This episode of the Boagworld show is sponsored by Balsamiq and LinkedIn Jobs
Related Links
- Mr Bingo
- Figma
- Creating a Responsive Design System: Sketch, Figma and Adobe XD Compared
- Tailwind
- PC Specialist
- Venture Habour
- Serene, Productivity App
Transcript
Paul: This week on the Boagworld Show we argue about the best design tool and explore the best ways to launch that side project that you’ve been dreaming about. This episode of the Boagworld Show is sponsored by Balsamiq and LinkedIn Jobs.
Paul: Hello and welcome to the Boagworld Show. This season of the show is a series of virtual meetups of web professionals recorded live and attended supposedly by drop-in guests. However, because they’re drop-in guests, we have no idea what’s going to happen from one show to the next. The only consistency in this show is my co-host Marcus Lillington. Hello, Marcus.
Marcus: Hello Paul Boag. I guess, yes, I’ve been consistent for … How long have I been … 15 years now.
Paul: Since 2005 we started doing this.
Marcus: 15 years. I was just a small boy back in those days.
Paul: I know, right? Well, no, you weren’t, you were an old man then.
Marcus: Yeah, no, I was. I was a small boy in shorts and a little tie pulled down a bit.
Paul: Hello, I’m Marcus Lillington. I’m on the-
Marcus: Exactly. If you go back to the start, that’s what my voice is like.
Paul: Is that how it sounds?
Marcus: Yeah.
Paul: Absolutely.
Marcus: “All right? You coming out to play today?”
Paul: To be honest, I don’t think we’re a lot different from that even now. Basically, this is the thing about men, is that I don’t think men ever grow up. I just think they get better at hiding the fact that they’re children.
Marcus: That is true, however I don’t think it applies to all men. Because some men do have horrible hardship and have to grow up in … That’s what we mean, isn’t it?
Paul: Yeah, okay.
Marcus: But generally speaking, I think you are absolutely right. I also think there’s a thing where we all have a particular age that we stopped at.
Paul: Yeah.
Marcus: In our heads. Mine’s 18. I am 18. And I get such a shock every time I look in the mirror.
Paul: Yeah, well minutely older than that. I know what you mean.
Marcus: [crosstalk 00:02:19]. Yeah. Some people might have stopped at 12. They are still in their shorts and climbing trees.
Paul: That’s really-
Marcus: But I’m just, I’m just on this constant night out getting drunk in my head. It’s fantastic, really.
Paul: Yeah, except your body doesn’t respond as well in the morning anymore, does it?
Marcus: Oh no. No, it certainly doesn’t.
Paul: So-
Marcus: What?
Paul: You can tell that I’m really still a kid at heart, because in the show notes, I wrote as the thing that I wanted to talk about in the introduction, that my wrist was aching.
Marcus: Aw. But that made you laugh, didn’t it? Its made me laugh.
Paul: I know. Because immediately, your brain goes childish. Doesn’t it? Which no adult would do. But there is actually legitimate reasons for my wrist ache.
Marcus: Just talk about your injury. No, that doesn’t work either. Is it the old … When you smashed the champagne bottle into it?
Paul: No.
Marcus: That sounds really rock and roll, doesn’t it?
Paul: It does, yeah. My devastating scar from-
Marcus: That was after he threw the TV out of the hotel room window. He then smashed a bottle of champagne over his wrist.
Paul: No, I tell you what I normally tell people, is I got bottled by an old lady. I always think that sounds like a good story. And it’s actually strictly true, from what did happen that severed the tendon in my thumb, although it is kind of related to that. So you know that I’ve got the book coming out at encouragingclicks.com?
Marcus: Is this because you’ve had to sign so many of them. It, isn’t it?
Paul: Yeah. Right, [Vitali 00:04:00] has sent me 500 postcards. 500 postcards that I’ve got to sign, right? To be fair, he said, “Would you mind signing them?” And I thought, “Yeah, that’s not too bad. I can spread it over a few days. It’ll be fine.” I get them through the post, and there was a lot more than I thought, for a start. And then he adds, “Oh, can you put a little greeting to each person?” Okay. So now I’ve got to write something, not just my name. I’ve got to write something on it.
Marcus: You’ve written, “Thanks for being awesome” on there. Oh Paul.
Paul: All right, fair enough. I recognize that is cheesy. But here’s the thing, then he says, “Try and make them all different.”
Marcus: All different? What?
Paul: Right.
Marcus: That’s impossible.
Paul: Make them all personal. So, to be honest, the fact that 300 cards in I’m writing things like, “Thanks for being awesome”, is flipping understandable.
Marcus: You are talking to a man that spent seven hours signing records once, in a queue.
Paul: Did you really?
Marcus: Yeah. It wasn’t always bad because I did get to sign people, and I’m giving you no more than that. I remember we had a signing at a waterpark on the West Coast of America.
Paul: Oh, where people weren’t wearing a huge amount?
Marcus: Correct. And they didn’t have any records to … This is the days where people bought vinyl. I know they do again, but this is before it went out of fashion. And they didn’t have any vinyls, so they just said, “Can you sign me here?” There you go.
Paul: Have you ever had anyone go away and then get that tattooed? Because that’s the thing these days, isn’t it? You get someone to sign you and then you get it turned into a tattoo.
Marcus: Yes, obviously.
Paul: You’ve no idea, have you?
Marcus: Haven’t got a clue, no.
Paul: But it’s like, whatever story I tell, you always can one up me, Marcus. And interestingly, it’s all when you were about 18, going back to that.
Marcus: That would have been when I was … Yeah, yes it was. 18, 19, 20. That sort of age. It was more 21, 21, 22. A bit older.
Paul: There you go.
Marcus: Hey ho.
Paul: Actually, that’s a really good comment in the chatroom. Andy’s just said that I should outsource my postcards to Mr Bingo. Have you ever come across Mr Bingo?
Marcus: No, that means nothing to me.
Paul: He is quite a character. I met him at … I’ll try and put a link to his show notes. I was speaking at the awards conference, which ironically I’m speaking at next week, or the week after.
Marcus: What the a-w-w-w-w- awards?
Paul: A-w-w-awards conference, yeah. And he was speaking there, and it’s the first time I’ve ever come across the guy. He’s an artist, right?
Marcus: Okay.
Paul: But he does all kinds of fun, weird art projects. He’s a proper artist. But he also, obviously being an artist, most artists are rubbish at making money. Not Mr Bingo, he’s got some very clever ideas, and one of his many ideas that he does is every now and again, he opens it up so that you can pay him money to send a postcard to one of your friends. Right?
Marcus: Right.
Paul: And the postcard will be individually drawn. And it’s shitty quick scribble, and they’re normally deeply insulting. So he tells people to F off, and calls them the ‘C’ word and all these kinds of things. And you can pay him quite a lot of money to send you a card to insult one of your friends, which I was just thinking is genius. The other really good one he did, which is on a similar vein, was he did an advent calendar, which was a scene of a load of different people. And you could scratch off their clothes on this advent calendar. It was an illustration, it wasn’t pornographic. I guess it was in the fact that they then were naked, but it was a line drawing, it was nothing too obscene. And you would scratch off their clothes for each day of the Christmas period.
Paul: Very, very fun guy. Definitely worth following, absolute character.
Marcus: Described on my search engine as, “Mr Bingo, artist, speaker and T-W-A-T.” Because I can’t say that word on the podcast.
Paul: Yes. That’s pretty much it. So there we go, he’s someone that we could have had on the show because … So I asked before we started recording, who’s going to come on the show today? Absolutely nobody was willing to come on.
Marcus: I suspect the listener knows this by the amount of waffle that we’ve managed to get through so far. I’ve got loads more in me today.
Paul: Oh, is it one of those days?
Marcus: What do you want to talk about Paul?
Paul: It’s people’s own fault. If they’re not willing to come onto the show then-
Marcus: They get to listen to me.
Paul: They get to listen to our pointless crap. So the idea of this season, and it’s been going very well so far, is that people come along, they drop into the chatroom and then they volunteer to come on the show and have a little chat. Right? But people have been absolutely useless this week and are not willing to do it. But, if you’re listening to this and you fancy coming on the show, and you really don’t need to have anything particular to say, the whole idea is we’ll create a meet up environment and we’re all just chatting. So just saying, “Hello”, and “Who are you?” And “What do you do?” If you fancy doing that and you’re at home, just go to subcribe.boagworld.com/community. Sign up there and you’ll get notifications before we record each show, so you can come on and you can just join in.
Paul: Now, Gareth in the chat room is currently complaining that 3PM on a Thursday is peak burnout time, and so that’s why people aren’t willing to come on the show. Fair enough then. I’m going to call your bluff, Gareth. We are going to be mixing up the times every week from now on, there’s going to be a whole variety of different times. So that means, Gareth, you have to come on the show at some point because one of those times will not fall in your burnout time. So you’ve backed yourself into a corner there mate. I’d just thought you’d like to know.
Paul: So yes, if there is anybody in the chatroom that came in late and is willing to come on, you will absolutely save us because … See, I get distracted by the chatroom.
Marcus: I’m currently trying to nag Leigh to come in.
Paul: Okay, good. Because otherwise we are absolutely stuffed if he doesn’t turn up, aren’t we? So, what you been working on, Marcus? You been doing anything interesting that is worth telling the user … User? The listeners about.
Marcus: The user. Yes. I’m going to give you a bit of user experience. I think the only thing that was worth talking about, I suppose, is the fact that we’ve had a bit of a tricky situation with a client, which I was going to talk about last week. So did you.
Paul: Yes.
Marcus: But I’ll just talk about maybe what we’ve learnt from that, and occasionally you do. This is the way. We don’t always get things right, I guess it’s hard to admit. I know, but it’s true. And I think there’s a natural reaction to defend ourselves and say, “Well, you didn’t do X.” Or “You weren’t clear on Y.” Which nearly is always true, that is the case. But I guess in the end, I’d argue that it’s our responsibility as the hired expert to keep on questioning and probing, and trying find ways to a solution, rather than in some cases just crossing our fingers and hoping for the best.
Marcus: And in this particular project we were. There were two aspects to it, and one aspect of it we were very, very pushy, over and over. We need to know what the deliverable is, what are we going to be doing here? Are we going to be working with … Guess who’s arrived.
Marcus: Hey.
Leigh: [crosstalk 00:12:16]
Paul: Hey, it’s Leigh. Hello Leigh.
Marcus: I’ll come back to that thought because Leigh’s here. Sit down.
Marcus: And you can ask him questions about who he is, and where he works, and what he does, and stuff like that. I’m going to pass you-
Paul: He can sit there for a minute-
Leigh: [crosstalk 00:12:30]
Paul: I think-
Marcus: You’ve got to stay there while I finish off my thought.
Paul: It’s worth finishing that train of thought, because I think that’s quite interesting, dealing with clients when it’s problematic. So how did you resolve it?
Marcus: Well, I’ll come onto how we resolved it.
Paul: All right, sorry.
Marcus: I’m not absolutely sure that we have 100% yet, but we’re getting there. We’ve been a bit guilty of the other aspect of this project, of crossing fingers and hoping for the best. But we’re now trying to find a way forward, which I think we have, which is great. As I just said, a few alarm bells went off at the start of the project, and we dealt with some of them, but not all of them. But I guess, as I was writing thoughts about this, the fact that we are dealing with them means they were just a bit later. So that’s good. And I think-
Paul: Is the relationship all right?
Marcus: Yes, and it is. And I think one of the issues is that people can offer appear difficult, or maybe unengaged, or our biggest worry on this occasion was that they were at odds with each other. Turns out they’re not, but it seemed that that might have been the case. And I’m really guilty of this, is that if they’re not super happy bouncy people who are really excited about everything, then we often think that something’s wrong or broken.
Marcus: And I think what we’ve learnt here is just that some people are different. The way they approach things isn’t maybe the way that we look at the world, but that doesn’t mean to say we can’t find a way forward, and what we’ve done here and what they’ve done, which is great, we’ve both been super honest with each other, and that’s the way forward. Through this process of being super honest, we’ve both said, “Look, if we can’t find a forward, then we should just go, “Thanks it’s been great, but it didn’t work out.”” And on this particular case we have found a way forward, which is great. But we both realize that there’s no point banging your head against the wall if there isn’t one. That was it, really.
Paul: What I take away from that in particular, is the fact … Having the right fit between supplier and contractor is really important. Some people just don’t work well with one another, because they’ve got very different approaches and very different ways of doing things. If that’s the case, it’s okay to say, “Look, this isn’t really working.” And I’ve given clients the opt out before, where I’ve felt like they’ve not been really happy with the way I’m doing things. And I’ve said, “Look, it’s fine. If you want to go, I’m not going to tie you to this contract if you don’t feel it’s working.” It doesn’t happen very often. But it can happen.
Marcus: It doesn’t, those two were super honest. That’s what it comes back to.
Paul: Yeah, I would agree.
Marcus: And the one that I started this off with is that point that I think it’s our responsibility as the supplier to find a way.
Paul: And that’s where I messed up recently. You mentioned earlier that I had a client that was unhappy, and I did. And for some reason, they caught me in the wrong frame of mind and I went in very defensive. And you’re right, I shouldn’t have done that. It’s not the way you do things, and ultimately it’s our job as the supplier to keep them happy and make them pleased with where they’re going. Even if it is justifiable arguable that it’s as much their fault as it is yours. You’ve to be the bigger man as whatever the stupid phrase is.
Marcus: You’re great at that Paul, aren’t you?
Paul: I’m better than I used to be, but yeah, I’m not great as well you know. So, have we got Leigh in with us? Can he hear us?
Marcus: No he can’t, I’m going to give him the headphones.
Paul: Oh right. Leigh, you smell of raspberries.
Marcus: I don’t know. [inaudible 00:16:29] raspberries.
Paul: That was the worst insult ever.
Leigh: Hi.
Paul: I panicked. Hello Leigh, how are you doing?
Leigh: I’m all right, thank you.
Marcus: [crosstalk 00:16:39]
Leigh: No idea what you were just talking about, but I’m sure it was interesting.
Paul: It was fascinating.
Leigh: I think I can guess partly what it was.
Paul: Difficult clients was the conversation.
Leigh: How do you do this? Because you’re hiding behind the mic shield.
Paul: Don’t worry about the picture, it’s better-
Leigh: Is this live?
Marcus: Yes.
Paul: Yeah, there’s lots of people in here. Did you not know that?
Leigh: I wasn’t entirely sure, but I can see just see the chat.
Paul: Yes.
Leigh: Hello.
Paul: Good to have you in, Leigh. So how have you been? What have you been working on recently? Anything exciting? This is where you go, “No.”
Leigh: Yeah, loads of things. Well the project Marcus was just talking about.
Paul: Oh right.
Leigh: And trying to design a very [inaudible 00:17:31] component based system and pages in Figma.
Paul: Oh yeah.
Leigh: I’ve just been trying to persuade Ed to use Figma. He’s been a staunch Photoshop user forever.
Paul: Oh he has, yeah.
Leigh: And he’s never tried anything. Never tried Sketch, he doesn’t like anything new. But suddenly he’s been prepared to look into Figma. So I think I may have been selling its advantages.
Paul: So why have you settled on Figma compared to Sketch or InDesign or whatever else?
Leigh: Well, I was using Sketch but then I moved to PC. Unwilling to be carrying around a three, four grand machine in my bag anymore, because of the ridiculous price of a new machine I wanted, I decided, “I’m going to go back to PC.”
Paul: Right.
Leigh: Because I’ve always been pretty … I don’t really care which operating system I’m using, because using Adobe stuff doesn’t really make a great deal of difference, that’s mostly what I used. And I also used a lot of audio software for PC. So I decided to just stick in one operating system. And Steam on PC, that was a big reason as well.
Paul: I can’t believe … So basically, you swapped your work machine for gaming.
Leigh: I had to finish Tomb Raider with a decent graphics card. My Mac couldn’t even run it. [crosstalk 00:19:00] two frames a second.
Paul: Oh right.
Leigh: I think if you spend 20 grand now on a Mac you can get a decent graphics card, can’t you?
Paul: Yeah, pretty much. An external one, a big box that sits next to you.
Leigh: So yeah, that was just one deciding factor in … You know, [inaudible 00:19:19]. Maybe my PC, my laptop isn’t best built compared to a nice MacBook … But anyway, so Sketch isn’t available on the PC.
Paul: Yeah, fair enough.
Leigh: So that’s how I ended up at Figma. But then, the world I noticed seemed to be quite in favor of Figma.
Paul: Yeah, Figma’s very in at the moment, isn’t it, as a potential tool?
Leigh: Pretty much. It’s ripped off everything Sketch does, I don’t know how long Figma’s been around, [inaudible 00:19:54] both developed. But it seemed to do the same as Sketch, and more. A lot of the sharing stuff seemed to be better [inaudible 00:20:03]. Component use is really good. But yeah, that’s the main reason to use Sketch.
Paul: Yeah. I had a little play with it, so I had a project a while back where I had to build a design system for a client and very specifically, the design tool that I was creating the design system in, the components had to be responsive within the design package itself. So you wanted to be able to re-size them. So I looked at Sketch, I looked at InDesign, and I looked at Figma. And actually, interestingly, only InDesign could do a decent job at it, at the time. I mean, whether things have changed or not … Because of the way components worked within it, but Figma, in my opinion, came out better than Sketch did in that particular category.
Paul: So it’s really quite interesting, because it’s like all these things, isn’t it? There’s not right or wrong answer, it all comes out of personal preference at the end, doesn’t it?
Leigh: Well, me and Ed were just discussing why has no package ever let you do a list of things properly? In the same way that HTML does, a bulleted list.
Paul: Yeah.
Leigh: Which we have to simulate bulleted list still. Oh yeah, different paragraphs, indent them. Oh, it’s got to wrap around. Why? I mean, Figma knows all about the CSS for the gradient but no one still seems to be able to manage to do a bulleted list. Word can. Wordpad can. Why? [crosstalk 00:21:41] most things can do bulleted lists if they’re dealing with texts, but wrapping packages which deal with tech? No.
Paul: It’s so weird, and-
Leigh: Figma-
Paul: Go on.
Leigh: Figma now can do the thing. It knows about Flow, so you can set up your page. So if you insert lots of paragraphs it will all move down. Proper page flow, like a webpage. Rather than-
Paul: Which is good.
Leigh: Rather than, “Oh, I’ve got to now move all those things manually down the page.”
Paul: Yes. But Sketch now does that as well but-
Leigh: Oh does it really?
Paul: Yeah. But InDesign doesn’t.
Leigh: Right.
Paul: So it’s just so close. All these things are so close, you just want to take them all and bunch them together. But I mean, compared to what we were designing in 10 years ago, we are really spoiled for choice now, aren’t we?
Leigh: Oh definitely. Definitely things have got a lot better. But yeah, I live in hope that one day this kind of integrated knowing about web things in a graphics package will happen, and it will be beautifully … We’ll probably move to something else by then, completely.
Paul: Yeah. And of course, this is really an argument for designing in the browser.
Leigh: Yeah, and I still go back and forward between the two. Sometimes it’s faster browser, sometimes we try to come up with crazy new ideas. Because I do find designing in the browser just leads me down the same path, over and over again. The thought of doing anything mad when you’ve set something up, [inaudible 00:23:22], you just have to go back to square one and everything break. It’s easier to experiment with a graphic package. It’s easier to do linear components [inaudible 00:23:31] and things in the browser, so it’s this sort of two sides of the design problem. And yeah, on this particular project I’ve been flipping. I’ve designed in the browser, then I’ve gone back to Figma.
Leigh: I thought, “Oh no, this will be easier in the browser.” Gone into the browser, think, “Oh no, this will be easier in Figma.” That to-ing and fro-ing does drive me a little bit mad.
Paul: Yeah.
Leigh: Please, please both of these angles come together into one solution soon.
Paul: But you are right. In the earlier parts of the design process, I do tend to prefer graphics packages, and then the later you get into the process, that’s the point where you start refining it more. That’s where I think it’s better in the browser, personally. But again, it depends on yourself, your own working [crosstalk 00:24:28].
Leigh: It also depends how good you are at code CSS. If you’re working within your limitations you’re staying safe and you’re restraining what you can do, whereas in graphics pack you don’t have those restraints. “I’m going to shove this over the top of that.” That will probably take me two hours to get positioned properly in the browser, and I can do it within minutes. And oh, actually now I’ve done it I don’t like it. So you have to take the approaches still. [inaudible 00:25:02]
Paul: Yeah, they do. Yeah somebody’s mentioning tail wind CSS, which I’ve not come across.
Leigh: Oh, no.
Paul: For rapidly building custom designs. I’ve never come across that, I’ll have to have a look. See what it is afterwards.
Leigh: That’s actually the CSS live [inaudible 00:25:18].
Paul: Cloud based styling. Oh, so you can [inaudible 00:25:20] quickly style up things just using a load of-
Leigh: Components, [crosstalk 00:25:24]-
Paul: Good for prototyping then.
Leigh: Come to Linux. Yeah I did [inaudible 00:25:30]. I do love the idea having open source … Yeah, no. Audio software doesn’t work very well on Linux.
Marcus: Don’t want it.
Leigh: There’s no native instrument plug ins on Linux. So that’s it.
Paul: I was quite shocked, because my son works on Linux for his computer science degree. We were mocking up a website, and we were just popping in an HTML video tag that was pulling in a video that had been working fine on every other system, but didn’t work on his installation of Linux for some reason. Whether they didn’t have the right coding or whatever, so I don’t know. It all seems a bit hippy-ish to me, if I’m honest.
Leigh: Every time I’ve tried Linux I end up sat in the command line, typing in things I don’t understand, trying to get random drivers working and thinking, “What am I doing? What’s happened?” It’s so easy on the other platforms. The detachment and these obscure bits of code going in, pull down libraries and dependencies and oh …
Paul: You’ve had an offer of free lifetime technical support from Gareth in the chatroom. And that’s Gareth Thomas, if you wish to Google him. He’s offering free Linux support for the entire Boagworld community. So there you go.
Leigh: Can he [inaudible 00:26:55].
Paul: I’m un-googlable.
Leigh: I’m un-googlable.
Paul: Very wise decision there Gareth. So what did you get in terms of … Last question before I let you go, because I know you do actually have work to do. But I’m just interested in what PC you’ve got, did you get something cool, like a Microsoft Surface or anything like that?
Leigh: I do have a Surface I’m using as well. But no, I went to PC Specialist and I put together basically a big lump of metal which I can pull things in and out of. It’s-
Marcus: Noisy.
Paul: I’ve lost …
Leigh: It is noisy, I now can call that pro mode. [inaudible 00:27:40] introducing pro mode where your fan might come on now, soon. Look forward to that.
Paul: Oh yes, I’ve heard about that.
Leigh: So they’ve stopped thermal throttling you, and will actually let the CPU do more. But yeah, my fan goes off a lot. I don’t mind that. You’ve got headphones on, so … Marcus always likes to point it out. “What’s that noise?”
Marcus: I can hear sounds coming through the window.
Leigh: I can throttle it down, so you know.
Marcus: But you don’t.
Leigh: I don’t want to. [inaudible 00:28:13]
Paul: Fair enough.
Leigh: Why have six chords if you can’t use them all?
Paul: I completely understand.
Leigh: So no, PC Specialist let you tailor things [inaudible 00:28:26]. And the first day I got that machine, I took the screws off the back and put things in and out of it. It was like, “Wow.” I’ve never, ever taken my MacBooks apart, didn’t dare. It’s like, you know …
Marcus: That’s a good thing Leigh.
Paul: You are such-
Leigh: No, I like taking things apart. [inaudible 00:28:46]
Paul: I’m not sure that’s going to end well, but there you go.
Leigh: Well it still works.
Paul: Okay, Leigh thank you very much for coming and joining us and having a chat. You need to come back on future episodes whenever the chatroom is too coward to come in themselves. But for now thank you very much mate, much appreciated
Leigh: Okay, good to talk to you. Bye.
Paul: Right, so while Leigh hands back to Marcus, which I’m sure he’s about to do. I will just do a quick sponsor, if I may. So we’re going to just talk quickly about LinkedIn Jobs who are a really great sponsor, and if you are looking to hire I really recommend that you check out LinkedIn Jobs. So hiring the right people in our industry as your business grows really sucks. It’s one of the hardest things that we have to do, it’s incredibly time consuming and it’s extremely expensive. And let’s be honest, nobody likes dealing with recruitment agencies anyway. But it doesn’t need to be that way if you use a service like LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs screens candidates for all the hard and soft skills that you’re looking for. So you can find the right person fast.
Paul: So you can screen people for things like their ability to collaborate, their creativity, their adaptability. So it looks beyond just their work skills and puts a job post in front of the right kinds of candidates to match your business requirements perfectly. So that’s how LinkedIn make sure that your job post is seen by the people that you actually want to hire, people with the right skills, the qualifications and other interests to help you grow your business. And it’s no wonder that people are hired every eight seconds with LinkedIn, and why the company is rated … Or LinkedIn Jobs is the number one hiring platform for delivering quality hires.
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Paul: Right, okay. So, Ben has volunteered to come on the show. Is Ben still with us? He managed to stay even if [inaudible 00:31:19] got kicked off. Let’s have a look, where is he? Ben.
Marcus: I think he’s still here.
Paul: I’ve just sent you an invitation Ben, and we’ll get you on the show, find out what’s happening in your life. Have we spoken to Ben before? Have we spoken to Ben?
Marcus: I don’t think so, but that’s the … Yes is the obvious answer here. Yeah, loads of times.
Paul: Let’s play safe and say we have-
Marcus: Oh different Ben, obviously.
Paul: Yeah, exactly. I like the way you’ve covered yourself there. That’s very good. So hello Ben, how are you?
Ben: I’m very well thanks, how are you guys?
Marcus: Hello Ben.
Paul: Very good indeed. It’s good to have you on the show. So tell everybody a little bit about yourself. What do you do? Where do you work? Etcetera.
Ben: Cool, I work at a company called Venture Harbor. Small little business, we do digital … It’s a digital innovation studio, and that could mean many things. Essentially it allows us to build anything, and we’re in a really nice position where we can just boot strap ideas and stuff. So we’ve built affiliate websites around brokers and marketing automation things. We’ve got a really cool marketing blog, we’ve got SAS products on the form generate leads, forms and things like that. And we’ve recently built a [inaudible 00:32:42] for productivities, essentially, to help you block distractions.
Ben: So that’s quite cool. So we’ve got a whole load of things, and I do the product-y design side of things, and I live down in Exeter, work remotely from Exeter. So yeah, I’ve been doing this for three years at Venture Harbor, yeah.
Paul: So I should clarify, that all though we haven’t had Ben on the show before, I actually know Ben.
Ben: Yes.
Paul: Because me and Ben have worked together a little bit, and I’ve been doing some mentorship-y support-y stuff, especially of this Mac productivity app, because you know what a sucker I am for things like that, Marcus.
Marcus: Yeah. Well recognized of him as well.
Paul: Universally known to be a sucker for such things, oh, shiny software. So I’ve been having a play with that, which is-
Ben: That’s [crosstalk 00:33:40].
Paul: And it’s very cool, actually. I really like the premise of it. So the premise is that you can basically block distractions, notifications, websites that you shouldn’t be using, that kind of stuff. What I still don’t fully understand about Venture Harbor is you seem to be living the dream, really. Because you just, “Yeah, we kind of make what we want.” How do you make any money? Where does the money come from, Ben?
Ben: The founder, the boss-
Paul: Oh, he’s a millionaire?
Ben: That would be convenient if that was the case, but it’s not. Marcus who’s the founder, he set up a blog many years ago. And he’s invested in that SEO wise and content wise, and it’s definitely helped. He worked a lot in marketing beforehand, and he found some pains and struggles that his clients were having, and he started building solutions for those pains. And one of them was this broker comparison site, and another one was this lead forming site, and they’ve all been very profitable and they continue to be. And they’ve created a nice foundation for us to say … And our motto at Venture Harbor is that we build a product, or a venture, one every year.
Ben: And so last year was Serene, we’ve been building that. And this year we’re trying to come out with some ideas, but continuing to build the other apps as well. I mean, maintain the apps, that is. It is a really cool situation, very unique. And I’ve never worked anywhere like this before.
Paul: Yeah, how did you land this job? It seems like the perfect job where you just get to play with what you want.
Ben: I wish it was, I say it’s play … It’s a ton of work-
Paul: Yeah, not convincing anyone.
Ben: It was an interesting one. Three years ago Marcus reached out to me, [crosstalk 00:35:57] on LinkedIn, funnily enough. And we had similar interests and I love design, I was the head of design at Crowdcube, a small startup company back then. And he just caught my imagination a bit. And I said no at the time. And a year later I reached out to him, I said, “Now’s the time.” And then we went from there. We were a really good fit, and the culture wise and where the business was going, I was fully on board. And it was just exciting, there was so much potential.
Paul: So it sounds like at the moment you’re at that point where you’re trying to work out what your next venture’s going to be.
Ben: Yeah.
Paul: How do you do that? What’s your process? Do you have a process, or is it just pull ideas out of your backside?
Ben: There is a lot of pulling ideas out the backside. And that’s fine. But we’re really in touch with our customers who use our software and things, and we do have a niche. We work a lot in marketing, our target audience around the apps and tools that we currently have are entrepreneurs, small business kind of people. So when you have that constant communication and involvement with those people, you start to hear issues people are having, problems they’re having … You start playing around with other ideas, [inaudible 00:37:25], “Oh, how can we solve that? Oh, funnily enough they’re having the same problems we are. How are we going to solve that?” And so that’s where the ball starts rolling and we start experimenting, prototyping, throwing ideas out there. Then we think, “Can we monetize it?” We don’t build anything unless it’s a business, it can be profitable. It needs to be profitable in a certain period of time, yeah. So it’s a good one. [crosstalk 00:37:53]
Paul: So you’ve come up with a handful of ideas. How do you work out which ones have got the most legs? Do you prototype a number of different solutions, and if so how, how do you test them? What’s the methodology there?
Ben: We wouldn’t go as far as to prototype everything. We would narrow it down to a couple and start throwing some feelers out there with the people we know, with the communities we know, and start seeing the interest and the potential for again, monetization. Is there a value for it, with the end user? How could this grow? What is the potential, what is the market for the idea? It’s multiple factors, how big is the market? How much investment will it require? How much development time? So many things that go into it, and then we find, “Okay, this looks viable. How quickly can we build that? Can we get it done in two months time to get the idea out there?” It’s really tiring, it’s absolutely exhausting process.
Paul: I can imagine.
Ben: It’s constant, it’s constant, it’s constant. And it’s always another pretty big deadline. And it’s exciting and interesting, and massive learning curves. I’m learning something every week, so it’s really cool.
Paul: Good. There’s so many things that you’ve just said there that I think are lessons that others could do with learning, right? Obviously I’m working with you, but I mentor a lot of different people. One of the reoccurring things that I come across when I come across agencies that decide to build a side project is often what it is.
Marcus: Sounds familiar.
Paul: Yes, I know. This is why I know what’s wrong, because we cocked up in this field ourselves.
Marcus: What we would like to do is to have a piece of software that we can earn some money from. Oh, not the right place to start, is it?
Paul: Yeah. Everybody just goes into it with the wrong attitude. And the number of times people go, “I’ve got this great idea, I’ve started building it.” Is where the conversation begins. And it’s like, “No, no, no, no. Don’t build it. Don’t invest time in building this thing until you know there’s a market there. Do you know how you’re going to monetize it?” All of those kinds of things. So hearing you say that is really good. And the other thing that you do really well is you push something to market very quickly, so you don’t build a complete polished perfect product before you put it into the world, and I think that’s another really good point as well.
Ben: It’s a hard balance to find, and to know when that point is. And that’s something I’m learning a lot about in the last six months, is when do we push this next piece out? With this experience, it’s such a big … The idea of MVP, minimal viable product, and there’s all these new terms. Minimal lovable product, what is it? But there is a piece there, there’s the lovable which is really key now I think, especially I think it’s a macOS product, and there’s an expectation with macOS users to have something which is a bit more polished.
Ben: So it’s a really interesting process, and getting that balance right. Just want it to work, and get it out the door and get feedback. But you want it to be a nice experience as well. So it’s like, “Ugh.” Time and investment.
Marcus: Chris was really moaning about you this morning, Paul.
Paul: What have I done?
Marcus: You recommended a product that basically, “This doesn’t work, and this doesn’t work, and this doesn’t work.” Just because it looks nice, doesn’t mean to say it’s ready for market.
Paul: What product was that?
Marcus: I can’t remember the name of it, it was a survey tool. So he’s gone back to …
Paul: A type form?
Marcus: Yeah.
Paul: Oh dear, he’s just painful, that man.
Marcus: But to be fair, he’s right on this one. You can’t create questions where you can have a range between, “How much do you like this thing?” One to 10. It’s not available, haven’t built it yet. And it’s like, “Yeah, okay fair enough. Maybe you’re right on this one.” And you can only have 10 questions as well.
Paul: Okay.
Marcus: It’s like, “Hang on.”
Paul: Yeah, that’s because he’s being tight and doesn’t want to pay his blooming money for it. Tight ass.
Marcus: Anyway.
Paul: Anyway, going back to the minimum viable product thing, one of the things you said there which I think is really interesting, is that another mistake that people make with minimal viable product is that they … You’ve still got to have the quality experience, right? If we go back to Serene and what you did with that, is your minimal viable product there was beautiful, it was a lovely nice experience out of the gate. But it didn’t necessarily have as many features as it could be. And that’s so important, it’s this idea, minimal viable product doesn’t mean, “Just everything works, but it’s kind of a bit shitty.” And so many people still don’t seem to get that.
Ben: It’s a really tough one. What are the core features? And I think we go back to the vision of what we as a business want to achieve, we want to achieve … Allow people to not be distracted and achieve big goals, and actually do the settled features that we currently have, tick those boxes. And I think, “Yes, we’ve been able to do that. We use it internally.” And I think, “Yes, we can use it and we have a batch of 300 people that are using it, and they’re giving us good enough positive feedback.” That we think, “Let’s push it out and then take it to the next step.” It’s a gut feel, we’re trying to work out now what’s our product market fit. This elusive thing, what is the product market fit? Is anyone going to pay for it? We’re trying to figure that out at the moment, it’s tough because you’re investing money in this idea, when do you stop? There’s got to be a site you can say, “Can’t invest anymore in this.”
Paul: One of the things that I recommended recently to one of my clients, which worked quite well, was they had an idea. In their case it was for a course that they wanted to create. I said to them, “Look, don’t spend any time on the course at all.” Work out what your curriculum is, what it’s going to cover, what it’s going to do, et cetera. But then just build a landing page for it. Proper landing page with a buy button, the whole works, absolutely everything to do with … To sell it. And then basically push it out to people. And then if people click on that buy button, you know that they would be willing to spend real hard cash. And at that point you just give them a message saying, “We’re not quite ready to launch. Give us your email address and we’ll let you know.” And just doing something like that I think makes an enormous difference, to know whether your market is viable or not.
Paul: Have you ever done anything like that?
Ben: Well, with Serene with did something similar. We set up a waiting list, and started pushing that on that front. And that worked really well, for a course it’s different. But for Serene there’s an appetite for the concept. ‘Are they willing to pay?’ is a separate question.
Paul: Yes it is.
Ben: It’s almost like saying, “Will you pay five dollars for this?” Before they’ve tried it. And they’re like, “Oh yeah.” But when it comes to crunch, “Na, I’m not too sure.” And we’ve seen some really interesting data on that.
Paul: Yeah, I guess that’s where something like a kick starter campaign or something along those lines is a good idea as well. If someone’s willing to pay money up front for something that they haven’t yet got, for a big discount, admittedly, but you get a much more realistic idea of what’s going on. So it’s an interesting one.
Paul: Ben, thank you so much for coming on.
Ben: [crosstalk 00:46:11]
Paul: I’m sorry about the interruption partway through and my connection drop, but it was lovely to have you on the show. Come back in another week and we’ll talk about … I feel like there’s a lot more we can unpack there, so we’ll definitely get you back in again if you’re up for it.
Ben: Yeah, definitely. This has been great. Thank you very much.
Marcus: Good to meet you Ben.
Paul: Awesome, talk to you soon.
Paul: Excellent. So talking of projects and maybe a side project you’ve got, or something you’re trying to build. One of the things that we said there as one of the key aspects of it is marketing, is getting the word out about that product. And that actually brings us quite well onto our next sponsor, which is Balsamiq. I had the weirdest conversation … We talked about this, didn’t we? We had him on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, do you remember?
Marcus: We did. Yeah, that’s right. This has got nothing to do with Balsamiq, has it?
Paul: Yeah, nothing to do with Balsamiq at all, right? So they decided to do something very strange, which is that they bought a load of sponsor slots for the podcast, and they want to donate them to you. So if you’ve got a project that you would like to promote, maybe it’s the Serene app, for example. Or it might be a course that you’re running, or it might be a blog that you’ve got. Doesn’t really matter, as long as it reinforces the kind of values that Balsamiq stand for, which is things like making it accessible, making it usable. Quality user experience stuff. Then they’re happy to give you a slot. So if you’d like me to be promoting your product or service for absolutely free, because Balsamiq have already paid for it, go to Balsamiq.com/go/Boagworld and fill out the application form. And I will read your ad on one of our episodes. Now there are only a few slots available, so act fast.
Paul: But here’s the thing. You’ll go, “Oh yeah, they’ll get so many through that I won’t bother.” I’ve been tweeting this for a week, and they haven’t. Everybody goes, “Oh no, it’s not worth doing because there’ll be so many.” Bullshit, put it in. It’s worth it, because you’ve got a good chance of getting a free slot on the show. When you go to that page of Balsamiq.com/go/Boagworld, there’s also a promo code that you can use if you fancy giving Balsamiq a try. But don’t buy it, because they don’t want anymore customers apparently. Weirdos. I’m not convinced. I think it’s a clever marketing ploy, that’s what I think. [crosstalk 00:49:01]
Marcus: They’re taking over the world, aren’t they? That’s what it is.
Paul: Yeah, I think it’s insidious. I think they’re evil, really.
Marcus: This is the darkest of the dark patterns.
Paul: Yeah. Being nice, damn then.
Marcus: Exactly.
Paul: So actually that turned out all right in the end. Always pleasure to chat with Leigh, and I always end up talking about which piece of software is the coolest. That is our go to conversation with Leigh, he has played with every piece of software on the planet, so that’s always really interesting. And then to talk a little bit about minimal viable products and launching your side projects and that kind of stuff, really good stuff. Marcus, do you have a joke for us?
Marcus: I do, yes. This is one from Paul Edwards who is not with us … Oh, he’s gone on holiday, hasn’t he? I know this because of the slack channel. What do you call a herd of sheep tumbling down a hill?
Paul: You know this is just going to set Chris off, because Chris always associates this podcast with sheep for some reason. What do you call a herd of sheep tumbling down a hill?
Marcus: A lamb slide.
Paul: Oh that is so bad.
Marcus: I think that’s wonderful.
Paul: That is just so bad. There we go.
Marcus: “Baa”, says Gareth.
Paul: I can’t even remember why the whole sheep thing came about, but it’s like-
Marcus: Don’t bring it back up, don’t bring it up.
Paul: It’s too late. Chris is already … He does every show, it’s just his thing. I think he’s got some kind of sheep fetish.
Paul: So yes, talking of the slack channel, we’d love to have you join us. It’s a lovely little community and we hang out and have fun together. Yeah, it’s really pleasant. I’ve heard people go, “Oh, it’s only for freelancers and agencies.” Absolutely not, we have lots of in-house people here, I’ve heard other people go, “Oh, it seems to be a lot of developer talk.” Yes, there is a lot of developer talk. I try my best to discourage it because I don’t understand anything they say. So we need more designers and UX people in the room to actually counteract that pointless code vomiting that goes on all the time. But if you fancy joining us, go to boagworld.com/slack. I’ve now kicked it off with developers in the room. Andrew, you’re not a developer-
Marcus: He’s just a stirrer. That’s what he is.
Paul: He’s a manager, that’s what he is. He’s just a manager.
Marcus: Yeah, yeah. Dream on.
Paul: Right.
Marcus: That’s right. Yes, we’ll call him Andrew Manager Miller from now on. He’ll love that.
Paul: Yeah, absolutely. No-
Marcus: You should create a new little sub-channel within the slack channel-
Paul: Just for managers.
Marcus: Well I was thinking for developers but you know, tuck them away in a corner.
Paul: Well they’re not too bad to be honest. They do take into threads. Lot of the developer stuff disappears into threads. They haven’t been too bad recently, actually. I love our slack channel, it’s the best thing. Really is.
Marcus: It’s very good.
Paul: Anyway that about wraps it up for this week’s show. Lovely to see you all again. Just a reminder that if you want to join us on one of the upcoming episodes you can go to subscribe.boagworld.com/community. But until next week, goodbye.
