Lisa Simpson is the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer at Easol
How do you explain your company to friends and family?
Easol is the all-in-one toolkit for experience creators. Our software enables anyone to run and grow their experience business online.
What do you like most about being an entrepreneur? What do you like least about being one?
I love having the ability to apply design and creative thinking to solve problems and build something that genuinely brings happiness to our creators. The hardest thing for me is on a constant rollercoaster of ups and downs and highs and lows – it can be daily, weekly, hourly, even by the minute sometimes – something happens that could bring your immense joy and then or significant discomfort deep in the pit of your stomach. Getting comfortable with this and learning to ride the wave is the challenge!
What metric do you think about the most, and why?
MRR and NPS.
We are focused on both of these after hitting product-market-fit (PMF) and profitability in 2019 through customer referral alone. Right now, we are now laser-focused on scaling our product and customer success metrics whilst growing revenue.
What creative things do you do to develop a likable company culture?
During COVID-19, we’ve been organizing regular all-team skill-sharing learning sessions where we set out topics each week related to what we are working on as a company (e.g., brand building, resilience, product design, etc.). We watch videos to learn and get inspiration from experts or ask guest speakers to host a session with Q&A.
As part of our onboarding, we also set a challenge for new team members to ‘become an experience creator!’ They have to create, sell, and run their own experience on the platform! This exercise builds customer empathy so they can better understand our creators and the challenges they face. Plus, it helps them quickly learn how to use the platform’s tools. It’s also a great team-building exercise as the team can book the experiences the new members create.
What it’s like to work at Easol.
What advice have you been given that you needed to lean on most to navigate 2020?
Different things have been useful at different stages of the year. I’ve been listening to Guy Raz’s ‘How I Built This’ resilience podcast with lots of different entrepreneurs discussing how they are navigating these uncertain times. I think it’s been useful to stay connected like this and hear from other entrepreneurs in real-life situations and in the now.
How can collaboration with corporations help your business?
We are currently focused on working with SMEs; however, we see larger businesses and corporations creating experiences to amplify their brands, connect with their customers (e.g., The Discovery Channel and The Sunday Times), and build these out on Easol, which is amazing to see.
In the mid-term, we plan to build the ‘Pro version’ of our product for larger corporations and enterprise users.
More about Easol:
Easol is pioneering experience commerce & empowering experience creators. It is the all-in-one platform for managing your entire experience business, on your terms. Sell directly on your own website with smart booking, payment, and marketing tools that all work together, brilliantly. Visit Easol.com to learn more.