Welcome back to the hustle podcast. This is Anthony, and I am here with my friends Steve and James from a really cool new startup called Banter. Banter is a social discovery and player in the podcast space, and I don't know if I got that right. Guys, I'll let you guys try man in here a second, but it's really cool. It's Ah, it's a product that a few of us that fun size had a really awesome opportunity toe help out with in the in the beginning days. And today we're gonna we're gonna talk to these two co founders, learn a little bit. What about what they're doing, what's next for them and some of the things that they are dealing with. Ah, and running a start up together. Hey, guys, how you

guys do in good Anthony with Steve, and you almost got it right. Banter is a platform for sharing podcasts that you're listening to that that you enjoy. If you want conversations around them. It's a great place to do that. And you just follow your friends and see what they're listening to you as well. We're working on banter for the past several months down. Before that, I was at Twitter working on growth in emerging markets. Before that, James and I had actually done another startup called Think Fuse, which was very different. It was basically online project management in the same space as a troll, or is Lana that got acquired by sales force? Before that, we were Microsoft, So we've kind of we've done in a couple laps around a lot of the major tech companies.

Hey, Anthony, thank you so much for having us. This is James, Steve said. He and I have had a chance to work together at various points in our career, and this has been that certainly the most notable experience for us. We've been grinding away at Bachir building a building, an app to the sort of scratching itch that we've had in the podcasting space for several years. And before we got started, I was working in the Bay Area at Airbnb its stripe, and it was right after that when I had joined up Steve again Twitter that he started pitching me on this idea that podcasting should be a little bit more social and discovery should be easier. I think it was probably because I was asking him for so many recommendations, being kind of a podcast Nube at the time that he, uh he really wanted to see us build something in the space. And it corresponded with a lot of growth in the market and growth in the total listening audience s Oh, that's why we ended up jumping in and, uh, starting another company together.

That's awesome. So many questions, but back to the like a little bit more about the origin story. So, James, you and I, you were working with a client of ours. Keep health. And there was a cocktail hour that we did at the end of the at the end of that project together when you were in Austin. And I think that's when you first mentioned this. You're like, you didn't really say exactly what you're doing, what you're gonna do. But you said, hey, well, you know,

there's this big gap in the podcast space. You know, we think we could do something really interesting there, and at the time it was it really piqued my interest because, you know, I do this podcast and there's not a lot of really great tools out there for podcasters are really not even that much for podcast listeners. It's the early days. I think people are just starting to make things, and I'm just curious you. So you guys have worked together for quite a while on some big things. Big enterprise problems? Why podcasting?

We're both kind of pop. Guest means James more so now than when we first met. But I think I peaked his interest in it. And there's just so much great continent podcasting, but, uh, and at least so many great conversations. But yeah, so hard to share it, especially cross platform. If you If you're listening in the Apple podcast that you want to share an episode with your friend on Android, it's near impossible. And before banter, there were really just two players that I'd recommend people either overcast, their pocket cast and overcast, as I was only in pocket cast have to pay for. And so there really was no decent cross platform player yet alone across platform player that you could,

you know, follow your friends and have conversations around episodes, and it just it just seemed like photos that solve this super easy to share photos and have conversations around video had solved this. You know you could build communities on YouTube, but for some reason nobody had done this and audio. And I'll spend a lot of my time listening to audio. So we figured we should sit out and fix it toe enter that we We were looking at some of the trends at the time that we began batting these ideas around. There's a great annual report called The Infinite Dial that Edison Research publishes each year in the summer, and the growth of podcast listenership, especially in North America, was somewhere between 10 to 15% every year. And I think the year that we began really speaking in earnest, the total listenership in the United States exceeded the number of monthly active users of Twitter, which we thought was really funny, given that we were at at a multi $1,000,000,000 company by the very same name.

So we

saw a lot of growth in this space, at least this far as the number of your drums that were being reached. But the amount of revenue in the space is been relatively flat, stagnant. It's still less than a $1,000,000,000 industry, and we figured that this would be a very good time to hop in and see if we couldn't solve a couple of the problems that we saw in the space and get in early before what we think is going to be a very, very rapid period of growth. Once once some of the technical barriers are done away with your learning learning that there were more Americans listening to podcasts every month and using Twitter, it was really eye opening. And it really highlighted how siloed the current listening experience was where there's, you know, tens of millions of people listening to podcasts, and you you never really get a sense of that in a traditional podcast habits. It's very siloed and isolating. There's no there's no way for you to see which of your friends of listen to this episode or what are they? Well, what do you think about it? Yes, so we just wanted to make it feel more communal.

Yeah, I mean, just a reaction to a couple of those things. I mean, being that I'm an android user back to the earlier point about cross platform compatibility. I mean, you really can't create a riel product that has any sort of riel conversation if you can't be cross platform. And and so it was obvious that you guys knew that from the beginning, you know, it's it's otherwise you're just you can only talk about it within like certain tribes. It's it's impossible toe to create something like that. If you can't if you can't share with everyone and not everyone's using the same tools

from day one, we have decided that we have to build a cross platform app, and we were kind of going back and forth on that because it roughly doubles the amount of work we have to do. But but cutting out half of your network, it was just a nonstarter for us. It could. I often find myself wanting to share episodes with people on Android, and if I had built a product that didn't do that, that would have I would consider that a failure.

Okay, before we get too far down that I mean, why don't you guys talk a little bit more? You started to hint at the opportunity here it like what was the big opportunity that banter was created to sort of solve what was in what is this sort of mission of the company that you're trying to build on And, ah, you know, like, how would you describe this to someone in words? Because, you know, we don't have the luxury of, like, a screen share here, but people can definitely go check this out at banter dot FM, and they should but tell us a little bit more about what banter is and what it does. Sure, so one of our we

don't use this phrase externally, but internally, it's brought up quite often. But one of our kind of guiding principles is a story for every audience in an audience for every story. And the idea is that if somebody has a story worth sharing, we should be able to find some people that will enjoy it. And so it's really just about connecting people to stories or connecting stories to people and having interesting conversations around those stories. That it's really a simple is that we've you know, our vision is now bigger than that. We you know, as we've worked on this, we've discovered that a lot of publishers have difficulty monetizing You have to be a fairly large podcast before you can start making serious advertising revenue. And so you know, now we've started talking to publishers about how we can help the monetize or how we got them grow their audience and things like that. But the kind of the guiding principle is just getting good stories in front of people and allowing them thio talk about them.

That's big from someone that creates a part. You know, this this podcast for me started out as a hobby, and it still is. But it really is one of the most powerful marketing tools that our company has. But the problem is, how do you How do people find it? Like, you know, you know, like our You know, the hustle podcast is buried in the iTunes directory, and in fact you can't even find it unless you know, to type in fun size, hustle, podcast and and it's, you know,

it's like, How do you How do I get this to a wider audience? And I think that's one of the great things about banter is not just that more people can learn about the the thing that I'm making but even like working in the beta of the banter up like I discovered plenty of things that I never knew existed. But but what's beautiful about it? It's not about it's not so much about Well, this is a Siri's of a series of podcast used to listen to, but this is a This is something very specific an episode, you know, a story really, you should listen to. So while I've discovered a lot of contents, you know, some of these new podcast have subscribed to, but others I could just, you know, check it out and banter, listen to it as some commentary, but yeah, I mean the fact that you're you're tapping into the discovery, letting people find things that they would be interested in listening based on what they're connections.

Listen to. That's pretty Yeah, What you just said is so important. One of the things that we I wanted to do when we built this app was to reduce the granularity of consumption from the entire podcast to individual episodes. Because if you think about how existing podcast players work, they're a lot like our SS readers. You go into them, you search for a specific show. You subscribe to it and then forevermore you're receiving every single episode in your home feet. That's not a very good way. Thio. It's very easy to become overwhelmed by too many subscriptions, and similarly, you can end up in a rut where you're always listening to the same four things. We thought that what we really wanted to do was do what medium did for blogging. We wanted to do that for podcasting. Medium.

If you have something insightful to say, you can go on medium, publish it, and the social mechanisms there will elevate it, such that you don't have to go and cultivate and carefully build an audience over years in order for them to hear it. You can go there today without any. You can create your account even just this hour and have millions of viewers of your content within. Ah, within a day we wanted to do the same thing with with audio. So the at this sort of built around the concept of that, and specifically we call them re casts where you can take individual episodes and recast them out, too. Your followers and that's that's the way that you know, I actually discovered the radical candor A podcast from you at the knee because he recast in episode from it that really stuck with you. And what you were just describing earlier was that you were seeing some some things that really struck your fancy from some of our other early users. So it's been a really great way. Thio, Thio very up and the types of things you're consuming.

Yeah, it's important to discover content. And I think you know, whether it's, ah, audio or or text or, you know, whatever it is, it's all just kind of content, isn't it? Yeah. And you know another. You know, another another parallel, I guess, you know, for those that are listening is meaning is a good example.

But I think what you're also what you guys were also doing is starting to get really close to what other products were doing. Similar to like. Pocket Pocket is starting to get to a point where it's, ah, recommending things to read based on the other things that I favored it and so that you know, now there is this, like short list, and I think that's what's really powerful cause I mean, I don't know, everyone's different, but I think a lot of people are They're seeking out content, but they have very specific amounts of time, Right? We're all busy people, like, could be like on your morning commute or your afternoon commute or when you're taking a lunch break or even when you're on the toilet,

you're trying to find you probably find trying to find something to listen to. And it's probably a lot better to find something to listen to. If it's if it's something that you know people that you know act. I care about two and I think that's really powerful. And I want to go back to the cross platform thing just because I think that's really huge. I know that it took you guys a lot longer tow launch because of that, but I think that if you hadn't it would have been a flop, because it would have been really, really difficult to even begin to scratch the service. So I want to ask you a few questions about how you guys think and do product development. That's okay, really well. But first at 11 quick question. Are you guys, a Seattle startup or New York City startup?

That's a great question. We're neither or we're both, uh, you know, I have a lot of ties to Seattle because I spent five years there, which were the first years that Steve and I got to work together at Microsoft and we spend a bunch of time flying back and forth. In fact, right now we're both in Brooklyn. Steve's been out here for the week with me working so way find a lot of value from being located on both coasts. There's a lot of investors in Seattle that we've spoken to, and in New York you have a huge hub of content production. There's a lot of radio and podcasting here, so it's been great for me to be on the ground here, meeting and discussing the needs of publishers. So for now, we're a bit of a bicoastal company, and if we get some funding and are able to hire and grow,

we might centralize the one area. Yeah, and you know, remote teams are hard on remote. Co founders are the hardest. But as James mentioned, we make it a point to get to each other's respective cities roughly every month or so, and everything James and I have going for us is we've been working together for almost a decade now and write at most of those companies that Twitter and its sales force that was in a remote capacity. So we have. We have seven years working remotely. I don't think there's really anybody else that I would ever do is start it with remotely just because the remote brings a whole new slew of challenges. The gym. Yeah, I already have kind of those patterns.

Yeah, that's that's awesome. When you already have AH long history together, you know how each other works you have. You know, you share the same values, you there, the trust is there. I really I do imagine it's difficult because there's a fairly big time difference between New York and Seattle. But, you know, I think as long as you're you have those core things and you can make things happen. Well, you guys are also an interesting co founding team because you're both really awesome engineers that also are quite competent in design. So you guys, I'm sure, can divide and conquer quite well,

right? Instead, of like a lot of startups have. Like maybe like a business founder and a technical founder may be designed founder. But there's the engineering founders whose one that's always like, overwhelmed with, like, all the work. You guys can split that up pretty well. I met. Yeah,

it requires a lot of trust, and we have a lot of trust in each other where, you know, we were always on slack and we check in with each other a couple times a day. But for the most part, we just say like, Hey, this is what I'm working on and and we just started each other to get it done. It also really helps that we have some very clearly to find areas of ownership so that, in fact I mean, it's about as clear as it could possibly be. I own the app development and everything that is on the client side and on the device, and then Steve owns everything on the back end. So he owns the P I's and all the back and service is. So we're able Thio define the contract of our code, interacting with a fairly predictable and well designed A P I that we work together too, to spec out. But then past that we can go off and work on implementation apart from one another, and we obviously are sinking a lot. But that really frees us up to toe Have you know, many hours of uninterrupted work where we don't have to coordinate.

So okay, you the answer. My next question. Because I was gonna ask Where is they're overlapping. Where is there? Not if you guys don't mind answering this like, where is their overlap? And how do you guys? What sort of construct do you guys have for making final decisions? When you guys

don't agree on something, that's a very good question. So the overlap, as I mentioned a moment ago, the overlap that encounter every day is the apse, a p I. And because we're both engineers, I'm going to use a couple of technical terms is because I'm very nerdy and excited about how we built this. But we built our a p I using gravity Well, so we end up sort of specifying all of the different data that the APP can access and mutate through that a p i and we usually spend a fair bit of time every other day discussing any additions, removals from it. That's one of the ways that we should re directly overlap. But we also then spend time discussing the visual on the implementation of features specifically like user experience, implications of tweaks that were making to the app. And we'll also sometimes discuss scaling and performance concerns on the back end so you can see, like on. We're both sort of stepping into each other's territory and that typically comes in.

We both respect each other and how loud a skill on both ends the divide so that manifest in the form of us. One of us asking for the other's advice and we'll bring things up will surface them. We'll have a discussion, and generally, when we have a disagreement, will defer to the person who sort of owns that space. But it's very rare that we end up having like a 50 50 like we both are adamantly opposed to one another on a given point. We can usually bring enough data or rationale into the picture that we're able to convince what each other, usually pretty much on the same page and kind of going a level higher than, say, the FBI. Whenever we're in town together, we'll use your grab coffee and spent some time on the product roadmap, and we'll open up a notebook. It's kind of sketched out what we want to accomplish over the next few weeks or where we see the product going. And we'll usually kind of prioritize that

you guys must be hacked into my computer like reading my notes because my again, my very next question was gonna be How do you guys manage the product roadmap together? Yeah, we you

know there's more efficient to discuss it in person and kind of scribble out notes, and we have usually done it over coffee. But then, when we're in our respective cities, we just have a trailer board where we have all of my priorities in one board and James board is right next to it, and we just kind of throw everything into hello and then weaken right. There is a way for us to track how each of us are progressing through our respective are a mess.

Awesome. Okay, so back to little product and design questions when you guys after you committed to this. You're gonna make this thing. What was your collective vision about what a successful minimum viable product should be and how you want me through? What? Your thought process was on, How you guys were thinking about how you would get that done, right? Like I realized we were a part of that. But I'm kind of curious, like the question is kind of aimed from a cofounder perspective, being an engineer in, like, how you thought about design as a part of that need in really why you did things the way you did. I'm just curious. Yeah, s o

M v p is an interesting acronym to use because the M shifted a lot and even, you know, earlier we talked about how we wanted to build on both platforms at once. You know, you could make an argument that by choosing to build on both platforms, that is not minimal. But that was important to us. So, you know, that was one constraint we're going to give up. But the other thing we learned as we were developing banter, we are very first prototype was basically a list of episodes that you could press play on and you know that's it's pretty minimalist farts podcast players go on. We thought we could get pretty far with that. And we learned pretty quickly that we chose a space where at least the early adopters, you know, they've been listening to podcasts for years, and they already have fairly sophisticated APS that they use in many different ways.

And we learned pretty early on that a lot of people have patterns of usage that they just weren't be. They weren't able to walk away from ends. So, uh, you know, the most minimal pockets player we could imagine turned out, It's gonna be a nonstarter. And so we we kind of had to work a little bit harder to get to future parity with some of the more robust players and their features that we never thought we'd have to implement like a sleep timer. Uh huh. It's really we never thought we don't go to sleep timer, and then a bunch of our users started telling us like, Hey, you know, I fall asleep listening to the podcast and I need to sleep timer, and I can't use banker until until you guys have one and you know, weird feedback like that from enough people or another big one was playback speed.

A lot of people listen to the podcast at non native speed, and if you were to enumerate the list of features that go into a podcast player, I think any reasonable person would think that that doesn't make the cut for a minimal player. But we found so many people. We're kind of set in their ways that we had to adjust our definition of minimal in order to get early doctors using it. One of the good things about this process that was that by delivering something that was truly minimal and was lacking a lot of them were sophisticated playback controls and download management and things of that nature. We initially way engage for fun size and had you will step in and help us out. With the initial design, we were focused 110% on the social features because of social features were going to make us unique. Nobody needed another pot general like our assess style pod catcher. So we spent all the time with you really thinking about the social primitives like the concept of re casting and up voting, which eventually became likes and how to have conversations and reply threads and all that. That was what we explored with you, and you all helped us to get a lot of clarity on that. So what we did was we took that. We implemented that on top of a very,

very basic audio player and got that out of the hands of many people as we could the early, very early days and as people started falling off and saying, You know, I like the social features, but I really need my sophisticate download management. We started then back, filling all of those features that I would consider table stakes for podcasting at. And it's funny because it delayed our ability to get to market and sort of have a confident launch where we were mostly future complete. But it gave us a lot of time to tweak the social features while we filled in the audio playback features.

So I think it's brilliant because the folks that were part of the beta you didn't necessarily start with all the table sticks you started with what makes you different. So now they the folks in the Beta already have a clear mental model of like why

this is different. Exactly. It's a pocket exactly, and that we changed the Social primitives so many times. In fact, it's It's the area where we feel like we feel the greatest confidence relative to our our competitors in the sofa podcasting space when we think about how our social primitives map to user behavior. And I know I've just used a lot of jargon there, but we spent a lot of time trying to figure out sort of what wait to give reply threads versus recast. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to ask people to reengage with content and leave their opinion and and how widely to share it. And we There was a lot of things that we tweaked along the way in which we were using in early user data to refine while we while we added, you know, the silence, shortening and the playback speed controls.

Yeah, I want to talk to you guys more about what social primitives mean, because it sounds really sounds like a talk about that. That's, uh, that's just yeah, I guess that's that's a lot

of George and I. It's funny. We have a lot of jargon we use in the back end and in the code that we don't actually exposed the users, and I suppose that's just one of them. But when I say social primitives, I really mean the recast. Recast is tthe e thing in banter the idea that when you hear something that you like, you can hit a button similar to like the retreat button and make sure that all the people who follow you have a chance to hear it. I think it's been the most powerful feature for social discovery, like being able to see what your friends are really loving. Recommending it's led Teoh. One of the coolest stats that we have is that about 10% of the episodes that listen to inventor are re casts and specifically recast of episodes from shows that that user does not follow already. So one in 10 and that's that's really speaks volumes about how much the social proof really influences what people are gonna choose to listen to. Like if if my friend put something in front of me, even from like personal sports and like these episodes from podcast that, like I have no intrinsic interest and I will listen to and you'll usually find them really interesting. And you have a nice day.

That podcast is we. You know, we don't assume that everybody currently uses banter. One day they will, but you can also share recast the onto Twitter or Facebook. And if you start on Twitter, you can play it right from within your feet. And it's just it's a really good way for you to share podcast with, literally your entire social network, whether or not there on banter

just real quick before I get. I have several other big questions for you. But are you discovering any interesting data on, like what Social networks are the most popular networks that people are sharing on?

Well, right now, we actually just got the external sharing in place. Ah, a couple weeks ago, it was a feature that had a lot of lead time that went into it because we had to build a full Web app in order to have something that point, too. So we don't have much data to show for that right now. In effect, Okay, Facebook just changed their AP eyes for sharing in the wake of all of the various scandals. We're gonna have to retool that again because they just they just pulled the rug out from under all the APP developers this week. Yeah,

they changed. Quite a few. Things like that has been affecting things that are into, like, the way we share content. Exactly. All right, let's see, It gets more questions for you guys. So you guys launched. Congratulations. Thanks. Now what?

Who? Growth. Growth. Uh, it's all about getting users in the we have. Ah, we have a pretty good beta going on right now with a couple 100 users and everybody, and they're super passionate about podcasts. And it's a disappointed just about getting more passionate users in there to share. You know, more great podcasts. Yeah, I think that what that looks like in particular is that we want to We want to increase the top of the funnel. The number of people who are discovering banter and installing it. We really could could still afford to focus a little more on on boarding and sort of helping people understand what what is going on in the app make make sure that it bridges with their expectations in a podcast player. And then from there, the third area that we're really looking to push on to improve growth is to get to think through how we can make it even easier to share what you're listening to out to other social networks.

And that really leads into a feature that we've been we've been working on and refining over the past two months that were gonna launch sometime soon. Can't say when, but but we're very excited about it. And it's the ability to highlight specific clips in an episode and share those out well, share them within banter and share them out to Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. It's there a couple people in the space who are working on this, and we see some publisher tools that you have to pay for that will generate these little videos of segments of shows that we want to make that available to all listeners across all shows. That's something that we think will be really huge for driving engagement, and we're really excited to get that out as soon as possible.

Cool. A lot of people you know some, you know, everyone's different. Some people don't really understand how hard it is to, like, create a company and and grow company, much less a company like yours that I mean, I like company like mine. I mean, we have clients, they pay us money. You guys are building a start up like you have. Growth is different. So quite question for you is I want designers to understand this. This is where this is where this is coming from. How does this start up like yours? It Windows growth happen. And then a step below that. Like, when does this start up like your start thinking about needing to hire designers?

Yeah, it's it's interesting. It definitely depends on the start up. You know, the last start of James and I did together Think fuse, that was a beautifui start up. And you know, in that case, you can. When we were acquired by sales force, we had about 10,000 teams using us, and that was considered a big success. Meanwhile, in a consumer up, if you have 10,000 users using Europe, it's, you know,

it's barely a blip on the radar. And so when you start up with those criteria will change. Yeah, I make sense. Yeah, and as far as sort of when it when is the right time to hire first designer in the consumer space? We could use one right now. Honestly, it's It's one of those things where there was always a designer that's capable of synthesizing user feedback and a desire that is capable of sort of looking at the same data that we're analyzing because we're not that a scientist by trade, we're all sort of just poking around next panel. But if we had a designer that someone of the generalists, we could definitely So I used that right away. But I have to say, with the evolution of these small teams that I've been on, usually we see ah like full time designer or contract designer coming in around the fourth or fifth higher after. Maybe the two usually start with your cofounders like two or three engineers,

and then maybe maybe that's when you start layering in different roles, like Biz Dev or design. But it it really depends on the space and with with us having a number of consumer touch points, I would definitely like to have it earlier versus later. But right now Stephen are bootstrapping. The company's our ability to hire anybody is nil until we're able Thio, fetch some, uh, some investment capital.

Yeah, it's it's hard. Someone once gave me some advice. You know, I think about this a lot. Someone told me a camper who said Don't create a new discipline unless you can hire three of them, which I thought was interesting because like, it implies that, you know, unless you have, like, a culture of people that are doing the same problems, that the cost of doing that is not worth the investment. Because, you know, like recruiting will be hard or retention will be hard or sinking dollar. You know that you just like it's like it's like a money pit.

You guys, like, have this awesome bond together and also share a lot of skills like you can do you. You got the engineering covered and you guys are clearly, you know, like really confident, design minded engineers that can do design. Like in many ways. I think it's kind of it's really it's sometimes doesn't make sense to hire like one designer, you know, because then, like who's gonna create that culture for them? Who's going to grow their career? Tell me from right or wrong? But lately I've been thinking that what a lot of startups need is just like a fun size. Yeah,

yeah. Uh, eventually they need They need a partner that they can trust for about 20% of the year for big, pivotal were you And then for for the 80% of the day to day, they can probably do it themselves if they have the right frameworks or or do with relatively like low cost resource. And you, what do you guys think about it? Because I'm starting to mentor startups at the at this BC Fun in Austin and I people start You know what people have been asked me like, Well, should I hire funds? I was like, No, don't like not for that. Like maybe, you know, like maybe these small the small things but our big challenges. But not for that, not not on an ongoing capacity. You know, working

with you guys early on was was phenomenal and accelerate our progress a ton. We had been taking a stab at kind of simple product design before formally working with you guys, and we were slowly making progress. But it was one of those things where every time we open up some design have we knew that a real designer would do it in 1/10 the amount of time that that we were doing it. The nice thing about having a design team or people that are removed from the engineering decisions is as an engineer. It's very easy. It's even subconsciously dismiss ideas because you know they'll be difficult or, you know, burdens implement, whereas the designer is is not thinking about it in terms of how difficult is this future to implement their thinking about it? More, you know, how does it add value to the end user? And so it's nice to have someone who is kind of thinking about it without these additional constraints got in there thinking. And as far as working with you guys early on, the great thing that you did for us was you helped us come up with a visual language that after engagement ended whenever James and I had to design a new screen or new future, we could basically just lean on that visual language and come up with a decent result.

Absolutely. It's It's kind of funny, because when I look at, look at the envision boards that were delivered sort of the end of our time working together, fun size. The APP looks nothing like that anymore, at least in the details. But the overall design language remains the same, and we've been able to operate within that framework for a great amount of time because you left us with the great way of you. Give us a lot of assets. But you also just left us with a good mental model for, like, the approach that we're taking to designing a screen. And so it has been really good to have that on. I absolutely agree. I think right now the thing that makes me jump at the idea of having a full time designers that I that's one of those hats that is Steve's,

that kind of expensive to wear, like you know, we're all wearing multiple hats as co founders, but every time I put on the design hat, it really does forced me to think in a different way, and it does. I have to sort of spend the whole day focusing on design. If I'm going to do that, to switch back and forth between code, at least just the way that I might might. My skill set works is really expensive. So you know it. It's I think you can. You can sort of go a little bit in either direction. There's no silver bullet here, but we were very,

very thankful and privileged to be able to work with you because they all believed in what we're building. And we're willing to spend time with us in those early days, and it's definitely paying huge dividends for us now to give you guys shot on two things that really stand out. That you helped us out with. One is, ah, navigation hierarchy. If you were to use our app, you'd probably It probably feels like there's a handful of screens, maybe three or four screens, but there's actually dozens of screens, and that's something that we spent a lot of time iterating with you guys. How can you not get around the app with you know all this various functionality, but still make it feel very lightweight and still have the user to know where they are within the app that you know that they haven't gotten lost in some hierarchy. And then everything you really helped us with is we have been struggling With what? What's the vibe that we want to have to give off the way we wanted to the editorial.

But we didn't want to feel like a newspaper. And we have worked with Jim Jim Jordan, who's a brilliant designer. He doesn't deserve that. Uh, well, yes, he's awesome. Way loved him.

Just getting yeah, and it looks different iterations.

And one day he just threw ah half tone at us and, man, it just immediately stuck with us. It was, like, you know, very rooted in print and, like, kind of comment bookie. But at the same time, we made a little twist to it that made you feel a little more editorial. And, uh and we landed in this really nice spot where, you know, the half done in the app is a relatively subtle accent, but it makes the outfield distinct, and it makes it feel just just a little kind of ah, rooted in traditional media while still just feeling very late waiting and fun.

That's cool. And I appreciate the compliments. I mean, I wasn't looking for any of that. I mean, I appreciate you sharing it, but really, you know, I'm just trying, you know, what's more important is getting your thoughts on on how you think about design. You know, cause a lot of lot of folks I know are trying to get a job at a start up or there or there start ups. They're trying to figure out design. And And you guys have been around the block. So your viewpoint is really valuable, if you don't mind.

Like, I'd like to take this a little bit further. Two questions that relate to this. What advice would you give? Two designers or agencies that are trying toe work with startups

be cheap? Uh, no, no, no. But, hey, it was, uh, in all seriousness that it really comes back to What we what we just discussed. Which is, if you're if you're working with a start up, you need to You need to give them is you need to teach them how to fish, right? Don't just hand them, hand them a fish, teach them how to fish and that that looks like,

you know, setting a building like a minimal style guide, setting a visual language, helping to even show how that language has been just been applied to the couple of high fidelity screens that air delivered. So that so that the people who you're handing off to can go and replicate the thinking that went into the delivery bols that you hand off so that they can go in design. You know, screens four through 10 after you give them screens one through three. I think that's the most important thing. It helps those startups to get the most bang for their buck, get the most of the time with you. And if you set them up to succeed like that, they're likely gonna be coming back once they have the funding to do further engagements.

I think I think that's right. And I also think it Ted onto that. You gotta You gotta keep the ego hat and check like it's impossible, you know, to work with the company for a short period of time. And just assume that the thing that you thought was awesome is just gonna get implemented as you designed it. What's more important, like you said, is that there that there's a that there is a like a vision or framework in the right components necessary for for for a team to go build in injury because things were always gonna change, they have to. They need to be designed to change on. I think a lot of people get frustrated when they designed something, and then it doesn't get implemented. But that's that That world

is really well in with early stage. Shut up! So you really don't know what's going to stick eso less than unless the design team is with you for the entirety of that first year, like week after week, you're gonna really just be working on using the information you have available at the time. And I think it would actually be a failure for the company not to have changed your designs. Six months later, it means that the company isn't Iterating fast enough for they're not actually Toontown user behaviors in the data that they can see from the product. Yeah,

that I agree with that. So the opposite question on the opposite side, What advice would you give to a startup Who needs design or needs to hire a designer?

I would say you really you really need Do you need to hustle for it? It's not gonna It's not gonna be free. It's not going to be. It's never particularly easy to find because designed, like having a relationship with a design agency or with an individual Designers is a very feels very personal. I feel like with with code you can have there's a certain commoditized element to it, but with design, you need to find somebody that you think it'll be compatible with. And the good thing about the design world is that there are a ton of different fully of sites out there where you can get a taste for somebody's aesthetic and the way that somebody thinks about user interactions. And you can also tell whether they have experience in the platforms that you're targeting all in advanced of reaching out to them. So if you're looking for higher freelancer, you can use the dribble on me hands. And all of those sites and agencies tend to showcase their work and showcase their thinking through case studies, podcast, etcetera. I'd say like really do your do your homework, reach out to at least five different groups.

You know, it's kind of just like recruiting and hiring further down the road. You need to have Ah, you need to have, like, a pretty full top of funnel to get Tau one relationship that's actually going to work out and just just keep trying. It's ah, it was really serendipitous that we met through us being engaged with a different different company. But that that relationship is proved to be really satisfying when we got to work together again. And I hope you get to do some of the future.

Yeah, I do, too. I do, too. And I'm really proud of what you guys accomplished. I really love the product. I'm really glad that you guys were getting gr I'm glad it people love product. I'm glad that you guys are happy and kicking ass. Yeah, I don't really look forward to seeing you guys too. Well, after we record this, we should actually talk about how we can get together, But before we wrap. But maybe you could tell me a little bit about what some of the biggest challenges you face at this moment. in time like to get that,

you know, to accomplish some of these growth goals you have and and then maybe also if you want to share, like, what do you What do you excited about doing next? Like what? What is the May be? Whether it's from a business perspective or individual level, like what? You know, what are some of the biggest challenges You're the face and some of the challenges your most excited about. Yes, the

kind of in the immediate future where we're at this point where we've built this foundation where we have ah, really good listening layer and we've kind of built out all the social features or most of the social features that we want. And we've got, you know, healthy beta going on, and it's all been built by the two of us. But now we're at this point where we can build on top of this foundation and branch out in many different ways. You know, there's from the listening perspective. We could build clients for, uh, the Echo and Google home and kind of branched out into more clients. We could also move up the stack and start helping publishers out, but having a monetize er or focus more on discovery or, you know, the needs of publishers. And there's a bunch of other features within the up that we want temperament.

And so we're kind of getting to this point where we are kind of bound just by the size of the team and so the immediate future. We're very focused on user growth, but we're also probably rapidly approaching the point where we'll need to raise around just to grow the team, to kind of achieve everything that that's on our product roadmap. Yeah, and that's that's always, ah, scary prospect. Going out in front of investors is always always a challenge, but something that we're gearing up for an S, Steve said. We were pretty confident the foundation we built with the listening product and we're ready to really just throw some fuel on the fire there really start seeking press making sure that all of the activity on the platform is adequately syndicated and getting out in front of other people so they have a chance to see, hear about banter, install it, try it out themselves. Let's say it's very different from what we've done in the past,

our past startup was B to be so working in the B to C space. It's It's It's It's Ah, it's sort of scary, right? You're not. You don't have my reality until you do and s. So we're waiting for that. That inflection point we're trying to push until we have that critical mass of users that generates starts generating that that virtuous growth cycle. And we're hoping to have a bunch of different strategies that were trying t get that seated right now.

That's awesome. Everyone that's listening. Please, please, please, please check out banter. You confined them on banter. Dot FM could download the IOS app in the Google app there, check it out. Give the guys feedback Enjoy. It's pretty cool if you're a designer that wants tow three. Your designer that what's job banter? Maybe you could give the guys a hauler. I mean, they got a lot of really exciting things going on. Guys, I really appreciate you making time. I know it's a little bit later in in New York City, where you guys were at, and I'll let you go let you get back to your valuable time together. How can our listeners connect with

you guys? Well, I'd say the best way is to get on the app code of an RFM download the APP. And in fact, you're automatically going to be following Steven myself. So, uh, way we're pulling little MySpace. Tom, think there were Yeah, we, uh, James that I hope you like Tech podcast. No way. Say that And we're both reachable on Twitter were not particularly clever. It's just our names at James Reggio at Steve Krenzel. Those of the best ways to reach out to us. But if and if you prefer email, you can email us both at Founder's at banter dot of them. Absolutely.

That's smart. You guys got a way, right? It took me five years. All right, guys. Well, thanks again for taking time. Thio, come on the show and tell a story and have a conversation.

Look, thanks problems. And congrats again on being a father. It's very exciting. Thanks. Thank you, Anthony. Thanks

everyone for 10 and then

we'll get you next time. Pictures. Hustle is brought to you by fun size, A digital service and product design agency that works with inspiring teams to uncover opportunities about popular products to bring new businesses to market and prepare for the future. Learn more fun sized dot CEO. I'm a good person, you know, a design lead at fun size. Thanks for listening the hustle and be on the lookout for our next episode.