FreeAgent

Roan Lavery is the Lead Designer and co-founder of FreeAgent, the best online accounting software out there (note: I do use the software so I am bias but it is pretty damn good). In this interview Roan takes me through how he made the transition from Creative Director for a web agency in Edinburgh to running FreeAgent as a full-time business. If you’re building or run a web app yourself you’re going to really enjoy this interview.

And if you fancy trying out FreeAgent you can use me as a referrer: Referreral Link

Roan: My official title is Lead Designer, but what I do day to day is quite varied. Being the founder of a company, I’m having to do a lot of different things, and I wear a lot of different hats every day basically.

Ryan: OK, and of course you’re talking about FreeAgent. Do you want to tell us a bit about what FreeAgent is?

Roan: Yeah, sure. It’s an online accounting application specifically designed for freelancers and small businesses. So it helps them manage their money, does their invoicing for them, helps them track time and expenses, integrates with online banking, and then it works out the accounts and does tax predictions as well. So it’s really just all about the financial side of being a freelancer, being a small business, and sort of how we can help with that.

Ryan: How long’s FreeAgent been running?

Roan: We founded the company (myself, Olly and Ed) in the start of 2007. There had been a little bit of work done before then, with prototypes, but the company sort of kicked off in 2007. We started up just sort of making a prototype, getting something vaguely working, and we launched a beta version of the app in the middle of 2007 and ran that over the summer. So we had a couple of hundred people just trying out the app, hammering out, telling us what was right, what was wrong with it, and we were able to launch at the end of 2007 commercially. So we started charging for it then, and we’ve been running it commercially for over a year…over a year and a half now.

Ryan: And you kind of worked on the app partly in your spare time, and then you’ve took the plunge and gone full time on the app, I mean how long…

Roan: Yeah, all of us had full time jobs when we first started working on FreeAgent. I was working as the Creative Director of a web agency in Edinburgh, and Olly and Ed worked in sort of contract consulting, so we all had jobs to do. FreeAgent was very much a side project for us, and we didn’t know if it was going to work. We though it was a quite a cool idea, you know, there was nothing really focused for freelancers, so we thought we’d kind of keep building away, and we did that basically until the end of 2008. All that time, we were building this project in our spare time, trying to get it going, and the app was building, coming along, getting users on board, we were making a little bit of money, and it got to the point where it was becoming more and more difficult not to treat this as a side project. It was obvious that it was going to work, but it needed a proper commitment from all of us, and when you’re trying to do it in the evenings and at weekends – all of us have got young families, so we had to try and juggle that around having kids – it’s really tricky, and something had to give, and that something was our day jobs, basically. So, we took the decision that we were going to jack in the day jobs, and we took a little bit of investment money that would help tide us over until we thought the app would be generating enough revenue to pay us all a salary, and just went for it basically. We went for it about the end of 2008, and the start of 2009 was when we all went properly full time.

Ryan: So at the end of 2008, was it just the three of you that moved onto working on it full time?

Roan: Kind of. We’d be working with our outsourced sales guy, who was helping us with accoutants, getting them to pass FreeAgent onto their clients. So we brought on board the sales guy around the end of 2008 to help with that, and it was the beginning of 2009 when we got our first small office, with me, Ed and David (our sales guy) kind of seconded in there. But over 2009 was when things started really taking off for us, we started getting a lot more users on board, and we were just being able to bring more people on board into the company.

Ryan: So what’s an average week like for you?

Roan: Well, it’s a little bit different to when I was previously working at an agency, because obviously when you’re a designer in an agency you’re getting client briefs, you’re responding to them, you’re maybe doing mock-ups and front-end templates and stuff like that. When I’m working at FreeAgent, there’s less about designing a layer or something like that, there’s more thinking about “let’s look at a new feature in the app,” so how does that work within the application? Where does it go? What’s the user workflow? What’s the user experience of this? Or, how can we take an existing part of the app and make that work better for people? So it’s a lot of wireframing and talking to the developer guys, seeing what’s easy to do, really working quite closely with them, and just implementing those new features and making the app as polished and as easy to use as we possibly can. There’s a fair bit of my time spent doing that, and other time spent…like it’s my responsibility to track web analytics, and be on top of the SEO or the PPC campaigns that we do, so doing a fair bit of the online marketing side of things as well.

Ryan: So rewind a bit, let’s go back to the start of your career. How did you start out?

Roan: Well, I did a degree at university in physics, and when I finished that I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to get a job for one thing, so I did a PHD and ended up staying at university for another 4 years, and I quickly realised that I didn’t really enjoy being an academicm, but I wanted to stick out the PHD because I thought I’d started it so I might as well stick it out, but I always knew I was going to be doing something else. During my last year of doing my PHD, I wasn’t getting any funding because I’d run over my grant, so it took a year to write up, so I had to sign on – I was on the dole for a year. By the time I actually finished my PHD and got my thesis written, the dole were getting pretty stroppy with me, wanted me to get a job. So they suggested I go to this course, which was a web design course, which I thought was great because I’d been interested in web design when I was at uni but never really got a chance to pursue it, so I ended up going on this short course, this 6 month course teaching web design, and I loved it, it was an absolutely great course. I ended up staying with that company for 8 years, because after the course they took me on as an intern, and I worked there a bit just learning all about web design. Then I ended up, a little bit later on, teaching the course that I had been on, and that company did some training and also had a web design side to the business as well, and basically over the years I went from working on the training side to working on the web design side, and I ended up running the web design side of the business and leading a small team of developers there. That gave me a huge breadth of experience, everything from training through to designm, front-end build, online marketing, co-operating – because it was a really small agency, I got a chance to try out all the different aspects of it. So I was there for…that was where I was up until I started FreeAgent.

Ryan: So, one question I ask a lot of people is: what are you most proud of in your career? Do you have something you look back on and think I’m really proud of what I achieved there?

Roan: I think FreeAgent’s the one I’m definitely most proud of. It’s not a written story by any means, there’s still a lot more for us to do with FreeAgent, but I think quitting your day job and working for someone else, starting up something which is your own project and trying to see that through…you’re always reading some blog articles about people saying how you should start your own side projects up, and you get a lot out of it, and I totally relate with that, but being able to take it and actually turn it into a successful business, where in a day you get people emailng and saying “I love your application so much, it’s transformed the way I run my business” – getting that feedback is incredibly nice to hear and it does make it all worthwhile. So, hearing that is something I’m really really proud of, you know, I’m proud of what we’ve managed to achieve with FreeAgent, and I still think there’s a lot more we can do.

Ryan: So from building FreeAgent, what lessons have you learned that you would tell other people about – what advice would you give about starting a successful app that you could do full time?

Roan: Yeah, I think the first thing I would say is: just do it. It really is an incredibly worthwhile thing to do, so if you’re at all thinking about an idea, if you’re considering a start-up, I would really recommend it as a worthwhile venture. It’s a really rewarding thing to do, even if it doesn’t turn out hugely successful, you’ll learn a massive amount in that process. In terms of how you make it successful, it’s a difficult thing. I think have an idea about how you’re going to make money from it from a very early point. Even if you don’t make money from it straight away, at least have an idea for a business model of how you are actually going to make revenue from this, because if you leave it until much later down the line, I think you’ll find it quite tricky – it’s hard to retrofit something like a business model, despite what Twitter might tell you. That would certainly be one of the things I would advise.

Ryan: OK, and what mistakes have you made that you would tell people: avoid that completely?

Roan: Well, I’ve made loads of mistakes. I think the biggest one is…it’s quite funny because you read a lot about people doing web apps and things like that and they always say “build an application for you, build it to solve a problem that you’ve got”. Now I totally do agree with that, but there is a flipside, and that is if you build it for the way that you work, and it just so happens that everyone else works a little differently to you, then you’re kind of screwed. That’s what happened with FreeAgent – there’s a lot we got right, but the stuff we got really wrong with FreeAgent was making assumptions about the way other people would work based on how we worked, and those assumptions were wrong. So, the kind of key thing is that you build something to solve your problem, but get it out into other people’s hands as quickly as you can, and realise where you’ve screwed up quickly. So, get other people using it, even if you don’t think it’s that well polishedm, get it out there and wait for them to come back and say “er, this is wrong, you’re going to need to fix this” or “this is confusing” and then just kind of improve it from there.

Ryan: What do you do to manage that feedback, because obviously you must have thousands of people using FreeAgent, how do you keep track of it all and prioritise it all?

Roan: It’s really difficult. That is I guess the other main strand of what I do, it’s really just kind of like keeping your ear to the ground and seeing what’s out there. We use a web application called GetSatisfaction which is a community support/discussion forum application. We were one of the first people to use that, we started a couple of years ago, and that has been incredibly useful for us just to gauge what people want, what they like, what they don’t like, and then they can start discussions with other users and things like that. In the early days, it was really good because we could be incredibly responsive to people. They could say “what about this feature?” and we could say “no problem, we’ll have that implemented in 3 week’s time” or something, and now it just isn’t like that. So as an application matures, as it gets much more complicated and you have to worry about scaling and things like that like we do now, the management process of customer feedback and the roadmap is much more…delicate, shall we say.

Ryan: And being responsible to your users as well, the more people who are using it.

Roan: That’s right. There’s a much bigger support burden on us nowadays because we’ve got a lot more people using the application, so it’s about managing people’s expectations, but at the same time making sure you are totally engaged with your users because at the end of the day you’re making it for them, and they do know best, so using GetSatisfaction, Twitter’s another thing we use a lot, we’re always talking with our users on Twitter as well. So there’s a lot of these different tools out there but the key thing is just to make sure you listen to people, just make sure you listen to them. Even if you’re not saying you’ll put it in next week or next monthm, put it to the back of your mind and then if somebody else mentions it and then somebody else mentions it after them you can start to say “actually guys, this needs to be a priority for us” and we can start bumping it up the roadmap.

Ryan: So what are you most excited about at the minute, in the industry?

Roan: I think there are some really good things coming along. As a front-end guy, the fairly rapid adoption of HTML5 and CSS3 is quite an exciting thing, and people are starting to do some really crazy things just using CSS3, I saw some Andy Clarke stuff recently which was pretty mental. I think that stuff, as a designer, being able do do those things easily without having to resort to stuff like Flash is really exciting. We’re really looking forward to rebuilding FreeAgent as an HTML5 app and some of the stuff that’s functionally going to bring us as well, offline storage and stuff like that. I think that really excites me as well.

Ryan: OK so, I’m digressing because you’re an application man and I’m helping build a web app, but what do you do about browser support? Do you have graded browser support for FreeAgent and things like that?

Roan: A little bit, we’re not quite at the Yahoo! standard or anything like that. Because of our customer base, because of our user base, we don’t really have to worry about people using IE6 or anything like that, or we can say “no, we’re not going to support that” and that’s a decision we’ve made. So we’ve said we will support IE7 and above. You do need JavaScript to run FreeAgent. I think that as you get more and more involved with web apps, it becomes really really difficult to support a non-JavaScript version of the app for closed applications. We tried, in first year of running FreeAgent, we really tried to make sure we always had graceful degradation, but eventually it’s just become too much of a development overhead to maintain, so we had to make the decision that it was going to be a JavaScript-only application. And for our user base, which is really technically-able people by and large – it is web designers, developers, IT consultants, stuff like thatm, it’s not a problem. As for the visual stuff like using CSS3, I think it’s fine that browsers like Internet Explorer aren’t getting the full polished package, that’s absolutely fine as long as the app looks good in those browsers too, I think it’s fine.

Ryan: I agree. It’s one of those things when you get to a web app it’s a controlled environment isn’t it, and you can make what’s going to happen once you get into the application completely clear before they sign up, so I think it’s to be expected that you’re going to get JavaScript. Where do you see yourself in the future? What are your plans?

Roan: It’s a difficult one, because if you asked me that 2 years ago, I would have had fairly modest expectations for what we were doing with FreeAgent, and I think we’ve surpassed those expectations so…I mean we’ve got our own plans for where we see our business in a year or two’s time in terms of how many people are going to be in the company and how many users we hope we’ll have and things like that, but in terms of where we’ll end up, I don’t think any of us really know. We’re so focused on the next…for example the next soft release, which is next weekm, so all of our concentration is about how we can make sure the next release goes out and it’s as great as it possibly can be, so I think a couple of years down the line is different. For me, having come from a client/agency background, and now coming into application design, I absolutely love application design. It’s a much more challenging problem, rather than a lot of the time when you’re doing websites you’re kind of churning out websites that are not of a similar look, but certainly of a similar level of functionality, so another content management site, or another event booking site or something like that, and there’s a lot of repetition. When you’re doing a web app, you’ve quite often got some really difficult challenges and interesting problems, so as a designer they’re fascinating to get your teeth into, and working with the community, working with your users, getting their feedback and stuff, it’s a really good thing. So, I’ll definitely be involved in application UI in some way.

Ryan: And being able to go back and fix things that you’re not happy with, which you often can’t do with websites.

Roan: Yeah, that’s an amazing thing, I mean there was a little while back where I spent an entire day just designing our login page, and you would never have that luxury if you were doing client work because you’ve got deadlines and budgets and things like that. Actually we’ve got a new designer come on board, and I’ve said I really want him to have the ability to just pick apart bits of the app you don’t like, and actually spend a bit of time redesigning that and see if we can make it better, and don’t worry about deadlines and things like that, just have their freedom to say can we approach this whole thing from a different angle, and that’s a really nice thing to be able to do.

Ryan: OK, well thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me Roan, that’s really interesting, and I’ll speak to you soon.

Roan: Great, speak to you soon.

Thanks goes to David Goss for transcribing this interview.

3rd Edition

Ethan Marcotte is an Interactive Design Director at Happy Cog. He’s a contributing author to Handcrafted CSS, Web Standards Creativity and Professional CSS and has recently collaborated with Jeffery Zeldman on the third additional of his classic Designing with Web Standards. Ethan has also been a featured speaker at SXSW Interactive festival, An Event Apart, Harvard University and AIGA’s In Control conference. Check out his blog at unstoppablerobotninja.com and find him on twitter under @beep.

Interview Transcript

Ethan: My job title is Interactive Design Director at Happy Cog and it’s a little bit of a hybrid position as pretty much every job title I’ve ever had doesn’t totally encompass everything I do. So depending on the needs of the project, I could be doing anything from working with Greg Storey on Art Direction, or leading up doing template production – y’know dealing with somebody else’s art work. I’m actually working on a large project right now with a university on the West Coast of the States on Information Architecture and trying to help them plan out the user experience. So I guess I try to touch on different aspects of the project depending on how they impact the end user adn the final experience.

Ryan: Ok, so what’s an average week like for you – do you have an average week?

Ethan: (Laughs) Do I have an average week? It really depends on the project. We’ve got a really talented team of designers and developers at Happy Cog, so I tend to be working with them in an advisory capacity a little bit, although it’s usually watching them make awesome things and just sitting back and enjoying the fun. Lately like I said I’ve been spending a lot of time in Omnigraffle sketching out navigation flows for large sites, to working on wireframes y’know, but a lot of the time I like to keep my hands dirty on a lot of things. At the end of the day I like to crack open Photoshop and work on some personal projects, I do a fair bit of speaking as well so A lot of keynote time from time to time. So there’s not really an average week I guess – a lot of variety.

Ryan: Cool! So how long have you been at Happy Cog?

Ethan: Well I’ve been at Happy Cog officially since August last year now. Before that I was at a company called Air Bag, which is based out in California and was founded by Greg Storey. I was working there for about two and a half years and then basically we were sort of competing with Happy Cog on a lot of projects. We would find out we were bidding on the same projects and travelling in the same circles a lot of the time, so eventually we just ended up merging with Happy Cog and we are working now as their West Coast offices right now. So I guess I’ve been working at this company I’m at now for three years, but I’ve been at Happy Cog now officially since August.

Ryan: You mention the speaking, how big-a-part of your work life is that?

Ethan: This year it’s gonna be bigger than most. I try to do like three or four events every year along with speaking at some local colleges and designer groups in Boston. This year I’m doing all five of ‘An Event Apart’, which I’m really excited about and I just did the AIGA In Control Conference in January. There has also been a lot of in-promptu stuff that has come from working with web standards last year with Jeffrey Zeldman. The Boagworld thing was pretty awesome, so thanks for having us there. But this year has been really busy, but really exciting – the calendar seems to be filling up.

Ryan: I do want to talk to you about designing with web standards, but we’ll cover that in a little bit. Rewind a little bit and take me to the start of your career, how did you get started?

Ethan: Kind of accidently. I started working online in my second year of University where I was a literature major in college. I had just gotten my hands on a not quite legitimate copy of Photoshop, so I kind of started using it and I kind of fell in love with graphic design and I started working online as an extension of that. So student organisations that I was part of and some school departments, I just started building for them. When I finished up at school I was at a fork in the road and I thought about going into extended schooling, maybe going into some advanced degree in literature, or taking a few years off and working online, getting a dot com job and making it rich – which is working out very well (laughs). I took a few years off and got a quote en quote job and seeing if I missed the schooling and that would be a good start; but I’m about fifteen years into taking a few years off, so it seems to be working out so far.

Ryan: So what was your first job relating to what you’re doing now – the first job that sent you down this path?

Ethan: My first job was awful actually. I worked with some incredibly talented people in a small dot com outside of New York City. It was really awful working conditions, really long hours and the actual work I was doing wasn’t really that exciting. Bu the people I was working with were incredibly talented, so I think it was one of the first opportunities that I had to get rid of a lot of the bad habits that I had picked up learning on my own and getting in my own routines. I kind of got hooked on the studio environment and every job I’ve had since then, I’ve really tried to look at the people rather than the things that they’re working on. I tend to think that – with the exception on my first job, that if there are interesting people working there, that there ten to be interesting people working there. So I guess that’s how I got started, in New Jersey of all places with a copy of Home Site working on some crazy deadlines with some really great people.

Ryan: So where did you go from there – what was the next step?

Ethan: From there I moved up to Boston, which is pretty much where I’ve been ever since in 2001. That was a interesting job, I was working for a consulting company that tossed around all of the keywords like ‘B to B’, ‘B to C’, ‘Systems Integration’ and stuff like that. They had just bought a new studio in Soho down in Manhattan that had a really interesting background in print and they were one of the first companies to work online and I found myself working for the Boston offices of this new studio and spent a lot of time down there and worked on a lot of financial plans for the most part. Again there was a lot of people there from varied backgrounds – at the time, the web was so new that nobody had actually gone to school for anything I.T related. I worked with artists, writers, photographers that were basically web designers and web developers. There was this really great multi-disciplined approach to working online, for somebody that was a literature major that was pretty appealing to me. So yeah I was there for two years and when things eventually got a little bit rocky I decided to jump ship and move over to Harvard where I worked for a couple of different years holding a few different jobs, but the stability thing kind of appealed to me at that point. So yeah, like I say, I worked at a couple of different places. I worked at the education school first for this almost research based little dot com for want of a better term. They did online courses, so I worked on this team that worked on their custom software application and basically acting like a designer working on a three man software team. Trying to help them figure out what their students actually needed and the best way to customise that experience for them from people working in the development world versus people working two towns over from Harvard. I really enjoyed it there; it was kind of fast paced, but a little weird, very sort of left brain research driven environment, but it was a lot of fun. But then I actually moved into a different position working for a group that essentially built course ware for the University, which was another set of challenges altogether because it was based around pushing something out to lots of different schools put together. If you’ve ever worked in a large University, you’ll know that every department, much less every school is it’s own little fiefdom and there’s no technical standards for the most part. Getting an experience in place for somebody that was working in the Business School that was working in the Medical School was an interesting challenge. But it was great, it was a lot of fun – the software that we worked on is still in use today. It was a really great time and I felt myself in another fork in the road after spending two or three years. I could see myself doing that for another ten years, but I had also been doing a lot of freelancing at the time and it was starting to get the point where I kind of felt like maybe I should try this out for a while and branch out on my own, so eventually I did. Anyway, that was the very long winded version but…

Ryan: And the freelancing lead to the business that you were in that has now merged with Happy Cog?

Ethan: Yeah, so I was independent for about three years trading under the name Virtua for a while and worked with a couple of different clients. I worked for a while with an institution that actually does Au Pair matching, which was actually really interesting and staffed with some really great people. Then I ended up working for New York Magazine for their bug re-design in 2006 – most of which I believe is still around today. They were an incredible client, I still talk about that all of the time as I really learned a lot from working on a site of that size and working under deadlines that tight. They really had a lot of my personal heroes, a lot of my personal design heroes actually worked there. Ian Adelman is their Creative Director, if you’ve ever been to the site then its a really great example of taking an offline identity and merging it to the web and feels uniquely suited to life online. Just in general, it was a great time and I really had a great time working on it. But yeah after a while, I started working with Airbag on some projects, then more and more and more of my work just ended up coming from them. At some point I sat down with Greg Storey and we talked about formalising the relationship a little bit. So eventually I became a part of Airbag and then found myself a part of Happy Cog – it was like a weird dream come true.

Ryan: So you mentioned obviously earlier that you co-authored the third edition of Designing with Web Standards? So how did that come about – in the third edition, Jeffrey brought you in to help write it?

Ethan: Yeah, I keep thinking that Jeffrey meant to ask the other Ethan Marcotte to work on it. It was surreal and I actually wrote this on my dedication in the book. Designing with web standards was a huge moment for me when I first bought it. I had been reading Jeffrey’s blog for a while, but to actually hold this thing in hand and show it to clients and say ‘look, we have to revolutionise the way we are building websites’ was a huge moment for me. I had always had this hero worship thing with him for years before I had even met the man, but when you do, he is actually one of the kindest, most generous and funniest people you ever likely to meet. So I’ve been fortunate enough to work with Jeffrey on a couple of things, I’ve written for A List Apart a couple of times and I’m one of the magazine’s technical editors and just a few side projects here and there, for example I was a part of the Html5 Super Friends last year, which was a lot of fun. So when he asked me to help him write and finish the book, it was a huge honour – it was one of the most fun writing projects I’ve ever had. So yeah, I don’t really know how it came about, but I’m certainly really fortunate that it did – so that was fun!

Ryan: So what’s it been like personally now that the book is out and people are reading it – has anything changed for you. When people write a book, they tend to get a lot more attention, have you experienced that yourself?

Ethan: Well yeah, there was a crowd of groupies outside of my apartment (laughs). No I mean it’s not like I get recognised in the street or anything y’know I’m not the guy with the blue beanie. But nothing has really changed all that much – I’ve gotten some interesting emails from readers and it’s been really nice to see that for those of us who work and write, especially for us in the web standards circle that there are some people put there that this material is still new and daunting. So hearing that Designing with web Standards is their first edition – that has been important to me I think. There was this one woman that was middle aged and she was taking a continuing education web design class and this was the text book. She had been working with table based layouts for years and she was writing in saying she didn’t understand this whole float model thing, saying she didn’t find it compelling and not as powerful. This is someone who has never seen the CSS Zen Garden and probably doesn’t read any of our blogs. She was at that point where we were about ten years ago, when we were serving up these all of old techniques, trying to figure how to make the transition. So it was heartening to hear that there was still an audience for this kind of stuff. I think that is the main thing that has changed – I’m not getting mobbed by Paparazzi or anything like that.

Ryan: One thing that I ask a lot of people that I interview is ‘what is your greatest achievement’ career wise, or personal wise? What are you most proud of?

Ethan: Well this could be a long and awkward part, I may just start crying.

Ryan: Well If I can make someone start crying, then that’s a good interview (laughs).

Ethan: Thanks Barbara Walters. I guess what I’m most proud of lately is that I’m getting the opportunity to work on a lot of different things. Designing with Web Standards was huge for me, but in terms of what I have produced personally, I think that I’ve always been a big fan of flexible layouts and the whole fluid grids thing that I wrote about on A List Apart last year. It was really nice to finally have that out in the open; that was something that came out of a challenging client project. I think for the longest time, we as designers, we try to write constraints for ourselves because we try to find comfort in having some boundaries in our work. Especially working online, as soon as something is published and shown to users, we surrender so much control. I guess for the longest time, I’ve always tried to marry complex, rich layout with that loss of control that flexible layouts bring and the fluid grids thing seems like a really nice approach to me. I think that’s probably one of the things I’m most proud of lately, just trying to walk the walk a little bit in terms of non-pix width layouts. But other than that yeah, I was really pleased about working with web standards and incredibly humbled by that. Being a part of Dan Cederholm’s Hand Crafted Css book last year was also a lot of fun. So yeah, last year has been really busy for me and it’s looking like it’s going to continue.

Ryan: So is there anything that you wish that you’d done differently – have you got any regrets, or any missed opportunities?

Ethan: Hmm. Yeah plenty, I think especially since I was coming out of school in the early days of the web, I really do wish that I’d had a bit more formal training in Art History and Art Criticism I think. Most of what I’ve learned, whether it’s front end development, or Art History, it’s all been self taught and I can see the holes in my thinking – especially when listening to someone like Mark Bolton speak. So if I had infinite time and resources, I think I would go back to school for some training in that. But y’know, hindsight is 20/20 and all that. At the start of University I thought that I was going to be some dottering old literature professor when I was fifty, but things happen sometimes.

Ryan: I think that that’s also a difficult one to tackle, as often you don’t know what knowledge you’re missing because you don’t know you’re missing it.

Ethan: Haha – yeah exactly! In my first couple of jobs, everybody had fallen into the web and I think that just now we’re getting to the point where online design programs are getting to the point where people can go to school to work as a web professional, so I wonder if we’re becoming a dying breed, the self taught dinosaurs.

Ryan: People are still asking that. That’s one of the reasons that I do these interviews because of people asking how people get started and wondering what inspired them to continue. So what are you most excited about at the moment? What are you talking about and blogging about and talking about in the industry at the minute?

Ethan: Well, the subject of my AEA (An Event Apart Conference – organised by Eric Meyer) is a lot to do with the fact that we are starting to see clients with things like the Iphone, smartphones and the Android and web OS in general, that people are starting to see that there’s a world outside designing for the desktop. The result is that people are starting to ask and say ‘well I need an Iphone website’, or ‘I need a Blackberry website’, so try and think about treating whether it’s designing for the web, or designing for mobile and different displays and how we can start to treat all of these things as one experience; also using things like media queries and some intelligent design practices to be more responsive in general. I think it’s just breaking out of that compartmentalised thinking of ‘I need a print based website’ and ‘I need my webkit content to live over here’. That’s what has been really exciting for me, just thinking beyond the desktop a little bit. Beyond that, I spend an inordinate amount of time on Dribbble, I think that’s one of my favourite sites and I just love tinkering with it. There’s a lot of really great stuff on there and it’s a kind of perpetual inspiration machine. Are you on it?

Ryan: I am yeah – although I haven’t uploaded a lot of stuff on it, but I’ve started uploading a bit more stuff on it recently with a few things I’ve been doing. But yeah it’s good fun to see what other people are working on and it make you want to try harder to try and impress your peers a little bit more and thinking you want t work a bit harder on this project to make everyone go ‘OOO’.

Ethan: It’s really weird how it works, I was talking to Rob Weycher who’s a really talented designer who lives in Boston no and he said ‘well y’know it really just makes me want to create more’. Which is great, at the end of the day It’s easy for me to switch off and not want to be in front of a computer screen, but every once in a while I just get this Dribbble itch and need to get something out there. So it’s kinda nice and I like it a lot.

Ryan: They’ve just opened it for everyone to view, so it’s not closed to the public.

Ethan: Yeah, I think its read only to the public, but you can go on there and see the commentaries, but you still have to get the golden ticket to actually post stuff and respond to comments on stuff.

Ryan: Ok – so just to wrap up, where do you see yourself in the future; where would you like to see yourself in the future?

Ethan: Uh (pauses). That is a great question, I guess I’m really happy right now, I’ve got a great job and I’m able to do some speaking with some of my heroes and I think that at least right now, I can at least see myself doing this for a while. I guess the main thing for me is that as long as I can work on interesting projects and work with good people, then I’m pretty happy. At some point, I would actually like to write a book solo. We’ll see if that ever happens, but I’ve been kicking around with some ideas, so I think that’s kind of next on the list right now – beyond that, I’m good.

Ryan: Alright, well thank you very much for taking the time to speak to us Ethan and I’m sure people will really enjoy that.

Ethan: Ok -hey Ryan thank you very much for having me, this has been a real pleasure.

Thanks goes to Blake Williams for transcribing this interview.

To ensure you never miss an episode you can:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed
• Subscribe to my iTunes feed
• Follow me on twitter

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

The Whuffie Factor

Tara Hunt is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, karaoke lover and one of the most influential women in technology (according to Fast Company Magazine in 2009). In this weeks episode Tara talks to me about how she got started and her career to date, her love for karaoke, writing her book The Whuffie Factor, her experiences with public speaking and what she’s most excited about. You can find Tara on her personal site HorsePigCow.

Interview Transcript

Ryan: So what is your job title?

Tara: Well, I like to say author, speaker, karaoke lover.

Ryan: I saw your tweets about karaoke when we were in South By South-West, I saw that you were in the Sixth Lounge.

Tara: All about the karaoke at South By South-West for sure, yeah.

Ryan: Cool. So what’s an average week like for you? Is there an average week?

Tara: Average week… Well it depends on the week, so yeah there is not really an average. Quite often I am on the road, traveling, so a lot of the average week is spent in airports and hotel rooms. My favourite weeks are at home, quite often working on my startup with my cofounders. A lot of business stuff right now, like documents and getting those ready and presentations and looking over different open source code repositories to see if there is anything we can get out of there and web architectural documents, wire framing, that sort of thing. I try and spend a lot of time reading as well, but I am particularly in love with my lifestyle because there is not really a set routine and perhaps, for me – because I am easily distractible, a set routine would be a good thing, but I can never really stick to it.

So, I wake up when I want to and I have an average thing that I do every day which is to take my dog for a walk for an hour in the park, to get my head in the right space, and then get back home and turn on my computer. Usually there is a lot of email, I haven’t really found a good alternative to email, but that seems to be where all my business opportunities are, my potential speaking engagements, it sets the stage for things I need to get done and articles I need to participate in, send in quotes for or write myself. Sometimes I get inspired to write a blog post from certain interactions in the morning.

It’s very all over the place. A lot of fussing around, checking out what sort of links people are posting and the news of the day on Twitter, like where peoples heads are at, what the latest meme to follow and figure out is. I just discovered the other day through something somebody posted on Facebook that there’s this thing, oh… what is it called? I just forgot the name of it, “scraps”, I think, no it’s “shreds”. Have you seen shreds?

Ryan: No?

Tara: So shreds are basically where you take a music video, it was started by some guy in Finland who goes by St. Sanders, he takes his guitar and he records over his interpretation of what the guitar and the vocals and whatever else, like the clapping, would sound like.

Ryan: Right?

Tara: It’s pretty hilarious. I went through all these different shreds videos and figured out, I think it was on Jimmy Kimble Live, that it was this big meme, it’s not new news, it’s quite old news. But these are interesting things to me because I like to say that if there was any job title that I was allowed to give myself it would be, like, “Curious”, I guess. I’m really curious about human beings and our behaviour in web culture, our participation and why something like shreds has been picked up by such a wide audience of people to participate in, to create themselves and then pass around. A lot of these videos have well over half a million views and hundreds and hundreds of comments on them as well as video responses to them. It’s interesting to me that it’s really a silly thing, definitely fun to watch, and that it would create a whole community around shredding, as such.

I’ve always been a karaoke lover for my own reasons, but as soon as it occurred to me that it was a huge phenomenon in our social geek community and something that a lot of us have in common, this love of karaoke, and if you’re with an average group of people where somebody says “Oh, let’s go do karaoke” then most of the people in the group are like “No, way. I’m not going to subject myself to that.” But if you’re in a group of social geeks and everybody is like “Yeahhh! Let’s go, I know ten places that I love to frequent.”

So this was such a major phenomenon in our group and I really think that it is the participatory nature of karaoke and shredding, where you get to take a video and interpret it yourself so that you are participating in it, and like anything that allows the audience to talk back in that way, or for the audience to become the artist themselves, is something that’s taken up with great gusto in our community.

Which I just find fascinating and I’m finding more and more examples of this and fascinated by it and wondering how this is going to transform general culture. Like, how is this going to transform the World and what is business going to look like ten years down the road? What is our urban planning going to look like ten years down the road? All the ways that people are finding to participate rather than idly stand by and watch others perform and just be a passive audience is what is interesting to me.

Ryan: Okay. So you mention that you’re now working on a startup, do you want to tell me a little bit about this startup?

Tara: Yeah. It’s sort of along the same threads, but once again it is putting the, formally known as passive, audience into the drivers seat. So I’m looking at something that’s near and dear to my heart which is shopping, online shopping, and putting the customer into the drivers seat.

So we all know that word of mouth is the strongest form of “marketing”, whether or not you can call it marketing or just the way we interact with one another, and we see evidence of this all the time. Somebody will post to Facebook or Twitter that they are buying a new digital camera for themselves, that they’ve kind of seen somebody with a Canon and seen somebody with a Fuji or a Nikon and I like all those three cameras but can people give feedback, which you’ll see in the comments or @ replies on Twitter that there are numerous “Oh, I have a Canon, I love it, it’s a really hearty camera which takes beautiful pictures. Here, take a look at my Flickr stream and you’ll get a good idea of the kind of pictures it takes in low light, in nature, etc.” Then everybody will do that with the camera of their choice or maybe with a camera that they’ve been looking at themselves, admiring and thinking about buying. Then at the end the person get’s to make a decision based on real people and real people’s feedback, not like if they’ve gone to a Canon or Fuji or Nikon representative, they’ve actually talked to their friends who have used the devices and been told how they are enjoying them.

So we see this all the time, that we’re influencing each other and we’re asking one another for opinions on shopping. So there’s a lot of recommendation engines out there and stuff, but they aren’t really vendor focused. If you go to Amazon there are recommendations based on what you buy and what your friends buy, that sort of thing. You go to, even something like, Style Feeder you get the same thing, you go to Kaboodle and even the social shopping sites and a lot of it is driven off the vendor participation.

We’re looking at it purely from the customer’s point of view. If you take a look at Blippy for instance, I love Blippy and have been using it, have you seen it?

Ryan: I haven’t no.

Tara: Okay, well it’s kind of freaky and interesting all at once. So with Blippy you put in your Amazon and iTunes account information, some people put in their credit card information, and it records, basically by pulling from the feed of transactions, everything that you buy. Then it shares it and your friends can comment on your purchases and be like “Hey, man. How did you like that movie that you watched?” I think I rented Good Hair, the documentary, on iTunes and a whole bunch of people jumped on and were like “Oh, I haven’t seen that, is it good?” and then I can answer back “Yeah, it’s great, I really enjoyed it.” That’s really interesting to me because it’s really from the point of view of purely what you buy, right. You’re getting a really good live stream of just what you’re buying and what you’re paying attention to with your money.

We’re already thinking about this in terms of like what would happen if you took this step further and you also took a step back with the privacy of it. Blippy is fabulous because you can record everything really easily, you don’t even have to do anything and it records it for you, so we’re thinking about it from a bit of a different perspective, you don’t give us any passwords or anything. But then once you’ve got all your purchase history from all over the place, across wherever you are buying, you are not only able to see what your friends are buying and comment on it, but you can also start to track who you are influencing, how you’re influencing them and what areas you have more influence in that others.

For me, personally, a lot of people don’t think of me as an electronics genius or anything. So I might buy a new remote control, something most my friends would shrug their shoulders and pass that by or maybe my music isn’t their taste, but then anytime I’ve said I’ve purchased something from Sephora, I’m a makeup junky, a lot of my girl friends will ask what my opinion is on certain face creams and certain makeup lines and whether or not I like the powdered foundation versus the liquid foundation and what kind of results I’m getting. I know a lot of them go out and buy different products because I’m using them and enjoy them.

So what happens then, on the next level, is that I can see my path of influence. If you take that data and then leverage it for better deals for perhaps even setting up my own personalised shop so that I can make affiliate money off of it, who knows, there’s all sorts of interesting ideas with that. The customer is totally in charge, there’s no bribing by vendors, it doesn’t matter what it is, it could be the smallest local store all the way up to the big giants like Sephora that you’re buying these products from. We’re going to be trying to include the online/offline shopping experience in it as well.

Ryan: Okay. So is this a service that you provide, or are you analysing other services?

Tara: This is a service where, right now, we’re in the midst of testing and setting up and then hopefully launching within the next six weeks. Just like a really tiny beta version where just tracking is involved to begin with, tracking and sharing.

Ryan: Okay, cool. Is there a URL that anyone can go to to get more information or…?

Tara: Yeah, sure. Shwowp, so “wow” and “shopping”.

Ryan: Okay, cool. So, that’s what you’re doing now. This series is called “Please Start From The Beginning” so I want you to rewind a little bit and just tell me how you got started.

Tara: How I got started… Quite, actually well I don’t know if it was, accidentally. But back in 1992, when I was pregnant with my son, I was really lost because I was about to be a young mother and somebody had pointed me towards Usenet groups and so I got a really slow internet web account to attach me to the internet and all of a sudden I was asking questions and chatting with these groups. Then I went to university, and because I was already sort of getting into it and understanding it a little bit more and more savvy, while I was in university I’d be talking to people and they’d be like “Oh, so our club here at the university should have a website but we don’t have money and we don’t know where to start.” So I started to build webpages for some clubs and for myself and for friends and then the next thing I knew, when I graduated, my first job was doing corporate communications with an oil and gas company. They didn’t hire me because I was particularly savvy in oil and gas, they hired me because they needed somebody who understood the web and where the web was going.

I thought this was quite temporary and I wanted to get into more traditional marketing and every job that I continued to get along the way was all web related because, it was like 1999/2000/2001, the bubble was just bursting, but people were really interested and not very many people, especially where I was in Calgary, Alberta, knew what they were doing on that end. So I had taught myself Flash development and Director (I was certified in Director, and yeah, it’s obsolete now), HTML, XHTML and stuff like that, a little JavaScript and stuff. I was able to understand the web stuff and so my job was Communications/Web Girl. I had no idea what was happening outside of Calgary really at the time, I was actually focused on getting out of the web because I was feeling like I was just being put into this little tiny slice. I, myself, knew that it was going to be really big but I had no idea what was in store for this wonderful World Wide Web world that I was in. So, slowly but surely, my piece of the pie started growing over the years and the more I resisted the more I was pulled into it.

Every job I had, in my post secondary adult life, was web related so the online marketing stuff just came out of that and the next thing I knew I was blogging, then there were a bunch of other jobs in between and running my own company, then being drafted down to start work for a startup in Silicon Valley, in 2005.

People were talking about it, but very few people were really just doing a purely online marketing platform, like an online community marketing platform, and that’s what I did with the startup, it was riya.com and they did facial recognition in photos. We launched within six months to a million photos uploaded, from over twenty-thousand people within twenty-four hours of launching, and it was this huge thing where people were like “Whoa, that works! So, lots of people were talking about it and she just made it happen.” Then I started getting invited to conferences and to speak about what I just did and I had no idea what I just did other than I was given a budget of zero dollars and told “Go work your webby magic.” It just evolved from there.

So now five years later I have a book and it’s all so trippy, I just really literally just stumbled my way through it. I always had this pure notion that I wanted to change the World in the way that I wanted to invert hierarchies, especially getting into marketing and feeling like there’s something seriously wrong with marketing and the way that companies view and deal with customers and see them as consumers and numbers and targets and all these awful ways, and I always thought there was something desperately wrong with that. It wasn’t until I got in, and really just gave way, to the web stuff and watched these phenomenons like shredding, these phenomenas like Rick Rolling, these phenomenas like blogging and Tweeting and all these that were happening where people really wanted to talk back and participate and contribute and be part of the experience rather than just be passive recipients. Then I realised what they key was in all of that and got really utopic about it and excited about that this is going to change all of it. We still see a lot of top-down power structures but they’re scared and they’re doing desperate things and they’re failing all over the place. We even see traditionally top-down media and corporations trying to participate and just participating badly in media because they still see this control of it and that they’re the givers and we’re the recipients, kind of. So I think over the next couple of years we’re going to see this huge drastic change and it’s exciting to me.

I know you just asked me a very simple question and I just rambled on!

Ryan: No, no, that’s the best way, that’s the best way. So what would you say you greatest achievement has been, what’s your greatest personal achievement, what are you most proud of?

Tara: Oh.. Ah, I don’t know…

Ryan: I like to throw tough questions in to see what people say!

Tara: Greatest personal achievement… Well other than being able to raise a child, from zero to almost seventeen now, and have them still be alive and have them as a functional member of society (that’s awesome), and boy, that’s the hardest job of them all, no matter what people say, probably finishing writing and finishing a book (that isn’t a plug!). It was an interesting challenge and it felt like a major achievement when I hit that, I think I saw the last line of my book, coming to the end end of it, the last two chapters, it just felt like “What the hell am I doing? I’m writing a book? I’m a web girl!” But to actually get up to that point, and write that last line, felt like a really huge achievement for me. I think it’s not just like one thing, I mean that could be like a certain peak in it, there’s like a thousand little things that lead me to live the lifestyle that I have now.

I just feel like super privileged, and I am, I just don’t feel like that. I am super privileged to be in a position where I can sleep until when I want and I get flown all over the World to speak to audiences who like to listen to me, even when I’m rambling on against corporate values being out of line with human values and things like that which I hold near and dear to my heart, but I know that’s not what they paid me to hear, they wanted easy answers and I’m not giving them. And they keep inviting me back and do that and that’s mind-blowing to me and an incredible privilege.

I think that achievement has come about because of a thousand little things along the way, things that I’ve sacrificed, the ethics that I’ve stuck to, dreams that I’ve held onto, my insane curiosity for knowledge, a whole lot of fussing along the way, lack of sleep along the way, working at jobs where I had no idea of what I was doing and sort of clambering my way through. It’s just a whole series of falling on my face a thousand times, getting back up and persevering, like being told by hundreds of people, some of the same people multiple times, “What the hell are you doing, you’re going down the wrong path.” That sort of thing, and sticking to my guns.

Ryan: So, you speak at a lot of conferences, have you got one that particularly enjoy speaking at?

Tara: Oh, uhm, gosh. I know the ones that I don’t enjoy speaking at! Most of them I do, I think probably a better way to approach it would be to say “the most interesting ones that I’ve spoken at.”

Ryan: Yeah.

Tara: I spoke at one recently, The International Cemetery and Funeral Association Annual Conference. When I was asked to speak at that I was like “Why are you asking me? This makes very little sense.” Then realised, quite quickly, that this was a really amazing opportunity to talk about something that I’m really passionate about, which is this idea that we are creating digital legacies and that it is more democratised and available to more people around the World. I had a professor point this out to me, when at university, that history was created by a couple of single stories and usually those single stories belonged to the wealthy and the privileged and, you can argue today, that there is still a certain amount of privilege involved but its wider and wider.

There are blogs on homelessness from people that are homeless, there are blogs from Iraq in the war zone, there are blogs on aging from people that are dealing with being displaced in our modern world because they’re aging, people who are living in care centres and that sort of thing, there are blogs on cancer survivors, there are blogs from people with all sorts of voices and with all sorts of experiences. The richness of our history, and the story of our history right now, it so immense. So for me to able to talk to this audience about the fact that they’re really in the business of helping us preserve our legacies and helping us discover one another’s humanity, even after we’ve passed away, was really an enjoyable moment in my speaking history. So that was an unusual, but hugely enjoyable, conference to speak at for sure. I like conferences like that which take me out of my usual techie realm and put me in front of an audience that know that the web is changing the World, but they just don’t know it changes their world. It helps me think in a different way.

I’m speaking at The Pacific Builders Association, coming up, and I just started thinking about this, like where do I begin? For me, it’s a process of I learn, I learn a lot, about their business and where they’re at and why it is they are asking this question right now and then tying these threads together with this brilliant culture that I’m so overjoyed to be part of, this participatory social web that we live in. These are the ones that are the most interesting to me.

Ryan: Okay. You also mentioned your book, what’s your book called? What’s your book about?

Tara: My book is called The Whuffie Factor, it’s actually coming out in paperback under a different name in the next month. The different name is The Power of Social Networks because my publisher recognised that the original title appeals to our audience, who already know about this stuff, and we need to appeal to a broader audience. What it’s about is, in a nutshell, social capital in online communities. The word whuffie comes from a book by Corey Doctorow, a book called Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, and it talks about this future where there’s no money anymore and we have this currency called whuffie. We all have a whuffie score and it’s sort of implanted in a chip in our brain and I can ping your whuffie chip and get back a score and if it’s a high score I’ll know that you’re probably trustworthy or a pretty good guy, that you might have a pretty good network, probably have friends in common and that you’ve done notable things. Like creating these Podcasts is a great gift to the community so you’d get whuffie from that.

So when I was reading this, I realised that Corey’s not talking about some kind of science fiction future, he’s actually describing the kind of currency we exchange, right now, on online communities and how appropriate that is. So, you friend me on Facebook and maybe I haven’t met you before and so I’ll check the first thing, the friends in common, you look at how many friends, and who it is that your friends in common are, and then maybe if theres only a couple you’d go and check out the person’s page, maybe you’ll even Google them. What you’re doing at that point is paying somebody’s whuffie, in the same way that you figured out how to interview me for this Podcast is by going through somebody that you trusted in your comments suggesting, and you probably went and Googled me after that point and said well “Let me see what this person is about.” So you’re pinging my whuffie and found out that I had pretty decent whuffie for your Podcast and then contacted me and then after that point I did the same thing for you. I was like “Ah, okay, I’m going to click on his link and I’m going to find out who these different online networks are that you contributed to, who you are and do I want to take the time to sit down and talk with you.” So, we were pinging each others whuffie!

The book explains that, and explains that in the sense of one and one, but also like how we make buying decisions, and then teaches businesses, from individuals, to small, to large, to non-profit, to whatever creative business you’re in, how to raise you’re whuffie online.

Ryan: Okay, cool, that sounds really interesting.

Tara: Yeah.

Ryan: So, right at this minute in time, what are you most excited about?

Tara: Oh… Right at this minute in time I am most excited about the fact that it’s not only me but a lot of people are recognising the gulf, the gap, between human values and business values. It’s something I’ve been talking about for just a little while now and I actually just got back from having lunch at Cirque de Soleil. Do you know that, the organisation?

Ryan: Yeah.

Tara: Yeah, they invited me to have lunch, well (Name) from Cirque invited me to have lunch, and he discovered me through my presentation that I do called Mind The Gap and it’s talking about this gulf. He saw it and it really struck a cord with him because Cirque has been thinking about this and it gave him language to approach this. I’ve received multiple emails from people within big organisations where they are like “Yes! This is what I’ve been trying to explain and I haven’t had the language to explain it, but our company says this and they say we align with human needs and human values but this is the way that we act. There’s a big gulf between that and now I have the language to try and align the business back to our customers needs and values.”

So that’s what I’m really excited about, that thread is being picked up. It is supposed to, was supposed to, be part of my next book but doing the startup now, I don’t know if I’m actually going to be able to write that but I will continue to write about that on my blog and present on that notion.

Ryan: I’m trying to remember your blog URL, it’s horse, cow…

Tara: Horsepigcow.

Ryan: Where does that come from?!

Tara: It comes from my Mum.

Ryan: Oh, okay?

Tara: If she couldn’t remember somebody’s name she’d be like “George, John, horse, pig, cow, Ryan!”

Ryan: Hehehe. That’s funny!

Tara: It seemed like an appropriate name for a blog when I started back in like 2003, or whatever.

Ryan: Yeah, because I remember when I put your name into Google and that came up and I went “That’s a weird URL!”

Tara: Yeah. Well people generally remember it, they don’t always remember the order of the animals, but they remember it.

Ryan: Yeah, like typing in random farm animals like chicken, goats… “No, no it’s not that.”

Tara: I think I actually own a lot of animal combinations and they all point back to Horsepigcow.

Ryan: Cool. So just to wrap up then, where would you like to see yourself in the future?

Tara: Erm, where would I like to see myself in the future? Hmm, I don’t know, wherever the wind blows me, right now I’d like to see myself out of the Sun that’s streaming into my living room… There we go. Which is a beautiful thing, by the way, having sunshine in the middle of March. But, yeah, I don’t know, I don’t know. That question to me is one that you’re asked a lot though life and I think that people expect you to know the answer and for it to be very goal orientated, towards that end result, but it’s always served me better to embrace whatever opportunities come my way. It makes me more open to possibilities and things change so fast, especially now with the whole participatory culture there are tons of startups and there are all sorts of people inventing cool things and more and more people are becoming entrepreneurial in spirit and with more and more people people working on solving big problems.

I just think that the World is going to exponentially explode into awesomeness in the next little while and I just want to ride that wave and be part of it and try to contribute to it the best I can whilst also trying to be just a little bit ahead of it as much as I can along the way. So that’s my answer in a round about way.

Ryan: Okay, brilliant. Well thank you very much Tara for taking the time to talk to me, that was really interesting, I really enjoyed that.

Tara: Yeah, thank you Ryan.

Ryan: Thanks a lot!

Thanks goes to Dan Millar and the guys at Decode for transcribing this interview.

To ensure you never miss an episode you can:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed
• Subscribe to my iTunes feed
• Follow me on twitter

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

Campaign Monitor

Mathew Patterson is head of the customer support team at Campaign Monitor. Based in Sydney, Australia (so a late night recording for me) he has a background as a web designer, has spoken at a number of conferences including Future of Web Design New York and Web Directions and is awaiting the release of his first book with Sitepoint on HTML Emails (title not yet confirmed). In this weeks episode Mathew talks to me about his career, overcoming his shyness and the challenges of writing.

Interview Transcript

Matthew: Well, I don’t really have one. Campaign Monitor, where I am in the office right now, are not big on job titles so the business card doesn’t have one, but I guess what you’d call me is the kind of the head of the customer support team – that’s about 7 people apart from me: 2 from next week in the office in Sydney, 3 in the States, 1 in Canada, 1 in Norway.

Ryan: OK, so you’re quite spread out then.

Matthew: Yeah, so, we’re a Sydney-based company, but the customers are not Sydney-based. The customers are mostly (probably 60%) in the States, and then probably another 35% or something all around the world, and only just a small amount in Australia so in terms of customer support most of it has to be done outside of our business hours.

Ryan: OK, so for people who don’t know what Campaign Monitor is, do you want to just tell us a potted version about what the service is?

Matthew: Sure can. So, if you’re a web designer, say you’re an agency or a freelancer or whoever you are, you do web design and you have clients who need to send email newsletters, or email notifications or invitations or whatever they want to send. You can use Campaign Monitor as a web application – it’s all hosted on our side and we take care of all the tedious handling of bounces and unsubscribes, and the reporting on the campaigns that you send. You can do all that online, and your clients can log in online and do that themselves as well, and the whole thing’s kind of rebrandable so you can offer it as a service under your own name to your clients. And probably the really cool part is if you want to do it that way, if you want to rebrand it, then you can have your clients pay us transparently, so they don’t know – they just assume it’s you. They can pay a rate above our bases rates, and anything that you charge them above what we charge you we’ll send back to you once a month, so you can make some good cash that way.

Ryan: OK, cool. So, what’s an average week like for you?

Matthew: Well, a lot of my time now that I spend in the office is just looking after the whole support team, so it’s finding out what’s going on this week – have we got any product releases going on this week, changes to the application which are going to cause customers to have new questions. Looking after actual first-level support, which I still do quite a bit of, so that’s just answering questions from customers about “Why does Outlook 2007 not show my background image?” and the answer is because it can’t, because it uses Microsoft Word to render emails, which was a stupid decision – nice work Microsoft. So there’s quite a bit of that, there’s actually quite a lot of work involved with a remote team, in just making sure that everybody knows what’s going on and everyone is still kind of clear on what we need to be doing this week and where are we trying to head as a company. So we spend a lot of time chatting, doing this video chat with the other guys when we can match our time zones up, and using the intranet, kind of sharing information that way. I spend time talking to developers, so working with the developers about “How can we improve the actual application so that we’re not having the same questions over and over?”, “What are the customers asking for?”, because I guess it’s part of my role really, representing the customers within the company, because most of the developers are not web designers, in the modern times they don’t really do any design so they haven’t really used the product as the customer uses the product, which is for their clients, so they need that information to come back from the customers via the support team and via me to them so they know what’s working, what’s not working and they can kind of understand how they should be designing things and developing things.

Ryan: OK, so how long have you been with Campaign Monitor? From the beginning, or did you come in later?

Matthew: For about 3 years. Campaign Monitor itself has been around for about 5 years. When I started, so that’s 3 years ago (well, over 3 years ago) there was just the 2 founders and 1 developer. Now we’re up to 23, 24 people. The guys, they were pretty excited actually, when I came in the first day I started the most exciting thing was that now we have 4 people we can finally play doubles on the table tennis.

Ryan: Brilliant (laughs). They have a fussball table at the barn, at Headscape barn when I go down, so it’s always good to have 4 people playing on that. So rewind a little bit, take me back to the start of your career. How did you get started out, what’s your background?

Matthew: Right, well, I don’t know how far we’re going back here.

Ryan: All the way, start from the beginning.

Matthew: First job, it was 1885 (laughs). My first job was actually a paper boy, as many people probably had the same job, so I did that about my local area when I was quite young, and the interesting thing about that actually was that I have 2 younger brothers who look quite similar to me, so similar that we all were paper boys at around the same time but we kind of alternated weeks, and so many of the customers never figured out that there was more than one of us. So we eventually developed a kind of game where you would try and set up the most awkward conversation for the person who was next week, so that when they got to the same person again they’d ask them about something completely bizarre, and you’d have to just try to survive that conversation and leave it for the next guy.

Ryan: Good customer support training!

Matthew: Exactly, yes: “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about but I’m going to be nice and polite about it.” The main thing I learned from that is that you always want to go to the house of the young guy who’s been drunk on Saturday night, because on Sunday morning you’d get an awesome tip, he just empties out his entire pockets. So, that was the first thing I did. After school, when I finished my high school and I was trying to work out what I was going to do (I was going to go to university presumably) I didn’t really know what I wanted to do – something to do with computers. This was back in 1994 when I finished school, and so I just fell into an IT degree, which is kind of the most, well, the least specific kind of degree to do with computers that you can choose, I didn’t have to specifically do anything. The very first day I went and had a look at the course outline for the I.T. degree, I’d chosen the computer science specialisation and I quickly realised that there was a lot of maths involved, and so I swapped on day 1 to business specialisation instead which was an excellent decision – avoided a whole bunch of pain there. The degree, when I started in 1995, the commercial web was kind of really, really early still. In these days, to get onto the internet from home via the university I was using Lynx, so seriously text browsing, and Yahoo! was really just a list of websites, there was no search at that time. So early days, and there was only a very tiny bit of HTML involved, like I did 1 course in 4 years I think, so there was just a few days’ worth of that, and we made Geocities websites – pretty sweet – I guess that’s probably gone now, since Geocities just got shut down, there’s a very sad loss of history there. I did that for…that degree was 4 years, and at some point during that I started working at a “proper job” which was a firm that offered financial planning seminars and financial planning skills to accountants, and I got in there on a support desk, and this was a series of products which were all based on Microsoft Office products so there was a kind of product which was an Excel spreadsheet essentially that you bought, and it did a whole bunch of ridiculous calculations and it constantly broke, people would change things accidentally and it would stop working, and the Word macros would stop working so there was a lot of support with people ringing up and and saying “Why is my Microsoft Word margin suddenly wrong?”, I kind of did that over the phone, it’s a fun job.

Ryan: (sarcastically) That sounds like a really fascinating job, that one.

Matthew: You want to do that for your next career, I’m sure.

Ryan: Been there, done that myself.

Matthew: ‘Cause I could get you in there, it’s probably still going.

Ryan: No, you’re alright, you’re alright.

Matthew: OK, alright. So I was there for a couple of years, but we had people ringing us up with all kinds of computer problems because as soon as they know they can get support from somebody they’ll just ring anytime anything goes wrong, and I literally spoke to a guy who rang and said “I’ve just reformatted my computer and now none of your software works, I’m not sure what to do.” Well, this is going to be a fun phone call.

Ryan: The best one that comes in is “My kettle’s broken.” “Well, what’s that got to do with us?” “Well it’s got a plug on it, hasn’t it?”

Matthew: But at some point during that job, I literally heard over the other side of the cubicle, just poked my head up and heard people talking about the website for the company, so this is probably 1996 or 1997 sometime, and all websites were pretty ugly, and just by basically having an opinion and saying “Maybe we should try this” somehow I managed to kind of blag my way into being the webmaster of the company, which is what you could do in those days when nobody knew what they were doing with websites. And I had taken that over and that became my job then until the end of university, and I also strangely ran the support team eventually as well so I kind of completed a career circle at this point, back to doing that again, but this is a much nicer place to work. So that was my first job, and I left there because I got poached. One of the managers of the company left to start an internet company during the whole first web bubble, I guess, in 2000 maybe. She left and she took a whole bunch of people with her, so 6 or 7 of us, and we started working on this company which was kind of what Mint.com is today, except 10 years ago and not good – they’re the essential differences. Because in those days, the banks didn’t want to work with anybody, they wouldn’t let you access…there was no API access to anything, so we were doing a system which involved basically scraping sites and pages and you can imagine how reliable that was – every time they made a change to anything it would all stop working. But it was a fun time, we never really got to the point of the promised fabled land of beanbags and coffee machines. We got through all the VC money, didn’t really sell anything to anybody, and at some point it was pretty clear that it was all going downhill, and we all started jumping ship. I left from there, where my job was basically web design again but with a product that never really got sold and a website that never really got finished because we never finished the product, a lot of the time I actually spend kind of doing internal designs and just trying to keep it all from going crazy, in terms of “making the office at least a nicer place to be”. But I left there, and went to pretty much the opposite company you could choose after an internet startup was to go to the Australian Stock Exchange, the financial industry where when I took that job for some reason everyone thinks that all people who work in the Stock Exchange are on drugs. It’s kind of a stockbroker thing, I think everyone’s imagining that the whole Stock Exchange is full of stockbrokers, which of course it’s not, they don’t have a trading floor – it’s all electronic, even when I started there. So anyway there was no drugs, at least not in the web team, surprisingly.

Ryan: And you asked, did you then? “I searched everywhere and there weren’t any!”

Matthew: I looked in the stationery cupboard, it was just pencils. So I was there and they’d never had a web designer before so I was the first web designer. They’d had, you know, consultants and marketing companies building stuff before. It’s kind of been the theme of my career I think, which is probably because of the time I started in the web industry which was quite early, nearly all my jobs have been “the first person to do this” or “this is a new role” as opposed to replacing people so I’ve kind of always had the opportunity to design my own job out of that. So at the Stock Exchange I started doing a lot more kind of IA, working with the developers in business analysis side of things, and looking after a bunch of people who the Stock Exchange liked to call “webmasters” but who essentially used FrontPage to create monstrocities and post them on the website, which as you can imagine was some beautiful work from people who were not in any way computer people. I literally had to start a newsletter internally, again linking to my current job, a newsletter to say to people “this is a page that looks like what it’s meant to look like, and this what your pages look like, and you see how this font here is enormous and pink? That is not really what we want on the Stock Exchange website”. And you learn that most people don’t really have any sense of design at all. Like, I’m not a designer, I don’t really have any kind of design background, I’ve picked up whatever I’ve picked up along the way, but most people literally would not know that the page was terribly wrong, they wouldn’t understand a stylesheet. They’d look at the page and go “it’s fine, it looks perfect exactly like your page” and there was kind of a career moment for me where a realised I could probably have a job in this area as long as I want, because clearly this is not a common skill.

Ryan: You can just bluff.

Matthew: Well I thought I was bluffing and it turns out I wasn’t bluffing.

Ryan: So does that lead you into Campaign Monitor, or was there somewhere else after that?

Matthew: There’s a long and complicated chain of events, but basically I left there to go overseas, I went to the UK for a couple of years and I worked for a hotel booking company there in the UK, which was bought later by Priceline, the American price searching site advertised by William Shatner, which is awesome, so the day that they bought us for quite a lot of money they sent over a box full of William Shatner bobble head dolls (laughs). It was pretty much the best thing that came out of that acquisition, as opposed to…I guess apart from the money. He’s actually still up on my window, don’t know if you can see him, but he’s still sitting there today.

Ryan: I thought you were going to say you’d got to meet William Shatner, that would’ve been pretty cool.

Matthew: That would’ve been good, but no, we just got a bobble head doll of him which doesn’t look exactly like him. It kind of looks more like Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek, but still we got a bobble head doll, and he’s still lasting. But that was another internet company, so I went from there, left and as Australians always do had a 2-year working holiday. I lived in Cambridge, which is a really nice place, and left there to come back to Sydney and kind of freelanced for a while, ran my own business. I did a whole bunch of contracts for all kinds of interesting things, like some News Corp websites and the National Rugby League website. Basically, I didn’t really want to work in an agency, and in fact I didn’t really want to work for too long as a straight HTML coder which is like all of those agency jobs where you go in and they give you a design and you just build it, which seems like a career that’s not going to be around for ever. So I started looking to get out of that, and I took a job at the Taronga Zoo, which is the big zoo in Syndey, and I took kind of a part-time job as the web designer there, which is a pretty awesome place to work if you want to be a designer and wander round the zoo after hours when there’s no one there. That was pretty sweet. Also the best view of Sydney harbour is from in front of the Giraffess in Taronga Zoo.

Ryan: I’m trying to think where that zoo is, because I have been to Sydney but I can’t think where the zoo is. Is it the other side of the harbour then, over the bridge?

Matthew: Yeah, well it’s kind of on the side, so you can see thr harbour bridge and the opera house and everything right across from Taronga Zoo.

Ryan: Is it near the theme park thing where the ferris wheel is, near there?

Matthew: It’s kind of, yeah, not really worth explaining.

Ryan: I’m just interested (laughs). Anyway…

Matthew: Why do we all have Google Maps? We can look it up afterwards.

Ryan: OK, moving on.

Matthew: It’s a sensational location. You get on the ferry, you go across the harbour, and you end up at the zoo where you can look back across the harbour the other way – it’s really beautiful. But for a while, I was there and Campaign Monitor were looking for somebody. I had only recently found out that they were very local to me, I didn’t know. I was a customer, and yeah, I had no idea that they were in the south of Sydney where I lived. After I started at the zoo, literally the first day, that job went up and I sent them an email saying “What are you doing offering a job now, the day I start another job?” because I was a big fan, and they gave me a call and said “Come and see us anyway” and poached me from there, so I had to quickly resign after only a few months at the zoo. I came here, and I’ve been here for 3 years which is pretty much an all-time record for me.

Ryan: Yeah, it sounds like it. OK, so looking at everything you’ve done, what are you most proud of? What do you look back on and think “That was a good job”?

Matthew: I guess a big thing for me has been that I’ve always been pretty shy in the past, like in high school I was in the nerd group. I’m pretty sure that everyone, like 99% of the people that watch your show would probably put themselves in the same group, right?

Ryan: What a sweeping generalisation!

Matthew: That’s what I’m all about, that’s what Australians do. You’re all a bunch of nerds. So I was pretty shy, so I found that difficult, but moving to the UK and literally knowing nobody there, and having to basically find a job and start working and talk to people, showed me that you can do it, that I can do it. Coming out of that, I started saying yes to things and so after moving here to Campaign Monitor someone said “Do you want to go and do a talk in New York?”. I’d never done that before and so the first time I did a presentation was literally in the middle of New York, to 500 people at Future of Web Design. So it’s taking those steps and being able to say “Yep, I’ll give that a go”, and I think that was kind of a big turning point for me. Otherwise, I think that my best work is probably still to come, you know, I’ve moved out of the straight design role and now I’m trying to learn how to be a manager and look after a team, especially a team where half of the people I never see in person, and 1 person I have literally never met except by phone and Skype. So that’s where I see all the good stuff happening, now.

Ryan: I didn’t realise you’d spoken at a conference before. Is speaking at conferences something you’d like to pursue more in the future?

Matthew: Yeah, definitely, I’ll try and get a couple in this year hopefully. I spoke for one of the Web Directions conferences last year. Because a lot of our customers are web designers, we attend a lot of conferences as well, so I guess I’ve seen a lot of really good speakers, some of them really inspiring. Like I was just in Perth on the other side of Australia last year and I saw Derek Powasek and he was awesome, just watching him be able to explain things and get people excited was a really good experience, and I thought if I could be a tenth as good as him I would love to do that. There’s a little work to go there, probably at 1 percent at the moment.

Ryan: There’s some scarily confident speakers aren’t there? You look at them and think “Oh, my god. How are so you confident on stage?”

Matthew: Yes, well I just watched your Andy Clarke episode a little earlier this week. I was there, when he was saying @media was the first time he spoke in 2005, I was there and saw him speak and had no idea that was the first time he’d ever spoken because it certainly did not look like that. He was pretty amazing for, you know, a first time.

Ryan: He’s kind of made to talk, isn’t he, Andy?

Matthew: He is some kind of genetic government programme to create a super-speaker, that’s probably what’s going on.

Ryan: He’d love that as well. So looking at the industry at the minute, what are you enjoying the most? What are you keeping your eye on, and the most excited about?

Matthew: The whole web industry?

Ryan: Yeah, or just what you’re involved with.

Matthew: I think the big thing that’s going on for us now is there seems to be a move towards mobile. That seems to be where everything’s going. If you have the internet when you’re everywhere, as opposed to just when you’re in front of your computer, it makes a big difference to how you use it. I was just at South by Southwest (as you know, you were there) and having no local SIM card and not wanting to pay ridiculous price for roaming, I was disconnected from the internet except when I could get to the hotel or convention centre or whatever. It made me realise how much I rely on having that connection all the time now, it’s like I’ve lost part of my brain.

Ryan: It’s like a life support machine, isn’t it?

Matthew: Yeah, people would ask me questions and I’d be like “I’ve no idea, I don’t know and I can’t find out because it’s not working”. So if I potentially have access to anything when I’m mobile, and potentially with these new larger format mobile devices like your iPad and what and not, I’m very excited to see what people are going to do that changes the way I spend my life when I’m not at my desk. Because I don’t want to spend life at my desk, but I do want to see what people are going to come up with and I think we’re kind of really at the start of that, which is kind of where we were with websites in 1995 when I was starting there. You could do anything, nobody knew what you were meant to do, there was no kind of obsession with “That’s not how you’re supposed to use that technology”, so I think we’re going to see all kinds of interesting things, like what’s his name? The Chatroulette piano guy, you seen him? If you haven’t seen those videos you should go and watch them. He’s a guy who just gets on there with his piano and basically makes up videos about the people he sees popping up in Chatroulette, which is amazing. It’s amazing, it sounds ridiculous…

Ryan: Yeah, it does sound ridiculous actually.

Matthew: …yeah it does. You can look it up on Youtube, it’s quite popular. He kind of looks like Ben Folds, and then Ben Folds has done a version of him, it’s all very confusing, it’s a bit of a mess. But it’s that kind of thing that…you could never predict that. Nobody’s going to design a system for letting people randomly sing songs about random people they see on the internet, but someone makes that platform possible and someone will come up with the ideas, and I just think we’re going to see some amazing stuff over the next few years.

Ryan: So just to wrap up then, you touched on it a little bit but where do you see yourself in the future, where would you like to see yourself in the future?

Matthew: This is one of those awkward interview questions isn’t it? It’s to be in your seat!

Ryan: You haven’t got a job at the end of it, so don’t worry. (laughs)

Matthew: Right, no chance of success. I try not to predict too far into the future. I think…there’s no way I could have know in my 10 years, I guess, of working in the web industry what I was going to end up doing. Certainly I never predicted I’d end up having the same job I had 10 years ago, except in a very different environment, so I don’t worry too much about it because I’ve always kind of gone with the flow of what’s there, and I think the main thing I’d like to do is just to keep changing, keep learning. I want to make sure that when opportunities come up, I’m open to saying yes. The thing I’m doing right now, I’m just finishing a book for SitePoint, basically because they said “Does someone there want to write a book?” and I said “Alright, I’ve never done that before”. I certainly see myself being part of this company for a long time. I think…I’ve worked in a lot of places as I explained in tedious detail earlier, and this size of the company and the culture we have here is very rare, so whatever I do I guess it’ll be trying to stay involved here and make Campaign Monitor a more useful product. And the company, just to keep building it up, and just to be involved in the web industry whatever happens in the next 5 years. I mean, that’s like a thousand years in corporate time, right?

Ryan: Yeah, OK, so you just mentioned your book – you didn’t say that earlier, we could have talked about that! So when does your book come out?

Matthew: I think the plan is to print in April, so sometime April/May.

Ryan: Right, so it’s finished then I take it?

Matthew: Pretty much, yeah. I was writing parts of it in the hotel at South by Southwest last week, trying to get it done, which possibly was a mistake.

Ryan: Can you tell us anything about it? What’s the topic?

Matthew: Sure, so it’s HTML email. Basically it’s for web designers who are getting asked about doing HTML email and want to work out how you do it. It’s kind of one of those areas where it sounds easy because it’s just HTML and CSS and you already know all that, right? But the problem is that the rendering engines in the email clients themselves are kind of stuck in 1998-style tables. So there’s a lot of tricks and there’s a lot of work you have to do to make your modern web design work in email clients, because you don’t just have Opera, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. You’ve got 5 different versions of Outlook, web-based email clients, mobile email clients, and you’ve got 10 different desktop versions to deal with, and they are all much more variable than modern day web browsers are. So the book is kind of giving you an easy way to learn “How can I take my skills, apply them to this other area and hopefully build up my business and get a good stream of revenue?” because email marketing is one of those things that companies will do over and over consisently, as opposed to designing a website which they do once. So we get a lot of designers who want to do that, want to work out a way “How can I do something which is going to produce me income consistently and help me build up my business?”, so that’s what the book is for.

It also goes through a whole bunch of the stuff like “How do I help my clients actually send good emails?” because…when I do talks, I like to start with the question “Who hates HTML email?”, just to get a bit of a hands-up, and it’s usually about 50-50. Half the designers in the world kind of hate the entire idea of it, and get quite angry actually, which is fun. Just last week, I was talking to Jeremy Keith about it, and what I told him was (because it’s the first time I met him) “I talked to Andy Budd about this, and he really hates HTML email”, and he said (adopts Irish accent) “Yes, I’ve never done HTML email myself and I never want to, I’m never going to start, in my whole life, never want to send one”. That’s pretty typical, especially of web standards people, for whatever reason, they have the idea in their head that that email is just meant to be text, like it was written on a stone tablet and passed down to us: “Email is for text. If you put HTML in there, you are some kind of psychopath and you should probably be shot”. So, I may have slightly overexaggerated his opinion there. The book goes into a little bit about it as well, which is to say that HTML email is here. If you use Outlook, you’re already using it unless you’ve specifically turned it off. If you use Apple Mail, you’re sending HTML email. Any kind of business is going to send it, whether there’s designers involved or not. Part of the reason everyone hates it is because it’s so ugly, it can be really abused, and part of the reason it’s so ugly is that web designers hate it and won’t do it, so the way forward of course is for designers to put some effort in and make it useful, make it practical, and just do some really nice newsletters that are easier to read than just plain text. There is a reason we have different fonts and things, we don’t just use monospace fonts in all our books – you know, just buying textbooks, they have different formatting and different size headings and stuff, and you just can’t do that with plain text, right? So there’s a bit of selling of the whole idea of HTML email, and then how do you actually do it and how do you do it well. So, that’s the book.

Ryan: OK, and what’s that called?

Matthew: Er, that’s a good question, and I’m not sure of the answer. I think it’s going to be something like ‘Beautiful HTML Emails’. It’s kind of the style of Elliot Jay Stocks’ book, apparently.

Ryan: Yeah, the ‘Sexy Web Design’ one that he did.

Matthew: Yeah, so it’s similar, in terms of colour and image and that kind of thing, and the way it’s put together, it’s a similar model to that. And I’m sure you’ll be able to find it and we’ll promote it on campaignmonitor.com, so that’d be the place to actually find out about it when it actually gets published. Yeah, it’s been a really, really long process, but I’m quite excited to be at the end of it now, and I think a lot of people will find it useful. Especially people who aren’t Campaign Monitor users, because we’ve covered this information a lot on our blog and our resources over the years, but there’s a lot of web designers who are completely outside of the web application loop, especially people inside companies, and hopefully they’ll find it useful.

Ryan: OK, brilliant. Well, thanks a lot Matthew for taking the time to talk to me, that’s really interesting, and I’ll speak to you soon.

Matthew: Thank you so much.

Thanks goes to David Goss for transcribing this interview.

To ensure you never miss an episode you can:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed
• Subscribe to my iTunes feed
• Follow me on twitter

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

Paul Annett is a Senior Designer at Clear Left. He’s spoken at a number of conferences about design and is the creator of the most popular magic trick on Google (Disclaimer: May not be true, but he’s near the top at least.). In this weeks episode Paul talks to me about his career to date, how the Duty Calls cartoon is him (According to Relly), and what he’s most excited about in the industry today.

Interview Transcript

Paul: My job title at Clear Left, as it’s technically written in the contract is Senior Designer. That’s not senior within the company, there’s no real hierarchy in the company other than directors and then the rest of us. It’s more senior in terms of the industry, as everyone that’s hired by Clear Left is normally senior level within the industry. So technically yes, I’m a Senior Designer.

Ryan: Ok, so how long have you been at Clear Left?

Paul: I started at Clear Left in 2006 (I think it was). The guys – Rich, Jeremy and Andy set up the company in 2005 and they basically worked from their bedrooms for a couple of months and when they set up their office in 2006. I joined them in the office as a freelancer, hiring some desk space and ended up contracting for them for pretty much most of the year, to the point where at the end of the year, one hundred percent of my work was coming from Clear Left – this was around the point where they offered me a full time job. James box and I were the first full time employees who weren’t directors.

Ryan: Right, so you have been with them pretty much right from the beginning then really?

Paul: Pretty much nearly, yeah.

Ryan: Ok, so how did you meet Jeremy, Andy and Richard; how did that relationship evolve?

Paul: I guess we had known each other online through the Brighton New Media mailing list. Not necessarily as faces to names, other than avatars – did we have avatars back in those days? I can’t really remember, but we knew each other vaguely through profile pages on the Brighton New Media (BNM) mailing lists, that kind of thing. They knew each other better than they knew me as they were very vocal and very ahead of the curve on the CSS front, so I was really learning from them in that respect from the mailing list. I would perhaps meet up with them on them occasional social event, but the web scene then in Brighton was nothing like it is now, its huge now and there are social events happening every night of the week. Back then, events were relatively few and far between. That’s how I knew them right at the start and we kind of worked together – well we now discover that Jeremy and I worked together as freelancers before we worked together at Clear Left. We didn’t know at the time, and it’s only from exchanging notes recently, that we discovered ‘Oh, I worked on this project and you worked on this project’ and that we were working on the same code and sending each other code. At the time we didn’t really know each other but now we say ‘Oh so that was you!’ But we both vow to never look back at that code as we were both learning back then and admit that we didn’t really know what we were doing at the time – so we’ll keep that just between you and I okay?

Ryan: Cool, so that’s what you’re doing now, you’re at Clear Left. So rewind a little bit and take me back to the beginning. Have you always been into design?

Paul: Yeah – I’m not formally trained as a designer, but I’ve always been into design and I’ve always been interested in how things work and working things out. I guess in 1992 when I was about fifteen or so, I was at school working on setting up and working on the community magazine and designing the first issue on an old acorn using some software on (pauses) I can’t remember what software it was on. I also, at about the same time had a part time job working on a newspaper – the local evening news in Portsmouth, basically designing classified ad’s as a side job, which beat working in a shop I guess. When I started at college in 1994, was my first exposure to Photoshop on a Mac LC2. I don’t know what version of Photoshop it was, but I remember using a black and white version on a classic – at the time, I didn’t really see the potential of it. It wasn’t really a photo manipulation tool; it was more something to draw squiggly lines on and then you could print them out through the printer – and then what did you do with it? I also did some work with Quark Express doing some desktop publishing there at college which was where I first got my feet wet with the internet. There was one PC up in the library that was connected to the internet, so I was very interested in going up there and working out how web pages worked, fiddling around with various software and stumbling upon ‘view source’. Finding out that if I changed this bit, then I could change how the website looks. Finding out that if I change this bit, that I could change the colour and finding that if I change this bit that the images don’t work. Thinking ‘what’s all that about’, fumbling my way around the markup and not really knowing what I was doing obviously back then. My course wasn’t really about that, there was a section on it, but it was just a general media course, so I was specialising in video production. From there I went on to study TV production in Bournemouth. I didn’t really have any online training there either, although I did sneak in some projects. Whilst I was studying and making films, I would be designing websites to go with those films, or making websites to go with our degree shows – that sort of thing. So although it wasn’t part of my course, I would be using the computer labs out of hours to teach myself the basics of web design.

Ryan: Okay, so at what point did you decide that the web was a career path that you wanted to go down and instead of doing that as a hobby that you wanted to do that as a career?

Paul: Well, when I left University, I went to work in a post-production facility in Soho, London at a place called Image Makers. It was a place where I did a work placement; they actually took me on as a post production runner, which was essentially collecting video tapes and making tea for the editors. But they also were quite interested in the new web scene that was happening – it was 1999 when I graduated and they wanted to get a slice of that action. Because I had a little bit of knowledge from doing this on the side at university, I set up their web department. That was really ‘in at the deep end’ doing some commercial websites, which I had never done before. It really wasn’t about being in a glamorous start up company with lots of money, but it was more about if they could undercut everybody and cash in by offering websites at a much cheaper rate. It didn’t really work out – I was consigned to a broom cupboard that I was working in and occasionally let out. It was not a particularly nice place to work, but from there I kind of accidently fell into the industry, because basically working in London as a post production runner at the time, I think the salary was something like nine grand a year. It’s only really possible if you’ve got relatives who live in London who can put you up, or if you can sleep on a friends sofa, that kind of thing – which I didn’t have. So I was trying to support myself on this salary and it was only by making the move into the web that I could afford to live in London. So from there, working half in the web, and half as a post production runner, I happened to fall into my next full time job which was working for Harrods in their web design team. Basically I was on a train with some friends of mine and we were sitting opposite this guy who was doing some work on his laptop and they got chatting to him. They were saying ‘it’s Sunday morning, why are you working’? He said he had some work to do as he ran the website for Harrods and they said ‘ah Paul’s a web designer’ and hinted maybe he could give me a job and we exchanged details on the train. A few months later I had a job at Harrods, so that was a very fortunate stroke of luck just bumping to that guy on the train. So it was there that I thought right okay, this is now what I’m doing as a career – rather than doing the TV thing, I’m now a web designer for real. I left Harrods after probably a year and a half and then I went freelance for three or four years until I joined Clear Left.

Ryan: Okay, what made you take the jump to freelance, from working for a company like Harrods?

Paul: There was a lot of internal politics at Harrods for a start. The web design team came underneath the I.T umbrella, so there was a lot of fighting internally as to whether the web site should be a marketing tool to get extra people though the front door of the shop, or whether it was supposed to be a sales tool to make direct sales instead of their catalogue. So there were people pulling our department in different directions and they had a very high turnover of people in management. It wasn’t that good a place to work even though it sounds really glamorous – and the shop really is glamorous, but I really didn’t enjoy working there a lot of the time. Also I was living in London; while I enjoyed living in London for a few years, I kind of felt that I had had enough of it. I had met Relly at the time and she had moved up to London temporarily. We were both thinking if we wanted to live in London or move somewhere else. Brighton seemed like the obvious choice, it’s like London by the sea – I can’t really remember the chain of events that brought us to live in Brighton, but we visited and it just seemed like a nice place to be, a nice place to live. There was also a burgeoning web design industry down here, so yeah we made the move. I actually moved down to Brighton before I went freelance and had a few months of commuting to Osterley which is near Twickenham. So it was in and out of London everyday as that’s where Harrods was – they had this big depot out there which was not very glamorous at all. That commute wasn’t very nice, I know some people do it every day, but I couldn’t. I know it’s only fifty minutes each way, but you’re looking at an hour and a half commute door-to-door each way. So yeah, I just moved down to Brighton and started freelancing.

Ryan: So how long did you freelance for before you joined Clear Left?

Paul: That was 2002 until 2005/2006, so three or four years.

Ryan: Do you miss freelancing – do you miss the freedom and the flexibility of being a freelancer?

Paul: Not particularly, as we get a lot of freedom at Clear Left – not as in completely flexible hours, but we’re cool as long as the work gets done and you’re there for the right amount of hours, then there’s some flexibility there. I definitely don’t miss doing loads of paperwork and sales and things like that, I much prefer being hands on in the project, as I am at Clear Left, also at Clear Left we’re getting a lot more higher profile clients than I would as a freelancer. So I’m enjoying much more the opportunities to be working on the kind of stuff that we’re working on now at Clear Left than I was working on the smaller stuff as a freelancer. So no, I don’t really miss it.

Ryan: Okay great, so what would you say your greatest achievement has been personally?

Paul: It’s great to work for a company that’s as highly regarded as Clear Left is, I do enjoy that. As I say, we’re about to start work on the re-working of the Radio 4 website. We’ve been doing some work for other big companies such as Ebay, which I wouldn’t have the opportunity to do outside of Clear Left. So it’s a real achievement to be working there, which I’m proud of and I’m really pleased to be doing – work wise that is my best achievement. I enjoy public speaking; I spoke in front of thirteen hundred people at South by South West last year and that was a real buzz – it was a real high and I really enjoyed that side of things. Other achievements that aren’t really work related are things like this silly Youtube video achievement. I’ve got this one minute Youtube video which has now got something like 14 million views – which is not work related and I didn’t even have to do anything to even achieve it, but from that point of view its quite amazing that that even happened. So little things like that.

Ryan: I didn’t hear about that, what’s the video?

Paul: Oh it’s a magic trick called ‘This and That’, which is a one minute magic trick of my hands doing a card trick, just filmed on a Lo-Fi camcorder type thing in the living room. Miraculously it was up there on Youtube in 2007 and it’s ended up getting 14 million views. It was featured on their home page, which I think had something to do with it. I can’t really explain it, but there are now hundreds of other people on Youtube doing the same trick, basically copying mine. Mine was adapted from a different card trick, but was the first one to be called ‘This and That’ – all the other ones that are called ‘This and That’ are subsequent to the one that I did. It’s quite nice to know that there are other people out there who are saying they can do the same trick and this is how I do it. Some of them are reviewing how it works, but not in a good way. They tend to teach really bad methods, so don’t get me started – if you’re going to teach how to do it, then teach the right way, else the other people who are learning how to do it will be learning from you, when in fact you are doing it wrong in your video and making it really obvious what you are doing. I’ve seen countless videos of people doing it really badly and I’ve just had to stop watching them. Have you seen the XKCD comic strip – the ‘Someone on the internet is wrong’ one? That’s like me – saying that I can’t come to bed as there are half a dozen people doing my trick wrong and I have to go and put them right.

Ryan: That’s the one that’s linked to so often now that they just say the comic number! So you’re very much into your magic then, that’s a hobby?

Paul: Yeah, I haven’t done any for a few years and I really, really should learn some new tricks to put on Youtube. Especially since now there is Google Adsense running on there and that sort of thing, but with having kids and work, I don’t ever have the time, but I really should learn some new tricks to put on Youtube. But there are only certain types of magic you can put on Youtube, they have to be tricks where there is no spectator interaction, I can’t really ask someone to pick a card, as even if I had someone else in the video to take the card, then people may assume that it had been set up. The beauty of the trick that is up there is that it tells a story and there is no interaction from the spectator, so it’s just pure sleight of hand. But it’s obviously a trick, you get some comments up there claiming that it’s not magic – I mean it’s not wizardry; I’m not casting a spell, it’s sleight of hand and a mystery, but that what magic is. I’m still interested in magic though, a whole bunch of us are going to see Derren Brown on his Enigma tour, next Tuesday evening, so that should be fun. Back when I was working in TV, I also worked on the second series of Derren Brown’s TV show, which was fun even though I was only a runner. I was only giving people directions and doing crowd control and getting people to watch his performance and that kind of thing.

Ryan: Did you get to meet him?

Paul: Yeah – which was cool, I learned a couple of tricks from him and that sort of thing.

Ryan: Cool! I’ve forgotten where we were at now with the questions; I think I asked you about your greatest achievement, are there any regrets – any career regrets? Is there anything that you’ve missed up on, or anything that you wished you’d taken or anything like that?

Paul: One of the last things that I did before I joined Clear Left was joining a company in Oxford as a Creative Director. I don’t really regret this at all but, the company that I joined were very immoral and quite deceitful to their clients, so I got out after six months as I just didn’t agree with their business ethics. It was probably an experience that I could have done without, but I don’t think that it did me any harm. I guess that if I had my time again, that I wouldn’t go and work for them again for that brief period. But apart from that, no major regrets really, except for maybe when we hand work back over to web clients, that seeing as we don’t have any retainer, as we hand things over to the web team when we’re finished, that we don’t really get that feedback from users. We don’t see projects in a live environment; we build it, we design it, then we hand it over and we never really get people bouncing ideas back and saying things like ‘it was great and I love this stuff’ or ‘I don’t like this or that’ and then having the opportunity to react on that, which is a shame.

Ryan: That’s interesting! So of all of the things at the moment that you are involved in, with your view of the industry, what are you enjoying the most?

Paul: It is work related, but at the same time it’s not work related, but I’m really enjoying the way that the web and technology is becoming a part of not only our lives as geeks, but the people who always look at us a bit oddly and say ‘why are you doing that?’ – It’s now becoming a part of their lives too. I remember when I was at university and still figuring out how the internet works. People thought I was just wasting my time, but now they’re on Facebook all of the time. I can see the Ipad becoming – and will become I’m sure, a part of my parents lives, because they’ll be able to video chat with our kids. There’s always been this big hurdle that basically the user experience and the usability have been so bad, for technology so far, that there has been no way that people such as my parents could interact with devices that use the web. This is because they use mouses and browsers – my Mum has been on courses and she still can’t figure out how to move the mouse in relation to the cursor on the screen in particular, it’s a big hurdle to get over. So I love the fact that this new stuff is becoming a part of peoples’ lives as new technology comes along. It’s really interesting to see, that we have a three and a half year old boy and whereas we grew up with things like cassette tapes – I mean it was a few years ago, I think about telling him about that. What a strange concept it would be, that to listen to music, we had to have a little tape that we had to put into a machine – that would be a really odd concept for him to think about. Actually when he grows up, it’s going to be a really odd concept for him to think about using screens that you couldn’t touch. But he’s great at using the touch screen on the Iphone – he’s really speedy at that. He’s also great at using a mouse too, considering he’s only three and a half. So at the moment I’m really enjoying seeing technology coming into peoples’ lives like that. We had this instance the other day of him saying ‘Oh, can I watch such and such’. So I pick up the TV remote and say I’d see if I could find it and he was saying ‘No no Daddy, not on there, on Cbeebies website’. So I say ah I don’t think that shows on the Cbeebies website, and he says ‘No it is’. Then he goes over to the computer and picks up the mouse and navigates through the Cbeebies website, to show me that actually it is on there and that he can find it, but I can’t.

Ryan: It will be interesting to see what he’s like in ten years time when they’ve grown up with this technology. My son is only fifteen months now and he knows to touch my Iphone to play video and that’s just weird. I’ll hold it there and he’ll touch it to watch a video of him that I’ve recorded. There’s this aspect, that to them, their whole lives are recorded from day one, where we had old photos and things like that to look back on. They’re going to have their lives documented from start to finish.

Paul: This isn’t to do with my career, but I also regret not taking many photos when I was a teenager, or in my early twenties because there weren’t digital cameras. There are some of my old friends that I don’t have photos of, who I’m still in touch with now, but today I wouldn’t not-have photos of them. I don’t know if you have heard of it, but there is this Iphone app called ‘Bloom’. Bloom is this Iphone app which essentially turns the Iphone into a surface which is just a musical instrument and if you tap it, it makes nice calming noises – look it up its really good. I’m not sure yet whether my son knows that by touching it, that he is making the noise, but it’s an interesting process to keep on letting him have a go while trying to persuade him not to put it in his mouth and to try and make some music.

Ryan: That sounds really cool! So, just to wrap up, where would you like to see yourself in the future?

Paul: Um. On a desert island somewhere.

Ryan: Everybody says that.

Paul: Ha ha, so original. I don’t know – Definitely doing some kind of creating technology content, stuff. It probably won’t be websites in ten years time, I don’t know what it will be, but I enjoy doing what I’m doing. I’m actually getting more and more interested in – well I’ve come from working as a visual designer, so working at Clear Left has exposed me a lot more to being a UX designer and not necessarily opening Photoshop and getting started. Obviously that’s not how we work, there is a lot of sketching on paper. Not illustrative, or fine art, I mean just rough sketching – will this work/won’t it work/try something else out, opening Omnigraffle and wire-framing stuff up in there, printing those out and actually seeing people using them. So I’m now becoming much more interested in design as it actually is, which is not necessarily designing to make things pretty, which was perhaps my mind set ten years ago, but design to make things easier to use for people, which again brings me back to my parents using the Ipad and the kids using the Iphone. Just making it so easy and intuitive – don’t just chuck stuff in there to make it look better, chuck stuff in to make it easier to use. So I want to head more in that direction, it’s really interesting for me.

Ryan: Ok great! Well thank you very much Paul for taking the time to talk to me.

Paul: It’s been a pleasure.

Ryan: I’m sure people will enjoy that, you’ve had an interesting career and I’ll talk to you again soon.

Paul: Cheers, thanks Ryan.

Thanks goes to Blake Williams for transcribing this interview.

To ensure you never miss an episode you can:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed
• Subscribe to my iTunes feed
• Follow me on twitter

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

Richard Rutter is one of the co-founders of Clear Left and is also heading up the highly anticipated FontDeck. Richard started out as a Chemical Engineer before turning his hobby of building websites into a career. In this weeks episode he takes me through his career so far and what lead him to establishing one of the most respected agencies in the industry.

Interview Transcript

Richard: My job title is Production Director, normally. I wouldn’t say that was what I’d call myself to anyone, other than perhaps at the bottom of an email sometimes – don’t think it even goes there nowadays but, we had to come up with something.

‘Director’ because, well, I’m a Director of Clear Left and ‘Production’ because, back in the day – when we started five years ago, I used to be called a Producer or Web Producer, which was a term that I guess got carried over from from television. But it just means, and always did, User Experience Designer and Information Architect, those kind of things.

Ryan: Is that what you focus on most of the time at Clear Left?

Richard: Yep, that’s primarily what I do, I was about to say that I do a bit of front end coding, but that’s not really true – apart from on Fontdeck, which I built, so anything that’s ropey with that is entirely my fault and not our proper front end staff. So yeah, it’s mostly User Experience Design and the odd little bit of training, workshops and things like that.

Ryan: So, what’s an average week like for you?

Richard: An average week, the sort of division is that I need to spend the best part of a day a week, on average, doing company stuff. Whether that’s proposals or managing in one way or another – when you’ve got ten people you need to do some kind of managing. Then there’s User Experience Design, in one way or another, which is talking to clients, which is doing research, which is getting my hands dirty with interactive prototypes or OmniGraffle. A lot of time is spent with pen and paper, we use a lot of pen and paper nowadays and Post-Its and stuff like that. It’s a very efficient way of designing we find, particularly early on.

Ryan: You mentioned Fontdeck, you’re leading that are you?

Richard: That’s right, that takes up a lot of my time at the moment, which is no bad thing because I really enjoy doing it, it’s my baby as it were. So I spend a lot of time on that at the moment as we’re still going through doing improvements and bug fixing, which like any web project will be an ongoing process – just mainly the last few bits and pieces, getting it working better and improving the UI as we get more people testing it and more feedback and reaching out to more and more foundries. We’re getting a lot of interest from foundries and we’ve got quite a few signed up, some haven’t made it into the beta yet but we just need to get a few things signed and sealed with them – so it’s looking very exciting. It’s going more slowly that I would have hoped but I guess that’s the nature of these things and we’re still looking to get a public launch very soon, we certainly want to be out there before South By South-West which is coming along very quickly indeed and is four weeks away now, if that. I think I fly out on four weeks on Thursday.

Ryan: Yeah, I do as well, I’m going with Headscape so that’ll be really cool.

Richard: Yeah, I’m looking forward to it.

Ryan: Yeah, yeah, it’s my first one as well, so should be cool.

Richard: Ah right, well you’ll definitely enjoy it.

Ryan: So, that’s what you’re doing now and I’ve got an interview with Jeremy so that I can know a little bit about how Clear Left was started. Take me back to the beginning, take me back to your career leading up to Clear Left, how did you start out?

Richard: I started out as a hobbyist, and graduated, in 1994. Later that year Netscape 1.1 beta came out, which was very exciting, and early on there were no graphics, or perhaps they’d just introduced in that one the ability to put an image into a web page. There was no commercial web but it didn’t take long for that to appear. It did take me a while to actually get a job in the industry, I did a degree in Chemical Engineering and there was nothing relevant to web design and I had no concept of the idea that I could be a Web Designer as a job, so I did engineering and eventually became a Chartered Engineer, but in the meantime I was learning more and more web design stuff, or building really, more than design.

I created an HMTL guide called Sizzling HTML Jalfrezi, because it was for me and I didn’t think anyone else would bother coming along but lots of people did, and that’s still there frozen in time in the year 2000, or probably the year 1999, at jalfrezi.com or htmlbyexample.com as it came to be called. That was my way in and that was certainly the most popular HTML guide on the web at the time, there weren’t many others as it was fairly early days. It was one of those things where I built it and wrote it to scratch my own itch really, because early on you had HTML standards (HTML2) from the W3C and there was HTML elements being put together by Netscape, that weren’t in that standard, and then subsequently from Microsoft as well, when they joined the game, we had marquee and all of that stuff. I wanted one place where it was altogether so I could see in front of me how to use all of these elements and decide which ones I wanted to use, whether I was going to use blink regardless of its poor support – though I never did use blink apart from in the guide as an example, but that doesn’t count.

Yeah, so that grew there and it got someone’s attention. Basically, some friends of mine I was at university with were working later on, in about 2000, for a web company called Citria who were a company of about twenty people at the time and a full service agency that were starting to build commercial websites and host them and with proper software running them, and stuff like that. I was taken on, well, it was proposed to me that I could do, for a job, what I was doing for a hobby and for the same money, so that seemed like kind of a no-brainer for me. I ditched the engineering, I’d become a Chartered Engineer and then literally two weeks later quit, so I proved I could do engineering and then went on to do what I actually enjoyed doing – which is what I’m still doing.

So, I had about three really interesting years at Citria, it was real dot com stuff, a work hard, play hard kind of ethos – they were really, really talented people we were working with. The company, when I first joined, was only about twenty people and when it finally imploded it was about a hundred and fifty odd people and they’d spent the previous three years judging their success based on how many people had been employed. So they’d be telling us in monthly meetings that they’d just employed another twenty people and I think everyone in the company, apart from the people who were running it, wondered how this could ever last and why it would ever be a business that would really work, but surprise-surprise, in the end, the bottom fell out the market and everyone got made redundant and went on to other things.

I went on and did a bit of freelancing and then went on to join Multimap and had some really good time there. Again, a fairly small company when I joined, I think I was about the twentieth employee there, and then by the time I left there was about a hundred – although they didn’t judge their business by how many people they employed. They, as a pure dot com, never made anyone redundant and it was run really well and as a proper business, sensibly. They had, I think, one big round of funding which they actually spent mostly on advertising which really cemented their position, particularly in the UK. Like any company, when you go through from twenty people up to about a hundred people, there were a lot of teething problems, particularly one. As they got past fifty people they had to put extra layers of management in, which is always really hard work because it takes away all of those fast moving ways that the company is run and becomes a little bit more slow. It was still a really good place and once they’d sorted all that out it was still fun working there.

Then I left to do Clear Left. I should say that the Chairman of Mulitmap, Sean Phelan – who eventually made himself a nice tidy wedge when Microsoft bought them, was really good to me when I left. When I explained what I was doing and why I was leaving Multimap, he suggested that I worked my months notice across a period of two months, part time, so I had a chance to build up some of Clear Left while I was still getting some money from Multimap, which was entirely unnecessary from his point of view but really, really welcomed. That sort of sums up his entrepreneurial spirits, I owe quite a lot to Sean one way or another.

Ryan: That’s really good.

Richard: Yes, and that brings me right round to Clear Left, and joining up with Jeremy and Andy, and never looked back since.

Ryan: OK, and that was about five years ago that you started Clear Left, wasn’t it?

Richard: Yes, our birthday is in May and we’ll be five years old.

Ryan: So, how did you meet Andy and Jeremy? Had you known them a while before you started Clear Left?

Richard: Yeah, I’ve known them a little while, obviously we’re all Brighton based. It’s mostly because we’re in the same field, and even though we’re in Brighton, I guess we knew each other through our blogs. Then we realised that we were in Brighton and got in touch and said about meeting up for a drink, and so on, and then we got to be quite good friends. I guess they were the couple of years leading up to Clear Left, then there was just that one fateful meeting in a coffee shop. I think was New Year’s Day, one morning, when someone said “Hey, we should just quit our jobs and join up forces.” And we did.

Ryan: How did you find the experience of just quitting your job and starting a business? Was it quite scary in the beginning?

Richard: Yeah, it was kind of scary. We went into it with our eyes open and spent the best part of four or five months thinking in a lot of detail about what we were going to do, doing a proper business plan. I ran it past my people like my Dad, who used to be a bank manager, and then also I’ve got other relatives actually who used to be and, in fact still are, bank managers. So then I wanted to get it into the situation where they would be willing to lend us money – not that we wanted any money, we’ve never borrowed any money at all – I wanted to be in a position where they could read this business plan, they could understand it and then as people who would potentially have purse strings would say “Yes, based on this, we think that would be a sound business that we’d lend money to.” Like I said, because we started small – literally in our bedrooms, growing organically – we’ve never had to, it’s been self-funding apart from buying some computers and things upfront, but not money really.

Ryan: And now you’re up to eleven employees.

Richard: And now we’re up to eleven employees, yep. We had a good year last year and it’s looking reasonably good for this year as well, well I mean it’s looking very good at the moment. But, when you’re running these businesses you can never really tell too far in the future because you’ve only got two or three months work ahead of you at any given time so it could all completely disappear, at that point, but it never seems to – you’ve got pretty good warning signs as to whether that is happening or not. It’s alright at the moment, it’s good.

Ryan: So, during your career, what would you say your greatest achievement has been?

Richard: I suppose, overall, it has to be setting up Clear Left… (That was Paul joining us, by the way.)

Ryan: Hello, Paul.

Richard: Overall, setting up Clear Left, I suppose, has to be the highlight. We’ll see what happens with Fontdeck, that might be another highlight, I’m quite excited about it.

I’m quite glad of the webtypography project that I started and may one day be close to finishing at webtypography.net – the Robert Bringhurst ‘Translated to the Web’ thing – I’m quite proud of that although frustrated with myself that it hasn’t got any further. It’s just a lack of time, so many other things grabbing attention, it stands as it does at the moment and hopefully I can chip away at it a bit more.

Our new hire at Clear Left, Andy Hume, is a big typography fan as well. So, as he sits opposite me here in the office maybe I’ll start to rope him in and get him writing a few bits and pieces as well, because he writes quite well on web typography too so maybe there’s a chance to get it progressed further.

Ryan: OK, great. So, on the flipside of that, do you have an regrets?

Richard: I think the simple answer is “No.”

Ryan: No?

Richard: I’m not really someone who regrets actions. Maybe some odd drunken indiscretions, or whatever the word is, but nothing major. There is no major thing to my life where I think I would have done something different, I find that life tends to work out reasonably well if you go at it with a good attitude I think.

Ryan: OK, cool. Well to wrap up, as I can see that everybody is arriving in the office, where do you see yourself in the future or where would you like to see yourself in the future?

Richard: Speaking broadly, I’d like to still be doing something that I enjoy doing, as I do at the moment. I think a lot of the people at Clear Left, myself included, will one way or another still be doing website stuff, even if they didn’t have to – but just maybe not for eight hours a day or ten hours a day, or however long we actually spend working. So broadly speaking that’s what I’d like to be doing, something that I still enjoyed doing and probably something still on the web, but we’ll see what the web turns into over the next few years. It’s going to be there in one form or another but things are evolving as devices are evolving and branching out, changing and then merging back in again. At one point we thought that mobile phones were going to be changing the ways that we designed websites but then in some ways they’ve become so advanced that they’ve become regular browsers anyway. So who knows really what’s going to happen? As long as I’m still involved and enjoying it, that’s all I really care about.

Ryan: OK. Well, thank you very much for your time Richard and I’m sure people will enjoy that.

Richard: You’re welcome, Ryan. Thanks.

Much thanks goes to Dan Millar (@danmillar) for transcribing this interview.

To ensure you never miss an episode you can:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed
• Subscribe to my iTunes feed
• Follow me on twitter

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

… and the industry will be a much happier place. The titles of Web Designer and Web Developer should be binned, they’re too broad and misleading.

How often has this conversation happened to you:

Me: Hi, nice to meet you, what do you do?
Other Person: Oh, I’m a Web Designer
Me: Cool, what do you do then?
Other Person: Well I spend most of my time in Photoshop creating graphics.
Me: Do you code HTML? CSS?
Other Person: Yeah quite a bit actually, I’m learning jQuery at the minute.
Me: Great, will I have seen anything you’ve worked on?

Now if you forced that person to not use the word Web in their job title and instead they had to replace it with something more descriptive the conversion could have gone like this:

Me: Hi, nice to meet you, what do you do?
Other Person: Oh, I’m a Visual Designer mainly, I do some Front-End Development as well.
Me: Cool, will I have seen anything you’ve worked on?

Makes more sense to me, I instantly know what that person does.

Mr Stocks recently tweeted:

Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.

I’m not exactly sure of the context leading up to the tweet but it would seem to me that if the person in Elliots tweet had said he was a Visual Designer looking for someone to do the Front-End Development for his designs, things would have been much clearer.

There’s also the question of specialisation which I don’t have the energy to go into in this post, however I know of many teams that have people who only work on the Visual Design and people who only work on the Front-End Development and it’s a collaborative process from the start. If you work as a Freelancer your skill set has to be much broader out of necessity.

I think the time of using Web Designer/Developer as a catch all title needs to come to an end, it’s fine if you’re telling your Mum’s friend what you do for a living, but not between other professionals in the industry. Be more descriptive!

Chris Lea works for Media Temple. He does the systems engineering work for Virb.com and conducts research into emerging technologies the the hosting provider may want to pursue. You’ll find him on the conference circuit having recently spoken at FOWA London. In this weeks episode Chris takes me through his career, how Media Temple has grown and his plans for the future.

Interview Transcript

Ryan: So what is your job title?

Chris: I don’t have one actually. I haven’t had one for a bit, but if I did it would be something along the lines of Performance Engineer or Research and Development Engineer or something like that.

Ryan: Ok, so tell me a little bit; you work for Media Temple. So tell me a little bit about what you are doing day to day.

Chris: So what I’ve been doing… there are sort of a couple of disparate tracks that I’m doing with Media Temple. The easiest one is that I do the systems engineering work for Virb.com, which is a social network that Media Temple acquired in 2008. So, that’s making sure those systems are operational and are doing what the developers need the systems to do and secure and that sort of thing… that’s under my umbrella. I do some business development work just because some of the things that I’m researching tend to be emerging technologies and that puts me in touch with companies that are using those things and if we’re going to do work with different companies, different projects or whatever, I’m usually involved in those things. Then like I said, a lot of it is seeing what’s happening in the software landscape, sort of server wise and seeing what people are doing on the bleeding edge of things, because the bleeding edge things now are not going to be bleeding edge in six months and more traditional hosting customers may want to be involved in some of those technologies, so I check them out and see what they are used for, and how/if in what way we can leverage them at Media Temple for our customer base.

Ryan: I saw you talk recently at Future of Web Apps, so are you on the conference circuit quite a bit, are you talking quite a bit about this stuff?

Chris: It kinda comes in waves. Talking at FOWA is great, Ryan and his crew put on such an awesome conference, so I’ll probably try and do a little more next year. This year I spoke at South by South West, FOWA and maybe one or two more, I’ll try and do some more speaking next year, I’m not sure. But yeah, I’m out there on the conference circuit. I was just at An Event Apart out in San Francisco to say hi to those guys and its a good way to keep in touch with the community.

Ryan: Ok, right cool. So, that’s a little bit about what you are doing now. Rewind, go right back to the beginning. What was your first job?

Chris: First job post school? or first job like ever!

Ryan: Whichever is most interesting!

Chris: It would be post school actually. I moved out to Los Angeles in the last 90’s and at the time I was just planning on taking a year off and then going back to graduate school, but the Internet was just really, that what was really taking off. You know I studied Physics at school so you sort of picked up the computer skills there and a friend of mine started a little web design company. Actually I ended up working at Fox for a year and a half, working on digital television stuff. This is back when HD only existed in prototype form, so I did that for a year and a half also with the web development stuff. Then the web stuff got too much so I left Fox and did just web stuff for a couple of years. Then we shut that company down and I did freelance software for a while and worked on a couple of books, programming books, PHP books. From there it was Media Temple and I’ve been at Media Temple for six and a half years now.

Ryan: Ok, cool. How big is Media Temple? How many of you are their there?

Chris: It’s big. It’s 180 something people now which is crazy to me as I was employee 18 so its certainly grown a lot. You know you go to the office now and its really really full. That said we’re still hiring as quickly as we can for talented people.

Ryan: So was it quite small when you started?

Chris: Yeah, like I said my employee number was under 20, and a fair number of those people aren’t still there. There’s not a whole lot of people who have been around as long as me, there’s a couple but not too many.

Ryan: What’s your greatest achievement in your career? What are you most proud of?

Chris: Hmm, that’s a good question. I’ve done a couple of things at Media Temple that I’m pretty proud of. I mean most of them were internal projects that aren’t that sexy to talk about but, like, I was one of the guys that got our data centre moved. It was like this god awful project, but you know it had to be done and it actually happened, all things considered, really really smoothly. You know when you’re trying to move that many servers there’s a lot of room for error. We actually managed to get that done over a couple of weekends and few summers ago and that worked. I was sort of in charge of the technical groups at Media Temple during a pretty intense phase of the growth, and you know I managed to keep things going. It was pretty hairy at times, but I think when I took over that job role we were hosting close to 17,000 domains, give or take, and when I stopped doing that role we were hosting like 130,000 domains…

Ryan: Bloody hell.

Chris: Yeah, so percentage wise that was a really big crook in the hockey stick on the graph you know. So really I’m proud of that. I certainly could have done things better than I did looking back on it, but you know we got through. Then, outside of that, I think I’m really proud of some of the biz dev stuff I’ve done at Media Temple. You know when I started it was a company that very much catered towards graphic designers, and we still do certainly, but when I came in I was coming in very much out of being a PHP programmer, a Perl programmer and stuff. I think I helped push the company into supporting the web standards guys, the List Apart kind of crew that we’re friendly with now and that we work with. Things like getting the guys from the Django project and JQuery, sort of more developer centric guys, sort of in the family, I had a hand in there. They are friends of mine, they’re doing fantastic work so obviously I’m proud of those efforts.

Ryan: How did you go about getting those people on board to use Media Temple? What approach did you take?

Chris: Being really blunt. I would stalk them sometimes, but yeah, you know you run into these guys at conferences and I’d be like “Hi we’re Media Temple, we think you’re doing really great work. We’d like to help out with the hosting for people we think are doing great work, what can we do?” You start that dialogue… I think with some of the technical guys because I come from a more technical background we were able to speak the same language pretty well. But like with the jQuery stuff I email John Resig a couple of times and hadn’t heard back as I’m sure his inbox is crazy, and I finally found his cell phone number somewhere are just cold called him, said “Hi, why don’t you let us host the JQuery stuff, we think it’s awesome”. That worked too. So yeah, it’s going straight in I’ve found works best.

Ryan: Cool, ok on the flip side of your greatest achievements, what would you say is your biggest regret career wise?

Chris: Yeah, that’s a tricky one. I mean if I could change one big thing that I did I probably would have worked less in school. I really busted my ass in school, which I mean was good, but I really thought I was going to go into Physics and as I said I was going to take a year off and then come back and I think I missed out on a lot of college because of that. But other that that, biggest regrets… I don’t really have too many. There were a couple of start ups that had I gone with them back in the day I probably would have ended up doing pretty well, sort of when I was doing that freelance stuff people hit me up once in a while, but I don’t really regret it, I mean you never know and they seem pretty crazy at the time, so it’s ok.

Ryan: You briefly mentioned then you wish you’d not worked so hard in school. How do you feel about college or university education when it comes to coming into this industry? Do you think its not necessarily needed? Better to teach yourself on the job?

Chris: I don’t think it is necessarily needed, I do think you need to go through a process of learning how things work in the industry. I studied Physics in a very mathematical piece of the physics universe really hard in school, and I don’t use any of that now, but it certainly taught me a way of approaching problems in a very general sense and very applicable to technical problems. You know coding, dealing with servers, systems, sort of an ability to look at something that is big and complicated and break it down into smaller and smaller pieces until they are small and you can make sense of them and you just deal with them. I definitely got that out of what I learned at college, or I guess university if I were British. But, I don’t think it is necessary you know, the people I know who are really good have all gone through that process one way or the other and sometimes it was self motivated and sometimes it was school and sometimes it was training of some sort. A lot of the guys that I work with don’t have degrees and they are as, or in many cases better than I am at this stuff. I certainly don’t think that on the technical side it is a requirement anymore. I think that the availability of technology has really changed that. When I was doing it I think it maybe was more required more, I don’t know how I would have done it otherwise, but I mean you know Linux is free and easy for everyone to use. Back then if you wanted to get a C compiler you went to your lab because you didn’t really have one you could use or get for free on your computer at home, but now you do. The availability of the technologies that we’re all using for free I think makes that a lot more possible than it was 15 years ago or so.

Ryan: So I suppose really just to wrap up then, where do you see yourself in the future?

Chris: Well, Media Temple is going real strong so I don’t have any plans to depart any time soon. I think that I’m probably going to move, you know… I expect I’m going to go more or less technical than what I’m currently doing. Meaning I will probably get into, just in terms of really trying to focus, I’ll probably need to really hone down on some of these more complex technologies which is going to require doing less biz dev stuff and less publicly viewable stuff and really geeking out, or maybe the other way and I may really sit back and let guys who are probably younger and sharper and more on the ball than me start working on those things and do more of a developmental sort of a role going forward. Media Temple is the kind of company that… we try and hire really talented people and then we try and let them do where their talents take them. So it’s not, like I said I don’t have a title, and that’s fine, that’s cool. We are going to see what kind of problems come up and if I can be of help I’m going to do them and that not always something we can really plan for, but its taken me in some really cool directions so its not something I’m nervous about, its worked out pretty well so far.

Ryan: Ok, fantastic. Well thank you very much Chris for taking the time to talk to me, that’s great. I’m sure people will enjoy that and nice speaking to you.

Chris: Yeah great to speak to you too, thanks.

Much thanks goes to Dan Millar (@danmillar) for transcribing this interview.

To ensure you never miss an episode you can:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed
• Subscribe to my iTunes feed
• Follow me on twitter

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.

I received the following comment on my Please start from the beginning… with Ben Bodien interview:

Dear Ryan,

Thanks for this wonderful series which i’ve been following while residing abroad in a country with a high speed internet connection.

Now that i’m back in my native country and on my dial-up, i have a serious challenge to enjoy this wonderful content and would appreciate so much if you could put up a transcript (if you have such) of the interviews, it would make your website accessible to so many more who would really enjoy it. Andrew at Mixergy has similar series which comes accompanied with such transcripts, i don’t know how he does the transcripts though, i don’t think there is any automated process to it.

Looking forward to it (btw if you would be able to land an interview with Andrew as well it would be neat ;))

Once again thanks soo much for the inspiration you keep on pouring on the poor souls of internet citizens.

Gobezu

I couldn’t agree more! I’ve wanted to have a transcribed version of the Please start from the beginning… interviews ever since I started the series, infact I wrote transcribed highlights for the follow interviews before Christmas:

• Chris Mills
• Alex Hunter
• Greg Wood
• Eric Meyer
• Leif Steiner

I’ve subsequently not had time to transcribe further, it’s an unfortunate fact that there’s only so much one man can do. So I’m attempting to rectify this now!

For Boagworld we have a team small army of transcribers that cover interviews completely volunterally and for which we credit them and link to a website of there choice in the show notes.

Would anybody be interested in becoming a transcriber for Please start from the beginning…?

What’s in it for you?

If you become a transcriber for Please start from the beginning… you will:

• have your name, twitter ID and URL editied into the video that you transcribe for
• be credited in the episode notes
• get to see the interviews before anybody else!
• be helping make Please start from the beginning… more accessible for everyone

If you are interested please send me an email at ryan@havocinspired.co.uk

Thanks in advance.

Ben Bodien arrived in the web industry via a fuel depot explosion and an economic crisis. He’s co-founder & principal of Neutron Creations, a development agency based in London, that are quickly making a name for themselves, collaborating with well know designers such as Elliot Jay Stocks and Tim Van Damme. In this weeks episode, Ben takes me through he career to date and his experiences of starting his own business.

Interview Transcript

Ryan: So what is your job title?

Ben: My job title erhmmm , Ok my job title is co-founder and principal which is quite a mouthful it is one of those job titles where everyone sort of loves to hate. It is not something that is short and snappy that is very descriptive
the reason was when Mark and I set the company up we wanted to have a title that sort of described that we owned the company but it wasn’t a dusty corporate title like director or CEO because we are both equal partners in the business so we can’t both be CEO’s
So yeah we had quite a long discussion about it and we sort of borrowed from the advertising/creative industries where they have principals or partners so we went with that and we stuck co-founder on the front to make it a bit longer and also to imply we are the ones running this place.

Ryan: And we are talking about Neutron Creations?

Ben: That’s right yes, it is a web development agency very small agency more like a studio there are two of us in it at the moment the two co-founders, and yeah we may be looking to expand this year we are only a year old now so errhm we are now at the stage where things are running stably and happy with where it is going it might be time to grow but we do not want to run too fast I don’t think.

Ryan: So what do you do day to day for the business ?

Ben: Day to Day, there is no such thing as a sort of typical day really it depends what type of projects we have on, there is a lot of running the business. We sort of share that so we haven’t lumped either one of us with your doing all the finance, your doing all the marketing so there is a lot of admin answering emails we both look after accounting that sort of stuff all the day to day operational things for a business. My actual stuff, stuff that I actually do is front-end development that’s my reason to be I suppose typically it is, for the last few projects we do all sorts of different stuff, we do not have a typical project either so we have been asked to jump in on existing websites and add some extra stuff, we have also done projects were we have taken a design and we do all the front-end coding and also we we take designs and do front-end and back-end. So we do all sorts of things really. So depending on how much front end coding there is involved in the project dictates what I am doing on that particular day with that particular project. So if there is none then I will be doing other stuff, or working on another project. Mostly it is taking designs and implementing them in HTML and CSS, jQuery and making them work and sing that is really what I do.

Ryan: Lots and lots of variety then so that is always good

Ben: Yes, although recently over the xmas period it seems to be mostly email is what I have been doing. So I have had a month of emailing and now it might be back to work, actual work.

Ryan: OK, so as you say you have been running your own business for about a year

Ben: That’s right yes.

Ryan: Just rewind a little then and take me back to the beginning how did your career start out?

Ben: The beginning OK , [Laughs]

Ryan: Start from the beginning

Ben: Yes, OK I guess it is all in the title. It is quite funny actually I was thinking about this when we agreed to do this I haven’t really had any jobs that haven’t been directly relevant to what I have ended up doing, which quite handy I suppose I have never done any bar tending or anything like that maybe I will come back to you later as a retirement project or something. The first thing I did was like an internship for a company my aunt worked for actually and I was just lumped in with the IT department, like 5 people and I think it was a two month thing over a summer holiday and I was basically the IT busybody so I was checking cables restarting things and making tea was pretty much the extent of my duties. One thing I had to do was make an asset register of every single piece of IT hardware in the company premises which was like for a company of 500 people that takes a while.

Ryan: [laughs]

Ben: That was like a month long project that one, that was an unpaid work experience thing I think I was about 17 or so, 16 or 17 but i have been set on computery related things for decades now. So it has always been that sort of career path, I have never swung in from other avenues like being an accountant or microbiologist or anything.

Ryan: So where did you go from there I mean , were you did you do university or college.

Ben: I yes, I went to University, after that I did, I got into my head that I was going to be a video game designer or developer because I have been playing games since I could look at a computer basically so right from a BBC basic so gaming has always been there in a big way and I wanted to write games basically so I sort of set off down that path working out what I needed to do to reach that goal, I got internship, well it was not an internship it was a beta testing thing for two weeks with Loinhead studios.

Ryan: oh yeah

Ben: Who were the guys that made black and white and some other stuff as well Fable, Peter Molyneux’s company basically so I did two weeks there and that was fantastic It was like a games company brilliant this is what I want to be doing so talking to there coders they said the best way to get into games coding is to do a course in computer science as a degree rather than anything games specific as a degree as that does not give you a decent founding in the sort of theories of it so off I went I went to Kent University and studied computer science there. During which time I tried coding games and found it was actually quite hard so I drifted along for a bit not sure what or which way I was going with it. As part of the university program it was a sandwich year, or a year in industry and in that year I went to work for Sun Microsystems in California for one year so that was amazing, being paid, it wasn’t actually that much money but the accommodation was paid for flights there and back were paid for so it was kind of everything you were given it was errr disposable income so we bought lots of cameras and shiny things, explored San Francisco and the bay area that was all very good. So while I as there I was working with the streaming server team which was a software streaming server for video and they were developing one with this tiny team in Sun that no one even within the rest of Sun had heard of. So they were trying to get that started and get a voice within the company and get Sun actually using their own product. Part of that was helping to revamp the products internal intranet, sort of web page so they had this really ropey typical open-source web page which sort of said download this, download this download this there were like 50 download links on a web page it is how most open source things seem to work, and no one really knew what the thing was about so I worked with them to redesign the web page and introduce this new thing which was new to them and me at the time which was CSS moving from their tables based horrendous site they had before. So that was my first taste of front end development on the web I hadn’t really done much web stuff before it had all been in Dreamweaver or on the back end side of things with PHP and relaying on a CMS for front end so that was where I got my first taste for front end development so I thought OK this is the next to be looking at is coding interfaces and doing the front end of things.

Ryan: SO OK where did it go from there when was that, how long ago was that you were working for Sun ?

Ben: That was 2002,2003 that was a year long placement so they sent us back to the UK and we finished or degrees and what happened after that, well I graduated mysteriously by some string of luck then whjat happened, that time was all very lots of things happened all very quickly it was kind of a blur.

Ryan: [laughs]

Ben: Oh so that is right I did a diploma in audio engineering for a year which was another thing, I was always interested in making music as well so that was kind of me exploring if that was something I wanted to do professionally?

Ryan: OK

Ben: But as with games coding it turned out the industry is fiercely competitive and the salaries are not all that high so, it is not the easiest thing to go into and luckily I had the degree in CS sitiing behind that so that was a decent fallback. So then I worked for company called Trilogy logistics which is always a mouthful to say, I could never get the hang of that and they were a new division of a video games distribution company so it was computer science stuff not actually working on games but in and around games. It was basically working in a warehouse making sure video games got to shops from the pubishers and the manufacturing so there was a lot of more IT related stuff looking after a warehouse full of computers all the staff and operation stuff, replacing printer cartridges the usual exciting stuff but within that job I got involved in writing some of our own applications for the company and those were all web based apps. So it was my first taste of web apps. So they were like things for booking delivery slots for the drivers to come and collect packs of games, the warehouse only had a finite number of loading slots, I think it was one so we had a very tight schedule for when drivers would come to pick things up. They would get stuff loaded into the van it would take 20 mins or something and they would drive off and these guys are all working on a tight schedule so we needed something to organise all of this and is probably quite typical it was all done in a excel spreadsheet when I got there so I though you know there is a better way to do this something that more than one person can look at at a time, doesn’t loose information if someone edits the spreadsheet, you know it is done properly. So I set about building a webapp for that having learnt more about this transition everyone was making from desktop apps to web apps. This was in 2003 I suppose , 2004 when it was starting to happen. So yes that was a good run into web application building, as I was the only person their doing that, that particular side of the work I was doing front end and back end. There was no specialisation there it was just we need this get Ben to do it, so that’s pretty much how that worked.

Ryan: OK

Ben: And then the warehouse exploded. They had, I don’t know if you remember it was next to the Bunsfield Oil Depot in Hertfordshire .

Ryan: No but I can imagine where this is going

Ben: OK to set the scene it is basically this enormous facility which has petrol tanks, not just like tanks but massive storage containers for all the petrol stations in the southeast and Heathrow, and Stanstead and Luton and Gatwick so there is a lot of petrol there and one day some of it spilled out and someone started their truck and it all exploded and it basically levelled the warehouse we had so that was my first taste of how important backups are because ours were very rudimentary at the time. It did actually work out we had it all backed up but it was a bit scary when you turn on Sky news and your office is on fire and flat.

Ryan: I was going to say, so you was not there at the time I take it.

Ben: No that was pretty amazing actually it was the christmas period I think it was 2005 it happened around then it was kind of miraculous it was 6:00am on a Sunday morning. Had it been a few hours later there would have been some temp staff in there doing some packing or if it had been on a weekday then there would have been 50 people in there so no one hurt but the business was demolished and had to relocate so there was a long period of reshuffling moving servers and getting everything set up there. We moved to a new facility and carried on with that for a while. But you know there is only so long you can go on for changing printer cartridges in half of your time and then building webapps in the other half, when you really enjoy doing the webapps and the printer cartridges just start getting you down a bit you just start resenting them so

Ryan: [Laughs]

Ben: So I started to get a little bit bored there, so I think I lasted two years there with a massive explosion in the middle so that wasn’t too bad.

Ryan: So that’s what spurred on your interest to go down the web route.

Ben: Yes so then I was definitely set on doing web stuff I thought this was a fast moving industry and I’d heard about these people who specialise in doing certain aspects of web development are not just lumped with doing the whole thing so I thought if maybe I can find a different company I might be able to focus more on what I am interested in, not stuff that I can’t do or I am not confident I can do a brilliant job in. So for me that was moving away from backend development and towards the front end.

Ryan: OK So where did you end up after that

Ben: So after that one, well one random evening I met this guy in a bar who turned out to be the CTO of a hedge fund. We were both extremely drunk he was asking me what I did and I explained what I was doing and explained that I was working on some reporting stuff and guys in finances go crazy for reporting they can never get enough reports so I sort of lit up because I though reporting, oooh fancy stuff web stuff and he said why don’t you come in and talk to us and we will see if there is something you can help us with here. So I went in there and I sort of had a very rapid shotgun job interview in like 30 minutes where I sat down by the technical team and they asked me what i did and all that kind of stuff and asked me some finance questions which I completely flucked becuase I had nothing to do with finance before that. They said, they started me on a sort of probation period thing just to see how it goes so I did not know anything about finance that was a sticking point for both of us but it turned out quite well and I went on full time there and that one that was interesting, this was pre credit crunch and it was a hedge fund that was specialising in collatorised debt obligations which were the things that went pretty wrong and they were also specialising in American warrants and mortgage backed securities and all the stuff that you read about in the papers during the summer that year. So not only that the company was also doing it on behalf of an Icelandic Investment bank so ..

Ryan: ahhh

Ben: It was like this huge huse of cards, mountain of cards with a few of us perched on top. So that was fun and it unwound very quickly but while I was working on a webapp which again seems to be theme in my career was moving people away from excel to web applications so that was taking these dusty financial reports which were just a billion numbers crammed into a A4 page and no heirachy or anything it was just numbers numbers numbers and you just had to sit and look at it for ten minutes and have a degree in Economics to understand what any of it meant so I thought what … By this time I had been reading lots of books by Edward tufte aswell , the visualisation Informational designer

Ryan: Yes

Ben: So i thought I can apply loads of this stuff to this. So I started building this web application which would go through the same database that all these numbers were coming out off but get out the important ones for certain groups of people, so you had traders who made snap decisions so they did not want to be sat there with a spreadsheet that has a million numbers in it when they only need to see maybe five for a particular company they are looking at.
That was me trying to educate the finance industry or at least a tiny pocket of it, and it was going quite well but then it all collapsed extremely quickly when the credit crunch took hold. Since we were working on the reporting we had a pretty good idea of what was happening so we sort of had forewarning of what was coming since we were the ones doing the charts which had this lovely line going up and up and then suddenly bang this huge fall and at that company I had recruited Mark who is now my business partner who I had originally met at University I recruited him into the company as our sort of Systems Architect because he is a fantastic backend developer. So he was working with me there for, I think he was there for about nine months before the end, so maybe around that yeah and then it all started falling apart so they laid of a few staff, luckily we were seen as some of the key ones so we were kept on but increasingly there was not much to do in the office it was sort of us sitting around twiddling our thumbs while everyone else was running around putting out fires because the technical teams were, you know there was not much to do while the house was on fire. So we were there twiddling our thumbs wondering what to do facing the increasingly likelihood of redundancy so we started planning for that for quite a while and eventually we thought this has coming it was just around the corner so we may as well either we are going to have to go out looking for jobs, which neither of us particularly fancied or we can try and start up a company of our own doing much the same stuff as we are doing now just for something other than finance as that is going to be on hold for a while in healing mode. So while that company whilst it’s death throws we were quietly sitting in a corner setting up another company researching company names and this sort of stuff and planning our line of attack with our first clients. So that was how the company came about. We were given a few months notice period with redundancy by which time we had already had about two months preparation time on this company so we bootstrapped our company enabling us to have the first three months free of having to pay ourselves out of the business so that really gave us our jumpstart.

Ryan: Ok

Ben: And luckily it all worked and here I am still today.

Ryan: Cool, Fantastic, I suppose leading on from that, I suppose, you are the first person I have interviewed that’s a partnership. I have interviewed quite a few people who have freelanced or worked for an agency but there is just you and Mark …

Ben : Yes

Ryan: …as a partnership, what advice would you give to people who maybe looking to, maybe a bit afraid of going out on their own or don’t want to go for a bigger agency or want to get involved with working with someone else what advice would you give to them starting their own business?

Ben: Sure the partnership is really good I think it is has the best of both worlds it still feels like you are freelancing when there is only the two of you because, obviously initially you are not going to have an office I don’t this is my house [indicating behind him] so you don’t have that sort of slugging into work thing like when you are in a larger company but also with a partnership you have got someone else to lean on and bounce ideas of so there is a bit more stability and security then just you going stir crazy in a room by yourself. I think it has a lot of benefits from both sides, Mark had been freelancing before so he knew what that was about I had never freelanced myself before so it was all new to me. I had worked in sun for a year which was well at the time 40,000 people and I think day after I arrived they got rid of 10,000 so I was pretty sure I was not going to go back to that kind of scale of company since you know they can kill 10,000 people of with a wave of the hand and now they are owned by Oracle is it, I think they are owned by know is it I haven’t even kept up so yes it has all been a bit funny. So I think for partnerships as long as you find the right person to do it with, I would not recommend just grabbing someone of the streets and saying “hey be my partner this is what we are going to do” it has to be something you are both dead keen on that you both can bring complimentary skills sets to the table so you are not both doing the something arguing about how you would do something all the time and I think with Mark and I we already knew we worked really well together from our time in the financial sector short-lived though it was. So we were both confident we could work with each other I think that is the main thing. I think I read an article recently where someone was saying it is more important to prioritise the working atmosphere between partners in the company rather than the skills so if you go out and cherry pick people you would like to work with that you have never even met before just purely based on their skillets then you may probably end up being disappointed because you will find out they are complete idiots that you can’t spend more than five minutes with in one room.

Ryan: Yes true

Ben: So yes it is a good way to go as long as you can find the right person and as long as you havoc the necessary guts I suppose, because it is pretty scary as you know going freelance trying to do it the same but with two of you is a little bit more scary because then it is two people who are potentially being done over if it all falls apart so. Yes it is good we are aiming to turn it into a larger thing to grow a little more but as I say we are trying to keep it small and controllable for now.

Ryan: Ok so looking back at your career what would you say your greatest achievement has been?

Ben: Greatest achievement, I would definitely say career wise it is setting up this company because it has been the most enjoyable thing I have worked on in my entire career being able to choose what I work on being able to say no to people and them not just saying do it anyway. Yes it has been fantastic so I think definitely this company has been the best thing. Having said that if I had leapt straight out of University and tried to go into this I think it would have fallen flat on it’s face quite quickly so I think you do need a bit of experience under your belt working for other people before you leap straight out there

Ryan: Ok

Ben: Although I know people who have done that so it is not impossible but yes

Ryan: So on the flip side fog that have you any regrets?

Ben: Regrets ooh the difficult questions are coming now

Ryan: [Laughs]

Ben: Lets see I suppose let me think this is well OK I suppose the difficult thing would be what would I have done differently in hindsight I probably wouldn’t have flapped about with the career direction as much although I think I have been fairly focused but I probably would have abandoned games earlier if I had tried doing it earlier rather than just thinking about doing it. The diploma in audio engineering was fun but I haven’t applied that much to anything that has made any money so again maybe that was a mistake but you have to experiment to know where you need to be going and the web was also, you know how fast it moves so you never know what’s going to be around.

Ryan: OK so just to finish up then you have already touched upon it a little but where do you see yourself in the future ?

Ben: Hopefully ruling a small empire, err no well this empire here that I have now with Mark if we can build that into something that is able to support a few more people and get some more, I am not saying our projects have not been exciting , but some larger projects some more broader reaching projects we have had a few recently which have been really good, they have been improving all the time so if we can follow along that path and stay alive and keep feeding ourselves that’s been our objective so far and its been paying off we are both still here.

Ryan: Well OK fantastic and thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me and I am sure people will find that very interesting

Ben: Thank you Ryan it has been a pleasure. Thank you.

Much thanks for to Shaun Hare (@sdh100shaun) for transcribing this interview.

To ensure you never miss an episode you can:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed
• Subscribe to my iTunes feed
• Follow me on twitter

Please feel free to leave a comment and give me some feedback, I’d be interested to hear about who you’d like me to interview and I’ll do my best to arrange it.

Enjoy.