DevReady Podcast

E56 - Good Hustle: Building A Better World with Tom Dawkins

Our guest on this episode of the DevReady Podcast is Tom Dawkins, CEO and Co-Founder of StartSomeGood, the leading home of cause-driven crowdfunding, innovative partnerships and social entrepreneur education. Before StartSomeGood, Tom founded Australian youth non-profit Vibewire, was the first Social Media Director at Ashoka in Washington DC and was the founding Director of the Australian Changemakers Festival. Tom’s varied experience and journey to where he is now has taught him valuable lessons but also gave him the insight he needs to better support the next generation of social entrepreneurs. His passion for innovation and sustainable impact is the basis behind StartSomeGood and has helped countless people find success along the way.
Tom’s journey to a career that didn’t exist when he started out was full of risk but his optimistic attitude and adherence to his vision and purpose has helped him to achieve significant goals. As an early adapter and innovator, he wasn’t deterred by technology he didn’t understand but learned the value of key partnerships and how to leverage them to get to where you want to be. At the end of the day, Tom’s desire to help others better create social change is inspiring and truly accessible. Throughout this conversation he shares useful advice and combines it with tangible action steps, connecting anyone wanting to pursue their ideas with the tools they need to make it happen.
Topics Covered:
• How seemingly random events and opportunities paved the way for Tom’s career path
• Becoming a crowdfunding entrepreneur before it existed
• Youth empowerment is tokenistic, haphazard and deeply biased towards wealth.
• Tom’s path as an early adapter and innovator
• Building technological companies as a non-tech person
• Focus on equipping people
• Success stories from the platform
• What inspires people to give and invest
Key Quotes:
• “My whole life purpose is to try and build… a better democracy and to me that means one where people can participate in making things happen.” (1:22)
• “The heart of democracy is not an election. It's every other day of the year; how we participate, how we make a difference, how we create the future that we want (1:43)
• “Today you shouldn't know what you want [to do] because the thing you want to be probably doesn't exist yet.” (2:36)
• “Create spaces where people can engage in conversation, can share their stories and perspectives, and hopefully come up with new ideas and ways to collaborate together to create a better future.” (8:32)
• “I'm an early adapter and so I'm constantly scanning what's around me and then wondering how that might be relevant for the things I care about. (13:00)
• “People are always looking for that big idea that fresh idea that they can come out of their own mind, but sometimes we can take a concept that's in one market or another country and then bring it into a different space and create something new and innovative.” (14:58)
• “Paying for innovation means paying for failure. The only way you get innovation is by trying stuff that may or may not work and along the way there is risk.” (17:35)
• “Burnout is actually one of the great sources of failure for startups.” (34:46)
• “One of the things we pitch with crowdfunding is; it's not just an alternative source of capital, it's a source of validation that then helps you get the capital.” (40:39)

Episode 55 - Growing Your Tech Business with Zachary Kohler

Episode 55 - Growing Your Tech Business with Zachary Kohler by Aerion Technologies

Episode 54 - Legal Agility In Developing New Tech with Jeremy Streten

Our guest on this episode of the DevReady Podcast is Jeremy Streten, founder of “Business Legal Life Cycle”, a business focused on making legal advice accessible to business owners.
Jeremy briefly started out his career in IT before pivoting to become a lawyer about 17 years ago. After several years in the industry, Jeremy realized that many lawyers tend to speak with their clients in unnecessarily complicated ways that are not helpful to average people who do not have legal training. He saw an opportunity for building a bridge between business owners and helpful legal advice and he sought out a developer to help him create the infrastructure. The basis for the BLL assessment came from Jeremy’s outline of the 13 business phases, which eventually became his book entitled “The Business Legal Life Cycle.”
During the creation of the first version of the Business Legal Life Cycle software, Jeremy experienced plenty of miscommunications with the developer he had hired. This solidified in his mind the necessity for a tech partner and also for the implementation of proper documentation at the beginning of all client and employment relationships. When it came time to work on version 2.0, Jeremy reached out to a Mastermind group that he was a part of in the U.S. and met an interested developer there who eventually became his business partner. He says that having a tech partner continually involved in the business and the evolution of the tech being used is a crucial part of the business.
Topics Covered:
• Many lawyers aren’t very helpful because they don’t speak plain English to their clients.
• How Jeremy’s legal background helped prepare him to fill in this gap between business owners and proper legal advice.
• Keeping in mind what you want to do in the future.
• Setting up your documentation the right way from the start.
• Finding the right developer and building out the tech.
• How miscommunications can lead to misaligned expectations and outcomes.
• Changing the targeting of the product based on feedback.
• Having a larger purpose: to make legal advice accessible to business owners.
Key Quotes
• “It’s to help business owners generally to know what they need to do from a legal perspective.” (1:10)
• “People change. Money changes people.” (6:04)
• “Every business evolves over time, and if you’re not evolving then you’re probably going backward.” (19:25)
• “You get what you pay for.” (25:11)

Episode 53 - Four Pillars of Scaling SaaS Company with Matt Wolach

On this episode of the DevReady Podcast, Andrew and Anthony sit down with Xsellus founder and SaaS enthusiast, Matt Wolach.
Matt has been into SaaS for about 15 years. On the podcast, Matt shares his insights into how to develop a SaaS company, how to market it to the right people, and how to scale to something big—even in a world dominated by cloud services.
Matt argues that people are usually missing one or more of the four pillars of scaling your SaaS company. He developed these pillars as follows:
1. Attract—This is where you guarantee you bring the right people in.
2. Engage—It doesn't matter how you do this, but you need to find a way to engage your customers in a meaningful way.
3. Close—Once you’ve spent the money attracting and engaging them, you need to close the deal. Focus on emotion.
4. Scale—We need to be able to repeat this.
Beyond this, Matt shares key details about what actually works when thinking about attracting and engaging the people who will really allow your company to flourish.
Key takeaways from this episode are that you need to figure out how to remove barriers to your product (both on entry and exit), and that there is a way to use emotion to create buy-in that transforms into real conversion. Matt says the emotional language is about getting people to see services applied to their very own situations. Get them talking about themselves to understand the real emotional value.
Topics Covered:
● SaaS businesses.
● Methods to scale a SaaS business.
● Steps to attract customers for expansion.
● Why you need to pounce.
● How to remove barriers to entry (so you can close).
● Understanding the middle ground.
Key Quotes:
❏ “I help other software founders to not go through those early-stage struggles that I went through.” (3:00)
❏ “It’s really hard to find anything that’s not server-based now.” (4:45)
❏ “Whether or not you do it, your information is still there.” (6:00)
❏ “Everyone is so used to being pitched at for some new software tool.” (7:30)
❏ “We, as founders, still have conversations with our market.” (9:20)
❏ “Competitors will come.” (18:00)
❏ “Free trials are not your closers. Free trials are not your closers.” (21:00)
❏ “Never make it hard for someone to hand you money.” (26:15)
❏ “If they’re not a good fit, don’t make it hard for them to transition out.” (29:30)
❏ “People get emotional about themselves, about their own world.” (31:50)
❏ “They kind of sell themselves.” (34:20)
❏ “Hire three; fire two.” (36:30)
❏ “If you have the right process, it’s all about reining them in.” (39:45)

Episode 52 - R&D, Product Design, and Innovation with George Mirabelli

On this episode of the DevReady Podcast, Andrew and Anthony sit down with SoftLogic Solution's R&D Director, George Mirabelli.
George got his start designing air-traffic controller systems for the military and various governments around the world. He then started working with R&D in insurance and finance systems. He had a long career in design and software development. Recently, he’s been showing businesses how to really make the most of the R&D tax incentives from a design perspective.
Criteria for the R&D tax incentive:
● Australian company
● High innovation
● New knowledge requires experimentation and risk of failure
George really plainly puts it that with R&D, you’re investing previous profits into developing new products—so it needs to be worth it. The R&D structure of your product design needs to be fully incorporated to reap your maximum ROI. George also explains the difference between the apportionment method vs. the timesheet method.
Topics Covered:
● Understanding the R&D tax incentive.
● The knowledge that can be easily accessed is not new knowledge.
● Core and supporting R&D activities.
● Getting your documentation straight early on is key.
● R&D is an integral part of the product strategy.
● Tracking costs in core and supporting R&D.
● Creating an R&D manual.
Key Quotes:
❏ “With a rebate up to 43%, [The R&D tax incentive] is designed for high innovation, like new knowledge.” (4:30)
❏ “It doesn’t matter if the experimentation is successful.” (5:45)
❏ “It’s really important that people take the documentation process and embed it into the way they think about R&D, which is basically what I do.” (12:25)
❏ “It’s important in software development to separate the idea of Agile development from the iterations.” (15:45)
❏ “It’s just writing it down.” (17:15)
❏ “You want to be able to find [your R&D processes] consistently.” (24:45)
❏ “R&D starts when the product is being conceptualized.” (28:30)

DevReady Podcast E51 - Conquer Your Market With Design Thinking with Andrew Bird

On this episode of the DevReady Podcast, Andrew and Anthony talk to Andrew Bird, director at Foundstone Advisory. During their conversation, they talk about implementing a meaningful business strategy, involving your tech team from the beginning, and how technology and design thinking can transform how you bring value to your customers.
Before working at Foundstone Advisory, Andrew spent eight years at Datacom managing strategy and consulting businesses. At Foundstone, he has done a lot of work with businesses in technology and the digital space. He helped develop technology solutions in healthcare and other industries, consulting them on how to migrate and scale their models with growing IT and digital functions.
Andrew provides some insight into how design thinking can help alleviate headaches downstream from the initial business strategy rollout. He stresses getting into the mindset of the client and spending as much time front-end loading to try to understand their problems and wishes. And of course, do not fall into the trap of thinking that technology itself can stand in as a solution to big industry problems. Ask good questions, but the customer’s needs first, and seriously consider how technology could enable you to do business better.
Topics Covered:
● How technology comes into a strategy in the first place.
● Technology should be used to better customer experience.
● We need to educate senior people on what technology can really do.
● Customer experience and getting into the head of your audience.
● Communicating upfront will greatly increase your ROI.
● People jump into building the product way too early.
● Tech teams are often removed from the business strategy.
● The principle of design thinking.
● Covid changed people’s minds about design thinking.
Key Quotes
❏ “If you’re not asking how technology can better a customer experience, you probably need to question why you’re investing in that technology.” (4:00)
❏ “People on the board need to ask ‘how can technology actually enable our business?’” (6:35)
❏ “Building technology, really, is the easy part.” (8:45)
❏ “Technology is not the be-all, end-all of any solution. (10:30)
❏ “What can we do to make sure we’re building a product that people need and actually want in the first place?” (14:00)
❏ “We try to get as close to the customer as possible. (16:15)
❏ “Explore what you know and what you don’t know, and make the decision after. (22:30)
❏ “Asking good questions is the key.” (28:00)
❏ “The customer wants to be heard, ultimately.” (39:30)

DevReady Podcast E50 - The Future of Well-Rounded Leadership with Christine Khor

On this episode of the DevReady Podcast, Andrew and Anthony talk to the CEO of Peeplcoach.com and talent executive, Christine Khor. During their conversation, they discuss thought leadership, the benefits of executive coaching, and how to overcome fear in the marketplace.
At the beginning of the episode, Christine talks about what coaching actually is, and what it is not. She provides her background and discusses why she has a passion for helping people to improve their processes and their work-life balance. Going off the cuff for a moment, she mentions the fact that being a braggart about workaholism is not a virtue, and that Gen Z and the Millennials might actually have that part right.
She shares some industry insight into how executive coaching works, who it might be right for, and how people might get started in the coaching process. Christine believes that all people will ultimately benefit from coaching, and they can take their renewed perspectives back with them into the workplace to enhance their productivity and passion. This means having a diverse team around you to help make tough decisions. It also means not being afraid. It’s not as simple as just choosing not to fear things, though. It takes work, and Christine’s team of coaches at PeeplCoach know how.
Ultimately, the leadership at any startup is trying to create value for their investments, and executive coaching can help to maximize the returns on those investments by preparing leadership for any challenge that may come their way. You can reach Christine at the contact info provided below.
Topics Covered:
● How executive coaching helps you understand your limiting beliefs.
● Managing work expectations against working your life away.
● What should you take in if you want to coach others?
● Diversity ultimately creates better outcomes.
● First, try recruitment matching.
● Coaching yourself through fear—and managing to push you forward.
● Be careful about how much focus you put on money.
● Your startup is looking for value for money, not for what is cheap.
● The kinds of people that are ready for coaching.
Key Quotes:
❏ “Marketing is like psychology but for brands.” (2:00)
❏ “What we think of us impacts us more than what other people think of us.” (7:15)
❏ “A coach is not a friend or a partner.” (10:25)
❏ “Part of what a coach does is to question, to poke, to probe—to get a better understanding of who you are.” (12:00)
❏ “Me being proud to say I’m a workaholic is actually not a good thing.” (17:45)
❏ “By not being a tech person, I am not restricted by what can be done or what can’t be done.” (20:30)
❏ “How do we bring values and goals into the recruitment process?” (29:00)
❏ “It makes you a better father, brother, worker...to be passionate about your work.” (31:30)
❏ “The financial reward isn’t enough of a motivator...you need passion and drive.” (35:45)
❏ “The biggest mistake that I’ve made is with the investment side, the non-tech part of it.” (38:50)
❏ “Being a startup means being frugal, but not being cheap.” (41:00)
❏ “Who is your target? It’s everybody.” (46:45)

DevReady Podcast E49 - Ecommerce and Customer-Centric Design with Ben Shapira

On this episode of the DevReady Podcast, Andrew and Anthony talk to digital marketing strategist Ben Shapira about digital marketing, ecommerce strategy, and how to link your target audience to your product.
In the early days, e-commerce was so expensive. But now, almost all companies will benefit from creating an online presence. And it has never been easier. Ben talks about a variety of tools that companies can use to better understand the personalities of their customers and effectively grow their businesses. The more you understand about who your customers really are, the more you can deliver in the way of what they actually want. He provides examples of Target and Costco, and how they combine different marketing tactics to play to the interests of their consumer personas.
Ben also describes attribution methods, which ultimately let business understand the nature of how their customers interact with the brand, as well as how long it took them to become a customer.
Here are the attribution methods described:
1. First-click—When did they first interact with us?
2. Last-click—When did they become a customer?
3. Linear attribution—Tracking all points of engagement between
Breaking into this field of digital marketing may seem daunting, but business owners can use free resources to start experimenting with research on their own.
Here are the three main websites for gathering user data:
1. Pew Research
2. Nielson Data
3. Helix Personas
Once you have a handle on what you consumer personas are, it really would be advantageous to bring in an outside professional to help understand what to to next.
The= key takeaway from this episode is how to actually grow your digital marketing. Ben says the best way is to:
1. Educate yourself about consumer personas, who your customer base really is, and other extrinsic data.
2. Bring in someone from the outside to help you analyze and make sense of that data.
3. Create an actionable plan to bring your customers what they really want and turn them into brand loyalists.
Topics Covered:
● The barriers to entry into ecommerce are low today.
● Traditional marketing approaches don’t really apply in the digital space.
● Why you need to understand your audience for digital marketing.
● Understanding market research tools to boost digital profitability.
● How to serve your customers to become brand loyalists.
● “Single-source” models attribute multiple streams of disparate data to one individual.
● Using Google Analytics to boost your understanding of your audience.
● Turning your conversion rates with the right data.
● How Costco has engineered the layout of their floors.
● Less is more: satisfy your customers with less.
Key Quotes
❏ “When I started, Microsoft frontpage extensions were all the rage.” (1:20)
❏ “Just because you have an internet presence doesn’t mean you’re going to have sales in the long term.” (2:30)
❏ “Social media builds a richer story around our customers.” (6:45)
❏ “It’s more important to ask questions than anything else.” (4:25)
❏ “Every business has at least two personas.” (5:00)
❏ “Personas are not monolithic: they are a general best-guess.” (12:30)
❏ “We can make inferences based on a single piece of hardware: your phone.” (13:25)
❏ “The data that’s being collected has both positive and negative connotations.” (18:10)
❏ “Personas are bad for privacy but good for companies and consumers.”
❏ “Even if you don’t have a Facebook account, you are interacting with it, and they are tracking your engagement.” (21:45)
❏ “Investing a little bit upfront in the research side will ultimately return a lot in the long run.” (28:20)
❏ “The way Target markets to mom, she will sacrifice brand names for herself so that she can buy brand name stuff for her kids.” (31:00)
❏ “It’s really important as a business owner to surround yourself with experts in the field.” (33:30)

DevReady Podcast E48 - Storytelling, Modelling & Creating Value in a Start-up with James Bilson

On this episode of the DevReady Podcast, Andrew and Anthony talk to the founder and CEO of Primary, a tech consulting firm based in the Greater Melbourne Area. They talk about the challenges of modeling, working with clients, and the art of storytelling.
James talks about his history in the tech world and expresses some of the frustrations he experienced as an early developer. Among these are the problems he saw with the companies that used the agile model. He speaks to why agile doesn’t really provide any solutions for the customer, and what tech companies need to do is create models that address real problems to create real value. Andrew and Anthony share in this frustration because of all the projects they have been on where apps were developed that ultimately did not create any value for the customer.
The key takeaways from this episode iare James’s ideas that modeling is probably the most important step in the early stages of development, and that you can add value to the user’s experience by involving them in the story that the product is telling. In other words, storytelling has the power to create a meaningful experience (and valuable interactions in the real world). By building and model and developing a “scaffolding” of storytelling in your application, you can provide your customers with solutions they actually want instead of meaningless products that offer no value and ultimately hurt your company in the long run.
Topics Covered:
● Getting customers to clearly express their needs in the startup phase.
● The agile approach as a “solution” to real problems.
● The world of use-case models.
● PHP and user-management systems.
● The problems with novel tech and integration of systems.
● Storytelling as a way to connect the user to the app experience.
● Defining what the software actually should be doing.
● How just jumping in will often build the skills you need.
● Start by building a model.
Key Quotes
❏ “We were a hacker shop—we were just making it up as we went along.” (6:00)
❏ “I ended up building a lot of stuff that was beautifully crafted but did stuff that was stupid and that nobody wanted.” (8:55)
❏ “I agree that the agile solution that’s been bandied around--I don’t think it is.” (13:00)
❏ “You want to create a series of stories...that merge the tool and the communication piece.” (15:40)
❏ “A user must end up doing something of value to them in the real world.” (19:32)
❏ “Interfaces as an organizational structure are not great.” (22:35)
❏ “If you have too many conditions in the story, then the story arc is lost.” (25:40)
❏ “You can involve the other dev people [in the modeling process] and they can have real value.” (30:35)
❏ “Sometimes the answer is no dev, not pursuing an outcome at all.” (34:00)
❏ “We link processes that people are already carrying out.” (36:12)
❏ “It’s a massive win if you can take even just one or two iterations out.” (37:55)
❏ “There is this reticence to get started—just jump in.” (39:00)
❏ “The product will evolve over time as your relationship develops with the customers.” (44:10)

DevReady Podcast E47 - The Future of Parking with Mosstyn Howell

On this episode of the DevReady Podcast, Andrew and Anthony talk to Mosstyn Howell, founder and CEO at UbiPark, a startup that streamlines the parking experience for drivers in the greater Melbourne area. UbiPark has completely digitized the entire parking experience. They call it SNAP: search, navigate, access and pay—directly from the app. This allows customers to automate the whole process of parking, removing troublesome fees and interactions with staffers.
Mosstyn shares his experience as a parking lot attendant to eventual tech company founder and how all the work along the way opened him to the idea of automated parking. One thing Mosstyn hammers on in this interview is the importance of the team. That no matter how foolproof your idea is, without the right team, it’s going to be very difficult to translate that to real market value. Andrew and Anthony also discuss funding strategy for business ideas like these, when you only have friends and family to help support the costs initially. Mosstyn is fortunate enough to reflect on the fact the UbiPark has seen delightful returns for his earliest investors.
Finally, Mosstyn and the hosts talk about growing a business in the middle (and wake) of a global health crisis. Mosstyn opines that there has been a trend in the tech world for some time now to move to a remote work model, it just needed a catalyst to set it off. He believes that the world will more than likely transition to more remote work options after analyzing the great cost real estate is to business. He shared one story of a company paying $8M a year for parking spaces alone. Remote work, along with automated parking to ease congestion, could grow the bottom line like we’ve never seen. Mosstyn is excited to be on the frontline of this change to the way we think about parking.
Topics Covered:
● The challenge of finding the right people to come around.
● Raising funds on your own in the initial phases.
● Building the product based on feedback.
● The restrictions that Apple often places on developers.
● What do you do when you don’t have all the answers?
● Bringing development in when you have the funding to do so.
● Clarity is key.
● Remote working as a trend ahead of COVID.
● COVID’s changing mindset around tech and productivity.
● How UbiPark is providing the platform to spring into other value markets.
● Do your due diligence.
Key Quotes
❏ “I needed the best app in the parking industry.” (5:35)
❏ “Every time I took it to a new tech company, they said we had to start again.” (8:25)
❏ “By the time you set it up and get it out to market, it’s probably not exactly what they need anymore.” (13:00)
❏ “We want our customers to search, navigate, and pay for parking right from the car’s touch screen.” (16:20)
❏ “Listening to the customer is the number one thing.” (18:10)
❏ “There’s no right or wrong way to build a product.” (21:35)
❏ “If you don’t have a documented plan in place, it becomes very difficult.” (30:00)
❏ “There are pivots that are required, and there are trends in the thinking.” (38:30)
❏ “They’re going to invest in YOU.” (41:00)
❏ “The key is to make sure everyone on the team is on the same page.” (56:40)
❏ “You have to make sure you’re going into it with the right idea.” (1:00:00)