Entrepreneur Christy Laurence on innovation, social media and having fun

Andy McLean

Hello and welcome to Ashurst Business Agenda. My name is Andy McLean and you're listening to a special episode in our Outpacing Change mini-series, where we meet visionaries who are changing the world around them. In today's episode, we've got a treat: you'll hear my conversation with Christy Laurence, who's an extraordinary tech CEO and business founder in Sydney, Australia.

A few years ago, Christy created Plann, the social media planning, scheduling and analytics tool which generated $10,000 in sales in its first week, and has since secured more than 3 million global downloads and counting.

In this episode, Christy talks me through her journey with Plann and how she grew the business and scaled it up. She also talks about her time in Silicon Valley and what she learned from that. We talk about innovation in her business and how she's made that an opportunity that everyone in the business can contribute to. We also talk about social media, of course, and Christy talks to us about how to harness social media to anticipate change and stay ahead of the curve. And Christy shares some of her personal and professional experiences and experimentations with generative AI.

In fact, that quick run through that I've given you of the conversation doesn't even begin to cover all the topics that we explored. We really do cover a lot of ground in a very short space of time. I can't wait to share this episode. So why don't we jump in and hear the conversation:

Andy McLean

Christy, welcome to Ashurst’s Outpacing Change miniseries.

Christy

Thanks for having me.

Andy McLean

Let's start right at the beginning with your origin story for Plann. They say that that “necessity is the mother of invention” and I think that was certainly the case for you. So if I can just recap on some of the backstory - You previously had a career in corporate advertising and you worked as an illustrator, then you caught the flu. What happened next? And how did that lead you to create Plann?

Christy

Oh gosh. So a little bit of backstory is that I am hyper creative, but I'm also really analytical. So when you put that inside someone, you end up in marketing. So I was at marketing agencies and worked really hard and ended up client side at IAG, which is in NRMA, in Australia. But social media was just taking off and Instagram was really taking off. So every night I would go home and I would paint or draw or do some type of different medium. And I would post it online. So I started to build a community of people at home at night that I'd chat to. And I did love my corporate job. I thought it was really fun. It was in the direct response area, which is super nerdy, really data heavy. My cup of tea.

And then one day I woke up and I just felt odd. And I couldn't really explain it. All I could say was I felt like I was in a video game. And what had happened is that I had caught the flu. And instead of getting the normal symptoms, it had gone into my brain and had caused something called Vestibular Neuritis. And it makes you feel dizzy, and feel drunk and seasick. So it's like being on this ship and a jumping castle at the same time. So it was really hard to get to work and I'm trying to walk the streets going “Okay, breathe, walk, okay”. And it ended up getting so bad that I fell down the escalators at Martin Place train station getting to work. And that was my “Okay, I should probably look after myself” moment.

So I took some time off. And I would have to lay flat on the floor to try and tell my brain where in space it was, because it didn't know, it had forgotten. But I could still draw and I could still paint. And that's how I passed the time. I ended up building up a little portfolio of artwork and drew attention. I was getting custom requests for certain illustrative types and styles and Red Bull even came and knocked on the door and asked me to do some work for them, which was awesome. And my friends were going “What are you doing? How is this working?” And I felt like I kept repeating myself. And here comes the real founder story where you repeat yourself. You repeat yourself and you think, “There's got to be a better way”. And I thought: “I'm super nerdy. I know technology. I used to run my own webcomic. What if I could put my marketing brain in an app and I could teach people what I was doing?” And that's how the idea for Plann came to be and I have had the best time ever since.

Andy McLean

Okay, that's amazing. So, you've talked about the challenge. Tell us a little bit about Plann - What it is, and perhaps a little bit about the growth trajectory once you got started.

Christy

Absolutely. So people, they either love or hate social media. And it's quite it's quite an honour to have to build a “grudge project”. Almost where people go, “Oh, do I have to?”.

So we've made a way for marketing to be fun and social media to be easy. What Plann does is it helps you figure out how to tell a story and brand. So in the early days, what was happening is that there was no way you could put all your images and drag and drop and design out how your feed would look for how to tell a story and take people on the journey. It was just people posting random things in it, when you visited the profile, it just looked off.

So I wanted a way to teach people how to brand but also story sell. And if I could teach people how to post and what to post and why to post, then I thought that I could help anyone be successful in business or their own brand.

And there's so much financial freedom, if you can master the art of social media, and I really wanted to help people get there. And by doing that, I was also able to help myself. And here we are, I don't know, almost eight years later, and we've had 3 million downloads. We're in 180 countries, and I have a team in 10 different countries. So it's working, and I'm really proud of “Back Then Christy”, who was recovering and proud of my team.

Andy McLean

Yeah, okay, so it sounds to me that that did kind of marry up both of those sides of the brain that you were talking about earlier on, which is the sort of the analytical and the creative, right? So you kind of harnessed both. But what I find interesting about what you've just described there is that you'd identified a challenge, you identified kind of a “why” for you. But you found a way to scale that up quite significantly, because you could, for example, have gone “Oh, well, what I'll do is I'll do one on one social media coaching”.

Christy

Well, I started there! Yeah, so that's where the repeating was coming in. And also, I just, I got bored, essentially, it was just the same conversation! I thought, “You know, I could maybe put this in a $20, guide and sell that on a website”. And then, as I'm thinking to myself, “There's no product out there that teaches people how to do social media while they're doing it. So they could learn and be tangible at the same time.” And I thought, “I could definitely do that”.

So Plann started as an app. And it was in your pocket, you could take it on the go. But what I learned about the customers was that an app back then it was a one-off purchase. In my first week I did make $10,000, I did an amazing pre-launch (I had a marketing background!). So my pre-launch strategy worked and viral growth hit pretty early. But I was getting this one purchase. And cash flow is pretty difficult.

So Plann is completely bootstrapped, which I like to call “customer funded”, because we have to be led by the customer to make revenue. And that's how I position us in the market. So we started as app and cashflow it, it didn't really work. So here I am trying to work out. I didn't even know what tech was, I didn't know what a VC was. This is back early early. I thought if you made an app, you are sitting at the beach three days a week. That's the stories you've read online, but it’s definitely harder than it looks.

So I changed the business model about three or four months into a SaaS which is a revenue subscription model. And so I had to learn how to get people to not to love me once, but they had to love me every month to stay on. And what I learned about those customers, they're quite fickle on the app, people don't value apps – they’re used to apps being free. So to get the high value customers, I had to learn what did they need. And that was a completely different set of skills as well. So they wanted a web product. But the investment of that is about a million dollars at the time. And so I had to save up the money from the app, and gradually build the web app. And then I was able to attract those high value customers.

So over the years, we've gone from looking after influencers and things like that and growing to University of New York or huge personal brands or big businesses with big teams. So now we can support both. And I found that over the years that that learning and moving people into the web product, their profitability is higher, the segments are higher value. And yeah, so over the years, it's we've changed business models we've changed. So you have the app still there if you want it by itself, but now the web app comes with the app. So it's been about three or four iterations of even just business models. And that's been a huge learning but really fun and worth it. You can't be stuck in what you've always done, because you've always done it.

Andy McLean

Absolutely. And it's interesting, as you're talking about this, I'm kind of extrapolating forward or perhaps into the present. And I'm thinking about generative AI. And immediately ideas are leaping to my mind about how you might incorporate and harness generative AI in your product and in your services. And of course, a lot of a lot of our listeners right now are asking that question or they're experimenting and they're trying things out. So I guess my question is twofold:

One part is: how are you using generative AI at the moment? And the second is: what learnings or observations might you share with other people who are other organisations that are sort of on that journey, but perhaps at the nascent part of that journey?

Christy

In social media, it moves so fast already. So learning AI and adding to it, it wasn't scary. It was just another thing we had to embrace. It was also changing really fast. And it made it exciting because we had something else to learn about as well.

So yeah, we were one of the first movers to put AI into the product, we're lean, we can move really fast, we've got a really creative team. The biggest challenge that people have with social media is, they just don't know what to post. And that really trips them up. So we've put in a whole bunch of AI tools that they can get ideas that they can get captions written. For example, Andy you could come in and say, “I am a lawyer, and I want to talk in a casual tone, or a professional or a sage tone. And I want to talk about contract law” and then Plann will spit out the caption for you. And you can use that and you can modify it across multiple platforms and cross posts across all of them in one push of a button. So that's one way we're using it.

We've also started exploring, when you want to respond to comments that can be a real challenge for people to come up with engaging conversation, because social media is the conversation is how can we get people to respond using AI to make life easier. So we're using it in multiple ways.

We're also heavy in R&D. And when I say R&D, I don't mean money. I mean, time that we are in the tools. I think this week, I would have played with seven different video tools, because we're already looking at how we're going to integrate, how we're going to make this even easier, so that people can say, “I'm a florist.” And we can create social media content that they can use immediately. It's not quite there yet, but that's why we're continuing to play with it to see who we're going to integrate with, who do we partner with? But yeah, I've got subscriptions to everything.

And I think what you might find interesting is that we do integrate with Open AI. And since we started with them, to now, they have changed their business model three or four times on us. And it's just part of it. It's part of the learning. So if they can do it, then anyone can.

Andy McLean

In terms of any observations on what that journey's been like for you in the Gen AI space, would you have any advice for organisations or business leaders who are sort of on that journey themselves too?

Christy

I would say, number one: play with it yourself. You can't get a real opinion on it unless you actually start playing with it. I hear a lot of people saying they're scared of AI. It's here to stay. But if you don't embrace it, now, you might miss it. And then the learning curve is just going to be so big, it's going to be really hard to keep up. So that's what worries me about people that tell me that they're scared is that the learning curve later is going to be even scarier.

So, if you don't have the time, there are so many people putting videos on YouTube or posting on LinkedIn, their experiences of playing with AI. I do it myself as well. If you don't have the time, follow someone who does and choose people from different industries, because everyone has different mindsets of why they want to use AI. And you might get inspired.

Andy McLean

And actually, given the audience right now are all podcast listeners, I might just do a shout out to the Ezra Klein show has just published a new podcast from the New York Times, which talks about how you can use AI. And that is a really, really instructive, practical and also an easy to follow discussion about how to apply AI. So for any listeners who want to find out more, that's a good place to go.

Christy

Or even start with one of the chat bots. Like if you jump onto Bing, or Google or Gemini, you can just start by asking it questions.

Andy McLean

Yeah, exactly. And it's about prompt engineering and is kind of a skill and it does become quite intuitive quite quickly. And then suddenly, as you say, the speed and the volume with which you can you can make iterative improvements really starts to accelerate. It's amazing.

Christy

Exactly. So my creative brain has also come in so there's a company called Midjourney. And one of my favourite pastimes is to learn prompts to create beautiful art. I've been making, like Gaudi inspired skyscrapers and things like that. So mixing different genres and different pastel colours. And, yes, I am addicted!

Andy McLean

Awesome. Sounds amazing. Along the way of your journey, I know you did spend some time in Silicon Valley - quite a bit of time. I'm fascinated by that. I think everybody who hasn't been to Silicon Valley is always a bit kind of intrigued about what the experience is like and what you learned while you were there. I just wondered if you had any reflections on what the highlights were from that time?

Christy

There's so many. So what I found is I just wanted to immerse myself. So once I realised how much I didn't know, I just wanted to be surrounded by people that could help lift me up. And so I jumped on a plane and went to conferences and meetups and just met as many people as I could. And there was one point where I was jumping around different co-working spaces just to chat to the different people at the tables to see what they were working on.

And in those places, you'd have people working on robotics, and there'd be robots running across the table. You walk down the streets and there'd be people testing their driverless cars and it'll just be cameras on cars, and you’d be like “What is that?” And you'll be at a cafe lining up for a drink in the morning and you get the Head of Design at Apple having a conversation. And everyone was really friendly and able to give introductions. It was just such an intensive learning period.

But not just for being surrounded by people. But particular things that I went for was learning how to do product management, business models, team management, because one of the biggest challenges that I had was how do you scale a team from two or three people to, you know, where we are now, which is almost at 50? Where the people from the beginning aren't the same people that you need later on when you're trying to specialise? And what does that journey look like, you know, having to learn how to have those really difficult conversations and personal growth and learning? How do people structure their marketing team? And so just having that real awareness of what is out there, and just because what you know, already, it doesn't have to stay that way. And what are some other ideas to help change your business for the better?

Andy McLean

Yeah, fantastic. And, you know, I mean, if I really stepped back from that, and boil that down, as somebody who's a business leader, whether you're large or small, it can sometimes feel a little bit lonely, right? But what you're talking about is actually surrounding yourself with people who've been on a similar journey, and not necessarily always reinventing the wheel, right? Learning from people who've been down that path.

Christy

Exactly that. And it's different there, because you've got mostly VC companies, and so they’re experiencing rapid growth or rapid cash flow, so the challenges are quite different. So I always felt that they were just ahead, so you could just learn from them. And I just found that in Australia, when I was here, trying to find those people, it's just a little bit harder to find and pull them out. So I did go through accelerated programs, but I just wanted to really, really make a good go. But so I jumped on a plane and headed over.

Andy McLean

Amazing, amazing. Now, having somebody who's a real brain on social media on the podcast, means we have to ask you a question specifically about social media. And I think if you think about the theme of this podcast mini-series, we're talking about Outpacing Change. We're trying to anticipate the future, to look ahead. It seems to me that social media is so “in the moment”, and there's constant trends emerging and so on organisations need to think about social media as a two-way thing where they can actually listen to their customers and listen to what's going on in the community. Perhaps I'm leading you towards the answer a little here, which I don't mean to do, but I suppose my question is, if I'm a c-suite business leader, and I'm trying to keep in touch with what emerging trends are amongst my customer base, how can social media help me do that?

Christy

There's a couple of ways. The first way is to follow people that work in social media. So people on LinkedIn that work in social media, they love talking about the industry trends themselves. And there are always changes, or we have to be across a lot of them. At Plann, we write three blog posts a week. So you can just scroll through our blog posts and you could almost just get a read off the headlines, and sign up to and get information delivered.

The biggest way that I learned is being on the platforms themselves. I don't spend heaps of time, but if you follow the right people, you get served the information that you're looking for all the time. And for example, Instagram, the Head of Instagram does his own updates. And if you follow him, he'll tell you what's new on the platform. But the trends specifically is quite tricky, because they're nuanced with the niches. So it depends on your niche of who you really want to follow for those, or you can try and create your own trending items. It's a real mix.

Andy McLean

And I guess a lot of our audience would be avid LinkedIn followers, right, they'd be on LinkedIn as a platform that a lot of business people use. What's exciting you about where LinkedIn is now and perhaps what the future holds for LinkedIn?

Christy

I do you think it's had a real growth since the pandemic, there's been a lot more people because networking in person wasn't really available. So a lot of people jumped on the network to meet new people and to see what was happening in real time. I did see a trend, I don't know if you noticed it, but there was a lot more personal content. It was almost like Instagram had moved over onto LinkedIn. And that's when it kind of started to take make a real shift.

There is something that is happening right now that I really love. And that's the fact that people have acknowledged to have a conversation. And if you start making comments on people's videos, or brands or commenting then you yourself will get more views on your profile. So a little hack there. I am seeing a lot of that: Adding your own thought leadership into other people's posts, because you're joining the conversation. So yeah, it's a really great tool to establish trust and credibility so that even if you're moving jobs or moving around, you not only are going with your work experience, but you also have a personal brand that follows you and that's becoming really valuable to employers.

Andy McLean

Now, the other thing I wanted to ask you about is mentoring because I know that you mentor on tech accelerator programs, and just reflecting on everything we've talked about so far from the perspective of business leaders who want to do deliver innovation or challenge conventions. Do you have any advice for them in terms of, I guess, stepping outside the mould and trying to help their organisation take any bold steps forward?

Christy

One thing I do talk a lot about on the mentoring program is, again, I think I've mentioned that here before is not doing it just because it's always been done. You don't have to make a change at the beginning of the year or the beginning of the month or the beginning of a week, you can make a change tomorrow. And it could be as little as an hour meeting could move down to a 45, something like that. Or you start to learn how your team works.

So at Plann, we don't have meetings on Mondays. We're all an entire team of self-motivated, curious learners. And when we come to work, when you've had two days off, I'm really excited about this project. “Oh, now going to go to meetings.” And that momentum that you've built is gone.

So that was from my experience for working and talking to my team, we decided "That was it! No meetings on a Monday". It's the most busiest day of work output.

And other things that we might do is when we come up with ideation for new products, which excites me I lead product, it's my favourite thing to do is innovate. But I don't want to sit and write a scope document first. I want to be tangible; I want to play; I want to get into the playground.

So I opened up the design tools to our whole team – they can all use the tools. It's not like, oh, this person does this role. And that person does that role. Silos have all been wiped out. And so we can come together and collaborate and design together. And we can come up with features because we can move features around. And then we start chatting about who would use it and the business models and the paid versions and the different tiers. And then we write the scope. All of which in most technology businesses is actually backwards, but it works for us. So you don't have to do the norm.

Andy McLean

Two things I love about what you've just said. The first is to the point you just you just made around innovation, which is you kind of talking about making innovation, something for everybody. So it's not just the R&D team. It's not just the technology team – everyone has the opportunity and indeed the responsibility to contribute to innovation, which I think is fantastic.

And the Monday idea I just adore. I'm almost tempted to block out every Monday for the rest of the year for myself, because what you do is so good.

Christy

You should do it, it's so good!

Andy McLean

Well, you do feel energised and ready to go on a Monday. You want to get runs on the board. And isn't it satisfying, to get to the end of Monday go, “Gosh, I got loads done. I've made a good start to the week”. You know, I love that absolutely love it.

And now we have come to my favourite part of the show, which is the five quickfire questions. Christy. So are you ready for me to launch into it?

Christy

Let's go!

Andy McLean

All right. So the first question is, how would your colleagues describe you in three words?

Christy

Innovative. Compassionate. Resilient.

Andy McLean

Wonderful. Second question is: if you could have a coffee with any leader from the past or present, who would it be?

Christy

This took me a while to think about that it has to be Ryan Reynolds. Because he's able to have such a good time. He's really present on social media. He's such a great brand ambassador for multiple different companies, and is also known as a really great family man. So someone that can juggle that many things successfully, I would be really excited to talk to.

Andy McLean

Next question: what is the biggest myth or misconception about your industry?

Christy

It has to be that “anyone can do it”. When I hear about people employing their receptionist or their daughter or cousin to do the social media. I'm like, “Okay…”, because it does take a special skill set to really understand the speed and agility and creating content. And it's just it's not for everybody.

Andy McLean

Yeah, great, great. Okay, when it comes to generating new ideas, are you a morning person or an evening person?

Christy

First thing in the morning, I'm up before the sun.

Andy McLean

So actually, if we were to be really specific, we then presumably say Monday morning would be your time.

Christy

I would say any morning.

Andy McLean

Okay. All right. And the final quickfire question, Can you name one book or podcast that you would recommend for business leaders to hear or read?

Christy

It was really funny because it fits your theme perfectly. But it wasn't intentional. But there's a book by Reed Hastings, who's the ex-CEO of Netflix. It's called No Rules Rules. And I got heaps of ideas from that book. It was phenomenal. Even things like paying underperformers to leave. Because you just want a team of go getters and that, yeah, it just opened Pandora's box of ideas on team culture for me.

Andy McLean

Oh, fantastic. That's a great tip. Thank you for that. So tell me like what's exciting you about what's next for Plann and what's next for Christy Laurence?

Christy

So for Plann I'm really excited about some of the features that we're got it coming out to suit bigger teams. So we've been focused on SMBs for a really long time. But we're growing because we're really mastering how they work. And now we're learning how to take, like law firms, for example, through the process.

What we find is the Social Media Manager will get to the end of the process and then not get approved, or we'll go live and someone will go, “What was that?”. So what we want to do is take the whole team on the journey for input along the way, so we don't get to that final mark.

But what I would really love as part of that is for teams to understand that a Social Media Manager needs to have training wheels for a little while, and then those training wheels need to come off and go wild.

So for example, Duolingo, who's one of my favourite social media examples, they have gone so leftfield with their strategy, but it happened because – and I don't know if everybody knows this – but the way it kind of came about was, somebody wrote a comment on Duolingo social media, and it was all in caps. I can't remember what the comment was. But the social media manager thought that they were responding from their personal account. They responded from Duolingo’s. And they wrote, “Why are you yelling?” Because the comment was all in capitals – and it took off! And from that little tiny piece of the puzzle, they are now where they are now. So I would love for teams to be able to experience that.

Andy McLean

Yeah absolutely. That little serendipitous moment has really led to quite a revolution really for Duolingo. I mean, social media has kind of been the genesis of their wider marketing strategy, right? There was a real moment, a light bulb moment there.

Christy

It used to be product-led, it used to be all product-led. It used to say, you know, “Wow, did you see Duolingo’s product?” And now it's that’s turned things around. If you're not on a paid plan, I'm not actually sure because there's a test that they're running. And I'm not sure exactly which tests it is. But their icon turns into a sad, angry owl. I'm not sure what test I'm in, but it's happening, but it's just really fun. Social media and business can be fun. And I think that if I can pass any knowledge from my journey then it’s that the more fun that we have, the better our results are.

Andy McLean

Lovely okay so then, I think a few takeaways for our listeners in terms of who to follow on social media would be to follow Plann. Follow you. Follow Ryan Reynolds. And follow Duolingo, right?

Christy

Sure, yes. Okay.

Andy McLean

All right. Well, we’ve got some homework! Thank you very much, Christy, for joining us today.

Christy

Thank you so much for having me.

Andy McLean

Thank you for listening to Ashurst Business Agenda. This episode has been part of our special Outpacing Change mini series, where we speak with innovators and disruptors who are changing the world around them. For details of Christy's business, check out www.plannthat.com. And to make sure you don't miss any of our future episodes, subscribe to Business Agenda on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And while you’re there, feel free to leave us a rating or review. We'd be really grateful if you did. And so until next time, thanks very much for listening, and goodbye for now.