#390: How To Easily Create A Beautiful Presentation Slide Deck & Company w/ Visme's President & Founder, Payman Taei
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, create, tools, platform, ai, design, agency, flash, websites, designers, template, users, called, bought, companies, hindsight, case, talking, intuition, good
SPEAKERS
Speaker 3 (66%), Law (27%), Ben (4%), Eric (3%)
BG
Ben Goldman
0:00
Minutes from 6pm See if I know I don't know. So most of the backdrop that's good I got I think we got a lot of different two and a half think that we probably Emily
Law Smith
0:42
that's cool
Eric Readinger
0:43
all right got Polly's to actually fund the booty call but
Law Smith
0:47
do you want my jasper AI?
0:50
Morgan. I have it. I bought it for a month.
Law Smith
0:53
Oh fuck you did?
BG
Ben Goldman
0:55
I did too. Well, those are specifically for Dixit. Oh,
Law Smith
1:03
well, you're just probably running out right? Yeah,
1:05
I got a call Dixit.
Eric Readinger
1:09
By the way, I was watching the game last night
BG
Ben Goldman
1:12
all right. Details can result in this burn out
BG
Ben Goldman
1:27
the shippers billing table. Sounds like I was my roommate Adi. No, that was a shimmy Berg's. So yeah. And then I was like wheezing was any ideas was good? Wasn't that his family or some shit? Yeah, that sounds good. I need it.
Law Smith
1:50
I'll call him randomly and see what's up.
1:56
I'm in Hong Kong this
Law Smith
2:01
upright on up for leaping over
BG
Ben Goldman
2:04
she's backs up against the wall man. Does flow flow to
Law Smith
2:11
the other one.
BG
Ben Goldman
2:13
I'm getting ready, guys. Hey, how's it going? Good. Good.
Law Smith
2:20
We're rolling as we do.
3
Speaker 3
2:23
Awesome. You guys mind if I catch my little T on the next side so I can sip on it. Just give me about 10 seconds. Absolutely. Okay, all right. Cool.
Law Smith
2:34
Green tea. Sure. SM seven. Like that mic is on. That's that's the mic I want to get us to. Not that matters that much. But if your podcasts are out there and we keep this in the SM seven sure mics are top. That's one of the reasons already. What kind of bike is that? And what kind of tea did you get? Oh, that isn't SB seven, maybe SB seven shore?
3:09
Talking about us. Me? Yeah.
3
Speaker 3
3:12
Actually, I honestly don't know. I haven't used this one before. I could plug it in and see if it works. But yeah, well, their mics. Yeah, we
Law Smith
3:19
were trying to same way.
3:22
I mean, I got this bag and get out of whack. It's on it looks good.
Eric Readinger
3:25
Looks good. It looks like you. Yeah,
3
Speaker 3
3:30
I'm just I got my office and using this room, I hardly in this room. So bigger than you the other rooms all windows and all that stuff. So
Law Smith
3:40
it looks like you kind of have started the wall behind you for Yeah,
3
Speaker 3
3:45
watching. Oh, yeah. See, this is this is our recording room for our YouTube channel.
Eric Readinger
3:50
Oh, very nice. No, yeah, I was gonna say that's artistic.
3
Speaker 3
3:53
Artistic. Yeah. Cool. Let me see here. I got Oh, yeah, here we go. See? See? All right, cool. Getting the interview down. All right, cool.
Law Smith
4:07
So we let the guests so we don't we don't fumble through plug in their name. Why don't you tell us who you are, what Visio is all about and where people can find you?
3
Speaker 3
4:24
Yeah, cool. So visit me. Well, as far as where I'm looking I'm in the DC area payment is the first name taught e is the last name. The payment sounds Jamaican, you know from the Caribbean? Yeah, that's right. And they tell you they people think I'm from Asia. But it's a Middle Eastern name. So that's that and but as far as what bothers me is we're basically you could say work like PowerPoint on steroids. That's one way you could say it, but the way I explain it in a more formal way is we're an all in one visual communication platform that basically empowers non design professionals. To create any form of content from the ordinary to the extraordinary. So from normal presentations and you know, clean looking graphics and social media documents, all the way to fully engaging interactive content for learning management for fully interactive video presentations, short videos. So that's essentially what we are. And last thing I will add, I guess this will give you some food for thought is, if you were to think of, let's say dumbed down design tools or standard presentation platforms on the left, and you think about let's say Adobe Creative Cloud figma the very high end professional tools on the right side, we literally sit at the intersection of both we're in the middle we marry and bridge the gap between the simple and the powerful.
Law Smith
5:50
Yeah, we would call low tech crowd would like that. Good. Because, you know, we've talked about a lot on this show where there's a tech gap between generations we feel like yeah, we're 3830 and I'm 38. So we're kind of old. I was
3
Speaker 3
6:12
mad, I'm getting older. I'm older than you guys. I don't want to disclose my age, but
Law Smith
6:16
But you look younger. It's that Middle Eastern.
3
Speaker 3
6:20
Bob, so How old do I look? The Honest 4240 tentacle. Add a few more years. There you go. Yeah. Cool. All right.
Law Smith
6:29
Any profile. We don't have to show it. Yeah. So you know, visit me if I'm not mistaken. You know, started out in the kind of PowerPoint deck kind of area, right? Because when I saw you came on the show you were coming on the show. I was like, Oh, this is me. Okay, this is some. I've been I've been sent a lot of those decks Yeah, visibly decks three years. But I you know, I knew it as more of that. Just a PowerPoint contract. Yeah.
3
Speaker 3
7:03
Yeah, that's that's so I mean, I think the story will be pretty cool to go back and are we by the way, are we recording or? Okay. All right, cool. Well, let's get rolling. So, yeah, here's, here's what I would say. So, going back to my journey, I was web designer to pay my way through college. Back in early 2000s. Some people that are probably listening weren't born yet or anyway, I was designing websites and what I used to do was to create these animated flash websites so I don't know if you guys remember or not flash Adobe Flash, you know? I loved it. And I was always into animation. So created some really cool award winning stuff with me and my small team of just less than 10 people at a company called hindsight interactive. And that was my agency and so out of that. What happened was, Flash was no longer supported. Suddenly, because iPhone came out for the right reasons. You know, it was a battery hog and so on. And literally overnight. Overnight, and the exaggeration within a matter of six months or so was like nobody wants flash websites anymore. What the hell? So my thing was like, well,
Law Smith
8:21
let's be like, Oh, six or seven when the
3
Speaker 3
8:25
iPhone came out with was six or seven, but I think it was, oh, 809 the one they announced it and then it was this is like 2011 12 when it really started taking effect where like nobody wanted anymore. Yeah. And so I was like, alright, well, you know, let's create a let's create a flash for the future. So animators, like myself, designers myself can create animated content for websites. And you just cannot get rid of it. Because you see Flash was a plugin. So it had to be supported by browsers that browser could come one day and say we no longer support Flash which is what essentially occurred, such as a Safari browser and so on. But the fabric of the internet then, and today is still what's called html5. And so I was like, well, let's create it on html5 on that because nobody can get rid of it. And so by the time I put out like a little focus group, and they had 1015 people show up to this very buggy, very kind of an MVP. And no designers show up almost, I just targeted the wrong people here in the DC area. And what they were trying to do was to create like a slide deck, or they're trying to create, like, what's called an infographic, and then that was an aha moment. So real quickly, long story. Short, I was like, Man light bulb moment. This should be a tool for non designers, not the designers and let's go back and make it an all in one platform. And because I personally as a designer, what a big frustration I really had was that, let's say in those days I was creating a really cool animated intro for a website, you know, and I had to go in, create something in Photoshop, export as a JPEG or something, bring it in, put into Flash. And then I would have to go to like Illustrator do some vector graphics bringing in so anyway, three, four or five different programs. And guess what the learning curve of each one is a little bit different. And even for great professional designers. Those are really good, powerful tools, but they have a different interface. So you're going from one interface to another to another, and I just, it will always frustrate the heck out of me. I was like, there has to be a way so I was like, Okay, well, let's bring this in. Let's create the platform that allows anybody to create anything, that sounds like too much to be true. And so that it gives people the best of both worlds but then we always stop short of making it way too powerful because then in that case, a we're competing with the larger platforms which do a much better job and those high end items. And we're kind of like this, like, hey, I want to graduate from creating stuff that I do. Like I get these tools that are really good an entry point to get into. But at some point, I want more. I expect more. I want to create something different. Your other option has been as you gotta jump all the way from the left, all the way on the other side, high learning curve a lot more. We are the answer between that. So that's basically what it's been, what, eight, nine years plus that of work that we've been working on. And here we
Law Smith
11:19
are interesting you're giving Cuba a run for its money. I told Pictou chart and we got graphics dog don't worry about Yeah, yeah. Stay down in Malaysia or whoever there.
3
Speaker 3
11:33
Well, I think, all great tools, you know, we are kind of this other alternative that people would have to experience for themselves. To make our decisions. We have audiences that to people that use those tools, we have others that graduate from there, they come to us there's something different and unique in our platform, but at the same time, there's some things that are very similar.
Law Smith
11:52
Well, let me put that it's scalable, it's simple and detailed if you want it to be great and we know how to do design on a very basic the air is much better than I am every time I open up you're really good okay now, but every time I open up Illustrator I get apoplectic because it's just
Eric Readinger
12:12
that arrow different from there or Photoshop that yeah, I wouldn't do something different. Why?
Law Smith
12:17
Well there's your hands now. I use Pixelmator over Photoshop just because I don't need for what I need to do. I don't need a lot I concept but when when I really need design done well listen to Eric or someone who's really good but I need enough to do concepts or or backgrounds or whatever. You know, you're really fulfilling a need. I feel like that. You know you're in a an interesting space because I think we're gonna see a lot more of this in a lot of apps. I feel like Adobe tried to make a move for this when they bought Google Apps. And they they re branded in theirs. And they go okay, these are simple. These are simple mobile apps that are now Adobe and they do anything and then now that was probably like five years ago and then now all the Adobe apps are way too complicated on mobile. I feel like what you're fulfilling a big need to me I'll do a pitch for you. anybody listening? They're freaking out. They got to do a presentation. You know what kind of last second they need something good we got to do visit me
3
Speaker 3
13:21
usually say next level, you know, what's the next level? So what I would say and again, I'm not here to sell that that thing that I asked people to do is this. If on the surface, we're like, Hey, you're like this other tool where we ask people as a yes, we're very similar. But when you go into this mean, I say for the magic of it to show you got to spend about 15 minutes on it, because that's where there's like these little easter eggs. There's this very specific assets. We have even 3d assets inside bismi that no other tool has that are exclusive envision. We have other assets that are there that we actually have a design team in house debt for years. All they do is create assets that we only make available invisibIe we do license some videos and some images and so on but when it comes to a lot of icons and a lot of our 2d illustrations, and we even have characters that you can create, like short explainer videos, you can apply poses. Those are only exclusive invisibly. There's other tools that have characters but what you find in ours is that so another thing about our platform is that sometimes people get tired of seeing the same design and template that is used by tools that have you know, much more users on us. I mean, we have about almost 18 million I think users at this point already super busy but it's not 200 300 million. So they see a lot of the similar designs like I said, this deck is you know, it looks like this other deck can be very similar. In ours, we have them exclusively within our platforms that you can enjoy and use that so that's kind of something that's pretty cool. Another thing is we're very big on branded content. So companies like businesses, they can go and plug their website URL using our brand wizard and will detect their colors and logo on everything we're applying to a bunch of templates and they're ready to go. And we'll go from there.
Law Smith
15:03
Yeah, yeah, I just I'm empathizing events, this position a lot but in 1520 years of having to, you know, live the professional life, it's just like you'd have to make a deck last second. Point next, or an infographic, which infographics are really tough to make honestly, if you don't know like,
Eric Readinger
15:23
just that brand wizard thing, right? Yeah. If you're a marketing firm doing it, you don't want
Law Smith
15:29
to do the trapper in like, like what are what's killers, you know? It's procuring all the info that's avail yeah,
3
Speaker 3
15:37
there's one more thing that's pretty cool in our system that I wanted things I really liked about and then people took a big liking on is that when it comes to presentations, we have a we have hundreds of templates, but we have what's called themes as well. So there's, I think, three or four themes. There's a modern and simple and creative they're like different styles. And it's literally a template with like seven 800 900 slides so every permutation was like could ever imagine. So process there's like 2530 slides would ask you like Oh, three items or five items so that you literally find a recommendation all you do is replace the content. So that's something because a lot of times we found other people they bought go on buy a template or they use a template and it's got 15 slides and like okay, what the hell like oh yeah, every one by yourself. Well that or then you bring in or then you go on bring some other slide for another template and it looks nothing like it you can do that. If it's me but we have this like for that solution we have that so you're just very seamlessly you know, embedded across across that. You know how
Law Smith
16:34
I can tell he's good. Wow, he said permutation not combination. There was a big deal.
3
Speaker 3
16:41
I didn't know I use that word. Cool. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, it's like, I must use it so often. I don't pay attention to them your brain
Law Smith
16:48
is next level. I'd be remiss if we go back got it. If we didn't ask. You know, the question we ask everybody that come on the podcast. The first time did you get to have you listened to any episode was curious. I have actually so yeah, most people have it. Now. We're finding people listen to
3
Speaker 3
17:09
everybody. Let me tell you something I had to add to be a little bit. One of my colleagues, she scheduled me for this and said hey, yours, you want to go so I had to get ready right. I listened to one just I think it was yesterday today. So to be honest, I've listened to one but it's actually pretty interesting. Gotta have a liking to it and I'm thinking I'm gonna have to download this pot on my iPad. Nice. Nice. iPod iPhone, iPhone with a buddy yeah. Zoom.
Eric Readinger
17:41
There'll be flash.
3
Speaker 3
17:43
Lot of these, you know, like, so a lot of these podcasts and so on that I've heard and I do is like, you know, you guys are bringing a different flavor of excitement and in, you know, informal versus it's more casual versus like formal, you know, how do you do this? How to do that just very like dry run. So you guys bring up the angle and I think it's, it's good to have that in the in the community. We really
Law Smith
18:07
try to play as if you're in the room and we're talking to you normally without any mics on. I mean, that's honestly
Eric Readinger
18:13
the questions we would ask conversationally anyways, yeah, we get excited about I might even nerd out harder. Yeah.
Law Smith
18:22
Yeah, and it's one of those things where there's a real lack of real business talk. We want to be kind of anti LinkedIn fever. It's all saccharine sweet. We want to ask about you know, a lot of the entrepreneurial journey is lonely. A lot of times it is. I want to ask you about that when you had the idea. And then you're also still working as a designer, but we got to ask you this one question. What advice would you give your 13 year old self?
3
Speaker 3
18:55
Just what one is what will be so many right but I was back in time, you know my time okay. So here's what I would say. Um, I was a self taught designer. I kind of taught myself things when I say taught, you know, I mean, I didn't go to school for I was a biology major. I didn't go to graphic design school, right, W three. So yeah, so Visual Basic learner, Visual Basic, Pascal by Pascal.
Law Smith
19:19
Draw. Yeah.
3
Speaker 3
19:22
So I think you know, what I would tell myself would have been is I didn't I never went in and like took an internship and work for like another company. And so I just started my own business. So I think I would have learned a bit more seeing how others do it being in the woods and so on. So I had to learn things. Make a lot of mistakes along the way, because I did figure out my own because okay, I started a small business, I was two people, five people. So you essentially made a lot of businesses made a lot of mistakes that way, so I would have probably recommended dad. And another thing I would say is that I mean, we do a lot better planning now than we did then. But in those games, you just go with like your, you know, intuition and your intuition at 13 or 15. Or 18, or 20 are going to is pretty bad, like you haven't really built you have a good intuition when you you know, have a decent amount of experience and things just become second nature. When you're young, you make a lot of mistakes because you don't really think things through I know what I'm doing. I think this is I'm telling this is gonna work because I feel it. That's what I do. So I would have done a deeper research I would have done sometimes a bit in terms of business and so on just in my first business, which was, you know, designing websites and so on. It was a lot based on like, this looks nice, you know, and today, you know, looking back it's like it's all about user experience. You know, design is supposed to complement the experience before in those flash days and so on. It was all about let's bring some cool music and protective music and move this object from left and right because it just looks cool, but is it delivering a message that's taking me a long time to learn I wish I'd gone back and done a little bit different.
Law Smith
21:02
I forgot about your now given the time we're thinking of when sites have the auto music on.
Eric Readinger
21:09
Yeah, I came across an Italian restaurant website that did that to me. I was like oh man, throwback
Law Smith
21:16
What about this sign there guestbook never that right. So I'm the guestbook that came on the site,
Eric Readinger
21:23
or the ticker with the cow.
3
Speaker 3
21:25
Oh, yeah. I remember that MySpace, the MySpace pages you go in and it was like, you know, so Facebook right came in and just basically was like the Google extremely simple. You can't customize your page you just it's just information right like MySpace was you just had control over everything. So you go to like a page was purple and it's got like music playing. It's got a video on a corner.
Eric Readinger
21:47
takes over your gifts. Yeah, well
Law Smith
21:51
yeah, I remember Angel. Angel Fire maybe or geo
3
Speaker 3
21:56
cities? Yeah. Geo cities. Yes. Yeah.
Law Smith
22:00
Those are like the first CMS is of sorts like,
3
Speaker 3
22:03
pillars. Yeah. Geo cities. Yeah, I remember that one. They I think eventually got bought by Network Solutions, which then I think was became VeriSign. But they bought him I think they mentioned this mantel it Yeah, that was good for your Squarespace, Wix and all those sites.
Law Smith
22:19
I'll go deep. I'll go deep on some Lycos and Netscape, all that stuff.
3
Speaker 3
22:24
Alta Vista I've ever been asked Jeeves ask. It's now asked. That's what it was asked. Yeah.
Law Smith
22:31
What happened in that guy? Oh, what happened to Jeeves? Well, so I want to I'm always curious about the plight of the entrepreneur where you, you already have this company? No. But you have this idea, right? Yeah, you're like I need to make them safe. And I have almost a calling to make visma thing. When you're overlapping, right? When you have a web design company, and then you're starting to go I have to make this idea happening. Can you tell us about that part of your life?
Eric Readinger
23:03
Or did it go down like that? Or was it Yeah, did you have to or was it kind of like, okay, we got to pivot right away.
3
Speaker 3
23:08
No, so it wasn't making money. So, you know, vis vis me, wasn't making money for the first two, two and a half years. Well, we put it out once we open up past the beta within about a year we were generating revenue and about a year and a half, two years later was essentially cashflow positive. Visit me has never raised funds by the way, none of my companies have ever raised funds. It's always been bootstrapped. So I think it's kind of like then, you know, I'll make 50 bucks and then I'm gonna invest 20 of it, spend 10 of it, you know, put the rest aside for a rainy day to invest for the future. That's essentially how this meat has been. So that's one of the reasons that like you know, we I've seen multiple tools, you know, names you probably wouldn't even know of any more because they when they raise money, and then they just didn't grow fast enough and they basically had to sell for peanuts or they close down. Then there was a hand if you in our industry, you know cam will be one of them. Of course we've done a fantastic job and Grunch messenger like Did you know huge now. So looking back I mean as far as like hindsight, it was a self funded agency and what most agencies are, they're essentially you know, self operating and so on. Not a high profit margin because it's labor intensive, right, you essentially you need team. Like with me, we could grow another 50% not hire another one or two people right? You know, so, but yet in an agency, you know, you want to acquire three or four more clients to grow temper, so you got to hire one or two more people. So however, it was generating revenue, and so I put that into essentially taking that profits and putting into business and just investing that profits month after month. And so I couldn't just let go and say Okay, all in let's go to Disney because Disney couldn't stand on its legs anymore and needed some help. So I use the if the investment from the hindsight instead of going buying fancy cars or whatever, I just put it back in into this. And that's how it kind of started then what happened was over a period of time over a period a few years, people always asked like how is you know, how did it work and so on. How did you become profitable and you know, grow the company at one point because me exceeded revenues of my agency and at that point, it no longer made sense for me to continue focusing on the agency side and I was like, agency actually was not growing as much Well, I wasn't investing as much in it there you go to. I just knew this is not a very scalable business and three, I really wanted to get out of agency where as much as I love designing websites, and so on, you're creating something for somebody else. You know, they have their own input. They essentially pretty much ruin your idea every time but they're the clients I pay for
Law Smith
25:58
a custom homebuilder. Yeah. The custom home builder probably knows a lot better design right and flow but you got the owner that owns the house
3
Speaker 3
26:10
yeah, it's your last summer is always right there not always right but you gotta listen TV
Law Smith
26:16
show did you watch to get this idea? You know, like that, you know, those shows are cut and that's how I feel about website design is like a lot of people go, Oh, I like this website. And you're like, Yeah, you're not paying that.
3
Speaker 3
26:29
Yeah. Yeah. So that's how it was, you know, it was it was a slow journey. It took a few years so it literally was like, you know, going down a very new heights going down and bless clients coming in. And also actually it wasn't just because I knew I saw the science coming in is that I know that if I spend $10,000 invest into hindsight, I won't get the same ROI as I would on Visby. And one of the reasons for that was because we built there was this is when website builders like Squarespace and Wix and so on. We're really getting getting more and more popular. And so the market of websites that small business websites that were like three to $5,000, you know, reasonably and we're now coming down where people just want to create it on their own, and it just became extremely flooded. There's more and more designers coming to market and we were not the ones that were going to do 250 $500,000 websites will run made for that there, believe me or not, there's actually companies that build sites for that price. And so I just saw the signs coming in. And essentially that's how it was is an easy decision. But it wasn't an uncomfortable decision because you've been running this like agency for 1211 12 years and put a lot of work and so on into it. And so it's almost like, you know, divorce away from that, but I think it was definitely the right choice.
Eric Readinger
27:44
I was about to say I think that's every agency owners secret dream is to go off and do something laid off and deal with clients.
Law Smith
27:50
Yeah. Like, it feels like the winner Phil. Not helped. Was it Hellmuth, the poker player who would always say like, everyone, maybe it's the guy who's the guy. He was like, I win every hand if it wasn't for rock or something like that. Those think about that with clients. It's like we crushed this project if you guys didn't bottle the human variable is tough. It's in Project mode.
3
Speaker 3
28:20
There's something else also that's really rewarding about this type of work. See, as an agency, you're creating something for somebody else and so the output is you creating something and hand it off to them. And once you do, it's theirs and that's done and that's fine. But invisibly, what's really cool is that and I think what drives me and my team to kind of, you know, move forward and do the things that we do is because you get to see and you kind of have this self fulfillment, yes, there's people saying love what your platform is things I can do, and it helped me to do X, Y, and Z. But you also get to see what they create. You visually see what you do, and they you know, share it online and send you links. So they posted on the gallery and so on. So that's really self fulfilling. In that regard. You're empowering people to do you know, the to visualize ideas or concepts in our case for like their business and marketing and sales and data.
Law Smith
29:15
And this these stats are probably wrong as I pulled up CrunchBase and our it says you got about 70 employees average revenue is 4.1. Yes, and those are a little
3
Speaker 3
29:28
outdated. Oh, yeah, those are wrong. Yeah. We don't we don't disclose. Definitely hardening that.
Law Smith
29:36
That's that's important.
3
Speaker 3
29:37
Funding zero. Yeah, that one's correct. Yeah, the CrunchBase is definitely outdated. I don't think I've been on that for a while. Yeah, but yeah, we're about we're a little short of 100 people, so by 9070 people here. And, you know, yeah, the revenue is definitely above that. It's not something that we openly talk about and disclose, but I can tell you
Law Smith
30:00
have to 4.1 Yeah, I was looking at that. I was like that seems very low, considering how competitive your are in this market. And yeah, it's one of those things. It's interesting as you're talking about, you know, not having to deal with humans. As much as you have. You're kind of doing this meta thing where you're, you're going, here's what we think is the tool to empower you. It's art that empowers artists, out of people that don't think they are, you know, it's one of those things in an art world. You You paint Eric's a painter, you paint something you hope people you know, vibe. You hope people like it. You put it out there and you go that it's a tough line between like, I know what's right speaking to intuition, when we talked about earlier when you were younger, having this intuition, but also knowing and working on that intuition. It sounds like over the years to go. I know what people have been, like in use, in a sense in a similar way.
3
Speaker 3
31:03
Yeah, it's, yeah, it is. No, it's true. I mean, look, I've gotten things wrong a lot. We have but there haven't been like major terrible, like big decisions, you know. So here's the thing. If the purpose of izmi for me was to just build the design tool that would have generated the most amount of revenue acquired the most amount of users, we would have made it dumbed down and just focused heavily on just quick entry point, quick outcome and so on. We would be no question further along in terms of users and in terms of revenue and so on. But that's not what our mission was. It wasn't to just be another platform out there. And there was it's a space that's already been filled. You know, there's a lot of options for that. And so for us, it was where, okay, you know, we want people to have the best of both worlds, you know, get the simplicity and yet have when they want at the disposal more power, more capacity to do to do what they want. I mean, that's that, essentially, is what a lot of, you know, a lot of us want in life, right, is that you want your cake and you want to be able to eat it too. So that's what we're trying to get them.
Law Smith
32:21
Right, yeah. And you have an infinite white board, which may stray me away from Bureau as I've been a 00 Yeah.
3
Speaker 3
32:27
But that's that's a new one. The two and a half months ago, we launched that it's been very, very nice for us. Yeah,
Law Smith
32:33
I'm looking at the I guess the press release or some martec news about it. And you know that to me with remote collaboration, I don't think it's I don't think we've crusted to the market really catching up to those whiteboards yet, but it will be a thing that everybody does.
3
Speaker 3
32:49
Yeah, I think I mean, look, one thing for sure happened, when the pandemic started and so on. And that is of course, you know, this sudden shift, have everyone working remotely. And I think the one issue is that if this wasn't a case for us, like, for example, just inherent transparency when the pandemic started, we weren't yet a collaboration tool. We didn't have live editing where you have multiple people in edit at the same time. Or send people to comment, you know, on something. We didn't have that Amuro and a handful of tools had that that were around, they had better rent name recognition. And overnight, they had tremendous growth and site builders and so on. Everybody's kind of going online, right. So we, in our case, didn't have this like 2x 3x growth during the pandemic. It was just another year for us essentially. And so what's happened is a lot of those companies that grew like a weed, they also acquired a lot of junk and a lot of I'm not saying individuals, but they acquired a lot of traffic and users that really, were gonna go back anyway when things came back to normal. Okay, and so, what happened was, from the site builders to productivity tools, and so on, those type of users, a lot of them now slowed down in the growth and it's affected them. For us. It's just been, you know, like any other year so it hasn't really affected us so that's kind of been a cool thing and it's been a bad thing and that we didn't get enjoyed as big big growth in that case, but at the same time, we haven't had a negatively affect us where other has been affected. It's just another year. For us, you know, so anyway, when you said about the whiteboarding and so on. One of the cool things about our tool and it took us a while we're like late stage we're after everybody else has already has a whiteboard, and so on. But one thing that's cool and unique about ours is you see in this me in other whiteboard tools, you have so Limited is a certain type of content assets they give you and that's what they are therefore whiteboarding, like you can imagine mark you can draw you can bring some icons, like ours, you can do much more colorful and interactive things because you can use the same exact assets that we have invisibly for your presentation for your data visuals you can actually do full blown charts, you can connect to live data. So I could create a whiteboard with you right now, like it will for a marketing KPI I use a whiteboard and I'll put a chart I can actually like Google sheets that pulls like marketing KPIs. I could draw an arrow and go to like a short video and then in near future be able to link it to other stuff and other content as well. So that's pretty cool. And I think that the future, yeah, is going to be more productivity. I think there's like an intersection between design and productivity that's happening, but I think it's coming. The other part of it is AI.
Law Smith
35:36
Yeah. No, no, go ahead. I don't want to stop
3
Speaker 3
35:38
that. So yeah, the other part is AI. So I personally think that if we're talking about Yeah, like right now I mean, like you I know where I get most of my information right now people like think I'm an idiot sane as but I a lot of my information when I write people don't know anymore. What are Hawkman Tiktok that thing when you get past the whole dancing, all that BS stuff that you pass a you go in and you follow the right people and the right channels, you get bite sized information and little pieces more I could get in a day than I would spending three four hours I can get it in 15 minutes. So it has its place but anyway, so what I was referring to was that platforms such as you know, tick tock and absorb get a lot of information. And in our case, what's helping us is that we're able to see kind of correlations and trends that are happening the paint fish those networks and then seeing what kind of what is it that people individuals want to might be looking for. With that said, it's getting extremely flooded. So I see that coming. But what I was going why point, by the way, was about AI. So going back to AI and the reason I say is because three four months ago, there was almost no mention of anyone promoting or talking about AI tool now. In the last month I probably had five or six AI tools that are almost doing like the similar thing. They're all piggybacking off of, you know, GPT three, and those open AI technologies. And so they're just very quickly putting out all these AI based solutions as standalone. The problem is that all of those majority of them can easily be replicated by one or two people development. So you're gonna see more and more replication, so everybody's all excited about it. But at the end platforms like you know, content creation and other platforms that already have built this platform and you utilize some of the AI on top of it, then you really can bring the magic of that and so I think that there's a lot of noise going on. And I do foresee that when it comes to AI My theory is that in the next one or two years, you're gonna get this you know, almost like crypto just constantly another coin and other coin other coin coming in and really there's only space for a few of them. So there's going to be a lot of this stuff coming with AI and there's gonna be a lot of noise. And at the end of it, a handful of them are gonna be the ones that are gonna stamp
Law Smith
37:53
those your douche bag. With AI can I can I pitch a slight marketing thing because I'm just this week this last week. I've seen you know how a lot of you don't have to answer this but I'll pitch it to Eric because I don't want you to get drunk or anything but I see a lot of women you know that put the in there like Instagram stories like some some like quotes like motivational quotes for themselves. Yeah for put out there. The next thing I'm seeing now and and this is the next trend that a lot of chicks are going to do that kind
Eric Readinger
38:30
of automated Instagram posting that AI or
Law Smith
38:33
of themselves. I've seen it Oh, it's
Eric Readinger
38:36
like I like my idea, but I've
Law Smith
38:38
seen it. I've already seen it about 50 times just in my feed I'm trying not to really I'm trying to just post stuff and not really intake a lot and men that that is really catch it I've never I haven't seen a dude yet that I'm friends with it was their own way to do it.
38:54
I'll do you mean that profile, I mean their profile picture.
Eric Readinger
38:58
What are they inputting?
Law Smith
38:59
That they're getting to do the art? Yeah. selves. Like
Eric Readinger
39:05
what kind of input do they give you
3
Speaker 3
39:06
put, like you'll upload a few images of yourself. Okay. And then
Eric Readinger
39:13
the picture of you that looks at the Grand Canyon
Law Smith
39:16
as we record this December 6 2022 You're gonna get flooded with every every check.
Eric Readinger
39:23
You and I should take a bunch. I will show you it and then have it
Law Smith
39:28
now I find that funny. I don't know why it I'll do it just to see what it is. I doubt I met let us
Eric Readinger
39:35
first see it it's probably pretty creepy to see you look somewhere you know, you've never been
Law Smith
39:41
by the way. The AI may seem a little bit hotter than than actually.
3
Speaker 3
39:45
So it takes away all the you know, it. blemishes, the imperfections and blemishes. Yeah. And so yeah, it's pretty neat. And then of course you can put a star like illustrative or flat or like you know, there's like yeah, watercolor and so on. Yeah, it's pretty it's pretty cool. Um, you can do crazy stuff you know, I haven't done it yet but I like just you can say it was like put me put my head on top of like a horse you know, and then like give me big earrings and it doesn't get generated art and so on. But that's what I mean is that like there's a lot of noise and it's really cool I think to play with but as like a business use case or something like that. There's really just going to be a few right and I think so by this. Yeah,
Law Smith
40:26
yeah, I feel like y'all are headed in the right direction. It seems like you've got kind of calculated growth in a good way even if you didn't think you've missed off on the lockdown era, where, you know, a couple companies went skyrocketed like you're saying, I noticed was some of the other apps I've use. There. They added too much too quickly and really relied on marketing how many users they got in that period instead of working on a product so yeah, I
3
Speaker 3
40:54
guess you know, it's kind of like vanity in some ways. There is you know, somewhat of a vanity metrics like for example, us like, hey, 80 million users, that's a vanity metric that's great at basketball, you know, don't stress per se. Yeah, yeah, so that's, it's another metric but yeah, um,
Law Smith
41:12
but we gotta we gotta jet man. We could talk about this stuff for a long time.
3
Speaker 3
41:16
Now, man anytime you want. I'm glad I'm glad you guys had me and you got any questions or anything else? Let me know. I'm here.
Law Smith
41:24
You're big. You're a big gift for the show. We don't get also. So appreciate you coming on. Yeah.
41:31
Thanks, man.
Law Smith
41:32
We'll schedule
3
Speaker 3
41:33
another time. All right, perfect. Thank you very much, guys and good stuff. Thank you. See you Take care. Bye.
