ways to do styling services for them, even if it's just a monthly guide or something that they get access to your top tips. We think that continuing to build on Substack, frankly, we think that that is a trend that we're excited to give stylists tools to do that.

Then, personalization, I think that probably in line with social media, we think that folks are overwhelmed by choice a lot. Then also, seeking to stand out from the sameness, I think that's one thing we've heard a lot from the consumer side, if you will.

So, stylists continuing to lean into personalization, in their technology, but also in their style, not making personalized recommendations to stand out from that overwhelming choice on social media and also really helping their clients figure out their personal style, how do they perceive themselves, how do they want to be perceived, we think that that is contributing to the growth of the personal styling industry, which I don't know if we called this out yet.

I think you and I have talked about this, we talked about this, Nicole, but the personal styling industry is expected to grow 34% every single year until 2031, which is crazy. Then I think another thing is, I think there's a call for more inclusivity, diverse representation, and then also sustainability.

I think clients want to see themselves reflected more in fashion than they have previously, especially as millennial babies. I think stylists are stepping into that gap of meeting the needs of all body shapes, sizes, identities. I think that we'll continue to see that to grow.

On Nove, we're looking into how we can make tools available for stylists to really step into this gap and offer all sorts of services to all sorts of people. Then the last trend I'll chat through is the buzzwords of AI and data-driven insights. I think it's been everywhere, especially our background in tech that's been the last two or three years of our lives, it's like how can we AI-ify everything that loves AI?

We've been thinking of how can we actually use data or AI to help stylists run their business. One thing we've talked about is shopping. How can we make it so that when they're shopping for a client, rather than searching the entire internet, we can help them parse those out based on the specific needs that they have and their past habits?

Then also one dream thing for us is building a tech spot for stylists. We have so many conversations with stylists who are like, "I don't know if I should offer texting or if I shouldn't. I can't always be available, but I want to offer that to my high-tier stylists.” So we've thought about, can we build a tech spot version of themselves for some of those quick inquiries by using their past data? Then that's also a thing they could package up and offer as part of their services.

Those are some of the fun things that we think about when we think about how to harness not only the trends in styling but also just the trends in technology and how they could be leveraged for styling.

Nicole Otchy: That is so exciting. I had just taken so many notes.

Megan Wright: I know that was a really long answer.

Nicole Otchy: No. It was a really big question, and as I was asking it, this is a big ask, but also I [inaudible] answer, so thank you. One other thing you said that was so fascinating, which is why it is so critical to have people with a different set of expertise looking in on your business, on your industry, on your own skills and gaps in skills, is that you said two things that I never would have dreamed of or that there was just wouldn't have even come into, I think, the mind frame of a stylist, which was that one of the opportunities stylists have that brands can't fill is because we're all different and we come from different backgrounds and whatever, we can personalize the experience more than, honestly, and this is not an either/or game because I know you also work with influencers, but an influencer selling something according to their experience of the world.

That's why they have their own business model. We're selling something according to our client's desired experience of the world on themselves. That is a gap. That is a spot that a brand won't be able to fill, an influencer won't be able to fill.

Knowing those opportunities, even though we're like, “Yes, we work with you through your body shape or whatever,” there's not always an appreciation of how valuable that is to the client because it's just what you do.

Hearing you say that directly before the AI conversation is helpful because so many stylists are like, "Oh, we're going to get overrun by AI." What I'm hearing you say is, "It's not a problem."

Kaitlin Oran: That is never going to be, obviously, our goal, but we do feel really strongly that this industry is here to stay. To your point, people want that personal understanding of “Who am I?” I mean, we joke, and in speaking to some of the women in our beta, it's almost part styling, part therapy for a lot of women.

I remember, having done this, coming back from maternity leave, got some fireworks just went off behind my head on the screen, coming back, those who have had children know you don't feel comfortable in your body, but you're like "My body just did this amazing thing," there's just so much that goes into, obviously, for everyone getting dressed, but for me, for that period of time, it was so sensitive.

No AI is ever going to replace the ability to have that conversation with me and understand how to make recommendations that make me feel confident. I think to your point, Nicole, I love hearing you say, coming in as outsiders, we are “outsiders,” I hope we're insiders now, but I think what stylists do take for granted is the impact that they're having sometimes.

When we talk to them or we hear them speak about their relationships with their clients, it is so incredibly moving to us. It's an amazing thing that you're doing every day. Again, as people who experience the output of working with a stylist, we get it, feeling more confident when you get up and get dressed in the morning, we all have to get dressed every day. That's just one thing we have to do. If you are helping people step into that, feeling better, it's an amazing thing.

Megan Wright: Yeah, it is. I like also what Kaitlin was mentioning, coming back from maternity leave and it's like your body's changed, but you're also so proud of this amazing thing your body's done and I think that's one thing that, as we think of trends in the styling industry is we're seeing that clothes are less seen as armor, covering up insecurities and more using it as ways to exude your confidence and personal self and we think that that's so powerful.

We love seeing that shift in the industry and how that also gears towards inclusivity and allowing folks to feel represented through what they wear rather than using it to cover things up.

Nicole Otchy: I love that point. It's just so great to have people that you're very much on the inside, but also having clients, having talked to so many people, having also their perspective of being in technology and seeing how we can get better because of it, just all of it is so incredibly valuable.

What other aspects of the business do you think are potentially in the future for you guys? Are you thinking you're going to stick here? Just because I'd like to have a bigger conversation, I think it's important to always be present, but also looking towards the future, so what are thoughts that you guys have on that for the business?

Kaitlin Oran: I would say we are in it. We are here. We want to keep committing to this user figuring out, if we get to a point where we have done all that we can do for stylists via Nove, great, we can retire. We have no plans to shift out of that. I will say, I think we've mentioned this a little bit, but the biggest things on our roadmap are really going to be leaning into those new monetization strategies.

We've talked about guides and that's something that's available today, but you talked a little bit about memberships or subscriptions, how can you as a stylist reach your audience in different ways? Again, maybe it's a $ 30-a-month membership and they get one guide or five recommendations personalized to them.

Right now, that takes a lot of balancing of different tools, you have your payments over here and you have your recommendations in a spreadsheet or a platform over here. What we really want to do is lean into helping support that through our platform.

Then along that same vein, being able to support things like newsletters. How great would it be if you could send a newsletter from the same place where you're managing your clients and storing your recommendations? Right now, it's just so much, you have your recommendations here and then you're going into Canva, and then you're taking that Canva and you're putting it into Substack.

Our goal for Nove is to be able to really consolidate that entire workflow and, again, lean into giving you those monetization opportunities, allow you to power your newsletter from the same place that you are creating your Lookbooks, and sending the reminders to your clients that you have a session coming up or whatnot.

Nicole Otchy: That's amazing. I'm so excited for everybody to have everything in one place: a dashboard, a business dashboard for stylists.

Kaitlin Oran: Yeah, the dashboard is so interesting, and maybe it's our tech background. I don't know, businesses rely on analytics. That is how they make decisions. They, in theory, you would hope.

Megan Wright: A little bit [inaudible].

Kaitlin Oran: Right, sure, not a perfect science, but I think we're just so excited to be able to put that in the hands of our users. You are a business. That's going to be our mantra forever, like you are a business, we're going to treat you like one so we're going to give you the tools to make those business decisions.

I think one thing we talked about, Nicole, is understanding your client personas, understanding and digging deep into who are you working with. Even if we can give you an export of, "Here are all your clients, and here's some overarching data about them so you can understand where you're connecting with people," great, and that's so low-lift for us, so it's even more exciting when it's just an easy thing for us to be able to give our users. Those are the things that we're going to continue to lean into. I feel like I'm missing something, Megan.

Megan Wright: I think you crushed it.

Nicole Otchy: You did. It's so incredible to hear you say, I've heard you say this multiple times when I got to walk through to you like, “Oh, that's such an easy thing, that's such an easy thing.”

When you are, I mean, not just a stylist, but we'll talk about that as an entrepreneur, and you have your skill set, and you're used to doing things the way you do it, because it takes so much brainpower to change the way you do things in your business, because you don't know what you don't know about tools, I think it's going to be life-changing for so many stylists to see what the things you guys can start to be "Oh, that's full. Let me just add that feature or whatever," to us is life-changing and we don't even know it yet, so I want to encourage anybody listening, get on that beta, try it.

I don't care what software you are already in, try it because I want you all to experience because I've had the conversations with both of these women before about this, I want you to see what it's like to have someone say, “Oh yeah, it's really not a crazy lift for you guys to want your scheduling to be in the same place where you are interfacing with clients and to be able to look at how long you're staying on an app to do your work is not a crazy ask.”

It is a pretty reasonable thing to want and I want the stylist listening to ask for more of the experiences around them and I think that you guys are really just such a great example of a company that's helping us do that and be better in that way so thank you so much for that.

Megan Wright: Our pleasure.

Nicole Otchy: Alright, and before we wrap up here, I'm just going to ask one last thing that I'm curious about. If you could give the stylists listening, one or two pieces of advice or the top thing that you think would be most helpful for them to focus on when it comes to running their business like a business, what are the biggest blind spots that you can say generally across the board, if you started here, you'd be that much better off?

Megan Wright: Oh, I think the first thing that came to my mind is retention. I think 80% of revenue comes from 20% of clients for most businesses. Just really understanding how they can retain their clients, keep them engaged, offer varying services, they might not need a big edit every quarter, but they might need some gap pieces or things like that. I think getting a handle on their retention strategy is the first thing that comes to my mind.

Nicole Otchy: Love that.

Kaitlin Oran: The words out of my mouth. I don't know.

Megan Wright: One brain.

Kaitlin Oran: Yeah.

Nicole Otchy: That was a good one. You just talked about data, which your data's not a bad one either.

Kaitlin Oran: Yeah, look, I think, yeah, treating yourself like a business, like we keep saying, and there's no reason not to feel empowered to act like a business, look at your data, make decisions, cut things that aren't working for you. I think one thing as an entrepreneur that we've learned, sometimes you go down a path and there's the sunk cost fallacy.

You're like, “Well, I've been doing this for this much time. I just need to finish it.” Maybe sometimes being honest with yourself and saying, “This isn't the right service. Maybe I focus here, or maybe I focus on this type of client,” just being open to having those internal dialogues and finding people, to Megan's point earlier, who were happy to be those people who are in it with you and can be that sounding board.

I know, Nicole, you're that person for a lot of people listening, but having that support system I think is huge. Not a business decision, but a personal piece of advice as you're going through this journey. Find your people that will support you in doing this and hang in there even on those days that it feels like “Why the heck did I decide to do this? Why don't I just have a nine-to-five job?”

Nicole Otchy: That is a very good reminder because often we don't realize when we start a business, we also need a whole other group of people who are not in our normal life to get it better. That's not something we look at or have to do when we go get a normal job. That's not one of the requirements to balance both.

I mean you have your colleagues or you have the people you work with, for however good or bad that is, that's part of the whole experience but we don't get that when we start businesses so it's a very important reminder and it's important to life and business so thank you to that. Thank you both so much for being here and for sharing your experience and platform.

Megan Wright: Thank you. We appreciate it.

Kaitlin Oran: Talk soon, Nicole.

Megan Wright: All right, bye.

Nicole Otchy: Thank you so much for hanging out with me. It turns out that social proof is actually pretty important. So if you could help me out, I'd so appreciate it. If you just had a quick free moment and could leave me a rating or review on the podcast app, that would be killer. And even better, if you wanted to share this episode on Instagram and tag me, that would totally make my day and it would bring so much more awareness to the podcast and would help other stylists just like you who are looking to build lucrative styling business because the better each of us does, the better all of us do. Thanks for hanging out with me and I'll chat with you next time.