Hello, and welcome back to our podcast. It has been
Caroline:Quite a while.
Jason:It's been a few months. We're those people now. Yeah. Like take a nice unplanned ghosting.
Caroline:But you all knew why we were leaving?
Jason:Of course.
Caroline:We had a child.
Jason:We did. Which we're gonna
Caroline:talk about in this episode.
Jason:A child into the world. So we'll talk about that and more as we dive in.
Caroline:So where are we in time in this moment?
Jason:Where are we in time? Well, it just turned a whole new year, so that's exciting
Caroline:As we because were, we actually
Jason:are in an interesting time phase.
Caroline:But Yes.
Jason:We are coming out of our four month parental leave, which we had planned to do with our little one Leon, who you will meet via some clips throughout this.
Caroline:Yeah. It just occurred to me, like, if any of you don't follow us on Instagram, not even that we've done many updates, but yes, we had a baby. Her name is Leon Avery Zook.
Jason:Yeah.
Caroline:She was born August 30.
Jason:Yeah.
Caroline:And we'll tell you a little bit about how the first four months of her life have gone. And we will share with you as we get back into work stuff, what we're thinking 2026 is gonna be for us. Some of you might know we closed down our coaching program, Wham Unlimited, in the summer, so June. We did our last launch ever
Jason:Yeah.
Caroline:With the anticipation that we would basically close down Wham Unlimited, have Leon, and then start basically a new iteration of whatever our business is gonna be. And that's what we're gonna update you all on of, like, where we are in real time with that.
Jason:Also, before we get to the update part, I just wanna mention for those of you who are not watching this on YouTube, you're listening on the podcast, this is probably one of the rare occasions where it's the same episode kind of on both. And if you wanna see clips and things
Caroline:Clips.
Jason:Pause and go over to YouTube. I will leave a link to the YouTube video in the podcast episode. If you're watching on YouTube, you're already getting the clips. Congratulations.
Caroline:Okay. So the last four months, we have had a major change in our life. Like I said, we had wonderful, beautiful baby Leon at the August. And so what has all of that been for us? Of course, we could spend an entire podcast episode talking about that, but we'll kind of give you the cliff notes here.
Caroline:How have the past four months been, Jason?
Jason:Well, we had a baby in Portugal. You don't know, if you don't track along, we moved to Portugal, now three years ago, which is pretty crazy. And that experience was fantastic. It was, I mean, it was fantastic as I think you could be having a baby. The labor was like thirty six hours long.
Jason:Baby had jaundice when she just was a few days old. She's So had to still going stay a little bit longer in the hospital, but she's super healthy. She's super happy now. So that's all that matters. But yeah, I mean, I think the first four months of Leon's life were about as hectic as I would have thought a kind of small blob of a human would be that you have to like do every single thing for.
Jason:But man, I'll tell you what, when she turned to like, I think it was like three months. Yeah. And you start even in the two month mark, you start to get a couple smiles out of her. Game
Caroline:changer. All worth it.
Jason:All the poopy diapers, all the struggles breastfeeding, all the wake ups.
Caroline:So cute. Yeah. I would say, and believe me, like we had it easier than most, I would say, because we just happen to roll the dice and get a very content baby. But those first eight weeks, you're in a gauntlet of just like, you're learning so many new things. Yeah.
Caroline:You're learning your baby, you're learning yourself, you're like adjusting to this like mental new life that you're living, you're grieving your old life, all these things are happening, it's everything people say, but you really just it feels like you can't ever really get your feet under you, and then it feels like that eight to twelve week mark, we started to get into a really good rhythm where I started feel a lot more confident. We were taking her out, we were going places and then twelve to sixteen weeks, like three months to four months has been like an explosion of just like
Jason:She did our taxes. She's already coming up with business ideas. She can feed herself properly. She can't do any
Caroline:of those things.
Jason:She's still a baby. I will say though She's
Caroline:like a baby now. Now we're like, she's not like a newborn. Now we're like, Oh, you are baby.
Jason:You're a baby. One of my most unforeseen things of having a baby that is very exciting for me besides like loving and caring for the baby
Caroline:Or whatever.
Jason:Is buying outfits. Man, I love buying these baby
Caroline:the like dress my daughter up person. No, it's Jason.
Jason:Also the Instagram algorithm I
Caroline:have to like shut it down.
Jason:The Instagram algorithm's like, hey, do you want this really fuzzy cute bear suit for Leon? And I'm like, yeah, I do want that. And we do need to have that.
Caroline:Need a clothing budget for her.
Jason:But it's it's okay. We actually we do a pretty good job. We rotate through, like, six to eight onesies and, a couple of cute things. It's it's not actually all for real.
Caroline:Do a pretty good job of, like, keeping it. But honestly, like, yeah, it's it's funny. I never could have foreseen that you are the one who, like, gets super excited to buy her clothes.
Jason:Yeah.
Caroline:And doing chores.
Jason:And doing chores. Yeah. It's well, it's like I have a little buddy who can like help me do all the stress.
Caroline:Take her around the house and you like do laundry and like do the dishes and Yeah. Half the time, it's like that's way more entertaining to her than do it like playing with toys, which is very cute.
Jason:Yeah. So basically it was like three to four months of just taking care of Leon, not doing much work. Was doing some little bit of stuff with Tea Tree. We did hire an admin person or an operations person for Tea Tree and Sada has been absolutely amazing. And she has helped with both Tea Tree and Waim.
Jason:We could not have had a smooth parental leave without her, so big shout to Sara.
Caroline:All these decisions that we made ahead of time, not knowing what what kind of post having Leon would look like, I'm so grateful that previous us did that. So that included hiring Sara and kind of getting her trained before we left and had Leon, and then also giving ourselves, like, plenty of time. Like, we kind of told ourselves, let's have three full months off, and then let's sort of dive our foot or, like, dip our toe back in in December, which would be, like, her fourth month. That's exactly what we did, and that was the perfect transition to getting back into, like, thinking about business.
Jason:Yeah. Pop quiz notes real quick. Yeah. What's your favorite baby thing that we bought that, helped make raising a baby in the first four months' life better?
Caroline:I there are so many things, but I think the thing that gets the most use is probably the bouncer.
Jason:Yeah. Oh, the bouncer. Yeah,
Caroline:because it just it allows you to like put her down and she can watch us do stuff and I just she loves it. So
Jason:I think my surprise one is actually the bouncer attachment. That's the little bar with like little activities on it. When you first were like, we're gonna buy this thing. I was like, this is ugly. Like, come on.
Jason:It's not like aesthetically cute, man. That thing is great. Like Leona has gone from just like staring at it to now like trying to put all of it in her mouth and she really loves it. It's, I mean, I'm not trying to like, you know, give my parenting to a little bar that attaches to a bouncer, but it's just really nice when we wanna eat a meal and like eat it while it's hot. You'd be like, oh, we can put the little bar on and she could just watch that and like play with it for five minutes.
Jason:So I think it's super helpful. It's also one of those that's like very easy to get and anybody can get a version of that.
Caroline:Yeah. Will also say we had a I don't know how I would characterize our like gear strategy. We didn't wanna overdo it, but we also wanted to have things that like would Easier. Kind make it a little easier and kinda integrate with our day and and and all this stuff, but I feel very good about like the gear that we invested in versus the stuff that we were like, we don't need the wipe warmer.
Jason:Yeah. I remember the other one that's great. The iPad. You just put them in front of an iPad and like a baby is just like fully taken
Caroline:care of.
Jason:I'm totally Honestly are doing no screen time. It's The way that
Caroline:you like sold that was Yeah. Pretty
Jason:We we did not put the baby in front of iPad. No. Boy, a baby can find a screen when you are not looking. A baby can find any screen. Okay, so that gets us to we had a baby, we're getting back into work mode.
Jason:So what are we actually doing? Yeah. For me personally, I have been working on Tea Tree kind of this whole time, a little bit here and there. Very proud of our tiny team that we were able to launch a new landing page builder finally, a template marketplace, which has been really fun for people to have better courses. And there's a ton of little like quality of life improvements throughout the app, which has been nice.
Jason:And I'm really looking forward to the things that we're working on that are coming next. So we have like a file management system, which sounds really boring, but it's a really nice quality of life improvement, a Canva integration. So now when you're designing a course, and you want to have a header image, you just design it in Canva and just connect your account, you just click add it, and it's just in your course. And so any images throughout, there's also if you want to, you don't have to use it. But there is an open a AI connection now within our file manager where you can generate images.
Jason:So if you want like a minimal desk setup view for like your course about setting up your desk to be more productive, you can just generate an image and give it a prompt and it's got the most recent OpenAI image generation model. And that's only if you wanna use it, you definitely don't have to. We're not going full AI mode in Tea Tree, we're just trying to add in things that'll be helpful.
Caroline:Time savers and whatnot.
Jason:Yeah. And then three other big features that are coming, maybe four, I guess, really simple checkout pages. So this is kind of like lemon squeezy for those of you who know that Stripe tax management, so you'd be able to do tax calculation and management right away and simply a new digital product templates, you can quickly and easily sell a digital product without having to have a course. So think like your gum road style, just like make a product available for sale. And then a new course template that's gonna be similar to our existing template, but a lot more flexible in like what you can do with it.
Jason:So those are the twenty twenty six plans for Tea Tree. Exciting. And we'll see how much of it gets done, that's
Caroline:I what's on the also did just want to celebrate the fact that for years and years, we have said that we would like Tea Tree to replace Wandering Aimfully
Jason:Or outpace. Not replace it,
Caroline:say, like outpace. I was going to say replace Wandering Aimfully as the dominant
Jason:Got it.
Caroline:Revenue leader in our two businesses. So for many, many years, it's been Wandering Aim Fleet makes the most revenue, and Tea Tree was always kind of the side project. And we've always been trying to make Tea Tree the main thing and have Wandering Aim Fleet the side not side project, but anyway, to to replace that. And this was the first year that we
Jason:accomplished that. Very first year that that happened. And Tea Tree's been around since 2013, basically.
Caroline:And I give all the credit to you and the team. You have done such a great job. I I've taken a step back from Tea Tree, but you've done a really amazing job with making decisions and just kind of going with your gut and growing the business.
Jason:I'm very hopeful that Tea Tree can evolve even more in 2026 to something that like people are really excited to use. And I know people are excited to use it now, but I just think like there's so many things I want to do with it. And so much has changed and kind of like the online course digital products, landscape that even I feel like when I go to make a course and teach her, I'm like, this is slow. Like I want it to be faster. I want it to be easier.
Jason:It doesn't need to be as complex as it's been before. So forward to those things if you're a Tea Tree user. And if you're not, you can check it out. You can start a free trial at teatree.co.
Caroline:Now as far as wandering aimfully, I did mention that we basically retired our coaching program, Wham Unlimited, but that doesn't mean it it was a lifetime program. So we have all these amazing Wham members, and we're not just, like, leaving them in the dark. We're still having our monthly accountability game, which is awesome. We still are doing our monthly calls, but it's turning more into a behind the scenes of what we're gonna be doing in 2026, which we'll talk about in a second, and just continuing to kind of nurture that community of creators that we have built up over the years. And, yeah, just evolve it into the future even though we're not taking new members anymore.
Jason:Yeah. So you might be wondering, okay, great. So Tea Tree, I'm gonna focus on Wayne kind of have these like small little things. But what's like the next thing that we're working on that I teased at the beginning of this? We don't
Caroline:know, we don't know. And we're actually in the thick of deciding right now, we've had a few brainstorm sessions of different potential pathways that we could go in.
Jason:Okay, I'll do the boring one and you can do the fun one.
Caroline:Okay, we're gonna tell you what our choices are before us.
Jason:Option one is the boring one. This is kind of what we have been thinking about doing for the
Caroline:I don't sell it as boring.
Jason:Option one is an exciting one. It's what we've been thinking about doing.
Caroline:It's the more practical.
Jason:Option one is the more practical one. It's the one we've been thinking about doing and that we are equally as excited about as the second one, which is not more fun than the first one. It is to create micro SaaS apps. So what does that mean? Think of little tools that solve problems very affordably.
Jason:So like your countdown bars. So you wanna have a little countdown bar that goes on top of like a landing page. There are other tools like this, like Deadline Funnel and Countdown Hero. These are okay tools, but a lot of them feel really over complicated, too bloated with features, and they don't just do a simple thing well, and you can't customize them.
Caroline:And they're usually fair, not expensive, but like for all the different Yeah, it's just like Little micro tools that you want suddenly Let
Jason:me pay for a countdown bar tool that's like $50 one time and I never have to pay for it again. I can make all the countdown bars I want. Yeah. Think about the, you know, that direction. So we would, I guess, try to make like four to five of those.
Jason:I don't know the exact number, but that's the number that comes to mind for us this year. And we would build those, they would be things that you could use within Tea Tree. So that would kind of be a part of it that would be helpful to kind of frame that. And these little tools we would sell as like just little lifetime deals. And then we would build them with feature sets with you all watching and kind of getting to contribute along the way of like, okay, we're going with this.
Jason:You all voted this as our next tool. Okay, what features do you want in it? And like whatever gets uploaded the most we build into it. And we'll be doing all this ourselves using Lovable and just kind of like vibe coding these, vibe coding, still doing a lot of work, but, we won't need a developer mostly to get these tools out into the world. That's option one.
Caroline:That is option one. Like I said
Jason:The practical.
Caroline:I would consider that the more practical route.
Jason:Yeah.
Caroline:And it is the original idea that we had when we thought about what would come next after Weim Unlimited. The past few weeks, we've been marinating, and this other idea emerged that is way more risky, I would say
Jason:Yeah.
Caroline:Way more fun.
Jason:Yeah.
Caroline:And more off the wall. Yeah. And so this direction would be to create apps and these tiny apps that are much smaller and a lot more fun, a lot less, I would say, practical or useful. But, really, the intention would be to create little things, games, different little, like, apps, etcetera, that bring more delight and fun Yeah. To the Internet.
Caroline:And, really, this is born out of the idea that we are living in an age where all of these AI powered tools are being used to sort of, like, over optimize, over prod you know, productivity I think one of the One
Jason:of the taglines that, like, we would kinda come across with in brainstorming was, AI wants to make your life like 10% more productive. These apps, wanna make your life 10% more fun. Exactly. Something like that. Like, it's not a perfect thing, but just like, that's the way of thinking of these apps.
Caroline:In the this like AI powered era where everyone is so focused on making things more efficient and more just, like, almost homogenous. Like, we wanna bring a human touch and and really more creativity, more fun, more inspiration back to the Internet. And so you're asking yourself, well, how are you gonna monetize that? Because, like, people are not gonna pay for these, like, fun little delightful apps that are maybe not as useful. And so that path would be much more monetizing it based on sponsorships.
Caroline:It's almost like think of software as entertainment. I know that's, like, kind of a weird concept, but it is something that we've thought about where you're watching us build these apps. You're getting delight out of the creativity that we come up with for these little things. I'll just go ahead and throw one of the ideas out there to give an idea. So one of the ideas we came up with was, solving a problem, which is you have these all these little tasks that take less than five minutes, but you just procrastinate them because it's like, call the insurance company.
Caroline:Finally, you know, download that PDF paperwork thing, etcetera. And so I thought of an app where it's like, doitortheydie.com, and it's just these little cartoon characters that have different, like, perilous situations where like, you know,
Jason:an anvil is being lowered
Caroline:on top of it. Being lowered and you have a five minute timer to like do the task where these like cute little cartoon characters. I mean, it's a little bit morbid. But yeah, it's fun. Little things like that where it's just purely like, yes, it's doing a small thing, but it's more delight and fun and interesting.
Caroline:Yeah. What was your one?
Jason:I wanted to share dog mail. So it's basically Gmail, but it's an inbox that looks exactly like Gmail, but all the emails are either from dogs or about dogs or are you could plug in your dog and you would get updates about your dog. This is nonsensical. This is stupid. It's just about bringing to light.
Jason:It's like, kind of like, could we give you fifteen minutes of fun every day? And in some ways it would actually be helpful. Like Caroline's idea that, you know, the to do list you do a thing. Dogmail is is nothing more than just like, Oh, this is fun. Like, I'm feeling like my inbox is a cluttered mess.
Jason:Like, let me go read my dogmail.
Caroline:Let me have a moment of zen.
Jason:Exactly. So those are the two ideas. They, they are very different. Obviously, first one's practical, not boring. It's practical.
Jason:But we would really love to know if you want to leave a comment below. Like genuinely, which one would you be more interested in us building and sharing all of the journey about it? Because if you don't if you don't want to watch us build nonsense apps, and you just think that's stupid, this is We wanna know. We're just curious, you know, those of you who do watch our YouTube videos here and or do listen to our podcast, we'd be very curious to know. So feel free to let us know.
Jason:Definitely leave a comment on YouTube is probably the best place to do that. So if you're listening to the podcast, jump over to the link and leave a comment. That'd be helpful.
Caroline:Yeah. Either way, the idea is really to add in some type of layer of behind the scenes and have you come along with us for the journey of building some of these apps and what it takes to actually build type of small software products as a solopreneur or a small team in 2026. So we will be deciding probably in the next week which of those paths to go down, and it's not a forever path. It's like, in our minds, it's really we know from the past that clarity comes from action. So we have to choose boldly going one direction, see how it works.
Caroline:Where it ends up is never gonna be where you think in the beginning. Same with Wandering Infully when we started it in 2018. It turned into something so different than what we thought it was in the beginning. But if there's one takeaway from just watching this at the top of the year, it's that you can't overthink your way to an outcome. You have to just choose boldly, start taking action, and eventually the action is what will bring clarity and bring you to a place that is way better than had you just stood still and been thinking, you know, a year later and taking no action at all.
Jason:Alright. Just to wrap this up here, let's talk about some of the things we wanna do in life this year, just to kind of like put it out into the world so we actually do these things. An easy one is we're going take Leon back to The US for the first time here in a couple First of
Caroline:flight and it's a
Jason:ten hour flight. But we'll be fine. It'll be fine. Everything will be fine. Also, we're bringing the iPad.
Jason:She's going to love it. I'm totally kidding. And we will introduce Leon to our families because no one has really met Leon yet. And that'll be fun to do that. And then when we get back, I think for the rest of the year, we kind of have two to three trips that we want to take around Europe.
Jason:We haven't even picked out countries, but just because we live in Europe and we want to travel, like it'll be fun to create those memories with her. Because we've heard from lots of parent friends as well, like the travel is hard when they're young, but it's so rewarding to look back on those trips and those memories that you make. So we're going to push ourselves to maybe do some some more travel because we've been really kind of comfortable for the past three years not traveling after traveling all of 2022 and doing that. And then what else?
Caroline:What else? Did you already say some places within Portugal?
Jason:Oh, yeah. We do definitely need to see more Portugal.
Caroline:But we're like, have you been to Porto? We're like, no.
Jason:No. We need to we've a bad job of seeing Portugal. So we need to see more Portugal. I think having Leon will give us an excuse to kind of do
Caroline:that. And you're gonna get some sleep tattoos.
Jason:Oh, and then I'm definitely gonna get sleep tattoos. Maybe I won't. Maybe I will. Maybe I won't.
Caroline:You might have like a dad midlife crisis, you know, where you're like, oh my gosh, like
Jason:I can only think of like four things I would want honestly tattoo and the rest of it, I'm like, I don't know what it would be. So it'd be like a cinnamon roll Yeah. Like Goku from Maybe Dragon Ball Z. Maybe And then like, I'd already run out.
Caroline:Okay. So just cinnamon roll.
Jason:Maybe a tiger, a little bit cats.
Caroline:Okay. Okay. Okay. So we have a tiger, we have a cinnamon roll, we have Goku, and then why don't we do the fill in the sleeve tattoo with like brands? We'll do we'll do
Jason:Oh, nice.
Caroline:Yeah. I feel like I wear your shirt like I wear your logo tattoo.
Jason:Yeah. I definitely want like a Pampers, you know, just to like support
Caroline:Do you want Pampers or do you want rascals? Rascals.
Jason:For a rascals family. I'm not gonna get sleeve tattoos, as a silly aside. But I am gonna keep baking and having just fun with that. And and I think we're just really gonna focus this year on, yes, we have this new direction we wanna take on our gameplay, we wanna like build whatever we're building, but also just know that like we don't get these early, you know, moments with Leon ever again. So just trying not to be so sucked into our laptops.
Caroline:Yeah.
Jason:And I think it's also just gonna be natural because like, she's not going to daycare, so we're gonna be taking care of her. And we do have a nanny who's gonna be helping us because we don't have any friends or family here. So it's like we have these moments that we can create with her and we have the time to do that and not to just be kind of like plugged into our laptops and working.
Caroline:I know. It's so wild to think that one year from recording this video, like, she'll probably be walking.
Jason:Yeah. I mean, she'll just be walking around back here doing stuff on her iPad, obviously. Know?
Caroline:Yeah. And and it's like the classic cliche thing of like the time really does go so fast. Like, it's very hard to believe it's already been four months. So yeah, like you said, just trying to soak it up and happy to share this update. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments.
Caroline:If you have a vote of which direction you think we should go and you have a reason why, please leave that in the comments.
Jason:Yeah.
Caroline:There's pros and cons to both. And like I said, we're gonna be choosing this week.
Jason:So you'll Feel free to also let me know what I should get on my sleeve tattoos besides the things I already mentioned.
Caroline:And he's back.
Jason:Yeah. So maybe I will get that. I don't know.
Caroline:Maybe I'll get a sleeve tattoo.
Jason:Oh, okay. Bye.