[email protected] Interview
Interview with Nick Kellet
“The best question a mentor asked me was …. “What are you to the Tiger”. This question works for any problem / any startup. It helps you flush out a list of all the actors and the possible roles in the domain in which you are seeking to create value. Are you the parasite on the tiger’s back? Are you the ringmaster at the circus or the audience? Are you the tiger’s next meal? Are you the hunter, with the tiger in his cross-hairs? ” – Nick Kellet
Today we feature Nick:Kellet, the founder at Deckible. We hear their story in their own words, their successes, their challenges and their insights.
Let’s start by getting to know you. Can you please tell us a little bit about you and what you do?
I invent for a living. I love domains, where I know nobody and I don’t know the rules that hold the industry in stasis. It took me a while to figure out that’s what I do. It was priceless to discover that I love beginner’s mind.
A great introduction and start to this interview. Can you please tell us, how did you start, from what age, and what made you decide to change direction and start?
I was a teenager. I made my own board games and I wrote my own computer games. I was lucky my school had a computer room full of Commodore Pets. Later I had a Commodore 64 at home. That was rare in 1975 England.
I tried to commercialize both, but that’s another story.
Thank you for that insight. So can you tell us…What does your business do and where is your company based?
Deckible is Audible for decks. Card decks are a hot category, but many people have not connected the dots yet. I’m not talking about playing cards.
There are 100,000 unique card decks split across two main segments.
Coaching/leadership/ideation decks, Spiritual Card Deck (Oracle, Tarot, Affirmation and Manifestation decks). Movies, books and music have all been digitized.
We know who won those markets. We believe decks are going to be bigger than books. “Books as decks” is hot. If you want to be a thought leader, a book used to be the way to go. Today that’s a long-winded and non-visual strategy.
The phone looks like a card deck. Now it acts like one. We believe that’s a game-changer. You’ve only experienced engagement like Deckible in games. Now personal growth can be as fun and engaging as a game, but I promise you no badges. This is not gamification.
Instagram gave us short attention spans. Your modern consumer wants/needs text, visuals, media, and participation.
Deckible offers all of this on one app and, it turns out, that’s highly unique. We don’t need more apps, we want less apps that do more.
What’s the story behind your success? What led to your aha moment? how did you get to where you are now?
I started working with a friend, who’s a successful coach, to create engaging learning-experiences. We wanted to make learning more fun. Project scope grew and grew.
Along the way I got fascinated by cards. Decks deliver a fun, tactile and engaging learning medium. I’m a board gamer, so I love cardboard. It spoke to me.
So that was my “aha moment” : Card Decks + Mobile = Deep Learning Engagement.
I hired a UX company to help make my sprawling duckling into a swan .
They did the best thing. They told me the solution was to drop everything and begin again with a sole focus on card-decks for the mobile consumer.
They showed me how this could look.. I could not go back.I wanted to vomit. And I took a few days to absorb the harsh truth. Sometimes you have to kill your darlings.
To-date, deck-apps have not hit the spot for card-deck lovers. The opportunity was real.
And so I hired them to build Deckible. That was a year ago.
We launch in August, but creatives still have time to load their decks and participate in the launch. We revenue share. We offer a killer deal for bold creatives.
Thank you for sharing that. What’s been your life’s biggest lesson so far?
I ran a 500+ person survey and discovered the average card-deck lover owns 10+ decks.
As a consequence, they either need a backpack or they leave their cards at home.
We solve that.
You could call this a before (problem) and after (solution).
I call this “froto” – an abbreviation of from and to. Froto is the dream you are selling your customers.
From: Card decks left at home (problem)
To: All the deck you love in your pocket (solution).
The big lesson: know the problem you solve.
If your customers resonate with your vision, you just won lifetime membership to the “buy one get one free” marketing club and you win a trip to Aruba. That’s free fuel to launch your rocket ship
People pay to go on roller coasters. I get the pleasure of riding roller coasters for a living. I’ve learned to enjoy the ups and the downs. There will be both.
My biggest challenge: The Deckible platform demands “content” – i.e. decks.. I had to convince content creators to put their decks onto an as-yet unnamed, unbuilt, unproven platform. No small feat. I loved the challenge, but it took longer than I imagined, but equally the solution was even better than I’d imagined.
I set myself a goal of 100 creators. We will launch with 250+ and will pass 500+ not long after launch. We have the sustainable momentum startup founders would kill for.
A lot of people said “yes”, but not everyone followed through with loading their artwork the next day.. So we become more flexible to help people load their decks.
FOMO works in your favor. FOMO has become a thing for creators who are not on Deckible.
I wish I’d known it would take this long and that it would be just fine. This was meant to be. This is just perfect. Gratitude is a wonderful thing.
I wish I’d known I’d be in a community with so many wonderful creative folk. This is my version of joy.
If you were to go back in time, what piece of advice would you give to your younger self?
I’m used to blank expressions and confused faces (I invent for a living – this is normal) By turning-up each day and by working on the next most pressing problem, you solve the friction points that hold people back. You build trust and belief.
Everyone is both an early AND a late adopter. We vary by category. Some people have still not tried AirBNB, Uber, Etsy or even Amazon. And thats OK.
People convince themselves on their timeline. Your job is to be visible and find the people who can say and act “yes” right now. Get used to “no” and “maybe”, and not let it impact your day. Another frog will be along in a minute. Resilience is a must.
I’m probably 1000+ cold-intros into Deckible.
I’d tell my younger self that “pull” is better than “push”. I’ve learned to look for signs of natural momentum. Conserve your energy. Follow the fast flowing water.
We’re nearly halfway through our interview so it’s a great time to ask how does your business run. What three tools make your business run better?
We built Deckible with Flutter (Google’s version of React).. That was such good advice from an advisor.
At a marketing tool level, I adore Ghost.io. I could gush on Ghost for an hour. That’s how we run the Deckible newsletter (aka blog). I love writing in Ghost. I never felt that with WordPress.
We have just started using Airtable for our Card Survey , it’s simple and fun. You can embed the survey, but automating the signup process to Deckible is pure joy (just tick a box). A few lines of code delivers so much value to Deckible and to the survey takers.
https://cards.deckible.com/annual-card-deck-marketplace-survey/
Deckible talks to the Airtable API and kapow. Experience matters a lot.
Early on our focus was more design-centric. With mobile apps, UX/workflow is critical. I don’t think I’d bought into the UX vs UI difference before Deckible. I’m a convert.
We’ve recently hired a UX guy who’s 200% workflow-centric and he’s big on experience. Isaac Cotec happens to be a deck designer, that’s how we met. His masculinity archetype deck is great.
He loaded his deck. I saw his Linkedin profile. We spoke and imagined our first mini project. He started adding value right off the bat. Isaac was a wonderful choice that fully supported my intuition
As to futures: I’ve heard great things about Jasper https://www.jasper.ai/ from multiple sources.
What do you know now that you wished you had known before?
I wish I’d known it would take this long and that it would be just fine. This was meant to be. This is just perfect. Gratitude is a wonderful thing.
I wish I’d known I’d be in a community with so many wonderful creative folk. This is my version of joy.
What has been your greatest or proudest achievement or moment?
My board game, GiftTRAP, won 20+ awards and sold 100k units. My best moment was on stage in Berlin to accept my Spiel des jahres prize. On stage with some of my favorite gaming designers including Friedemann Friese (of Power-Grid fame).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedemann_Friese
What future life goals do you want to achieve and why?
I admire Etsy, eBay, Uber, airBNB, Instacart etc. These companies have fuelled the “slashy” economy. They help people make new income streams.
These tools do the marketing for the many millions of people who make a living using these platforms, which is what makes them viable.
My goal is to add Deckible to this list of viable income streams for creatives.
Having spoken to many many artists I know they need marketing help.
I visualize being at the Deckible user conference in 3 years. I want to welcome on stage 100’s of creators from around the world, who make a living through and because of Deckible.
That would be profoundly meaningful for the lives of creatives who struggle to make a living digitally.
I have the best job in the world to meet creative people as they share their creative projects with me each day.
To finish our inspire questions…”We believe that sharing inspiring words can inspire others.” If there was one positive thing you would say to someone to inspire and empower them what would it be and why?
The best question a mentor asked me was …. “What are you to the Tiger”.
This question works for any problem / any startup. It helps you flush out a list of all the actors and the possible roles in the domain in which you are seeking to create value.
Are you the parasite on the tiger’s back?
Are you the ringmaster at the circus or the audience?
Are you the tiger’s next meal?
Are you the hunter, with the tiger in his cross-hairs?
For Deckible that has helped me flush out the different creators, the business coaches, the card deck creators, the publishers, the tarot readers, the deck printers etc
There are more actors in every startup play than you’d imagine.
It’s almost always a game of dominoes. It’s about lining up the people small to large and using your skills to trade-up to bigger dominoes as quick as. In case you didn’t know a domino can knock over another domino up to 25% bigger than itself.
It’s about leveraging influence at every turn. Save your energy and act effectively.
I was working at FCUK at the time and my mentor was Harish Davda. FCUK was an amazing place to work in 1984. Mentor rich. Stephen Marks as a great mentor.
You can get lucky by finding the mentors that inspire you, but you also own the problem of finding them and the challenge of letting their advice land with you in the right way.
“Thank you it has been great learning more about your founder story and Deckible”
To learn more about Deckible Visit www.deckible.com
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