The story so far

Welcome to The Digital Brew, a podcast about making your business more awesome online.

Your hosts are Angela (a copywriter) and Stew (a web designer). Pour yourself a cuppa and let’s get started with today’s episode…

In this episode, we talk about who we are and the story so far.

You’ll notice that we called this first episode “0” instead of 1. That’s because it’s going to be super awkward… we’re major podcast noobs here. So please excuse the awkwardness. Maybe just skip it, actually. Skip ahead to episode 20 where we know what we’re doing…

If you’re tuning into this in real-time, sorry. No such luck. Maybe check back in a few months. 😉

Okay, so I guess we should introduce ourselves.

Angela is the creative director and copywriter at The Digital Brew. Her preferred brew is green tea.

Stew is the web designer at The Digital Brew and his preferred brew is coffee or Assam black tea.

We’ve been thinking a lot about the purpose of this podcast, because we don’t want to make episodes just for the sake of it. And you definitely don’t want to listen to a podcast that’s directionless and confused about its topic and audience. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

The purpose of the TDB podcast is to connect with more small businesses and creatives by sharing the journey and talking about useful or interesting stuff. Pretty simple, hey?

But it’s also here to help us create content for our business. We both already have blogs, plus Angela writes clients’ blogs… we don’t want to write more blogs for TDB at this stage!

The first bunch of episodes will be focused on launching The Digital Brew. At this stage, we’ve got at least 10 episodes planned. After that? Who knows… nah, we’ll probably focus on sharing the stuff we know or are most interested in.

That means digital marketing talk is pretty much guaranteed. Especially topics related to:

• Websites
• WordPress
• Content marketing
• Copywriting
• Branding
• SEO

But there might be some more personal stuff in there too (like all parents we pretty much can’t help talking about our kids, sorry). And maybe we’ll even interview some guests?

At this point, we’re not looking too far ahead but we’re open to seeing where things go.

The plan is to just be useful, have fun, and see what happens.

Okay, so let’s get into our story.

Who are we?

In a nutshell, we’re married high school sweethearts in Brisbane, Australia. We’re parents and creatives. Stew is a web designer and Angela is a copywriter.

And how did we get to this place? How did we get to a point where we’re launching a brand and podcast together?

Well…

Angela has a marketing/communication background. She studied a degree at uni and then got her first legit job as a small business marketing manager. Soon after that, she felt the call to start her own small business and so she resigned from that job and began freelancing. She took on her first clients and the vision rapidly expanded into a small business called Big Idea Marketing.

Stew at this time was working for another small business, mainly watering plants in office buildings in the city. But he’d spent a strange amount of his childhood doing geeky things like making websites to share Simpsons episodes online illegally. Skills that were clearly being wasted at his previous job. 😉 So he joined Big Idea Marketing within a couple of months to help take on some of the web/design client work so that Angela could focus mainly on strategy and writing.

At Big Idea Marketing, we did all the things. We did social media, graphics, and even print, before we finally found our sweet spot. For Angela, it was copywriting and for Stew, it was web design.

We launched a bunch of small business websites together but then it came to a rather abrupt end.

About two years into running our business, baby #1, Nathaniel, came along. He was a bit of a cyclone (and still is), which meant that Stew had to head back to a day job so that Angela could focus mainly on mum stuff. That meant keeping the baby alive, trying to sleep wherever possible, and doing a little freelancing on the side.

And only a year and a half later, baby #2, Bazza, came along. By then, Angela had got clearer on what the future needed to look like for us to achieve our goals. So she’d started planning her personal brand re-launch as a copywriter/content writer. She timed this to happen around 6 months after Bazza was born.

It was craaazy times juggling it all. Soon there was more work coming in for Angela, while she was still juggling the babies at home…

(Shout out to the many mums in business who are at this phase – it is so hard – pretty much the hardest thing I have ever done.)

But then in early 2018, we reached a critical point of enough ongoing work so that Stew could come home and do most of the parenting. (While still being able to afford the rent.)
With more time for Angela to do the work, it soon got to the point where it made sense to start kids in daycare. This freed up some of Stew’s time, which meant time to collaborate on some new projects together! We could finally do some things that didn’t revolve around toddlers.

That brings us to The Digital Brew!

TDB is focused on our all-in-one website packages that include copywriting and design, plus hosting.

At least, that’s what we’re doing for now. 😉

We’ve got some other ideas and plans for the future, but right now we’re keeping things simple for our initial launch.

We’re all set to launch on October 22, 2019 so if all goes to plan, this episode will go live then or soon after.

To wrap things up…

The biz journey can have a few twists and turns in it (especially when you introduce kids).

So it’s a really good idea to focus on your vision for the future. This will help you get through the hardest parts.

And remember – you don’t have to have everything figured out before you launch – just know the next 2-3 steps that are coming up. That’s where we’re at right now!

We’ll catch you in the next episode, which is all about choosing a business model and name.

Thanks for tuning in to The Digital Brew with Ange and Stew. Make sure you head over to thedigitalbrew.com for more episodes, detailed show notes, resources, and our newsletter. And if you feel like this episode has helped make your business more awesome, pop us a review. We’ll catch you next time!