#35 – How Tina Roth Eisenberg aka @swissmiss turned her side projects into businesses

The Role Models Podcast

Tina Roth Eisenberg (aka @swissmiss) is the founder of CreativeMornings - a global monthly lecture series; TeuxDeux - a to-do list app; Tattly - a design-led temporary tattoo shop; and Friends Work Here - a co-working space in New York City. Swiss-born Tina started swissmiss in 2005 as her personal visual archive and watched it grow into one of the internet’s most popular design journals with over 1 million visitors a month. After working in several prominent NYC design firms Tina decided to start her own design studio but found that many of her side projects were (unexpectedly!) growing into small companies. So, in February 2015, Tina took a one-year client sabbatical to follow her labors of love in their many and varied directions. This led her to found a global monthly lecture series called CreativeMornings; a to-do app called TeuxDeux; Tattly, a design-led temporary tattoo shop; and a co-working space called Friends Work Here. Tina is dedicated to finding intersections between her personal and professional interests and believes we should all be taking our side projects seriously, and sees these passions as areas of opportunity through which we can create wholesome work environments for ourselves. Today’s episode is full of advice on how you can turn your passion projects into long term businesses. This includes how to: - Take the time and space to be entrepreneurial - Make your side projects work together - Scale ideas and add value to them - Overcome hesitation (clue: examine what that hesitation is about) - Do things for the joy of the process, instead of the outcome - Adopt five personal rules to help root your beliefs and ideas Tina credits much of her businesses’ success to the individual teams in charge and is infamous for assembling her teams through unusual interview techniques which isolate shared visions and outlooks. Later on in our episode, Tina shares these invaluable tips for finding talent that’s the right fit in your company. Find out more about Tina: 5 personal rules: http://www.swiss-miss.com/2014/06/sharing-my-5-personal-rules.html Swissmiss blog: http://www.swiss-miss.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/swissmiss Tattly: http://tattly.com/ TeuxDeux: http://teuxdeux.com/ Creative Mornings: http://creativemornings.com/ Friends Work Here: http://www.friendsworkhere.com/ Thanks to our patrons for this episode: - Anna Caroline who coaches leaders in Berlin: http://truthcircles.com - Megan Quinn who supports Code2014: http://www.code2040.org - Alexandra Cosma: http://alexandracosma.com - Emma Harris If you want to help us create The Role Models Podcast in the future, become a patron and chip-in $1, $3, $5, or $10 per episode. Read more about the different tiers and rewards on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/rolemodels