1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,040 Yay, we are officially live. 2 00:00:03,040 --> 00:00:05,640 I'm so excited for today's conversation. 3 00:00:05,640 --> 00:00:07,740 I feel like I've been saying that every day, 4 00:00:07,740 --> 00:00:10,520 but they just keep getting better and better and better. 5 00:00:10,520 --> 00:00:14,440 Today, we have Mike Bifuco. Did I do that right? 6 00:00:14,440 --> 00:00:15,680 I'll take it that counts. 7 00:00:15,680 --> 00:00:16,200 Yes. 8 00:00:16,200 --> 00:00:17,480 Okay. You correct me. 9 00:00:17,480 --> 00:00:19,340 Then tell us just a little bit about you. 10 00:00:19,340 --> 00:00:20,280 Who are you and what are you doing about it? 11 00:00:20,280 --> 00:00:21,360 No worries. 12 00:00:21,360 --> 00:00:23,640 Yeah. Hi, Tessa. Thanks so much for having me. 13 00:00:23,640 --> 00:00:24,840 My name is Mike Bifuco. 14 00:00:24,840 --> 00:00:28,600 I am a CTO and co-founder of a company called Craftwork. 15 00:00:28,600 --> 00:00:31,600 We are a Y Combinator S23 company, 16 00:00:31,600 --> 00:00:35,360 and we're a tech connected vertically integrated painting company. 17 00:00:35,360 --> 00:00:39,800 We're a tech company that paints homes and buildings and businesses. 18 00:00:39,800 --> 00:00:41,800 We've been in business for about two years. 19 00:00:41,800 --> 00:00:45,680 We went through Y Combinator's summer batch in 2023, 20 00:00:45,680 --> 00:00:47,080 so about a year ago. 21 00:00:47,080 --> 00:00:51,880 We have been putting together the dream of painting homes and 22 00:00:51,880 --> 00:00:54,760 building a home services brand and experience that lives up to 23 00:00:54,760 --> 00:00:58,800 what the average person should expect from something in 2025. 24 00:00:58,800 --> 00:01:01,640 The way I usually say it is that most, 25 00:01:01,640 --> 00:01:03,640 if you look up a paint company in your neighborhood, 26 00:01:03,640 --> 00:01:06,080 it's very likely that most of them wouldn't have a website, 27 00:01:06,080 --> 00:01:09,000 let alone a person that would respond to you. 28 00:01:09,000 --> 00:01:10,880 We try and set the bar really high. 29 00:01:10,880 --> 00:01:14,720 We do interior and exterior and cabinetry and specialty painting. 30 00:01:14,720 --> 00:01:16,280 We're based in Charlotte, North Carolina, 31 00:01:16,280 --> 00:01:18,600 and our plan is to expand across the US eventually. 32 00:01:18,600 --> 00:01:21,480 Right now, we're focused on building a platform and a product and 33 00:01:21,480 --> 00:01:24,240 a brand and an experience that we can scale. 34 00:01:24,240 --> 00:01:28,280 We have a team of about 50 people total, 35 00:01:28,280 --> 00:01:30,440 half of which roughly are painters. 36 00:01:30,440 --> 00:01:32,800 That's an interesting difference about our company too, 37 00:01:32,800 --> 00:01:35,000 is that we employ our painters directly. 38 00:01:35,000 --> 00:01:37,280 Our team of painters are incredibly talented. 39 00:01:37,280 --> 00:01:38,200 They're super skilled. 40 00:01:38,200 --> 00:01:40,840 They know what they're doing and they deliver on brand. 41 00:01:40,840 --> 00:01:43,560 They show up at your house in a fancy craft work uniform. 42 00:01:43,560 --> 00:01:47,520 They know how to deliver an experience that is unified. 43 00:01:47,520 --> 00:01:50,800 No matter what team shows up at your house to paint, for example, 44 00:01:50,800 --> 00:01:54,360 you have an experience that is delightful and thoughtful. 45 00:01:54,360 --> 00:01:57,280 One of the really interesting things that we do that's different is we try and 46 00:01:57,280 --> 00:02:00,240 create a connection with our customer and with our painters. 47 00:02:00,240 --> 00:02:02,720 For example, Tessa, if we were painting your house, 48 00:02:02,720 --> 00:02:05,440 after we agree on the scope of what we're painting, 49 00:02:05,440 --> 00:02:08,600 we also ask you some things about what we're doing on the job. 50 00:02:08,600 --> 00:02:11,200 We ask you for, for example, 51 00:02:11,200 --> 00:02:12,800 where can we park when we show up? 52 00:02:12,800 --> 00:02:14,480 What door should we come in through? 53 00:02:14,480 --> 00:02:16,400 Do you want us to wear plastic covers on our shoes? 54 00:02:16,400 --> 00:02:18,240 Where can we wash our hands and use the bathroom? 55 00:02:18,240 --> 00:02:20,680 Things like that. We'll also ask if you have any pets and 56 00:02:20,680 --> 00:02:22,440 what their names are so that when our painters show up, 57 00:02:22,440 --> 00:02:24,960 they know that your dog's name is Spot, for example. 58 00:02:24,960 --> 00:02:28,120 They don't let your cat out of the house when they're loading paint and 59 00:02:28,120 --> 00:02:29,880 ladders in the house, things like that. 60 00:02:29,880 --> 00:02:30,360 Yeah. 61 00:02:30,360 --> 00:02:32,760 Just as well, we try and create a connection with our painters. 62 00:02:32,760 --> 00:02:35,120 So we'll send you a profile of the team that's coming over. 63 00:02:35,120 --> 00:02:38,920 So you'll get headshots and names of the painters that are coming to paint your house, 64 00:02:38,920 --> 00:02:41,360 as well as things about them like maybe their favorite sports team or 65 00:02:41,360 --> 00:02:43,680 what foods they love to create a human connection, 66 00:02:43,680 --> 00:02:46,920 something visceral that creates comfort that it's not just a stranger showing up. 67 00:02:46,920 --> 00:02:47,840 It's a known quantity. 68 00:02:47,840 --> 00:02:51,400 It's someone who we trust and we believe in that can show up and deliver a great 69 00:02:51,400 --> 00:02:51,800 product. 70 00:02:51,800 --> 00:02:56,960 And our painters will come, deliver the job, apply the right color paint to the 71 00:02:56,960 --> 00:03:00,880 right surfaces and all the right places and leave your home better than we found it. 72 00:03:00,880 --> 00:03:03,640 And so my team's job is building the software that powers all of that. 73 00:03:03,640 --> 00:03:07,360 That's everything from marketing and sales and our public-facing website to a 74 00:03:07,360 --> 00:03:11,360 great big line of business app that does all the logic and logistics for sales and 75 00:03:11,360 --> 00:03:13,280 operations and ordering paint and stuff like that. 76 00:03:13,280 --> 00:03:17,320 And we also have a mobile app built with React Native that our painters use to 77 00:03:17,320 --> 00:03:20,960 show up at the right place to know what to paint to mark their job is done, 78 00:03:20,960 --> 00:03:22,320 the clock in and out, things like that. 79 00:03:24,320 --> 00:03:25,400 Wow. 80 00:03:25,400 --> 00:03:30,480 So we got to chat a little bit before the live stream started and you got to 81 00:03:30,480 --> 00:03:31,440 share a little bit of this. 82 00:03:31,440 --> 00:03:36,360 And I was just blown away because I think, you know, obviously, aside from the 83 00:03:36,360 --> 00:03:39,400 developer challenges that you are solving, which is so cool or should say the 84 00:03:39,400 --> 00:03:43,240 technical challenges, there are so many different pieces that are going into your 85 00:03:43,240 --> 00:03:43,600 business. 86 00:03:43,600 --> 00:03:46,360 And I think that, you know, you could create a marketplace, right? 87 00:03:46,360 --> 00:03:47,360 And that's not what you are. 88 00:03:47,360 --> 00:03:50,560 You could create sort of a service directory and that's not what you are either. 89 00:03:50,560 --> 00:03:53,640 You very much have an ex, you're an experience, right? 90 00:03:53,640 --> 00:03:57,280 And it's an experience that like, for me, I'm like, when are you coming to Texas? 91 00:03:57,280 --> 00:03:59,640 Because my house is all white, if you can't tell. 92 00:03:59,640 --> 00:04:01,600 And I could really use some accent walls. 93 00:04:01,600 --> 00:04:03,280 So when are you expanding to Texas? 94 00:04:03,280 --> 00:04:05,280 Because this is just, it's beautiful, right? 95 00:04:05,280 --> 00:04:09,280 This is exactly what a consumer or anyone really wants when they're 96 00:04:09,280 --> 00:04:10,400 dealing with the scenario. 97 00:04:10,400 --> 00:04:11,240 They want the tech. 98 00:04:11,240 --> 00:04:13,480 They want to be able to book the person just like you said, right? 99 00:04:13,480 --> 00:04:14,720 They want that. 100 00:04:14,720 --> 00:04:18,280 They want to know that they're getting a good service provider. 101 00:04:18,280 --> 00:04:21,440 Oftentimes, you know, you're like, oh, let me hire a company to give me a service 102 00:04:21,440 --> 00:04:23,360 provider and they show up and you're like, who are you? 103 00:04:23,360 --> 00:04:26,240 You're in some vehicle with no brands, right? 104 00:04:26,240 --> 00:04:28,880 And I don't, I'm supposed to just trust you to come into my house. 105 00:04:28,880 --> 00:04:34,280 So so many things that you do different that, wow, is just so beautiful. 106 00:04:34,280 --> 00:04:34,760 You know? 107 00:04:34,760 --> 00:04:35,280 Yeah. 108 00:04:35,280 --> 00:04:35,680 Thank you. 109 00:04:35,680 --> 00:04:36,480 I appreciate that. 110 00:04:36,480 --> 00:04:37,120 It means a lot. 111 00:04:37,120 --> 00:04:40,480 It's definitely a different approach, a different tack to this than a lot of 112 00:04:40,480 --> 00:04:44,320 companies that have come before us who have tried to do similar things have done. 113 00:04:44,320 --> 00:04:47,000 One of the things we try to remind ourselves fairly regularly is that our 114 00:04:47,000 --> 00:04:50,400 customers are often in their homes and your home is often the place where you 115 00:04:50,400 --> 00:04:51,120 feel safest. 116 00:04:51,120 --> 00:04:52,880 So we're letting ourselves into your home. 117 00:04:52,880 --> 00:04:55,520 We need to create the environment that makes that a comfortable place to be. 118 00:04:55,520 --> 00:04:56,960 We need to set expectations. 119 00:04:56,960 --> 00:05:00,640 And importantly, we need to do the best job we can and the most right thing all the time. 120 00:05:00,640 --> 00:05:04,120 So there are cases, situations where things happen that are unintentional, 121 00:05:04,120 --> 00:05:07,240 like we might break a lamp, for example, and we're not just going to hide that 122 00:05:07,240 --> 00:05:08,560 from you and hope you don't notice. 123 00:05:08,560 --> 00:05:10,040 We will replace the lamp. 124 00:05:10,040 --> 00:05:11,600 We'll work with you to reinstall it. 125 00:05:11,600 --> 00:05:13,040 We'll do whatever makes the most sense there. 126 00:05:13,040 --> 00:05:16,200 If it's a lamp you hated, we'll reimburse you for it anyway and kind of hope 127 00:05:16,200 --> 00:05:17,800 that things go well. 128 00:05:17,800 --> 00:05:20,800 In terms of your question when we're coming to Texas, right now we're located 129 00:05:20,800 --> 00:05:24,160 in Charlotte in North Carolina, which is where I'm standing right now. 130 00:05:24,160 --> 00:05:26,640 We have plans to expand across the US. 131 00:05:26,640 --> 00:05:30,680 The job that we're undertaking for now is making it so that craft work from end 132 00:05:30,680 --> 00:05:32,600 to end is an experience that we can reproduce. 133 00:05:32,600 --> 00:05:36,240 So the idea is to take this thing and this brand that we've developed from 134 00:05:36,240 --> 00:05:39,920 the uniforms to the vans we have to the website experience, the way we communicate 135 00:05:39,920 --> 00:05:43,080 and make that something that we can kind of stamp out and grow in other places. 136 00:05:43,080 --> 00:05:46,320 So you can kind of imagine the direction we'll go from Charlotte is sort of 137 00:05:46,320 --> 00:05:50,160 radiating out from here across the country, but Atlanta, Nashville, 138 00:05:50,160 --> 00:05:54,520 Richmond, Washington, DC, places like that and kind of just outward from there. 139 00:05:54,520 --> 00:05:55,920 For the time being, we're in Charlotte. 140 00:05:55,920 --> 00:05:59,080 We do a couple of small projects occasionally in sort of like the 141 00:05:59,080 --> 00:06:02,360 neighboring cities, but we definitely have plans to get to where you are. 142 00:06:02,360 --> 00:06:06,440 And I will definitely be putting you on our interest list so that we can paint 143 00:06:06,440 --> 00:06:07,840 your room, whatever color you're interested in. 144 00:06:07,840 --> 00:06:09,320 For what it's worth, I like your room in white. 145 00:06:09,320 --> 00:06:12,520 I think it's really nice and you've got some good natural light going in there too. 146 00:06:13,160 --> 00:06:15,440 But yeah, if you want to try something funky, we can do that as well. 147 00:06:16,000 --> 00:06:18,880 Absolutely. No, actually, I really do have a beautiful house. 148 00:06:18,880 --> 00:06:20,360 It's like a modern farmhouse. 149 00:06:20,360 --> 00:06:23,200 So it's very white and black, but every room is white and black, right? 150 00:06:23,200 --> 00:06:25,000 So beautiful, but it all looks like this. 151 00:06:25,000 --> 00:06:26,120 So it just gets a little boring. 152 00:06:26,120 --> 00:06:29,520 And the wall over here that you can't see because I have a toddler 153 00:06:29,520 --> 00:06:31,960 and my office is too loud for him right now. 154 00:06:31,960 --> 00:06:33,920 The wall you can't see is the behind the bed, right? 155 00:06:33,920 --> 00:06:35,960 And so there could be a beautiful accent over there. 156 00:06:35,960 --> 00:06:37,480 And I think we could do dark, right? 157 00:06:37,480 --> 00:06:38,720 Because the beautiful light. 158 00:06:38,720 --> 00:06:41,840 So digressing from all the beauty that is paint. 159 00:06:43,200 --> 00:06:46,480 You are solving some pretty awesome technical challenges over there. 160 00:06:46,480 --> 00:06:49,920 And I think that's, you know, that's the part that we love to talk about 161 00:06:49,920 --> 00:06:52,920 and really dig into, you know, in this show. 162 00:06:52,920 --> 00:06:55,640 So remind me, are you I know you're a co-founder. 163 00:06:55,640 --> 00:06:57,600 Are you on the CTO side, CEO side? 164 00:06:57,600 --> 00:06:59,520 What what title are you holding these days? 165 00:06:59,840 --> 00:07:05,800 I am a CTO of the company and co-founder, which primarily means I do 166 00:07:05,800 --> 00:07:09,480 a bit of engineering and a lot of sort of product management work 167 00:07:09,480 --> 00:07:10,840 and sort of collaborative work. 168 00:07:10,840 --> 00:07:13,880 So a lot of what I do now is making sure everyone is on task 169 00:07:13,880 --> 00:07:15,880 that we have a good direction for the product 170 00:07:15,880 --> 00:07:18,640 and that everyone is communicating well and understanding each other. 171 00:07:18,640 --> 00:07:22,000 So we're also in a unique position where we're building a product 172 00:07:22,000 --> 00:07:23,640 that we're actively using. 173 00:07:23,640 --> 00:07:27,280 In a lot of ways, our sort of peers in Craftworks HQ office 174 00:07:27,280 --> 00:07:29,840 that do sales and operations and customer success 175 00:07:29,840 --> 00:07:31,160 are our first customers. 176 00:07:31,160 --> 00:07:33,280 They use the software we build all the time. 177 00:07:33,280 --> 00:07:35,280 And to be perfectly honest, a lot of the time that means 178 00:07:35,280 --> 00:07:38,280 that they're running and using things that are either half baked 179 00:07:38,280 --> 00:07:40,480 or like essentially prototypes that we want to test, 180 00:07:40,480 --> 00:07:43,080 which is very different from shipping something to paying customers 181 00:07:43,080 --> 00:07:44,880 and making sure it's polished. 182 00:07:44,880 --> 00:07:47,880 And that's very different and can be an uncomfortable experience too. 183 00:07:47,880 --> 00:07:51,480 We have to be cognizant and sort of emphatically aware 184 00:07:51,480 --> 00:07:52,920 of the experience that our teammates have 185 00:07:52,920 --> 00:07:55,720 and hold our customers to a super high bar as well. 186 00:07:55,720 --> 00:07:57,560 We don't want to give our customers a beta experience. 187 00:07:57,560 --> 00:08:00,160 We want them to have a polished end user experience 188 00:08:00,160 --> 00:08:03,600 and sort of this transparently beautiful modern service 189 00:08:03,600 --> 00:08:06,040 that they get to experience. 190 00:08:06,040 --> 00:08:07,640 And then the thing that I should mention too 191 00:08:07,640 --> 00:08:10,200 is we have a horde of painters that work for us. 192 00:08:10,200 --> 00:08:13,440 This army of really talented people who also use our software. 193 00:08:13,440 --> 00:08:15,600 And the really interesting thing there is that a lot of our painters 194 00:08:15,600 --> 00:08:17,840 primary language is Spanish. 195 00:08:17,840 --> 00:08:20,000 So our software has to be multilingual. 196 00:08:20,000 --> 00:08:21,080 I have to be multilingual. 197 00:08:21,080 --> 00:08:23,560 I've been polishing up on my Spanish since high school. 198 00:08:23,560 --> 00:08:26,520 And that's a challenge a lot of developers maybe think about 199 00:08:26,520 --> 00:08:30,400 or get to experience on some level, but don't need to build for too often. 200 00:08:30,400 --> 00:08:33,560 Yeah, and building for that is actually really difficult. 201 00:08:33,560 --> 00:08:36,560 Maybe it's easier today, but it was really difficult like 10 years ago 202 00:08:36,560 --> 00:08:38,200 when I had to face that challenge. 203 00:08:38,200 --> 00:08:40,240 Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. 204 00:08:40,240 --> 00:08:41,680 Wow. OK, that's really cool. 205 00:08:41,680 --> 00:08:44,600 OK, so a couple of the like show logistical questions, 206 00:08:44,600 --> 00:08:48,240 but I honestly just want to get into like the guts of the challenges 207 00:08:48,240 --> 00:08:51,640 that you're solving. Yeah, but like really quickly to help Dev sort of see 208 00:08:51,640 --> 00:08:54,800 how someone gets from zero to one or wherever. 209 00:08:54,800 --> 00:08:56,120 What's your developer education? 210 00:08:56,120 --> 00:08:58,320 Do you have official education self taught? 211 00:08:58,320 --> 00:09:02,520 Yeah. OK, so I have been working as a paid software developer 212 00:09:02,520 --> 00:09:04,680 since my freshman year of high school. 213 00:09:04,680 --> 00:09:07,120 Oh, look at you. Yeah, I know. 214 00:09:07,120 --> 00:09:10,160 By chance, I enrolled in a elective my freshman year of high school 215 00:09:10,160 --> 00:09:13,480 called Computer Science, had no idea what it was, had no real interest in it. 216 00:09:14,000 --> 00:09:14,920 Couldn't have told you what it meant. 217 00:09:14,920 --> 00:09:17,520 I just checked the box, you know, people are enrolled in high school 218 00:09:18,080 --> 00:09:19,960 and end up really loving that course. 219 00:09:19,960 --> 00:09:23,840 And by being in the right place at the right time, a whole lot during my life 220 00:09:24,320 --> 00:09:26,920 that's been sort of a running pattern. 221 00:09:26,920 --> 00:09:29,600 I got my first job programming the end of my freshman year of high school 222 00:09:29,600 --> 00:09:32,080 because a guy from my local town wandered into the school 223 00:09:32,080 --> 00:09:35,240 and asked our computer science teacher like, hey, do you have anyone who does this? 224 00:09:35,240 --> 00:09:36,600 And I was like, the one thing I could do. 225 00:09:36,600 --> 00:09:40,200 And yeah, it's been, you know, I don't know, 20 years since then. 226 00:09:40,200 --> 00:09:42,640 And I've been coding more or less every day since then. 227 00:09:43,600 --> 00:09:47,160 I went to undergrad for computer science, but because I also wasn't really 228 00:09:47,480 --> 00:09:51,040 entirely convinced I was going to be a developer for my entire life. 229 00:09:51,040 --> 00:09:52,960 I double majored in mechanical engineering. 230 00:09:54,080 --> 00:09:55,840 Because I wanted to build old cars. 231 00:09:55,840 --> 00:09:59,080 That's all I wanted to do was like make hot rods and, you know, have a cool car 232 00:09:59,080 --> 00:10:02,280 to drive around in. As it works out, mechanical engineering is almost 233 00:10:02,280 --> 00:10:03,960 exclusively not about that. 234 00:10:03,960 --> 00:10:08,000 So I did a lot of physics and calculus and had a good time doing that. 235 00:10:08,000 --> 00:10:12,000 But never have worked as a mechanical engineer essentially as a result. 236 00:10:12,000 --> 00:10:13,480 I have the degree in it. I finished all that. 237 00:10:13,480 --> 00:10:16,200 I do a lot of mechanical engineering with craft work. Funny enough. 238 00:10:16,200 --> 00:10:20,120 We do some 3D printing stuff and some really interesting like spatial design. 239 00:10:20,840 --> 00:10:23,680 But yeah, I've been a programmer since then. 240 00:10:23,680 --> 00:10:26,440 So I have a very traditional background. 241 00:10:26,440 --> 00:10:29,520 I have worked with a whole lot of people who don't have traditional backgrounds. 242 00:10:29,520 --> 00:10:32,360 And one of the things I say often is that some of the most interesting 243 00:10:32,360 --> 00:10:35,760 and most talented people I've ever worked with have come into tech 244 00:10:35,760 --> 00:10:39,480 from completely bonkers backgrounds that are just totally different. 245 00:10:40,240 --> 00:10:43,400 My one of my first mentors came from a sociology background. 246 00:10:43,720 --> 00:10:47,600 I know people who've come from library science, which is weirdly an interesting 247 00:10:47,600 --> 00:10:49,400 parallel for UX. 248 00:10:49,400 --> 00:10:51,200 I have a lot of people who are traditional engineers. 249 00:10:51,200 --> 00:10:55,040 My co-founder of craft work Tim studied English in undergrad. 250 00:10:55,040 --> 00:10:56,520 And now he runs a tech company. 251 00:10:56,520 --> 00:11:00,720 It's a really fascinating group of people, an interesting sort of position to get to work in. 252 00:11:01,600 --> 00:11:05,440 I also ran a code school at one point that was trying to teach people 253 00:11:05,440 --> 00:11:08,240 how to build software that came from creative backgrounds. 254 00:11:08,240 --> 00:11:12,040 So trying to get graphic designers and illustrators and copywriters 255 00:11:12,440 --> 00:11:14,920 sort of get their feet wet and 100 level stuff. 256 00:11:15,040 --> 00:11:17,800 That site is called gym.com. It's totally free. 257 00:11:17,800 --> 00:11:19,720 It's self-paced video courses. They're amazing. 258 00:11:19,720 --> 00:11:21,840 I love those guys spend a lot of time with them. 259 00:11:22,320 --> 00:11:23,720 And that was super fun, too. 260 00:11:23,720 --> 00:11:25,880 So while I do have a traditional background, 261 00:11:25,880 --> 00:11:28,360 I think I have a lot of appreciation for non-traditional backgrounds. 262 00:11:28,360 --> 00:11:30,720 And I'm definitely the first champion of it. 263 00:11:30,720 --> 00:11:34,200 Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a there's a whole lot to what you just said. 264 00:11:34,200 --> 00:11:38,680 First off, very much resonated on the like working on cars thing. 265 00:11:38,720 --> 00:11:42,520 I have my dad made me like the boy that I the boy he never had. 266 00:11:42,520 --> 00:11:45,920 So I love cars and I could see we're getting into that. 267 00:11:45,920 --> 00:11:48,480 And then you're like, wait a minute, this isn't necessarily what I get to do. 268 00:11:48,480 --> 00:11:50,680 But the beauty of that is it can become a hobby, right? 269 00:11:50,680 --> 00:11:54,480 You know, build that that rat rod or hot rod that you want for yourself. 270 00:11:54,480 --> 00:11:59,680 I want a 1970s Chevy pickup that's like not lifted, but slightly lifted. 271 00:11:59,720 --> 00:12:02,920 I will have that one. Yeah, that's perfect for your neck of the woods, too. 272 00:12:02,920 --> 00:12:07,880 That's like the Texas Texas brand practically, you know, I know, right? 273 00:12:08,640 --> 00:12:12,400 But coming into more of the sort of boot camp and the, you know, 274 00:12:12,400 --> 00:12:15,760 the technical side of what you shared, it's very interesting to me, though, 275 00:12:15,760 --> 00:12:17,000 that you got involved in high school, 276 00:12:17,000 --> 00:12:18,680 because I actually did the same thing. 277 00:12:18,680 --> 00:12:22,120 I was fell into I always took any computer class that existed 278 00:12:22,120 --> 00:12:24,520 because mostly I'm like, it's not a teacher and it's not lecture. 279 00:12:24,520 --> 00:12:26,880 I can sit at a computer instead of having to listen. 280 00:12:28,120 --> 00:12:29,680 But when I did it, same thing, right? 281 00:12:29,680 --> 00:12:31,320 I was very interested in it. I loved it. 282 00:12:31,320 --> 00:12:34,680 But then I actually took the opposite path, but maybe sort of similar. 283 00:12:34,680 --> 00:12:35,680 You took two, right? 284 00:12:35,680 --> 00:12:38,480 I took the path of not going after that because I wanted it to stay a hobby 285 00:12:38,480 --> 00:12:41,400 and then ended up coming back around and now almost have regret 286 00:12:41,800 --> 00:12:43,800 that I didn't just go to college for that. 287 00:12:44,960 --> 00:12:46,040 But either way, it doesn't matter. 288 00:12:46,040 --> 00:12:48,280 And I think so when you're when you're coming around to sort of the different 289 00:12:48,280 --> 00:12:51,240 education past, I love that you also helped with the boot camp 290 00:12:51,600 --> 00:12:54,520 and you shared this pre-libestream, but you just have this vision and 291 00:12:54,880 --> 00:12:57,360 and desire to just help people know what you know. 292 00:12:57,360 --> 00:13:00,200 And so I think that's really beautiful also in all of that. 293 00:13:00,200 --> 00:13:02,000 So all right. Yeah. 294 00:13:02,000 --> 00:13:04,800 Hey, thank you. I think the 295 00:13:05,000 --> 00:13:08,640 the theme that underlies all of this is you and me and everyone who's watching 296 00:13:08,640 --> 00:13:11,960 and listening, like the biggest skill you can have in life is learning to learn. 297 00:13:12,880 --> 00:13:15,680 And in particular, like if you're in a place where you're allowed 298 00:13:15,680 --> 00:13:17,320 to do that, I think that's very important, too. 299 00:13:17,320 --> 00:13:19,160 There's a lot of proof that wrapped up in that sentence. 300 00:13:19,160 --> 00:13:22,600 But that's something that is has been a theme for me. 301 00:13:22,600 --> 00:13:26,080 Like a lot of what I get to do as a founder is tackle a brand new problem 302 00:13:26,480 --> 00:13:30,200 and do something for the first time with probably more confidence than I deserve. 303 00:13:30,520 --> 00:13:32,560 And a lot of the time that's enough to get by on, you know, 304 00:13:34,280 --> 00:13:35,280 that's good, though, right? 305 00:13:35,280 --> 00:13:38,800 That's I think that's what helps developers like get through those challenges 306 00:13:38,800 --> 00:13:42,320 is having that like level of confidence that maybe is a little aggressive, right? 307 00:13:42,320 --> 00:13:43,800 But that's how we build beautiful things. 308 00:13:43,800 --> 00:13:46,760 I mean, that's how you build experiences like what you build at Craftwork. 309 00:13:46,760 --> 00:13:48,760 I mean, that's that's crazy. 310 00:13:48,760 --> 00:13:52,440 The the, you know, all the bits and pieces and everything that you're doing 311 00:13:52,440 --> 00:13:54,760 because when you think about all the logistics that's involved, 312 00:13:54,760 --> 00:13:56,200 I mean, that's that's a big challenge. 313 00:13:56,200 --> 00:14:00,120 And nonetheless, if you can't tell, I'm excited to start talking about that. 314 00:14:00,120 --> 00:14:04,840 So yeah, I think let's let's do one of these other questions first 315 00:14:04,840 --> 00:14:08,120 and then dive into the kind of guts of what you do. 316 00:14:08,440 --> 00:14:10,200 So what is an average day? 317 00:14:10,200 --> 00:14:12,200 What does an average day look like for you? 318 00:14:12,200 --> 00:14:15,560 And then I'm going to ask you about all the big challenges that you're doing right now. 319 00:14:16,280 --> 00:14:21,360 Yeah, if I could describe my most average day, they all vary pretty well. 320 00:14:21,360 --> 00:14:25,000 I think one of the interesting things about this business is that we're building software, 321 00:14:25,000 --> 00:14:29,520 but a lot of the time my presence is needed physically at places to solve problems. 322 00:14:31,880 --> 00:14:35,160 That aside, a typical day for me, I'm an early morning person, 323 00:14:35,160 --> 00:14:38,880 so I tend to rise very early, get up sort of before sunrise. 324 00:14:38,880 --> 00:14:40,320 I also really like coffee. 325 00:14:40,320 --> 00:14:43,960 So I have a nice espresso by myself in my kitchen while the sun comes up. 326 00:14:44,840 --> 00:14:49,480 I usually start with a fair bit of like self time just taking care of myself. 327 00:14:49,480 --> 00:14:53,000 So I do a small amount of meditation, a small amount of journaling and planning for the day. 328 00:14:53,760 --> 00:14:58,800 And then I'm typically either head to our office, which is a walking distance from my home, 329 00:14:59,360 --> 00:15:01,800 or I go to a coffee shop and sit down for a few hours 330 00:15:01,800 --> 00:15:04,440 and knock out the things that I meant to do yesterday. 331 00:15:05,440 --> 00:15:08,280 Generally speaking, a lot of our work that we do at Kraftwerk 332 00:15:08,280 --> 00:15:13,080 in the engineering world is around taking care of the most important burning problems 333 00:15:13,080 --> 00:15:14,400 that we have right now. 334 00:15:14,400 --> 00:15:17,040 And that's getting everything from the planning phase of understanding 335 00:15:17,760 --> 00:15:21,800 what projects look like, what features we want to build, designing the sort of UX of that. 336 00:15:21,800 --> 00:15:26,200 We have a really talented designer on our team, Drew, working with them to design features 337 00:15:26,200 --> 00:15:28,920 to make sure that we've detailed everything we plan on doing. 338 00:15:29,560 --> 00:15:33,720 We take that thing and show it to our peers in our sales or operations or success 339 00:15:34,720 --> 00:15:37,960 parts of the business and say, hey, this if we built this, do we think it would be helpful? 340 00:15:37,960 --> 00:15:40,480 Like, is this a good plan before we start building it? 341 00:15:40,480 --> 00:15:42,440 Hopefully then we go and build the thing and then test it. 342 00:15:42,440 --> 00:15:46,760 And so I'm doing everything from sort of working in our project management tools, 343 00:15:47,000 --> 00:15:50,960 putting feedback in our design tools, pair programming with my teammates 344 00:15:50,960 --> 00:15:55,640 to work through technical challenges to honestly, when I when I get enough time 345 00:15:55,640 --> 00:15:59,840 to do it, just sitting down and writing some code myself and putting in a few pull requests 346 00:15:59,840 --> 00:16:02,640 for more of the developer experience side of things lately. 347 00:16:02,640 --> 00:16:06,200 But whatever I can do to unstick the thing that's most important today. 348 00:16:06,200 --> 00:16:08,240 And so that's kind of what the day looks like. 349 00:16:08,240 --> 00:16:11,480 We're lucky that our workdays aren't too meeting heavy, 350 00:16:12,200 --> 00:16:13,880 or at least that's my perspective on it. 351 00:16:13,880 --> 00:16:18,000 If my pals on my team are watching, I would love to know what you think about that statement. 352 00:16:18,000 --> 00:16:22,640 But we don't have a ton of meetings and that's hopefully to unlock productivity for people 353 00:16:22,640 --> 00:16:25,920 to let my engineers get things done. 354 00:16:25,920 --> 00:16:29,400 And it's being as responsive as possible. 355 00:16:29,400 --> 00:16:33,840 So I do have moments of focus during the day, but I also have moments where I've just got to go clear 356 00:16:33,840 --> 00:16:38,000 a stack of notifications, emails and things that have piled up while everything's happening. 357 00:16:38,000 --> 00:16:40,720 And lately, I've been talking about that as the curse of the engineers, 358 00:16:40,720 --> 00:16:43,840 like you're going to get a notification about everything and you're going to get really good 359 00:16:43,840 --> 00:16:46,600 at filtering down to the ones that you need to respond to now, you know. 360 00:16:47,600 --> 00:16:52,880 Yeah, that's actually that we could have a whole conversation about sort of that level of insights 361 00:16:52,880 --> 00:16:56,840 on notifications, because it's really hard to not get distracted by that, 362 00:16:56,840 --> 00:17:00,840 especially when you're sort of in this tunnel vision of coding, you get pulled away for a notification. 363 00:17:00,840 --> 00:17:01,840 How do you get back in? 364 00:17:01,840 --> 00:17:04,600 You know, so I love that. 365 00:17:04,600 --> 00:17:10,840 Sounds like you're a fabulous person to work with and work for, which is really cool. 366 00:17:10,840 --> 00:17:11,960 Yeah, yeah. 367 00:17:11,960 --> 00:17:14,560 The one thing I repeat a lot is that I'm not perfect at anything. 368 00:17:14,560 --> 00:17:17,680 So I try and be a little bit better each day, you know. 369 00:17:17,680 --> 00:17:19,560 Yep. None of us are perfect at anything. 370 00:17:19,560 --> 00:17:23,760 So I think, you know, just the fact that you say that and resonate with that and know that and 371 00:17:23,760 --> 00:17:26,000 are self aware that you're continually growing. 372 00:17:26,000 --> 00:17:28,160 I think that's the beauty in it, right? 373 00:17:28,160 --> 00:17:29,560 Yeah, thank you. 374 00:17:29,560 --> 00:17:30,280 Yeah. 375 00:17:30,280 --> 00:17:34,480 OK, so I want to hear about all the challenges you're facing. 376 00:17:34,480 --> 00:17:39,440 And in terms of, I think, you know, I'll let you sort of take that as you want to share it. 377 00:17:39,440 --> 00:17:43,800 You did share with me a little bit and you shared with all of us right early on about the different bits 378 00:17:43,800 --> 00:17:46,360 and pieces to how craft work was operating. 379 00:17:46,360 --> 00:17:49,720 But I'd love to hear about some of those challenges, how you've sort of overcome those challenges. 380 00:17:49,720 --> 00:17:54,840 Maybe you're still in some of them, but y'all have some some good tech stuff going on over there. 381 00:17:54,840 --> 00:17:55,960 And I'd love to hear about it. 382 00:17:55,960 --> 00:17:56,760 And so what are listeners? 383 00:17:56,760 --> 00:18:00,240 Yeah, maybe I'll start by giving you some background on our tech stack. 384 00:18:00,240 --> 00:18:08,280 So we are a small but mighty team of four here in Charlotte for engineers, including one engineer 385 00:18:08,280 --> 00:18:13,000 who also happens to be like the shiny unicorn who can also design and deliver on those designs, 386 00:18:13,000 --> 00:18:18,160 which is a great luxury that I recognize not many people get to have. 387 00:18:18,160 --> 00:18:22,760 We build our platform on top of Ruby on Rails. 388 00:18:22,760 --> 00:18:27,840 So the sort of brains of Craftwork, the line of business app that powers the logic for how we communicate 389 00:18:27,840 --> 00:18:34,000 with customers, how we price paint projects, how we do logistical things like putting together 390 00:18:34,000 --> 00:18:37,240 orders for paint or lining up schedules for projects. 391 00:18:37,240 --> 00:18:44,160 All of that is a giant sort of monolithic Rails app that is designed to communicate with external services 392 00:18:44,160 --> 00:18:46,440 as well as sort of coordinate things internally. 393 00:18:46,440 --> 00:18:49,720 So we do a lot of automating and aggregating and integrating. 394 00:18:49,720 --> 00:18:57,160 We talk to services like Stripe and to real estate services like Zillow and Redfin and some sort of 395 00:18:57,160 --> 00:19:00,720 real estate APIs so that when you put in your address for your project, 396 00:19:00,720 --> 00:19:03,040 we know a whole bunch about your house before we even talk to you. 397 00:19:03,040 --> 00:19:06,360 So we know you have a two story house, it's three bedrooms. 398 00:19:06,360 --> 00:19:09,560 We can ask questions about, oh, hey, it looks like your house was built in 1950. 399 00:19:09,560 --> 00:19:12,760 Like we're going to need to test to see if there's lead in the paint before we do anything 400 00:19:12,760 --> 00:19:15,800 because there's health concerns there and things like that. 401 00:19:15,800 --> 00:19:18,160 That's the Rails app does all of that stuff. 402 00:19:18,160 --> 00:19:19,560 It's a ton of logic. 403 00:19:19,560 --> 00:19:27,120 It's a ton of coordination that is pretty heavily involved in making the business tick. 404 00:19:27,120 --> 00:19:31,600 We have mentioned before a mobile app that our painters use that communicates with the Rails app 405 00:19:31,600 --> 00:19:33,920 via a REST API that's built on React Native. 406 00:19:33,920 --> 00:19:41,080 It uses TypeScript and Tailwind and is sort of very simple and meant to make our painters lives easier. 407 00:19:41,080 --> 00:19:44,920 So right now they primarily use that for clocking in and out and for knowing what to do on the job. 408 00:19:44,920 --> 00:19:47,080 We're also soon going to be adding features for communicating. 409 00:19:47,080 --> 00:19:50,480 So if they need resupply, for example, oh, I need two more gallons of paint, 410 00:19:50,480 --> 00:19:54,960 they should be able to do that from their phone rather than sending a text or calling someone. 411 00:19:54,960 --> 00:19:59,040 And also use that mobile app to enable our sales team in the field as well. 412 00:19:59,040 --> 00:20:02,960 So one of the things that happens occasionally is we'll go to customers' homes to scope out a project. 413 00:20:02,960 --> 00:20:04,480 We'll walk through the home with them. 414 00:20:04,480 --> 00:20:07,600 And the dream there is for our salespeople to be able to walk through the home with the customer 415 00:20:07,600 --> 00:20:11,200 and ideally never touch their phone at all, maybe even just talk to the customer 416 00:20:11,200 --> 00:20:12,880 and have the phone kind of listen and do things. 417 00:20:12,880 --> 00:20:18,040 But before that, it's as simple as walk through a room and sort of take inventory 418 00:20:18,040 --> 00:20:22,560 of what we think we're going to be painting, maybe take a few pictures or videos to catalog it as well. 419 00:20:22,560 --> 00:20:24,200 That's React Native. That's the mobile app. 420 00:20:24,200 --> 00:20:28,680 We also have our Craftwork.com website is a Next.js application. 421 00:20:28,680 --> 00:20:30,880 We use Next primarily because that's my bread and butter. 422 00:20:30,880 --> 00:20:32,880 I've been using it for a long time. 423 00:20:32,880 --> 00:20:36,960 It's very oriented towards SEO and trying to make Google happy, 424 00:20:36,960 --> 00:20:40,720 trying to present our business in a way that our customers can understand, 425 00:20:40,720 --> 00:20:44,120 that presents our brand really well and super helpful. 426 00:20:44,120 --> 00:20:48,720 We're actually in the process of the early stages of revamping the website as well 427 00:20:48,720 --> 00:20:52,280 with sort of a brand refresh that'll be coming sometime in the next year. 428 00:20:52,280 --> 00:20:57,160 But those three things all work together and they all communicate with our Rails app via REST API 429 00:20:57,160 --> 00:21:02,160 and sort of synchronously, harmoniously work together to power the business. 430 00:21:02,160 --> 00:21:04,160 Oh my gosh. 431 00:21:04,160 --> 00:21:05,960 Okay, first off, so much. 432 00:21:05,960 --> 00:21:11,880 You shared so many beautiful insights in that and I'm kind of like a lot. 433 00:21:11,880 --> 00:21:15,680 But I think what's really great about that is that you spoke to the different stacks 434 00:21:15,680 --> 00:21:18,400 and why you're using them in the way that you are. 435 00:21:18,400 --> 00:21:25,440 If anyone is listening and they listened yesterday, Neil actually went on a little bit of a kind of... 436 00:21:25,440 --> 00:21:30,160 Just a chat about Ruby and then Rails and why it's so beautiful and why to make that decision. 437 00:21:30,160 --> 00:21:34,720 But then you were also able to speak so eloquently like why you chose Next.js for your website 438 00:21:34,720 --> 00:21:40,600 and how that SEO and that Google goodness is so, so, so, so important. 439 00:21:40,600 --> 00:21:46,200 I actually was using a DevTool essentially that helps you build out a Next.js site. 440 00:21:46,200 --> 00:21:48,560 It's called Rewweb and it's actually pretty cool. 441 00:21:48,560 --> 00:21:49,560 It's very early. 442 00:21:49,560 --> 00:21:52,800 It's more, I wouldn't say it's beta, but it's very early, right? 443 00:21:52,800 --> 00:21:55,880 And so that's the one thing that it was lacking was some of those SEO bits. 444 00:21:55,880 --> 00:21:59,880 And so I think what's beautiful about that is they're building that out into Next.js. 445 00:21:59,880 --> 00:22:04,280 And so to me, it sounds like there's this little challenge to solve, right, of bringing all that in. 446 00:22:04,280 --> 00:22:06,760 But that Next.js is well suited for that solution, right? 447 00:22:06,760 --> 00:22:11,240 So it just feels like it's just the next feature that will be built out there. 448 00:22:11,240 --> 00:22:12,240 Okay. 449 00:22:12,240 --> 00:22:13,240 Yeah. 450 00:22:13,240 --> 00:22:14,600 Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off there. 451 00:22:14,600 --> 00:22:20,520 I would love to hear about challenges that you have struggled with. 452 00:22:20,520 --> 00:22:24,400 Has there been, I mean, obviously there's probably been many, but are there some that 453 00:22:24,400 --> 00:22:28,320 you can think of or, you know, those triumph stories of we were trying to do this and that? 454 00:22:28,320 --> 00:22:29,320 Yeah. 455 00:22:29,320 --> 00:22:30,320 I'd love to hear about those. 456 00:22:30,320 --> 00:22:31,320 Yeah. 457 00:22:31,320 --> 00:22:34,160 We, we, I sort of described this before, but the interesting thing about our business 458 00:22:34,160 --> 00:22:37,840 is we're building a really complicated and deeply integrated product that we need to 459 00:22:37,840 --> 00:22:39,120 use all the time. 460 00:22:39,120 --> 00:22:43,440 So very often we don't have the luxury of getting something perfect before we ship it, 461 00:22:43,440 --> 00:22:46,960 which credit to my, my homies in our HQ office here. 462 00:22:46,960 --> 00:22:51,360 They're incredible at putting up with various states of things being ready for them to use. 463 00:22:51,360 --> 00:22:54,440 But it means that I'm more testing things out as we build them. 464 00:22:54,440 --> 00:22:59,560 So yeah, really good example is the most basic thing we need from any customer is some idea 465 00:22:59,560 --> 00:23:01,400 that you're interested in getting your home painted. 466 00:23:01,400 --> 00:23:05,440 And so thesis when we first started Kraftwerk was that we were going to put up a website 467 00:23:05,440 --> 00:23:09,320 that people here locally, when they search for painters near me, they would find in Charlotte 468 00:23:09,320 --> 00:23:13,040 us and they would fill out a form that told us everything they wanted painted. 469 00:23:13,040 --> 00:23:17,160 We would give them the price before they even hit submit so that they could understand the 470 00:23:17,160 --> 00:23:19,240 budget and what it costs. 471 00:23:19,240 --> 00:23:22,180 And they'd hit submit and we would fire off a whole bunch of things in action to get them 472 00:23:22,180 --> 00:23:25,440 scheduled and paid and get the paint job delivered. 473 00:23:25,440 --> 00:23:28,240 As it works out, there's a lot of things wrong with that assumption, but a lot of things 474 00:23:28,240 --> 00:23:32,600 right that we've sort of come to over the long period of time that we've been in business 475 00:23:32,600 --> 00:23:33,840 here. 476 00:23:33,840 --> 00:23:37,600 The primary thing that we found is that there's a psychological thing that was happening that 477 00:23:37,600 --> 00:23:38,600 safe. 478 00:23:38,600 --> 00:23:40,240 Tessa, for example, you want to have your whole home painted. 479 00:23:40,240 --> 00:23:42,840 Say it's three bedroom, two bathroom, something like that. 480 00:23:42,840 --> 00:23:47,160 That's maybe 15 rooms total that you now need to go give me an inventory of putting together, 481 00:23:47,160 --> 00:23:52,240 you know, okay, all ceiling trim, windows door, what do you want painted, how many doors 482 00:23:52,240 --> 00:23:55,200 are there, how many windows are there, how big is that room? 483 00:23:55,200 --> 00:23:56,720 And you have to do all of that yourself. 484 00:23:56,720 --> 00:23:59,240 We were asking you to do a ton of work there. 485 00:23:59,240 --> 00:24:02,400 Also there is that that's something that's way easier to do if you're on your phone and 486 00:24:02,400 --> 00:24:03,400 not like on a laptop. 487 00:24:03,400 --> 00:24:08,240 So we had to make it highly mobile responsive, which it wasn't great at at first. 488 00:24:08,240 --> 00:24:11,560 Like I'm the first one who had made our mobile responsiveness in the earliest days was a 489 00:24:11,560 --> 00:24:14,360 little rough. 490 00:24:14,360 --> 00:24:16,840 Besides from that, it was it was challenging to get people to do that. 491 00:24:16,840 --> 00:24:20,880 And what we found was really the most poignant thing that we were seeing in our sort of user 492 00:24:20,880 --> 00:24:26,000 logs was that someone might put together a three bedroom paint project and then spend 493 00:24:26,000 --> 00:24:30,560 an hour or two hours a day just toggling on and off things to because the price was updating 494 00:24:30,560 --> 00:24:35,400 in real time to try and get it down to some more. 495 00:24:35,400 --> 00:24:36,920 And that's very human, right? 496 00:24:36,920 --> 00:24:41,400 There's this thing called behavior economics that there's things that you'll do, whether 497 00:24:41,400 --> 00:24:44,560 you realize it or not to try and match your expectations of how money works and how your 498 00:24:44,560 --> 00:24:46,400 budget works and bang for your buck. 499 00:24:46,400 --> 00:24:47,400 Yep. 500 00:24:47,400 --> 00:24:48,400 We turned around. 501 00:24:48,400 --> 00:24:52,080 We actually a few months into this basically pulled the rug out from under that and got 502 00:24:52,080 --> 00:24:56,240 rid of that process completely and replaced it with just a form that was name, phone number, 503 00:24:56,240 --> 00:24:57,800 email address and home address. 504 00:24:57,800 --> 00:25:01,960 Get in touch with us and we will immediately contact you and talk to you about it. 505 00:25:01,960 --> 00:25:04,520 And it turns out that the human element of that is really helpful. 506 00:25:04,520 --> 00:25:07,560 It's really nice to be able to send a text message and say, Hey, this is Mike from Kraft 507 00:25:07,560 --> 00:25:08,560 Work. 508 00:25:08,560 --> 00:25:09,560 I see you're interested in a project. 509 00:25:09,560 --> 00:25:11,320 Love that you submitted this thing. 510 00:25:11,320 --> 00:25:12,960 Can you tell me more about what you're interested in? 511 00:25:12,960 --> 00:25:13,960 Do you want to set up a phone call? 512 00:25:13,960 --> 00:25:14,960 Those sorts of things. 513 00:25:14,960 --> 00:25:15,960 Hmm. 514 00:25:15,960 --> 00:25:18,920 A few months after that, we found that it's really nice to have that conversation and 515 00:25:18,920 --> 00:25:24,440 to create the human connection because in your home, again, it's a very intimate personal 516 00:25:24,440 --> 00:25:25,440 space. 517 00:25:25,440 --> 00:25:28,200 It is the place you're at and it's very important to people to have a home that they're comfortable 518 00:25:28,200 --> 00:25:29,200 with and that they love. 519 00:25:29,200 --> 00:25:30,200 Yeah. 520 00:25:30,200 --> 00:25:33,640 And when you're talking to someone and having an experience like you and I are having, it 521 00:25:33,640 --> 00:25:37,240 creates a much better sort of connection for the brand and for the product. 522 00:25:37,240 --> 00:25:38,240 Yeah. 523 00:25:38,240 --> 00:25:43,320 And I've dealt with a lot of other paint companies, local paint companies often are too busy painting 524 00:25:43,320 --> 00:25:44,320 to pick up the phone. 525 00:25:44,320 --> 00:25:45,320 That's not a criticism. 526 00:25:45,320 --> 00:25:46,320 That's just a reality. 527 00:25:46,320 --> 00:25:51,440 The operator of a paint business is also painting because they have to get the job done. 528 00:25:51,440 --> 00:25:55,720 So they take the time to create that connection, which creates kind of, I don't know, the not 529 00:25:55,720 --> 00:25:58,960 great like end user experience for the customer. 530 00:25:58,960 --> 00:26:03,280 So turning this back to the engineering side of it, we're now trying to mechanize that 531 00:26:03,280 --> 00:26:06,480 thing and turn that into a product that we can build and make repeatable. 532 00:26:06,480 --> 00:26:10,400 So discovery that a phone call or text message was better. 533 00:26:10,400 --> 00:26:15,000 We built a pretty deep, intensive integration with Twilio, where now when you submit a form 534 00:26:15,000 --> 00:26:17,600 to us, we automatically text you from our Twilio thing. 535 00:26:17,600 --> 00:26:19,440 A salesperson will be put in charge of your thing. 536 00:26:19,440 --> 00:26:21,840 They send a message that says, Hey, tell me about your project. 537 00:26:21,840 --> 00:26:24,480 We went into a phase where we did everything over text. 538 00:26:24,480 --> 00:26:27,280 So we'll text back and forth, get a scope, send you a link. 539 00:26:27,280 --> 00:26:30,200 If you agree to it, you pay and kind of do the thing. 540 00:26:30,200 --> 00:26:34,360 We found from that that it worked much better than what we had before, but also some people, 541 00:26:34,360 --> 00:26:38,160 particularly older people don't want to text and nobody wants to text the thousand times 542 00:26:38,160 --> 00:26:41,000 to understand what they're going to paint in their house. 543 00:26:41,000 --> 00:26:44,040 So now we kind of have a world where we also do voice via Twilio. 544 00:26:44,040 --> 00:26:45,560 So you can call us. 545 00:26:45,560 --> 00:26:48,840 And while you're calling us, our salespeople are seeing your project on screen. 546 00:26:48,840 --> 00:26:49,840 They know the size of your home. 547 00:26:49,840 --> 00:26:52,360 They have some information about your sort of real estate. 548 00:26:52,360 --> 00:26:54,960 They're putting the other your estimate in real time and hopefully sending it to you 549 00:26:54,960 --> 00:26:56,680 in a way that you can then see it. 550 00:26:56,680 --> 00:27:00,960 Yeah, sort of fully fleshed out vision of that is that as we're talking, maybe one day 551 00:27:00,960 --> 00:27:06,360 our sort of LLM brains can ingest that conversation and assemble it so that the salesperson can 552 00:27:06,360 --> 00:27:07,600 just focus on the conversation. 553 00:27:07,600 --> 00:27:10,120 Yeah, they can create the relationship and the trust. 554 00:27:10,120 --> 00:27:12,880 And while they're talking, it's assembling something for them that we then send over 555 00:27:12,880 --> 00:27:15,120 to the customers. 556 00:27:15,120 --> 00:27:18,960 The last magic trick we did most recently is that we turned it around to that we put 557 00:27:18,960 --> 00:27:21,960 together an inventory of everything that the customer wants painted based on what we've 558 00:27:21,960 --> 00:27:23,920 learned from them from conversation. 559 00:27:23,920 --> 00:27:27,520 Then we send them that inventory as a here's your quote for your paint project. 560 00:27:27,520 --> 00:27:31,400 It has a whole bunch of checkboxes on it saying, if this is too expensive or if you decided 561 00:27:31,400 --> 00:27:34,360 you don't want the ceiling painted in that room, just uncheck it. 562 00:27:34,360 --> 00:27:37,160 And when you're ready to go, just pay us a deposit and we'll get into the scheduling 563 00:27:37,160 --> 00:27:38,160 phase. 564 00:27:38,160 --> 00:27:42,160 And that's really useful because that eliminates a whole bunch of other texts to us to say, 565 00:27:42,160 --> 00:27:44,320 like, oh, can you show me what it would cost without this? 566 00:27:44,320 --> 00:27:45,320 That sort of thing. 567 00:27:45,320 --> 00:27:49,040 It lets them play around with it, sort of get to a scope that they're comfortable with. 568 00:27:49,040 --> 00:27:52,520 That thing in itself, what I've just described is a ton of data and a ton of user experience 569 00:27:52,520 --> 00:27:56,160 and a ton of coordination that relies on understanding how people think. 570 00:27:56,160 --> 00:27:59,320 It relies on really great engineering and really great designs that my team has done 571 00:27:59,320 --> 00:28:01,560 an incredible job of implementing. 572 00:28:01,560 --> 00:28:04,640 And it also relies on just kind of being ready to throw things out. 573 00:28:04,640 --> 00:28:08,280 Like I said, we built a pretty deep, intense estimate experience at first. 574 00:28:08,280 --> 00:28:11,280 That is just completely in our get history at this point. 575 00:28:11,280 --> 00:28:13,800 It has been in the room from the project. 576 00:28:13,800 --> 00:28:18,080 And we kind of have landed on the fact that our job as an engineering team is to love 577 00:28:18,080 --> 00:28:19,080 that. 578 00:28:19,080 --> 00:28:21,960 We build things and we rebuild things until we get it right or better. 579 00:28:21,960 --> 00:28:24,240 And that's just okay. 580 00:28:24,240 --> 00:28:26,840 There's a million different versions of that in what we do and they've all kind of been 581 00:28:26,840 --> 00:28:31,400 some variety of success, failure, triumph, whatever you want to call it. 582 00:28:31,400 --> 00:28:35,080 And we're just trying to learn a little bit more each time we deploy something. 583 00:28:35,080 --> 00:28:36,920 Yeah, I love that. 584 00:28:36,920 --> 00:28:42,080 I think what is really key to what you shared too is that, and this isn't always the case 585 00:28:42,080 --> 00:28:44,720 and I think people try to do it when they can, but they also get really bogged down 586 00:28:44,720 --> 00:28:45,720 is the feedback. 587 00:28:45,720 --> 00:28:49,840 It's like you have these various feedback mechanisms and you're also capturing that 588 00:28:49,840 --> 00:28:51,720 data and understanding. 589 00:28:51,720 --> 00:28:54,960 Because I would have, I mean, you understanding that like, hey, you know, they're starting 590 00:28:54,960 --> 00:28:58,480 to click in there, you know, the budget tool, where is the power, right? 591 00:28:58,480 --> 00:29:01,000 And you completely shifted and when you were like, oh, we got rid of it. 592 00:29:01,000 --> 00:29:03,400 I was like, no, that sounds beautiful. 593 00:29:03,400 --> 00:29:05,040 That'd be how I'd be in there messing with it. 594 00:29:05,040 --> 00:29:07,320 Like what rooms can I afford to paint this year? 595 00:29:07,320 --> 00:29:08,840 What room should I paint next year? 596 00:29:08,840 --> 00:29:12,560 But then bringing it into like the later part, right, where you're sharing, hey, we've gone 597 00:29:12,560 --> 00:29:13,960 through that deep conversation. 598 00:29:13,960 --> 00:29:18,160 They're bought in and then they can start to sort of manipulate and look at, oh, okay, 599 00:29:18,160 --> 00:29:20,920 here's something I can plan my work or think about what this might look like. 600 00:29:20,920 --> 00:29:24,160 And I feel like they're already bought in personally, right? 601 00:29:24,160 --> 00:29:26,800 From a personal level, it's easy to be like, oh, click, click, click. 602 00:29:26,800 --> 00:29:30,680 Like I was looking at better mortgage, you know, years ago when I was like, oh, my house, 603 00:29:30,680 --> 00:29:31,680 right? 604 00:29:31,680 --> 00:29:33,640 And I loved that I could go in there and sort of change what's my down payment? 605 00:29:33,640 --> 00:29:34,640 What does that look like? 606 00:29:34,640 --> 00:29:36,560 If I want to do 15 year versus 30, et cetera. 607 00:29:36,560 --> 00:29:40,360 And I think people like that, but I wasn't bought in and I didn't necessarily was emotionally 608 00:29:40,360 --> 00:29:42,360 bought into them because I was able to do that. 609 00:29:42,360 --> 00:29:47,000 And so you found the perfect world of getting them bought in while also giving them the 610 00:29:47,000 --> 00:29:51,680 technical logical capabilities they want to be able to not have that conversation of like, 611 00:29:51,680 --> 00:29:53,360 hey, I can't afford all of that. 612 00:29:53,360 --> 00:29:54,600 No one wants to admit to that. 613 00:29:54,600 --> 00:29:55,600 Yeah. 614 00:29:55,600 --> 00:29:56,600 Yeah. 615 00:29:56,600 --> 00:29:57,600 Yeah. 616 00:29:57,600 --> 00:30:02,480 I mentioned before I studied computer science and mechanical engineering. 617 00:30:02,480 --> 00:30:07,280 I also studied human computer interaction in grad school. 618 00:30:07,280 --> 00:30:12,960 So I did a degree in HCI as part of my interest in doing user experience work. 619 00:30:12,960 --> 00:30:17,960 And one of the things that is most most memorable to me about that whole experiment of learning 620 00:30:17,960 --> 00:30:22,120 about UX was that a lot of getting software right. 621 00:30:22,120 --> 00:30:26,520 If we do our job really, really, really well as designers, people probably will never realize 622 00:30:26,520 --> 00:30:28,800 that they've used something that someone built. 623 00:30:28,800 --> 00:30:32,600 And the more someone ends up thinking about what they're doing or pays the tax of doing 624 00:30:32,600 --> 00:30:36,080 something that's a little clunky or funky or just doesn't meet their expectation for 625 00:30:36,080 --> 00:30:41,040 some reason, the more opportunity there is for us to do better and the better we can 626 00:30:41,040 --> 00:30:42,840 do by them, you know. 627 00:30:42,840 --> 00:30:43,840 I agree. 628 00:30:43,840 --> 00:30:44,840 Okay. 629 00:30:44,840 --> 00:30:45,840 I have a couple of things. 630 00:30:45,840 --> 00:30:46,840 I know that we're at time. 631 00:30:46,840 --> 00:30:47,840 Do you have to run right away? 632 00:30:47,840 --> 00:30:48,840 Otherwise, I'd like to just ask you. 633 00:30:48,840 --> 00:30:49,840 I've got time. 634 00:30:49,840 --> 00:30:50,840 Yeah. 635 00:30:50,840 --> 00:30:51,840 Okay. 636 00:30:51,840 --> 00:30:52,840 Sure. 637 00:30:52,840 --> 00:30:53,840 Perfect. 638 00:30:53,840 --> 00:30:54,840 I try to keep them to a half an hour because it's hard to listen to something, but man, 639 00:30:54,840 --> 00:30:55,840 this conversation seems so good. 640 00:30:55,840 --> 00:30:56,840 No worries. 641 00:30:56,840 --> 00:30:57,840 We can do it again any time. 642 00:30:57,840 --> 00:30:58,840 Yeah. 643 00:30:58,840 --> 00:30:59,840 I love that. 644 00:30:59,840 --> 00:31:00,840 Okay. 645 00:31:00,840 --> 00:31:01,840 What do you do when you're stuck as the CTO is the leader? 646 00:31:01,840 --> 00:31:02,840 Yeah. 647 00:31:02,840 --> 00:31:03,840 Yeah. 648 00:31:03,840 --> 00:31:05,840 Job number one, the first thing is to admit it. 649 00:31:05,840 --> 00:31:11,840 I will say I'm stuck because most often if you admit to being stuck on something, you 650 00:31:11,840 --> 00:31:13,840 are going to find someone who can help. 651 00:31:13,840 --> 00:31:18,840 It may not even be someone who knows the answer, but there's this thing in the computer science 652 00:31:18,840 --> 00:31:21,840 world called the rubber ducking or the rubber duck effect. 653 00:31:21,840 --> 00:31:22,840 Oh, yeah. 654 00:31:22,840 --> 00:31:26,840 It's like old programmer legend of someone who had literally a rubber duck on their desk 655 00:31:26,840 --> 00:31:28,840 that they would talk to when they were stuck on something. 656 00:31:28,840 --> 00:31:32,840 And the idea of talking to that rubber duck would get them to explain the thing in a way 657 00:31:32,840 --> 00:31:34,840 that highlighted the problem. 658 00:31:34,840 --> 00:31:38,840 My teammates, Sean and Drew and Eduardo are often my best rubber ducking friends. 659 00:31:38,840 --> 00:31:43,340 We'll hop on a call and talk through something in either direction and come to an answer 660 00:31:43,340 --> 00:31:44,340 there. 661 00:31:44,340 --> 00:31:46,840 The next thing I do is I turn to the sort of social internet. 662 00:31:46,840 --> 00:31:48,840 So I have a DevRel background. 663 00:31:48,840 --> 00:31:53,840 I have the good fortune of having lots of friends who are way smarter than me as software developers 664 00:31:53,840 --> 00:31:54,840 that I can reach out to. 665 00:31:54,840 --> 00:31:57,840 GitHub is a great resource for that too. 666 00:31:57,840 --> 00:32:04,040 And I also maintain a personal website, mikebyfullco.com, where I publish sort of tutorials and newsletters 667 00:32:04,040 --> 00:32:07,240 and things for people who are building stuff like I am. 668 00:32:07,240 --> 00:32:10,400 And the best thing I've found about that is when I publish something that says, here's 669 00:32:10,400 --> 00:32:12,080 the right way to do this. 670 00:32:12,080 --> 00:32:15,560 Every single time I do that, someone smarter than me comes along and says, actually, no, 671 00:32:15,560 --> 00:32:16,560 that's wrong. 672 00:32:16,560 --> 00:32:17,560 And here's why. 673 00:32:17,560 --> 00:32:18,560 And that's like, perfect. 674 00:32:18,560 --> 00:32:20,440 You, everyone should do that as long as you're comfortable with being wrong. 675 00:32:20,440 --> 00:32:23,600 It's the best way to find the smartest person on the planet because they will come out of 676 00:32:23,600 --> 00:32:25,440 nowhere the minute you post something. 677 00:32:25,440 --> 00:32:26,440 Yes. 678 00:32:26,440 --> 00:32:31,040 I was just reading a draft blog blog post for one of my clients and that's what I said. 679 00:32:31,040 --> 00:32:32,920 I was like, hit them in the feelers. 680 00:32:32,920 --> 00:32:34,040 And it's a constant thing that I say. 681 00:32:34,040 --> 00:32:37,960 And I don't mean it in like make someone sad or make someone mad, but give them an emotional 682 00:32:37,960 --> 00:32:38,960 reaction. 683 00:32:38,960 --> 00:32:43,040 If you tell them your very opinionated, opinionated way of doing something, they will give you 684 00:32:43,040 --> 00:32:44,040 their reaction. 685 00:32:44,040 --> 00:32:45,360 And that engagement is good, right? 686 00:32:45,360 --> 00:32:46,360 Because you get to learn. 687 00:32:46,360 --> 00:32:50,640 But then also, like you said, all those super smart people come out of the woodwork because 688 00:32:50,640 --> 00:32:52,960 then they're like, wait a minute, no, there's this. 689 00:32:52,960 --> 00:32:53,960 Yeah. 690 00:32:53,960 --> 00:32:54,960 Absolutely. 691 00:32:54,960 --> 00:32:55,960 Yeah. 692 00:32:55,960 --> 00:32:56,960 I love that. 693 00:32:56,960 --> 00:32:57,960 All right. 694 00:32:57,960 --> 00:32:58,960 Any other threads on that? 695 00:32:58,960 --> 00:32:59,960 Where you go when you're stuck? 696 00:32:59,960 --> 00:33:00,960 Oh, yeah. 697 00:33:00,960 --> 00:33:03,520 I mean, there are a lot of places. 698 00:33:03,520 --> 00:33:05,520 Like I said before, GitHub is really helpful. 699 00:33:05,520 --> 00:33:09,320 If it's a bug that I can't get through and it's just an error, I'll often take the error 700 00:33:09,320 --> 00:33:13,080 and paste it into the search thing on GitHub and just ask for help and see what it comes 701 00:33:13,080 --> 00:33:14,080 up with. 702 00:33:14,080 --> 00:33:18,640 Because oftentimes, if it's a like a nondescript error, it'll have come up in someone else's 703 00:33:18,640 --> 00:33:20,160 issue or pull request or whatever. 704 00:33:20,160 --> 00:33:24,720 And there will be a whole discussion of people who've worked through the problem before. 705 00:33:24,720 --> 00:33:28,600 When all else fails, sometimes it's better just to walk away for a little bit, go change 706 00:33:28,600 --> 00:33:33,120 gears mentally for an hour or two or overnight or whatever it is and come back to it later. 707 00:33:33,120 --> 00:33:36,080 I'm a big proponent of like taking a break and going for a walk when you're really stuck 708 00:33:36,080 --> 00:33:40,080 on something because that is a great way to process and sort of move your mindset onto 709 00:33:40,080 --> 00:33:43,080 the next version of solving that problem. 710 00:33:43,080 --> 00:33:44,080 I love that. 711 00:33:44,080 --> 00:33:45,360 I need to start doing that more. 712 00:33:45,360 --> 00:33:46,360 Okay. 713 00:33:46,360 --> 00:33:48,680 Very similar follow up question. 714 00:33:48,680 --> 00:33:50,840 Where do you go when you're looking for new solutions? 715 00:33:50,840 --> 00:33:56,360 So you talked about how you brought Twilio in and you started doing SMS and text messaging. 716 00:33:56,360 --> 00:33:59,440 Where do you go and who do you look for and what are the steps that you take when you're 717 00:33:59,440 --> 00:34:01,840 like, okay, now I need to do this next thing? 718 00:34:01,840 --> 00:34:07,800 Yeah, there's a muscle of doing research that I think is really important for the sort of 719 00:34:07,800 --> 00:34:11,680 world I live in where I may not even have a term for what I want to do sometimes. 720 00:34:11,680 --> 00:34:14,240 I may not know what it's called. 721 00:34:14,240 --> 00:34:18,200 And just going and like Googling a whole bunch of things and taking notes on what seemed 722 00:34:18,200 --> 00:34:21,280 promising, what didn't is really helpful. 723 00:34:21,280 --> 00:34:24,600 I will kind of go and take an inventory of what I see that's available and what's worked 724 00:34:24,600 --> 00:34:26,240 and hasn't worked. 725 00:34:26,240 --> 00:34:30,320 For example, if I was looking for a new library to do, let's say just transactional emails, 726 00:34:30,320 --> 00:34:31,320 send emails from our software. 727 00:34:31,320 --> 00:34:34,400 I would go and find five, 10 solutions for that. 728 00:34:34,400 --> 00:34:36,880 Go look at all of their documentation. 729 00:34:36,880 --> 00:34:40,080 If there's not good documentation, I'm usually not interested unless it's like a very early 730 00:34:40,080 --> 00:34:41,080 product. 731 00:34:41,080 --> 00:34:43,560 Then I'll go and look at how active the thing is. 732 00:34:43,560 --> 00:34:45,880 Are people communicating with it on GitHub? 733 00:34:45,880 --> 00:34:47,960 Are there new issues and pull requests and releases? 734 00:34:47,960 --> 00:34:50,720 Are people talking about it on the social internet? 735 00:34:50,720 --> 00:34:52,680 So on Blue Sky and on threads? 736 00:34:52,680 --> 00:34:55,200 Is there actual movement about it? 737 00:34:55,200 --> 00:34:57,120 Have people formed opinions? 738 00:34:57,120 --> 00:35:00,520 And then honestly, a thing that's happened more and more for me recently, and maybe this 739 00:35:00,520 --> 00:35:03,440 is my pedestal for another day, is what's the leadership like? 740 00:35:03,440 --> 00:35:06,760 I don't want to build a product based on someone's thing if they suck. 741 00:35:06,760 --> 00:35:11,000 That's something I'm really fully willing to cut people off for. 742 00:35:11,000 --> 00:35:15,640 Maybe that's an unfair bar to hold, but I'm also not past giving someone a second chance. 743 00:35:15,640 --> 00:35:19,440 If for some reason, someone changes their ways, I'm also always willing to give something 744 00:35:19,440 --> 00:35:20,440 a shot too. 745 00:35:20,440 --> 00:35:24,080 Yeah, there's a lot of factors that come into it, definitely. 746 00:35:24,080 --> 00:35:28,480 It is largely a don't assume you're right or don't assume your first instinct will be 747 00:35:28,480 --> 00:35:29,480 right. 748 00:35:29,480 --> 00:35:33,320 Hopefully, my team would reflect this too, that when we're trying something and trying 749 00:35:33,320 --> 00:35:39,840 to find something new, we'll try out a few options and group crowdsource the answer. 750 00:35:39,840 --> 00:35:41,480 What's everyone's experience with this thing been? 751 00:35:41,480 --> 00:35:43,760 How does this feel as a developer experience? 752 00:35:43,760 --> 00:35:44,760 What do you like? 753 00:35:44,760 --> 00:35:45,760 What do you dislike? 754 00:35:45,760 --> 00:35:50,200 We recently went through redesigning the way our API responds to requests for craft work 755 00:35:50,200 --> 00:35:53,600 and had the whole teamwork on that so that we could get to a point where all of our lived 756 00:35:53,600 --> 00:35:57,240 experience was added into the feature that came out of that, which was a really nice thing 757 00:35:57,240 --> 00:35:58,240 to do. 758 00:35:58,240 --> 00:36:01,040 Oh, my gosh, that's amazing. 759 00:36:01,040 --> 00:36:02,680 I ask people this question a lot. 760 00:36:02,680 --> 00:36:04,160 How do you choose your tool? 761 00:36:04,160 --> 00:36:05,600 How do you make decisions around this? 762 00:36:05,600 --> 00:36:07,760 There's tons of different answers that I get. 763 00:36:07,760 --> 00:36:11,920 I have yet to get the answer where as a team, we sit down and we all somewhat experiment 764 00:36:11,920 --> 00:36:14,920 with the different prototypes or different options. 765 00:36:14,920 --> 00:36:17,960 That's really beautiful because each different type of developer, and like you said, back 766 00:36:17,960 --> 00:36:21,400 to how we think and how we operate, they're all going to have different reasons why they 767 00:36:21,400 --> 00:36:24,960 love it or hate it or think that it can solve a problem or not. 768 00:36:24,960 --> 00:36:27,960 That really does, similar to what you said about posting your opinion and letting the 769 00:36:27,960 --> 00:36:30,400 smart people come out of the woodwork. 770 00:36:30,400 --> 00:36:34,520 You're literally pulling out what is going to ideally be probably the best decision in 771 00:36:34,520 --> 00:36:35,520 that space. 772 00:36:35,520 --> 00:36:36,520 How smart? 773 00:36:36,520 --> 00:36:37,520 I love that. 774 00:36:37,520 --> 00:36:40,640 Another thing I'll mention there is that the benefit of working with a really talented 775 00:36:40,640 --> 00:36:44,640 team of very curious people is often I will mention something that I'm starting to think 776 00:36:44,640 --> 00:36:47,840 about in passing. 777 00:36:47,840 --> 00:36:51,600 People that I work with will go and take that as a thread and explore the curiosity on their 778 00:36:51,600 --> 00:36:52,600 own. 779 00:36:52,600 --> 00:36:57,320 I swear to you, I have an indentation on my desk from my jaw hitting it so often where 780 00:36:57,320 --> 00:36:58,880 they'll come back and say, hey, check this out. 781 00:36:58,880 --> 00:36:59,880 What do you think of this? 782 00:36:59,880 --> 00:37:04,360 It'll be something that's done in a better way than I could have imagined. 783 00:37:04,360 --> 00:37:05,360 It isn't all just me. 784 00:37:05,360 --> 00:37:06,360 It's never all just me. 785 00:37:06,360 --> 00:37:10,600 In fact, it's rarely me at all because the people that I work with are really well-driven 786 00:37:10,600 --> 00:37:13,600 and do some really amazing stuff. 787 00:37:13,600 --> 00:37:15,560 I'm not the source of answers here. 788 00:37:15,560 --> 00:37:20,400 I'm just a coordinator of things. 789 00:37:20,400 --> 00:37:25,320 We have to get to the big thing that I want to talk about here that you're objectively 790 00:37:25,320 --> 00:37:30,320 looking for and I think before we dive into that, I have really enjoyed talking with you 791 00:37:30,320 --> 00:37:35,760 and I have so much enjoyed how you manage your team, how you think about things, how 792 00:37:35,760 --> 00:37:37,560 you really put all the details in. 793 00:37:37,560 --> 00:37:41,000 I know that you were saying your commentary around maybe not picking products that have 794 00:37:41,000 --> 00:37:42,400 leaders that you don't align with. 795 00:37:42,400 --> 00:37:43,720 I actually think that's really beautiful. 796 00:37:43,720 --> 00:37:47,360 I think the only way that we forge and see the world that we want to see, which in my 797 00:37:47,360 --> 00:37:52,080 world is filled with kindness and love, but the only way we get to that world is by being 798 00:37:52,080 --> 00:37:55,840 very strategic about who we work with and the products that we choose. 799 00:37:55,840 --> 00:38:00,720 It's not to say those are bad people, but it's to say that they don't align with the 800 00:38:00,720 --> 00:38:04,080 values and the morals that you personally align with and that's okay. 801 00:38:04,080 --> 00:38:06,840 Like you said, if they change, great, you'll reconsider. 802 00:38:06,840 --> 00:38:11,400 But I think that to me is actually a major pillar in my decision-making process as well. 803 00:38:11,400 --> 00:38:14,160 I wanted to call that out. 804 00:38:14,160 --> 00:38:16,520 You're looking for someone to join your team. 805 00:38:16,520 --> 00:38:17,520 Yeah. 806 00:38:17,520 --> 00:38:18,520 Tell them about it. 807 00:38:18,520 --> 00:38:22,960 I don't know, if it turns out we're hiring at Kraftwerk, so we're in the middle of actually 808 00:38:22,960 --> 00:38:27,000 just published earlier this morning a job rec for a full stack engineer. 809 00:38:27,000 --> 00:38:31,560 We're looking for someone with extensive Ruby on Rails experience to help us build out the 810 00:38:31,560 --> 00:38:34,920 next phase of what we're doing here at Kraftwerk. 811 00:38:34,920 --> 00:38:39,680 Our application, our stack is a lot like GitHub and Shopify where Rails is the engine that 812 00:38:39,680 --> 00:38:47,600 powers all the logic and the APIs and the inbound web hooks and things like that. 813 00:38:47,600 --> 00:38:50,560 Interestingly we're building interfaces that are based on React. 814 00:38:50,560 --> 00:38:53,560 Rails might be the backend sort of middle layer and React will become the front end 815 00:38:53,560 --> 00:38:54,560 of things. 816 00:38:54,560 --> 00:38:58,280 We'll sort of use Rails as our eventually maybe even more like a headless API. 817 00:38:58,280 --> 00:39:02,400 That's certainly how it works for the mobile app and for our website right now. 818 00:39:02,400 --> 00:39:03,400 Sure. 819 00:39:03,400 --> 00:39:05,920 We're looking for someone who has extensive Rails experience. 820 00:39:05,920 --> 00:39:08,800 The thing I say to people when I'm talking to them about jobs, when I'm interviewing 821 00:39:08,800 --> 00:39:12,680 engineers is that what I'm really looking for is someone who's curious and passionate 822 00:39:12,680 --> 00:39:14,760 and really well communicating. 823 00:39:14,760 --> 00:39:17,440 I really love having engineers on my team with side hustles. 824 00:39:17,440 --> 00:39:20,680 I think it's a really good sign that someone has built something from zero to one if they 825 00:39:20,680 --> 00:39:23,280 have a product that run on their own. 826 00:39:23,280 --> 00:39:26,240 By that I run a couple of things outside of Kraftwerk that are just passion projects 827 00:39:26,240 --> 00:39:31,280 of mine that when I can morph an extra hour into my day I'll work on. 828 00:39:31,280 --> 00:39:32,600 That's the kind of person I'm looking for. 829 00:39:32,600 --> 00:39:35,120 We are based in the US in Charlotte. 830 00:39:35,120 --> 00:39:38,840 If you happen to be in Charlotte or interested in moving to Charlotte, that's fantastic. 831 00:39:38,840 --> 00:39:45,200 We're also able to support remote work in the continental US, from the east to west coast. 832 00:39:45,200 --> 00:39:48,880 We're remote friendly, we have an engineer on the team right now who's remote. 833 00:39:48,880 --> 00:39:53,720 I worked remotely for 10 years before founding Kraftwerk and am really passionate about 834 00:39:53,720 --> 00:39:57,840 making sure that we are inclusive over our remote teammates as well. 835 00:39:57,840 --> 00:40:01,440 If that sounds like you or someone you know and you've got Rails experience and you like 836 00:40:01,440 --> 00:40:04,440 React, we would love to talk to you. 837 00:40:04,440 --> 00:40:09,520 I will be publishing a link to this on my LinkedIn, on Blue Sky, on Threads, on my personal 838 00:40:09,520 --> 00:40:11,560 website and my newsletter. 839 00:40:11,560 --> 00:40:13,440 If I can get tests out of Post-it somewhere I'll get that. 840 00:40:13,440 --> 00:40:14,440 Oh yeah. 841 00:40:14,440 --> 00:40:15,440 Yeah. 842 00:40:15,440 --> 00:40:17,760 Anywhere you can find me I should be shouting about this. 843 00:40:17,760 --> 00:40:18,960 It's just gone live this morning. 844 00:40:18,960 --> 00:40:19,960 Oh my gosh. 845 00:40:19,960 --> 00:40:20,960 I love that so much. 846 00:40:20,960 --> 00:40:21,960 Okay. 847 00:40:21,960 --> 00:40:24,280 So you alluded to it. 848 00:40:24,280 --> 00:40:25,280 What side hustles do you have? 849 00:40:25,280 --> 00:40:26,280 Why don't you drop those? 850 00:40:26,280 --> 00:40:27,720 Because I think the listeners would love both of them. 851 00:40:27,720 --> 00:40:28,920 Once for founders and once for devs. 852 00:40:28,920 --> 00:40:29,920 So it's beautiful. 853 00:40:29,920 --> 00:40:30,920 For sure. 854 00:40:30,920 --> 00:40:31,920 Yeah. 855 00:40:31,920 --> 00:40:35,080 So if you're an API developer, I run a developer community called APIs You Won't Hate. 856 00:40:35,080 --> 00:40:37,600 I co-founded that with my friend Phil years ago. 857 00:40:37,600 --> 00:40:42,200 It's a passion project where we are the largest community of API developers on the web. 858 00:40:42,200 --> 00:40:43,520 We have a newsletter. 859 00:40:43,520 --> 00:40:46,080 We have a giant Slack channel with a few thousand people in it. 860 00:40:46,080 --> 00:40:50,000 We have a YouTube channel, a podcast, we publish books, we do open source software. 861 00:40:50,000 --> 00:40:53,040 The dream of that is just to help people build better APIs and sort of love what they 862 00:40:53,040 --> 00:40:56,040 do. 863 00:40:56,040 --> 00:40:58,480 Seeing some friends drop some comments in the chat here too. 864 00:40:58,480 --> 00:41:00,320 Hey, how are you? 865 00:41:00,320 --> 00:41:07,200 I also run my personal website, mikebyfullco.com, my name.com, where I publish a newsletter 866 00:41:07,200 --> 00:41:10,720 every week called Tiny Improvements, which is meant for people who are startup founders 867 00:41:10,720 --> 00:41:15,240 or interested in being startup founders or interested in spinning up a side hustle. 868 00:41:15,240 --> 00:41:18,480 Where I share my lived experience about building products and sort of the things that I've 869 00:41:18,480 --> 00:41:22,240 gleaned along the way that aren't necessarily like NPM install product. 870 00:41:22,240 --> 00:41:25,760 It's more like, oh, this is what it's like when I'm stuck and I'm frustrated or this 871 00:41:25,760 --> 00:41:29,160 is what it's like to run a team or this is what I want in a good teammate or this is 872 00:41:29,160 --> 00:41:33,000 what behavioral economics says about user experience and these are the things you should 873 00:41:33,000 --> 00:41:34,000 think about. 874 00:41:34,000 --> 00:41:37,040 So it's a lot more strategic, philosophical maybe. 875 00:41:37,040 --> 00:41:41,640 I also publish some tutorials on my website about peers how you do XYZ with React. 876 00:41:41,640 --> 00:41:42,640 That's fine. 877 00:41:42,640 --> 00:41:43,840 That stuff's fun too. 878 00:41:43,840 --> 00:41:47,080 My rule with that is I try and make an article every time I have to Google something more 879 00:41:47,080 --> 00:41:48,080 than once. 880 00:41:48,080 --> 00:41:51,840 I'll make an article for it so that I'm Googling my own answer to the problem next time. 881 00:41:51,840 --> 00:41:55,160 Yeah, that's the things I can think of for now. 882 00:41:55,160 --> 00:41:59,000 It's certainly a busy existence and I'm very lucky to have it. 883 00:41:59,000 --> 00:42:01,600 And what I'll say is that if any of this is interesting to you, please reach out. 884 00:42:01,600 --> 00:42:02,760 I'd love to chat with you. 885 00:42:02,760 --> 00:42:05,280 I'd love to talk to people who are interested in the job. 886 00:42:05,280 --> 00:42:07,880 And yeah, whatever I can do to help, don't be shy. 887 00:42:07,880 --> 00:42:08,880 I'm here to help. 888 00:42:08,880 --> 00:42:09,880 That's the dream. 889 00:42:09,880 --> 00:42:14,480 Oh, well, I think that this interview was very well timed because if I fell into the 890 00:42:14,480 --> 00:42:18,600 stack, even though I'm trying to run my own business, I would be eager to apply for a job 891 00:42:18,600 --> 00:42:21,760 to work with you because of just everything that you've shared and the way that you think 892 00:42:21,760 --> 00:42:23,760 about things and the way that you lead. 893 00:42:23,760 --> 00:42:26,240 And I think oftentimes developers, yeah, you're welcome. 894 00:42:26,240 --> 00:42:30,040 I think developers don't always think about the leadership or at least sometimes earlier 895 00:42:30,040 --> 00:42:33,440 on they don't think about it and it ends up being sort of a pain point for them and 896 00:42:33,440 --> 00:42:37,880 realizing and maybe even getting to a point of not liking it or enjoying their role. 897 00:42:37,880 --> 00:42:41,280 And so when you can find amazing leaders like you that really give the opportunity for people 898 00:42:41,280 --> 00:42:45,760 to be curious to do what they love to do, but provide that mentorship and that guidance 899 00:42:45,760 --> 00:42:48,480 man, that's that is the sweet spot to be in. 900 00:42:48,480 --> 00:42:53,440 So I hope that you find that absolute best candidate because you deserve it. 901 00:42:53,440 --> 00:42:54,440 Thank you. 902 00:42:54,440 --> 00:42:55,440 Thank you. 903 00:42:55,440 --> 00:42:57,680 Tessa, this has been a bright spot in my day and it's genuinely a lot of fun to talk with 904 00:42:57,680 --> 00:42:58,680 you. 905 00:42:58,680 --> 00:42:59,680 Thanks for having me on. 906 00:42:59,680 --> 00:43:00,680 I really appreciate it. 907 00:43:00,680 --> 00:43:01,680 Yes. 908 00:43:01,680 --> 00:43:07,520 I appreciate you actually coming on and wanting to join us and it has been absolutely lovely. 909 00:43:07,520 --> 00:43:08,520 I agree. 910 00:43:08,520 --> 00:43:12,400 So to anyone who is still listening here at the end, reach out to Mike. 911 00:43:12,400 --> 00:43:15,640 He has a really awesome opportunity over at Craftwork. 912 00:43:15,640 --> 00:43:21,440 If you are a Ruby on Rails dev that also likes to dive into React and a hustler, you know, 913 00:43:21,440 --> 00:43:24,720 someone who likes to hustle and who likes to work hard and more than anything, I think 914 00:43:24,720 --> 00:43:27,880 that really just wants to like dive in and be curious, like you said. 915 00:43:27,880 --> 00:43:29,760 Yeah, I love to meet him. 916 00:43:29,760 --> 00:43:30,760 Awesome. 917 00:43:30,760 --> 00:43:32,640 Have a great day, everyone. 918 00:43:32,640 --> 00:43:34,640 We'll see you all tomorrow. 919 00:43:34,640 --> 00:44:03,640 Thanks.