Building a Platform for Productivity and Mental Health

Anne-Laure Le Cunff is the founder of Ness Labs, a learning platform dedicated to mindful productivity while also studying neuroscience part-time at King's College with her masters. Previously Anne-Laure worked at Google leaving that job in 2017. As part of Ness Labs, she creates some truly exceptional content that I've had shared with me time and time again, which is evidenced by her 19,000 strong email lists for her newsletter, Maker Mind.

Here's what we covered in this episode:

On Ness Labs

• Tell me a little about your back story and why you started Ness Labs?
• What is Ness Labs?
• When did you start generating revenue?
• What have you done to grow the membership & newsletter subscribers?
• Neuroscience at King's College on the side! How does that help you research and write articles?
• You're a proponent of building in public, what are the benefits of this for indie hackers?
• You have a sizeable audience, how do you cut through the noise / deal with the inbound?
• What advice would you give to aspiring female indie hackers navigating a male-dominated sector?

On mindful productivity

• What is mindful productivity?
• You're a prolific writer, how do you get so much done?!
• Time management article
• It can be long and hard to grow a side-project / business, how do you stay motivated?
• As indie hackers, what are the best ways to stay on top of everything and not get overwhelmed?
• Taking care of yourself. Sleep, taking breaks, journaling. Why is it important and why do so many people neglect it?

Quick fire

• Favourite book is 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology
• Anne-Laure doesn't listen to podcasts 😱
• Follow Marie Denis, Steph Smith and Rosie Sherry

Follow Anne-Laure

• Twitter
• Ness Labs

Follow Me

• Twitter
• Indie Bites Twitter
• Personal Website

Full Transcript

James: Anne-Laure, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? 

Anne-Laure: Great. Thanks for having me.

James: Good to have you. Tell me a little bit more about Ness Labs for people who don't know? What's it all about?

Anne-Laure: Ness Labs is a platform for ambitious makers, knowledge workers, creators who want to be their most productive and creative without sacrificing or mental health, and so it offers content, a community, and also coaching for people to achieve these goals.

 James: Yeah. And where did you come up with the idea? 

Anne-Laure: I both at Google and while working at startups, I went through burnout and I think lots of ambitious people have this experience at some point in their work life. And when I was looking for resources to help me go through this, there's actually wasn't much out there. So it started with this goal of helping people really taking care of their mental health at work.

I've always been fascinated with how the mind works, how the brain works, how do we think, or where do ideas come from? How do we make decisions? So that's always been an area that I've been really curious about.

James: Yeah, absolutely.   Where are you at now in terms of subscribers and revenue with Ness Labs? And was it always generating revenue?

Anne-Laure: So  in the first six months of Ness Labs, most of the revenue was coming from sponsors. And I didn't really like this model because it meant having to chase them, a lot of back and forth. Also quite irregular revenue where some weeks, I have three sponsors reaching out and saying, "hey, can I start with the newsletter?"

and some weeks there was no one. I figured that really wanted to have some recurring revenue that I could, even if it was growing slowly, sell something that is a bit more stable. And at this point I have about 600 members and the Ness Labs community generating about $3,000 a month.

And that doesn't include all of the, one time revenue that nest labs leaking through books and other products that I'm selling.

James: It's amazing how you've grown it and I think that there'll be a lot of indie hackers who are at that level where they're trying to build something up and deciding on a monetization model. Why at the start did you go for the sponsorship route and also, how did you start to build your newsletter list, which made it appealing for sponsors?

Anne-Laure: At the very beginning, with the sponsors, I didn't really have any outbound process. I just grew the newsletter and I made it clear with the little inserts and signed it, that there was a spot here. So if any reader was also either an entrepreneur or working at a company that was relevant to the audience, I was reaching that they could just reply back and claim that spot for the next newsletter. There was no outbound work, but I think that making it very clear that this spot existed and also having a very niche topic made it appealing to sponsors because they could in one go reach a certain amount of people.

The audience; I can really think Twitter, I think, for most of my subscribers.   

James: How beneficial has that Twitter following been for you? Cause you have about 30,000 Twitter followers. And over how long was that built? Was there a specific time where you just started growing or was it quite linear?

Anne-Laure: It was very linear and slow for years and I think up to  two years ago, I only have 3000 followers. It took off pretty recently. And I think it's because I really changed the way I used it. I used to just post whatever articles I was reading, not really contributing value.

Whereas now I'm really trying to help people and I really use Twitter to work public. So I really show people my process. I show unfinished articles. Sometimes I ask questions.

I do polls where I really ask the community, what do you think about this? Should I write about this or that? And I think the fact that I switched from just broadcasting content on Twitter, to working in public with the garage door open, has been one of the main reasons why my following has grown so fast in the past year.

  I think lots of entrepreneurs make the mistake of falling prey to the planning fallacy. Where you spend so much time trying to figure out how am I going to go about this? What's the best framework to build this? And which library should I use? And how am I going to do this and that? And I think for me, building in public is a way to fight the planning fallacy, where instead of waiting until they have something absolutely perfect that I can put in the world, I just share little nuggets of my progress and I can get feedback much quicker.

So it shortens the feedback loop too, which is especially I think...