Tell me about your vision.
Vision for life.
What would you like to share?
Well, very powerful word.
So you tell me, like, give me like context,
like Mark, what do you want?
What does your audience want actually, even more important?
What do they want to hear?
Do they want to hear like a business side?
Do they want to hear a personal side?
Do they want to hear, you know, what side?
Our audience is mainly entrepreneurs and leaders.
And we have all sorts of leaders come on our show who share different sides of
their vision.
Some people talk about their author side.
Some people talk about their business they do.
Some people talk about their journey as a father or a mother.
So it's what you would like to share.
What you feel passionate about most.
I mean, a million things.
Okay, so for me, I guess let's do business first.
So again, devhub.com, like I said, I think there's a place in the world for
what I would call like ultra luxury, ultra boutique, ultra.
Like when you have a website, if you're a brand, call it a Saks Fifth Avenue or
what's it called?
One hour heating and cooling.
It doesn't really matter.
The fact that your website is powered by devhub means you have like the absolute
best.
There's nothing better, right?
Versus if you got a website through an agency on a platform like WordPress or
others, or you built it yourself with some other tool, having a website through
devhub is the fucking, or sorry, is the best.
And we think we can do that for probably about up to a thousand plus brands and
keep it still, you know, high and tight in terms of a company.
Personal vision.
Live as long as possible with and around the people that I love.
Like I hope to God my parents never die.
Hope we've got no cat ever dies.
And so, yeah, those are probably roughly the two.
Where did this vision of you coming in as a CMS side come from for you?
Like how did you get started in that?
Okay, so that's, I documented everything.
So it's at devhub.com, devhub.com forward slash history.
Because of course, when you know, you come from tech, everyone thinks I'm going to
build the thing, I'm going to flip the thing, I'm a genius.
And some people do for sure.
Not the journey we've been on.
This is year seven.
What we started when we raised a couple million bucks to what we do today almost is
totally different.
We started with domain names and monetizing those and a blogging platform,
which morphed into a small business kind of website builder, which then morphed
into an enterprise level platform for really big brands all over the world.
And so it was definitely not a linear journey.
It was totally, I mean, there was basically three major pivots and the biggest one
obviously happened probably because of the pandemic.
Right?
Where, you know, in the world of, I don't call it software as a service, call it
martech or marketing technology, call it local marketing.
You know, it was easy just like, let's sell as many tools to as many brands as
possible.
And a lot of those tools or services, whether it's paid ads or social or reviews,
whatever it is, when the pandemic happened, a lot of brands were like, why do we
have all of these marketing technologies?
Tools that we don't use.
But the one thing that nobody wanted to shut off obviously is their websites.
And, you know, it's crazy to be in this thing for 17 years and be talking about
websites in 2024 when all this shit that's happening with AI and whatnot, like
we're talking about websites today.
And if I've learned anything so far in these 17 years, sometimes just nailing
the basics, you know, is more powerful than building the next one.
And so, you know, because of the pandemic, because we saw that a lot of brands
were shutting off their agencies, shutting off marketing tools.
The one thing they didn't shut off are DevOps websites.
And more so like innovate, helped innovate, create the product roadmap for what
this is ultimately now becoming for these brands.
And so it became a lot more fun of a company in the last 18 years.
And so it became a lot more fun of a company in the last, call it, three years
for sure.
That's awesome.
All right, go.
What was your most significant learning experience in life?
So far, so I've been blessed that I've had nobody really die.
I mean, the cat dying really was a...
If there was grief with a cat for six months, I can only imagine when it's like
a very, very, very close friend or family member.
So everyone around me is alive.
So I had to deal with having death, which will be a very hard one.
But in terms of most significant learning experience, I mean, there's probably
a lot now that are all racking my brain.
I'm trying to think of like more or less your audience and like what would help
them.
This one won't make sense.
I'll do two.
The first one would be...
It's actually probably the name of your podcast, Vision Profs.
The first one is again how important values are to a company.
And if they're made up, it's why your company is not big.
That's my hot take of the moment.
And again, when you're starting out or when you're in it and people are like,
you need a mission, you need a vision, values, your principles, what's up?
And you're like, it makes no sense because you're trying to just make payroll.
You're trying to grow.
You're like one more deal and I'll do that.
One more deal, one more deal, one more deal.
Today, if I was starting a company, I would start with that as the basics.
That's the basics.
That's level 101 of business.
It's like what are you trying to get done?
What are the values of the company?
I.e. what are the types of people you want to attract to help you get there?
And that would be the number one thing.
And again, it's something that just getting pushed to the side for so many,
I mean, decade plus because we're like, let's just make money.
Let's just do...
And then again, as the company grows, you realize very quickly that it's people,
that helps the thing scale.
And so not having again that north star of again, vision, mission-ish,
and then values to like align people to.
Another one would be you are a leader.
How you show up, how you talk, how you...
What words you choose.
I mean, all the things like you're constantly being watched.
And so, you know, at some level, you're never able to...
Like I don't think you should...
This is my own personal opinion.
I don't think you should ever bring your own personal issues to a business.
Right.
So for me, like if I'm having a down day or whatever,
like I would never show that to anybody.
You know, because I think business should be like a happy place,
not like, oh, this is too miserable today.
So it's like, you know, one, again, you're constantly being watched as a leader.
And then third would be again, no two...
Again, in a company, whether it's four people, three people,
40 people, 100 people, whatever, none of those people are experiencing...
As much as you think,
none of those people are experiencing the company in the same way you are experiencing it.
You know, and so you just got to remember that people are people.
And, you know, aligning to, you know, their ambitions helps you achieve your ambitions.
And so it is one to one. It is hand to hand.
You know, in some respects, I'm grateful for the advancements of technology in the last, call it, two years
in the sense of AI and the efficiencies, I think, that it can probably bring to organizations
in building bigger companies with less people.
But I think those people can be more connected than they've ever been.
And so, yeah, those are some of the lessons.
Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.