Conrad Poulson

I'm Conrad Poulson, I'm based in Hampshire and I'm a startup founder.

I split my time between trying to find customers and keeping the customers I've got happy and working with the remote team that makes up our business.

So our business is we build AI workers for, businesses that are trying to grow. So think of these as extra employees for a business but employees that work 24 hours a day and they're designed to really help those businesses make the most of the teams that they have got.

And so growing a business is ultimately it's about selling. So you can have the best product in the world, but how you get that product into the hands of the right customers and find those customers is really what makes or breaks that business and what makes it successful.

Our team works remotely quite a lot. So there's me and two others who have set the business up. My co-founder is in London and my other co-founder is in Brighton.

So I sort of have three typical days, I suppose. I have a day probably out trying to meet new customers or keep my existing customers happy. So those tend to be like a day in somewhere like London. And I would have meetings around town where I'm having coffees and it's kind of back to back.

One, talking to customers, two, talking to people in the industry that I'm in so that I'm up to speed with the latest and greatest that's going on. So those are those days, London days.

And then I sort of get my head down and do a work day. It consists of two things. So probably in the morning, I try and use that time. I feel like my brain is working best at that sort of time of day. So I work on the kind of hard problems.

And so some of the stuff that I do is about how do I make sure that the products that we're building for our customers are effective? So I get quite hands on with the product.

And then in the afternoon, I will probably then spend quite a lot of time thinking and working about where are we gonna find new customers. A lot of that is about my own network. reaching out to people via email or phone, setting up video calls.

And then the third type of day tends to be then how I work with my co-founders. So twice a week I have, we have a check-in and we all talk about what we're doing and what's our, what our, agree what our priorities are for the week.

So we work on quite a short time scale. We think about what's the week ahead, what's really important.

The best thing, it's very flexible. So I have two children and so I get to go and see their sports games and I get to go for a run at lunchtime if I fancy it or go for a game of tennis in the afternoon.

And it's really interesting, right, so every day is different. I don't have a set routine. I quite enjoy it. Some people do like a routine. I quite enjoy the variety that comes.

The hardest thing is that it's quite uncertain. You're not necessarily able to think too far into the future. The success of the business is not guaranteed.

So it can be difficult sometimes to plan too far ahead because you have to think, okay, have I got enough business to last me the next six months?

So from that point of view, it can be a little stressful.

Somewhat by accident, I suppose.

So I studied, I did quite a lot of sciences at school and then I went to study product design, designing and manufacturing real things in the real world.

And so I did a degree in product design and then I took that product design background and I moved into interface design. So designing lots of applications for mobile phones. So those kinds of interfaces.

And so that gave me, that exposed me to the world of tech and I joined a very small company as one of the early employees working on interface design.

My first job was with a small company. So I was very, I was already very comfortable with working with quite small companies. And I was in an area where things were moving really quickly. So there's plenty of opportunity to create. It was quite easy to create a business early on.

And then I did do some corporate work. So then I did work on a couple of early stage companies and then I went and worked for a large telecoms company. And then I came back to another startup.

I think the moment, probably the moment in my career, my last startup before this one, the last startup I founded, it took a lot of work to get it started. It was almost like three years before we signed our first really big customer. And I just remember that moment where that customer agreed and I was actually on holiday.

And it's one of those things where when you're doing your own business, you always feel a little bit guilty taking a holiday. And this contract came through while I was on holiday.

And it was a really good reminder that it's important to take time out, that if you put the work in, the reward comes. So just sitting there staring at the screen, waiting for the news, didn't really help.

So I always kind of go back to that and remind myself that there are times to kind of, there are times that you need in order to kind of recharge.

I think about this a lot. I think it's always it's easy to think that as you look at the adult world, that there's this kind of set of secrets that you're not privy to, right?

That everybody knows something that you don't know, that unlocks opportunities or that there's this kind of knowledge that everybody has. And you need to remember that that generally there isn't, right?

Everybody is still learning and lots of people are still kind of figuring it out even when they're old and gray like me. I suppose that's that that thing about being slightly fearless and not being afraid of making mistakes.

You try things, try as many things as possible. You don't have to decide, right?

You will learn what you love doing by trying lots of things. Don't try and plan it out all in advance.