The Family Fun Cheat Code w/ David Watkins | Ep. 211

In this episode of Biz/Dev, we talk with David Watkins, founder of PlanMyKids, about the realities of building products that actually solve everyday problems.

We get into the intersection of product strategy and entrepreneurship from leading enterprise product teams at companies like IBM and AT&T to launching a startup focused on simplifying how parents plan activities for their kids. 

David shares how years in product management shaped the way he approaches building, validating, and evolving ideas in the real world.

Along the way, we talk about what it takes to move from strategy to execution, how customer insight should drive product decisions, and why the best founders stay curious while solving problems that matter.

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David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] David: They want to punch me in the face. Apparently I have a very punchable face. But yeah, I have to ask, almost beg them to give me negative feedback. 'cause they don't wanna, and I'm like, guys, you're not gonna hurt the relationship we have over here because this thing sucks.

If this thing sucks, tell me. That's gonna be way more helpful.

[00:00:18] David: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Biz Dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host, joined Per Usual by Gary Boyd. Hello, sir. More importantly, we are joined by David Watkins. Not to be confused with Dave. We have a similar thing. Don't call us Dave. That's right. He is the founder of Plan My Kids.

Welcome to the podcast. I'm sorry in advance.

[00:00:39] David Watkins: I'm so glad to be here. Surely it's an honor, and please don't call me Shirley.

[00:00:46] David: Nice. Alright, so well, we've already broken the ice, but we like to start with a few easy questions. Let's get things going.

[00:00:54] Gary: Wait, let's just respect the airplane joke too. Good job, David.

[00:00:57] David: Nice it. That's okay. Just pretend I'm not here. Be better. Alright. Favorite dessert?

[00:01:03] David Watkins: Oh, creme brulee.

[00:01:05] David: Interesting.

Are you a road trip guy or rather fly there guy?

[00:01:11] David Watkins: Both, but I have a limit, right? So if it's more than five hours, I'm flying.

[00:01:16] David: You're flying. Okay.

[00:01:17] David Watkins: But if it's within five hours

[00:01:19] David: So loading the kids and the fam in the car for a three day road trip to Arizona. That's not gonna

[00:01:25] David Watkins: happening. No, we're getting an airplane. Yeah.

[00:01:27] David: All right. Fair enough. We do a two day trip to Dallas every year. It's, my wife loves it or drive the driver's. Her favorite part.

[00:01:35] David Watkins: Some people love it. My folks moved from upstate New York to North Carolina when I was young, and they would make that trip 14 hour trip back and I hated it. Maybe that's why, because I hated as a kid, so I'm not gonna put my kids through that. We got my kids on an airplane pretty early in, in life,

[00:01:54] David: Oh yeah. Yeah. My kids started flying when they were wee tots. Absolutely. And that, and it's good to do that. 'cause when they're too old it gets hard. One of our guys, I. Flew him to a client meeting and it was the first time he had ever been on a plane over 30 years old.

And I was like I feel honored that I put you on the plane for the very first time. Hi, Scott. I'm, you don't listen anyways, but that's okay. Alright,

[00:02:18] Gary: wondering if that was Scott.

[00:02:19] David: there was Scott. For sure. For sure.

[00:02:21] David Watkins: Is the first for everything, sir.

[00:02:23] David: Favorite type of music? Gary says, this is going to tell us a lot about you, so I'm re I'm excited.

Let's go

[00:02:29] David Watkins: Type of music. So you're looking for a genre. So I grew up in the nineties, so the sort of classic indie is what I grew up with. The Smiths

[00:02:38] Gary: Good. Good answer. 

[00:02:41] David: We're reaching a high point here.

Tell me about Plan My Kids.

[00:02:44] David Watkins: Yeah. Plan my kids makes planning kids activities easy for busy working parents. We do this by providing a marketplace as essentially concierge, and we use a vast network of partners and we curate it through an AI assisted. In a nutshell, if you've got kids who are looking to go somewhere and dunno what to do with them, we'll help you figure that out.

[00:03:04] David: So is it like date night for kiddos? Does that mean that you're planning like a date night with the bam?

[00:03:12] David Watkins: It could be you're looking to go out like parent night out and you're looking for a parent night out situation. We started with summer camp planning 'cause it's the hardest of things for parents to to plan because you.

[00:03:23] Gary: Spring break too. That was, yeah.

[00:03:26] David Watkins: Spring breaks, all breaks, winter breaks.

[00:03:29] David: Okay. Okay. And what is the, is like there's coding camps nowadays and like robots and there's all and sports, everything. Are you all, everything

[00:03:42] David Watkins: Yeah we cater to children that have interests of all types, from cooking and baking, to arts and crafts, to sports, outdoor activities. Whatever your kids are interested, there's probably something out there that they're interested in that we can help.

[00:03:57] David: So you guys are curating, you're not producing any of this content that's, is that the future for y'all or?

[00:04:03] David Watkins: We so we work with the providers of those programs so that we can help get them matched with parents. So we're like a mat where we do matchmaking basically for parents that are trying to figure out what's out there for their kids. So you happen to know New Life camp, but maybe your kid was interested in something else, but you weren't sure what?

What was available that was out there. So we would help we'll help make sure that we can find what you're looking for. And we modeled it similarly. Fundamentally it's a marketplace underneath. But we put a concierge service over top of it because it turns out when we went to talk to parents it was less about buying like a product like in a normal marketplace, but more like planning travel, especially for summer camps.

So you think about, Hey, I'm going on a vacation. I got a budget, I got some dates. I'm interested, I got some things I want to do maybe I wanna go with somebody. And it's like that for summer camps. I got kids, they got interests, I got some dates I gotta plan for, maybe they want to go with their friend down the street.

I got a budget, so how am I gonna fit all that in? And so we we modeled it as a concierge service. Parents.

[00:05:06] David: Now, is there a fee involved or is it more like a travel agent where the places give you a little something to connect?

[00:05:15] David Watkins: So we, our business revenue model is on both sides. So parents put pay for the value of. Productivity and doing things faster for them and servicing things they maybe weren't aware of. And then we also take a commission from the businesses that provide those services.

[00:05:33] David: Nice. Nice. So how long have you guys been around?

[00:05:37] David Watkins: We've been around four, five years.

[00:05:39] David: Five years. So are you guys, did you bootstrap this? Did you take some money? Are you on a runway? How's this looking for you?

[00:05:46] David Watkins: Yeah, bootstrapped doing it all on my own right now. And hoping to get a little bit of fuel to take it. Marketplaces are just fundamentally capital hard, right? You've got the typical issues with marketplace of chicken and egg, getting supply and demand matched up. Being able to grow nationally is just, is gonna take some money. So we're.

[00:06:07] David: Nice. Nice. Yeah. When we've done, we've obviously as big pixel built, lots of two-sided markets like this, and what we find is the vendors, the, in your case, the camps and whatnot. Relatively easy. They're fine. They're fine with signing up and paying you that commission because you're just free marketing for them or cheap marketing for them.

If you work out, great. If you don't, it's fine. They're still doing their thing. The hard one is the consumers or is that true for you as well?

[00:06:36] David Watkins: Actually it's the other way around in this particular industry. Yeah. And so we started the marketplace focusing on the parent. 'cause we felt like that was the harder pain to solve to your point. And, we've tried different pricing strategies and we've proven that parents are willing to pay.

The right model is basically a freemium problem for some things and a premium for working teachers. On the supply side of it there's just some industry challenges in, in, in this space. So there are standards for how you buy physical goods, for example. There aren't any standards in how you purchase these types of services.

A lot of these services are tech savvy at all. So they don't have a lot of technology in place to facilitate the process. So it. You're right in that it, they're like, yeah, I'd love for you to bring business. That's a no brainer. But when it comes to the hard plumbing of saying, Hey, I've got a parent.

I'm gonna get them registered in your program. That's where the, that's where the hard part comes in.

[00:07:40] David: Yeah, I could imagine there's a lot of those camps that it's almost, they might be one step away from paper maybe. But certainly there's not an API or something to hook into, to do

[00:07:50] Gary: Yeah, especially if they're like a spring camp or a summer camp like program that's run by like volunteers from a network that are just putting it together. They don't really have it's not a thing that they do all year round, like those kind of situations I could see friction with trying to get information from them and then information to them.

[00:08:07] David Watkins: Yeah we're in this adolescent, the industry in a whole is like in this adolescent stage, I would say 10 years ago there was no software that these businesses were using at, at all to manage their back office. But in the last 10 years, there's a few, but those software platforms are still immature as well, so it'd be easier, it's easier to solve for the paper.

Business. Because you're like, anything you give them is good, but it's the ones that have something in place and they're like but I need you to get that information into this. But it doesn't to your have the APIs, the.

[00:08:39] David: So what inspired this idea five years ago?

[00:08:43] David Watkins: I'm a parent of two. And as much as I didn't think that our household played by traditional gender roles, the truth of the matter is my wife at the time was doing all the planning for the kids. And then one summer she's okay, you take one kid, I'll take the other. And that's when I was like.

This is, this sucks. This is horrible. And I come from an e-commerce background, so I've helped companies like Levi's and Howard, Jims, create these beautiful omnichannel experiences. And so I'm like, why is it so easy for me to buy, find and, purchase sunglasses and jeans, but I can't do this for my kids.

So anyway, so I thought maybe we can help there, help myself and help other parents in the process.

[00:09:21] David: Nice. Nice. You say, now I see this on your LinkedIn profile, leading innovation with AI and fam tech. What does that mean in your world?

[00:09:34] David Watkins: So when I started the business AI wasn't a thing. And and technology wasn't even the hard part. Me, we built marketplaces.

 With the marketplace. There, it wasn't, technology wasn't the hard part. We did have to add some things for the planning com component of this because it wasn't just adding something to a shopping cart. There was a process that had to happen before that that we solved with technology, but it was really just workflow at the end of the day.

And then AI came along and then it was like, oh my gosh, this is a game changer. And like most people, again, I'll date myself the nineties. So I've seen, big transformation. My first I used to be a software developer a long time ago, so my first program was using like a beta version of Netscape, right?

Helped building an internet site. So I've seen that and I worked in a company that helped with cloud solutions. So when I saw AI come along, I was like, this is the next big thing. And so how can we work that into not only the, maybe the business processes, but how can we work that into the product?

And so we were pretty fortunate. When when Open AI came out with with our models, they were toying around with how they were gonna commercialize this. And so they were they had, they used to be called plugins back then, and it was like Expedia came out with one and they had a few big companies that they were, promoting.

And so we were able to get into the program pretty early. To basically develop an OpenAI plugin so that if you were in chat GBT and you were trying to find chosen services, you could actually connect with our plugin and it would actually get the data that you actually needed. 'cause that was the hard part because at the time these, the lms again, back then, initially, like it was all historical data that they were, using to train their models.

Now obviously they can access the internet, but even then they're not getting the most up to date information, we really leaned into ai. And so we built mia, which is basically a virtual assistant that sits inside play my kids that parents can comm, talk to, not like any other chat bot.

And they can use it to not only do research but it also interacts with the platform. They can add things and take things off their platform. So it it has tools now that you can actually add. It's just the start, it's just the beginning. For sure. 'cause I think it's got a ways to go.

I think Brian Chesney che of of Airbnb early on was saying his issue with AI was the user interface that he felt like that. It was still very textual based and that it needed more visual components to that. And so we're still going through the process of what does the visual component look like for parents?

And again,

[00:12:12] David: slapping on a chat bot. That's not how that

[00:12:14] David Watkins: not just Jo, not just

[00:12:16] David: See Gary, I was right. It's not just a chat bot.

[00:12:18] David Watkins: Yeah.

[00:12:19] Gary: What,

Why are you targeting me? I didn't say anything about a chatbot.

[00:12:23] David: I am just saying does, I had to help you with design. 

[00:12:26] Gary: Oh,

[00:12:26] David: just wanted to make everything a chatbot, so you know, I was just telling you

[00:12:30] Gary: Okay.

[00:12:31] David Watkins: So I'd like to think that we had the first, and then it was a chat bot. 'cause that's what the, that,

[00:12:35] David: sure you didn't have a choice

[00:12:37] David Watkins: We had the first one for activities. So I think I can, that I know of any other ones I was doing.

[00:12:43] David: Yeah, I mean it's true as far as hey, that's

[00:12:46] David Watkins: as far as I know, yeah.

[00:12:47] David: So if you were, if you had five years from now you warped five years and you've had no major hurdles, where would plan my kids be?

[00:12:57] David Watkins: Yeah. Yeah. So I think first of all the company's pretty mission and vision driven, so that was part of my goal. So our vision actually was to enrich the lives of kids. Because I felt at the time that some of the societal challenges that we had were that kids weren't getting out and being around other kids like them or not like them.

So we wanted to build something that would enable that with the mission of empowering or enabling parents so that they could do that for their kids. And we wanted to do that as, as broad as possible, starting. Regionally growing nationally, and then in other parts of the world that, that need this.

So from a mission and vision, that's you know what we wanna do, we want to, we ultimately, we wanna be the infrastructure to enable parents to find, plan and purchase activities for the kids.

[00:13:55] David: So you, in five years, if all things went well, you're just much bigger. That's the

[00:14:00] David Watkins: And we're achieving we're achieving our vision and mission. So as long as I've always, decisions that we make are always around, is it gonna achieve the mission and vision of the company? I don't really care what, how we do it. In fact, we're a little bit in a, I want you to pivot it called a two-way door.

But less on the marketplace and more on the plumbing that needs to happen. As I mentioned earlier, I think that's one of the biggest challenge, if you're a competitor to play my kids, if you're in another marketplace, in another part of the country, you're gonna have the same problem. I think that's where the bigger challenge is.

And and again, so that's what we're looking at right now is it's how can we make this.

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[00:15:14] David Watkins: So when I started playing my kids, I actually, so I have, I had a little book of problems and I write them down like I'm an engineer by train, so I'd see a problem by write it down and the, planning kids activities is one for my personal life. The other one I had was around, I've done two remodels on my house. And so that was a nightmare. And so I was like, wait, maybe there's a better way for me to manage the construction process. And so I started talking to some people I knew that were general contractors and like David, like culturally like subs.

They don't use an iPhone, like they don't like, and this again, this was like. Six, seven years ago. But it's like cultural, like that's your biggest hurdle was getting people to actually use the technology when they just wanna, be more verbal or, just call me on the phone. You're right some, sometimes your users aren't ready.

I would say for parents and there's some data on this, but parents are actually, as far as using ai on average, I don't know what the numbers, I can give you the. Linked to the study, but compared to most people on average, parents actually use AI more. And I think it's because of all the pain we, parents have and they're just looking for ways to solve the problem and they're willing to try ai.

[00:16:29] David: Oh, for sure. Oh, for sure. Yeah it's a great tool for those really weird questions you only get as a parent. That's for sure. That is for sure. So I wanted to pivot a little bit. You mentioned that you were in one of the inaugural class for the Founders Institute. Tell me about that. Tell me what is involved with that.

[00:16:51] David Watkins: Yeah. The Founder Institute. It's one of the I don't know, at least top five accelerators probably in the world. It's one of the larger ones. And I had already started playing my kids, but as I mentioned, I wanted to, so I got to zero to. Myself and I realized that in order to achieve the goals that I was gonna need some capital to do it and bootstrap.

So the Founder Institute is it's a pre-seed accelerator. So their goal is to get you in a position to be a fundable business. And so the first year that they had a chapter here in North Carolina. I was able to apply and I was accepted and was able to go through that program and graduate.

So it's a great asset for the community and I think they're still having cohorts. So definitely encourage people to apply for the next.

[00:17:43] David: We just interviewed and Gary reminded me, I was like, I know we've just recently spoken to someone of the Founders Institute and it was Oz Merchant. He's just so much fun to talk to. We talked afterwards. We have a lot in common. And we had coffee for an hour and a half of just chatting.

It was great. But he's a pretty, a big deal. I didn't ask him specifically about that he would talk about his startup, but he's a pretty big deal over there. And he's a great startup guy if he's involved that's good stuff.

[00:18:09] David Watkins: Yeah, it the program itself takes you from basically building a business model, doing customer interviews, getting your first prototype built getting that feedback, and then most importantly, getting your ducks in a row so that you can go pitch pitch investors.

So it's a

[00:18:26] David: But you'd already been around for a little while. Hadn't you done a lot of that? Did you find the content to be a bit redundant? I know at all. You've been doing it for a while, right?

[00:18:33] David Watkins: Yeah so that I went into the program thinking, oh, this is gonna be easy. I've already done all this stuff. And it certainly was helpful, but it's also good to give it another lookie. So you go, you had this idea and you built a, a three-year plan from it and then you dust it off again and go through it and so you tweak it a little bit.

So it was a good exercise to go back and revise some things, update some things, validate some things, say, oh yeah, we've already unvalidated this, take this off the list. So it was a good exercise to do that. Every week, you've got, it's a lot of work. It's more, but I was like, oh yeah, I'm gonna get this done in no time.

And then I'd be up late Sunday night trying to.

[00:19:11] David: Sometimes, the, they, there's a reason they call them fundamentals, right? It's like people like to skip over it. Oh, this is the easy stuff. This is the, this is just a bunch of words on a piece of paper. But man those hillers that you build a business on. That hasn't changed. It's that's where I was talking to someone the other day and I'm really bad at attribution.

It's business is the same. It's someone's buying something. How you get there, how you entice them, how you market them, all that might change with AI or whatever. But at the end of the day, business is the same. It's been for thousands of years. It's connecting people.

It's giving, getting them enticed by whatever it is you're selling and those kinds of things.

Those foundations are still the same, even in our fast-paced, crazy breakneck world, it's still the same. And yeah I find the same thing. So I, we have a little startup that we're working on and I'm applying for not, we're not raising money, so we're not applying for those specifically, but, but I'm doing those same applications, asking those same questions, and they have that same content.

I'm like, but I've already built my prototype. Like it's already out the door. I've got a beta go and it's a, and I'm like, I'm betting I still have a ton to learn here. And it's easy to put on your your ego and think, oh I'm good at this. But I know those founders and those mentors are just gonna shred me.

And I look forward to it in a way.

[00:20:31] David Watkins: Yeah. Yeah. Learning is a continuous process, so yeah, and you do have to put your ego, ego down and let people, I think that's hard for people to, it's like, why are you calling my baby ugly? 

[00:20:42] David: Dude, I, what's funny you say that I, so our pilots for our little thing have been big pixel clients, and I joke, it's like working with your mom because they're very supportive and they're kind, and I'm like, no, I need someone to kick me in the teeth and tell me this product is bad and why it's bad so I can make it better.

Just telling me, oh, that's great. Not helpful Stomach.

[00:21:03] David Watkins: yeah. So in, in your prompts, do you say, please be, please be really critical and mean to me

[00:21:09] David: Yeah. 

[00:21:09] David Watkins: In your answer.

[00:21:10] David: And some people like Gary really enjoy that. They want to punch me in the face. Apparently I have a very punchable face. But yeah, I have to ask, almost beg them to give me negative feedback. 'cause they don't wanna, and I'm like, guys, you're not gonna hurt the relationship we have over here because this thing sucks.

If this thing sucks, tell me. And that's gonna be way more helpful.

[00:21:28] David Watkins: Yeah.

[00:21:29] Gary: Now, David, you mentioned that you use AI a lot in the app and then also from a business standpoint behind the scenes. How much is AI infused to the way you run the business?

[00:21:41] David Watkins: Yeah ear early on, a lot of it was around content. So in building the business, the marketplace content was important to bring people. To, to the platform. So we did a lot with, helping come up with what's right on our blog helping edit the blog. It's interesting.

Early on there was a lot of blow back on should you give AI credit, if you wrote something. And so early on we would write in our blogs, this. This blog post was I, the right exact words, but it was like, we used ai, but everything was edited and approved by real people.

Which I think in anything, I think the idea of what's the term I'm looking for? It's like human in the middle, ai, or what is it? There's another

[00:22:28] David: Human in the loop.

[00:22:29] David Watkins: In the loop I think is so key. And that's true with anything. Like any, if you just take what you're gonna get out of AI verbatim, like you're gonna be in a world of hurt. so you've got to, you've got to have some human intervention in there to see, again, it's an easy task that doesn't, that's just like binary then maybe that's okay. But most cases you've gotta, so mo early on it was mostly around, around helping us. Create more content.

As a solopreneur it's like you wear so many hats I'm not a creative writer. That's not what I went to school for. So a, it was super helpful in doing things like that. And then it was around, gosh, anything any, anytime you would think, oh, I have to do this task.

It's okay, how can AI help me do this more efficiently? When I graduated the Founder Institute, I don't remember, I guess AI was a thing then. But I can see how people would just use the AI to do all that stuff. But again, if you don't the thing about, and I feel really bad for kids who've graduated now.

They have great opportunity 'cause of ai, but I think the thing that I'm most concerned about is like I can prompt ai. To do things for me more efficiently because I've done them before myself, and so I know what the inputs and the outputs are. I just wanna shorten that, right? I just wanna get that done faster.

And so it's like when you in school, like when you learned arithmetic, like you, you were taught what, addition was. And then at the end of that chapter, there was a word problem, right? You could only do the word problem if you knew the fundamentals. And I feel like ai that's like how can you go and prompt things and understand what the output is if you don't know the fundamentals.

And so I think it'll be interesting to see how our education system adapts to that in the future. But I feel fortunate now that I have all these frameworks and just historical knowledge of things that, I can to. Get the things that I want out of AI and be able to check it to know that it's going the right direction.

Where if you don't have that, I dunno, I just feel like you'd be lost.

[00:24:35] David: I was just reading an article of the Harvard Business Review and. They were talking about, they did this big study 'cause that's what they do. And they gave an assignment to expert writers people who were tangentially around writing like marketers, but they weren't writers themselves. And then they gave technical people who weren't writers at all and they gave them an assignment each, the same assignment.

And they had judges over here, like real experts, magazine editors and stuff like that. Choose the best ones and rank them. And they found that, of course, the writers with no ai, the writers did, they chose the best topic. They, and then the adjacent did pretty well. And the technology was lagging behind.

And then they said, okay, let's give them all ai. And now we're talking about choosing a topic. And the writers did marginally better. The marketers, the adjacent people jumped actually ahead of the writers in choosing a topic and the technology people jumped up. They were still behind, but they jumped a big thing choosing the content that, or the topic to write on.

Then they said, okay, now write it. Long story short, the writers jumped ahead again. The marketers were close within shooting distance, and the technologists were often the just doldrums. And they came to the conclusion of the further you are away from whatever you're doing, the less AI can help you.

And they were saying why did they able to choose good topics? And they're saying it's kinda learning about a marathon, understanding a marathon, and then doing a marathon. You can learn all about it stuff and technologists can learn, Hey, that's I need good shoes, I need this, that, and the other.

But then actually going in and doing it, when they've never done that before, it's just, it overwhelmed them and they got, and their scores dropped. And ev, the difference was quite large. What? And what was interesting is one, okay, so if you're not a creative writer like you are, then someone gotta make you so good.

And that I thought that was really interesting if, but if you are pretty okay at it. It can make you really good. And I think that's something to learn from. It's from my perspective, it's like the vibe coding, right? This is the bane of my existence right now. If you don't know technology at all, vibe coding is gonna give you slop and trash if you're adjacent though, so you don't have to be a full on programmer like I have been for 25 years.

We can make great software with or without ai. But now if you're adjacent to it, maybe you were a low coder before, you have a little bit of knowledge, you can now do something pretty decent. But if you're just a regular Joe, you're not gonna just suddenly magically be able to create this magic, this great piece of software.

And I think there's a lot of. Hype mis misinformation around that is like anybody. And there's all these ads, you see it every, everywhere. Anybody can build software just with a prompt and I'm using software just 'cause that's my world, but it's, every world has the equivalent.

[00:27:30] David Watkins: Yeah. Just if you're not. If you don't know it, it's just a black box and like you just don't know what's in

[00:27:36] David: You don't know what good

[00:27:37] David Watkins: machinations. You don't know the machinations that are going on in there, and then something comes out and you don't, you can't judge the.

[00:27:42] David: Yeah. Yeah. When the vibe coding thing first started and they started introducing it into design programs and, the designer hype was like, oh, now we don't need, engineers, we could just go straight from design to finished product. And everybody designed a color picker app or a to-do list, and they were all trash.

They might have been beautiful, but they didn't do anything.

[00:28:03] Gary: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:28:04] David Watkins: Yeah.

[00:28:06] Gary: David, from your experience five years with this, it's, I guess technically still a startup, but you seem to be pretty well established. But more interestingly is when you started without ai, but now you use AI very commonly in the business. What would you give a new entrepreneur or a new startup as your three pieces of advice, but see if you can connect it with.

From the fundamental knowledge you had and then now how they can use AI as well. 

[00:28:34] David Watkins: I think first start big, actually not so small on your, what your vision, what your moonshot is, what your great outcome is because those will end up being the things that are more aspirational that you want to get to. And then the second one would be create systems of accountability. And those could be family and friends, it could be mentors, accelerators, advisors, and eventually, hopefully the board members. And then the third thing I would say is celebrate the small successes because, startups, entrepreneurship is a tough road and you've gotta at least stop and, be able to, to, to celebrate the small successes because there's gonna be a lot of times when things are not good and you're beating yourself up. In play, my kids' case, for example, we any time we finish successfully planning a kids kids plan for parents, we would just send out an email and it was just a celebratory.

You you've helped empower or enable a parent and youth. Help to enrich, the life of a kid, and those little things are the things that just keep you going back to that great outcome.

[00:29:42] Gary: Sounds good. So if anybody wants to learn more about you or about Plan My Kids, where's the best place for them to find you?

[00:29:51] David Watkins: You can find us@planmykids.com and you can find me on LinkedIn at in slash watkins. And for any parents that are listening to the podcast, you can use promo code big pixel 25 and get 25% off

[00:30:08] David: Oh, look at that. We're part of a, we're part of a promo code. Gary, I feel so big

[00:30:14] Gary: We've made it. We finally made it.

[00:30:16] David: we did it.

[00:30:17] Gary: This is our version of having sponsored content.

[00:30:20] David: That's right. It's our first ad. Yay.

[00:30:24] Gary: Nice, nice. So we'll get the residuals for that when David.

[00:30:28] David: That's right. I get to keep that 25%. Is that right? No.

[00:30:33] Gary: Awesome. We'll put those links in the show notes for anybody that's interested. 

[00:30:37] David: On that note, thank you so much, David, for joining us. It's been a lot of fun.

[00:30:41] David Watkins: Yeah. Thanks for having me guys. I appreciate all the work you're doing and it's been a great conversation.

[00:30:46] David: We will be back next week. Everybody have a go?

[00:30:49] OUTRO: That wraps up this episode of the Biz Dev Podcast, and this time you get me, Scott Bailey. I'm the lead dev over here at Big Pixel, and I know what you're thinking. I thought David did all the work. Well, not exactly. We have an awesome team of people to back in both. Biz Dev is a production of Big Pixel, the US based provider of UX design strategy, and custom software.

This podcast is edited by Audio Wiz Matt McCracken and Christie Pronto marketing guru for Big Pixel. Want to connect? Shoot us an email at hello@thebigpixel.net. Or you can find out some Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X and LinkedIn.