October 19, 2025 • 22 mins
Keeping a family running smoothly is a difficult task that so often falls on the shoulders of women, which is why Nicole Retter created Personal Admin Manager or PAM for short. PAM helps you and your family deal with the mental load of the modern world by keeping track of appointments, reminders, special events and so mch more all in one place.
In the episode, Toni and Nicole chat about how the idea for PAM came about, why it's a such a useful resource for modern families, and the process of starting a tech startup from nothing, plus so much more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode is brought to you by Uber one.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
We need to Talk Conversations on wellness with Coast FMS
Tony Street.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hello, welcome to We need to talk that. Every so
often you stumble across something that makes your life a
little bit better. And for me, that was in an
app that I got recommended actually by a friend a
couple of weeks ago, called PAM Personal Admin Manager. Now
this app has a key we founder. Her name is
Nicole Ritter. Nicole has been over twenty years in marketing
and brand work, and she created PAM to help parents
(00:31):
like me, especially mums, lighten the invisible mental load of
managing a household, which is hectic at the best of times. Now,
what PAM is. It's an AI and abled assistant that
digests school newsletters, emails, WhatsApp, threads, invitations, photos, and calendars
so that families don't have to juggle all the admin
in their heads. It's about not just organizing your life,
(00:51):
but freeing your mental bandwidth. Now I have just downloaded
this and I've had it for a couple of weeks now,
and to my great delight, last night, we're recording this
on the very first day of school, going back I
got this this is what you've got coming up this
week email?
Speaker 3 (01:06):
I went, oh, this is so good because.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I don't even know what I've got coming up, and
it actually just clarified for me and gave me a
bit of order too, a week that I thought was
going to be just a mad scramble. Nicole, congratulations, this
app is amazing.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
Go you, thank you. I'm so stoked that for you.
Speaker 5 (01:23):
Like honestly creating the app, you know that it was
a bit of a passion project. But every time someone
tells me that that's what it's done for them, that
it did something in terms of maze my week easier,
meant I didn't forget something so therefore got to school and
had a crying child and was running late for a meeting.
That's why I did this. Like, look those people sharing
those light little nuggets of what it's done for them.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
That just makes me so stoked.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Thinking, what do you think is the big difference between
PAM and other merging calendar apps out there? Because I
had one once before that merged calendars together. But this
gives you a different sort of tool, doesn't it.
Speaker 5 (01:58):
Yeah, all the difference is that those made fans, so
you know, I've done so much research because a we bootstrap,
so I was using I literally use the money that
we had pulled together to do our bathroom renovation to
build a second bathroom. I was like, we have to
get I can only get this right once. I don't
have enough money to do this twice. So I did
lots of them to using lots of questions and found
(02:19):
that everyone is using either a wal calendar or Google calendar,
but still like sixty six percent of mums in New
Zealand were saying they're still either like severely or majorly
stressed out of organizing this stuff, So those tools don't work.
What happens is they kind of get everything and mash
them together. But for families, it's such a different like
no one's really cared about the family unit. Everyone just
(02:41):
cares about you as an individual, your productivity at work
as opposed to going well a family's quite a different dynamic.
And what PAM does, which is quite different to other tools.
As PAM goes, I don't care what channel it is,
what format it is, So you can send me a
twenty six page long school newsletter as well as you
can talk to me and say it's my mom's birthday
(03:01):
or Wednesday next week and the kids. Then you shouldn't
pads for football on Saturday. It doesn't matter what format.
PAM will take all of that and go, oh, I
get it and turn it into a really simple calendar
for you, tell you what you need to do ahead
of time so you don't forget it. But then also like,
but you know, that part's really cool. But the part
that I'm the most excited about is then looping and
other people to help support you, so you are no
(03:22):
longer the central project manager of your family. Like it's
not hot to have to remind your husband or partner
or whoever else in your life what they need to
do every day and become the nag of your house
or like I didn't sign up for that when I
started dating my husband.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
No, it's so true. And I like that part because
you can add family members in and I've got a
thirteen year old who's now going to have her own
calendar increasingly so, and they've all got a different color code,
and so I can tell when it's one of their
activities and when it's one of my sons. And it's
also got a very good to do list that task
to do list. I like because it tells you when
things are overdue, right, and when things are coming up,
(03:58):
and it's just that, yeah, it does. It feels like
you've got another person that's just going, hey, don't forget.
Speaker 4 (04:03):
This, yeah, and decentralizing it right.
Speaker 5 (04:05):
Like So I went to Auckland the other week and
for like four days for some work stuff, and I
was on the plane, I went, oh, wow, that's a shift.
It didn't even cross my mind to mention to my
husband or my mom, who helped school pickups what the
kids had on that week. I just got on a
plane and left.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Because they all have HAM too.
Speaker 5 (04:26):
Yeah. Yeah, so they just look at what they needed
to do for the day. You know, there was a
teacher only day, there was sports activity, there was a
birthday party, and I didn't need to take There was
no like handover or briefing session. Like it's all centralizing HAM.
I'm no longer the household Edmund person.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
Now.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I love that you came up with this idea, but
it's one thing to have an idea of, oh, this
could make things really easy. It's an absolute different thing
to get it off the ground and to have the tech.
No house So how did you get from oh, this
is a good idea to the point where you actually
had a working.
Speaker 5 (04:57):
At So I'm a really big believer and messy action
Like it's kind of a bit of a catchphrase. I
use that basically, putting one foot in front of the other,
one messy step up together, even it's just an email
or sketching something on a piece of paper, If you
do that repeatedly, over and over again, before you know it,
you've climbed a mountain where the number of like an
(05:18):
all you know, like I say this would love the
number of people who come unt to me like oh
I had the exact same idea.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
I like, oh, but I didn't. You know, I never
did anything with it, And I'm like, well, you could have.
Speaker 5 (05:29):
I'm really lucky that my background is that I have
worked in marketing with digital products for a long time.
The role that I was at previous to doing PAN
was actually a digital agency, so I understood the guts
of how to create it. I mean, I was a
marketing and brand person, but I understood the guts of
what you need to go into a I also understood
kind of general YUEX design principles and stuff just from osmosis,
(05:52):
from working with brilliant designers and things. I'm also very
lucky that I have lots of very talented friends who
were willing to kind of give me help or a
nudge here or there with bits and pieces.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
But when it came to the technology, the very first
PAM I created.
Speaker 5 (06:06):
Where there was no technology, I said to a girlfriend, like,
I want to create this app. I've designed it, I
have no idea how to build it, but before I
do anything, I want to make sure it's really worthwhile.
How would you feel about pretending to be a like
AI personal for families? And she went amazing, And she
was a mum who was wanting to get back into work,
but it wasn't quite sure what to do. And so
(06:28):
for about a month I had three families, including our
friend Anna, sending all of their stuff to her every day,
all their emails, all their like flights or their tickets,
anything from school.
Speaker 4 (06:38):
And she would every night diligently read through the whole
list of all their comms and build them out a
calendar and like a word dock and.
Speaker 5 (06:45):
Send them back to them. And that was it, And
then that proved it was saving people. A couple of
hours a week. I was like, okay, so I started
with that. And then the next version I did was
I found some no code like zero code tools, which
is like the ability to build an app without have
to actually know how to code. And I really implore
people that there's really there's things are ten times better
(07:05):
an hour. You can literally go to an AI app
building tool and type it on the ten lance you
can build a proper concept.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
You know, you can get quite far with that stuff.
Speaker 5 (07:13):
Yeah, and then I and then I went and worked
with an agency to build out like the first kind
of actual app store version. And then I'm very lucky
that one of my very closest friends is a very
talented innovation was and he came as a profounder, and
then he went and built the actual, like you know,
the scalable version that's in the app store that we
have thousands of people using, and that isn't going to break.
(07:33):
And although when we doubled our users in a couple
of days, it definitely strained and creeped them struggled for
a few days.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
But yeah, well you don't anticipate that, And I beat
you didn't anticipate at one point you had more people
downloading it than Tender and hinge. What the heck you're
beating dating apps?
Speaker 5 (07:48):
Yeah, well it's funny because ironically, maybe you need the
dating apps before you need PAM. But yeah, I mean
and that the reason that that happened is, yes, we
had this, We've had lots of lots of downloads recently,
but almost all of our users give us five starts.
So people go in and they kind of go, oh, yeah,
(08:09):
I really need someone to help my family life, and
they open it and then five.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
Minutes later go, oh my god.
Speaker 5 (08:14):
And I get these messages from people saying things like,
you know, we have messages from I get messages almost
on a daily basis saying things like I open this
and I cried. It seems so insignificant, you know, like, oh,
there's a gold coin day on Tuesday, and my kid
needs to come dress to some random book character thing
next week. But it's Deaths by a thousand carts. It's
this never ending pile of things. And like when you
(08:36):
have multiple kids and they all have their own activities
outside of school, and then you have your social life
and your work life and your romantic life, and trying
to keep all of those things going. I think you
feel like you're failing at everything, and it's so unrealistic
and it's so unmanageable that when people go, oh, I'm
not dropping balls and I don't have to walk around
with what feels like a thousand post it notes in
(08:57):
my head, you just feel.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Like, yes, someone else is gonna remind me, and you
think they're insignificant. But no mom wants to send their
kids to school on book day and not in a costume.
You want to be the mum that remembers that right.
You don't want it to have slipped through the cracks,
and it can if you don't have someone reminding you.
And that's what I like about it. I think, oh
my gosh, it's just it's remind us without even having
(09:18):
to look at the app. It was like the email
I got, it just went wow, this is just giving
me clarity for the week. And I didn't even know
it did that. So it's surprising me even you know,
two or three weeks down the line.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
This is we need to talk with Tony Street.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Where are you at? Like it's free at the moment,
where are you at in terms of how this is
going to help you financially? Because I know that you're
in that stage at the moment where you're looking for
backers and backers are coming in. How does that work?
Speaker 5 (09:46):
Yeah, So we're in a very exciting stage where we've
hit our minimum raise a bound. It's a very complicated
process for anyone who isn't involved in setup. So we
actually have hopefully money starting to hit our bank accounts.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
This week next week.
Speaker 5 (09:58):
So it's been two and a half years. I've not
made a dollar yet. It's been two and a half
years without a salary. So that's why my PAM HQ
is my caravan as you can see me in right now.
But what's happening is we still need some more investors.
So if there's anything investors out there like, oh, I
love to list the PAM. They're still a bit of
room and the investment round. But what we're doing is
(10:19):
I wanted to before we did anything else, I wanted
to create a tool that actually did what I was after.
And my whole thing was I want to reduce the
mental load on parents, and I wanted to solve the
overwhelm of all the stuff coming at you, and I
want you to be able to know who's responsible for
what and I want you to be able to loopen
other people and I don't care about anything else until
we deliver on that and people love it. So now
(10:41):
that we've hit that mark, I'm like, Okay, we have
to have some kind of financial viability in order to
keep going.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
So the next so sometime this month.
Speaker 5 (10:49):
We will change Pam into a from a completely free
product into a freemium.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
So there's a big chunk of it that's free, which
is basically the Pam brain.
Speaker 5 (10:59):
So sending all your emails, talking to Pam, having her
create your calendar for you, that part will always stay free?
Speaker 4 (11:05):
Is the intention?
Speaker 5 (11:06):
Never say always, because start up to change. And then
the idea is that then if you fall in love
with Pam, like everyone gets a free two week trial
of everything. Yeah, so if you fall in love with Pam,
you're like, I want to hook up my Google calendar,
my WhatsApp, I want to add my partner, my mother,
I want to be able filter on my children. Then
you pay fifteen dollars a month to hold on to
(11:26):
those kind of extra features. But if you're just using
Pam as an individual, have it for free, go for it,
like everyone should have less stress in their lives like
knock yourself out. But if you like actually this as well,
this is next level, this is this has changing my life,
then I hope that people would be happy to then
pay fifteen dollars a month.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Yeah, and it's not a stole a lot fifteen dollars
a month. I think I'd almost pay fifteen dollars a
week with the way it's helping me.
Speaker 5 (11:48):
Yeah, and we hear that from people a lot. But
for me, accessibility is really important.
Speaker 4 (11:53):
But I didn't know. I'm not.
Speaker 5 (11:54):
I didn't create pam to as a completely altruistic thing,
but I also created it because I cared about six
and that's predominantly for women. Like I was just like
of seeing all my friends who are incredibly competent women
in their lives, and the biggest thing that they were
struggling under was trying to juggle family life coordination and
edmund and doing it all themselves. Well not you know,
like some of us have great partners. Often, I think
(12:16):
that men actually get a really bad rap, and I
think a lot of it is that they actually just
don't have awareness. They don't know what the mental load is.
They don't know that when you get a birthday invitation.
It's actually not just a birthday invitation. It's adding it
to your calendar. It's remembering to RSVP, finding that parent's number,
RSVP to them, remembering to buy a gift, actually buying
(12:37):
the gift, remembering the date of the event, organizing who's
picking up and dropping off. But there's so many steps,
and so Pam, actually you take a photo of a
birth crumpled up birthday invitation, and Pam puts all those
steps into the calendar.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
So you go, okay, well, let's div these up.
Speaker 5 (12:50):
Yes, And so it gives partners who maybe weren't the
kind of primary caregiver the opportunity to opt in as
opposed to being dictated to and kind of and the
and the parent who does mostly em and just deciding
what they're not going to bother telling them about.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Yes and almost falling into that trap of becoming another
child that you've just got to give instructions to which
no one wants to have aged yeah.
Speaker 5 (13:13):
Yeah, And and and you know, like my husband less
as common socks, I mean, I adore him, is the
love of my life. But he says that you know,
he was the inspiration for him because he was so useless.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
Haha.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Well see, now if you didn't have a useless husband,
this might never have happened. So good on him, he's
your mused.
Speaker 5 (13:28):
Yeah, and he was just you know he I would
tell her we had something on and he go, oh yeah.
He wouldn't mentally register it because he knew that I
would remind him. So why would he bother putting in
his calendar or mentory restrant because he knew that the
day before remind him. Probably on the day would have
to remind him. And that was using up so much
of my bandwidth, and it's and I don't want to
have that relationship with my partner, no, you know. And
(13:49):
the other week, my daughter had a doctor's appointment and
I hadn't told my I'd mentioned it in passing, but
I hadn't told my husband, like time where And he
just was outside the doctor's clinic and my daughter goes
Daddy and I was like, well, no, no, no, actually,
like daddy, and he was part across the road.
Speaker 4 (14:05):
He'd seen it in PAM, he'd had a gap between meetings.
He was like, well, I just wanted to come and
support her.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Oh see, that's that's really really cool.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
And he wouldn't have had the opportunity to do that
if we hadn't have Pam, because I wouldn't have told
him about it, you know, Like I know.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
You're listening to we need to talk with Tony Street.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
So what does it mean for you as a business
owner as a founder now? Like it must be pretty
exciting to think, you know, I've been in a salary
job and now I've created my own business, like this
could potentially be well it will be, I suspect very
life changing for you and your family.
Speaker 5 (14:36):
Yeah, hopefully, I mean that would be amazing. I'm just
very much looking forward to a paycheck, my first paycheck
in a couple of years. Because we've been we've been
living lean, but we knew what the big vision was,
you know, like.
Speaker 4 (14:48):
What I wanted to create and how large this could be.
Speaker 5 (14:51):
I think for me, what it's meant more than anything
else is I've been able to just sounds really cheesy,
but for my entire career, I've always been told to
kind of stay in my lane.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
I have a lot of big ideas.
Speaker 5 (15:05):
I have a lot of energy and a lot of ambition,
and there's been a lot of that's a great idea,
but that belongs to this department, So you can't go
there like just kind of pull back, or if you're
going to do it, maybe like give them the idea
run word or you know that sort of thing where
being a startup founder, I just got to like this,
just spread my wings and like go for it. You know,
(15:25):
like anything that I put my energy into would build
something and be able to really really rely on my intuition.
So I did all the original designs for a PAM
and I'm not a trained designer. I haven't done any
UX courses, but I know what simplicity means, and so
I have broken so many rules around how you should
(15:47):
design things by going no, if you make me click
three things to do that, it's you using it too
much mean to Like I want you to imagine, it's
ten o'clock at night. I've just been dealing with two
screaming kurds getting them into bed. I'm exhausted aff to
day at work. I've just down the couch with a
glass of wine and I've just got a twenty six
page school and you did that.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Don't make me think.
Speaker 5 (16:08):
Yeah, I just want to go oh, and now I
get this almost like arrogance go, I don't even to
deal with you. Fought it to Pam like ha ha
like almost like evil, like wicked, laugh.
Speaker 4 (16:18):
Like I know what you mean.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Because the first couple of emails I thought it, I
was like, I don't even have to read this. I
know what it's about, and I'm not going to look
at all the extra stuff because Pam's going to sort
of for me and I know exactly what you mean.
Speaker 5 (16:30):
And just things that, and it's Pam's actually caught stuff
that because I I have ADHD. So people will sometimes
say to me, oh, did you create Pam, because you're
really good at m and I'm like, no, I was
the mom who never had any of the things that
you were meant to have At school, I dropped every
ball and felt awful and was running around with my
ass on.
Speaker 4 (16:48):
Fire all the time.
Speaker 5 (16:50):
And so I had a just a routine ultrasound, not
another baby, I'm well past that stage, but just for something.
And so I sent the appointment to Pam. And on
the day of the appointment, I was like, oh, yeah,
the pay there's two Pam had sent to me, Hey,
remember to drink a lead before your appointment. There is
no way I would have read that one line at
(17:10):
the bottom of this email. I would have turned up
to my appointment and they would have turned me away.
Speaker 4 (17:14):
Wow, and it to me weeks to get the appointment right,
and so just that stuff going, Oh, it's just all
those kind of balls that always got dropped all the
time that just derailed your day and just that doesn't
happen to me anymore. Like I get to turn up
now and be the parents. I hope. People are like, oh, wait,
so what day is that? Like football day?
Speaker 5 (17:36):
I'm like, ah, and I just without having any of
it use my brainsposts, I just know.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Yeah, you know, because you're getting reminded. I finally just
want to ask that moment from where you were at
work like normal employee and now you somehow had the
guards to start and go out on your own, knowing
that you were going to not have a paycheck for
a while. And I'm sure you'll be able to renovate
that bathroom now, but in fact, what did that take?
(18:03):
What was that moment we went right here we go?
Speaker 5 (18:05):
So there are like and I was thinking about it
the other day, like people ask about your origin story
and I think there's no one, there's no one, just
from moment. There's all these little micro moments, right, and
I think I'm really lucky my husband's hyper supportive, right,
And so he was like, I was like, I don't
know if we can live at one page, and it's like, ah,
we'll make it work, you know. He was like, I
(18:26):
lived on way less than what we had as ocurre
to'll be fine.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
I was like, Okay, we don't.
Speaker 5 (18:30):
Need a new power. We don't need over these holidays.
You know, we don't need flash new shoes. We can
live on it, you know, having a super supportive partner.
And I know that that's a luxury. Not everyone has that.
But I think the thing that made me go, actually, yeah,
I've got this. I can do this was when I
got accepted into my first incubator. And I recommend anyone.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
Who I get lots of people content me going I've
got this idea. I don't know where to go with it.
And the first thing I say.
Speaker 5 (18:54):
Is boil it down to the nugget, like, get it
down to the smallest rain of gold.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
That is the idea.
Speaker 5 (18:59):
Don't try be the next Google Calendar, or don't try
and be the next I don't know, Tinder. Please don't
be out of tender and then start by talking to
people like I invite some girlfriends over for wine and
cheese and said, I've got this business idea I want
to take you through. I swear it's not Amway or
are born or any of that stuff. Come of a
(19:22):
chat and they all fell over themselves when I told
them about the idea. And the next thing I did
was I posted it on like a Facebook mummies group
that I was part of, and people just loved it.
Speaker 4 (19:31):
So you can you can kind of test your idea and.
Speaker 5 (19:33):
Lots of safe ways before you quit your job to
make sure that you're really onto something.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
But yeah, then the accelerate.
Speaker 5 (19:39):
So then I got I applied for an incubator and
these are free. There's a really good one at the
Ministry of Awesome. Do the remote around the whole country
and basically you get all the support and all the
structure around you that you need to do a startup.
And after ten twelve weeks of doing one of these
things part time, like it's not full time, you can
do it while you're working, you will know that the
(20:00):
end of it. If you have a bible business idea.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
And you did that and then you knew yeah, And.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
Then I was like, right, okay, I'm out.
Speaker 5 (20:06):
I'm pretty much job Like, there's enough, there's enough in
this that it's worth me, you know this, because what
is it? You know, there's a really awful success rate
about startups and how many actually go the dustines and stuff.
But I think if you think, if you get to
the point where you're like this could really work, you
kind of have to go for it, because like regretting
(20:26):
it forever and then seeing someone else in twelve months
time doing the idea that you had will just kill you.
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's if you can.
I was really lucky and that my skills meant I
could still just some contracting work, so in the early
days before PAM was all consuming, I was able to
get paid. You know, I knew if I worked a
(20:47):
certain number of contracting hours a week, we could kind
of keep the bits paid.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Well, Nicole, I think this is magnificent. I love the app,
and I think the more people that get to know
what it is and experience it for themselves, no doubt,
you'll get more investors. And I look forward to seeing
where it goes, and I look forward to that paid
option because I think it's just a no brainer and
so good for Jahimir Mary to be doing this as well.
What a great example you're setting.
Speaker 4 (21:11):
Yeah, I think so to.
Speaker 5 (21:12):
Like I think I am not a technical person, you know,
Like I was really proud when I hooked up my
second screen in my office the other day and my
husband and co founder person themselves, and like, dude, you're
the founder of a technical business and you're excited that
you manage your second.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
Screend for your laptop. Yeah, so you don't.
Speaker 5 (21:28):
I think this preconceived notion of what you need to
be to be a founder is absolutely rubbish. What you
need to be is you need to be gutsy. You
need to be willing to like actually put yourself out there,
and you need to be willing to take messy steps
like do the uncomfortable and put one foot in front
of the other and ask people for help. There's pretty
much no one out there who won't give you fifteen
minutes a good time.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
We need to talk well, Coast FM's Tony Street.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
If you enjoyed the podcast, click to share with family
or friends. To get in touch, email we need to
talk at Coast online dot co dot mz
This episode is brought to you by Uber one.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
We need to Talk Conversations on wellness with Coast FMS
Tony Street.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hello, welcome to We need to talk that. Every so
often you stumble across something that makes your life a
little bit better. And for me, that was in an
app that I got recommended actually by a friend a
couple of weeks ago, called PAM Personal Admin Manager. Now
this app has a key we founder. Her name is
Nicole Ritter. Nicole has been over twenty years in marketing
and brand work, and she created PAM to help parents
(00:31):
like me, especially mums, lighten the invisible mental load of
managing a household, which is hectic at the best of times. Now,
what PAM is. It's an AI and abled assistant that
digests school newsletters, emails, WhatsApp, threads, invitations, photos, and calendars
so that families don't have to juggle all the admin
in their heads. It's about not just organizing your life,
(00:51):
but freeing your mental bandwidth. Now I have just downloaded
this and I've had it for a couple of weeks now,
and to my great delight, last night, we're recording this
on the very first day of school, going back I
got this this is what you've got coming up this
week email?
Speaker 3 (01:06):
I went, oh, this is so good because.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I don't even know what I've got coming up, and
it actually just clarified for me and gave me a
bit of order too, a week that I thought was
going to be just a mad scramble. Nicole, congratulations, this
app is amazing.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
Go you, thank you. I'm so stoked that for you.
Speaker 5 (01:23):
Like honestly creating the app, you know that it was
a bit of a passion project. But every time someone
tells me that that's what it's done for them, that
it did something in terms of maze my week easier,
meant I didn't forget something so therefore got to school and
had a crying child and was running late for a meeting.
That's why I did this. Like, look those people sharing
those light little nuggets of what it's done for them.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
That just makes me so stoked.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Thinking, what do you think is the big difference between
PAM and other merging calendar apps out there? Because I
had one once before that merged calendars together. But this
gives you a different sort of tool, doesn't it.
Speaker 5 (01:58):
Yeah, all the difference is that those made fans, so
you know, I've done so much research because a we bootstrap,
so I was using I literally use the money that
we had pulled together to do our bathroom renovation to
build a second bathroom. I was like, we have to
get I can only get this right once. I don't
have enough money to do this twice. So I did
lots of them to using lots of questions and found
(02:19):
that everyone is using either a wal calendar or Google calendar,
but still like sixty six percent of mums in New
Zealand were saying they're still either like severely or majorly
stressed out of organizing this stuff, So those tools don't work.
What happens is they kind of get everything and mash
them together. But for families, it's such a different like
no one's really cared about the family unit. Everyone just
(02:41):
cares about you as an individual, your productivity at work
as opposed to going well a family's quite a different dynamic.
And what PAM does, which is quite different to other tools.
As PAM goes, I don't care what channel it is,
what format it is, So you can send me a
twenty six page long school newsletter as well as you
can talk to me and say it's my mom's birthday
(03:01):
or Wednesday next week and the kids. Then you shouldn't
pads for football on Saturday. It doesn't matter what format.
PAM will take all of that and go, oh, I
get it and turn it into a really simple calendar
for you, tell you what you need to do ahead
of time so you don't forget it. But then also like,
but you know, that part's really cool. But the part
that I'm the most excited about is then looping and
other people to help support you, so you are no
(03:22):
longer the central project manager of your family. Like it's
not hot to have to remind your husband or partner
or whoever else in your life what they need to
do every day and become the nag of your house
or like I didn't sign up for that when I
started dating my husband.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
No, it's so true. And I like that part because
you can add family members in and I've got a
thirteen year old who's now going to have her own
calendar increasingly so, and they've all got a different color code,
and so I can tell when it's one of their
activities and when it's one of my sons. And it's
also got a very good to do list that task
to do list. I like because it tells you when
things are overdue, right, and when things are coming up,
(03:58):
and it's just that, yeah, it does. It feels like
you've got another person that's just going, hey, don't forget.
Speaker 4 (04:03):
This, yeah, and decentralizing it right.
Speaker 5 (04:05):
Like So I went to Auckland the other week and
for like four days for some work stuff, and I
was on the plane, I went, oh, wow, that's a shift.
It didn't even cross my mind to mention to my
husband or my mom, who helped school pickups what the
kids had on that week. I just got on a
plane and left.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Because they all have HAM too.
Speaker 5 (04:26):
Yeah. Yeah, so they just look at what they needed
to do for the day. You know, there was a
teacher only day, there was sports activity, there was a
birthday party, and I didn't need to take There was
no like handover or briefing session. Like it's all centralizing HAM.
I'm no longer the household Edmund person.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
Now.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
I love that you came up with this idea, but
it's one thing to have an idea of, oh, this
could make things really easy. It's an absolute different thing
to get it off the ground and to have the tech.
No house So how did you get from oh, this
is a good idea to the point where you actually
had a working.
Speaker 5 (04:57):
At So I'm a really big believer and messy action
Like it's kind of a bit of a catchphrase. I
use that basically, putting one foot in front of the other,
one messy step up together, even it's just an email
or sketching something on a piece of paper, If you
do that repeatedly, over and over again, before you know it,
you've climbed a mountain where the number of like an
(05:18):
all you know, like I say this would love the
number of people who come unt to me like oh
I had the exact same idea.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
I like, oh, but I didn't. You know, I never
did anything with it, And I'm like, well, you could have.
Speaker 5 (05:29):
I'm really lucky that my background is that I have
worked in marketing with digital products for a long time.
The role that I was at previous to doing PAN
was actually a digital agency, so I understood the guts
of how to create it. I mean, I was a
marketing and brand person, but I understood the guts of
what you need to go into a I also understood
kind of general YUEX design principles and stuff just from osmosis,
(05:52):
from working with brilliant designers and things. I'm also very
lucky that I have lots of very talented friends who
were willing to kind of give me help or a
nudge here or there with bits and pieces.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
But when it came to the technology, the very first
PAM I created.
Speaker 5 (06:06):
Where there was no technology, I said to a girlfriend, like,
I want to create this app. I've designed it, I
have no idea how to build it, but before I
do anything, I want to make sure it's really worthwhile.
How would you feel about pretending to be a like
AI personal for families? And she went amazing, And she
was a mum who was wanting to get back into work,
but it wasn't quite sure what to do. And so
(06:28):
for about a month I had three families, including our
friend Anna, sending all of their stuff to her every day,
all their emails, all their like flights or their tickets,
anything from school.
Speaker 4 (06:38):
And she would every night diligently read through the whole
list of all their comms and build them out a
calendar and like a word dock and.
Speaker 5 (06:45):
Send them back to them. And that was it, And
then that proved it was saving people. A couple of
hours a week. I was like, okay, so I started
with that. And then the next version I did was
I found some no code like zero code tools, which
is like the ability to build an app without have
to actually know how to code. And I really implore
people that there's really there's things are ten times better
(07:05):
an hour. You can literally go to an AI app
building tool and type it on the ten lance you
can build a proper concept.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
You know, you can get quite far with that stuff.
Speaker 5 (07:13):
Yeah, and then I and then I went and worked
with an agency to build out like the first kind
of actual app store version. And then I'm very lucky
that one of my very closest friends is a very
talented innovation was and he came as a profounder, and
then he went and built the actual, like you know,
the scalable version that's in the app store that we
have thousands of people using, and that isn't going to break.
(07:33):
And although when we doubled our users in a couple
of days, it definitely strained and creeped them struggled for
a few days.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
But yeah, well you don't anticipate that, And I beat
you didn't anticipate at one point you had more people
downloading it than Tender and hinge. What the heck you're
beating dating apps?
Speaker 5 (07:48):
Yeah, well it's funny because ironically, maybe you need the
dating apps before you need PAM. But yeah, I mean
and that the reason that that happened is, yes, we
had this, We've had lots of lots of downloads recently,
but almost all of our users give us five starts.
So people go in and they kind of go, oh, yeah,
(08:09):
I really need someone to help my family life, and
they open it and then five.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
Minutes later go, oh my god.
Speaker 5 (08:14):
And I get these messages from people saying things like,
you know, we have messages from I get messages almost
on a daily basis saying things like I open this
and I cried. It seems so insignificant, you know, like, oh,
there's a gold coin day on Tuesday, and my kid
needs to come dress to some random book character thing
next week. But it's Deaths by a thousand carts. It's
this never ending pile of things. And like when you
(08:36):
have multiple kids and they all have their own activities
outside of school, and then you have your social life
and your work life and your romantic life, and trying
to keep all of those things going. I think you
feel like you're failing at everything, and it's so unrealistic
and it's so unmanageable that when people go, oh, I'm
not dropping balls and I don't have to walk around
with what feels like a thousand post it notes in
(08:57):
my head, you just feel.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Like, yes, someone else is gonna remind me, and you
think they're insignificant. But no mom wants to send their
kids to school on book day and not in a costume.
You want to be the mum that remembers that right.
You don't want it to have slipped through the cracks,
and it can if you don't have someone reminding you.
And that's what I like about it. I think, oh
my gosh, it's just it's remind us without even having
(09:18):
to look at the app. It was like the email
I got, it just went wow, this is just giving
me clarity for the week. And I didn't even know
it did that. So it's surprising me even you know,
two or three weeks down the line.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
This is we need to talk with Tony Street.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Where are you at? Like it's free at the moment,
where are you at in terms of how this is
going to help you financially? Because I know that you're
in that stage at the moment where you're looking for
backers and backers are coming in. How does that work?
Speaker 5 (09:46):
Yeah, So we're in a very exciting stage where we've
hit our minimum raise a bound. It's a very complicated
process for anyone who isn't involved in setup. So we
actually have hopefully money starting to hit our bank accounts.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
This week next week.
Speaker 5 (09:58):
So it's been two and a half years. I've not
made a dollar yet. It's been two and a half
years without a salary. So that's why my PAM HQ
is my caravan as you can see me in right now.
But what's happening is we still need some more investors.
So if there's anything investors out there like, oh, I
love to list the PAM. They're still a bit of
room and the investment round. But what we're doing is
(10:19):
I wanted to before we did anything else, I wanted
to create a tool that actually did what I was after.
And my whole thing was I want to reduce the
mental load on parents, and I wanted to solve the
overwhelm of all the stuff coming at you, and I
want you to be able to know who's responsible for
what and I want you to be able to loopen
other people and I don't care about anything else until
we deliver on that and people love it. So now
(10:41):
that we've hit that mark, I'm like, Okay, we have
to have some kind of financial viability in order to
keep going.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
So the next so sometime this month.
Speaker 5 (10:49):
We will change Pam into a from a completely free
product into a freemium.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
So there's a big chunk of it that's free, which
is basically the Pam brain.
Speaker 5 (10:59):
So sending all your emails, talking to Pam, having her
create your calendar for you, that part will always stay free?
Speaker 4 (11:05):
Is the intention?
Speaker 5 (11:06):
Never say always, because start up to change. And then
the idea is that then if you fall in love
with Pam, like everyone gets a free two week trial
of everything. Yeah, so if you fall in love with Pam,
you're like, I want to hook up my Google calendar,
my WhatsApp, I want to add my partner, my mother,
I want to be able filter on my children. Then
you pay fifteen dollars a month to hold on to
(11:26):
those kind of extra features. But if you're just using
Pam as an individual, have it for free, go for it,
like everyone should have less stress in their lives like
knock yourself out. But if you like actually this as well,
this is next level, this is this has changing my life,
then I hope that people would be happy to then
pay fifteen dollars a month.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Yeah, and it's not a stole a lot fifteen dollars
a month. I think I'd almost pay fifteen dollars a
week with the way it's helping me.
Speaker 5 (11:48):
Yeah, and we hear that from people a lot. But
for me, accessibility is really important.
Speaker 4 (11:53):
But I didn't know. I'm not.
Speaker 5 (11:54):
I didn't create pam to as a completely altruistic thing,
but I also created it because I cared about six
and that's predominantly for women. Like I was just like
of seeing all my friends who are incredibly competent women
in their lives, and the biggest thing that they were
struggling under was trying to juggle family life coordination and
edmund and doing it all themselves. Well not you know,
like some of us have great partners. Often, I think
(12:16):
that men actually get a really bad rap, and I
think a lot of it is that they actually just
don't have awareness. They don't know what the mental load is.
They don't know that when you get a birthday invitation.
It's actually not just a birthday invitation. It's adding it
to your calendar. It's remembering to RSVP, finding that parent's number,
RSVP to them, remembering to buy a gift, actually buying
(12:37):
the gift, remembering the date of the event, organizing who's
picking up and dropping off. But there's so many steps,
and so Pam, actually you take a photo of a
birth crumpled up birthday invitation, and Pam puts all those
steps into the calendar.
Speaker 4 (12:48):
So you go, okay, well, let's div these up.
Speaker 5 (12:50):
Yes, And so it gives partners who maybe weren't the
kind of primary caregiver the opportunity to opt in as
opposed to being dictated to and kind of and the
and the parent who does mostly em and just deciding
what they're not going to bother telling them about.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Yes and almost falling into that trap of becoming another
child that you've just got to give instructions to which
no one wants to have aged yeah.
Speaker 5 (13:13):
Yeah, And and and you know, like my husband less
as common socks, I mean, I adore him, is the
love of my life. But he says that you know,
he was the inspiration for him because he was so useless.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
Haha.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Well see, now if you didn't have a useless husband,
this might never have happened. So good on him, he's
your mused.
Speaker 5 (13:28):
Yeah, and he was just you know he I would
tell her we had something on and he go, oh yeah.
He wouldn't mentally register it because he knew that I
would remind him. So why would he bother putting in
his calendar or mentory restrant because he knew that the
day before remind him. Probably on the day would have
to remind him. And that was using up so much
of my bandwidth, and it's and I don't want to
have that relationship with my partner, no, you know. And
(13:49):
the other week, my daughter had a doctor's appointment and
I hadn't told my I'd mentioned it in passing, but
I hadn't told my husband, like time where And he
just was outside the doctor's clinic and my daughter goes
Daddy and I was like, well, no, no, no, actually,
like daddy, and he was part across the road.
Speaker 4 (14:05):
He'd seen it in PAM, he'd had a gap between meetings.
He was like, well, I just wanted to come and
support her.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Oh see, that's that's really really cool.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
And he wouldn't have had the opportunity to do that
if we hadn't have Pam, because I wouldn't have told
him about it, you know, Like I know.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
You're listening to we need to talk with Tony Street.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
So what does it mean for you as a business
owner as a founder now? Like it must be pretty
exciting to think, you know, I've been in a salary
job and now I've created my own business, like this
could potentially be well it will be, I suspect very
life changing for you and your family.
Speaker 5 (14:36):
Yeah, hopefully, I mean that would be amazing. I'm just
very much looking forward to a paycheck, my first paycheck
in a couple of years. Because we've been we've been
living lean, but we knew what the big vision was,
you know, like.
Speaker 4 (14:48):
What I wanted to create and how large this could be.
Speaker 5 (14:51):
I think for me, what it's meant more than anything
else is I've been able to just sounds really cheesy,
but for my entire career, I've always been told to
kind of stay in my lane.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
I have a lot of big ideas.
Speaker 5 (15:05):
I have a lot of energy and a lot of ambition,
and there's been a lot of that's a great idea,
but that belongs to this department, So you can't go
there like just kind of pull back, or if you're
going to do it, maybe like give them the idea
run word or you know that sort of thing where
being a startup founder, I just got to like this,
just spread my wings and like go for it. You know,
(15:25):
like anything that I put my energy into would build
something and be able to really really rely on my intuition.
So I did all the original designs for a PAM
and I'm not a trained designer. I haven't done any
UX courses, but I know what simplicity means, and so
I have broken so many rules around how you should
(15:47):
design things by going no, if you make me click
three things to do that, it's you using it too
much mean to Like I want you to imagine, it's
ten o'clock at night. I've just been dealing with two
screaming kurds getting them into bed. I'm exhausted aff to
day at work. I've just down the couch with a
glass of wine and I've just got a twenty six
page school and you did that.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Don't make me think.
Speaker 5 (16:08):
Yeah, I just want to go oh, and now I
get this almost like arrogance go, I don't even to
deal with you. Fought it to Pam like ha ha
like almost like evil, like wicked, laugh.
Speaker 4 (16:18):
Like I know what you mean.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Because the first couple of emails I thought it, I
was like, I don't even have to read this. I
know what it's about, and I'm not going to look
at all the extra stuff because Pam's going to sort
of for me and I know exactly what you mean.
Speaker 5 (16:30):
And just things that, and it's Pam's actually caught stuff
that because I I have ADHD. So people will sometimes
say to me, oh, did you create Pam, because you're
really good at m and I'm like, no, I was
the mom who never had any of the things that
you were meant to have At school, I dropped every
ball and felt awful and was running around with my
ass on.
Speaker 4 (16:48):
Fire all the time.
Speaker 5 (16:50):
And so I had a just a routine ultrasound, not
another baby, I'm well past that stage, but just for something.
And so I sent the appointment to Pam. And on
the day of the appointment, I was like, oh, yeah,
the pay there's two Pam had sent to me, Hey,
remember to drink a lead before your appointment. There is
no way I would have read that one line at
(17:10):
the bottom of this email. I would have turned up
to my appointment and they would have turned me away.
Speaker 4 (17:14):
Wow, and it to me weeks to get the appointment right,
and so just that stuff going, Oh, it's just all
those kind of balls that always got dropped all the
time that just derailed your day and just that doesn't
happen to me anymore. Like I get to turn up
now and be the parents. I hope. People are like, oh, wait,
so what day is that? Like football day?
Speaker 5 (17:36):
I'm like, ah, and I just without having any of
it use my brainsposts, I just know.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Yeah, you know, because you're getting reminded. I finally just
want to ask that moment from where you were at
work like normal employee and now you somehow had the
guards to start and go out on your own, knowing
that you were going to not have a paycheck for
a while. And I'm sure you'll be able to renovate
that bathroom now, but in fact, what did that take?
(18:03):
What was that moment we went right here we go?
Speaker 5 (18:05):
So there are like and I was thinking about it
the other day, like people ask about your origin story
and I think there's no one, there's no one, just
from moment. There's all these little micro moments, right, and
I think I'm really lucky my husband's hyper supportive, right,
And so he was like, I was like, I don't
know if we can live at one page, and it's like, ah,
we'll make it work, you know. He was like, I
(18:26):
lived on way less than what we had as ocurre
to'll be fine.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
I was like, Okay, we don't.
Speaker 5 (18:30):
Need a new power. We don't need over these holidays.
You know, we don't need flash new shoes. We can
live on it, you know, having a super supportive partner.
And I know that that's a luxury. Not everyone has that.
But I think the thing that made me go, actually, yeah,
I've got this. I can do this was when I
got accepted into my first incubator. And I recommend anyone.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
Who I get lots of people content me going I've
got this idea. I don't know where to go with it.
And the first thing I say.
Speaker 5 (18:54):
Is boil it down to the nugget, like, get it
down to the smallest rain of gold.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
That is the idea.
Speaker 5 (18:59):
Don't try be the next Google Calendar, or don't try
and be the next I don't know, Tinder. Please don't
be out of tender and then start by talking to
people like I invite some girlfriends over for wine and
cheese and said, I've got this business idea I want
to take you through. I swear it's not Amway or
are born or any of that stuff. Come of a
(19:22):
chat and they all fell over themselves when I told
them about the idea. And the next thing I did
was I posted it on like a Facebook mummies group
that I was part of, and people just loved it.
Speaker 4 (19:31):
So you can you can kind of test your idea and.
Speaker 5 (19:33):
Lots of safe ways before you quit your job to
make sure that you're really onto something.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
But yeah, then the accelerate.
Speaker 5 (19:39):
So then I got I applied for an incubator and
these are free. There's a really good one at the
Ministry of Awesome. Do the remote around the whole country
and basically you get all the support and all the
structure around you that you need to do a startup.
And after ten twelve weeks of doing one of these
things part time, like it's not full time, you can
do it while you're working, you will know that the
(20:00):
end of it. If you have a bible business idea.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
And you did that and then you knew yeah, And.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
Then I was like, right, okay, I'm out.
Speaker 5 (20:06):
I'm pretty much job Like, there's enough, there's enough in
this that it's worth me, you know this, because what
is it? You know, there's a really awful success rate
about startups and how many actually go the dustines and stuff.
But I think if you think, if you get to
the point where you're like this could really work, you
kind of have to go for it, because like regretting
(20:26):
it forever and then seeing someone else in twelve months
time doing the idea that you had will just kill you.
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's if you can.
I was really lucky and that my skills meant I
could still just some contracting work, so in the early
days before PAM was all consuming, I was able to
get paid. You know, I knew if I worked a
(20:47):
certain number of contracting hours a week, we could kind
of keep the bits paid.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Well, Nicole, I think this is magnificent. I love the app,
and I think the more people that get to know
what it is and experience it for themselves, no doubt,
you'll get more investors. And I look forward to seeing
where it goes, and I look forward to that paid
option because I think it's just a no brainer and
so good for Jahimir Mary to be doing this as well.
What a great example you're setting.
Speaker 4 (21:11):
Yeah, I think so to.
Speaker 5 (21:12):
Like I think I am not a technical person, you know,
Like I was really proud when I hooked up my
second screen in my office the other day and my
husband and co founder person themselves, and like, dude, you're
the founder of a technical business and you're excited that
you manage your second.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
Screend for your laptop. Yeah, so you don't.
Speaker 5 (21:28):
I think this preconceived notion of what you need to
be to be a founder is absolutely rubbish. What you
need to be is you need to be gutsy. You
need to be willing to like actually put yourself out there,
and you need to be willing to take messy steps
like do the uncomfortable and put one foot in front
of the other and ask people for help. There's pretty
much no one out there who won't give you fifteen
minutes a good time.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
We need to talk well, Coast FM's Tony Street.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
If you enjoyed the podcast, click to share with family
or friends. To get in touch, email we need to
talk at Coast online dot co dot mz
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