Your Life After Tech

Ep 011: Jess Vice - From Copywriter to Collective

• Life After Tech • Season 1 • Episode 11

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What happens when you reject traditional business hierarchies and build something radically different? Jess Vice takes us on their journey from struggling English graduate to tech professional to co-founder of Kit Research and Strategy—a collective challenging how business gets done.

After years of corporate instability, being repeatedly laid off without warning, Jess realized they needed to create a work environment aligned with their vision. The collective model Jess co-created offers clients expert services without the 40% markup typical of traditional agencies. It allows practitioners to set aside vacation weeks at the beginning of each year, create multiple income streams aligned with their passions, and question workplace norms many take for granted. 

Jess shares valuable lessons from their journey: apply the entrepreneurial mindset to your own life, start with small experiments, and always question established norms. 

Find Jess at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessvice/ and https://kitresearchandstrategy.com


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Debbie Levitt:

Welcome to the your Life After Tech podcast. This is episode number 11. I'm Debbie Levitt. Don't forget to check out our lifeaftertech. info multiverse, including our book, Discord, community coaching, live events and more, Because you might be done with tech, tech might be done with you, or you're thinking about adding non-tech work to your tech career. Today's guest is Jess Vice, J-E-S-S-V-I-C-E, who co-founded Kit Research and Strategy. They moved from writing to content strategy into UX and is now focused on creating a strong collective of practitioners. Let's get to know Jess.

Jess Vice:

Hey, I'm Jess Vice. I use they/ them pronouns. My story starts at a small college in North Carolina where I got a degree in English and thought I was going to be a writer. Turns out you have to have some money to be able to live in New York City and be a writer. So all my dreams kind of crashed. I also graduated in 07, which was during one of the recessions that we've seen in the last couple of decades.

Jess Vice:

So there were no jobs and writer Jess, with no jobs, ended up working retail. I worked part-time at a bookstore. I worked freelance, which, with a degree in English, I wasn't really prepared for. No one had taught me business courses or how to write a contract or any of those things. So I did a lot of editing work for folks and then chased them down for money. For a very long time I was pretty broke and at some point someone said hey, you can write things. You should work for this agency. They're hiring a copywriter. I thought you know, I've got nothing to lose. They offered me a job. They said you don't know shit about marketing, but you are a good writer so we can teach you.

Jess Vice:

Okay, day one I was looking up on my tiny slide phone, how to open a Mac computer, because I'd never seen one before. That was my first introduction to everything Internet. I learned how to use Macs. I learned how designers make things and then developers turn them into websites, and then what SEO means and where that goes and how people find a new business. So it was sort of my crash course into business as well as marketing and tech. I didn't understand the internet, so I've been from copywriter I moved into content strategy, which is sort of that higher step up.

Jess Vice:

Let's look at all of the different pieces of content that are being made and how they work together for people. And then I moved into UX, which seemed really obvious to me. My questions were always coming back to well, who's using this and is it working? And are we answering their questions or are we just making more stuff to put on the internet? And most of the time folks said, well, we don't know, just make more stuff. So, whether it was tools or yeah, it was this big cycle of just keep producing stuff. We have no idea if it's working, especially in content strategy at that time Just keep writing articles, just keep posting things. We don't know. You know volume. It was quantity over quality for sure. So I bugged people long enough until someone gave me $500 budget, I think, and said if you can use this, figure out what people think, see if it works, see if we can change what we're making. And that was sort of my intro into UX.

Jess Vice:

I'd been studying it for a long time, studying apps and devices and experiences and sort of that Don Norman approach of user experience is people interacting with things. So looking at the world around me and having been in retail for a couple of years, I just thought there's got to be a better way to do this than what we are doing. So one of my favorite projects was at this affiliate marketing company that took sales calls off the Internet and they had live people in a sales center all day long taking sales calls and the software they were using was 12 plus years old. It had been band-aided to pieces. The original developer was gone, nobody knew how to get in touch with them, nobody knew sort of the original purpose of the project and they had no internal tracking. They were using sales like rep reported data every day to check their operations and it just was. Everybody knew it was a mess but nobody wanted to talk about it and someone finally said well, just keep talking about UX. What if we brought them over and had them look at this and turned into a whole process of rebuilding the software from the ground up? We had so many reps within a couple of days asking me if I was going to be fixing it for them as soon as I showed up on the floor hey, I have some questions. Let me look over your shoulder. They kept saying, oh my gosh, are you going to change this? Is it going to be better? And by the time we'd launched our beta, there was this great backlog of teams that were like please, can we be next to have access to it? The first team was already just so excited about how great this was. So that kind of got my I think that kind of got me really into tech and the idea of like software and tools that we use to help accomplish our daily business.

Jess Vice:

Um, from there I went to a commercial real estate company that was building their own version of Adobe products internally for real estate agents. Questionable, um, we and really they were printing books on paper and my first question was why are we printing books? It's 20, 23, 21, 20 something. Give them an ipad, push data to them like, what is, what are we doing? We're a commercial real estate company. It was berkshire hathaway associated like let's, let's, use that cash. It was wild, um. So working there was fascinating. I was just seeing how badly tech in 2019 was still being built.

Jess Vice:

And then my last job in corporate was with an agency where we did a couple of different interesting things. We tried to build a couple of different apps Marketing and ad agencies plus apps don't really mix, so they leaned on me a lot for those, but it was still really funny to see the outcomes. I think the interesting piece of all of those jobs is that I was let go from every single one of them, mostly without any warning and usually not by my own fault. I hadn't done anything. It was a business decision, um, and I had, you know, a few days to a week or two to regroup and try to find another job, and, you know, keep going. And so I was sort of in that pattern of getting let go and then going to a new job quickly for years.

Jess Vice:

And in my last job, when I finally took a job, I said, okay, I'm going to guess the runway here is pretty short, they're probably not going to keep me long. This seems to be a pattern. I'm going to take those couple of years and plan what I want to do next, because I hadn't had the chance to do that before. I hadn't had the foresight yes gave me and did a lot of side work trying to figure out what would be the thing that I would love to do on my own, maybe in a different scenario, when this job ends. So that's where I am today. I've launched a small collective and excited to talk about that at some point, but that's sort of who I am from a work perspective.

Debbie Levitt:

Fantastic. Thank you for those stories. And that time to talk about your collective is probably now, because my next question is when did you start thinking about making a shift away from some of these more traditional jobs or agency jobs and moving into kind of more control over your own universe, more control over?

Jess Vice:

your own universe. Well, I'd always been freelancing and that has scared me right, like there's so much that you have to do taxes and there's so many things that you have to consider and contracts and how do you get paid. And I'd sort of been doing freelance all along on the side and it was just easier to use it as like a write-off. And so one day after I decided like this is the last job I'm going to take in corporate, I need to figure out what's next. I hadn't even gotten really to not corporate yet. I was doing a journal entry that somebody had sent me the prompt and the prompt was describe your perfect day. And I just went through and started writing that I wanted to wake up with the sun and I wanted to go outside and I wanted to sit and work in the garden for a little while and then, when it got too hot, I wanted to come inside and talk to people whether that was contract work or something, I didn't know, but I wanted to be involved with folks. And then I wanted to go back outside for happy hour and spend the evening cooking on the grill and sort of like that's my perfect day. So that helped me realize I'm not a nine-to-fiver. That has never worked for me. I'm I'm very. It doesn't feed my creative juices.

Jess Vice:

Um, and as I sat with that over the year or two that I was still working at this agency, um, I had a chance to talk to someone in South America who runs a collective, and that was what he told me about. I was asking him about something completely different, but he said well, I have a collective. Here's how we work. It's all mutual benefit. We're set up in a way that we all talk about finances together, we talk about clients together. Nobody makes decisions without everybody else involved. There's no CEO, there's no hierarchy. If someone needs money this month for an expense, they are free to say so, and then we decide amongst ourselves how the work gets split up. And I lit up. It was just one of those things of this is community, this is fair and equitable. This is a different way of working that we've never seen before, and I want to do that. So it wasn't like I didn't really have a specific thing I was going to. I just knew when I leave, I'm going to start a collective.

Debbie Levitt:

It's really interesting. I can't wait to hear more about this if you can go even deeper because I know in the last handful of years, a lot of people have said, oh my gosh, I'm so tired of corporate or I'm being laid off or I can't find a job, I'm going to go into business for myself, I'm going to be a freelancer consultant, I'm going to start my own agency, and it seemed like everybody I knew on LinkedIn was going to become an agency, and my natural reaction to that was, while I want to support people starting their own business, I felt like then we were just all going to compete against each other and I didn't understand why more of us weren't going into business with each other or hiring each other or whatever that looked like. So tell me more about kind of anything that inspired you to go in that collective direction.

Jess Vice:

Yeah, I mean, you're exactly right. I feel like if everybody leaves corporate and starts their own agency, we're just repeating at scale the things that we've been doing for a really long time. That model doesn't work. I don't want to work in a business where the CEO gets paid so much that they can go on safari every summer and literally, and I'm still struggling to pay for my house and my food and you know my bills. It doesn't think that's just not that. I don't think that's the future.

Jess Vice:

And I also kept, I kept having this thought of I want to work with my friends. I have really smart friends. I have a friend who is a theater director. I have a friend who is a mountain climber. Like there's got to be a way to bring them in and give them money and give them business that that I can set up. Like I've got to be able to figure this out. And I also, after freelancing for so long, was like I really don't want to take on the responsibility of a business by myself. I don't want to be the chief, anything. I would like to be one of many making hive mind decisions. There's probably a beekeeping thread here. I've kept bees for four years and watching how all of those bees work together. And it's not for the queen, it's for the hive. Um, just like that there's. There's so much more.

Jess Vice:

So I also started to think about the benefits of the collective. When you hire an agency, most of the time there's fees, right, there's like a 40% markup, um, that goes who knows where. I worked in agencies for five or six years and I still don't really know where that markup went, except maybe funding safaris, you know, I mean, I think it probably does. It doesn't make me feel any better, but that might be where it went. So if that's the case, then wouldn't it be beneficial for the people hiring agencies to hire a collective that maybe doesn't have a 40% markup?

Jess Vice:

And how could we make money? That is fair. I get paid what I'm worth. But if I, let's say so, I'm a contractor, let's say my rate is $200 an hour. Let's say my rate is $200 an hour and if I can quote a client, a project, with $200 an hour for 15 hours and I add five hours for admin, that's still so much less than 40% markup. And I am doing the admin work. I have to pay my own taxes. I have to right, there's all these pieces to it. So even when you add, let's say, the collective is five people and we're going to have five people on this project and we had five admin hours for every person, we're still coming in under 40% markup that it is much more beneficial to the client to work with a group of experts who don't cost as much.

Debbie Levitt:

Yeah, that is a really interesting thought.

Debbie Levitt:

It kind of reminds me of what, for me, is the early days of working with agencies, which for me was the mid-90s, late 90s, early 2000s, and you'd go into these agencies or become a freelancer at them and there was always people who had, I don't want to say, weird backgrounds, but non-design backgrounds.

Debbie Levitt:

You're talking about your mountain climber friend and it kind of reminds me of like what I a dream organization, and that, especially if you're trying to offer innovation or disruption or something fresh, then it makes sense for people to be from different backgrounds and different places and to offer that diversity and not just be like, well, here's four brand designers, they're gonna do the thing. It's like, no, here's a brand designer with a mountain climber and a tennis player and a musician and uh, you know, and someone who runs their own craft brewery, you know, and they're gonna brainstorm some of your brand stuff. And I I always felt like that was a better way to go, but we didn't see enough of that and then it kind of died out as we all became sure it's good to specialize, but then what happened to the mountain climber friend?

Jess Vice:

Yeah, exactly. Well, if you think about it, if you build a group around an agency model, you have to have a diverse team. So we're building our collective around a very specific niche. We are research and strategy. We don't do anything else we can, but what clients will learn is we will do the research and strategy and then we will hire from our network to experts to do the things that we don't do. So we'll bring in what I'm picturing is groups of collectives all around the world who specialize in really specific things. So I can say, yes, we will build you a brand and a new website and an app and all of the things you're asking for. Here's the price.

Jess Vice:

I sell the project and then I do the research and strategy with Kit, and Kit hires a dev collective and a design collective and an app building collective, and we bring in the experts to do all of their work, because they're the ones who are really good at it. And my hope for those collectives is that the way that it's designed is that you don't have to work 40 to 50 hours a week to survive. It's more that freelance style. I've got a little bit of time. I can put my passions of what I love doing, into the things I love doing, so I can be mountain climbing or beekeeping or all these other things that inspire and grow me as a human so that I'm a better, more creative researcher and strategist when I get to do those kinds of things.

Debbie Levitt:

Yeah, love it, love it. One thing that I like to ask all of our guests is to kind of take them back into one of the core things from the Life After Tech book, which is how does this type of work that you're doing now match some of your core personal qualities or personality traits?

Jess Vice:

Oh, okay, I'm a sucker for personality tests, that's just I don't know why. I love to see how. I guess it's the researcher part of me that's trying to figure out how did they build these questions and the groups that they're putting people into? And are these the only groups, or are there more that they didn't see? So I take any personality test that comes my way.

Jess Vice:

One of my favorites is StrengthsFinder, and a couple of my top strengths are networking, storing resources in sort of like a library in my brain, and then connection, which is bringing all those resources to bear on different people and to bring them resources from that library. So there's this networking idea like the collective and this network of collectives and all the different resources and ways that I can tie threads between them is right up my alley. And then, having all these resources in my head that I can say, oh, we can't do that for you, but let me connect you to this person who can, or did you see this article and this explains what, like that, it's almost silly that it took me 40 years to get here. It's what it feels like. Um, but in hindsight, I had to go through all of the things that I went through in order to make it to this point where I had this aha moment, the aha moment, is always at the center.

Debbie Levitt:

Thinking back on your transition into your own collective and kind of a business that it sounds like you're co-running or co-owning, do you have any mistakes or regrets or things you wish you could have done differently?

Jess Vice:

Yes, first of all, if you're going to LLC, if you're going to incorporate or do any of that kind of business documentation, if it's in the second half of the year, just wait until January. We incorporated, we did LLC filing paperwork on, I think, december 4th and then realized we have to pay taxes for the three weeks that we were alive in 2024. And it's just a giant headache. Just talk to a CPA before you file things. Yeah, and that's. I think that's. The other thing is hire experts to do what they do. We hired a lawyer to file the docs for us, which was so helpful because my brain again, like I don't want to file my own taxes, I don't want to do all the legal stuff. I'm happy to read all of it and sign it, but please don't make me think about what needs to happen next. That was just such a good use of money and time.

Jess Vice:

Um, I think, as far as mistakes go, the other thing that we did was we jumped, we got really attached to a name really quickly and we didn't do enough homework on who else was out there, and so we'd already sort of started a brand and design and website and then realized, oh, this name isn't going to fly. We have to kind of try again and several people told me as we were getting into this, just let it flow, let it be organic, don't try to name it. And we went straight for let's get a name and a website and do the thing. Yeah, I think in hindsight I would have shopped things around more, I would have talked to more people and asked questions and poked some holes and stuff a little bit longer. But when you leave a job and you don't have more job coming, there's sort of an urgency to fill that gap with. Like, let's do something that feels legitimate like a business.

Debbie Levitt:

Yeah, those are some great. Be carefuls. I know that everybody is always like I've got to name my puppy and I've got to give it a name right away, and sometimes that can land people in some very strange names or sometimes names people are already using. And I'm not a lawyer, but I always recommend people do a lot of research and digging into other names. But I always recommend people do a lot of research and digging into other names.

Debbie Levitt:

Check the US If you're American. Check the US trademark database to see if some of these names are trademarked. These are searchable for free. You might as well check. Check if somebody's already using the com and do they compete with you? Then you don't want to be the net or the whatever. So, yeah, lots of great advice, great advice.

Debbie Levitt:

But you know it's hard to tell people to pause on that because they're so excited to jump in with all of this stuff. I'm working with a startup now who's going through some of the same things, where they're trying to come up with logos and colors before they have other things named and decided, and then are we getting what's our dot com? And then they keep giving us new email addresses because they changed their mind again and I. I want them to watch this episode, but we haven't even edited it yet. So you know, definitely, definitely feel you there. Um, anything else you feel like might have been a mistake or an oops, we should have done that differently um, not a mistake, but I think maybe a mindset that really helped us.

Jess Vice:

Pretty early on, my partner, my business partner, maria, said we should really do for ourselves the way that we would do for our clients. It's sort of standard and accepted that the cobbler's children go without shoes. The agency doesn't ever get a new website because they're always working on everybody else's websites. And she said you know, if we're going to be like a really legit research and strategy group, we should do the research and strategy, which is where we found the name issues and started digging in a little deeper. Ironically, the name that we were going for was Dig, and the more we dug, it was not good, it didn't work.

Jess Vice:

Yeah, but I think that mindset of this is our first step into doing this in the real world. We should do this in a way that we're proud of, that our clients could look at as a case study that demonstrates all of the different steps of our expertise. And also, then we kind of didn't miss anything. We caught all the things that we really needed to catch and we caught them at the right time. I think if we'd kept going with Digg the way that we had been, we would have caught that too late and had an LLC and had to do name changes and documents and things. So I think that had to do name changes and documents and things.

Jess Vice:

So I think that mindset to Do for yourself the way that you would do for your clients, use that business expertize in the acumen that you have. And then also the mindset that we're really new at this and it's OK if it's not right. The first time I told you before we launched the website and immediately both of us were like, oh man, we could have done that so different. We're going to have to redo it, but you know what we did it it's live, it does what it's supposed to for right now it's fine. That's the hardest part, I think, when there's no work coming in is looking at all of your things and just criticizing and picking them apart instead of taking that next step towards finding clients, making those connections, building relationships, instead of fine-tuning and nitpicking, which is very tempting and we've had to put it on the back burner.

Debbie Levitt:

Yeah, taking the larger actions and saving some of the smaller ones for another time.

Jess Vice:

Yeah, yeah. The other thing I'll say too, that we did that I think should be a new norm is, at the beginning of the year, we looked at the calendar and we picked time where we wouldn't work. And I got this idea from Vivian Castillo and Humanity Centered. She talks about this all the time, but we said if we don't sit down before the calendar year and say we're off these weeks and we will not work those weeks, and our clients will know it from the beginning and we're never going to give ourselves a break, and so we really need to make sure that that's part of the idea of this collective of self-sustaining and sustaining each other is also making sure we have space and time to be away and to honor that commitment together. So if anybody's thinking about this, I highly highly recommend even if you're an independent, I think, even if you're a solopreneur making sure that you have at least two consecutive weeks somewhere on the calendar that are just blocked off for no work, so that you can refresh and just start over.

Debbie Levitt:

Yeah, great point. We definitely do that in our world. My husband and I do a plan, a camper vacation. That's usually two or three weeks out in the universe somewhere. And it reminds me of a conversation I had with someone today who they have a religious holiday coming up. But they were like, but I can work, I'll work this morning and I'll work over here. And I said, look, you're a religious person, it's a religious holiday, please take the days off, I'll adjust the project plan, it's fine. And they're like no, uh, I can probably work a few hours over here. And I I was just like it's really fine, like it's really okay, it's, it's okay to go have a couple of days off for your religious holiday. Like it doesn't make sense for you to feel like you, the project dies if you, if this, we're all going to be okay, I'll take day. I said there's no work-life balance without work-life balance. Give yourself the gift of balancing these things.

Jess Vice:

I love that. When I was working at Bricadia, I had a team in India and went to see them for a week and a half and was just blown away by how carefully their culture honors all of their religious holidays. And they have one a month and it's everybody knows that we just don't work those three days and they eat and sing and party and go see family. And I was like what I came home going? I want a different calendar. I'm done with this American stuff where, like we have all the holidays in December when it's gross outside and nobody wants to leave the house, and we have like one in the middle of the summer. Like I want a holiday a month. So kids even were kind of joking around about like maybe we set up our own annual holiday calendar and we just make up holidays every month and take them off because, why not? We're in charge, we make the rules every month and take them off because why not?

Debbie Levitt:

We're in charge, we make the rules Right. Yeah, you know, I recently learned and I feel so embarrassed that I didn't know this before. So everybody, please excuse me that I didn't know this, but I am learning. You know, when we get all of these pieces of software and calendars, they always ask us does the week start on Sunday or does the week start on Monday? And have you ever looked at that and thought what are you talking about? Of course the week starts on Monday. Why is this even a question? Well, I recently learned why it is a question.

Debbie Levitt:

And because I have a client right now who is in Dubai and their weekend is Friday, saturday, interesting, and I didn't know this. And so they book because I have my calendar open seven days a week. So they book appointments with me on sunday. They book appointments with me sunday to thursday. They don't talk to me friday, saturday, and I was like, oh my gosh, all these years I've been accidentally slightly ethnocentric by not realizing that there's people in other parts of the world that have a different week than I do.

Jess Vice:

Well, even I've had this debate all the time Is Sunday the beginning of the week or is Monday? Is Sunday part of the weekend? Yes, right, we think like Friday, saturday, sunday, but in my mind, on a calendar, sunday is the beginning of the week. So where did these come from and why do we persist? And especially if you're going to go build a collective or start your own thing, do your own thing. We need, right now, especially we need people to buck the system and to buck the trends like there's oh, we need that so much. Um, there is a better way to do this.

Debbie Levitt:

do the four day, a week thing, or do yeah, or I say every day is the same to the self-employed. I have no idea what day it is. I think I've asked the people in my house twice today what day it was. I have no idea what day it is. That that's got positives and negatives, um, but totally so. Yeah, I mean like the local restaurant closed on Wednesdays. Why can't you be closed on Wednesdays? You know, maybe that just works best. Oh, you know someone who has been been on my YouTube show a lot and I don't want to name them since they're not here to say whether or not they'd want that, but they've told me that at their job they have, I think, work from home Friday and I think they end up taking a half day because, like that's the day to see the dentist and do all the things that are only open 9 to 5 that otherwise we can't get to.

Jess Vice:

Yeah, I remember that. That was so frustrating. And now at this point, I make appointments whenever I need to. So when the doctor says, well, we have a Tuesday at 1, I'm like great. I actually just scheduled a tattoo appointment for Thursday at 1 pm. I was like great, that's the first available, I'll take it right. Yeah, it's like life like, like you said, like work-life balance. We've skewed it so heavily towards work, controls, everything, and life fits in around work and that, just that realization, was where I just said you know, I'm done, that's, I can't, I can't anymore.

Debbie Levitt:

Totally feel you there. So getting back to some of my standard questions, since we're headed towards wrapping up my last two questions. So one of them is our listeners might be considering leaving tech or starting their own thing or trying to adjust their work universe. What advice do you have for them?

Jess Vice:

I'm just going to parrot what you've said before. I think planning is really important. Plan ahead. Go ahead and look a year, two, three years down the road, stash money and plan ahead. Also, I think there's there's a lot of like we've said, like there's systems and traditions and these sort of built-in ways of doing things that we never question. Question everything. Why am I waking up to go somewhere at 9 in the morning that I don't actually really like being at? My brain doesn't come online until 10. This has now been proven for the last year and a half. I'm just not coherent until 10 am. Why am I working at 9? There has to be a different way to do this. So question all the pieces of your daily life, both at work and at home, and start to pay attention to the things that you really love and light you up. Another piece of advice that you gave, debbie. I'm just literally going to say everything that you've said was Work doesn't have to be what we've always thought. Try things you love for side jobs.

Jess Vice:

It could be several streams of income. Last year I made tea out of my herbal garden in Utah and I paid $50 every once in a while to have a booth at a market to see if that was something that I liked doing, to see if I connected with people. It was really low cost. I think I maybe spent $500 all told across a couple of markets and supplies and I made a little bit more than I spent.

Jess Vice:

But that whole process was really interesting because it let me see how taxes work and it let me see about the market circuit and what people were interested in and connect with folks and by the end of it I was like this is not for me. I I cannot maintain this level of production, um, and I can't maintain this level of energy to to not always make money every time I go to a market, um, but trying things like I have bees. I'm talking about beekeeping lessons for kids. I think that would be so much fun. It would light me up to put a little kid in a suit and put them in a beehive and have them look at stuff and talk about bugs. So why not? There's got to be other streams of things that you can do so that if you're working some, you can make it up with other things that you love and get that work-life balance.

Debbie Levitt:

Yeah, I think there's a lot of. We all go into tech jobs and we talk about experimentation and then when it comes to our own lives, we get really locked up. Sometimes I mean I love planning, I'm an over planner, but then I think sometimes that ends up freezing people up, and one of the examples that I've been given and you and I are talking in March 2025, is my husband and I have decided that we are karaoke DJs. Cost to decide we're karaoke DJs $35 in business cards and a few hundred dollars in equipment I didn't already have, because I already had a mountain of equipment.

Debbie Levitt:

What would it cost to experiment with something? You know you spent $500. We probably spent around the same. And then you have to look at you know how much enjoyment would I have to get out of it for it to have been worth it? Or how much business would I have to make for it to have been worth it? And then you decided it wasn't for you. We're still experimenting with it. Who knows what we'll decide. But I wish people said you know what? And of course it's going to be a factor of time, available money that not everybody has, but you have to spend money to make money and can you spend $35 on business cards and decide you're a beekeeping teacher? You know what does that cost to try $35 in business cards.

Jess Vice:

Yeah, there's almost nothing to lose. And it's also business advice Again. When we start a new business, people always say, well, experiment with a niche for a little bit, try biotech for 90 days, try family-owned businesses for 90 days and talk to them and pitch them and write about them and be immersed in it for 90 days and then see if that's working for you or not. Why don't we do that with our own lives? I love I've even toyed with, I love cooking and I'm a vegetarian, and people in the grocery store always say, oh, look at you with all those vegetables, good for you. And I've almost every time said I could cook for you too.

Jess Vice:

Veggies are tasty if you'd know how to season them Like. I could definitely start like making meals that are enough for seven people and distributing them to a handful of folks if they pay me for the groceries. There's some food safety regulations and things in there that have held me back from trying it, but that would be a great way to meet people and build community and get to know my neighbors and spread the news about eating healthy vegetables instead of meat, which is that's my soapbox, but totally different. But yeah, like, it costs almost nothing to say well, I could cook for you too. Here's my number, and try it a couple of times.

Debbie Levitt:

Yeah, totally and totally worth investigating what has to go into that, like in my book as an example. I've had so many people say to me I'm going to open a cafe and I'm like do you understand what it takes to open a cafe? Why don't you start with a food truck? Like even that's going to be difficult and expensive, but at least it's not the level of expensive opening a cafe Like how. This is where we all talk about experimentation and minimum viable product and then we don't try that ourselves. Like what's the minimum viable product for running a karaoke dj business? I need a car that can carry equipment, I need the equipment and I need some business cards. Like minimum viable karaoke business yeah, yeah, I again.

Jess Vice:

I think it's apply the lessons that we already know going forward. If this is something you want to leave tech, if you want to branch out from tech, like you know, all the lessons iterate, fail fast, fail cheap. Um, don't invest too much until you figure out what you want. And then my advice always is follow what makes you happy, like we are only on this planet for 80 to 100 years. That is a very short amount of time and there's a lot of garbage that we have to put up with while we're here. So why not try to make some of your work life also be really fun and happy and life-giving?

Debbie Levitt:

Rewarding, find what is rewarding to you, as I say in the book. All right, so last question, as usual how can people get in touch with you, follow you or do business with you?

Jess Vice:

sure. So if you would like to get in touch, um, my website is currently under construction, so I would use linkedin, the. I am just jess vice on linkedin big they them pronouns next to my name. If you google me or search me, I come up pretty pretty quickly. I've, of course, googled myself. Yeah, I show up on Google, it's the hair. Maybe If you would like to follow me, I have abandoned Twitter, which I will always call Twitter, and the only place I'm really yapping right now is Threads, which is wild, but I'm just Jess Vice on there. That is sort of uncensored, jess. And then, if you would like to do business with us, kit is kitresearchandstrategy. com and we have a quick little contact form there and we do free 30 minute consultations with any business who'd like to have a chat, mostly just to see if we click and hear what's going on in your world and if it's something that we could help with. And if it's not, we try to build on that networking premise and connect you to someone who could help.

Debbie Levitt:

Excellent, excellent, Jess, thank you so much for an absolutely fun conversation and I hope everybody listening feels extra inspired.

Jess Vice:

Thanks, Debbie, I really appreciate it.

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Debbie Levitt

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