SMALL ON PURPOSE

Most marketing advice assumes you want hundreds of people in your course. If you work 1:1 and only need a handful of clients a year, that advice has you building for a stadium when you’re trying to fill a living room.

Lydia and Maira get honest about what they’ve automated, what backfired, and what they’ll never hand off. Maira tells the story of the $10K program where nobody ever checked in on her. They get into why booking a free discovery call has started to feel like a big ask, and the Airbnb test for what can run on its own. Lydia shares the small change to her welcome emails that gets people replying with what’s going on in their world.

Where in your business is someone getting an automation when they were hoping to get you?

Hosts Info:

Connect with Lydia Lee: https://screwthecubicle.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydiallee

Connect with Humaira Akhter: https://humairaakhter.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/humairaakhter

The information game is changing. Courses that used to sell for hundreds of dollars can now be generated in an afternoon. So what does a service-based business actually sell in a market where the information is free and the frameworks are everywhere?

Lydia and Maira get into the stuff that AI can't touch. The pattern recognition. The pauses. The way a client's body tells you something before they can. The moments where someone lands on a truth they've been dancing around for six months. That's the work that never makes it onto the sales page.

What's the human part of your work AI can't touch, and why isn't it the thing you're leading with?

Hosts Info:

Connect with Lydia Lee: https://screwthecubicle.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydiallee

Connect with Humaira Akhter: https://humairaakhter.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/humairaakhter

Maira and Lydia get into the question one of Lydia's podcast hosts asked her recently: is meaningful work a luxury? They pull apart the two versions of that sentence, the one that's real math and the one that's habit dressed as math. Maira tells the corporate story about hitting the 2-year mark of paid-well-and-perked and feeling the nag she couldn't name yet. Lydia gets into the identity cost of pushing work you've outgrown, why comfort is often just familiarity, and the case for tiny experiments over blowing up the whole business. 

Hosts Info:

Connect with Lydia Lee: https://screwthecubicle.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydiallee

Connect with Humaira Akhter: https://humairaakhter.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/humairaakhter

Round two on body of work. Last episode we drew the line between what you sell and the body of work you carry. This one's the weirder part, what happens when you've outgrown some of it but not all of it, like the offer that made your name or the model that used to fit. Lydia gets into the moment an ideal client paid her and instead of excitement she felt dread, and Maira names what she calls the profitable prison, the offer that still pays but has gone dead inside. We get into the side quest of talking about the new work publicly before there's an offer or brand ready for it, why guilt shows up right behind boredom, and the difference between resistance that's fear and resistance that's you refusing to give yourself permission for something smaller.

Hosts Info:

Connect with Lydia Lee: https://screwthecubicle.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydiallee

Connect with Humaira Akhter: https://humairaakhter.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/humairaakhter

We're getting into the difference between what you sell and what you actually carry as your body of work. Maira lands on it with a hiking metaphor: your body of work is the terrain, your offer is the doorway. Lydia stretches it wider. Your body of work isn't just your business. It's every project, relationship, and chapter that ties back to the same red thread across a lifetime, and that means the pressure to make one offer hold all of it is unfair to both of you. We get into the cereal aisle problem of trying to sell everything you can do, the text Lydia sends her best clients to find out what she's actually good at, and why what her sales pages say is not the depth of the work she's really doing behind closed doors. 

Hosts Info:

Connect with Lydia Lee: https://screwthecubicle.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydiallee

Connect with Humaira Akhter: https://humairaakhter.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/humairaakhter

We're talking about the version of outgrowing that's hardest to name. Not the business that stopped working. The one that's still working, technically. Clients are coming. The money's fine. And something underneath has quietly stopped fitting. Lydia talks about the year she hired a framework expert to spice up her positioning, watched it land better than ever, and still couldn't shake the boredom. Maira on the service soup years, and the identity that shape-shifted with every new offer.g. The episode lands on what made it move for both of us: experimenting small, in private, before anything had to be rebranded.

Hosts Info:

Connect with Lydia Lee: https://screwthecubicle.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydiallee

Connect with Humaira Akhter: https://humairaakhter.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/humairaakhter

We've both stopped running our businesses at one constant speed. For Lydia, it was caregiving for her 94-year-old aunt through cancer in Penang. For Humaira, it was the 50-tabs-open feeling of running a business with kids at home. We talk about what triggered the shift, what assets keep working when we're not, and why the newsletter gets the love and social media is just sprinkles.

Hosts Info:

Connect with Lydia Lee: https://screwthecubicle.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydiallee

Connect with Humaira Akhter: https://humairaakhter.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/humairaakhter

Humaira would rather have a root canal than do sales. Lydia knows that desperate energy ain't sexy. So naturally we have a lot to say about what marketing looks like when it actually feels good. In this episode we both share what works for us, what it took to stop performing for algorithms we didn't care about, and why none of it looks anything like what we were taught. Spoiler: it involves a lot less strategy and a lot more just being human.

Hosts Info:

Connect with Lydia Lee: https://screwthecubicle.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydiallee

Connect with Humaira Akhter: https://humairaakhter.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/humairaakhter

Lydia and Humaira have both tried the things they were supposed to try. The funnels, the launch cycles, the lead gen coach who had them scrubbing lists. Some of it even worked, technically. But at some point, feeling bad about how you're doing something starts to count as data too.

This episode is about the things they've officially let go of — in marketing, in how they sell, in how they think about what success is even supposed to look like. And what they've quietly replaced them with instead.

Hosts Info:

Connect with Lydia Lee: https://screwthecubicle.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydiallee

Connect with Humaira Akhter: https://humairaakhter.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/humairaakhter

Lydia and Humaira get into something a little deeper this episode. The stuff that runs quietly in the background long before you ever start a business. They both grew up with immigrant parents who worked hard, sacrificed a lot, and passed down a whole set of beliefs about what it means to succeed. Not out of bad intentions. Out of love, and survival. But somewhere between "work twice as hard to be seen" and "you could've done better," those messages became the operating system for how they showed up in their businesses. And both of them are slowly, imperfectly learning to do things differently.

Hosts Info:

Connect with Lydia Lee: https://screwthecubicle.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydiallee

Connect with Humaira Akhter: https://humairaakhter.com, https://www.linkedin.com/in/humairaakhter