Havoc Inspired

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.

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