36: Jennifer Lachs: Digital Nomads and Overcoming Perfectionism

I have someone special on the podcast today. Her name is Jennifer Lachs.

Jenny is the founder of Digital Nomad Girls. She’s also a former client and now a friend as well. What I think is so interesting about Jenny and why I’m excited to have this conversation and share that with you today is one, the talk we have is very open, very transparent about what we both have gone through, but two I think her business model and her business journey is really, really interesting. Most people start out with maybe coaching, then a group program, then eventually, they do a membership. She started with a free community because she saw a need, then she started running retreats, then she started a membership years later. So, I think that those transitions are really, really interesting.

Coming from a traveling community, Jenny felt lonely when she first started working online. She couldn’t understand why there isn’t a bigger female digital nomad scene. So, she decided to start her own. She started a Facebook group, a community for women who work online and travel the world. The group had 5000 members, within the first year.

Her next step was to monetize her community. The first thing she sold to her community was a retreat – an in-person event in Spain, for one week.

About two and a half years into having her community, she launched her first proper digital product. And that was her membership site, which is how she is now earning most of her money. She also added a course in the meantime, which is for total beginners, for women who want to become a digital nomad and have absolutely no idea where to start.

According to Jennifer, one of the most important things when you are working for yourself is productivity. And when you are working for yourself, you have to make decisions every single day. Rachel’s advice is to look at it more as an experiment, rather than looking for that perfect solution to all your problems. But also, just to remind ourselves that this whole thing should be fun- sometimes the decision that sounds most fun is the right one.

Another thing that helps Jennifer in her decision-making process is “the leap”. This is a tool that she picked up from a book called “Playing Big” by Tara Mohr, which is basically just like a mini experiment that you can do whenever you’re unsure if you should do something or not. For example, whether you should do a podcast or make videos. In order to decide, you can design these little leaps to try out both. Instead of saying- Okay, I’m going to plan out a whole podcast launch, I’m going to create the graphics and the intro music and everything, without actually knowing if you like it, just create a little podcast episode by yourself and just put it out there and share it with 10 people of your ideal audience and see what they think. And you do the same for videos. That takes so much pressure off and it makes it fun again, because it makes it small enough to be exciting, but doable.

When talking about decision fatigue, there’s this concept that we don’t have an unlimited amount of attention, as well as capacity to make decisions every single day. There’s only a limited amount of attention, we can pay at those things and after that, everything starts getting really difficult. So, if you waste a lot of time deciding every little thing in your life every single day, you’re using up that attention that could be going to something more important. This is where productivity and a certain amount of structure does help Jennifer in her everyday life because it takes a lot of decisions away for her. So, take as many decisions away from off your plate, so you can actually use that attention span for something that’s more important.

When creating her membership, Jennifer struggled with content creation. She wanted to offer her audience virtual coworking sessions, virtual events, monthly courses, guest experts. She soon realized that she was spending about 80% of her time on her membership in creating, planning, scheduling, organizing guests’ experts, etc. And that was actually not where her interests lay, that was not was not what she was passionate about. Even worse, once she started digging into it, wasn’t what her members really wanted or even consuming. She started doing some surveys and talking to her members about this and she soon realized that this was too much content, that they can’t consume all of this content.

So, it was a very eye-opening moment, when she realized she was spending 80% of the time on something that only 20% of her members were using. This is what she calls her 80-20 rule.

Keep an eye on the pulse of your audience and your students, use surveys, ask your people questions, and just keep getting feedback and make the process easier for yourself.

An action step for our listeners: This week, Jenny is running a visibility challenge for her own community. They are all trying to be very visible in their businesses. So, she encourages you to do the same thing. We tend to do the thing where we create one freebie after the next, one free blog posts after the next, but we don’t actually put them out there and really get them in front of the people that they should be. So, Jenny encourages you to just share your best stuff this week. And don’t create anything more, just take what you already have and use that.

Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode make sure you subscribe so you never miss new episodes. And if you have a business bestie, who needs to hear this message go share this with them. See you in the next one.

Love + magic,

Maggie