Podcasts about oh adam

 Leave it to her beaverThe 1950s was a swinging time.Based on a post by mydeepsix. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories.Forward: People think the 1950s were a prudish, almost Victorian time, the "Leave it to Beaver" era of "Separate single beds for married couples", but that is so untrue. In a well-crafted effort to convince society to embrace the television, Hollywood moguls heavily censored the studios to leave out any hint of sexuality. Networks were hiding sex, and so were communities across the nation. But every town had countless social groups who collaborated in mutual sexual kinks. Here's a tale from my early years.Homecoming.I arrived home from an overnight business trip early one afternoon, just as the lawn boy was peddling away on is bicycle. Bobby, shirtless, young, blonde kid working the summer to pay for next semester at city college. The lawn looked great, I noticed the hedges were freshly trimmed.My wife Maureen was waiting for me, dressed in a housecoat and pink fuzzy slippers. "Welcome Home!" she said, kissing me on the cheek. I turned and kissed her on the mouth, surprising her a little, I think, but kissing her deeply. She hesitated at first, then kissed me back with gusto. I thought I detected a musky scent on her breath, for a moment, but then she reached between us and ran her fingers over my trousers to tug my growing cock, and I quickly forgot about it. "Can't wait until tonight, Mister, so I can welcome you back properly!" she chided me."The lawn looks great!" I said, as she twirled off. "A home maker does what she can; I think Bobby did an especially good job today." She said, with a wicked grin, before disappearing into the kitchen. Then she came back into the living room with an icy martini and handing it to me, saying "Marge from 21st street said that when she gives him a blowjob, he trims her hedges for free." She said, in a feigned serious tone. I smiled. Marge is a famous slut, locally. Married, but lusty. Her retired husband liked to fish, She likes young men.We were married since she was 19. Maureen was the sexiest woman I had ever met. She grew more sensual and beautiful with each passing year. She seldomly ovulates, so we rarely deal with menstruation inconveniences.For a few years we tried having a baby. It was not to be. So for the past 7 years we assumed we couldn't. But on the bright side, we didn't need condoms.I'm well-hung and carry a big sack. Maureen and I loved fucking at least 4 nights a week.  I traveled overnight for business, 2 or 3 days a month. I had weeklong travel events at least twice each year.I was still classy and skilled enough to easily pick up a lady or two, usually married, for the evening's entertainment at the hotel bar wherever I stayed. Married women were eager to have a sexy adventure; then eager to leave once it was over.I never asked Maureen what she did when I was gone, but I'd met enough wives over the years to understand a woman's needs. Our rule was "No strangers are invited back to the house unless we were both home." Home was our sanctuary, period.Younger generations can call this "cheating", but in fact we were both living our best lives, and our marriage was strong.We had a few select friends, couples actually; whom we swapped partners with. Usually on New Years Eve and Independence Day, at least.Which reminded me of the freshly trimmed hedges I'd noticed earlier. I wondered if she was joking, or if she actually sucked Bobby's young cock outside, discretely? I'll have to ask her about that later.It was Friday, early autumn, we had a dinner engagement at the home of Neville Sinclair, a local celebrity. Both Maureen and I volunteered each year for his favorite charity, and this year he generously offered his home (Summer home, actually;) for our annual celebration.We knew him because he sometimes invited us over to meet his latest supermodel date, (showing off), or rising Hollywood starlet he was coaching. The night almost always ended with me screwing the model while he seduced Maureen in another room. He had class and sophistication, and his friendship and business connections were good for my career. My wife knew how to give my career a boost, like a lot of wives then. Maureen liked that he tried so hard to please her, and certainly the full dress dinners and expensive outings were a welcome treat.The Sinclair Home.At the celebration, Marge and I wore tennis whites, hoping to get a game in after the festivities, His house outside of town was enormous, you really didn't see it from the road in its entirety. 12 bedrooms, a pool, dock, solarium, separate parking facilities, the works. Our host had hired caterers, and staff, the party was grand. Almost the whole neighborhood was in attendance. This event was the highlight of the summer."Darn it!, Adam is here!" Maureen said, exasperated.Adam was a nice young man. Tall lanky athlete, he fancied himself a bit of a lady's man. Not even graduated college yet, and he thought he knew everything. And said so, often. The trouble was I saw him at work, we both saw him at church, and he volunteered seemingly just to hang around where he could bump into Maureen. He was everywhere we were. At the volunteer job site, he never missed an opportunity to take off his shirt, and flex when he knew Maureen was nearby. When we were moving building materials, if I picked up two cinder blocks, he'd make a point of getting three of four at a time. If I carried 5 planks of wood, he grabbed 10. I knew Maureen was amused by those antics, and I'm sure she was flattered by this stud performing for her attentions.But, we both got an "Immature" vibe from him, and thought it best not to include him in any of our sexy times. Especially his obnoxious ambition to one-up me, Neither Maureen or I had any interest in playing that game with him. (Hint: If you want to fuck my wife, don't be annoying to me!) Still, he was nothing of not persistent. At the party, She decided to prank him.After the dinner celebration, we did get a few matches in on our host's tennis court. Then wandered around the grounds and house. It was a treat to explore the well-kept grounds. Also, we were trying to ditch the ever-present Adam. It became a game. At one point, I saw Maureen whisper something to slutty old Marge,Then, Maureen said (loud enough for Adam to overhear) "Let's take our drinks up to the rooftop terrace and watch the sunset!" I visibly agreed, and we left down a long hall to the stairway, herding the crowd ahead of us, drinks in hand. At the last turn, Maureen looked behind to see if we'd been followed, then darted into a separate stairway leading down. We both hid just inside and waited until we heard Adam pass by on his way to the roof area and the lusty Marge in waiting. There would be enough people out there to distract him for a little while, at least.Maureen confessed with an evil grin; "I told Marge that Adam was looking for her."I chuckled at the thought. She would certainly tie him up for as long as she could. Poor Adam!Gameroom.We crept down the stairs to what we discovered was a party room. There was a full, stocked bar, pool table, pinball machines, and a jukebox. We left the lights off, but there were neon beer logo signs and the bar was lit from below, so our eyes got used to it pretty quickly, and it was fun to explore. In one corner near the pool table, was an old "Gypsy Fortuneteller" booth. It was essentially a wooden phone booth, except one side had a mirror with an old gypsy looking at a crystal ball, painted on the glass. If you entered from the back, you would tell it was a one-way mirror, and there was a light that when you hit a lever, illuminated your face. The illusion was, from the outside, it looked as if the gypsy had come to life. People would stand outside looking at the mirror, ask the gypsy a question, and the performer would hit the lever and speak. I stepped in, and Maureen (acting innocent) stood in front of the booth, saying "Oh, wise and mysterious gypsy, what is my fortune?" I flickered the lever, the lights illuminated my face and in a low voice with my best gypsy accent, said: "You will have an orgasm soon! In fact, many!"Maureen feigned shock. As I left the booth, my arms surrounded her tight, athletic body and I pulled her close, feeling her firm tits pushing against my chest, and kissing her deeply. I said "I'm so lucky to have you, my love!"She giggled, replying "You said the magic words, look!" and she showed me that she had removed her panties and were waiving them around.Still kissing her, I managed to drop my shorts in record time and pull her legs up over my hips. I walked back, lifting her ass onto the pool table, and in a swift motion my hard cock slid deep inside her tight, wet, cunt, pounding away.In a few short moments, she was moaning quietly and I was pumping her cunt full of my hot semen. She slid off the table and bent down to take my dripping wet cock in her mouth, savoring the fresh taste of our combined sex, it was a great part of our routine.Adam's Entry.Just then we heard footsteps on the stairs and a voice "Maureen?"  It was Adam, he found us! There was no escape!Maureen quickly picked up my shorts and her panties, pushing them into my hands and pushing me toward the gypsy booth. In a moment, I was secreted inside, but naked from the waist down still semi-hard too. Maureen grinned slyly at me, putting a finger against her lips "Shush" she mouthed, winking at me. What was that sly minx up to?"Adam, I'm here" Maureen said, demurely. Leaning up against the pool table, and striking a sexy pose. "Leave the lights out, we don't want to attract attention" she said, slyly sneaking me a wink.Adam looked around as his eyes adjusted to the low light, but Maureen put her hand on the side of his face, caressing his cheek. Adam looked like a deer who just spotted a wolf, his eyes wide. "Do you want to kiss me, Adam?" Maureen said, innocently.‘How devious' I thought, a great prank! He'd get a mouthful of my cock musk and cum from her lips, that would be funny!"Not waiting for an answer, Maureen pulled his head down to her lips. I never noticed how tall he was, maybe six two? But he bent over and kissed her. I thought I detected Adam start to pull away, perhaps realizing what her mouth tasted of, but Maureen grabbed his head with both hands and pulled him closer, kissing him passionately. It didn't take Adam too long to get over his surprise and he pulled Maureen in close, running his meaty hands over her back and touching the sides of her tits.I watched, fascinated, as she ran her hands over his muscled body as well, slowly and erotically touching him and getting him hot. This was too funny! I was afraid Adam might hear me chuckling, so I gritted my teeth. Any minute now he'd realize he'd been set up, and bolt home! She was good!But, to my surprise, the kiss when on, and Maureen let him slip his tongue into her mouth. I could see her chest heaving, and I knew she was allowing herself to become aroused. I thought to step out and stop things, but hesitated. Not sure why, but watching her with a lusty young man, maybe his first time with a woman, was oddly erotic, and I felt my own arousal growing.Adam Cleans my spunk.She pushed him back for a moment, and asked "Do you know how to eat a cunt, Adam?" I almost choked, stifling a laugh. Adam, looked worried for a second, I'm not sure he'd ever seen a cunt! But he nodded.Maureen said "Put my legs over your strong shoulders!" She leaned back on the pool table, lifting her tennis skirt, and showing him she was not wearing panties."Lick my hot cunt Adam;” Maureen pleaded. Adam hesitated."I'm so wet for you, see?" She said, pleading, and spreading her legs, lustfully.Oh, My god! She was going to get him to lick my fresh cum load out of her cunt! I was shocked, this was a devilish trick indeed! That would teach him not to lust after a married woman!Adam clumsily lifted her legs and Maureen locked her knees around his shoulders. Adam moved his face tentatively into Maureen's cooch and started licking, tentatively. Amateurishly. I thought she'd push him away and reveal the joke to him, at any moment, humiliating him and sending his on his way;  but she didn't, in fact she seem to encourage him. Maureen gasped and visibly shuddered at his efforts. He was a trouper, no doubt now, and his tongue continued to lap and his lips kiss at her cunt."Oh, lick my wet cunt! Please, harder!" Maureen cried out. She looked up at Adam whose busy tongue was pleasing her. He raised her legs higher and pulled them apart, exposing her wet, hairy slit. I don't know if he had any idea he was licking up her husband's fresh cum, but he was undeterred, and when at it with gusto. Young guys will do crazy things for cunt, that is for certain."Ah; oh yes!" Maureen cried out as Adam's tongue licked across her vulva. He flicked his tongue lightly against her clitoris before diving back in, deeply.Maureen moved one hand down to open up her cunt for Adam, pushing his head in with the other. I could see her pulling her cunt lips aside and letting the cream flow out.Adam tongued her clit and then fastened his mouth on it, sucking hard and pushing in deeply with his tongue."Oh; God! Yes! Oh Adam!" Maureen cried out as her cunt was overwhelmed with sensation. "Oh; what are you doing? It's fabulous; Oh, ah; Adam don't stop; keep doing that;” Maureen was rapidly losing control of the situation. What started out as a prank, was evolving into my wife enjoying, and even reaching orgasm from this hapless young suitor.Adam pushed a finger into her already sensitive hole and curled it upward, exposing her little button clit.Maureen quivered in sensual shock as his finger found her sensitive g spot. He finger fucked her as he continued to suck and tongue her clit and cunt.Encouraged by her cries of pleasure, Adam was relentless in stimulating her g spot, licking her wet cunt, lapping both our combined cream like a hungry wolf.Her entire body writhed and squirmed uncontrollably, she squealed and panted hard, her cunt must have positively tingled. By her response the feeling must have been intense."Oh god, I'm gonna cum;  Don't stop! Don't take your finger out, Adam! She cried out. "Adam! It's so intense, Oh god, oh fuck; oh!"Adam didn't stop his fingering and licking.Maureen arched her back as she drove her cunt urgently into Adam's face, as if trying to clamped down on Adam's finger and pull in deeper into her cunt. As her orgasm hit her, She lost all control."Ah; Ah; ah! Argh oh Fuck" Maureen's hips quivered and her thighs clenched his head, her body trembled spasmodically and then she stiffened, cried out, then went limp. Adam withdrew his fingers and wiped his mouth on the back if his arm."Did you really cum?" he asked her, boyishly.She eyed him, incredulously. "God; Yes!; that was amazing;  " She said, softly, panting. Holding onto him, legs still shaking, she said "So hard", as if admitting it to herself.She looked up at him with wide eyes, perhaps re-evaluating him in new light. "Oh wow! It was so good;” Maureen whispered, her voice exposing the surprise she felt, still trembling from the body-shaking orgasm. She looked at Adam's tented out pants. Maureen ran her hand along the length of his hardness, it's apparent remarkable size, still confined in his baggy shorts, but just barely.Maureen's Show Tryst.She glanced over at me, still hidden in the booth, but any thought I had of pranks or laughing, long gone. She tugged at his belt. I silently gasped."Can I return the favor? Please?" Maureen asked softly, almost demurely.She glanced at me, and I realized she was actually asking me, but Adam took it as his green light and pulled his own shirt off. Maureen put her hands on his young, chiseled chest, pinching a nipple playfully.Adam dropped his pants like they were on fire. I was just about to jump out and stop him, when I saw Maureen pull her tennis dress over her shoulders and then tossing it away, roughly tearing her bra off in the same motion. Then nude, she urgently pulled his stiff cock into her waiting cunt. It all happened so fast, I hardly noticed that Adam was completely nude as well. I froze and watched, fascinated. When we swapped partners in the past, we never played in the same room. I'd never seen her so passionate, so in erotic heat, from this vantage point before. It was remarkable. I became very aware that my cock was rock hard, and dripping precum all over the booth. My head was spinning.Adam slid in to Maureen roughly, wet as she was she still gasped as she accommodated his size. She was so beautiful, so wild. Both of their fit bodies glistening with sweat and glowing from the soft neon bar lights, his urgent thrusts and her desperate, sensual writhing and soft little cries of encouragement, was incredibly erotic to experience. I lost all sense of time, a voyeur, watching my beautiful sexy wife perform for me, in the most intimate and exotic way possible, breaking taboos and with secret glances, daring me to follow her down this rabbit hole, to be a witness to her unbridled lust.Adam slammed into her with no hesitation, months of his pent up desire being realized at this moment. Maureen's big tits shaking and jiggling with each desperate thrust. I think she was approaching another orgasm, when Adam's muscular body stiffened, then pumped his pulsing cock into my wife with raw animal passion, over and over again, filling her wanton cunt with his young seed, before finally going limp. I looked down, my own cock was spurting hot jizz in powerful jets, all over the inside of the booth; I'd cum without ever touching my cock.Adam fell backwards, his chest heaving, his wet cock clipping out of her cunt, but still mostly hard and dripping. He used his hand to balanced himself on the pool table, watching as Maureen lay there, shivering in the afterglow.Adam Gets Put In His Place.After partially catching his breath, He leaned over to her and asked "Was that better than your husband fucks you?"Maureen, even though panting herself, looked genuinely amused by that question, and raising herself up on her elbows, replied "Oh, Adam, of course not.” She gave him a patronizing smile, patted his head and added; “It was a fun romp, but you have so much to learn about women!"Adam looked like he'd just struck out at the world series, and hung his head. I fell in love with her, all over again.Maureen reached over for a nearby bar towel and cleaned up her nethers. Then she knelt to tenderly whip off Adam's long, slender shlong, and after kissing and licking the purple head of his still hard cock, gently cleaned him off, then tried to sop up the continuing puddle dripping from her wet, fucked cunt and tight ass.Maureen said "You've got a lot going for you. A little more practice and I'm sure you'll do fine! And never, ever, compare yourself to my husband. Never ever mention this fling to anyone. If you do these things properly, We might have another event, together. If you violate my trust, I will violate your reputation. Cappeesh?" she winked to him and smiled.Adam dressed quickly, almost as if embarrassed by his own awkward attempt to impress her, he looked up at Maureen for a second, said "Um, Thanks." and quickly dressing, hurried up the stairs.Once he was gone, I exited the booth and hurried over to Maureen and helped her off the pool table, noticing it was soaked and stained. (Neviille would get a kick out of that, when we told him how it happened, I thought). She clung to me, weakly, and said "Well, that was, energetic!" Snapping out of my trance, I kissed her deeply and said, quite honestly "That was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, you are incredible! I love you so much!"We hurried to dress but were both such a mess, we plotted to sneak out unseen and escape to our car.

A school assignment changes everything.By Secretauthor2021, in 5 parts. Listen to the ► Podcast at Explicit Novels.The teacher sat there, just staring outward from his desk. He wore a look that said he didn’t want to be here anymore than we did.The classroom itself was virtually empty. It was just me and one other student.It was a girl called Madison and she was sitting on the far end of the table, opposite me.I could see she was busy writing away on a piece of paper, prompting me to glance down at the piece of paper in front of me. I appeared to have written down ‘I love Madison’ at least a hundred times.The teacher stood up abruptly, the screech of his chair as it slid backwards against the floor, forced me to look up from my declaration of love for Madison.“I’m going for a smoke, you two finish your lines.”With that, he left the room and slammed the door closed behind him. The noise echoed around the empty room.I looked across to Madison, who was now looking back at me smiling. I returned her smile with one of my own, when suddenly she stood up.I watched as she approached, standing over me briefly, her gaze alternating between my paper and me. As I prepared to speak, she gracefully lifted her leg and seamlessly positioned herself between me and the desk. With a confident move, she settled on my lap, facing me and assuming a straddling position.She began to gently grind on my lap, before touching the sides of my face, with her soft delicate hands.“Oh Adam! I want you so badly,” she cried out, before starting to kiss me passionately.That’s when she started to moan out my name.“Umm Adam, Adam, Adam.”It was then I noticed the sound of her voice begin to change, it wasn’t this soft seductive voice anymore, but more of a louder, persistent shouting.“Adam! Adam!”Madison faded away in front of me.“Adam! It's time to get up, you’ll be late for school,” a different, yet familiar voice called out.A chill swept over me as the duvet was abruptly pulled away. It was fortunate this time, that I wore underwear to bed.“Mom!” I cried back, then curled into a ball to keep warm.“Don’t Mom me, I’m not your personal alarm clock. Now go get ready, and for god’s sake, open a window, it stinks in here.”I waited for her to leave the room, before slowly uncurling myself. She had just interrupted one of my favorite dreams about Madison, it was the one where we were stuck in detention, and we were just about to get to the best bit.I got up from my bed, yawned, stretched and then scratched. It was then I realized, I was pitching an almighty tent in my underwear. Glad mom didn’t see that! I thought to myself.Like a zombie, I staggered to the bathroom slowly. Sliding the shower door open, I turned on the taps and removed my underwear to reveal what I had now began to refer to as the 'Madison Effect’.I jumped into the shower and let the water run over my face. As I relaxed under its warm embrace, my mind drifted back to Madison. She was perfect, she was pretty, she had a great body, and she was smart to boot. She ticked all my boxes, and I was crushing on her big time.It wasn’t just the way she looked, sure she had beautiful long blonde hair that hugged her shoulders, a smile that could melt anyone’s heart and eyes that sparkled like a mountain lake, but it was her smell, she always had this amazing floral scent, like an English garden.Before I knew it, I had started to fantasies again. I grabbed onto my raging boner and started to jerk off. My horny teenage mind, starting to peel off the layers of her clothing, imagining what her body would look like underneath.It didn’t take me long to reach the point of no return. I held my swollen cock and did my best to angle it down towards the drain, which in itself was a challenge given the intensity of my arousal. I shot my load and watched the evidence disappear.Feeling slightly more awake, I continued to get ready for school. Not that I would ever thank her, but thanks to my mom’s morning wakeup, I just managed to make the school bus on time.As I boarded the bus, that’s when I noticed her - my beautiful Madison, seated in the front row. I couldn’t help but smile at her to which she reciprocated. Walking past her, I caught a delightful whiff of that incredible floral scent, a fragrance that seemed to lift me up.A few rows behind her, my best friend Ethan had, as usual, reserved a seat for me. I settled in next to him, my attention divided as I found it hard to tear my eyes away from Madison.“Dude, you are so obvious,” he said.“What?”“You’re giving off all sorts of creepy stalker vibes.”“I am?”“Yes, relax, play it cool,” he suggested, as if he held the secrets to understanding all women.“Like you’re the expert,” I rebuked.“Excuse me, how many girls have you been with? That’s right zero, whereas I have kissed one.”“It doesn’t count if she’s your cousin Eth.”“It does too.”Ethan and I bantered back and forth like this until we reached school.The first thing we did was head to our lockers to grab our stuff for the upcoming lesson. As we collected our books, Ethan began discussing our plans for the weekend. In the midst of our conversation, Madison strolled past, gracing me with a quick sideways glance and a smile, effortlessly tucking her hair behind her ear. At this point, I had completely stopped listening to Ethan and I only had eyes for her.“So, how about it?” Ethan asked, nudging me and snapping me out of my trance.“How about what?” I responded, somewhat confused.“Were you even listening to me?”“Yeah, of course I was, but I just saw her.”“Dude, you’ve got it bad.”“I know, but she’s perfect.”“Okay, if you say so.”“What? You don’t think she’s perfect?” I said defensively, ready to defend my beloved Madison.“She’s alright, I guess. She’s no Charlotte though,” Ethan said, tilting his head towards the girl at the end of the lockers. Charlotte, head cheerleader, had all the boys chasing after her.“Please, Charlotte is just a walking pair of tits, she doesn’t have a patch on Madison.”I audibly swooned.“I can live with a walking pair of tits,” Ethan then said smirking.“I bet you can, now let’s get moving our we’ll be late for class.”Our first lesson was Biology. As we entered the classroom, we were immediately taken aback.Instead of the usual freedom to sit where we wanted, each seat had a name card in front of it. We all looked at each other at first, wondering what the hell was going on, before scanning the rows to look for our name and going along with it.It soon became apparent, that the seats were arranged in a way that every boy sat next to a girl.As I sat down in my allotted seat, I caught the scent of a very familiar fragrance. My whole body reacted to it and that’s when she sat down next to me. I was now sitting next to Madison. This day just got a whole lot better.I pulled out my notebook and pen, and then watched as Madison did the same. Her things were so neat, and she was so organized, unlike me, where the corners of my notebook were all curled up from being haphazardly stuffed in my bag.“Okay, now that you’re all settled.” Mrs. Wrentmore announced at the front of the classroom.The class turned to fixate on the middle-aged woman, dressed in the long tan skirt and cream colored cardigan at the front of the room.“Today, we’re going to talk about Sex! Yes, that’s right, get your giggles out of the way now, because this is serious class.” She said, pacing up and down the length of the classroom.“Today’s lesson will be split into Two parts,” she said emphasizing the word two, then pausing for a moment.“Part one - Sexual Health,” she said holding up one finger in the air, “and part two Reproduction.” she followed with a second finger, inadvertently making the sign for peace.“So, let’s get started, shall we.” Mrs. Wrentmore said clapping her hands together.“The CDC state that 78% of you, by the time you’ve reached the age of twenty would have had your first sexual experience.”The class watched as she walked over to a drawer in the corner of the room.“So, in all likelihood, some of you, as you’re all eighteen by now, have most likely had one. You’re all technically adults, so no judgement there, but if you have, I hope you were all being responsible.”The class started looking around at each other, no doubt mentally working out who were the ones most likely to be having sex.Mrs. Wrentmore pulled a bag from the drawer and walked to the end of the first row of desks.“As such, the school health board and the student body, have authorized me to hand out and make available to you these.”She held up the bag for all to see.“No, they are not free balloons, but condoms. Designed to keep you safe from STD and of course, unwanted pregnancies.”She handed out a few to the person sitting at the end of the desk.“Please pass these on to all the boys on the row,” she asked the girl sitting closest to her.The condoms were passed down, one by one, until each boy on the row had one.Mrs. Wrentmore repeated the process, moving down each row in the classroom. When she reached my row, Madison handed me a condom, giving me a quick once-over that left me blushing, as if she were playfully imagining what I’d have to do with it.“I am giving these out to the boys, because it is Your responsibility to wear protection, not your partners.”She went on to talk about the rise in STD and how we should all be practicing safe sex. This pretty much covered part one of her lesson plan.“Now that part one is concluded. I hope you’ve all learnt something valuable and that if you are sexually active, you continue to be safe. Now on to part two.”She returned back to the front of the class and began talking about reproduction, the differences between males and females. We sat there listening and looking at diagrams in our text books.There wasn’t much time left to the lesson, when Mrs. Wrentmore announced what the assignment would be.“Now, I bet you’re all wondering, why I sat you all in this order. Well wonder no more, class! Your assignment is to work with the person next to you, and here’s the twist.”She paused for dramatic effect.“In an effort to foster a greater understanding of the opposite sex, which I think is incredibly important. Boy’s you will write a report on the girls reproductive system and girls you will write a report on the boys, then when you’ve done your individual assignments, you will then need to work together, to combine your new found knowledge into a report.”The class was somewhat stunned by this, with each of us looking at the person sitting next to us.Madison and I exchanged looks with each other.“I guess we’re working together then,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ear again.I wanted to sound cool, but all I could say was, “yeah.”“Do you want to meet up in the library later to prep?” Madison asked.“Sure, yes, that would be great.” I replied sounding a little bit too eager.“Okay, I’ll see you there.”She stood up and smiled at me once more and left with one of her friends. I could see them whispering amongst themselves, when just before they left the classroom, she looked back at me and gave me another one of her dazzling smiles.I was dumbstruck, I actually had a conversation with Madison, and not only that I get to work with her too. I’m not sure how comfortable I’ll be with the subject matter, but hey, I get to spend time with the marvelous Madison, so who cares.I met up with Ethan, and he could tell how excited I was to be working with Madison.“Right, don’t mess this up man. This is the perfect opportunity to ask her out.”“I can’t, what if she says no?”“Then at least you know.”“I can’t.”“Yes you can. It’s time dude, it’s been like five years. You got this.”I mulled over Ethan’s encouragement; he was right of course. It had been five years, and I had done absolutely nothing about it. Was this my chance?After our lessons had finished, I left Ethan to go find Madison in the school library. As I pushed open the door, the smell of old books was over powering. I walked past the front desk and headed towards the study area. I couldn’t see any sign of Madison, so I started to look up and down the book aisles, in case she was there.I headed to the science section, the most probable place to find her given the assignment. I passed through Physics, then Chemistry before finally reaching Biology. Bingo! There she was. When she saw me, she gave a little wave, and I approached her.“Hey.”“Hey, so what are you looking at, books?” I responded, cringing internally. Books! Of course, books, you Tool! We’re in a bloody library.“Yep, lots of books here,” she said, smiling to herself as she skimmed through a page in the book she was holding.Slowly but surely, I was reaching peak nervousness, and it started to show. When nervousness shows, awkwardness isn’t far behind.“Sorry, it was a stupid thing to say. Of course, it’s books,” I replied.“I’m Adam,” I said.“I know who you are, silly! We’ve been in the same class for like five years.”“Sorry, of course you do,” I said, my face turning bright red.I then tried to recover from my complete lack of cool by leaning against the bookshelf. With my arm outstretched, I placed my hand and subsequently my weight on a row of books. It soon became apparent that there was no backing to the shelf holding the books in place. As a result, they all tumbled off the shelf onto the floor on the other side of the next aisle down, causing me to stumble into the bookshelf itself, humiliating myself further.I quickly pulled myself back and tried to compose myself.“Are you okay?” Madison asked, touching the side of my arm.“Yeah, I’m fine, just a little…”“Just a little what?”“Nothing, it’s okay. So, what are we reading?” I said, keen to change the subject after making a complete tit of myself.“Well, I’ve found these books.”Madison handed me a book to hold, but I didn’t quite grab it properly, and it slipped out of my hand. Instinctively, we both reached down to catch it, causing us to bump heads.“Oww!” Madison cried out.“Oh my god, I am so sorry.”As if things weren’t going well already, my meeting with Madison was practically slapstick at this point. Please, Lord, just strike me down now and put me out of this misery.“It’s okay. Guess we’re both to blame for that one. Let’s go sit down, in case we hurt each other again,” she joked.We went over to the study area and sat down next to each other at a desk, placing our books in front of us.“So, where do we start?” I asked nervously.“Well, I guess I’m starting with the penis,” Madison replied, with a little wink.“In that case, I’ll start with your vagina, I mean the vagina. Sorry not yours, not that there’s anything wrong with your vagina, I’m guessing, not that I’ve seen your vagina. Oh boy.”I wanted to cram my fist into my mouth to stop myself, I had said the word vagina way too many times in one sentence.At this point, I had turned into what could only be described as a violent shade of red.Madison looked at me and burst out laughing.“You are so funny, you just dig yourself into all these little holes.”“Yeah, it’s quite the gift I’ve got. I think they call it foot-in-mouth disease.”Madison laughed again. She had such a melodic laugh; I could have listened to it all day.“Let’s just start reading shall we, then we’ll compare notes.”I nodded my head in agreement, in fear that I might say something stupid again.We red through our biology books in silence for the next ten minutes, when Madison declared she was bored of reading.She propped up her book, brought out her phone, and hid it behind the upright book.It looked as though; she was scrolling through pictures. It took me a moment to realize what she was looking at. Madison was busy scrolling through a photo gallery of men's cocks.Well this was certainly a side to Madison I didn’t expect to see.“Um, what are you doing?” I whispered.“I’m just curious, I can’t exactly write about something I’ve never seen before, now can I? Besides, I’m more of a visual learner you know. I like pictures and diagrams.”“Maybe the school library, isn’t the best place for that kind of learning.” I said worried someone would see and report us.“Hmm, maybe you’re right,” she said, then closing her browser down, just as someone walked behind us.“Tell you what, why don’t you come around to mine tonight and we can study then.”Oh my god, Madison had just invited me to her house. Her actual house! The place where she lived. Be cool, be cool I recited in my head.“Sure, I can do that.”“Great, here’s my address.”Madison wrote her address on the back page of my notebook.“See you at six?”“It’s a date. I mean not a date date. A study date. Oh boy, I’m doing it again.”“Uh huh,” Madison said, amused by my awkwardness.“I’m sorry.”“Don’t worry about it, it’s kinda adorable. Anyway, I’ll catch you later.”As I watched Madison walk away, I did everything I could to suppress my excitement. As soon as she left the library, I punched the air triumphantly, eliciting some strange looks from the other library users.I couldn’t believe it; I was actually going to Madison’s house. I know it’s not an actual date, but it’s gotta count for something right? and then there was that last remark, she called me adorable. Needless to say, I was on cloud nine from this point forward.As soon as school finished, I hurried home to get ready. I took a shower, then empty my closet and threw all my clothes on to my bed.Wha

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On this episode of One Indescribable Podcast… Adam H, Todd the Librarian, and TV Lindy continue their journey through all four seasons of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend by recapping Season 3, Episode 10: Oh Nathaniel, It's On! Then Adam and Lindy compete in Todd's quiz about podcasts! It's one indescribable amount of fun! Here are the anagrams if you want to play along: Timing Mud Bouncily A Demoted Dish Wight Roundly Wiggle Twin Omitted a Wallet A Smiths Eighteenth Snowsuit "That's her Paris!" We're truly happy you're here with us! Follow us on Twitter @oneCXGpodcast! Adam - @pianomanadam1 Todd - @librariantodd Lindy - @tvlindy

Oh Adam… ❤️‍

Find us: Head to our community page to register & join the MindfulCommerce community as an expert, brand or merchantInstagram: @mindfulcommerceFacebook @MindfulCommerceContact Us - info@mindfulcommerce.ioWhere to find Adam Pearce:Adam Pearce - LinkedInWhere to find Blend Commerce:Blend Commerce - WebsiteBlend Commerce - BlogLinks Mentioned in Episode:Magento CommerceAccentureDue WestOctane AIKlaviyoClubhouseBrewDogDr. Will'sShoppingGivesInsights Profiles'Start With Why' - book by Simon Sinek'Find Your Why' - book by Simon Sinek, Peter Docker, David Mead'The 4-Hour Workweek' - book by Timothy Ferriss'Life Leverage' - book by Rob MooreShownotes:Krissie Leyland  0:00Hello and welcome to the MindfulCommerce Podcast, a place where we talk to ecommerce brands, service providers and developers who care about protecting our planet. I'm Krissie.Rich Bunker  0:11and I'm Rich. We are your hosts. This podcast is an extension of the MindfulCommerce Community.Krissie Leyland  0:18The MindfulCommerce Community is a safe place for ecommerce brands and experts to connect, collaborate and explore opportunities to work together to unleash the power of e commerce as a force for good. Rich Bunker  0:30You can join by going to mindfulcommerce.io and then clicking "Community". See you there!Krissie Leyland  0:36Today, we are talking to Adam who is the CEO and cofounder of Blend Commerce, a Shopify agency specializing in turning ideas into reality. Blend are driven by success with a mission to help Shopify entrepreneurs achieve significant and sustainable growth. I love Blend Commerce's motto, which is "clarify, create and convert," which we will go into more detail on in the show. So hello, Adam. It's great to have you here. How are you doing?Adam Pearce  1:08Yeah, very good. Thanks, Krissie. Thanks for having me. I'm really pleased to be on here.Krissie Leyland  1:13Good, great! It's always nice to hear that you're pleased to be on the podcast. So do you want to start by just telling us a bit about how Blend Commerce came about? So I believe you're running it with your brother-in-law, which is interesting.Adam Pearce  1:29Yeah, so shout out to anyone else who is in business with their family, because it's good and it's hard too. But yeah, just a detail about how it came about. So my business partner, Peter, who is also a brother-in-law, he started out developing Shopify stores about seven or eight years ago. We'd always talked about going to business together. He was banging on about Shopify, and how it was this great thing that was allowing people to have ecommerce stores. He said they're all these people in the US and Canada that were building out these stores and making really good money from it. I just kind of brushed it aside and said, "yeah, whatever...  it's just another fad." People were already already use Magento for ecommerce. I was actually managing a Magento store at the time. I didn't really kind of think much of it. Then, probably about a year into developing, it really started to pick up and Shopify started becoming more mainstream lexicon. When I looked at it, you know, having the fact that I was actually owning a Magento store at the time, I started realizing what the opportunity was. Basically what happened was that I was a sales and marketing director for an educational app company. We had been talking about this idea of going to business. I said, "Look, I've worked with agencies before, and what really annoys me about agencies is that I can't get everything that I need done under one roof. Because I come from marketing, while Peter came from development, that's how we came up with the idea with Blend Commerce. It's the idea that we are blending both development and marketing in one. So that's where the cheesiness of "Blend" comes in. We now trying to be the on demand digital department for companies. A lot of growing businesses, they think about recruiting, but actually trying to recruit a developer, a designer & a marketer: there's a lot of costs with that, as well a headache in that. Basically, we just come on essentially, as that automatic department that you can then talk to, and get everything you need from one team. So yeah, that's how we came about.Krissie Leyland  3:46Perfect. I love that. It's like blending your two brains together, as well, so not just your creativity from the marketing side, but also like the geeky techie side as well, which is perfect. Yeah, it's such a headache trying to find all the unicorns in the world, isn't it? So if they're all in one place, that's perfect. So I recently saw that you went through a bit of a rebrand and a new website so you want to talk a bit about that? That'd be cool.Adam Pearce  4:19Definitely. Well, we are you know, not unlike any any other business, we imagined what our business should be like... And it always gets to a point–and we get this with our own clients–where we go "Look. Actually, what we will be pretending to be or what we were aiming to be initially is not actually what we are." So we've been through a few different versions of websites now. The first ever website that we did, it was very copy heavy, it was very tongue in cheek... A little bit rude sometimes. That was kind of "our take" at the time, that we want it to be very different. But the problem is that people weren't really going to take us that seriously. We got some really good clients but I think a lot of people couldn't see through the fact that we were very jokey & that we had a lot of means on our site. It just didn't really fit in with the kind of customers that we were working with.Fast forward, coming out two years after we launched our initial site, we then sort of started obsessing about this. It was actually a financial services company: They got this really cool looking black and green thing and we decided that we wanted to have that. But again, I'm not saying with the Average Joe's of the Shopify world, but we're definitely a company that values each other and has got a very strong team mentality. So that black and green at the very start was trying to be a little bit too "too cool for school" and that just wasn't us. So we actually went through a process with our head of design Stephan to look at a different brand archetypes. Now, if you're not familiar with brand archetypes, have a look on our website, blendcommerce.com, there's a really great blog in there. Essentially, what brain archetypes are is looking at different parts of your company as a personality. While going through quite an in depth process of working out exactly who I wanting to be, we landed on the fact that we were: the Everyman, the Sage and the Hero. You can kind of look at that a little bit like  an aeroplane: so the hero is the body, then we're tipped on the wings by the everyman and then on the other side there's the sage. I won't go into too much detail but when you look at our site, if you understand archetypes, hopefully you'll see that that's what we're looking for. That was the main purpose of going through that rebrand, because we wanted to make sure that people see us as that helpful, honest, and really direct company that is going to help people rather than the typical very skinny looking site that is very flashy, and has got big brand names all over it. That really isn't us. So we wanted to make sure it reflected what we do as a company. I think the other thing as well, Krissie, is that our site is also on Shopify. It always has been, always will be. Ultimately look, you know, Shopify wasn't made for for service-based businesses, but there's definitely capability of doing it. We want to show that with our own website, some of the things that are possible with a Shopify store.Krissie Leyland  7:26That's so cool. So for example, when you do win a client, do you do the payment system through Shopify or is it just purely fo a front end website?Adam Pearce  7:40Yeah, we actually used to sell our services through the Shopify payment system. We're going to be bringing in more productized services in the next 12 months. So we'll go back to using Shopify for that but in terms of, larger scale projects, we do that externally at the moment.Krissie Leyland  7:58Yeah, probably makes more sense. Did you notice a difference in the types of clients that you were attracting after you did the rebrand?Adam Pearce  8:10Definitely. I think that the thing was, is that with the rebrand, we also made sure that our tone of voice was right. Obviously, you know a lot more on this than I do, but that was the thing: making sure that we were talking in the right way to our customers. That was also things like podcasts that were on & social media, just trying to make sure everything was aligned. I think now, as a result of that, we've definitely seen the kind of clients that we're looking for. We work best, really, with clients that are doing 100k a month plus, or maybe just below that. So helping us to get in front of those type of people was a big part of that rebrand. Yeah, it definitely has made a big difference.Krissie Leyland  8:55That's so cool. So the guy that you went through that process with, was he kind of like helping you to understand who your customers are and the way that you want them to feel? Was that part of the process as well?Adam Pearce  9:09Definitely. Stephen, our head of designed delivery, he actually came in at a great time. Because we were looking to do this and we actually tasked this to Stephen as his first first project. So you didn't kind of have that issue you've got you know, when we're usually in a company for over six months, and you get a little bit blinkered in terms of what the company is really about. So Stephen came in with a real power of sort of fresh eyes. So if you have an opportunity where someone is coming into your company, even if they're not a designer, I think it's always worth you talking to them and then getting their opinion of what they think you should actually be doing. Obviously if that's not possible then using someone external thing is a really good move because what we would have resulted with with just me and Peter, or me and the existing team, I know would have been a very different to what we've got actually today.Krissie Leyland  10:05You're always too close to your business to really know if what you're seeing is actually making people think what you want them to think about your business, if that makes any sense. Yeah, that sounds really cool and it's a nice process to go through, isn't it?You get clarity on who you are and the types of people that you want to work with. One of my favorite things in business! So let's move on slightly to your services. So what are your core services at Blend?Adam Pearce  10:46The easiest way to think about it is: we offer something that we call the on demand digital department. What this means is, as a business owner, it's likely that you are going to be facing a particular problem. Whether that is that you feel like your conversion rates too low, you feel like actually, you're not selling in the right markets or you perhaps, are at a point where your your average order value stagnated. I think with those problems, it's not just development. What you're actually going to need is some strategy, some design work, some development work, and you're gonna need some marketing work too.So when you work with us, we are actually going to take a look at your business first and say, "Right. Number one: what's the problem? Secondly, what are the things we think needs to be done? And thirdly, in what order they need to be done it? Off the back of that then, what we then do is say, "Look, you're going to need this amount of time from development, this amount of time from design, and this amount of time for marketing to do these things. We will then set a goal, which will be related around solving that problem and then we'll just keep on reviewing that. Now we don't go down the route of doing sort of large projects. We prefer to actually kind of say to client, "Let's solve the here and now issues and then let's build on that, from the growth."If you look at that as a model, it is slightly different to what a lot their agencies do. I always talk about an example: a few years ago, I bought a very nice, flashy car. When I bought it, I went into the garage, I asked for all the additional bells and whistles. So all the tech in there, the heated seats, all that jazz. I think after a month, what I realized is that I probably used about 10% of that stuff and it started to frustrate me that I paid all this extra money for Sat Nav, when the Sat Nav was crap, and I could've just used my phone. And I think "No, if you think about a website, it's exactly the same thing."Ultimately, when you're having a website, you want it to get from A to B. So if you focus on solving that core problem that you've got–which might be low conversion rates, so that's your A to B–as time goes on, and you get more data and you've experienced using that site, you can then work out what bells and whistles you do need to actually add. That's the way that we work as a company. We'll have that time to sort of get settled in and then after we'll add the things that we actually do need to add, rather than just going for the add ons from the immediate start point.Krissie Leyland  13:32Yeah, that's so nice and probably less overwhelming as well. Because even so with the MindfulCommerce Directory, we found it really hard to give our developers and designers the exact thing that we wanted straightaway. We were like, "Oh, I don't know!" It wasn't until we got something launched, like an MVP site, that we went, "Oh, it would be really handy to have this, this and this." Yeah, so to start off small and have one goal... I like that and the bit at the beginning too when you set your goals. It's just really nice. You like wake up every morning go, "Right, how am I going to work on this, with whoever I'm working with, to reach that goal?" I guess that's part of 'clarify', which is one of the goals that we're going to work towards. Then, "How are we going to create it and then convert?" So, how does that process work if I was a one of your clients?Adam Pearce  14:41The "clarify, create, convert," we just felt that it summarizes exactly what we do. So the initial call that we tend to have the clients is all about clarifying, "What exactly is the problem?" I think that the interesting thing is that when when you look at a problem, typically clients can say, "We don't feel like we're selling enough." But when you drill down on that, what you're actually finding is what they're really saying to you. And that is: we have this product that we thought was going to be an absolute winner and it's not selling in the way that we thought it was. But we do have other products that are selling well. So rather than actually saying, "Well, let's try and fix that product that we thought was going to sell better. Let's ramp up on the product that is selling very well but it's not maybe kind of a sexy product that you wanted to sell, and then get your growth in that way." So I think that clarification process is kind of flipping the mindset a little bit here saying, "What actually can we change and what is the real problem?" So that's the first thing. The next thing then in terms of the "Create" is to say, "We've got the problem, you know the cause of that problem, and now we actually need to start putting things into place that are going to actually changed that situation." Again, we don't want to necessarily go in and change everything overnight, but what we do want to do is make some smaller changes to see if we can get them to that convert point. Then basically, we're just going to loop that process around again. So, we've had three months, we clarified it, we created something, we converted. Now, let's go again and say "What are the problems now?" So it might be that once you've done that change the site–so maybe you've got new landing pages, what we're finding out now is actually the email signup rate on those pages is not as high as we need it to be because we know that email, for example, is a very good sales channel. So again, starting up that process again. It's these kind of small, iterative changes that are going to get you beyond that threshold of that 100k a month. I think that's where, a lot of our clients get a little bit sticky, because we always tend to see there's a bit of stagnation, 82k - 110k a month. Once you can get beyond that, that route to 500k a month is actually a lot smoother.Krissie Leyland  17:00Oh my god, I love it. I love how you talk through that it's so nice. I bet you're really good at sales.Adam Pearce  17:07I don't do sales anymore too much. (laughter) The reason it sounds quite polished when I say it to you, isthat its something that we've been doing a lot of work on Krissie. I would definitely recommend anything by Simon Sinek, "Start With Why". It's a little bit cliche, I suppose in a way but a few months ago, and my business partner actually did a very short workshop with with Team Simon. I think it was about $29–so, super cheap–but what it did is it helped us get our 'why'. What we did with that is that we then translated that into the "why" for our company. By having that, we can ask, "When we're doing something, does it align with that reason of why we get out of bed in the morning? If it doesn't, then that's not do it." I know, it's probably sounds like I've got a lot of conviction to it–and I do–because I see how the things that we're doing are aligned to that particular 'Why?'Krissie Leyland  18:10I absolutely love that. Is that the guy that wrote the book that is in blue writing ("Find Your Why")? What's his name?Adam Pearce  18:24It's Simon Sinek. There's a five minute version of his very famous TED Talk, where he talks about "the why, the how, and the what?" So what he says is that a lot of people are very good at explaining what they do. So if I go to a party or networking event, and someone says to me, "What do you do?" Well it's very easy: "I'm a CEO of a Shopify agency, based in Warwickshire." Well, frankly, who cares? But if I said to someone, "Look, what I want to do, my why is that I want to inspire people, so that actually everyone can achieve what they're capable of." Then if you get a few more raise eyebrows, "Well, what do you mean by that?" That's actually my 'why'. So if you kind of have that as your center point, not only can it then generate better conversations face to face for also marketing, but also then it makes you a lot easier to then differentiate yourself from other people. That's the big piece of what we've tried to do, both as individuals but also as a company.Krissie Leyland  19:32Wow. And is your 'why' as an individual the same as your 'why' in business.Adam Pearce  19:40So we've basically got two very different peopleat the head of our company, me and Peter. We're also very big into this thing called 'Insights Profiles', which basically looks at how you as a person & your personality aligns to particular colors, which represent different moods and activities, things that you're doing. So you can read more about the insights profiles but I think, me and Peter are very different. Now Peter's 'why' is more about being able to solve problems quickly to empower people to work rapidly. So his is quite different to mine. What we've done is that we're working on a company at the moment & we're there [at the 'why'] I think. But we're changing it slightly, because as more team members come in, we want to make sure that our company 'why' is aligned. So it needs to be something where everyone in the company cam feel like they're part of this. That 'why' is reflective of what people actually get up in the morning for. But equally, we can convert that into something that clients can then actually say, "Yes, I want to work with these guys for that reason!"Krissie Leyland  20:49Yeah because then they're aligned, hopefully, with your 'why'.Adam Pearce  20:54Absolutely. I'd recommend for you to do a session as a team. You know, we did one with our team probably about three months ago. The key thing that came out of our session on the 'why' with the team was that all of us had been in a situation in our lives where someone had told us that either we weren't good enough, we couldn't do something, or we weren't allowed to do something. That was a common theme that was coming across from everyone. So for me, it was the fact that when I was at schools in a careers lesson, my teacher leaned over my shoulder while I was looking at Accenture, which is a consultancy company. He said, "Oh Adam... they only employ the best people there!" From that point at 16, I was like, right, "screw you, I'm going to prove you wrong." And I did. A lot of people on the team had similar stories about parents, colleagues, friends & family that had told them that they couldn't do something or weren't allowed to do something, and they went on to prove them wrong. That's where we're going with our company wise: If you've been in that situation, where you faced adversity or people trying to put up roadblocks to where you want to be, then actually we're a great company to work with, because we've experienced that. We know how to move past those roadblocks. That's the similar thing that clients have, they get to a certain level, and they think, "Actually, the market is telling me that we can't go any further." We'll actually, screw that. You can! You just got to work out different ways of how to get there. That's how we aligned our 'why'.Krissie Leyland  22:32You know what, that's amazing and that was literally touched me? I recently published an episode, just a bonus random one, talking about my experiences and why did I end up in business? Well actually, I think it's because in school, I had a bit of a shit time and had people telling me, "You can't do that. You're worthless. You're this, you're that." And it's like, actually a can! Now my 'why' is to inspire other people to just follow their dreams and do what they want to do, because they can. One of the reasons why I love Shopify is because it gives lots of people in different situations access to business. Adam Pearce  23:23I completely agree. I think that's what I love about it too, Krissie, because I think the nice thing is with Shopify: most industries are 50, 100 or 200 years old, for example. We're talking about an industry here that in effect is less than 15 years old. You haven't got the old boys club that you get in finance, management software–where I used to work–or in teaching, which again is an industry that I used to be in. So everyone's got that opportunity to not feel like they're being judged. We all get imposter syndrome, I agree, but I don't think it's as prevalent in Shopify, because we are all new to this industry. It's a new thing that we're doing and we've all got a damn good right to be here. So yeah, I completely agree on that front.Krissie Leyland  24:15Oh my god. I didn't expect you to like bring that up but I totally, totally agree. I actually also love Toby's little story, you know, snowboarding stuff. Then I can relate to that about surfing and whatever. It's just also giving people freedom, like you said, we're all in this at the beginning of something. Even though I still get massive imposter syndrome, it's about finding your niche within it anyway and then telling the world.I need to like, take that in. So going back to your process of getting clients beyond the 100k a month threshold, do you wanna like just talk about how you have helped any particular clients to do that? And what that looked like?Adam Pearce  25:21Yeah, certainly. Typically speaking, when we work with a client, they've got a particular problem that they're trying to solve. Here are a couple of different examples: One is that we had a company called Due West that we work with, who are a clothing brand based out in Canada. The main thing for them was that they were seeing that their sales started to stagnate. The reason for that was that the they had a very strong customer base and those existing customers had stopped buying at the rate they were before. Trying to acquire new customers, of course, is costly, and then the profitability of your sales is then going to go down. So the main thing that we focused on with them is really twofold. One is that, first of all, they haven't refreshed their website for a very long period of time. And also, because they have brick and mortar stores, there wasn't this alignment with the brick and mortar stores and the online shop. A lot of people were shopping in store and online. Or they have a lot of tourists who come in and shop in store, and they continue to shop when they're back home. So the main thing for them was that we need to do a redesign of the store. And it wasn't about, you know, basically fundamentally changing what was happening on site.The first step was actually, we just need to make sure that the brand looked the same consistently through the store, so that the site actually has some alignment with the brick and mortar store. The second thing was that on their email marketing front, they again needed to do the same piece of work there. So those are basically the two key things that we did. What basically happened with those guys was that after three months, they increased their sales by I think 45%. So it had the the impact that they wanted and now we're still working with those guys to basically say, "Right, we've got the actual branding right now. People are interacting better, but what can we do to actually push them to buy more." So I think that's kind of a good example of look, where you've got an issue, you're using two different mechanisms to actually change it. You're looking at the conversion, and then right, we're back at that clarify point.Each time, it's not just necessarily about "Just go and do a redesign." for example. It's not just about that. I can't really share with you about particular clients that we do work with but it goes a lot further than the actual online store. You know, it can be about internal relationships, within members of staff or members of the team. It can be about delivery processes. It can be about taxation issues... all these things that we're not experts on. But if we can identify it, and then we can put them in touch with someone who can help them, then actually, that then does have a trickle down effect to their sales. Because if you've got a situation where you know, two members of your leadership team aren't necessarily seeing eye to eye, but we can come in, and actually, by going through the process of working with you, get you to work better. Then there's a lot of, I guess, unexpected changes that happen when clients work with us. Ultimately, they trickle down to the bottom line. So I think that's the important thing to know here: from my point of view, when you work with an agency, ultimately they should be looking at you as a business and not just a website. And I think that's the kind of thing that a lot of clients like is that the website is just actually an asset. It's not their business. There's a lot of things that go behind that website that are really important to try and tackle as well.Krissie Leyland  29:00That's so true. Cool. I've never heard of an agency doing that actually. But obviously, the Shopify partnerships is really valuable as an agency, because you can do that–as long as they live up to what they say that they're going to do, because then obviously, it will come back to you, if not. Then that helps to grow your client's business, and they'll eventually come back to you anyway. So that's interesting. I was just thinking about the client, that you sorted out the website and the branding for, and then I think you mentioned email... So how do you tend to get a potential customers from the website onto their email list and then sell stuff through email?Adam Pearce  29:57Yeah, good question. The thing at the moment for us, and the thing that I just absolutely love, is a product called Octane AI Shop Quiz. What this does is that you can actually have on your site, a quiz that will ask that person a set number of questions that you want to ask them. So, when you think about a quiz, we always probably think like the Facebook quizzes where you work out what Disney character you are. I'm not talking about that but the principle, I guess, is the same. Let's say, for example, you're a beauty brand. If you can ask them a series of questions about their skin type, the age or lifestyle, and then also ask for their email address, what you can do is then recommend them a particular number of products that you think they should buy, there and then on the site, but what you've also done is you've collected that data.Now we use Klaviyo with all of our client and because you can integrate, obtain our shop quiz with Klaviyo, all of that data then get stored on that person's profile. So let's say for example, Krissie, you complete that on my beauty store. Then,, I find out about your skin type, your age group & your lifestyle. If you buy when you complete that quiz, great. If you don't, by no problem, because I've collected a lot of data about you that I can then personalize that email marketing to you. So it might be that, maybe for example, you're telling me you've got dry skin. So then I'm gonna send you an email that says, "Here's three great products for making sure that you get more moisture into your skin." Personalize without kind of feeling like, "Hi, Krissie, you must buy these products!" A lot of people do, but that doesn't really work. So, in terms of getting people to sign up, that is my hot tip for the moment, certainly.Krissie Leyland  31:48That is so cool. I love it. Can you do that for a normal website?Adam Pearce  31:53Yeah to be honest with you Krissie, well, I I've actually been talking about using it for our own website. And look, let's say if someone wanted to join the MindfulCommerce Community, you could create a quiz that would basically ask a series of questions that would assess if they're a good fit or not. If they were a good fit, you could then recommend them to apply. If they weren't a good fit, you could say please join our waiting list, you know, and kind of go through that way. So that that would be a way I would say to use it for you.Krissie Leyland  32:23Oh my God, I'm sold! I'm doing it. That is awesome. But I was also thinking, like, you know, if I'm a brand, I'm a sustainable brand, you could ask, "what are your values?" So: what's important to you? Are you vegan? Do you need plastic free? Like that could be the quiz! The quiz could be: What do you care about? That's just great. We can just personalize everything and then that's not spammy. While you would think it's less spammy because it's actually interesting to that person who's reading the email?Adam Pearce  33:02Absolutely, I think the other thing is while you can do with it is that if you were looking at sustainable brands, people would be interested in different paths. If we were talking about environmentalism, sustainability, mindfulness... If you then were selecting that then naturally, you're interesting in those different things. You could then send a guide, PDF, or an ebook related to each one of those different streams as a result of completing that particular quiz. So yeah, I think there's a bagload of opportunities with that.Krissie Leyland  33:41I literally want to put it in my search bar right now. How much is it? Just interested.Adam Pearce  33:48Um, I believe it starts at $29 a month. And then I think if you convert someone to a sale, they charge you literally cents for each conversion. There's an enterprise plan, which I think is probably into the high hundreds.Krissie Leyland  34:09Nice. I was on clubhouse last night at 10pm, like in bed–or was it 11? I don't know, it was really late. Anyway, the Octane AI CEO was talking. It was really interesting, I loved it. So now just in my head, I'm gonna have to probably invest in them.Adam Pearce  34:35It's definitely worth having a listen to Ben Parr, who's the president. And then there's also Matt Schlicht as well, who's their CEO. Those are two people definitely worth following.Krissie Leyland  34:46Yeah, I think that was the guy. I think it was Matt or maybe it was both of them. Anyway, are there some pointers that you would give to those who aren't quite on the 100k mark. Is there anything that they can kind of do in-house, apart from Octane AI and Klaviyo that can get them to the 100K, and then maybe they'll work with you.Adam Pearce  35:14To answer you, the biggest question that people ask me is: "I've got x amount of money, what should I spend it on?" Nine times out of 10, if you're not going to be working agency, I would say photography. It's one of those things that, honestly, is one of the biggest reasons for slowing down sites. So the mistake that some people make is that they'll go out, and they'll source a photographer that then put the huge high resolution images on the site. They'll see the conversion rate goes down and say, "Well hang on, what's going on here?" The reason will be is because those images are too large. So first things first, everyone who's listening: if you do have a Shopify store, go and check your site speed. If it is poor, use one of the many free tools that are out there that you can use to actually reduce the size of images. But if you've got images, you know, where they're different sizes, you've got different backgrounds, you haven't maybe got consistent angles on all of your images, all these things are a real turnoff. There's been a lot of studies done, the real in-depth white papers produced on this. Photography is always one of the things that has an impact. So if you're able to pay for some decent photography, then I would say definitely, it's worth doing that. I think the other thing too, is that if you're trying to drive that traffic, and you haven't got a lot of cash at the moment, try new things at Facebook groups. They can be a really fantastic way of not only driving people to your site, but also as well, a lot of market research. We have a company that we work with that actually sells candlemaking supplies and the very first thing we did with them is that we set up a Facebook group, which is all about candle making in the UK. From that, we learned straightaway what kind of products people are interested in. We understood what problems they were going through. We understood what they didn't like about the competition. So all of that was a really good thing to do. Look you know, starting a Facebook group is easy to do. You know, it will take time to build a community up around it but if you are low on cash, that's a great way to work out what you need to do next. It will give you that roadmap you need to grow.Krissie Leyland  37:29Completely agree. On the photography side, oh my god, it's the worst. If somebody's got terrible imagery and it's all different sizes, and Higgledy Piggledy... oh, I'll click off straightaway. Also, one thing I was thinking then is, with photography and resolution, if you lower the resolution, it not only increases site speed, but it reduces your impact on the planet, because you're taking less energy. I talk about this all the time but it's basically: solve your site speed and also help the planet. With the community thing, of course, I totally agree. There's tons out there like, eco pod. And also, at MindfulCommerce, we're going to build a second directory that will be completely free where brands can get listed and stuff like that. So yeah, there's so much out there but that was really good tips from you. Thank you! So have you worked with any brands who are trying to be better for the planet? And if so, what are those projects like?Adam Pearce  38:55Yeah, definitely. So there's one I wanted to talk to you about in particular. A company that actually basically sells supplies to a particular hobby–I don't want to say too much because I don't necessarily want to give too much away here–but the issue they're facing was that the owner of the company was very, I think, cognizant about packaging. He was seeing what Amazon were doing, in terms of sending out these huge boxes with very small products inside–and sometimes, you know, three or four levels of packaging within that. With his company, he wanted to bring down the cost of shipping for his customers, but he also wanted to reduce actually the amount of wastage and his carbon footprint with each of that shipping. Now, one of the things that we were very keen on doing: "How do we basically indicate to someone that when they purchase something, they're not doing this in a very sustainable way because of the way that that product needs to be packed?" So we actually built them a tool that will allow people to build a box so that they could actually visually see the space that was left in that box. BrewDog did this very well. So if you go and order beer from BrewDog, if I put six cans of my favorite beer in there, they're actually going to show you on the screen, that your crate, your box, is still got six spaces in there. Psychologically, that's quite powerful because you say, "Well, okay, actually, I'm being a bit wasteful here. I could actually get more in there rather than waste that space." Actually, also with that, they also do a down sell on it where they recommend that you buy less. So that actually you're reducing the amount of waste in terms of packaging. So I think that's a project that we've been really pleased with. And we're actually diong something else with another brands about just being more efficient with that packaging. So I think that's an important one.Krissie Leyland  41:01Wow, that's cool. One thing that I just thought of then is, if you've got a brick and mortar store as well, and you've put things on the shelves, if you could make your packaging ready to be shipped, if that makes sense. So it's already, like in a box. I don't know if I'm making sense here.Adam Pearce  41:33I think that what you're saying is that then you don't have to completely repackage or repurpose your product. So then, it makes sense, from an operations point of view, from a sustainability point of view, from a cost point of view. It's got to be ready to go and I think that that's exactly the right thing to do.Krissie Leyland  41:54Yeah and that's actually really cool of BrewDog to do that. Also, I was thinking, "Oh, I've got room for six more. Okay! But then does that increase how much you buy, so it would increase average order value as well." But then you said that they encourage you to buy less, which was quite interesting.Adam Pearce  42:20I mean, I think on the one hand, you could say, "Well, look. You're increasing the carbon footprint by adding more products." But it also depends on your products. BreweDog, for example, I think they're even carbon negative now, definitely carbon neutral. But if you then got an associated carbon footprint with that delivery, then actually, as a proportion, that level, you're actually being better, because you're then not gonna have that other order on top of that, to then give the extra that you would have ordered in a second order. So I think it kind of depends on the way you look at it, but it's kind of win--win. You know, from an environmental point of view, but but also from a sales and business growth point of view as well.Krissie Leyland  43:09Definitely. Cool. Love it. I was super excited to see that you had read "The Four Hour Workweek" by Tim Ferriss. I personally get stuck in my work zone, I can't get out of it but I'm trying to not work as much, like give myself time outside for doing nice things and spending time with my friends. So have you experienced burnout before and is there a way that you were hoping to combat that... or?Adam Pearce  43:44Yeah, I've 100% experienced burnout. The thing is with the four hour workweek book, I'm nowhere near a four hour workweek at the moment. What I have done is though, that I we only now work Monday to Thursday, so I'm getting close to it and that's basically my business partner. I think the main thing that that book taught me is that actually, if you can put structures into the way that you work, you can work a heck of a lot more efficiently. For example, one of the things he talks about in the book is, checking your emails twice or three times a day. We've all been guilty of opening your laptop at eight or nine o'clock in the morning, spending 45 minutes responding to emails, then feeling tired and getting a coffee, then basically, killing that morning. The one thing that I got from the book is that I also do this "eat the frog" thing where you're going to be your biggest task of the day, the first thing. So I generally work from quarter past seven in the morning, till half past four in the afternoon. From quarter past seven to half past eight. I'm smashing something out that I need to do. Like I need to do a finance analysis, and I've done that, it's out the way. Then I can go and check email. Because you feel like you've accomplished something, you're also then more efficient with your time, so I think that's kind of the one side of it. So in terms of burnout, I don't mind admitting that I still suffer from depression. I've medicated for depression for probably about four years, along with kind of a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy. The thing is with this is that, a lot of the mental health issues that I had were exacerbated by burnout but obviously, not the root cause of it. I think I'd say that if anyone is listening, number one, if you ever want to talk about mental health to me, find me on LinkedIn. I absolutely would love to talk to you about it and tell you about some of the coping strategies that I've used & tend to use.But I also think having that awareness that is actually something that's real, and not like you're being a flake, which is how, you know, some people will tell you if you've experienced burnout. Everyone will have something that indicates when they're burning out. It might be the fact that you're not sleeping as much or it might be the fact that you're not being able to make decisions. So look around at those warning signs, and if it gets to that point, then literally take a step back. Because ultimately, wherever your business is now, or wherever your job is right now, wherever it is that you're doing, it can stay at that place for the time being. It doesn't need to be pushing forward, and you're not going to lose where you are, and what you've achieved so far. So if you do need to step away from it for a week, two weeks a month.In my case, I basically had three months out to figure out what the hell I wanted to do in life when I had my big, I would say, a sort of meltdown–but after that point, you can pick up on the things that you've done. So I don't think it's that case, you think like I've got to get over it. If you are that point, just say, "Look, my mind is just devoid of ideas. I'm not enjoying anything. I'm not taking any benefit from anything that I'm doing." Then just step back from it, and just say, "What are the things that truly make you happy? What are the things that really don't make me happy?" I actually did this one because I actually had a breakdown when I was a teacher. I just completely was in beds in tears in a ball for probably about a month. When I got out of that process, that period, I actually got a piece of paper and I wrote down the pros and the cons of things that I liked and the things that I didn't like about my job, about my relationship, about my life, about our friendships, and I looked at all the things that I didn't didn't like. Then what I did was that I looked at it said, "Is there a job where I can get more things that I like that I dislike, and what are the things that I disliked that I can actually remove from my life, or I can actually make better? The result of that: certain relationships or friendships that had, I got rid of. Certain things that I did, I got rid of and never did again. Certain things I know that I need to start doing, I start doing. So for example, running, exercising with a thing that I never did that I now do religiously. And that helps me with my mental health and avoid that burnout. So that will be my tip.Krissie Leyland  48:33That is amazing. Wow. Thank you for sharing that. It's also really brave to like talk about that kind of stuff. Yeah, normally whenever I feel burned out, I just can't do anything. I'll just sit on the sofa, sat there going, "I don't know what I'm doing my life!" But then, yeah, you just have to take a break. That's what I'm trying to teach myself is to, like you said, take a step back and just think, "you know, what do I enjoy doing?" and then just do more of that for a little bit. So for me, I have to go surfing or just be in the sea and then come back to working when I feel positive again, and ideas are coming in my head again. So, I think that's really powerful. And how you said to write down a list of all the things that you like doing and all the things you don't like doing and then what can you get rid of or delegate as Tim would probably say? Yeah, love it. So... do you think it's actually possible to reach a four hour workweek?Adam Pearce  49:59Good Question. I wonder, you know, whether actually, it is possible because I think delegation is something that I think I've learned to do better, I'm still not great at. I'm too much of a control freak but ultimately, that's going to be the thing that stopped me from doing that. And for me, when I initially started thinking about this, that thought the four hour workweek was like, "that's going to be amazing!" But actually, what I realized is that that's not actually what I want. And it might be that actually, for you, it might be the same: "well actually, I just want to work mornings, or I want to work four days a week, because I want to do this particular thing." So I think the main thing for me & my business partner, Peter: two years ago, we both set it up, we would love to not work Fridays, because at that time, both our wives are both expecting children. We said, wouldn't it be amazing, while they're not at school, from birth to four, to be able on a Friday to then go out to the zoo for a day, or go and do something fun with them, or take them horse riding, whatever it might be. That's what we realized will make us happy: to have more time to that with our family. So it could be possible, but I also think there's no point putting that pressure on yourself because, ultimately, is that the thing that you really want to do? I think I for if I was in four hours a week, I would just be a wreck.Krissie Leyland  51:44If you just did four hours a week, you'd just sat there itching thinking "I need to work on that!" because you like what you do it. That's why you choose to be in the business that you're in. But I really liked it when you said, that progress that you've made isn't going to just go away and you don't always have to be working towards the next thing and the next thing... which is what my mind tells me quite a lot the time. But yeah, I don't think I could do four hours a week either.Adam Pearce  52:16No, I think it would drive me crazy.Krissie Leyland  52:20Oh, gosh. Well, I just love that book. But also there's Rob Moore's. Love that one. What's it called?Adam Pearce  52:34I don't know but again, he's he's very active in Clubhouse.Krissie Leyland  52:40"Life Leverage," I think.Adam Pearce  52:41Yes, that's it.Krissie Leyland  52:43Brilliant book, you should read it. So yeah, I think we've covered quite a lot. I'm very conscious of your time, it's 11 o'clock and we did have technical difficulties at the beginning. So I guess one final question would be: I'm really excited that you are officially on the mindful commerce directory... When I approached you with this, what was it that you were the most excited about?Adam Pearce  53:16I think the main thing is for me is that the way that you set this up, Krissie, is the fact that around the issue that we've got in the world is that there is a lot of shaming going on, around not being sustainable. What I liked about this is that you you're not basically saying with this directory, that you have to be completely 100% sustainability in everything that you do. What you're saying here is that let's start taking steps to be more sustainable. And that's what really appealed me to it.It's the same with me and my company: I feel like we are fairly sustainable in some things that we do. You know, we don't do travel, we work remotely, all those kind of things, but there's definitely things that we do buy for the company that are sustainable. And that's fine. I'm not gonna lie that we are 100% perfect.I think that's the thing here for brands and also for agencies. I feel that a lot of brands are scared about going down this route, because they feel they have to be 100% focused towards being sustainable and it's not the case. You can start small and start thinking about the actual impacts in your business. It's not also about saying, "We've got to do all these things, and it's going to cost us 'x' much." It's actually about saying, "You can be more sustainable and actually help yourself become more profitable, which is something I know that you know, quite a few brands, like Dr. Will's, for example, have found that sustainability is actually helped their bottom line as well. I think that's when it starts going a bit more of a two way conversation rather than something to be dictated to like some of the other kind of discussion and discourse that's out there on sustainability.Krissie Leyland  55:05Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? I think we just wanted to make it really open and just to be more of like facilitating a conversation. Like you said, definitely, there's no such thing as being 100% sustainable but there are things you can do like small things that have a big impact or have a big difference in the world, like even as simple as downloading ShoppingGives, which is an app that helps you to give back easily as a ecommerce brand. And like you said, it then comes back to your bottom line, because your customers will have more trust and loyalty and yeah, that's another episode but I'm super excited that you're part of it. Thank you.Adam Pearce  55:53We really appreciate being part of it, thank you.Krissie Leyland  55:56Welcome! Actually... this is my final question: Where can people find you?Adam Pearce  56:03Yep. Cool. So if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, just Adam Pearce. If you want to find out more about Blend Commerce, just go over to blendcommerce.com and you'll find lots of different useful blogs on there. You've got to the one about brand archetypes that I mentioned. You've got different things about Shopify apps, and things like mental health, a little blog that I've written recently. So quite an eclectic blog over there so yeah, go and take a look and let me know what you think.Krissie Leyland  56:30Perfect. Thank you so much. And yeah, thank you for your time today. It's been great.Adam Pearce  56:37No problem. Thank you!Krissie Leyland  56:38Thank you!Rich Bunker  56:39We hope you enjoyed the episode today. If you did, you're probably like being in our community. There's a whole host of exciting things going on.Krissie Leyland  56:46So don't forget to join by going to mindfulcommerce.io. Click on 'Community' and register from there.Rich Bunker  56:52If you liked this episode, please share, leave a review and remember to subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is a continuation of the last episode regarding transforming prayer. We discuss obstacles encountered when cultivating intimate prayer with God. Prayer is a key; but there is a key to prayer.

Original Broadcast: June 2008 Monthly Theme: Chronicles of Narnia, The Magician's Nephew For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to GOd, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. (Romans 8:7) "He Thinks Great Folly" After Aslan has created Narnia, he comes to a scared stiff Andrew. Polly asks Aslan to "unfrighten" Andrew. Aslan replies, "He thinks great folly, child ... he has made himself unable to hear my voice. ... Oh Adam's sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good" (185). Andrew was absorbed in the study of magic because there might be a way to travel between worlds. In his pride and arrogance, he thought that this gave him power over other worlds. He refused to listen to anything that said otherwise. We naturally desire what feels good and what pumps up our own ego. But when we stand before God, we realize, like Andrew, just how naked we are. We see that we've done things for ourselves and not for God. It was too late for Andrew. He could only receive a brief respite from his torments. It's not too late for you to turn to God and ask for forgiveness and guidance. Do that today. Amen.

On episode.3 of Jucie Box chronicles Desrae talks about the story of Adam and Eve. Eventually how their story relates to the “blame game”. As she continues to discuss the concept of being content with yourself as well as the fear of losing time.

A return to Gallifrey sooner than we expected. We are back with another episode of your favorite Doctor Who podcast. Should we be worried? The ratings for Doctor Who have been slowly dropping. We talk about why the show must go on. Is Capaldi already the best Doctor? Some people are already saying so. We give our thoughts on where he stands. Are we already talking about Christmas? Popular actor Nick Frost is rumored (actually it may be confirmed now) to be appearing in the Christmas Special. Next time on Doctor Who. We speculate based on the trailer and some images for the next episode "Time Heist". Listen! We give our review of the latest episode and if you stick around after the credits you can hear Adam's crazy theory involving the Master. Oh Adam.

Michele Chiavarini "1 World" (DJ Spen, Gary Hudgins) Tony Humphries "Oh Adam" Micky More & Andy Tee "Philly Sensation" DJ Spen "Stranger" Thatmanmonkz "Girl I Know It" Bobby Blanco & Miki Moto "3am" (Supernova 10 Years Later) Krankbrother "Thank You Baby" Mr. V "Jus Dance" (Christian Nielsen) Michele Chiavarini "Let Me See You (Clap Your Hands)" Jeff Dougler, Balu "Oh My, My (Love Sick)" Floorplan "Never Grow Old" Aretha Franklin "Never Grow Old" (1972) EP117 Thank You Baby Recorded 06.25.14 Time 51:41 Lots of brand new gospel, soul & deep house tracks for your summer listening. Enjoy. iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/deep-house-episodes/id342587477

For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. (Romans 8:7) Aslan replies, "He thinks great folly, child ... he has made himself unable to hear my voice. ... Oh Adam's sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good" (The Magician's Nephew 185).

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think complexity gets a bad rap because I think a lot of times people think complexity is the opposite of simple and everyone loves simple because simple is elegant. How do you have your creator tools give people the knowledge of how to be able to address such complexity? 00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest today, David Hong of Webflow. 00:00:38 - Speaker 1: Hey, thanks so much for having me. 00:00:41 - Speaker 2: Now something that we talk about quite a bit in the Muse world, maybe we take inspiration from physical workspaces, physical studios, but I understand you are creating your own physical studio screen free these days. 00:00:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s one of the pandemic projects, if you will. We’ve been working in our garage and trying to create a more creative space that just really fosters movement and I think the inspiration just came from Back pain, you know, and just sitting in front of your desk all the time and just being on Zoom, which is a lot of my day these days. And I was watching Brett Victor seeing faces again and just really got a lot of inspiration of like How do you leverage like physical spaces to create stuff? So my girlfriend’s an interior designer and I used to do a lot of art. I went to school for art, which ties a lot into a lot of the work I’m interested in these days and really just wanted to create a space for us to be like, let’s just work all analog and really Just to feel something, right? Just create something really physical, just to really deviate away from what feels like a 100% digital world right now. 00:01:57 - Speaker 2: Yeah, doing things with your hands, the texture of paper or certainly craft materials. I like to go to just art stores, craft stores, and yeah, I like highlighters and I like chunky markers and I like butcher paper, and I like all that sort of thing, and I have less as the digital tools get better and better and in fact. Superior, particularly in their shareability, which is really important on your kind of distributed teams, those things become more of a curiosity maybe or something I keep around, but every once in a while I get them out for a similar reason to that. But yeah, maybe that means I should really just take up like wood block carving or something like that. 00:02:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah. The thing that’s interesting about that too is I think in many ways, our tools are processing way faster than we can think about our ideas. And the thing I love about working on paper and those chunky markers like you said, is it gives you time to really kind of flush through the idea and work on it because the problem today is not the level of computation you have access to, maybe 10 or 20 years ago. It’s like you can process and build anything, but it’s just like how do you Hash out the ideas and I’ve really kind of found this return to working on paper recently and that’s whether it’s drawing up a user flow or creating low fidelity wireframes. It’s been really helpful to work in that material that almost intentionally slows down and gives you time to think a little bit deeper. 00:03:24 - Speaker 2: And I’d love to hear a bit about your backstory, days before web flow, and then what you’ve been doing now that you’re there. 00:03:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so, right before I joined Webflow, I was the head of product design at a health tech startup called One Medical and was there for about 4 years. I led design and research there. 00:03:41 - Speaker 2: Quick personal note, I was a customer there while I lived in San Francisco. This was kind of A doctor’s office, but reimagined a bit in terms of being more user experience centric. Is that a right way to describe it? 00:03:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s accurate. I hope you had a good experience with it too. 00:03:57 - Speaker 2: I did. I’m missing that there is no such thing in Berlin as far as I know. User experience is not a key feature of doctors I visited here, sad to say. 00:04:08 - Speaker 1: Healthcare experience is something where I think we need more designers and more technology, like thinking about that end user experience. Yeah. So when I was at one medical, one of the first features I started working on was our video visits platform. So it was being able to do a one on one virtual call which You and your doctor, and I built that prototype using Quartz composer and kind of started that from the initial prototype of like how we could even wire the AV and really test these cases. So a lot of what I’ve been interested in is design prototyping in a lot of ways. And prior to one medical, I was director of mobile design at a company called Black Pixel that was really focused on Like iOS and Mac apps doing our own products, but then also doing a lot of client services as well. And what brought me to web flow was after I left one Medical, I think. It’s really great when you leave a place that you feel like you could be there for another 4 years, and that’s kind of how I felt at one medical and was just looking for something a little bit different. So I took a mini sabbatical, probably about 2 months off trying to figure out what’s next. And my original idea was considering to do a startup around like prototyping on the iPad, because I think that was the year when Swift UI came out and I thought to myself, it’d be really cool to Build tools for people to build, and really build layout, and whether it was like a full-on developer tool or prototyping tool. That’s what I was exploring, but I think for me, I know how hard startups are and the life expectancy of those. So, you know, it’s something that I was continuing to explore lately, but then got connected with web flow. And for those who don’t know, web flows a visual development platform and it’s really focused on websites, blogs, and more dynamic web experiences. And I think the thing that got me really interested in that is this bridge between design and engineering. And it wasn’t just prototyping, but the stuff you build goes straight into production right away. So you can build your site, publish it, and you know, wire up a domain and you’re done. And I was just like, wow, you know, I think this is a really interesting space to be able to take the things that I was really excited about, which is like visual programming. And that is naturally just a part of it too. And I was like, OK, this is a company I have to join. Like I think at that time, they were growing and still growing, and I figured, you know what, instead of doing my own thing, I’d love to join forces with a company that’s already doing a good thing. 00:07:02 - Speaker 2: And thinking about the product positioning there. Is the target user or I’m sure you have a lot of diversity of customers now, but when you’re doing this design work, do you think of it as someone who’s coming from maybe a simpler tool, I don’t know, Squarespace comes to mind, and they want to upgrade and do something that’s more powerful and gives them more control over the CSS more capabilities, or is it actually the other way around, which is someone who’s been hand coding their HTML and they go, you know, this is a little bit tedious, and I’d like a visual tool that augments my ability to do that. 00:07:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, oh man, that’s such a good question, and I think it’s something we’re talking about a lot. And the thing that I know for sure is, you know, our end user and who we’re targeting are designers, and not to get into this existential crisis, but it’s like, what is a designer, right? There’s so many different flavors of what a designer can do. I would say this predates my time at web flow, but I would say like when the early product was being developed. I think it was really focused on the web designer and the web designer that really knew, really familiar with HTML and CSS, you know, that material of code to create and build these sites, but I think as Our customer base has grown, you are kind of seeing people who maybe their mental models are more from the Squarespace or using a tool like FigMA or Adobe XD to really understand design, so they’re kind of bringing those mental models in. So I think the thing that I think about a lot is What are the different types of personas of designers that we’re looking to serve, and that could be many different levels, you know, could be designers who know code really well or they want to use no code tools so they don’t have to know code. 00:08:52 - Speaker 2: If I can make a comparison to Hiokku, this was a similar, I think dilemma we had, you might say in our user base, and of course a good product can be used by different types of people and it works to try to understand the different segments you’re trying to support. Yeah, Hiroku both had developers who were people that maybe would have struggled a bit to get like a production deployment of. on rails and a SQL database and so on, and we made that much more possible for them to do, but it also had the other way around, which was professional developers that completely knew how to buy a server, install Linux on it, put it in a co-location facility or set up a VPS or whatever, do all that server and operation stuff. They said, I don’t want to bother with that. I would rather outsource. To you, it’s undifferentiated work. I just want to build my app, but we have people that are sort of coming from two very different skill directions that land on kind of needing the same solution, but as you said, like their mental models of how everything works is going to be wildly different in that, hence the huge design challenge to make a single product that works for both of them. 00:09:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s such a tough challenge because what I ask myself is, who do you serve in that instance? And for me, the answer should be both approachable software for these sort of tools. is you want to be able to abstract away the complexity, but you also want to be able to pop the hood open, if you will, right? So if someone wants to use code and make things more extensible, there’s a lot of challenges if we cap that from people and they don’t have access to it and to what you mentioned with Hiroku it’s like. Do people go with a different solution, or do you find ways where it can be a little bit more flexible for what people’s needs are? And I think that’s the sweet spot you want to hit and it’s really hard to find, which kind of makes me really excited about this space because it’s not only like a diverse persona, but it’s also the different use cases and how people learn too. So really trying to figure out how you find that place where it meets both of those ends of the spectrum is really challenging. 00:10:57 - Speaker 2: Maybe that’s a good moment to introduce our topic which is designing for creative tools. Now creative tools can include a pretty big gamut from word processors and video editing. Here we’re talking about maybe the fairly far end of the spectrum on complexity, which is dynamic modeling tools, web design, development, but if you think of that spectrum as being on one far end as the pure consumer, very everyday apps, something like a kitchen timer. Whether maybe things that are in the middle but still closer to that consumer side might be social media, for example, not to say there isn’t a ton of complexity in that, but compared to what you can do with creative tools or what the user can do with creative tools, there’s the variety of possible states essentially that a user can put their document into with anything on this end of the spectrum is vastly greater than some of those everyday apps. And that creates some pretty big challenges, but also for the right kind of person, and I would count, I think the three of us in that category, those challenges can be very fun and interesting. 00:12:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it keeps you on your feet, for sure, and I think the word I keep attributing to this is just dynamic, right? It’s that it’s always changing, it’s always evolving. And I think what’s most interesting for me in this space is you build a set of capabilities for people and you see what they do with it, right? And that’s different for what you alluded to is that, you know, a lot of my background before was consumer apps or networks and e-commerce and they’re more rigid in the user experience, so it’s more predictable with what people will do. Like, of course, there’s flows you want to Optimized for, but I think there have been times where I imagine a lot of spaces of people working in creator tools see this a lot, where end users just subvert and find new ways to use your tool and you’re always so surprised by it and I think Rather being worried about what happened to you, embrace that and see where it goes, and I think that’s really interesting. It’s just kind of like, uh, you know, this whole notion of like, I think Microsoft uses the term citizen developer or you know, end users creating stuff. Now it creates such a unknown journey map for a lot of these users, which I think is personally really cool. 00:13:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that rigid design you mentioned in, for example, e-commerce, that’s actually by design, you want a checkout form, for example, the number of forks in that path should be pretty minimal, right? The data is different, where I’m shipping to is different, maybe there’s a few options in there, but you don’t want to choose your own adventure on a checkout form and perhaps the work you did in the medical space was similar that you want something pretty structured, pretty rigid. Everyone kind of does it more or less the same way with some essentially minor variation is really the complete opposite of a great creative tool. I think almost by definition is one that your users will use it to make things that you never expected. They like you said, that subversive element. 00:14:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think that’s why at Webflow, we tend to call things capabilities versus features, and we want to focus on that lens where it’s like, what are we equipping end users being able to do versus like, here’s this feature that will do X or do Y but it’s more like, here’s this capability, here’s this offering. Let’s see what you do with it. 00:14:32 - Speaker 2: I’d be curious to hear if there’s any cases you’ve seen so far of web flows, users and customers doing something interesting, unexpected, even even subversive. 00:14:43 - Speaker 1: Oh man. 00:14:43 - Speaker 3: Have you had any bitcoin miners like we did on Hookku? 00:14:46 - Speaker 1: Not yet, not yet. We’ll see, there’s still time for that. I’d love to hear the Hiroka use case. There’s two that come to mind for me, and one is a weblow community member created, I think it’s called The Big Bed, and it’s a children’s story that he illustrated. I can’t remember if it was directly about his daughter, but it was this narrative that they created. So he created an interactive site with web flow that had audio and just this really great immersive experience. And then there’s another use case where someone in the blood flow community created a game that I used to love playing is he actually recreated some of the intro and functionality of the game Civilization in web flow, and I’m just like, oh my goodness, there’s so many events, so many interactions built this, and you could tell like the people who built this is just, it’s pure passion for learning and just love of creating stuff and like. When I saw those two things, especially, I’m just like, oh my goodness, like this isn’t just for building like the websites built on Twitter bootstrap where they all kind of look the same. It’s kind of returning this sort of expressive form of the web, which got me really excited because I think in my iOS days, I think at that time the web was becoming a little bit stagnant and less expressive, but kind of seeing these sort of tools come back for people to be expressive on the web, I think it’s really awesome. 00:16:18 - Speaker 2: I think we talked with Wei Weixu a bit about kind of personalization in our online spaces, and I think I expressed my love of personal websites and the web and HTML remains and has only gotten better with years, even if there’s fewer sort of GeoCity style places for people that easily have their own spaces, what you can express through a personal site is greater than ever before, but that’s balanced out or maybe just drowned out would be the way to put it by. Yeah, maybe social media profiles or even just sites that are designed to be a profile for you, and it’s nice cause you upload a picture and you type in a bio and you click on three things you like and it gives you a nice looking page, but yeah, it lacks that personality, that expressiveness, and certainly that handmade element, but that’s still live on the web in terms of what you can do with HTML. You have to get away a little bit from the template driven world of say a Squarespace and a little bit closer to the metal if we want to call it that, and I think you know hand coded HTML is a great way to go, but not to drop in too many metause references here, but we also talked with Maggie Appleton about visual programming, which I think David discussing that episode is part of how you and I got talking and Talks about, well, look, we don’t want to replace code, but maybe we want to layer new kinds of visualization tools on top of it. I think the web is really, really perfect potentially for that, and you see a small version of that and say the developer tools, the Chrome slash fire bug derived developer tools, but there’s so much more we could do with that, I think. 00:17:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for me, the word I keep coming back to is expression, right? And the expression of how you create, and I think. I don’t like using like web 12 and 3 just because I think it’s just like a continuous evolution, but for the sake, let’s say web 2’s a lot of social media, a lot of feeds, and that’s where conversation happened, right? And I think for me, I grew up in the earlier days of the internet having a Geo City site using Dreamweaver to build my personal websites. I use this analogy of like visiting people’s homes and you would go to people’s home pages to be able to see that expression and now things are in social graphs, right? And there’s still a lot of where web 3 might move and I still think it’s. Really early, but through all this, I think there’s a lot of this interest to kind of bring personal expression back and bring back personal websites, blogs. RSS is a technology that I continue to use and love today, and I think there’s like a resurgence to this because people want expression in the content, you know, whether it’s personal expression or that of the people they interact with. 00:19:02 - Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely hitting on some recurrent themes from the podcast here, just kind of give another angle on it. This idea of a personalized space is so important for professionals because almost by definition, you’re spending all of your waking, working time in it. And if you have no agency over how it works and how it looks and how it feels, that’s very demoralizing and discouraging. So for that reason alone, it’s very important. There’s other angle of like being able to do things that the creator of the tool didn’t specifically envision. In some ways, that’s the very definition of a creative professional, as someone who’s doing something novel, who’s doing these. Combinations because if there was no novelty for it, it’d be more like turning a crank and why pay really high professional labor rates for doing that, right? And so the tool has to facilitate it. You have to make this leap of, we’re going to provide these primitives and building blocks and people are going to reassemble them into games or whatever, you know, civilization, who knows, right? You have to be able to support that. 00:19:56 - Speaker 2: So going a layer deeper on what it means to design creative tools and design for creators, including designers and developers. One of the big topics in design is always mental models, and I’d be really curious to hear about the mental models you’re using for web flow, David, maybe Mark, you could talk to Muse a little bit or maybe we have some other examples from our collective experience, but maybe to start, Mark, could you define mental model just to make sure we’re all on the same page? 00:20:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so a mental model is sort of the platonic forms you’re dealing with in the domain. It’s the nouns and the verbs and how they interact, you know, what is the way that you think about the space? What are the primitives, how do you build on top of them? How do you combine them? So, for example, with a desktop OS you have things like files, folders, windows, things like that, mouse, and so forth. 00:20:51 - Speaker 2: One trick I’ve always liked for coming to grips with the mental model of some system that I’m designing is to write a glossary, essentially a list of all your vocabulary, and these are things that you’re surfacing to your user. So for example, I think I might have first tried this for the Hiroku add-on system. And in writing that glossary, I realized first of all we had way too many things. There was like 20 different things in there we were expecting people to keep track of, many of which were like kind of a relatively new concepts and certainly pretty abstract ones. So we’re looking for ways to kind of reduce those. Second, I found that sometimes we would use two words to mean basically the same thing, and that’s confusing. But then third, it kind of forces me at least to ask, does each one of these serve a really good purpose? Is a person going to have a clear understanding of what this item is? They know this term refers to that, and they can either connect it to something else they already knew before they started kind of using the product or reading your documentation or whatever, or for the very few you want to offer as new, is it worth your while to introduce this new term, this new concept. And of course one of the tricks, I think you Kind of illustrated pretty well there, Mark, is to take physical world metaphors. So your desktop is on your computer as a literal metaphor to your top of your desk. Files and folders are also metaphors, although even there you see where it’s an imperfect. fit. My mom actually has commented on this a number of times, which is she’s worked with paper files and folders for a long time and from her perspective, a file folder is one kind of thing and it’s one of those folding manila envelopes that you can put pieces of paper and documents into. So she thinks that you should call files documents and you should call folders files, and now of course, we’re set now, but it’s a good example of where users have preexisting expectations, you’re trying to borrow these metaphors, but they don’t necessarily map perfectly, but you get some leverage there because you’re not asking someone to learn a whole bunch of new words that don’t map to anything they know from any other domain. 00:22:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and my experience has been that the product architecture, which is the phrase we sometimes give to coming up with and naming these mental models, is incredibly important. If you get this even a little bit wrong, it’s gonna make everything much harder down the road, and in particular for some people to be able to span the full range of use cases from very simple to very complex, and to be able to do unanticipated recombinations, they have to be really solid. 00:23:24 - Speaker 2: So what kind of mental models do you make use of in web flow, David? 00:23:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think a challenge in a lot of creator tools is to decide how opinionated you should be. And what I mean by that is when you become opinionated, there’s kind of a trade-off with that, right? You can kind of really help guide people in how they build certain concepts, or do you be more open ended and you give people the flexibility to explore that. And I think the thing that’s tricky with that is The question I ask myself is what mental models do people come in with using web flow, so someone who is a front end developer, the way they approach using web flow is going to be dramatically different than someone who may use FIMA. And I think the thing that’s hard is In design, there’s a lot of these things that are very similar, but not necessarily identical, right? So, for example, in Xcode, the auto layout engine is a lot different than auto layout in Figma, but yet, these are things that people associate with how to approach using it. So I think When we’re thinking about the mental models of web flow, I think a lot of things that we’re asking ourselves is like, what do people come in expecting, right? So, someone who’s coming in and using layout may not think of things as divs, right? And also think about things like nesting and parent-child relationships. They may be thinking of it as an infinite canvas that they drag and move freeform. And unless you kind of set position to absolute, there’s really no way of doing that in a way that produces good code and That can be frustrating for users if you’re coming in not knowing box model and some of these web design practices. So I think a lot of things we’re thinking about like, how do we become more opinionated in our own product without like biasing them on what to build, right? So for example, a lot of this can come from onboarding new users and teaching them like, hey, these are the core aspects of web design that’s going to be really important for you. To know, you already know this, great, you can skip it, right? But if you don’t know, it’s going to be really helpful for people to really understand those mental models, because I think for me, really being true to the material and the material in this case being like HTML and CSS I think. I personally wouldn’t want to abstract it so far away where you’re creating some like proprietary markup or something, right? You really want to make sure that you can get as close to the native output as much as possible, but abstracting how people build with. That I think is key. 00:26:08 - Speaker 2: It also occurs to me that some of the mental models are things about what do my users come in expecting a front end developer versus a designer, for example, but also, as you said, the material, you just inherit a bunch of things that are just true whether or not you want them to be, and certainly the web and HTML and CSS are full of plenty of quirks and history and that sort of thing, and so something about how the grid system works or something about how Flexbox works or what have you, you’re just gonna inherit that. Some of that may be good because there’s good mental models, some of it may be more like baggage or gets in your way, and so presumably, maybe I’m realizing now I’m just kind of resting what she said, but just for my own understanding, you’re trying to figure out which things are abstractions you really want to surface to your users because they’re useful, they’re powerful, they’re compre. Sensible, they fit well with the visual tool you’re creating and which are weird quirks of the web that don’t really help you to know and I don’t need to know about, I don’t know what JavaScript mification, it’s just we do that quietly behind the scenes and kind of tuck it away and you don’t need to really like have a concept for that in your mind to get value from the tool. 00:27:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think this is why I like the jobs to be done framework where you’re kind of focusing on that outcome that a customer wants, right? And I think for us, when we think about it. There’s like multiple ways to build a layout, right? But if we’re kind of looking at some of the best practices of like, here are the things that people typically try to build and it solves like 80% of those use cases, like how do we surface more of that because the likelihood of what people want to build with that is higher, right? And there’s always going to be this option B, C, D, and E that people can explore. But when you give them A through E all at once. It’s this paradox of choice, right? So if I drop a div and then you’re asking like, OK, you can use display, flex box or grid, someone who doesn’t know what the difference is three are, they probably just pick one, right? And then really just trial by error with that. But if we can be more opinionated about some of these things, I think it helps reduce the cognitive load of decisions that people have to make. So can we streamline people to what we think is the best decision while giving them that option to subvert it or explore other paths to, as opposed to give them all the divergent paths at once. 00:28:38 - Speaker 2: Now here we’ve spoken a little bit about sort of things within the page ad, a flex box, and that sort of thing, but actually the web has a huge number of abstractions or that mental model glossary for the web would include pages, include URLs, would include links. I think all of those are pretty well understood even by non-creators, which is actually pretty great and so you can just rely on using those things, I assume, even something like a website, what actually is a website. Where are the edges of it that may or may not be fully understood by the average person, they may not fully grasp when they sort of leave Facebook and go to another site, but certainly I think for your target audience, those things are probably really well understood and you can totally lean on that, is that right to guess. 00:29:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s the beauty of building for the web is there’s such a rich taxonomy and a lot of like standards already set on that, that even if people aren’t familiar with it, it’s not like they’re learning just web flows mental model, right? They’re learning the mental models of like building a website and links, buttons, and even in layout, you know, thinking about sections and Some other elements that are offered to people. So I think that’s the thing that’s been helpful for us is that it’s like, as you’re learning web flow, you’re learning the web mental model as well. 00:30:01 - Speaker 2: Can you give us an example of something, you know, we’ve talked about this kind of visualization element, which in many cases I think a visualization tool is something that doesn’t really add a new mental model, it just helps you better, well, literally see what it is that, yeah, understand, for example, margins and padding. It sort of shows you how those layout. Is there some major new abstraction that web flow gives you that’s sort of a new capability that’s added to your user’s tool kit, but it is not something that comes from the web, but is something you created as part of your universe of mental models. 00:30:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s not something we originally created, but maybe I’ll throw this example out here because we just had our no code conference. We announced a capability that we call logic. And now when you have the UI side of things, and you have logic, and you have data with our CMS offering, it’s essentially a 1 to 1 connection to model view controller, right? And I think as we start exploring this is like, The question I’m asking is, do we teach everyone the fundamentals of model view controller and ask them to build it the exact same way? Are there ways to leverage those ways of doing things in new ways? And I think for us, there’s a lot to be able to explore there, even with our CMS, right? It’s like we’re letting people buying data to layout and building collections with them not necessarily knowing. What a collection is and how you would build that in code, right? So I think it’s not necessarily like inventing new definitions of things, but maybe new ways of manipulating and using it. And I think for us now that we have data, UI and logic, being able to manipulate, layout or data based on events, there’s a lot for us to really explore on how end users interact with that. 00:32:00 - Speaker 3: This brings us to another interesting aspect of designing for creative tools, which is the social aspect. So increasingly designing tools and then using the design tools takes place across many people, and there’s interesting social dynamics there. So especially if you look at a domain like the web, which is very multidimensional, like you can use absolute positioning or box model or grid or whatever, you have to come to some common language and understanding as a team, and sometimes you just gotta kind of pick one or be on the same page or at least call things the same thing. So an important job of design tools I think is helping teams reach that agreement. I can give you two examples. One is Hiroku, where there’s basically a lot of ways you can design and deploy an app, and Hirokoku picked one, and there were good reasons why Hiokku picked that way, and we said basically you should do this, like you should use Git and you should not write to the local file system and so on and so forth, you should use environment variables and Yes, those were good choices to make in of themselves, but they also basically forced everyone onto the same path, which was itself another example that’s maybe more analogous to web flow is Ruby on Rails, where basically it need people to pick a way to do NBC like, put this here, put this here, call this that, use this convention for converting between lower case and uppercase, and just do it, it’ll be fine. And there’s actually a huge service and just picking these defaults and having these guard rails in place. 00:33:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s really interesting you bring that up, Mark, because I think one of the things we’re really thinking about and that’s really top of my mind is how does collaboration work in web design and in a tool like web flow, and I can give some examples of that is one, let’s say you have an end user creating their site, but perhaps they find inspiration from our showcase and they pick a template to use, right? But that template is built Flexbox only. And let’s say they use CSS grid or something else for their site, they drop it in and just boom, the whole layout just collapses, right? So I think for us, that’s something to really think about. It’s just like, again, just how do users understand like how the material’s created, right? And I don’t know if it’s something where we’re like, want everyone to use flash. Xbox only and get rid of the other stuff because there’s implications with that. But how do we kind of nullify and make sure that when people are using other resources that people build, like in a community aspect, that there’s clarity, there’s good documentation, and there’s some good best practices around that. And I think the other thing. That you touched on, Mark, that I think is really interesting is, how do you think about like design architecture as a team, right? And if you have multiple designers working in web flow on a larger team, it’s like, how do you make these agreements and how do you declare these things that’s like, hey, as we’re working, this is our approach to Naming our CSS architecture or this is kind of how we want to approach building pages and having that. I think a lot of that lives off platform right now today. Some of the things that we’re thinking about is just like how do we enable teams to work better in web flow, and I think we’re still doing a lot of research on it and trying to figure out like what that best case is. 00:35:13 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it seems inevitable that all design tools are going to become collaborative and social, at least have the capability to do things as a group, and it’s interesting that we’re sort of working our way up. So the first thing was like Google Docs, which is text, and then you add the whole office suite, and now we’re working on complex tools like Figma and web flow, and I think eventually we’ll get to video that’s probably the hardest one to do collaboratively because of bandwidth, but we’re gonna get there. It’ll be interesting to see how that all plays out. 00:35:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m starting to see a lot of startups working on collaborative video too, so I think definitely a really gnarly problem, but I think it’s a sign, like you said, it’s inevitable that everyone’s shifting to collaboration in as real time as possible too. 00:35:55 - Speaker 2: A bit of a tangent, but it’s certainly a reminder of something I feel like comes up on Twitter from time to time, which is, it does seem odd that you basically have all of these startups that are reimplementing collaboration, typically inspired by Google Docs or some combination of Google Docs and GitHub. And in fact, given that we want every single tool to be collaborative, couldn’t you imagine that as an element of the operating system or the file system? And instead, every single startup that does this has their own big engineering team and like needs to build it all, but one can’t help but to envision that future operating system where by default that is part of anything you build. 00:36:36 - Speaker 1: I think about that a lot about annotations too. Couldn’t annotations and commenting be more native across the operating system based on the objects that you’re working with, but like you said, a lot of these tools, it’s part of this walled garden, right? And everyone’s building their own version of it and there’s got to be a way where How do you take that a layer deeper, like either in the operating system or being more open source about it, but it is interesting, like everyone’s kind of building these same like set of features, and I always think about annotations and commenting as ones that I would love something like that on the OS level. 00:37:15 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I actually had the aspiration for such a thing existing. I think it could be an OS service or a web service sort of like S3, and I repeatedly hear people ask for this, and I think there are two big hurdles. One is there’s an expertise hurdle, which I think is not obvious until you try to do it, but it’s very, very hard to build such a system, and I think it’s basically impossible to do without having a motivating example product. So I think it’s most likely this gets extracted out from either a company or someone who has experience with the domain of trying to build such a system. And I think there’s an important path dependence thing where yes, everyone wants the operating system to support this, but, you know, it’d be very convenient if the operating system was the one that already ran, you know, my program, right? I don’t want to have to rewrite all my stuff or change my business or lose my business for such an operating system. So there’s a first mover problem. So, basically, I’m looking for the bookstore that wants to get into the business of web services in this space, and I think they’re out there somewhere. If you are, remember, we’re looking for such people, so contact us please. 00:38:16 - Speaker 2: David, what you mentioned earlier about the dropping a Flexbox component into a grid layout also makes me think of another thread here, which is the kind of componentization elements of things. Yeah, I think a product with a good mental model, a good set of abstractions, the elements of it can be combined together in a lot of different ways, again, ways the creator didn’t originally expect, but you take that even a step further, which is not just that I, the person using the tool within my document, can Do interesting and different things, but then you can go from there to, as you said, the collaboration, we’re on a team and we’re working together on something like a website or a document, but then the furthest step is to go from there to, you have these components that you can plug together where maybe the I don’t even know the person that made this calendar widget that I’m plugging in. But I feel like this has been a dream for a long time, and maybe one that there’s been many attempts, I think OpenDoc is kind of a famous one there, maybe ActiveX kind of Microsoft had a couple of different iterations of object embedding and yeah, I’m curious if you have a take on that path of computing history attempts. 00:39:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I can speak about the promise of OpenDoc cause candidly speaking, I never really had a chance to play around with it and. Implemented, but I think this idea of component software that is reusable and adds value for people immediately, I think it’s still a lot of ways the dream, right? And when we think about community plug in the ecosystems, it’s an aspiration I want to continue to pushing now, there’s a lot of trade-offs in practice because I think for me. Someone who used like cocoa pods a lot, right? There was something around like how open are these plug-in ecosystems, and I think that’s a tough tradeoff for any platform that’s being built, but I think for me with OpenDoc, I kind of felt like web objects was a lot of this too, in this world where you now have people who can build components. That serve other people and really being able to open up like how work is done, right, whether within your company or externally, but I think OpenDoc is just one of those still kind of waiting for that promise to be fulfilled and then I think that vision is so inspiring. 00:40:40 - Speaker 3: I think this is a super interesting frontier as well, and I think it’s like understudied and under theorized. I think people don’t appreciate how complex it is, especially when these plug-ins are turned complete and they have access to compute and data, you know, that is your compute and your data, they can do wild stuff and there’s sort of a this problem in the engineering world of libraries. And I think we’re still in the very early days of how we think about libraries, which is basically we download a bunch of random code from the internet and run at our computers and who knows, you know, a lot of it’s probably like mining Bitcoin or, you know, stealing my keys. It’s a complete mess. And I think it requires a very serious design and engineering effort. As well as again this respect of the path dependence problem where you need a way to bootstrap the ecosystem and to incentivize the ecosystem. So I’m so optimistic. I just think it’s a very hard problem. 00:41:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think in a lot of ways, you’re right, it’s still so early in the way that we’re doing it. And I think one of the things, like let’s take no code, for example, and use this open doc analogies. I’ve always described as no code being like the 3D printer for building on the web. So what it does is really creates repetition and reusability in a great way, right? Now, no code tools, there’s always going to be this threshold where if you’re doing something sophisticated, you might need to code it, right? So it’s never this like one or the other, but I think it kind of evolves into that and I see that with component software too, in the sense that it’s like, I think about this all the time. If I’m building an app, I’m like, why do I always have to build the same authentication flows, right? Or kind of build these things that people predict. It’s a very rigid solution intentionally, like, you know, e-commerce and check out some of these things like why do these things have to be constantly unique, right? There’s clear interactions of what people expect in those. And how do you do those things at scale. So then the things that need to be unique for your business or your product, you can really focus on that. And I think that’s where, again, I think this whole concept of like component software, I still very much believe in it. It’s a very ambitious vision and I think in a lot of ways still pretty early. 00:42:54 - Speaker 2: By the way, it probably is worth defining no code briefly for the audience. Again, we suspect a lot of folks may have at a minimum part of it, but given that you put on a conference with that name, it seems like you might be an authority to speak to what you think that word means, you know, what the category is, what the movement is, etc. 00:43:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. With like what it’s not, right, which is not the absence of code or any existence of that. And it’s really more of like the primitive that you build with. So instead of building, using code in a command line interface or a text editor, it’s through like visual abstractions. So there’s no code and low code. But yeah, it is something funny where It’s not even in my opinion, combating with code, right? It’s just kind of the existence of these two approaches in a lot of ways. And I think the companies that are going to excel at this is they’re probably going to use a combination of both, right, depending on some of the different use cases, but yeah, no code is kind of starting with not needing to learn how to code and you’re kind of focused on like the visual abstractions of creating with code. 00:44:05 - Speaker 2: My sense is that it’s often non-programmers doing automation and particularly connecting services together, so I think of the if this, then that and Zapier as being kind of a starting place, very simple, just, I don’t know, we use a Zapier integration for someone tweets about X, then put it in the Slack channel, for example, or you get an email with a PDF, stick it in this Dropbox. Those kinds of basic automations and that certainly I’m sure professional software engineers sometimes use such service just because it’s easier, less work to maintain or whatever than using their full on development stack, but I think very often it’s a business person or a designer or some other person that the writing a, I don’t know what a shell script to do the same thing would probably be out of reach for them. 00:44:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it makes me think about and name any use case, right, where before you’d have to like ask an engineer to run a rake task to be able to get all these things done. Now you’re empowering people, like you said, maybe they’re on the business side of things or not on the engineering and product side to be able to create their own automations in that way. And the question I always ask myself is like, this is the stuff you want to democratize even within your own company, right? It may not be the stuff like an engineer even wants to work on. So it’s like, again, it’s not contrary to how you do it, it’s just kind of really thinking about some of these use cases. I don’t know, do you all remember Yahoo pipes? That was another one that I think about with the automations too. 00:45:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I had to do some serious digging around in the web archives to find a screenshot of that because I wanted to reference it for the inco switch end user programming article that we did. But yeah, I think of that as one of the original put together flow-based programming with, I guess the emerging idea of web services or the fact that URL over here as a web report and another API over here is where I can feed in my travel plans and maybe I can connect all those together with well pipes. And maybe it was before its time, I’m not sure, but the concept there was so simple and maybe coming back to our mental models point, you know, you even look at a screenshot, you instantly understand what this is doing and what it might be capable of. Now another thing that I think about when thinking of a tool like what you’re making with web flow, I think Kokku had some of this as well, and I think any kind of creative tool always has this, you know, you talk about your ideal is the low floor, high ceiling, that’s the idea, it’s relatively easy to get started with, but you don’t get constrained later on. There’s also these powerful cases, but I do think there are cases where you do want to say, OK, you’re asking for something that actually is more kind of off the edge of what we actually want to offer with the tool. Certainly when we ran this Hiroku, someone would come in. I want to tune all these kernel parameters, whatever, we’d say, well, look, this actually isn’t the right platform for you because that level of control and customization is exactly what we’re trying to save you from. We’ve just made good choices there that will work pretty well for most people, and you can just remove thinking about all that kind of stuff from your head. And an example, you know, that I like to cite a lot for end user programming is Flash, which I think did a really great job of bringing animators and maybe what we would now call motion designers into something that was essentially kind of a programming environment, but it’s been speculated on some of these uh flash dyed postmortems that came along a couple of years ago that one of the Issues that it faced was in those early days, it was so accessible to animators, then people started making games, those games would get pretty complicated, they would need all these things that just professional software engineers need, want, expect in terms of data layer, caching. Complexity of the language, all that kind of stuff, ability to add libraries and dependencies, and eventually it became such a powerful programming tool that it actually lost that ease and that accessibility. Essentially the floor kind of crept up as they pushed up the ceiling. So I also think in designing a particular tool, it’s very reasonable to decide our spectrum of use. cases, you know, there’s some that’s going to be too trivial or too, you know, we don’t want to make things so easy, you know, we push you out to some more beginner tool, but there’s also a ceiling somewhere where we say, look, you actually reached the limit of what this tool is for. We’re not designing it for you. You should go use this over here that’s more powerful but also has, you know, other trade-offs. 00:48:38 - Speaker 3: Furthermore, I think there are different ways to do this. So I think the ideal way, again, if you have the right mental model and product architecture is to have basically a nested mental model, a nested architecture where you can peel back layers and get at the granular abstractions within. There’s all kinds of examples on Hooku. I think we did do a pretty good job with this. If you get push an app to compile and deploy it, it just basically picks how I think it should compile based on what the app looks like. But if you want, you can swap in your own compilation step and say, here’s the script that I want to compile this app, but critically, both the Hiokku default and that. use the same interface. They’re totally interchangeable. It’s like basically peeling off that one layer and saying I want to insert something different into this interface. It’s not saying, oh well, you know, Her only deploys Ruby. I gotta go do my whole own thing on AWS from scratch, right? You get to granually pick apart pieces and there are all kinds of examples of that. In contrast, sometimes I see these programming tools that are like code generators where there’s a super complicated problem and you invoke the code generator and it spits out 100 files. And as long as you don’t need to do anything different, you’re fine, but as soon as you need to do something different, you’re completely out of luck. It’s like you’re often hand editing these 100 different files. So I think the extent that you can create a system where you can peel back these individual abstractions while still enjoying the stack overall, that’s great. 00:49:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it makes me think about, I’ll give a small example. So there’s this note taking tool I love called Obsidian, and the thing I love about Obsidian is you use your local markdown files, right? So. If Obsidian ever gets to a point where it’s not scaling for me, which I think it serves my use case, well, you still kind of have the native markdown files and you’re not kind of stuck in that application layer, right? And I think great applications will figure out ways to be more of a facilitator than controller on that, you know, and I think for some like web flow, we think about, OK, we no longer are meeting the threshold of what like a certain customer wants, they can still export their code. But are there other things we can kind of build to make that interoperability a little bit easier too. So I think that’s the trick is like being in an application that can be great at facilitating some of these things. So if such things do evolve too, that you’re not kind of locked into that, but I think what you said, Mark is spot on. 00:50:57 - Speaker 2: Yes, I guess in the ideal world you design your tools so that. You start with a basic set of primitives, abstractions, mental model glossary that hopefully someone can understand and do something useful with when they need a little more power in some particular areas, that’s where they, as you said, mark, peel it back or I think David you put it as kind of popping the hood, and you can go down one layer at least for that spot, but you’re not completely off in some new world, you’re still within the kind of universe of abstractions that all fits together. And then there’s a final step, which might be what you referenced there David, which is where you actually do get to the end of what the tool can do for you, but hopefully now it’s not, now I’m really screwed and I have to just kind of recreate everything from scratch in some new environment, but rather you can, I think it’s React Native uses this term. Eject, where you essentially can say I want to take my project out of the React Native world to just make it a standard X code or Android Studio project, and there’s no going back once you eject or no easy going back, but that’s your out, right? 00:52:05 - Speaker 1: Interesting choice of words for React Native. 00:52:10 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s actually the kind of project that I was thinking of in my previous example where if you have to eject in that case, I think it’s pretty bad. I mean, you can still run. Another example of ejection would actually be with deploying apps with Hiokku. If you have a standard app, you can deploy to Hiroku, but you can also take that standard, like Ruby on Rails app, for example, and deploy it somewhere else, sort of an injection in a sense. Hm. This is a very important concept, by the way. Another way I think about this would be as an efficient frontier where the axes are difficulty slash complexity and the other axis is power, and what you want is you want a smooth trade off on those where you can always add a little bit more complexity to get a little bit more power. If you need it. And so if you need a little bit more power, you never have to undergo a huge complexity jump, like migrating your app to a whole different platform. For example, there’s little changes you can make along the way. And furthermore, you want that frontier pushed out as far as possible, so that the minimal amount of complexity is needed for the given amount of power. 00:53:01 - Speaker 1: I think complexity gets a bad rap too, because I think a lot of times people think complexity is the opposite of simple and everyone loves simple because simple is elegant, so then complexity becomes a sort of like villainous thing, right? And I think there are times where we do need to embrace complexity, but how do you make it approachable, right? And I think that is the thing to solve, right, is to figure out like when there is a time where complexity is called for, how do you have your creative tools give people the knowledge of how, like again, to peel that layer back or pop the hood open to be able to address such complexity as opposed to avoiding it entirely. 00:53:45 - Speaker 3: And again, I keep coming back to this idea of mental models, often with complexity, you’re dealing with a fundamental reality of the underlying world, and if you ignore it or try to cover it up for long enough, you just make it worse, you have to address it. But on the other hand, you don’t want to make that problem any worse than it is by, for example, combining two problems and giving yourself three problems. 00:54:06 - Speaker 2: I’m reminded of the Einstein quote, Everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler, which is, yeah, the world is complex, it can be messy. You’re creating a tool for someone to model something about the world or create their own little mini made up world, and they are just going to need to deal with that complexity. In the web world, that’s something like all the different browsers and all the different devices that someone might browse from and different screen sizes and the difference between interaction on touch versus mouse versus trackpad versus stylus. Those things all exist and you need to deal with them when you’re creating something and attempt to totally abstract all that away because it sounds too complicated. It may impair the ability of the creator to make something that’s really good. 00:54:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, because abstractions still derived from the original thing, right? And I love the idea of really focusing on where you address complexity as opposed to neglecting it or putting it everywhere, right? So when you have these complex things to solve, what’s the optimal place to solve it? 00:55:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I do think we’re in kind of a golden age or the beginning of a golden age for creative tools that includes being more interesting, maybe place for designers to go work on tools for thought and things like that, that the the stodgy old kind of vanilla styles of the office suites of the past and so forth are giving way to more stylish and interesting and opinionated tools for thought and developer tools and designer tools. I’d be curious to hear from both of you looking forward to kind of the future, you know, if we could fast forward that trend 3 or 5 years, how does creative tools look different in the near future? 00:55:50 - Speaker 1: I think you’re gonna see a lot more participation in it, and it’s almost like. The consumerization of creator tools, which I think is exciting. And the reason I’m excited about it is I believe some of the people with the best ideas and things that can be life changing and can really change the world, probably don’t know how to code. They might not know how to design. So being able to give a platform for people to explore and express, kind of gives the continuation of such idea to manifest in other ways. Now, it may not be that person who ends up creating it, but maybe it sparks an idea somewhere else. So I’m always like a big fan of participation in anything because I think for me, honestly, if it wasn’t for visual programming tools like Hypercard and Quartz Composer, I may not have gotten into an interest in Building software and if I went the conventional route, I probably would have failed. So I think for me, that’s what I’m excited about is that like, this whole notion of like end user programming and it being more accessible, just for people to play and explore is pretty exciting for me. 00:57:03 - Speaker 2: It’s funny, I’m obviously a huge proponent of end user programming and more people learning how to grasp the power of the dynamic medium that is computers, not just as users, but as creators of software. But when you use the word consumerization, Then that actually almost gives me a little bit of an opposite reaction and intellectually, I think I agree with you that more participation, more accessibility is better, but I guess as a crafts person and I love my niche and sometimes kind of complicated powerful tools, then what consumerization brings to mind for me, I don’t know, Instagram stories, or for example, you’ve seen this in some of Apple’s creator products like they have for audio editing, you’ve got. Logic Audio, but then you’ve also got GarageBand, which is installed in a reac. It’s pretty simple and easy to use, which is nice, but then in some ways they brought some of that design aesthetic to logic, maybe taken away some of the things that the longtime pro users of that could be described as like a dumbing down. So it’s interesting to reflect on that reaction of myself. I don’t think that’s a good thing. I don’t think I’m proud of it, but I just had that twinge when you said that word. 00:58:12 - Speaker 3: Oh Adam, I got a different phrase for you. What if we called it end user creating as a sort of generalization of end user programming, and this is a road we’re already part of the way down. So it used to be that even end users couldn’t do something like word processing that was kind of a professional activity you had a typist or whatever. And we’ve since brought the Office suite to end users, and now I think we’re in the process of doing that for richer media, so audio, video, web pages. Of course, those are things that are kind of on the cusp right now of even a few years ago, it was quite hard for someone to casually do audio editing or video editing, but now you go look on YouTube and there’s these like super, super niche, random people doing super random stuff, but the video quality is like insane because everyone can do video editing now. And I think that kind of progress is going to continue. 00:58:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think Adam, even when I said that word, I had a similar reaction too and it just makes me wonder, like, has the term consumer transformed in a way that, you know, needs to evolve a little bit, but I’ll give you an example. There’s an awesome. iOS app called Universe, which lets you build websites like on your phone. And I think for that, that to me is like the consumerization of a creator tool, right? You’re kind of taking the mental models of what people are used to on their. Smartphone dragging and dropping these swipe gestures, but instead of consuming content, maybe it’s more the consumers are becoming creators, right? So it’s kind of normalizing creators in that way and I think the universe is a great example of that. But just wanted to say when I said that word too, I had a certain mental model that came to mind and I think it’s, yeah, kind of like, maybe it’s more turning consumers and the creators rather with the mental models that they know. 00:59:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that, and certainly I have my own career to thank for that in a way. As a kid, I loved video games, I was a consumer of video games, and that led me to think I want to be able to create these for myself, h