When Michele Hansen and her husband started planning for the birth of their daughter, they quickly realized that the high cost of daycare—a whopping $24K per year—was going to require an additional income stream.
So, they created an app called Open Nearby as a side project. In the course of building that business, Michele and her husband uncovered a need in the market for geocoding software that translates addresses into latitude and longitude coordinates. They built that product too.
Four years later, Geocodio has grown to become Michele’s full-time gig. She has adopted a see-what-sticks approach to business, using jobs-to-be-done interviews with customers to improve their product and initiating meetups to support fellow entrepreneurs AND combat the loneliness of working from home. And the whole process happened organically.
Today, Michele sits down with me to explain how the expense of daycare inspired her entrepreneurial journey. She offers insight around how being a parent has made her more efficient with the use of her time and how Geocodio grew from a side project to become her full-time work. I ask Michele what it means to be a ‘product person,’ and she discusses the value of customer feedback in making business decisions. Listen in as Michele shares her efforts to help during Hurricane Harvey by creating a disaster relief map and her work-in-progress approach to entrepreneurship and parenting.