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Moni Talks Tech (and other things) is a show hosted by Monika Rabensteiner, a weird Austrian lady, who went on the journey to start her own business and is now here to tell the tale. But not only that: she will be caressing your earbuds with tips and tricks around tech tools and design - everything you need to make your online business work smarter not harder - and look better in the process.
Welcome to Moni Talks Tech and Other Things, the podcast where service based business owners and coaches like you can walk away with simple tips and tricks to level up your business and defeat the ultimate end boss, your dreaded tech set up. Are you ready for this then? Let's go.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Morning Talks Tech, and today we are talking about failures and fuckups because yes, even as a techy person, failure and fuckups are gonna happen. And why do we talk about this today? Because while I do try to really deliver good work, there are sometimes things that you up during a process that then cause your client some issues and it's all about really handling it afterwards. So as a little side information, some tools are really worse than others when it comes to setting up things. Some just make it really easy for you.
If you say you create an email marketing funnel with a freebie and the sales page and you have a tool like ConvertKit, things are really easy because you can create multiple forms with different things. And ConvertKit makes it really simple for you to just address the certain kind of people because it's set up for multiple-ness. , it's not a word, I know it's not a word. It's set up for you to do a lot of different things with the same account and so is ActiveCampaign. I know I've preached this already in previous episodes because that's really just the great thing about both of those and I'm sure a lot of other things. But the tool that won't let you do any of that nicely from in its in its own, its own accord, is MailChimp. So that also means when you set up different things, things get difficult because you can't just create the form and not difficult, they're not impossible, they are just sometimes not doable without a third party influence.
And sometimes you need something in addition to that even though MailChimp is already charging you for things. But it's just sometimes really tricky and more complicated than necessary to set up something specific. And I'm not going into the backend of other people's businesses lightly, like I crosscheck everything and the usual processes I crosscheck. So in certain cases, especially when it comes to MailChimp I check, because I already know is there already a journey set up that starts when you sign up to the list or what other things are happening and what is going on for people to join this email list? And I made assumptions based off of that and set up something for it. And it turned out it wasn't a good assumption. it shouldn't, shouldn't have made it. And sometimes I realised that my own brain, well fucks me over a bit because I also have a problem solving brain.
So whenever I try to set something up or when I do set something up or when I try to figure something out or something is in my corner, in my area of expertise, my goal is to fix this thing and to create this and to have a result afterwards. So my brain is in problem solving mode. And when I'm in problem solving mode, a lot of scenarios constantly go through my head. There are different things that I know that I need to look after and then I do. And that means to me that this is not used for example, but this isn't always the case, right? I'm not involved in the business itself sometimes to that degree that I would know how they usually, how they usually set things up. So my assumptions might be wrong. And in this particular case it was wrong, which caused some people to get something that they shouldn't have gotten.
And it was really unfortunate for the client, especially because they were currently, you know, in a launch and it was really not a great view on the outside for people to, to receive multiple emails that they weren't supposed to be getting. And I know things happen and that's normal and sometimes there are fuckups and you rectify them and you move on and that's totally fine and normal and shouldn't be taken personally in the slightest. But especially when you focus on problem solving, it is really tricky and really annoying when you've created one. And when I'm personally often, very lenient with what's happening because I know that mistakes happen and an email isn't the end of the world, an additional email isn't the end of the world. I feel really, really guilty when I've caused a problem for someone else. But here we are on this fine day having caused an issue for other people and it annoys me.
And I just want to share this with you because I want to show you that number one, nobody is perfect. None of us are as much as we try to be, nobody's perfect and tech can also fail you. And still we move on with dust ourselves off and we continue with what we've been doing despite the issue that has been caused. But it also means we can learn something from it, which is never assume anything about somebody else's business. And for me personally, that's sometimes a bit difficult because my brain goes into the problem solving mode a lot of the times because that's what I do. I solve issues, which means I need to pull from different areas and different kinds of knowledges that I have to fix the issue because if I would not have the context of everything, I wouldn't be able to solve the problem, right?
So I need to pull other things that happened somewhere else to solve the problem that I'm currently facing because how else am I gonna solve this basically? And in this case, I assumed that things were set up a certain way when I couldn't confirm that those were set up like that. That meant for me that this, the way I was setting it up was a good way to do it. I didn't cross-check with the client at the time because in my head the majority, I generalised basically, and the majority of people had set is up differently. I would be able to see if that were used or not, and therefore that means I'm fine, right? My setup is fine, everything about this is fine, which it wasn't because I wasn't asking any more questions about it. And therefore would I have done that? Maybe I would've been fine, maybe this would've not happened.
But who knows? I mean in the end nobody knows. But as a reminder for myself, it's never a bad time to ask additional questions. And sometimes we refrain a bit from it because we don't wanna seem stupid and we don't wanna cause unnecessary conversations or communication because everybody's busy, like people are launching, people are doing all kinds of things and sometimes some questions seem really trivial when they are and in fact aren't at all. And so sometimes maybe just ask or confirm one more time before you assume that something is correct and that must be set up like that because in the end we really don't know. And even though maybe 95% of people would tell you, yeah, of course that's set up like that, the other five people are like, no, well actually I made something totally different because X, Y, and Z. And for them that makes total sense because in the end, every business is very individual and every business has a different kind of setup that needs to be looked at.
And another thing I personally learned is maybe don't immediately go into 100% problem solving brain because people might not feel acknowledged during that . Since my love language is acts of service, the fact of fixing something is showing acknowledgement, is my way of acknowledging that I totally see that there's a problem. I'm on my way to fixing it. Now that also means I am answering questions more technically and less emotionally because I'm fixing it right now. So, I try to figure out how this has happened. So I'm like full on in the mode of where is the problem? Like a dog when he has something in his nose and he needs to get it. That's how my brain is then primed in that very moment. But people might not need it like that in that very moment. People might need an acknowledgement that I'm so sorry that happened.
It was a massive fuck up. I really see that this is not a great thing that happened and I'm sorry and let me rectify this. And sometimes taking a step back, taking a breath instead of going full on in fixing things is not what everyone needs in that very moment. So you need to also acknowledge and be aware that people sometimes speak a different language than you, and that's fine. And you just need to also accommodate what is needed on a personal level at this very moment. For me, this now means after a couple of days of still feeling guilty because that's how my brain works and that's how I work, I will brush myself off and will remember that everybody makes mistakes sometimes that it's normal, that we make mistakes. And even if you have the most smooth tech set up, that can always be something somewhere in the middle of the entire process that won't work smoothly. And that's also fine in the end, nobody died, which is good. That means we're still here, still alive and continue to do more, try more and create better things for next time.