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00:02

Hey guys and welcome to the TED Teo business show the best place for action advice for entrepreneurs. This is Ted, your brilliant host speaking. So we are in the thick of the holiday season and Man oh man, am I happy, I’m surrounded by my friends, my family and of course, good food. Whoo. Today we are in for a treat because we are joined by Josh Liddell, who is a serial entrepreneur who has founded multiple tech companies. His earlier ventures, may Stroh and bloom bio, which he has exited from had been wildly successful, and today is disrupting the way we communicate with Bali. Bali provides users with the ability to communicate with asynchronous communication by allowing them to record videos of themselves, which artists can respond to at their own time. So join us as Josh shares about the importance of testing your product or service in the market, how he maximizes his customer retention rates, and his framework to coming up with great business ideas. All these in more on today’s show are this quick commercial break. Hey, guys, is Ted, thank you so much for joining me on my show. And for all the support. If you ever found any value from the show, I would love if you could subscribe to the show, leave a review on Apple podcasts and share the show with somebody who find it useful as well. The show is running twice a week and we have new episodes out every Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. All episodes Tuesday resources are available on Ted to.com. So make sure you log on to tattoo.com. That’s tdto.com. And make sure you sign up for the newsletter if you want to hear updates from me directly. And now let’s dive right in. Hey, Josh, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s so nice to have you here.

 

01:36

Oh, it’s my pleasure, Ted. Thanks for having me.

 

01:38

Yeah, the pleasure is mine. Now Josh, let’s dive a very simple icebreaker. Could you share with us so you can get to know you a bit better? Who is Josh Liddell when he isn’t working?

 

01:48

Oh, that’s a good question. Well, a family man for sure who loves God and and is probably preparing some sort of musical performance, whether it’s on guitar or vocals, for choir or with my family, and probably tinkering on something in the garage, either building, you know, some four by four truck or making a jar of pickles, or one of my many random hobbies. So that’s that’s just a little couple swatches on the mood board. That is Josh.

 

02:21

Yeah, I know you have a YouTube channel called Josh’s garage where you do the wackiest scientific experiments in your garage itself. Could you share a bit more about that before we move on with the rest of the interview? Oh, well,

 

02:31

it’s really just something to justify the time I spend in this garage of mine tinkering on stuff. But I’ve done you know, turning vehicles into overlanding rigs, or installing solar panels on the tops of motorhomes. Or I’ve once turned a tablesaw into a rocket launcher after I had a terrible accident with the kick back of a tablesaw. So I just wanted to show the world how powerful that blade of a tablesaw really is. So I’ve done all kinds of fun stuff.

 

03:06

Well, I like to add that your natural storyteller and subscribe to your channel. Now, Josh, you are a serial entrepreneur. And you’ve had quite a wild journey to say the least. Interestingly enough, I happen to know that one of your first jobs was at Red Lobster, and you called it the best job that you ever had. What was that about?

 

03:24

Well, I really feel like everything I needed to know I learned at my crappy jobs like Red Lobster, I worked there for five years. Put my wife and I through college working there, you know, like, it was kind of I mean with a lot of student debt as well but but it was it was just a great job singing working with EX convicts trying you know to get through the night and and you learn a lot of things from those jobs like how to prioritize how like I worked as a line cook for most of that time I did every job in the restaurant but I enjoyed being on the line just because of the the pressure and being on and and learnt you you learn how to think quickly you learn how to prioritize you learn how to make decisions, you learn how to move efficiently with with your hands, like every movement has to count for two or three things and and how to memorize and in so all these little things and being alive. So

 

04:22

systematizing of items is Yeah, especially when it really is so two steps into recipe and make sure that everything is executed well enough.

 

04:29

That’s right. It’s it is an art and it was fun to be able to do that night after night and I got so good at one of the jobs that I was actually able to to it was the assembler job where you kind of plate food and get it up in the window and ship it and that and I could run two stations in one night because I was able to keep enough in my mind and get so efficient. So it was kind of a quest of excellence. Crazy enough working at a seafood restaurant as a line cook but I love that job and love the people I worked with.

 

05:00

So Josh since then I know you’ve moved on to start several companies, you’ve also exited your companies boom fire and Maestro. And among the rest of your existing portfolio companies, you have your current venture volley. Before we dive into explore volley, could you share with us? How did you achieve your exits with Maestro and bloom fire? What was the process like?

 

05:19

Well, the process was hard for someone who grew up in rural Michigan and knew nothing about business. I mean, the first day I actually, I left my corporate job, I quit cold turkey and started maestro, I showed up at the Chamber of Commerce asking questions like, How do I start a business? They told me about, oh, this thing called an LLC. And and I was like, Is this important? Liability, right, that’s how unprepared I was. But we figured it out. And we, we were doing something that was valuable at the time, which is building elearning programs for corporations. And this is very, very much at the time that everyone’s trying to scale their learning programs build elearning. And so it was right product at the right time, especially for medical and pharma companies. So Maestro was, was able to see some quite some good success pretty quickly. And we were able to capitalize on that success and work with dozens of fortune 500 companies and help build and scale their learning programs and create the content because they they didn’t have this expertise in house. And it was from the back of that experience that the idea of balloon fire came about. Because maestro, we created you know, these training programs and 3d animated total knee replacements and all these cool things. But only 10% of what you need to know to do your job do you actually learn from training, the rest is learned from all of this informal learning, like that email that this person send, or that text or the video that this person created, or, you know, the conversation we had in the hall. And all of that is totally unstructured, not collected anywhere. So that was the original idea of bloom fires. Let’s create a place for all of this to be collected the organization’s collective brain and give give someone all the tools to easily share their knowledge and answer questions for those who need it. So that was the idea of bloom fire. And it was it was a hot idea at the time. And it was acquired 18 months after we launched it in 2011. Just today, yeah, today it was it’s the premier knowledge management platform out there. So the the acquiring team and at took it, you know, the extra 10 miles that needed to go and, and got it there. And around the same time my partner in maestro, she, you know, she, she had felt like she had made the company her own because was really the two of us, co founders and I left to go build Moonfire. And we kind of copy and pasted cap tables between the companies. And she really wanted to continue running maestro, I didn’t know that I wanted to go back and continue, I wanted to move on. And so we executed a deal. And she bought me out of maestro, I see.

 

08:10

So over the years is quite clear that you have an affinity or a specialization in corporations and the tools that help them work more efficiently. And I think that has some link to what you are offering with volley today. So could you maybe share with us? What is the unique value proposition of volley that you’re trying to offer to your customers?

 

08:29

Yes, so volley is a video messaging app that helps teams collaborate better increase connection, and potentially reduce meetings. So the whole idea is, we take turns, just like any other conversation, except in volley, record your turn with a video. And that gives us kind of the best of both worlds the richness of talking with the flexibility of texting. And if you really think about it, you’ve only have two ways to communicate at work. One is talking, which means we need to get on Zoom or get in a room. And the other is texting or typing. So that’s tools like Slack, or email or chat. And you’re flipping between those throughout the day. And typing, or writing a message has benefits because you can you can batch it, you can stick it into corners of your day. It’s flexible. So we tolerate it because because when we choose to write a message to our coworkers, we’re choosing to do something we’re seven times slower at then this gift we have speaking with all of the richness that it is the words that you speak from speak, right? Yeah, the words that we speak are only 7% of the message. The other 93% is filled in by tone of voice or body language, why we’re looking at each other when we do this interview, why podcasts are a lot more informative and valuable than just the written transcript. Right? Exactly. So that’s the idea of volley is we’re giving people a new way to communicate at work at a time When connection is low, and communication is strained, because we’re all trying to work remotely, we’re all trying to increase that connection. And, and Simon Sinek has recently just said, Hey, this is only working, because we’re living on borrowed time, we had existing relationships when the pandemic hit, we’re still surviving on those. But all of these new relationships, all of these new people that are coming in, they’re having a hard time getting connected. So that’s, that’s the problem that we’re, we’re focused on solving. But we also well, that is our deliberate strategy. We also have all kinds of communities and coaching that are being built on volley, and they’re just blowing up. And it’s really exciting to see as well. So

 

10:43

Josh, I can fully understand the problem that you just described. So for me, I have the benefit of being with my law firm for about five years, actually. So I’m familiar with my team, my partner’s my mentors and my colleagues. And we still have that level of camaraderie, even through text messages. But it’s a bit different for our newer colleagues and the juniors have been joining us, what I understand is, they’re feeling a bit more lost, they don’t really have a face to the person who’s actually instructing them. And they have this barrier to maybe reach out to ask for a little bit more assistance or to really understand what is needed from them. So I can understand that volley could really step into helping under situation. But can you walk us through the process? How would a person really get to use barley? And how does it really benefit them from a day to day basis as compared to the Zoom meetings?

 

11:30

Yeah, well, I’ll compare it actually to slack. Because there are still reasons, very good reasons to have a synchronous conversation, especially when something is emotionally charged, or when there’s a tight feedback loop. For those reasons, yes, you need to get in a room or get on a zoom. But for everything else, there’s volley. And volley can kind of span the spectrum of what you might be using something like Slack, or loom. And then some of your meetings don’t need to be meetings, we’ve all heard the, the the comment, this meeting could have been an email. But you know, Slack. So slack, for example, you were writing these text based messages back and forth. But with volley, you can you can create a workspace just like Slack that has channels and conversations in it, you can invite your team to it, you can create the channels that you’re interested in are typically used to. And then instead of typing messages, because volley is a video first communication tool, meaning when you open it up, there’s a camera that has that staring at you that has a record button at the bottom, it just feels like that’s what you should do. Versus slack. There’s a you know, a text based thread, and a text box at the bottom, it feels like oh, I should write a text message. So that’s it while you can upload videos to Slack or use their new clips functionality. If you’re paying for it. You can also write a text volley. It’s just flipping the importance of video in the conversation. And when we put video first. Almost 70% of volley sent our video volleys, when you put video first, you are putting all of the context and emotion in that relationship, even in something that maybe doesn’t even need it. But even simple messages, like we need to talk can be can be misinterpreted. Like that’s the classic.

 

13:16

Scary, you know, yeah, someone above you just say, hey, Ted, I need to talk to you right now. You’ll be like, Oh, my God. Did I screw up what I do?

 

13:25

Right? But if you hear Ted, we need to talk. There’s no mistaking that. There’s, you know, exactly. I’ve got something cool. I can’t wait to share it with you. Yeah,

 

13:35

there’s more aggression behind it voice itself.

 

13:38

But we all read it as Ted, we need to talk. Yeah, exactly. Da, you know. So, volley volley helps with those misinterpretations throughout the day, for sure. But you’ve got to put it first, you’ve got to use it instead of tools like Slack, which is hard for some people because they’re on Slack crack and zoom Doom, and they just can’t get off. And so we’re just trying to provide another way.

 

14:03

Okay, Josh, so to clarify bullies in here to really replace synchronous meetings, like zoom calls when you need to have that immediate face to face conversation? If I understand you correctly, volley is really here to help with the remaining spectrum of meetings that can happen within Office context, that is not able to really happen in the remote working environment. Right?

 

14:24

Well, sort of. And I love that you acknowledge that there’s a spectrum because there is a spectrum of communication and it from simple things like sharing a link with someone, you’re not going to call a meeting to share a link or to say lunches here that that would be crazy to have a synchronous discussion about lunch being here, right. So we know there’s an asynchronous side of the spectrum. We’re gonna use email or text or chat for that. And then we also know there’s a synchronous side of the spectrum, like a termination conversation or deliberation about a time bound important decision we need to make today. Like those things. Getting a room for those things like you don’t want to chat about those. You don’t want to email about those, like get get your faces together in a room. But there’s all of this gray area in between between something between slack and zoom. Right? And so yes, some meetings in the middle of that spectrum. Some of the reasons you’re getting in a room really are just, they could just be three or four volleys. Like I just have a question. I can’t type it all out, it would take me an hour to type it out. I might as well just explain it to you because I could explain it in three or four minutes. And then you could you could see where I’m coming from, you could give me feedback or ask clarifying questions. And then I could clarify my questions. And then you could give me your response meeting over now we we would probably schedule 30 minutes or something like that. And it’s Isn’t it crazy that when we schedule 30 minutes, it’s exactly 30 minutes, it took exactly 30 minutes talking about this thing, we must just be brilliant, and know exactly how much time it takes to discuss things. No, more likely meetings are sponges and they take up whatever time you give them. This is Parkinson’s Law that that work will occupy whatever space that you give it to to occupy right. And same is true with meetings. So So yes, we were giving an alternative for the part of that spectrum, that you would have scheduled a meeting, but it really is just kind of a couple of volleys. And there’s just a lot of a lot of communication fits in there. We as a team of Olli only have one meeting a week. For everything else. We’re just constantly in the flow of work, syncing up checking in unblocking one another. And it’s a beautiful thing. But it does require a change in behavior and a change in thinking. Because the old instinct is instinct is when you when you need to talk, you just get something on the calendar. And that’s just the best you can do. But now, when you need to talk, you start with a volley. And then maybe you meet need to meet but maybe not. So we’re just probably providing an alternative. For everything else that doesn’t require getting in a room.

 

17:04

It sounds like volleys providing this avenue where you can have that knock on the door conversation that is no longer available in a remote working environment.

 

17:12

Absolutely. It’s the first thing we noticed when we went remote is the all of these ad hoc little conversations and popping in but even better than popping in, we’re offering something that isn’t interruptive. Because when you send a volley, the other person doesn’t have to view it right now, compared to popping in if someone knocks on my door and says, Hey, I have a question. I might be writing the last line of the manifesto for our company, I might be thought you just you just broke my train of thought and I it took me three hours to get to this place. I got it. And I’m in flow. And you want to know about you know, the cups for the water cooler, or whatever the thing is, right? Like it, there’s no way it’s as important as the last line of manifesto, or the last line of code of this hairy bug that we’re trying to, you know.

 

18:01

So you experienced something like this before? Oh,

 

18:05

everyone has everyone has? Hey, you got a minute? No, but I have no other answer to that. I guess I do now. What do you need? Oh, I just wondered, did you see the now that’s the beauty of asynchronous conversation is you can volley when you have the thought and the other person can volley when they have the moments or when they’re they’re out of flow or when they need to respond. Right? Hmm,

 

18:31

I can clearly see the value. It’s really exciting to hear about this from you directly. So maybe share with us the process that you went through when you were developing and testing your product. What was the feedback like from your customers? And what have you learned from it?

 

18:44

Well, some positive, some negative, it’s really interesting to see this, we’re seeing a unique process. It really is. But you know, we’re seeing a lot of creator consumer behavior modeled out in the corporate world. So we we thought the world was more ready for our product when we launched it, then it’s actually seemed that it is so the user base is growing organically and everything is great. So but I’m just surprised when I because we have any new user that comes into volley gets a conversation called Hello volley with the team at volley. And I like to spend a lot of time in that conversation and engaging with users like the moment that they download the app and a moment of delight or confusion. Because we can learn from both of those. So I spend a lot of time there talking to users and it’s just amazing to me. How you I’m looking at someone who’s recording the first video they’ve ever recorded of themselves in their life, even though YouTube for almost two decades even though Snapchat even though tick tock even though this person has had a phone in their pocket for the last 10 years, and they’ve made all kinds of videos of other people. This is the first video they have Ever Made of their own face? Credit, and it freaks them out. And they don’t say that to me. But they do say things like, oh, when you’re gonna get filters, Oh, I feel like I’m talking to myself, Oh, you know, what can I turn the camera off? I just want to, you know, and all of these things that I’m like, oh, man, really, really, don’t you see the power of this. And like, so these folks are kind of hard to convince, we call them Zeds. And so there’s, there’s Zedd on every team, if not multiple on every team. So that’s kind of some of the fun where we’re having is helping champions though, because we also get users who are like, Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe that. This is what I’ve been looking for, for years.

 

20:44

So it’s just super interesting for me, because you are a veteran of some form in the office productivity and communication space. But even then, when you released your features, you’re still surprised by how the market is reacting to it.

 

20:55

Absolutely. Well, and I am super biased, I grew up with a video camera in my hand, I’ve made 1000s of videos of myself, you have a YouTube channel, of course, this is the way that you’re going to communicate. And of course, when the Snapchat Tiktok generation are in charge, this is the way they’re going to want to communicate as well. They’re just not in charge yet. And the rest of the folks are, are still interested in old behavior. So if we believe that the future of communication looks exactly like the past, we’re going to get disrupted, you know, we’re walking dinosaurs already.

 

21:32

So guys, no matter how much you think your product is going to be accepted, or it’s going to be the next big thing. You never really know until you’ve released it into the market and seen how your customers have reacted to it. Josh himself has been in the Office Communications base for years, and he’s even exited to successful companies. But even then, he’s still surprised by the way that his customers and the market is reacting to volley and his speeches. So always make sure you test your product and his features as soon as you can. That’s why you should always get your minimum viable product as soon as you can. Because that way you can test the idea that you have to see what really works before you build up the whole product itself. So back to you, Josh. Now volley is one of those services where the moment someone adopts it and implements it into the organization. So the user base would definitely explode overnight. So what are the strategies that you are currently employing to help these numbers grow?

 

22:20

It’s a great question. This is my first product led growth company. Even though Mike other companies had interesting products that had growth mechanics, they were kind of performance marketed or sold their way to growth. But with volley, we’re being very patient with growth. And we’re just working on building a product that is sticking that that is so easy to adopt. We we call it the sneeze and initiative internally, because I want volley to be so easy that you like sneeze and you’re in five conversations, you can’t even help it. It’s just you just run into people in the app, and you’re talking to them and it’s so good. And you’ll never want to delete it. And so we’re trying to make the product that good and and back that up with education and the right touch points. And we have kind of an automated onboarding system that we’ve built that that helps a user that that’s actually just videos of me that kind of pop in at the right time. Hey, so you just created a workspace. Let me show you a couple things that you need to know right now. Right, because nobody’s gonna watch some tutorial video man Joshua,

 

23:22

kind of like the old Microsoft paperclip that right used to appear at the oddest of places. Offices.

 

23:28

I am, but I hope I’m more helpful than that paperclip, because every time I saw a paperclip and like you can’t help me, there’s no way you’re gonna know my answer to my question. Yeah,

 

23:36

but I do kind of miss that guy. Kind of thing of it. There’s so much nostalgia attached to that memory is always there. But it’s never really helpful at

 

23:43

all right? He was yeah, they kept popping out like how do you get this guy to stay in his cave?

 

23:49

Yeah, that’s such a good man. We Josh. Okay. So here’s my next question. I’m glad you raised the word sticky just now, because we’re going to talk about customer retention is not enough to just get someone to download the app, you want to make sure that they are retained within the ecosystem itself. So what tactics or strategies have you been employing?

 

24:06

So the first thing we did was try to figure out if there was a correlation between some behavior in the app and retention. And we looked at a lot of metrics and events in the app. And it turns out that the thing there is a direct correlation between sending volleys creating volleys and retention. In fact, we retain just over 75% of users who send just 10 volleys, which is not very much like if someone’s using it heavily. You can send 10 volleys in a day. But we retain 98% of users who send 100 volleys. So

 

24:44

now, you don’t need to explain to them what the benefits of volume are anymore.

 

24:48

They get it. They’re explaining to other people. They’re inviting people to the app every day. I mean, some of our top users are inviting like dozens of people a week. And so we love it and that this is great, right? But we Need to get them to 100 valleys? How do you get them? Well, you’ve got to first get them to 10. Well, how do you get them to 10? Well, you’re probably not going to get to 10 volleys chatting with Josh, in the Hello volley conversation, you’re only going to get to 10 volleys if you have a couple of friends. And those couple of friends need to be willing to play ball. So that’s why we use volley is the name of the company, because it is kind of a metaphor for the game volleyball, you need to have a willing ball, right? Yeah. But if you have, if you’ve ever played volleyball with like a kid who can’t hit the ball over the net, you realize you’ve, you’ve got to keep picking up the ball, and you got to serve it again, right, and they’re not going to return it and you got to pick up the ball and you got to serve it again. So you’ve got to understand whether you have a willing participant, but if you’ve got a willing participant on the other side of the net, you can keep that volley going as long as you’re able to as long as you need to. Right. So the goal in getting to 10 volleys is get a one or two or three people in, that are worthy participants in having conversation with you and volley. That could be your team, that could be your inner circle, that could be a spouse, that could be a business partner that could be you know, whatever that person is. And so we’ve done a bunch of things to try to help people make the invite flow. So easy, give you a personal link and volley let you share that personal link, on your website, on your email on your LinkedIn profile, like you know, and just make that so easy, that it’s really as easy as sneezing that you can just share your volley link in the world jumps in and you’re in meaningful conversations with people you’re moving work forward with. And you’re never going to delete the app. So that’s our goal. And we’ve been working on it we’ve been, we’ve been, you know, bending our numbers each up each week. This is kind of the aggregation of marginal gains, sort of approach or growth hacking, right. And we’ve just been doing

 

26:51

a critical point where you might just explode exponentially.

 

26:55

We hope we think we’re starting to see some of those, we’re starting to see some bends in some of the important charts and like, ooh, could this be it? Could this be it right now. And it’s actually, it’s not even teams that are bending these charts up right now. It’s all of these little communities, membership communities, paid communities, all of these experts and coaches and creators who are finding value in realizing oh, my gosh, yeah, none

 

27:19

of you mentioned, I can understand how this would work for a coach. So instead of having that shared at one, one hour of coaching, they can actually allow their students to have a little bit more access to them to send a certain number of volleys to them, maybe to get an immediate response, right?

 

27:32

Absolutely. It’s just in time learning or individualized instruction, if you’re talking in one to one, but if you’re talking about one to many, how long does it take you to write that message to your discord group? Well, it takes you a couple minutes. How long could you say that? How long would it take you to say that to your discord group? Right? Oh, well, it would take like 20 seconds. Oh, so you just got a 7x speed game. And how much does your group or your community or your VIP fan, appreciate that 22nd message that you just spoke to them? Well, 10x, live it over the you know, because you could just have an intern writing a discord message with your profile pic on it. But that was you and you’re outside feeding your chickens or doing whatever it is you’re doing, right? Like oh, my gosh, I got to see my hero, or this person that I’m following, or this person that I’m trying to learn from, in their real life at their home or whatever. In fact, Blu Ray, it’s way more impactful. So that’s what we’re seeing blow up right now. And I love it. Because I actually built a product 12 years ago called Blue Fire that did the same thing. But the world wasn’t quite ready for it. So now it does seem actually the world may be ready for all these little boutique learning communities that are happening around harmonica or watercolor painting or, you know, marketing or YouTube secrets or whatever those things are, right.

 

28:48

Alright guys. So he has some key takeaways from Josh, as we have discussed is not enough to just have a higher number of users downloading the app, you also need to make sure that your customer retention are high. So like Josh did, he studied the behavior of the users within the app, and how the activity correlated to their usage and retention rates. When he realized that users who have sent over 100 volleys at a 98% retention rate. He knew that the key was to help a new user in Duck more users into the platform so that they can send volleys to each other organically. So user need to apply a similar mentality when you are looking at your own customer retention rates, identify from their behavior, what needs to high retention rate, and do your best to supplement and encourage that behavior from growing organically within the users itself. Back to you, Josh. So you’ve created many successful companies over the years. What is your framework when it comes to coming up with the right ideas and executing them well, as well?

 

29:42

Well, I’ll quote Kenny Loggins who I don’t know if it’s an artist from the 70s and 80s. Worth the song Footloose, maybe. Yeah, I love it. Is that right?

 

29:52

I mean, I’m an odd guy, so

 

29:55

yeah, good. So he said something once that I just think is so perfect. He said this Somebody asked him, Well, how have you written so many hit records, and he says, Well, I allow myself to write crap. And what he meant is he allows himself to just write, he’s prolific, he writes so many songs, you’ve never heard of that. He just, if you, if you just stay at the bat and stay at the plate and swing long enough, if you just keep writing and writing and writing, you’re going to write a hit song. And that’s my recipe for, for business building and company building. There, my name is on a number of LLCs that are not on my LinkedIn profile, because it just didn’t pan out or didn’t work, or it failed to validate. In fact, there were 12 ideas on the way to volley. I spent two years working through hundreds of ideas that I have, validating about a dozen of these that I spent weeks or months on 1000s of dollars on trying to figure out if it was a valid business idea, or something I wanted to build, or something the world was ready for. So I don’t talk about those 12 ideas. I talk about volley. And so if you look, hindsight, if you look at my past, it’s like, oh, my gosh, this guy wrote hit record after hit record after hit record. No, yeah, I’m not talking about the 12 that in between this record and that record that you never hear about, and that I don’t talk about, right. So that’s, that’s the recipe is just be prolific as a creator, paint, as many paintings write as many songs, create as many companies as you can imagine, and, and, and go all in. So I’m not saying do this as a side hustle, necessarily. I was all in on all of those. I was building a pickle company. And that was my 100% focus for the three months that I was doing that, you know, and it turns out, I you know, I hired a pickle scientists build a lab in my garage, like I’m all in I’m building Lego scientists.

 

31:48

Yeah, that’s quite fascinating. I never knew this pico Sinese.

 

31:53

There are yes, yeah. So I hired one of them to kind of work with me. And we made hundreds and hundreds of batches of my family’s recipes to try to make a shelf stable version of this magic concoction. It turns out, it’s scientifically impossible or impossible from the FDA standpoint, right? So or the restrictions of the FDA. So on that one, it was either I’ve either got to build a really grindy capital intensive business, or I’ve got to sell out and build whatever’s on the shelf. And I just didn’t want to do either of those. So I passed on that and moved on to the next one. RV park roll ups, smart car, air fresheners, you know, interactive classroom tool, like, you know, all of these different things I was thinking about working on. But then just pass pass, pass pass, volley was just the one I couldn’t pass on. It was too good. The timing was too, right. The world just needs a better way to communicate. Let’s build it. And so we did. And it was. And when you get the right idea, it’s sometimes things just click, like I wrote reached out to my co founder, and that like pitch the idea in like, five minutes, he was like, Yep, I see it as pitch, Joe, multiple ideas over the years. And he’s like, nah, nah, but this one, it was just like, yep. And he started designing it that night. And we were working on prototypes, you know, the next week and formed a company the next week. And yeah, it just, it just kind of worked, right. Just like each

 

33:17

of the ideas that you worked on, that didn’t pan out. They were kind of like exercises and trainings that you had to go through to make sure that when you were ready to hit that home run, that you were ready to hit a home run. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. So guys, to come up with great business ideas like Josh, give yourself the allowance to come up with the bad ones. And just keep at it and train your brain. Josh, I have another question. With regards to the videos that you’re filming with the platform on Bali? Have there been any legal or compliance considerations that you had to take in mind when you’re designing the whole platform? Whether it’s from a personal data perspective, or whether it’s confidentiality as well? Or is there any encryption built in? Or what is the kind of processes they have built into the software itself to make sure that it’s safe for users and corporates as well?

 

34:06

That’s a great question. And it’s it’s one that is so challenging for startups, there are all of GDPR and CCPA. And all of these privacy regulations, which are great, and they certainly are put in place to help make the internet a safer place. Right. And we see that, but it is so hard for startups to actually comply to every one of these across the board and build a product that you can actually make reliable and performant. So encryption, let’s talk about that one. So volleys are encrypted upon in transit. So when you’re sending a volley up from your phone to our servers, then yes, it’s encrypted. But right now, because because we are getting video from 6000 different models of Android phones and you know, all of the models via iPhones across all kinds of connections. There’s all kinds of different Ways this, we’ve, we’ve had to build our own custom video pipeline, because anything off the shelf just was not performant or reliable enough. So. So in order to do that and make it reliable, you’ve got to be able to look at content. And so at volley right now, the only there are only to people that have keys to even do this. And they’re too painfully private engineers, that would never look at anything unless, you know, I can, I don’t even have the keys to look at any content. But we have users say, Hey, I try, I’ve been trying to send this volley up and it won’t send or this one has garbled sound or this one. And we still got to look at those things. So we our goal is to be end to end encrypted very shortly. But in order to even build a product and get it to market to be in this beta phase, you kind of have to ignore the rules for a short period of time to even build a product. If we made volley end to end encrypted from the beginning, we’d have all kinds of users who just have problems we can’t even fix because we we can’t even understand why that video has a problem or what the user is seeing at this point. So it’s a great question. It’s one that I’m speaking honestly and openly about, which could open me up for, you know, some sort of liable, but it’s, it’s the honest truth, any startup kind of has to go through this phase where we’ve got to crawl, walk, run in terms of security and privacy. But you know, I’ve built and then encrypted, world class secure enterprise level software in the past, I know what we need to build, and we are building those things. But if if you really expected every startup to have those things in place, day one, there would be no startups, and there would be no innovation very,

 

36:40

very challenging. And it would be any startup would be in compliance completely from day one. But what’s important is that you actively try to make sure that your ship is in order, and that you you know, you seek the relevant professionals to help you get it in order as soon as you can, as well.

 

36:58

Absolutely. And, and we are and we’re eager about it and our CTO is probably he probably has a rash every day about this because he knows the gap that exists and in we’re working with larger companies and their security audits and, and passing those for the most part, right and, and learning Oh, okay, we’re going to need to get this done in the next few months. So it’s, it’s a journey. And so we really appreciate the companies, we’re using volley that. Understand that right, that they understand that there is no innovation without startups and new companies and and there has to be a little bit of given take with us.

 

37:37

So what is the process like after the video has been recorded and sent across the boy platform? Does volley record and keep every single video file? Because I will imagine that, you know, your internal service will be jammed up with 1000s of terabytes of data very quickly.

 

37:52

Yes, well, like I said, we’ve had to build our own custom video pipeline and encoding engine, so that we could do what we’re able to do without just totally being eaten alive by server costs. And we’ve we’ve done a great, great, great job at that so far, like, hats off to our CTO and our engineering team. Like, like our costs are way less than kind of at the same scale is, what quiser was in quiser was just online quizzes, text based quizzes with some images in them. But man, our server costs were just out of control at that company. So we’ve done a great job volleys expire after 60 days, and according to our terms are deleted after I think it’s six months or something like that. So we do clean up after ourselves. And there’s no way we’re going to be able to offer a free product and just allow videos recorded of something you said three years ago to be available or searchable, because nobody’s really going back to them. And it’s really only companies that need to keep you know, a seven year record that would be interested in that. And of course, they’re willing to pay for that service. So that’s why we feel like with a free product volleys expire after 60 days, they go away. And then we’re able to do according to our terms and remove and and replace those things. But we’ve we’ve built a pretty, pretty reliable pipeline that gives you a pretty high quality video. That’s very, very compressed. So there’s a lot of magic tricks into this video messaging thing is we’re learning.

 

39:19

I see. Now, Josh, entrepreneurship is never an easy journey. Who do you say you have an immense amount of gratitude for and you would like to take this chance to say thank you to right now.

 

39:30

Oh, well, I’ll have to do it without trying to tear up but my mom, actually is who I’d have to say because she was an entrepreneur and didn’t know it. And I didn’t know it. And it’s not that she had some secret life. It’s just that we didn’t have a word for what she did. She cleaned houses, she she cleaned houses and she had clients. And sometimes those clients would ever do odd jobs like painting houses, or papering or removing rocks and building a waterfall are all kinds of things, she could do anything. And she believed it like she could do anything she set her mind to. And that’s what she taught me and, and my brother in law, and I believe it, I still believe it today. And so it wasn’t until, like recently, like, really the last 10 years that I realized, oh my gosh, my mom was an entrepreneur. And we didn’t understand that we didn’t know that she was, she made her own money, building her own business. And, and we, we kind of overlooked that. And the place where I grew up there was entrepreneur wasn’t a word that was used, like nobody in my high school ever said that word. Very few people ran their own businesses, or even understood why that was valuable in the world, right. So it’s just kind of a different kind of place, it was in rural Michigan, that I grew up a lot of blue collar workers, the value was get a good job, and hold on to that with all of your life, so that you can sometimes retire from this company that you worked at for 3040 years. That’s what my dad did. And that was kind of the example he worked for the power company. So in my, in my, you know, goggles growing up, what I saw was I had three options, I can work for the power company, I work at the prison, because there was a state prison in our hometown, or I could become a teacher. And those were the were my examples, or, and but I totally overlooked the one that my mom was doing, which was entrepreneurship. And it’s just late until lately that I’ve appreciated that. So that’s why I have to give a shout out to as my mom for paving the way in teaching me how to dream is very

 

41:38

nice. In fact, I think you picked up a lot for your mom, not just as an entrepreneur, but I think the handiness that you came with all your projects, probably a little bit of a rub off on us. Well,

 

41:49

no doubt like you. Yeah, she can’t move those rocks for the waterfall that those clients want to build. And so yeah, I learned how to make waterfalls out of sandstone and concrete, and how to wallpaper and how to fix this handle when it broke. Because, you know, we we just broke it when we’re trying to repaint this house or all of these things like she would take on all these crazy projects, like total refurbs of houses like yeah, we can do that. And she’d bring her two boys. And we didn’t know how to do most of these things. But we figured it out. And then we go to the store and buy tools to figure it figure the rest out. So yeah, we did learn a lot. She is a dreamer. And I love her for it.

 

42:27

So cool. Now, Josh, if the listeners only remember one thing from today’s conversation, while you’d like it to be

 

42:36

there’s new way to communicate. If you’re willing to be seen, how can

 

42:40

the listeners get in contact with view if they want to learn more about volley?

 

42:44

Well, the go to volley app.com, you kind of can’t not get in contact with me right now. Like I said, you missed every new user gets the Hello volley conversation. Totally not scalable. It’s already reaching the the fringes of scalability. But that’s probably the best way or you can go rummage around LinkedIn and find

 

43:03

me there. Josh, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing with us your stories, experiences and this new form of communication, I can really see it becoming a part of the new way to communicate in the office setting in the future. Thank you for joining us.

 

43:16

Thank you. That’s that’s my goal and vision as well. So I hope you’re right. Thanks for having me.

 

43:23

Guys, thank you so much for joining Josh and I in today’s episode, if you only walk away with one key takeaway, I hope you remember the importance of coming up with your minimum viable product and testing it in the market as soon as you can. You never fully really understand what the market wants from you. And how do you react to your product or service, get the feedback from the market directly and then see how you can pivot thereafter. Now as before, if you’ve received any value from the show, I would love for you to subscribe to the show, leave a review on Apple podcasts and to share the show with somebody who find it useful as well. The show is running twice a week with new episodes every Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, or updates to some resources and my email list available on patreon.com. That’s tdto.com that’s all for me today. I’ll see you guys next time.

[This transcript has been automatically generated by a digital software and will therefore  contain errors and typos. Please kindly take note of this and only rely on the digital transcript for reference.]

00:02

Hey guys and welcome to the TED Teo business show the best place for action advice for entrepreneurs. This is Ted, your brilliant host speaking. So we are in the thick of the holiday season and Man oh man, am I happy, I’m surrounded by my friends, my family and of course, good food. Whoo. Today we are in for a treat because we are joined by Josh Liddell, who is a serial entrepreneur who has founded multiple tech companies. His earlier ventures, may Stroh and bloom bio, which he has exited from had been wildly successful, and today is disrupting the way we communicate with Bali. Bali provides users with the ability to communicate with asynchronous communication by allowing them to record videos of themselves, which artists can respond to at their own time. So join us as Josh shares about the importance of testing your product or service in the market, how he maximizes his customer retention rates, and his framework to coming up with great business ideas. All these in more on today’s show are this quick commercial break. Hey, guys, is Ted, thank you so much for joining me on my show. And for all the support. If you ever found any value from the show, I would love if you could subscribe to the show, leave a review on Apple podcasts and share the show with somebody who find it useful as well. The show is running twice a week and we have new episodes out every Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. All episodes Tuesday resources are available on Ted to.com. So make sure you log on to tattoo.com. That’s tdto.com. And make sure you sign up for the newsletter if you want to hear updates from me directly. And now let’s dive right in. Hey, Josh, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s so nice to have you here.

 

01:36

Oh, it’s my pleasure, Ted. Thanks for having me.

 

01:38

Yeah, the pleasure is mine. Now Josh, let’s dive a very simple icebreaker. Could you share with us so you can get to know you a bit better? Who is Josh Liddell when he isn’t working?

 

01:48

Oh, that’s a good question. Well, a family man for sure who loves God and and is probably preparing some sort of musical performance, whether it’s on guitar or vocals, for choir or with my family, and probably tinkering on something in the garage, either building, you know, some four by four truck or making a jar of pickles, or one of my many random hobbies. So that’s that’s just a little couple swatches on the mood board. That is Josh.

 

02:21

Yeah, I know you have a YouTube channel called Josh’s garage where you do the wackiest scientific experiments in your garage itself. Could you share a bit more about that before we move on with the rest of the interview? Oh, well,

 

02:31

it’s really just something to justify the time I spend in this garage of mine tinkering on stuff. But I’ve done you know, turning vehicles into overlanding rigs, or installing solar panels on the tops of motorhomes. Or I’ve once turned a tablesaw into a rocket launcher after I had a terrible accident with the kick back of a tablesaw. So I just wanted to show the world how powerful that blade of a tablesaw really is. So I’ve done all kinds of fun stuff.

 

03:06

Well, I like to add that your natural storyteller and subscribe to your channel. Now, Josh, you are a serial entrepreneur. And you’ve had quite a wild journey to say the least. Interestingly enough, I happen to know that one of your first jobs was at Red Lobster, and you called it the best job that you ever had. What was that about?

 

03:24

Well, I really feel like everything I needed to know I learned at my crappy jobs like Red Lobster, I worked there for five years. Put my wife and I through college working there, you know, like, it was kind of I mean with a lot of student debt as well but but it was it was just a great job singing working with EX convicts trying you know to get through the night and and you learn a lot of things from those jobs like how to prioritize how like I worked as a line cook for most of that time I did every job in the restaurant but I enjoyed being on the line just because of the the pressure and being on and and learnt you you learn how to think quickly you learn how to prioritize you learn how to make decisions, you learn how to move efficiently with with your hands, like every movement has to count for two or three things and and how to memorize and in so all these little things and being alive. So

 

04:22

systematizing of items is Yeah, especially when it really is so two steps into recipe and make sure that everything is executed well enough.

 

04:29

That’s right. It’s it is an art and it was fun to be able to do that night after night and I got so good at one of the jobs that I was actually able to to it was the assembler job where you kind of plate food and get it up in the window and ship it and that and I could run two stations in one night because I was able to keep enough in my mind and get so efficient. So it was kind of a quest of excellence. Crazy enough working at a seafood restaurant as a line cook but I love that job and love the people I worked with.

 

05:00

So Josh since then I know you’ve moved on to start several companies, you’ve also exited your companies boom fire and Maestro. And among the rest of your existing portfolio companies, you have your current venture volley. Before we dive into explore volley, could you share with us? How did you achieve your exits with Maestro and bloom fire? What was the process like?

 

05:19

Well, the process was hard for someone who grew up in rural Michigan and knew nothing about business. I mean, the first day I actually, I left my corporate job, I quit cold turkey and started maestro, I showed up at the Chamber of Commerce asking questions like, How do I start a business? They told me about, oh, this thing called an LLC. And and I was like, Is this important? Liability, right, that’s how unprepared I was. But we figured it out. And we, we were doing something that was valuable at the time, which is building elearning programs for corporations. And this is very, very much at the time that everyone’s trying to scale their learning programs build elearning. And so it was right product at the right time, especially for medical and pharma companies. So Maestro was, was able to see some quite some good success pretty quickly. And we were able to capitalize on that success and work with dozens of fortune 500 companies and help build and scale their learning programs and create the content because they they didn’t have this expertise in house. And it was from the back of that experience that the idea of balloon fire came about. Because maestro, we created you know, these training programs and 3d animated total knee replacements and all these cool things. But only 10% of what you need to know to do your job do you actually learn from training, the rest is learned from all of this informal learning, like that email that this person send, or that text or the video that this person created, or, you know, the conversation we had in the hall. And all of that is totally unstructured, not collected anywhere. So that was the original idea of bloom fires. Let’s create a place for all of this to be collected the organization’s collective brain and give give someone all the tools to easily share their knowledge and answer questions for those who need it. So that was the idea of bloom fire. And it was it was a hot idea at the time. And it was acquired 18 months after we launched it in 2011. Just today, yeah, today it was it’s the premier knowledge management platform out there. So the the acquiring team and at took it, you know, the extra 10 miles that needed to go and, and got it there. And around the same time my partner in maestro, she, you know, she, she had felt like she had made the company her own because was really the two of us, co founders and I left to go build Moonfire. And we kind of copy and pasted cap tables between the companies. And she really wanted to continue running maestro, I didn’t know that I wanted to go back and continue, I wanted to move on. And so we executed a deal. And she bought me out of maestro, I see.

 

08:10

So over the years is quite clear that you have an affinity or a specialization in corporations and the tools that help them work more efficiently. And I think that has some link to what you are offering with volley today. So could you maybe share with us? What is the unique value proposition of volley that you’re trying to offer to your customers?

 

08:29

Yes, so volley is a video messaging app that helps teams collaborate better increase connection, and potentially reduce meetings. So the whole idea is, we take turns, just like any other conversation, except in volley, record your turn with a video. And that gives us kind of the best of both worlds the richness of talking with the flexibility of texting. And if you really think about it, you’ve only have two ways to communicate at work. One is talking, which means we need to get on Zoom or get in a room. And the other is texting or typing. So that’s tools like Slack, or email or chat. And you’re flipping between those throughout the day. And typing, or writing a message has benefits because you can you can batch it, you can stick it into corners of your day. It’s flexible. So we tolerate it because because when we choose to write a message to our coworkers, we’re choosing to do something we’re seven times slower at then this gift we have speaking with all of the richness that it is the words that you speak from speak, right? Yeah, the words that we speak are only 7% of the message. The other 93% is filled in by tone of voice or body language, why we’re looking at each other when we do this interview, why podcasts are a lot more informative and valuable than just the written transcript. Right? Exactly. So that’s the idea of volley is we’re giving people a new way to communicate at work at a time When connection is low, and communication is strained, because we’re all trying to work remotely, we’re all trying to increase that connection. And, and Simon Sinek has recently just said, Hey, this is only working, because we’re living on borrowed time, we had existing relationships when the pandemic hit, we’re still surviving on those. But all of these new relationships, all of these new people that are coming in, they’re having a hard time getting connected. So that’s, that’s the problem that we’re, we’re focused on solving. But we also well, that is our deliberate strategy. We also have all kinds of communities and coaching that are being built on volley, and they’re just blowing up. And it’s really exciting to see as well. So

 

10:43

Josh, I can fully understand the problem that you just described. So for me, I have the benefit of being with my law firm for about five years, actually. So I’m familiar with my team, my partner’s my mentors and my colleagues. And we still have that level of camaraderie, even through text messages. But it’s a bit different for our newer colleagues and the juniors have been joining us, what I understand is, they’re feeling a bit more lost, they don’t really have a face to the person who’s actually instructing them. And they have this barrier to maybe reach out to ask for a little bit more assistance or to really understand what is needed from them. So I can understand that volley could really step into helping under situation. But can you walk us through the process? How would a person really get to use barley? And how does it really benefit them from a day to day basis as compared to the Zoom meetings?

 

11:30

Yeah, well, I’ll compare it actually to slack. Because there are still reasons, very good reasons to have a synchronous conversation, especially when something is emotionally charged, or when there’s a tight feedback loop. For those reasons, yes, you need to get in a room or get on a zoom. But for everything else, there’s volley. And volley can kind of span the spectrum of what you might be using something like Slack, or loom. And then some of your meetings don’t need to be meetings, we’ve all heard the, the the comment, this meeting could have been an email. But you know, Slack. So slack, for example, you were writing these text based messages back and forth. But with volley, you can you can create a workspace just like Slack that has channels and conversations in it, you can invite your team to it, you can create the channels that you’re interested in are typically used to. And then instead of typing messages, because volley is a video first communication tool, meaning when you open it up, there’s a camera that has that staring at you that has a record button at the bottom, it just feels like that’s what you should do. Versus slack. There’s a you know, a text based thread, and a text box at the bottom, it feels like oh, I should write a text message. So that’s it while you can upload videos to Slack or use their new clips functionality. If you’re paying for it. You can also write a text volley. It’s just flipping the importance of video in the conversation. And when we put video first. Almost 70% of volley sent our video volleys, when you put video first, you are putting all of the context and emotion in that relationship, even in something that maybe doesn’t even need it. But even simple messages, like we need to talk can be can be misinterpreted. Like that’s the classic.

 

13:16

Scary, you know, yeah, someone above you just say, hey, Ted, I need to talk to you right now. You’ll be like, Oh, my God. Did I screw up what I do?

 

13:25

Right? But if you hear Ted, we need to talk. There’s no mistaking that. There’s, you know, exactly. I’ve got something cool. I can’t wait to share it with you. Yeah,

 

13:35

there’s more aggression behind it voice itself.

 

13:38

But we all read it as Ted, we need to talk. Yeah, exactly. Da, you know. So, volley volley helps with those misinterpretations throughout the day, for sure. But you’ve got to put it first, you’ve got to use it instead of tools like Slack, which is hard for some people because they’re on Slack crack and zoom Doom, and they just can’t get off. And so we’re just trying to provide another way.

 

14:03

Okay, Josh, so to clarify bullies in here to really replace synchronous meetings, like zoom calls when you need to have that immediate face to face conversation? If I understand you correctly, volley is really here to help with the remaining spectrum of meetings that can happen within Office context, that is not able to really happen in the remote working environment. Right?

 

14:24

Well, sort of. And I love that you acknowledge that there’s a spectrum because there is a spectrum of communication and it from simple things like sharing a link with someone, you’re not going to call a meeting to share a link or to say lunches here that that would be crazy to have a synchronous discussion about lunch being here, right. So we know there’s an asynchronous side of the spectrum. We’re gonna use email or text or chat for that. And then we also know there’s a synchronous side of the spectrum, like a termination conversation or deliberation about a time bound important decision we need to make today. Like those things. Getting a room for those things like you don’t want to chat about those. You don’t want to email about those, like get get your faces together in a room. But there’s all of this gray area in between between something between slack and zoom. Right? And so yes, some meetings in the middle of that spectrum. Some of the reasons you’re getting in a room really are just, they could just be three or four volleys. Like I just have a question. I can’t type it all out, it would take me an hour to type it out. I might as well just explain it to you because I could explain it in three or four minutes. And then you could you could see where I’m coming from, you could give me feedback or ask clarifying questions. And then I could clarify my questions. And then you could give me your response meeting over now we we would probably schedule 30 minutes or something like that. And it’s Isn’t it crazy that when we schedule 30 minutes, it’s exactly 30 minutes, it took exactly 30 minutes talking about this thing, we must just be brilliant, and know exactly how much time it takes to discuss things. No, more likely meetings are sponges and they take up whatever time you give them. This is Parkinson’s Law that that work will occupy whatever space that you give it to to occupy right. And same is true with meetings. So So yes, we were giving an alternative for the part of that spectrum, that you would have scheduled a meeting, but it really is just kind of a couple of volleys. And there’s just a lot of a lot of communication fits in there. We as a team of Olli only have one meeting a week. For everything else. We’re just constantly in the flow of work, syncing up checking in unblocking one another. And it’s a beautiful thing. But it does require a change in behavior and a change in thinking. Because the old instinct is instinct is when you when you need to talk, you just get something on the calendar. And that’s just the best you can do. But now, when you need to talk, you start with a volley. And then maybe you meet need to meet but maybe not. So we’re just probably providing an alternative. For everything else that doesn’t require getting in a room.

 

17:04

It sounds like volleys providing this avenue where you can have that knock on the door conversation that is no longer available in a remote working environment.

 

17:12

Absolutely. It’s the first thing we noticed when we went remote is the all of these ad hoc little conversations and popping in but even better than popping in, we’re offering something that isn’t interruptive. Because when you send a volley, the other person doesn’t have to view it right now, compared to popping in if someone knocks on my door and says, Hey, I have a question. I might be writing the last line of the manifesto for our company, I might be thought you just you just broke my train of thought and I it took me three hours to get to this place. I got it. And I’m in flow. And you want to know about you know, the cups for the water cooler, or whatever the thing is, right? Like it, there’s no way it’s as important as the last line of manifesto, or the last line of code of this hairy bug that we’re trying to, you know.

 

18:01

So you experienced something like this before? Oh,

 

18:05

everyone has everyone has? Hey, you got a minute? No, but I have no other answer to that. I guess I do now. What do you need? Oh, I just wondered, did you see the now that’s the beauty of asynchronous conversation is you can volley when you have the thought and the other person can volley when they have the moments or when they’re they’re out of flow or when they need to respond. Right? Hmm,

 

18:31

I can clearly see the value. It’s really exciting to hear about this from you directly. So maybe share with us the process that you went through when you were developing and testing your product. What was the feedback like from your customers? And what have you learned from it?

 

18:44

Well, some positive, some negative, it’s really interesting to see this, we’re seeing a unique process. It really is. But you know, we’re seeing a lot of creator consumer behavior modeled out in the corporate world. So we we thought the world was more ready for our product when we launched it, then it’s actually seemed that it is so the user base is growing organically and everything is great. So but I’m just surprised when I because we have any new user that comes into volley gets a conversation called Hello volley with the team at volley. And I like to spend a lot of time in that conversation and engaging with users like the moment that they download the app and a moment of delight or confusion. Because we can learn from both of those. So I spend a lot of time there talking to users and it’s just amazing to me. How you I’m looking at someone who’s recording the first video they’ve ever recorded of themselves in their life, even though YouTube for almost two decades even though Snapchat even though tick tock even though this person has had a phone in their pocket for the last 10 years, and they’ve made all kinds of videos of other people. This is the first video they have Ever Made of their own face? Credit, and it freaks them out. And they don’t say that to me. But they do say things like, oh, when you’re gonna get filters, Oh, I feel like I’m talking to myself, Oh, you know, what can I turn the camera off? I just want to, you know, and all of these things that I’m like, oh, man, really, really, don’t you see the power of this. And like, so these folks are kind of hard to convince, we call them Zeds. And so there’s, there’s Zedd on every team, if not multiple on every team. So that’s kind of some of the fun where we’re having is helping champions though, because we also get users who are like, Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe that. This is what I’ve been looking for, for years.

 

20:44

So it’s just super interesting for me, because you are a veteran of some form in the office productivity and communication space. But even then, when you released your features, you’re still surprised by how the market is reacting to it.

 

20:55

Absolutely. Well, and I am super biased, I grew up with a video camera in my hand, I’ve made 1000s of videos of myself, you have a YouTube channel, of course, this is the way that you’re going to communicate. And of course, when the Snapchat Tiktok generation are in charge, this is the way they’re going to want to communicate as well. They’re just not in charge yet. And the rest of the folks are, are still interested in old behavior. So if we believe that the future of communication looks exactly like the past, we’re going to get disrupted, you know, we’re walking dinosaurs already.

 

21:32

So guys, no matter how much you think your product is going to be accepted, or it’s going to be the next big thing. You never really know until you’ve released it into the market and seen how your customers have reacted to it. Josh himself has been in the Office Communications base for years, and he’s even exited to successful companies. But even then, he’s still surprised by the way that his customers and the market is reacting to volley and his speeches. So always make sure you test your product and his features as soon as you can. That’s why you should always get your minimum viable product as soon as you can. Because that way you can test the idea that you have to see what really works before you build up the whole product itself. So back to you, Josh. Now volley is one of those services where the moment someone adopts it and implements it into the organization. So the user base would definitely explode overnight. So what are the strategies that you are currently employing to help these numbers grow?

 

22:20

It’s a great question. This is my first product led growth company. Even though Mike other companies had interesting products that had growth mechanics, they were kind of performance marketed or sold their way to growth. But with volley, we’re being very patient with growth. And we’re just working on building a product that is sticking that that is so easy to adopt. We we call it the sneeze and initiative internally, because I want volley to be so easy that you like sneeze and you’re in five conversations, you can’t even help it. It’s just you just run into people in the app, and you’re talking to them and it’s so good. And you’ll never want to delete it. And so we’re trying to make the product that good and and back that up with education and the right touch points. And we have kind of an automated onboarding system that we’ve built that that helps a user that that’s actually just videos of me that kind of pop in at the right time. Hey, so you just created a workspace. Let me show you a couple things that you need to know right now. Right, because nobody’s gonna watch some tutorial video man Joshua,

 

23:22

kind of like the old Microsoft paperclip that right used to appear at the oddest of places. Offices.

 

23:28

I am, but I hope I’m more helpful than that paperclip, because every time I saw a paperclip and like you can’t help me, there’s no way you’re gonna know my answer to my question. Yeah,

 

23:36

but I do kind of miss that guy. Kind of thing of it. There’s so much nostalgia attached to that memory is always there. But it’s never really helpful at

 

23:43

all right? He was yeah, they kept popping out like how do you get this guy to stay in his cave?

 

23:49

Yeah, that’s such a good man. We Josh. Okay. So here’s my next question. I’m glad you raised the word sticky just now, because we’re going to talk about customer retention is not enough to just get someone to download the app, you want to make sure that they are retained within the ecosystem itself. So what tactics or strategies have you been employing?

 

24:06

So the first thing we did was try to figure out if there was a correlation between some behavior in the app and retention. And we looked at a lot of metrics and events in the app. And it turns out that the thing there is a direct correlation between sending volleys creating volleys and retention. In fact, we retain just over 75% of users who send just 10 volleys, which is not very much like if someone’s using it heavily. You can send 10 volleys in a day. But we retain 98% of users who send 100 volleys. So

 

24:44

now, you don’t need to explain to them what the benefits of volume are anymore.

 

24:48

They get it. They’re explaining to other people. They’re inviting people to the app every day. I mean, some of our top users are inviting like dozens of people a week. And so we love it and that this is great, right? But we Need to get them to 100 valleys? How do you get them? Well, you’ve got to first get them to 10. Well, how do you get them to 10? Well, you’re probably not going to get to 10 volleys chatting with Josh, in the Hello volley conversation, you’re only going to get to 10 volleys if you have a couple of friends. And those couple of friends need to be willing to play ball. So that’s why we use volley is the name of the company, because it is kind of a metaphor for the game volleyball, you need to have a willing ball, right? Yeah. But if you have, if you’ve ever played volleyball with like a kid who can’t hit the ball over the net, you realize you’ve, you’ve got to keep picking up the ball, and you got to serve it again, right, and they’re not going to return it and you got to pick up the ball and you got to serve it again. So you’ve got to understand whether you have a willing participant, but if you’ve got a willing participant on the other side of the net, you can keep that volley going as long as you’re able to as long as you need to. Right. So the goal in getting to 10 volleys is get a one or two or three people in, that are worthy participants in having conversation with you and volley. That could be your team, that could be your inner circle, that could be a spouse, that could be a business partner that could be you know, whatever that person is. And so we’ve done a bunch of things to try to help people make the invite flow. So easy, give you a personal link and volley let you share that personal link, on your website, on your email on your LinkedIn profile, like you know, and just make that so easy, that it’s really as easy as sneezing that you can just share your volley link in the world jumps in and you’re in meaningful conversations with people you’re moving work forward with. And you’re never going to delete the app. So that’s our goal. And we’ve been working on it we’ve been, we’ve been, you know, bending our numbers each up each week. This is kind of the aggregation of marginal gains, sort of approach or growth hacking, right. And we’ve just been doing

 

26:51

a critical point where you might just explode exponentially.

 

26:55

We hope we think we’re starting to see some of those, we’re starting to see some bends in some of the important charts and like, ooh, could this be it? Could this be it right now. And it’s actually, it’s not even teams that are bending these charts up right now. It’s all of these little communities, membership communities, paid communities, all of these experts and coaches and creators who are finding value in realizing oh, my gosh, yeah, none

 

27:19

of you mentioned, I can understand how this would work for a coach. So instead of having that shared at one, one hour of coaching, they can actually allow their students to have a little bit more access to them to send a certain number of volleys to them, maybe to get an immediate response, right?

 

27:32

Absolutely. It’s just in time learning or individualized instruction, if you’re talking in one to one, but if you’re talking about one to many, how long does it take you to write that message to your discord group? Well, it takes you a couple minutes. How long could you say that? How long would it take you to say that to your discord group? Right? Oh, well, it would take like 20 seconds. Oh, so you just got a 7x speed game. And how much does your group or your community or your VIP fan, appreciate that 22nd message that you just spoke to them? Well, 10x, live it over the you know, because you could just have an intern writing a discord message with your profile pic on it. But that was you and you’re outside feeding your chickens or doing whatever it is you’re doing, right? Like oh, my gosh, I got to see my hero, or this person that I’m following, or this person that I’m trying to learn from, in their real life at their home or whatever. In fact, Blu Ray, it’s way more impactful. So that’s what we’re seeing blow up right now. And I love it. Because I actually built a product 12 years ago called Blue Fire that did the same thing. But the world wasn’t quite ready for it. So now it does seem actually the world may be ready for all these little boutique learning communities that are happening around harmonica or watercolor painting or, you know, marketing or YouTube secrets or whatever those things are, right.

 

28:48

Alright guys. So he has some key takeaways from Josh, as we have discussed is not enough to just have a higher number of users downloading the app, you also need to make sure that your customer retention are high. So like Josh did, he studied the behavior of the users within the app, and how the activity correlated to their usage and retention rates. When he realized that users who have sent over 100 volleys at a 98% retention rate. He knew that the key was to help a new user in Duck more users into the platform so that they can send volleys to each other organically. So user need to apply a similar mentality when you are looking at your own customer retention rates, identify from their behavior, what needs to high retention rate, and do your best to supplement and encourage that behavior from growing organically within the users itself. Back to you, Josh. So you’ve created many successful companies over the years. What is your framework when it comes to coming up with the right ideas and executing them well, as well?

 

29:42

Well, I’ll quote Kenny Loggins who I don’t know if it’s an artist from the 70s and 80s. Worth the song Footloose, maybe. Yeah, I love it. Is that right?

 

29:52

I mean, I’m an odd guy, so

 

29:55

yeah, good. So he said something once that I just think is so perfect. He said this Somebody asked him, Well, how have you written so many hit records, and he says, Well, I allow myself to write crap. And what he meant is he allows himself to just write, he’s prolific, he writes so many songs, you’ve never heard of that. He just, if you, if you just stay at the bat and stay at the plate and swing long enough, if you just keep writing and writing and writing, you’re going to write a hit song. And that’s my recipe for, for business building and company building. There, my name is on a number of LLCs that are not on my LinkedIn profile, because it just didn’t pan out or didn’t work, or it failed to validate. In fact, there were 12 ideas on the way to volley. I spent two years working through hundreds of ideas that I have, validating about a dozen of these that I spent weeks or months on 1000s of dollars on trying to figure out if it was a valid business idea, or something I wanted to build, or something the world was ready for. So I don’t talk about those 12 ideas. I talk about volley. And so if you look, hindsight, if you look at my past, it’s like, oh, my gosh, this guy wrote hit record after hit record after hit record. No, yeah, I’m not talking about the 12 that in between this record and that record that you never hear about, and that I don’t talk about, right. So that’s, that’s the recipe is just be prolific as a creator, paint, as many paintings write as many songs, create as many companies as you can imagine, and, and, and go all in. So I’m not saying do this as a side hustle, necessarily. I was all in on all of those. I was building a pickle company. And that was my 100% focus for the three months that I was doing that, you know, and it turns out, I you know, I hired a pickle scientists build a lab in my garage, like I’m all in I’m building Lego scientists.

 

31:48

Yeah, that’s quite fascinating. I never knew this pico Sinese.

 

31:53

There are yes, yeah. So I hired one of them to kind of work with me. And we made hundreds and hundreds of batches of my family’s recipes to try to make a shelf stable version of this magic concoction. It turns out, it’s scientifically impossible or impossible from the FDA standpoint, right? So or the restrictions of the FDA. So on that one, it was either I’ve either got to build a really grindy capital intensive business, or I’ve got to sell out and build whatever’s on the shelf. And I just didn’t want to do either of those. So I passed on that and moved on to the next one. RV park roll ups, smart car, air fresheners, you know, interactive classroom tool, like, you know, all of these different things I was thinking about working on. But then just pass pass, pass pass, volley was just the one I couldn’t pass on. It was too good. The timing was too, right. The world just needs a better way to communicate. Let’s build it. And so we did. And it was. And when you get the right idea, it’s sometimes things just click, like I wrote reached out to my co founder, and that like pitch the idea in like, five minutes, he was like, Yep, I see it as pitch, Joe, multiple ideas over the years. And he’s like, nah, nah, but this one, it was just like, yep. And he started designing it that night. And we were working on prototypes, you know, the next week and formed a company the next week. And yeah, it just, it just kind of worked, right. Just like each

 

33:17

of the ideas that you worked on, that didn’t pan out. They were kind of like exercises and trainings that you had to go through to make sure that when you were ready to hit that home run, that you were ready to hit a home run. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. So guys, to come up with great business ideas like Josh, give yourself the allowance to come up with the bad ones. And just keep at it and train your brain. Josh, I have another question. With regards to the videos that you’re filming with the platform on Bali? Have there been any legal or compliance considerations that you had to take in mind when you’re designing the whole platform? Whether it’s from a personal data perspective, or whether it’s confidentiality as well? Or is there any encryption built in? Or what is the kind of processes they have built into the software itself to make sure that it’s safe for users and corporates as well?

 

34:06

That’s a great question. And it’s it’s one that is so challenging for startups, there are all of GDPR and CCPA. And all of these privacy regulations, which are great, and they certainly are put in place to help make the internet a safer place. Right. And we see that, but it is so hard for startups to actually comply to every one of these across the board and build a product that you can actually make reliable and performant. So encryption, let’s talk about that one. So volleys are encrypted upon in transit. So when you’re sending a volley up from your phone to our servers, then yes, it’s encrypted. But right now, because because we are getting video from 6000 different models of Android phones and you know, all of the models via iPhones across all kinds of connections. There’s all kinds of different Ways this, we’ve, we’ve had to build our own custom video pipeline, because anything off the shelf just was not performant or reliable enough. So. So in order to do that and make it reliable, you’ve got to be able to look at content. And so at volley right now, the only there are only to people that have keys to even do this. And they’re too painfully private engineers, that would never look at anything unless, you know, I can, I don’t even have the keys to look at any content. But we have users say, Hey, I try, I’ve been trying to send this volley up and it won’t send or this one has garbled sound or this one. And we still got to look at those things. So we our goal is to be end to end encrypted very shortly. But in order to even build a product and get it to market to be in this beta phase, you kind of have to ignore the rules for a short period of time to even build a product. If we made volley end to end encrypted from the beginning, we’d have all kinds of users who just have problems we can’t even fix because we we can’t even understand why that video has a problem or what the user is seeing at this point. So it’s a great question. It’s one that I’m speaking honestly and openly about, which could open me up for, you know, some sort of liable, but it’s, it’s the honest truth, any startup kind of has to go through this phase where we’ve got to crawl, walk, run in terms of security and privacy. But you know, I’ve built and then encrypted, world class secure enterprise level software in the past, I know what we need to build, and we are building those things. But if if you really expected every startup to have those things in place, day one, there would be no startups, and there would be no innovation very,

 

36:40

very challenging. And it would be any startup would be in compliance completely from day one. But what’s important is that you actively try to make sure that your ship is in order, and that you you know, you seek the relevant professionals to help you get it in order as soon as you can, as well.

 

36:58

Absolutely. And, and we are and we’re eager about it and our CTO is probably he probably has a rash every day about this because he knows the gap that exists and in we’re working with larger companies and their security audits and, and passing those for the most part, right and, and learning Oh, okay, we’re going to need to get this done in the next few months. So it’s, it’s a journey. And so we really appreciate the companies, we’re using volley that. Understand that right, that they understand that there is no innovation without startups and new companies and and there has to be a little bit of given take with us.

 

37:37

So what is the process like after the video has been recorded and sent across the boy platform? Does volley record and keep every single video file? Because I will imagine that, you know, your internal service will be jammed up with 1000s of terabytes of data very quickly.

 

37:52

Yes, well, like I said, we’ve had to build our own custom video pipeline and encoding engine, so that we could do what we’re able to do without just totally being eaten alive by server costs. And we’ve we’ve done a great, great, great job at that so far, like, hats off to our CTO and our engineering team. Like, like our costs are way less than kind of at the same scale is, what quiser was in quiser was just online quizzes, text based quizzes with some images in them. But man, our server costs were just out of control at that company. So we’ve done a great job volleys expire after 60 days, and according to our terms are deleted after I think it’s six months or something like that. So we do clean up after ourselves. And there’s no way we’re going to be able to offer a free product and just allow videos recorded of something you said three years ago to be available or searchable, because nobody’s really going back to them. And it’s really only companies that need to keep you know, a seven year record that would be interested in that. And of course, they’re willing to pay for that service. So that’s why we feel like with a free product volleys expire after 60 days, they go away. And then we’re able to do according to our terms and remove and and replace those things. But we’ve we’ve built a pretty, pretty reliable pipeline that gives you a pretty high quality video. That’s very, very compressed. So there’s a lot of magic tricks into this video messaging thing is we’re learning.

 

39:19

I see. Now, Josh, entrepreneurship is never an easy journey. Who do you say you have an immense amount of gratitude for and you would like to take this chance to say thank you to right now.

 

39:30

Oh, well, I’ll have to do it without trying to tear up but my mom, actually is who I’d have to say because she was an entrepreneur and didn’t know it. And I didn’t know it. And it’s not that she had some secret life. It’s just that we didn’t have a word for what she did. She cleaned houses, she she cleaned houses and she had clients. And sometimes those clients would ever do odd jobs like painting houses, or papering or removing rocks and building a waterfall are all kinds of things, she could do anything. And she believed it like she could do anything she set her mind to. And that’s what she taught me and, and my brother in law, and I believe it, I still believe it today. And so it wasn’t until, like recently, like, really the last 10 years that I realized, oh my gosh, my mom was an entrepreneur. And we didn’t understand that we didn’t know that she was, she made her own money, building her own business. And, and we, we kind of overlooked that. And the place where I grew up there was entrepreneur wasn’t a word that was used, like nobody in my high school ever said that word. Very few people ran their own businesses, or even understood why that was valuable in the world, right. So it’s just kind of a different kind of place, it was in rural Michigan, that I grew up a lot of blue collar workers, the value was get a good job, and hold on to that with all of your life, so that you can sometimes retire from this company that you worked at for 3040 years. That’s what my dad did. And that was kind of the example he worked for the power company. So in my, in my, you know, goggles growing up, what I saw was I had three options, I can work for the power company, I work at the prison, because there was a state prison in our hometown, or I could become a teacher. And those were the were my examples, or, and but I totally overlooked the one that my mom was doing, which was entrepreneurship. And it’s just late until lately that I’ve appreciated that. So that’s why I have to give a shout out to as my mom for paving the way in teaching me how to dream is very

 

41:38

nice. In fact, I think you picked up a lot for your mom, not just as an entrepreneur, but I think the handiness that you came with all your projects, probably a little bit of a rub off on us. Well,

 

41:49

no doubt like you. Yeah, she can’t move those rocks for the waterfall that those clients want to build. And so yeah, I learned how to make waterfalls out of sandstone and concrete, and how to wallpaper and how to fix this handle when it broke. Because, you know, we we just broke it when we’re trying to repaint this house or all of these things like she would take on all these crazy projects, like total refurbs of houses like yeah, we can do that. And she’d bring her two boys. And we didn’t know how to do most of these things. But we figured it out. And then we go to the store and buy tools to figure it figure the rest out. So yeah, we did learn a lot. She is a dreamer. And I love her for it.

 

42:27

So cool. Now, Josh, if the listeners only remember one thing from today’s conversation, while you’d like it to be

 

42:36

there’s new way to communicate. If you’re willing to be seen, how can

 

42:40

the listeners get in contact with view if they want to learn more about volley?

 

42:44

Well, the go to volley app.com, you kind of can’t not get in contact with me right now. Like I said, you missed every new user gets the Hello volley conversation. Totally not scalable. It’s already reaching the the fringes of scalability. But that’s probably the best way or you can go rummage around LinkedIn and find

 

43:03

me there. Josh, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing with us your stories, experiences and this new form of communication, I can really see it becoming a part of the new way to communicate in the office setting in the future. Thank you for joining us.

 

43:16

Thank you. That’s that’s my goal and vision as well. So I hope you’re right. Thanks for having me.

 

43:23

Guys, thank you so much for joining Josh and I in today’s episode, if you only walk away with one key takeaway, I hope you remember the importance of coming up with your minimum viable product and testing it in the market as soon as you can. You never fully really understand what the market wants from you. And how do you react to your product or service, get the feedback from the market directly and then see how you can pivot thereafter. Now as before, if you’ve received any value from the show, I would love for you to subscribe to the show, leave a review on Apple podcasts and to share the show with somebody who find it useful as well. The show is running twice a week with new episodes every Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, or updates to some resources and my email list available on patreon.com. That’s tdto.com that’s all for me today. I’ll see you guys next time.