Robin Sargent 0:00
Welcome to become an idol. I'm Dr. Robin Sargent, owner of idle courses. This is the place where newbies come to learn and veteran share their knowledge
I have here with me today, Stephanie badly and Lizzie Steenkamp. And you may or may not have heard of them yet, but you are going to love these guests because they are the founders of who's your Addie. And so I just brought them on, because I just would love for you to learn more about who they are, and what they do, and their unique position in our instructional design world. So Stephanie, and Lizzie, would you guys just do a better job of introducing yourself?
Lizzy SteenKamp 0:54
Sure. Thanks, darlin. Yeah, we're very, very happy to be talking to you today. Because we've obviously been following it around as well and be interested in in how it's been adding to the industry and adding skills to the industry. And that's definitely what we're interested in as well. So I started my instructional design journey, probably about 10 years ago, my first my first role was as a tech support officer is an E learning context. And I've been very interested field ever since. And I'm still working in it now with Stephanie, my co founder, if you want to go? Sure. So
Stephanie Bandli 1:29
I haven't been in the field as long as he, I started about six years ago, actually, by complete accident, I saw an internship and I was like, oh, that sounds interesting. And I need to do it for university. And I just absolutely loved it. After not knowing what instructional design even all as to being crazy about it. And yeah, from an instructional design, I tried a little bit of everything in the field, and moved more into learning experience, design, and UX. And Lizzie and I actually work together at my first job. And we stayed in contact after we both move on to other jobs. And we came up with this idea for who's your daddy and we just really wanted to pursue it. And now we are which is amazing.
Robin Sargent 2:13
Are you guys doing? Who's your Daddy full time? Are you do you both have your own jobs right
Stephanie Bandli 2:18
now. So I recently started freelancing so that I could put more time into who's your Eddie. So it's not full time. Hopefully, one day in the future? It will be. But it's on the side at the
Lizzy SteenKamp 2:31
moment. Yeah, for me, at the moment that also have a position with a secondary education learning company where I'm the head of product. But I'm kind of moving out of that. Now. I'm focusing primarily on who's ready going forward. Oh, my
Robin Sargent 2:47
gosh. So I think that we just have to tell people like, they're like, Okay, who's your auntie, but like, really? What is who's your Addy? So? Do you guys want to describe what this platform is? And where people can go check it out?
Stephanie Bandli 3:01
Yeah, sure. So who's your ad is essentially a multi vendor marketplace, which I guess it's just a fancy way of saying that. It's an online store where you can buy or sell products. And those products are anything that's related to elearning. Whether that's templates, assets, resources, are anything methods within the ADDIE model. Lizzie if you want to add,
Lizzy SteenKamp 3:26
so when Stephanie and I started working together, in around 2016, because both of us had studied other degrees before we started working in instructional design, we found that we had quite a lot of transferable skills, so from media studies and myself from storytelling and studying English literature. But we didn't quite know the words and the language for the profession and a lot of the very important underlying principles and theories and pedagogical pedagogical approaches. So be found that we were relying very heavily on having the right templates and the right tools to help us learn to become professionals in this new field. And just remembering that time with Stephanie, when she told me about this idea that I just felt like this is such an important thing to do. And it's very similar to what a lot of other people in the industry are doing is trying to create spaces for people to share their skills. And that's really what you're trying to do with this being a multi vendor marketplace. And that it's not us necessarily sharing our own perspectives, because we have a very specific context. But we're creating a space for professionals in the industry to share their skills by selling their own templates, their own guides to people who are new in the industry and might benefit from a different perspective.
Robin Sargent 4:45
Yeah, it's a it's a great idea. And so when did you actually launch your your website?
Stephanie Bandli 4:53
So we officially launched at the end of May, so it's been almost two months now. But We've been building it for quite a while. The building process and all the challenges along the way with creating the actual platform was about, I'd say, just under a year. So it's been a long time coming.
Robin Sargent 5:15
Oh my gosh. So this is like your passion project. So what kind of resources do you have on there to date? What kind of vendor resources do you have? Or have you just mostly loaded your own and you're still looking for, for new and more vendors.
Lizzy SteenKamp 5:29
So we are quite still in the phase where we are primarily focusing on recruiting more vendors. But for to date, we've got quite a wide range of templates, we've got some that focus on, for example, a needs analysis template that takes the instructional designer through the process of doing an internet Asus. So that's one of our own templates that we loaded. But then we've also got things like storyline templates, we've got some interactive courseware, some graphics, so we've got bits and pieces that are coming. But at this date, we only have about under 20 products. And so we are still in the phase where we're trying to recruit more and more people to create and sell things on our platform.
Robin Sargent 6:10
And what's so great about your guyses platform to is that while other people like other freelancers or other instructional designers, like you guys, they may have templates or ideas or resources to share. But the difference between sharing it on your own site and then sharing it on a site, like who's your Addie? Is the exposure, you can get to all those templates and resources, right? Because it doesn't matter if you create something awesome if nobody knows about it. And that's, you know, part of the, you know, the value that you guys bring on having this multi vendor platform,
Stephanie Bandli 6:48
right? Yes, exactly. So, I think we're also seeing as we have a huge appetite, so people are signing up almost every day. But we always can't keep up with the amount of users or customers, we can sort of match that with the amount of vendors and products. So like exactly what she's saying, I would love more vendors or instructional designers to be able to bring their products because we do have customers who are willing to, to buy their products and would love to benefit from the expertise. Because something Lizzie and I find all the time is everyone always sort of thinks that like the instructional designer has to be that unicorn that has skills in the entire process from like graphic design to like working with an LMS. And every single aspect of the process is more likely as you sort of have skills in one aspect or you niche down into one thing that you're really good at. And then you need to rely on other people and other resources to help pick up the areas that you're weak at. And that's what we're trying to do is help us profit from the areas that you're great at and share your resources, but then also give you affordable resources to help you upskill in areas that you're not so good at. So it's a bit of a give and take.
Robin Sargent 8:05
Yeah. And would you guys like to I love your pricing model. I think it's completely reasonable. And I think it's not only great for your end customers, but even your vendor. So do you guys want to explain a little bit about the kind of tools and templates that you're looking for? Or those guidelines? And then how, you know, your pricing works, which is actually pretty straightforward model from what I saw.
Lizzy SteenKamp 8:31
Sure, yeah, I think in terms of what we're looking for, so we calling it your Addie in the sense that we want to encompass resources for every single part of the ADDIE process. So it's when coming up ideas for products. And I thought I speak to vendors and I help them I try to help them come up with ideas for things that they could make and sell. I often tell them to just imagine the process that they would go through as an instructional designer, from analysis, all the way to evaluation and all the different tools and resources that they would have used in that process. So examples like course design templates, storyboarding templates, graphics, accurate photographs, because we all know, having a photograph with someone wearing the wrong safety boots in a factory doesn't fly with most clients and stock sites don't have those things. So all the very specific niche elearning things captivating, that storyline templates, things that could really make the workflow so much faster and easier for new instructional designers or instructional designers that don't, for example, have skills and Captivate to create a template, but they want to be able to purchase one was really good UX really good design and benefit from someone else's design abilities. So how it works is we also send the vendors or vendors a email series that will help them through the process of getting to know the customer so that they understand exactly who our customers are. for interest sake they're typically people Who are educational technologists or they are instructional designers who specialized in a specific part of the design process. For example, they are really good at content writing, but they don't feel confident when it comes to designing or good user experience. So they won't, for example, be able to create their own storyline samples. The hardware X is a vendor can create a profile on our platform, create a store name, ID and branded, and then upload the products from whatever part of the ADDIE process that they feel they specialize in. And then hardware X is they they can keep 80% of the money they make. And we take a 20% commission for the platform. And that basically just covers what we spend on doing marketing for the platform and attracting more customers.
Robin Sargent 10:47
And really, as a business owner, only giving a cut of 20% and then making the rest and you take care of marketing that's cheaper than with I have to go and do marketing on my own. And so that is that is a wonderful offer. And so what are some of the most popular templates you've seen? So far? I know, it's only been a couple of months. But what do you see your customers really engaging with or purchasing?
Stephanie Bandli 11:16
So like he said, It's been quite new. So it's difficult to find trends at the moment. But definitely storyline templates. That's a popular one for obvious reasons. And it's something that you can download and rebrand quite quickly, and get it in product. And strangely enough things that are, I guess, just what I would think would be quite simple things that you could find online elsewhere. But you wanted collated and moderated. So things like storyboarding templates, and the user testing procedure. So how to conduct user testing once you've already made a cause. And yeah, I think those are the main ones so far. But we also don't have enough products and all the categories yet to be able to find the trend. So we Grace's to ask us this question in six months and see what the answer
Robin Sargent 12:11
is then. Oh, yeah, for sure. And are your customers at all, like, telling you what they'd like to see more of? In general? I know you said, storyline templates are they like reaching out and being like, we need more storyline templates or anything like that.
Stephanie Bandli 12:27
So you do have an option where people can review templates. But we haven't had a lot of feedback yet. So at this stage, we haven't been able to get that much feedback. But we desperately try to because we obviously want to try and put more templates up that people will find useful and push our vendors to create templates that obviously bring in more money for them. But we don't have that much feedback to see it.
Robin Sargent 12:53
And what kind of marketing efforts are you guys doing right now? I mean, I know it's new. But what do you guys got going on? What are some of those channels that you are spreading the message of who's your Addie?
Lizzy SteenKamp 13:05
Sure. So I think probably our most popular channel at this point is our LinkedIn company feed. So about twice a week we post in elearning tips. So things like the best practices for writing learning outcomes, best practices for approaching how to design storyline templates. And these have been shared quite widely and we can link them back to products as well to say, these are the five things you should consider when quality assuring your course here's the quality assurance template that we have on offer. So because I follow is find a lot of value in the content that you produce. So they consider us to be a source of expert knowledge on instructional design based practice, they share our content quite widely, and we can link the content back to the relevant products to still drive customers back to the platform in that process. So we're also playing with the idea of starting a YouTube channel we were also presenting at the instructional design tips exchange conference on our analysis process our analysis templates, in essence, I'm sorry, experimenting with a range of things, as well as we've got our own Facebook group now. Stephen, you might remember what it's called, I think it's called elearning that's a cold safe
Stephanie Bandli 14:19
instructional design and elearning development resources and templates. Yeah, there we go. Easy to find people who
Lizzy SteenKamp 14:32
have hundreds of groups Yeah, but we're really enjoying the process of interacting with the community as well because we get we we love seeing our blog article shade and people engaging and arguing what what is the benefit of Bloom's Taxonomy and having all these topics discussed so I must say the marketing side we've really been enjoying as well building a community around our our brand.
Robin Sargent 14:56
That's wonderful. And so I just love what you guys are doing. I wanted to Make sure that people knew about too. And so what are some of your best in? Well, obviously, we got to tell them what the address is, like, who's your auntie.com? We haven't said that. Right? So we should probably say that, even though it seems so obvious to us, so what's kind of your best and final tip, because, you know, most of the people who are listeners are usually new to instructional design. And so they could definitely benefit from your elearning templates and product just like you guys said, like, just seeing those standardized templates and, and those resources could help even a new person, just understand what types of tools we use in each step of the process. So what's kind of your best tip and advice for those new instructional designers?
Lizzy SteenKamp 15:50
So I could probably give that a shot from my perspective. So I think the most important thing for me is the when you're later in your career, you started developing a lot of intuition around what would be the best way to approach a particular learning problem. But when you're new right at the beginning, it's so important to really research your customer, so your learner and the context in which they're going to learn incredibly carefully, because that's the best way to start learning, all the different things that could impact how you do your design. And really, it's was the a of Addie, that I think a lot of the learning on the job happens with instructional design. Because if you start asking a lot of questions, and you start realizing how different every single client or every single learning intervention is, that's when you start understanding how important it is to create really nuanced and fit for purpose designs. So that's definitely my first and most important lesson that I learned on my journey. And for that a really good template can definitely help because it helps you to know exactly the questions that you ask.
Robin Sargent 16:59
Yeah, and organize that thought. That's great. What about you, Stephanie?
Stephanie Bandli 17:02
I'd say just try as many things as possible. I think we often see instructional design or ELearning Development as these siloed different fields. But I think there's so much overlap between the different parts of instructional design, and you never really know which part of it you'll be interested in, or which phase of the ADDIE process you might be great at without just diving right into the deep end and trying all of them like Lizzie saying, just asking questions, but not just to the context of your learners, but to an instructional designers like it's a really great community, and everyone's so willing to help. And it's really awesome to just try as many different things as you can and see which part you'll be great at. Because it's such an interesting field, you can do a little bit of everything. There's so much overlap with graphic design, with user experience with consulting with so many things. And I think there's so much room to grow. So yeah, just to be completely curious, and draw from the knowledge that already exists. Because everyone's so willing to help, which is what's so great.
Robin Sargent 18:09
Yeah, and what's also great about your platform, and it's the vendors, they don't even have to be expert instructional designers. Because the benefit of being new to instructional designer and then creating your own templates for your platform would be that you are a fresher, I mean, you know exactly what you needed in your journey, as you were learning that would have helped you and then you can help who's your Addie customers in the future with those same types of resources. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for sharing who's your daddy and building such an incredible multi vendor platform for our industry? I really think you guys are onto something great. And I want to see you reach all the success of thank you so much.
Stephanie Bandli 18:53
Thank you so much for having us.
Robin Sargent 18:55
Thank you so much for listening. You can find the show notes for this episode at idle courses.com. If you liked this podcast and you want to become an instructional designer, and online learning developer, join me in the idle courses Academy, where you'll learn to build all the assets you need to land your first instructional design job, early access to this podcast tutorials for how to use the elearning authoring tools, templates for everything course building and paid instructional design experience opportunities, go to idle courses.com forward slash Academy and enroll or get on the waitlist. Now get out there and build transcendent tours.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
