LauraLiisa

Live website, rebuilt from the archive

HJ Kaubandus

HJ Kaubandus is a family company that has looked after football pitches and grass fields all over Estonia for more than thirty years. The old website had disappeared together with the people who once managed it, so the company had thirty years of work and no page to show for it.

I dug the old site out of the web archive, kept only the things the family could actually confirm, wrote the Estonian copy and built the new site. It is on purpose a simple one: what the company does today, who they have worked with, how to reach them. I think that is exactly what a company like this needs, not more.

Product in progress

Yunisyl

Yunisyl is my own product. I have had a major interest in understanding people and finding the reasoning behind the hidden mannerisms they have for as long as I can remember, so this was originally built for myself, across eight systems from Human Design to astrology and numerology, and then it turned into a product.

Now it is an engine. You give it your birth data, it computes the real profile across all eight systems and writes you a reading that is about you, not a horoscope for everyone born in the same month. The engine is built and tested, the public release is the next step, and I put the name here on purpose so I would finish it with a little more hurry than I have felt so far.

Co-founded startup

Smorty

Smorty is an AI study tool for students and the first company I have co-founded. We are three founders and my part is growth and sales, which for me means understanding who the student actually is, what they are stuck on the night before a test, and how to talk to them without sounding like an ad.

This year we went through the Tehnopol AI Accelerator together, decided who we build for and wrote down why a student should pick us when free AI is already everywhere. My share of that was the research and the customer side of the plan. We keep developing it, and I made an effort with this one, so it stays on this page.

Three years of it, before the trainer role

Customer journey and CRM

This is how I explain CRM to friends and family. Let’s say you have a loyalty card for the grocery shop you go to every week. The store sees that two weeks in a row you buy a certain brand of milk, so on the third week you get a lil discount if you buy two at the same time, and the week after that you get 5% off your entire basket, just because we noticed you and we make sure you experience something with us that you do not experience with our competitors. The fact that the store knew your favourite brand of milk AND did something with that information, that is CRM essentially.

I did customer journeys and CRM for three years before the trainer role, in what I would call the mecca of marketing: the most competitive corner of online marketing. It meant segments, triggers and things nobody had tried yet. I turned a mechanic that was originally impossible with the native tools into a workaround where the system actually let us build something that went out once every week. This seems small, but I constantly did things where I pushed the systems in front of me to achieve what the use case needed. We improved targeting and segments when we saw the wrong metrics were being used, and validated everything against the segment size and the hypothesis. I was there when we pushed multiple brands live, with constant dynamic change and constantly changing yourself based on what the environment required from you. So much testing, validating and thinking from the customer’s perspective.

What I am most proud of from back then are the brainstorming sessions with a colleague who did the same role as me. We came up with the most insane solutions with the tools we had, pushing heavy on what the tools were capable of, and the way we taught people to analyse a journey still lives to this day. If you are a company reading this: I would want you to see my AI skills and the things I have built with them first, because that is too wide to fit in a box. But CRM is my strong suit, and I know my customer journeys.

Trainer role, anonymised

A learning system built from ambiguity

I have been in my trainer role for almost two years now. Within the first year I built the entire knowledge base, because before that the knowledge only existed in my head and in a couple of other people’s heads. How I got to be that person is simple: curiosity that never ends. To justify my tasks I needed to understand WHY I should even do a task and where the contribution ends up, so I investigated and made my own lil notes and manuals, until the point where I started publishing them. When the role opened I applied with a six-page overview of what I would do and what I would actually change in the whole system, and I got it.

There was no example before. It was a full-on mess, and nobody could have the information unless they had written the manual themselves or I had shared my documentation. So I have done the entire scope of the role myself: the manuals, a learning management system so I could keep track of my students and justify extra training with actual results, and then, after my AI course, a workflow that produces courses to my own standards, standards that rely on research about how grown-ups actually learn. I could only build the courses because I had built the whole ecosystem of information first.

Tbh I am proud of what I have built. I see people following a system that only existed in my head, caring about the courses, understanding how information is presented, and helping themselves without relying on a colleague who might not be in the office when they are. You can actually teach yourself to be the absolute expert, and I truly think that is amazing. If you count all the trainings, courses, workshops and one-on-ones together, I have trained and consulted over a hundred people.

Creative identity and experiment

liza.arual

liza.arual is my visual persona for fashion, images, video and the ideas that do not need to behave like professional work before they are allowed to exist. liza is from Liisa, my middle name, and arual is Laura backwards, so it is basically me in a mirror.

It has its own brand rules, its own palette of creams and soft pinks, and its own Estonian voice written the way I actually talk, lowercase and a little shy. I post when I remember, not on a schedule. The clothes under Made by hand carry its label, so it is a real thing you can sew into a hem, not only an account.

Made by hand

DIY, clothing and physical problem solving

Sometimes the answer is a workflow. Sometimes it is a website. And sometimes I sew the thing I can already see in my head, because it does not exist yet and the fastest way to find out if it works is to wear it.

Everything in the row below is made or remade by me, knits with ribbon ties, hoods, bows, pleats, a sheer coat, and a label of my own sewn into the hem. Creating things like this is honestly liberation for me, it feels like being a kid who can do magic. And wearing something I made myself is like a double layer of me: I am protected and true to myself, because the thing is literally filled with my energy.

How one person runs all of this

The system behind it

Everything on this page runs on one system I built for myself. It keeps track of everything I aspire to do and lets me actually do all of the things I love. In plain words, it enables my brain to do so much more than I was able to before.

Each project has its own folder, its own written rules and a handover that any assistant can pick up cold, plus gates that block the mistakes I have already made once. My dream is to develop it to the point where it truly acts as my second brain. It is not finished, but I am already quite happy with my ops system.