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Gil Mayron is the Founder and CEO of Cobot Nation, Architects of Automation™ which takes us into incredibly exciting discussion about what he and his team at Cobot Nation are doing to change the way robots and automation advance organizations.
We cover industrial robotics, 3D printing, getting off the planet, making this planet better, and exploring the exponential opportunity we all have if we put our attention towards what matters.
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Welcome back, folks. This is Eric Wright. I’m the host of your DiscoPosse podcast. And thank you for listening. And of course, thank you for watching too. If you’re keen on it, head on over to the YouTube channel and you can see the video version of this podcast. Go to Youtube.com/discopossepodcast. This is Gil Mayron. Gil is the CEO and founder of Cobot Nation. They’re doing really amazing stuff around automation, industrial automation. They’re changing the game of robotics. And Gil’s laser focus on solving big problems and really just first principles thinking. This is a fantastic conversation, a ton of fantastic lessons. I hope you enjoyed as much as I did. You’re going to hear about the impact of automation on society, society’s ability to leverage automation to make all of us better. And a lot of big picture turning into real tactical ideas and execution. Super cool. So thank you, Gill, for this great conversation. And also a huge thank you because the folks that make this podcast happen, that include our friends over at Veeam Software, I got to give a shout out because I actually just had a bit of a situation where I totally blew up one of my cloud servers.
But thankfully I was actually protected by Veeam. I’m not only a sponsored podcast, but I’m actually a client. I do use the platform. Very cool. So thank you, Veeam, for saving my cloud instance. Whether it’s your cloud or your on premises environment, cloud native, even things like Office 365, Microsoft Teams, you got to back that thing up. So head on over to vee.am/discoposse and you can check it out yourself. I highly recommend it. And speaking of protection, yeah, I travel a lot and many of us do. And heck, even if you just go to the local Starbucks, what you should be doing is you should be protecting your data. Because while it’s in flight floating around sketchy WiFi, you never know what’s going to happen. The world’s a difficult place. Bad people are hanging around those WiFi. So what do you do? Protect yourself with a VPN. And I’m a fan of ExpressVPN. I’m a user myself. So if you want to check it out and you want to protect your data in flight and make sure your identity is safe, then go to tryexpressvpn.com/discoposse. Because the network is scary, let’s make it less scary by using a VPN. It also helps you with advertising and all sorts of weird stuff like that. So pretty cool. Highly recommended. Go check it out. All right. And drink Diabolical coffee. Go to Diabolical coffee.com. All right. This is Gil Mehran. Enjoy.
Hi, this is Gil Mayron, the founder and CEO of Cobot Nation, the architects of automation. And you’re listening to DiscoPosse podcast.
I always say that’s like my go signal. It’s like when you here the iron man start line and you hear the big horn go, you’re like, that’s it, we’re going. So Gil, thank you very much. This is a rare treat because you’re in a very neat space and it’s exciting. But we don’t hear enough about what’s happening in it because it’s in the area of robotic automation, like true robotic automation. We always hear and I’ve had a lot of folks on about robotic process automation, or process, depending on which side of the 49th you’re from. I gave the American version. I’m usually say process.
I was born in Canada. I live in the US.
All right. Fellow Canadian.
Yeah, it makes no difference.
Exactly. Now, you see, now I’m totally going to derail because I want to find out.
I was born in Montreal. I moved to Boca Town, Florida, in 1996. I think I was eleven years old and everything went on from there.
Nice. Two beautiful places. I have a son who’s going to Concordia in Montreal, and..
I live in St. Luke. Yeah.
I got a family out there up in NDG. I love Montreal.
Yeah. Small world. Funny.
That it is. But speaking of small world, for folks that do not have a chance to already know you, Gil, let’s give a quick bio on you and Cobot Nation. And you’ve got a really cool history. So we’ll start with now and work our way towards now.
Yeah, no problem. So my background is in 2011, I sold the first consumer 3D printer company. It was called Bot Mill, and I sold it to 3D Systems Corporation. They’re publicly traded on NYSE. That turned out to be their consumer division. And I ran all the business development and corporate development in that for a number of years and pretty much until my acquisition terms were done. Once that was done, I left the company and I was recruited quickly to go over to a company called Graphene 3D Labs. They were making conductive materials, obviously with Graphene for the 3D printer market. I joined as chief marketing officer. I left within a year. I didn’t really like how long it would take to get certain deals done and move my family over to Las Vegas. A lot of reasons for that. The anticipation was to start another business once non compete and all that stuff ran out. And also Las Vegas, there’s no state income tax. There’s a lot of good things happening here. There’s incredible amount of sports teams coming in, and of course, all the house prices are going up.
Yeah, that’s the downside is that.
Actually in Las Vegas, it’s the worst place you can be. The weather is horrible, actually. There’s not a cloud in the sky, probably 70 degrees right now outside. It’s phenomenal. With that being said, once my non-compete ended and I did do a few things after Graphene 3D, when I was in Vegas, I sat on the board for Mosaic Manufacturing for a little bit of time. They make a 3D printer hardware device that splices filaments and makes them into one filament of different materials or different color, and then you can print the full object without really having multi novel. Another company that I did work for was Polymaker. They’re probably one of the largest companies in the world right now for filament for 3D printing. I know them quite well. And then once everything ended, I did some work also for HP, where we released their printers. These are industrial printers, probably the only ones that compared to injection molding that anybody knows of. We have one here at Cobot Nation, which is good, and we’ll explain why and what. And then, of course, all that leads into Cobot Nation. So Cobot Nation, the reason why we came to automation was very similar for the reasons why I got into 3D printing.
So before bot mill, I had a few other companies starting from just before college to after. But more so, what happened was my older brother and my father had introduced me to at the time was a very large full color 3D printer. My older brother was either in his PhD program or already a professor at a local university. And I put up the Google alerts and then RepRap came up. The RepRap project. RE-P-R-A-P. Once that came up before there was even over a page on the site, maybe there was a one page thing on there, probably not even a form yet. Once that came on board, I contacted Adrian Bauer, who was the guy who started it, and I was able to get the rights to make the first fully assembled version of the next machine that he was coming out with, which I don’t remember what could be Mendel, I don’t remember what the name was of the machine. Anyways, with that, we had a huge backlog. We had to hire some engineers to come help and finish some of the instructions and things like that. There were some differences from an open source printer.
I think it had something like 1800 moving parts on a different nuts and bolts. The whole thing was nut and bolts and 3D printed parts and all that stuff. And so we had a huge backlog. And with that backlog, my only competitor at the time was MakerBot, and everybody who’s within the industry would know who MakerBot was at the time, they were probably the ones who kicked off the Hype. But more so in the comparison I want to make here is that the reason why we got into 3D printing is because the industrial patents were expiring. On some of the core processes for the filament based type stuff. The layering with the filament and call it a 3D printer or call it whatever you want. Whoever out there decide to call it a 3D printer, and we rocked with it, no problem. The same thing happened in robotic arms. So a number of years ago, you had a PhD student in the Netherlands who then started a company called Universal Robots. They are absolutely the leader in collaborative robots with the amount of robots that they have out there in the field. Cobot Nation runs a completely different business, and we’ll get into that.
But that really is why we got into Cobot Nation. We saw the exact same business pattern. We saw a lot of fragmentation within the business processes. We understood what it takes to introduce a new technology into Fortune 500 companies. We’ve done it before. Very few others have done stuff to this degree where you’re really pitching a brand new thing and you have to really make a win out of it in order for somebody to pull the trigger on a million dollar check. And so with that being said, all of the boxes checked for going into collaborative robots. So the way that we do Cobot Nation, and I’ll be brief with this, too, and I’m sure you want to add some stuff. But the way that we do Cobot Nation is we’re the only collaborative robot company that manufactures everything. So we engineer, design, manufacture everything. We go directly to the customer. We do not use distributors, resellers, or integrators. All of our engineers are hired full time. The majority of them are master mechanical engineers. And if they’re not master, they’re pretty much there. They all are wizards in CAD. So much so that anytime we go to an onsite with a customer and we leave the onsite in order to then make our proposal, our workflow, and quote and everything else, typically within 24 hours, we turn around and we give the customer 3D CAD of the entire project of what we’re doing.
And that’s something that nobody else. So we do a lot of weird things. But the more important thing is that in the market, you have all of the large companies sorry, the light just went out here. All of the large companies. There’s no way for them to scale across hundreds of facilities if they’re going through a value added reseller chain, you won’t get the support. And if you do, it won’t be the same. You won’t get the same payment terms. And that’s only on the business front. Imagine what happens when something happens with the robots. Who are you going to call? The integrators? The integrator is going to call the distributors, going to call the manufacturer. The manufacturer is going to say, well, you guys installed it, and it’s going to go right back down and right back up until somebody decides to fork it up. Here at Cobot Nation, with every single order, we offer a three year support plan. The three year support plan is very low cost. It’s $4,599 period. Doesn’t change, doesn’t go up, doesn’t go down, doesn’t matter what we’re doing. That is what it is. The reason why we’re able to do this is, first off, we have control over all the engineering that we do. We make everything. We have all the equipment here to make everything. CNC’s, 3D printers, the whole deal. And so for us, we’re able to really move ahead with a customer in a way that nobody else is able to do.
So if any of the large companies call us and they all have and they say, hey, we’ve tried to do automation, it hasn’t worked. We’ve used X, Y and Z company, some of them I may or may not have mentioned already in this podcast. And these companies, unfortunately, they get these robots, they’re not installed properly. And if they are, if it breaks down, the integrator may or may not still be in business. If you have an industrial robot, like a Fanic robot, good luck and support for that thing. And if you do that’s a very difficult thing to program if you don’t know what you’re doing. On the other hand, our guys at our company, not only can they program everything that we do, we can program everybody else’s robot as well. So the support program, we can also put onto other robots if we feel that they’re up to speed. Not only that, we have the ability to take unused equipment off the machine floor in order to make room for some additional automation processes. So we really have the entire thing covered for an enterprise type company. And in our opinion, that’s the way that you go about introducing this stuff.
If you can’t perfect it with the largest guys, don’t go perfecting it with a little CNC shop where you expect them to do all the installation and everything. They don’t want to spend the time doing it. They want to make sure that the thing is done. So we don’t allow any customer to do the installation. We do all of the installation. Our payment terms are completely unique from anybody else. So if it’s a new customer, it’s 10% down. That’s it. At our facility here in Las Vegas, we have 10,000 sqft. We call it a collaboratory. So that’s a mixture of collaborative and laboratory. We were just talking about synergistic words off air. Everything is -.ly and whatever. Who knows, maybe somebody owns the term slot.machines. When you walk into the office here and I’ll get back to the business, but when you walk into the office, it’s a very Las Vegas theme. You see couches. It’s a loungy area, almost like a Wooly Wonka type thing. I mean, you can even see from my office. You’d have no idea that we do anything with robots. And so this was done, by the way, by my wife.
She’s a great designer. I’m sure everybody can go on Instagram and see all the different pictures and things like that. But with that being said, at our facility, we do all the prototyping over here. So it doesn’t matter how big the customer is. We will produce higher manufacturing line, not the whole facility, but at least main line. At our facility, we’ll automate everything. The customer gets a chance to come over here, or they can do it by video for whatever Covid, or whatever the reasons may be. And only once it’s approved by the customer fully. So it needs to work 100%. Then they go with the next payment of 40%. Then we install everything. We train everybody. We make sure it’s running for a number of days. We don’t just leave you. And then, of course, then we’ll invoice for the last 50% if it’s a repeat order, which is the majority of customers that we have out here. So they’ll do one sell. And because we’re working with large companies, they probably have a few hundred more of those. And so with that being said, on secondary orders, it’s usually 50% down 50% upon completion.
And we haven’t seen any issues over there. Everything has worked out perfectly for us and had prototypes. And once the prototype is approved, any 3D prints, parts, we may go ahead and get machined and so on and so forth.
So the interesting thing is how you’re able to do it. And I think we’re going to probably see a lot of references to Elon Musk, so no one get mad at me because I’m using Elon Musk as a comparison.
My head might go beyond the screen.
But sometimes he’s a difficult figure to call upon because people have some strong opinions on him. But in his approach to engineering and business, he did a great podcast recently with Lex Friedman, who is an MIT researcher in robotics and AI.
I watched it. Yeah.
And ultimately his theory is this idea that if the goal of everything he does is to look at raw material costs and get as close, he says we can get us asymptotically close to the raw material cost through manufacturing. That’s what we want to do. That’s the goal.
Regardless of what you do in every company, right?
Yeah. But everybody else is like it’s incremental change and the true sort of zero to one type of innovation, first principles thinking can’t live in that world. So it was very interesting to see that. And ten years ago he was just that crazy guy that’s rich from PayPal, and then all of a sudden he was that guy who, boy, I can’t wait to watch till he goes out of business because he’s spending money in these goofy startups. Now he’s a gazillionaire. He said the largest amount of tax that any human has ever paid in history, the largest single donation he’s given in history. Three companies that have defied convention. And it’s incredible. So I think take that concept, that style, that approach. You were early to the market. You’ve lived through multiple organizations and seeing it play out. And now you’ve got a chance to basically take the Etch a sketch and shake it out and say, okay, what do we really want to accomplish? Right? And owning the supply chain, owning the deployment, owning the support. Because that’s the only thing when you get to support it’s not even just like the up and down of the ISPs and the support folks, whatever.
But at some point there’s a secondary market for support contracts and they sell it to a third party, and then that gets sold to another party. Next thing you know, who knows who’s actually responsible for that contract because it’s been washed out.
Well, there’s also another thing. So the reason why we’re able to offer the support the way that we do with the amount of engineers that we have in the company. So we don’t have hundreds of engineers that are scattered around the country. We have a number of them, but not hundreds. And so why we’re able to do this is because for the majority of our customers, we’ll make a custom dashboard. And on this dashboard, they can see every robot and machine that they have on their machine floor. And so everything that we integrate to the robot, any point of sale system that they want to integrate to the robot to help with the flow, everything we’re the only ones that we know of that’s made such a dashboard for the customers. At some point we’ll have it released to the public, likely in the next month or two. But for right now, we’re only using it for certain customers because it’s that valuable to us. For example, if there is any sort of a data spike that we see anywhere, usually that’s an indication that we know something before the actual operator or before the machine breaks.
And we can always say, go take a look at X. Or we could just come out there and do a preventative sweep and do what we need to do. But having the preventative maintenance is a massive cost saver, not just for us in doing support, but also for the customer in support. So for us, we built the business based on what we would want if we were one of our customers, how it would work. And then we just built it out from there. And it just so happened that it made sense for us to make all of the hardware. It made sense for us to make all of the software. Because ultimately, the way that I believe to push a business is the following. So in 3D printing, you can pedal push sales like anybody else, no problem. Get a list and email and see what happens. You can pay for advertising, no problem. You can brand and all that kind of stuff. And you can hope that certain people see you and they come in and they buy some of those machines. They see the benefits and all that kind of stuff. I don’t like to deal with hope whatsoever.
I think it’s absolutely ludicrous to go beyond that line. And so the way we see it here at Cobot Nation was a go after big players because nobody else is, and they cannot. And we did that, and we did that very quietly. We wouldn’t be on the podcast with you if we wouldn’t have already completed it already. So we wanted to make sure that we were in a little bit of a stealth mode before we started to come out there to the public. The other way that we can go about it is so obviously we can reach out code to customers, get meetings, and go from there no problem. We can hope that they find us no problem. Or we can make the entire supply chain. So we have all the hardware, we have all the software. And when you put it together, we’re actually a massive competitor for some of our customers as well. Now, the customers we have, we’re not there to compete with them. We’re here to make the robots. However, we do have a business forward program where we’re making full businesses. These full businesses are completely automated with one person operating the entire thing.
This could be a full pizza joint. And that’s just an easy example to give to an audience, which we are working on, and some other food products as well. But that is what we’re seeing. And so one of the ways that we can go about this, we can release full businesses and again, hope that some people come around to doing it, or we can also go out and acquire or start our own and do what we need to do. Most people or people in my position would be quiet about that. We want to be a little vocal about it. We think it’s important for people to understand what’s going on. The deals that we’re doing will instantly delete 20% of a workforce, it could be mor. And nobody knows these kinds of things. Nobody knows the kind of scale that we’re dealing with right now. And it is going to happen so fast. The rise was pretty big, and the drop is going to be even bigger. And so it’s one of those things where you’ll have typically it’s an aging demographic, and we’re talking about the people now who are going to be displaced.
It’s usually an aging demographic, usually ones who typically do many things with their hands. And there’s really not much else required there. So the manufacturer will not require them to actually put any thought into it. This is what you’re doing, and this only. And those are the processes that we’re taking over in a day. So it’s very easy for us to go out and replace a human in a lot of those things. And we know of some very large businesses out there, some publicly traded ones in the billions, who have very few humans in their manufacturing facilities, yet they do $2 billion in revenue a year.
And if you think about the most common thing that comes up is the replace versus displace versus replant I guess in human capital. It sounds kind of gross to say it that way, but like a human resource, a person that works for a company that is no longer doing something that the human instinct is to say you just took away that person’s job. But flip it over, go back to what we’re really doing. We’re reducing the risk on that person’s life because they’re doing a mechanical repeatable thing that’s probably going to lead to them having a repetitive stress injury.
That’s right. We get a lot of that. Yeah.
They’re exposed to other environmental concerns that when lengthens are caused degenerative physical problems.
I can say yes so. Many times when we get a lead, it’ll start out very what we call soft. So my guys are getting injuries, and I want to see what this automation does. It always ends with the exact same thing. They only care about throughput. And of course, because of throughput being increased by automation, all the other stuff is just a given. And so safety will be increased and all that kind of stuff. So here’s what we’ll say. When we’re phasing out a project for a customer that really wants to do full automation, you can’t do it right at the beginning. You’re going to phase it in. There’s going to be a way of getting it done. There’s a method to the madness. You’re not just going to put down $10 billion and get your entire 700 facilities done. But the way to go about getting some of these things done, and again, one of the slogans that we have is Cobot Nation supports the human vacation just to dig in a little bit deeper with all of these things. So when we’re doing a phased approach, it does start with where can we put some of the people in order to help the robots with their jobs?
And that could be for a specific reason. So it might be because we didn’t make a certain indexing device yet. So we put the robot arm there. It’s taking care of a crucial point, but maybe the garments you have shirts and pants right now, they’re in one bin. Maybe we move the people to removing some stuff from the bin and indexing it that way for the robot. And even in that case, you’re already getting rid of a certain amount of people. Once we get to the point of throughput, the company is no longer sitting there talking to us about the people that they’re getting rid of. We never hear about that. All we hear about is how can you increase our throughput after you’re done with this? How can you continue to optimize because they see an immense amount of benefit on their site. First off, they know exactly to the decimal what their throughput would be, which means they know what their margins are. They know where the margins are going to increase with their suppliers. They get excited to renegotiate supplier contracts. They get excited to go back to the customers. And even if they give them a 10% savings, they’re like, oh, my God, I’m already making another 200%.
So what do I care? And so it looks good for everybody. And so everything starts to increase. But there’s also another warning that comes out there as well. It’s not just what we do for an individual company. It’s what does that company do to other companies in their field once they have even one process automated? And here’s what I’d like to say to your audience. If you have a company down the street that does the same thing as you and they have a process automated right now, the first thing that they should do is go after your customers 100%, go after your customers and say, Look, I have a better deal, I’m faster, I’m better, I’m cheaper, whatever the case may be. And that would be the end of it. And so you would probably have very little time. Not only that, there’s a sales process involved here. And if you don’t call a company like Cobot Nation and you call anybody else, there’s going to be a timeline there. With us, we do have an awareness as to what’s going on. We know how fast things are moving. We only care to supply the robots and to do all the hardware and software, let everybody else run the business.
So even if we were to go out and acquire one day, it would just be to accelerate automation across an industry. That’s really all we care to do right now. And whatever that leads to is what it leads to.
Yes. The question is, do you make your own coffee? How much of your day is automated? Here’s the fun part, right. Making this business live and thrive, you must have an incredible amount of stuff that you need to free yourself to be able to do.
Sure. Yeah. No, absolutely. So internally in here in the office, we have about twelve people full time. Out of the twelve people, the majority are mechanical engineers. We do have our creative director. We have the marketing team that she handles, which includes also our front and facing UI type stuff that gets done over there for a lot of the customers on the dashboard. And not only that, within our facility here in Las Vegas. And you can imagine I’ve been to an immense amount of schools and facilities. I’ve seen the best of the best. And what they claim, I can tell you right now, we have the best of the best here. We have every high tech piece of things you can ever imagine. If we don’t have it, we can make it, and if we can’t make it, we’ll get it. We really have an opportunity here to push forward without waiting, and that’s important to me. So the last thing I like to see is things getting stalled due to a company looking to squeeze more margin, more profit for the shareholders. I absolutely couldn’t care less about that. I think that the more people that get to automation, the better off things will be in the end.
Your robots dance, though. This is awesome dynamic, right?
Yeah.
What I really do like about the broader industry and I call on that example because it got a lot of people to laugh about robots. And I think if nothing, what they’ve done and what society has learned is that if you put the right music over, it can be equally scary. Like somebody did that really video and they put like horror movie music over
Like the Family Guy episode, yeah.
But if you look at the innovation that’s occurring, this is stuff that has an incredible second and third order effect. And we really struggle sometimes with like, what are you doing right now, not seeing the vision and you’ve got to have a very long view yourself and of course your old team. Because a lot of what you’re are doing won’t actually be real for quite some time. The amount of research and design and iteration is incredible.
What I can say is this, first off, the mechanical engineers that are coming out of the university today, they don’t have to do certain things that they did even a decade ago. They can pick up a Raspberry Pi, they could pick up an Arduino. They can start to find an immense amount of ready made templates and things online that help them guide them in the direction. And for the most part, anything that we’re building robotic with Motors and other things, it really does come down to some basic things that we do in the end. So there’s really a very big similarity in the program. It doesn’t matter what robot we’re making. We can be doing a sign robot with no robot arm, a gantry system. It doesn’t matter. All of it will play a part. But our design process is very quick here. And that’s one of the reasons why when we did raise money at the beginning of last year, we did a seed round of a few million dollars. We were very successful very quickly. I think everybody understood where the vision was going here. And actually when we see long term, our long term is like 2025.
So we have all the customers right now. The only thing we’re doing right now is executing on the business that we have. And so with that, that’s why we’re going out and starting to explain about the thought leadership and explain about some of the things that are out there. We don’t see the problem that a lot of young people are getting into apps, and it’s been going on for a long time now. And NFTs no doubt we’ll see what happens over there. All that stuff will play a part. But the older generation, the one who’s in manufacturing, that’s a rough one.
But even on the NFC’s things, I explained this to somebody yesterday, and they somehow didn’t capture the humor and irony that I said. Do you remember when there was a day when somebody talk about the humor of the fact that somebody had, like, a monkey and they trained like the monkey just threw it on a canvas coin started. Yeah, somebody sold this monkey poop thing but didn’t tell you it was made by a monkey. And some art collector bought it for people like those idiot art dealers. And you just paid $1,000 for something that Gary Vee wrote on the back of a barn napkin and he took a picture of it and you bought an NFT of that picture of a napkin of a turtle. Like, remind me how the monkey poop buyer was weird.
Or the other thing that I heard where if I’m standing in front of a Museum and I take a picture and I’m in the picture, but that picture is owned by me. But there’s the Museum.
Yeah, there’s very weird stuff that we get sort of hung on. And that’s why when you get into advanced innovation and we get into human function displacement, we really, as humans, get hung on weird stuff. We are still sticky on the long term effect. i-Robot was a terrible movie, but it makes a great cover. Like, the cover art from the i-Robot movie has gotten way more play in blogs than it ever did at blockbuster because it introduced this idea of robots gone wild. And I’m a big fan of the old Ed 2000, Dead or Alive, you’re coming with me. We have all these memories of these, like the memes and the archetypes of the robots gone bad. But meanwhile, what’s it enabling is the research that you’re doing that also translates to folks that are going to do like human integrated robotics and prosthetics. And every innovation we’re doing in 3D printing coming as far as it is, it’s an amazing world we’re in right now, and it’s moving fast.
Well, in 3D printing, aside from maybe a few chemical methods that might be coming out, the only way to speed up an inherently slow technology is through automation. And that’s exactly what we’re doing with our printers here as well. So we have the HP multi jet fusion printer here in the office. It’s the only printer that we know of to compete against injection molding on quality and quantity. And of course, price as well. We use it for an immense amount of fixed string. And so that’s one thing where, again, people are going to be surprised when they see that we’re able to pump out 10,000 parts in two days with our printers, it starts to get interesting.
Wow. Yeah. And when you get into discussions of, again, sort of bold discussions about off planets terraforming, we’re not going to be sending out stuff from Ikea. We’re going to be sending the bloody robot to build the Ikea furniture on the other side. I only hope that we call it, like, Sven and Gunter, and we give them appropriate names for whatever the Mars based printer furniture looks like. But this as an innovative thing, the hardest part we get is that it’s not tangible to a lot of people. Even today, 3D printing, they don’t see, like, in home application yet.
It may not happen. It’s one of those things where it needs to hit the industries that require it the most first, and then hopefully it will transmit over to the home. I think when I started in 3D printing, we marketed out as well. This could be a home 3D. It never was. It was never a home 3D printer.
Yeah, it would be for the tech nerds that got a good equity payout from an acquisition that decided to spend it on a 3D printer. And that’s like the old somebody the Pancake bought fun things like that. It takes, like, 14 minutes to make a goddamn pancake.
But speaking of the pancake bot, because I don’t want to forget about it. So if anybody goes to our Instagram at Cobot Nation, they will see. We went to a local school here in Las Vegas, and we made a pancake bot. The only difference, though, is our robot picked up the batter in a cup, poured it in, dropped it off, got the spatula, did the whole thing, flipped it, and then I put it onto a plate, did a little wave to the person, and did it right over again. Like I said, it was a lot faster than 14 minutes.
That is awesome.
Yeah.
And I think this is where innovation is unseen until it’s broadly steam. And it’s a weird thing. You’ve been doing this for a long time. What drew you to doing stuff that no one is going to believe? It’s already real.
Yeah. So I think I was brought up with some sort of a knack for believing in what I can accomplish. And I think that as long as I see the logical steps to get to the end, no matter how long it is, then I’m going to push as far as I can as fast as I can to that point. In 3D printing, I did the first licensing deals in 3D printing with Viacom NBA Star Trek. You can take a picture with a webcam on the front inside of your face, mesh the whole thing together, put it on a Star Trek body, make some components, and send off to the 3D printer. And then all that. We did very well with those things, especially because we were publicly traded at 3D systems. And so I think that with all these things, it’s just about having a belief that they can get done. And understanding that what you have is way better than anyone else. And why on Earth anyone else has not moved on this? That’s what really gets me. And right now, Cobot Nation, we’ve been operating right now for over two years. So we’ve been doing this sight unseen for a little while.
And it allowed us to go excuse my language, but falls to the wall with absolutely every single facet of the business the way that I would have wanted it if I would have known how to do business the way I do it today when I was 26 years old and sold the 3D printer company.
What do you think is the greatest potential right now at the consumer level for this stuff? Obviously, what we talked about already, the idea that manufacturing can get margins down, maybe bring it local, which is a competitive offering now where US-produced items can now be US sold. I think that’s fantastic, but there’s got to be, some what are some other things that are truly consumer affecting that you really see the opportunity for?
Yeah. So there’s a few things here that we need to recognize. First off, in history, and I think it’s 100% of the time, I think the audience could correct me if I’m wrong, but when you see a shortage in inventory start to happen, like, what we’re seeing on the shelves and in every single industry, the consumer sees it. No doubt. We don’t see it in the advertisements because you can’t blame the business for saying, oh, we’re fully stocked. But then you get to the store and they’re like, they don’t have paint. They’re the largest paint seller. What’s going on here? So one thing that people should be aware of in history, when you have inventory go down, what follows it is actually a demand that goes down. And so when inventory goes down and then demand goes down, well, it’s actually not a bad thing for us to be automating in order to level that playing field, in order to make sure that things are still flowing. So with automation, number one is the throughput. The throughput affects everything and mostly affects the price. So the price will go down substantially because payroll is the biggest substantial thing in a company for the large degree, as part of the operations cost to a massive degree.
And so when you start to eliminate large percentages of that, you start to see some radical changes in companies. And so we have no doubt that we will see massive disruption in different industries, and it’s probably going to be spawned by automation. So that’s one thing that we know will affect the consumer, whether it’s positive or negative. That is something that’s happening now. That’s something that’s going to affect them, and they should be aware of it. But, yeah, I think other things that they would end up seeing will be the quality of the products that they get. You’re going to see an immense amount of consistency. You’re never going to have to worry anymore that when you open something, something’s not there. Let’s say you go to McDonald’s and you go through the drive through and you get those two, you get home, one kid has a toy, the other kid doesn’t. That’s a problem. So you’ll never have that problem. And that just creates a lot of smoothness going out there. And it makes for a lot of humans to have to find something else to do to get an occupation out there. It’s going to change politics.
It’s going to change everything. And like you said, I think originally you will see an even playing field. So it does open up for the US to do manufacturing here in the US. But ultimately, once things start to condense, maybe 10-20 years down the line, big time. But once for industries are automated, at that point, I think you’re actually going to see a lot of manufacturing probably gravitate towards the raw material parts of the world that affect them the most. Because now we’re talking really into the future, but not that far off. That’s where we expect things to be, because right now with logistical stuff, people are seeing right now what happens at the raw material level when even they can’t get parts for their machines or people to run that stuff. At that point, it affects everybody else, including me and you.
I think the other problem we bump into is the bigness of the problem, then it feels unattainable as a solution to a lot of people. So there’s an unwillingness to put effort towards it. Right. That’s why climate change and all these things are you got one side of there’s a lot of bold opinions, but very few bold solutions. And even of those bold solutions, very few people are enacting those bold solutions. It’s a big risk, because if we don’t do this and now on the other side where they’re saying, like, I worry, I watched this movie called The Truth About Killer Robots, and they hear all these things. They read the dark side. They’re like, we should resist automation. And they’re like, no, you understand, but the alternative, it’s already occurring. Right. So it’s going to happen elsewhere in the world. So especially if you look at the North American market, if we want to stay relevant.
Well, that’s exactly. You actually just touched on the biggest point that I wanted to blur it out. It’s going to happen elsewhere in the world. And a lot of people. So just look at today’s news with Russia and Ukraine, right? Yeah. I don’t know what’s happening. It could be withdrawing, maybe they’re not withdrawing. Who knows? And so all of these things play a massive part. What happens when another country has automated before the other country? You’re going to see major issues in tariffs, which we already see with China. And by the way, I can tell you right now, China has more robotic arms installed than any other place on the planet.
Right.
Hands down, no doubt, 100%. And so these are things that people really need to understand because this is going to be the next wave of security and other things that come up. It’s where are the products being made? How are they being made? How do we know that being made a certain way? And people are going to want to know that you don’t have a human presence in certain products.
The direct example I have is this one here. It’s an Epiphone Les Paul. So it’s basically the lighter cost version of a Gibson manufactured. I don’t know exactly where it’s manufactured, but it’s perfect because it’s generally machine made. If for the most part, there are certain handcrafted pieces of it, but it’s for the most part, it’s all machine made. Now, if I take the Gibson version of it, significantly more money, I could probably fit change for a dollar between the neck and the body on every other one. Like, they’re physically different. They’re handcrafted. There is the artisanal nature of it is why we kind of like it. But it can’t be made at any scale. And so if Gibson wants to stay in business, they got to make some machine guitars.
And what you got to do, no matter what, you could still make those great artists, all the other stuff, but you still need to do what you need to do.
Yeah. I often talk, so it’s a beautiful advantage to it. And so there will be that sort of that handcraft buyer, there will be that person that wants that human touch on something. But for the most part, most of what we’re doing, like I said, this is not about me wanting to hold onto this hope that humans build everything. Like some 48 year old guy that still wear in his high school football jacket. Like, he’s active. It’s already occurring elsewhere. And we have a rare opportunity to use beautiful, localized innovation and to do other things. Like I said, I’m always thinking about what is the second and third order effect of this stuff, and that’s what Metaverse. Yeah.
So automating and making manufacturing in the mid averse and products get made there, which then turn up in the real world. That’s something that it’s being explored. I’ll put it that way. And it’s a really interesting concept, whether it’s done somewhere like that or not. It’s very interesting to see how metabolic or Omniverse or whoever ends up getting the share of that pie at some point.
Right.
Yeah. Who owns all the stuff I look at?
Yes. That’s going to be tough part is like, are you going to the medaverse today or are you going to the Omniverse then going to go to the Omniverse in the morning, then go to the Metaverse in the afternoon.
It’s actually much more effective on robotics. It’s much more effective for a company like Cobot Nation. We prefer to look at that than metaerse, because Metaverse is a little more consumer oriented to me. Doesn’t mean other one isn’t. It just means that the other one has a little more ability.
Totally. Yeah. And isn’t funny if you think you went back like even five years and you said stuff, people are like, hell, you guys talked about it’s like broadly used. I’ve actually referred to the Metaverse and the Omnivorous three times in the past week on podcast, because we’re there. This stuff is occurring. It’s just that it hasn’t hit sort of mass market consumption yet. But it’s like people will say, well, the Metaverse isn’t actually there yet. Well, it’s always there. People are terraforming it right now. Effectively, they’re letting industry in first, which is interesting. Like the consumers are going to be the last ones that arrive. They are building the mall and then selling the spaces to the stores, and then they’re going to open the doors and cut the ribbon. That’s right. You’re not letting the people walk around the open lot and saying, what do you think we should build here? They’re like, It’s going to be built for you, Dragon.
No, but speaking on that five year thing, imagine if you said to somebody five years ago, hey, by the way, Facebook, they’re going to change your name. Here’s what’s going to happen. And that is what it’s going to be. And Metaverse, I’m not sure that I think it would have had the same weight.
Yeah. On the consumer level, if you don’t mind, I’d like to tap into what are the real positive consumer level product innovations that are happening in the 3D printer space that probably make it really accessible and valuable for people to literally get a small consumer level hardware in their home.
I’ll give you a very good example. So Invisalign. Invisalign those retainers that are on the mouth, and I just had an implant done. So I have one, which is why I’m giving the example. It’s what came in my mind, obviously, but basically with Invisalign, they may not use this process 100% anymore, but there’s definitely a combination of this process. But for example, with the HP printer, because you’re looking more of a chemical process, so heat doesn’t affect it as much. Well, now I can print, I can vacuum form, and now I have an unbelievable array of end products that I can make, which are mass customized, which are unique to the individual person on each one. That’s pretty powerful. That’s pretty heavy stuff. So, yeah, you’re going to see an immense amount of that stuff. And actually, that’s what they’re doing already in local dental offices. You’re seeing less of some of that design stuff and more of, oh, they have an SOS machine or they have something in there, a resin machine that they’re printing and doing a little bit of vacuum forming and stuff like that. With HP, we can vacuum form over and over again.
Nothing will happen. So there’s a little bit of a difference there. But those are things that I think the consumer is going to start to see is 3D printing in itself is inherently slow. 3d printing or metal 3D printing. If it’s not powder, it’s garbage. It’s not going to do anything. And the materials are probably not even approved for consumers anyways. Like, it’s not going on a Boeing aircraft that the consumer is going to go on. It might go on like a test something. Powder, on the other hand, that’s different. And with powder 3D printing, you can still do a number of things. And so that allows you to increase speed, that allows you to do multiple things because you can fill up a whole bed in 3D and not just the first layer over there. And so I think with that, we’re seeing more people gravitate to having a comfortable ability to make materials in those things. And that also came about because we’ve exhausted the materials that we make on Filaments. I mean, come on, there’s really not much left that we can melt and let me make a hotter extruder and then melt something else.
There’s not much more we could do there. So it makes sense that the methods that we do are going to be where we see some of the differences, but it’ll be differences that are going to be beneficial to the consumer. They are going to be more geared customized to the consumer. And that also is what automation does for them as well. Automation doesn’t just mean repeat of the same product. It could be repeat of the same process in manufacturing, but it would absolutely allow you to make different products if you had the right method over there, especially if you’re doing vacuum forming, something like that. So, yeah, those are things that we think are going to come out. And by the way, it’s not just dental stuff you can do with vacuum forming. My wife and I, not too long ago, we made a small company where we’ve been doing chocolates and the chocolates.
I saw this. Yeah.
Pouring the chocolate and poof MGM buys a bunch from you.
So that literally is what happened.
And then, of course, we realized that you can’t really ship chocolate across the country from Las Vegas in the summer is a pretty tough task.
Yeah. All that beautiful printing you do, suddenly these people get a chocolate blob at the other side.
Yeah. But the reason we did that business is because that was the transition to automation. So we did Sweeter words or chocolate stuff because that involved 3D printing and involved vacuum forming. And the only way that we would be allowed to put that in any sort of a commercial kitchen facility is if we automate the whole thing because they did not want people around that stuff. Right. And so that is where a lot of stuff came as well.
And I think that brings up a very important piece, which is a split in challenge and in benefit. Regulatory boundaries that we are facing because unfortunately, regulatory boundaries are generally not made to create innovation. If anything, they say dominantly will stifle innovation. But there’s a good example where because of a regulatory boundary, you are able to immediately get the solution right. You can immediately create a business. You can immediately create a product because you eliminated stuff that would have been risky because of commercial kitchen regulations.
But on the other side of getting around. Right.
Yeah. But on the other side of it, where you do want to be able to, say, create children’s strollers or something, that’s a safety equipment. It could take a decade to get approval for something that won’t even need to exist by the time it’s approved. And so it really stifles a lot of people attempting it because they’re just like, I don’t want to fight this fight.
I don’t know. Imagine if Uber had to wait for approval before they start. I don’t know if they would be around right now.
No. And you know the tough part about Uber, if Uber was run by a really friendly person that did the same thing, it wouldn’t have been a problem. It was a douchebag. That was the problem.
Yeah. A little more than that. Yeah. And by the way, if he ever hears this, I hear that he claims to be one of the top Wii Tennis players out there.
I have heard that.
Let me throw something out there that I’ve never thrown out there before. You’re going to love this. I created way back in the day, the Virtual Tennis Tour. And with the Virtual Tennis Tour, I was the first and only person to claim the number one Wii tennis title. So this guy claims that he’s the best. He clearly has not played in a Virtual Tennis Tour tournament.
There you go. The gauntlet has been thrown down.
My stuff is documented. You can see it. It’s on YouTube. It’s real.
And it’s funny. Again, I talked about Elon. We mentioned sometimes polarizing figures. And in a way, I think we even do need polarizing figures in order to get there. As a founder of something, my only goal in life is not to one day be referred to as embattled. That just seems like a thing you never want to attach to you. But there will be people that will have to sort of throw authority into the sun and just say, God damn you. And they’re going to be even athletes. Like I would tell people all the time, don’t meet your heroes because you’re going to be disappointed. Right. You’re just going to get kicked in the stomach emotionally by somebody because the reason why they’re fantastic athletes, they have no time for humans wasting their space out in order to get that way.
Right. They kind of don’t want to really spill the secret out to anybody else.
Certainly I’m not forgiving the negative behavior that occurs, but there’s a personality trait that’s paired with excelling at something in those cases. So what can we as a society do on the regulatory front to make sure that we are preparing that for what needs to happen to advance this innovation?
Yeah. So there’s a few things. So first off, when you think of collaborative robots and anybody out there who sells collaborative robots, I think of it in the same way as a consumer 3D printer, which could have been called a personal manufacturing device, for all we know, or Hawk glue gun transport machine. So it’s whatever the case may be. So when I look at collaborative robots, the way that we look at it is the same way that we see materials and 3D printing, there literally is no regulation whatsoever. So when somebody says this is safe to be with humans, I say, wow, that’s a statement. I mean, if I run into a robot that stopped, that could be detrimental, that could be a problem. And so we put an immense amount of safety for our customers. And not only that, that helps with support as well, because less people around certain things, more processes to go through, which makes you a little more aware as to what’s going on. And again, with the others, there’s no process. There is no regulation. There’s not even a recommendation to the customer like, oh, hey, put some perimeter sensors or get some curtains from here and they attach directly to our robot control box.
You don’t have anything like that. And so we take pride in doing those things. And those are things that we think are extremely important. Same way, for example, in 3D printing, it hasn’t happened yet, but it needs to happen where I can make any filament I want right now. I could package it up, I could put it on Amazon, somebody could buy it. I can have graphene in there. I can also have something that could be illegal within that material as well. And there is no regulatory body whatsoever that goes through those processes because these companies don’t need to be ISO certified. They don’t need to have any of that kind of stuff. They could be somebody with a syllabus at home and just making some filaments and throwing it out there. And what gets scary is if you see people do that for powders and if you see people do it for resins and other things, that starts to become a problem because you do want a consistency in the future products that come out there. So regulation is good in some areas and it’s not good in others, where, for example, maybe Uber is a great idea, where there shouldn’t be regulation there at the beginning, but maybe it was there just due to the taxi crawling or whatever the case may be, but certainly wasn’t safety.
It just depends on what the scenario is.
Exactly. That thing, right. Where there’s going to be a point where stuff goes in and there are requirements for regulatory protection for certain things. Right. But it also becomes a joke on the other side, like California, I forget which proposition it was. Whatever it is, the one that tells you that basically everything in California is going to give you cancer. So you walk into Starbucks and it has a placard on the wall. You get a chocolate bar, it has it like my playing card in the oven, every single building as a placard saying that some or part or many or just the meat building. Something around here may or may not be contain cancer causing ingredients. And you’re like, is it the coffee? Is it the wood on the wall? I don’t understand what it is. So we basically become blind to the actual risk because we’ve regulated the notification, not the actual risk reduction. It’s just bizarre. So then I look at manufacturing. Like I said, you could just take the stuff home, print it, fire it on Etsy, and you’re cancer to a bunch of people. I don’t know what the end result is.
I’m not saying we don’t do it, but there’s a mix of the right amount of protection and safety that we have to make sure is present there. Luckily, you’re going to be laser focused on that, especially at the level that you’re working.
That’s where the view is very iterative. We have overhead conveyors right in front of me in one of our Collaboratories here. And so, yeah, we care about safety probably more than anybody else. And not only that, keep in mind our customers, they need to be up 24/7. And if something goes down and again, safety is included in throughput. And if something goes down, that’s a massive issue. We could be affecting their projections and everything else. So we want to make sure that we’re right on target with everything that we’re doing in safety is the most important thing to us. That’s not just a claim that we’re trying to make, it’s because it actually does make a difference.
It’s also a false pretense that gets attached to things like automation, where CNN will have a thing saying that a Tesla was in self driving mode and it crashed because the guy that was in the front seat was on his laptop and playing poker and dribbling a plate on his nose like whatever it’s going to be. But the headline is Tesla self driving car crashes in autonomous mode. And I’m like, you know, there were 14,000 other car crashes, 2000 of them were fatal today in California alone. Right. That wasn’t in the news, but they are really fast to race to the headlines with the fact that a Tesla crashed.
That’s right. No, it’s pretty incredible stuff. And we fully expected over here. I think I have thick enough skin to deal with it.
But, yeah, I think that beyond the clickbait of that type of thing occurring. The good news is that the people are still willing, you included, right, to continue to innovate, to continue to drive. Safety is top of mind. When we look at the statistics, we understand they’re on the right side of things. It’s just there’s this transition period where it’s like, this is crazy. This is risky about the car.
Right. When the horse and bug, I’m going to stick to my horse.
Exactly. And even Tesla V, the world, right. This whole thing, everybody’s like, now we got to be careful. We got to figure out how to regulate them out of business. And then all of a sudden we’re hearing all about Ford and Hyundai and all these companies that are making groundbreaking moves with electric vehicles. But over there, we’ve been doing this for 20 years ago.
Suddenly you had to wait for somebody to do it, to say, okay. And it’s a mixture between a lot of these companies do have the ability to do the innovation, by the way, you don’t need a guy like Elon to come out with a Tesla in order to do it. The problem is, though, is that, again, you have other things that play in there. It could be inventory, for all we know. Maybe they have a certain amount of inventory out there, and it affects a certain number in the stock for what, I don’t know. So there could be a whole bunch of other reasons why they wouldn’t want to get something out there yet. And also, when you have certain competitors, sometimes they try to keep things stable, so they actually work quite well together sometimes.
If you look at your example earlier and we talked about not just the supply chain, but ultimately the deployments, the support, everything that you’ve got, the fact that you own the process from start to finish gives you an inherent advantage in that process versus another company that has been in the game in semi autonomous stuff or in semi robotics, where they’ve dabbled, but they’ve got non autonomous stuff and non robotic stuff, but they still this massive commitment to support for. So it’s hard for them to adjust. It’s hard for them to pivot. It will take longer. But somebody comes along and say, like, I got no history here, but I got this great idea and we’re going to do it. And that it inspires innovation in those big companies, and it kind of reinvigorates the innovative process that got them started, right. Ford was once Tesla. Tesla will be that old fuddy Duddy company that just didn’t pivot. In 2041, they’ll be like, oh, man, that was the year that like you said, you have to respect both sides of that innovative coin and how it comes together. It’s hard to have that view sometimes.
But hey, I may be a little bit closer to it because I’m like diving into these stories all the time and diving into the tech and the personalities. So it’s exciting. But the truth is, it’s going to continue to happen mostly quietly. And then when it makes the big splash, it’s kind of already been there for a while.
Well there’s a reason why it’s quite. For example, we have a case study coming out with one of our customers probably in about a month, and that was pretty difficult to get. And there’s a reason for it. So many of the larger companies, some of them are unionized as well. And so they need to be unbelievably quiet about what they’re doing with us until they find it to be absolutely perfect for installation. And then once we do that, they want to know, how fast can you do everything at once? Because we don’t want anything, if you only do a third this year, what’s going to happen with the other two thirds? So that’s what we’re experiencing right now. And I think it’s going to continue without a doubt. And that’s the main reason they’re being quiet. They’re being quiet for a reason. But once it starts to get out there, you’re absolutely right. It probably would have been there for a few years already.
Yeah. And the turnover. Same with autonomous vehicles. Ultimately, the risk to autonomous vehicles on the road is the non autonomous vehicles. There will be a point where it becomes normal, just like cars with roll up windows. Like I grew up as a kid and used to have to roll up windows need to pay money for automatic windows. I don’t think there’s a manual window company. Like, no one makes cars with manual windows anymore.
Somebody said, yeah.
There will be a point where it’s just default. And I think that’s what we’ll see is that especially like you said in manufacturing, anybody that’s read Eli Gold Rat, right. Like the foundations of the theory of constraints is that there’s going to be a pain for a period of time where they adopt these processes and find the constraints. And so you spend all this money on this 1st third of your manufacturing line, but if it then sits idle 60% of the time, that’s no good. Your shareholders won’t allow that.
And you shouldn’t have done automation. Right, right.
Once you start, you’ve got to start rolling downhill.
The good thing is that once you start, you actually start to see it opens up the door a lot for the companies to start first. So if I’m in one industry, I don’t know, I get fish at sea. And part of the process, when I bring it in, there’s a lot of manual processes, whatever the case may be, maybe unloading a bin. And so now we have robots doing these things. But no, we’re seeing a lot of these processes that are just going to be turning out to be permanent. Yeah.
I, for one, welcome our robot overlords. I look forward to it. Yeah.
Inside a Cobot Nation. I call myself the Cobot King.
I could spend all day digging into a lot of stuff, and I really appreciate you taking the time. The architects of automation, Cobot Nation’s doing some fantastic stuff. I really look forward to more noise being made about what you’re doing because we can come out of the quiet mode with a lot of things. So I appreciate that. I got to be one of the early ones to share some of your story. And I look forward to more success at the same time. So if people do want to reach out, of course, we’ll have Linked to all the places where they can find Cobot Nation. If they wanted to get in touch with you, Gill, what’s the best way they can reach through your robot and get to you?
Best way would be through LinkedIn. So you can find me at Gil Mayron or through my company directly. Just you can go to the contact form, and somebody will get something over to me if it’s addressed to me. No problem.
Perfect. Excellent. Well, thank you very much and many successes ahead for Cobot Nation, for sure. Yeah. Now, question, do you do any facility walk through, or is there any like that?
With every single customer, we always do a facility walk through. We had a few times during the major Covid period where we took videos, and they did turn into deals. But then ultimately, we still have to do a walk through because we really need to understand how we’re going to make the floor plan again. We’re not just selling the robot. We really want to make it work for the customer.
I’ve been lucky. I have a good friend, Missy Young. She’s the CIO of company called Switch down there. Yeah. So I’ve gotten walk through their stuff, but there’s a lot of gentlemen walking around with AK 47, and you’re not allowed to take a camera. But I’m thinking one day when I get down into Las Vegas, once the world opens up a little bit more over here, I would love to come down. And even what little I’m probably legally allowed to put in video. I would love to just do a quick.
No, you can video everything. We close off the Collaboratory rooms. Actually, we print the glass. So again, when somebody walks into the office, it’s like Willy Wonka’s Beautiful lounge, Las Vegas club type feel. And then industrial robots and squeaking and individual rooms.
All right. Well, I’m waiting for the world to open. I’m going to come down. I definitely do want to get folks and be able to see it from the inside. Would be great to see the collaboratory, or at least get next to the collaboratory and see where it all happens. So, Gil, thank you very much.
Sure Eric, thank you very much. Really appreciate it.
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Aja is the co-founder and CEO of Trella Technologies, an organization that provides technical, innovative solutions to make indoor and urban farming a sustainable, long-lasting industry.
We cover a lot of exciting topics including:
– Value and advantage of indoor growing
– The journey from risk management to founder
– Economic and sustainability impact of horizontal farming
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Check out Trella Technologies at https://trella.io
Hello, friends, and welcome back to the show. This is Eric Wright. The host of your DiscoPosse podcast. Super excited because we’ve got a great episode ahead for you with Aja Atwood. She is the co-founder of Trella Technologies, something that’s really making an impact on the ability to do horizontal plant management for indoor growing. Why is this awesome? You’re going to find out. So listen to the whole show. Oh, and if you wanted to watch as well as listen, you can head on over to YouTube.com/discopossepodcast. We are now broadcasting both audio and video for every episode. So go check it out. Make sure you hit subscribe and like and all those good YouTube-y things you’re supposed to do. And if I could. I could ask you one more thing. This podcast is made possible by number one, all of you the amazing folks that listen and watch and bring these amazing stories to the world, but also to the sponsors that helped me to keep the show on the air and help to make sure that we’ve got a real good ability to drive these fantastic conversations and get them amplified. And I got to start. Of course, with my good and long-time friends over at Veeam Software. I’ve been a fan of Veem for years. They’ve been great support to both the podcast as well as my own personal blog. It’s been something that I respect what they do, love the technology, love the team, love the mission they’re on. And if you got stuff that’s digital, it needs to be protected. Whether it’s cloud, whether it’s on premises, whether it’s physical servers, whether it’s cloud native, even SAaS stuff like Microsoft Teams and Office 365. It’s all vulnerable and at risk. De-risk your world. Go over to Vee.Am/discoposse. Check it out and you can see how you can make your world all kinds of Veeam-tastic. Please do go check it out again. It’s Vee.Am/discoposse. Another great supporter of the show is speaking of protection, how we’re protecting your data in flight by giving yourself a VPN. This is really important because I travel a bunch, and it’s especially important because then I’m at risk with all these sketchy WiFi all over the place. So I use ExpressVPN, and I highly recommend you should do the same. And if you want to, it’s easy to do! Go to tryexpressvpn.com/discoposse. Let them know old Disco sent you their way. Oh, right. And if you want to get your coffee, go to Diabolicalcoffee.com. That’s not really a sponsor. I own the company. But it’s really flipping great coffee. So go check it out. All right. This is Aja Atwood from Trella on the DiscoPosse podcast.
I’m Aja Atwood, CEO and co-founder of Trella. And you are listening to the DiscoPosse podcast.
All right. Now I know we’re in business. That’s like my go-signal, right. Once I hear that phrase, I’d say the microphones are on, the on-air light gets turned on, and life is good. So Aja, thank you very much. I’m so glad we got a chance to chat. Because your personal story, your business story, and everything you’re working on is just enthralling from every angle. So being able to spend time and exploring some of that with you is something I’ve been really looking forward to. For folks that are new to you and new to Trella, if you don’t mind, Aja, let’s give a quick sort of bio on you and the company. And then we’re going to dive into what I’m excited about and what the world should be excited about with what you’re doing.
Excellent. Thank you. Well, thank you for having me, Eric, getting a chance to share the story with your listeners. I’m Aja Atwood living in New England in the Massachusetts area right now. Kind of been on the East Coast most of my life, done a lot of world traveling back into the corporate space right out of college with Northeastern. And after College, started working in something called risk engineering, property risk engineering. And basically what that is is engineers that go around and assess how bad will it be if there’s a fire or some sort of natural catastrophe, explosion, et cetera. And then what can you do to try to mitigate that with technology, different construction protocols, building codes, et cetera. So I did that for a very long time, for about 15 years. But while I was doing that, I was always dabbling on the side with a little project here and there. Maybe when I was 29 or 30 years old, I got that. I think I need to be on my own and create something on my own and be an entrepreneur but wasn’t really ready to make that full-fledged leap right away. So I got into day trading and came up actually with solution to automate identifying Fibonacci levels.
And that was something small, not very big, but had some cash flow coming in, and it was a great learning experience. And then after that, I moved. I took a really good break and started just working on my leadership skills, management skills, got a coach just to really figure out what do I really want to do? And if I want to do something big, I’m going to need to figure out how to lead people, how to manage people. So I started working on some of that stuff to get myself prepared. And then also on the side, I always played sports and what they would call a weekend warrior. You graduate from college and you still want to play all the sports that you used to play in high school and College, and you’re playing them on the weekend. So I got into playing flag football, and then that morphed into playing on a woman’s professional football team where we were at full pads, full helmet, and you’re doing that just because you love it. There’s not like a great physical therapy or a trainer afterwards to mend you up after you hurt yourself. So a lot of what we were doing was self-medicating ourselves and some of us are doing it with cannabis.
And this is before, you know, I’m giving myself away. But this was before it was legal, which, you know, a lot of us did. But as the industry, especially in Massachusetts, started to develop, legalization was on the rise more. And I lived in a state where we were luckily able to get our medical card and home grow. So I had the ability to really dig into it and learn more about the plant, get a lot of education and learn how to grow myself. So I got into growing on my own, got into growing other types of other food, then got into a start up that was focused on the AGtech space. That was my first entry into what I would say AGtech, where we were developing a system that would grow one plant inside of a container, inside of a home. You may have seen competitors like that out there. There are solutions out there for that already, but we were working on something similar. And decided that I wanted to do my own thing, something a little bit more unique and just different, and took a break from that startup to give my brain a chance to soak everything in and figure out what I wanted to do.
And voila, we got into Trella Technologies. So I’m now CEO and co-founder of Trella. My co-founder and I are both engineers. We met at Northeastern University and I came to him when I said, hey, I’m having a problem with my own grow in my basement. I travel a lot for work. I was still working my corporate gig at the time, so I was out of pocket and away from home. Sometimes for a full week, maybe every other week it was getting that intense. So trying to grow plants, even if you grow them outside, grow them inside, they require maintenance, they require some sort of upkeep. And especially when you’re inside, you have to manage your lights, manage your nutrients, and a lot of that stuff can be automated. I know you may have had other guests on that talk about indoor farming technology. There’s lots of stuff out there. Thing I couldn’t figure out was how do I control, how tall the plants grow? They’re growing out of control. I’m away. They’re growing into the lights. Getting too close to the lights is too hot, so they start to burn. How can I create a situation where I’m controlling all of the solar when I’m not there?
So I got together with my co-founder, Dre, and we started working on a solution and that’s what we have here today is TrellaGro LST. It’s the only automated plant training system. We say it’s the automated horizontal plant training system because what it essentially does is it grows a plant from sideways – from one side to another, keeping it at a predetermined height so that you can keep them in really tight, short spaces, specifically stacked farming situations and container farms or just in your grow closet. So it’s all about trying to grow whatever you want to grow wherever you want to grow it. Because we need that option, especially as the climate is changing. So that’s a little bit of my history, a little bit about me. I’ll stop talking.
No, it’s fantastic. And it’s such a perfect sort of top quick view of your progression. And the concept of vertical farming is something that people often hear about is the idea that we could move into instead of field farming, traditional field farming. And then ultimately the impact there is that you have to have certain years of fallow. There’s a lot there’s things you have to do, the environmental impact of doing that ends with crop types. There’s a whole host of reasons why there’s challenges there. And so folks think, what can we do indoors? And that’s fine as long as your plants don’t grow up and down, which unfortunately, most plants do. So the fact that you went at it, first of all, you had a personal problem that you could solve this challenge. Right. And then from there, there’s really kind of industrial level of capability that’s empowered now because of that and the fact that you use technology to solve this patented at that. Right. So there’s so much of this story that’s incredible to a lot of people because you’ve done so much. Right that I don’t even know if you knew you were doing it right all the way through. Like.
What? Thank you very much, Eric.
It’s amazing because in hindsight, we look back on people generally to understand the patenting and intellectual property protection, especially mechanical design stuff, is super important. Having the foresight, though, the one thing I want to pick, I want to dig deep into Trella, the gashville technology. But you said something was very important to me. You think about getting into a startup and the first thing you did was you chose to find a coach so that you could be a good leader. I wish everybody would do this. You really had the foresight that you knew that what you needed to do to be successful, to build a team was to make sure you were ready for that. And that is such a beautiful part of the story that you really saw that need early. And I can bet as anybody that works with you would attest that you did the right thing in making sure that that was front and center before you went to just throw a company in front of it.
Yeah. Looking back on it, it was kind of an organic progression to make that decision to do it. I was just trying to really figure out what do I want to do in life and working with someone already. So I was already in that kind of mindset of you need help to get resources to help you with things. My coach at the time would say to me all the time, you really could be a leader. And she would hear me from time to time say something spot out of belief, like, oh, it’s too difficult to manage people. I don’t really don’t want to have to deal with people’s problems because that’s kind of how I saw the position. I saw my manager, that was really how he came across. He was just solving problems all day, which is what you do. But I think when you understand that you’re not solving problems, you’re actually assisting your team so that they’re enabling them so that they can do what they really need to do, it’s a different perspective. But I had to learn that through coaching, through reading books and taking courses, being honest with myself about my weaknesses, still working on it not perfect. But one of the things that I think really sealed it for me that I needed to do it this way was my own experiences of working with leaders who unfortunately had a negative impact on my work life and some of the work-life of my peers when I was working. People I was working with and working beside. And I said that someone said something, I can’t remember where I heard this but your boss, quote-unquote, or manager has the biggest impact. You have the biggest impact on someone’s day because they spend a lot of time with you. You can say something or do something that really throws their whole and they take that home to their family and it affects the community. So it’s a very important role when you’re leading a team and you’re in charge of morale and just the culture and the mission, and there’s a lot of emotional IQ, I think, required for it. So I needed to step up my game, and I’m still working on it. But, yeah, I just thought if I’m going to do it and I don’t want to be what I’ve already seen, I’m going to have to figure out my way of doing it so that I’m happy with the community and the culture that I’ve created.
Yeah. It’s such a beautiful sort of empathetic understanding that you had early that more founders really could tap into is that even before they know they’re ready for it, sometimes just being able to start to recognize and look at like, yeah, like you said, everything’s a work in progress. There’s probably plenty of relationship counselors who are divorced. There are plenty of psychologists and psychotherapists who are seeing therapists because they have their own. No one is perfect in any way. It’s always about revisiting and rechecking and the fact that I had a huge respect, just even in the fact that you can open up about that piece of your life and the importance to you and not just to you, but to the community that’s wrapped around you. And I think that’s really cool. You could give coaching classes to many people I know on that capability. When you look at the initial problem, right, so obviously farming is a challenge, especially when you get into small space utilization. When you first thought you had a very distinct small space, you had to solve a problem for, did you recognize early that this was a scalable solution?
Yes, we did recognize it early because luckily an angel investor whose name I cannot recall, unfortunately. But if I see him again, I will definitely thank him. Profusely said to me, before you get all willynilly with this inventory, that’s the word he used. You need to make sure that there’s a market for it. So I spent maybe about six weeks just researching, research and researching indoor farming, modern farming. And that’s when I found, oh, this would be perfect to be placed in racks for vertical farming situations. I’m seeing a lot of microgreens, a lot of lettuce, short, tight things. I’m not seeing a lot of diversity in the racks. And we need a variety of plants. They all have different benefits, different things they provide to us from a health perspective, from a healing perspective, fruit is important. So we need to get those types of things inside as well and be able to stack them and make the most out of the vertical height that a building might have. So Luckily, thankfully, that angel investor said something and we went and did some research and found, wow no, this is huge. This isn’t just a cool toy for a cannabis home grower, it’s that too.
I’m not saying that it’s not just fun to have because it is like we enjoy having it. But it also has a greater purpose of trying to figure out how can we get taller plants indoors and stack them without driving ourselves and saying we’re trying to manage all of those plants on all those levels, these different configurations.
Yeah, I guess maybe it’s funny even just the way you describe this is so fantastic to listen to because it probably comes from your risk background. You’re way ahead of thought evaluation before execution. Which means that your execution inevitably is weighted strongly in the positive because you’ve kind of weighed a lot of risk in a lot of your decision-making leading up to it. Again, it’s kind of upside, not upside down. It’s non-traditional to how a lot of people are. Like, I’ve got an idea, I’m going to get some money and then I’m going to see if it works. You put far more effective risk planning towards it so that when you hit the true start line, I would believe that it should lead to like, now all the positive growth can come because you’ve weighed so much the negative and you’re prepared I think for the risk more so than a lot of people would be.
It’s a positive, but it’s also having that risk engineering brain, it’s a curse and a blessing. Because I’m constantly evaluating what are the risks, what are the pros, what could go wrong? How can I mitigate it? And sometimes some people would say from outside looking in may have delayed our growth and how fast we can move, but we’re still making progress and we’re still progressing. So I’m happy with that. And I’m not going to put speed on the list. I’d rather stay where my comfort zone is and be thoughtful and plan ahead and do things the right way. So, yeah, a lot of thinking about the patent. My co-founder, Andre Chamaro, we call him Dre. He’s a brilliant individual. We work really well together. He’s able to find solutions, and we brainstorm really well together. He’s been incredible. But he also brought to the table that patent experience. He’s very heavy in patents, has a lot of I think he’s over 30 patents, either pending or already issued. So he has that mentality, too. So we’re very both of us are kind of like introvert, over analyzed, maybe sometimes to an extent. So now what we’ve done is we’ve decided, especially in the last, I would say mid 2020 moving forward, it’s time to supplement those are skill set with the other side of people that can do and that can see our vision and do the communication and help push us so that we get to the point where we want to be, which is eventually acquired or to a global distributor.
Yes. And this is the understanding and the acknowledgement that risk awareness is being beautiful in that it prepares you well for stuff. But it’s very easy to get sort of, like, locked in and never proceed with stuff because it’s like the over awareness of their risk profile. It’s tough to escape sometimes. And it’s easier to talk yourself out of things because you see the inherent risks. And there’s this really interesting thing that a lot of founders often are, like, completely blind to risk. They’re like, risk is not my problem. My problem is getting this idea to the market. Someone else will take on the risk portion. You’re like, I think you need to have some understanding of it. But I worked at a financial services company, and we would go, we’re just going to do, like, a scavenger Hunt for, like, a team building thing. And we get there. And one of the people that was with us for the scavenger Hunt was our chief counsel. And so she’s there like, redlining the waiver. Like, no, we can’t do this. I need you to sign that you’re agreeing that you’re waving your waiver for us. And I’m like, it’s okay.
We’re going to look for cupcakes in downtown Vancouver. This is not exactly we’re not going driving.
Yeah. That’ll mess up the vibe of it a little bit. But, yeah, some people will say because we’re at risk averse, we just, I think, try to identify and understand it and figure out how can we just like I did in my old professional lifestyle, let’s see what we can do to avoid that as best as possible, but still try to move forward.
Yeah. That concept, as the saying goes. Right. That plans are useless, but planning is essential. Right. It’s the fact that you’re preparing so that you won’t be caught off guard. Right. You’re willing to do something. Playing football, if we looked at some of the data now and some of the historical stuff on entry risk, you’d think that they would just pull the game off of the map altogether. But we don’t. We understand there are risks attached to it, but the benefits that we achieve are significant. Right. Everything from physical to commercial, there’s a lot of benefit to it all. So everything comes with risk, and it’s a matter of understanding and mitigating that risk and then succeeding into it, really, and making it worthwhile to take those risks. I think that’s the biggest piece.
Yeah.
Let’s talk about the physical. What’s in the life of a plant as it gets into the Trella LST and like, what does this process look like? Sorry, I’m Canadian, so I say process instead of process. What is that early life of a plant as it grows into the system?
Basically, you can put any type of we call fruit-bearing plants. So that could be Cannabis hemp, but it could also be melons, tomatoes, et cetera. So you’re going to want to put in a fruit-bearing plant. So in the case of a cannabis plant, it would be what’s called a feminized plant. So something that’s definitely going to give you the flower, not give you seeds. And the male plant gives out the seeds. So you would put whatever you choose in Trella. When the plant is roughly between six inches and twelve inches tall and you can see behind me a little bit of the device, there’s a screen ring that’s sitting up here on top. There’s an opening. You can see my hand going through there.
Yeah.
So the plant will grow up towards and through the screen ring to the lights that are currently off so that you can actually see it because they’re blinding when I turn them on. The top of the plant will come through here. And there are a group of sensors that are sensing what’s going on. Is the plant getting too tall and if so, I need to move down the road, down this pathway. So in this case, we’re going past me, past my side shoulder. It will be growing in that direction. Grow for a length of 6ft, this is our model six. We have another model that’s called a model four that only grows 4ft in length. But basically what it does is it’s tracking how much growth is happening, moving sideways accordingly. And then there’s this agricultural netting that holds all of the foliage in so that the leaves and the branches don’t pop out and get in the way. And then we also have a series of fans, which you can’t see from this shop. But there are some fans that blow air under the plant as it grows down that pathway, so that we’re making sure that since we’re holding the plant in a contained space, we want to make sure that we have lots of air movement to avoid microclimates. Microclimates can lead to bacteria and mold. So we’ve handled that with ventilation. And we also have sensors that are sensing temperature, the humidity and the CO2. We’re going to add some additional things onto that. We’re talking to a couple of different companies that might help us take this to the next level. Take our current app to the next level. But that’s what it does. It tracks growth rate as it grows from one side to another, gives you some data and some information with the TrellaGro LST app. And then once the plant has grown all the way to the side, and that happens during what’s called the vegetation stage. So if you grow tomatoes or grow anything, there’s a period where the plant is just building its structure. It’s just growing the branches and growing the leaves. And then when the season changes, it starts to flower, it starts to fruit. So this automation process is happening during the vegetation process. When the plant is growing its structure. We want that structure to be molded as we grow that plant. And then when it’s time for flowering, you can take this comes out of the way.
You take off the top mesh panel, and the whole thing is open and exposed to the lights above. So the branches stretch up towards the light, and then they start to flower. And we have some other types of trellis netting that you don’t see in the shot that help it. When they start to flower, they get kind of like floppy, so you want to hold those up. So we have another level of trellis netting that goes over the top to help with that. But the bulk of the work is done during the vegetation stage. Once it’s time for flowering, the structure is there, it’s all contained. And now you just have to go through that stretch period, and then you’re ready for harvest. And you can take the whole plant out in whole. We have a really great picture of me holding a plant that came out of our model six, the larger unit, and I’m holding it over my head. That’s one full plant, all intact that I just chopped off at the base and pulled out of the unit. Or you could do it. You could harvest it in pieces if you want to, just take a little bit, depending on your needs.
But that’s basically what it does in a nutshell.
It’s amazing because the amount of technologies that come into play and the amount of understanding of nature is such an interesting merger, like just understanding plant life cycle when growth occurs. So there’s that side of it. And then also the sensors and being able to measure and then create feedback and automation that’s wrapped around it. There’s a lot of moving parts.
Yeah, there are a lot of moving parts. The development of the software. And we did this with Bootstrapping, the two co-founders. And then we did raise some money. But all for less than $600,000. We’ve gotten to this point where we’ve been able to get a patented product, but it did include software that had to be developed. We had to figure out how are we going to control the automation. Luckily, I brought the software experience to an extent when I was doing some coding with the trading software that I developed. And then Drake brought to the table his expertise from his medical devices and robotics. So figuring out how to control movement. And then we took a lot of courses and a lot of learning on plant life. And I always say people who dig a little deeper that really I’m not a horticulturalist by trade. I’m an engineer. And this idea kind of came to me suddenly. And even the vision of the device, I have notebooks where I was writing down, sketching out what it should look like, how it should work, and that just came to me. And I used George Washington Carver as my muse.
He basically learned a lot through just picking it up from nature, walking in nature talk. He literally would talk to the plants, and he’s just able to kind of pick these things up. So I always say, thank you, George. I like to believe that you planted this idea in my head so that I could see it through. So that’s how we got all this done on multiple dimensions. We needed help.
Yeah. But again, it’s like you look at, especially when you mentioned where you are as far as investments at this point. Like, some people couldn’t write a bloody app. You just a goofy mobile app that would play like Flappy bird for the price that you’re like. You’ve done a lot of real good groundwork that with every further detail I learned about you, my respect grows incredibly. You and Dre are really doing some great stuff with this.
Thank you.
And that’s what I also you can see that this is the beginning of something wonderful. When you think about now the secondary impact, there’s the initial thing of, like, we can solve this very distinct problem here and scale what sort of the size of market that you may be looking at and where this can be applied?
Yeah. We need food everywhere. We start with our global market from that perspective. But because of the risk engineering background as well, and specifically, I specialize in natural disasters. So I spent a lot of time evaluating damage from Hurricanes, floods, hail, snow loading. We just got hammered up here in the Northeast in the US. And unfortunately, one of our grow friends, I call them we’re all a family, people that grow and share ideas and things together. Their hoop house collapsed underweight. So I’m looking at it from a perspective of, okay, we need to grow food everywhere. We are having significant changes in our climate. It’s going to have to be grown indoors, but it might also have to be grown in transit. We may need to figure out ways to grow food while we move it. I mean, one of the most expensive parts of our food supply chain is the transport. They grow it somewhere and they transport it somewhere, maybe to store it if it can last for a season. And then they transport it somewhere else. So to be able to maybe grow and transport would be one way to dig into that issue.
You have situations where people are thinking about growing, leaving this planet and going to Mars and developing populations and industries there. You’re going to need food there. You’re going to need food while you’re transporting all that stuff there. So we’re looking at this being used not just in a warehouse on Iraq, but maybe being used in a freight container that’s on right on a railway system, maybe being used in a NASA shuttle or some other type of device that transports people from Earth to the universe somewhere. But it has lots of opportunity, lots of potential. One of the other things that we would love to explore is how if we can reduce the power consumption needed to grow plants. So we’re also working with LED companies and try and testing out different types of LED systems. What we want to do and people can. I’ll give out the information later and you can check this out to learn more. But we want to sink the lights to go on as the plant grows across this plane. So right now I’ve got a series of lights, LED lights over my plant. If you can, use your imagination a little bit and imagine a plant going from left to right.
For those of you that aren’t looking at this on a video, you’re going from left to right growing a plant for a six foot distance. And you may have eight different lights, eight or twelve different LED lights hanging over that area. It only makes sense to turn on the lights where the plant actually is at that point. So at week one, the plant may have only grown 1ft in distance. So you only turn on one or two LED bars. When it’s grown to 3ft in distance, then maybe you turn on four LED bars. But it’s about trying to develop the canopy and you’re only using the light when you really have to. And that can take down our power consumption, and then that really allows us to be able to grow anywhere, because now we’re not relying on infrastructure so much. So I think Twilight has a role to not just diversify the types of plants we can grow indoors, but to get that power consumption down as best we can so that we can put these enclosed containers that don’t require solar panels, don’t require a substantial 200 power supply.
Yeah, the lighting is interesting. I actually wanted to dig into this because, of course, sun being the nature’s lights that generates growth through chemical processes, photosynthesis. But there’s a lot of things that why internally, as we’ve made the move from incandescence to LEDs and fluorescence and different types, how have you been able to have LED have the same effect that nature’s sun has been able to give to Earth for so long?
Yeah, well, you know, they always say there’s nothing like a sungrown plant. I got to stand by that. I can’t say that it’s 100% exactly the same, but I also think that there’s something to do with soil and all the different minerals and nutrients that soil provide versus when you bring it indoors, you’re using kind of manufactured nutrients that don’t have a robust variety of nutrients that soil might have. So I think that’s kind of where the taste and the quality changes might take place. The LED light in the LED industry has come a really long way over the last five to ten years. When they first came out, no one wanted to touch them, especially in the cannabis space. People really just made fun of them. They called them blurpos because they would be like red and purple and stuff. And you still have blurpos out there. We started with Blurples, so no shame or shading that. But there’s Fluent Bioengineering and a couple of other LED companies have really taken it to the next level. They’re a little pricier. That upfront costs out of pocket will be a little bit of a difference, but the operating costs are substantially less.
And at the end of the day, the power consumption through that light fixture is so much less and it doesn’t give off a lot of heat. So all of these LEDs bring so many pros that kind of outweigh the fact that it’s not the sun. But I think we can do better. I think we can get a lot better at that and even try to find ways to utilize the sun indoors. There are people that are doing that, too. I can only remember it by describing it. They’re like skylights that are focused, coming through a ceiling and focusing and kind of what’s the word I want to use? Maximizing the light intensity in one space with the sun, and it’s coming through, coming through a building like a large magnifying glass of some sort. So there are people doing all types of stuff out there with LEDs and if we can use more Sun, I’m into discovering those options as well.
Yeah. But when you talk about the idea of in transit off planet, if we can get the technology right, that really enables a different future of potential. And even though we get these funny things that come every once in a while, like nature’s, fruit is always going to be the tastiest, as you say. Right. In the same way that every once in a while you see sort of an article come out for, like, astronomers are complaining about all these bloody satellites in the sky. They’re wrecking the starscape because every time I try and take a long exposure shot, I get all these swipes because of the space garbage, low Earth orbit satellites and like, you know, the social media tool that you’re sharing from your cell phone of those pictures. Yeah. That’s empowered by the fact that you’ve got these low Earth orbit satellites and CubeSats. And it’s weird that we’re going to have to shed a bit of maybe the pureness of the traditional flavor of fruit, vegetable, whatever. But to get nutrient value in a place where you don’t have access to sun, it’s pretty damn fantastic, if you ask me.
Yeah, I think so. And I don’t think that’s not a great goal. Let’s try to duplicate and get as close as we can to the true taste of a sun-grown tomato plant.
Right.
It’s possible. I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibilities. I don’t do it like that whole it’ll never happen thing that’s over with.
If Elon isn’t watching this one, because daddy has time to watch my stuff, but he needs to be watching you. You and Dre need to be getting people putting you in front of folks like Elon Musk and other real big thinkers. Because the potential is really fantastic and the opportunity is huge. And the fact that you are in that mindset that like, no isn’t an option. It can’t happen isn’t an option. It’s actually one of my favorite. There’s a recent podcast. Lex Friedman is a MIT researcher. Elon Musk was on his podcast, and he asked him the question was, how do you think about the risk of something and the fact that it may not happen? It’s actually one of my favorite podcast moments because he stopped. And as if you ever watched Elon Musk and he’s on a podcast, he really thinks about what he’s about to say. He doesn’t just jump in and start talking. And it was pure silence for like 20 seconds and you could see him and he’s like little like, blinking and eyes are darting around. And he says, that’s never entered into my mind. We just know we have to find a way to do it.
No is not an option. Right. And it’s like the sort of hero, like, no is not an option. Give everything 110%. Like that’s sort of the coach yelling, like, less empowered like, fire ourselves up. But he is like mathematically trying to get to no is not an option. And I see that in your approach, too. And that’s why it’s cool, because the potential is great. And how big is the ecosystem of people that are trying to solve this kind of problem, Aja?
Not incredibly big, but it’s growing. I would say maybe about three or four years ago, I didn’t see a lot of talk about diversifying the types of plants you can grow indoors. It was really focused on the microgreen, the lettuce. And now I’ve seen a lot more vertical farming companies, container farming companies trying to grow things like strawberries, raspberries, trying to get a little bit more diverse. There’s also, unfortunately, the genetically modified option where people are modifying the plants to make sure that they only grow at certain height. That’s an option as well. But for the most part, it’s been old school trellising, tying things down with the trellis and doing it that way. And that’s what the bulk of the industry still does. And I think that approach works, but at scale, it’s very difficult. And for me, you might recognize this thought from a book. I can’t remember which book it is that I read about the real impact of technology, and that technology is really supposed to allow us to have more time to be creative and to rest. Technology isn’t really here to go faster and to drive more people faster.
Right?
It’s here to free us from that burden of labor and to be able to allow more resources to be spread out so that people can do that. That’s kind of where my thought when people push back on automation and technology. It’s like it’s coming, and it’s either going to go past you or mall you over, or you can adapt to it and make it yours. Like, put your funk on it and make it yours so that it’s the way that you want it to be. So that’s what we’re trying to do. All right, it’s coming. How do we want it to be and what can we do to help?
Yeah, they have a chance to shape it or to watch it shape you. It’s an interesting sort of personal responsibility that I think very few are taking on. And we get this sort of interesting divide of things that happen around, like building a business around something ultimately driving towards revenue growth. And we talk about growing companies, getting towards successful exits. Like, you should be obviously rewarded for having bringing something to the market. And so we end up in this an interesting dichotomy of capitalism and the ability that we can have something created that wasn’t there that can then give back to the ecosystem. So in its theory, of course, is right. We won’t talk about how trickle economics doesn’t work. There’s lots of places breaking down. But today’s founders, you in particular, you and Dre, everything in your messaging, in your speech, in your thought process, community team, give back. It’s entrenched in how you’re doing things. And I think more and more people are thinking that way. We kind of get mad at Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and other folks that have obviously become profoundly rich. Right. Like so much money there is no possible way they could spend it if they just sat there and burned it in piles. They couldn’t get rid of it as fast as they’re making it. But in cases that we don’t often see, they are doing other things that are giving back to the world. It’s just that we see the dark parts a lot easier than we see the light.
Yeah.
But as a community supporter, what is the opportunity for us in getting more people involved in building these technologies and leveraging these capabilities to truly give back to more people that won’t necessarily be founders and may not have access to those kinds of resources?
Well, I think some of the stuff that I see is we have the ability to, like, 3D print. It’s just so easy to create nowadays. So I think that everybody who has the true will, I guess, really wants to create because not everybody really wants to do this stuff. We don’t need everyone doing it, but we definitely need a lot more. And we need a lot more people with a diverse perspective in a diverse way of trying things. I don’t know. My brain is stuck on the word expert, and this might not answer your question, Eric, so I apologize if it doesn’t,. But my brain just won’t let me avoid that word expert. This isn’t really the time for them, in my opinion right now, because I’ve been an expert on something, quote-unquote. In my corporate life, people considered me in my corporation that the top level person that had to make a decision for engineering in windstorm. But when something new would come to me because I’m such an expert, I don’t see the opportunity. I don’t see how this could potentially do something different than what it’s currently doing right now. So I really think the opportunity is that the more people we get involved that aren’t experts, that are willing to get in and break things and make mistakes and try again, it’s going to yield such incredible technology and things that we can do.
And at the same time, the world is changing with the metaverse, not one metaverse. I’m talking about all of the metaverses that are being I’m not doing a plug for an individual company, but all of the metaverses that are being created really allow a lot of people who are more on that creativity side to be able to benefit from the technology that’s being developed. So technology there’s people that create the technology, that maintain the technology, that use the technology. There’s all these connections through it. So the more that we can, the more things that we can create and foster that’s more connections that we’re all making and that fosters community. So I don’t know that’s brain’s way of answering that question on the fly.
I love it. And it reminds me, too of in government representation in so many places, we really struggle. We’re often overly concerned on the impact of capitalism and money, which, again, not going to say that believe there’s a whole host of problems in abuse of that system and abuse of privilege and power in that area. But then in the regulatory side of the world, there’s not enough representation. There of true what the world looks like. Right. It’s not about its diversity of physical diversity. There’s one thing. But having lawyers who are diverse, like ten lawyers that are from all different genetic backgrounds, they’re still ten lawyers. We need farmers, engineers, artists, creators. That’s the diversity that we really need to embrace is that diversity of thought, diversity of willingness. That’s why I’m with you in this idea that the metaverse concept is going to open the doors for people with creative ideas and they can experiment and test. And that’s really what we need as a community, too. When I create a community of people, we often there are communities of practice, there are communities of commitment to religion, there are communities of commitments to many different things.
Each is a community. And then the blending of those communities in this Venn diagram of common goal, we all want to succeed, grow, empower each other. So how can we see that blending of those things come together where artists, engineers, mathematicians, farmers, everybody can contribute to this and have a feeling that they can make something happen. And that’s why I love entrepreneurship more and more. Like the great resignation. So I don’t believe the numbers when they say, like, the jobs numbers are what they are. Like, you’re measuring the wrong numbers. Like, let’s talk about who’s creating opportunity, who’s creating a new economy. We’re going to spend the next decade still wondering why the numbers don’t line up to something. Like we’ve got more people who aren’t on the jobless role but who aren’t wanting to be on it because they’re doing different things now. It’s an interesting. I love this time. I love the opportunity. The potential is here. I just hope that more people can unlock it.
Yeah, 100%. It’s a fantastic time to be alive. And you don’t have to be an engineer to engineer. There’s a lot of opportunity for most of us on this planet. So it’s a good time.
What’s the next big problem that Aja is looking to solve?
All right. For Trella, we’ve accomplished so much with getting to the point where we have the product, we’ve got our patent, we’re making our first round of deliveries. But scaling it to the point where it can actually be what it is that I see in my mind that’s going to take a lot of help. And that’s going to take a lot of capital and a lot of human capital as well. So one of the biggest projects that I have on my plate for this year and next is building this company and building this team. That’s really where my energy is right now is okay, how do we get this into the hands of more people and what resources do we need to do that? And that’s the focus day after day.
Obviously, I don’t want to walk you into things that you wouldn’t want to delve into, but thinking just not necessarily just Trella, but things like crowdfunding and the next generation. I see there’s a lot more like cooperative investments. And this seems like one of those great fits. And I think there’s a lot more of that opportunity coming up where we can have cooperative venture capital where it’s not just sort of the restricted set of accredited investors. We’re seeing more people doing stuff with direct investments via angel list, collaborative investments, crowdfunding investments. It’s in a weird space right now because once a while, the company goes under and a crowd funded investment goes away. And everybody says like, oh, this is horrifying. Do you know how many venture capital companies go under? It’s like, this is a disturbing amount of them. Most of the bets lose, sadly, at least at the scale that they hope to get. This outsized return. But it feels like that’s an area where you and many others like you have a huge potential if the world is ready to properly do that.
Yeah, we are huge proponents of crowdfunding. It’s really how we got this far. I mentioned that we bootstrapped for a little bit, but the first thing we did after that was we went out to the crowd and we did Indiegogo, raise some money that way. And then we did a Start Engine campaign, which is regulation crowdfunding. So you’re giving away some sort of security in exchange for the money you receive. And you’re right, it’s open to the public. You don’t have to be an accredited investor like a high net worth individual. It could be anyone who is like, hey, I like this idea. I want to support this mission. I may only have like $200, but I want to put my $200 into this to support it. And that’s what we’ll continue to do. We have another regulation crowdfunding campaign that by the time this airs, will be open to the public. So please, I’ll share some information at the end, but check us out. And if you’re interested to support us, be a part of it. Have some weight, some skin in the game rather, is what I’ll use. If you want to have some skin in the game and you want to support us, you can invest in exchange you get some security. It’s not just a donation. It’s actual a form of ownership in the company. It allows for a much wider audience of individuals to participate in investment. And I mean, that’s really the way that people build wealth in this capital structure that we have is through investing. And I just find it crazy that you can bet on the Super Bowl game without limitation, but you can’t put $100 into a buddy’s business without the SEC. That was the old school way. Now with regulation crowdfunding, you can do that. So I’m glad that it finally is starting to pick up more steam. Yeah.
Like the idea that I have to go and take a series six or series at the minimum, I have to take an SEC accredited exam, which basically equivalent becoming a financial advisor just to be able to put in money. And then of course, there’s like minimum investment levels and minimum, like you said, that’s just a strange concept to me. No one can stop you from pouring money into a slot machine without checking your bank account size. But yet I can invest $1,000 into an equity fund if I don’t have 100 X that in the bank secured somewhere else.
Right.
It’s just bizarre. Not that I want people treating equity as a bet, but it’s like that is a bet. The slot machine is likely to not win. The equity is likely to have at least a modest return.
It’s uncertainty. It’s all uncertainty.
So I do hope that we see more and more. And I think there’s more and more even in the traditional venture capital, sort of like the second stage that we had, like the VCs with the Sand Hill Road folks, and then they created this wave of initial big companies. And then those people have left their big companies with big equity results, and now they’re becoming investors. And then those next layer, like we’re seeing this sort of tree, upside down tree of like now this layer, and those people are saying the system is broken, we’re going to reboot it. We need a Robin Hood for equity management. There is regulatory stuff. There are things that we have to consider because there’s an unfortunate amount of legalese involved once you have equity involvement in a company, even if it’s non voting equity. But anyway, just the same way that we can change the way we grow food, we can change the way we grow value, monetary value for people that didn’t have access to it before. I think we’re getting there.
Yeah, for sure. I’m really happy about what I see. And I think blockchain web three decentralized autonomous organizations, other novice known as Dows, they all have potential. And I’m looking at all of them and really looking forward to the future. And as you describe those levels of investors, that kind of trickle down and there’s a lot more options. I’ve seen a lot of different funds that I didn’t see two or three years ago that are now available and looking at companies like ours. So if you are one of those investors that likes the story wants to hear more. Please take a second if you can, and check out our website. We have an investor thing on our menu, so just go there and learn more.
Do it. This is a bet I would be willing to make, and it’s one of those opportunities now for all of us to do something fantastic and to see what you and Dre are doing and you’re building a team around it, which is great. So I definitely see that you will have a positive result in one way or another. There will be a positive outcome to this, whatever it looks like, maybe reshaped as interesting. Yeah, but especially like post-covid, worlds are changing. Understanding of the impact on the Earth is changing. The policies that were written that tell us how we should farm were about as equivalent in timing as the first Sand Hill Road investors were on the first startups. It was right, and it created an ecosystem. But we are now at the point where we’re saying, like, an Etch A Sketch. All right, let’s shake it out. Let’s rethink some of this stuff and there’s enough people that see the value. There’s no more like, the world will outlive me. Right? I think there’s a generation of people who are like, they didn’t believe they were going to see the change occur, so there was less impetus to make the change. We have a generation in front of us who are like, I’m tired of your shit.
You’ve done enough. Thank you. We’ll take it from here.
Exactly. Let me run with this. In closing Aja, what’s the advice you would give to someone who has an idea that they want to turn into action?
Oh, boy. You have the idea and you want to turn it into action. There’s so many things that you can do, but I think I’ll have to start with you. Before you do anything else, you need to figure out why you want to take that next step, whatever that step is. Why are you focused on this idea? Why did you create this idea. If it’s five years from now and the idea hasn’t taken off, what’s going to make you still want to work on it? You got to start with what drives you. And then I’ll also say there’s nothing you can do but act after that. What do you do to act like you have to do something. Send the email, pick up the phone, post the post. Trust me, I struggle with that a lot. Like, I rather keep things to myself and not share them until I think they’re exactly the way I want them. But that professional stuff is not sustaining. So figure out why you want to do it before anything else and then do something.
Love it. Another quote that I got from somebody, Peter Sisson. He was the founder of a company called Yasa, which they pivoted, and he founded four companies. He’s a serial entrepreneur and he says if you aren’t embarrassed about what you produce then you waited too long. Like there’s got to be a little bit of like I hope this goes okay. Sometimes you just got to push the skateboard over the hill and start gliding. You said it just perfectly perfect closer to that. So Asia if someone wants to get in contact with you what’s the best way that they can do that?
Yes please. Thanks for listening all the way until the end for it. Trella.io. T-R-E-L-L-A.I-O is our website. If you want to check us out on social media we’re on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok LinkedIn. Trellatech. @trellatech is our hashtag on most of those so if you put in @trellatech will come up but trellatechnologies and Trella.io is the best place to find this. Please reach out if you have any ideas or thoughts or anything. We’d love to love to hear it.
If you want to invest, hit the button do the thing that is well, thank you. People need to do that. I look forward to the chance of maybe I’ll dip my toes in some investment waters. I would put a bet on you and Dr. You’re doing fantastic stuff so thank you very much for taking the time and sharing your story today.
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We chat about the Conversational AI revolution, what’s next for the call centers ecosystem, how conversatioanl AI is growing and disrupting traditional sales teams, and how to leverage AI for business in an authentic way to improve the human experience.
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What’s happening? Welcome back, listeners, crew, family, friends, and newcomers to the podcast. Holy Moly. We are rocking out the chart, so thank you so much for listening. Watching. Make sure you also head over to the video version of the podcast so you can go to youtube.com/discopossepodcast and you can see the whole conversation as it happened, which is super cool. All right, this is Brian Podolak from Vocodia. Brian is really, beyond being a fantastic human, has an amazing radio voice. He’s just somebody who’s solving a really neat problem, has a background in engineering, but Vocodia is doing stuff around conversational AI. And this is not the, you ask it a question and it pops back a thing, where you’re calling into a call center. This is actually the reverse, where they’re having outbound conversational calls, that pre-process things to help drive better conversations and really, ultimately increase the flow of success for customer experience. Super cool. We dig into the tech, we dig into his own background, how they solve the problem, and just their approach as a company. Really neat story. Definitely a must listen. So I hope you enjoy it. And by the way, these kind of amazing conversations, which I’m about to have a great announcement about.
Super cool. So hang tight. That’s coming up in a couple of weeks. But in the meantime, talking about great things, the folks that make this podcast happen, that support us, I got to give a shout out to our fine friends who sponsor the podcast over at Veeam Software. If you want to get everything you need, whether it’s on Prem, in the cloud, everything you need for your data protection needs, this is the place to go. Go to vee.am/discoposse. How easy is that? Seriously, just go to vee.am/discoposse. Check it out. They got lots of great tools, whether it’s SaaS protection for stuff like Microsoft Teams and Office 365 and much more that’s coming down the pike. Congratulations to Veeam on lots of really great stuff. They’ve been doing great new products and capabilities. And another thing you got to make sure you do is protect your data in flight, which means wherever you are, make sure you’re running a VPN. I know I use one. And this is not the I don’t need to protect free speech because I don’t say bad things. This is literally your identity is flying back and forth. You’re putting informed data.
You’re filling stuff. You are at risk. Use a VPN. It’s just a great practice. I use ExpressVPN. I recommend you do the same. You can go to tryexpressvpn.com/discoposse and you can join me in the battle for protecting your privacy. All right, let’s get to the good stuff. This is Brian Podolak.
Hi, I’m Brian Podolak, CEO and-co founder of Vocodia here on the DiscoPosse podcast.
You got a perfect radio voice, Brian. This is it. You make it easy for me. I just get it going. I’ll come back in an hour. You’ll have a great show all on your own.
No, I like to talk, but I like the conversation for sure.
Yeah, this will be good. Thank you very much. This is a real honor to share mic with you. I really dig what you and the team are doing. And I’ve had a few folks on that are sort of in the area of this idea of conversational AI, but it traditionally is at the drift chat type of layer. And being able to go farther and really see the power of what we can do in voice technology is super exciting to me and a bunch of people that I’ve talked to. So we got a lot of people who are going to be sitting in. And the good thing is we’re on camera. So it’s not like you sense a voice assistant to do this for you, Brian. But the next time we should actually bring a third party, have some Vocodia technology helping us out with the podcast.
100%. Every time I do a demo, people ask, is that really you doing the demo? Yeah, all the time.
Well, thanks for having me, Eric. Appreciate it.
Yeah. If you want to give a quick sort of bio and your background, Brian, for folks that are new to you. And then we’ll jump into the Vocodia story.
Absolutely. So make a long story short. About 17 years ago, I was relocated to Costa Rica to help manage a call center a friend of mine was running. And make a long story short, within a year, he decided, I don’t want it anymore. You take over. And we went from about 20 agents when I was there to about 600 at our peak. And I always said, I love the business, but if only I could do it with less people. Right. And the challenge with that call center business is it’s easy to find five or ten people to do a good job. A lot of times it’s harder to find 150 or 200. And so between things of turnover rate training, just hiring, HR, et cetera, et cetera, we’ve always thought this would be a neat concept. And the genesis of this was that we had a client that we had what we called a retention campaign. Basically, people who had a recurring charge on their credit card would call us to cancel. And our job was to try to have them stay on just one more cycle. Make a long story short, every call you get in, most people are very upset.
Nobody says, hey, you’ve been charging me $40 a month. Can we work on it? It’s usually I hate you. I want to kill you. These kind of things. So it’s a very hard campaign. Our turnover rate was approximately 900%. What we did is we had the agents as an idea to start their first line of Hi. My name is Brian. How are you doing today? Each agent pre-recorded it and press the key on their keyboard to say their opening line. Well, the agents loved it. Immediately they had like ten or 15 of their most common lines pre-recorded on the keyboard. So now you took a job where you’re getting beat up all day and made it a little bit fun and just took off a little bit off of you. And having that energy on that initial call, as you can imagine in the morning, compared after six to 7 hours, getting beat up, being pre recorded made a noticeable difference. That was kind of the genesis, I like to say, of where we are today with our technology. So my background was running large call centers for very big clients, consulting with other call centers, literally worldwide.
We owned our own centers in Costa Rica, Panama, the Dominican, et cetera, a consultant from the Philippines, India, and a lot of other countries you probably never heard of, like Ghana, et cetera, that we actually had centers into. And it’s a very, very great business. It’s a very big business still to this day. And to be able to do that internationally was a lot of fun. So I’m very happy on where we are on the journey today.
Now, this is an interesting thing. Boy, could I use that. I could do my podcast that way. Just have everyone just be like, hit F1, you know, that’s a great question. How does that affect your business exactly?
Tell me your history. Right.
The story of it and the reason why it’s been meaningful to customers and to you know, your folks that use the platform is super important. The raw technology is incredible. Like the excitement I get, I’m like a nerd. So I get a nerd. And I’m like, oh, all right, we’re going to talk about some real nerd bits. So the good thing is we can kind of cover both bases. But really the truth is, for folks that most folks that are listening, we can nerd out all we want. But in the end, the story of how it actually has delivered meaningful value to a human is the best part of technology. And when people hear stuff like voice assistant and AI and conversational voice centers, they worry. The first thing is always like, oh yeah, you’re taking away jobs. And so we’re going to get right to the good stuff.
Let’s do it.
Let’s dispel that rumor.
Well, Ironically, what you’re talking about is true. When Jimmy and I first started having a little bit of our breakthroughs and I’ll nerd out later with you. But we started having a breakthroughs was pre Covid. When we first got a working model was right before COVID was hitting. I was actually a consultant in the Dominican at the time and had to come back because Covid was just starting to become an issue where it was sort of in the early days. I remember saying, I’m not going to get back home if I jumped on that plane, got home, and people were just starting to wear masks at the airport. And so we got over here, the narrative when people heard about the technology and started hearing the demos, they said, oh, you’re going to replace jobs, you’re going to take jobs from people. Well, now fast forward from Covid, and you have what a lot of people call people who don’t want to work. And where we’re focused on is not replacing people at all. It’s augmenting existing processes. It’s helping fill the holes in an organization. So we definitely are not there to replace anybody. We’re just trying to help fill in.
And more importantly, because it is so hard to find people now, we found a lot of our clients and prospects we’re talking to, are actually settling for mediocrity. So, for example, let’s say you have 100 people in the phone and there’s 30. You’d like to fire them today and get rid of them, and they’re just not working out. But your fear is you can’t replace them, so you keep them on the phone. So what happens to your client now? The end user is now dealing with somebody who’s probably not doing the best job for you. So everything on our design, not technical at all, was thought about the end customer experience first and making sure that experience was perfect. A lot of people get compare technology to IVRS as they’re trying to understand it. And I always like to say, I did my dad test. When my dad was able to get that call and go all the way through and had no problems. That’s when we knew that we had a working product. But we’re definitely 100% right now. We’re having more and more clients come and say, listen, I need 20 more positions, 50 more positions, whatever it is.
And that’s been our strength right now.
Yeah. I think the thing we have to remember is what is the actual purpose of that call center experience? It’s a way that you can route to somebody in IVR have been the death of any hope for that for so long because it’s always like, how many times do you get on? And you and I, we’ve been around the industry for a while, Sue’s like, hello and welcome to Ex Call Center. I’m hitting the zero button downtown. I’m doing whatever I can to exit out of the menu. I’m trying to trigger it to fail. So, like, one moment we’ll get you a person. Yeah. I want to fast forward to the human part because they’re true-false, if-then-else, they aren’t guided conversational processes. And this is the gap that people don’t see. So we do this upfront kind of like pre interview through the IVR, which just enrages the person to the point. Then by the time they get to the human, they’re like, look..
You bring up a good point, Eric, and that’s exactly what we try to avoid. For example, about two months ago, I had an airline issue. I couldn’t change my ticket and I couldn’t do something online. It was one of those errors, how to call in. And this particular airline, when I called in, it was a three-hour hold time. They didn’t even have that we-can-call-you-back option. So I’m on hold for an hour. I’m going around my damn hearing this music. I was getting so frustrated. Finally, somebody picked up on an overseas call center. And unfortunately, due to this COVID thing, we have a lot of people who are not working at home. So you’re in a third world country, not even in a proper call center, trying to work from home. And this poor person, let’s face it, they’re trying to make a living, provide for their family. Right? And I’m talking to them and all I hear is this and I’m trying to talk to them and get my conversation out. And now I don’t want to hang up and start over, for the love of God and start the process over.
So my experience was horrendous. Again, the end-user experience has got to be as good, if not better than a human for a new technology to be adapted. People don’t want to adapt a new technology if it’s lesser quality. Ironically, they’ll settle for lesser quality people before they’ll settle for lesser quality technology. So we had to make sure at any time the AI got stuck. And AI in general has to be not to geek out too much, but it has to be trained. Just like when you hired somebody, you have to train them, they have to learn. So if the AI does get stuck or it gets asked a question, it doesn’t know how to reply to, one of our preferred options. And we have many. One of the preferred options is, hey, you know what, Eric? That’s a great question. I don’t have the right answer. Let me get you a supervisor and immediately get them to a human. So it asks a question one time if it doesn’t know or if it’s stuck, it immediately transfers. So we first do an implementation. There might be a little more transfers in the beginning as the AI learns.
But one of the ways that we speed that up and again, to get immediate better customer experience, because again, nobody wants to implement an AI and have it learn with real customers, is we just upload 500, maybe 1000 recordings of agents on the phone to help train the models. So we basically take three to six months of training. And we can do it in a matter of days now through our AI modeling process. And that makes that initial rollout to give that end user customer a much better experience than any IVR tech technology that’s out there.
Yes. And this is really the differentiator that we’ve got with the technology available to us now. It’s much more both democratized as far as availability and then commoditized in that it’s being broadly used. So then the pricing is no longer this real sort of platinum pricing for a coal experience. You’re able to now leverage back end technologies that are continuing to evolve now even beyond before, where you’d be like Brian and his team are developing their own machine learning. They bought a data center, they filled it with stuff, they’re teaching it. You can leverage other technologies that have broad access to scalable architectures. And then that lets you be your business now can empower the person who God bless that poor call center person or a call center manager or even a CIO for a company that has a significant call center presence, they shouldn’t have to care about the technology that could do something for them. They should be buying services.
Correct. And one of the things that we thought would be our key to we had a couple of challenges. In the beginning is, especially if you’re doing an outbound presales call. So let’s just say you filled out a lead to buy a product or service. You actually want someone to call you back and actually speak to them about that product or service. So when you get that call back, you want to be assisted and make sure you get routed or have the right information sent to you. So for example, you’re looking for a quote on health insurance. An agent is going to call back, verify if you’re under 65 or under 65 to see if you need a Medicare package or one of the Obamacare packages. And then there might be some budget restraints. So there’s a lot of questions we could have a true conversation. And what’s the great thing about it is this? When we first started doing this, we have latency issues. Now if you do an inbound call to a bank and you lost your credit card and they say, okay, let me pull up your information on the system. We’re used to delays so you don’t notice a latency in a conversation on an inbound customer service that call at all or very little but outbound sales.
If I say, hey, how are you doing today? And you say, I’m fine, and it takes me 4 seconds to reply to that, it just kills the conversation. So on the technology side, we developed our own proprietary MLP, which is the brain of an AI. And it’s the only AI we know that’s been 100% trained only with call center sales conversations. So that was all of the training we gave to it. Then the secondary thing was getting that latency down. So now we’re literally about the 20th of a blink of an eye or about five milliseconds per response. But then we connected to a VoIP switch. Well, now VoIP has its own set. So we’re very fortunate. We were able to get Omar Khan, our CTO, who came on and said, listen, I’m not going to work for a start up. I hate start-ups. I’ll be a consultant with you. And four months later, I wore him down. He’s now our CEO, and he developed a voice switch optimized for AI, not just our technology, but AI in general. And our response rate on the phone calls is just extremely quick. We don’t have I don’t want to say no latency, but it’s basically almost immersed.
You cannot even hear it. In fact, the last recording I sent out, Eric, somebody thought I edited it. It was that fast. So we actually do live all the show. Yeah. But as you said, go back to your other point. Now you have the customer shouldn’t be worrying about latency, shouldn’t be caring about VoIP switches. They want to implement this and get their customers sorted and helped. One of the other great things about the AI is it doesn’t want to hang out and be your friend. So, for example, Eric, you call in, you just like, I just need a health insurance quote. I’m going to use health insurance a lot because we just got out of open enrollment. So you’re going to call in and I go, Eric, where are you from? And you say, I’m from Jackson, whole Wyoming. I go, oh, my gosh, I have a brother and wax. And I start talking about a restaurant down the street. And you’re probably being polite, but you want to get to the point, right? So what happens is one of the stats that people look at in a call center is, what’s the average time it takes for an agent to handle a call.
And let’s just say you have an average of, let’s say five minutes. So many times when we implement that number goes down by 30% because we’re staying on script. We’re getting to the point. And you as a customer, getting what you want quickly. You’re not hanging out. You’re not having a blah, blah, blah. You’re getting to the point. Customer experience is happier. We’re spending less time on the phone, getting more transfers to wherever the sales reps are. And the great thing about it is it is a turnkey solution. We’re not a framework. So you literally just give us data, we click some buttons, and a week later you can have AI up and running. It doesn’t require a forklift upgrade into your team. It doesn’t require a whole bunch of any hardware. It’s literally give us a phone number to send calls to. We handle the rest. So in answering your questions and jumping around a bit. It’s kind of where we are today. The first true turnkey implementation of AI that people can get up financially risk free because we don’t let our clients pay us a Penny until it’s implemented and turned on.
If they’re not happy with the results or it doesn’t meet those expectations, they don’t know it’s a dime. And that’s how we’re able to get our foot in the door. As a young start up, we’re very confident in our skills. Of course, there’s a lot of understanding of clients scope of work and requirements before we do that. But we’ve only lost one client thus far since we started.
Amazing.
Ask me why I lost them.
Exactly. Now, that’s fun part. Now when you say you’ve lost one, that you’ve already laid the groundwork that I got to ask now. Yeah.
So the one client we lost was that our AI was getting them so many transfers. And as a startup and like every company, you have your requirements of what you need to do business, our requirements. We require you to think of ten physical agents on the phone. So ten licenses of our software is basically like having ten people on the phone, virtual agents, if you will. Well, those ten agent minimums were making so many transfers go into their call center, they couldn’t handle them all, so they had to pause us until they could ramp up more to be able to handle the amount of calls we were sending them.
It’s an Eli gold rat problem of throughput and the theory of constraints that was highlighted. So that was just purely market timing with that customer, which is really 100% that. Yeah, it’s the right reason actually stepped back, too, is as a business owner, you have to have the respect to be able to share that story and recognize where it wasn’t the fit. Inevitably, once they’re ready, who do you think they’re going to come back to? Right. They’re not going to try and ramp up this front line again. They’re going to say, let me get my tier two team really ramped and ready to go. And then let’s put front line and have it be that better experience because it’s like when you talk about call duration. So I’ve worked in insurance companies for a long time in technology, but became very familiar with the business and the call center business side of it was really amazing to watch because it’s a tight ship. They’re managed differently. It was a little hard to watch sometimes because the metrics that they’ve got to get, they have heroic numbers that they have to hit consistently. And like you said, you get these conversations.
The point where going into a chat where someone is from and getting them happily engaged is tier three type of level. And that should happen because tier one should be like, I just want to get to my answer. Right. Tier two is either they got to the answer and they need a little more detail or they’re really irked and they need a human. So then you’re handling them. Tier three is okay. I’m going to need my manager. And we all know that I’m going to have to get my manager on the line. They’re now like hostage negotiators. That’s not a call center anymore.
No, you’re right.
That’s like Chris boss suddenly. What do you think that I can do about that? You’re bringing the guy on that’s got the late night DJ voice. We’re going to talk about your problems.
Good old Johnny Fever right from back in the day. Yeah. And our technology does great on the tier one. Tier two, tier three. I don’t think we’re there today. And of course, we always look at competitors and try to learn from everybody. And you have a lot of conversations. But I think that there’s a point where people do know they’re talking to a bot or an AI system, and there’s nothing more comforting than talking to a human person. Right. As much as AI is great and can help us and definitely augment our processes. And for example, if I’m a customer and I just want to say I’m checking on a tracking number, I’m checking on a refund status, I got a credit card loss, these kinds of things. Whether I’m speaking to an AI in person, I care about, did it get done? Did it get an effective and at the end of the day, I feel good. After I hung up that phone call, hey, you know what? I lost my card. It’s a horrible situation. But I called and hung up. I actually just replaced my debit card two days ago, and I called in and guess what I had to do?
I had to type in my number, pushing the buttons on the phone, had to push in this numbers. And it was such a frustrating experience. And again, you already have a lost card. It’s already a little frustrating. And now you have to go through a process and it’s not thought of, hey, how do we support customer just went through something. It’s bottom line from a bank is how do we not have to speak to this person and make them go through the process and hit the numbers on your phone, which is called the DTMs? It’s not a happy experience. And especially if you miss Typ or hit two at a time, you got to start over. It’s just not exciting. And then you hit it in and have it repeated to you. So there’s so many little things in a customer service or sales organization that not only is it our AI to try to make that process better, it’s the experience that I have and other people in our company of working for centers for 15 or 20 years that’s making this technology work. So it’s funny, in the beginning, people are like, well, you’re a tech company that happens to do.
And that’s a big thing in tech companies, right? Your tech company that does sales, your tech company that does health insurance, or a tech company that does this, we started off at that way. I said, you know what? No, we really are sales first. We’re using the technology there. But every piece of technology we’ve developed today in our product roadmap over the last twelve months is all about helping a sales process. Now, after I do a sale, I want to keep that customer. So customer service is a piece. But it all started with that sale to a client. You used to use my service, Eric, but now you don’t anymore. Well, why not? Let me reach out to you six months later, Eric, can I do a quick survey with you? Can I get you to come back? Right. And a lot of times we’re talking to clients like, man, I want to do that, but it costs too much. But now with AI, we have a service that maybe we weren’t even doing before that makes that customer happier. Wouldn’t you be happy if somebody that business that you’re working with actually called and said, hey, here’s our product roadmap.
What other robots do you want to see? What’s the feature you want to see what’s the KPI we should be doing a better job on that’s important to you. You talk to ten clients and you have some basic KPIs that are the same, but you have a lot of that are very industry specific and our customer specific, hey, this is the KPI care about and then think about in the organization what’s the CFO’s KPI compared to. Let’s say a call center manages KPIs, they want to Mount it. So it’s very exciting because you’re in different points of view and a lot of times everybody is correct. And I love it because even though I think we do a great job and we are doing a great job, we’re also ourselves learning on a daily basis. And that’s what makes it so exciting to be in this business.
Well, to carry through what you just described. This is interesting because your outcome driven as any company is whether they know it or not. And the outcome is often some measurable KPI, like it could be average call duration reduction by 30%. That’s fantastic, right? But that’s actually a side effect of what you’re doing because your outcome is actually empowering the sales flow to generate business. And it’s this weird sort of intangible thing that has a lot of tangible measurements along the way. But because that is your outcome, you’re building the product to drive the business there versus drive call duration down.
Correct. And again, some of these things happen without us even focusing on, for example, getting that average handling time of a call from five minutes to three minutes means we could handle more calls per day, more calls per hour per agent. But the other great thing because we are AI and we don’t have physical bodies in the seats. For example, my earlier experience with that airline with a two or three hour hold time, nobody wants their customers away. Even an hour on the phone, usually two minutes or three minutes is kind of every business is different. But here’s the thing about this with AI, if you said, hey, Brian, I know we have 200 agents on standby, but can we get to 1000? It takes us about an hour and we can ramp up to have 1000 agents just the way our voice works. Or maybe we needed better yet. Hey, listen, the last two weeks of the year are dead for us. Can we just pause and the answer is yes. Or how about this? Let’s say you had the best, most expensive data of all time and you realize the only and we just actually had this with the client who we lost.
We found out with their very good data that they purchased that there was, and we found this out within a couple of weeks just to back up and jump around a bit. Ai does learn as it goes, but you can’t expect changes by minute or even every half hour. You need a lot of data to make decisions. And there’s of AI sales as education. It’s not a flying unicorn here’s where it can do today. So going back to that point is, let’s say I had those agents and I wanted to really optimize my data with this client. We realized there was a two hour group here, then no calls for 2 hours made more sense than another 2 hours. So it’s basically three two hour shifts with an hour or two in between that optimize their data. So not, let’s say, quote, unquote, burning leads, calling them we know had the best results. And where else are you going to be able to hire people for 2 hours, send them home for 2 hours, come back, no one’s going to work a split shift like that. And more importantly, now the customer is getting a call when they’re able to talk.
And so again, customer experience went up and then the company made money. And I find that if we look at that customer experience first and really care about a client, the money usually works itself out. It really does.
Yeah. This is the other thing people need to know, too, right. This idea of outbound conversational voice, AI is very different than Inbound. Like inbound has more measurable patterns, more specific use cases. There’s probably a lot of tools that they’re trying to measure data that’s doing post call recording analysis, like capturing sentiment analysis, doing certain things like that.
Sure.
Tying it into customer record. There are certain things there’s stuff that’s very much about enhancing the data and customer knowledge, not the experience, but the knowledge within the trust that they can use that knowledge through the customer record to empower a call center rep or an agent or a sales rep to then have follow up, which will be more meaningful versus you’re literally. I’m going to go find people and I’m using conversational voice AI to do this. So that then when they’re at this, we empower people to take in this knowledge. And then you can do the hand off right back. Like, let me grab somebody who can take care of this question you’ve got and then immediately handle a person that they’re warm, they’re nurtured, they’re engaged. That’s awesome.
Yes. One of the other neat things we do, Eric, because we’re a turnkey solution. We’re not just saying, hey, we’re the AI brain. So anything that’s telling VoIP related, go talk to your vendor. We’ve built this all in one package. So now again, making sure that the customer experience is best regardless of AI. But because we control the technology, I could do things like this. Hey, Eric, I see you’re calling back in. Last time you spoke to Brian. Would you like to speak to him again? I don’t need AI to do that, but I need to handle that at the switch, right? Yeah, but we’ve also had some pretty funny experiences. I had this great message from basically when we first developed this, I said, yeah, it would be great. Let’s go help a whole bunch of hedge funds and VCs and all. And they’re out there trying to raise money to be able to fund companies. Let’s use our technology to help them open accounts to raise money to then invest in us. So one of the first companies we were trying it with, he sent me a message and I love it. I saw that on WhatsApp it’s screenshot of my LinkedIn.
But basically he said, hey, I missed a call. I was on another line, I called the individual back and he said he wanted to speak to the other guy. I explained to him that was AI. He said, no, I want to talk to the AI instead. So the guy got so frustrated, unfortunately not understanding it was AI, hung up on him. And so we’ve had some interesting stories as we’ve gone. It just shows how conversational and humanlike that this experience is. And remember, artificial intelligence, all it is, is a way for computers to think and act like a human. That’s what we’re trying to do. And of course, you mentioned earlier, and I love those if then else statements. I always see that’s all AI is if the L statements. I think I could kind of make that argument to a degree. But it is a little more than that. It’s really understanding interactions with people to make them feel comfortable. So as great as the technology is, the scripting of it and how we implement it is just so important.
Yeah. The last thing you want is like, hey, we’ve got this beautiful framework that you can do and you’ve got to learn now, VML, some new markup language, some new proprietary thing, or God help you, it’s written in JSON or some bizarre coder unfriendly language. So you basically need to become a coder and you need to hire a team of experts. Like, I love the turnkey approach, because that’s really I’ve looked at a few different ways of even like rudimentary, like call flow handling for stuff. I use a product called Go High Level, and it’s very good at SMS based capture and it routes it to your phone. So I can enter into a text conversation pretty quickly and I can build some very simple upfront stuff. Nothing more than that. Right. However, there’s lots of other third party things that like, we can take that call, that initial SMS, and then we could route it and we can add more knowledge to it. But then I’ve got to train this bloody thing, integrate it with my tool. And now I own the relationship between these two techs, and I own the programming of it. So I would never go down the road with it.
It’s just not in my best interest to spend the effort there because the ROI for me is not there. But if it was, I’d be like, let me give it a whirl.
And that’s the fear of a new technology. What’s the cost to learn it? What’s the cost to understand it? What’s the cost to implement it? And then if it doesn’t work, I just wasted time and money. And on top of it, that’s what stops a lot of technology going forward. Or when they hear of AI, that’s voice Basic, first they think of an IVR. Or I’m sure you probably thought of this to the all auto warranty calls that we get, which are actually Robocalls. Right? So there’s a lot of confusion on a new technology, and it’s very common for us when we learn a new technology, you want to compare it to something, you know, just to help make it understand better. So when we were first going down this path, kind of going back to what you were talking about there, these are some of the challenges we had. So I said we’ve got to be able to be turnkey. And I’ve made very success in the past saying, I’m your neck to grab. I’m not going to finger point. So you’re going to give me everything after we’ve done our needs analysis, realize we are, we can’t help you, we’re going to take it from you.
I don’t want to talk to your tech guys outside of getting me recordings. I need get me a couple of phone numbers to transfer calls to, that’s it, and then we handle it all. You’ve probably also seen, like, little things again, outside of AI that we’ve had to overcome. I’m sure you’ve gotten phone calls before. That’s a scam likely on them. Right? So the D ID management and rotation and all of that especially when you’re doing the good things and you’re doing things right. But somebody spoofed your number from an offshore call center or one of these robot Islers now is a problem for you. So when I say turnkey, we handle the caller IDs, the reputation management of those caller IDs, the routing the calls correctly. Based on things like that, we are implementing things such as voice print signatures and all and all of it to make that customer experience again. Better. Again, if I get a phone call yet to the point, tell me what I want and leave me alone, right? Nowadays people attention stands are shorter and we want to be able to encourage that to be as quick and as efficient and accurate as possible.
I always think if you ever seen the scene, it’s from a movie called Boiler Room and Giovanni Ribisi, he gets the phone call from it’s like Wall Street Journal or New York Times. Good morning, sir. Do you like to get and he’s like, no thanks. And then the guy’s like, he goes, okay, thanks for your time. What? That’s it? And he’s like. And he walks it through this whole thing. He’s like.
He gets all fired up. He’s like, yeah.
And he goes So do you want your subscription? He goes, Hell no. That was great that the disengaged outbound call is worse than not getting the call 100%.
Let me tell you, Eric, I can’t tell you how many times just over the last few months that I’ve been interested in a product or service or maybe a JV I’ve seen as an opportunity for a company where I filled out a lead on a website and a week or two goes by. I sometimes don’t even get an email acknowledgement. So sometimes I’m like, I got a little thank you. And by the way, little side note, I always hate when I fill out a form, I just get a thank you. So even on our website you’ll notice if you fill out the form there’s a video pops up from Jimmy and I say thank you for your time, right? Yeah. And acknowledging people when they give you something to say thank you. And so sometimes during our AI process, if you’ve taken existing processes from companies we’ve been able to consult and just try to make that process better. So the AI comes out that much better. So for example, if I called you and I said, by the way, how old are you? Are you 65 or under? Let’s say you say you’re over 65.
A lot of people go, okay. And they keep going down the script, then they acknowledge that they just got this information. How old are you? I’m 65. Okay. Thank you for that. Just little pieces of being polite outside of being conversational AI on the technology. But just sometimes how to be a good listener, how to treat people with respect makes that experience better and that’s outside of the technology, but it complements it very well.
Is there a customer or a type of business that you want to begin with because of whether it’s complexity or sector, business or risk profile because of that engagement, is there anything that you have to watch out for in your line?
Well, we’re very ethical companies. So of course, any business that’s, shall we say not in an ethical or sustainable scalable model is something we’re not going to work with. We’ve actually had some very interesting requests from international. So, for example, in Europe, where online sports betting and gaming, there is no regulations here in the US, if I provide my technology to Europe, what happens? Right. So there are some legal things that we need to kind of ferret out and see how we’re going to go where our typical engagement is. I always like to believe in a quick win. Right. There’s nothing worse. If you’ve ever done a long technology upgrade and you start today and six months later and you’re waiting and you’re waiting, people lose. They’re like, forget about it. They’re not as excited about it. The support behind it’s not like the beginning. So I always like to get what I call a quick win. So our typical engagement will say, hey, listen, if you’re doing an outbound sales process, let’s not do the entire sales process. What are the three to five questions we need to do to qualify somebody and now transfer it to a live agent so that they can be actually more time pitching and selling instead of prospecting?
So let’s do that first. Now, phase two, let’s ask two or three more questions and maybe steps four or five and six. Now let’s integrate to your CRM. Let’s integrate to your payment processor. But let’s try to get a quick win so that within 30 days of engaging us, you have something up and running and you’re starting to see a measurable result for the nerdy Geekies out there. Think about agile. Right? That whole framework, the manifesto. How many times have people like people have been working on my system? Six months. I see nothing different. All of a sudden you had a red button that took ten minutes and wow, look how great the system is now, right? So sometimes it’s not what’s best technology wise. It’s getting a customer. That’s where the business and sales side comes before the technology. That’s why I like to say we’re a sales company. First is let’s get a quick win within 30 days of being engaged. So you can turn this thing on. See that it’s making a difference to your organization, to your customers. And then over the next six months or a year, this evolves kind of like any business.
Right? But the nice thing is once we get that first process in and set up now, we could start talking about others. And it’s also outside of getting those quick wins, a lot of times during that implementation because it was just a small piece. People understand the technology better. So, for example, if you’ve ever bought a car that you spec out online or you ever had a house built from scratch, almost invariably somebody say, well, if I had to do it over again, I would have changed this or done that differently. So trying to plan a full AI implementation of business can be very time consuming. At the end, people go, I wish I knew this. So by doing a small, quick implementation, getting something up and running, and now understanding gives a better idea of how we could build this going forward so we don’t have to go back and redo things.
How do you handle dialect accenting? There’s a lot of linguistic challenges, especially when you have global audiences. You’re serving multiple GEOs. I mean, some people even make fun of me because I speak Canadian, not English. Right. I still say process and project instead of the proper way. As I’m continually reminded my wife is American. Our poor kids are going to be just so broken. They’re going to sound half from New Jersey and half from Toronto. And it’s going to be a really strange mix.
Sure. Yeah, it’s a great point. So right now, we’re really focused on English. However, if you do have that, say, a thick Creole accent or if you ever met somebody from Louisiana and you love the accent, if they get going quickly, I’m like, what did they say? Right? My wife is Costa Rica, and the first time we went to the Bahamas, which we had a lovely time and people are lovely. We went to the little shops there, get a little knickknacks for the family. My wife’s like, what language is that? I’m like, that’s English. Right. So even though we heard it and understand it, she had a hard time. So the bottom line is the AI, which is basically using speech to text if you use your phone and you’re talking to it or using voice based type searches, as accurate as that is, we’re very accurate on it. Now that’s the only piece of our technology that’s not proprietary, by the way, is the St T. We use a product by IBM’s Watson, by the way, and great product, but it took us a long time to figure that out. But it does learn and get better over time.
And it’s really interesting. It’s more than the absence of the issue. Eric is like when we get to a vertical, for example, medical, we have all these different products or medical terminology. That’s where a lot of times training those models ahead of time is just so important. Again, having that 500 to 1000 recordings that we can help train the models makes those implementations much more efficient. But the accidents we do pretty good with, we are trying to work on where the outbound AIS more match the user’s accent, but it’s kind of hard on an outbound sales call because you got to have something kind of preselected, so to speak. But over time, we are getting very cool. Yeah.
Those things of the nuances of an industry and even just we have the curse of knowledge as humans.
Right.
So we throw acronyms around. And the difference between an IVR and an IV drip are fundamental. Right. But IV could have multiple meanings, right. There’s like lots of if you go from one place to another, even the same acronym can be meaningfully different between industries and you have to be able to adapt to that. So that’s a unique challenge of doing this stuff. So you folks are doing pretty cool things.
Well, one of the things what we’ve done is and Jimmy, who’s my partner. And again, there’s no vocodo with that. Jimmy. It’s amazing the brain he has and how he came up with this. So we started going down and you’re talking about the acronyms. And by the way, why is acronym such a long word? But I digress. But sometimes you hear it on a call, you write it down and look it up and you go to Google to search it and you’ll see 20 different meanings for it. So for example, we call actually our AI Adisa, which is a digital intelligence sales agent. Well, Diesel has already been taken by the military and a whole bunch of other people. So Dice itself has a lot of different meanings Besides what we use it for. So it’s really hard to come up with an acronym that probably nobody has used before, which is very interesting.
The best thing you could have is when you Google it, as long as Urban Dictionary isn’t the first response, you’re in. Good.
You know what? There’s probably a different type of podcast. I would go into that further with you, but yeah, so we’ve had those before. The other nice thing what we do is we try to even though we have our main conversational model. So think about it this way. Conceptually, in any call center outbound campaign in the world, you’re going to have common rebuttals when I call you. Who is this? Why are you calling me? How did you get my information? Let’s say the top ten. I’m not interested right off the bat. And you have these top ten. But again, as you talk about industry or vertical specific, like if we’re in legal or we’re in home services or whatever, you’re going to have different acronyms and different learning. So even though we have our base model for, let’s say, general conversation, we also have our models per vertical that get better and better. So as a company, we decided we can’t be in every vertical at the same time because we have too many models. We’re trying to train. Right. So we try to be within three to five vertical tops at a time. And until those are up and running 100%.
We don’t want to go outbound to other verticals just because we know what time it takes for that model to be trained. But the great thing is once we have, let’s say, a health insurance type client set up and running, we now have a model train that allows us to go after other insurance type products, whether it’s wellness checkups from a doctor’s office, appointment verification for a hospital, health insurance quotes, benefits verification, which is a huge call. You know how many doctors call a health insurance company just to verify benefits? Last time and again, you’re in Canada, you don’t have this issue. But as Americans, we’ve all been a doctor. In fact, I just had an appointment where I already had a Fax in there. They said Fax, which was great. I took a picture sending a copy of my insurance card so they could call in to verify benefits. How is it in 2022 that people have to call in to verify benefits? Because you’re calling in to somebody’s looking at a screen. But however, that’s another problem we can help with.
Yes. Even when you get, like, interagency stuff. That always drives me a little bit nutty when you think of the government work. I used to always get it when I would fly. And you have to be careful how cheeky you get with those. The folks at TSA, because they have to be a little bit more bland. But they would say, like, when was the last time that you crossed the border? And I’d be like, being honest, I fly a lot and I can’t remember. And you’re probably looking at the date right now. So whatever that is, it’s right about three weeks ago.
Yeah, for sure.
It’s like that data is out there. We shouldn’t have to have this weird hand offs and being able to introduce it, capture this data, and then feed it to a system that then can be built knowledge for a human to take it up from there. That’s the next Goldilock stone as far as I’m concerned about where conversational AI needs to go. It’s not just in treating it as a one and done, but taking that knowledge and then taking it further into enhancing the overall customer experience. And ultimately, even though we’re talking about enhancing the sales flow and business flow, you do that by enhancing the customer experience. That ultimately is always the true initial goal. The end goal is that what does that generate? More sales, more happy customers, more post sales, customer success opportunities, stuff like that?
Yeah. I always like to say our technology is here to help you sleep well at night, Mr. Company Owner. So we were like, hey, if I get 10,000 more sales this month, I need to hire another 2000 customer service agents or whatever the numbers are. Well, now guess what? With AI, we could just go ahead and ramp it up. Or if you’re a seasonal business say I sell flowers. And during Mother’s Day, wow, my business goes crazy. So maybe I need 5000 diesels, but after Mother’s Day, I only need 50. Well, again, I think Kobe taught us all. You got to be flexible in business. And so we allow that in our agreements. Like, here’s your minimum, which could be like ten. You go up to 5000, down to 500, and go up and down as you need on even a daily basis. Let’s just say you’re having one of those days. That’s just so slow. But going back to the data, Eric, which I think is an important point. A lot of times when we’ve talked with AI, people are talking about, okay, well, if you know you’re calling Louisiana, you could have a different accent and they think about things like this.
But it surprises me how many times external factors aren’t considered in making a successful contact to a client. That’s what we’re trying to do, right? We’re trying to get somebody on the phone’s, requested information or answer their call if they have a customer service issue. So we’ve tied in external factors. For example, what’s the weather? If Oklahoma just had a tornado, should we be calling people in Oklahoma? Right. However, it’s a Super Bowl one. The Super Bowl here. This is football for you, Mr. Eric, not hockey. Sorry about that. Yeah, well, the week where the team won. It’s been psychologically proven. When a sports team wins, people in that area that are sports fanatics spend more money. If their team loses, they spend less. Well, where should I not be calling? Possibly calling this week as an example.
If you want to be avoiding Cincinnati for a sales cost.
But there’s so much data out there, sometimes you don’t even know what to look at. And we’ve also assisted clients, non AI related, again, because we control all the technology. So, for example, we had a home security company, and their service really is based on your credit score. Well, there’s no way through public information can I get an accurate credit score. You just can’t do it, right, because of Privacy, et cetera, which is a good thing. However, there’s a lot of factors I can get from you called in to give me an idea of your credit. So, for example, if you call me on your at and T cell phone, I said, well, if you have an at and T plan, you probably had to have halfway decent credit to get that phone compared to a prepaid service where maybe the credit is not as high and somebody would need to send them to a different Department homeowner compared to renter, things of that sort. So there’s like 800 data points we have thus far. And I think we get more to, again, improve that customer service to help them get there and also help business owners make better decisions on who their customers really are.
By the way, I was also much more wrong than I am right. So I was just like looking at the data and we have so much data for the first time, you couldn’t get another great example is if you asked me what colors the sky. I said blue. Well, does that help the client better than saying dark blue, light blue depends on the weather. So we can have all these different responses. Think A. B. Testing on the web, but through our AI system to overtime to figure out which are the better results for each client. And that’s where it just gets so much fun and exciting. And one last point, while we were developing this and we were going through the different verticals, et cetera, we realized that the reason we had to develop our NLP was that the NLP that are out there all have a similar way that they process a conversation or the text. And you’ve probably seen it yourself, even on web based chat. You’re texting and you hit Enter and you see it takes like a minute or tens of seconds to come back. And we didn’t have that luxuries.
We had to figure out fast. So Jimmy and I realize is that the way that NLP process information, in our opinion, was an incomplete process. So we’ve come up with our own process and our own NLP of how we process a conversation. And to my knowledge, it’s not done this way. We’ve looked at it, we’ve done patent searches, et cetera. We’re still trying to find the right patent attorney to help us get that one done because it’s such a unique process. But this system has made it so much faster and so much more efficient on how it processes the data that the conversations are much more rapid and much more accurate. There’s examples. For example, if I said, where are you located? Or I said, where did you get my information? There’s a lot of products out there here to see the word where and say, oh, Boca Raton as an example. No, that wasn’t the intent of that sentence. Right. As a human, we got it right away. Other things like if I asked, are you over 65? And you say, I will be next week or I just have my birthday, well, that wasn’t a yes or no, right.
What did you mean by saying that in this NLP that we’ve created to be much more conversational, we took into consideration a lot more. And that’s why I think it took us an extra year to get to where we are today. But I’m glad we did because we have such an amazing product and service today. And more importantly, even though it’s great, we’re meeting so many other companies that are trying to implement AI that have other ideas and thoughts that they have that helped make us our product or service better. But at the same time, those conversations we have with other owners has just been exciting, too. And every 90 days, right. There’s so many neat things happening in the industry that it’s exciting. I mean, we really are still at the very beginning of AI. We’re definitely not halfway through. Regardless what you see online, the term AI is thrown around everywhere. Everybody’s AI now. Sometimes they just add extra fields. And I’m like adding extra fields to a CRM. Sorry, Mr. Sf out of San Francisco. There. That does not add AI to me. Help me make my business better, help me be more productive quicker.
Don’t make me analyze the data. Just give me the answers. And that’s kind of what our approach was. Yeah.
And that thing around latency in the discussion, I even had to just even funny. A visual audio matching is a real challenge that I bumped into early on. I actually changed platforms and changed some other hardware that I used for the podcast because I was using a really good streaming box that would go in and then I would have my USB microphones. I had a really good microphone and all stuff. And it was like a 200 millisecond latency from the audio channel, which it wasn’t obviously noticeable, but it was enough that people it kind of makes you squint a bit when you’re looking at someone talking and their voice and their audio and their mouth are not quite on, but they’re not off.
Right.
So it takes you out of the moment. And when we get the same thing with the conversation, when you hear a conversation with somebody and it sounds like they’re, you know, the CNN person calling a guy in Cobble going, yes, we’re on the ground here. And it’s really good, really fast paced conversation. I’ve got a great answer. Absolutely. There’s a lot of stuff going on.
Yeah, great.
Jeff, thank you very much. When you hear those gaps, it makes it mechanized and it removes your ability to stay. So you find yourself kind of like, come on, leaning into and it changes your mood about the conversation at that point, 100%.
Now you’re anxious. What that’s going on? It’s unknown because it’s not natural, right? It’s not conversational. It’s not humanlike. Again, AI one more time is how a computer thinks and acts like a human. That’s the basics, what we’re talking about. So a human is not going to take something and go, I’m sorry, can you repeat that? I’m sorry, can you repeat that? Which gets annoying. What would happen if you asked me a question? I didn’t know the answer. I’m going to say, I don’t know, let me get on Google and I said, let me call Bob and find out. And which Rob was saying that.
Hey, you know what?
I don’t know the answer. But Eric, I don’t want to get you wrong information. Give me a minute and most people go, okay, so if our AI gets stuck and has to transfer it, that’s good, because Eric got the information he needed as quickly as possible and didn’t have to worry about, oh, well, I don’t care about this person having the wrong answer. I’ve had that case where I call somebody and I ask them a question, and I could tell they don’t know. They’re like, you know what? I’m not really sure. I think we had somebody a couple of months ago that has I’m trying to remember. I’m like, I just want the answer right. How many times you have to talk and they’re looking something up on the screen, and all of sudden a you go, what colors of the sky? And what are they doing? They’re looking it up and you don’t even know. Have you ever been on a call you’re like, are you still there?
Right?
Yes. Am I still on the call? Right. Because again, it’s uncomfortable now, and now you’re in an uncomfortable, anxious situation. How much did your value drop of that company you’re working with? What’s the chance of you doing business with them? Because that’s an extra piece of uncertainty and doubt. So we want to remove all of that and make it as smooth as possible.
The challenge we often find, too, is when if you’re experienced at calling a call center, you’re actually not the target customer that you need to have. So you and I, we joke about this stuff because we’ve been inside it. I’ve helped build IVR systems. I still remember Meridian Mail mailbox number. I know the voice. It’s burned into my mind. I know her voice. If I ever met that person in real life, I’d be like, you’re the Meridian mailbox mailbox number lady, and we have to build these systems and think like systems. But the people that are really affected by this are the people that are just calling to talk to a human to get a question answered, or they’re getting a call now, an outbound call, and they want to be engaged, and they want to be able to have a path to somebody not to have an outbound call. Do you imagine this, an outbound call? And then someone responds back with, I’m sorry, I didn’t get that. I’m sorry, I didn’t get that. I’m sorry you would end up having somebody who’s like, look, you called me, and then they’d be screaming like Samuel L.
Jackson English mother effort. Do you speak like he’s yelling into the phone? Terrible experience, right?
Absolutely. Yeah. Your stuff you’re doing is Wild Pat Fleet. She was the one who did most of the voices for at and T back then that we all knew when you call, the number you have called is and that kind of thing. And she worked with Susan Bennett, and I forgot the third. I know a lot of telecom nerdiness.
I almost want you to get you to say is because you have such a fantastic voice. I almost wanted to say, like, high ball, three, high and wide, just a bit outside. You’ve got a perfect announcer voice.
You know what? I had a very short lived radio show in the 90s, and we were taken off immediately because nobody wanted to hear what we talked about because it was just me and my friend. And we were just saying, but I appreciate the compliment. I’ve heard it a lot. And I do get told I’m animated, which is when I do the voices for the AI. So in our very beginning, when we had our first recordings and we were kind of showed off and Jim and I said, listen, we’ve gone the organic route in business before. This is not our technology is too strong. Let’s get some money behind us and really push this. Like any business you want to be big, you need some resources behind you. Right. So as we were going out there trying to find investors and we would show recordings, we had people not calling us back. I’m like, I thought that was pretty good. And what we found out was a lot of people thought it was fraud. Well, that’s not an AI. You’re just talking to somebody and you recorded it. Right. So I actually made our first AI is me talking to me to remove that doubt.
But I’m very animated when I talk and can be. And so a lot of people just laughed at it because the AI took on my personality. Like, okay, and things of that sport, it was a little extreme, but it was still kind of fun. But I appreciate the compliment. Thank you.
When you go that route and that’s interesting thing. Right. Like the bootstrapping and revenue funded and that decision to go the next phase of growth, especially because you’ve got a strong amount of technology investment you’ve got to make. What was the sort of driver that said, we’re ready and we need this?
Yeah, there’s a couple. Number one, it took us about a good year to get past the latency issues. It was just too slow. And of course, we were trying to do things like where you cache the recordings or cache the voices and you go through all these tests. And actually our first one that we tried to put into production with a friendly client where we just wanted to test, Jimmy said, okay, listen, this works great, but it’s got to catch the calls. So your opening statement to an individual has to be at least 7 seconds long so we can load all the data. I’ll never forget it’s like, hey, my name is Brian calling with XYZ. So how are you doing today? We actually put the Oz and whatever. Actually, another guy worked with us, did the recording, did a great job, and just vamp. And so the funniest thing is that initial thing was saying, how are you doing today? That’s a human thing. You’ll never hear an AI really do that. And so in our AI, because we have things like how you doing today, to be more personable, to be more human was why we had an issue in the beginning, because they said, well, why is the AI doing that?
But once we had that first client who started seeing results, started getting the calls, and that’s when we said, okay, to go from A to B, it’s going to cost a lot more than we thought. And unfortunately, AI processing all is still not cheap. Any engineers or developers you need that have that skill set. And remember, when you’re in a brand new industry and AI really is brand new, you’re not going to find people with ten years of experience in AI. You’re not going to find people with five years experience. So you got to really kind of break it down to the piece, hey, we need a react guy here. We need some.net people there Cosmos people, whatever it is. And so we had to break it down. Well, all those people cost a lot. So in the beginning, Jimmy and I’ve been very blessed that we had enough friends and family to actually work with us knowing that, hey, we’re a startup, this may crash your burden, you may never get paid, but if so, here’s some stock. But we got past that where people are like, well, this is great, Brian, but I still have electricity to pay, right?
I still need some money coming in. So that’s when we said, let’s go ahead and raise that first million dollars. Let’s get out of the garage into an office. Let’s raise another 5 million. Let’s get the product done. Let’s get into revenue by this first quarter, and we are going into revenue this first quarter, which is great. But now our next thought as a company is it’s a lot quicker to buy revenue than generated. Remember, not everybody knows conversational AI for call centers exist, so it’s not a lot of search results for it. So there’s a lot of educational sales which traditionally cost more. So what we’ve done is we’ve been identifying targets and trying to buy complementary technologies to make our product better and get to pieces quicker and also add revenue because they also have a customer base that we can sell into. So it’s been an exciting time. But our next phrase is definitely more about acquisitions than implementation just to get that revenue quicker to get our evaluation higher. But the initial one was just like, we need a few good people and they’re not going to work for shares anymore.
They have some bills they need to pay. And I’m really glad we’ve done it. We’ve got such an amazing team. We’ve been again, so blessed, I can’t explain it luck, whatever you want to call it, that we’ve been able to find the people we have to work with us and take a risk as a start up. And I think it’s starting to pay off for a lot of people though. It is a fun business, too. I think that’s what makes it interesting is a lot of developers take a job and I built a database, and there’s really nothing you could show friends and family. Right. With our product. Every time somebody does something like, hey, look, there’s Brian doing another call or, hey, I’m Brian speaking over here, and I’ll do a live call and things of that sort. By the way, that’s the scariest thing. When you do live calls in front of like 1000 people or 200 people and those technology Gremlins love to come out of the woodwork. We’ve been very good on that, too. Yeah. So that’s always the scariest moments for me. But the technology is so strong and the people that we have working with us because again, we were able to raise the money to get some very good engineers on here, and now they have a product that they could see and touch and show off.
I think that’s what gives them the excitement about working with us, too.
Yeah. This is the real leap of faith is two sided in the startup ecosystem that people don’t realize is that number one, as an engineer coming on board to a company that specializes free revenue, there’s a real challenge of like, is this the right place? I need to be. Everybody’s got kind of there’s a lot of good ideas out there. There’s a lot of ideas. Then there’s a subset of those that are good ideas, then there’s a subset of those that are good ideas that have revenue opportunity and potential close at hand. So the field, like any marketing funnel, narrows. But then as a founder, you also have a leap of faith of you’re making an idea that you can bring to market that, you know, you have a path to revenue. You know, you have a path to growth that when you bring somebody on board, it’s a beautiful relationship. Those like early employees where you learn so much from each other, and it truly is like a family, which I know gets overused. And in fact, people get sometimes really angry when you say, like, if your company says that it’s like a family, it’s because they’re going to abuse your hours of your week.
Like, that could happen. Maybe. But I found quite the opposite. Like, I started with a start up and I was like, employee 200. So it was a big family already.
Yeah.
But we grew and grew, and I saw that culture maintained with growth, and it’s challenging to maintain that culture, but that two sided faith continued so much through it, which was a beautiful thing.
Well, we took some chances in the beginning. Again, I used to work team more than family because I always want that in the concept. But 100%. But some of the things that we did in the beginning, which was looking back now, I guess was a little gutsy in hindsight, is always 20,020. But one of the things I’m glad we did from day one, as soon as we started hiring people and bringing them on full time, saying your vacation time is unlimited, if you feel you need to take off two weeks or four weeks or whatever time you need to take off, I’m not going to give you two weeks of vacation pay. Take as much time as you need. Keep in mind, we’re a startup. There’s deliverables as long as you need them, do your job. So we took a little bit of chance to give them people to make sure that they understand that, yeah, this is a company, but I know your family at home is important also. So if you need to take off that week or two, I want to encourage it. And if the company has got to redo things around that, we’ll do it.
And a couple of investors in the beginning are like, are you sure about this? And we’re like, I know it’s a start up, right? It’s a scary, scary thing to do. And then also because again, we want to encourage to get good people, our cheapest employees. The bottom line, we have nobody that’s under $35,000 a year. And we could have gotten some people that were cheaper than that. And I saved a little money. But again, even like our base receptionist up, we want to make sure everybody that came to this company realize that we do care about your time. We do value your time. And the other hard thing we did again as a start up, a little gutsy was we got everybody. And again, you’re in Canada, you don’t have this issue, but we got everybody insurance from day one. So we raised a little money. We had to find those investors who agree with those values and not just the technology, because as we all know, it’s that team, those people that make something happen. And if you’re having an issue with your AI or you want to develop something, we want to make sure that that person who takes your call as our customer has a great experience, too.
And how do you do that? You got to take care of your people. So we’re very happy to say that every single employee that works for us and I don’t care what they do has shares in our company. So if we were on track for a Nasdaq IPO June next year, and if we get bought beforehand, great, but whatever. But worst case scenario, by 18 months or so from now, everyone’s going to have a nice little payday ahead of them, right? So we wanted everybody to not only have a good working environment and proper money and benefits today, but also have to have a future just like Jimmy and I are.
When it comes to road mapping and execution, I’m curious, especially because the complexity of what you’re building when you look back across road maps that were 18 month road maps. How well have you been able to stay on top? What are some of the biggest sort of things that you slipped, but for the right reason.
We basically had to redo our VoIP switch. So before we had Omar working with us, we had another gentleman who did a great job. But again, remember, we were startup. We didn’t have cash. So this was like, Jim and I have our own pockets paying the subcontractor here or hey, I owe you one kind of things. And our initial switch did get us a proof of concept. It did get us our initial funding. And then Jimmy knows me pretty well. And the last couple of companies we worked with, I’ve outsoled production. I know you’re shocked direct to hear that I’m a sales guy, but I’m a salesman. So he said, hey, listen, with this switch, we’re not going to be able to grow that quick. We’re not going to get that many businesses. We’re going to have to have a whole bunch of clusters. And this is not going to work. I think we need to start over because again, it’s such a new technology, what do you need to build and how to build it? You don’t know. Going back to my early analogy, you have a house built, you think you know everything. And then once you’re in, you’re like, man, now that I built it, I wish I could have done this differently or that differently.
Well, this was brand new technology. There was no resource to say you should build it XYZ. Nobody said the foundation should be six inches deep or anything of that sort. So after building it and realizing the latency that was happening on the void side and getting the privilege of working with Olmer to join our team, we had to redo that. That threw our time frame off by three months. There’s a rule of thumb. They say when you do, a technology company usually takes three times as long. It costs three times as much. The good thing is we came about a million dollars under budget. It took us about an extra five months to get into commercialization. But now we have something I could scale before if you would have said, hey, Brian, I have 50 days. I need to go to 500. You have to give me three days notice. Now it’s literally an hour or two again. So I’m glad we did that. We took the steps back to take the steps forward. And now that we have the diesel running, actually this week we released a 2.0 product, which is just so amazingly faster.
And we already have the 3.0. But that was our biggest, biggest change that we had to do was that VoIP piece. And it was just so underestimated by us. I guess in hindsight, being 2020, we were so concentrated on the brain and to get that work. And when we got it done. We’re like, yeah, then I’m like, cool, you plug it into Twilio and it’s like, no, I’m like plug it in and let’s make some money. So we had to take that Dag. It definitely cost us a little more. But again, we still came in under budget, took us a little more, and now the product is just so enterprise ready that we can’t scale up. We also redid another piece of the architecture, how we do the administration of the product. So before we had, let’s say in a typical CRM or most software, you have like say a God level and then kind of filters down to your managers and agents, we had a similar architecture. But with Jimmy realizes, hey, what if there’s a hiccup in the admin level? It could affect each client. So not to talk nerdy geeky, but just conceptually each client in their own basic silo.
Even our administration piece of it is a separate silo. So if any of these silos were to crash or have a problem, the rest of the machine keeps going. So we can literally have the administrator disappear and each client would be up and running. So that took some re architecture on the Azure cloud. And Jimmy and those guys, they could talk much more detail than I can. But the fact and we’ve actually tested it. We’ve done over a billion phone calls of the simulator and we’ve stressed test the heck out of it. And the thing is just cruising. The other thing about redoing it and moving from one cloud to another, we wound up on the Azure cloud testing. Our cost came down dramatically. So now our margins are where you would expect to be in a SAS model. And more importantly, we could scale so much quicker, we don’t have to order a lot more processors and memory so we could scale without any forklift upgrades, to use an old IBM term.
There you go. The one thing is there’s a lot of technology required in order to make technology be more human, right? And the ability for AI like now at least the accessibility of these technologies being on demand, seeing that commoditization of the back ends huge boon for you because those providers are never going to do what you’re doing. They just can’t. It’s too close to the true customer value. They’re in the infrastructure game, they’re in the services game. So this is a big win because ultimately Azure is going to love you, your customers are going to love you. You’re in a two sided marketplace on both sides. And it gives you as you grow, the opportunity to get wins with the provider side. And then if that the economy of scale starts to happen. And ultimately, then the customer, the true winner of all this is that end customer end. Like all the way. The person that’s getting that outbound call from that company that’s using you, that they don’t have to know you’ve got as your digital twin that’s making something happen. And so many layers down the line, they don’t need to know that.
But every layer has one because of the advancements in technology that in the end made the human experience better 100%.
And the other exciting thing on our roadmap is even though we focus on voice today, I’m sure you imagine, oh, well, I could also get a text, right? I could also do this through a chat or messenger, WhatsApp, etc. Or. Well, those conversations that you have over text and the conversation you have over voice are different. An email you get is usually not how you would speak to somebody when you would get an email. So how we converse going over different mediums is also a challenge because if you got a text that sounded exactly how I was speaking to you, it would look weird and vice versa. So the other exciting thing about our technology as we’re going on the channel is how to have the conversation adapt based on that medium you’re on. So again, to make that customer experience better. And by the way, Eric, I may call you and you’re like, I don’t want to talk, but can you give me a quote or text? Why not? How come I can’t? And maybe there’s some sensitive information you wouldn’t want to do, but I can’t tell you how many people are like, hey, let me just text you my credit card information.
I would never do that. But an end user might. So the technology again, still in its infancy, still such a long way to go. But where it is today and how it could be impactful today just to us is such an exciting thing. It really, really is.
It is an exciting time to be in this world and being able to do what we do. I feel blessed because of the opportunities we’ve got and excited by the ability to create those opportunities for others. And you guys are doing great stuff. Like I said, your energy is infectious in the greatest way because it will come through in product. It will come through in telling your story. And I really want to thank you for taking the time to share your story here for folks that do want to find more, which they should, because this is a really wicked cool, as my Boston friends would say, wicked cool product. So Vicodia will have links down below. And Brian, if they want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that?
Brian at Vocodia and that’s Brian with an I@vocodia.com.
That’s perfect. One thing I remember is like every once in a while you’d get these little things to be like a little Easter egg that would come up. I often think about doing this with like a voice AI, because you get those ones. It was like the old IVRS and some would say like, phone this number. It would show up on like Reddit or somewhere and it’s like for English press one for this whatever. To hear the sound of a duck, press nine.
I remember that I used to love the Aflac one we used to call in just to hear the duck or one of the vodka companies had Smirnoff. Remember they had Jacob smirk. You can call in and get a joke every day. We actually have on the new website coming out. There’s a couple of cool little fun things on there that we will talk about. We like for people to find. Yes, absolutely.
That is the fun part about mixing technology and human experience and you folks, you’re doing a great job so Congratulations on so far success and I wish you can’t continued success as you grow.
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David Kofoed Wind is the co-founder and CEO of Eduflow and Peergrade, a service for providing peer-evaluations and peer-feedback integrated into an enablement platform. David did his Ph.D. at The Technical University of Denmark with a focus on machine learning, data science, and educational technology and previously worked as a software developer for cBrain, Edlund A/S and at CERN.
We discuss how Peergrade was founded, the transition to Eduflow, lessons in pragmatic product management, and David’s personal challenge which led to founding a company.
Welcome back. It’s another episode of the DiscoPosse Podcast. My name is Eric Wright. I’m gonna be your host. This is a really great chat with David Wind for fear of really poorly butchering his name, I’m going to say he’s David Kofoed Wind. He was very kind enough to walk me through the pronunciation. And David is a fantastic human. He’s a founder, part of the co-founding team of EduFlow, and also a professor and really has a great history on what he brings to the educational world around his work with Peergrade and EduFlow. Tons of startup lessons, tons of lessons in how to build a good educational platform. So this is a founder’s rich pool of lessons.
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Hello, my name is David and I’m the CEO of EduFlow and you’re listening to the DiscoPosse Podcast.
I’m really, really enjoying in advance this discussion because this is a passionate area that I’ve really enjoyed a lot of work in around education and collaboration and creating engaging, collaborative ways to help people learn and advance their skills. So when the name EduFlow came up, and I looked at what you and the team are doing. It was like, all right, this is literally the platform and the concept that I’ve been waiting for, for a long time. And I’m only saddened by the fact that I only just recently learned about you. So, David, if you want to give a quick background for folks that are new to you, let’s talk about your story, who you are, and then we’ll get into the EduFlow story and the value. It’s really, really compelling for me.
Yeah. So I think I’ll try to see if I can wrap it all together in one coherent piece. Right. So who am I? Is kind of the start, right? So I’m David, as I said, right? Today, I’m the co-founder of a company, but this whole thing kind of started as I was a programmer. I was one of those kids who started the program when I was little. I was thinking about this the other day. I think I launched my first product or app when I was in 8th grade. So I’ve been, like, 13 years old or something. I built like, a skateboarding website or something.
Oh, wow.
It totally broke. Like, I had no idea about security or anything. All the passwords got leaked or something, but it was a good way to get my hands dirty. I had a sponsor that sponsored a pair of shoes, and it was really cool. So I’ve always been a coder, basically. And then I went to University. I studied math. I did a PhD in computer science. And then during my PhD, I got a chance to teach my own course. And I always loved teaching. And I probably also loved teaching more than researching. I found out during my PhD I wasn’t really good at research, but I had this course, and it was about big data, and everybody apparently loves big data. So I thought I would have 30 students, but I got 150 enrollments the first time, and that was cool. But it was also a lot more than I had planned for. So I had this course summary where it’s like, okay, weekly written assignments solve all these big problems. And then you did back at the envelope of math. When you see, okay, 150 students, weekly assignments, it’s like at least 40 hours a week upgrading. Does not make any sense, right? So I thought, okay, what can I do? And I’d heard about this idea of peer review before Costaro had these courses with peer review. So I thought, okay, maybe I can get the students to grade each other, and then I save some time and they can also learn something. So that’s what I did. I sat down aside of programming, as you always do when you’re a programmer, and thought, I can build this in a weekend, it won’t be too bad. And here I am, seven years later, I’m still working on it, but I started cooking up this peer review product, basically to help solve this problem. And then what happened was that my supervisor thought it was really cool. And he was like an entrepreneurial kind of guy. And he said, you should sell this to somebody. You should sell it to the Department. And it didn’t really make any sense, right? I was just a PhD student. I was doing this kind of at work, and it wasn’t a product. It was more use for me. But he kind of pulled me to the Department heads office and said, David’s going to sell you something.
And I was like, I built this thing called Peergrade, and you can do this and that. And the department head was pretty skeptical, to say the least. And he’s just like, oh, what does it cost them? $1,000 per calls? He just looked at me really scary. And then I said, okay, but then I won’t take any teaching assistance because I have the product. This would be enough. And he’s like, wow, that sounds like a good deal, because the teaching assistant is more expensive than $1,000. So I sold a product now that I didn’t have, and I didn’t have a company. And now I had no CA’s as well. So I kind of went back to my office, and then I called, well, I had one CA left there. I think I got one left. So I called my old high school friend and said, I messed up. I promised to sell something that I haven’t built your program as well. Can you come and help me? You can be my one CA, but just call this thing with me. And then I’ll run the course alone. And that’s how we started back in the day with PeerGrade. So we sat down, we built this peer Review, and we sold the first license to my own department. And then it became a company. We had to make a company to send the first invoice. So the whole story of Eduflow starts with another product, actually.
Well, that’s the interesting thing that you’ve literally given, like, every Silicon Valley story, right? Is that I had a concept. I found a prospective customer. You sold on the idea. They liked it so much that they wanted to buy it right there. And then you go hunting down. And the funny thing is, you had a chief revenue officer who was just basically saying, hey, David, come over here. He’s going to sell you something.
There’s so many incidents that are so random that you can’t bank on it. It just has to happen on its own at some point, right? And in this case, it was like, I’ve seen Cassera do Peer Reviews. I worked on some algorithm a year earlier that I could use for this. I was doing a PhD and I had this problem on my own. I had my old friend, I had a supervisor who was super easy going with entrepreneurship. All of these things combined made this happen. Right. But if any of those things didn’t work, it wouldn’t have happened. Right. So it’s kind of crazy how many random accidents have to happen at the same time for anything to work out. Right. But that’s what most companies are born, I guess you solve your own problem at the right time, at the right place, and then it becomes bigger than you think you go.
Yeah, I think part of the thing that we have as a challenge in telling the stories of startups is often the compression of the time frame. And there are sort of heroic moments that occur like weekends of coding. And like you hear about many, many companies that they’ll have a hackathon and it becomes what it will be, the landmark product for them. Usually it’s just this idea like we’ve got this brand new thing we want to develop. And so they hack it and they code it together really quickly. Then they solidify it and all of a sudden they realize it was built generally because you understood there was a problem that existed. When the reverse happens where you say, I’m going to take a blank slate of paper and I’m going to write down an idea and I’m going to code something towards that idea. It’s very different than you having true lived experience and an immediate problem. So the speed that you had to move at was abnormal just because of that. But it’s really a fantastic story and that’s why I love the background. Now, your own ability to influence what the product is.
That’s where I think is also interesting for folks that you were an instructor, you were a student. So you really understood both sides of it. When you talk to other founders and other folks that are thinking of developing a product, that’s actually a bit of a rarity. Do you find that yourself, like when you talk to other founders or other people that are in the tech space, that the fact that you really had direct experience, that helped a lot, probably in the ability to develop quickly.
Yeah, it totally does. Right. It doesn’t only have upside. Right. It’s massively helpful to be your own customer initially because you don’t have to talk to anybody else. The first 20 features you build, just build whatever you would like to have in the product and then you have one customer that you’re really building for who is yourself. And it makes iterating extremely fast and communication is always tricky, right. When you have an idea in your head and you have to get it in somebody else’s head, that can be complicated. But you don’t have to do that at the beginning if you are the customer as well, you can just take your idea and code it. Plus we had our students, right. So the first four months, five months of Peergrade’s live, we met them every Tuesday for 4 hours. Right. And they would line up outside our office and next to me and just give feedback and tell me how much it sucks or whatever. And then we would fix it and we would see all these weird box. It helped a lot. The challenge is if you’re very weird, then you’re building for an audience of only you. Maybe you are so rare, but the world is big. It’s unusual that you are so rare. Right. But that is the challenge that you could be building for a very niche audience to just build for yourself.
You really highlight an important piece there that getting feedback. So that feedback loop in iteration and feature development, you sort of had a captive audience because they were obviously engaged in it. Right. They had little choice because you had little choice. This is the only way you could host 150 students at once.
And they had even less. Right. I just forced it on them. They’re like, now you’re going to miss this whether you like it or not. This is how I run this course. You have to deal with it.
Well, David, the one thing that I think of, however many University profits that I’ve bumped into, your interactive process is beautiful because it’s so much better. You built this for the benefit of the students to be able to let them do what they could do in a large cohort versus a lot of I find a lot of professors, their whole goal is to write their own text and then they can make it mandatory and charge $180 for the text so that they’ve always got 30 brand new customers every semester. Everything about your approach to it was meant to make their experience better and coincidentally make your experience better. And that in itself, too, is a rarity that most folks just don’t have the ability to change the flow of engagement so well.
I think that’s one of the things that made Peergrade work is, there is a lot of these tech products for education. They only win on one of the sites. Either they help the teacher or they help the students. But then often the trade off is kind of a reverse on the other side. What’s kind of magical, not about peer grading itself, but about peer feedback as a concept is that, it has benefits on both sides. It’s not perfect for students. It’s not perfect for instructors. But it’s pretty good for both parties. And that’s quite magical, I think. And you would see people coming for both reasons, right? You would see some instructors saying, I don’t care, I’ll spend a lot more time. But I really think the learning benefits here are big. And you would have some who snuck up after the worship said, I love this. I don’t have to grade anymore. Right. They were just there for their own benefit, but still the students will learn something, right? So it has the disk of magic doubleness to it. I think.
As an educational content creator, how did it shape your ability to create new curriculum, new content more rapidly? And I say more effectively. That’s really the goal. I’ve created online courses then, you know, of course, it seems like it’s okay when I put it down on video. And then when you go through the peer review process, that’s when you find like, yeah, we have the curse of knowledge, especially as an instructor, it’s difficult sometimes to step back versus that when you have that highly engaged peer review process, it gives you a lot of checkpoints in which you can say like, oh, yeah, I moved past the concept too quickly, or I spent too long on one concept. Did you obviously felt the benefit. And how did you know that this was going to be worth building?
I didn’t know it was going to help in learning, honestly. I was at PhD in math, right. I knew it was going to help with my grading because that was kind of obvious. I could just decide not to grade anything. And there was like 40 hours a week saved that’s a lot of time. And I haven’t read any papers about the pedagogical, psychology or whatever. That happened later when I started interacting with the students and figure out, okay, it works for grading optimization. Now, how do we make it learning effective as well? Some of the things that they kind of come before you even touch the student side. Right? Because you’re like, okay, we have to have them greet each other. Well, how? What criteria are we going to give them? I guess we have to develop some kind of criteria. Oh, you learn something. It’s called a rubric. Then what do we do with what kind of rubric do we build? And then you talk to the students and you say, I’m going to have you do a peer review. And they say, we’re not doing that. And you’re like, oh, no, why not? We don’t trust each other. Okay, what do we do then? What about so we developed this feature earlier on called Flagging, where if the students got feedback they didn’t trust or like, or accept or whatever, they could click a flag and then I would review it. That was kind of like a safety valve for them. But that also gave all sorts of benefits where we would have interactions about all the feedback. That was confusing. We build in such something where, like, if I give you feedback, then you gave me feedback on my feedback with feedback, reflections, and all of these things kind of came as we started running the courses and started seeing, okay, this is where they get annoyed. This is where it stops working. How do we fix it? And then we kind of pile different features on top to make it a good experience. So that all came as we were running it, which I think was super interesting. It’s a good phase, I think, in the product as well. It’s very interesting, like talking to students face to face every day. I kind of missed that, actually.
Yeah, I think that’s really the advantage when you’re doing product development that a lot of traditional engineers start to forget is the interactivity is what really speeds the process. It ensures that you’re actually developing towards something that, you know, be used. And it’s also just great, like to hear real direct, honest feedback, even positive or negative for you. Like, hey, I’ve got this amazing feature. I spent all the time coding it, and it’s beautiful. And we’ve introduced 17 new JavaScript frameworks to make it a really neat user flow. And then you talk to the user and they’re like, no, I would never do that. That’s not the way I use the product. And a very common thing I see is then sort of the engineering team or product management, if not engaged, interactive will be like, well, you’re using it wrong. I know I’m building the product. Only I can know this product as well. You’re like, no, why are the users so dumb? Exactly why do they keep using this product the incorrect way? I always quote that sort of Steve Jobs thing where the Apple when the antenna problem.
They call it antenna gates. And this whole thing is that you’re holding the phone wrong. I’m like, well, I don’t think I agree with that. A lot of people are holding it wrong.
We could probably hold kick it wrong as well. There’s ways to best use the product, for sure.
Yeah, because I was doing some work myself around creating, engaging and mentoring with a lot of folks. I mentor people, and then I would talk to other people who are doing mentoring. And I would often say, like, how do you find the way that you best match with somebody who would be a good mentee or mentor? And it was funny. The more I did research on it real quick research, not super formal. I would say they look for the skill sets, they look for their current role. Is it something that I would like, you ideally want somebody who’s done the thing you would like to do and help them guide you towards it. But the most common features that made it a good relationship and a good outcome was common hobbies, other shared interests, other historical things, geolocation. There’s a lot of things that increased the chances of a successful mentoring outcome. And so I actually built this app that was really mostly a dating app that in the end you didn’t get a date, you got a mentor. And using all these criteria, it was like, this is fantastic. I could actually match people up very beautifully.
And so I built this thing, and I had a couple of other quick features that I was thinking would be important at the moment that I shared it with somebody. They’re like, I need these three things. And they never clicked on the tab that I thought would be, like, spectacular. You get to go beautiful dashboard, and you can see this information. They used it anecdotally much differently than I thought the data would drive. So it was a good lesson. And then I realized as a solo non-coder that I was in real trouble. So I sort of abandoned the project, unfortunately. But it was a good experience.
Yeah. And I owe you the rest of the story. Right. So we got to the point where Peergrade is up and running. Then it became a real company. Right. We found our third co-founder, Simon, because I’m a mathematician, he’s a physicist, and we can build things so we can’t make them nice. So Simon is a designer, and he kind of came in and helped us. Then we went down the classical startup path, right. We raised some capital from some angel investors. We went to Y Combinator in San Francisco, and that was a physical thing. And then we raised some more money and kind of hired a team and so on. And Peergrade worked kind of, well, it was growing. It still grows today. But I think after was it like three or four years. We started to see the limitations to the product in the market that we are product team. We like building products. We like coding. We like that kind of we can sell our own product, but we’re not driven as a sales culture or whatever. And peer grading software was not a big demand in the market overall. There was some demand, but not enough. So we would have to go and create demand everywhere. It’s like, hey, you need to do peer feedback. And then when we convince them of that, then we could start selling them feedback software. But there wasn’t even really a need. So that was one part of what happened. And then people really loved the product, but they just kind of wanted a little bit more than what we had. Like, oh, you can do peer feedback. What about teacher feedback? What about self reviews? What about other forms of peer feedback? And what about submitting again and all these things? And we’re like, yeah, I guess so. We kind of tried to make it work, but it was already too late. Period was getting a little bit technically complicated at that point. So we sat down in the summer house in 19, I think, and said, okay, what should we do? What about starting over? And then I think it was April 19, and we came up with the name a couple of days later, and we had zero lines of code again. And we said, okay, we’re building Peergrade if we had all the knowledge we have now, we would start over.
So basically EduFlow started as Peergrade 2.0. It’s just like, let’s build it again, slightly more flexible, better codebase. And then over the next year we realized a lot of things. But one thing we realized is that maybe we should do a better version of period, maybe we should build something different. But we rethink things a little bit more and that’s what eventually became Eduflow. So EduFlow is a learning platform called it has many names, right. But it’s a way to run online courses. And where we differ from the 9 million other online course tools is that it’s a way to run online courses that are very active and very collaborative. And that’s where the story is important. Right. Because everybody will say they build active and collaborative and social learning experiences. But we have a whole product just about collaborative feedback that we took as foundation for Eduflow. So everything you could do in Pivot, you can also do an Eduflow. So there’s a lot of functionality that is inherent to social, collaborative and active in there. So the courses that people run in Eduflow today that you can’t run anywhere else are the courses that are much more than videos and quizzes. Basically. I think that’s a huge differentiator too. That the thing we’ve got a lot of these days. I’m a user of a few platforms myself, right. Is this purely like video hosting and flow, of course. And purely in the like, getting from beginning to end chopping, measuring, maybe a couple of surveys in the middle. But most of the collaboration is just comments, which is not actually collaborative. It’s like when people always tell me, they said, like I said, I’ve got too many meetings. They said, well you like collaboration so you must enjoy it. I said, I like collaboration, I don’t like meetings. And that’s the difference between comments and collaborative feedback. Collaborative feedback allows you to take that comment and comment on the comments and then take that and feed it back into a total course. Like there are a lot of things that go beyond just someone writing. Good module really fast. I struggled with it, you get those. So that’s interesting. But then there’s no carry on.
And that’s what we saw. Right. So we’re looking at all the competitors and seeing what are they saying on their landing pages. And 50% of them say we have peer feedback functionality and what they have is people can submit something, which means they can upload a file and then you see a list of all the files in the course and then for each file there’s a comment feed like on Facebook where you can comment and people write awesome exclamation mark. That’s peer feedback in their world. For us that’s like nothing like peer feedback needs so much. You need rubrics, you need careful allocation of who’s giving feedback to the room. You need feedback on the feedback you need flagging. There’s tons of things you need to take care of if you want peer feedback to work. And that’s the key, I think. Peergrade was complicated because there’s a lot of things you need to do to make peer feedback even work. If you don’t do all the things, you’ll get nothing. You’ll have no effects. And if you do all the things, then it suddenly starts magically working. And that’s I think another kind of underlying thing in EduFlow is that the learning processes you build and can build in EduFlow are very scaffold and very structured.
It’s not just like come and take what you want and go here and there. It’s very carefully, like you do this. What you do here is then fed into this other activity where you then see something, but it depends on what you did in this third activity, what you’ll see. And you can create these very custom learning experiences that it requires a little bit of like almost like programming. Right. But like setting up the flow on the instructor side. But then the learning experience for the learners will be like personal and very interesting. So that’s where we try to differ. But the challenges on the landing pages, we all say we could do everything right. So you have to really get in to the product and start playing with it before you really see the differences I think.
I would say that EduFlow is to online course hosting what Salesforce is to Outlook contact management. So while there are notes features in my local contact view, it’s not collaborative, it doesn’t get better. It doesn’t let me take that thing and do another thing with it, because you can drive flow through feedback, because you can create that customizable flow and then engagement. At our true rubric of measurement, it is really head and shoulders above what these other things do, which is purely course hosting, like video hosting. Like I said, it’s fantastic. There’s a lot of folks that’s maybe all they need. But if you truly are creating corporate enablement, even sales enablement, like true enablement content versus lecture content.
I think that’s super interesting. That’s very important. Right. Because and that’s also why no product is for everybody. Right. There’s a ton of people who are using the thing they want to do is they want to sell a calls, they want to make some money on Twitter by selling a course. If that’s your goal, I don’t think it’s a bad idea necessarily to do a video course, because if people pay for the course, whether they complete it and whether they learn something will not make you richer. Essential, right. Of course, it will be good if they like the course and they’ll share it. But people buy houses for non-obvious reasons sometimes. It’s not always trivial to figure it out. Right. And another example is Coursera. Right. The way they make money, if they sell the certificate at the end of the course, if nobody completes the course, they don’t make any money on certificates. So if you look at Coursera’s paid courses, there’s no peer review. Why? Because peer review is hard. Right. You have to write something. It’s very effective for learning. But learning is also hard. Right. So if your business model is getting people through the course, you don’t necessarily want to make it hard. If your business model is built on getting people to learn something, well, then the causes might have to be hard. And that’s why I think we have fewer customers in the category where people are selling online growth marketing courses or whatever on Twitter. And we have more customers in internal company trading. So, for example, Google is one of our customers, maybe the biggest customer. And what’s interesting about Google is when we talk to them a while ago, I asked them, why did you buy Peergrade and ask you for, like, what’s going on here? When they bought into it a long time ago, we were basically a school product, and I didn’t get it. And they said, that’s exactly why we liked it, because you guys, everything else we look at is like corporate training software built by corporate training people, and they don’t really get it. But you came from education. You came from a place where you had rubrics and you had all of this. Because in a University, you don’t want students to complete the course. You want them to learn. Right. As a Professor, I’m okay with stating half the students, if they don’t know anything, it’s fine. Right. So the incentives are different, and I think we cater more to the community of people where they actually have to learn something. So process you can build an edge of law can be really hard. It’s not for everybody, right?
No. And I think that’s the best thing you can do as a founder as well as immediately disqualify folks that seem like they could be customers but will take you down a very different path. And understanding who your real customer persona is. Google would be in hindsight. Now, it’s like they’re obviously a great fit. They’re dominantly, well-educated engineers. They’ve been through that system, so they would map to it very beautifully, and they would understand the value of that. And the funny thing is, if you thought, I’m going to go to somebody to sell them, Google would almost seem like the last one. Like they’re filled with millions of hundreds of thousands of PhDs. Wouldn’t they just have built this themselves? But for them, it’s not their core focus. They don’t want to build an educational product. They want to build products that will drive revenue in other ways. So it actually is a perfect pairing. So Congratulations on that customer, because they will be just by scale and capability. A really fantastic way to get into the industry.
Yes. We love working with them as well. Just really nice people, actually.
And this is where it’s interesting, too, this idea of customization, I think I mentioned sort of the Salesforce as a comparative. Right. I’ve even called Salesforce for a couple of small, like, say, real estate companies. There’s folks that I was helping out years ago, and they said, I need a good CRM. Well, I would call Salesforce and say I need to get set up to walk them through it. And they would say, no, you cannot do that. We need to interview them. And what was interesting about the onboarding process was they really wanted to qualify their customer. So I’m interested in your team, David. When somebody does come to Eduflow, what is that onboarding process look like?
Yeah. So we actually have two types of customers. We have self-service and we have premium customers. We’re a small team, and I don’t think we’ll want to be a big team. We don’t mind being bigger, but we don’t want to be big. So I don’t like many teams, honestly. I like working with good people, but I don’t want to have middle managers. Then I know I’m fucked it up. Right, exactly. I like working with the people directly. Right. And to stay small and grow, you have to do things at scale. And self-service is part of that. Right. So we have a self-service component to the product where people just sign up and use it. The last customer I think I saw on Stripe was like a Romanian Church. Never thought about that. Right. And never talked to them. They just found out they could use it and signed up. But then we have the premium customers and those who qualify more, we talk to them. And this is also where I actually turn down people regularly. I try to be very honest on a sales call. If I can hear they’re looking for something we’re not, I’ll recommend a competitor because that’s much better than trying to win a deal we’ll lose eventually anyways. So talking about, like picking your customers. Right. One of the features that we don’t have that everybody thinks we should have is payments. You cannot pay for a course in Eduflow because of the thing I said before. Right. That the people who charge for their courses generally don’t have the right incentives. You can still do it. Right. But you have to make an integration with another tool and then you can charge with the other tool and then enroll in Eduflow. But we know that once we start going down that path of charging people for courses, then we become a marketing tool and not a learning tool like many of our competitors are doing that they have a ton of features around giving coupons and sending out grip email campaigns. And it’s not really related to the learning, which is what we care about. But yeah, we talk to the customers in these early calls to figure out what do they want to do? How can we help them do it? If they want to do something we’re not, recommend them to go somewhere else. If they are doing something with us, then they should start. And we try to get people in small and grow with us. Often people come to us and say, okay, I think according to our plans, we’ll have 10,000 learners in a year, but right now we have none. And then it’s perfect.
Start with the free plan, set up your courses and start growing. And if you hit 10,000 learners, here’s the price you’re going to see at that point. But don’t talk about it. Don’t do that right now. You don’t need to pay us money before you have real scale. And for us, it’s fine. Because if they already started building their courses in our product and they start growing, then comes kind of complicated for them to get out again. So it’s easier for us to just say, like, we have a free product, go test it, go play with it. It’s the way to have a small sales team and have a lot of customers is to make the customers able to look at the product themselves.
Well, in looking at your tiers of the platform, you actually do something, which is fantastic. And I would use it to measure most of the people that have the bronze, silver, gold type of tiering. Your free platform has very few limits, almost no limitations other than just like the amount of course content, like storage wise. But you’re not limiting users, students, anything. And it’s funny that as you move into the paid platform, then you begin to sort of like segment it a little bit more. So I love that. And it’s kind of like the way that when somebody won’t post any pricing, guilty as charged. Right. I work for a company and we didn’t post pricing publicly because there was a nurturing process to understand the customer story. And so it was. But I sort of joke when I want to buy a platform or test a platform out, and they had this real difficult sign-on process, they want to interview you. They don’t have pricing. They say, look, I can tell you how much it costs to send this to Space. I can go to SpaceX.com/rideshare and I can find out exactly what it costs for it to send that. And maybe I want to add a couple of stuffed cats. I know how big they are. I can send them to Space, and it cost me exactly what it says on the website. So if you’re a goofy sass product, doesn’t have public pricing, I’ve got a question. What you’re doing in this onboarding process.
It’s something we think a lot about. Right. And I think the bad news is that it would probably benefit us, at least in the short term, to not have pricing. Because the premium plans that we have are significantly more expensive than our self service plans. And then when people see the premium pricing, they’re like, Whoa. I thought, but pro is so cheap. Why is premium so expensive? And like, I shouldn’t have shown them the pro pricing. So I think we could win in the short term by not showing any pricing. But I think personally, I never touch a product that doesn’t have public pricing. And that’s because I’m a technical co-founder for a small company. I’m the persona that also reads news. And these kind of people were like, I’m allergic to sales people. I do not want to talk to them. If I can’t buy self-service, I’m not doing it. Not everybody is like me, right? Google is not like me. They take calls. They have security processes and whatever. But long term, I think the way to dominate and win a market like this, where we have a list of competitors in our Notion database, it’s like two other products in there, right? There’s ton of competitors. The way to win here is to do something different. And one of the things we’re able to do is that we have a self-service product that people can actually start using on their own. So we will become the entry-level product will become your first learning platform for internal training. We won’t be the biggest one. We won’t be in SAP competitors necessarily, but people will when they’re small, when there are 50 people, they don’t need SAP yet. They need to run onboarding codes, for example. And then they’ll be like us, and they’ll buy the product that fits them, the self-service product with public pricing. And then when there are 100 people or 1,000 people, they’re already in it to flow. They’re already used if they’re happy. So they won’t ever go to SAP. Right? That’s kind of the goal. And I think it can be a winning strategy. Paul Graham has a good essay about being the entry-level product in your category. And that’s basically our approach, right. Premium entry-level pricing. We still make most of our money on the premium customers, but a lot of those premium customers start as small customers, right? They start on their own, they start free, they do $20 a month, and then suddenly, boom, they’re premium customer.
So Paul Graham, many of his essays stand out. And actually that’s one of the ones is this concept of and it’s led really to a lot of people that call the topic of value pricing, and you’re getting this touchless self service experience. And so it’s actually very smart to price it according to quick entry. And then the moment you go to this next level, HubSpot is a great example. They do the same thing. Now, I won’t quote their numbers because the pricing may change but it’s something like $20 a month, $40 a month, $1250 a month. The moment you have a certain trigger. And it’s either, like, number of contacts, type of email, like adding if, then else flow into your email nurtures, you immediately move to this massive price bump. But if you’re using the free or the lower tier product already and you’re really involved in it and you’re using the adjacent products, you start to say, well, what’s the value I’m getting from this? Like, well, I’m selling product. I’m getting customers. Then you attach the value to the price.
We’re using. Right. I love it. We use hubspot of course. It was easy to start when we didn’t have any money when we were young and when we needed our first CRM, we didn’t want to go with Salesforce. We had to call them. I actually did call them. And then we’re like, oh, but HubSpot is kind of the same, and it’s free. Let’s do HubSpot. And here we are. We’re still in HubSpot, right? Seven years later.
That’s it. That ability to do that is fantastic. And I think if you’re looking for just, like, mass market, quick turn, like you said, if somebody wants to sell courses on how to do amateur photography, how to do like, I have a simple course on how to do effective product demos. It’s very fixed. It comes with an ebook at the end. I have an interactive thing, but it’s like I set up a Zoom call every month. So it’s very different. But it’s fixed. It’s simple. You consume at your pace. There’s nothing more to it. I honestly don’t want feedback other than I liked the course or I didn’t like the course. And the number of people that buy it is my greatest feedback because I don’t want to really build a truly interactive educational experience. It’s meant to be like, I’ve got a couple of things that it’s basically a webinar that I’ve cut into slices so that you don’t have to watch a two and a half hour webinar and people like it. And it’s great. So fixed value, fixed price, that’s all that I need. But the moment that I want to, I look at corporate enablement products all the time and what they do.
And David, you know this pain, right? If they just take those platforms and then even worse, they give them these awful 1990 pictures of people sitting around tables and pointing at things. They’ve taken the worst clip arts. And then a little pop up comes over, click here. And they force you to interact with it. But it’s more for, like, compliance training and human resources stuff. Like legal and compliance stuff. That’s what drives that. They don’t care about someone actually being involved in the enabled as a part of it. They’re just like, make sure they take the anti-money laundering training every year. You’re required by law to do it.
Yeah. And that’s one of the challenges, right. A lot of the people who come to us to look at our product, they come with an Excel sheet in their hand and say, like, Dear Eduflow, we have investigated the range of products, and you’re one of our top whatever. Can you please fill out this short Excel sheet? And then I open it. It’s like 250 rows of requirements. And then I said, oh, there’s a column called Priority. Oh, it’s all high priority then. Never mind. So then I have like a 250 row high priority requirements where it’s very important that we can do all these insane things. You wonder, like, how do they do this again? It’s probably like they send it out to everybody. Everybody can add their own requirements and then they just sum it up and they generate this massive list. And then that’s how they buy. Like, how many points do you get in a massive requirement dark? It’s a terrible way to buy products, right? It will make everybody kind of mad. Nobody will be super angry, but nobody will be really excited. Right? And the way for us around that is if they’re already using our product, if they already know the value it brings, then the requirement darkware looks slightly different when it ends up in our hands of density, because they know now what they should be asking about, not all the other things. Right? So I hate the conversations that start with that doc, because just know, nobody’s going to win. Nobody’s going to be happy at the end of this.
I’ve gone through RFP processes in so many places and it’s like even just competitive. Like, how are you different than X? Right? And so what do you do? We do exactly the same thing that every company does. You hand them a feature matrix with Harvey balls, you’re on the left with all full Harvey balls and one, three quarter Harvey ball because you don’t want to be arrogant. And then all of them are like, one quarter Harvey ball. And then I tell people, when I do competitive training for my own company said, you know that if you just move the logos and switch them, that’s what the competitor will say. And they can say it because they’re going to box us out with a word they use in the sentence.
And it seems like non-meaningful things, like, great support we have that, the other don’t, like meaningful pricing. What does it even mean? Right? They’ll make up things that don’t exist or like they’ll just have vague terms like the best user experience. Well, that’s us and not the others. It’s like totally opinionated stuff. And I hate those. We don’t have any of those matrixes because I just don’t like them. That’s the problem.
Well, that’s it. It unfortunately becomes, especially when you get to a true RFP, the measurement, the questions become very vanilla. The responses become very vanilla. You try to nuance words so that will isolate you as being differentiated. But in the end, it isn’t. The only advantage that those things get is quite often it gets rid of some of the marketing language. We try to hammer it in there because that’s how we differentiate by messaging. And you’re like, no, use the bloody product, use the product and you’ll see the differentiation. And that’s what you’re hoping to get to. This whole pre-qualification process is sad that we still have to go through it.
Well, I’ve started saying no unless they want to talk to me. So if they sent over a doc, I say, like I looked at the doc for five minutes, it looks kind of fine. Are you willing to take an hour on the phone with me and figure out what’s actually important here and see a demo of the product? If you’re not going to do that, I’m not going to fill out your 250 row Excel sheet because then you just send it out to it’s easy for them to just send it out to 100 vendors rather than they hope they get the work done for them.
Now talk about meaningful work and stuff that has a greater impact. Your description of when you went from this idea of what can I do around peer measurement, we’ve got this great product, we’ve got a company, we’ve got a successful company that’s running. Then you say, we want to create what would become Eduflow, wiping the slate and beginning from zero. Did you think that you would do that? And what are the real sort of both advantages and disadvantages to you taking that approach?
It’s very hard, right. I think there are some easy wins. Right. You can start over on the code base and you can delete my old code. When I was programming, I didn’t know a lot. Right. So that goes away. That’s nice. You get a lot of customer feedback, customers, data, all of these things that you have a much clearer picture because when I started, right in Peergrade, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know it was going to be a product. So I didn’t even have a table of users because it was just for me. Right. So I didn’t even need to log in. If you have this happenstance beginning, it evolves to be some kind of Frankenstein. Right. And then when you start over and you know, we already have hundreds of customers and so on, you can paint a much more clear picture of the end. So the sign wires, it just becomes a lot more coherent. The big problem is that things take time. I think what most entrepreneurs do wrong is that they stop too early. It really takes a long time to get something to work often. And if you just go for long enough, random things will happen once in a while that will just tell you forward and what we underestimated is how much momentum we had on Peergrade, right? So we’ve been going for three, four years. We’re like, things are going well, it’s growing. And we think, okay, we’ll build a better product, then it’s just accelerated even faster, right? So we spent a year building Eduflow from scratch and they were like, okay, now Eduflow is ready. Keep rate is still going up. And Eduflow row is just like, nothing is happening. And we’re like, yeah, we just invest a whole year and it’s much worse. It has to start from scratch again. We had to get momentum again. And then slowly it starts building up. And now age, of course, growing faster than Peergrade. But it took a while, right? It took a while to get the ball rolling because we’ve gotten to the point with Peergrade where people started writing academic papers about, we started getting mentioned in books people were writing and like, that takes a while, right. To get to the point where it’s such a household name. We have all Danish universities as customers. We have most Danish high schools as users or customers today. But they know us as Peergrade. We’re the Peergrade people. They are from Peergrade, right? The brand becomes so strong as well. So starting constraints is hard. But you can start with a bang, right? You can start with customers, you can start with revenue, with knowledge and a brand and an audience, right? So it is easier to start the second time, but also it will still take time, I think, yeah.
Even if I think it’s sort of the biggest example, if the founders of Google left Google and started another startup right now, the only thing they would get a lot of is investors, not customers. Even though we know what as a customer of Google services, I can get from it, what we do know is as an investor, you’ll probably make a gargantuan amount of money in ROI. There’s that level of trust. So like, as a founding team, people are like, yeah, these are the guys that brought us something that we know and we trust and it’s got this incredible market momentum. But as much as they love it, they’re always going to still wait before they buy the product or they license the product. They’ll watch. And it’s always funny, even in stuff that I’ve done in tech community stuff all the time. I started running sort of an online competition. We literally did a reality competition for IT architecture. And we took like twelve people and then narrowed it down and made it almost like an Ink Master. We called it Virtual Design Master. And I would go to everybody and say, like, they knew what I did as far as speaking engagements.
They knew how I engaged people and ran these small community groups. And so I had this fantastic thing. I had all of this recognition. I have all of this trust of this incredible peer network. And I said, what we need is we need sponsors to have prizes. And every single one said, this looks great. Love the idea. We’ll be in for season two. It won’t be a season two if there’s no season one. And I need prize money for season one. And so it was through grinding and scraping, even with that history that I could have brought to it, it was really, really interesting. So I love that you’ve highlighted that as a thing. Like even YouTubers, right? They could have a fantastically strong YouTube channel and following. And then they say, I’ve got another channel. Well, it starts from zero and it may tick up faster as they’ve got if they’ve got a huge fan base. But it’s more than zero friction to move people over to that thing. And that’s literally click and subscribe. That’s the simplest possible low friction thing you can have. You are bringing people into a different product that has different outcomes.
I see it over and over also in consumer rights. So recently there was a housewife. It’s a big thing, right? They really managed to drum up a lot of attention with the help of their investors and reason horrors and so on. And then people are like, this looks like it’s going to be massive. And then it took a while, but then the inner mechanics retention started really showing, right? And then like, oh, it didn’t actually work, but they got very last before people started training. And now it’s slowly dying, right. And you see this constantly with famous people, especially who launch products. They’ll get a lot of attention coming out the gate. They’ll get a lot of sign ups in the early days. And then when the PR is over, right? Then it’s just a slow ramp down to nothing because the chain is too high. Why the people just disappear. So I think if your retention is good and all of that, like PR and so on, can help a lot. If it’s not, it doesn’t matter. It will just take longer for you to die eventually. The more you get up in the beginning.
When you begin, how did you introduce measurement of success in product consumption?
Measurement of success? I don’t know, actually. So we’ve always been asked by people in the old days like, hey, so how do I know if Peergrad and Eduflow works? Do you have efficacy studies and so on? And I was always like, honestly, I was just like, first of all, it’s complicated to run an efficacy study on an educational product because maybe it’ll work for Mrs. Anderson in 6th grade in Ohio or whatever. And then one word for the next person. So that’s hard. You need real big intervention studies. Second of all, what if it doesn’t work? I don’t want to run some kind of third party unbiased study. And then they published that period made to go sucks, right? So I was like a little bit hesitant, even though I had a pretty good feeling about it to do anything. Then I started thinking more about it. And then when I started to see how complicated it would be to do an actual efficacy study, we decided to ignore it and say we don’t know better than the users. But if the instructors, if the teachers keep coming back and they keep using this product semester after semester, something is working, right? They know their classrooms and they’re busy. Right? There’s an opportunity cost using one intervention in their courses, right. Using peer review means they can’t do another thing. So if they keep using that, then surely there must be some value they’re getting eventually. And this is actually also by combinators internal tech startup advisors. Like just talk about user growth. If your users are growing, something is working. Don’t worry too much about efficacy studies. And that’s kind of how we landed on it. We’ve done some and it works. So it’s all good. But we didn’t go all in and trying to set up some official study. I think it would have helped with sales. Sometimes they would have liked some kind of cool looking white paper, but for us it didn’t matter too much. As long as people like this we were having yeah.
And I guess in some spaces it’s necessary. Especially large like enterprise products. They have to have the sort of like the Gartner and the Forester like economic impact, valuation study and stuff like that. But it’s way further down the road and very different target audience. It’s that big enterprise buyer, but they’re looking to affect the PNL for a business unit in their company versus you’ve got a better niche and an easily measure more easily measurable value. Just like I said, retention. If I can get retention, then that’s where we know that if people are still using it, we’re doing something right. And now we can dig in further on it.
I think also as a researcher mathematician, I’m also just like a skeptic of any simple answers, right? Like my wife is also researcher and she researches in complexity theory in like the humanities. But the common thing at home is it’s complicated, right? It’s always complicated. All these companies will try landing page with like better, whatever. No, like it’s not that simple. Nothing works that simple, right. If I send more code emails, but they’re worse still won’t get me more money, right? Or if I do my support tickets faster, that doesn’t lead to revenue growth in itself. It’s so complicated. And I think that’s my stance on everything, especially with our product. We’re like a training product. Of course, if you train your employees better, something good will come out of it at the end. But I have no possible way to connect the use of Eduflow to top-line revenue or something for corporate. I could try and I can make some numbers up in Excel. Right. But don’t trust it. Right. It doesn’t make any sense. And if our competitors are doing it, they’re just lying. Right. But I don’t really believe in those kinds of things.
Yeah. And it’s a really tricky thing, especially talking about the educated founders.
Right.
You’re a mathematician, a physicist, and a designer. You’re the most perfect sort of set of folks to put into a room and said, you’re going to come out of here with a product, and you know, it’s going to be all the things. You could just go back to Y Combinator every year probably, and create new products. I love that. The diversity and the strength of your own backgrounds really are.
That also ties into the curse of knowledge that you mentioned. Right. It has many sides to it. One is like the knowledge of things, but also this idea that as a statistician, I did machine learning and statistics. I know stats are fake. Right. Most statistics are just lies, and it means that I don’t trust them. But you have to remember that other people do. You can have this weird bias to not do things that work because you will see through it yourself. And I think that’s a trap sometimes to fall into not selling enough, not marketing enough, not talking big enough words because you wouldn’t fall for it. But most customers aren’t like you.
That is a tricky one, too, especially when you’re a technical founder. You’re already like, I know this is BS. I don’t want to say these things because it’s like, but I joked with somebody recently and I realized I should actually quote this. So my podcast happens to be the top 1% of all podcasts. And it was like three different platforms that kind of showed me the statistic. And like, okay, this is really cool. I could say I’m in the top 1%. Well, there’s 3.3 million podcasts. So I could be the bottom of that 1%. And there are hundreds of thousands of competitors who have me. But to most people, you just say, I have a podcast that’s in the top 1% of all podcasts. They’re like, holy moly!
Very effective marketing. Right. It’s good pitch, and that’s kind of the challenge. What does that even really mean? Like, what is it measured on? What do anybody even have those numbers? There’s surely some power law. There’s all these things underneath that. Once you really dig into it, all these numbers are kind of weird to think about. But on the surface level, because I told this not 1% thing to my wife, she’s like, Whoa, for people who don’t do math, it’s like these things just are very impressive on the surface. Right. But yeah, it’s very interesting how to use that effectively because never lie. Right. But always like, don’t undersell necessarily is also a good idea.
Yes. I often tell people even who are in product marketing and engineering. The best thing you could do is go through the writings of Daniel Conneman and Amos Tuberski, like the idea of prospect theory and understanding how these heuristics work. It can help to guide you on these things. I had a founder. He was really incredible, such an incredible knowledge that he brought stuff. But he was almost like people thought he was an absent minded professor. He just had no bother with speaking. He’s just like he’s always thinking. And when he didn’t speak, it was meaningful and loud. He’s Israelis. He was argumentative. And it was a really fun relationship. And I remembered at one point, someone would talk about the product, like, what’s game changing and unique way we solve this problem. And he would finally say, like, stop, stop. Did you have a lot of friends when you were in high school? And you’d be looking around going, oh, no, I’m in trouble. I don’t know what’s going on.
You’d say like, yes.
And you’d say, Was it because you were unique? And you be like, no. Then why do you use the word unique to describe our product? And he just like, caught what’s an actual thing you can describe about what we do that’s meaningful to somebody game changing, unique industry first. Like, all these superlatives are throwaways, however, on the front page of every marketing website, right?
Yeah, unique and so on. And I think it’s also wrapping a few threads together. Right. It’s around, like when you’re looking at a product, trying to sell a product, and there are some things that are very important that are very hard to measure. If one of them is user experience, is it a good user experience? And I get this question weekly, at least from a customer or potentially customers, like, how’s your user experience is it good? And I always answer, like, that’s a terrible question because all of my competitors and me, we will say we have the best user experience. You got to find a way to measure it somehow, right?
Yeah.
And I tell them, you can’t trust me. I’m just going to say we’re the best, but you have to find a way to figure it out. And my only way to give some form of validation of our user experience is that we have a self service product. It has to be good in user experience. Otherwise people won’t start using it without, like, talking to a salesperson, whereas our competitors, generally, you have to buy it before you can use it. So they don’t need to have a good user experience. Maybe that’s why you should trust us, but honestly, you got to try it yourself. So there’s something about these things that are hard to validate. You have to find a method of validating them anyways.
I often describe user experience is like a painted room. When you walk out of a room and then someone paints it, you walk back into it. It just is done, it feels done, it looks done. So user experience when it’s done right is non obvious. User experience when it’s done wrong, very obvious. And retention. And there are measurements that you can have as far as the way that they engage in the product. But yeah, it’s such an odd thing to get asked, but we get it because unfortunately, this is how we’re measured of the words we describe as a fantastic user experience. Low friction, self sign up, no sales calls, all of these things you say in the end, it’s the greatest thing that you can say. It’s here, it’s $0. Try it.
Yeah. See if you like. I guess if somebody could come up, maybe this is a hypothetical. Right. But if somebody come up with a way to measure user experience in a number of a product, then it would help the enterprise buyers a lot because they could put it in their requirement Doc and give it a weight and say User Experience 30% will use this novel method for calculating user experience in a good way and then base it on that. But because there is none, then the vendor has to tell you how good the user experience is. And would you ever believe that? Honestly, that makes no sense, right? That’s right. So they should either test it themselves or they should have like a third party company that will just go and test products and give them a score, one to five or something. But that’s so bad. Nobody can do it.
No. It’s such a dangerous amount of influence. Even NPS scores are like, I know we all have to do this as an industry, but it’s like the NPS score is such a false because you go to your existing happy customers. I need you to fill this NPS survey. You never go to a customer. That said, can you fill out an NPS survey for me.
Please go to D two and Captera and rate our product. Now we know you hate it. Sure. Everybody has 4.8 or whatever on D Two and keptera because you only ask your favorite customers to go there. Right. It makes no sense.
Yeah. And the interesting thing about feedback, too, is it’s middle of the road feedback is tough to get. And what’s interesting about your peer review, I know we don’t have much time left, but I want to start tap into this real quickly. You either get edges of feedback, ten out of ten or one out of ten would not use again. How do you get effective use of four to seven? Like that middle of the road feedback? And how does that affect your rubric inside the product yourself?
Yeah. I never use a scale that’s more than three levels myself because I’ve seen the one in ten problem on Imtb and so on. Everybody’s just I hate it. I love it. So personally, I always go for very small scales. I think one of the things we’ve done a lot of work on with Rubrics is to make every level meaningful. So it’s not numbers like, how good is this? One to five. It’s like, how good is it? And then the five levels will be very explanatory. Let’s say it’s a video pitch, right. That you’re giving feedback to. They’ll be three questions. One is about style, and then you’ll have how good was the style? And then they’ll be like, the style was bad. It had some of these problems. The style was okay, it had some of these, but not some of these. The style was great. It had all of these. So it makes it very clear for the reviewer, am I giving one, two or three here? It also makes it very clear for the receiver, like, okay, I got a two, to get a three, I need to do these things. So to tie actionable constructive feedback into the numerical ratings is the way to make really good assessment rubrics, I guess. And this is maybe even more important, like feedback. You don’t learn anything from getting feedback. You only learn if you do something with the feedback. You have to at least read it. You probably also have to think about it. And mostly you have to work with it. And I think that’s what most people forget, right. They go to school, they hand in their paper, they get it back, they put the feedback in the backpack, and they never look at it. Feedback wasted. Nobody learned anything from this. Maybe the teacher learned a lot, actually, because they wrote the feedback. That’s pretty hard. But they’re not supposed to be learning. Right. It’s the students. So feedback. Everybody thinks about how good the feedback is, but nobody thinks about how do we get people to learn from the feedback? People totally forget that part, which is kind of scary, actually. So almost all of the work we’ve done since then has been since we realized this. It’s like, how do we get people to use the feedback? Learn from it.
Yeah. It’s the difference between an UDA loop and confirmation bias. Right. You’re just like simply I read out of feedback what I want to get out of it, and then I shed it altogether. This is meant to support my current feeling. Well, David, thank you very much. This has really been great. And for folks, I would love to actually have you back and talk a bit more longer form. But the Y Combinator experience, because that’s an interesting one that I didn’t want to dabble in because it’s a very unique thing. And given that you went through it and your team make up is very interesting to me. A lot of people could learn from that. So we’d love to catch up again on future. But for folks that do want to get connected with you, of course, we’ll have links to Eduflow and make sure people can get access there. What’s the best way if they wanted to reach out and give some feedback?
Yeah, they can always find me on all the social media like Google my name I have my own name, nobody else has it. So you’ll find me on all the social media profiles and everything but Twitter, LinkedIn or write me an email to even a day to flow a car.
Perfect. Yeah, that’s how I ended up with DiscoPosse, people. At this point I don’t even have to explain it anymore. I feel like it’s just sort of stuck. It was a band that I was in and if you Google Eric Wright it’s like Eze his name was Eric Wright. There’s a very prominent US NFL football player named Eric Wright. There’s a Canadian author named Eric Wright. I didn’t stand a chance of getting social media anywhere for Eric Wright so my DiscoPosse bands was the one I picked as my domain name way back when. That’s as unique as I can get. Well, good stuff, David. Thank you very much. It’s been a real pleasure.
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Donna Loughlin is the Founder of LMGPR known for her work with futurists and innovators. She has launched more than 500 companies taking them from stealth to market leaders since forming her agency in 2002.
She is also the host of BeforeItHappened, a leading narrative podcast featuring visionaries and the moments, events, and realizations that inspired them to change our lives for the better.
Donna and I talk about the origins of her story, how PR has fundamentally changed, and how roots in Silicon Valley are still strong and rich with lessons we can carry to the future of science and technology.
Welcome everybody to the show. This is Eric Wright. I’m the host for your DiscoPosse podcast. Thank you for listening, watching. Oh, that’s right. If you are listening now and you want to see this in video action, you can head on over to YouTube.Com/discopossepodcast and you can see it all as it happened, which was really cool. Nice new element for the listening podcast if you want to see the viewer side of it all. This is a great episode featuring Donna Laughlin, who is the founder of LMGPR, and she’s also the voice behind the “Before It Happened” podcast.
Donna is a fantastic storyteller. Fantastic, as she describes it, the PR SheDevil. Super cool. We get into the background to that, her own history in Silicon Valley. What drew her to the industry? Really, really enjoyable. And I think of the people in the industry that I know, do such a great job that I would trust my company to them. Donna is one of those folks, so she’s really really got a good sense of how to draw fantastic stories out of the human experience, especially with really wild like, way out of the curve technology companies. So, go check her out.
But in the meantime, speaking of checking out companies that are super cool, that I really adore, I want to give a shout out to the folks that do support this podcast, including a friend over at Veeam Software. They’ve got some really neat stuff going on, so you’ve got to check out new landing page. All you got to do is go to Vee.Am/discoposse. You will love what you see there. Very cool. Everything you need for your data protection needs, regardless of whether it’s on Prem in the cloud, cloud native wow and SAS stuff, even stuff like Microsoft Teams and your Office 365 and more coming. So you got to get over there and check it out. Definitely worthwhile. Vee.Am/discoposse. And when you talk about other things around, protecting yourself, protecting your identity, protecting your data in transit, I recommend that you should use a VPN, as do I. So if you want to try one out, I do recommend using ExpressVPN. I’m a customer. If you want to go, it’s very easy to do, go to tryexpressvpn.com/discoposse. And that’s an easy way to get hooked up there and make sure you protect yourself because there’s a lot of bad stuff going on out in the world.
And while you’re at it, don’t forget to enjoy a fantastic, tasty, delicious diabolical coffee. Go to Diabolicalcoffee.com and caffeinate your way to goodness. All right. This is Donna Laughlin. Enjoy the show.
Hi, everyone. This is Donna Laughlin from Silicon Valley, and this is the DiscoPosse Podcast. I’m the host of “Before It Happened”, and I’m a known for in the Silicon Valley as sometimes the PR SheDevil.
I love it. The PR SheDevil is officially the best title ever. So people always say they want to have founder beside the name, I’d say PR SheDevil is way cooler than founder. So, Donna, thank you very much for joining. I’m excited by the chance to chat today.
Yeah, absolutely. I’m so excited to be here. Thank you.
This is a beautiful thing where I love when you read a book and you’re interested in that book, and then that book references another book that you’ve already read, and then, you know, you’re like, this is it. I’m in my perfect space. When your name came to me as a potential guest, Donna, it was that moment where I said, wait a second. Storyteller, podcaster, Silicon Valley. This could be my last podcast. I have officially hit the perfect guest. So you’ve got a fantastic background in what you bring to the world. You have an amazing, I love your podcast style. So Donna, if you want to introduce yourself to the viewers and listeners, and then we’re going to jump into what the PR SheDevil does. And of course, we’ll talk about your podcast and much more.
The SheDevil is a little bit naughty, but a whole lot nice. For the last 20 years, I’ve had my PR agency called LMGPR, which stands for Leadership, Momentum and Growth, which is ultimately what I do working with emerging tech companies. Oftentimes there are two guys and a cat or two gals and a dog, and they have a great idea and looking to bring a company to market. Other times, the product is much further along and they’re gearing up for funding or for even an IPO. My role in collaborating with them is very hands on in developing the core messaging, the narrative to bring a product to market and not just the product, but also the company. And that means the texture and the fabric of who are the visionaries behind the company. And that’s what really ignites me. And that’s what my podcast is about, too, is the visionaries in the future that they imagine.
Well, in your intro, which I love, just beautifully well-produced, and I love that style. I’m sort of the free forum. It does not have time or capability to edit in such a beautiful way. But your idea of “Before It Happened” to the moment you really know how to go through this discussion and then pin down the thing that sometimes people don’t even realize. That’s actually the thing. It’s what makes a great author. If you read Steven Pressfield and you read about this whole style of PR and playwriting and screenwriting and everything and storytelling, it’s like that pinpoint moment that then you wrap in this fantastic, the run up, the conflict, like it’s all fundamentals. It seems effortless in the way you do it, which I know that means it’s absolutely not.
Do you remember when you were a child and you would be a story out, whether it be at school or with your parents or your grandparents, and you would sit in a circle and so ultimately was what I really wanted to achieve with “Before It Happened” was that, opportunity where you have this up close and personal kind of story time with somebody who’s actually changing how we live and work. And to do that, I couldn’t do a straight interview. I wanted to do kind of a narrative style. I’m a former news reporter, and so I would go out and interview, and I would come back and report. And so it is a slightly longer process, but the goal is to create something that is a little bit of a gift back to these individuals that have worked super hard in undaunting hours. And whether it is raising funding or finding, getting the patents approved and all the things that they do. I’m just in awe that this unstoppable spirit that we know that the entrepreneur has. But in my scenario, it’s these big idea creators. And I’m not a tinkerer. I’m more of a thinker. And I sit back and I look at in all respect and saying, wow, we can actually do this. We can drive an electric car. We can have a smart device in our home, and we can charge our vehicle to home with an electric motorcycle. All these things just are enchanting to me.
I think the key to any of the success of these technologies and these platforms and these websites, whatever they are, any business, is really about making it matter to the prospective customer. And when you’re the creator, when you’re the innovator, it’s very difficult to be that focused on it. They probably shouldn’t be. In fact, they should be like, I know amazing engineers who are creating fantastic systems, and they probably wouldn’t pass a touring test. I would never want to put them in charge of the website or the marketing or understanding the customer story and being able to emote that. And that’s really what it is. It’s not just writing down what we do. It is making someone care about what we’re going to achieve together and empowering them. It’s the hero’s journey. It’s all this stuff. And when paired with a great technology and being able to give them that capability to find their story, it needs to come from outside, I think, because when you’re close to it, when you’re inside, they can’t possibly be thinking that way. Like, it’s too hard, you’re way too introspective, and you have to be, to be this fanatical founder’s mindset of like, the world is wrong I’m gonna solve it this way.
Yeah. Well, too often I’ve experienced what I call ego engineering, which is my own term. There’s ego engineering, and then there’s innovation. There are true innovators that imagine the most amazing products and concepts that sometimes don’t even go to market. And then I’ve met over the years others who have a me-too product that’s not even a challenger product that have egos that are bigger than the sum of its parts. And those products usually don’t go very far. And those are typically not the ones that I work with. But in the land of unicorns, we see a lot of them. And I’m not going to name any, but we just know what’s the kind of the fashion anistas of the time. I really look for the acorns that ultimately can grow to be these majestic oaks, right. You’ve got to start some someplaceplace. And so to me, the unicorns. Unicorns are great. We all need them for financial purposes, and oftentimes we chase the unicorn, but planting seeds and developing something from scratch. Before a unicorn existed, they had to come from someplace. And you get people like, I love Guy Bras and how I built this. It’s one of my favorite podcasts, and it’s many people’s favorite podcasts, but he really profiles the unicorns. And I felt my sweet spot is working and collaborating and on my podcast showcasing the Acorns. In fact, I have an Acorn this week that’s actually going to IPO. That’s really exciting to see a company go from in the last seven years going from zero to hero.
It’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it, to see it come to fruition. Because it’s not a winning game. A lot of the statistics are not in favor of the business succeeding. There’s a lot of headwinds. There’s a lot of stuff. In looking back, what draws you to be able to coach them through that journey and bring them through that journey?
It really starts with listening. And so often we don’t listen and we respond, which is just human nature. It has nothing to do with being a reporter or in marketing. But, really listening and being able to extract the content. So when I first started out in my career, I would go out with another reporter. And his number one thing with me was, “watch me”. Don’t say anything. Just watch me. Watch me in action. And so that was his way of teaching me kind of the ropes of listening and being able to collect. Because the more you listen, I think the more people talk. And so it’s very important when I’m abstracting information from a scientist, an engineer, founders of a new product or company, and it’s really listening, but helping them also rediscover what they might have forgotten because they’ve been so busy on developing the product and meeting patent deadlines or getting funding. And so going back to that discovery phase, the same way I described sitting down and having a story hour is I literally take them to a process. What is a self discovery process, of going back to the roots of why do they even set out to create the product? What is their vision? And so oftentimes the company mission statement when the company is forging ahead. But if we go back to what was the vision that you had? Was there a dream? Was there a problem that you were solving? Was there a moment that you realized that you wanted to create a carbon footprint, energy saving, operational building device, which is a mouthful or an electric motorcycle or an electric tractor. Like, what really happened? And so really going through that discovery process and reigniting them as well to like, wow, you know what? I actually imagine you’re using a Disney word, but something that nobody else had. But, what is the problem? And then what is the solution to that problem? And really taking them back to that root? Because oftentimes they get so tangled up and all the other intricacies of things, they forget what their original origin was.
Yeah. And I think that the vision and the mission, the only people that can carry that so strongly are often the founding team, as much as you can create those early disciples, the first ten employees, the first 20 employees, even later on down the road, the folks that really built the idea, then they built the product to deliver the idea. The idea is still in them. But most people beyond that are product builders, not idea. Like, they’re not necessarily attached to the idea strongly. And this is where you have this funny thing. There’s like, a great book called The Founders Mentality. I think it’s by Bane and Company. They’re Boston based.
Great book. Read it.
Yeah. So, at my company’s engineering kickoff, I noticed we were in this weird sort of struggle of like where product was diverging from vision and we were struggling with where we were. Well, capital. Everything was going well, but you could tell there was tension in – should we build a feature or should we go back to the core? And I really saw this pull. So I showed it to our founder. And then when I got to the engineering kickoff, it was the most warm feeling I’ve ever had in my body and my mind as I walked in and I saw 200 seats, each with a copy of The Founders Mentality sitting on it.
Wow.
Because what we wanted to get to was this. Remember why we’re here. What we’re doing now is important, but what’s more important is why we are doing it. And it really allowed everybody to go back to the core of what was the reason we did this. And ten years, twelve years at any company’s age, it’s like having a teenager. They’re suddenly, like, forgetting that they were the kid that wore a Pokemon costume at age six and they want to be their own thing. And you realize you can’t forget your upbringing, you can’t forget what got you here.
I’ve been to some meetings where grown people wearing Pokemon costumes and hanging onto the dream.
That’s it. I love this idea of making sure that people stay true to that, because also that comes with culture, too, right? Like, culture is the way they behave when you’re not looking. It’s not the thing written behind the desk at the front, by the elevator.
Yeah. I was just going to say that. And also they know that founders’ passion does dictate culture, and as companies grow, sometimes they lose sight of that. So years ago, I was fortunate to work with Sun Microsystems and might not be a company a lot of people know, but it was a really innovative company back in the networking boom. And Sun had a building that was full of security experts that I was kind of told not to go to. It was literally because there was one company, but there was like these different think tanks under the Corporation. And so I was working with the corporate group, but I would wander around because I was like, oh, there’s distinguished engineers in each one of these groups. I wonder what they’re working on. Excuse me, they’re a little bit naughty. The curiosity seeker ended up finding out about the security group, which was amazing. And in that group, there are all these. And this is in the 90s. So this is before cybersecurity really took off. And I’m, like, poking around and I find out how the hardware group is actually creating something insecurity. The software group is creating something insecurity, but they don’t talk to each other. So I ended up kind of propelling and shaping, but ultimately became a security symposium, which brought them both the hardware and the software and a bunch of industry experts together. And being able to Daisy change the network, that’s just kind of indicative to the types of things I do on an ongoing basis is looking at who’s in your network and how do you actually get to reach your goal faster. So we had an analyst, and there was an investor’s day and all the who’s who and security over the years that as cybersecurity continued to grow and become part of the mainstream and the standard. I was fortunate to work with a company that ultimately came out of the basement of that building, and I didn’t know it until I went and sat down with the founders, and I found out we had a common connection. He was one of the top security innovators that was in the basement that I wasn’t allowed to go to. And that company recently was acquired, went through IPO and then acquired by McAfee. So looking back at that, where the company was, the vision of what they wanted to be and the roots that they had is exactly kind of that exploration process that I was describing.
If you put six people in the room, you have six different backgrounds, six different journeys, six different educational levels. Some could have completed College, some could have a PhD, others might have been high school graduates. Regional cultural differences on all those components are basically the makings of a great narrative recipe and is looking at all those components, and that’s indicative of the Silicon Valley. That’s very tried and true to other regions in the United States. But I think when you look at the entrepreneurial spirit. The entrepreneurial spirit doesn’t have any boundaries, really. It doesn’t have a gender. It doesn’t have an IQ. Well, maybe it has an IQ, but it doesn’t have a lot of things. It’s like really for the fearless person that really wants to break out of the mold. And one of the things that we keep reading about in the pandemic is people leaving their jobs and starting their own businesses. And I think that’s pretty exciting for the marketplace.
Well, this is the interesting thing, especially now because we hear about the great resignation, and we see things like the jobs numbers, and it’s tough to measure today what’s really going on. In fact, one of my guests I had not too long ago is Michelle Seiler Tucker, and she wrote a book called Exit Rich. She’s written a couple of books, actually, really fantastic person. She specializes in helping businesses to reach a point of growth towards a sale and make sure they can organize the business to be most effective through that process. So one of the things that she talked about is this sort of like false statistic that we all carry around, that 90% of startups fail. Well, in fact, according to the Small Business Administration, it’s actually the inverse, that companies that are larger than ten years old are more likely to fail than one that is in the first five years. So what we’ve been quoting this old statistic, and it carried through a generational change. And now that we’re finally going to catch up and we’re seeing now, of course, people are leaving, they’re realizing the technologies there to start from your desk, you can put together a website.
And so easy to do relative to what it was 30 years ago.
I hire and fire myself pretty frequently. There are days that I just can’t like, I just can’t deal with it. But that also reignites me to think, okay, what can I do better? What can I do smarter? What can I do faster? Do I need to hire people? Do I need to hire a consultant to help out with different gaps? But I’m excited about even in my own small town, and I live in San Jose, California, which is not small. It’s over a million people. But I live in a community, a subset of the community that does have its own little downtown, and it’s a little bit of a village. And I call it the Cotswell, although it’s not quite the Cotswold. But I see some new businesses coming in, and it’s really exciting. We lost some businesses and they’re in the pandemic. But one of the things that I thought was so amazing was the community came together for a children’s bookstore that was owned by two retired school teachers. And it’s a fabulous bookstore called Hugobee’s. And the community came together and helped raise over $200,000 for a bookstore. And Meanwhile, we have restaurants and other businesses that were struggling.
But the bookstore is such a pillar of education and Stem in the future. They have a bookwall for those who can’t afford to buy a book. It’s like give a book, take a book. People donate books. And so it’s just a part of the community. But that was pretty exciting to see in the bookstore is thriving, but they used to do all kinds of book sightings and book and Billings and all those things stopped. But on the same Street, I’m seeing other family based businesses, people that I’ve known in my community that had corporate jobs and a lot of jobs in tech that are opening up restaurants, and they’re opening up champagne bars and opening up kids’ clothing stores. And to me, that’s exciting to see that creativity come back into the community.
It’s a beautiful thing, and it’s like a forest that has suffered in an unexpected fire. But in fact, in a way, by nature’s course, is the best thing that can happen to it because it allows for regrowth. Strong regrowth. Right. And that’s really what I’m hoping is ahead, is that we can see these people that are the next generation where they’re like, yeah, we’ve got a good savings and we’ve always wanted to do this. And it’s just possible now, of course, I was just on with somebody very recently. They’re saying we’re putting together a central, like a meeting place for his company. We aren’t doing a traditional office, but it is literally so cheap to get real estate space now because those folks need money. The REITs are struggling. Everything around real estate is a real challenge right now, so they’re willing to let people come in. So now if you want to get retail space, it’s more accessible than it had been. And then you’re supporting a landlord. It’s a beautiful ecosystem. Watch, rebuild.
Yeah. Well, unfortunately, where I live, we live in some of the most fertile land, which was originally called the land of Hearts Delight and which ultimately became the Silicon Valley at the beginning. And so defense companies were here, then Hewlett Packard, and then later on, Apple and even IBM had a West Coast facility here and stone strewn away from the Facebook and the Google and all these companies, they say the land is fertile and so there’s always growth opportunities. But I laugh about that sometimes. I think, why do we put concrete on some of the most fertile land? And then it’s expensive because a three bedroom, two bath tracked home from the 70s, maybe built 70s, 80s. It’s going for 1.5 million. So I’m obsessed with home and garden. That’s my hobby. And then there’s a great Instagram site called Circa Home Circa. And I look at these beautiful farmhouses and these mid century houses and every place from Colorado to Ohio to Southern States, Alabama, Arkansas, all the way to Florida, and I go, what am I doing here?
I know.
Then I have to stand back and realize, okay, I have a purpose. I have a reason to still be here and not to be hybrid. But I applaud those who can’t be because I still feel that not quite like an Urban Rockwell stuck in a painting. But I still feel that the work that I’m doing is international because my clients are all over the world. But there’s still something kind of majestic and sometimes medicinal about the Valley. There’s a lot of things about it that I would edit out, but I try to select the things that are most compelling. And interestingly enough, I’m within miles from really fertile farmland and I work with an electric tractor company. And so to me, it’s kind of like back to my roots of growing up as a four H kid when the Valley was apricots and cherries and Walnut orchards. In fact, I live on a Walnut Orchard, which used to be a Walnut Orchard. So I think the fruits of the labor of what we choose to advocate as entrepreneurs, whether you’re a hair salon owner or bookstore, children’s bookstore, or you’re starting a tech company, or there’s a couple of kids that live in my town that have created the two brothers. They’re actually two twins and they have a cookie business. And they started during the pandemic because they were home with their extra time what to do. And so now they’re serving their gourmet cookies into restaurants. I think that’s brilliant.
That’s amazing. Yeah. No matter how much you will see the shifting in the makeup of the community and the population, it will still be at its core, what Silicon Valley? A lot of the history of Silicon Valley will continue even as you see more folks sort of decentralize real estate wise. We’ll see other up and coming areas. Austin, of course, is the next one, which is hilarious because then all the people in Austin are like, yeah, keep Austin weird. And they’re like, keep out of Austin like, we’re done. We want to stay weird and you’re not weird enough for a while.
There used to be shuttles daily from Silicon Valley to Austin back in the.com bubble. And so what I heard and speaking to someone, it was in Austin last week reporter is that people are living already 25, 30 miles outside the Tesla area because the housing is shooting up. So they once thought they could go there and get a home in the five to 800 range. And those houses are all been pushed up. So they’re moving out further, which is no different. It’s the ripple effect. But one of the things about change and the pandemic and economies, I mean, I started my business in 2001, which was not the best time to start. It was a great time to start for recruiting because there were a lot of people that were a lot of people on the market.
Yeah.
There were a lot of people that were at home not working but in terms of the economy. But to me it was a great time because either it was going to work or it wasn’t going to work. Being able to kind of stand back and look at the opportunity. We have to be agile and we have to make sure that we’re continuously going through that discovery process. And it’s not a one size fits all entrepreneurial T shirt that we go around wearing. We have a bad economy or we have some form of crisis or maybe there’s a personal crisis, whatever sea of change is happening. We need to be able to paddle out of that really quickly. I think 2020 was like, okay, we got through it. 2021 is like, okay, we got through a little better. We were paddling at 2022. I’d be like, okay, we’re canoeing. We’re going upstream. And I think that’s the part of the continuous kind of entrepreneurial spirit. If one has never owned and operated their own business, and whether it’s part time or full time, it could be at the farmer’s market or it could become an LLC Corporation doesn’t make any difference. You don’t really have a day off. That’s the one thing that people is the Mythbuster, I think, is that people think, oh, you have your own business. I have a friend who calls me constantly. She’s retired now. She’s been retired for quite a while at a nice pot of gold company. And she’s constantly said, let’s do this. And I’m like, it’s Wednesday at three. I’m working. It might be Saturday at three, and I might be working. I think that’s one of the other components. There’s a great book called The Entrepreneurs Faces by John Litman. And John Litman used to be a Wired reporter. He wrote for Mac Week and PC Week and then Mac Week. So he went from the one side to the other side. And then he wrote a bunch of books for IDEO, which is a design firm that was known very well in consumer electronic space, working with Apple and Dill and everybody else. But his book, The Entrepreneurs Faces, is really interesting because he looks at the different types of prototypes of entrepreneurs, and they’re not the obvious. So you’ll find a collaborator or you’ll find the visionary and the leader and all the different parallels. But what I like about it is I found that I’m a little bit of each one of the potential profiles and oftentimes as entrepreneurs. And this is why we need to keep a tribe. And the podcast that you created is really creating a community and a tribe for us to come together and share and collaborate and learn. By the way, listen, his listing is really good for us.
One of the names that comes up very often was the Entrepreneurs Organization. And it is exactly that. There’s like a very specific range. Generally, I think they need to be like 1 million in revenue or there’s a certain floor and a ceiling. So basically, it’s a great place for people that are in sort of this stage of business with that entire purpose. There are community of practice surrounded by people who are in exactly where you’re at, who are living the pain you’re living, and can teach you lessons that you need to learn, and they can share stories and share understanding and learn from each other. And when I talk to people that are members of EO, quite often, it’s their second run because they’ll have a successful exit at their company. And then they’ll start a new start up. In the moment that they hit this range, they go right back because they want to give back to this community. And that’s such a beautiful thing that people rarely see that side of entrepreneurship is that it is not. They think of it as like a lone Wolf, this sort of idea monger strategy creator, somebody that’s going out on their own and they’re a little bit odd.
And they’re going to put together a team like the Bad News Bears, and they’re going to create something that’s going to change the world. But in fact, the moment that you give them an opportunity to sit with another founder builder, anybody, there the excitement level for them to give something to that other person. It’s amazing to watch.
Yeah, that’s one of the things so exciting about accelerator programs that are designed to be a platform to help visionaries and entrepreneurs really think out of the box and push them to discover, is this the product to come to market? And recently I had Johnny Crowder of Cope Notes on my podcast. And one of the things I really liked about him is, yeah, he’s so impressive. He’s under 30, 29 still. And when I was 29, I wasn’t creating a company. I was working in editorial, and I had a great newsroom job. But he created a company out of going back what I was describing, a problem and a need. So he dealt and he continues to deal with his whole life, schizophrenia, ADHD, all types of personal challenges. But he turned that challenge into profit because by creating a platform that would allow him to send a hey, how are you doing today, Eric? I’m feeling really good, but I want some disco music would make me feel so much better. Anyway, he created this whole platform that would allow him to connect with his small group of his own personal community. But he realized going through an accelerated process that potentially could be his business, which he’s now created. And it’s called Cope Notes, and I love it. I subscribe to it. I’ve actually gave it to my daughter as part of her holiday gift. I’ve given it to some of my employees and a couple of my friends because throughout the day you get these little nice life coach kind of Cope Notes. And I was just checking to see if I had one now because I get them throughout the day and they’re inspirational. It’s kind of like that high five in the hallway or the water cooler conversation that we don’t have anymore.
Right. Especially now.
Right. But I just love the fact that you go from a place in his place of like, I don’t know how to deal with this, to like, oh, I bet there’s other people in the market that don’t know how to deal with this. So therefore, going through mentoring and accelerating, and I think that’s what’s great about. And I’ve gone to accelerator discussions throughout the US in different regions. And it’s the same spirit. Doesn’t make any difference in Chicago or if it’s in Austin or it’s in Atlanta, North Carolina, that same hunger and thirst. And I think if we all help each other in that coaching process, because I always tell people, you’re going to have some good days and you’re going to have some bad days, and you’re going to have some in between days and owning your own business.
Yes.
After 20 years. In fact, when I hit the 20 year anniversary mark, I just thought we were the right smack in the middle of the pandemic. And I don’t think anybody cares. Nobody knew. I do. I remember getting excited and telling some of my friends, they go, that’s nice. You got to have a party. I’m like, well, of course I’m not going to have a party. I said, I’m going to create a video and I’m going to create a podcast. That’s exactly what was really kind of a hallmark for me was, okay, I have 20 years of working and building and bringing companies and products to market. I had some stories that were not part of necessarily my business, but I’ve been carrying around in my back pocket great people that I met that weren’t my clients, that were in my network that had amazing stories, and then other people outside my network, as over time, it blossoms to that way. And to me, that’s really exciting, because that just means that there’s so much creativity and talent that’s out there that you and I bringing these types of discussions to market will hopefully excite somebody to go out and do something different.
Yeah, I applaud your format as well, because I really adore. I like well-produced podcasts. Like, I like tattoos. They’re amazing to look at, and I just don’t have the stomach to do it myself. So the moment I turned the first one on, I was like, it’s just like an NBC, ABC. It’s just beautifully done. It immediately draws you in. You did such a great job of putting a perfect hook, letting you in, and then the story plays out. And when you hear that, it’s so easy to listen to and just immerse yourself in. And it’s admirable because very few people have the ability to ask questions and lead a conversation that will fit back into that format. So you know that you have to think about how it’s going to work so that it’s the most compelling way to consume it. And it’s such a weird thing. And I’m nerding out a little bit harder than most people would just because I listen to so many different styles. I’ve listened to short form and I’m long form conversational because I hate editing.
Yeah, editing is an art of itself. When I first sat down and made a list, I said, well, if I do a podcast, which ultimately is going to write a book. And then I realized if I write a book, I’m going to be spending a lot of time by myself with a deadline, I’ll get to that. I’ve edited like 80 books in my career, but my book, yeah, it could wait. I’m going to do a podcast. But then I started looking at all the platforms, the turnkey platforms in the market, and then do it yourself, this and that. And I tried a few. I already record something to hear my voice. That’s great. But now how do I edit it? And what if I actually don’t want to do more of a narrative? Because being a former journalist, I like the narrative documentary style. And so even as a child, I could watch uncountless of film strips or video reels. And my father would get things from universities within Stanford and Berkeley and Santa Clara University. The libraries would get rid of things and he would bring them home because I would just kind of geek out on all these science and nature type of content.
So I love science and technology, and I love the deconstructing of things. I would say I’m kind of a weird girl. I like the sound of a piston engine. I love the smell of printer’s ink. I also like lavender and cinnamon. But I tell behind my father going to the local Metro airport to going to car shows and going to rock exhibits and all these things that science fairs and competing in science fairs. And those are the things that as a kid, four H working, doing four H projects as well. And I wanted the episodes to be a little bit like a science fair. Not everybody is a scientist or an innovator. I have book authors that cover those markets. And I also have a few episodes out. I have a formerly homeless teenager turned Baker extraordinaire and inspiration for generations of teens that we want off the street. That’s just an extraordinary story. So sometimes we just want to profile these amazing people. But that innovation of change in society, the ability to actually change, not just the light switch, but breathing light into other people’s life by facilitating change. And to me, that is that before it happened.
Like, what happened? Why did you become homeless? How did that happen? And how is that now changing the way your career, how your career is now able to change the lives of others. So ultimate before it happened Moment has multiple places that can reside, not just in the technologies. And that’s what I said. I could do a really geeky nerdy show and just have all the chic, geek hair. But I had other people that I had met, and I kind of look at it as being the hybrid world we work in. But it’s like a universal community is that when you start appealing the layers and you find these people and you find out really why they exist, and not only that they exist, but they’re eliminating their lives and changing people’s lives. And so I have said no a lot to people that solicit me for the show. And I’m sure you have to. And I’m like, well, I’m not really here to sell product as much as it is to ignite people, to maybe get out and do something different, like volunteer at the local senior center or this is a funny one.
New fire station coming into my town. I know I shouldn’t be so excited, but literally, it’s a beautiful fire station. It’s less than a quarter mile from me. And they painted this wonderful mural on the outside. And I told my daughter, I think I’m going to make cookies for the firemen. And she just says, mom, that’s kind of weird. I said, they’re in our community. I take pride in that. And I think that’s one of the things that we’ve all, in retrospect of the last couple of years of reconnecting with the simple things. Firemen have a really exhausting and important job in our community. It’s not a job I could do, but the fact that they’re doing that job allows me to be home safe and hopefully safer in my home, doing what I like to do. I think they deserve the cookies. And the funny thing is, I’m not even a Baker, so I might have to have somebody else make this cookie.
There’s a film called January Man as a film, a movie, whatever. I also date myself by the fact that I call them film still. And one of the lines from it, it was just this class thing is trying to explain to his fellow trying to explain to his girlfriend, like, you don’t understand. You will never understand me. He says, I run into effing burning buildings when other people are running out. That is what I do. I’m a fireman. And just like that, trying to explain and realizing the weight and the severity that they carry as a job. And it’s like, this is not just a volunteer gig to get some hours and some pay, like you’re signing up for something. I’m with you. I applaud all the folks that do that job because it’s not an easy one. It’s a high risk.
It is. And I fly. I used to go flying with my father when I was a kid and sit on crate boxes or books or whatever he can put on the plane. And then during the pandemic, I actually start spending more time at the airport. And one of the things I loved about it is there was some very small professional career and a very small hobbyist of women pilots so surrounded by men. And I see a woman at the airport, oh, it must be a good day. There’s a woman at the airport. Seldom do you see women at the airport. Usually they’re passengers. But I learned so much from their stories. Former commercial pilots, former military, former rescue Rangers, every type of you can imagine and listening to them and learning their stories and just amazing. And now the little travel that I do, I was just up in British Columbia and I went to CES in Las Vegas. I always had to peek into the cockpit because the little planes that I fly, the little Cessna 152, 172 Beechcraft, there’s still a lot going on. You cannot have ADHD and fly a plane.
Exactly. There’s a lot of gears and pulleys.
I have some amazing friends. And most of them, I would say the entrepreneur, I might get in trouble, but some of the deepest, sharpest kind of futurists that I work with, they all bet they have ADHD. The celebrity ones, Steve Jobs and Richard Branson, first thing they would admit. But they’re also so wicked brilliant. Like, you can jump out of the plane, but you can’t fly the plane. Right. And so I learned a lot of discovery and the flying, because when you look at the cockpit and you see all the steam dials and all the buttons and you’re not quite sure where to start, it’s very indicative to the entrepreneurial spirit. It’s like, where do I get started? And there is a process. When you fly a plane, you do need to know where to start. But when you’re an entrepreneur, I don’t think there really is a right or wrong answer of where you start. You can start just with the plan. I know people that start with a really detailed business plan. I know the people that my plan was on a napkin. I literally was on a napkin. And I just thought, but I have a friend who had told me three years before, you need to do this.
And I laughed and I said, no, maybe someday. And then when I actually saw the crack open in the window to bolt and leave the corporate world and create my own business, I never looked back. Do you think there’s a right where to start when you want to bolt out?
No. In fact, the small plane is probably the greatest analogy to it. Even more, it’s more like getting into the small plane, whereas somebody goes, have a good flight, Dr. Jones, you know, there’s a rough start ahead, but there’s no option. Actually, one of the most amazing podcast and interview moments I recently saw, it was Elon Musk was on the Lex Friedman podcast. And this is an interview skill that I show this moment to people and people think I’m an idiot because I keep saying you have to check this moment out. And it’s 30 seconds of silence. I said, do you understand? This is the moment he asks him. He says, Elon, what do you think about when you think about what can go wrong and why you shouldn’t, why you won’t be able to make it to Mars, and why we won’t be able to do something? And just the beauty of the silence. And he says, I can’t, I don’t there is no it’s just effort. We’ll get it done. But to give him the moment to just like air that out and sit in silence, it was beautiful. And that’s when you think about, should I do this?
You run it through your head and then you go, there’s no reason why I wouldn’t.
The thing I think is most interesting about Elon, and I’ve never met him. I’ve heard him speak. I’ve been in with maybe 50ft of him. He’s a lot taller than I thought he would be. That was one observation.
Yeah, it is funny. You normally see them just in pictures and realize he’s a gigantic fellow.
Yeah. Well, I don’t think Elon actually, he’s genuine to who he is and he doesn’t care. And so he’s going to go to Mars if he chooses to go to Mars and thinks that he’s done with Solver X and he’s done for Tesla. And I just kind of stand back. I worked years ago on one of his first projects, which was a digital media kind of platform, and it failed, but a lot of entrepreneurial things fail. And so you just keep on going. But I think he generally works on things that he’s passionate and believes in because you can’t have that much success and not believe in it. You just can’t go back to that core. And it’s like, well, what is that Core we all hear the stories about as a kid, he stood out and he was different. And I bet he was. He was probably that kid you didn’t want to sit behind because he’d probably pull your pigtails or something. But I think it’s interesting that I had a conversation a few weeks ago with the President of SETI, which is the center for Extraterrestrial. And it’s really interesting the stuff that they do and they have very high caliber scientists that are working to better our future by looking at the unobvious.
And I think that’s one of the things that scientists do. They don’t look at the obvious. They look at the unobvious. So where do we actually have things like in the ocean or in space or on Mars? These are the people that found the two new moons. They found the new species of crab a few years ago. And I think it’s really interesting that we have so much untapped in the universe is that there’s a race to go to other places, but there’s so much that we still have to discover here.
Right.
And I love to go to space because I would just like to experience that. But when I recently watched the movie “Don’t Look Up”, I thought I was curious about that type of stuff when I was a kid. When looking back at all the different moon launches and now we go to the moon, it’s like, oh, yeah, we went to the moon. I went and got a gallon of milk. But there was a time. And so I love the movie “Hidden Figures”, because that movie brought out a story of the going to the moon that we had heard before the back end story. And that’s the type of stuff that personally, again, excites me because everybody has a story. And when I was in College, we were told not to write our obituary as a journalism project, which is quite common. We were told to write our manifesto. And I thought that was great because that meant that we had to have a conviction to something, not what nice things people are going to say about us. And I would like people to say nice things about me someday. But I think ultimately it’s like, what do you stand for?
And what’s that conviction and that driving force that made you make a decision at some point that you’re chosen to do this? And that’s what I feel about my podcast is like, it started out as an idea and it’s kind of grown. And I have this amazing team that I work with. I have a writer that collaborates and crafts the narrative. And I have a producer. My daughter would say, mom, you’re a little high maintenance. And I’m like, yeah, you know, this was going to be done in the home office, and now I actually have a team. And then my social team, it’s evolved. But I feel that I have a personal, personal consciousness. And like, I’m going to say I want to give back to each one of my guests something that they’re going to feel good, that is going to be a historical document, almost like the old Encyclopedia Britannicas. Have anybody remember those? And my father would never invest in those. He says, that’s a waste of money. They’re going to be outdated in a few years. You’re going to be able to get everything online. My father would say that. And I’m like, but what’s online?
I had a typewriter. And so I forget my neighbor’s old editions, which is funny.
Yeah. You get the previous editions. You’re reading old things that don’t exist or that have been undiscovered.
Do you remember when things like Lexus Nexus was like new technology?
Right.
And I went to College, undergraduate and graduate school without Google. Most of the millennials went without Google. Gen X’s, no google. Baby boomers, definitely no. So how did we survive? I think we survived and our creativity and our unstoppable curiosity and whether people are conscious that we have it, it’s there. You just have to untap it.
Yeah. And I’ll say to bring together the value of what you do, we can talk all day about what Elon does and SpaceX does. And there’s fantastic things that get done. But in fact, what brings it to the most ears and eyes and makes them care about it to the point where they would make it successful. There was a Netflix documentary about the group of four who were like normies. Right. Just traditional citizens who were citizen space Flyers now. And so citizen astronaut suddenly has this story behind it. And it brought excitement to what was being done in the same way that hidden figures. If it had been done when it happened, imagine how much further the space race would be if we had that.
Yeah. Well, and I think that’s the importance of Stem education. I’m a huge advocate of Stem education. And I don’t know, I think growing up, we always had it, and then we took a bunch of stuff out of it, and particularly public schools started reducing programs, and maybe private schools had more programs than others, but we took so much out. It’s kind of like the food industry. Right. We’re going to take all the organic good stuff out and we’re going to put in all this homogenized substitute things, and then the taste goes away. And then we found out they’re bad or worse for our health, and then the original purity of a product. And I think that’s been the same thing with education and Stem education is that when I grew up, literally, I was told that there was boys math and there was girls. They had gender. Math. Math has a gender? And so I was thirsty and hungry to go in the harder math. But I was always told, I don’t need that. And I’ve talked to so many people that experience that as well. But because I was an honors student, I always bullied my way over to the boys math forgiven.
And then that’s changed, obviously. And I was really happy to see my daughter in school. Never had to deal with that. But we have a shortage of Stem professionals and particularly women. And so we can get kids excited about science and technology and engineering and the arts, because I think when you have a deep technical background, but you also have appreciation for arts and understanding of how the two intersect. Industrial designers working together with engineers have to work very similar to storytelling. They have to look and listen and then go apply. And I think it’s interesting how mechanical engineers and industrial engineers work together to create these ideas and bring them to market and particularly consumer electronics. We have to inspire kids to have that curiosity.
It’s a creative process. It’s an amazing thing. It’s funny. Looking back to my own. So when I was in high school, I took business English, which was like and typing. It was basically the idea that you would learn how to write a memorandum, and it was like learning traditional office lingo. And it was funny. I was born in 72, so this was at a point when I was in typing class, we were on IBM Selectric Typewriters, and it was me and 29 female students. And I was the weird one because at the time, it was seen as, like, working towards administrative work, and it was generally seen as focused on traditionally female roles. I was the odd one out, but then five years later, it was 50 50.
We placed a week girls.
I know it was like heaven, one of the 29 at a target rich environment, but five years later, it evened out. And in other areas we still struggle and we have to. But I love this idea of, like, teach creativity as part of technology and empower them through that story, and they realize it’s a beautiful pairing of things. And so I have to applaud that you do it so well. Definitely a book in you, and I would love to read it. I’m cheating by listening to your podcast and getting the little snippets along the way.
Yeah, well, I’m kind of stuck in the middle of my book. Like, I was describing the bookings. I think I know what it’s going to be. I just need to find a discipline to sit down and do it and think once I do it, then I won’t look back. But I want to comment on your typing. So my mother said, Typing will be one of the best skills you ever have. And I’m like, Mom, I don’t want to type. I don’t want to learn to type. I’m not going to have a typing job. She said, you want to work in the newsroom, you better know how to type. She was right. And so I took typing in summer school because I didn’t want it to interfere with my regular academics. So I learned to type 125 up to 150 words a minute without error, because that ultimately got me the job interview that I could go in for because it used to be a typing test. There’s no keyboarding test anymore. And I know in editorial they don’t ask you to take a test, but it gave me that entry point to working in the newsroom.
And to be able the faster you type, the more stories you had given to you to set up in the word processor to then go to production. And then eventually I go, this is where I get a little naughty. I said, the she devil can be a little bit naughty. I would actually edit things where I would type and make them sound better, only without approval. So when you finally get that call to go into the managing Editor’s office because you’ve been known to be changing copy. But the much appreciated, thinking out of the box desire to do that was appreciated and got me promoted out of what I call the editorial pool, which is ultimately the secretarial pool, which was male and female, but predominantly female people just typing away. And yes, I feel very proud about that. That was a little bit of my naughtiness that got me to the next level. But I think one of the things that is fascinating about technology is now on my phone. I could literally write up a Press release, a pitch, do a presentation, pretty much my mobile office. And in the hybrid world, we have access to content 24 by seven, constantly.
I wake up and I try not to look straight at the world news because it’s a little bit disturbing, particularly today things I’ve seen, and I go, this is not how I want to wake up. I wake up to my lemon tree, literally. And I look at that, and sometimes there’s no lemons. But right now it’s prolifically, full of lemons. And I say, oh, life gives you lemons, right? You go to make lemonade. So it’s very symbolic. There’s no happy accident. I have a lemon tree there. But no two days are alike. And I think that’s the great thing about what I’ve chosen. My career is as a news reporter. No two days were like in public relations. No two days are alike. No two clients are alike. And that’s the kind of a common thread that I’ve seen is having that constant curiosity means I’m going to have a lot of diversity.
What’s given you success so far. And as a consumer of your stories, I gotta say, Donna, you do it well. That’s a magical thing, isn’t it? One quote I get, and although he’s somewhat obviously a controversial figure these days, but I enjoy some of the quotes as Dr. Jordan Peterson. And he says that creative people often create an incredible amount of value, rarely for themselves. And when you think of that pool, of how much creativity was in that pool and how few of them will exit that pool, it is amazing. So you deservedly made it outside of the pool. And I could say anybody that gets to work with you is doing well and will no doubt be pleased with the outcome. It’s been a real pleasure to share time with you, and I will definitely make sure that we’re going to have links to your podcast and to everything about you. What’s the best way if people do want to get a hold of you, Donna, how do they do that?
There’s a couple of ways. Probably my easiest business way is LinkedIn. It’s just Donna Loughlin and that’s L-O-U-G-H-L-I-N. “beforeithappenedshow” on Instagram and beforeithappened.com for the podcast. And my email is Donna@lmgpr.com, and you can use any of those avenues to get a hold of me and I’d be delighted to chat, mentor or share stories or if you think that you are a candidate for the show absolutely email me as well.
Well, I definitely think we got some folks that we can send your way and like I said maybe one day I’ll be lucky and I’ll be a founder myself and I’ll have a story to share and I’ll be there and it would be a pleasure to be on your show. So beautifully done. So congratulations on continued work that’s going on there.
Oh, thank you. Now do we get your disco music?
I know sadly there’s very little disco in my life. The hilarious thing is my name came from so I’m old enough that email is new, right? You and I remember those days. Potentially you remember when email started and I would move from place to place when I lived in Toronto. And every time I would move you would get to a location that didn’t have the same service provider. So we have to go from Bell to Rogers same as AT&T Verizon and every time I would move they would give you a new email address and it was like @rogers.com I was like, oh@bell.com and I moved back to a place that had Rogers I was like, perfect I’ll be Ericwright@rogers.com again. They’d be like, oh no, that one’s taken. No, I know it was my email address. They’re like, oh well you can’t reuse the email. No, it’s mine. And that was like AOL was beginning and so what I finally did was I bit the bullet and I was in a bunch of different bands and one of the bands I was in called the discoposse. We did extremely heavy versions of disco songs and it was kind of fun and so I thought I’m going to use that as my email domain because no one will take that.
It’s an awesome name. Well, my favorite disco song was the BeeGees’ “Staying Alive” the last couple of years. So I think that was a good one for all of us to dance to. Dancing into it. Well, thank you so much for having me, Eric, as a guest. Hopefully I’ve ignited some curiosities and people to do something great.
Most definitely. Most definitely. Thank you very much.
Sponsored by our friends at Veeam Software! Make sure to click here and get the latest and greatest data protection platform for everything from containers to your cloud!
Sponsored by the Shift Group – Shift Group is turning athletes into sales professionals. Is your company looking to hire driven, competitive former athletes? Shift Group not only offers a large pool of diverse sales candidates from entry level to leadership – they help early stage companies in developing their hiring strategy, interview process and build strong sales cultures that attract the best talent for early stage companies.
Sponsored by Diabolical Coffee. Devilishly good coffee and diabolically awesome clothing
Does your startup need strategic technical content? The team at GTM Delta delivers SEO-optimized, compelling content that connects your company with technical users to help grow your credibility, and your pipeline.
Jesson Bradshaw is the CEO of Energy Ogre, an electricity management company that uses proprietary systems to ensure its customers are always getting the best prices on their energy electricity.
More than what he does day-to-day leading the team at Energy Ogre (https://energyogre.com), Jesson has a wealth of knowledge on energy production, technology, and our impact on the earth. This was a really enjoyble and informative discusison.
Check out Energy Ogre here: https://energyogre.com
Sponsored by our friends at Veeam Software! Make sure to click here and get the latest and greatest data protection platform for everything from containers to your cloud!
Sponsored by the Shift Group – Shift Group is turning athletes into sales professionals. Is your company looking to hire driven, competitive former athletes? Shift Group not only offers a large pool of diverse sales candidates from entry level to leadership – they help early stage companies in developing their hiring strategy, interview process and build strong sales cultures that attract the best talent for early stage companies.
Sponsored by Diabolical Coffee. Devilishly good coffee and diabolically awesome clothing
Does your startup need strategic technical content? The team at GTM Delta delivers SEO-optimized, compelling content that connects your company with technical users to help grow your credibility, and your pipeline.
Patrick Baynes is an American entrepreneur and marketing executive. He’s best known for working at LinkedIn (#162), as co-founder of PeopleLinx, and being CEO of Nerdwise. More than that, Patrick is a fantastic person and a real pleasure to learn from.
He and I cover a ton of really important lessons in business, startups, product management, biz dev partnerships, sales development and much more.
This was really fun and I learned a lot.
Check out NerdWise over at https://nerdwise.com
Connect with Patrick (tell him DiscoPosse sent you) on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/baynes/
Welcome back, friends. This is the show. This is the DiscoPosse podcast and you are listening to what is about to be a really fantastic conversation with Patrick Baynes. He’s the founder of Nerdwise, serial co-founder and somebody with a really cool background. I say serial that he’s actually had successful launches in the past of startups. Great history and just somebody who I really enjoyed chatting with. Nerdwise really solves a neat problem about solving lead generation, creating SQLs, MQLs, is really driving value and getting better information and insight to make the journey towards pipeline friendlier and more effective. But if you’re not going to do that, then you can learn tons of startup lessons and how to build culture and product management. And this literally is just a sea of startup lessons. I could turn this one into a book. So big thanks to Patrick for being such a fantastic guest and conversationalist. I do have to, of course speaking of success, thank you all and the amazing sponsors that make this podcast successful and allow me to keep doing it and bringing it to the world. So I got to make sure that if you’ve got data out there, it is at risk. Unless of course you’re using the fine folks over at Veeam Software. And if you want to find out more, it’s super easy. Just go to vee.am/discoposse and you can find out everything you need for your data protection needs, whether it’s on premises whether it’s in the cloud. They really have so many cool things. I absolutely think you should check it out. And because for the first time in like a zillion years, I’m actually going to read the official line because I think they do have much more than just pure data protection. It’s being backup and replication. We’ve got new V11A, which is out. And this is everything when it comes from AWS as your Google cloud storage repository integration with Kubernetes and ultimately greater RTO for Nutanix. That’s right. If you run Nutanix, then you need to get saved. So go to vee.am/discoposse. Speaking of getting saved, save yourself getting your identity sold online by being better by using things like a VPN. I’m a user of ExpressVPN and I think it’s fantastic. So much so that I’m able to say that I think you should try too. And if you want to try it, it’s easy. Go to tryexpressvpn.com/discoposse. And hey, I also like coffee, so go diabolicalcoffee.com. That’s it. Here’s Patrick Baynes.
Welcome everybody. This is Patrick Baynes and you are listening to the Disco Posse podcast. Welcome to the show.
My start to the year is going so well because it’s really content specific to stuff that I’m digging deep into. You are doing some really fantastic stuff with the team at Nerdwise and we’re going to dive into that. But just with your history that led you up to Nerdwise, with the problems I see constantly in the industry, especially in the startup ecosystem where we’re just pouring over tool chain issues. We’ve got all these interconnected or semi connected things, and everybody thinks they’ve got the ideal solution, and they got 27 single panes of glass and none of it seems to fit. So I’m excited. We’re going to unpack. We’re going to break down some myths about the early stages of setting up effective marketing tool chains and much more. But if you don’t mind, for folks that are new to you, if you want to give a quick bio of yourself and introduce the Nerdwise story, sure.
Well, thank you, Eric, for having me again. And for those of you listening, thank you for listening. I am Patrick Bayne. So I’m an entrepreneur. Both kind of have an agency background and the fact that I’ve provided a lot of professional services in my career and then also a technology entrepreneur. I built multiple software products. I was an early employee at LinkedIn in 2007 and then built the first enterprise kind of employee optimization and management tool for LinkedIn. That was a company called People Links. And we were early, although at the time it didn’t feel early. But we started that company in 2009, and People Links was really my first run at entrepreneurship. Had a good about six years there before we sold the company, raised close to 10 million in venture capital. And yes, we started as a training organization teaching people how to use LinkedIn quickly learned what type of product we wanted to build for the market, and services are a great way to get to know customers and know their pain points and what opportunities there may be. So then we built the People Links platform. That is a whole story on its own.
And then the market had changed more than I realized after People Links in the sense that people talk a lot about the barriers to starting a company being less and less. And of course, now you can have a TikTok account and be an entrepreneur. And it’s like crazy. But when I started this business, I realized I could do something. Now with my skill set, I could build a company without having to raise money. At least I felt confident that I could. And over years, I proved that to be correct. And then this business has started with that was kind of the primary mission was, hey, let me get out of the I don’t even know if you call them golden handcuffs when it’s venture capital. More just like real handcuffs. When you raise money, your business really becomes not just a business anymore. It becomes an investment vehicle like you have shareholders and people that you are responsible to and you have to report to. And it’s a good thing for many people if you want to be, if you’re really building out a company for that exit. But I didn’t know what I was necessarily doing when I started Nerdwise other than I wanted to take a solution to market without needing outside funding.
We have been profitable now for seven years. We built a lead. We work with sales teams, so we do the broader category of sales enablement. But it’s really lead generation and lead scoring for sales teams based on all their different data that they have, their sales outreach, their website traffic, what may exist inside of a CRM. We can help kind of activate that data, generate leads from it and score it. So both sales qualified and marketing qualified leads. And as this world has changed in the last seven years, one of the things, in addition to just access to starting a company, whether that be like launching a quality website or finding talent freelancers and all these other things that are so much easier to do now than ever before, there’s a whole marketplace now of practitioners. Whether they be software developers, graphic designers, web developers, website developers, and they’re affordable. They’re all over the world. Ten years ago, if you were to outsource development to India, for example, it was a much more risky proposition. Now, if you find a decent group in India, they’ve got 10-20 years of cycles under them where they’ve been doing this stuff for a long time.
And in any case, it’s been exciting to be on the front of that. And it’s put us in a better position as a company to be able to build a business without needing outside funding. So that’s sort of the story of nerdwise. We may go out and raise money at some point now, but it’s been seven years working with a whole breadth of different industries and company sizes, but that’s a little bit about who I am.
That’s fantastic. And also I’ll say congratulations on just growth and success already. Not that taking on additional funding to do bigger growth. It’s neither a good nor a bad thing, depending on what your goal is doing that. But I like how you highlighted earlier that getting money from a bank is they’re going to charge you a nominal interest fee for giving you the money. Getting money from venture capital, they specifically are expecting an outsized return on their investment and they have a guiding hand in delivering that outsized return. There’s a very different requirements and responsibility in taking venture money. So whenever somebody gets a new funding round and everybody’s like, yeah, congratulations. Inside my mind, I’m like, hopefully, congratulations, there’s some weight that comes with it. Again, there’s great reasons why companies need that and people need that. But it’s not free money for sure.
Even that’s changed in the last ten years. Now there’s startups to fund startups and even Stripe. So we use Stripe as a payment processor. Stripe is offering Stripe capital to its users based on their revenues. And they’re my biggest investor right now. Yeah, it’s unbelievable what has changed.
And you look at, like in the last year, what’s going on with micro, acquire and stuff. I’ve been kind of deeply watching where that was, this idea of people just posting SAaS. And it’s a beautiful sort of two sided marketplace. And I’m like, it started off as just people buying websites, and then all of a sudden they’re doing an incredible amount of business by being this beautiful two sided broker to it. It’s a vastly different world. And this is moderate level investments. To do it, you don’t have to go in and be an accredited investor, which is there’s a lot of work to do that you can’t just walk in even if you suddenly win $500,000. You can’t just go and become a venture capital investor. There’s legal requirements to be accredited, and there’s this history. It’s a weird sort of whole scene, but I don’t want to disparage it because it’s a fantastic thing, but it’s an odd world. And like you said, it’s changing fast.
And I’ll tell you one of the most interesting things I’ve seen, and this has always been there, but it has shifted completely which is, if you talk to PE firms and VCs, except for maybe some of the unicorn VCs and some of the bigger ones, although I think it’s still true for them. They’re hunting harder and harder for these opportunities than ever before now. It used to be that you had to find them. You had to get in. You have to get the opportunity. Still, by no means it’s easy to go raise money, but they’re hiring multiple associates to go out and find these investments and compete for these investments. And the folks I talked to, we actually do lead gen for three PE firms right now, helping them get in front of established companies that are privately held and they want to be first in line. And they’ve always looked. But it used to be that again, I think the whole marketplace, the boom, all the money that’s poured into startups. But now it’s almost like they’ve got business development operations that are 10X what they were to go out and find these investments and to be the first in line.
Yeah, it’s funny. I used to work in a financial services firm in it. So I became really highly attuned to the investment world and then to come into the tech side and then get involved in startups. So now to really literally see it from inside the machine. And now PE has changed so much. We’ve got private equity. One of the funniest transaction I saw last year was for folks that have kids. You probably know his name is Blippi. So Blippi is a YouTube phenomenon. He’s somebody that created this personality for kids videos. And there’s another one called Cocomelon, and they just do, like, funny cartoons for kids. Well, they were picked up by a PE firm that’s backed by Blackstone, and it’s like they’re literally buying up YouTube channels. Now, I didn’t have that on my bingo card for 2021 for sure.
Don’t get started on NFTs.
Yeah, I’m still trying to figure out how to even approach what it is, let alone what’s coming out of it. That is a wild world.
Oh, my God.
But I think what’s really interesting and I like your personal story that being early with LinkedIn, then the opportunity as you went to found your own firm coming out of it, that story of being inside somebody that solves a very specific problem or set of problems. Like, obviously LinkedIn really, really grew in what they were attacking. It’s a standard name in the market. No one even questions right now. Like, there’s no LinkedIn killer because they came and went right Plaxo, etcetera, etcetera. There’s all sorts of folks that want to do it. But then you had this beautiful opportunity. Now it’s a beautiful marketplace, but then in itself is now the machine that needs to be fed with other ecosystems and partners. And so then coming out, you’ve got this inside view of, like, there’s still a problem to be solved, and now to have the confidence to go out and solve that. What was the thought process, as you said, I think I’ve got something I can build.
Well, hindsight is 2020. And so some of it around what we built and the fact that we were early and how we got there. It happened very organically, kind of day over day. But the real story, the real push, was a desire to grow at a rate that LinkedIn wasn’t offering me, Ironically, because LinkedIn was like this rocket ship. It was a deck of corn. But I mean, it was a unicorn 30 times over. And it was my first job out of College. And so when I started applying for other jobs inside the organization, I was competing against people from Google and Deloitte, going for these entry level marketing manager positions and account manager positions and things where it wasn’t anything that I interviewed really well. They took me through multiple interviews. And I mean, I was interviewing with people who were like, one guy was the former head of marketing at Yahoo who took over marketing at LinkedIn, and then the other guy was on The Apprentice show and then came to work at LinkedIn. And there’s just these people that had profiles that were beyond. And this was before social media. So these were just credentials.
And at the time, in any case, so I couldn’t compete. And I didn’t want to go kind of like horizontally. And I got forward sitting in my cube and felt like I want to do more with myself. I’m 23, 24, and I just knew I wanted to grow at a faster pace. So I called my uncle, who is an entrepreneur, and I told him, I think I want to leave and start my own company. And he said, well, hold on to the job for as long as you can because that’s your cash flow while you figure out what you want to do. And I tried that for about another month. And I was like, I just can’t do it. I was breaking hackysack records out outside of the office three times a day with a buddy of mine. It’s like just fun, but not fulfilling. And so I left. And then I was very fortunate. Not a lot of people were leaving LinkedIn at that time, but another person had just left, and we got connected. And he reached out to me within a week or two and said, hey, I’m starting this other business.
And we kind of interviewed. He hired me as a contractor to do a little bit of work. We were basically selling training on LinkedIn and companies. He had been selling LinkedIn corporate solutions he saw in the marketplace. People just had questions that weren’t part of their solution stack. And for me, it was a low risk opportunity. I’m 24, I don’t have a wife, kids, a house, a mortgage, all those things. And someone who’s in their late 30s, wife, kids, houses like, hey, I’m starting a company, offered me a decent paycheck. I said, sure, there’s no risk here. It aligns with what I want to do. And then two or three months later, he made me a co founder offer. I got a piece of the business I described as being a shotgun seat entrepreneur, where I just got to kind of come along for the ride and learn a tremendous amount. And it paid off. I mean, two or three years later, we were doing seven figures and really built a strong brand and attracted the right people to come work with us. And that’s where I built my version 1.0 of my entrepreneur toolkit skill set.
And then I left there for a similar reason. I was ready. The company was at that time starting to be run by really senior people from the outside. And I was ready to do my own thing again. So went from shotgun seat to driver seat and started Nerdwise.
So when you think of describing Nerdwise, this is always the fun part of either like, there’s product led startups and there are services consulting lead startups. They’re never that far apart because they’re generally paired up. When someone says they have a consulting startup, I say, you have a consulting team. It’s not a start up. You may be building products. A good example I found is a company called Heptio. And I referred to them all the time as a product startup. And everybody’s like, no, no, they’re consulting. They do consulting for people building Kubernetes, but they’re using their own products they’re building to create a machine framework for people. That will be the value they sell. And they did sell, and they got bought by VMware, and it was a big deal. And even when the acquisition happened, I said, watch out, this is going to be a competitive product play into this ecosystem. And everybody’s like, they’re a consulting team. I’m like, no one pays this much money for a consulting team. There were products, but they were consulting lead.
Yeah.
And then other ones are, look at the Maz story. Of course, it’s like, same thing. Consulting, build products. All of a sudden the products are assassin switch up. Now you’re a product led company.
Yeah. You can come at it from a lot of different angles. And when you know the problem that you’re solving or your customer and they say, do things that don’t scale, and sometimes that’s what you do to get to know the customer, get to know those opportunities. And then you realize, oh, hey, we could build an app for that. Or, hey, we’re putting a lot of time into this one process that applies to everybody. And if we just put together a little bit of a user experience and connect some data and add a few buttons, we can now provide a little bit better of a workflow and some reporting and some analytics versus it’s also always good to go look at the spreadsheets. What are you doing on a spreadsheet right now that shouldn’t be or doesn’t need to be in a spreadsheet? And there’s a million examples of startups that were literally just spreadsheets and then turned into these great products.
Well, I tell you, in Enterprise today, I tweeted the other day, it said, it’s like the Scooby Doo, like removing the mask, meme. And it said, what’s running finance today? And it’s like complex AI and machine learning solutions you pulled off. It just says, Microsoft Excel. Like that. Yeah, it’s amazing. When I were in a finance organization, I would have these incredible people that they were quants before they were called quants, but they were doing stuff. And, like, in It offices, we get calls like, hey, I need to restore this three and a half gigabyte Excel documents. Well, first of all, that’s terrifying because it goes beyond what Microsoft even built the bloody thing for. And then you think, what are you doing with this thing? They’re like, this is our modeling stuff. But there was no SAS alternative at the time. And it’s amazing that that stuff still today powers a ton of people’s backends you tableau. You do all these things, no matter how you slice it, someone’s going to just dump that down to Excel, then copy and paste it into PowerPoint to give a team presentation. Oh, no, it’s 22.
Why are we doing this now?
And when you think of the problem, what was the reason that Nerdwise you knew right away that this is a thing we can build? Because this is a question I get asked all the time.
Yeah, well, gosh, even before that, I feel like you have to just sort of be committed to what you’re doing and then know that you’re going to screw it up and you just got to change it quickly, right? In whatever sense that may be, whether it be that you chose the wrong target customer or the wrong value proposition, or you’re building a product and you say, hey, I think we’re going to build we just want to have some SAS element of our company. Sometimes you just have to start to then run into the first brick wall or the first road bump and go, oh, wait, it’s not that. It’s this right? For us, there was a lot of that. And that’s me being candid in the sense that I didn’t have some AHA moment other than I thought I had a bunch of them. And then through trial and error, you find the one that sticks. And for us, it was we were doing lead Gen services for our clients for a broad range of different customers. And there was one theme across all of them, which was in addition to generating the coveted sales qualified lead in the meeting, the appointment, whatever it was that they wanted, there was also this base of marketing qualified leads that were the folks who they were showing interest but not making, not converting.
They weren’t taking the next step. And we were pushing our clients were saying, hey, but there’s all these warmed up prospects, there’s all these people that have been on your website, we can track them, we see all this data, it’s a million ways to pull this data and show it. And we were putting it in a Google sheet and we’re sorting it, we’re scoring it. We pay someone to run all these crazy algorithms, so it scores, it updates, it does all these things. And then we’re trying to push them to do something with it and we’re creating little tactics to get value out of it, to kind of like squeeze some juice from the lemon or whatever. That was the moment we said, hey, wait, the problem here is that nobody wants to work from the spreadsheet. This doesn’t say I’m a lead. It says I’m data. And so people weren’t logging into it. They weren’t using it after some trial and error realized. And by the way, setting up those spreadsheets is a pain in the ass. I think we weren’t smart enough to do it. I have the instructions still on our blog to teach other people how to do it, but it was like 30 steps and something breaks and there’s algorithms and things in there.
We’re paying an outside contractor to help us put them together. So we said, okay, look, let’s build it around this first. Let’s build it around this lead scoring and some workflows and user experience. And it has been night and day. I mean, you can see the same data on a spreadsheet as on the application. And it’s like you want to do something with this, right? So that was the theme is we just saw this kind of opportunity across all of our clients, and we’re trying. We’re using all of our creativity and brute force to try to get something to happen with it. And then it was like we’re fighting this with the wrong tool. We need to go from square one and build something that has a better workflow. And that was the beginning of we went from not just Lead gen and services to a lead scoring application. And then we’re continuing to build more around that to help reactivate those leads and identify them and have kind of a big brain that can take all your data. So now we’re iterating on it. But it took a while to figure that out.
I like this. You’ve really moved into the very specific thing that the audience problem is always like, we pull all this data, there’s a lot of companies out there that are into slicing and dicing data, and then they move it up to tableau and they put it into Snowflake. They throw a hot spot in front of it. They do all this stuff. But then you’ve got you basically have marketing Ops and sales Ops, people that are doing, like you said, what you were doing with Excel. But every time you want to say, like, hey, what active opportunities or prospects do I have? What MQL do I have right now? Okay. I’ll go get Charles to run a report for you. There should be a place that’s live updating at least as close you can to it.
Yes. And also, if you think about the conversion rates on either the effort itself to generate a lead or on the amount of leads that you convert to sales, it’s small on both sides. Right. So you might get I don’t know, let’s just say if it’s sales outreach or something, 1-3% upfront positive meeting flow, and then on converting leads, people say numbers like 15 to 20, and those are high. If you’re converting 15-20% of your leads, that means 80 to 75 or 85% to 90% or whatever percent of your leads aren’t converting. But where are the ones that wanted to convert or that we’re ready to have a conversation? And then on the flip side, 1-2 or 3% conversions on a campaign, it’s still kind of a revolving door. So how do you get the most out of all you’re investing in Zoom info, you’re investing in outreach, you’re investing in all these people that are doing all this work. You got the CRM, they’re tracking it, they’re doing all this stuff, and you’re getting these numbers that are great if they’re working and it’s driving up. But then you just have to go on to the next push. The next push, the more people. More people. So how do you just get more out of all of this investment, time and technologies and everything? That’s kind of where we’re playing.
It’s funny when I’d love to actually find anecdotal ways or analogous ways to show this. It’s really like imagine that there’s a Starbucks or like coffee shop that’s next to a Starbucks. So they’ve got similar keywords. They’ve got similar attractiveness audiences is adjacent. And you’ve got 100 people that walk by the front door or 1000 people that walk by the front door, and then 100 of them go in. But out of that, 100 of them, 80 of them walk all the way up to the cash and then go, Actually, I’m not going to get a coffee today. The numbers are horrifying. We’re still in business anywhere.
Well, I love the challenge of putting an analogy around that, too. They call that storytelling, but that’s great. I’m going to think about that and make a powerpoint slide get back to you on that one.
But then to this idea that we’re just repeating that machine and it’s like I hear all the time, like, SDR is 120 dials a day. If you’re in ten years into being an SDR, what does your day look like? It’s 120 dials. It doesn’t get better.
What do you look like ten years into being an SDR. Probably look a little bit like me. But yeah, SDR is a tough role. People can do that for 5-10 years. But yes, still, the point is valid and that you’re putting in all this effort, you’re getting all this activity, and what more can you get out of it before you just move on to the next thing?
Now, when it came to qualifying, there’s a very human aspect to qualification of leads. And this is what I want to dig in with you. Right. Because I work in an organization and I hear SQL/MQL all the time. I wish that for one thing, can I just throw my anger at the acronyms of the world, the fact that we’re using data and then we call them SQLs. And like, what do you store your SQLs in a database? What kind of database you stored in? Oh, yeah, that acronym was a little bit overused. But we’ve got SQLs, MQLs, you’ve got all these things. And so on the marketing side, we say, like, good lead, my MQL. Right. Then it gets to the sales side of it, and then most of them will just out into the air they go. Hey never get touched. And there’s somebody that says, well, it wasn’t really a good MQL. So that’s the SQL process. But that seems very, does not seem very systematic, that layer. How do you figure out what goes from MQL to SQL?
Yeah, it’s a very good question. So I see things as and there’s a graphic that I’m picturing where it’s like marketing funnel into sales pipeline. Right. And it’s horizontally versus vertically. But if you think about the stages of a marketing funnel and they’re a little different, you can label them however you want. But I think anything in the marketing funnel that hasn’t, like, gone where it goes, like, say, awareness from interest to consideration and then opportunity. You know, awareness isn’t enough. Right. Someone saw your ad, they saw your email. That’s not enough to be a marketing qualified lead. Interest, you could. Now it depends, maybe how many you have. You don’t want to be trying to go after everybody. But if they go to the point of, like, where you think they’re showing some interest to real consideration. And consideration may mean how much time on site, how many times did they visit your site? How much did they go back to an email of yours? More than once. Right. You’re now in the consideration stage. So that’s where I would say, is it true if you’re going to say to your sales team that these are marketing qualified leads, they better not be just like reading your email or saw an ad and clicked on some link bait.
They should be somewhere further down that marketing funnel. Now, a sales qualified lead and from my perspective, has to be in the sales pipeline. And that means that they took a meeting. If they’ve taken a meeting or they said yes to a meeting and maybe didn’t show or they signed up for a demo or requested information or something that is now and maybe not requesting information, but something that has actually said yes, I would like to meet with you. And they’ve gone into a sales pipeline like a CRM. They’ve been assigned to somebody, anything along those lines. That’s a sales qualified lead because that’s somebody that stepped on the showroom floor and said, I want to take this thing for a test drive. And that’s the distinction that I would make.
Now, when it comes to your team going in, and obviously every organization, they’ve got their preferences, a platform or they’ve got some other they got onto AppSumo, and there’s a really sweet deal. There’s always like a bunch of reasons why we choose any particular product. What’s your approach? When you go to an organization and say, we’re going to help you out, how much is their products fit into your process, how much of it is. I would suggest you go towards this other product because it may do you better. I’m curious what that flow looks like.
Yeah. So it’s interesting because we have two parts of our solution, a prospecting system. And that’s a system that requires not just technology, but it requires a true plan. Then you’ve got to have some data and some resources that aren’t necessarily even technology. Like you do need access to prospect lists, for example, or you’ve got to have something like that going on where you need it to do your prospecting. Then you do need automation solutions, and then you do need some resources and things around enablement. But the way that we’ve approached it is that we believe that we’ve selected what are the best in class, best of breed solutions for a turnkey prospecting system. Meaning if you don’t have anything or if you have something that’s maybe not performing that well or whatever the case may be that, hey, don’t worry about it. Let’s not go in and try to tweak a broken engine. Just let’s go. Apples to apples. You can either run what you ran or compare us to what your past performance. I mean, we have tools that we’ve selected that we think are best in class. Now that said, I know there’s a lot of great tools out there.
I like to tell our clients that we are tool agnostic and I want to be agnostic because what I really care about using list as an example is I just want quality data, quality prospect lists, wherever it comes from. Your internal, your CRM, your Zoom info, your email list. However, as long as it’s high quality. If it’s an outreach tool, what I care about is deliverability. Is the tool getting the right open rates, response rates, engagement rates. So it’s really got to be performance based. Now, as an entrepreneur and from a long term perspective, I would like us to be able to have and now I was talking about the prospecting system. From a SAAS perspective, I would like us to have an ecosystem that our platform. You can export your data from Salesforce or from outreach and you can upload it into the lead scoring thing and we’ll score it and we’ll do all that stuff. But we haven’t built integrations with every platform yet. And so on the system side, we have to come ready with everything that’s necessary that we know is no to low risk in terms of how it’s going to play out for our clients because nobody likes spinning their wheels and spending money and not getting returns.
So we have a set of suite of things that come included with our plan. Now on the lead scoring application, I would love for that to be part of. And we are in a couple of different integration partners or in a couple of different like, app marketplaces for different tools. But that’s something I want to build out and have it so you can turn on lead scoring for your Marketo account in a really turnkey way and then have those marketing, not just lead scoring, but then the workflow and the enablement around it and all that. So we have it. We want to be tool agnostic. I love discovering new tools through our clients and finding out that, hey, they’re using something they really like and it seems to be working like got my antenna up. And then from a platform perspective, it’s just about roadmap and prioritization and what we can do first. And selfishly, the things that are on the roadmap, I’m focused more on our existing customers than acquisition. Like what’s the next thing that my customers are going to get the most value out of? And then if we want to hit the gas and do some things from a marketing perspective, try to build that out.
Well it’s funny that you say that, this idea of going to a customer and then finding out what tools are out in the ecosystem. There’s lots of on my Nerd crew, we always had it was if this then that was the first one that was like doing all your goofy home automation. Then I started using it for some enterprise automation, which was kind of neat. And then I got turned on to Zapier, and I was like, okay, this obviously solves a bit of problem. And I had a couple of different folks on the podcast, and they both were like, yeah, we were deeply with Integromat. I’m like, never heard of Integromat. Then I find that this massive enterprise ecosystem wrapped around Integromat. I’m like, you don’t know what you don’t know. These are huge platforms that I had never seen. And now that I get exposed to, I’m like, oh, okay. Now, here’s the interplay and the interoperability opportunity, which is kind of wild, but that’s tough as an entrepreneur. Especially, you’ve got to be sort of ruthlessly pragmatic on how much you invest in partner integrations, because now you’re beholden to their mobile changing API and integration platforms.
Like, I used Go high level for something, and all of a sudden Zapier, they’re like, we’re building our own things, so we’re not doing a Zapier thing anymore. I’m like, oh, no.
I’ve learned that lesson the hard way. And best advice there is, if you’re going to build it, get close with the partner in one way or another, get in. Don’t just do it. Yes, you can tap into the API and start building, but reach out to the CEO first. Reach out to their head of product, reach out. They’ll tell you, if you email customer service, they’ll connect you with their head of integrations or whoever is running their API and make sure that you’re aligned with their ecosystem and that there’s no red flags. And ask them straight up say, hey, look, this is what we’re thinking about building. Is this good? Because it may be that they say that’s actually something kind of where we want to build, or we’re looking for partners more in this area so you can get the plug pulled pretty quick on you if you don’t build a close relationship and truly treat it like it’s a partnership.
Yeah. It’s funny. Whenever a product would come to me as a tech buyer and influencer inside my company, I would always ask them, like, sort of the same stock set of questions. And everyone was always like, do you have a well documented, publicly accessible restful API? I have no plans of consuming your products through a restful API. But what it tells me is that you are invested in external integration, which means that my other software could more easily potentially be linked in with this or put together with this. So it was to this degree of phoning the customer rep and saying, I worked with one company and they’re like, we’ve got a C# SDK. And, like, I’m out because I’ll never write a C# integration to map my data to your tool. So I’m going to have to look elsewhere. It was an interesting lesson in thinking about future proofing my investment, and I think that’s where the partnership ecosystem is pretty heavy in needing that.
Yeah. And even if you built a relationship, even if the ecosystem changes, they’ll be nicer to you. And give you some time, some heads up, some access. Hey, we’re rolling this out, but you got 90 days to adapt or whatever it may be. So you got to build that relationship. And like I said, I learned that one the hard way. Yeah.
When it becomes a point, like you said, where it could be that they’re suddenly going like, we’re about to introduce a similar service to what you’ve got. I used to always love it when you watch Amazon at the AWS reinvent. And on Day One, it’s always like these big keynotes. And like, we’re big handshake. It’s like that when the charity hands you the giant check, you’re like, we’re super proud of our integration. Here’s an amazing customer story, and I’m like, wait for it. Day Two keynote is Amazon announcing that they just launched this exact service that does what the day one keynote does. Like, oh, no, that’s tough news. That wasn’t the way you wanted to find out.
Yeah.
Now, when it came to product management and understanding the consultative experience, how do you weigh where you have to like, is this a solution needed? And then productizing it, what comes first in the chicken and egg of that scenario?
Well, I think at some point you have to have those, like, concentric circles that are what’s important in the middle. What are you really building in the middle? And then what do you think goes around? What are the features that make that kind of core feature pop that aren’t necessarily core, but they do further the user experience, the use cases, and so forth. And so I think that’s part of it. And you have to have that core thing and do it well. People would say it’d be great at that one thing. So I feel like that’s key for us, we’re really focused on productivity, and the lead scoring feature is one of those things. And then it’s like, okay, if we can be really great at lead scoring, that will drive massive productivity, and then what are those features that are going to actually take those score leads and make people more productive? What are the things that they need to take action on those workflows? And so you need some of that. I think it’s just call your true north. But the one thing you want to be good at, and then what do you build around that to support it?
And then you can become big. Maybe I can use all the other companies as examples. But if you can win that one thing, you kind of get the right to start to expand your use cases and what customers you serve and how you want to go from there. But you’ve got to get that foothold. And if you don’t have that priority, you’re going to be spread too thin in many ways. In all the ways, yeah.
And monetarily it’s the biggest punishment for that stuff. Right. Is just the capital investment to stand up a new system or service and then find that it’s not going to be generating revenue. And you’re like, oh boy, that’s a tough one. Now, here’s the interesting thing. We’ve talked a lot about the evolving world.
Right.
As you go into each startup, it’s like fundamentally different from when you started the previous. What about the idea of sort of APIs are forever and clean deprecation? Like, have you ever had to reach a point of the age of your platform or feature where you have to really think, is it safe with customers using it, that I need to just get rid of this thing? I’m always curious, the founder, where you approach that moment.
I think when you’re building products in general, you want to be sovereign with your product. You want it to be that product can be used regardless of an integration or not, and create real value for the client and the integrations can add to that value. Now, it’s very attractive to shortcut that and go right to an integration as a core feature, because now you’ve got all the data and you can just plug in workflows and things can get going really quick. Like you can turn the lights on really fast. But I think that’s the biggest piece is if you’re sovereign, if you’ve got real value, then you’re not taking on as much risk when you build out through integration. And so use integrations to make your product better, to enhance it, to help serve your customers and serve them in more and better ways. But also that if for some reason the lights go out on that integration, that it’s not a showstopper. To our point around at the end of the day, everything’s an Excel file, have that ability to get around the integration. If the data flow stops, at least you can have another way that the customer can get their data into your platform or out of it or whatever it may be. So there’s some of that. But I think that’s the biggest thing is don’t build around and the integration is your core thing.
Yeah. And that’s always a tough thing when you think of scaling the platform is where because you then have a data investment, you’ve got other implications that come by bringing that, bring the data closer to sort of own and be more sovereign with it. It’s not a one to one of us. Just bring it over here. Like we’re presenting a dashboard of external data versus bringing the data in as a different responsibility, especially on SAS. And you’ve got a lot of things to account for on the back end, for running and operating that environment.
Yeah, for sure.
There’s always the tough one to ask, and we give it the safest answer. You can. Have you ever had to fire a customer?
Oh, yeah, sure. But I do it. Absolutely. And I do it with so much love. You know, that can be I can give you scenarios where I’ve let a customer go, but I do it in a way. Like, I try to do it the right way. But the bigger thing that comes to mind is I try not to let them into the clubhouse. If my gut tells me that this is going to be a challenging individual, a challenging company, or that because of whatever element, I’m sensing that this just isn’t going to work out, I’ll pull out the special pricing sheet or have some other things up front. I said to somebody, I said, this guy was just challenging me and challenging me. And I said, you know what? I’m going to respectfully pass on this opportunity. And he was like, you’re giving up that easy? And something I said, well, and to be honest, yes, I am giving up that easy. This conversation has not been pleasant for me, and I don’t think that I would want to pass this on to members of my team, but I appreciate that people hate that, and I don’t like doing it either.
I don’t want to be on those conversations, but hiring a customer, yeah, I’ve done it. I guess I shouldn’t say that it’s easy, but you can wrap it in service and just tell them like, hey, this isn’t working out. And we tried everything, and I think it would be best if we just call it here. But there’s ways to do it with service first. And then I’ve had some of those customers try to come back as well. And it’s a $5,000 set up fee and an annual commitment if you want to come back.
Yeah, there’s a toll at the exit and then a toll at the reentry.
You want it that bad. But if somebody’s got it. And you know what I lost in my early days, I want to say three employees, definitely two to one customer. And the customer was so important to us, literally year two or year three. And they were only like three or $4,000 a month. But it was a big customer for us and meaningful revenues at that time. And I would just assign hire somebody just on that one account, like 10 hours a week, whatever it was, working on their service, working with the admin, and it was just an absolute shit show. But yeah, it took losing the second team member before I realized probably not worth it.
Yeah, it’s tough because I forget who did the Ted Talk, and she has a great book called on being wrong and this idea of sort of that Wiley Coyote that we make the decision that we’ve made a mistake after we’re well off the cliff. And it’s really tough to do that, especially when we’re talking about employee. You’re affecting the core of your company by retaining a customer. And it’s a tough thing as a founder and CEO to have to weigh, but it’s huge respect because I have not had to face that myself. And I hear the stories all the time, and they go either way. But you still bear the burden of that decision.
Yeah, I hear you. It hasn’t happened that often, but the cost far outweighs the reward and the morale of one teammate. And then for them to have to carry that and dread their job. I don’t want anybody I tell my team I want them at 60% to 70% capacity. And if they don’t feel good, don’t force it. It’s not about the grind. It’s just going the right direction. We do our best. And yeah, you don’t want anybody dreading to go to work or dreading to talk to a customer.
And I think this is interesting, too. We talked about the ethos, and the company is a representative of its founders. Right. Like, it’s a mirror of them for a while. We talk about the first ten hires, the most important because they will hire the next hundred. You’ve got a very mindful approach to the way you want to deal with customers, which I would imagine then translates to who you hire. And you just said like 60-70%. The most common sort of founder thing is you’re like 2015 Gary Vee. You’re grinding or you’re dying. Sleep is for the weak. I’ve been in too many startup environments seeing that you’re like, oh, this is not good. I like that you’ve come with it like, hey, obviously you don’t need to be at zero, but you don’t need to be at 120.
Yeah, well, culture is interesting for us because we started remote, or I should say we started in an office for a year or two. And then we went remote. And we’ve been in business a little over seven years now. So the last five have been all remote. And we went from two people to 15-16 now. And now I’m finding all the things that I’m missing in our culture that aren’t there, where I want to be around my team. I want to get to know them. I want to hear what they’re thinking or what’s going on between the Zoom calls. Right. I had a friend. This is just a silly thing, but it’s just a very clear example. A friend and I are texting the other day and he’s like, oh, my Fire remote from my TV stopped working. So we got to take a trip to Walmart to go buy a new one. And I was like, dude, there’s an app for that. You can download the Fire app on your phone and just do that. It’s like, oh, my gosh, perfect. I never would have thought of that. How many of those situations are happening in my organization right now scared the shit out of me for somebody’s doing something and there’s like, someone else who there’s an app for that, or they found another solution or even just the fact that you get to know somebody on a personal level and then the conversation and the working experience is so much more pleasurable.
And I hate that we don’t have this. Actually, I’m opening a lounge, not an office. In two months, they’re renovating the space for us in downtown Philly. And it’s like my team to come a couple of days a week, once a quarter. However often they want to attract new employees, but like a place to actually hang out, work. Feel like I want to go there because it’s awesome, not because it’s cubicles and desks. By the way, if you want to get into office space, commercial real estate, now is a fantastic time.
Lots of deals. That’s not a good time to be an RET investor, but good golly. If you’re looking to get space, it’s opportune.
Yeah. That’s where my head was at. And I found a place that was a yoga studio for 20 years, and they were empty for a year and a half now. And they offered to renovate the whole thing for us and make it nice. But I’m doing it just because I just want even if it’s for a day, a quarter with half of my team. I just want to hang out and get to know them and have those conversations go for a walk. I’m missing that. I think that’s an important part of culture that you don’t get when you’re remote. Any team with any team.
Yeah. It’s funny. When I first became a remote staff, I worked for a company that got hired in Vancouver, BC. And I was living there, and so it was, like, totally normal. And then I had to move back to Toronto, Ontario. So I’m moving across the country, different time zone. But I’d been there for three years, and this is pretty remote work. Before, it was a thing, really. It was really tough to get it. And then when I said I got to move. So I guess we got to figure out what to do to back fill my position. And my manager was really great. He says, well, let’s just order business cards with your new address on it. That’s it. You’ll work remotely. The data center was in Vancouver. Everything that the team’s in Vancouver, different time zone, but your core to the ecosystem. So there was this sunk cost and sunk culture of me fitting in. But if I had gone to them that day and said, I want to do this job and I’m based in Toronto, I wouldn’t have got the second interview. Well, now, obviously, none of us have a choice. Like, we are predominantly remote, but it’s like that just like seeing the look on someone’s face when they’re working on a problem and knowing you’re like, I’ve walked by Joanne’s desk three times in the hour and she looks like she’s really struggling. You just can pop over and say, hey, what’s up? You’re cool? You want to grab a coffee? Pete’s looking like he’s falling asleep at his desk.
Like little things that you can high five once in a while.
Just some kind of like that real water cooler, as they’d call it, interaction. And yeah, I miss it.
That’s how I made it. Some of my best friends came through work and that’s an important source of socializing and meeting people and creating connections. I’m excited to get back to that for sure.
Yeah. Like the pre-planned, like, happy hour 5 o’clock on Friday. No, I don’t want to open a beer over Zoom while sitting in my bedroom because that’s my home office. That’s weird to me.
Yeah. As the day goes on and on, I start turning camera off, headphones on. Like I can’t be on the screen anymore and definitely not to socialize. I took my Zoom battery for the day. I’m done.
Yeah. And it’s funny, I’d actually enjoy seeing more studies on this stuff because it is cognitively tiring to be staring. Like if you’re in a meeting room and there’s twelve people, you’re consciously aware of how you’re sitting, but you can sort of swing around, it’s not a big deal. And you relax. And sometimes I goof around, I touch, I play with cards, you can check your phone here and there, but when you’re on camera, you see how you look and it’s hard to escape that. So you find yourself looking at yourself and like, oh, I need a haircut. And like, stuff you would never think about because you’re staring at your own bloody face as part of the experience.
Yeah. It’s way too immersive in the sense that even if I’m watching TV, I can go do something else, right. Like I can go have a snack, look the other direction, be disengaged. I’m stuck. We’re stuck. And then you do this 6 hours a day. 5 hours a day.
Yeah. Like, you feel guilty if I shut my camera off to reach around to grab something off my shelf. Because if somebody sees me looking away from the camera, it’s as if I’m not paying attention. Like, turning the camera off isn’t not paying attention, but it’s a weird experience for sure. Now, one thing I’d love to dig in on is the give back to the ecosystem because I know that you’re also an advisor. You’re working with other folks in sort of the startup community and what draws you towards doing that. And I’m curious if that helped you in the early days when you started up People Links and when you started up Nerdwise, if that was part of what got you going.
Yeah, it’s fun. It’s fun when you’ve learned how to do a thing and you can share with others, or it’s fun when you can save someone. You can show them the shortcut and save them the headache. So I enjoyed. Sometimes I do wish I could get paid to do it because you do here and there. But if I’m selling my time, it’s a misuse of my time when I’ve got a responsibility to my company and my team and everything. So I just don’t do a lot of paid engagements outside of work. But I love it. I would love to be able to work with entrepreneurs and startups all day. It’s fun. And yeah, it was big for me. One of the things that actually I thought about recently was how much of it. And I’m going to use just the expletive version just to paint a picture. But I want to say I was like a little shit in the sense that when I was starting up at People Links, I thought I was hot shit. I was like, man, we got this great company, all this we’re cooking, and I just had my ego was like I could barely walk through a door.
I felt like. But I was so happy and so proud and everything was going great. And there were so many talented entrepreneurs and investors and people that were around the company and that came to work with us. The most humbling thought the other day is like, they all knew I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. And they were so nice. They were so nice people, any one of them. And they probably saw, yeah, the part is in the right place and potential and did good work and everything was fine. But I realized now in the last seven years, being going from that shotgun seat to the driver’s seat, all the things I really didn’t know and how much other people were carrying me and that I wasn’t successful at that point. Right. I was very fortunate and we had a great run and everything was fun. So I’m humbled in that sense that I go back and I still want to almost like, pull a bunch of those people aside and go, I just want to thank you for when I was like 25 to 30 that you were knowing that I really didn’t have my shit together in the sense that I hadn’t earned the real merit badges.
I hadn’t really hadn’t earned it. I got lucky and I took all the right chances, did the right things. Everything’s great. I don’t feel bad about any of it. So I think it’s important that’s just important to give back or help other people. But it’s fun. I think they had fun helping me. It’s fun to see people in their earlier stages. But if I had said to you seven or ten years ago that I was advising other entrepreneurs, I feel bad about the advice I might have been giving them because I was so lucky. I was like, everything’s great. But now I’m much more equipped. I’ve actually had to learn all the unsexy hard things about building a company on my own. And through that, you do learn a tremendous amount and you can help others much easier. And I think it’s one of the most important things to do in any practice business. Sports, dancing, making music, whatever it is that you want to do. Go talk to somebody who’s done it before. They can show you the way. They can tell you how they did it. They can tell you what’s important to know.
And that’s going to save you a whole lot of time. Heartache, headache. And so if I can help somebody, I’m always happy to do it.
The communities of practice is something that like as an entrepreneur, there’s not that many. Like, there’s EO. So the entrepreneur organization, which actually has come up a ton, I’ve had a ton of folks on the podcast and they’re members of EO. But I think the floor is like 1 million in revenue, and there was other employee counts, floor and ceilings. They’ve got they’re very targeted of like, this is the phase of the company where we can all be very helpful to each other.
Yeah.
And sometimes they’re second time founders and they stay in because they’re back at that phase again. So they love that range of growth and sharing. But like you said, it’s like asking a guy that’s in a train with no driver, like, hey, how do you drive a train? It’s easy. Just keep going. It works. You’re like, no, you don’t understand. You haven’t hit a bump yet.
And for me, it’s really almost like if you invited me to come and work on a Lego construction that you’re building or an Erector set or some cool project that you’re like, hey, want to give me a hand with this thing? I’m like, awesome, that sounds fun. Like, I want to build stuff. I want to fix things. I want to ideate and be creative and roll up my sleeves. I love that stuff. So it’s fun to work with people, especially when you can have sometimes you need an outside view, right. Because you see everything with kind of near term or with what’s in front of you. And somebody can come in from the outside and they can go, hey, you should consider pitching this way, or you should consider positioning yourself this way. Or you mean to tell me that you can identify things and you’re like.
Yeah, that outside in. Because I remember even in corporate, that was the advantage to going to outside contractors, not because they’re smarter or because they’re better. If they come in with no an empty whiteboard or I’m old enough, I can say it was an empty blackboard back then. So they are a clean slate. They come in. They’ve got no predispositions, no prejudices about the decision they’re about to advise you on. They listen to the evidence and they’re like Supreme Court judges for a business decision. They’re just like, based on the evidence presented to me, I would do this and quite often you’re like, I guess you’re like, what? I can’t believe they would say that. And then when you stop and you sort of take that in for a while, like the kid from the outside is right, we’ve been looking at this way too hard. We should just rip this piece out and refactor like, oh, right. And that is a good advantage to that outside view. If you were to give the advice to somebody saying, I think I got a problem that I can solve, and I’m thinking about putting a business together around it.
What’s the first thing you do when you take them aside to tell them what they’re about to face?
You could attack it from so many angles. But the best thing I would maybe think to say is just get started. And when you get started, pick a vessel brand, which is a term I learned where it could be anything. So if you’re going to build a new headlight, don’t call it like you think you’re going to build the greatest headlight for cars. Maybe don’t call it headlight because maybe eventually it’s tail lights, maybe it’s interior lights. Maybe you find out that it’s like some water resistant technology that applies to planes. And the lights are called something completely different. So don’t get too stuck on your product. And I think sometimes people tend to start with the name of their product or something very germane to it. I’d say start with a vessel brand where you’ve got flexibility to move about and then plan for those learnings like, hey, this is my number one hypothesis of what I’m going to do. And then if that doesn’t work, maybe then it will mean I can do this or start to have some of that mapped out. But I would say just start and start learning. And again, the barriers to getting started are lesser than ever before.
So you can get a cute vessel brand of some kind, go to brandbucket.com and play around and see some fun names and get some ideas and go buy some other, more generic version of it. Get it going and just start learning. Because ultimately time is like it’s your friend and your enemy when you’re in a startup. But it’s your friend in the sense that if you start today, it’s like the old Chinese proverb, when is the best time to plant a tree? It was 20 years ago. If you want to have your own company, start it now. In two or three years from now, you’ll know what it’s like to try and what you learned. And you’ll be much better equipped than you were if you just stay on that blackboard/whiteboard phase and keep working on it.
You think of the tools available today to start a company. The buried entry is so low now. It’s fantastic.
Yeah. I might have gone on microacquire seven years ago and just bought something for 100 grand versus..
Yeah, the build versus buy or build then or buy then build. Like, there’s a lot of ways. And the $100 startup, I think someone needs to do $1,000, $5,000 and a $20,000 version of that because there’s lots of things you can do and you could buy a mommy blog. And it sounds like a pejorative when I say it that way. But like a blog with an audience aimed at folks that are health conscious and they’re businesses, a YouTuber is a business. I’m really excited by what’s available to people today. I think that the job numbers, when we hear them from the government, it’s gone to me because I don’t think that means as much as it used to, because I talk more and more to founders and they’re not shown up in the numbers somewhere. And that’s it is good that it’s happening. But it’s also I’m worried about the lack of measurement of it to open people’s eyes to what’s potential.
Yeah, no, you’re right. I don’t think that the employment numbers include all the TikTok influencer, Instagram influencers. There’s a lot of people that’s their side hustle and now that’s their main source of income. I have two friends who make their living through Instagram. One does custom swimwear for women, and she posts it, gets bought immediately in ships. Another one does glass. You want any type of glass pieces, custom art. He’ll make something, post it, sell it. Another guy is actually free. Another one is it makes jewelry. Same thing.
It’s amazing.
And it’s just Instagram. They didn’t ever got a website. They’re not e-commerce companies, sophisticated. It’s just you make something great. Someone wears it, posts it, Tags it, shares it.
It’s amazing. It’s amazing. Well, and I tell you, this has been fantastic. And thanks for spending the time today, Patrick. For folks that do want to get in, and I tell you, they should. So nerdwise.com, of course, is the main spot to go your testimonials, tell the strong story. This is something that’s really, really good. And I love that feedback loop that you’re able to bring. Like, I see it all the time, the gap between leads coming in and lead generation and successful sales organizations executing on it. It’s a chasm that people don’t realize can be crossed. And so I hope to generate some business for you myself with a few of the folks that I advise and I highly recommend people do go check it out. And your videos are great as well. It’s really good. I saw a couple of your previous interviews as well, and I liked that you’re very open book on your previous experiences. You’ve made it through the phase. You didn’t cut your hair this time around. So this is always funny. I talk about the founder the hair story. It’s generally the first time found the employee clean cut gets the hoodie, then they leave there, then they found their own company so they got a new hoodie, slightly longer hair, maybe a little bit more dark around the eyes because it’s hard to live your life every day working hard.
Then they successfully exit hair grows. They are now angel investor, then the next founding they tend to cut the hair again. So I like that you’ve held on and stayed long hair all the way through.
Yeah, I appreciate it. I can still remember we used to work in legal and financial services. The first time I had the guts to wear jeans and boat shoes and tuck in a button down. That was edgy. You could just tell people like who’s this? But the world has changed so much and I appreciate the opportunity here. It’s been nice chatting with you.
Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. Excellent. And also, if people want to connect another way, what’s the best way if they wanted to reach out and get in contact with you, Patrick?
LinkedIn is good. Add me on LinkedIn comment that it came through here. Otherwise I probably will ignore it because you get all the stuff. But if you say, hey, I enjoyed the show or you just want to shoot me an email, please have at it.
Awesome. Yeah, I want to actually create I want to go and get an explainer video done to send to people telling them why they shouldn’t ask me about selling explainer videos to me. Because it’s drive me nuts. I get about four of them a week. God bless them. I guess it’s a big ecosystem nowadays, but, yeah, the amount of overuse of LinkedIn as a new outreach mechanism. It’s natural, but, yeah, it’s hard to get the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. All right, great. Patrick, thank you very much. It’s been a real pleasure.
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Matthew Hunt knows that no one likes to be marketed to, or sold to, especially prospects. After scaling and exiting 2 search marketing agencies, he’s committed himself to teaching busy B2B CEOs how to more easily scale leads and sales with less effort, less time, and less money.
His company, Automation Wolf, is known for helping clients generate a full month of LinkedIn content in just one hour per week. This was super fun and inspiring.
You definitely want to listen to every minute and enjoy Matthew’s take on things.
Welcome back. This is Eric Wright, the host of the DiscoPosse podcast. Thank you for listening. You are in for a fun one. This is Matthew Hunt. He is the Automation Wolf, and he is somebody who I really really thoroughly enjoyed a conversation with. We talk about the concept of creating snackable content for LinkedIn. Look, you got to go check it out. Absolutely. This is a great way to get your voice out there, get awareness, and take your message to the world without you having to overthink how to get it there. So Matthew and his team do a great job. We cover the gamut on a ton of different stuff in this conversation. So if you’re at all interested in using social media and getting your message out there and you’re a founder or if you’re just a human, you want to check this out. All right. Anyways, in the meantime, I also have to give a huge thanks and a shout out to the fine folks at Veeam Software who are making so much of this podcast possible. We are in like, this is episode 209, and that’s crazy. And this is because I know that I’ve got the support of a great community and also great platforms that I thoroughly believe in.
If you want to check out everything that you need for your data protection needs, regardless whether it’s in the cloud on premises, it’s cloud native, containerized, Office 365, Microsoft Teams. There’s stuff that you are going to lose that you don’t even realize is at risk. Ransomware – rip, ransomware. Hello, Veeam. It’s just that easy. Go to vee.am/discoposse. You can check it out. And I definitely recommend you also go on the old wayback machine. And I had Danny Allen, who’s the CTO of him on the show. It was just fun to chat with Danny. So highly recommended. So go check it out. Go to vee.am/discoposse. We got a big year ahead. Let’s make sure that we’re protected all the way through. Speaking of protected, don’t forget to protect your life, your identity, and your data in transit. I’m a user of VPNs because there’s a lot of weird stuff out there. There’s a lot of bad people out there. There’s a lot of bad technology out there. So if you can protect yourself in every possible way. I use ExpressVPN, I recommend it. So if you want to go to try ExpressVPN.com/discoposse, you can see why I use it and hopefully you dig it as much as I do.
Oh, and one more thing. I also have a coffee company. And I think it’s really good coffee. It’s also amazing swag. So devilishly good. I recommend that you head to Diabolicalcoffee.com. There you go. Full disclosure. It’s my company, but it’s great coffee. I love it. I drink a bunch of it. And also amazing shirts, amazing hats. But talk about amazing, here’s Matthew Hunt.
This is Matthew Hunt. I’m the founder of Automation Wolf and I help busy CEOs and founders create all of their social media content in 1 hour. You’re listening to Matthew and Eric Wright at the DiscoPosse podcast.
Now, the funny thing when I saw your name come up, Matthew, and now finding out that we are fellow Canadians, always a bonus when you get to share some connect airspace, even though we’re on different sides of the 49th at the moment. I love what you’re doing and I love the name. The first thing I saw was an Automation Wolf. And your tagline about being able to get people there in 1 hour, I just thought of like the Winston Wolf. You’re 2 hours away. I’ll be there in an hour. That’s kind of where it’s at. And looking at the folks that talk about what they do with you, Matthew, it’s working. And so I got a ton that I want to dig in with you about what you’re doing, how you came to do this, and really what the huge opportunity is for businesses to turn content into opportunity and how to do it in the most effective way.
Sure. Sounds good, man. Looking forward to it.
So for folks that are new to you, because they haven’t had a chance to be able to study your bio and look over your content like I have in advance, if you want to give a quick intro and then we’ll jump into what it is that you are getting people doing.
Yeah, sure. I’m a three time business owner now. They’ve all been agencies. And so I exited two of them, one in 2014 and in 2018. I started the first one in 2010 and I’m a glutton for punishment. I just can’t get enough of it. So I decided to do it all over again and start a new one in 2020. And so 2020 was sort of figuring out what the product market fit was. And then 2021 is the startup stage, 2022 is stay up and then 2023 will be scale up. So that’s where we are with the company right now. But this business at the end of day came about from a real problem that I was experiencing in my previous two businesses. And I noticed that a lot of my peers, first time founders and CEOs or really any CEO or founder at the end of the day, anyone who’s just extremely busy had this problem and there’s just not enough minutes in every single day to get it all done. And the one non-renewable resource that everybody has is time. And so I was looking to solve that problem because most of my clients right now, they all know how to do it.
They even know what they need to do. It’s just a matter of they just don’t have enough time to do it. So I was on a mission to solve that problem. And so they all know they need to build a personal brand. And most of them know that it needs to be done on LinkedIn if you’re a CEO or founder. And they know it’s all about being consistent. But their problem was being very inconsistent or being able to find someone, even if they wanted to find someone who goes right for them to do it for them, it’s hard to find their voice. So I said, I think I know the solution to this. We’ll lead with video as the lead domino. And I thought at first maybe the solution was just to slice and dice long form content that they were already doing. But I discovered a couple of things. Some of them were not doing it. And then even if they were doing it, it was a pretty difficult task to do. Because long form content has the intent of being long form. And long form content doesn’t have a place in social media news feeds.
In social media news feeds. We are there to either be to procrastinate or to be in discovery mode. And we’re looking for snackable content, things that are short. And so if you’re going to create short form content, you have to actually lead with the intent of it being short form. It’s almost more about being like, you have to actually create content that’s more like when you become media trained for the 06:00 news. Yeah, we have your sound bites down and you’re able to communicate very clearly and articulately in 60 seconds or less. Some sort of message that piques people’s curiosity. That’s why I always call look, step one, if there’s three pillars to demand Gen, is short form. Step two is Longform. Step three is controlled form. And so, short form is a way for you to stay top of mind and consistent. And you can get transformation from people if they already know you. However, if they don’t already know you, the short form stuff is the hook where they’ll hopefully ladder into more of a long form. So the 1 minute video leads to a two minute video. The two minute video leads to five, then a ten.
Then all of a sudden they’re listening to you for an hour. Next thing you know, they’re binge-watching you like a Netflix series. Well, if someone’s binge-watching you as a Netflix series or engages with you for an hour, they are a pretty big fan and you’re going to get some sort of transformation. And then the trick is to how do we ladder them up into a controlled form, which is a form of community. And so if you’re a SaaS company, this would be a channel partner program. If you were maybe a consultant, this would be maybe a private Slack community or Facebook community with maybe a course that you can get some transformation around. But the point is you’re putting them into a controlled format where you can build goodwill, reciprocity, and continue to keep banking that trust equity. Because you can’t control when someone’s ready to buy, but you can’t control the trust you built to them. And the reality is, over time this compounds and the more energy you put into this over time, the better it is. Most people think they want more leads and more sales, but if you’re a high ticket price B2B business with a long buying cycle, that’s not really probably the best approach to go about it.
It’s probably more important to focus on how do I build more trust and more community with my ideal buyers at the end of the day? Because if you really pay attention to the people who are buying from you, they don’t spend 50,000, 500,0000, $3 million, whatever your ticket price is without knowing who the hell they’re buying from. And rarely is it based on your marketing funnel or your website or all your content that is there. So what you’re trying to engineer is how do we go from zero to building trust right away? That’s the whole system. At the end of the day, what I realize is there’s a lead dominos to this. And the reason why there’s a lead domino to this is, we got to start somewhere with these busy founders and CEOs and usually that first place is creating their stack of content in a consistent way on LinkedIn. Once they lock that down, they can then do the next thing because what we’ve done is we’ve been able to help them create their content in an hour and a half per month, 1 hour to create it, 30 minutes to approve it, or provide feedback so it can get syndicated.
If you can’t commit to an hour and a half to doing the most basic thing around demand Gen, how are you supposed to get into the other things that require a lot more time? And so whenever I’m talking to someone, I’m always asking them most important questions. How much money do you have or what do you want to do or what’s all the cool things. I always ask them, how much time do you have? How much time can you commit to this particular project? How much attention can I get of you? And that will determine what is the right tactic and strategy to pursue.
This is the challenge that I’ll say like content marketing and awareness and brand marketing. It’s like exercising. It requires consistency, commitment, and not necessarily feedback in the early phases, but you don’t get the benefits of the hundredth day without the 99 leading up to it. And we really struggle, especially with small businesses and solopreneurs. People that are focusing on product building or other things that are core to the business. And they don’t have the mindset of like, hey, if I just like talking to a camera for 20 minutes and with a function and a goal of like three pieces of value that I can emote into this camera and someone else can slice it and dice it and do that trust, building that brand awareness. It’s personal brands, too. I often tell people, number one, we’re all in sales. That really twists people up, right? I’m not a salesperson, but I also know I’m in sales. We call it selling yourself. Right. Like, you’re selling yourself short when you’re doubting yourself. Like, it’s in the nomenclature for things. But that’s just it, right? So if I’m a founder, I’m thinking I should be talking to a client in this hour instead of somebody, well, how do you get that client?
Right? Take that time with a good partner, somebody who knows how to do this, and then what will happen is 100 days, 120 days, 150 days in those little snippets suddenly are all over the place. But it’s really, really hard. Like, if you were a founder and that’s what you’re really good at, you’d be the founder of a content agency. Most people, if you’re a product founder, even, like I said, a solopreneur, it’s great to have a coach. Like, somebody like you can just say, look, I know I’m your audience, right? I’m the one that I hunt down people on LinkedIn, and this is how I find them. And you get the chance to be overly aware of how to be effective in that minute versus when you give someone like, I need you to talk and tell me what you do for a minute. And it’s like, well, it’s complicated. And, you know, like, I send all these people to Donald Miller. I’m like, go to watch the Story Brand one-liner workshop. And like, what is it that makes that foundation up? And they really really start to understand it. And then the funny thing is you get to consult with them.
And then there’s that weird barrier where they’re like, you’re going to create me 20 snippets of content and you’re going to charge me how much? You’re like, well, because I know exactly what those 20 snippets of value are. And if they wait four months, they’re four months older, no content. And then all of a sudden they’re like, Matthew, I want to talk to you again about that thing we talked about before. Because if you don’t do content, it doesn’t grow, it doesn’t get discovered. And was the Chinese proverb that says the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. And the second best time is now. And if you’re waiting for the perfect landing page, the perfect script, the better camera, whatever it is, and all these YouTubers that are millionaires now, they started on iPhones, bad iPhones, because they just got in and did it. And when you can imagine, you can shave off that coaching to tell you, like, I can save you the first year that those folks did. I can teach you how to make their content. And then time becomes the discovery model that helps you to amplify it.
I know we’re sort of like preaching to the choir a bit on this, but I want people to understand, I see it every day. And you shouldn’t have to be good at it. If you’re a founder of a company, you shouldn’t be this good at this part. Getting a coach, getting somebody to push you through it is such a fantastic thing. So bravo to you, Matthew, for what you and the team are doing.
Thanks. Yes, it’s kind of funny. A lot of people sign up because they think they want more leads or sales or more content or brand awareness or whatever it is or thought leadership. But the reality is, the first piece of transformation that happens for them is because they’re forced into a routine of sitting down and creating content with us. And because we’re doing it privately, not in a long form, where we can have interruptions and talks or retakes, they start to lock down how they communicate with their sound bites. And by them becoming a better communicator, they actually become a better team leader. They actually become better communicator with their existing clients. So they get more up sales and more referrals. And then once we put it publicly, the same thing happens. The first thing they always talk about is like, oh, my God, I’m getting way more referrals in my warm network. Well, yeah, because they’re top of mind continuously. That’s the first growth. And then after once they get through that, then they start creating a little bit more, and they start realizing I need more leverage in my life because I realized how much this transformed their lives, that they’re able to be consistent and people with their marketing on a regular basis, at least organically.
And the cool thing is this organic stuff can easily be sponsored with paid advertising and controlled if you want to amplify it. And the best ads actually don’t feel like ads. Right. So this is actually even better type of content to amplify. So the reality is they have this also transformation where when they start working with us, I start challenging them on a lot of beliefs that they think they have. So they think they need more sales people. I say you don’t need more sales people. Usually they’re the number one salesperson until they exceed at least two or $3 million in revenue. You really don’t need to be hiring salespeople. They just need more leverage. They’re just used to doing sales appointments as a one to one experience. And then once we teach them how to do it as a one to many experience through a workshop or through ten minute amplifier videos where they can find more leverage for themselves so they don’t need to do a demo. The idea of having more people to be able to do this melts away, which means they have more money and they also have a lot less problems because the reality is more people, more processes, more problems.
I know Vicky said more money, more problems. It’s more people, more processes, more problems. Right. So the next stage is always to develop that long form content format that allows you to create one to many selling. They also start to realize that when they’re consistent, like you said, we’re always selling. We’re all salespeople in a way. I don’t think that that’s necessarily the intent that you want to have. I think you want to have the intent to always be helping but not always be selling. But the idea at the end of the day is that is a form of selling in a way, content marketing and adding value and building goodwill and building reciprocity by putting helpful information or processes or systems or swipe files into the universe. That you get to attract the right people and hopefully repel the wrong ones as well too, is when we do that process, they start realizing, I see what I really need is more leverage. There is a time later on for multiplication, but it’s usually much later on in their journey. And these are why so many of these busy, particularly first time CEOs and founders, have so many false starts.
And it takes them so much longer to get there is because they haven’t developed the decision tree of asking how much effort do I need to put in for how much impact? Or can I do less effort for bigger impact? Or what would be the actual lead domino that knocks down all the other dominoes? Right? Right. Can I just focus on that one little piece? I know people talk about it like the 80-20 rule, but really you have to think of it a little bit different than that. Because that’s a later thing of analyzing, which I find is reactive versus proactive. This is another thing I always tell them is, they also measure their indicators of success a little bit ass backwards. And what I mean by that is – almost all of these people, when I start working with them, they’re always looking at lagging indicators of success. And that’s way too late, right? It’s just too late. So for every lagging indicator of success, you need to have at least two leading indicators of success and know really clearly what those KPIs look like. And if you do, then you will be able to pretty certainly know that the lagging should work out at the end of the day. Particularly if you’re following someone’s footprint who’s done it before several times, because success leaves footprints.
And so you don’t have to guess. You don’t have to make your business the training wheels on something, and it could have been someone else’s business that did that. But if you have that and you have the leading indicator of success, you really pay attention to those dials. You don’t need to worry about the lagging ones. That’s just the confirmation that it did work. But if you’re only looking at the lagging, well, you’re screwed, right? That’s a whole year gone before you figured it out. So always figure those things out. Like I always tell people, if you’re going to outreach the people, you don’t need to have an inbound. You need to have an outbound strategist, not sales or marketing, because you know who your ideal clients and customers are, generally speaking. So why not build the Dream 120 list, right?
No. And it’s funny you say that, like leading versus lagging on indicators. Lagging indicators are only most valuable when they’re tied to the leading indicators and measured as a function of success across the sales cycle. If you’re using hindsight to define what was successful, you’re backing into the answer. And we will always like, so easy to put confirmation bias into this stuff. Or if it took you nine months in a sales cycle to then look back and say, oh, well, this must have been the thing. Then you try that thing. Well, you’ve got nine months to complete that measurement cycle. What you should have had was upfront like, this is the thing that I’m doing and I’m going to measure it. And even when I read the most successful sales authors and speakers and full guy Jeb Blount, who’s got great stuff around the idea of how much it takes to generate leads, turning them into prospects, turn them into opportunities. Like that whole flow. Jeb is a fanatical prospecting, literally. But his whole thing is, what does it take to get to a warm perspective Leads that becomes an opportunity. And in the end, to your point, Matthew, it’s like, don’t just keep selling all the time because that’s not going to get you.
You create awareness. Awareness is built with trust. So don’t tell me that you’re selling to somebody, telling them that you want to be their trusted advisor and all you do is shove your product into their throat all day long just trying to like, you need this. Everybody’s failing because they don’t have us. Just share their problem with them.
Well, the problem is this is that inbound and outbound marketing is extremely limited thinking.
Right.
It really is. And it was cool at the time. Both work. So outbound was a very 2010 thing because of predictable revenue. With Aaron Ross and Salesforce scaling that business, it was the model. And so then every other business thought they could do the same thing. And then fast forward 2014, the hot buzzword was inbound marketing because of HubSpot and what they developed around there and the content. And it was really cool. And then people got crazy ass crazy with all these sort of like what I call Rugo machines were like this funnel to this funnel. There’s lead magnet to this trigger to this, all this fancy stuff, which is super cool. But most of it is just a lot of busy work. And now that its fast forward 2022, it’s not fancy anymore. No one’s wowed by it anymore. And both marketing concepts are very limited. Thinking because you’re only focused on the 1-3% of the people who are looking to buy from you right now. And so the example that I always tell the people is the biggest businesses in the world are founders and CEOs who understand the concept. They understand two concepts, short term pain for long term gain.
And they also understand in a very deep level the laws of compound interest. And this is why Einstein said compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. Those that understand and earn it, those that don’t pay it. And most people are such short term thinkers and they think in such short term that they only focus on the bottom 1-3% who can buy from right now. So I always ask people this, I go, look, it doesn’t matter what it is that you do, but let’s just take it a really simple example. Let’s just say you are a web design and front end development agency that specifically markets for, I don’t know, let’s say B2B coaches or fractional CMOS. Like something really specific. Hopefully you’ve picked a very specific niche in your marketing. And if we took a thousand of those fractional CMOS or B2B coaches consultants and put them into a room and you were to ask them this question, you said, hey, who here is looking for a new website or a website redesign or possibly a marketing funnel? Okay, in the next 90 days, well, 1% to 3% of the people are going to raise their hand, which is a very small part of that 1000 people.
But what if we change the question? We said, who here out of all this group of people here, these fractional CMOS and B2B business coaches, who here between now and the end of their career will require a website or a website redesign or a marketing funnel. Well then probably 98% of them are going to raise their hand so they can all buy from you. Right? At the end of the day, the challenge is you just don’t know when they’re going to recognize the problem and decide to have money to throw at solving that problem. But what you can control is take that 1000 people. If you had them at an event, you already did it. Put them into a controlled environment like a community. We can continue to keep building that relationship with them so that when they are ready to buy, you will most likely be the first choice for the only choice, or at least you’ll get invited like be able to throw your hat in the ring to participate. And then I find in general what’s great about it is if you truly do have trust, then you can suck at sales or have less sales people, which saves you money.
Less people, less processes, less problems. And you can usually charge more because we don’t buy based on price. We buy based on trust. At the end of the day, it’s the devil you know versus the devil you don’t know. Rarely is the price ever, I would say almost ever really an issue. Most of the time, if anything, the price is higher, usually makes you much more attractive and instantly gives you some advantage and positioning from all of your other competitors who play in the sea of sameness. Right? At the end of the day, this is why I say inbound and outbound marketing is very limited. But what we want to do is we want to take some of the best practices from that, use the inbound and outbound to shake out those that are in market right now, but really lead with demand gen. And that’s what demand Gen is today. The challenge why people throw up these things like, well, how do I know that that works? Is it always comes down to they can’t track it in their silly Attribution software because they can’t have like a neat PNL sheet where they can show where things are working or not working or they haven’t actually just figured it out yet is why it always gets shut down.
It defaults back to the inbound or outbound stuff because it’s very simple metrics for them to be able to see a sales pipeline. How many people do we spam to get into a demo to then get into a close call or et cetera? Or how many ads, how much money do we spend in ads? Do you have people that download our white paper lead magnet, which then are SDR spam to get them into our demo or whatever it is? It doesn’t matter what kind of consulting, doesn’t matter whether they can see it. It’s easy to kind of like piece together, but what they’re realizing is they’re attracting usually the worst clients. They’re treated like a commodity. And when they really do add up all the costs for all those people and all the energy and stress that comes along with it, it’s not a very effective system at the end of the day and all they need to do is ask. They just need to do two things, which is create a process on their forms, on their intake forms as a blank form that just says, how did you hear about us? That’s not like a drop down option.
And they’re going to start to get feedback loop on very clearly on what is working and what’s not working because they can’t track all these relationships. But if people really know at the end of the day, we know like going to the golf club, the ski club, the supper clubs in the private slack communities, YPOs, all these really, those are things are actually driving the very best clients and business for us. At the end of the day, things that are tied to a real relationship, you’ll start to see that appear when you do that or it’ll come from the content marketing or long form content, short form long form control for one of those three buckets is going to come from usually all three, you’ll be told about that. And then when they get into the sales process, you have to teach your sales team or yourself to ask three questions. The question again is to reconfirm, how did you hear about us? Let your customer prospects and clients tell you what they remember, even if it’s not accurate, it’s what they remember. Two, how long have you known about us? So you can understand how long they’ve been the buying cycle again, it’s probably even short.
Like whatever they tell you, you can probably multiply it being longer times two, because they just didn’t realize they were in your marketing funnels. And then three, you ask them what was the thing that you really appreciate that we put out there? And they can tell you what content pieces or podcasts or white papers or lead magnets or blog posts or whatever snackable piece of video that you created that just blew their mind. Help them. And then you can do more of that. And there will be a pattern that starts to show up very clearly. If I look at my sales pipeline right now, literally half of it is from referrals, which is what it should be like, unique referrals. And the rest is from literally, they say LinkedIn. The other one says my community. And then I know there’s a bunch that I get through doing like mastermind dinners and things like that too. This is just crazy. People are working way too hard, spending way too much money, creating way too many processes to accomplish something really simple at the end of the day.
Well, this is the very interesting thing, right? The example I’ll give as an anecdote is people think like, imagine that the kids that play video games today, they’re so good at it. Their hand-eye coordination is fantastic. They’ll become amazing game developers, they’ll be amazing game creators. And then you have to remind them, like, you know, that amazing game that your kids play that gives them this hand-eye coordination that you believe will be the foundation for their future and game development was written by somebody who had Pong. There was no game. So the skill of today, this idea, when the cookie, that was it, the cookiepocalypse came along and they said Facebook, Google, they’re having to shut it all down. Gdpr, all of these things that were the end of marketing. I had to remind people, I’m like, you know that all these companies that are multi billion now trillion dollar companies were built without cookies except the ones in the break room. Like that. If you had to go back to fundamentals. And that’s what I always tell people, products go away, data goes away, what do you do? And that’s it. Even if you just talk to somebody, say, how did you hear about us?
Every sales call, it always kills me, I tell people, ask them, how did you find us? Oh, that’s awesome. How long have you known about us? And it’s so funny that these fundamentals, because immediately they may be a bit guarded, which is natural. Like, human instinct is like, you never want to be like, oh, okay. Why? I specifically downloaded five white papers. You want to say, like, yeah, I saw you on the web. Okay, cool.
Right?
So somewhere on the web, we’re getting closer, right? Or I saw you at an event and you should go into every conversation with that question leading, because the worst thing that happens is you get a fantastic SDR with a fantastic machine behind them. But because they’re so confident, they see a lead that came through a website or an event and they just immediately go to like, you did this. So therefore you’re ready for this. Like, they start to lead with, we know about you. And I’ve seen it time and time again where you don’t know, how do you know about us? Should have been the opener. Instead of you were at X, they say, well, no, I wasn’t there. I’ve been talking to you guys for a year and a half, or like, there’s get them to share with you, and if you get no answer back. Okay, cool, right. You know, they’re probably much more guarded, but it’s a bloody conversation. Take the cookies, take the marketing machine out of it. You suddenly have somebody in front of you who’s keen to know more.
Yeah, totally. I mean, there’s even a problem. At the end of the day, it’s always funny. As we’re talking, what you’re going to start to realize is exactly this. It boils back to the fundamentals. Also, it boils back to a mindset. Like, most people don’t have business problems, they have mindset problems. And I’ve been guilty of it. And I constantly still suffer from this problem. It’s an evolving thing. As you get to the next level, you’re like, oh, my God, I didn’t realize that I was being so limiting in my thinking or so forth. So the reality is, even with SDR, again, it’s a mindset thing. It stands for sales development reps, right? We got to rename it. It should stand for starting deeper relationships. And then the way we reward them is based on commissions and appointments booked or closed deals or whatever it is. The comp plan is even structured more to incentivize the wrong things. What they really need to be treated is really starting deeper relationships to build a relationship or community and reward them more. Like, I would actually pay them the same way you’d pay a client success person and give them the same kind of bonuses based on that.
Because it’s about really being helpful to people and getting them pointing in the right direction, not hitting some weird arbitrary number that the sales manager or sales director or VP of sales farted out to make the CEO and board members and partners, et cetera, happy. It’s really crazy. So again, it comes back to this mindset thing and this limited kind of thinking. And I understand it the other day. I’m not trying to get old woo woo and that we can’t have things accountable and that we can’t grow. But I’ve generally found in general, working with so many businesses now like Holy B2B business, specifically thousands of them at this point in the last 15 years, including my own. And you have no problem growing when you focus more on trust and community. It’s a happy byproduct. You never miss your targets. But we tend to miss them when we’re focused on I need more leads, more appointments. I need the calendar full. We need more SDRs, we need more BDRs, we need more demos. Because again, it’s all about, like you said before, it’s about me, me, right? Instead of you, you, you, right.
One is inwardly versus the other one is outwardly. Outwardly thinking businesses always tend to just do better.
The weird thing of the consultative approach, the first thing any consultant has to do is get somebody to share their problems. Which means you have to get them to trust that they are willing to share their problems. Because they know, like, I’ve been on the other side of that phone a bunch. I’m going to lie to every cold call I get, of course, because I’ve been researching this company for seven months. So when they called me, cold call me, because I finally accidentally fill out a bloody form with a real email, I always will be defensive. And then their reaction to it is what makes me care about opening up to them. And it’s something that we feel like everybody is human. And if we help each other, then in the end, like, look great account executives, great account reps, folks that are in that level of selling. There’s a reason why they’re relationship sellers, because they will work for Company X. They will reach penetration and good market, and they’ll do good quotas, they’ll do good numbers. And then the following year, well, that number just adds 30% to it because we have to keep going up and to the right.
And they know they’ve sort of exhausted their main relationship pool. So they go to work for Company Y and they talk to the same seven strong relationship they’ve got, and they sell them the product of Company Y. But by listening, because they know they don’t want to burn it down because they want to go to Company Z or Z for those folks, they want to be able to do this. So they’ve got longevity in mind. But we need to move that up. And SDRs is a classic. So I’m a nerd, right? I came up in tech building technology, and I remembered the SDR is like help desk. And both are fantastic, valuable, necessary, amazing groups of people. But what I was told, because I wanted to be in server development or in larger scale stuff was, well, we’ll get you a job at this company on the help desk and then we’ll get you a real job from there. And it horrified me because to the recruiter, to a lot of people, that’s what it was. But I’m like, no, you understand, this is your front line. This is the most valuable entry to the vision of your company – is how they will handle the relationship in five minutes of a phone conversation.
And it’s like it’s such a forgotten thing because we just think like, oh, let’s get better call center systems. Let’s get better ways to track, attach it to their account, tie it to Salesforce, do all this stuff great and necessary things in other ways for understanding the intelligence of the customer lifecycle. But in the end, having all that amazing software that ties it all together doesn’t do you crap all good. If people just want to race to get off the phone because they’re displeased with that frontline experience and that’s the trust, that’s the build. Like when you’re going LinkedIn, I’m not going to watch the second minute of your video. If the first minute doesn’t make me actually pause and go, yeah, I get that. Make them care. Then you can talk about stuff later. It’s like Glenn Gary, Glen Ross, Ricky Roma sitting at the bar going just talking about wives and friends and family and cars. And then 4 hours later someone’s like, So what do you sell? I don’t want to talk to you about that. Obviously there’s deeper psychology underneath it like they are in the end going to move towards the sale.
But it’s like when it’s ready.
When it’s ready. Yeah. And it’s very true. You have to be very patient and people don’t really care what you do until they know why you care. This is the whole Simon Cynic thing, right? Start with why at the end of the day. And so it is true when we’re creating stack of content. This is why we follow the Aces method for clients, which sometimes throws them for a loop because they just want to do authority content all the time or expert content that makes them like thought leaders. And so Aces method stands for this authority, connect, Engage and Show or Sell. I prefer show than sell. And so authority is anything you want to be an expert on. You can be a thought leadership or helpful tips on your expertise, but connect is something they always avoid, which is anything that hits the heart, the gut or the funny bone. And when you do those pieces, that’s what makes you likable. People always forget we only buy from people we know like and trust. And they can’t trust you if they don’t like you. And they can’t like you if they don’t know you. So knowing you is about being consistent and increasing the frequency both through paid advertising as well as organic advertising.
Like is making sure you hit all the different notes on the piano. So I tell people like, look, if you’re going to play one key, if you play one key on the piano, it’s really boring song, you want to play all the keys. And so authority, connect and then engage is another one that people forget all the time, which is you don’t need to be the expert on everything. You need to start changing your mindset from being the talent to the talent Scout and being able to go to your community and tag people and promote other people, interview other people or ask questions. Be a really good host of the party to start conversations, right? Be a provider of goodwill, a person who thinks in collaboration in general. And when you do that, you get far more engagement at the end of the day on your content and it’s actually easier to do. Sometimes you just need to ask a question, run a poll and let other people feed in and tag other people who are really smart. The last one is sell or show. I prefer show. I think that’s just where you demonstrate your existing clients transformation.
Where you show before and afters, where you show how to do something really cool that gives you credibility, that you know what you’re doing or you show you give something where it fast tracks someone, where you can make someone instantly awesome, right? Like they can get it and immediately apply it. Not end up in your marketing funnel where you’re going to try to convince them to end up on your demo or sales call for consulting or services or whatever it may be. But at the end of the day, that is a form of selling. And so many people forget those different notes. Like you said, they’re not going to get convinced by just hammering over the head all the time. Sometimes you need to do other types of content and it doesn’t necessarily have to be hard, but if we don’t like you, we can’t trust you. We got to focus on the like part too.
I’ll give a funny truth in how it works. Story of measurability not defining strength of the product. So imagine that I started this podcast selfishly to figure out how to do it. I’ve always been keen on doing it. So let me do it through work and do it completely with no attachment to work. And it was hilarious because they’re like, So you’re going to talk to customers, you’re going to talk to whatever partners I’m like, no, I’m just going to talk to people that are basically going to tell stories that are meaningful, that people who are customers would like to listen to, regardless of what we do. I’ve been lucky, right? I was given a lot of rope, a lot of time, and so I did it. I ran this continuous experiment and I even had some people from the company. It was always meant to be an adjacency to work, as a way to build trust, to just give away content and also sort of like figure it out on my own. Because in the long run, I thought it would be neat to start my own. It kept going. And then at one point someone says like, hey, wait a minute, we have to pay for the hosting for this thing.
So what’s the ROI on this? Where are the metrics? How do we attach? And it became a thing of like, how do you attach when people listen to when they go in the funnel? And I was like, you can’t, there literally is no mechanism to do this. And I was just told like, well then maybe we just need to pull the plug on it. I was like, oh, okay, no problem. Makes sense. Totally get it. So then I just rebranded it called it My Own Podcast. And then the funny thing was from there, I never changed what I did. I lengthened it, I did other things, but what I did was always core. And the funny thing is now, in hindsight, more people come on sales calls and like in product calls and open event discussions and they’ll say, oh yeah, I listen to your podcast and it’s hilarious because the sales people are lit up. They’re like, oh, wow, that’s awesome. Like, how did they know you? And I’m like, Because I just keep giving away stuff and it builds familiarity and trust. And if then they come to me and I show them something that I’m passionate about that my team is passionate about and I trust because my trust is on the line too.
If I sit in on a sales call because I’m not in sales myself, I’m giving my reputation to the experience that customer is about to have. So I have to trust my sales rep is not going to pound them in the head telling them that they need this product or they’re going to go away. It becomes a bi directional. But the first thing I have to do is just give it away. If they come and find it, it’s fantastic. It’s a beautiful experience. Because then same thing for like, LinkedIn content. And I see the way that people are getting so much mileage out of this stuff because like you said, it becomes a muscle that they flex because you do it in this format so that they just know, like, Ah, it’s accessible. They’re training their amplification muscle, their sharing muscle to this format. And then you get somebody that’s really good at getting them to that main point. You are like a personal trainer for that process. Hey, in two years they probably may not be a customer anymore, but that’s fine because they’re kind of self sufficient and that’s the best thing they can be, right?
Totally yeah, it’s interesting. Just in general, like even when you talk about the mindset wise, at the end of the day, the people who want to build a boat around their careers and businesses focus on a community and build a media channel around that community. And they build at the end. I think it’s Geoff Kelly first wrote about it. Your 1000 True Fans was the essay that was first written back in 2010 or something like that. I know Tim Ferriss is a big promoter of it and there’s been different iterations of it since then. But the point is if you do that and you build True Fans or subscribers, right, versus sponsors. Okay. So like when you have sponsors, you’re a victim to the sponsors. If the sponsors don’t like what you’re doing or your boss, like in your situation, well they can just take it away at any time. But when you have subscribers or a community around your immediate channel, well you can decide what you want to do. There’s a lot of power in it, there’s a moat in that business. So even like this time with this third business, one of the things I learned from the first and second business is I quietly made the money and did well with those businesses.
But I never and I had a bit of a community privately, but not a public one. And I realized, oh, I want to do it again. I was like, Holy crap, starting over is hard. And I realized this time when I do it, I’m going to build it publicly as well and much bigger. And I picked a niche that I could live in. So my niche is B2B C. As the founders. There’s a lot of things I can create and sell anytime that I want out of that. And if you have a real relationship with them, you do what Gary Vee and other people are doing today, which is they just ask the community, what are your pain points? What do you need to have fixed? And then go solve that problem and boom, instant business right away because you already own the trust in the community. You just need to make a really simple offer and you can have an overnight business that’s a smashing success right away because you chose to be a media company and have subscribers versus sponsors. You don’t see Joe Rogan with sponsors. I mean he got one through Spotify recently that’s his sponsor, but it was $100 million sponsor.
And you go back and look at his first podcast like there is a joke. But what he did instead was he built subscribers, stay curious, focused on community, focused on relationships with these individuals, and understood the short term pay for long term gain. And a decade later it’s different. And I can’t remember Tony Robbins or if it was Bill Gates, one of these individuals that said we greatly overestimate what we can get done in a year, but greatly underestimate what we can do in a decade. And the reality is so true. We really just don’t think of it that way. And these are all things like what you just said are hilarious because you keep building DiscoPosse podcasts. It’s just going to lead to infinite opportunity for you after opportunity after tuning. And it builds a moat around your fucking career. Nobody can touch Eric Wright. You’re untouchable.
Yeah. And it is an amazing thing. And the hardest part of things to tell people and connect and to make them understand is that it’s a grind. And it’s like Gary Vee, like you mentioned, I kind of laugh now as we look at five years ago, Gary Vee was the guy who looked like he had Coke sweats on stage screaming at people that if you’re not grinding, you’re dying. And 20 hours a day is typical. And if you’re doing less, you’re a failure. He was all about this kind of they called it struggle porn. Right. But that was how he got to that point. And then fast forward five years later and he’s doing like, cartoon art on the back of napkins and then selling it as an NFT, probably making more money than his first business did. Now, per month off of adjacent things. But because he has built this community around him and he’s built this authority, built this trust, built this world, now people are going to in another couple of years, forget about struggle-porn Gary, and they’re going to be like, he’s got it. It’s like fortune cookie Twitter, as they call it, for like the fortune cookie BCs.
They’re the people that are five major exits deep. And people are like, oh, you’ve got all this money. You’ve just got nothing but time to go and be pious on Twitter. Like, no, but this is the next iteration of their career that will get them the next five successful exits because they’re then dispensing this advice that got them to this point. And yes, there’s hindsight bias. Yes, there’s all sorts of things in it, but they’re then giving into a community that will grow with them and evolve with them to the next thing. And that’s kind of always been my thing. And like, what I should have thrown away when the boss said there’s no value in it. Well, this is going to be like episode 208 and go back to pick Rogan as an example. Right. His 208th episode was him talking with his goofy comedian buddies over a really bad video connection and just pushing it out to YouTube or wherever it was going at the time. Right. Now, on the other side of things, we have to be careful when we reference certain large scale things like Gary Vee and Joe Rogan. There’s a lot of opponents as much as there are proponents.
But take the methodology, take the specific human out of it, make it whoever you need to be. It’s like it’s the methodology that we’re mapping to that successful. But most importantly is, credibility is given to you not coming from you. And authority – so that’s what I want to talk to you about. How do you create authority but do it with credibility? The first day I published this podcast, it said the leading technology startup podcast, zero listeners. I have to do it right. So it’s working out. I’m catching up to the moniker. When I was careful, I mean, I wasn’t making a huge bold statement. The number one downloaded or whatever. So when somebody’s getting started, Matthew, what’s the way that they can with credibility, create that authority as we continue to seek?
Yeah. So I think at the end of the day, if you genuinely are actually trying to deliver real results and then actually do it, the results always speak louder than themselves. So my cheat always is do it like execute on it and then use that execution so that you can create testimonials. If you look at my silly little website, there’s literally a ten minute VSL on there video sales letter or what I call an amplifier video, which is like a demo of my services.
Best thumbnail of a video ever, by the way. So people need to go there. I’ll have a link to them. You’re magnificent. I love this.
Well, we’re speaking the truth. The truth is people don’t like to be marketed to or sold to. In the minute they feel it, their guard goes up. And so all your marketing should feel invisible. That’s what I call invisible marketing funnels. Some people are smart enough to know that it’s actually happening. But if you can make the right people and when people are sick and use that kind of thing, do the opposite to make it invisible. But the point is, if you actually deliver results, then all you have to do is people are very happy to share the results that they had and that instantly becomes your copy and your stories afterwards. And before you know it is snowballs, you do become the number one person for that at the end of the day. And the reason why what I would recommend is that the only reason people don’t get that transformation is they’re usually trying to bite off too much to chew to begin with. So even in my whole demand Gen system where I talked about short form, long form controlled form, I have twelve other steps that you can do. But our first year, the only thing we focused on as a service was step number one.
How do we create the best content, snackable content for super busy CEOs and founders in B2B. Right. And just do that smashingly well. And then what ends up happening is they end up rolling into the next service as the beta for the next one and the next one depending on the product that we’re launching. Our source of time, it’s going to be 90 days to twelve months to fine tune it just perfectly. The problem is most people try to do the whole fucking thing, right? And that’s probably just pick one thing, one problem you can solve better than anybody else and just smash that one thing repeatedly and you’ll watch yourself become number one for that thing before you know it. You can always expand into other things later on. Other verticals, other services. But just do one thing.
Don’t start with sitting on the couch and then starting CrossFit. And that’s what it is when people do, they don’t realize they’re like, why don’t you just maybe go for a walk and then maybe go for a longer walk and then go for a gentle run. And that’s how you get to that thing. You don’t just immediately think like, I got to go buy a weightset. I got to head to GNC and get some protein powder. I got to do all this stuff. That’s what we do. I got to get Marketo. I got to get HubSpot, I got to tie in this. I got to get Salesforce. Then you’re $12,000 a month in products, having somebody from you’re hiring somebody to set up your landing pages, and you’re doing all the stuff. And it’s like, all right, well, what do they get when they go in that funnel?
You don’t need it. Totally. Yeah. The person who comes to mind, who’s really good about backing this off and doing that, as James Clear, a really smart dude. Tomic Habits. He wrote as a book, but I prefer his blog at the End of the Day, which I think his book is just snippets of his blog, which I think you can sign up for free and get from. But he’s a big proponent of that. Like, back it down. Like you said, instead of trying to even go for a walk, just stand on the treadmill. Just stand there for five minutes a day, and next thing you’re going to go, Fuck, I’m standing here. I might as well walk. And the next thing you know is ten minutes or instead of doing 20 push ups a day, three times, just do one or just add one per week or something like that to make it so easy that you can succeed. And what ends up happening at the End of the Day, Eric, is this – the reason why people grow, become number one is it’s really about success, beginning success and confidence. Because you can’t win if you don’t feel confident.
And so if you engineer, guaranteed wins for yourself. It plays well with my understanding of how the human brain works. And it’s been like this for hundreds of thousands of years for humans. As we move away from pain and we move towards pleasure, the problem is people set these goals or have set these expectations, even for their companies. Internally, this is the same thing for your team. You want to demoralize a team, set BHAGs that are impossible to hit and then beat everybody up that we didn’t hit it or keep telling them how you’re missing it. It’d be better for you to set very realistic goals that are very achievable and engineered because then people’s confidence goes up. And like I said, success begets success. Just back it down, back down the goal you want to do and build off of that. And if you realize you have a runway of a decade versus a year, you’re going to get there.
Well, you hit on the beautiful point. Especially James Clear is a great example. There’s many others like this, right? Tim Ferriss’s four hour Work Week was his blog organized as a book. Atomic Habits is taking working blog content and reorganizing it in a book. Obviously, he may have had, James Clear may have had the idea of the greater vision he was trying to aim towards, and he may have structured his blog in order to do it. But in the end, snackable content is when compiled correctly, is large, long form, valuable content. But you don’t say, like, I’ve never written anything before. You know what I’d like to do? Write a Tolstoyesque level of book, because I think I’ve got it in me. And I tell even like technical white papers, like sales white papers, people always get this thing of like, I need to write an eight page white paper. I said, well, it’s really hard. It’s actually much harder than you think it would be to write eight pages and have form and have beginning, middle end. So don’t write eight page white papers, write one page blogs and then write a three that kind of relate to each other.
And then, well, guess what? You’ve got an eight page, six page white paper right there. Right? You take that, you put some more visuals in there. You put a what’s the customer story at the front of it, at the end of it your call to action of how to get there. When you go into it with the purpose of just sharing content that’s valuable for someone to consume without having a strong CTA and everything, create stuff that people will care about. And then in the end, you can package it together and all of a sudden you’re an author. That’s just how it begins this time and time again. We see it. And SModcast was like one of the early podcast, too, is Kevin Smith. And he did a book just like literally just took them and put it into a book format. And it became a best selling book. You know, we can go countless examples. Ricky Gervais did the same thing, took his BBC podcast, produced a book on it, became a New York Times bestseller. Now, granted, other things got him to that point. I certainly couldn’t take this and turn it into a book just yet. To make best seller list. But I always had it in my mind of doing this. In fact, I did a little series specifically with Founders, and I got it down to like five key questions. I asked every founder. And I was like, oh, this is cool. That effectively could become a book. It’s always there.
That’s what Tempers did. That’s what Oprah did, even that’s what you’re aware. They’re actually experts of nothing. They’re just really good at fighting experts and asking them the same questions or questions of what to look for and look out for on behalf of their audience because they care about their audience. Even all the Tim’s books, except for the four hour work week, as far as I know, are just snippets of the same question over and over again to 100 different really smart people this big and a number one best seller. And then what he ended up doing by interviewing that many people, it became a co marketing book because everybody’s featured it and everybody’s going to promote it. So it’s going to immediately make it a best seller right away. It’s the smartest thing to do in the world instead of making it myself, because now they have a stake in making sure that it’s successful because they like to say, yes, I am listed with these other hundred really smart people in the world.
I’m alongside Bill Gates, I’m alongside whatever tribe of mentors. It’s a really great book. And it’s like each chapter has its own standalone thing. Founders at Work is another great one. And goodness gracious, I’m terrible with names, but the author, she also happens to be marries to Paul Graham of Y Combinator Fame. And she just interviewed these founders and like I said, just asked the same fundamental questions. The stories built around them were compelling and just packed them together in a book. And it was great because it’s anecdotal stories that if you just read it, maybe at the end you find out. Oh, she also has a business consulting firm. Right. Like, oh, well, she asked really great questions. I’d actually like to connect with her.
Yeah. Well, what ends up happening is this is actually called the law of transference again. So this comes back to physics, like actual science and stuff like that. But the law of transference is here you are, Eric. Right? You are the host of the podcast. And then you interview expert here. And then next expert comes in. Next expert comes in. Next expert comes in. Well, all the experts come and go, but the constant is you while they’re there, they pass all of their expertise and authority to you. Right. It doesn’t matter. Joe Rogan is interviewing or Schwarzenegger or David Goggins or the vice President. He ends up getting all that transferred to him and he could actually play it dumb and be like, I’m just a dumb comedian, but yet everybody just remembers that. So you get to tap into what I call other people’s authority OPA and other people’s audiences OPA. And it’s much easier to do that just to be a really good talent, skill and a really good curious individual who cares about your own community to pull it out of there. And it becomes all this coworking stuff. People are working way too hard. This is a much easier way about doing things. And anybody can do it right. Like anybody could do this. If you just genuinely care and are interested, then you can do this. It requires almost no skills whatsoever.
Example, Harry Anderson, who if you’re an older fellow like me, he was Harry the Hat from Night Court, but he was a magician and he purposefully did weird bad deals. Like he was a guy that would take people in poker. He goes through his career as a bit of a sham in how he got some of his money. But it’s really cool because one of the examples he gave, I forgot the name of the book was too. But it’s basically how to fool people. And he said, I can take the ten greatest chess players in the world that you can throw at me and I will win more than 50% of the games, even though I don’t know how to play chess. And so he got somebody to take them up on this deal. He says, But I get to set the scenario. So you find me, your ten players and I win more than 50% of the games. And so the way that the set up was, I’ll paraphrase it was they all play at the same time. Ten chess boards lined up. Black, white, black, white. He’s black on the first one. First player makes their move, he goes to the second board, he makes the same move.
And what ends up doing is he’s not playing chess, he’s just moving the pieces, they’re playing each other. And he may pick up a move that he can inject in, right. And this is what doing this podcast has been for me, it’s like I can refer to ten other guests that have similar things every time now because I’ve just been listening and learning enough that now I’ve got an anecdotal history pool to call from. It’s kind of cool. And that’s again, the other thing I always tell people up front is they say, like, how do I talk about my product or my service? I’m like, you don’t need to, because I care way more about your message coming out than you do. You just be you. And this is why I only take guess who I respect in what they’re doing and why you’re here. And so you don’t have to sell your services. I’m going to sell them. Right. Because if I was looking to connect somebody to somebody that I believe in, they’re going to go to the links below and they’re going to go find Matthew Hunt.
Right.
They’re going to see what Automation Wolf is. This is your integrity didn’t need to be given to me. I found it. And that’s also the network effect too. It’s like you said, your community that all of a sudden you find yourself re-meeting people and maybe their company names change, maybe their life situation changed. In the end, we all find each other. And community is such a perfect description of that at its core. That’s why I like the tech community. That’s kind of how I started was just finding other people that had the same problems that I had and kind of just like sharing trench stories of like, oh man, remember that time we had like a server that went down? Or it was like just goofy, nerd technology stuff. But next thing you know you’re hearing like, oh, they’re like blogging about it. I was like, oh, I should do that, right? And we all grow and learn together. And then eventually, whatever new venture you’ve got, you’ve got this baked in community, not audience. They may be an audience, but they’re always if you treat them like a peer community, that’s such a much more respectful way to grow whatever’s coming for you and for them, because they will one day sell you something.
Right? And it’s okay, it’s cool. I say sell it. Sell is almost like a pejorative. It’s a sad thing that we attach negative things to it because there are so many vacuum salespeople. Kind of like methodologies. But also I’m old enough that I used to have vacuum salesmen. Maybe I’m dating myself on that one.
Yeah, it’s true at the end of the day, birds and feather want to flock together, so they want community. We want to understand each other. I mean, people drive around the world to meet other people with the same cars or in the golf or to the same artists. Like people make websites, but a particular person. And then even then those people want exclusivity to that. That’s why you’re going to see all these NFT membership tokens where you can get access to individuals. This is why only fans worked, right? People wanted access to certain individuals. That is a little misrated, but you get the idea. So this is the way to go. And I like the same thing you said. Building a community is better because you’re thinking outwardly versus inwardly. I always think of it as building followers or an audience is one to many broadcasting. But really you’re trying to create a situation where it’s one to one where it feels personal. At the end of the day, you can make it feel like a belly to belly experience. Like you both broke bread together at dinner. That’s how you want it to feel and appear. And when you get that, then you know it’s a true relationship.
And that’s how you know someone will drive 500 km to go have coffee with you or whatever it is. And that’s when you really produce true wealth. At the end financially, but true wealth at the end of the day of meaning and purpose. And that’s what ends up what we’re all really after at the end of the day.
Yeah. But for folks that definitely want to dig in more and will say that they absolutely should and this will not be the last time we chat for sure. Both.
Thanks for having me on, man.
This is really cool. So how do they find you, Matthew, if they want to get connected?
Well, there’s only two places I’m active so you can go to LinkedIn and search my name. That’s the only social network that I’m active on currently. It’s important sometimes to know what to say. No to delete and delegate is what I would say. And the other place is Automation Wolf right now which is spelled exactly the way it sounds. Automation and then wolf.com
And it’s worth the trip. Like I said, being able to spend time with you has been fun. I probably spent way more time talking on this podcast than I should have but it was just fun to you know, you inspired me understanding why stuff has been meaningful. And sometimes that’s what it takes and that’s why even when you’re coaching people and helping them to understand what’s meaningful it’s like the outsider is much better at pulling meaning out of what we do than us digging into 100 hours of content and finding the one thing that’s like let somebody pull you through that are a guide and that’s why I love this. The method you use is cool. So there you go. So if you all go to automationwolf.com, you will be richer for having done it, I can tell you that. And just it’s been a real pleasure. So there you go, folks. Follow the links below and yeah, hang tight. We got hundreds more of these podcasts coming. I can say that confidently now. I’m like there’s a day where I was like I don’t know if this is going to work now. I’m like this is it.
It’s so much fun and I learned every day and you taught me a lot today, Matthew. Awesome.
Thanks, Eric. I really appreciate being on the podcast.
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Stu is considered one of the top thought-leaders in the non-profit sector. He is also the Director of Thought Leadership and Advocacy for Omatic Software, a data-integration software for non-profits that allows them a complete view of their donors, promoting data-driven decision making.
Founded in 2002, Omatic Software has also made the ‘Inc. Magazine’s Inc. 500 | 5000-America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies list’ for 5 years!
We have a great conversation around the power of technology and data for doing good, and how a personal mission can become a career.
Just imagine being able to say that you literally do good. And someone says, how are you doing? I do good. This is somebody who does good. Stu Manewith is the guest on today’s DiscoPosse Podcast. Had a really fantastic conversation with Stu, we’re going to dive into why he and the team in Omatic Software are doing really cool things. But in the meantime, speaking of doing really cool things and people that do good.
Good stuff is doing things like protecting your data. So shout out to our sponsors and supporters of the podcast, including the amazing people over at Veeam Software. I can implore you that this is the place you need to go to get everything you need for your data protection needs, whether it’s On-premises, whether it’s in the Cloud, whether it’s Cloud-Native, protect yourself from ransomware, protect yourself from just day-to-day making mistakes on the keyboard, accidentally hitting delete, maybe Microsoft teams, maybe Office 365. Look, we’re losing data all over the place. Don’t do it. Just go to vee.am/DiscoPosse and you can make yourself completely protected for just such an occasion. Don’t be a victim. That’s something I’ve learned the hard way.
I lost some data here and there, then I got Veeam and I got good. So speaking of good, also what’s really good, not just protecting your data, whether it’s at rest, but delivering it in transit safely using a good VPN. I say this because I use a VPN all the time, especially when I’m traveling or when I’m moving around. I’m using other people’s Wi-Fi. There’s a lot of weird stuff that goes on on Wi-Fis when they’re not yours. Heck, even when they’re yours. Let’s protect your data, protect your identity.
And if you want to use a great VPN, you can head over and try out ExpressVPN. I’m a fan. I’m a user. So if you go to tryexpressvpn.com/DiscoPosse, you can get set up. And it is absolutely a must have in this day and age. It also helps you to cut down on some of the spam, the noise and the adjunct. Very, very cool. I also use it for web testing. All right, one more thing.
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All right, let’s get to the good stuff. This is Stu Manewith from Omatic Software. He’s a thought leader and advocate. Those aren’t titles he gave himself. Those are what the world gives him. He’s a great person. This is a great conversation. Enjoy this.
This is Stu Manewith from Omatic Software, and you’re listening to the DiscoPosse Podcast.
Stu Manewith, thank you very much for joining. I love when I get a guest submission, and it takes me all of, not even hitting below the fold before I think, it’s an absolute yes. You are among a list of the type of people that I have a real respect and adoration for in what you’re doing both directly. We’ll talk about Omatic software. We’ll talk about what you’re doing today, but beyond what you do in your day-to-day, I’m a big fan already. I loved your other podcast. I got to listen to some of the other stuff you’ve done, so I’m excited to be able to share some time with you.
But for folks that are new to used you Stu, if you want to give a quick bio and an introduction, and we’ll dive into your world at Omatic and beyond.
Great. Thanks so much, Eric. I’m Stu Manewith. I work at Omatic Software. My title is Director Of Thought Leadership And Advocacy, but that means a lot of different things. And I think we’ll talk more about those things as we talk for the next little while. I have been in the field for 30 years. I’m a man of a certain age. I started out working in the nonprofit sector the first half of my career. My very first job actually was in the performing arts. I worked at the Repertory Theater of St. Louis producing children’s theater.
But in doing that, I learned that you had to raise funds and you had to engage granters, etc. And I was mentored, thankfully, by a brilliant director of fundraising who showed me how grabbing funds from funders and then putting them to work is the best way to show how those funds are used. And so I learned a lot about the fundraising field. And I went to work for a small educational foundation, and then in 1996, I’m aging myself. I’m getting myself. I found myself working in healthcare. I was living at a big hospital foundation, a big part of a big medical center.
And I really learned a lot more about constituent relationship management and how to deal with donors and supporters and decidedly how to use data. How nonprofits use data really as the nourishment, as the lifeblood of their organization, to interact with people, to raise money from people to find what makes someone tick and then kind of hone in on it in a really good way, not in an exploitive way, but in a very positive way to help them meet their philanthropic goals and philanthropic challenges.
So I worked there for about seven years, and then I was called some might say to the dark side. I thought it was a great experience. I went to work on the technology side of the nonprofit sector. So I went to work at a company called Blackboard, which is at least one of the world leaders in technology for nonprofit organizations. Fundraising, CRMs, accounting, educational, education system management exclusively for nonprofit organizations. I worked there for 13 years from the beginning of 2003 to the end of 2015. And then at the end of 2015, I moved to Omatic software, which was actually started by an employee of Blackboard to build a better mousetrap in terms of donation and I’ve been here in Omatic for the past six years.
I just celebrated my 6th anniversary, the end of last month.
Wow. Very cool. The thing that I really like is this progression and the interesting realization now. I get into this often in the tech side of the world. So I came from the customer side of technology, working in financial services and designing systems, and then moved over to the vendor side of the world. And I like you described sort of like the dark side of one side of the business to another. And what was interesting is the more that I worked in the technology. I realized the business was intrinsic in how I would do technology because I understood the business side, and it led me to make technology decisions based on the business.
And then when I work for a technology vendor, I made decisions on how I did technology marketing based on the business usage, and then the sales team. The connection started to move together, and I started to realize, oh, I think I’m in sales, like, in a way, there is sort of a general acceptance. But the difference is I’m understanding the story. I’m using data to drive decisions. I’m working with the relationship sellers, and it became a simple thing of understanding, what is the funnel? How does the buyer’s journey work?
So now I’m a nerd, right? I look at nerd technology, but the first thing I think of is like, kind of what’s the buyer’s journey, what’s the adoption curve? What are all these things? So I look at your progression as well, career wise. Lived experience that then you bring towards attaching a business wrapped around it. So it’s a beautiful and natural transition to them running or going it alone, so to speak. So you’re clearly not alone. Omatic is growing well. And congratulations on all the work that you’re doing there. But now it’s this thing of combining those things together and realizing that there are systematic things that you can do in philanthropy that will help to promote giving power and value to those, like philanthropic investments, which is people have trouble understanding, where does my money go? Like, what does my money actually do?
It’s so important that donors and supporters and volunteers, anyone who is engaged with an organization that they feel that their time, their money, their input is that it matters. And what we want to do is we want to help organizations use their data to do all of that, to benefit them from the bottom- up, from the top-down, from the sides in every possible way. But the point that you make about how we engage, how we engage supporters, how we engage. People generally don’t start out with an organization giving money to them immediately. They need to have some connection. Was I cured? Was I educated? Was I fed? Was I given a basketball to play with as a kid when I couldn’t afford one? Was I given food during the pandemic, when I lost my job? And now I’m back working and I can give back. So people need to have, generally, have some emotional tie. And then that’s where organizations that are technologically savvy start collecting and using data to engage people. And one of the things that has changed over the past 20 years. And let’s be honest about the time frame is how many different platforms and systems organizations have used.
When I worked at Barnes Jewish Hospital Foundation in St. Louis, we had one system. We used one database system. There wasn’t online given in 1996. Not very much. There wasn’t email journeys or email marketing. We just had a single system. Fast forward 20 years, and organizations are using one or very often multiple online giving systems, email marketing, peer to peer fundraising, special events, volunteer management. There may be a separate system for membership or for ticketing or for any of the different things that are needed. And those all lead to multiple data repositories. And so organizations that 20 years ago had a single system where all the data was stored now are facing. It’s not unusual for the organizations that we work with to have at least four and often up to eight or nine different places where their data comes from. And that doesn’t even count all the spreadsheets that people keep. Right. So it’s a challenge.
No, seriously, it’s a challenge to amalgamate all of that data and keep it clean and keep it from getting stale and keep it from being siloed.
People always they ask me, what would you name as the top used software in the world? And I would say it’s Microsoft Excel.
Unquestionably. What we find is, and I’m digressing a little bit. But what we find is people have shadow systems. It works for them. They are successful at their job using this spreadsheet. But what they don’t realize is they don’t have the benefit of data collected. Let’s say you’ve got a major gift officer, and she’s working with her list of 150 people, and she knows what their gifts are, what their giving history has been. But she doesn’t know what emails they may have opened based on some newsletter that they received from the marketing team that talks about a specific program. And so she doesn’t know to talk about that program the next time she calls them. And so she’s got a blind spot. Does that make sense?
Absolutely. Yeah.
And this is where people would look at, especially sort of large giving philanthropy. And they often think it’s purely a relationship and a life position type of opportunity. And obviously, that’s a big player right there. Where there’s sort of like friends of the school, friends of the university, friends of the hospital. They are generally people who are at a particular financial level in life, and they’re familiar with the brand. But what we don’t realize is that’s almost like Pareto’s principle, but that’s a big portion of it. However, the other gap is hundreds, potentially thousands of donors, of participants in philanthropy where you don’t have a direct relationship. And look, the truth is that relationship seller has learned over time that, hey, I may have some key contributors, donors, whatever they want to talk about as discussion point or how we call them. But how do we acquire new faces and introduce people to this organization to this brand and then excite them about stuff? And so long gone are the Rolodexes where it’s like, Jenny has a good friend and he likes to support the university. Okay, great. But what happens when Jenny’s friends suddenly doesn’t give money?
Jenny’s friends actually has a friend who came to the newsletter. And like you said, they clicked on the link because they saw something about a school program and like, oh, you can start to then use that data.
Absolutely. 100%. I mean, you’re hitting the nail on the head there. It’s very tactical. It’s not sexy and exciting. It’s very tactical, but it’s collecting as much data on these touchpoints coming from various sources. These days, most are different systems, like email opens, email click throughs, what people are clicking on, or volunteer opportunities that people even express interest in and they may not follow through. But it’s all of these data points that you can amalgamate and then leverage by using other data about these people that you’ve collected and then figure out a story or a journey that makes sense for them.
And in the perfect world, there’d be a very personalized journey for each $25 donor. That’s not practical. But with data, organizations can at least group people reasonably into reasonable sized groups, depending on how big their staff is and what their resources are and then build relationships back up based on that. And I am always surprised at really how well that works when people feel that you care about them enough to talk about something that’s important to them or on the flip side. And this happens to me by personal experience. And this is again, I’ll kind of weave in some of what Omatic does, but I made a gift.
I guess it was the beginning of 2020 pandemic. So early 2020 to a large, well known organization. Everyone. I’m not going to say the name because I don’t have their permission to, but everyone would know the organization. Very well known, does great work. I made a gift. And not surprisingly, a few weeks later I got a solicitation for another gift, but I got two emails, two separate emails. And then I got two direct mail pieces. It may have been that one was addressed to Stu Manewith and the other Stewart Manewith, and they may have had my name in their database from a long time ago. And then I made a gift in March or April of 2020 that they didn’t realize was the same guy. And so I started getting two of everything. I’m in the business. So I take it with a grain of salt, maybe. But people who aren’t thinking, what the heck? Don’t these people know that I’m only one person? Or what kind of systems do they use? They’re mailing me two letters. That’s twice the postage they need to pay. So it works both ways. It can bring people closer to you.
And it can also push people away if you’re not careful with how you’re using data. And again, to weave in what Omatic software does, when we move data from, say, online giving to your main CRM, we check that we prevent duplicates. We will pop up and say, oh, and it doesn’t work exactly the way I’m telling you, which is on screen with a user interface, but it’s saying, oh, this guy, there’s an 80% chance that these are the same people. Do you want to merge them? Do you want to investigate further, or are they really, maybe the senior and the junior, and they are, in fact, two different people. But at least it gives you. We give database professionals the opportunity to make those decisions so that they are really ultimately treating their constituents, their donors and their supporters as best as possible.
Yeah. And that really is the thing that we experience, and we get it all the time. So I’ve got my little trick that I use when I go to, like, events, and I have to sign up. So I signed up in my name. I put it E-R-I-C, but I put the E and the R capitalized, so that when I get an email.
You know, it’s yours.
I can tell automatically whether this was me actually signing up for something. Or it was just an auto sign up from me just showing up at an event.
You know what that also does. It also tells you who’s selling their lists to whom. I’m serious.
It does. So this is the funny thing. Suddenly you get an email from a company. I’m like, I didn’t go to their booth. And you’re like, wait a second. How did this happen? And you realize, like, oh, wow. So they’ve probably done. We call them list swaps, right? Or contact swaps, which in fact, is illegal. I’m old school. We touched before we record because I’m Canadian. For people that know me and my odd voice and things I say. But we introduced something called CASL, Canadian anti spam legislation.
I’m familiar with it.
Yeah, it was onerous to deal with this. I worked for a major financial services institution. So we suddenly went to the point where every system has to be able to recognize CASL, and it was opt-in required. It wasn’t automatic. So there was like, if you have an existing business relationship, that was one thing. But there is no way that someone could even. If they go to your booth, they had to actually opt in, and it sort of switched the industry around. So it was funny. But like I said in that experience, if I’d get something from a company and I know how the systems work. So I’m like, sometimes just curious of, like, now it makes sense to me, but I know how the machine works, and I see past it like you said, but most people would be like, what the heck? I didn’t go to this company, and now they go through their personal list of, like, I’m not giving to anybody because this is what happens to my data. And it affects the whole industry when bad practice, unfortunate practices, even. Like you said, just a simple thing of like, we accidentally sent a thank you, and it included somebody’s name when it shouldn’t have or whatever.
Even like my dad, bless his heart, will key in all uppercase. And then he’ll get a letter that comes back to him in all upper case. And he’ll think, what the hell, what the heck? What are they doing with my data? Not realizing that he’s the culprit. But there are tools like Omatics, for example, that will fix that. It’ll clean it up along the way. So that data are pristine. And so people really feel like they are important to the organization. There’s two pieces. There’s that piece. And then to your point, a little bit ago, it is then reflecting back to people that their money was used wisely, what their money was used for, that the organization is being good stewards, that they are making nobody individually, but that together they are helping the organization make its mission impact, make the impact that is consistent with the mission that it’s trying to propagate.
Yeah. I was lucky. I had Emily Jillette, who also for people that know the name, she happens to also be the wife of Penn Jilette of Penn & Teller, but I had Emily on. She’s strong in the world of philanthropy, and I have a huge respect for her. Through a friend, we got connected. And that was this whole thing of like finding an organization that you believe in their mission, and you believe in their ability to do good with what you give them.
And every little interaction you have can influence your belief in the actual output of good and understanding the breakdown of the dollar I give to what the recipient will actually get. We hear for years about this, the difficulty of the cost of management. You hear about charities that have issues with overpaying staff, underpaying the actual people that should be receiving the money by doing what you’re doing, you get rid of the need for that to occur, right? Like, by giving good practices, giving good data management, we don’t have to throw high dollars at administrative stuff because it allows us to be more effective and efficient.
Yeah, it’s both. And you’ve made me think of two things that I wanted to talk about, and I’m happy to be given the opportunity. There’s efficiency, there’s reducing expenses. That’s very tactical. And then there’s using better data to be more effective in driving revenue. And both of those things, directly and indirectly, they generate more funding for an organization to use towards submission, whether it’s money that is saved from being more efficient or more money that is raised, not necessarily through fundraising, but maybe through programmatic fees as well, or whatever the direct program in revenue. But let me dig into that just a little bit more. On the expense side, if you can make your data management activities more efficient to use a very broad example, if it used to take you, I’m making this up 8 hours a week to key in data by hand. Philanthropic data or accounting data or what have you. And now through technology, it takes 1 hour. That’s 7 hours that saved. That where people can be redeployed and you’re spending this end as an executive team looking at it, you’re spending the same amount of money on someone’s salary or on someone’s job, but now you’re getting them not to be doing data entry for 8 hours, but doing data management work for 1 hour, and you can redeploy them to do other things that need to be done for seven more hours.
And so that is you’re driving mission impact because you’re redeploying people to do work that wasn’t. Otherwise you had to pay extra for or that just didn’t get done. That’s a on the flip side, if your data is processed faster and it’s better quality and it’s no longer siloed and it’s all amalgamated and consolidated and it can be used effectively, then you are better able to be strategic about being able to get people to renew their donations, being able to convert people who were involved with the organization but not donors to become donors. You may even be able to get them to increase giving or for organizations. My first job I told you was at the Repertory Theater of St. Louis. When I think of revenue, non fundraising revenue, I automatically go to ticketing. But if you can use data to get somebody who’s a single ticket buyer to buy a subscription or someone who has bought a subscription to buy a second subscription or anything like that, you are increasing earned revenue, and then you can similarly use data to improve fundraising activity by again having it faster, having more of it so that you can segment better.
You can talk to people more personally. You can communicate with them at the right time, and all of that is going to grow revenue. So by using technology to save money and by using technology to drive revenue more strategically, all of that is more funding for your mission. I know that’s a mouthful, and I get kind of passionate about it.
That’s Perfect.
It’s 100% true. And we see that every day with the customers that we work with that were paper everywhere or that were spending hours keying data in and now they can or putting stuff in spreadsheets that someone else had been keyed in. It’s funny, we work with accounting systems as well. We have a big piece of our business is transmitting fundraising and other revenue data to account to general ledgers so that it doesn’t have to be rekeyed. And I said to somebody, I said, you know what? When the term double entry accounting was coined, it didn’t mean enter here and then reenter it here. That’s not what it meant. A big piece of that time savings is we help organizations take that those revenue transactions and transmit them directly to the general ledger perfectly without having to be rekeyed and also easily reconcilable. So there’s not that hunting and pecking for a missing transaction or something that got delayed in transit to the bank or etc.
It’s a very important thing, too, when you think of. These are organizations that may not even realize that this kind of data flow, this kind of analytics can drive things. Like you think about a regional church. I had this joke with somebody that said, Imagine you’re starting a brand new church. You don’t sort of think of like, okay, who is our prospect audience? And I got four potential prospect parishioners. I got three moving into strong upside this week. Like, in the end, the sort of funnel dynamics are always there. We just don’t use the name. We talk about new contacts and their leads, their contacts, their prospects. They’re in stages of funnel.
But all that really is that there are signals within the data that we understand about them in their journey, whether it’s the buyer’s journey, the givers journey, whatever it’s going to be, that if you look at the signals, you can better guide a positive experience towards the ultimate goal, which is to acquire, get funding for donations, get funding to drive good, and then the bonuses, then you can spend the time showing them the value they’re getting from that money going in which then leads to, oh, right. If I send an email with a response, it gets more reintroduction, they will be more likely to give a second time.
Absolutely.
Status reports.
Absolutely. In the fundraising field, we refer to that as stewardship. Similarly, stewardship is the way the term is used in faith based organizations, but it’s absolutely a cycle. And there’s been some studies that have shown that for a new donor to an organization, if they receive proper stewardship meaning, thank them for their gift, tell them how their gift is being used or how similar gifts have been used and then re-solicitation within three months. They are four times as more likely to make a second gift than without those things. And that kind of retention and being able to leverage that kind of statistic is imperative but it’s all based on that cycle, and again, using data to properly tell people what they’re interested in knowing about and then re-engaging with them at the right time. But, Eric, you said something else about when you mentioned a church, something about technology that wouldn’t have happened other than when the pandemic started is really interesting, both in the faith-based subsector and also in the arts. The visual arts sub sector, even performing arts to some extent. And that is, organizations were able to broaden their reach to audiences that they never imagined that they would with online technology.
Museums can offer exhibits across the country, around the world. Churches. People can attend church services whatever time they want, whatever church they want. And nobody has to know. If you’re Catholic, you can go to a Protestant church if you want to test it out and from the comfort of your own living room. But what that has done is it has opened. It has expanded the reach of organizations the way they never imagined. I know of a woman who lived in Maine that sent her daughter to drama camp in Florida because she could.
Yeah.
Or we looked at an exhibit in Boston Museum of Art from the comfort of our living room in St. Louis. And that kind of reach is something that technology has afforded because it’s driven by the pandemic. But obviously it will continue well after. And it gives organizations the opportunity to reach audiences, prospective donors, even possibly prospective volunteers and supporters in a way that would never have been thought of, even with the technology the pandemic made it, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. It made people think about different ways to leverage technology in order to be able to stay alive, to stay in business.
Well, the thing that I always look back and said, what are the positive impacts of what’s the most difficult thing that in my lifetime we’ve experienced, right? And it’s tough to even say it because how could you think this put something positive like, well, think about it. We’ve democratized access to systems and services that prior to being forced into having to do this, right? How many organizations struggled with work from home like, well, it would really break up the dynamic of the company. There’s no way we can operate, like in November 2019. There’s a lot of companies that you’re like, hey, you can’t get a job there because you’d have to come into an office and it would be a massive impact on your life. Well, all of a sudden, especially for Canadians, too. Back when I was getting into technology, you had to work for a Canadian tech company. There was no option to cross the border to work remotely. You had to live near the financial center. You had to live near mark of Ontario. You had to live near a tech center or drive to it.
Right or so. Same difference.
Yeah. So now in everything, in every sector. We suddenly, as you said, the invention has had to occur because of a real adverse situation. But goodness, we really have learned great things from it so that if we do go back to a more location centric existence, we will really value why we do it more so than you’re forced to do it. It’s not a good time to be in real estate, investment trusts and such.
Right. Commercial real estate? Yeah, I know.
I saw a commercial the other day, and it was one of the things like investing. You’ve got people that are selling gold and silver and all. God bless Bill Davey. He certainly must own a lot of silver and gold. But there was somebody that was pitching some kind of an REIT. And at the end, of course, it’s like past performance is not indicative of future results. I would not be putting money into REIT right now because those are going to be vacant spots. Sadly, I really feel for the folks that are in that sector because it’s going to be a struggle for quite a while.
Yeah.
But the other thing that really hits me, too is when you can connect what you do with the real outcome. And sort of the joke I always say to people when someone says, how are you doing? I’m doing good. Like, no, Superman does good. You’re doing well. So grammatically. We have to correct that all the time. But then I tell people and I use this story at work, and I showed people I like to use strong imagery when I’m presenting I’m working for a tech company right now. I talk about what we do with software automation, and I show like, a picture of a rocket. I’m a big fan of rocketry. Like what does SpaceX do? And how do they get to do that right? And ultimately tying the business outcome to what the technology does. And like, my thing that I close with often. You’ve probably seen the video of it. A little two year old girl who receives a cochlear implant, and the video is her hearing her mother’s voice for the first time in her life. And like, if that doesn’t stop you in your tracks when you see that stuff. So here I am like an audience full of people who are like a bunch of tech nerds, and they’re just like, you really inbring this thing forward.
And they said, this is what we do. The Salesforce system you built. This is what happens because of what you do. And I tell them we do amazing things with technology, and it’s beautiful to be able to tie it to that.
It’s interesting. It’s actually something I’ve not thought of, but that our technology, which again, I know I’ve probably said this three times already, which provides very tactical solutions for organizations. If they leverage it properly, it allows them to leverage other technology. Like, you’re talking about right now that really can solve big problems, like big medical problems or climate problems or animal welfare problems or medical research. All of the things that vaccine research. I mean, all of the things that we think of when we think of technology for good, we don’t necessarily think of importing data faster or transmitting revenue transactions to an accounting system, but that’s really kind of at the basis of it, because if we can figure out a way to streamline that kind of stuff and to make data more accessible to organizations to use, they can go ahead and make more money, frankly, raise more money, build more revenue to support that really cool tech that will help the little girl with the cochlear implants or put a fast track on fixing our environments or building a new wheelchair. I’m making it up doing and doing those kind of high tech things that people really do think of when they think of tech for good.
Our tech for good is kind of the bottom of the pyramid. But I guess, in my opinion, it’s the most fundamental. It is making sure the systems are working effectively and efficiently so that organizations can drive the big stuff.
It’s the perception, even in the way that we describe some of the things which is tough. Imagine if you got a friend who’s, like, I’ve got a friend of mine. He’s a plumber. He makes a disturbing amount of money doing it. And he’s like, so people talk about, like, oh, it’s just the plumbing. He’s like, I’m right here, dude, I’m in the room. Yeah, I drive a Mercedes. That’s just the plumbing. Like, pardon me, but guess what goes through a toilet. I deal with your stuff so that you don’t have to.
Right.
We have difficulty sometimes in seeing the importance of those tactical things. But really, this is the opportunity for us to create a connection of turning data into insight and then turning insight into actionability and whether it’s empowering your sales force or your donor outreach force and whatever it’s going to be empowering them to do more with what they’ve got today and to find more signals inside the potential noise of the amount of data that’s out there. This is massive, right? This is effectively almost a Gutenberg revolution in the fact that we can take what was seemingly an intractable problem of just like, hey, this is just the way the systems work.
People talk to people and they give money. You’re like, no, no. What if we find out why? What if we actually use, like, Kahneman and Tversky taught us more about economics and their behavioral psychologists. They won a Nobel Prize for economics as behavioral psychologists because they taught us about the heuristics that drive prospect theory. And then how did they do it? Well, they took research and data and anecdotal information. They combined it. So when it came to this stuff, where whether it’s giving back, whether it’s local and regional churches, whether it’s global giving organizations. If you can take that data and turn it into true insight, you find something incredible in the same way that Kahneman and Tversky figured out that if you tell somebody they’re going to lose money instead of they’re going to get money, their risk profile alters.
Yeah. Changes. Yeah. What we want to do is we want the organizations that we work with. I think I mentioned it. We work only with nonprofits, exclusively with nonprofits. We want the nonprofits that we work with to understand that we can make it possible for them to amalgamate data from as many sources as they have, as many sources as they need, whatever engagement tools they find best to engage with their constituencies. We want to help them amalgamate that and then use it exactly as you say, to build insights to drive the next strategic thing they do, to continue to engage existing supporters, new supporters, people who have been with them for a long time and are looking for something new to leverage those connections, leverage those relationships, and it becomes unstoppable. It becomes a ever growing concentric ring. That’s the image that comes to my mind of data relationship stewardship. And then using that data again to drive the cycle. Does that make sense?
Yeah. Absolutely. It’s fantastic.
So looking in your own personal stories throughout your career, you stayed close to this ecosystem. And so I would tend to think from there that there’s something meaningful to you in being in an area to help with giving. What drew you to this as a choice, even when given a business, you talked about sort of going to the business and going to the tech. But it was always in an area where you’re working with people in this ecosystem, in this opportunity to be able to give and create giving.
Well, I’m glad you asked it. It’s a good question because I think that nonprofits are underserved. They are under something I’m trying to think of the right word. People don’t give non profits in general in the US anyway, the credit they deserve. And when I was in the trenches when I was a fundraiser and a non profit finance director, I was focused on my thing. And I was focused on my organization and on success for that organization. When I went to work with Black for Blackboard, and I saw how many different organizations we worked with at the time. Back in 2003, Blackboard had about 20,000 customers. Now they’ve got twice that. What that helped me understand was all of the different organizations that need help that do things poorly, not because the staff aren’t intelligent or not professional, but because they’re spread so thin and they don’t have resources. We could help Blackboard and Omatic, for sure. We can help organizations just do better. And that just is to say a turn on. Is that a bad thing to say? That’s just a turn on for me is to know that we can help organizations be better, do better, be more effective in how they, now in formatic, use data.
But when I worked for Blackboard, we use systems to just be better at what they do so they can get more basket balls to poor kids or get more meals to families, or get the next vaccine developed or educate people. Give them scholarships, give them a rewarding, faith based experience, give them a great show to watch and exhibit to see. I’m trying to look at all the different sub sectors that we work with, but just to make them be able to deliver their mission better just is very rewarding for me. And what I learned was, I can do it more and better working for a company that serves the sector broadly than for any individual nonprofit. There’s plenty of great fundraisers and nonprofit executives out there. There are less of us who work in companies that are committed to serving the sector and bring the best technology to them. And I’m proud to be able to do that kind of work.
And it is the beautiful combination of your personal giving to the world through what you do and that you can have a greater impact both directly and indirectly, with this. And this is why I really enjoy. In fact, your progression is like I said, it feels like that true natural progression of number one. I can directly give back, right? I’m on the ground, boots on the ground, day to day, making sure that my organization is able to thrive and our community can thrive so we can give back to them. Then you move to understanding the systems approach of things at a larger scale. And then from there, you say, well, I know how it works directly. I know how these systems are built in order to support this industry and this ecosystem. But I see the problem, right? So now you ultimately have gotten to the problem statement because of the scale at which you could work. And then you make an active choice to say, I’m going to go and solve this, and I can’t do it here because my role mission would not allow me to sort of step out and say, like, hey, folks, I think we got a problem here.
They’re like, “Sorry, Stu, you got a day to day gig here. This is neat that you’re doing this stuff”, but you do have to go out and say, okay, true. Sort of first principle startup methodology. Let’s go solve this problem. And in the end, young Stu benefits, middle career Stu benefits. And now you are able to benefit because you can.
New me Stu benefits, right?
That’s right. Yeah.
And it’s a beautiful thing to be able to find opportunity to do something that can have a greater effect than the hours you put in your day.
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I’ll say that our team at Omatic generally is aligned with the nonprofit sector. These are people who are talented engineers, developers, and even the people that work in our sales and marketing team. These are people that could easily work for companies that serve the insurance industry or the manufacturing industry or anything else. And they are equally as passionate. They have chosen to work for a company that serves the nonprofit sector because it’s just so important. It’s so important to provide tools and technology that will help them make the processes better.
Now, I like your role and your title. That’s one that as a technology evangelist. Before there was advocacy, it was evangelism. And so I always sort of joke, one day I’ll change my title to map to the rest of the world. I’ll become a developer advocate, which is sort of in the tech world a similar thing. But the idea of advocacy and thought leadership is important in that you’re representing the larger sort of system through words, writing, communication and ways to engage with the broader community and introduce people through thought leadership is always a funny thing because there’s a lot of people that they usually say I’m a thought leader. Like, if you say you’re a thought leader.
No, you’re absolutely right. Someone is a thought leader when others say they’re a thought leader, and I have no idea this whole thought leadership thing is I’ve been doing it only for about two years, two and a half years, when I joined Omatic, I was in implementations. I ran the implementations team. I’ve graduated to this role and we had a little bit of a struggle coming up with my title. We knew what we wanted me to do, which was to advocate for the sector, whether they were customers of ours or not. We wanted to know what their challenges were and build our products and deliver services that address those challenges. So I really very firmly consider myself an advocate for organizations in nonprofit sector, and I would encourage anyone who’s watching or listening if you’re in the sector and you want to talk to me, I love talking to the sector and finding out what makes you tick, what you’re especially in the area of data quality and integration, what your needs are, because that’s what a big part of my job is know, is trying to get a handle on that so that we can build better products.
But thought leadership, Eric, to your point, is kind of the evolved advocacy. It’s taking all of that information that interaction with the sector with your market and then building thought provoking questions and answers around it. I want to say more than dabbling. I’m getting a handle on that. I get a handle better and better as each month progresses.
Well, if I were to put somebody at the front, there are two personalities. There’s the self proclaimed thought leader, somebody who’s very good at public speaking and storytelling. That’s fantastic. Right? There are people that are great stage presence or the real person that I want to carry the title that you carry and the responsibility that you do, is somebody like you who’s doing everything you describe yourself. You never describe you at the front of anything. You talk about advocacy and graduating into your role and being given opportunity as magical, right? It’s actually rare to have somebody who has put yourself into opportunity, but do not take credit for it. You are absolutely in the right world, and I need the world to contain more Stu Manewith’s.
Well, thank you. I appreciate that very much. You know, I don’t like to be the center of attention, and so I tend to focus on the customer or the process and kind of extract me from the situation. But I certainly appreciate your words. Thank you.
I always tell people the greatest thing I will ever achieve will be helping somebody else achieve their greatest thing they’ve ever achieved. And it’s a great thing when you can do good, you can bring something to the world where you can empower people to achieve more. Now on the data side, this is the interesting thing, too. Obviously, you’ve got a strong technical background. You led the services and professional and services and engagement side and implementations. So this is probably a fun, real career positioning where you can take all that experience and now take those progressions and then bring them back in stories and in connecting to the world, it probably does feel exciting. Did you think five years ago that you’d be where you are today in your career?
No, I didn’t. You know what? I’ll give a plug to our CEO, who’s Canadian, he’s from Toronto. Who, Daniel Kim, who about two and a half years ago took me aside and said, I need someone like you to be our company advocate to advocate for the sector, and we’ve never had a position like this. So we’re not exactly sure what it’s going to look like, but let’s partner in building used to being our domain expert and subject matter expert and being kind of out in front going to conferences, writing blogs, writing white papers. The irony was, so that was summer of 2019, and of course, conferences kind of went the way of all things during the pandemic. But again, we’ve had an opportunity to do virtual conferences and to kind of promulgate our message to again, a broader spectrum of people than would have ever come to an in-person conference. So there’s the benefits of that, too. I was just going to say, sorry, but I have loved that progression that you’ve reminded me of, is kind of being in the field and working directly with customers on a one to one basis for so long and then amalgamating all of that experience to be able to tell stories, to figure out how to help organizations that are the organizations that have yet to come.
Well, this is the important thing is never disconnecting from that. And this is often what happens when folks I work in tech and the tech evangelist was that one that funny title that everybody’s like, I want to be a tech evangelist. So they end up working in technical marketing for a while. I left right from working for the customer world to going and becoming a technology evangelist for a vendor. And it was like as if I bypassed working as a sales engineer and working in technical market. I just, rocking it right through that. But I’d been a blogger. I’d been doing a lot of stuff and understanding how to connect value and storytelling and such and every step of the way. I always make sure that never forget how you got here and never forget who you helped get from their morning to their evening. Right? And that’s the customer stories and sitting with customers and listening to them is such an important part. Advocacy is, in fact, a two way, much more inbound than outbound.
Yeah.
And it’s something that people don’t realize. So they see this with like, oh, yeah, Stu, you just see a professional speaker. Stu is grounded out in the trenches for a long time, so he bloody well deserves where he’s at and first of all, and it’s earned. And then I guarantee. How much of your time do you spend still directly connecting to the people that are doing the thing? I guess.
One of my most fun parts of my job is I get to write case studies, so I interview. We call them customer success stories. I interview customers who, first of all, are willing interested in having their story told. It surprised me, actually, how many are circumspect and I get it. Non profits, and I worked at three before I went to the dark side. As I said, there’s a level of privacy, and I understand it. But I also expected organizations to also want to gush about how happy they are, not with our product necessarily, but just in general when something’s working. And so there’s not as many as I would have thought, but it’s so rewarding and exciting to interview customers and then write their story up and then send it back to them and say, this is what we want to use to help others do what you’re doing. And that’s one of the most fun parts of my job, is writing our customer success stories. And also, I do get pulled in to one part of my job. I would say kind of is the universal translator. So if there are people, whether it’s in our products team or our sales team or whomever marketing and they need someone who really deeply understands the sector who can help be an intermediary so that everyone’s communicating on the same wavelength.
I was a fundraiser for so many years that when some fundraising function comes up in discussion and there’s a lack of clarity how I may get pulled into a conversation. So I love those conversations because then I can let the prospect or the customer know that we get it. There are people at Omatic that have walked in their shoes. We know what their challenges are, and we can describe solving it in a way that makes sense to them.
It’s funny. I hate to make it a thing of sales and psychology, but it truly does work. And I do it all the time myself, directly, because I know I can say I’ve lived your experience. I’ve walked in your shoes. I’ve been on the other side of the computer, running a data center at scale, doing whatever it gives the credibility to your thing you’re attached to. So ultimately Omatic benefits because the people that you’re talking to say, look, I literally know what you do because I did it for years.
Right.
And it builds a comfort with them because they’re more likely at that point to be sort of disarmed. They’re more open to discussing things because you have a peer relationship with them, and it helps.
And we speak the language. I can use terminology and experiences if I need to. That just build a level of confidence and trust. And again, not that I want to talk to people that don’t get it or that are argumentative or that are circumspect. But I love the opportunity for people to understand. Yes, we really do have your best interests at heart. We really have walked in your shoes, and our technology solutions will help solve your problems because we know what those problems are. And we’ve designed our solutions through a nonprofit lens from the bottom up.
Yeah. The converted are often the most exciting parts of it. Right. When somebody comes to you and says, Stu, I saw what you guys do. Where do I buy it? Okay. That’s neat. But I want someone to go like, I don’t know if I see a fit you’re like, no, trust me.
When I was doing this. I kind of know what it was like. And this is an example of where I wish I had it. And also they’re like, okay, I’m interested. Let’s go further. And you’re like, all right. I feel excited now.
That’s exactly right. And it’s like something as simple as, now do you have to add a bunch of columns to your spreadsheets in order to get them to import? Yeah, that takes me so much time. That’s what I used to have to do. And it just becomes an easy conversation with a lot of confidence and a lot of trust built because of our background in the sector and just knowing what our customers are living through.
Nowadays, especially that we’ve moved to a dominantly digital experience. Every organization struggles, the ability to pair up with in person events and be able to have a presence there, gave you visibility. Well, now we are using mailing lists, and we are using digital outreach. This is the new door-to-door. This is the new in person relationship is we have to begin with digital, survive and thrive in digital. And then when an in person opportunity comes, it’s actually further in the engagement. Right?
Exactly. I was just thinking the same thing. The relationship has already been established and even built upon in a digital way, so that when you do talk to somebody, you’ve already had email conversations with them, you already know about them bluntly, you can look them up on LinkedIn or Facebook and learn about them and vice versa. It’s a two way street. And so the relationship has been established already.
It’s a beautiful familiarity. And when you connect the face to the name, when you get to break bread and press the flesh in real life as. What used to be the first stage was we’d begin there and then move through the digital journey and then hopefully meet again on the other side as a customer. Now it is a great thing for us to leverage the tools that we have available do more good with the data we have and then see that little girl, that little boy, that person that’s given a home where they didn’t have it, somebody who has a shelter tonight because they didn’t have one last night when we can connect and really impact the world in small, positive ways every day and use what we have, the tools we have, Stu, of data and storytelling and connecting it together.
And ensuring that the tools that you, if you’re a nonprofit and you’re listening, the tools that you’re using are going to ensure that your data are right so that the processes that use them do what you want them to do or better, and you can engage more people and raise more money and have that available to do more calculator implant research. Or I always go back to buying more basketballs for the underserved so that they can enjoy their after school time where they wouldn’t otherwise, or any of the non profit missions that all of us are familiar with or the things that are most important to us.
That statement right there should be in the front of your website. It’s beautifully said.
Thank you.
So, Stu, thank you very much. It was a great discussion and it’s been a pleasure and an honor to share time with you. If folks want to connect with you, what’s the best way they can do that?
Thanks, Eric. It’s been a great conversation. Thank you so much for having me. omaticsoftware.com. Info at omaticsoftware.com. You can also email me directly at stu.manewith@omaticsoftware.com. Thank you.
Excellent. So this has been great. So definitely folks, however, you can get connected, and if nothing, you can at least be inspired by what any of us can do in some way of connecting the end to the day to day. The tactical stuff. It seems unsexy. Sounds like plumbing, but we can work some pretty good magic with it. And when you can see a real worldly impact, it’s one of my favorite things to be able to do so. Thank you very much for all that you do, Stu.
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Welcome to the show. My name is Eric Wright. I’m the host for your DiscoPosse podcast. I hope that you liked this one as much as I did when I recorded it with Fabrice Testa. Fabrice is an author, an entrepreneur or an investor, and somebody who genuinely is using technology and business to bring good to the world. It was such a fantastic opportunity to really delve into his book Super Entrepreneurship Decoded. I loved it so much that I actually read it multiple times in preparation for the interview, and it was just that good.
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And also it’s just fantastic for web testing. If I need to test like, remote location to make sure that it works as expected from different regions. So it’s really, really great. I use ExpressVPN for that very purpose. If you want to check it out yourself, go to tryexpressvpn.com/DiscoPosse and you can get it for yourself. All right. This is Fabrice Testa. I hope you like the show. He is amazing. Get his book.
Hey. Hello. It’s Fabrice Testa and you are listening to DiscoPosse podcast.
This is perfect. What a great way to start the year. This is fantastic. So Fabrice, thank you very much. I’ve been engulfed in the school of Fabrice now for a while. I was really pleased when I had the opportunity to put you on as a potential guest. And I really enjoyed. First, I read your most recent book, which is the Super Entrepreneurship Decoded. Fantastic book. Went a lot through the rest of your history, of course. And leading up to that book, you have so much to bring and you’ve brought so much to the world already.
But for folks that are brand new and who don’t already know you. Fabrice, if you don’t mind, let’s just get a quick bio. We’ll talk about the book and a really good exploration of this concept of the superpreneur.
Yes. Thanks Eric, for welcoming me on this show. Yes. So I’m Fabrice Testa, and actually I’m Belgian. I have also some origins from Italy. So I live in Belgium, but I work mostly. My business is mostly in Luxembourg, so in Europe and I have, of course, travel all over the world during my career. And basically I’m an entrepreneur. So I co-funded different companies in the space sector in the digitalization. One of them achieved 100 million Euro turnover, 200 people. Then this company was sold and after that I funded also a company in the satellite service company, Luxembourg.
And after three years that company was also sold. And after the sale of this company, I had no new entrepreneurial projects. So I started some new life as an investor, a business center. So I did different investments again in different technologies, space, artificial intelligence, ICT, et cetera. And then, I started also to be a coach and mentor to help other entrepreneurs because I wanted to give back somehow and to help other entrepreneurs by sharing my experience. And let’s say those successful strategies and tactics that was working for me.
I also created by that time a blueprint that I call the Superpreneur Blueprint to help entrepreneurs to become what I call superpreneur. And maybe we will discuss more about this and to solve some big problems by materializing crazy ideas. And actually I met a young Dutch entrepreneur in 2017 and he came with a crazy idea. So for me it was the opportunity to also be again involved in a kind of superpreneur venture. So we co-founded with other people in 2019, the company called Maana Electric that is also mentioned in my book.
And now this company is working well. So today I spent my time between this company as a co-founder and shareholder. I also spent time mentoring, coaching, speaking at several events to explain this super entrepreneurship movement that I launched. And I wrote a book, this book, Super-Entrepreneurship Decoded, because I think that one thing was missing in the Superpreneur Blueprint. It was a method, because the Superpreneur Blueprint gives the core pillars, the guiding principles and the key characteristic of this kind of venture, but it was not telling how to do it.
And so I try to analyze what super entrepreneurs and super achievers, how they do it. What is their secret to succeed? Why others fail? And in the book, I unveil five secrets that I think can help entrepreneurs to maximize their chances of success. Of course, it’s not a guarantee of success, but I think it’s a way to maximize the chances of success. They put all these five secrets around a method that I call the crazy method. So that’s a bit of my story and the origin of the book.
I really appreciated the beautiful use of acronyms. So, we’ll talk about crazy as a method. People think, is he meaning literally crazy? But it’s a perfect pairing because it allows us to assign a memorable name to it. And it’s not far off of, you know, these real sort of crazy and moonshot type of ideas. If we take it in this literal sense of the word and then a pathway to execution that’s been tested and proven that you’re bringing this methodology, you’re bringing a framework to the world that you’ve lived and experienced, which is, I think, one of the best things that people need to appreciate about the book.
This is not a Harvard Airplane NBA guide that you read between New York and Boston flights. This is a lived experience that’s brought down and distilled into effective, meaningful steps that you can implement with great analogous references that are meaningful and helpful. And, of course, likes to bring your personal experience. I trust it. I think Nassim Taleb says the greatest way to be a philosopher King is to be a King first and then a philosopher second. Too many times these days, when you go through the business section or these sort of self help sections, it’s a lot of people who are straight from school and their PhD year was writing from research.
And while it’s a beautiful thing, ten years later, when they go back and revisit their early work, they’re like, ‘Oh, wow. I was naïve a lot of times in what was written’. Your book, first of all, tells a beautiful story. And like I mentioned before, we talked, it is you telling the story. It really comes through as a person telling me how to achieve this from their own experience. And I said, it’s a refreshing change because I’ve read a lot of books of this style that aim to do this, and they often come back as the same three things that I already sort of knew, and it’s a little bit reinforcing, but it was very well done.
So I honestly can’t talk enough. We’ll have links, of course, in all the show notes for people, they should absolutely pick up the book.
Thanks, Eric. I really appreciate it. It’s always nice to hear nice words like this, but I think I wrote the book as I would like to read a book, because I also read a lot of non fiction books, maybe between 50 and 60 books, you know, per year. I like book support, entrepreneurship, business, etc. Some are very good, and some, I think are less good because it’s true that there are a lot of, maybe they tend to have some frameworks, et cetera. But you don’t see really how to apply it.
And what I wanted with the book is to give a very simple framework because I think the framework is very simple in essence. Now the difficulty is to apply it in real life, and it’s why I provide in the book worksheets so that people can apply, let’s say the principles of the book, try to answer a lot of questions and try to put in practice the principles of the book. And it’s also why I’m just launching by end of this month, a companion course to the book, which will be called The Crazy Method Launch online course.
And it’s an online coaching program on twelve weeks. Every week there will be a module and we are mostly following, let’s say, the method which is in the book, but I’m going really to dive deep into each of them, which of course, I could not do with the book, because in the book you are obliged a bit to scratch the surface, unfortunately. Because the book will be indigenous and will be much too big. But with the course, I think the people will have really the opportunity to go really, to dive deep into the principles of the book, to put in actions the method that I propose in the book, and hopefully like this, they can really materialize their breakthrough potential.
They can really have a solid plan if, for example, they want to launch this kind of breakthrough venture that I’m suggesting in the book.
The thing that we need to look at, too, and that’s why I appreciated the references throughout and very specific stories that are called on from other parts of the industry as well, is the proof in execution elsewhere. Right. It gives us a chance to have a reason. Why is the book built to last? One of the most popular ones is because it’s five familiar brands that we know, and that familiarity breeds the belief that I can achieve it. There’s something to be said about this, but when you get into the moonshot areas and these very big ideas, it’s a little more difficult to find meaningful, real existing references.
Looking back now, it’s funny that in two years, three years, you’ll look through those stories in the book and they’ll be like it’ll seem obvious, but at the time when you’re writing this, of course, these are still moonshots. We look at Elon Musk, not just in a single moonshot, but in multiple ventures that he’s achieved. You, of course, coming from supporting and investing in space technologies and being in that ecosystem, there’s a lot of these sort of hidden, there’s a hidden world that’s existing that most people are not going to be aware of until it’s already on their phone or wherever it is.
They just take for granted all of this other work that’s happening to support the thing that makes the news or that makes the big story. So I just realized, too, by actually coincidence, I was wearing a SpaceX shirt. My wife and I are both space fanatics. And last time I got a chance, we actually went to watch the Delta Four Orion launch in Florida. It was fantastic. There’s nothing like an in-person launch. And being aware of how seemingly unrealistic that idea is to most people and why the super entrepreneur has to and is somehow able to put that aside and say, this needs to get done.
And despite advice and despite doubt, we’re going to do things to get back to like this, it can be done. So maybe let’s start there describe to me Fabrice, what is the super entrepreneur or the superpreneur?
Yes, I think it’s a good question indeed, to start somehow the conversation. What I call super entrepreneurs are people that they want to solve some big problems. Because I explained in the book that in 2007 we enter in what I call ‘The Edge of Exponential Acceleration’. So everything is really going very fast. Mostly technology is going exponentially, which is a good thing, because today we have many technologies that have achieved a good level of maturity, and they are used by this kind of innovators and inventors to build some amazing solutions.
But at the same time, problems are also accelerating at an exponential pace of change. If you look at climate change and unfortunately, you know, these disasters in Colorado, for example, I strongly believe that this is a consequence of climate change. And we see that we have now more wildfires, more flooding et cetera. In Belgium, for example, we have terrible flooding in the summer. So I think that we must do something. And unfortunately, most of the conventional solutions have proven their limits. So it’s time for radical solutions, what we call crazy ideas, crazy solutions, solutions that initially seem impossible.
But what I try to always explain is that today at the edge of exponential acceleration, nothing is really impossible. And at the edge of the exponential acceleration, impossible becomes possible. And this kind of entrepreneurs, I call them super entrepreneurs because they probably believe that nothing is really impossible. And they are ready to dedicate ten years, 20 years of their lifetime to solve such kind of big problems and to come with some amazing solution that will solve this problem. And, for example, to give a very concrete example to your audience.
There is, for example, this guy in the book that I described, Joseph Pescounty. He is Italian but living in Barcelona, in Spain, and he discovered that he could use some technology used for 3D print human tissues, et cetera. That he could use the same technology to 3D print food and so now he’s using this technology to 3D print food. Imagine that today is, of course, still a very small scale. But imagine that tomorrow he can build machines, he can scale these machines to produce tons of food and 3D print tons of food.
This could be really a big solution for solving hunger around the world, because today, unfortunately, in the world many people, they have only access to one meal per day. So I think at the 21st century, we are always saying we live extra ordinary times, et cetera, which is true. But how can we admit that today in our civilization that some people, they have only access to one meal per day? So I think we need to come with some solutions. And it’s not with the traditional solutions that we will do it.
But with this kind of breakthrough solutions, it will be possible. And so it’s why I call them super entrepreneurs. And just to be clear, I don’t want to oppose one kind of entrepreneur to another kind of entrepreneur. I’m an entrepreneur, and I respect all kind of entrepreneurship. It’s just that these kind of people, I think they are super because they want to really solve big problems, to dedicate a big part of their lifetime to this, to work on moonshot things that others may think are impossible.
When I met this young entrepreneur, Joost van Oorschot, that is also in the book that came with this idea behind Maana Electric. When I met him first, my first reaction was also to say, wow, it’s crazy. He wants to turn sand into solar panels into a machine. This is impossible. So my first reaction and I’m also in this movement. But my first reaction was to say that’s impossible. So our first reaction, because we have a linear mind is to say it’s impossible. And if we go to an exponential mind, then we see the thing is possible, because in the exponential world, you know, if you can go ten times, if you have ten doublings, it’s a grow of 1000.
If it’s 20 doublings, it’s a grow of 1 million, you know. If it’s 30 doublings, is 1 billion growth. So it’s going very fast. And today we see with this progress of technologies that many things are possible. So I think we need to have a mind shift and to really shift our perspective and see. Okay, if I would have a magic wand, how I will solve this problem. And it’s what I recommend to innovators if you would like to solve this problem, what would you do? Don’t think that with possible solution.
Just imagine if you could do it or you will do it. Like, for example, I said this 3D printing machine, like we seen some science fiction movies, you know, that the food is printed or appears directly like this. And this is really something that we think with a magic wand that it could be possible. But today the reality is that it’s probably feasible and it will happen. I’m pretty sure that it will happen in the coming years that it will be at this time.
To take it back to this first principles thinking approach, which I think is obviously the fundamental to the folks that are achieving these sort of grand visions is because they’ve gotten rid of linear thinking. They have to shed the belief that everything is one to 1.1. It truly is this sort of zero to one. Go back to raw materials. And I think Elon Musk was recently on Alex Friedman podcast. He talked about that. The only way you can approach this is simply look at the costs of the raw materials, and the goal in the end, is always to the cost of manufacturing will be asymptotically close to zero above the raw materials.
And it’s just a matter of the work that you do to get closer to that raw material cost. And that’s ultimately what led to battery technologies. And we’re seeing this with solar. But you’ve proven it out right in that very idea that if you just said, well, we have to just make it slightly better than the current lithium manufacturing, right? That can’t be it. You had to go to what seems like a crazy idea, as Joost brings and say, okay, what if we actually could do this and then you realize you always could with the right, first mindset and then second, which is why the book is important, executing the approach in operations as well, because there’s lots of big ideas.
But then having the team, the growth, the understanding to financially survive to execution is where, it’s a long distance from idea to execution. So that’s why where do we learn this? Is it as rare as it seems to be able to have this thinking?
Yes, I think you are right, Eric. When I met again, when I met you the first time, I was thinking, okay, that’s impossible to transform sand into solar panels. All this will be impossible. But then I go just 1 minute after. Yeah, but let’s imagine that it can work. Okay. So I asked some people, do you think that it’s possible? And many people told me, look, it’s not against the laws of physics, in sand, you can find everything to transform it into Silicon and then into solar cells and glass.
So basically it’s possible from just a physique standpoint. And so this was for me, the confirmation. Okay, that’s probably possible. So now let’s dive a bit deeper into that. So I did my due diligence. I analyze more. I try to understand also the business model, et cetera. What was the plan? I was also impressed by your master plan. It’s a notion that I explain also in the book, what were the big goals, etcetera. And to be honest, we are just following the big milestones right now.
And then you are right. I think an idea remains an idea until it is materialized and so what I see so many times is entrepreneurs. They have a lot of ideas, et cetera. But they never take action, or if they take action, they take the bad action. So it’s why I always say first, you need to really know, okay, what do you want to achieve? What do you want to create in this world? What is your true purpose? Okay. And after that, you need to press your crazy ideas that these crazy ideas will really allow you to materialize somehow your big dreams and you have to dream big and bold.
Many people are unfortunately not audacious enough. These kind of super entrepreneurs or super achievers. They have dream. They have big dreams. They believe in their big dreams, and they are bold. They take the necessary actions to materialize their dreams. But you are right that the proper execution is key, because without a proper execution, without what I call a flawless execution, you cannot, unfortunately, materialize because these kind of moonshots are very complicated, to be honest, to be achieved, to be materialized. So it’s why it’s very important to have a flawless execution.
And these kind of super entrepreneurs and super achievers, they are master at execution. They really try to see anything that can help the business. And now the secret one of the secret to succeed this flawless execution is to have a good preparation. The preparation is key, but now you have not also to spend months and months just in preparation and never take action. So I think there is a good balance to have when you think that your plans are good enough, then you have to act and maybe to revise a little bit your plans, et cetera, iterate.
Of course, move forward because I see also a lot of entrepreneurs. They have big ideas. They create big plans, but at the end they have the fear to fail. Or maybe they try to perfection their plans, but at some point they never do it. And they have very nice pitch deck. Or they have very nice business plans, or they have even very nice products. But they never ask the customers about their products or they never try to sell their products. So they have fantastic products. But at some point they never question also the business case for the product.
Again, it’s nice to have big ideas, but you need to go from a big idea, from a dream to a plan and then to some execution. Again, it may seem very simple, and I think the basics of the business is simple. Business is what an entrepreneur is there to solve a problem with a product or service that you want to sell to some people and you make some profits. I think the basic of business are very simple. The realization is something which is more complicated because there are so many parameters and these kind of super entrepreneurs and super achievers, they have a holistic approach about how to manage the company and they try to minimize the flaws in every aspect of their business.
Now you bring up a very important point when without customer validation, this is quite often the death knell for product management and bringing products successfully to market, because if they wait too long before they expose to their buyer and their user and their true technical consumer, they go far down the path to what they believe is the correct thing to build or method to use. And then you have the double problem of number one. They’re now pot committed or too far invested into this. And so they then start to discount the customers ideas like, ‘oh, no, but you don’t understand. We know what we’re doing better. We built it.’
But then the counter problem exists now, Fabrice, where in moonshots, quite often the customer doesn’t exist in a way when you’ve got an idea, you have long plan as to when a customer will be able to test it. How does that gap get bridged in your experience dealing with very early emerging tech?
Yeah, that’s, of course, a good question. And it can be a problem, actually, it’s also something which is well known. And I re-explain also in the book is the technology adoption lifecycle. So initially I think for this kind of, because mostly what I describe in the book are what is called deep tech companies. So it’s really very long. Let’s say moonshot venture that will take probably 5 to 10, if not 20 years, because there is a lot of research and development up front, et cetera. And for these kind of deep tech companies, generally, what you need is to have the validation, at least a kind of validation or pre validation from early pioneers.
So early pioneers are really people that are visionary that love new things, et cetera. That maybe see beyond, they like futuristic things, et cetera. And let’s take the example of Lilium, for example. It’s a company also that I described in the book. What they want is to have a small electric plan to make inter regional, let’s say, or intercity flights. So this will be perfect. It’s a bit like also Uber Air. So it’s these kind of companies that want to make some flight taxis, et cetera.
And you are right. Is there today customers? No. But there are some people that they may question some people and say, look, if this would be available, will you take it? Will you be able to pay for it? And I think there are many people that will say, yeah, I love Uber Air. That for example, in LA, where there is a big traffic jam, maybe I would have the possibility to fly instead of going on the road. I will love it. And I will be ready to pay for it.
So I think you can always find some people that at least validate your, let’s say, your proposition. Now, the difficulty for this kind of companies is that after two pioneers or what we call the early majority that will adopt, let’s say, their product, it will be to go to the mass market. And they might be more complicated. But, yeah, it’s all the difficulty of creating a business that can scale et cetera. But there are some, of course, fully, some strategies to do this. But I think in the case of Lilian, for example, they now went on the stock market.
I think it’s on the Nasdaq, their value at 1.5 billion. So the market believes in what they do. And I think there is a strong, let’s say, thinking among the population that, yes, this kind of solution at some point will take off, which is the right word will take off as long as, for example, the barriers related to air regulations, et cetera will be removed. But early validation is very important. And I like to give a very simple tip to start up, which is the Starbuck tip.
So if you have an idea, you go into Starbucks and you ask someone, ‘Look, I pay you your latte, but you spend ten minutes with me. I explain to you what I want to do, and you just give your honest feedback about what I want to do. If you think that it’s completely crazy, tell me that it’s completely crazy. If you think that you will never pay for it or that it will never work. Just let me know if you think that it’s amazing. Just let me know, et cetera.’
But you know what? Recently, a company in Luxembourg. I met them in an event and they talk about this idea. And I said, Did you validate your idea? “Oh, no, we don’t know exactly yet. We have not talked with potential customers yet, et cetera”. And I told them, look, go into a coffee shop and do this, and they did. And they receive an incredible validation of their solution. And many people said, look, if this would exist, it would be fantastic. And since then, they just won some prices, et cetera.
And they started doing well, because now they are convinced that there is a real market behind. So I do believe that early market validation is very important. But you are right that for this kind of companies, it’s not always easy. I think they have to focus on the pioneers, the early adopters, if at least they have this validation, it’s already a good sign. But after they will have some challenges, of course, for sure.
And I think an important thing that obviously plays out in the book. And with all the work you’re doing and the upcoming courses is, I often call it framework over firepower. That the old saying goes that plans are useless, but planning is essential and being able to adjust pivot, deal with changes in inputs. But if you do not have a framework in which you can apply these methods and you’re lucky more than you’re right in the execution. And this is the belief that we can just sort of throw.
If I scale my engineering team by 100, then I will suddenly be 100 times more productive. And it’s the mythical man month, as they often used to call it a mythical person month, of course, but more politically correct now, because you cannot just throw human firepower at it or money firepower necessarily and have it scale. The framework is incredibly important because then it becomes the methodology that anyone in your team can apply and that it also comes from vision and principle of the company. And I guess when you’re creating your own framework and you’re using your own method here Fabrice or you’re looking to entrepreneurs, especially as an angel investor, what is it that you look for in that, this is an idea and I trust these people to be able to scale towards this solution.
Look, before I make an investment. I use what I call the four T’s. And it’s not because my name is Testa. It’s around the T. And again, I like acronyms et cetera. But here it’s very mnemonic system for me to remember what is important. The first tier is technology. So is this technology really something breakthrough? Is it really something unique? Can this technology really create a big value? So that’s the first tier that I look into. Then I look at the second T, which is traction. And for me again, traction means market.
Is there a big market enough for this? Now, referring back to the previous question, sometimes it may be a bit complicated, but at least, is there some early pioneers, early adopters that, let’s say, that are quite excited about this solution and it’s what I call the traction. Then the third tier is the team. Is there a team able to materialize this big idea within this big market? Because for me, this is essential. It’s the execution. Is the team available today or maybe with some other people to execute the vision?
And then the fourth tier is the timing. Is it the right timing for it? Is it too early or is it too late? It’s a notion that I explain also in the book because I think this is really paramount. And there is a famous person that, unfortunately, I forgot his name. But he did an analysis of many ventures. What were their success factors, et cetera. And among, let’s say, all these startups et cetera. I think the video is available on YouTube. He found that, actually, timing was the key success factor.
So yeah, because why? Because sometimes some people, they have a very good idea, but they come too early and they are going to burn a lot of money before the market is ready. It’s maybe a bit the case, for example of Lilium, that I was talking about previously because I think they have a fantastic solution. But today the market is not fully ready, so they need a lot of cash. And it’s why, for example, they did an IPO to have enough cash. If you are too late for the market, the market is already over, and that’s done.
I think probably you will have some late people that might, let’s say, what we call the late majority that might eventually buy your solution. But the market is over. So it’s finished. So I think the proper market, the proper timing is very important. And what I have observed is that most of these super entrepreneurs, they are able to really sense, ‘Okay. What are the moods of the time? When is the right timing for it? And they launch the solution at the right timing. For example, I think Elon Musk, he was a master in that when he launched Tesla.
I think he really perceived that there was something missing on the market, that it was a time for electrical vehicle. But there was a need for some new kind of electrical vehicle, et cetera. He was right when he launched SpaceX. And you have dealt with SpaceX. It’s also in the right timing because there was all the start of the new space, et cetera. There was many projects of multi constellation, et cetera. And he was right to say, okay, if I can have a solution, which is maybe cheaper, et cetera, I can give a boost into this new space edge.
So I think the timing is very important. So I use these four T’s, the technology, I have the right technology, the right market, the right team, and the right timing. And for me, these are the basics after that. Of course, there are many things, but I think these are the four basics. And if at least a company has these four green lines into these four pillars, then for me, I can try to investigate a bit more.
Yeah, the timing is very interesting, and it’s often, it’s difficult to know until you run the other side of it. But if we take anecdotal experience, combine it with data, and I believe that we are going to be better. And we are today better at predicting that timing and ability to execute into that market. Of course, I brought up Built to Last. The funny thing about Built to Last is most of the stories in Built to Last actually led to pretty deep failures, years after the book had come out because the markets completely shifted away.
And it was sort of the idea that while they were successful in this pivot of those companies, they then failed to pivot soon after, and they suffered because of the belief that it was now stabilized. And they languished what they believed they already achieved what they needed to do to survive. But survival, like most things, is a continuous effort, especially in business when you’ve got funding. In the end, they often say it’s like startups fail for two simple reasons. The money runs out or the founders give up.
Yeah. Exactly. Dispute between the founders, or they give up or the lack of cash. Yes, these are the two main reasons, for sure.
But the four T’s that you talk about are the reason why the second part will occur most likely, right. Because we joke about pets.com and the original.com era. They all would have been fantastically valued and successful today, of course. But we’ve now succeeded on the backs of their failure. And I think that’s what as humans and as learners, in business and in tech, if we take those learnings and we say if given the right timing, if we change the approach, if we go back to first principles, could we bring this back to the market and be successful in it?
It’s good. I like that entrepreneurship as well as being celebrated. We saw a long period where it’s a bit of a tough word when you say the Uber of something. Right. Uber was this fantastic thing. But then it became synonymous with a negative view of the founder, of the specific founder. Right. That story was unfortunate because it truly did taint the incredible thing that was done to change the market to create something that just didn’t exist. And so I like that now entrepreneurship, we’re going to see more and more people that are successful with it, because I think further down towards the school system.
They’re studying these things instead of General Motors and Vodafone and the early technology creators as the case studies. They can now use case studies from the last five to ten years, which are fundamentally different than what we had 30 years ago, which were the case studies that were put in print and treated as the gospel of schooling, at least. And I’m curious on this one, Fabrice. Is there enough further down, even like in high school and secondary education, that is being done to make entrepreneurship a viable future for people?
I feel like we’re still not there yet, but I’m curious of your experience as well, talking to especially early founders.
Yes. I strongly believe that we need more entrepreneurship and not only to create profit ventures but also nonprofit ventures. I think anyway, the same principles of entrepreneurship can be applied also for nonprofit. So we need more people with an entrepreneurship spirit. I think when you have an entrepreneurship spirit, you can achieve anything you want in life because you have some capacity to convince others. You have some tolerance, let’s say, to risk. And maybe again, to things that are impossible. Things that are possible. And unfortunately, I don’t think that today the education system prepares enough for entrepreneurship, at least at primary or secondary school.
Of course, after that, there are some masters in entrepreneurship, et cetera. But yes, when the children are very young, I think there should be more kind of entrepreneurship, which is taught to our children. So, for example, to learn them, how to make great presentations, how to maybe have a small business which can be a profit or nonprofit, but at least to try to put in place of projects. So project management is very important. How to test their hypothesis, how to make experiments. That failure is not a problem.
I think there are many, many notions that could be to learn, for example, the exponential technologies. It may seem complicated, but it’s not, you know, a 3D printer is not so expensive and they could play with the 3D printer to build stuff, et cetera. AI, for example, coding in Python, et cetera. It’s also not expensive. So I think there are many things that could be taught in virtual reality, and that are sold today. This metaphors, et cetera. Again, just simple glasses, et cetera for virtual reality is not so expensive.
So I think today again, because in this age of exponential acceleration, we also seem a decrease of many costs, et cetera. So it’s the zero marginal cost society that has been well described by Jeremy Rifkin. And so, today many of these technologies are not so expensive if you want just to experiment a little bit. So why not to create in school some kind of living lapse where children, they can play with this. They can also try to put in place some projects and to pitch their projects in front of an audience, et cetera.
Maybe to fundraise also because sometimes they ask to the parents, or they ask to the teachers, but why not to the children themselves to try to fund raise for their school. And we should also learn the principles of personal finance to children because it’s something which is also not taught. And I think it’s unfortunate. So I think there is a lot to do in that space, unfortunately.
Yeah. You are speaking the words that I think of and said so well to this idea that there are things that we do not teach. And I guess there’s an assumption that the parents, it’s on the parents to teach these principles. But in the end, if it’s not promoted through the school system where they spend the majority of their time learning where that’s the most formal part of their day to day education. By the time the parents get around to it, they’ve spent a day learning or a day in some kind of programmatic method.
The last thing you’re going to do is suddenly, hey, let’s explore creating a pitch deck. And it’s funny that when I work with my kids and I recall here that you have kids as well.
Yeah. Four kids.
There you go. I know your number too. I’m the same. And my older kids when they would come to me for money, I would say, okay, what can we do? So that if I give you this money, we can turn it into a way that it can create more money. The first thing is what’s a repeatable thing that we can do. So rather than just go and buy this thing once and at least just to introduce critical thinking and them having to explain why they really wanted something to me.
They would often become more confident, like, okay, so I’ve got this idea. I need $40 for something. But I’ve got an idea. What I’m going to do is I’ve got a bunch of stuff in my closet. I’m going to maybe do a garage sale. And so I would say, well, tell you what, I’ll save you the trouble. We’re going to donate it. And I’ll give you the money so that we can win twice because you’re going to help somebody in need. And you’ve pitched your case.
I’m now your VC is when you give them, though, that freedom to create an idea and to push to get towards it, they feel good. And you can tell in the next thing they ask you. Now they’ve got an approach. They’ve got a method, right. So I think next time they go to their teacher, they’re going to say, I need more time on this. But here’s my proposal. I’m going to run a study group. This is entrepreneurship in the smallest way. I love that spirit, and you can see it in the kids.
They know it’s in them. It’s not for everybody for sure. There are many kids who they also think and act and learn differently. And we should support that as well. But for those kids that can take that to the next level, I really think we should be putting stuff in place to help them and nurture that.
No, I like it. And I try to do the same with my kids. For example, one of my son said, ‘There is this business that I know some friends. They do it’, et cetera. I said, you can do it, but I need some capital to start. I said, ‘Look, I will make your sponsor. I will give you the initial money and then you have to try. Then if you make profit, that’s fine. And let’s see how it works’, et cetera. I like it. But you are right.
The parents, of course, that maybe are educated can do it. But many parents probably are not businessmen, or they are not entrepreneurs. So maybe they just don’t think or they don’t have the knowledge to learn to their children. And it’s why at some point, the school should try to learn this kind of principles to the young generation, because I strongly believe that we need and it’s all, you know, my mission. I try to elevate a new generation of young entrepreneurs because I think that entrepreneurs can really shape a better future for humanity.
I think it’s through entrepreneurship, through building new things, et cetera, that we will build a better world, as I always say, build the world you love. I think if you wait, that others, build the world that you love for you, it will not happen. You have to do it. So what the book is also called with more doers more builders that can really shape a new world that will be better for the next generation. I’m a father of four kids, and what I want is that when I pass away, the world will be a bit better than the one that I knew because I want my children and my grandchildren that they live in a better world.
And so I think it’s a collective responsibility. So it’s why I call so this super entrepreneurship, a super entrepreneurship movement. I hope that many people will read the book. It will inspire them. Again, it’s not a guarantee of success, but maybe it will give ideas to some people. Okay. Maybe now it’s my time to start. I will follow some principle of the book, and I will try to take my chance because I think it’s never too late and we have one life. So why not to try at least?
Now, some people will fail. And I also had some failures like everyone that’s perfectly normal. But you need just to say, okay, I fail. What I can learn from this failure. And I can try differently next time. But maybe during this journey, some people will meet some investors or some team members, and maybe the next time they will do another venture with these investors or these team members, and it will work. So I think that’s normal. I think failure is part of the journey, but it’s not a reason to not try.
And I think we need more people that try new things, try to change how things are done. So we need more game changers at all, let’s say, levels of the society, we need more game changers, people that don’t accept the status course. I think there is too much acceptance. Let’s see how things are done. And again, at this age of exponential acceleration, everything is going fast and there is no reason why we could not do things differently and change how the world is going. Again, I think there are many things that are going well.
So I’m not pessimistic at all. I think we live probably much, much better than 100 years ago, for sure. But there are anyway, many problems. And I think it’s the collective responsibility of all of us to try to find some solutions to solve these problems.
Yes. An interesting quote is from Penn Jillette of the magician duo Penn and Teller. And he says two things are invariably true. The world is getting better and people think it’s getting worse. There’s an incredible amount of media attention to negative news stories. It’s very easy for that to spread and to us feel engulfed in this. But as you said by most measurable factors, we are better off economically, better off as far as distribution of food. There are many things we have a long way to go, and it happens by people like yourself and people like the superpreneurs and the people that are ready to give whatever to give back. We can continue to exponentially affect the world and at the same time making it commercially viable to run the organizations that can create these systems and solutions that can give back.
It’s an interesting dichotomy of celebrating sort of the free market capitalism to grow a business fund, development fund, research fund, delivery of new things, and then balance that with making sure that we give back. And I’m optimistic of what’s ahead. But I’m also careful about my optimism. Nothing is automatic for sure. You brought up a great point Fabrice. I’d like to quickly touch on this, too. Failure is an important part of the process, and we’ve all had levels of failure at some point in our life.
For those early entrepreneurs, do you find, is there any risk that a lack of exposure to failure can be problematic? I’d say for them as they begin this entrepreneur journey because they’re maybe not prepared for that first hit, that first thing that could set them back. How do you prepare somebody for adversity when they haven’t experienced it yet?
Yes. Look, let’s be honest. Who likes to fail? I think nobody. I think we all like to win and to never fail, that’s for sure. So I think unless you are wrong, I don’t know people that like to fail, but for me, it’s not a reason not to try. Now, all these super achievers or super entrepreneurs are they let’s say, overcome failures is through their massive transformative purpose. So they know what their true purpose is and they are fully committed to this. So it’s what gets them off the bed every morning and they know why they are doing this. For example, to solve hunger or to try to contribute to climate change, et cetera.
And it’s their strong motivation. So with this, they know that, okay. I have to try. I want to pursue my moonshot. It will take time. I will face setbacks. I will face many years. I will have failures, but I will need just to continue, because what I do is great. What I do can be great for humanity. So I need to just continue, even if I face some fears. I think for me their true purpose is their tool to always keep the true north and to always go, even if there is snow, there is rain, there is a lot of things.
They just continue on their track until they achieve their goals. And this is what I have observed. All these guys took Elon Musk and he waited probably 20 years before SpaceX is a great success. And many rockets just crashed and exploded. So he had a lot of failures. But he just continued. At some point he was almost broke. But he continued again and again. I think it’s just the secret. It’s only the secret to succeed is never give up. Like Winston Churchill was saying, never give up.
But I think it’s true. And these kind of super entrepreneurs and super achievers. They have a relentless, let’s say pursue of their dream or their objective. They will never give up until they reach their dream. Now, at some point, if they see that really, they need to take some other route to go to any way to achieve their dream, they will do it. They are not stupid too, so pivot or to try to change a bit and adapt the plans are also possible, for sure. But generally they are very relentless.
And even if everybody around said, look, you will never succeed, they just continue. Steve Jobs was well-known like this. He was saying, no, we will succeed, we will do it, et cetera. Everybody around was saying, no, it’s impossible. Again, it’s impossible. And he was saying, no, it’s possible. I think it’s really a question of mindset. And if you are fully convinced yourself, I think you can convince others. But if the founder says things that he will not succeed, I’m not sure that it’s going to work, et cetera.
How can he convince his team that it will work? So I think the best super entrepreneurs, they have a very strong belief that what they do will succeed and it’s all. They can convince investors, they can convince team members, they can convince customers because they say no, I’m sure it will work, it will work, et cetera. It’s what I’ve observed. I have known some guys, they were incredible. Even if everybody was believing that it will never work, they will continue. No, I’m sure it will work.
And they were demonstrating why it will work, etc. And they can bring some convincing arguments. Just people follow them. Why? Because dreaming is nice too. And so you try to also believe in these dreams too, because you want to be part of the big dream, because if you don’t have a big dream yourself, but you want to help someone else, maybe to make their dream come true. So I think that’s something which is fascinating.
Oh, definitely. And the most important thing and why I will implore people to pick up the book. And I’ll say that either through the blog or through social media, I want to make sure that people get access to this. So I’m going to offer up to buy up a few copies myself on people’s behalf and make sure that I get more people exposed to this. If you take something that’s executed successfully at scale and bring it down to a human level, that’s what makes day to day entrepreneurship accessible.
If we use the practices and the successes from incredible moonshots and bring them down where there’s less risk and there’s less things but use the methods. This is fantastic. It’s much harder to take traditional business methodologies and then scale them into an area where no one’s been exposed before. This is why it’s such a beautiful opportunity to take the lessons from the book and then put them into day to day. And when I read it, it immediately made me want to revisit a few things that I’ve got active.
I’m an advisor to a start up, and I’m doing other things, and it just lit up an incredible creative spark in me to shed the unnecessary things that are being worked on. And let’s go to core principles. Let’s go to what needs to get done. So I found it to be a very inspiring read, and I sure hope that other folks do. And it’s funny just to further that one thing you talk about SpaceX landing rockets. I use this in presentations all the time recently at a customer talking about how today’s stuff that we see as normal was not that case two years ago, even because Blue Origin, they sent people to the edge of space and back, and they landed the rocket.
So they land the first age of the rockets, and it wasn’t even in the news because it’s normal now. So SpaceX has normalized landing the first stage of a rocket, which was unfathomable five years ago.
Now for sure. And if I tell you that there is a way to land rockets without using any fuel, because SpaceX is using fuel to land rockets. But if I tell you that there is today, a means to do it without using any fuel. So a very sustainable way to reuse a rocket. Will you believe me or will you say that it’s impossible? I can tell you that it’s possible because I’m now part of a venture which is a German entrepreneur, fantastic super entrepreneur. And he just demonstrated very recently with a drop test on a small scale that it works.
It’s a kind of an inflatable parachute, if you want that enveloped, let’s say the rocket and it works, but it’s not using any kind of fuel, et cetera. And so it’s a fully sustainable solution to reuse rockets. So you see, it’s going so fast. What I wanted also to say maybe about the risk is that there are some techniques also to minimize the risk, and it’s part of the good preparation. And I explained a little bit in the book and in this course, the crazy method launchpad that will start end of this month.
I will also give much more explanation about these tools, but there are some tools that exist also to try to have a very good preparation to analyze all the possible risk, et cetera. So that again, the risk of failure still exists, but at least you try to minimize it. And I think that again, maybe some entrepreneurs are fearful to do something because they say it’s going to fail, and sometimes it’s a lack of preparation. I think if you are well prepared, if you have well evaluated risk, and if you see what I like, this principle of asymmetry of risk.
Okay. There are some risk, but they are minimal compared to the reward that can be provided by what I want to do, then it should be always the decision. Okay. I’m going to do it because what I’m going to do if I succeed will just be great for the planet. By the way, if I succeed, I can even have a billion dollar company. Why not? And the risk is quite small. Or at least I know what I can do because I have some backup plans, et cetera, to minimize the risk.
If eventually they would happen.
Well, I look forward to seeing the outcomes from the first cohorts in the crazy method launchpad, so Fabrice will stay close for folks who do want to get in touch with you. What’s the best way they can reach you in order to get in contact?
Yeah. So I think the best way is to go on my, I have two websites, but my main website is fabrictesta.com, where you can find all the information. You can reach out to me on this website. I have also another website, which is superpreneurblueprint.com. I’m also available on all social media networks, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube. So just feel free to connect with me if you need some advice for your startup. If you need some mentoring, coaching if you want to follow this new course, if you want anything, I try always to be available for entrepreneurs because I love entrepreneurs and I want also to give back by helping them so that we built a better world.
That’s fantastic. Yeah, I wanted to spend some time talking to mentoring, but I didn’t want to take away from what we wanted to talk about here. Mentoring is incredibly close to home to myself as well, and I’ve definitely seen the advantages that come. And so thank you for giving back to the entrepreneur community. In doing that, it’s more and more. I’ve now spoken to a couple of hundred entrepreneurs through the course of this podcast life, and invariably the successful ones always say my success is because of the lessons that were given to me by others through mentoring and effectively, we can save each other risk.
We can save each other pain. We can share. It’s not all just about pat on the back. You’re doing a great job, kid, and that’s really not what mentoring is about. Mentoring is about having a good, critical voice partner to share ideas with, and I’ve seen it myself as a recipient and also in mentoring I’ve done in the community as well, so it’s great. Hopefully we’ll come back. I’d love to have you back on again in the future, and we can talk a bit more deeply about mentoring.
With pleasure, Eric. It was a great conversation, great questions. And I really enjoy very much this conversation. Thanks a lot for inviting me.
Ladies and gentlemen, Fabrice Testa. Thank you very much.
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