24 Burst results for "Tobey"
Kids Media Club Podcast
"tobey" Discussed on Kids Media Club Podcast
"But I think with kids so invested in the franchise and not just the character, the acts of the plays the character that they love to like see a bit more about that person and any way they can any sort of acts or artists that they love. They like to get to know them a bit better and it's hard to do that just on your general source, social media profile because you maybe you don't want to kid your sort of content or what you're putting out there. So any way they can sort of talk to kids or kids can get to know them a bit better through sort of tailored content promotional material on TikTok or on YouTube, maybe on a YouTube channel, do you know what I mean? Rather than just sort of a general bit of content that they put out there, I just think kids really love that about YouTube as they love watching a YouTuber do stuff that they do so that that's why they like gaming YouTubers in their toy YouTube. They're doing stuff that they can relate to and that they'll do at home. And if you humanize these great stars in some sort of way through, you know, maybe they're playing a video game or something. I think it just really sort of helps the kids get to get to know them a bit better. When I was speaking to some kids last week and it's amazing how many they were talking about Tobey Maguire. They know all the actors names and I was just really they're just so obsessed with these big IPs, these franchise films..
Code Story
"tobey" Discussed on Code Story
"Beautiful. Kind of like the beautiful aspect is what we're kind of working on now. Making it beautiful. It's already quite robust. We have customers with lists of well over 500,000 people where they send 500,000 emails per day. Without much of an issue, without any issue, really. And that was always that was always priority number one for me, because WordPress has a rep. For, you know, if you have big plugins on it, it's gonna slow down or you know, it's unreliable and the, you know, sass does a good job of marketing that. To their customers. And they have a marketing engine designed to ensure that the stigma sticks. It exists. It's a process that happens and you know, you don't hate the players hit the game. So there's a stigma to overcome for us. So reliability was always kind of like evangelizing WordPress is a viable option for small businesses to not only host their content, but their ecommerce and their digital marketing and CRM as well. So scalability was kind of just like a done deal in terms of day one, making doing our stress testing during a load testing, doing our case studies. Getting a big client, and then working with them on Zoom calls to figure out where stuff could be improved. And in year one, we did a whole ton of scalability improvements and efficiency improvements to our event Q model and our AWS SES integration for multi threading and multiprocess curl requests and the whole thing. And we got it to a point where even at 500,000 sending an email in like a couple hours is like non issue. In terms of team, right? I've personally like I've always wanted a big team. But there's not enough work for one. Really. At least I don't I haven't reached a point where I feel like there's enough work. For a big team, like Jesse's really good at what she does. We have certified partners. We have a Facebook group that takes care of a lot of the technical support. We have incredible videos, incredible education, we focused a lot on our academy and our courses. That was also a big pillar that we wanted to focus on was making sure that there was education surrounding the product to make sure that new people could understand what to do and how it worked, investing in templates, investing in all of these things to ensure that there was this minimal work to do on behalf of us so that we could focus on building great product. And to an extent that's still true. And we went, I hired a big team. That's what for three. And that just didn't work. And here I am being a small team again. Getting more work done, getting it done faster. Right? And. We're certainly enough to handle the amount of people that we work with. And the profitable, which is important, right? Again, we're not we're a bootstrapped organization. We can only spend what we make. Which is around 25 K USD per month. Which is where our current MRR is. And yeah. So in terms of scalability, you know, if it gets to like a million MR, then that's a little bit different story. I think we have a ways to go until we get there. I wish it would be there overnight, but that's not usually how it works. Or if someone writes me a $3 million check that'd be nice. But I digress. In terms of scalability, I think it's important to just know how much work you can actually provide to team members because if you're overzealous, you're gonna get in a trouble with like I did. Where and certainly when there's no, there's no product person. I'm the product manager manager and the CEO and the sales guy. And I'm wearing all these hats, and I hired a developer and I provided them very long leashes. Right? And that's probably my fault as a leader. I provided them. I don't really care how it gets done. I just want it done. This bait was basically what I did. And I thought because you know, I've experienced, or not, not direct experience, but I've seen other people be micromanaged and those who micromanage them. And that doesn't work. And I think I overcompensated for that by giving them absolutely free reign to get it done however they saw fit. And that ended up that's what turned what should have been, or at least what I ideally believed would have been a three month process into an 8 month process that was only half baked. Well, as you step out on the balcony and you look across what you've built, what are you most proud of? The fact that we have been able to assist small businesses launch grow and scale their lists who would have otherwise been unable to. The our price point, the fact that we are self hosted and the fact that you own the data has enabled many more businesses that would have otherwise been unable to have any software. Leverage CRM marketing automation to grow their businesses. This is specifically true in European countries where GDPR came in and basically stopped anyone from using American based CRM and marketing automation companies that didn't have servers out in Europe. And if they did, they were expensive. We're talking a 150 plus a month. A license for groundhog is at most $40 a month paid annually. And so many businesses have been incredibly grateful to me personally for even making this. Regardless of how it looks so that they can use it to grow their business. And I think that's probably one of the things that I'm most proud of is just the fact that the only reason that we built this product the first place was so that we could help people. And that's kind of just aware of always come from. It's like as long as the product can help people we're doing our job. Not doing it when I hear to be a billionaire although that'd be nice. You know, I'm not, you know, as long as we can help people we're doing our jobs right. So that's what I'd say I'm as proud of. Let's flip the script a little bit then. So tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team responded to it. Well, I think the biggest mistake to date was was my, what was investing as much as I did in the three process. And that.
Code Story
"tobey" Discussed on Code Story
"Subpar. There's always the information is there. The data is there. It's just so incredibly difficult to view it as a business owner in a format that enables you to make good business decisions. For example, take active campaign or infusion soft. With their flow chart editors, you can create these epic campaigns and epic automations, people go in, people come out, but trying to find out how many people went in and how many people came out and what that meant for revenue and correlate revenue to specific emails with open rates and whatnot is just mind bogglingly difficulty. You have to go to three different screens and then you basically have to have a spreadsheet up at the same time plug in the numbers and do all the math yourself. And it's like, I don't got time for that. So in two, we released this whole dashboard, which basically took the most relevant metrics from the funnels from the emails from everything. And we give conversion rates, we get revenue per email, we give orders per email, we get out to carts per email, we give donations per email, per funnel as well. So we have we built this entire tracking system to basically correlate between all of the relevant top shelf WordPress plugins like Google conversation to get to PPE and basically anything that collects money and be able to tie that directly to which email did a person open, which immediately led to this purchase so we can give a much clearer view of the customer journey so that a user and end user someone who's using groundhog to look in the reports can go in and see. All right, well there's three emails in this funnel. This one is getting a 50% open rate at 30% click through. But this one is getting a 60% open rate, but zero click through, what's up with that? And there's absolutely zero orders for this email while there's three for the other one. Like what's up with that? And them being able to say, hey, that's probably a hole or there's probably something wrong with that email. Let's go and change it. Well, let's switch to teams. You mentioned hiring a developer, right? How did you go about building your team? And what do you look for in those people to indicate they're the winning horses to join you? Honestly, if I were to go back and do it over again, I'd probably do it differently. I did it in such a dramatic thing. I was very dramatic. It was very traumatic the way that I did it. Too dramatic for the size of business that I was, right? It was just me at the time, and I'm like, all right, well, I need help. Let's go, let's go find help. So we hired locally. We did it locally. We had an office at that point in time. We're remote now. And we put out a job listing on indeed, and we had a group of people come into the office. We had maybe 7 or 8 people come in to all developers. And I posed them a question. How would you solve this problem? You have 30 minutes. And then they wrote out their solution on a piece of paper that I looked in, whoever had the best solution got hires. And honestly, that was, I mean, I mean, the person who I hired was great. And he was with us for two years. I needed a really good job. But that was so dramatic. That's like some Google level stuff. And I'm like, I wouldn't do that again now. It's embarrassing, really. And honestly, it was just us for a long time. Well into well into the end of the year too, it was so throughout year one and well into the end of year two. It was just us. We were both doing development and I would do I would do customer support and you would do customers more and really that's all we needed. We didn't have tons of clients. We had maybe like around a thousand. And the software was good. We weren't getting tons of support requests, and it was manageable. And the features we were still being a feature factory still pumping out new stuff. And at the end of year two is when we started to pick up steam, Black Friday happened, we I had made a bunch of friends at this point, so I'm not sure if we're going to talk about product marketing at all. And getting customers for your product. Because I have a few words to say on that. But I'll just say for now, by the end of year two, I had made a lot of friends in a powerful and large communities and I was totally leaching off of their lists and building our own, where we had to eventually, all right, well, we need more help. We need people for specifically support because I'm the CEO. I can't be doing this for the rest of my life. I got to build product and lead and do other things and be on podcasts and whatnot. So we had started a certified partner program, which is a very common thing for most Sierra market automation providers to have. And we have around 40, 40 year odd certified partners at this point in time. And we basically put out a call to people in our Facebook group. We have a Facebook group. It has 1500 people in it. And we're like, hey, listen, we need to hire someone for a customer support. Is there anybody who uses our product that needs a gig? You know, a friend of mine, Chris badgett, who's the CEO over at the trellis, which is like the second largest LMS plugin for WordPress. He said, you know, the first place that I always go to hire is in our own community. And I'm like, oh, that's a good idea. You know, the people who already use your product know what best. So I went to our list. And lo and behold, we actually brought on a certified partner to be one of our customer success people. Her name is Jesse. She's great. And then after that, basically hired in a much more standard format, put out a job listing, put out, put it out to the community as well. We hired contractors, we brought on people, salaried, we brought on developers, let go developers. It's been the team has grown, the team has shrunk based on demand based on needs. One of the most my most recent. HR experiences was, in year three, while at the end of year two, it was time for, as I mentioned, you know, another major version upgrade to get rid of it, again, a whole bunch of technical debt. And I had this grand vision. Of groundhog three, which would be fully react, it would have eliminate the tech debt. It would be beautiful, it would have flow chart thing. It would have this wonderful block based email editor that was a major improvement beyond we had. And it would be done in three months. That was that was my grand vision at the end of year two. So we had year two was profitable actually. So year one we lost money. As most tech businesses probably do. But year two, we actually made up for it and then some. So we had cash in the bank. I'm like, well, let's go hire some people to make this happen..
Code Story
"tobey" Discussed on Code Story
"And lead. A team that has your back. I'm your host no a lab part. And today, how Adrian Toby built the best CRM and martech tool for SMBs and agencies using WordPress. All this and more on code story. Adrian Toby lives in Canada. He got started in his tech career right out of high school working for his father's digital marketing agency. In high school, he was interested in computer science and developed video games and useful UI for his school. Prior to digital marketing, his father was a jazz musician and Adrian followed in those footsteps to play the trumpet. For university, he had two options. He could go to school for computer science, or for music. And he ended up choosing the latter. During school, he was working full time for his dad's agency, building websites, email campaigns and such. While he was doing this, he built his first product called form lift, which is a WordPress form builder for infusion soft. Around three years into school, he failed his first university course, a discrete computer science course around computer runtimes, big O notation, et cetera. He had invested a ton of money into his degree already, but he started doing the math, an estimated, he wouldn't complete school until 2025, because he was part time. With that in mind, he dropped out of university and thought, what next? He didn't want to do agency work forever. He took a look at how expensive convoluted and clunky, marketing technology tools can be. And he vowed to create the ultimate suite of tools and to do it in WordPress. This is the creation story of groundhog. Groundhog is a CRM and marketing automation platform specifically for businesses that use WordPress. So the main differentiator between something like maybe active campaign or fusion software HubSpot and the big three that I see or maybe even ConvertKit and drip and whatnot is that all of those are softwares of service. So you're paying monthly fees, you're renting their space. You're using that platform. If you stop paying that Bill, what happens to your data? Goes up and smoke, right? Your count access is locked until you pay the bill. You can't export any of the information. You can't bring it, can't port it over. And the only thing that you could feasibly export this like your contact list, but any like the emails, the automations, all that stuff. It's like, it's gone. If we build a serum and marketing automation platform, which didn't really exist yet for WordPress, there's a few. There's a few options now. We were kind of like the first to enter the space and really define it. We can build something that's natively hosted on WordPress that natively integrates with all of the major top shelf WordPress plugin providers and developer shops. And we can also make it so that all of your data is self posted. You have full control, makes you ethically compliant with GDPR and HIPAA and all that stuff because you get to choose where that data is actually put because you get to choose where your website is hosted with which server with which posting service and which company and that was really, that's kind of a Eureka moment. If we could make that happen, then we could solve so many problems that exist or so many considerations for agencies and small businesses who are heavily investing in this technology to help them launch grow and scale their business. Then we might have like a winner. We might have a product that people might be interested in. So I started kind of identifying the unique value props and kind of going a little bit deeper into it. As an agency, it was incredibly difficult to duplicate content for like businesses. So let's say I have a general contractor come in and I build up this whole system and quotes and his quote system is intake for his follow-up email reminders. Review requests. And I went through all of this work and I built it for this client. And I get another general contractor. He's basically just acting like the same stuff. It was incredibly difficult for us to go into a tool like confusion soft or active campaign or HubSpot, and basically just do export from one account and import into another account. And if it was possible, it was like ten steps and you had to be a partner and you had to upload it to their central directory and it had to be approved by someone and it could take weeks. Days to weeks in order to actually go through that process, which is just ridiculous and in my own my own view of it. And we're like, let's just make it as easy as humanly possible. They can click and export button of all of their content and they can go to any other WordPress website that has their plugin installed and they can download it, no hassle, it literally just exports to a JSON file. And it's like stuff like that where there's just these really simple efficiencies. For developers and agencies and freelancers who are often doing the work to make their experience better and to allow them to do more business faster. And we started drilling into stuff like that and then eventually, let's get to actually developing product. So tell me about the MVP, right? That first product you build, how long it took you to build and what sort of tools you use to bring it to life. So for the MVP, it was, it worked. It was, you know, there wasn't a whole lot to compare it to in terms of functionality because it's the only kind of a product that existed as a WordPress plugin. It was there was nothing else to compare to. The only thing that could be compared to was sass. Right? Which a lot of people may have just not even looked at because they're just kind of looking for that WordPress plugin to fill that role. So it was very much a just get it done. Focus for the NPV. If it works, that's it. And we're not going to focus on the most beautiful UI, we're not going to focus on the fringe feature requests or specific things as like content has to be portable. It has to be all on WordPress. You have to be able to send an email and you have to be able to schedule events after someone buys product stuff like that. As long as we can fulfill the base, the base requirements to enable your average business to be able to use this and get value out of it, then that's where we're going to stop. At least as far as the MVP is concerned. As I mentioned, that process took two months, not the other two months. We had marketing automation. So being able to lay out a funnel with delay timer, so wait three days, send an email, wait three days, send an email until someone buys a product and after that, wait a couple days, send a review request. So we had that component. We had a block based email editor to being able to drag in your paragraph and being able to drag in your image and your button,.
Code Story
"tobey" Discussed on Code Story
"Picking that from day one is going to make it significantly easier to get a business off the ground. That's great advice. Later and thank you for being on the show today. Thank you for telling the creation story of groundhog. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. And this concludes another chapter of code story..
Code Story
"tobey" Discussed on Code Story
"Out. We made them premium, and then we took a whole bunch of features out of the $200 plan and we moved it up to like a $4 plan and literally just changed the whole model overnight and literally the next month we doubled. So in terms of business influence, certainly a lot of the word press professionals that I mentioned, but from a developer standpoint, I can't really name anybody. Well, last question, agent. So you're getting on a plane and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. They're jazz about it. They can't wait to show it off to the world. Can't wait to show it off to you right there on the plane. What advice do you give that person, having.
Code Story
"tobey" Discussed on Code Story
"A little bit hypocritical to me because the same was true. The data was there to search to pull up specific context. If you want to find everybody on your list, who purchased a product in the last 60 days, right? The information was there. You could see it in the report, but you couldn't actually see the list of people. You can see their names. You can see their email addresses. So one of the big focuses was making that possible and making that data accessible. And we built this incredible search filters search filters function where it can basically allow you to create a person bought X product within the last 60 days and they have tag new customer and they were created in the last 90 days or they were or their contact owner is whoever or their or their last open to email was email a and they opened and they clicked this link in that email. And they can design these incredibly flexible search filters to find really specific people on their lists so that they can market to those people and take actionable steps on that data. One of the big kind of communities that we've been resonating with recently has been nonprofits because of our recent integration with gift WP, which is the leading donations plugin for WordPress. And how powerful would it be? Let's say you're a nonprofit and you have a deadline to raise $10,000, but you've only raised 8, right? So you need to go find $2000 by EOD. Where do you find that? You go to your CRM and you search for your top ten donors. You search for donation amount above $10,000 or above $6000 for Harvard much. They've donated within the last 30 days, and you search that query and then you pick up the phone and you start hammering the phones on those specific people, you send them an email using them. Follow ups. So that because the people who are most likely to donate are the people who've already donated. And certainly you're top donors. And that's what you can do now with that search filters feature. So not only do we make our own data accessible data within the serum, we make the data of other plugins accessible, which a lot of them don't. They're great plugins, but CRM and that kind of thinking about actioning on that data is just not what they do. They have they're focused on membership or their focused on donations, or the focused on things. They're not focused on making data actionable from a marketing standpoint, which is our job. So we make the data in everybody else's platform, accessible, and that's kind of the road that we're going down. So not only just making the platform beautiful and making it a lot more user friendly and a lot more accessible to people who are not developers or agencies, but just like your job average business owner, but making the data of everybody else's platform accessible where it just wasn't before. Let's switch to you, Adrian, who influences the way that you work. Name a person that you look up to and why. I'm a self taught guy. Right. I learned code through YouTube videos and through stack overflow. I want you university for computer science and I don't think I learned. I mean, I learned a big O notation, which I suppose is helpful, actually, you know? We're designing our event cute. And like, all right, well, this would run in O two, but this would run in ON plus one. Right? So let's do it this way. But in terms of influences. I mean, I'm a developer, but I am also a marketer. And I feel like I receive more influence on that half of my job description versus being a developer. I have what I like to believe is a unique development style, all of the frameworks, all of the libraries all the code patterns. Maybe are borrowed from other people, whether consciously or subconsciously, but it's certainly a lot of them. I've developed just over time on my own, and they've worked very, very well. But in terms of the marketing side of things, my dad for one digital marketing agency knows a lot about it. And, you know, he worked with people like Joe Vitale and kind of like the old boys club of digital or early digital marketing from like 2000 8, 2009, and certainly got a lot of my marketing skills from their Russell Brunson click funnels is okay software, but he is a next level brilliant marketer. Grant cardone like I mentioned and certainly also borrowing concepts from other business owners within the WordPress plugin community like veto peleg who's a friend of mine. Chris badgett. Oh my God, I leaned on Chris badgett as a business owner kind of like for business influence of how to run a WordPress plugin company. I leaned a lot on him. Chris lemma. I went to Chris lemma's event, Cabo press, and I met pretty much like WordPress top brass there. I remember so back in year one for everything in groundhog for the full all access sweet. We were charging $200 a month. Or sorry, $200 a year. Not $200 a month. So a little bit a little bit under $20 a month, right? And nobody was buying it. Nobody. Like I mentioned, we had like we had, we had maybe a hundred to 500 people for the entirety of the first year. I want to make money. That was not how to do it. And I went to this, I went to the I was invited to this event through Chris badgett, the CEO of journalists. And I went and I brought my there's like bring your problems leave with solutions. So I brought I brought kind of like my laundry list of here's all the things that aren't working. Mostly just to do with marketing and sales. And like, hey, listen, I have this pricing model. We are the most affordable CRN marketing automation solution for small businesses on the market. Why is nobody buying it? And I basically posed the question to every single person that might have been 60 people there. All of them very successful WordPress plug in business owners. Certainly much more successful than myself or else they probably wouldn't be there. And every one of them said the exact same thing to me. It's like, it's not expensive enough. It's like, but don't people want it to be inexpensive? They're like, well that's what most people think, but you'd be surprised. You know, double the price. Watch sales go up. And I asked so I asked everyone they also did exactly the same thing, so I came back in the next day, I literally doubled the price across the board for everything. And then I removed I removed stuff from our free version. We have a premium version as well. That's available in the word present dog or positivity. And we took a whole bunch of features.
Code Story
"tobey" Discussed on Code Story
"Curl requests and the whole thing. And we got it to a point where even at 500,000 sending an email in like a couple hours is like non issue. In terms of team, right? I've personally like I've always wanted a big team. But there's not enough work for one. Really. At least I don't I haven't reached a point where I feel like there's enough work. For a big team, like, Jessie's really good at what she does. We have certified partners. We have a Facebook group that takes care of a lot of the technical support. We have incredible videos, incredible education. We focused a lot on our academy and our courses. That was also a big pillar that we wanted to focus on was making sure that there was education surrounding the product to make sure that new people could understand what to do and how it worked, investing in templates, investing in all of these things to ensure that there was this minimal work to do on behalf of us so that we could focus on building great product. And to an extent that's still true. And we went, I hired a big team. That's what that's what for three. And that just didn't work. And here I am being a small team again. Getting more work done, getting it done faster. Right? And. We're certainly enough to handle the amount of people that we work with. And the profitable, which is important, right? Again, we're not, we're a bootstrapped organization. We can only spend what we make. Which is around 25 K USD per month. Which is where our current MRR is. And yeah. So in terms of scalability, you know, if it gets to like a million MR, then that's a little bit different story. I think we have a ways to go until we get there. I wish it would be there overnight, but, you know, that's not usually how it works. Or if someone writes me a $3 million check that would be nice. But I digress. In terms of scalability, I think it's important to just know how much work you can actually provide to team members because if you're overzealous, you're gonna get in a trouble with like I did. Where, you know, there's one and certainly when there's no, there's no product person. I'm the product manager manager and the CEO and the sales guy. And I'm wearing all these hats and I hired a developer and I provided them very long leashes. Right? And that's probably my fault as a leader. I provided them. I don't really care how it gets done. I just want it done. As bait was basically what I did. And I thought because, you know, I've experienced, or not, not direct experience, but I've seen other people be micromanaged and those who micromanage them. And that doesn't work. And I think I overcompensated for that by giving them absolutely free reign to get it done however they saw fit. And that ended up, that's what turned what should have been, or at least what I ideally believed would have been a three month process into an 8 month process that was only half baked. Well, as you step out on the balcony and you look across what you've built, what are you most proud of? The fact that we have been able to assist small businesses launch grow and scale their lists who would have otherwise been unable to. The our price point, the fact that we are self hosted in the fact that you own the data has enabled many more businesses that would have otherwise been unable to have any software. Leverage CRM marketing automation to grow their businesses. This is specifically true in European countries where GDPR came in and basically stopped anyone from using American based CRM and marketing automation companies that didn't have servers out in Europe. And if they did, they were expensive. We're talking a 150 plus a month. I've got a license for groundhog is at most $40 a month paid annually. And so many businesses have been incredibly grateful to me personally for even making this regardless of how it looks so that they can use it to grow their business. And I think that's probably one of the things that I'm most proud of is just the fact that, you know, the only reason that we built this product the first place was so that we could help people. And that's kind of just aware of always come from. As long as the product can help people we're doing our job. Not doing it when I hear to be a billionaire although that would be nice. You know, I'm not, you know, as long as we can help people we're doing our jobs right. So that's what I'd say was proud of. Let's flip the script a little bit then. So tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team responded to it. Well, I think the biggest mistake to date was was my, what was investing as much as I did in the three process. And that was well, I guess it's only a mistake if you make it twice, but it was certainly a painful learning experience. If I would go back, I would change what I would have done. And I would have done it. The good old fashioned way with the tools that we have access to and the things that we know and as long as again, as long as it's 95% of the way there, then nobody certainly the end user is not going to know the bloody difference. Right? There are never going to know. So like why bother? And it's just, I got, you know, I bought into the hype. There's a lot of hype for react. Because of at the time, you know, gut Berg for WordPress that were press editor. It was getting a lot of hype and a lot of limelight. And I'm like, well, if we build react stuff, then, you know, we'll be hype. Doesn't work like that. Well, what is the future look like for the product and for your team? I know you're working on some stuff. You've gone back to what you know, to your roots of building the product, what is the future look like? We have gone back to our roots, but the roots have developed, for sure. So we have we're using the technologies that we're familiar with. But we've developed brand new patterns for working with them. And major efficiencies. So it's basically like, you know, if you're using the UI, it's basically like you would be using something built with react, but it's not. And we've developed ways to get it to 95% of the way there that no one would ever know the difference. And that's enabled us to build what my original vision had been in three months from when we pivoted three months ago to doing it this way. And releases imminent. We just released groundhog 2.5, which we kind of released some of the stuff that we're working on early, one of the big things was search filters. Now I made a big deal earlier about how the data is there, but it's impossible to access for reporting purposes. And the same could have been true and it's.
Code Story
"tobey" Discussed on Code Story
"Can't go on. It's not sustainable. So we ended up that was a tough that was a tough decision. We vested well over a $100,000. At this point, into this project with this react team. And it was tough, but you don't, that's the call. If it's not gonna get done, then, but you can do it a different way and you can do it for cheaper to reach 95% of the same results. Which caught what's the call? What choice do you really have? So we ended up laying off that team and moving directly to just kind of good old fashion, get her done mode. And we are basically imminently away now within three months. Which was the original goal to get something out the door. And we actually just shipped a not a major release, but a minor release with some of the stuff that we've been working on and the reception has been ecstatic. It was painful. It was. And it's also like, you know, the sunk cost fallacy, right? I had invested so much. At month three, I'd already invested basically 30 K because we also hired we hired a contractor to get the boat started, and he was like 15,000 for a month. And I'm like, okay. You know, we have we have it. Sure, why not? And then it kind of added up. This episode is sponsored by ratable. Are you interested in joining a team that encourages intellectual curiosity problem solving and openness? Not only that, but one that provides the support and mentorship needed to succeed learn and grow? Meat routable. The team at routable has built a world class platform for modern bill payments, payouts, and invoicing. Ratable helps companies speed up their business payments using a secure invoice and bill payment system. And not just for accounting groups, the company is solving problems for the CFO controller, the accountant and the developer. Ratable is engineering lead and fully remote. They're looking for the best engineers and operators to join their team and drive forward their mission of removing the burden of business payments. To apply today, go to routable dot com slash about and click view open roles. That's rou, TA BLE dot com slash about. Check out routable today and join a team who's changing the face of business payments. This episode is brought to you by CTO AI. You guys know that I interview a lot of great builders on this show. In one of the most important aspects of a great code story episode is how a team works together to continuously deliver a great product. And not only just a great product, but one that will scale to meet growing demand. It's easy for growing teams to get overwhelmed by you know it. Complex tools complex tools can be a major source of frustration across a team to spend all of your time managing tools instead of building great products. Meet CTO dot AI. CTO AI is a workflow automation platform that simplifies developer operations, so you're growing team can improve their delivery velocity and hid their launch dates. What I love about the platform is that it doesn't matter your experience level. You can be a junior dev, you can be a senior deaf, it doesn't matter. The platform allows any developer to build powerful workflow tools and share them across their team. You can do this using their services, pipelines, commands, and insights tools to create your singular workflow in a powerful way. You can easily release code anywhere directly from slack. It's where you live anyway. Automate live previews of new feature changes, and measure your integration, your ci CD, cadence, and stability of all of your products. So who uses CTO AI? The best and most sought after startups in the land. CTO AI has helped fast growing startups who've raised over half a $1 billion in funding to scale their software delivery workflows. Find out how they can help your team work flow smarter, not harder. By visiting go dot CTO dot AI slash code story. Well, let's flip the scalability then. So how are you approaching scalability when you're building your product and are you fighting this as you grow and get traction? Well, in terms of the product, a scalability was concerned from day one. So making sure that it worked was always top of priority, not making sure that it was beautiful. Kind of like the beautiful aspect is what we're kind of working on now. Making it beautiful. It's already quite robust. We have customers with lists of well over 500,000 people where they send 500,000 emails per day. Without much of an issue without any issue, really. And that was always that was always priority number one for me because WordPress has a rep. For, you know, if you have like big plugins on it, it's gonna slow down or you know, it's unreliable and the, you know, sass does a good job of marketing that. To their customers. And they have a marketing engine designed to ensure that the stigma sticks. It exists. It's a process that happens and you know, you don't hate the players hit the game. So there's a stigma to overcome. For us. So reliability was always kind of like evangelizing WordPress is a viable option for small businesses to not only host their content, but their ecommerce and their digital marketing and CRM as well. So scalability was kind of just like a done deal in terms of day one, making our stress testing during a load testing, doing our case studies. Getting a big client, and then working with them on Zoom calls to figure out where stuff could be improved. And in year one, we did a whole ton of scalability improvements and efficiency improvements to our event Q model and our AWS SES integration for multi threading and multiprocess.
Code Story
"tobey" Discussed on Code Story
"Then they wrote out their solution on a piece of paper that I looked in, whoever had the best solution got hires. And honestly, that was, I mean, I mean, the person who I hired was great. And he was with us for two years. I needed a really good job. But that was so dramatic. I was like some Google level stuff, and I'm like, I wouldn't do that again now. It's embarrassing, really. And honestly, it was just us for a long time. Well into well into the end of the year too. It was so throughout year one and well into the end of year two. It was just us. We were both doing development and I would do I would do customer support and you would do customers more. And really, that's all we needed. We didn't have tons of clients. We had maybe like around a thousand. And the softer was good. We weren't getting tons of support request, and it was manageable. And the features we were still being a feature factory still pumping out new stuff. And at the end of year two is when we started to pick up steam, Black Friday happened, we I had made a bunch of friends at this point. So I'm not sure if we're gonna talk about product marketing at all. And getting customers for your product. Because I have a few words to say on that. But I'll just say for now, by the end of year two, I had made a lot of friends in a powerful and large communities and I was totally leaching off of their lists and building our own, where we had to eventually, all right, well, we need more help. We need people for specifically support because the CEO I can't be doing this for the rest of my life. I got to build product and lead and do other things and be on podcasts and whatnot. So we had started a certified partner program, which is a very common thing for most Sierra market automation providers to have. And we have around 40, 40 year odds certified partners at this point in time. And we basically put out a call to people in our Facebook group. We have a Facebook group. It has 1500 people in it. And we're like, hey, listen, we need to hire someone for a customer support. Is there anybody who uses our product that needs a gig? You know, a friend of mine, Chris badgett, who's the CEO over at the Trello MS, which is like the second largest LMS plugin for WordPress. He said, you know, the first place that I always go to hire is in our own community. And I'm like, oh, that's a good idea. You know, the people who already use your product know at best. So I went to our list. And lo and behold, we actually brought on a certified partner to be one of our customer success people. Her name is Jesse. She's great. And then after that, basically hired in a much more standard format, put out a job listing, put out, put it out to the community as well. We hired contractors. We brought on people, salaried, we brought on developers, let go developers. It's been the team has grown, the team has shrunk based on demand based on needs. One of the most my most recent. HR experiences was, in year three, while at the end of year two, it was time for, as I mentioned, you know, another major version upgrade to get rid of it, again, a whole bunch of technical debt. And I had this grand vision. Of groundhog three, which would be fully react, it would have eliminate the tech debt. It would be beautiful. It would have flow chart thing. It would have this wonderful block based email editor that was a major improvement beyond we had. And it would be done in three months. That was that was my grand vision at the end of year two. So we had year two was profitable. Actually. So year one, we lost money. As most tech businesses probably do. But year two, we actually made up for it and then some. So we had cash in the bank. I'm like, well, let's go hire some people to make this happen. So that way did pricey people. And they did, they did good work, but it wasn't fast by any stretch of the imagination. So after three months, not even anywhere close to anything releasable. And then another 5 months. Goes by same story, you know? It's further, but it's not there and I'm paying U.S. salaries now for react developers, which I'm not sure if anyone on this call is familiar with the going rate for react developer, but you know, it's not inexpensive, and I'm a small business at the end of the day and we work with small businesses. We're not this has been a bootstrap venture from day one minus the friends and family loan, right? But there's no venture capital coming into fund this project at a loss for whatever. You know, at a certain point, it's like, well, I'm looking at where three is. In terms of production and I'm like, you know what, if I eliminated react and I just do it, I did it. The way that I know how to. I could probably have this whipped up. In a week. Right? Just using good old fashioned template literals and a little bit of jQuery and a little bit of ingenuity and handling event listeners manually. I could probably have this done to some relatively acceptable fashion by the end of this week. And so at nights going back to my kind of all nighter schedule, I whipped something up in a week. Now it's not a finished product, but I think it's just imagination, but it's already further than the previous 8 months. Of react development with not cheap developers. And at that point, it's like, all right, it does not, and I'm looking at how far there's probably still to go and investment and operating the company at a loss, essentially, to cover to cover the extensive development costs. I'm.
Code Story
"tobey" Discussed on Code Story
"Until logic of it. So it's kind of like it's somewhere in the middle and because that's the way that originally designed it. That's where we are today still. Well, dialing back to where you were talking about. You got your MVP done. You got it released. You're getting some traction, you're getting some feedback. How did you go about progressing the product from there? And maturing it, and how did you build your road map and figure out, okay, this is the next most important thing to build. Our first customer was my dad, and his agency and their clients. That was our first customer. Leverage the opportunities that you have. So he ended up switching pretty much all of his clients from infusion soft to groundhog, which they were all very grateful because an entire year license of what we charge as equivalent to one month of their product. So they were all very grateful. And, you know, we got a lot of feedback through that. In terms of this is broken. This isn't working, this isn't right, or we need this feature, or to actually be able to conduct business, so a lot of early development in that first year was more or less a hundred people in this circle and us basically or me and we did hire a developer who was with us for a full two years in month two. So I mentioned I did that friends and family thing. That afforded us a developer who was his first job ever, so it wasn't like a $100,000 a year or anything. And we kind of just bank stuff out as quickly as we could. Basically just whatever people needed in that first little while we were we were a feature factory. Just trying to get as much out as humanly possible increase the value prop and provide more options for small businesses. Moving into sort of the later half of the first year. Is when not even really through direction was set probably in year two like clear, defined direction for what needs to happen with the product and where it needs to go. Because the beginning of year two is when we did our first major version upgrade from one to two where we basically just rewrote the whole bloody thing. And added a whole bunch of reporting features. That's one of the major drawbacks of a lot of these platforms is that the reporting is always subpar. There's always the information is there. The data is there. It's just so incredibly difficult to view it as a business owner in a format that enables you to make good business decisions. For example, take active campaign or infusion soft. With their flow chart editors, you can create these epic campaigns and epic automations, people go in, people come out, but trying to find out how many people went in and how many people came out and what that meant for revenue and correlate revenue to specific emails with open rates and whatnot is just mind bogglingly difficulty. You have to go to three different screens, and then you basically have to have a spreadsheet up at the same time plug in the numbers and do all the math yourself. And it's like, I don't got time for that. So in two, we released this whole dashboard, which basically took the most relevant metrics from the funnels from the emails from everything. And we give conversion rates, we get revenue per email, we give orders per email, we get out to carts per email, we give donations per email, per funnel, as well. So we have we built this entire tracking system to basically correlate between all of the relevant top shelf WordPress plugins like newcomer CD to get to PPE and basically anything that collects money and be able to tie that directly to which email did a person open, which immediately led to this purchase so we can give a much clearer view of the customer journey so that a user an end user someone who's using groundhog to look in the reports can go in and see. All right, well there's three emails in this funnel. This one is getting a 50% open rate at 30% click through. But this one is getting a 60% open rate, but zero click through, what's up with that? And there's absolutely zero orders for this email while there's three for the other one. Cyc what's up with that? And them being able to say, hey, that's probably a hole or there's probably something wrong with that email. Let's go and change it. Well, let's switch to teams. You mentioned hiring a developer, right? How did you go about building your team? And what do you look for in those people to indicate they're the winning horses to join you? Honestly, if I were to go back and do it over again, I'd probably do it differently. I did it in such a dramatic thing. I was very dramatic. It was very traumatic the way that I did it. Too dramatic for the size of business that I was, right? It was just me at the time, and I'm like, all right, well, I need help. Let's go, let's go find help. So we hired locally. We did it locally. We had an office at that point in time where remote now. And we put out a job listing on indeed, and we had a group of people come into the office. We had like maybe 7 or 8 people come in to all developers. And I posed them a question. How would you solve this problem? You have 30 minutes. And.
Code Story
"tobey" Discussed on Code Story
"Started drilling into stuff like that and then eventually, let's get to actually developing product. So tell me about the MVP, right? That first product you build, how long it took you to build and what sort of tools you use to bring it to life. So for the MVP, it was, it worked. It was, you know, there wasn't a whole lot to compare it to in terms of functionality because it's the only kind of a product that existed as a WordPress plugin. It was there was nothing else to compare to. The only thing that could be compared to was sass. Right? Which a lot of people may have just not even looked at because they're just kind of looking for that WordPress plugin to fill that role. So it was very much a just get it done. Focus for the MPV. If it works, that's it. And we're not going to focus on the most beautiful UI. We're not going to focus on the fringe feature requests or specific things. It's like, content has to be portable. It has to be all on WordPress. You have to be able to send an email and you have to be able to schedule events after someone buys product stuff like that. As long as we can fulfill the base, the base requirements to enable your average business to be able to use this and get value out of it, then that's where we're going to stop. At least as far as the MVP is concerned. As I mentioned that that process took two months and at the end of two months, we had marketed automation. So being able to lay out a funnel with delay timer, so wait three days, send an email, wait three days, send an email until someone buys a product and after that, wait a couple days, send a review request. So we had that component. We had a block based email editor to being able to drag in your paragraph and being able to drag in your image and your button, change the text, change the links. And we had the serum component, so being able to create custom fields, see, first and lasting email address, script, the profile picture from gravita and that's where MVP was. And after that, we launched it. We released it. One, we didn't do beta tests. We didn't do anything. We just put it out there to see if anybody would be interested. Because there's no point in investing tons of money and time and see if that for two months, nobody wants it. And we got a little bit of traction. It was a slow start. It was like a hundred people, a zero to a hundred people for at least the first few months. With any MVP, you've got to make certain decisions and tradeoffs about what you're going to cut or what you're going to accept as far as technical debt, right? And you alluded to a little bit a few of those when you were talking about I want to dive into it and answer it specifically, you know, what sort of decisions and tradeoffs did you have to make in that short term? And how you coped with those decisions? I had only built one product before that. And my understanding of fundamental technologies, I didn't finish computer science. I dropped out, I dropped out and in year two and a half basically because I was doing it part time. So I was there for three years, but I was only really into two and a half. And then I cut my losses. And so there's a lot of technical debt, even to this day that has to be overcome. Removed a lot of it over what will be soon our third major upgrade in as many years. For example, everything now is like react or Vijay S or like these awesome JavaScript libraries for creating beautiful UIs. There's a lot of that. V one was jQuery Ajax and PHP and just kind of takes a couple seconds to load something. You added into the DOM manually and sends an Ajax request and it updates the database. And then comes back. So, you know, again, it wasn't it about making it perfect. It was about making something that worked. And seeing if it was a viable, you know, because the only business that we were using it for was our own and our list only had a hundred people on it. We wanted to make sure we were going to invest time in this that it would be viable for someone like a list of 5000 contacts on it, which it is, by the way. And so that would be the major tradeoff, but not necessarily a tradeoff, more just like a lack of my own personal knowledge. I didn't invest time in learning libraries or learning new stuff. I'm just like, this is what I know and this is how what I'm gonna use in order to get this out the door. Right? And again, I'm doing it. I'm doing myself. I didn't have any other developers at that point in time. And I mean, fortunately, there's help now. It was just relying on on what I knew. I didn't even know that react existed or view JS was an option. I wasn't even consciously aware of these these great tools that exist now to improve the development process. Or web hacker or whatever. And Gutenberg for WordPress, which is their new word press editor, which is why kind of like the entire WordPress ecosystem is moving towards using react as a love thing. The white one is didn't even exist yet. So, yeah. A lot of and the one the one major tradeoff. And again, this comes to this comes to my own personal skills and ability at that point in time. Was a lot of our competitors when you build marketing automation, you're inactive campaign or you're in infusionsoft. You have this flow chart, right? You can drag a nodes and then there's like arrows and conditions and stuff like that. And I had no idea. No idea where to even begin with that. So the way that we approached it, and also I thought this was a good way to approach it because a lot of the time we saw that the whole flowchart thing tripped a lot of newbies up. Trips, it trips businesses up because they end up building these flow charts with no exits. Accidentally not on purpose, and based on my own skill level, it wasn't even possible to build something that would allow them to do that. So we just built out this linear system, so you could basically it was basically halfway in between just setting up a simple auto responder, but also having sort of like the if then.
Code Story
"tobey" Discussed on Code Story
"This episode is brought to you by courier. Your application speaks to your users with notifications. But what do you do when your users each respond better to a different channel? Building the event triggers is annoying enough..
Relentless Geekery
"tobey" Discussed on Relentless Geekery
"You know, any number of movies have been oh, not quite as good as the book or different than the book. And I just, I want to see that cool thing made in real life. I want to see, you know, Tobey Maguire as the, you know, the lookalike silent killer out on the farm. I don't think I'm doing any spoiler alert or anything like that. It's old enough. Man, I just. Literally good. I really like about it. All the things you said. I mean, it's that 50s film noir hard bitten cigar smoking hat. And he even rough guys. I don't have any rights that way in the rhythm and cadence mostly. He doesn't use all the over the top cliched words and stuff. Exactly. It has that feel. And it doesn't like you said you're not insulted. It starts right off and you've got to keep up and figure out what's going on. And he doesn't overuse words. I mean, it's not like, you know, like, Watchmen. Good, but I mean, every panel is half full of words. And I remember the dark tower series Stephen King, there's just some amazing artwork, but by Jim Lee and it's just fantastic..
Zero Credit(s)
"tobey" Discussed on Zero Credit(s)
"I don't know sony sony plus paramount. They don't mountain they really don't have a streaming thing at all spider man into the spider verse. I believe is available on netflix. It's They i don't think they've dip their toes in the streaming waters and they might be the one media company. That hasn't if i'm being honest the because that's the only way could really see them possibly making up for putting venom out when they're putting it out. Yeah and unfortunately venom might be suffering. Because of that. I don't want to call the shortsightedness or stubbornness. Because i really don't know this the decision behind it on. But the fact that sony doesn't have their own dedicated streaming platform might be hurting the odds that their villain based marvel sort of related. Cinematic universe doesn't go forward. I mean gonna fucking spider man. We're gonna watch spider-man. If if i watch listen this is a true thing if i can watch things with mostly spiderman and i would buy that streaming service so the tom holland spiderman are going to be available on disney. Plus sony's they add. Did names that deal odd. There is no place where you can watch as far as i know and please write an emphasis if you know otherwise. I don't know of a place where you can watch spiderman one through three with tobey maguire or spiderman in the amazing spider man. I don't know if those are called with the cat who likes lasagna. Andrew garfield I don't know where you can watch those they're all sony properties and sony has no centralized streaming service. I don't know where i could see them. If i wanted to. Not that i would want to spider-man's who is golden. I never watched any of the andrew garfield ones three was k. I just feel like it had too much going on. One was okay to was amazing. Three whatever but here's the thing. I know exactly where you can watch it. And we've been talking about sony not having a platform but god. I know where you can watch it all my god. We've been talking about only fans this whole whole time. You can watch spiderman on all. The only man's only man's only open for the spider close parentheses may ends. This was the pivot that none of us saw but sony was playing forty chess. The entire. we've been on ted but we don't band venom the only thing that's banned as the dance scene from spiderman three because it's too hot to handle it's much too hot So that is blurred. They didn't for move they. Just blurt the entire sequence this is edible and of course you can also watch it on your esp on you md..
The Ringer-Verse
"tobey" Discussed on The Ringer-Verse
"Top might be the age now. That tobey maguire was when he started playing spiderman or might actually be older. Did tobey maguire tobey. Maguire might have been in his thirties when he was playing him. I'm not sure. I have to go look but I think that I think that for me. She's got so many big counting on him being around for a lot of movies because he still has such a such a youthful face. They're still in high school. They're moving the character forward. Kinda slowly game. Really think when you when you think about it. As far as him being the super confident i know what i'm doing even come to doctor strange like this in this situation It's it's still spiderman going. Hey i don't have the answers. Be figure out what it is that i have to do something wrong with that but you wonder if they're going to have that same energy for tom holland plan spiderman if he's even plant by man when he's twenty eight twenty nine thirty and he looks more like a a a a grown man and the character itself has got out of high. School is now trying to be in the real world so tobey. Maguire was twenty six during am ham mcguire omen face like i. I would have thought he was thirty. Nine right at ta ta and thomas twenty five now so he's younger it. His thirst spider man movie. The tobey maguire was his first spiderman movies. So there's a difference between those two guys anyway So now. Let's talk about the attorneys attorneys. The first question. I'm going to ask. You is did the spiderman no way home trailer just completely neuter. The neutral fraternals that we got. I'm a little mad. I feel like the new trailer for spiderman khanna neuter cianci and internals in terms of like anticipation in terms of wedding. Those films like breathe. You know what i'm saying. Like i don't know the lake like there. There was no level of response as high for the latest turtles. Charlier as there was for spiderman. Do you think that was mistake blowing. They're going to do. They're they're unwinnable situation. Where i'm just like it's just does by florida. They're going to do. I mean i. I enjoyed the new turtles trailer. I'm worried about internals. 's i'm not worried and i'm not i'm not worried that it turtles will be good movie. I'm worried that eternal will be too much of a movie. speak on it. Speak on a man. I'm worried that eternal is by looking at. It is going to be a sweeping epic lyrical deep And emotionally touching film that the m. c. You audience is it quite ready for it. This time that. When i say not quite ready for i don't mean to not ready for the making i mean people are itching for marvel to get back on their bullshit. They are people are itching for marvel to get back to the ship. They wanna have while moments like game is crazy in game was a big huge deal for marble. Because it's like it was such an event such a spectacle movie and there's going to be an intimacy and assertive assertive. I how can. I put it like a an allure and a mysticism to the turtles right. with these characters that are eons old that have watched and loved humanity. Love is going to be a tremendous fame in the movie And even the look of it. I wonder if the fans are waiting to see what happens in no way home are gonna go in with open hearts and open minds for what eternal was. Looks like. it's going to be which is a different type of marvel movie a marvel movie that has Steaks all it's all and is really talking about fundamental questions about humanity's place in the universe and what it means to be human and if it would have been if turtles is going to be maybe the big the biggest casualty of reshuffling the the schedule a little bit concerned a little. I'm concerned but i do think that i wanna give credit cards. Do like if we think about the best movies in the mci talking winter soldier. I'm talking black panther. Thor ragnarok guardians of the galaxy. What have you in my opinion. Those are the ones that happened in pocket where they don't push the thor ragnarok didn't push the story forward that much. It was a good movie because it's like now. We're going to be zany in this corner. Same thing with winter soldier it was just like oh. This is like a movie. I can tell anybody to watch and i do want to. I think the best version of eternal is like a We know y'all are waiting for spiderman. But we're going to just do shit over here. And i but to your point i don't know if the mc you as a fan base that's willing to do that. And i think part of that problem is is like black widow kind of tripped up. You know what i'm saying and like it didn't it didn't get people excited enough or trust marvel enough that they can still do solo movies. That are world shattering events and like that might be the thing also. Black widow didn't have anything to do with anything though. And that's the thing about the black willow didn't push the story forward. It was It was unique in that way. I enjoy black widow for what it was but i wonder if people aren't man no way home just makes you go. Jesus man this is going to be crazy. She looked crazy g crazy. You talking about dr strategists. Think about how crazy that is. We're going nuts here. we're also but i also do think can marvel even like sustain like solo adventures. And what i mean by that is like what we talking about. The ones where site about we wanna see tobey maguire garfield and tom holly in one movie with all the villains. We wanna see doctor. Strange and loki and wanda all in the same damn movie like we're getting to a point where marvel marvel does have multiple euros. Multiple villains. were crossing dimensions. Where like all right. That's cute give us the real shit and is that. Is that going to be a problem. Where no one has the patience anymore. So wait you know what i mean. I mean maybe i. I think that's a lot of the places to television shows are going to come in to television. Shows are gonna come in to establish characters like moon knight. I miss marvel and she hulk and people like that so that we understand them and get a little bit of their solo journeys and we'll necessarily have to run out to the theaters to do that. At the movies might be more of a situation to where these characters where they become team ups. It's going to be even like you know three or four guards at galaxy. You know you have all of these different characters that are going to be in these movies and we're really like in the comic book round now. They're not very many of these. Could these books that are part of these big saga that you read them that they only have one character. And that's the whole usery wolverine series. You removing series. It would all his his solo book all be about who was joining wolverine and his adventure that that top wolverine and he's in new orleans and he has a click gambit or is wolverine and he's in canada and he has a cook pup from alpha flight or it's wolverine and he's for some reason made an alliance with blacktop fucking cassidy and that's kind of the way. The adventures with go and because marvel is in its comic book. Sort of run. Now you might see fans having more expectation of who's going to pop up in his movies when you get a i always just give me about rap records right so so is coming out with a new record but yeah. We're happy that this person is coming out with new music. And then the first question..
MyTalk 107.1
"tobey" Discussed on MyTalk 107.1
"Our first Tom Cruise movie. I want everybody to Slater, Bradley Uhh Tobey Maguire. No. Joey show. What is it? Wait. Hold on. Don't. Nope. What is the name of that movie? Stop it. Um, What am I thinking of? You know, that's funny, right? This is actually an actor named club. Okay, Five seconds. Brad. Okay. It's Mm hmm. Bobby move. What? Jerry Maguire, Jerry Maguire. Oh, my God. He's a good player from Lord of the Rings. Wasn't the Lord of the rings. No. Colleen and Bradley. Listen, Live or podcast it any time at my talk one of 71 dot com or on the my talk ab my talk 1071. Lorien Julia here with David Luzinski from first Equity mortgage, Our favorite Santa Claus and tis the season. David Happy Holidays. Happy holidays to you, and to all of my talk listeners. This year we've brought the gift of incredibly lower payments. Some of your listeners bought new houses. It's been quite a crazy year out there. But there's been some benefits this year, such as the super low interest rates where we've saved some might talk listeners 304 100, even some up to 8 $900 a month in house payments. That's amazing that I'm glad that people are So calling because the rates are low, and people still need to be smart. People got preoccupied with everything happening. And now maybe if you have that moment to stop and make that phone call, it's worth it. It is worth it and you'll cheer.
Donna and Steve
Kate Hudson and Dax Shepard Revisit Their Former Whirlwind Romance — and Why They Broke Up
"Dax Shepard has podcast arm chair expert with pod with dax Shepard under expert with podcast yes it's actually a good pocket is a lot of time here welcome to Kate Hudson and her brother Oliver to his podcast and they talked about how the dax Shepard and Kate Hudson dated back in two thousand seven it's really funny I do remember it now okay it was a short lived romance yes they split after just a few months but they were looking back on their time together and they said that it started as a joke so they first met in the backyard of Tobey Maguire's house this is like how small famous Hollywood as right and yeah so you probably dated everyone it's like the island of Manhattan everybody everybody that everyone right they immediately headed off but they were both in other relationships so when they met Kate Hudson was married to Chris Robinson and dax Shepard was dating brie Morrison and Kate said we were in a totally different place and she said I wasn't plotting anything but I certainly wanted your approval and if you thought I was cute all the batter then they reconnected at a real at a restaurant in Malibu shortly after Kate Hudson ended her relationship with when Wilson and they decided to mess around with the paparazzi who were waiting outside so it started as a joke they said when this be funny if we came out holding hands and I was your new boyfriend all my I could we were just this happening yeah they were friends so they said and then we added is what doc shepherd said wouldn't it be great of her new boyfriend didn't wear a shirt at Nobu of course they were never now but just FY I if you are ever in Malibu get away to get into noble it is every celebrity every celebrity that's because you were like guaranteed to have a celebrity sighting in over and you have some really great food and so she said that she thought it was so funny and she said that then doc said he was acting matter the paparazzi that they were invading our privacy and then it just somehow led to hanging out and then Kate Hudson's jokingly said that I wanted to have sex with him it was like the perfect of my gosh and they said they laughed a lot when they were together at the at super compatible personalities and he credited their romance with helping him communicate better because they had a lot of fights and he was monogamous for the first time in fifteen years with her and he said ultimately though they just parted ways and they said it was mutual ask and they were just in very different places and their lives she seems like she already had a child at that point I'm sure that's what it was
How I Built It
Building Better Marketing Automation Through WordPress With Adrian Tobey
"Everybody everybody welcome to another episode of how I built it the podcast that asks how did you build that today my guest is Adrian Toby the CEO of Groundhog Inc Adrienne. How are you today. I'm doing great Joe and first of all. Thank you so much for having me. It's a I've listened to your show before it's great to be on and I'm you know it's great. What you do Sharon the Sharon you know how he built it so I'm so excited and and want you lead the way awesome. Thank you so much for those kind words. I really appreciate that. It's it's sometimes I feel like I'm yelling into the void on the podcast but hearing a lot of feedback when I go to work camps and stuff like that and us. It's always nice to hear people do listen unappreciated cool so let's talk about your product groundhog and let's get into who you are and and what you do. I I I do want to ask you though I didn't ask us in the pre show and you don't have to answer it because you know some people might think it's true but you look pretty young like a young guy or do you just take hey cary twenty two okay so yeah. You're you're young guy. CEO of a company and it looks like it's doing you know pretty well. You have a really cool product as we'll learn so I just wanted to to get that out there like I i. I'm really bad at telling age but I may be in my infinite wisdom in my thirty th year I can. I can tell now Matt so awesome. Let's start with who you are and what you do yeah absolutely so my name is Adrian. I've been in the digital marketing marketing and email marketing industry for quite some time. I may only be twenty two but I've been in for about seven years. I went to university here in Toronto the University of Toronto for Computer Science for about about three years until I dropped out to focus my efforts. in the wordpress communities so used to be a certified partner for a company called infusion soft. If you're not familiar with infusion soft they have many similar competitors out there that you've likely heard of mail chimp get response tough spot active campaign in pain for example. All of those are the same vein they'll do marketing automation as a service and I was a certified partner in that community for about five years and in that time I built several wordpress plug ins catering to people who used those tools to integrate those tools with wordpress a little bit easier until finally is took all of that knowledge that I've learned being in that industry and building wordpress plug ins to build a wordpress competitor for for those that people would be able to just install them their website and that's what we're going to talk a little bit about today yeah so so already there are a lot of really interesting the things you just mentioned there first of all first of all so you have been doing digital marketing and e mail for about seven years. If I do my math straight we probably got started in our professions at the same time right when I was twenty two. I was like I'm doing this for almost a decade and people like that's insane. I don't like it's true and you also did computer science at the University of Toronto for three years before dropping out. What led you like what so I I mean you said you wanted to focus your efforts in the work space and on development and things like that but what was like the ultimate decision because when I went to college like I I did my master's the program to double the amount of years of college and and I think that at no point in nat journey I would have been like I got a job out of college. So what what was the thing that leads you to do that. Well so as I was going to university. I was is also working part time in a digital marketing agency which is as I was saying. I have that seven years experience in the in the in the industry but I was doubling up that time at the same time doing going through university so I was doing that full time and then doing school in the nights part time and I just found as going through I wasn't getting the amount of value that I wanted wanted for my dollar spent from from university that I was getting kind of just learning as I go through the through the agency through the industry and going to to conferences and all of that superbowl stuff so at one point and my last year of university I started to develop my first wordpress plugin which is called form left forearm lift currently has about thousand users and makes modest passive revenue for my current company and it is a form builder specifically for the CRM in marketing automation tool infusion soft so what people can do as a can essentially installed this plug in on their site and they can import their forms directly from their Sierra after going through the authentication process they can import it directly then use a short code to pasted on their website otherwise without form left you'd have to do like the send this code to your developers so they can follow it on your website type deal right which is not the best user experience but that's what I built and I was really really focused on on making not the best that it could be in my last year in my third year of university so much so that I kind of neglected some of my university responsibilities because I was looking at I was kind of looking looking at the the user count is at one hundred it's at two hundred south three hundred you know this actually like really be something maybe that would be super cool and I was all excited about it and it was just a you know studying for my three to one class exam was just so much less sexy then then bend then bumping up the user counts so at the end of the third year. That was the first time ever failed course ever. I failed to sixty three which is one of the the class where you learn a lot about optimization runtime and all of that good stuff and I failed that of course is the first ever failed in my entire highlife and that was basically at that point. I'm like well. You know obviously if I failed the course you know I'm not really in. It and I'm spending all this money. Tuition at U. Of T. is not an expensive so so I'm like well. You know what I've learned a whole lot from this whole wordpress plugin adventure and the digital marketing and I honestly if I put the same amount of effort into something the thing that's kind of like its own business doesn't rely on any others then maybe I could actually grow something relatively quickly that would help up a significant amount of people rather than just spending all that time and energy sitting in a classroom somewhere at nine o'clock at night. I mean absolutely that makes perfect century. I think the the divergence our journeys was that I was self employed through college and I went to I got my masters in part art because it would it would help me stay in school while also building the business before I went into the quote unquote real world and so I was teaching I got a I got an assistantship for the master so it didn't cost me any money Um so I was getting free education building my business and getting paid which was really nice. I do have one. It's one question about the education like the higher education system in Canada though it sounds like it is very similar to the United States. It's like there's go ahead. Yeah the the only the only difference is that you call everything college and we we we have a very distinct line in between college and what we call a university college is very much focused towards the actual practicality of the workspace traits. It's journalism event
Mornings on the Mall with Brian Wilson
"Spider-Man" Is Leaving The Marvel Cinematic Universe
"So here's the way this works Marvel creates a spider man Stanley creates spider man Marvel's got the rights to it for years Marvel which wasn't really producing movies end up selling the rights to Sony so then we get the Tobey Maguire version of spider man in the in the beginning of this century and so we see those movies they're wildly successful Sonny tries a reboot with this guy Andrew Garfield I thought the movies were fine but they were critically reviewed very poorly and audiences were not really going for it either they didn't make what they want in the box office so Sony finally gets over itself and says okay fine we'll work with Marvel on this incredible cinematic universe that they've created with Iron Man and all these other characters they put them all together in this giant marriage that work out the contracts the right way and ends up being a smashing success well it's over we get news yesterday spider man is now leaving the Marvel cinematic universe Tom Holland who's played the character really well in the latest movies well not apparently be although there is a some hope still hanging out there apparently be a part of any more of these Marvel cinematic universe's movies and instead Sony's just gonna hold onto I'm selfishly because they can't agree on you guessed it money for more on this we got Victoria Gleick is the executive producer filling in this morning for our heather hunter Victoria I know you watch all the stuff really closely checks to me about this yesterday to me America you were very disappointed in the US yes it's funny because my friend Logan shot out to him texted me and I ended up texting this Chris plan if I weren't twenty two I would be angry crying right now just because I think Marvel did such an amazing job with spider man and Sony and they kind of saves the character concerning I think mess it up some with Andrew Garfield Andrew Garfield am and it's I could enter Gardasil right actor and they did but they did the same thing with the new venom movie like Tom hardy would have been he is the perfect venom any such a great actor but they made such a forgettable movie yeah I hate that I did I said this to you yesterday and I hope this is right in the long run I kind of hope that these studios these major studios do maintain some distance from one another and and create products to compete because it doesn't seem like Disney's taking over everything I mean Disney on think about what does the US Disney owns the Muppets Disney owns Star Wars the entire franchise Disney owns all of marble Disney owns Disney ESPN and ABC I mean you just got unless you don't fox now you don't everything fox's ever produced all the movies that's on by Disney now no Disney plus is coming out the streaming service what is it next in two months or so October I believe they're coming out the streaming service to compete with net flex and they own everything the behemoth I'd like to see a Sony Sony studio exist that can actually produce something to compete with Disney because it feels like everything's a little to consolidate it now I agree with that but I just think taking that character that belongs to the Marvel universe is just absurd to me what's the contract on this and how long to Sony get to use the spider man character do we now it's like a crazy agreement they get a spider man four ever at the to the expense of Marvel and the thing that bothers me is that kind of set it up in the last movie far from home as far from home yes far from his when he goes overseas yeah they set it up in the last movie that he's is basically going to be the main adventure spider man and I was like the conflict he was having throughout the movie is like he wasn't sure if he was basically ready to be the main Avenger yeah so I don't really know what their plan is also the last movie ended on a cliffhanger I'm not gonna say what it is I haven't seen him yeah but ends on a cliffhanger and I'm just like and he's done really well for John by the way they've they've earned over a billion dollars worldwide so far on that movie it's been the I think the only smash success of the summer has been that's vitamins anyway it's wild he's a good he's good at that role but once again he's not actually American is neat nice British yeah what's what's the deal here I can we get Americans the plate American superheroes I have no idea but I think you did amazing and I think a lot of fans are very emotionally attached to Tom Holland as writer man why no one who is thank
Lee Mathews
Stanley, Kirby And Chris Evans discussed on Lee Mathews
"Never be another Stanley for decades he provided both young and old with adventure, escape comfort, confidence inspiration, strength, friendship, and joy. Chris Evans, does not go on to say and a dandy paycheck for me. But, but that's but I think implied. He goes on to say he excluded. He exuded love and kindness, and we'll leave an incredible Mark on. So so so many lives Excelsior Evangeline, Lilly rights, STAN more than a master of stories. You also seemed like a master of living. I will look to you for inspiration for the rest of my life. You live on Xs and os from your wasp, Jimmy Kimmel rights at age seven. I drew a weird portrait of Stanley. And he includes a picture of the portrait in his Twitter post and goes on to say, I asked my mom to send it to him. Thankfully, she didn't because thirty plus years later, I got to give it to the great one in person. Thanks for all the funds Stam and hashtag Excelsior. Kevin. Smith says farewell, my friend. You're not only responsible for the boy, I was. But also the man I am today. And I will miss you all my days, and I know a lot of people feel. That way as well. You gotta think of it as one of your favorite if you're not a comic book. Geek, you've got to think of it. As one of your favorite authors has died or one of your favorite actors has died, especially when they've created so many great characters. That's what he was. He was authored, and he was a crater and the story guy who's producer as you know, in Hollywood. If he was in Hollywood, that's what he would have been a writer director producer everybody was in comics. So he was helping the guys, you know, shape stuff and come up with the name. He came up with the name Spiderman. Handed off to dicicco and Kirby. And then of course, they ran with it. And actually, drew everything. Yeah. But he came up with the concept and probably consultant on some of the plots. Exactly what he did. Yeah. Yeah. In the various obits. They've talked about over the years about, you know, who did what went in home, and we're talking about life in the fifties and sixties in New York City, and those buildings sure ideas flying all over the rooms. And who knows what came up with what you know. So when they had a bunch of baby boomers who didn't have a lot of limits. So they were just going to. They didn't have anything holding them back. Exactly. And that's Mike antelope canon, my producer, can you tell he's a comic con freak and do you have a collection of your own? That's I was more of a DC guy. But I did have three great marvel comics I had a Spiderman with. The in humans was trying to remember their name with the hint, humans that was Medusa the woman who had red hair that would make like an octopus, snakes, I had one with her and the cover ended up being the key scene and Spiderman two with Tobey Maguire when he stopped the train. The in the comic he was stopping the Coney Island roller coaster from. Okay. So that corporation the film that was cool to see that say a fantastic four. I was big fan of majestic four back in the seventies. I was a huge fan of them. Well, that is another one of the creations. So, and that's why he touched so many people, and there was a big fan of the X men are cartoon series in the nineties that ran pretty much back with the Batman nine. There's that excellent cartoon series Stanley was really proud of because they great job with the characters. Eight Portland thousand star one thousand on NewsRadio one thousand K T. Okay. You may have heard over the weekend Oklahoma school SU well, it was it was a cash in school. They're FFA barn. Caught fire. And when I first heard it, I thought, Ooh, I hope it wasn't because some sort of heating element got too close to some. Hey, but as it turns out, the cash in school superintendent Sammy Jackson said Monday that after they announced that their barn had burned and that they had lost several show animals students have received
Jason and Alexis
Ben Affleck Had Been 'Drinking Alone for Days' Before Heading Back to Rehab
"This. Morning let's talk about Ben Affleck Ben Affleck according to people magazine had been drinking alone for days before heading back to rehab that he was on a downward. Spiral he was in bad. Shape he wasn't. Eating he hadn't showered and it didn't take much convincing to get him to go to. Rehab he wanted to go and he. Cooperated so that's the latest story for. People I, mean we kind of knew that he didn't put up a, fight but that was what was happening leading up to the days of. Him I just heard a story to that Warner Brothers is considering removing him or he's considering removing himself from the role of Batman because of insurance that the. Insurance on him playing that. Role would be. So high now because of his addiction struggles I mean that's been that project has been. So plagued right with him they should. Probably move on I I liked him. I didn't, dislike him as much as some people did as Batman but, maybe move on and re let that franchise settle for a little bit Well yeah I mean but let it settle or do what they, did with Spiderman they relaunched it so successfully with Tom Holland that you know Because, remember they had a blip with Andrew Garfield with Spiderman nobody liked those two movies you'll let it you let it simmer for, a couple years and then you do you do a great casting job like they did with, Tom Holland and look now when people think Spiderman. They no longer think at. Tobey Maguire which I used to they now, think of Tom Holland, they have to. Do the same, thing
The Guardian Books Podcast
Madeline Miller discussing the meaning behind Circe
AJ Benza: Fame is a Bitch
How Leo DiCaprio Inadvertently Saved Michael Blutrich's Life
"There was a night when Leonardo DiCaprio pretty much saved blue tricks life without realizing it. But back in 97, Michael blue chick was supposed to meet with the Columbo boss alley boy persica. And then we're going to meet at scores that we're going to discuss the fact that persico was looking to open up they wanted to put scores in Brooklyn as well. So that was what the meeting was for. But earlier that night, DiCaprio unexpectedly showed up with Tobey Maguire at David Blaine. And they were like, hey, Mike, come drink with us. Come sit with us. And he put the guys up in the crow's nest, a really private second floor room where you look over the whole floor with all the girls dancing and you take up whoever you want and you completely alone. It's where the real, the real, real celebrities go. So blue trick is sort of the guys up there and he's like, look, I can't stand can't stay. He was wearing what they call an F bird, all right? FBI recording device. And it was taped to his inner thigh. Now he apparently didn't want to sit with the DiCaprio Blaine and Maguire because you didn't want to get involved with, you know, if they said something embarrassing, he didn't want that to be on tape because he liked the way the movie stars felt about it. He was kind of vain. Which is kind of really fucking weird because on one hand you don't want to embarrass a celebrity, but you're okay with incriminating yourself against a mobster. Like what the fuck is you're more scared of DiCaprio than a fucking monster? But that night, alley boy persica was like three hours late. So at one point, blue trick snuck outside to the FBI van, which was down the street, and the agents took the recorder off, and they went back to their fucking precinct or office. And the night was done. Ten minutes later, Ali boy shows up. And it's almost like I think he planned it. I think he had a look at or not a guy on the inside, and he showed up. And ten minutes later, he's there, 15 minutes later. He's got blue tricks standing in a hallway naked because alley boys partner wanted to make sure a blue chick wasn't wearing a wire.