You are techY podcast

[00:00:00] Ellen Twomey:
You are listening to the You Are TechY Podcast, episode number 168.

[00:00:04] Narrator:
Welcome to the You Are TechY podcast, where it’s all about growing in your tech so you can find the tech job of your dreams. And now your host technology learning coach Ellen Twomey.

[00:00:22] Ellen Twomey:
Tamara Lucas is the founder and c e o of my panda, where your to-do list is their job. My PANDAS stands for the Personal Assistant Next Door App. So instead of a magic wand, my panda will give you your own panda to make your to-do list a thing in the past, worried about safe vetting, have no fear.

All pandas live right in the same community as the members they serve. They’re fully screened, embedded, and have complete full background. Identity verification and also our insured. Tamara has worked in education, sales, marketing, and business development is now using those skills as a C E O. Tamara has an undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Mary Washington and a master’s in social work for the University of Georgia Global Dogs, and she lives Decatur with her two sons, two dogs, and one cat camera.

Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, 

[00:01:13] Tamara Lucas:
Ellen. I’m happy to be.

[00:01:14] Ellen Twomey:
All right, let’s dive in. What drove you to start?

[00:01:17] Tamara Lucas:
My, um, I am my target market. I needed, uh, what we have created. as you heard, my background is psychology, social work. I have a driving desire to help people, and I saw a extreme need that there were so many people all around my neighborhood that needed help, right?

It’s that whole. Rushing out the door and the sink is just full of dishes and the shoes and socks are everywhere. And the dog hair is everywhere. We all know it. And one day, actually I was having lunch with a friend of mine who was working as a dog walker in my neighborhood, and she was like, wow, these people need so much more than just a dog walk.

Like I go in their house and if they would just throw me 20 bucks, I would clean up their. And I was like, wow, if I had three or 20 bucks at my kitchen. and so, you know, this dessert came from that and I was like, my God, there’s so many people. Like you could point at a house anywhere that I’m sure has the same situation that I did.

And then you’ve got so many people, like my friend who have little pockets of time who live right around us, who would want to help. And so we just sort of started thinking how cool it would be if we. Step in and help support our community, and help people just live better lives. That’s kind of where it started from and it kind of just has exploded.

You know, I really at first was just thinking it would be something for my neighborhood, every time I’d bring it up to someone, they’re like, oh, wow, no, I need that. When can you come Colorado? I need that. When can you come New York? When can you come to Florida? And um, and so at that point I started sort of digging in and thinking about growing this as an actual

[00:02:58] Ellen Twomey:
Super interesting. Also super reassuring that I’m not the only one leaving the house with a sink full of dishes. let’s just be real. we don’t have time to like clean every little thing and put everything away and then we’re doing it again.

it’s challenging to manage it all and then you feel so bad that you aren’t keeping your house up, but you’re trying to, you know, do your job. take care of the kids or what, running to school, whatever. 

[00:03:19] Tamara Lucas:
All of it. All of it, you know, and it’s, as human beings, we are meant to live in community, right?

We are social creatures. We are not supposed to do everything on our own. And so, Up until, what, 50 or a hundred years ago. We lived in communities, we had our moms there, we had our aunts, we had our uncle nearby. We, we knew who to go to for different things and we relied upon each other. And there’s still some cultures that do that, right?

But here, in particularly in America, We do not do that now. Now we are isolated. We live away from our whole community of support and it’s not how we’re supposed to live. and really that whole idea of looking around my neighborhood and thinking and visit, like what is happening in each of these houses all around, we have the community support around.

We just don’t have a way to access it. and as women, our expectations continue to just get built upon us. It’s just ridiculous. All the stresses have been put on women. and so it just really is a way for us to find that community of support that we need so badly.

[00:04:24] Ellen Twomey:
Yeah, I mean, I love what you said aboutwe’re a mental living community and so many of us, I know my, my, life is like this. Like I don’t live near any of my family. I mean, they help when they come in, but it, it’s just not, it’s not a viable reality.

And so to talk about living in community, I think it’s great cuz I know a lot of, especially like stay-at-home moms looking for like side gigs. Like they wanted to like earn extra cash, but they wanted the flexibility to volunteer in school and they wanted, they want different things.

And so, I mean, I certainly, you know, a lot of, know a lot about that with my community and, um, with your techy members. Like some of them want part-time, some of them wanna, and sometimes people just wanna integrate back to work slowly, and some of them don’t wanna right back into corporate America, which I totally get.

[00:05:01] Tamara Lucas:
And, and the thing is too, like we know how to run households, right? We do these things. We know how to empty a dishwasher. We know how to fold laundry it’s not like you have to learn new skills. It’s what we’re doing anyway, right? And the thought of like going into a house and.

Walking out and locking the door and thinking of that mom coming in and like the joy on her face when you know the dishwasher’s emptied. Oh my gosh, I hate empty the dishwasher and folding and putting away the laundry. I can put it in dish in the washing machine every day and the dryer, but then it’s the getting it out.

[00:05:34] Ellen Twomey:
And we all have our things I hate. Sweeping is my thing. I’ll unload your dishwasher. Right. But I don’t wanna sweep. Okay, so we’re talking about it already, but I wanna make sure we cover it. So what are the services and who should use them? 

[00:05:46] Tamara Lucas:
Yeah, so it’s personal Assistant next Door app, right? Mm-hmm. So it is personal assistant sort of thing. So say you were to hire a full-time personal assistant, which is very difficult to do and it’s very expensive.

but if you were, then that person would come in and help you with that random stuff around the house, right? They would help you plan your vacation. you know, your kid’s birthday party is coming up. They might order your jumpy house for you or go shopping and get the presents.

Help decorate for the holidays. like, our most common things are the things like the kitchen tidy up or folding the laundry. we don’t really do like deep cleaning. We’re not house cleaners. there are a few pandas that I have that love to clean, so occasionally we will do that, but like, We’re not house, there are our house cleaning businesses out there.

We’re not handymen. Although we can, maybe swap something out real simply, but like there’s handymen out there. So it really is stepping in to take care of the day-to-day stuff, of running the household and also the life management 

[00:06:43] Ellen Twomey:
I can think of a ton of things without like, right, like it’s hard to plan birthdays and, purchase gifts and order things it’s fine if you just have one, but if you have 10 of those things to do, it’s just really over. 

[00:06:58] Tamara Lucas:
That’s right. and the things too, like, you know, getting household repairs done, the AC guy coming, like helping to just get that, hey, remember you have to do it right. So you could have us help you with that.

1. Arranging for someone to come, finding the right person to do it, and then being at the house, you know, so you need your HVAC repair. You could hire a panda to find the best person with the best price. Then they could come to the house, wait for ’em, and while they’re there they could be folding some laundry and, I don’t know, swapping out the kids’ winter clothes for summer clothes.

so it’s just really the extra set of hands to step in and help. you know, I mean, the biggest struggle that. So many of our users have though, is that actual identifying those things that they can prioritize and. So that identification is really the biggest obstacle. cuz one moment, like you, you and I are sitting here thinking about this stuff right now.

You’re like, oh, I could do that, and that and that. But you’re having to be prompted to do that, you know? So that’s also something that we are trying to do. We’re actually, um, getting ready to launch a new membership model and our premium members, we’re gonna give them access to, a coach, an executive coach.

our first coach we’re working with is, actually one of our very. Clients that we’ve been working with for a while, she loves us. She’s like, Tamara, I have learned how to hack my panda. She goes, I know exactly how to use everything to make my life so much better. And so she’s in the meeting, we’re gonna have monthly, office hours that our premium members will be able to get in with her and get tips and stuff like that.

so we are the hands that show up and. But we’re also really stepping in to be a bigger, broader support for our users and help them in more ways than just showing up as a pair of hands. I, 

[00:08:39] Ellen Twomey:
I think that’s so important and interesting that you’ve identified kind of the problem, and that you have a super user willing to, step in and be the coach.

I think that’s, And my membership, our alums become the mentors and they’re the best mentors because they know exactly how our program works. And they’re like, it’s just, it’s fantastic. And, they’re the best, marketing tools for me because their success is really the best example.

So when you say that to me, I, I have things in my brain, but it would be hard for me to like really understand and maximize. So I can see that being super valuable. Like someone to say, Ellen, did you ever think about this? What about that? Oh yeah, that would totally level up my life.

because there’s just so many things. So then knowing like what’s is the party is great. So if, if someone signs up, so like how do they sign up? what will the new tiers be or, options be so that everyone kinda understands how do I sign up?

[00:09:31] Tamara Lucas:
How do I get started that? you download our app. The easiest way to do that honestly, is just go to our website, which is my panda app.com. there’s links for both iOS and Android there. in the app stores, there’s a lot of Panda apps and there’re all these like, Weird.

Yeah, it’s really, it’s, it’s funny. so I really try to always direct people to our website. to download the app. So when you download the app, our technology will automatically assign you to the service grove that you live in. It’s kinda like a bamboo grove, so we name them. and those service groves really leans into our hyper-local approach.

They tend to be no more than like, maybe 15 minutes to get from one side to the other. that really helps encourage. Time efficiencies for our pandas and increases trust. it also allows our pandas to, they work within the growth that they live in, so they know what road to avoid when it’s trafficking, right?

They know where to go to get the best fresh bread at the local market. So, and we can really encourage keeping money within. The local economy as well. because it’s people saying in the local economy, right? If you want to get something picked up dinner, you don’t need to go to a chain, you can go to a local restaurant, things like that.

so you get assigned to your local service grove and then, we have an option. You can just not be a member and just pay an hourly rate for whatever it is that you want. You just try us out, once or twice if you’re only gonna be using. once every month or two then, you probably wouldn’t wanna join a membership.

You could just put in a request. And we have, it’s broken down. We have some standard things like, kitchen tidy up or laundry folding. so you could select one of those. It’s a little more specific. Most of our people put in our custom requests, and that really is like, Whatever you need, right? So you might have a bunch of errands to be run, you know, swing by the grocery store, pick up stuff for dinner, bring ’em to the house, cut up the veggies, put ’em in the fridge so they’re ready for me when you leave, you know, make sure the dog has been fed, and then take the bag of clothes that are sitting by the door and take ’em to goodwill.

so you can just, there isn’t a standard request for that. That’s kind of what we are great at. We can just be like, okay, and you just, they type that in. You can have your preferred panda that if you’ve worked with someone and you like them, if you’re a member, you can go ahead and select that preferred Panda and it will go out to that.

PDA first they have the option to take it, but then we have a whole other slew of PDAs available if they are not available. your preferred person. And then the pandas, are on the other side and they see the jobs come through. They select the jobs based on whatever their skillset or schedule is. So it’s great for them on that end because they’re able to, work when they want with the source of things that they want to work with.

they accept it and then they just start communicating with the member. Get it all done and then, um, your card is charged in the app. If we have to do any purchases for you, we purchase it for you, on your behalf and we just add that into the charge at the end. membership levels, just so you know.

Um, we do have, our standard, which is 9 99 a month. and with that we just pay 9, 9 99 and then you get 10% off any hourly fees, whether it’s one hour or a hundred hours, and you have your chance of selecting your preferred, panda as well. And then our premium membership, if you’re gonna be using us about eight hours or more a month, so a couple hours a week or more, I really recommend that one.

It’s 99.99 a. But you get 30% savings of any hours that you use. So it’s a really significant savings. you get preferred Panda option and then you also get that coaching support. 

[00:12:50] Ellen Twomey:
Okay. Got it. So, that’s fantastic. I will say, $99 might feel like a big jump from 9 99, but we we tried to get a home Wheaton chart.

We got a home mainten. service company in North Carolina before when I was pregnant with Gwen, and it was chaos. And that ended up being about a thousand dollars a month, really? Like 1300. And some of those services were included and some, but like, really, that’s the value. And, that was like the low end of it, you know, like we were like, okay, can you get it lower?

And so really when you look at. To say that’s like, that’s what, if you got a management company to kinda help manage your life. And to be honest, it was a really negative experience.

[00:13:34] Tamara Lucas: 

[00:13:35] Ellen Twomey:
It wasn’t good. it was a startup, sowe’re both being this hard, so supporting them, but if you think about it from the value add standpoint, that’s what you’re competing against.

It’s like a hundred dollars a month plus some hours. And you can really get someone to know you and the way that you work. I think that’s a really big value add. 

[00:13:53] Tamara Lucas:
Yeah, if you budget out a few hundred bucks a month, you can get a ton of support, 

[00:13:59] Ellen Twomey:
That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing all that. So let’s talk a little bit of tech if we can. What technical skills do you feel have helped you the most in your career? And, do you consider yourself techy?

[00:14:09] Tamara Lucas:
Why are, okay. well, I’ll talk about. My general career before great.

I was not like, I, you know, was in social work. I did special ed and then I did a lot of years in, fine wine sales and distribution management. my family has a small, vineyard and winery. That’s where I’ve been helping one with the business development and growing that business. So like that’s the world that I lived in.

email and like basic stuff, right? Basic stuff, very little tech stuff. Then when you talk though about my career now as a c e o of a tech startup company which I do not consider myself techy. it’s almost embarrassingly un untuck. However, I think that that almost has been my superpower.

I’m so focused on my customers. I’m so focused on the problem and the solution. I find that I don’t even get distracted by the tech. Ooh, I love that comment. Yes. Which is, it’s very interesting to me, like I, in talking to, now that I’m in this tech startup world and I talk to the founders and they’re like, they have this thing built and they’re just trying to like shove stuff into this thing they’ve built.

I, that doesn’t even make sense to me. I don’t even get it. I’m like, well, what is the, like, do people need that? and so yeah, that’s my passion and that is where I’m always driving. So I. But what I’ve found I’ve had to do, is find people around me that can basically translate the things that I, my ideas in my head and what I want to do into a tech thing.

Yeah. Um, and I was fortunate enough where, so my tech team that I’m working with, they have been with me since the very, very beginning. Like back when I didn’t even know what a wire frame was. you know, and I had this idea of building an app and helping my neighbors. I just put a call out to like my neighborhood Facebook group, like who develops apps out there.

Like I had no, I’m like thinking it might be five grand to develop an app. Like this is little, no idea. And, um, I interviewed some people and the, team that I interviewed, I, I am going with, they just started their own little, development business and they were doing websites and SEO and app development and all this sort of stuff.

And so I started working with them and, um, they’ve grown with me and have helped me since the very, very beginning. But it’s great cause we’ve got like, Christopher, who’s our, he does all the engineering development and coding, and then Jonathan. I just call him like my translator, right? So I’m just like, okay, this is what I’m wanting to do.

And like I say things to Chris and he’s like, do you even know? I’m like, no, I don’t. But you’re like the computer guy. Fix it. they’re like, do it. And so, having the people around me to help, translate stuff for me and get my ideas of what the solution is and how we can fix things into a technology.

Thing has been the biggest thing that I’ve found. So it’s a kind of off the beaten path, but that’s kinda the way I think about it. Does that make sense? Yeah. So do you think of yourself as techy now? A lot more. So, yeah, I mean, in comparison to like all my other friends who are not in here, like I definitely know a lot more.

Like I talked to my mom, she’s like, I don’t know what you’re even talking about. Like, oh my God, well who are you? so I would consider myself relatively, but in comparison to the people around me now in my world, I’m like, I’m still like a baby when it comes to, well, I think that’s, really interesting because it’s been my experience that I think founders can get very distracted by the tech and not just the technical founders

[00:17:34] Ellen Twomey:
Like non-technical founders can think they need to know so much tech when really what it is. I actually think that at its core, you said such a pure, beautiful thing. I’m focused on my users, I know the problem that I’m trying to solve, and I’m just really laser focused on a solution that’s gonna help.

[00:18:00] Tamara Lucas: If you do that and then you give that to someone who like acts as a translator, which is like my role at Fugitive, it’s like a, it’s a translator role, and then then you have the, the team to support you. You’re actually gonna move faster in my experience, which is really amazing and I, I just love that you said that.

[00:18:04] Ellen Twomey:
I think it’s so important to understand that like anybody gets to be in this world, you don’t have to have a credential, which, can be hard, especially from your experience. Like social work requires a lot of credentials. Sometimes I work with, we have students who have teachers that lot of credentials.

[00:18:39] Tamara Lucas: You don’t have to have any like specific credentials.

[00:18:41] Ellen Twomey:
You have to have a problem and passionately wanna solve it and be willing to like figure that out no matter the hurdle. And so I think. It’s interesting and I’m sure that you were able to move faster cause of it.

[00:18:52] Ellen Twomey:
So what do you think, and you talked a little bit about really feeling this problem and talking about with the, with your friend, but what factors impacted you the most in your decision to start a company?

cuz you could have done that with something else, right? You could have, there are lots of, there’s lots of ways that you could have gone about solving that problem. And then why now, which I know my hand is. Three years old, is that right?

[00:19:13] Tamara Lucas:
Yeah. We launched our app in September, 2019, so, yeah.

the, the, the half was. It was kind of winding. I mean, when I came up with that idea, I was like, this might be fun. Let’s just see what happens. Right? And so at that point I was working, I was selling wine, I was traveling, I was like, I had a bunch of my kids were younger, like it was just a lot of stuff happening.

But I was like, well, let’s just see. And so I just, we built a very basic website. We did not build the app until like later. very basic website. Just started putting stuff out there and just sort to see if there was, you know, a beta test basically. and. That’s when I was like, wow, this is something that’s a lot goes beyond me and my neighborhood.

There’s just definitely a need. And, I started taking some classes here, in Atlanta at T D C as, a great, program to help, with founders get started. And so I started in classes there and I started to like really kinda learn about what it would take to scale and getting financial models and like technology and just doing customer discovery and all of that.

All that was just kind of happening in drips while I was doing all my other stuff. and then I started to realize, I’m like, this is actually like, I was doing a lot of panda jobs and then I brought on a couple of my friends and I was like, wow, this is getting busier. I think this is something we need to look at expanding.

And then, then it started to be the, like I mentioned earlier, Everyone I brought up to was like, I hate this. So at that point I was like, well God, this might be something we need to actually do. So raise a little friends of family money. And I started putting more time and energy towards it. we started to develop the app started to really start to look at how the technology could help the whole process along.

And then, I still was working all my other jobs, launch the app. I was not really intending to make it necessarily a full-time thing until it was like big enough. But then when Covid happened, Everything changed because my, mm-hmm. All my wine stuff stopped. immediately, any other way that I was making any money, like all stopped and then I was at home with me and my kids in the computer and so we just, like, I just started going.

And at that point too, I had also gotten into the women’s entrepreneurship Initiative program. So that was all, online. I had done the Start Me Incubator program here in Atlanta. So there’s a lot of things that I’d done that were just sort of like got me onto this, like ready to launch. and so really it was like after Covid happened when it just, there was like no stopping it at that.

I just shut down everything else. 

[00:21:40] Ellen Twomey:
I love  that because it’s not. it was a bit of a a like, let me just take the next step. Let me just take the next step and see what happens. Lemme just take the next step. Now there’s a global pandemic, which shifts everything, 

[00:21:49] Tamara Lucas:
I mean, that’s when I was like, okay. 

[00:21:52] Tamara Lucas:
I’m Done working out of the house after Covid. So many people are in my house. And, 

[00:21:57] Ellen Twomey:
Um, and Zeki was, bumping then because people were, they’re like, let me take, learn some 

[00:22:02] Tamara Lucas:
Ssex skills. How am I gonna do this? That’s amazing.

Yeah. So, yeah, I think it 

[00:22:05] Ellen Twomey:
Definitely, some industries, there was like some parish and some flourish and it just 

[00:22:10] Tamara Lucas:
Dependent on what you’re doing, it’s interesting too, you know, cause it’s like, okay, we’re going on four years, which is a long time in like startup world, and sometimes investors will be like, like, why?

What’s taking you so long? Like, this wasn’t started as a let’s go all the way. Like, I didn’t start it as. Fast growing startup, right? It was like, I started it as, let’s see what happened. And then also I was like, oh, wait a minute. Okay. And so it’s like, it’s been this shift over time, and really, I mean, the way I kind of feel about it, it was like, as 2021 is really what we were just like, we just really started to push at that point, 

[00:22:46] Ellen Twomey:
I actually really appreciate you saying that because I think that’s a bit of. Mom path, like it’s a legitimate mom path and it’s legitimate for anyone else. It’s someone who’s working a full-time, but it needs to be normalized in startup that like, because especially when you talk about not just like underrepresented founders, but also just like economically there’s any type of economic pressure.

Yeah. It’s really hard to be like, oh, and today I’ve started my startup and I would like You mean it’s you really? Allowing there to be some product market fit before you kind of move forward. Like, I feel like that normalization is so important. So thank you for sharing that about your journey, because that, that, I think that your answer is a valid answer in, in.

in a path to start up that they don’t, it doesn’t all have to look the same.

[00:23:35] Tamara Lucas:
Yep. 

[00:23:36] Ellen Twomey:
I believe you have an offer for our audience, and then I have one final question, so if you wanna share that 

[00:23:41] Tamara Lucas:
with us, that would be, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we are, serving metro Atlanta.

We’re expanding throughout Atlanta, and I know a lot of your listeners are here in Atlanta. and unfortunately the other ones we can’t service quite yet. we’re gonna be lots of places soon. But, um, for those that are Atlanta, we do have a 20% off discount code. when you put in the request, there’ll be a place to put a promo code at the finish and it’ll be TECHY.

put that in and you’ll get 20% off of your request. 

[00:24:07] Ellen Twomey:
Ok. T e c h y. Cool. so this last question is like my favorite everybody.

Cause I, I was, I just have brilliant guests. That’s all I have. just speaking from your heart, what advice would you give to a woman who is considering, starting a tech company? 

[00:24:22] Tamara Lucas:
I mean, just think about my experience like don’t keep yourself back because you don’t think you know enough tech-wise.

I mean it. You can learn any of that. I think that if you have something that you wanna solve, And it’s technology enabled, just go for it. and don’t, don’t stop either. And I think that that’s true in most things in life. But you know, if it’s something you believe in, like the people that are successful are the ones that just don’t stop.

So persevere, believe you can do it. And surround yourself with people that can support you with the areas that you need help. 

[00:25:00] Ellen Twomey:
Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to sign up for the are techie email list. Imagine being in the tech job of your dreams. Join me to get the strategies, training, and never ending support. To get hired, sign up at youaretechy.com. That’s Y O U A R E T E C H Y.com. I’ll see you next time.