Episode Transcript

This transcript was AI generated.

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Welcome to today’s episode of Mumbition! We’re joined by a very special guest, Sarah Cummings, co-founder of Teach Ted. Did you know that over 1.25 million children go to hospital every year? For many of them, the experience can be incredibly overwhelming and scary. That’s where Teach Ted comes in.

Sarah and her team have developed a program that helps ease the anxiety children often feel before a hospital visit or medical procedure—giving them the tools to feel more confident and calm. Today, we’re excited to go under the bonnet of Teach Ted and explore how Sarah has built this impactful business from the ground up, all while raising a young family.

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Sarah Cummings (00:02)

You know how little kids can get frightened when they'regoing into a new situation? Well what we do is we let them play virtuallythrough that experience so that they know what might happen and who they mightmeet. In fact after using our book, Goes to Hospital, Travis went from beingpetrified of hospital visits to joking with the staff, calling them thecharacters' names from the stories. The staff couldn't believe their eyes.

Lucy (00:22)

Sarah, welcome to Mumbition the Podcast. We are delighted tohave you here today.

Sarah Cummings (00:26)

Thank you, I'm so excited to be here with you.

Lucy (00:29)

Yeah and I can't wait to get into this. You have such aunique product and obviously you're a business owning mum yourself but theproduct that you've created is also serves business owning mums or all mums orparents. Let us know first up how does your business help, who and how?

Sarah Cummings (00:48)

So basically we're here for families of everyday kids.There's a lot of support services that are available for kids who are reallyquite sick. But pretty much every child will go through experiences where theyneed to go to hospital or have a blood test or get a vaccination. And generallythey're doing these in an environment that is for everybody in the community.So they're often being treated by staff that don't treat kids every day. Andit's not that these people don't care because we know they do. It's just theyoften don't have a lot of practice with it or they're not set up for it. Andthe other thing that we found was parents often don't know and don't havepeople they can go to for it. So we're here for families who are needing toprepare their child for some sort of medical experience or to help them if aloved one is going through a medical experience. And we provide the informationto the parents so they feel really confident to support their child. A lot ofthe anxieties that come from, that kids have, actually come from what they'refeeling from the parents or the carers. And a lot of that anxiety comes fromjust not knowing. It's the same as every other topic. If you don't know, it's abit anxious for you to go into it. So we provide things like, “Here are thecommon things that your child might be worried about. Here's a way to explainit to them that's age appropriate. And here's some things you can do at home.So you prepare them before they go in.” There's a lot of research that showswhen children are less anxious, they tend to recover more quickly. They needless escalated interventions like, you know, being put under general anaestheticand also it just makes it a much nicer experience for everyone. It makes itoperationally more efficient for the providers so they can charge less for theservices or get through more children more quickly to reduce waiting lists. Butthe big thing for us is the longer term. If you've got a child that is scaredof needles, for example, you're much more likely to put off giving them a bloodtest because you know it's going to be really traumatic for them and for you.Blood tests are often a really quick way to identify diseases early and theearlier you find something the easier it is to treat. So we really feel thatthe work we do sets families up for a great relationship with the health systemfor the rest of their lives basically. And it's a real win-win because whenpatients have a great experience, the staff are having a great experience,their costs are reduced, you find out who might need a little bit of extra helpbefore they get into the very expensive operating theatre and it's just a greatthing all round. It's based on research, so all the children's hospitals havethese amazing people called child life therapists, but there aren't that manyof them in Australia. And so what we do is we take the tools and techniquesthat they use and we create resources that are really easy for parents andcarers to pick up and use at home before they even get into whatever theirtreatment is, no matter who they're going to to have it or if it's a loved oneand they're trying to tackle how do I talk to my child about grandma being inhospital.

Lucy (03:44)

Wow, it's such a deeply needed product for one and obviouslya lot of thought has gone into it. I'm curious to know why you started this.Was it a personal experience with a child?

Sarah Cummings (03:58)

Yeah, absolutely. in, when my daughter was two, she neededto go in to have grommets and have her adenoids removed. My son went in on thesame day to have his adenoids removed. We have great genes in our body. And mykids are pretty bulletproof. Like I had to throw them into situations and theyusually coped really well. They had different medical experiences, never shownany real signs of anxiety or medical concerns and my son went in and he wasfine. They took him into the operating theatre, he laid down, the anaesthetistwas fantastic, he gave him a game with cats to play as he was, you know,putting on the mask to put him to sleep and he was fine. My daughter, verysurprisingly for me, was fine all the way until she got into the operatingtheatre. He gave it the same cat game. Their masks started going towards herface and she started screaming blue murder. And it took about five minutes Ithink for us to calm her down enough to get the mask on so that she fellasleep. Clearly traumatic for me, expensive for the hospital because that'sfive minutes of you know having the anaesthetists and surgeons and everyone inthe room but also throws out the rest of their list for the day. And look Idon't know if this happens to everyone but my experience so far has been ifthey go under screaming, they wake up screaming. And so when she came out intorecovery, she was also screaming and I had to climb into the bed with her and,you know, stay there for 20 minutes to calm her down. So it was a reallytraumatic experience. And at the time I was doing a lot of work with PlaygroupNew South Wales, teaching parents about learning through play. And here's howyou can support your child through getting ready for big school or toilettraining. And there were books that we read and activities that we did and ifwe didn't know what was going to happen, we had all of these parents around uswho had already had a child at school and could explain. But when I was gettingready for this hospital visit, I didn't know anyone whose child had had anoperation. I'd only ever been to hospital to have my babies, neither of themwere Caesars, so I'd never had a general anaesthetic. And I really just didn'tknow how to prepare them. And so I kind of didn't. And so after I had thisexperience, I started looking around for resources that might have been useful.And I just, really couldn't find much. There were things like, you know, PeppaPig goes to hospital or there was a game where you could take a dinosaur tohospital and clean its teeth, which wasn't really particularly useful, but alot of fun. And my co-founder, her daughter was born on the same day as mine.That's how we met. And her daughter had open heart surgery at six months. Soshe was in the children's hospital. Obviously her daughter was too young toknow what was happening, but she was helping to prepare her son, who was abouttwo at the time, to know what was happening. And she put together this littlepicture book for her son and then for her daughter when she was older. And wewere just talking at playgroup like you do. And we thought, you know what, thiswould actually be a really helpful thing. You know, a book that is based onfacts that helps parents know what's going to happen. so they can learnthemselves. And through the work I was doing at Playgroup New South Wales, I'dheard about these child life therapists. And so we started putting a booktogether and then we approached some of them to ask them to, you know, reviewit and make sure that it was in line with, with what they practice and whatthey know from their research. Cause you know, they do a lot of study beforethey do this. A lot of the tools that they use are really straightforward.Their real skill is knowing what to use when, and also for dealing withfamilies who have much more complex medical situations and traumas to dealwith. So we felt that it was something that a parent could just pick up and useif they got the extra information. And that's really what we focused on is wefocused on providing contextual information for parents so that they didn'tavoid the conversation in case they could ask the curly question that they justdidn't know how to answer. And I think from the feedback that we get fromfamilies, that's really where we make the difference is the parents go, I hadno idea. So, you know, as an example, if you think about the context that wehave around hospitals, we know that people go to hospital every day and they'refine. Kids generally only hear about hospitals on movies that are reallydramatic or on the news when someone's dying and they don't have the life knowledgeto know that thousands of people go into hospital every single day and arefine. They just know that terrible things happen when people go to hospital butthey can't voice that to you because they don't have the articulation and whenyou explain it to a parent they're like of course that makes perfect sense. Soa lot of our advice is on how to address the questions that your child willnever ask but is really worried about.

Lucy (08:53)

Yeah, it's so, so much thought and research has gone intothis as a product. Can you take us back to the time when that was allhappening? So I guess I'm not sure if this is correct terminology, but itsounds like that was the research phase, collecting all that information. Whatage were your children then and how are you piecing together a business whilethinking about the kids and fitting it into family life as well? Is thereanything really top of mind at that stage?

Sarah Cummings (09:19)

So our kids were two and four at that stage. I got diagnosedwith ADHD last year, which I think explains a lot of my life. So when I left,I've always been in corporate financial services, so quite high pressure, longhours, types of situations. When I had my son in 2008, I left corporate and Ibecame a marriage celebrant because I really enjoy rituals and ceremonies andsharing things with families. And not happy with just being a marriagecelebrant, I started up a network for marriage celebrants because I really waslooking for a way to scale. So I've spent a lot of my working life helpingfinancial planners and businesses to scale and how to use technology andframeworks and processes to build things and deliver them in a way that is highquality, but scalable. I just sort of have that desire to improve and build allthe time. And so it seemed quite natural for me to turn this into somethingthat was scalable because I also know, you know, we're not rich people. We werefunding all of this ourselves. We had to make it make money. Otherwise wecouldn't keep doing it. And we knew it was something pretty early on. It wasvery clear that it was something that was going to be really helpful. And, youknow, the story that I told about Travis, that was one of our earliest pilotattempts and he literally would scream every time he had to go into emergencyand just changed. And the doctors were saying, what drugs have you given thischild? Like he can't be so calm. We've seen him because he was in a prettyoften. And we just knew that it could make such a difference. But I knew frommy commercial background that we had to make it make money. Otherwise, wecouldn't keep doing it. So Sarah and I had already started a little businessdoing some fingerprint trees and things for fun and so we thought well we'llgive this a go and we started to try and build it out at that point. Weactually put together a team who were working effectively pro bono to try andmake this thing happen because again they believed in what we were doing and weput together a prototype. We actually thought we had a grant from the federalgovernment to build this and then at the very last minute they rang and saidlook we're really sorry we've been told that on a technicality we can't giveyou the grant because we were a company that built apps rather than an appbuilding company and back in 2012 it was when the iPad had first come out andthe government was really trying to encourage people to build apps butunfortunately this particular grant had very specific wording. We started thenand we got a full storyboard out, like effectively a wireframe of the wholething. But then the grant fell through and then my husband got sick and Iactually had to stop my businesses and go into full-time work. And so we putTed down for a nap for a little while. But I think we are perpetually evolvingthe product. Like every time we talk to people, every time you I do stuff withmy own kids, it's research. You know, we're living and breathing this. I was onthe Playgroup Victoria board for five years and you know, through that we also,you learn about, you know, what's changing and things, but really playing withkids has not changed. And it's probably been our biggest lesson is keep itsimple. Kids don't need fancy. You know, we're targeting kids generally betweentwo and 10. We often get older kids where they have extra learning needs or,know, children on the spectrum in particular who like to play through things alot to prepare themselves. We do get older kids, but generally in that two to10 range and they really don't care if it's you know, whiz bang all singing ordancing VR thing, or if it's a piece of paper with some instructions on how to,you know, do really practical medical play. They get a lot of benefit out ofboth.

Lucy (13:18)

Yeah, that's really insightful. I also, think it's obviousthat the product works. It's speaking to a real need. So I feel like when kidshave their needs met, that as you say, it doesn't have to be fancy, but it hasto really speak to whatever challenge it is that they're facing in that time.Your business partnership sounds like a dream partnership, which is fantasticand ongoing.

Sarah Cummings (13:31)

Unfortunately, it's not a business partnership anymore. Not becausewe fell out or anything.  So it's now2025, as I said, we started in 2012. We sort of put it to sleep in 2013. Andthen in 2018, I got really sick of corporate life and doing a lot of things formoney, but not a lot of things that were good for the world. And so I left mycorporate job in 2018 and sort of went full tilt at this but on and off throughyears because of COVID and you know our lives got in the way and last year myco-founder actually is no longer officially in the business purely because itmeans that I can commit us to random things when I have the time and energy andI don't have to worry about it disrupting her life but still very much involvedwhen I need help on the creative side because she is the amazing person thatcreates all of our gorgeous drawings and she's got a lot of skills in thatcreative space. So I do still involve her, but the business now is really justme, which kind of works because most of it now is focused on building it outand scaling. And that's really where my strengths are.

Lucy (14:49)

That's your skill set, yeah. And how do you keep yourselfmotivated in the business? Like you were talking then before about getting sickof the corporate life, which is totally understandable and very common in thiscommunity. What is it that keeps you in flow day to day now? Is there somethingthat really helps to motivate you?

Sarah Cummings (14:59)

I have a method that probably doesn't work for everybody andcertainly doesn't work for my co-founder, but works very well for me where Ienter myself into things. So my first pitch with Teach Ted, which at the timewas Ted Goes to Hospital, was actually for Mums & Co. It was back in 2018and it was the very first pitch that we ever did and it was quite wellreceived. So we're very happy with that. it forces me to work through thedetail because in my head I go, yeah, yeah, yeah, we've got it all done. Andthen when you have to write it down, you go, actually, I haven't quite workedout how that bit was going to function. So I'd best work that out. So, youknow, I enter into pitch competitions, into programs. I do find I get reallymotivated. I'm very much energy from other people kind of person and I lovehearing people's stories. So I will often go to workshops and things where youget to hear from other people, whether they're, you know, the actual speakersor just audience members. And I love learning about what other people aredoing. And I find that is really motivating to me. So forcing myself to get outinto the community, the startup community is hugely motivating. But also Iaccept that sometimes I just can't and you know, I've had to do consulting workin financial services and health and other fields in my background, which ismainly around marketing and product building and operational governance,because that's what paid the bills. And it's nice to do things that you knowhow to do really well. It can be exhausting where everything you do is a newthing that you have to learn.

Lucy (16:40)

Yeah, gosh, I really love that as a way of motivatingyourself. And I think you're very fortunate and obviously very clever to havethe skill set that you do. And it's wonderful to hear you talk about the factthat you dip in and out in terms of doing some contract work on the side aswell, because I think that's a really important thing to mention. In thisparticular season of the podcast, we're really looking at how you start abusiness from nothing. And a lot more women now are considering sort of whatyou might call a side hustle. So something that they're doing on the side withsomething they're interested in. So I think that's a really good point that youraised there. Thank you for sharing all of that. When we've touched ontechnology a little bit, but I'm just wondering what you've used in terms ofstaying ahead of trends in terms of technology or how it supported thedevelopment of the business.

Sarah Cummings (17:32)

I love technology. So I've always done things withtechnology, you know, in my role in financial services, I've built or workedwith teams. I'm not a coder, but worked with teams to develop front ends orback ends or administration systems and things that will help you to scale. AndI've always been quite fascinated with new toys. But I think the biggestlearning we had was you don't need the most novel tech to be good, so figureout what tech you do need and use it wisely. So by way of example, in 2013, wewere going to build an iPad app. At the time, there was an iPad. I think theremight have been two different sizes and one operating system, probably three orfour that you might have to keep up to date with. These days, there are so manydifferent devices. Each one, interacts with its different operating system in adifferent way and every time it does an app update, your app will break. Youneed one, massive teams of people upfront to build it and two, ongoing. Youneed people who are across it and you need really highly skilled people. And Iknow that AI is coming in and resolving some of this. And I know that there areways you can do wrapper apps and things, but what we considered when we weremaking the decision to move away from an app and instead to go with videos andPDFs and things were a couple of things. The first one was the use case for us.you you're not likely to take your child to hospital as a new experience everysingle week. It's likely to be a once off event, which means that downloadingan app, taking up space on your phone or your iPad or whatever is actuallyquite painful and creating a point of friction for you. Also, it's likely totake up a lot of space because, you know, we've got imagery in ours andanimation and that by nature is a higher res. So therefore it's a bigger file.And the biggest thing for me, so my family is actually from the country. I knowthat in the country in particular, there's even less paediatric specificspecial services. So they're very likely to go to someone that might betreating a child once every two weeks, not 20 times a day. So it's even moreimportant for them to be able to access tools like what we offer. And a lot ofthe time in the country, your Wi-Fi is really crap. You know, at three o'clockwhen all the kids go home from school or at eight o'clock on a Friday night,it's very hard to be able to get things downloaded. We also wanted to make sureit was really accessible for people who might be on older devices or they onlyhave one device in the entire family or they might have a PC at home that theyuse rather than a laptop or a phone or an iPad or something, or they might evennot have a lot of technology and they actually go to the library to look atstuff. So it became very clear very early that having things that wereeffectively lo-fi, was actually going to be better for us. So yes, we do usetechnology. And one of the biggest reasons I use technology is scalability. wepurposefully, so this is Ted, should have introduced him earlier. I'm veryrude. Hi. And this is an example of our book. So what you can see is Ted isobviously a teddy bear. Lamy actually acts as Ted's carer and support person. Whatthat allows us to do and you'll see through the book. Let's find a good page. Thisis Nurse Stork. So you'll see throughout all of our resources, there isn't amum and a dad, so it works for all different families. It isn't a boy or agirl, know, every child has a Ted. But if you have a boy or a girl, or a boy ora girl that doesn't look like the child, they don't connect with them as much.Whereas having the animals and having Lammy as Ted's best friend, means that noone reads it and goes, that doesn't apply to me. And, they won't consciously doit, but it does make a difference to how they connect with the storylines. Sowe use technology smartly. Ted in our animations is made up of bits. So hisears are separate pieces and his eyes are separate pieces and his arms areseparate pieces. So we try wherever possible to build ones he's often. Andtechnology allows us to do that. There's some newer technology out now that wethink will speed up how quickly we can animate stories, which makes it a lotquicker to roll out new stories. We don't heavily animate our stuff. So it'snot like watching a Peppa Pig video or something like that. It's very muchlight animation because we're trying not to distract the kids or overwhelm themwhen they're already in a bit of a sensory overload. But we use technology toreuse that. So the biggest time constraint, is these are all hand drawncharacters and then they're uploaded. We don't have to keep doing that everytime. The lead time to get something into production, you know, we did onevideo series from scratch in three months, you know, to end production in twoseparate languages. And the language is the other one. So whilst we always usereal people to record our voices in our actual children's storylines, we usetechnology to create the closed captions. So it can be used by people who arehearing impaired or who might struggle a little bit with the accent or the languageor what have you. And it also helps kids learn to read, you know, so it's got afew bonus things. But for some of our other videos, so I've recently just beencreating a video for the parent guide. So we have a written parent guide, butit's quite dense. And for some parents, it again can be quite overwhelming. Sowhilst the language is all very simple and easy to read, just the sheer volumeof it can be a lot. So we've just produced our first parent guide video and Iactually did that all myself, quietly proud. I used Canva to do the slides andput some animation into the slides. I actually used ChatGPT to create some ofthe text. So I basically put the entire parent guide in there and said, turnthis into a three minute video script. And then, you need to do a fair bit ofrework on it. But it stopped me from going down rabbit holes of, should Iinclude this or this or this? And I used Clipchamp, which is a new, I thinkit's a new Microsoft video editing tool that lets you layer the music and thesound and things. And I used a fairly new program called 11 Labs, which letsyou create voices. It's not great for Australian. I tried creating my ownvoice, because you can create different voices. And it was great in my sample.But when I tried to make it say more, it suddenly became American or NewZealander. So it was a bit odd. But I found a voice that worked. But that againmeans that I don't have to wait to book a studio recording and find someonewho's got the time to come and do it and then when I get home and I've redonethe video 10 times and I realise I actually need to change this bit I don'thave to get everyone back in because I'm very much an iterative person you knowI develop things over time I'm not one of these do it all first and then lockit all out very much agile methodology in my head where you just sort of keepreworking and reworking. Something like that works really well for me because Ican just go back and re-record the bit that I need.

Lucy (26:09)

Wow, yeah, it's phenomenal how much you're across with theproduct. Like you've obviously stayed very, very close to it, literally, thewhole time, which also must create a definite sense of satisfaction. Thank youso much for sharing all of that. I'm curious, as a mum running a business, andwith your very clever way of thinking, what kind of hacks you might have thatyou'd be happy to share that help you at home or in family life while managingthe business and then sometimes doing other work as well. Is there somethingthat you'd recommend?

Sarah Cummings (26:39)

Yeah, I tend to look at my life over a long period, not ashort period when I'm considering balance. I had to learn very probably thehard way that I'm not a slow and steady person. I'm a peaks and troughs person.And when I'm switched on, I can be going until three in the morning veryhappily. And then I'll have days where I can hardly you know, stand to look atanything, I just need to sleep. I've got a few chronic conditions that are notterrible, but they just mean that sometimes I get really tired more easily thanothers. And I've got two kids with chronic but not critical issues as well. So,you know, we spent a lot of time going to medical specialists only to be told,yeah, that is odd, not quite sure why. So I've just had to learn to that pacingis a really good thing for me to do and when I've got energy to go with it andwhen I don't or other things crop up in my life or in my family's life that Ineed to be involved with to not beat myself up. So, you know, I think in 2013when I was doing it, I wouldn't let myself read a normal book because I wouldfeel guilty that I wasn't doing something for the business. And of course allthat happens is you burn out. And so now I don't do that. I just go, you knowwhat? It doesn't matter. Like I know there's all the tech bros and there arelots of people who quite validly go in and they go all gung-ho and they canspend a hundred hours a week and they can live on nothing but noodles and youknow they can have their prototype to go live with a million dollars funding insix months. Happy days for you. I don't want to take anything away from that. Ithink it's a perfectly valid approach. It does not work for me and I think itdoesn't work for a lot of families because you can't do that generally whenyou've got a young family or even an older family. And you may not want to. Butdefinitely I think trying to look at the balance of your life over monthsrather than days will help anyone. Whether they're a plotter, and I don't meanthat in a derogatory way, just someone that wants to steadily work throughthings, or there's someone like me that goes in peaks and troughs, look at howmuch time you're spending over on the different elements like your family oryour work or yourself or whatever and don't feel the need to have them allseparate. Like a lot of my meetings about my business are also with people thatI really enjoy spending time with who help my mental health by hanging out withthem. You know, I use my kids to road test a lot of my resources and they loveit.

Lucy (36:43)

Yeah I love that and I really love what I'm hearing there isjust and there's not enough encouragement I don't think to work in the way thatyou need to and it sounds like you've found that you know through trial anderror or however it's come. And I'd love to challenge you on your inability totake opportunities because it sounds like you do when you can. And reallythat's all we can all do and should do. And you're so right. Being a mum inbusiness is so different because we have the responsibility of our family inaddition to our business. Yes, we might love to just drop everything and runfor it, but there are certain times in our lives where that's just not going tobe possible. So I'm really grateful to you, Sarah, for sharing all of that,particularly, you know, in this season of the podcast where we're trying toencourage other women to get into business. But you've got to go in it withyour eyes open and some wisdom. And I think that’s what you've shared sobeautifully so thank you so much.

Sarah Cummings (37:48)

Yeah, and I think it's really important to not get caught upinto that. I think the startup community in Australia and in particular inSydney is fantastic. Like I've always found them to be incredibly supportiveand really welcoming of women. And I've been fortunate to be part of somefantastic female focused and also digital health and med tech type focusedevents. And I come from financial services, so I know that sort of boys worldand I think you do get a little bit of it with fintech but generally in thebroader startup ecosystem I think women generally do get a pretty good run andopportunities. The biggest challenge I faced I think is a lot of people hearthat I'm doing something with play and small children and I've got a littlestuffed toy. And they go, that's a lovely charity idea. And I go, no, thanks.This is a fully scalable, self-fundable, could make you quite a lot of money ifyou're interested kind of way. But that mentality of if you're in a socialimpact business, which quite frankly, a lot of women do go into because theysee a problem that they want to solve, it can be harder to be taken seriously.But it is, I think, really important to not get caught up in the noise and themedia that can come out from the startup community where all you're seeing isthe people who've raised five million dollars on the back of a pitch deck andthey've gone from naught to a hundred. Because actually, if you connect withthe real people who've been successful and talk to them, you know, they're theovernight success that took 10 years to make, not two years. And I thinkfinding your and surrounding yourself by them is really important. And that'swhy I've stayed involved with Mums and Co for so long, because Carrie first onand then all of you have come along and shared the same sort of vein. It'sabout encouragement, but also supporting you to figure out your own way, notjust giving this one single model. And Carrie was really fantastic early on inconnecting me with people who were three steps ahead of me. That could say noit's okay if you don't fix it in six months that doesn't mean you're a failureit means that you're building a sustainable business that works for you andyour family so I do think that's really really critical to make sure you dosurround yourself with people and also people who'll tell you Sarah that newshiny thing over there stop don't look just come back here and finish the thingthat you started. You need people, well I need people like that.

Lucy (40:22)

Thank you for that lovely feedback on this community too andwe're very grateful for you to be part of it and to share all of this. The lastquestion I had for you today was around, and you know, I feel like you've kindof answered this anyway, like thinking about Australian women in the smallbusiness space, what's one thing you'd really like to see changed for us as anindustry?

Sarah Cummings (40:43)

I think really it's the view of the funders and thepolicymakers around It's not necessarily female led organizations. I think it'smore to do with, as I said, that most women that go into a startup, they tendto be socially driven. And that's a very big generalization. And there's someamazing women doing things in really deep med tech and fintech and all sorts ofspaces. But I definitely think that that sort of social impact space where alot of women do play and where they want to build scalable, sustainablebusinesses, they're not building a hobby, but they're not necessarily trying tobuild the next Uber. There doesn't seem to be a lot of support and funding inthat area, you know, the VCs, they're not really a good fit for me because Iwant to be able to drop in and out. And maybe at some stage they will be, butI've basically bootstrapped everything that I've done. And I've been very luckythat I have a family that can pick things up when the wheels fall off. Butother than government grants, most things now are, they're matched funding. Soyou need to have funding. And you don't necessarily have the networks to getthose fundings. You know, I'm not from wealth and I am quite well connected toa lot of people who are incredibly generous in the time that they give, but arenot in a position to be giving me lots of money to see if this works. Andthings like, you know, the MVP used to be sweat equity, where you can't do thatanymore. You now have to have the money there. It often means people can't evenget themselves started you know, some of the micro funding programs that theyrun overseas, I think could be really valuable in Australia where you oftenonly need 10 or 15 grand to get started. But if you're not working full timeand you don't have a partner that's working full time, you can't get a businessloan. And a lot of the grants are very, very specific. So when I've got grantsbefore, they've been for a very specific purpose. They can't be for generalrunning of business or funding the time that I'm not earning money, that for aspecific project. And if you don't go into the not-for-profit space, which hasits own complications, then there's not a lot around to help you build scale.So I would really like to see some different options available in that sort ofmiddle of the road space. The people who need 10 to 150,000. Even angelinvestors, they're really looking at you know 100k plus generally. Because Ithink there's a lot of women really building some fantastic businesses and alsoI would love to see more of the types of events where you can connect withpeople. Again, as I said, my background is financial services. I didn't knowanyone in health other than the large collection of doctors and specialiststhat I'd accumulated along the way. And I've been really fortunate to go thatI've come in at a time that coincided with the government being reallyinterested in health and digital health. So New South Wales government inparticular, also, know, and health and CICADA labs, they do a lot of workshopswhere you can come along. And the people who are presenting are the people whoare senior in New South Wales Health, who might be senior in some of the pharmacompanies or in the private hospitals. And you can go up and talk to themafterwards and say, hey, is there any chance I could talk to you about thisidea? And they're interested and you can get your foot in the door so you canactually present to them. So I think networking opportunities and connecting tothe decision makers is equally as important as money. And that's what makes thedifference for me in the success of my business now. I've sort of given up onthe idea of figuring out a way of getting funding other than, you know, thesesort of grants for specific projects and really focused on the hustle. Thehustle is very hard to do if you can't even get in the front door. Whereasthese workshops get me in the front door. Once I'm in, I can talk to someoneand I can put together my business case. But if I don't even know who I'msupposed to talk to. Where do I start? So can have this great idea and it goesnowhere.

Lucy (45:10)

Yeah, so well said Sarah. Thank you so much for sharing sogenerously. You've just got an incredible story.

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