Andrew: Cool.
Richard: I had to move locations. I’m at the Battery Club in San Francisco.
Andrew: Ah, I know it. Good. I’m not too far. I’m in the Ferry Building.
Richard: Cool. We could have done this in person.
Andrew: How do I make this interview a win for you?
Richard: That’s a good question. So, I am in the middle of a transition from my latest startup to whatever my next adventure is. So, that’s my challenge.
Andrew: What happened with Prompt.ly?
Richard: It’s interesting. It’s neither unicorn nor zombie is how I describe it. It’s a business. It has 25,000 registered users. It’s ticking along nicely, but it’s not going to make anyone filthy rich. So, I’m spending a lot of time thinking about… I’m putting that into a place where it can live and survive as a business as opposed a hybrid startup and then thinking about what my next challenge is.
Andrew: What kind of revenues did it do?
Richard: Our average revenue is about $10 per user per month. So, it was doing–call it 20 percent of the 25,000 are paying us some money. It’s early. We just released the revenue generating features in May. So, the uptick’s been good, but steady but small. So, it’s tiny revenues. If we made $20,000 or $30,000 a month, that would be fantastic.
Andrew: So, you’re saying you’ve got 25,000 users, 10% of them are paying and it’s $10 a month. That’s not bad.
Richard: Yeah, but it’s not…
Andrew: That’s $20,000 a month. That’s what you were saying is fantastic, no?
Richard: Yeah. No one is going to get rich on that, right?
Andrew: It’s not a huge business.
Richard: It doesn’t pay my salary.
Andrew: Frankly, to be honest with you, we didn’t want to interview you about Prompt.ly. We wanted to interview you about some of these bigger success and we thought at some point in the future Prompt.ly would be huge.
Richard: Yeah. It’s great. It may be, but it’s an interesting fundraising market and we realize that we’re going to structure the business differently so that it can have a different kind of success.
Andrew: Okay. You know what? Let’s keep everything we’ve said up until now in the interview. Are you good with that?
Richard: Yeah. Fine.
Andrew: I want to do the full analysis. I want to spend some time with you on Prompt.ly and explain why in a bit. Why don’t I first introduce you since we already started the interview?
Richard: Yeah.
Andrew: You are Richard Titus. You are the founder of Prompt.ly, which is an app that I’ve been using just to get to know what this business is and it makes sense. Imagine I’ve got a tutoring business where I’m teaching people math and I need to have them book with me and I don’t want them texting me saying, “Can I come over Monday?” “No, Monday’s booked,” is my response and then they come back and say, “How about next Thursday?”
That whole mess of going back and forth your app Prompt.ly solves. And then invoicing the person is a bit of a pain in the butt. Your app solves it. I don’t have a credit card processing system. Your app solves that for me too. All that stuff is taken care of soup to nuts by promptly. That’s what the business is.
But it’s not the only business that you’ve ever started. You’ve actually started several other companies. I was looking at TAG Media, which is a company that you launched in 1996, sold in ’98. There was a company called Schematic thank frankly my pre-interviewer and I were a little nervous about because it’s a huge hit for you but we didn’t fully understand it even though I read the variety article and they usually simplify things.
Richard: Right.
Andrew: And I should introduce myself. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. This interview is sponsored by HostGator, but I’ll talk about that later and Toptal, I’ll talk about them later. Let’s continue with this.
Richard: Great.
Andrew: Let’s talk a little bit about Prompt.ly, then your past and then just explore what you’re looking to do in the future. The idea came to you when you noticed what for Prompt.ly?
Richard: So, I had one daughter had a violin teacher. The other had a drum teacher and a tutor. I had a personal trainer. These four people were amazing at the work they did, but they weren’t very good at the mundane bits of running a business–scheduling, payments, invoicing and marketing themselves. I was constantly getting charged, reschedules and things like this. I thought, “There has to be better solution.”
So, I actually went out looking for a piece of software to download and put on their phones so they could schedule with me better. I had no intention of starting a company. But the more time I spent looking for the software, I realized it didn’t exist. There was no integrated solution for scheduling, payments and promotions in one simple mobile app. That’s what they used. These people didn’t own computers. They were very technically phobic.
Andrew: They didn’t even have computers in the US?
Richard: I’m going to blow your mind–of Prompt.ly users, 30 percent of them do not own a computer.
Andrew: That does blow my mind, especially when you’re talking about Americans. A laptop doesn’t cost that much.
Richard: Ah, but what’s interesting is it’s not about cost. It’s about why do they need it. So, these are people who are out and about–personal trainers, tutors. They own a smartphone. 100 percent of them–we found one person so far who didn’t own a smartphone before who was a potential Prompt.ly customer and she went out promptly and bought one after seeing the app.
Andrew: Okay.
Richard: But they’re 100 percent smartphone penetration and usually very modern smartphones. But 30 percent of them did not own a computer. They would go to the library to do their invoicing or borrow a roommate’s computer. This is the next wave of computing, mobile computing. We talked about it for a long time, but as these things usually are, the meme moves much faster than the reality of our businesses solving the problems that face consumers and, in our case, business providers.
Andrew: Richard, this is a little bit crass for me to say it this way, but I have to be as open as I can. You’re filthy rich. You’re rich.
Richard: I’m not.
Andrew: Why build this business–you’re not?
Richard: I’m not actually rich. Being an entrepreneur means you go through cycles of being very wealthy and cycles of being very, very poor. And you’re a gambler, right? So, being an entrepreneur is being a gambler. One of the gamblers I took that didn’t pay off really well was being married.
Andrew: Oh, really?
Richard: Yeah.
Andrew: So, you end up losing half of the money from the previous businesses.
Richard: Right. Well, and not only that, but you lose the time and energy and the money you would be earning during the process where you wage a very high-conflict divorce.
Andrew: How long did it take you?
Richard: Six years.
Andrew: This is one of the things that we don’t talk about because it’s kind of tough to bring up in public, but it’s one of the biggest fears that I have. The biggest decision that I made was getting married.
Richard: Yeah.
Andrew: As much as I protected myself, who knows?
Richard: I have an amazing girlfriend now and I’ve been dating her for a couple years and people always want to hear the dirt. The fact is there really isn’t any. I don’t regret getting married. I don’t regret getting divorced. They were both worth it.
Andrew: I don’t know, half. What was the biggest hit? Was it Schematic?
Richard: Actually, Razorfish–Schematic was the biggest financial hit, but Razorfish was probably the most famous. Although, oddly, the most famous startup I ever did was a movie. So, I produced a film called “Who Killed the Electric Car?” which I think is probably one of the more important things I’ve ever done in my entire life.
Andrew: Why?
Richard: So, if you’ve ever seen the movie–
Andrew: I have.
Richard: If you haven’t, you absolutely should go see it. When we made that movie, it started as a piece of revenge theater because I wanted to get a car and GM wouldn’t lease me one and it made me mad. And then the director, Chris Paine, had one. They took his car. So, we went out and started shooting this movie because we wanted the world to know about these cars and some of the unsavory things GM was doing. What we actually did was we uncovered a whole bunch of elements of a story in classic journalist fashion. It was far more interesting than our person narratives and frankly agendas.
But what really happened from “Who Killed the Electric Car?” is we created a national and international dialogue about vehicles and transportation and electricity that allowed companies like Tesla to exist. So, Elon absolutely says that Tesla would never have happened or been successful in any way had it not been for our movie.
Andrew: Really?
Richard: People were prepared for a conversation about something they weren’t aware of before. So, if you think about the most important things we do in society, you have to prepare the land before you can sow the seed. So, in the case of Tesla, Tesla could exist because people were like, “Oh, electric cars, those are really cool. I saw a movie about that. Oh, hey, here’s one I can go buy. Let me go check it out.” As opposed to, “Oh, electric cars, they’re too slow. They have no distance. They’re expensive to charge,” all those narratives–false, by the way–that people had could be corrected in one simple 90-minute effort.
Andrew: I thought that the ending of it was a brave one, where you didn’t just point the fingers at the other people, but you said you, the listener, we’re all part of the problem. We can’t just say it’s some company somewhere that screwed us. Frankly, we screwed it too for ourselves.
Richard: Absolutely right. This is true of everything, right? Journalism is the same thing. The death of newspapers, I was talking to someone today. I ran, among many of things I did, I worked for a long time at the BBC and at the Daily Mail. Yesterday–I don’t have the picture here on my screen or I’d put it up–I was on the Washington Post website and there were five ad windows up in front of the content while I was trying to read a very simple article.
And I looked at this and I thought, “This was offensive.” If this was happening at a bar, I would punch someone in the nose. And yet, this is where we are now. We accept that this is sort of the nature–it’s like Myspace ten years ago. The nature of consuming content on the internet is going to be a kind of mediocre existence with lots of interruptions. I think that’s unacceptable, but you don’t know it’s unacceptable until someone tells you something else is possible.
Andrew: I’ll tell you, there is something possible, ad blockers on the web including the mobile web. And frankly, if an ad that I do here on Mixergy is not interesting, I highly recommend people use programs like Downcast and Overcast which allow you to easily skip 30 seconds forward. That’s not just for ads. If my intro is boring, you should be able to do it. You should take control of your online experience.
Richard: I total agree. My friend Ben Barokas, who is the founder of AdMeld, has a new firm in this space that’s thinking about the big problem with ads and the reason all ad tech–and not all ad tech is bad, but a big chunk of it is, because it’s all about data sharing and pooling and inefficient economics. His idea is if you fix the economic problem, the behavior and the delivery will improve and change.
Andrew: So, Elon Musk is considered the founder of Tesla, but technically he is not, right? He funded these other guys who were the founders but now he’s considered and he’s called the founder including by them. I looked up your AngelList profile and you’re listed as the founder of Razorfish, and then I looked back in time to see who were the founders and your name wasn’t in the original articles.
Richard: No.
Andrew: But apparently it’s because they bought TAG Media in ’96 and you owned TAG Media. So, how do you end up as the founder of Razorfish?
Richard: It’s pretty funny, right? I always bristle when people call me the Razorfish founder because it’s not true. I founded a company in LA as you said called TAG Media with two partners, Titus [inaudible 00:10:37] and one other guy, who remains unnamed today. We sacked him a month later. And we built this business up and Omnicom came knocking and found us and actually introduced us to the all the Omnicom digital agencies and the one we ended up deciding to get married to was Jeff Dachis and Razorfish.
But what’s interesting is people like a simple narrative. So, wherever I go, people talk about me as the Razorfish founder because what Razorfish did, and I thought this was really powerful, is they took these companies they acquired–because all of Razorfish’s growth in the early years was through acquisition, geographic acquisition primarily.
So, they treated us all, as we all remain part of the leadership team, most of the founders stayed for the first three or four years of the business and were very, very active in running it and that was part of the brand. So, it’s someone else’s narrative. It’s not mine. But you can’t get rid of it. It just survives past anything.
Andrew: And frankly, there is no official title as founder in some corporate paper, so I guess it kind of is. There is, actually. I take it back.
Richard: I founded one of the largest offices of Razorfish, which was my own company, which then was acquired. We don’t have a good word for that yet and we probably should come up with one because it probably needs a name. Schematic is the opposite. I founded–the original corporate papers for Schematic were me and Dale Herigstad and a guy named Paul Taormino, who founded a company called Schematic and then bought the assets of Dale’s old company and a bunch of other companies over the years.
Andrew: So, let’s talk a little bit about both of those companies. TAG Media, as a researcher, is really tough for me because go search for TAG anywhere. The word tag is in every website, it seems like.
Richard: That’s absolutely true.
Andrew: What did TAG Media do?
Richard: So, TAG Media was one of the early interactive agencies. This term interactive agency has morphed to be something very different today than it was in the old days.
Andrew: And very broad. What was it back then?
Richard: So, the way I describe it–the way I grew up, I’m sort of generation one internet. So, I ran a BBS out of my bedroom in Orange County when I was a kid. I had an account on the web and was using Gopher and Telnet long before the browser existed. When the browser came along and it became apparent that the internet that I was so in love with was about to be democratized, a lot of people went out and started building businesses like eToys and other businesses like this.
My partner and I, Steven, decided to build a company. Our analogy was that the guys selling the picks and shovels to gold miners made far more money than the guys digging for gold for the most part. Because we were capital constrained, this was a business we could do and bootstrap ourselves without outside capital. That’s what we did. We founded TAG Media.
Our first client was Centropolis. We made a website for a movie production company that made “Independence Day,” “Stargate,” “Godzilla,” “The Patriot.” And then from there, we were called by NASA to bid on the redesign of NASA’s Ames Research Center’s website and ended up being AOR for Ames Research Center and grew that into a very nice portfolio if business.
And then at some point, we were growing too fast for our cash reserves. Like good agency men, we realized we needed a bigger brother. But our business was primarily building websites. In those days, no one had a website. So, every meeting you were introducing someone to the idea of the internet and what a website was and then helping them figure out how to put their business on the internet.
That could take the shape of an ecommerce website. It could take the shape of a marketing brochure website. We didn’t really do a lot of those. Later as part of Razorfish, it was taking Schwab and turning it into the number one online broker for the number five home broker.
So, it was really more business reengineering and transformation–design and build and design a thinking strategy rather than marketing services or advertising in those early days. That was really where my twin passions of media and technology came to fit.
Andrew: I’m seeing an article here from July, 1998 about the acquisition. It’s listing your contract work with NASA, Qualcomm, Intel, Microsoft, Jim Henson Productions, 20th Century Fox. And look who broke this. The story was broken–
Richard: By Jason Calacanis.
Andrew: Yeah, by Jason Calacanis of Silicon Alley Reporter. How did he get that story from you?
Richard: He didn’t get it from me. There’s a funny story I tell and it’s absolutely true. Omnicom introduced us to all the Omnicom digital agencies. I realized because we were small that the way I was going to get the best deal was to have a little bidding process. So, what I did is my now ex-wife who I worked with at the time was working on “Godzilla.” The premiere of “Godzilla” was at Madison Square Garden in New York. So, I got all the CEOs and their wives or girlfriends tickets to the premiere of “Godzilla” at Madison Square Garden and more importantly, I sat them next to each other.
So, Rare Media, Razorfish Agency, Think New Ideas–they were all sitting–they all knew each other and they were all sitting right next to each other and they all knew instantly who gave them their tickets. I think that helped me close the deal a little faster. Jeff called me the next day and said, “How do I make those guys go away?”
Andrew: I see because they knew that you were talking to all these people in such a close way.
Richard: Yeah.
Andrew: So, how did Jason Calacanis get this story? Do you know?
Richard: Jeff Dachis leaked it to him as part of making sure he’d close the deal with me. So, he basically called me. We verbally agreed terms and 20 minutes later Jason Calacanis called me to confirm the story because he was going live.
Andrew: I see. I’m looking at an article on ClickZ.com about it because Silicon Alley Reporter, Jason Calacanis’ website is down. Frankly, I don’t think he put the stuff online, really. Well, maybe this he would have. So, you had a bunch of other business after that and then Schematic. Where did the idea for that come from?
Richard: So, Razorfish–I dabbled. I had a bunch of little angel portfolio before that word angel really had any meaning. I was at Razorfish in part of the management team and really helped build that business. I think I was maybe the hundredth employee of Razorfish when we merged our companies. By the end, we had 2,500 people, 14 offices in 11 countries. It was really–I always call that my business school experience. It was the experience where I really learned how businesses operate and learn and grow and scale.
Andrew: What did you learn from there? I remember they were so big I didn’t fully understand what they were, but they got to a place where they were like the new McKinsey in some way, that they were the consulting firm.
Richard: It’s interesting. We were much more akin to McKinsey than to Deloitte or to Ogilvy, right? So, we were more about–Jeff used to have this line he used, “We’re about the thing, not the thing about the thing.” And so, derivative value or derivative connection was something he was allergic to. But really, if you think about the impact of digital technologies, primarily the internet, but all digital technologies–telecom, wireless, mobile, multiplatform–all of these things had huge effects on existing businesses.
We became a firm that was known for helping a business figure out how to pivot their strategy and then execute on that strategy to make themselves a full service business. So, if you’re Guardian Insurance, it’s about your gateways into your business for your customers and your suppliers. If you’re Charles Schwab, it’s about being in online trading. If you’re Urban Decay, it was about an ecommerce website to sell your cosmetics direct to consumer and bypass your retail channels.
Andrew: So, Richard, what you’re saying is that it wasn’t about building the website, which is what a lot of people needed at the time. It was about rethinking the businesses, which is why you compare the Razorfish to McKinsey.
Richard: Yeah. We called it digital change management. So, when I left Razorfish, I had some money in my pocket and I was very tired and I spent nine months building a nice beautiful architectural house in the hills of Hollywood Hills, did a bit of consulting and then a guy named Dale Herigstad, who’s a brilliant, brilliant designer and he was a company that I almost bought when I was at Razorfish, approached me and asked me if I could help him out. His business was having some trouble.
I went down, spent some time at his company and eventually ended up becoming his business partner. His business, it was a distressed business. So, we started a new company and bought his company from the bank. And that company we renamed Schematic and we spent the next seven years building and acquiring, merging with a few firms and finally selling that firm to WPP in 2007.
Andrew: All right. Let me do a quick commercial break. People can hit the fast forward if they want and then I’ll come back. I want to know a little bit more about what you learned at Razorfish and then how Schematic worked.
The sponsor is HostGator. If you need a web hosting company, you should go to HostGator.com/Mixergy. They’ll give you a big discount. Richard, actually, let me ask you this. If you were to start over right now, brand new, nothing but the knowledge in your head and a HostGator account to start whatever website you want, what would you start?
Richard: Probably something to do with sourcing of supplements and vitamins. Now, wait for a minute. It would also be something that did–my assessment is that most of the medical community for 50 years has been pushed by pharma. What we don’t have is anything that puts like natural remedies on the same level as pharmaceuticals as potential solutions. So, it would be a database that allowed you to go through with results from a set of testing and self-service select things that could help you improve your medical condition.
By the way, I’m not talking about if you had cancer or something like that. But a lot of people have issues where they’re over-prescribed pharmaceutical solutions because that what the system indexes for, when in fact a non-pharmaceutical or non-medical solution may be better. In my case, for instance, I was in a motorcycle accident. It turned out yoga and Pilates were much better for me than the surgery they had originally suggested.
Andrew: So, you would go onto this website, say, “Here’s what’s hurting.” Hit a button and get a prescription that wouldn’t be something that you have to take to your pharmacist but you could take out to the world.
Richard: To be honest, it would be a lot more complicated. It would look at your 23andMe. It would look at data. You’d probably have some medical advice involved. So, it would be a much bigger idea than that. But the idea would be to meld traditional and alternative medicine together to give you a better, more complete diagnosis and give you a full selection of the possible remedies.
Some might be down the traditional channels. You’ll have to go to the doctor and get that. But at least you’d be better informed. You’d understand really what the holistic view of your problem was. It’s called integrated medicine, as opposed to going to a doctor and being prescribed a pharmaceutical solution because that’s how the business model is structured.
Andrew: That’s a great idea. How would you feel if somebody heard this interview now and went over to HostGator and started it?
Richard: I hope they do because I don’t have time.
Andrew: Let me suggest this. First of all, that’s a great idea. Here’s another one that occurred to me as I was listening to you. Imagine going to the most successful people you could find and just asking them this one question that I just asked you, which is if you could start any business right now, what would it be? What business do you want to see out in the world but you don’t have the time to build? That as a collection of articles, I would read that. That would fire up people’s imagination and businesses would be starting off of that.
Richard: That’s a good idea.
Andrew: What do you think of that?
Richard: I love that idea. Is that what you’re doing?
Andrew: No, I’m talking more about the past, but someone who could talk about the potential future could really make a killing here or change the world the way you did with “Who Killed the Electric Car?”
If you want to start that or any other project online, all you have to do is go to HostGator.com/Mixergy. They’re going to give you a 45-day guarantee. So, if you don’t love them as much as I think you will and I know you will, then they will give you your money back. It makes it really easy to get started. Or if you don’t like your current hosting company. Go to HostGator. They’ll give you support. They’ll help you migrate. HostGator.com/Mixergy.
So, you were saying all the things that you learned at Razorfish. What’s one thing that you learned back then as you looked at all these different businesses getting formed around you? What’s one thing that you still take with you today?
Richard: Well, it’s very interesting, right? The first rule of being an entrepreneur is understanding the failure is the norm and success is the abnorm, right? So, at Razorfish, we had very few dotcom clients. Most of our clients were Fortune 2000 because we just found them better clients that paid their bills, they had plenty of money. But we did take on some occasional dotcom clients. One of the famous ones is theGlobe, which flamed out spectacularly after one of the biggest NASDAQ offerings in history.
What I learned is success is ephemeral but long-term value is predicated on a deep relationship between business and client. At Razorfish, one of the things we really struggled with during the dark ages of the first dotcom crash is we didn’t have those deep relationships. We had a very transactional relationship with many of our clients. So, they had no loyalty. We were very expensive. So, it was very easy to sell a stronger relationship at a lower process and take our customers from us.
But I also saw this–now, if you think about it with things like social and mobile, we have deeper relationships with people who supply us services and products and yet we’re still treated as sort of third class citizens in many respects. I just today was talking to AT&T mobile. There was a bit of confusion around my bill. I spent 30 minutes on the phone before I realized she was looking at the wrong account.
Andrew: Oh wow.
Richard: How is this possible in the 21st century that I called in on a mobile number. It confirmed my mobile number to me on the phone system, but somehow in the process of getting to this woman, it had tagged me on an old account that was actually closed. So, she spent all this energy trying to reopen a closed account as opposed to managing a phone I was actually talking to her on.
Andrew: That happened to me too. It’s so strange because you’re talking about an account and I think I might have a mistake of giving them the account number, but it’s no longer mine. I was saying, “Oh wow,” because that could be a potential privacy violation too for the next person.
Richard: I thought the same. I was like, “Don’t turn that on. First of all, I am talking to you on the phone that I’m calling about. How is this difficult? Did it not show up in your system that I’m calling you from a number that is one of your phones?” It was fascinating.
Andrew: So, one more thing about Schematic–
Richard: Razorfish we’re talking about.
Andrew: Yeah, right. So, let’s move on to Schematic and then I want to move on to this newest company and then find out where you’re going after Prompt.ly. I have to be honest because in the past, I’d listen to my interviews where I wasn’t, where I would hold back on something that I didn’t know. I go, “You still don’t understand. It makes no sense. You should have asked.” So, I have to be honest. I still don’t fully understand what Schematic did. I know that you acquired your cofounders past business, but what did it do?
Andrew: It’s really interesting. So, at Razorfish, we spent a lot of time doing this digital change management. What I realized is the fulcrum of digital change management was user experience and design. It was the understanding, coming from a design-led thinking and applying design led thinking to business problems, this was a very big new idea and no one had ever done it before.
And Razorfish, to its credit–I didn’t invent this; I simply stole it from Razorfish where I worked and learned it–is design thinking is about thinking about the various parties to a business problem and what their goals are trying to design a system that allows them to achieve their goals with the limited friction.
So, at Schmatic, my partner Dale is probably one of the most important–I’m going to say he’s the most important user experience designer in the 21st century. So, every big television and immersive design system, from “Minority Report,” the ones in the movie to systems on televisions, [inaudible 00:25:49], which is the first Time Warner [inaudible 00:25:50]–all these UI projects, he is the guy.
Andrew: Including in the movie “Minority Report?”
Richard: Yeah. So, “Minority Report,” all the conceptual design around that show was done by Dale Herigstad and a group of other people. Many of those people have gone on to start companies based on some of that work. But this guy Dale was this phenomenal designer. What I realized is that interfaces were the sort of really important part about digital. When I talk about digital, it’s never just the web. It’s about all the ways you interface with digital technology. It was still a very new idea then, just five or six years later then we were literally inventing it.
So, I said, “Let’s focus on just that practice, the craft of user interface and design and let’s do it really well, multiplatform.” And so our clients ranged from BMW, where we did heads up displays for cars to Comcast and Cablevision where we did VOD systems. We did some work for lots of companies. About half our client base we couldn’t even talk about because it was secret. And then we branched out into things like websites. But it was always websites from a point of view of really difficult user experience and design problems, where the interface could change massive amounts of money either way. So, whether it was ecommerce or maybe it was a membership club that needed better systems or a banking system.
I think one of our penultimate opportunities was Panasonic hired us–I think I can talk about this now. If you remember the old days of Sony, you would by a Sony television and there was a design language that went across the entire set of devices. So, the same icons were the same on all the different devices. Panasonic wasn’t this way. So, we actually helped them define all of the design thinking across all the devices so that when you turn something on, you visually knew what it was and how it connected to the rest of the portfolio.
Andrew: I see.
Richard: And then we also did the same kind of work for Xbox, Microsoft, lots and lots of companies. At one point, the LA Times–and you can actually probably Google this–called us the world leader in user experience.
Andrew: Yeah. I see a bunch of articles about you–in Newsweek on that. I see articles about the work you did for Cablevision for, I think it was Comcast. I get it.
Richard: Now, what’s interesting is today, the discipline and craft of user experience and design is much more widespread than it was then. It was very much a dark art in those days and very expensive.
Andrew: How do you like the environment, the room that you’re in right now?
Richard: It’s kind of dark. Can you see me?
Andrew: I think the whole space is dark, isn’t it?
Richard: Yeah. Well, it’s been getting darker ever since the sun is moving. I can move if you like.
Andrew: No, no, if you’re comfortable, I’m comfortable with it.
Richard: Yeah.
Andrew: Why are you a member of–I forget the name. I’ve been there a couple of times.
Richard: The Battery.
Andrew: Sorry?
Richard: The Battery Club.
Andrew: The Battery–why are you a member of The Battery?
Richard: I love what it aspires to be. So, when I lived in London–I was in London for seven years running digital for the BBC and then the Daily Mail. London has a culture of members clubs and you go to these clubs and you meet like-minded people and you socialize and you work there and you can have client meetings. It’s a really interesting idea. I had never seen this here when I lived here before.
When I came back, Michael, actually–we weren’t friends, we were acquaintances probably in the UK–he opened this place and I found the idea really interesting and a couple of friends of mine nominated me to join and I joined. I don’t come here a lot, but I really enjoy it whenever I’m here. I love this as a community and I really enjoy it whenever I’m here. I love the sense of community and I love the connection to arts and culture. It feels like it’s really finding its legs and trying to be a place that will try and sustain long-term culture here in San Francisco.
Andrew: It’s a club for entrepreneurs, right?
Richard: It’s arts, entrepreneurs and community.
Andrew: I see.
Richard: So, it really is trying to be more than just entrepreneurs. Michael would cringe if he thought this was just a place for lawyers and VCs to hang out. He really wants artists, he wants musicians, anyone who’s talent, anyone in the community who can a contributor to a fascinating group of people.
Andrew: Okay. So, back to your story with Prompt.ly–the question I was going to ask you earlier when I was analyzing your wealth was why didn’t you say, “This is a great idea. I’m going to bring someone else to run this thing for me. I’ll either fund it or I’ll help get funding for it. I think it deserves to be in the world but I shouldn’t be making the customer calls, which frankly as an interviewer I admire and I want to learn from. But why didn’t you say someone else should be doing it?
Richard: It’s interesting. When I was doing this, I rolled up my sleeves, raised a little bit of money and started down the journey of building a company. It had been a long time since I’d been the garage, in the garage metaphorically speaking, of course. I really enjoyed it. It was really nice to go back and touch the work again.
At the Daily Mail, I spent all of my time in meetings about meetings about meetings and spent not nearly enough time doing and touching the work. I really miss that. I think also being new coming back to San Francisco after a 20-year lapse of time here, it was really good just to go back and be in the trenches. And ten frankly the company, we didn’t raise enough money to where I could actually hire someone at some point until we could sort of prove out the model.
That’s sort of where we are now. We probably will hire someone if it turns out it really is a growing concern and we need to sustain ourselves. But where I am now is realizing it’s not the place for me to spend my time day to day.
Andrew: You told our producer that the problem was more complicated that you imagined and you gave the example of a yoga instructor who needs to sync five calendars, invoice different clients and so on. How did you understand this problem before you started launching? What was your process for understanding it?
Richard: I’m going to go back to reference my point previously about design thinking. So, design thinking says you don’t know anything. You start from a blank slate and you listen and you learn. So, we built a bunch of prototypes. We spent a lot of time doing customer interviews. We did over 600 customer interviews in groups and individually with solopreneurs over the past three years to find out what they needed.
Frankly, I don’t think we raised enough money and I think we underestimated how difficult the problem is to build a tool that’s super simple for people who are not technically literate to use on their mobile phone to run their entire business. I think we actually did accomplish that in the end, but it took a long time to go out longer than we expected. We failed to raise enough capital to allow us to sustain all the way through product development and get to product launch and growth.
Andrew: Why did you decide to do all of them? I was really overwhelmed and ready for it to be overly complicated when I saw the list of things. The user interface–and now I understand why–actually makes sense and I was able to follow along, but I still wondered why not just focus on calendaring first and then add the next and the next?
Richard: So, it’s interesting. The problem as I understood it spending time with the solopreneurs was not that there weren’t individually great scheduling solutions or invoicing solutions or marketing solutions. It’s that those systems don’t talk to each other.
So, in the case of the personal trainer, we schedule. We reschedule. We figure who rescheduled. We have a bunch of sessions. Then she sends me an invoice. It’s wrong because she cancelled that one time. Wait, I want to refer a customer. So, she’s going to give me a discount. Where does that get reflected? What has happened is by adding digital to our lives, we increased the complexity and friction, not decreased the complexity and friction.
Andrew: I see. Where would you–tell me a little bit more about how you would find people to interview and to learn from. I know that’s a big part of your process.
Richard: It’s a huge part of design thinking and process–watching, observing, listening, asking questions. There was a funny joke I used to tell when we founded Prompt.ly, which is if you go to the US government and you say how many solopreneurs there are in America and yet every one of us has five, ten, some of us twenty of these people on their payroll in some way or another. You have babysitters. You have dog walkers. You have a chiropractor, nutritionist. You have a yoga teacher. There’s the tutor for your daughter.
All those people are solopreneurs. They’re self-employed professionals who are time-based who sell their services by the hour or by the session. So, finding them was easy. What was interesting is giving them this promise of a world where they can run their business on their mobile phone–it was nirvana for them. But they were very technically–I don’t want to say inept. That’s the wrong word. They were not technical. So, if it was hard at all, they would give up.
Andrew: I see.
Richard: So, what I found is–there was a great story. I had a housekeeper who we interviewed. Her system was she used Google Calendar. If you left the money on the table in cash, she would put a one on calendar and if you didn’t leave the money, she would leave a two. And then once a month, her daughter would go through the calendar and find all the number twos and send an invoice.
I said to here, “That’s great. What happens if they don’t pay?” She said, “They usually pay.” And I said, “So, you’re telling me there’s no collection process? You sent the invoice, that’s it, hope they pay the bill. She said, “Yeah.” So, I said, “If you say to me if I give you a customer, you’ll give me a discount.” She goes, “I usually remember to give it to you.” So, the integration of the systems was the key value proposition. Otherwise, there are far better solutions on the individual basis.
Andrew: How did you find this housekeeper?
Richard: Referral. A friend of mine told me about her.
Andrew: I see. And you sat down with her and you asked her these questions.
Richard: Yeah.
Andrew: I see.
Richard: And by the way, she’s still a Prompt.ly user today.
Andrew: You did even more than that. The Facebook advertising part I was shocked by. I just kept going through waiting for it to say not ready yet, but it was built. I would actually go and promote my–if I was a house cleaner or a music instructor, go to Facebook and say I’m going to give you 25 percent off because my calendar is empty right now. And the system would keep track of that.
Richard: Yeah. It still does. So, like I said, it’s a business. It’s a very real business. But without a lot of dollars to market it, it’s never going to be a humongous business.
Andrew: Why do you think you had trouble raising money?
Richard: We didn’t raise enough in the beginning and then because the problem was harder than we thought, we found ourselves in this place where we’re raising little tiny tranches of capital, which is a very bad signal to traditional VCs and we finally hit product market fit–he hit product market fit way too late to raise the really big rounds to take the company to the next stage. So, fundraising is a momentum game. The minute you lose momentum, it’s very, very hard to go back and recover.
Andrew: What does that look like when you lose momentum? Is it people not returning your calls anymore? They’re feeling blah about you?
Richard: No. You go in–we raised our seed round. I took a couple of meetings. Foundry came in. Within the next 72 hours, we had $1.5 million in our bank account.
Andrew: Okay.
Richard: It wasn’t that way the second time.
Andrew: What happened the second time?
Richard: Lots of questions, follow-up questions, requests for more information. And then the communication, the velocity of the communication would slow down. I don’t think anyone ever told us no, but they all hesitated and that hesitation was death.
Andrew: I see. So, you started doing these interviews. Did you start showing prototypes to make sure you were on the right track?
Richard: Yeah, for sure. We built a paper prototype to begin with, with a firm called Idean. It’s an amazing design firm based actually in Finland with a presence here in San Francisco and down in Palo Alto. The founder, Risto, is a friend of mind. They just did some amazing work. They did some design key frames, which we originally used for prototyping. Then we took those key frames and stitched them together into a digital prototype which we put in their hands. We just kept iterating the product. So, we release, I think, 17 variants of the product before we finally hit product market fit.
Each time, as we got bigger and bigger, in January we started putting this out in the wild on the app store and we would do a little Facebook blast of advertising to get some users in, had them use the product, see what would happen, look at the logs, look at the tracking. We need to fix these three things, go fix them. We did this over and over and over and over. That is a really great way to build a product, but it is slow. It was difficult with the resources we had to scale up quickly and efficiently.
Andrew: It’s slow because you get feedback and you have to prioritize it and fix some of it and so on.
Richard: Right.
Andrew: That company you’re mentioning is Idean.com for the transcribers. So, at first it was on paper. What did you learn when it was on paper and you showed it to people? The first thing we learned was we originally envisioned this as mostly a calendaring app with a little bit of invoicing and marketing. What we found was the invoicing was as important if not more important than the calendaring. The marketing was important. So, the two gateway drugs for Prompt.ly–gateway drug number one was, “Get me some new customers.” So, they would go directly to promos, didn’t pass go. They’d do a promotion, they’d get a booking and that’s how they became addicted to the product. The other use case was someone who had either schedule or invoice but they weren’t connected and hated the fact that their scheduling system and their invoicing system weren’t connected to one another.
Andrew: Let me do a quick sponsorship–did someone just walk into the room with you.
Richard: Yeah.
Andrew: It’s okay. Are you okay with it? I’m alright with it.
Richard: Yeah. I’m fine.
Andrew: Yeah. The sponsorship message is for Toptal. Have you heard of Toptal?
Richard: No, actually.
Andrew: Oh, you should know about them. These guys are funded by Andreesen Horowitz, really major players right now because they discovered this opportunity in the market. It’s really hard to find developers, right?
Richard: Yeah.
Andrew: You want to go find developers by posting job ads. You ask your employees for recommendations to people. It’s a really tough, long, drawn our process. Even if you go to headhunters, it will take a long time and it will cost a lot of money.
So, what these guys at Toptal decided to do was they were going to put together a network of the best developers. They were really going to screen them out, make sure it was the best people. 97 percent of developers are turned down from Toptal. They take the top three percent and they say, “These are in our network. This is our posse. This is our posse. These are our people.”
When a company calls them up and says, “We need a developer that works in this language, that works in this way and in this time zone,” they can make the match within their network and get that developer started, up and running within a couple of days and then the developer is in there, part of the team, able to continue and you can hire them for full-time, part-time, just a few hours to get a project finished, whatever you need.
They give you personalized service. As soon as you go to Toptal.com/Mixergy and you say you want to come in, they will contact you and they’ll start asking you and who knows? Maybe Toptal isn’t the right fit for you. I happen to know that a couple of people who talked to them were not the right fit and they’re open. They say, “This is not the right company for us to be working with,” meaning that it’s just going to cost you too much and they’re not going to get you the right person.
But if they can, they will get that person started and if you go to Toptal.com/Mixergy, give you 80 free Toptal developer hours when you pay for 80. And of course, they have that Mixergy offer, which is two weeks, if you’re not 100 percent satisfied, they will not bill you and Toptal will still pay the developer.
So, go to Toptal.com/Mixergy if you need a developer. I know they’ve branched out beyond developers. They do designers. They do so much more. But they’re a fantastic company and people keep hiring them from Mixergy and that’s why they keep sponsoring–Toptal.com/Mixergy.
Richard: Cool.
Andrew: You told our producer another thing. You said people really love it when the CEO calls.
Richard: Yeah.
Andrew: You know one thing I found is if I call people, they don’t pick up their phones anymore.
Richard: It’s very funny, actually. Before I met my girlfriend, I had many girlfriends who used to joke–I would call them on the phone. They were like, “Why are you using this for calling?” I was like, “You do know it was invented for that first.”
Andrew: It’s strange. I know now I’ve been getting a lot of spam phone calls, so I’m trying not to answer the phone. I only picked it up once today because it was a California number and I thought maybe you had an issue and I wanted to take it from you. It was spam. So, when I call my customers up to try to do what I’m learning in these interviews, I end up going straight to voicemail. What did you do to allow you to get directly through to your users?
Richard: Well, you and I are not solopreneurs. I say that half in jest but half not. We found most of these providers, you could reach them if you call them a couple of times. Also if you sent them an email they would call you back. I was also open. I would always say, “I do one or two of these a week. I’m calling you. I’m not selling you anything. My goal here is to learn about how you’re using our product or not using it.” There were a couple of times and I got an ear full about a bug or a problem someone experienced. Other times I learned really fascinating insights about someone’s business.
By the way, I’ve done this throughout my career. This isn’t something I just did for Prompt.ly. My favorite example is when I was at the Daily Mail. So, I had this portfolio and 20 percent of my revenue came from the online newspaper but the rest came from these classified businesses. One of the biggest ones was a business like Auto Trader. It was an automotive classified business. I realized particularly in the UK I had zero knowledge about how auto used car sale worked. I didn’t know anything about the process.
So, I went out and visited some guys, some used car salesmen and their forecourts, which is what they call it in the UK, the little parkways where they park the cars. I just said, “Tell me about your business. A car comes in here. Tell me the whole process for how the car comes in, how you’re going to get it ready for sale, how you sell it, how you find your buyers, how they buy it, who they are, how they find you. I learned the most interesting insights.
One of the insights I learned is there were three companies in the UK that made the software that did the inventory management for the used car salesmen. All of them had a button in them to publish that ad to our competitor. So, I bought one and transformed the business.
Andrew: You bought one of these two software makers.
Richard: Yeah. So, suddenly the market changed because now there was a very easy button to list on their website. I made it a web app and we improved it tremendously.
Andrew: I see. I didn’t even realize that you were working for the Daily Mail. I didn’t see it on your LinkedIn profile.
Richard: Well, Associated Northcliffe Digital was the digital holding company for all digital assets under the DMGT, which is the owner of the Daily Mail.
Andrew: I see. And that’s 2009 to 2010.
Richard: Yeah.
Andrew: Do you have a few go to questions when you’re talking to customers to understand what their problems are, what you should be creating?
Richard: I always ask them to tell me what they do. You always can tell when someone talks about what part they love and what part they don’t love. I always ask them, “What part of what you do are you really frustrated with and what part do you love?” So, those three questions are my first leading questions. And then the next thing I usually ask is I ask them to tell me about their best engagement and their worst engagement. Those two stories will give you the narrative without any editorial from them about went well and what went wrong. Often the thing they will think went wrong is not actually the thing that went wrong.
Andrew: What do you mean?
Richard: So, I’m going to give a different story to explain the analogy. I had this kid that worked for me at Razorfish actually. We went to go sell a big engagement to–it was actually one of the big mall companies. I don’t think I can name them. It was this project that we were going to do virtual pop up storefronts. We went to the meeting and he was super excited. He had done this whole pitch.
He went in and within five minutes he’d lost the business, not because his ideas were bad or because his presentation wasn’t good. Because the customer said something early in the conversation that he failed to pick up on. It was a really small thing, but it was a thing about their objection to us. Instead, this kid, having prepared this whole presentation, just barreled ahead and demonstrated repeatedly over and over that what their fear about us was what might actually be true.
I couldn’t rescue him from it because it was his meeting. So, I sort of laid this out for him and he was astonished. He said, “You’re right. I didn’t pick up on that at all.” I said, “Often it’s not what someone says. You have to listen to the whole narrative and look at them and look at the room and really understand how all the parts are moving around. That’s where you’re going to get the most data, not from the actual words they say.
Andrew: I see. So, if you’re interviewing a housekeeper and you ask her, “Do you always get paid?” and she says no, it’s…
Richard: It’s the thing where she says, “Well, they usually pay the bill.” What does it tell you? It tells you that she doesn’t get paid all the time.
Andrew: I see. That’s how you’re understanding the problem. Then she might say it’s because they’re very busy or it’s because of something else. But in reality, it might just be that they don’t keep cash on hand. It’s really tough to go to the ATM every day and get some cash, right? But if it was a credit card, then you’d know you solved their problems. So, it’s hearing them tell their stories that allows you to pick up on where the real problems are.
Richard: Right. It’s also about really focusing on the friction, as we call it in design thinking. So, the friction between consumer and problem–that’s where all the value is created in the world, reducing friction. Too often we have a feature and we’re searching for a problem to solve with it, as opposed to starting from the problem and developing a solution for that problem.
Andrew: How do you look for friction? When you were working at Schematic, what did you do to see where people’s friction is?
Richard: Well, a lot of it’s watching people. We did a Cablevision. We watched people buy movies and then we said, “Look, if we lose x-percentage of people at each step of the process and it’s a 20-step process to find a rent a movie, what if we made that a five-step process. We’d lose exponentially less people. We’d do little tests. It actually turned out we got even more people to buy movies because when they knew there were only two more steps, they would stay.
Andrew: Would you go to their homes and watch them as they watched movies?
Richard: We videoed them a few times. We had some people come in and use the system. We used the system. But most importantly was we got the data from the servers that showed us that people would click the link to look for a movie and by the time they actually got to the buying movie decision, 80 percent of them were gone. And now this is very common wisdom, like ecommerce is big businesses built around reducing each lost step in any flow on a website or ecommerce site or whatever. But when we were doing this, this was revolutionary.
I think now by the way, the same thinking applies to all kinds of other things. You see a lot of people applying design thinking to civil solutions. So, city architecture, thinking about bike lanes, thinking about parking. San Francisco is doing a lot of work where they’re trying to move traffic outside the urban center and have that be bicycles and taxis and mass transit. A lot of that, you don’t have to realign the roads, but just putting poles up in certain places causes the traffic to fork and divide and move in different ways. So, the same set of thinking and solutions can be applied to any number of problems, not just websites and designing pretty interfaces.
Andrew: You told April about this big challenge that you had when there was a software bug. Why was that such a big issue? What was the bug?
Richard: Well, it’s a really interesting question. So, at Prompt.ly I think we’re talking about. So, we shipped a version of Prompt.ly. We underestimated the invoicing opportunity, how big an opportunity it was and what people wanted to do with invoicing. So, realizing this, we raced to market to build invoicing again. We didn’t test it very well. We did some good research. But the thing our research–in identifying people to research to learn about invoicing, we said, “Do you invoice?” People said yes and then you were in the pool of people we interviewed that do invoicing.
What we failed to do is interview anyone who didn’t do invoicing. So, we shipped the invoicing part of the product and it had no off switch. So, there’s some percentage of Prompt.ly users–I don’t know what the percentage is today, but at that time, call it 20-25 percent who had no interest in invoicing. Either they worked at a hair salon or a nail salon. There was a cash register there or a POS system or they had some other way of getting paid that didn’t involve invoicing.
So, we launched a new invoicing feature. Over the next week and a half, 20 percent of our user base disappeared. Boom. Gone. We didn’t know why. We were literally like, “Oh my god. What happened?” It was only through calling people where we realized we forced them into this invoicing flow that 20 percent of them had no interest in. By the way, another 20 percent loved the product even more because it had invoicing.
Andrew: I get that. Maybe they’re more valuable.
Richard: I actually think that the answer was we should have done a little more research on a broader base before we narrowed down the feature development.
Andrew: Okay. So, the business is there. The revenue is coming in. You’re not sure what to do with it, but you are evaluating what to do next with your life. What are you thinking?
Richard: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting. I know exactly what to do with the business. I’m working on a blog on this topic, which is the idea in the valley is it’s either unicorn or death. I think this is kind of mad, right? This is a very good little business, but it’s a little business, not a big business. So, my hope is it will continue to scale slowly under the tutelage of someone we’ll hire and it will pay off as liabilities and bring us a small income stream and maybe pay back the investors over time.
For me, though, I realize that I’m spending a lot of time working on something that’s not the best use of my time and resources. I forget who it was that said the only thing you can’t get more of is time. So, we have a limited amount of time on this planet and what I want to do is take my learning from this recent experience, but then my knowledge and breadth of experience across all the things I’ve done and apply that to some larger problems and scale problems where I can really make a difference.
Andrew: What are some problems you’re seeing?
Richard: So, I’m thinking about a lot of areas. One of the areas I’m thinking about a lot is media. I really worry for the state of journalism and media today. The economic model is broken. Interruptive advertising and all of the sort of issues around the uncomfortableness of brands and content is getting worse, not better. I think the content is getting better as well, but we’re starting to see models where it’s a very different world. So, subscription works for consuming pre-created content, but for journalism it’s a little harder to sell on digital because they gave it away for so long. So, I’m thinking a lot about that.
I’m also thinking a lot about the issue of journalism in general. I think the state of journalism today is probably the lowest state it’s been in 150 years. So, there’s less accuracy. There’s less information. There’s less knowledge in general about the events around us, which is bizarre because never have there been better ways of discovering that, but there’s a disconnect between information and consumption of that information.
I’m thinking a lot, as I mentioned before, about medical, specifically around–there’s this whole world of digital medical and future medical. I’m just thinking about healthcare and health systems in general and how can we apply design thinking and some of the thinking that I’ve learned in digital to some of these problems of digital healthcare. So, less about building devices to get better blood testing, but more thinking about systems thinking and design thinking to solve some of the big problems in that area.
Andrew: How do you take it from here? Do you have conversations? Do you talk to peers? Do you talk to customers?
Richard: I’m doing a lot of those things. I’m having a lot of conversations with a lot of people. I love talking to people anyways. It’s one of the things that feeds me. So, on that one, for instance, I’m not a doctor. I don’t know much about medical or healthcare. So, I’m spending time talking to people about that area.
The third area I’m thinking a lot about–it’s actually a personal area of interest, which is political action and public service. So, when I worked at the BBC, it was my first exposure to working in the public service. When you work for the BBC, you are a public servant. You work for a man who works for a man who works for the queen. You have a civic and public responsibility. It was the first time I had ever really married up some of my social and personal views with my business goals.
I’d like to find something that marries those two things together that’s a very successful business to run, but ones that’s a little closer in lien to my social values and personal values and some of the long-term goals I have for society and us as a people.
Andrew: That makes sense. Finally, what do you do for fun?
Richard: That’s a great question. I have two children. We do a lot of things together. We cycle. We swim. We surf. If I had to pick one sport or non-business activity, it is snowboarding. I am a quite aggressive snowboarder. If you Google me at all, you’ll find lots of videos of me jumping out of helicopters. My absolute passion is heli boarding and snowboarding. The deeper the powder, the steeper the mountain, the more fun it is for me.
Andrew: Snowboarding–where do you go snowboarding. I’m typing in snowboarding in snowboarding and Richard Titus. I don’t see it. Oh, Titus heli boarding–oh, heli boarding too.
Richard: Yeah. So, I did a trip a couple years ago in Valdez, Alaska that was amazing. I did a couple of trips in Canada. My friend and I are looking at going to a small conference in January for tech entrepreneurs to go heli skiing in Alaska. Really, one of my goals next year is to go to the Himalayas with her or go to South America again.
Andrew: Heli skiing or snowboarding means you’re dropped out of a helicopter?
Richard: Yeah. I snowboard whenever there’s snow in the mountains here. I jump in my car and get up there and hit the mountains for a couple of days. Heli takes to a different level. So, rather than having a lift in a bunch of people in bad Lycra eating stale French fires, heli is you and four or five guys or girls in a helicopter.
The helicopter is like your ski lift and takes you to the top of the mountain and drops you off there and then you snowboard or ski down, which could be like thousands of feet. So, one of my longest runs when I did on that trip–I think there’s a video of it–it’s like a 20 minute run of perfect powder turn after turn after turn from the top of the mountain to the bottom.
Andrew: I see it. Man, that feels so–I’m watching you there in the middle of nowhere. It feels very lonely and scary and fun.
Richard: It’s amazing. It’s life changing. It gives you a totally different perspective.
Andrew: I can see that.
Richard: My other passion is yoga.
Andrew: Yoga?
Richard: I’m a huge fan of yoga. I discovered it after my motorcycle accident and it transformed my life.
Andrew: How do you get–I can’t stay focused on yoga. I go there for like an hour and four minutes into it, I get bored and I can’t settle in.
Richard: By the way, mindfulness, I always joke that yoga is the gateway drug to mindfulness. Mindfulness is, I think, possibly one of the most important topics for entrepreneurs to be thinking about, which is we are constantly suffering under the monkey mind. Our minds are racing with 1,000 different things.
Yoga was the first time I learned the discipline of letting my mind wander until it ran out of gas and stopped. So, I could suddenly be present just in the moment. That ability to be present in the moment and exist just in the now is the first step to being phenomenally successful for your commercial and entrepreneurial endeavors.
Andrew: I’ve had that for meditation, but some reason yoga doesn’t work for me.
Richard: Yeah. For me, yoga was transformative. It changed my physical body. It changed my mental health and it introduced me to mindfulness and meditation, which I probably would have never paid attention to had I not had the yoga success story first.
Andrew: I get that. I’d rather me into yoga because I do feel like I’d look better in the mirror. My wife would be more into if I did yoga with her and if I had a yoga body. All right. Thank you so much for doing this. How was the interview for you? I know you came here with the idea you were going to promote something and that something changed.
Richard: I’ll tell you this, I think originally when we were doing this, I was like, “Let’s talk about Prompt.ly.” You’re right. The pre-interviewer was really opposed to that. They wanted to talk more about the broader sense of entrepreneurism. I think my goal today, I try and learn something about myself and something about my worldview and something about the person who’s interviewing me, which I’ve done.
Andrew: What did you learn about yourself today?
Richard: I think that design thinking is a really key element of my worldview. I think I grossly underestimated its importance in my efforts to change the world.
Andrew: All right. I learned that importance too here in this interview. I really just loved your whole process. I wasn’t sure about doing this interview on Prompt.ly, but the more I read about your process, the more I realized this is something that should be taught in school and I like how systematically you applied it.
All right. Thank you so much for doing this interview. Thank you all for being a part of Mixergy. The sponsors are HostGator and Toptal. And if you like this interview, please subscribe to the podcast. Bye everyone.
