Family Planning as a Solopreneur

Nikolai Paquin, a creative solopreneur, discusses strategies for building a personal brand, the significance of understanding your MVP (Minimum Viable Product), and how failure can be a valuable teacher with host Kaila Sachse. 

They also discuss Nikolai’s journey in self-employment and how he managed to pay off his student loans. 

Nikolai shares insights on preparing for parenthood, the impact of upbringing on entrepreneurial mindset, and the value of self-education through online resources. 

The conversation concludes with Nikolai's aspirations for his business and the transition towards teaching others how to succeed in entrepreneurship.

More About Nikolai Paquin
Nikolai Paquin build brands at the intersection of design and AI. With 10 years of experience across industries from food & beverage to SaaS, his specialty is creating scalable brand systems that work across every touchpoint, from packaging to paid ads. He’s particularly passionate about helping companies leverage AI tools without losing their human touch. Based in upstate New York, Nikolai is always experimenting with the latest creative technology while staying grounded in timeless design principles.

nikolaipaquin.com

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Transcript

Kaila Sachse (00:00)
Welcome to the Bringing Up Business podcast where we talk about business and parenting. I am your host, Kaila Sachse, owner of marketing and creative agency, Yumari Digital, and I am a mom of a toddler. I'm excited to chat with today's guest, Nikolai Paquin, He has an amazing eye for branding and he is a creative director turned solopreneur, YouTuber,

Nikolai Paquin (00:04)
Okay.

you

Kaila Sachse (00:21)
and digital product creator who helps creatives, creators, and entrepreneurs turn their knowledge into income by teaching them systems to launch their personal brands. Nikolai, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here.

Nikolai Paquin (00:36)
Thank you for inviting me. That was an awesome intro.

Kaila Sachse (00:39)
Ooh, I'll take it. Cool. Thanks.

So tell our listeners about your journey with self-employment. How did it start? Where are you

Nikolai Paquin (00:48)
So I've been running my own design agency for the last five years. I opened it in 2020 because I really had no other option. ⁓ I graduated college with a design degree in 2019 and it just happened to be the job market was so bad and there really was not many openings for junior designers at that point. Then I said, you know, instead of going and finding something else, which is most of the people I graduated with ended up going into other fields besides design, branding.

Kaila Sachse (00:55)
Yeah.

Nikolai Paquin (01:15)
⁓ But I said, let's give a shot doing it on my own and see where I land. And it ended up being the best decision of my life.

Kaila Sachse (01:23)
What are some of the

fields that your colleagues went into? I mean, if you're studying design, how do you, where do you go?

Nikolai Paquin (01:28)
Yeah.

I mean, because of COVID and the pandemic and everything, think everybody was going for anything they could do. So I know some people who went, you know, had a family that worked in construction that went back to doing that. That was actually an option for me because my father owns a construction company. I had other friends their families owned restaurants or they had been waitressing before. So they went back to that.

So really everything under the sun. I think most of the people who didn't end up going into design, maybe swapped to something more in marketing. I know one girl who she started as a branding designer, but now she's a merchandise coordinator for Death Wish Coffee. So it was kind of an adjacent parallel. She's not doing design, but she's doing the facilitation of designers creating the designs for different merchandise that that coffee company makes. So.

Kaila Sachse (02:17)
That makes

sense.

Nikolai Paquin (02:19)
I

think as a whole, really, because of the timing, it's, you know, whatever is paying the bills right now because student loan payments are starting to come back.

Kaila Sachse (02:27)
my

goodness, student loans. we talk about that for a second? How has that affected you and your entrepreneurial journey? Because on one hand, you are expressing yourself through your solopreneurship, but also you have these student loans to pay off. I how have you been managing that?

Nikolai Paquin (02:30)
Mm-hmm.

Actually, it has not been a problem for me at all. I'd say I'm the exception because I stayed at a local college and the first year I stayed room and board. But after that, I started, I went back home commuted to save money. I only graduated with I think $26,000 in debt. And because of COVID and the forbearance that they had, I was able to pay off that $26,000 within I think a year and half or two years of exiting college.

⁓ I mean, most people didn't have to pay student loans, I think up until 2023. I may be wrong on that, but it wasn't until like the last year and a half or so that they went back to getting rid of that COVID era of forbearance or, whatever it was called.

Kaila Sachse (03:26)
Yeah,

yeah, that would be really smart to ride whatever wave you possibly can, right? If there's the forbearance, you can more aggressively pay down your loan without the additional interest accrual. Was there anything that you did financially to help set yourself up for an aggressive payoff? Because a year and a half, or two years, you said, is really fast. That's very, very fast.

Nikolai Paquin (03:31)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Well, the benefit of when I graduated and having a family that allowed me to stay home was I was able to stay, you know, after I graduated school. And so like the timeline was I graduated in 2019 for that first year from 19 to 2020. I went back to work with my father doing carpentry work and construction.

And then after I kind of figured out, okay, this is next and impossible to get a job in the design field as a junior during COVID. That's when I started freelancing while still living with my parents. And it was about a year into freelancing and running my business that then I finally moved out with my now girlfriend and we've been living together for the last four years at this point. ⁓ So I think it was having that safety net.

Kaila Sachse (04:32)
Congratulations.

Nikolai Paquin (04:35)
You know, being young, having a family that could still have me live at home and being able to ride that out through one of the toughest points in recent memory of the economy that helped me out to where I was able to save all that money up. ⁓ But again, with any business, especially freelance, you have your high times, your low times. think that 2020 period was a boom for most creatives and designers, especially going freelance because all these companies had to now come on.

And they didn't have websites, didn't have marketing, they didn't have paid ads. So it really was a gold rush that I luckily was able to ride for, you know, 2020 up until this last year, really just looking at the snowball of people saying, okay, I've been running this olive oil company or whatever company for 30 years. I need to now get online and figure this all out. So the generation that was just coming out of college in that era in the early 2020s. I don't even know if I can say that yet because it's only 2025.

Kaila Sachse (05:31)
Yeah

Nikolai Paquin (05:32)
⁓

But they were able to grow off of that.

Kaila Sachse (05:37)
Yeah, yeah, it's really smart. sounds like you utilized your resources in an intelligent way. You said, okay, I'm living at home with my parents. I'm assuming rent free or maybe low rent. ⁓ Some parents do charge their children rent, which is fine. Different.

Nikolai Paquin (05:41)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it was rent free. It was rent free

with the clause of you are doing everything in your power to set yourself up for the next chapter of your life. If I was just sitting around, you know, drinking, playing video games, whatever, it would not have gone that way. But the fact that, you know, I was on sales calls and by childhood bedroom trying to like figure out how to be adult and make money. And, you know, at the same time that everybody was navigating the world, shutting down.

Kaila Sachse (05:58)
Yes.

it.

Nikolai Paquin (06:18)
it ended up being a good thing.

Kaila Sachse (06:19)
That's brilliant, you're taking advantage of the time that here's the deal, the clock is going to keep ticking, right? You can either choose to sit back and not do anything, like you say, drinking, playing video games, whatever, whatever, or you can get out there into the world however you possibly can. During COVID, that meant you had to hop online or hop on the phone and network and hustle, try to get out there. So it's really cool that you utilize that resource.

Nikolai Paquin (06:26)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Kaila Sachse (06:47)
It's funny, I have a similar story. I paid off my student loans similarly. I was also living rent-free, but I was doing it as a property manager on site for a 21 unit apartment complex. And we, my then boyfriend, now husband and I negotiated a deal with the building owner to say, hey, we'll manage your building rent-free plus a small stipend every month. And that...

Nikolai Paquin (06:59)
okay.

Mm-hmm.

Kaila Sachse (07:13)
gosh, if I could go back and save even more money, I would. It it unlocked an entirely new way to pay off my car note because I was silly enough to purchase a new car when I was 20 years old. So I don't recommend that and also pay off my student loans aggressively. And so similarly, I was able to erase that debt and move forward with the next chapter of my life. So,

Nikolai Paquin (07:26)
Mm-hmm.

you

Kaila Sachse (07:38)
It's good on you for also taking advantage of a situation where you are living rent free and then able to save and save a lot of money and spend to pay off your student loans early. that's it, okay. I picture you have zero student debt and now you're going into freelancing. So I can see how you would have possibly more capital to play with. Did you use that in any way to market your business or what did that look like?

Nikolai Paquin (08:06)
I think for me, I've never had a problem with money, but I've always had the fear of running out of money. So I try to do everything as cheap as possible. And when I started my business in 2020, it wasn't by any means the first time I had been freelancing. So all through college, I would just do smaller jobs here and there like, hey, design a t-shirt or hey, we need a flyer for this. Not anything that was more than a couple hundred dollars a month, if that.

Kaila Sachse (08:13)
Yeah.

Nikolai Paquin (08:32)
but you know, in 2020 that was like, okay, I now need to replace a full-time income, that I've never had and like figure out this whole thing, figure out how to pay taxes. So my perception around money was, okay, I'm starting from zero. There's only way to go up from here. I don't have a whole lot of money to invest. So I was just, cold emailing, going to businesses.

really just any means to get business in the door for free. And I think the big thing for me, and my social media presence isn't the same as it was five years ago, but you know, I was just making case studies on Instagram when Reels first came out or TikTok. They're really just doing a quick and dirty breakdown of like, here's a brand that I designed and, you know, having a 30 second video and that caught the eye of a couple of people. And then I was able to turn those initial clients into kind of a referral machine where

I really didn't need to market my business for the last four, four and a half years because I was able to find a couple of good clients that had a network of business owners they knew because they were business owners who were 40 plus, 50 plus, and they were pillars in their community. And it was just, you do good work and you over deliver, but under promise. And then those other people will come back and just say, okay, I have a guy who's really good at this. Like, let's see if we can use him for this or that.

Kaila Sachse (09:44)
Yes.

Nikolai Paquin (09:52)
And it just snowballed from there. So I don't think I spent any money marketing myself. You know, the only money that went into my business the first six months of doing it was getting a website through Wix, which I used that for four years. My website now is on Webflow. But Wix was a great place to start. And I think it was $300 for the year that included invoicing software and, a good, no code tool.

for building a website and then just posting on social media using my iPhone at the time. as cheap as I could, honestly.

Kaila Sachse (10:22)
Yes.

Honestly, what I'm hearing from you is the story of somebody who is scrappy and we like scrappy because here's the deal. When you have buckets and buckets of money to play with, you might not necessarily be making the smartest marketing and business decisions, right?

Nikolai Paquin (10:30)
Mm-hmm.

Kaila Sachse (10:41)
I can see somebody who has buckets and buckets of money just spending and wasting it on avenues that don't work, right? But when you're limited by your capital, you are forced to take an honest view of your business and say, okay, this is where I'm at. This is where I want to go. What is actually going to get me there?

And it's not saying that every single avenue that you explore in marketing is going to work, right? Because some of it is trial and error and getting to better understand your market and how to speak to them. But when you are limited, you're forced to make smarter decisions. So long and the short, it sounds like you were working with what you had and that was the best you could do. And that's exactly what I recommend to my clients too. Hey.

Nikolai Paquin (11:09)
Mm-hmm.

Exactly.

Mm-hmm.

Kaila Sachse (11:29)
Don't go too crazy on all these big

ideas. Just start with one. Start with one, keep it simple. Will it work? Let's find out if it works. Great, let's move on to step number two. So just step by step. Yeah.

Nikolai Paquin (11:33)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think the

biggest thing to note as well is a lot of an idea with us a lot with branding clients is that they, as you're saying, they have these big ideas, but they don't know how to construct an MVP. And that's very much what I dealt with was it's like you go to design school and they teach you how to design a logo and like design branding, but they don't teach you how to market yourself. At least the program I went to didn't teach you how to market yourself, how to sell to people, how to create an offer and provide that to people. And I feel like.

Yes, you can be really good at the design portion of it, but if you don't understand why you're doing the marketing and the graphic design, then how you design things isn't going to actually convert later down the line. And I don't know if that was just a shortcoming of the school I went to, which ironically it's closed now. But college I went to closed last year because of debt issues. But it was one of those things that it's like, okay, if you're going to teach that in a design program, why don't you teach that to the students as well?

Any marketing or creative person should have a background in business as well. So they understand, okay, if I'm making an ad for Facebook, why do things have to be laid out this way? And why do we have to do 10 different variations of this for A B testing for different markets? Once you start understanding that as a designer, you become a lot more valuable in the long run, because I think all of us in the design field have seen just in the last couple of weeks.

With technology and the capability to outsource, you can hire somebody on Upwork in India or China or any country, and they can do the work manually for one eighth of what we cost in the United States. Or you can have a business owner go buy a $20 subscription to Chat GPT now, and you don't need illustrators anymore for t-shirt design. So yes, if you want something very specific, but to people who are savvy new business owners, they can go and do this stuff all themselves.

cut out the middlemen more or less. I still advocate that every business should have a brand strategist and a designer and people who are experts in their craft. But if you don't have the money and you're just trying to do an MVP and you can't afford all these experts that are charging high ticket offers for their services, your best bet is to start using these new softwares that are coming out now that can...

replace what I'd like to say are bad designers or people who aren't very good at what they do.

Kaila Sachse (14:01)
Yes, yes, that's a perfect way to put it. Exactly. And describe to our listeners what an MVP is.

Nikolai Paquin (14:03)
Mm-hmm.

So an MVP is a minimal viable product. depending on what your business is, whether it's a product or a service, or if you're in the SaaS space, software as a service, it's basically getting to the very minimum that you can launch with it. But even then you don't even have to like have a product in hand. It can be a landing page and then you start marketing and sending people to it to sign up. You know, it really depends on the product or service you're creating.

You know, what's the minimal point that you can start sharing it with people and seeing if there's interest for it and validating that idea. most people start at the opposite spectrum, which is like, I'm working with a woman right now that, has been trying for last year to start an olive oil company, importing, high end olive oil from North Africa. And she has gone off the deep end and spent I think close to a hundred thousand dollars, like.

getting stuff sourced and like building apiaries and like investing money into the village. And with the tariffs her whole business plan just like is starting to go underwater and she needs to repivot. She has money, she'll be fine. But for months I've been telling her like, okay, like let's just get a website up and get people to a newsletter. And like when you're there, like going through the olive orchard portraits, like take videos and like.

actually start showing people and doing the story behind what you're trying to sell. it's one of those things, if you went with an MVP, you wouldn't be in this scenario. So it's one of those things that I think a lot of people need to learn that not everything needs to be perfect. Move light and fast, be able to pivot and figure out what your customers actually need by

giving them something and then getting data back. The most important part of design, branding, marketing is having the data to back up the decisions you're making. And if you don't have data, you can't make informed decisions. So I think that that is why everybody should get an MVP going for their business.

Kaila Sachse (15:58)
Yes, very well said. Without the data and understanding what your market actually is responding to, you're just throwing spaghetti at the wall. Yep, yep. And it sounds like your olive oil customer or client is the same person with the buckets and buckets of money who's just dumping it in all of the wrong places.

Nikolai Paquin (16:07)
Exactly.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Well, I also feel like in her case, ⁓ I have known her for a number of years. I had another client that was an olive oil company that she used to be a part of, and then she left after two years and she wanted to start her own thing. So she had enough insider knowledge, but not the full picture to be a little dangerous. And I think a lot of new business owners that decide to take that jump from being an employee to starting their new business, they're in that.

position where they know a little too much, but they don't know what the business side entails. And then they can quickly get into deep water without a life vest because they just assume all these things that were being taken care of by the business owner they're working under and don't calculate for it. then all of a sudden they're six months in their project and they've made no progress because they don't realize that it takes a village to build these things.

So being a solopreneur, just starting a business with the hopes of getting employees later on is really a journey in reverse engineering where you want to go. And most people just start going without figuring out where they want to go. Instead, you need to figure out where you are and where you're going and then connect the dots between the two. And a lot of people miss that point. And again, back to what we were saying, like an MVP is where you start figuring out, okay, how do you get from A to B and do that without sinking your ship metaphorically?

Kaila Sachse (17:37)
Yes, it sounds like you have to have your compass set in the right direction before you start sailing. Otherwise, you're just going to wander out into the middle of the ocean and then eventually sink all by yourself. It'll be really sad. Don't do that, people. So tell me, growing up, were there any signs that you had this entrepreneurial mindset?

Nikolai Paquin (17:41)
Okay.

Exactly.

Yeah. ⁓ I think when I was a little, little kid, I was very into video games and there was this one game, I think it's still like on the internet called Runescape and it has like its own economy in it. And I remember as a kid, like having a little like notebook next to me, like, okay, how can I make money in this so I can get all the items and upgrades? And that transitioned into like when I was a teenager.

that being my dad having his own business, I would be like, Hey, I want like an X-Box or like, want like a new pair of shoes or whatever. And like, I grew up in middle class. like we had, disposable income, but it wasn't enough for me to like get all the things that all the rich kids I went to school had. So I think from the age of 14, I started working with my dad in this carpentry business. So I really had, had been born into it.

didn't really, you know, there's no story of like the lemonade stand. was kind of like, Hey, my dad has a business and I want money. I might as well go learn how to do that and make whatever minimum wage. And I ended up doing carpentry on and off, summers and weekends with my dad from 14 up until 22. So, it was a good life skill to learn, but it was one of those things that I think if you are lucky enough to grow up in a family where you have a parent or both your parents run a business.

You can be lucky enough, depending on what they do, that you can be incorporated in some way. And a lot of their skills, their mindset on how to run a business kind of trickles down to you. Cause I found that was the biggest thing with my father that a lot of the lessons I hold in business now originally come from him. And like his story was that he started his construction carpentry business at 25.

out of necessity that he was working for somebody else and then my mom and him got together and they got pregnant with me and he's like, okay, I have another mouth to feed now. I have to make more money than what I was making. And he managed to make it and he's been a carpenter running his own business for I think 32 or 33 years now, but you know, all those hard lessons he learned in his twenties. we would sit down when I was trying to figure out how to run my own business and granted.

there's a little bit of disconnect because he is still somebody who doesn't embrace the internet. Like I have to teach him how to use his email sometimes and how to do certain things for his business. So he can teach me the hard skills or the hard lessons he's had, it's, you know, soft skills, like how to, be on line and how to use email and how to, do invoice and this kind of stuff. he still does paper invoices and mails them to people.

it was good to learn those things instead of learning it the hard way for myself. So I definitely have to say that was a leg up for me starting my business know, ignorance is bliss. Everybody has to pay off their debt when they're learning something new. And I had less debt to pay off in that sense because I had somebody in my court who could teach me these things.

Kaila Sachse (20:50)
Yeah, that's huge. That's huge. And that reminds me of the scenario too of the rich dad, poor dad scenario because sometimes people don't have the, we'll call them the rich dad, right? I'm not saying your dad is rich. If he is great, sounds like he's middle-class, that's fine. But what I mean to say is not everybody has a parent who is entrepreneurial. So they have to learn somewhere else, right? And it's okay to look at other people in your life and emulate them.

Nikolai Paquin (20:55)
Yes.

Thank

Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Kaila Sachse (21:17)
whether they are an organic personal connection who you happen to be close with, or maybe you're hiring a business mentor. It's okay to reach out to others who know more than you do. And it sounds like you were able to utilize that resource effectively. That's cool.

Nikolai Paquin (21:35)
Yeah. Yeah,

The only thing I was going to add for people who don't have somebody in their life already that they can look up to as a mentor. I mean, for everything I couldn't learn from my father or previous people that I worked with, YouTube has been a great learning asset. I would almost recommend, and I know this is kind of like a hot take I have, is that if you want to go into the creative field or design,

and you don't necessarily want to put up whatever they're charging now for a degree and you are motivated, you can learn all this stuff online through YouTube or platforms like Skillshare and then basically market yourself through social media and not take on, you know, $60,000 to $80,000 for a design degree or whatever you're looking for. I will say, you know, if you're going to be a lawyer, a doctor or something like that, please go to school. don't want a surgeon operating on me who learned it on YouTube. That would go wrong in a million ways.

Kaila Sachse (22:26)
You

Nikolai Paquin (22:28)
But for

most fields that don't require a technical degree, YouTube, think has better resources. Cause I found at least in my, curriculum I had at a college, went that a lot of the stuff I learned was 10 years behind the curve. And that when I got out, I had very little knowledge of like how to design for digital, that it was mostly just like a print program that you're teaching how to do magazines and book binding. And I'm like,

Okay, now in five years I've been running a design business. I've never used my book binding knowledge at all.

Kaila Sachse (23:00)
wow,

yeah, no wonder the school closed. Okay, understanding, yeah. And your advice for hopping on YouTube or hopping online somewhere else, Skillshare, it's brilliant because it's true. You have education out there on the internet. Also, within the Adobe programs themselves, there are little snippets that will teach you how to use the program. I know Adobe has it, I'm sure other design softwares have that. The self-taught method.

Nikolai Paquin (23:02)
Yeah.

You

Kaila Sachse (23:27)
is an effective one. It takes a little bit longer and you're bound to make more mistakes, but you're going to make mistakes anyway in business. You might as well just embrace the funk and enjoy it.

Nikolai Paquin (23:30)
Good night.

Yeah, exactly. And I think one of the things when you self teach, you end up learning more than if you were sitting in a classroom going through a textbook or doing a tutorial. Because when you, you learn by making mistakes and you quickly, like the analogy I always use, like when you're a kid and your mom was cooking on the stove and you reached up and you grabbed the pot not by the handle and you burn yourself. Like you're never going to make that mistake again. And it's the same way when you start projects, like.

Kaila Sachse (23:41)
my.

Nikolai Paquin (24:07)
My girlfriend just started a new job as a video editor and she had okay video editing skills, but she wasn't an expert by any means. And I'm not like an expert video editor either, but over the last couple of weeks of her new job, I've been teaching her the tips and tricks I have. And she was like, okay, I'll remember that. And once she started, like she had one project she started, she did it the completely wrong way and she had to turn it in and it ended up being fine.

But she's like, I am never going to do a project that way ever again, because it caused me so much pain and suffering that that one edit they had that shouldn't take three seconds took 30 minutes because I did it between three different programs. And it's like, okay, you learned a lot more by doing it the wrong way, but still accomplishing what you're doing than me showing you how to do it. And then not knowing any better. So that's all I really have to say about that is like mistakes are your friend. Failure is your friend. The more

attempts you have at something and you fail, the better off you are because you learn a much wider skill set by failing time and time again. And then once you reach success, it's that much sweeter.

Kaila Sachse (25:12)
That is the coolest

way to reframe failure. I know for me personally, I have a fear of failure. It's very deep. I grew up with a deaf and autistic brother who requires 24 /7 care. So I had this weight on my shoulders of knowing that I would be the only sibling, because there are only two of us, and him. I would be the only person to take care of him after our parents pass away.

Nikolai Paquin (25:25)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Kaila Sachse (25:39)
And so that weight has caused me to create this mindset where I wanna do it right the first time, efficiently, effectively, perfectly, so that I can succeed and continue to grow the success and be able to support the both of us, right? And on one hand, that can be really helpful to go in and want to do something well.

Nikolai Paquin (25:39)
Okay

Uh-huh.

Kaila Sachse (26:04)
On the other hand, it's caused me to...

refrain from making decisions and taking action out of fear of not doing it well the first time. So I've had to work through that and rewire that thinking because ultimately it's more so not serving me than it is helping me. I think I'm now in a place where I don't need that thinking anymore. What has really helped with that for me has been parenting because before I had a baby, I was so afraid of

Nikolai Paquin (26:13)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Kaila Sachse (26:33)
not parenting the right way. I'm doing air quotes right now. The right way to parent, right? I wanna be perfect in how I change this diaper and how I reprimand him for doing something that isn't in his best interest or whatever it is, right? I wanna be the perfect mom. And what I very quickly found out after having my baby is that that thinking actually spiraled me into a depression.

Nikolai Paquin (26:38)
you

Kaila Sachse (27:02)
had to deal with postpartum depression. And a way to work back out of that was thankfully through a therapist who reiterated to me like, hey, there is no perfect mom. There is no perfect parent. You're going to make mistakes. Embrace them. And so over the past couple of years of having my son, I've been able to practice that every single day. If I say something that isn't the way that I want it to come out to my son, I can tell myself, okay,

It's fine, the world isn't going to end. Now I know how I want to rephrase something for the future

that said, is there anything for you and your girlfriend, you've mentioned to me offline that you are planning to build a family. What are some fears that the two of you have in building your family? I know, it's heavy.

Nikolai Paquin (29:02)
I feel like in the last year, well, granted, so we've been together for four years and we've had the conversation time and time again about, do we want to have kids? Do we not want to have kids? And we've landed on, if everything feels right, yes, we want to have kids, but we're fine not having kids. I also feel like because we're very much high achievers.

If we choose to start a family, we want to make sure like it's the highest quality it can be. So I think that's our biggest fear that we would fall into a trap where we don't have enough resources. We don't have enough time to dedicate both to our careers, but also to raising a child. Like my childhood was very good. I was blessed with, parents that stayed married, never had problems. Um, nobody in my immediate family had, you know, alcohol or drug abuse problems. Like I grew up very

blessed in that sense. And then I got older and I saw how a lot of other people's families were. And I realized, okay, I was probably like out of a hundred kids, I probably had the good parents, we weren't rich. We didn't have, a lot, but what we had was more than enough. And I looked back at that and I'm like, okay, there was like one or two times, like, there's things I wish I had that I couldn't get because we didn't have the resources, but I really.

I want to make sure anything I felt was lacking in my childhood, which was very little, that if I have kids that I can provide for them and give them the best possible case scenario, whether it's, never know when you have a kid, it's a gamble. It's a throw the dice that, you know, they could have a genetic thing or they could be born with some kind of disability that I want to make sure that, we are set up for that. Cause I do have a friend and just like how you were saying that.

her older sister was born with a disability and it absolutely bankrupt their family. And it's just one of those things I think I tend to be more on the scarcity key mindset of like, okay, there's not enough time, there's not enough money, there's not enough resources. Like I need to stockpile as much as I can to make sure if the worst possible thing happens that I'm still gonna come out on the positive side of this thing that it's not gonna ruin my life. But I've never had an instance in my life where everything went.

terribly and like the ship sank. So I don't quite know where that feeling comes from, but I know, you know, talking with my girlfriend, her operating was completely different that she, grew up, both her parents had mental illness. She grew up in a, family home and then she kind of bounced around different places and then managed to go to a private school for high school and then go to a really good college in upstate New York.

and really dug herself out of a really deep hole that was just a bad draw of the cards for her. like anything, where you're born, what color your skin is, your gender, all that stuff is a lottery. You don't get to choose any of that. You're dealt with the hand that you're given. I think it's just, okay, I understand my story, but looking at other people's stories, learning everything I've learned in last 28 years, how can I best prepare if I want to start a family?

Kaila Sachse (32:08)
Yeah, yeah.

Nikolai Paquin (32:09)
So

there is a lot of stress there for me. think even though there shouldn't be like if we were to have a child tomorrow, like I think we'd be perfectly fine. But I think there's just a lot of pressure, especially on Gen Z and millennials. Like, okay, like the old way of the world and like the perceptions like, okay, like the husband goes to work and the wife stays at home and cooks and cleans and does all this stuff. Like that doesn't work anymore. Like we both work full time, ⁓

decent salary for both of us. And we still feel like we don't have enough money just because of inflation or an economy. And I think that's the biggest thing that if the economy was a little bit better, or maybe we had a trust fund, like we wouldn't be like worried about this at all. We probably would have a kid right now in our late twenties, but it's one of those things that, okay, what's the next like life world changing event that's going to happen? Cause just in

Since I've been a teenager, we had the housing crash in 2008. Then we had COVID and now we got everything that's going on the last year with the government and you know, the world order and everything. It's like, okay, like how much more is going to happen before the cracks start to show? And by no means am I like a doomsday person, but it's just like, if I'm going to raise a kid in this environment, how can I do it and keep my sanity when...

The two people making over six figures a year are doing well financially, but not well enough to buy a house, have a kid, buy a dog. Like just the simple things we were all promised as kids growing up.

Kaila Sachse (33:44)
Yeah,

no, I feel that in my bones. It's disconcerting to grow up being told that the world works in one certain way, right? You move out at 18, you buy your house on your 20s, you get a good ⁓ job after you go to college and you live the rest of your life at least middle class and happy, right? Happy, shiny, rainbows, butterflies, happy. And we get out into the world and it's been...

Nikolai Paquin (33:54)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Kaila Sachse (34:13)
It has been different for our generation. Our generation, I'm millennial and we have to think about the way that we handle our finances very differently than I believe that our parents had to, although it is all subjective and in proportion. So house prices for our parents, I'd say specifically for my parents, it was less than six figures. You could buy a two-story house.

Nikolai Paquin (34:36)
yeah.

Kaila Sachse (34:38)
for less than six figures. That's just insanity to me thinking about it because now it's more than quadruple that price in our area. I'm in Southern California. And yet back then, even though the house price was 25 % of what they cost now, salaries were also less than, I don't think they were 25 % of what they were now because I don't think that the salary is

Nikolai Paquin (34:39)
the

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Kaila Sachse (35:05)
keeping up with inflation, but there was still that proportional difference. And so I remember that anytime I think about how are we going to survive? Are we going to have enough money? Well, it's like, look, if my parents could do it and if my grandparents could do it and if my great grandparents could do it, then I can do it too. And I'm not saying this like mentor you or anything, but I do want to shed a little bit of hope.

And that's

I don't know, that's what I'm finding as a parent. All of my fears that were really ingrained deep within me, the perfectionism, I also had a fear of not having enough money and not enough resources. I found that, gosh, despite those fears, we're still okay. We're still okay. And it's so funny, that actually cropped up last night. I was talking to my husband about baby number two. We're thinking about expanding our family. We'll see if it happens, right?

But I vocalized that fear again. I was like, honey, what if it's so much more expensive? And I just started like spiraling going down the rabbit hole. He's like, have you not learned from baby number one? We're fine. Everything has been fine. Yeah, the world is terrifying right now. There's no doubt about that. And also we have the ability to adapt.

That is something that we are very strong in being able to do. And especially as an entrepreneur, you have to be able to adapt.

Nikolai Paquin (36:22)
Exactly. If you don't know how to pivot, you can't keep growing your business, especially with how everything's been the last couple of years. I think everybody's had to pivot close to half a dozen times at this point. But to touch on something you were saying earlier, and I think this is important to note that the stress and the pain everybody feels and the problems they face are relative.

Kaila Sachse (36:35)
Yeah, my goodness.

Nikolai Paquin (36:46)
Somebody may be watching this and may have a very easy life, but they're going through something that seems very minute to somebody else. Like the hardest thing you're going through is the hardest thing you're going through. And it's all relative. So I think that's the biggest thing that if you were looking at your life and you feel like, I don't have any big struggle or I don't have any big reason to be anxious or sad or whatever. Like for you, if that's the toughest thing you've dealt with in the last year, you're

you know, entitled to feel how you feel in that case.

Kaila Sachse (37:16)
that's a very important point. It's important that we don't look sideways, compare our lives to other people, whether we have it better, whether we have it worse, it's all subjective. At the end of the day, when we feel like we have an issue, then we have an issue and it's something to work through and that's okay. It's okay. And yeah, I don't know. I think it's really easy, especially our generation,

Nikolai Paquin (37:23)
Mm-hmm.

Kaila Sachse (37:42)
being in the social media age and in a space where everything is online, everybody's highlight reels are one swipe away, it's really easy to compare our lives to other people and get lost in the sauce. Yeah, yeah, Well, what is your number one dream for your business? At this point, you have been in business for five amazing years. That's something to be very proud of.

Nikolai Paquin (37:54)
Exactly. I agree.

Kaila Sachse (38:08)
Where do you hope that it will take you in the future?

Nikolai Paquin (38:11)
So I'm currently going through a transition moving away from doing done for you service as a graphic designer to doing more of teaching people how to create a personal brand and start an online business. So like my big goal with that is to have more time freedom, more passive income, basically take all the knowledge I've accrued in the last five years and put that into products and courses and videos and stuff that people can consume for a fraction of what hiring me to do it.

for them would so they can kind of take back the power, but also they don't have to spend, a couple thousand dollars to have somebody do it for them and then not know what it does or like how it affects your business. So that's like the biggest goal for me right now is to like take everything that's in here and put it in a form that is consumable for somebody who just graduated college yesterday and says, Hey, I don't want to be an employee. The entrepreneurship, like this is another route I can take.

So what we've been speaking about here, like being a solo entrepreneur, being a business owner and not having any employees, it seems to be the newest trend moving forward. Yes, because of the economy and inflation, but also because there's so many tools and software now that can replace entry level employees or like freelancers or contractors that if you have a good understanding of how...

prompting works for AI, whether it's Chat GPT, or Claude, or any of the new stuff that's come out you can get back to that minimal viable product idea we had earlier and get something launched in a weekend and start making money in the first 30 days. So that's really my goal now is to say, okay, everything I've learned about branding online business, how do we turn that into something that can serve those people who can't afford

the experts now? Get them to a point where they're making enough money and they need that expert help that they can then come back and hire people like you and I to help them elevate their business from, if they're making six figures up to seven or eight figures, whatever their goal is really.

Kaila Sachse (40:12)
I love that. That is so cool. Are the courses online yet? Are they in process? Can people find them?

Nikolai Paquin (40:18)
So

I have three things. One being about two years ago, I made a master freelancing course that basically took everything I learned in my first three years of running a freelance business as a designer. And I just put that in the eight hour course. I do have that on my website. So if you go to my website and go to my guide section, you can watch all eight hours of it there.

That was my first attempt at doing a digital product. And there was a lot I didn't know with it. It's a great resource, but I don't charge for it because I've grown from there. And then the two other products I have that I'm selling are two guided notion workspaces. One being a personal brand launch kit. So basically guide you through how to launch your personal brand in the first 30 days. It basically takes all the, you know,

tools, onboarding forms, questionnaires I've used in my own branding business for the last five years. And basically I give it to you and say, with, you know, I think there's like 10 YouTube videos in that guide that basically walks you through as if I was in the room next to you, like, okay, this is how you're going to figure out your brand positioning. This is your target audience. And then the second product I offer is a a personal brand design kit. So again, it's a notion guided thing.

and you just go through, teaches you how to design a logo, pick your brand fonts, brand colors, all through Canva. That way it's accessible to somebody who has zero design expertise. And there's lessons in there from me basically teaching you like, okay, how do you design a simple and effective logo? Okay, how do you do this in Canva? Why less is more in logo design? Like what's scalability is basically breaking down fonts, like all that stuff, all the stuff you and I try to explain to...

clients when you work with them and then they say, make the logo bigger. Hey, take this thing and not making my brand color. Like that product basically breaks that down to where you can have a halfway decent brand without having to spend any money. That way you can get to your MVP, get your business going in a weekend and start making your first thousand dollars online within 30 days.

Kaila Sachse (42:22)
That's amazing. Those resources sound so helpful for somebody who's just getting started and they want to get off the ground. Where, if someone wants to get a hold of you, how can they find you online and get in touch?

Nikolai Paquin (42:27)
Yeah.

Yeah. So online everywhere, I'm just @ Nikolai Paquin. My name is here, just no space between it. You can find all those products and resources on my website. As for social media, I am on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. I sometimes post on TikTok, but I'm primarily on LinkedIn and YouTube. And as for like the free resources and videos that I create, they go on YouTube.

And then I have my own newsletter that I publish once a week called Expert Economics. And that's basically everything I've been talking about with you today. Wrapped up in a weekly newsletter, I send you a guide every week that basically breaks down. Okay, you're a new solopreneur. Here's something that you should know and how you can implement it in your business. Typically, the newsletters are anywhere between 1,500 to 3,000 words. So they can be scratching the surface or they could be a deep dive. And I always try to do a YouTube video with the newsletter. So if

you don't want to read, can go watch the video version of that.

Kaila Sachse (43:32)
Well, thank you so much for your time today. You've taught us so many good things.

Nikolai Paquin (43:37)
Awesome. Well, thank you very much for having me on. It was a great conversation.