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Amy Noel | Episode 1255
Amy Noel is the owner and potter behind Wabi Scotia Pottery in Nova Scotia. After years of working part-time with young children, she turned her passion for clay into a full-time business. Today, she creates functional pottery, teaches classes, and has expanded her studio to include kiln rentals, helping others discover the joy and confidence that come from working with clay.
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What was the big idea that you were trying to tackle? What was the big idea that you were seeing there was a need for?
It was more of the admin stuff like the automations and the bookings and taking payments and everything. Just saving yourself time so that renting your kiln out doesn’t become basically a time suck that makes it not profitable.
When you start looking at building something like this out, do you have a very specific person in my mind, like an avatar?
Yeah, me. I was the avatar because I made it first and foremost for me to use. But to expound on that, it’s like what we were talking about before where a potter or maybe a small community studio with just one kiln who wants to make a little bit of side income or maybe they have a few people who are approaching them in their community who want to rent their kiln but they don’t want to lose all of that time emailing back and forth.
You mentioned in our conversation on The Potters Cast that your husband was doing vibe programming and I’m wondering… Did you need to be a programmer to be able to make the actual app that useful for launching?
No, the beautiful thing about it was he is a little technically savvy, but he. It’s like talking to an assistant, but you have to be really good at describing what you want and explaining what you want. Like you have to have those really good communication skills because yeah, it’s basically like you’re talking to, it’s AI, but you’re talking to a programmer who’s doing the work for you. So you have to be very descriptive.
When you are looking at putting it out there to the world, how do you get the message out that you’ve got an app that would be useful for them?
I just today started my Instagram page for it with some posters. I haven’t posted anything yet, but I have a total of eight followers, so that’s very exciting. I thought I’d have zero followers when I was talking to you. But yeah, so Instagram, I think I’ll contact people directly who I know are renting their kilns and then advertising it on my own personal pottery page as well. Because I have a I do have a good amount of followers on there who are other potters.
When you were writing the app, what kind of costs are involved in coming up with the actual finished product?
That’s a great question. So you have to pay for Replit for a monthly fee. So I think it’s like $31. And then if you go over your allotted time, because everything you get it to do, it records the minutes that it takes. making that page or working on that page. So you have to pay extra. So let’s say $9 one week, $15 the next week, depending on how much you’re working on it. And then we have a huge emailing system as well, which is a different provider, but we’ve hooked that up. So it’s all the automated emails. So we have to pay for that monthly. I think that’s like a 30 or $35 monthly fee Canadian as well. And then all of your blood, sweat and tears on top of that, your time, which is the biggest thing. But I will say it’s amazing because I know a friend who tried to make an app just three years ago, not a pottery app, and he spent his life savings to develop this app with a developer before Vibe coding was a thing. So to say that I’ve put maybe $2,000 into this is ridiculous to actually have an amazing app.
One last question for you. Has it been worth it?
It has for me. I, oh my goodness. Like, so I’ve met so many great potters in the community, mostly beginners, but one really cool potter who like she’s doing all of these sculptural things and it’s so cool to see her work. And also on the revenue side. So like you get that community kind of built up and they come back again and again. And I’m kind of. I wouldn’t say I’m mentoring them now, but I’m giving them advice about how much to put in a kiln shelf and all of that. I think we discussed that before. And I think I’ve made enough, I’d say once I take away my fees for, you know, like kiln repairs and electricity, I think I’ve made enough to almost cover one month of income for the year. Not quite, but almost. And so It’s August now and I’m making for the fall, but I’m not teaching. I’m not doing any website updates in August. And that’s made possible because I’ve had this little bit of extra income coming in for a year.
Book
Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell
Contact
Instagram: @amyscotiapottery