Intro Hook (0:00)
Robby Wade:
I think the real secret to building these kinds of platforms is really, really pursuing simplicity. That’s the hardest part. Like, I would honestly say, coming up with, like, ideas and all the strategies and stuff like that is the easy part. But also, but being able to condense it down for simplicity purposes is the hard part.
Sean Weisbrot:
Welcome back to another episode of the We Live to Build Podcast. I’m here today with Robby Wade, an Australian entrepreneur based in the US. He was introduced to me by Stephen Keighery, who I interviewed in episode 65 about how to diversify your wealth into real estate after you have a big exit from your company. He took a company public on the Australian Stock Exchange. So, if you want to know more about his former company, what he’s doing now, and how you can diversify your portfolio, definitely go take a look at that. So, Stephen has invested in Robby’s company, which I’ll just mention really fast.
So, Robby is the CEO and Co-Founder of ThisApp, an all-in-one chat platform that’s on a mission to reinvent social communication. You were formerly the CEO of Vid, a blockchain based social media app and Co-Founder of Nebula Ventures, a seed stage venture studio focused on fintech.
The reason why I decided to interview you is because, funny enough, you’re building what I was trying to build four years ago, also in blockchain. And I just thought it was hilarious because I didn’t think anyone had the balls to try it, especially after I pivoted away from it. And so, even though we still kind of have an adjacent business where I do have a personal messaging side to my team collaboration platform, I just thought it would be hilarious to talk about communication in general. So, welcome to the show. And, yeah, it’s nice to have you here. And why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about ThisApp?
What is ThisApp? (1:59)
Robby Wade:
Thanks, Sean. I really appreciate it. I just want to touch on something that you mentioned in the bio. I was the COO, not CEO. I know that you just skipped over it, but I just want to pay homage to that CEO because I know how hard that job is, and that wasn’t with me. I was the COO, but that’s okay. Yeah, I agree. I really am looking forward to having this conversation with you. Just from your experience in China, have drawn a lot of inspiration from WeChat, which sort of led us on the mission to build ThisApp. And, yeah, I mean, we’ve had the similar funny looks that you might have had when you take on such a bold mission.
“Keep your momentum going”
But I think what’s been really cool is we’ve built up so much momentum now where it’s almost harder to stop than it is to keep going. In that sense, at the start, it’s hard and everybody’s questioning you as to whether you can get it done or not. You just have those small wins over and over again and raise that first check, get those first couple of team members and whatnot, as you would have experienced. But, yeah, there’s many different things we can discuss there.
In terms of really just thinking about ThisApp. I’ll try to keep it really simple. We’re essentially building a chat platform with three new tools. So, the first one being a calendar that makes it really easy to organize anything, whether it’s like a phone call or all the way up to a 30-day trip in Europe. So, our goal here is to really build, I guess you’d say, an intimate version of Facebook events, like fill the space where Facebook events or Eventbrite would be an overkill.
The second is a decentralized wallet, a wallet that also keeps track of sort of who owes who. So, you’ve kind of got like a Venmo mixed with a split wise in that sense, so you can keep a tab running and then just transfer money to each other whenever need. And then the inspiration from WeChat, where we brought in the sort of collaborative bookings. So, whilst you’re creating these events and trips, you’ll be able to book hotels, book restaurants, book tickets, and flights, and all of these kinds of wonderful things. So, a really sort of encompassing chat platform. But the key to everything that we’re doing is all of these feature sets tied back into and strengthen the chat.
Working on an app with similar concepts (4:08)
Sean Weisbrot:
So, when I first saw it, I thought it was very clever, honestly. So, I don’t know if I told you this on our original call, but what I was trying to do with Sidekick before it became Nerv was something very similar. Except the events and the calendar weren’t really part of it. Instead, we had a to do list that could be shared between individuals.
Robby Wade:
Yup.
Sean Weisbrot:
We had a task, sorry, a file manager that could be shared between people. And we had the wallet, of course. And then, deeper, more into that, we were thinking about doing things where the wallet could add value. So, like, if you wanted to do like a survey, you could potentially put your crypto into the system and pay to send out a survey to a segment of the user base, or even to your own group, your own community, and people would answer. So, let’s say for example, you wanted to put out a new product and you could say, “I’m going to put $10,000 into Sidekick,” and I want Sidekick to find people who will answer this question, “Do you want to buy this product or whatever.” And the people will get paid to answer yes or no, and maybe give a feedback or something. So, there was all sorts of feedback, surveys, polls. So basically, I tried to think of what are all of the different ways that I can make it valuable, that people will put money in and people can earn money out?
“Blockchain cannot create money out of nowhere”
Where the difference between other blockchain companies in the past where, “We’re going to have a blockchain, it’s going to create coins and everybody’s going to get rich?” And my thought process was, “I’m sorry, but that’s absolutely fucking stupid.” No blockchain is going to create value out of fucking thin air and everybody’s going to get rich. You need people to put money in so that people can earn that money from them. That’s how an economy works.
And so, for me, it wasn’t about, let’s have our own blockchain. It was about, let’s have people attach their Bitcoin wallet, their Ethereum wallet. Let’s let people use the coins they have to pay for the things they want, and people can earn from them. So, polls were part of it, surveys are part of it, quizzes, other sort of feedback, paywalls for groups. There are all sorts of different ways that people can do it. We had 100 screens for a marketplace that I mocked up, that I paid for a designer to make. I mean, we were talking about full on physical products and digital products in the marketplace. We were insane. I was insane. And my team was like, you’re insane, Sean. You’re insane. We can’t build all of this. We don’t have enough money to do it.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect (6:57)
Robby Wade:
“What is the Dunning-Kruger Effect?”
I think just to interrupt you there, I think I had a very similar experience. I was just thinking about this over the last couple of days. Earlier on, we had some of our most amazing ideas in that sense, and you realize what you can and can’t do with like certain constraints. I think a beautiful model is the sort of Dunning-Kruger curve where, if you know what I’m familiar with, like Dunning-Kruger curve is like you’re the expert, you think you can do everything and then you go into the Valley of Despair and then you come out and some sense of enlightenment after an enormous amount of work in that sense.
And, you know, as you track down, you start off as an expert and then as you start doing things, you realize things are a lot harder than what you thought and you end up in the Valley of Despair and start like trimming, I guess a good word would be. I think you hit the nail on the head. I think events is a secret that we like our sort of secret sauce, and I sort of call it our Trojan horse.
Messaging apps in the West and East (8:00)
Robby Wade:
I think what’s important as well is the Eastern chat user is very different to the Western chat user, right? And so, we kind of have to meet the Western chat user where they already are. A lot of the feature sets that you were talking about and because you’ve spent time in China, that would be, people would be very used to such sophistication in that sense. Whereas, you’ve got 2 billion people using WhatsApp, which is essentially text messages, audio messages and video calls. And don’t get me wrong, I have gained a lot of respect for WhatsApp after building a chat because whilst it looks deceptively simple, it’s incredibly reliable. But what I’m saying is you’re taking users that they’re their sort of capacity and expanding beyond that.
“Messaging apps are somewhat taken for granted”
The other thing as well is like, Chat’s a bit of a sewer point in the west in the sense that there’s been a lot of distrust. Like, you know, if you think about what’s weird about chats is you look at your sort of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, like these sorts of leaders of these technology companies that people look up to and are admired by. Chats, have the biggest user bases on the world. And if you ask the average person who is the CEO of WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal or whatever, they couldn’t tell you. These companies aren’t really brands, they’re kind of just like app tiles on your phone, which is really weird to me, given how fundamental they are in terms of our lives.
But where I think events is the secret is, as I said, chat is a sewer point and it’s not that interesting to people anymore. They’ve already moved from WhatsApp to Signal and whatnot. And when WeChat came out, it was really interesting and WeChat sort of secret source was they introduced audio messages because a lot of Chinese people found the keyboard quite hard to use. And so, that’s why audio messages sort of took off in the east much more than they did in the west.
But now, Chat is not that interesting. You can’t just come out and say, “hey everyone, I got a chat and no one cares,” like in that sense. For us, I was like, what are people doing in Chats? They’re communicating, but they’re also organizing. Right? But the thing is, there’s no organizational feature sets in Chat. Zero. People are just posting text messages of the event details and putting big messages about trips and all this kind of stuff and trying to remember to call each other and saying, “Hey, when are you free? Hey, when are you free? Hey, when are you free? Hey, call me on Friday.”
“These are the untapped potential of messaging apps”
And all these kinds of things that there’s a lot of, I guess just inefficiency in Chat because there’s no organizational features. But once you start to open that door to organizational feature sets, there’s a world of revenue generating opportunity. And you can start quite simply by just allowing people to create an event in the chat. It goes to their Google or Outlook calendar, and then when it comes to creating a trip, it’s literally just like a folder of events. That’s all it is.
And so, it’s very easy for us to naturally go from events to trips. So that’s kind of where I see events being the Trojan horse, as you mentioned. The other beautiful thing about events is they have a really cool like, growth loop in the sense that someone creates an event or a trip, usually they’re going with four, five, six people and whatnot. So, it allows you to kick start that sort of viral coefficient and get the platform growing.
Sean Weisbrot:
I think I had thought of events, but I think it was, like, on the bottom of my list of things. But before I go more into that, I want to touch upon what you’re talking about with the east versus west. So, yes, I was one of the first users of WeChat, I think in 2010 or early 2011, I can’t remember exactly. It was around there that they came out within two years of smartphones coming out, because smartphones really didn’t hit China the way they hit America. It took like another year, year and a half because of the way that their society was. What a lot of people don’t realize about China is they had desktops, and they kind of leapfrog laptops into smartphones, where laptops were a thing in the west for like, a while before smartphones came out. So, China had these really simple bar phones and desktops, and then all of a sudden, like, a year later, “Oh, here’s a smartphone.” And it was from HTC, actually, I think was my first smartphone. I don’t know if HTC is still a thing now, but.
Robby Wade:
Sorry, Nokia came out with the phone the other day, so you never know, people might, phoenix is arising from the ashes, I guess.
Sean Weisbrot:
I thought Nokia died. So, what was interesting for me about WeChat was something they came out with, actually, pretty early on, was translation on the fly. Where I’ve told this story a few times before. So, when I first got to China in 2008, before smartphones existed, like, trying to learn Chinese was very hard because you literally like, if I had a bar phone, I brought a phone from America. The phone didn’t support Chinese keyboard. It was like a Nokia bar phone. How are you supposed to type in Chinese to people by SMS? Like, no, I had to buy a phone in China to do that. But it sucked. It was horrible. Those smartphone keyboards made it so much easier to do. But then the ability to translate on the fly by pressing a button inside of your chat from Chinese to English was a freaking lifesaver. Because at the time, they banned Google, so you had no way to translate. Like, there’s literally no other application on the planet that you could translate from. And if you didn’t know what they said, what they were saying, and you didn’t have someone with you who could tell you, like, you’re literally stuck.
Robby Wade:
Yeah.
Sean Weisbrot:
So, I found it to be very useful tool in improving my Chinese very quickly. Again, this is like 2010, 2011. And then the voice Messages again was a really cool thing.
Robby Wade:
WeChat actually released voice messages three years before iMessage. Just to give an idea of how fast they shipped product in their messaging suite, like iMessage voice messages came three years later. That’s quite a long time when you think about it.
Sean Weisbrot:
I think this happened because the founders of WeChat were the founders of QQ, which was like a desktop messenger in China. So, I think because they already had a decade of experience with communication, for them, switching to smartphone was like a no brainer. And I think there’s actually an origin story for this. It’s not well known. I think I read about it a few years ago, but they were like they kind of hit on it. It was like this kind of Eureka thing. And they’re like, “Holy crap, we need to put all of our resources into this smartphone thing.”
Robby Wade:
Yeah. Yeah.
Sean Weisbrot:
And it was very well played, because I think in 2020, they did like, like $10 billion in profit or something.
Robby Wade:
Yeah, their revenue per user is astronomical. And the cool thing about WeChat is they feature facilitate revenue generation. Like it’s only about 10% to 15% of their sort of revenue pie is advertisements, whereas in the west you’re looking at 98% to 99%, especially in the cases of Facebook and whatnot.
“The downside of end-to-end encryption
There’s something interesting about what you said about the translation and the audio transcription stuff as well that WeChat does in that sense. One thing about the west that we all have to be kind of mindful of is there’s been this obsession over end-to-end encryption, which I get the importance of privacy and all those kinds of things. It’s very important. But what we all have to appreciate is that we’re giving up an enormous amount of potential feature sets because audio transcription is really difficult with end-to-end encryption. Translating things is really difficult with end-to-end encryption. If I can’t read your message, it’s very hard to translate it in that sense. So, I’m sure that there’s people coming up with creative ways to be able to do it with end-to-end encryption and we’ll probably crack that boundary.
But as much as I do believe in the importance of end-to-end encryption, I think at the same time it’s a band aid fix for companies that we don’t trust in that sense. And so, I think we need to figure out our relationship with that because it’s impacting the quality of the products that we’re using. Like if you look at a lot of the feature sets that have come out in different messengers over the last, since video calling, we’ve had like stickers, emojis, things that light on fire, boxes that open, all this kind of stuff, and you know.
Sean Weisbrot:
Right. Completely useless as far as I’m concerned.
How WeChat became a super app (16:54)
Robby Wade:
You know, compared to like, WeChat. I think people sort of underestimate what a super app is. Like, a super app isn’t just a product that’s multifunctional, it has multiple features. WeChat is kind of like multiple platforms, right? It’s like all YouTube, Instagram and all of that kind of stuff in one.
Sean Weisbrot:
I can give you a good description of it. I can help you to expand because I’ve lived it. Let’s say, you wake up and you get a message about a new job. That message is on WeChat. Let’s say you want to call about the job information. You call in WeChat, okay? The person says, “Hey, I’m going to send you 100 RMB, about $15. Come get a taxi over here, and we’ll do an interview.” Well, guess what? They’re going to send you that 100 RMB in your digital wallet on WeChat. It’ll get to you seconds after they tell you they’re going to send it, assuming they send it on time, you’re then going to use that money to hail a taxi inside of WeChat to get to that location using a map that’s inside of WeChat. And then, when the interview is over and they say, “Okay, fine, we’re going to hire you,” whatever.
And you say, “I’m hungry. I’m going to go for a meal,” you’re going to hire another taxi using the additional money left over from WeChat in WeChat, using the WeChat map to tell the driver where you’re going to eat. And then when you get to the restaurant, you’re going to load the menu in WeChat. And then, when you’re done with the meal, you’re going to pay for the meal using the WeChat wallet. And then, you decide, I need to go home and see my parents for the weekend. So, you book a train on WeChat, right? And then, you send your parents a message on WeChat telling them you’re coming home for the weekend, like, people live in WeChat.
Robby Wade:
It sounds like another world.
Sean Weisbrot:
That is a super app. That is a super app.
Robby Wade:
It sounds like another world when you think about it. Like, the closest, there’s a couple we do have in the west. Like, you could argue that Instagram is a little bit it of a, but I’d call them more multifunctional platforms because they’re in one sort of category. Like, Instagram has fashion and art photos, and then you can buy those products. It’s just an extension rather than, like, a multi-platform approach, if that makes sense. I’d almost call it, like, an iteration. Like, in that sense. I’m in New York, as I said at the moment, and I was on Uber last night, and I was like, “Oh, cool.” You can do, like, pick up where I could just see the restaurant around me and then look through their menus. And I was like, Oh, that’s awesome. But it’s such a 2022.
Like, why is that an exciting feature for me? Like, in that sense, I was like, but it’s just because that sort of innovation friction. But then, there’s been other areas where there’s been serious innovation, but I think we’ve kind of I guess a good word is we’ve got complacent in Chat, right? Like, I just definitely think that is such a space. And as you said, you have to be insane to consider innovating in this space, because you’re going up against companies that have more money than most governments and have the largest user bases in the world. Like, I heard someone say Facebook has more users than Christianity, and when you just let that sit for a second and they have achieved that in a decade, that’s a remarkable thing in that sense.
So, I think the sort of absence of innovation is the result of, I guess, how bold the mission is. But also, I think we have this sort of mentality in the west where it’s been like this sort of Lean startup approach, where it’s like, pick a niche, monopolize in that one little thing and then one of these big companies will come and buy you and put you on their Lego block. But really what they’re doing is they’re just going to buy your team and swallow you into their sort of, like, universe in that sense. So, I think we’re in shortage of bold visions in that way and I think Chat is, Chat is a deceptively, it’s such an important product that everyone’s almost forgotten about.
Paywalls in messaging apps (21:26)
Sean Weisbrot:
Well, call me bold, because four years ago, I wanted to put paywalls on a personal messenger. Like, if you look at, if you look at Slack.
Robby Wade:
You are early, that’s like a Discord, like, kind of Telegram’s doing a lot of that stuff now.
Sean Weisbrot:
If you look at Slack, you look at Discord, you look at WhatsApp? You look at all of these companies that have the potential to put a paywall on a group or on a community and didn’t is 100%, not even WeChat does it.
So, four years ago, I said, that’s going to be one of my defining features. I’m going to let people charge to join their group, and it’s going to happen inside of the app. They’re not going to go to a Patreon. They’re not going to go to a PayPal. They’re not going to use a launch pass, whatever alternatives, no bots, whatever. We’re going to build it natively, and we’re going to take a freaking cut, but we’re not going to take 30%. We’ll take 5%. Why? Because we want people to actually use it.
Robby Wade:
Why do you think no one has done it? What would be your hypothesis?
Sean Weisbrot:
I have no clue, but it’s a freaking masterpiece. It boggles my mind. You look at Discord, what did they do? They let you pay Discord to have stickers and profile banners? Are you freaking insane? Why don’t you let people pay to join a server? I’m trying to work this out on my own Discord server right now for my own community that I’m building, and I have
to use a bot.
Robby Wade:
Then, you’re going to have to create a bot and do all this stuff. Yeah, exactly.
Sean Weisbrot:
Right. Why? Why doesn’t Discord let me charge? Telegram, why don’t you let me charge? Nobody has a freaking wallet, and the only company that has a wallet doesn’t support it. I think WeChat has lost out on billions upon billions upon billions in revenue by allowing people to join a paid freaking group.
Robby Wade:
Do you think maybe it’s got to do with international payments? Because WhatsApp hasn’t even nailed payments internationally between different users, and I think crypto can bridge that gap in some capacities, but none of the chat apps have actually nailed payments at a global level. Like, you can send messages globally, but you can’t send payments globally. I definitely think that’s the next frontier. Whoever cracks that, hopefully us, that’ll be the next sort of huge evolution from being able, remember when calling internationally or messaging internationally was a financial decision. Like, you’d be like, “Oh, shit. Do I have enough money to call my friend in America?”
Sean Weisbrot:
It still is.
Robby Wade:
What do you mean?
Sean Weisbrot:
Sometimes I pay, like, one dollar to call Singapore per minute.
Robby Wade:
Oh, really?
Sean Weisbrot:
Yeah.
Robby Wade:
Okay. Well, when you use WhatsApp and stuff, like, you can call people in Europe or America or Australia or whatever.
Sean Weisbrot:
Of course.
Robby Wade:
Maybe, depending on certain countries. But in a lot of cases, video calling is free. You and I can have this podcast you’re in in Europe. I’m in America.
Sean Weisbrot:
This isn’t free, though. I’m paying $50 a month to be able to record.
Robby Wade:
Software. That’s like recording software. But, I mean, we could do a zoom call for free, right? But my point here is, do you think that these gates have been challenging because you have users from heaps of different countries with different currencies, and to be able to accept all of those currencies so that you can have people enter the chat no matter where they are? That’s the only thing that I could think of in terms of why it would be challenging.
Sean Weisbrot:
Well, I know India has had a problem, and I think Brazil has had a problem with WhatsApp doing payments?
Robby Wade:
Yeah.
Sean Weisbrot:
I think it’s a political thing because let’s say someone’s in Iran and they want to join you, but you’re an American group, or the group is an American owner. Are you allowed to take money from an Iranian? You know?
Robby Wade:
This is like, sort of, the anti-money laundering kind of stuff.
Sean Weisbrot:
Right. I think it’s political more than anything else.
Robby Wade:
Absolutely.
Sean Weisbrot:
And so, like, WeChat. They’re stuck using RMB. Why? They’re a Chinese company. They don’t want their citizens taking money out of the country, and they make it very difficult to do.
Robby Wade:
You have a billion people in sort of like a micro chasm, if that makes sense. Like, that’s an enormous user base that you can just own in that sense.
The struggle of building foreign businesses in China (25:37)
Sean Weisbrot:
“Business is not easy in China”
I know. Speaking outside of that specific situation, I can’t tell you how many people I mean, hundreds at least have told me, I’m going to go to China, and I’m going to make a lot of money because there’s a billion people. And I’m like, “Okay, good luck with that shit. I’ve been there. I tried. It’s not easy.” The chances of success are under 1% as a foreigner.
Robby Wade:
Even once you’re there, it’s hard. Like, you look at the situation with Jack Ma, and all those kinds of things. It’s a different ball game when you’re playing.
Sean Weisbrot:
“Western companies have a hard time in Chinese market”
It is, but if you look at, like, so there’s a lot of companies that have tried to go into China, and a lot of them fail. So, for example, I think it was Uber. Uber spent like, I think, a billion dollars or a billion dollars a month. They spent an exorbitant amount of money trying to get the Chinese market. And in the end, they sold their stake, they sold their local operations to DiDi, which is a local Uber. And they ended up owning part of DiDi, which is good for them because DiDi’s freaking grown fantastic. But they failed, and they failed in Malaysia, and Grab ended up purchasing their stake in Malaysia. Uber has tried in multiple markets in Southeast Asia, and they just have no concept of how to do it. And what’s Grab doing? Grab is doing a super app in, like, a car hailing thing. So, they’re taking a WeChat approach, but with no communications inside.
Robby Wade:
I have a little bit of skepticism there. I think that’s also political in a way. Like DiDi, I’m pretty sure We Chat has a large stake in DiDi. You know, there’s big organizations that have large stakes in WeChat. I think it’s; I think that given the opportunity, Uber could have figured it out. And when you look at Grab’s investor base, it’s quite heavy as well, when you look at that. And I think they just had the right partnerships. But, I mean, it all does come down to execution in the end. But I think that Uber was fighting a lost fight. I don’t think that they could.
Sean Weisbrot:
Of course.
Robby Wade:
Regardless of what they did, it wasn’t going to win. Given that there was a domestic option that everybody could back. You know, there’s a little bit of nationalism that comes off the back of that. But yeah, no, I think for us, I have tried not to focus too much. Like, I have been inspired by WeChat from a business model perspective, because I think feature facilitating revenue is something that’s underrated in the West. Like, our sort of business models are kind of either advertisement or subscription and that’s kind of it.
Simplicity works well (28:24)
“Sometimes, less is more”
But I think the real secret to building these kinds of platforms is really, really pursuing simplicity. That’s the hardest part. Like, I would honestly say, coming up with, like, ideas and all the strategies and stuff like that is the easy part. But also, but being able to condense it down for simplicity purposes is the hard part. I sort of like this analogy.
I don’t know if it’s actually true, but the story between the Russians and Americans in the space race, and even though the Americans made it first, the Americans spend heaps of money and time making, like, a space pen, and the Russians just used a pencil. In that sense, you sort of just got to try to think about these things. And I think about this a lot with product development because we only have limited resources and stuff. Often times, you’ll find that you’re trying so hard that you’re actually the blocker. Like, in that sense, if you think of, like, a river, and if a river is blocked, you need to unblock it. You don’t really need to push more force into the river.
I think sometimes product development is the same. Like, you can achieve so much more by removing feature sets and simplifying. I sort of tie it to if you think about, like, weightlifting, when you remove the weight, you’re pursuing power, like, in that sense. And I think it’s something that’s so undervalued, and when you’re pursuing such a big vision, it’s romantic to be able to do everything and serve your users in every single capacity that you can ever think of in your mind.
“You should build around your customer”
And, look, over 20 years, I need something to do for the next 20 years. Right? So, you don’t want to have all your features at once, and you slowly want to grow and learn from your users, but you want to tailor it to them. Like, if you build the juggernaut and give them the perfect product, it’s not theirs. They didn’t build it with you. They didn’t come on the journey with you. They didn’t grow through the evolution. They didn’t complain about things, and you fixed them and all that. And I think that part is underrated.
Like, one thing that annoys me, for example, with Apple, is, like, their AirPods. I don’t know if you wear AirPods, but when you’re having a conversation with someone, the amount of noise they pick up is just insane. But I keep wearing them because I know Apple will fix it, and when they fix it, I’ll be so happy about it. It’s just a relationship that I have with them, if that makes sense.
Sean Weisbrot:
They’ll fix it and charge you $5,000 to do so. So, these are $300 from Bose, and I hear nothing. I have no problems, whatsoever.
Robby Wade:
They’re, like, heaps comfy on your ears, right?
Sean Weisbrot:
They’re very comfortable. I wear them everywhere I go. I was introduced to them about probably six years ago. I was in a hotel room with a friend of mine, and he was on the bed next to me, working on his laptop. And I looked at him and I was like, “Hey, Alfred, what do you want for dinner?” And he’s sitting there typing away. I was like, “Hey, Alfred, what do you want for dinner?” Sitting there typing away. “Hey, Alfred.” And I’ve waved at him and he’s like, “what?” What do you want to do for dinner? That’s how it is. It’s just so incredible. You literally can’t hear anything. You’re on trains, you’re on planes, you’re in noisy buses, you’re trying to get work done in a co-working space where everyone’s talking on their phones, whatever. You can’t hear anything. Yeah, but unfortunately, a chat app can’t fix that.
Robby Wade:
I think it’s just a good analogy for just keep things simple and grow your product with your users. I do like looking at WeChat, but sometimes it sends me down the wrong path. Like, you need to sort of stay true to what you know about your users, and different countries operate in different ways and all those kinds of things. So, for me, it’s more been an inspiration rather than, like a direct influence in that sense, to really think about that. But I think it’s a good tie.
The problems with centralized currency (32:31)
Sean Weisbrot:
For sure. I wanted to touch back on your original question about why things didn’t kick off with the payments instead of apps, because I kind of only half really answered that. The thing that I was going to. The final aspect of my answer was going to be: I think fiat currencies are the problem. I think cryptocurrencies are the solution for it. And that’s why I wanted to build something with a cryptocurrency-based wallet in it because I thought that it would enable instantly anyone from anywhere to pay anyone for anything at any time and no one could tell them they couldn’t. And I was going to sit there and happily take a little cut.
Robby Wade:
I think it makes sense. I’ve studied information theory a fair bit and when you look back at the history of the telegram, the telephone, all of these kinds of things, people had similar fears with sort of like not anti-money laundering, but like communicative terrorism. In that sense, if we let the people talk to each other freely, then they are going to rise up against the government.
And if you think about before chats, you have to go to the post office and ask for permission to send a letter to your friend and all these kinds of things. And I know it sounds detached, but it’s not really like in that sense, the internet allowed us to create information and send it wherever we wanted. Before you had to get a newspaper to approve you to make a journal article or a blog or something, or you have to get someone to print you in your magazine and whatnot before you could go out saying things. And I think finance will have its time. It will be harder to do.
There’s more nuances with money than there is with information, in terms of what money can. It’s one thing to organize, a terrorist, let’s just use terrorism for an example. It’s one thing to organize a terrorist activity in a chat and you’re messaging each other and it’s another thing for someone to sponsor it with half a million or a million dollars, right? There’s an order of magnitude in terms of the difference that occurs there. So, we just need to solve those problems. But there’s incredibly smart people working on it and I agree with you.
Sean Weisbrot:
I don’t think you can solve that. The only way you can solve that is if you don’t have encrypted chat, so you can see what everyone is saying.
Robby Wade:
Yeah, I mean, the way we solve it is, like, I would say it’s multifunctional, right? Like, you, the state that cryptocurrencies is in right now, I don’t think it’s going to be the state that it sort of ends up in. I think people always opt for encryption in some capacity like what you were saying.
Data privacy and data leaks (35:19)
Robby Wade:
Like if you research, like the telegram or the telephone or whatnot, people used to create codes to send their messages in, so that people in the transmission tower didn’t read their messages and whatever. So, people have been doing it since the dawn of time and people have been in the underground transferring money. I think at a whole, the 7 billion, if you round it down, there are 7 billion good people in the world or 8 billion good people in the world when you sort of round it down. What was that? I can’t hear you. I don’t know if it’s my…
Sean Weisbrot:
Sorry. No, I was muted by accident. I was going to say probably closer to eight because China doesn’t publish its numbers properly and India probably doesn’t know exactly what their numbers are.
Robby Wade:
Well, yeah, and I think these things are bound to happen. And this is something that I think about just going back to product development. Sometimes we sort of overengineered for the worst-case scenario as well. Like, if you think about it, like if you were to look at a restaurant, right, and you were like, “Okay, we need to put all the guests in cages so they don’t stab each other with a knife” or something like that. Do you know what I mean? If you look at all the risks that were involved, or if you think about people driving, like, imagine sitting down with the product team of putting the average person in a car on the road and you’d be like, “Oh my God,” they’re going to drive over people, they’re going to crash into houses, they’re going to do all these things. And we think about you would have this problem when you’re thinking through product.
“Fear is holding our technology back”
And one real example that I think about a lot is like, imagine if you were the product team that came up with forwarding and sharing. You’d be like, “Oh my God.” Like, people are going to send my shirtless photos, and they’re going to send my bank details, and they’re going to share this under Facebook. But forwarding and sharing are two of the most important features in social communication that exists today. And without them, it would be an enormous amount of friction to be able to get things done. So, I think we also just have to become more trusting and optimistic in these scenarios. And there is like the law of big numbers is things are going to go wrong and that’s going to suck. But I don’t think that we should make everybody suffer because of a minor fear.
Sean Weisbrot:
We actually thought about forwarding and replying, and because we have a business use case, we were thinking about because we’ve got this team side and we’ve got this individual side. And so, we were trying to think about should people, should we default to you can’t send information from a team to the outside. And, there’s a lot of complexity just in privacy. And what do we default to? Do we fall to you could do it for everybody? You could do it for nobody. Does the team have a company policy that prevents anyone from sending information outside? It’s a very, very complicated feature.
Robby Wade:
But the reality is you can do it anyway. Like, if I wanted to screenshot it, or copy and paste it, or download it and send it, I can do it anyway. If I want to do it, I can. So, there’s no point restricting me, right?
Sean Weisbrot:
Yes, but if you do that and your company finds out and they have a policy against it, then you could lose your job.
Robby Wade:
But regardless of what you guys have feature wise, the company is going to have its own policies, right? So, like, to make you easier, the user can do it anyway, regardless of if you build this completely elaborate and I don’t know what feature like, I haven’t seen your product, so I’m just talking from my very limited knowledge of what you’re doing in that sense. But if the user can tack it together, like if they wanted to share company information, and they can copy and paste it, or they can screenshot it if they want to, they can do it, right? So, what would be the advantage of feature stopping them in that sense when they could just bypass that and do it their own way.
Sean Weisbrot:
For the sake of privacy. So, the way that I try to think of things is how can we create frameworks, you know, that companies that can then turn into policies in a simple way.
Robby Wade:
Okay. Okay.
Sean Weisbrot:
Because if we make a feature, and then, the company can decide to disable it, then if somebody does a screenshot, if somebody does this, whatever, “don’t look at me.” I let you decide to stop it. If it happens anyways, “Don’t look at me. I have nothing to do with it”, right? So, a lot of companies like Facebook are like, “I didn’t upload this content, why should I have to moderate it?” It’s not my fault. So, the way I think of it is if you create features that are open-ended and you give the people the responsibility for determining what they want to do with it, I’ve done my job. I’m protecting myself and my shareholders and my team. That’s all I can do. I have to provide the feature, but you determine if you want to use it.
Robby Wade:
Yeah. It’s an interesting one, like I have permissions is, you know, you would know this being a founder of a consumer product. Permissions is an endless, endless, endless wormhole. You could be like, “Yeah,” but if the user’s creating an event and it’s in a trip that they’re not in the group, but they are an admin of the trip, and it’s a different admin of the group, can that admin delete them and you can tie your own shoelaces together trying to figure it out.
Sean Weisbrot:
My CTO hates me for introducing permissions too early. We have like, I think we have 25 different permissions already for the team side. And he’s like, you do realize how annoying this is, right? He’s like, we should have launched without permissions and then added them later.
Robby Wade:
They just have so many edge cases, but they’re important, right? You have this fine balance where you’ve just got to try to figure it out, and you guys are going more down like a B2B enterprise road, from what I understand. So, permissions, you can be a little bit looser on permissions in consumer than you can enterprise, for sure. So that’s something that you have to consider and you obviously have.
Innovating in the messaging space (41:39)
Robby Wade:
Tell me just quickly, what are you thinking about? If you can share, what’s your concept of this? Sort of like, team versus personal thing? Are you mixing like a Slack in a WhatsApp is that kind of what you mean?
Sean Weisbrot:
Yes.
Robby Wade:
Okay, cool.
Sean Weisbrot:
So, the way that we look at it is if you look at Slack, you create a space for your team, and your identity is tied to that space. If you want to join multiple spaces, you’re essentially using the same identity for every space you go to. It’s not correct. Because let’s say I use my @getnerv.io email…
Robby Wade:
Do you mean with like every channel you go to, or do you mean if you go to a separate Slack?
Sean Weisbrot:
If you go to a separate Slack, basically, so it really depends, right? If you’re a user, you can go between different spaces, but you have different emails and you have different passwords, and you have to remember which one it is. It’s stupid.
Robby Wade:
Yeah.
Sean Weisbrot:
Absolutely stupid. So, what we decided to do was, now, again, we have the benefit of this knowledge because the architecture we’re using for our B2B platform is actually our original Sidekick architecture, which was an end user messaging platform, which is the user creates their own account. So, when we made the pivot, we kept the entire architecture. And as a result, we had the benefit of being able to start from the point of view of the individual user who may be part of multiple teams.
Robby Wade:
Which most people are. But it’s not only just teams that are on Slack, people are in communities and Masterminds, and all this kind of stuff. It’s not people with multiple jobs, per say.
Sean Weisbrot:
“This is the problem with Slack right now”
Right. The problem with Slack still is if I’m in 20 different spaces, which I’m sure a lot of people are, even five or ten, how do you remember all of the emails and password combinations you are using for all of them if you have multiple ones? And also, there’s this lack of seamlessness between logins. So, I might be logged in on Slack on my phone and I may be in three different spaces, but if I log on to my computer, I may be on ten.
Robby Wade:
Yeah.
Sean Weisbrot:
“The ideal messaging app for professionals”
So, what we did was we said the user is going to create an account, they can join a space, they can create a space, they can join a group, they can create a group, they can have private chats where they can add people as contacts. You can search globally, like LinkedIn. We have a profile system so that you can show off your CV, basically. So basically, we have a LinkedIn, we have a WhatsApp, whatever, and we’ve got a Slack. We’ve put them all together in a seamless way as the, ourvMVP. So, it’s focused on the user and there’s one account for all of it.
Robby Wade:
So, you’re almost like the Western version of WeChat work, right? Or the work version of WeChat.
Sean Weisbrot:
Yes, but I wasn’t inspired by WeChat.
Robby Wade:
Similar. Yeah.
Sean Weisbrot:
“There is a lack of messaging app catered for professionals”
I was inspired by the fact that there is no freaking platform for business professionals to network and communicate on a private level. Because if you are in Slack, there is no private communication. There is only what happens inside of a space, and the owner of the space owns your history. And even if you’re having what you think is a private chat, they can export the entire history of all of the conversations that happened.
Robby Wade:
I don’t think a lot of people know that.
Sean Weisbrot:
And it’s true. Just look up their information. It’s in their documentation.
Robby Wade:
No, I know it’s true. Now that you say it, but I was like, the DMs on direct messages on Slack, are on a safe place to chat, in theory.
Sean Weisbrot:
So, the only way that you, as a business professional, can have a private conversation is outside of a team space. So, we built a personal messenger with a profile system, with the contact messaging system, because LinkedIn is a profiling system, but it has shitty chat.
Robby Wade:
The chat is getting better. My main issue with LinkedIn is the amount of spam. Because anybody like, you go into your LinkedIn inbox and it’s just full of junk. Like, I probably go on LinkedIn once a week, maybe two weeks. I loathe going on it just because it’s just full of junk in that sense. And that’s something I’ve thought about a lot, is because I don’t want to be like, WhatsApp? Where you can only access your contact book, right? I want to more be able to search for users globally, kind of like you can on Instagram. But how do we make sure that your chat overview stays clean so that it’s not full of spam? And I can’t just message Justin Bieber because I feel like it, right? In that sense, you need to get a request element.
Sean Weisbrot:
So, LinkedIn has privacy in.
Robby Wade:
Well, they’ve got their 1st, 2nd, 3rd degree connection. Yeah.
Sean Weisbrot:
Right. So, what we’ve done is we don’t have 1st, 2nd, 3rd. We have who do I know that you also know?
Robby Wade:
Yeah. Friends of friends.
Sean Weisbrot:
That’s it. So then, based on privacy, you decide, do I want everyone to be able to message me? Do I want friends of friends to be able to message me? Do I want friends to be able to message me? Do I want nobody to be able to message me?
Robby Wade:
Yeah.
Sean Weisbrot:
So, when you come up with this kind of profiling system, you’ve got strangers, you’ve got people who are pending, you have people you’re connected to, you have people who are connected to the people that you know, and then, you make determinations about who’s going to message me, who is going to call me, who can add me to a group, simple things, you know?
So, that way, exactly, that way Justin Bieber doesn’t get bombarded by strangers. But you still have this beautiful profiling system that’s useful and functional, so that you can see information from people if they allow you to see it, like LinkedIn has, and it’s attached to your contact manager and your personal manager. And you can have these simple groups for quick chats or simple communities. And if you want something more robust, like a Discord, you create a team space.
Robby Wade:
“Map out the scalability of your business”
It’s just like when I think about it at a scaled level, it always makes sense. This is the other problem sometimes with permissions. And the privacy stuff is like, I like Elon Musk’s kind of framework of thinking where he says think of things with their limits. What does it look like when there’s a billion people? What does it look like when there’s zero? Right? And so, when there is zero or 100 or 1000, friends of friends is very limited, right? Because you don’t have a lot of friends on there. It hasn’t reached the scale of Instagram and Facebook and whatnot. And so, that’s the gap that I’m really trying to think of bridging, like how do you, friends of friends, the sort of degrees of separation becomes more useful.
Someone is three or four degrees away from me or whatever. It becomes possible as you scale, but low numbers make it quite challenging. So, that’s where you need to maybe swap for their contact book or some other strategy where you can figure out how you can still maintain that user’s privacy in the early days. And then, at the same time in the early days it probably doesn’t matter because Justin Bieber is probably not on your platform anyway, like in that sense. So, it’s a catch-22 but at the same time bots are always hunting your platform down in the early days. So, you don’t want bots to be able to feel someone’s chat overview, but you want them to be able to message their friends. And so, just trying to solve those problems which we both have to tackle on a daily basis.
Don’t give away your contact book (49:19)
Sean Weisbrot:
“Giving away your contact book is risky”
I made the determination long ago that even if it was a great way to get a bunch of users on the platform quickly, I would never use the contact book. Because, so, one of the things that a lot of these apps do is they require your phone number in order to be able to access the application, and in doing so, they basically take your contact list whether you like it or not.
Robby Wade:
WhatsApp not only does that, you can just be dropped in a group without your permission and everybody can see your phone number, I could just drop you in a group of 150 people and they all have your phone number instantly. It’s crazy to me.
Sean Weisbrot:
Right. And I don’t like groups and I’m not part of groups on WhatsApp. So, I made this decision that I wanted user accounts and it would never be tied to a phone number because I don’t want to know what your number is, and I’m sure you don’t want the government to know what the number is. Again, this was when we were thinking about end user messaging business, it’s a different thing, but still, you would never put your phone number into a business app. No way.
Robby Wade:
I think phone numbers also have a shorter life cycle or time frame than sometimes, like, email does. Like say, I don’t know, my phone died, or I’m in another country and I can’t receive a text message because I travel around a lot. The amount of times I’ve had to reboot my WhatsApp with another phone number and lose all my history over ten times, like and it’s the most frustrating thing, but if it was just tied to my email, everything would be okay.
Sean Weisbrot:
So, I understand that because I travel as well, and I do have this problem when I go between different SIM cards. However, I don’t lose my chat history on WhatsApp, so what I do is I have a backup to Google cloud using my Gmail,
Robby Wade:
Right.
Sean Weisbrot:
And so, when I get a new phone number, I’ll just download the history back.
Robby Wade:
For some reason, it hasn’t worked for me the last few times. I’ve been cleared out. But anyway, continue with what you were saying.
Sean Weisbrot:
Well, so I do that for Telegram. So, for all of my apps, I used to lose all the history for everything, and it pissed me off. So now, I just have it so that it doesn’t happen anymore. And it’s really useful for sure. Even though I am pissed off I have ten freaking chat apps.
Robby Wade:
It is what it is. So, you guys opted for using email, I’m guessing.
Sean Weisbrot:
We decided to use email, yes. We’re actually currently working on testing a feature that would allow you to make multiple emails connected to your single account. So that if you joined the space for a team that used one email and you joined another space for another team that used a different email. Let’s say you work for two different companies, or let’s say you’ve got a client and that client has decided to give you a domain email for the purposes of working with them, you could essentially join that space with that email, and then, you could tell us which is the main email you want to receive communication. And so, we’re not sending emails to every single one of your freaking accounts.
So those are the kinds of things we’re thinking about. It’s like, how we can manage make it easier for you to manage multiple different companies or teams or clients or whatever with one user account.
Keeping focused (52:50)
Robby Wade:
It’s fascinating to think about chat from like, you’ve gone from consumer mindset all the way through the enterprise mindset. We’ve stayed very much on the consumer side and I really, it’s been a dance for me because the target user that I’m looking at is the average WhatsApp user. So, you’ve got to educate them in a number of different feature sets as you sort of expand out. So, trying to expand features whilst maintaining familiarity and simplicity is something that we’ve gone for, like familiar UI with the new UX is kind of like our strategy in that sense, but it’s interesting to hear how we have similar challenges in that sense, especially when it comes down to permissions and edge cases.
I love the analogy of sort of tying your shoelaces together because sometimes you do that, you’ll be like, you discover the perfect UX, you get all the way to the end of it and then like four weeks later you’re trying to do something, and you’re like, “Oh man,” I drove myself down into like a dead end, or something like that. I think it’s also, and you would probably experience this.
“You should focus on the bigger picture”
I think it’s important at a product level as well, and I think people don’t do this enough, is think of like how an artist sketches a piece of paper. If you watch someone who’s good at sketching, they sketched the bigger picture and you can start to see the outlines of the product, and they do the sort of like shading and detail last in that sense because the big picture encompasses the small details and the small details don’t necessarily encompass the big picture.
“Think ahead for your business”
And I think early on in businesses, people trap themselves by focusing on one thing or focusing on too small of a vision, so that when your vision doesn’t have the room to expand because you didn’t sketch it out first as to what it might look like in 10 to 20 years’ time. And so, you know the steps that you could actually take to be able to get there.
And I can sort of see that in the way that you’re thinking. Like, you’ve got this sort of LinkedIn piece, you’ve got this individual messaging piece and you’ve sketched around the outsides because you sort of can see what the user wants to do over ten years, whereas other people might be like, “Okay, I just want to make a chat with channels and then businesses are going to use it.” But where do you go from there? You know?
Sean Weisbrot:
That’s our MVP.
Robby Wade:
Yeah, no, it’s ambitious. I mean, that means something obviously coming from someone who’s taking on an ambitious project in that way. And I definitely admire what you guys are doing and can’t wait to use it in terms of our business and whatnot. And it’s been a fascinating conversation talking to you because you understand and I guess I would almost use the word like empathize with the challenges that we have because you’ve faced them in your own way in multiple capacities.
We weren’t as brave as you to take on blockchain early. We do have a token strategy that we will be attacking down the road, but I more wanted to be a growth mechanism once the product sort of scaled and hear more product market fit and we’ve got a lot more money and whatnot to take on such a bold adventure.
Sean Weisbrot:
I mean the market is willing to buy into such a plan, which it’s not now, and it probably will be another two years.
Making good decisions (56:17)
Robby Wade:
Yeah, I mean, we’re going into the dark ages and so in that sense, I do wish you the best of luck over the next sort of two years. You and I have definitely got a hard road ahead of us. I’m sure that we’ve both got good teams and we’re making all the best decisions we can, but regardless of what we think, we’re going into a bear market and people’s attitudes and perspectives change, and all those kinds of things. So, we just got to keep our heads high and remain optimistic to get the job done.
Sean Weisbrot:
My secret to making good decisions is I tell my COO, and then, he tells me how bad it is. He gives me a better idea, and then, he tells the team and they make it even better.
Robby Wade:
That is a good path. Good decisions is an interesting one for us. We have a very sort of like open culture. I sort of say I’m the captain of the soccer team and I’ve hired experts around me. I’m not the best in each of their positions. And our lead designer will happily challenge me on anything, and if we can agree, usually it’s a better result. So rather I do everything in my power to not sort of force rank in that sense, because taking a little bit longer to find mutual agreement often lands in a better result.
“Making company decision in a remote set up”
But we have so many different types, because we’re a remote global team. We have people in different countries, different ages, different personalities who speak different languages. If every single person in the team is like, that’s a good idea, there’s a pretty good chance that it probably is. And it’s not as designed by consensus. They will always say when it’s a bad idea, but there’s just so many different personalities. If we can all agree, it’s a good sign.
Sean Weisbrot:
Yeah, I was kidding, by the way. But no, what we do is it really depends. Sometimes, I’ll be the one that has the idea and then go, “Hey, I had this idea,” and then they’ll tear it apart, and then they’ll come back with something better. It is quite rare for my original thought to be something that actually gets into the product, at least not anymore, because when I was allowed free reign to do that, I caused a lot of problems, so we had to hire.
Robby Wade:
It would be a manifestation of you in some capacity, I assume. Like, I mean, you’re leading the company in your…
Sean Weisbrot:
It goes through the lens now of what is actually necessary, and what is functional, and what adds value, rather than every little feature that I think is necessary and useful. So, we actually have to say before, I was like, “Oh, this is a good idea. Let’s go make it.” And now it’s like, “okay, well, this is a good idea, but maybe it’s not necessary for another 18 months, so let’s put it in a backlog, and let’s come back to it in six months and see.”
Working on a timeline (59:21)
Robby Wade:
I think what’s useful for that is announcing sort of like release dates and launch timeframes.
Sean Weisbrot:
We haven’t released anything yet.
Robby Wade:
“Time pressure can set you on track”
No, but what I’m saying is, like, when you set a release date, it really squeezes you. And when you tell everybody, you’re going to release that day and all those kinds of things. Yes, you’re putting boundaries around yourself, but it forces you to prioritize what matters. In that way, you’re like, I probably don’t need that, like, pink swirly thing, because as an innovator and a creator, you have innovative thought all the time.
I think one thing that’s undervalued and we can end on this, but I’m just a bit conscious of time, is never to underestimate your original ideas. Like, in that sense. I sort of recently read a business plan that I wrote two years ago, and it’s pretty close in that sense, and I haven’t picked it up. And I’ve heard this a lot from different people who have, like, written down what they wanted to do with their lives, and then when they’re, like, 45 years old, they find the note in the garage, and it’s like, it’s pretty close.
And I think without getting spiritual in that way, that’s sort of underrated in the sense, don’t forget your original sort of intuition that encouraged you to go on such a bold journey, because it must have been deep in order for you to take on such a ridiculous mission, in that sense. And when I look back through our designs that we did early on, we became better designers, but the concept was there in that sense, in terms of what needed to be done. So, I just try to always tie back what was my original insight and where am I now and how far have I drifted from that, and why is it an interesting construct?
The need to pivot (1:01:15)
Sean Weisbrot:
We drifted quite far from my original concept.
Robby Wade:
You’ve got to pivot, so that’s a different. Kind of, right, still communication. You’ve still got individual communication. You’ve still got essences and elements of your original idea that you have, even though you’ve pivoted, you’ve brought your original idea with you for a reason.
Sean Weisbrot:
Yes. However, in the past, we were building all of those extra features on our own, like the different things I mentioned, the different pieces. And in our pivot, we decided to change to something called deep integrations, which we’re building a framework for, where instead of us building a file manager or building a task manager, or building a communication, like a calling system, we’re taking the APIs of other companies and we’re building the UI/UX and then integrating them together so that they make sense inside of each individual chat.
Robby Wade:
It’s good to test, and then once it works, you can build your own later.
Sean Weisbrot:
“You do not always need to create new things”
No, we don’t want to. The thing is, what we realized was it’s hard enough to get people to use a new messaging system. It’s even harder to convince them to use other native tools that they’re already paying for elsewhere. So, kind of like with the original idea where we wanted to have our own blockchain, and then we said, screw our own blockchain. Let’s use the wallet, let’s use the tokens that people already have from their existing other platforms. In that regard, that’s how we saw these extra tools and how they integrate into the platform is why should we build it ourselves and maintain it when we can just build integrations from the tools people are already paying for so that it makes it less likely that they’re going to hmm and haww on their way to using our platform for the communication side?
So instead of building everything natively, let’s release that responsibility. Let’s focus on creating a UI UX standard for how those platforms integrate into our system, and we can manage them, and we can build out our own. We can build, we can create those integrations using their APIs for some, and others, people can make their own, and then we can review the code and make sure that it fits with our standard and then approve or deny their ability to enter our marketplace.
Robby Wade:
Absolutely. I think it loops back around to what I was saying about the space pen and the pencil. When you’ve already got a rocket to build, don’t worry about building a space pen. Just let people bring their pencils. In that sense, probably an easy way to think about it.
Follow up with Robby (1:03:39)
Robby Wade:
You know, Sean, we’re coming up. So, I want to respect your time, but thank you for having me on, and it’s been an absolute pleasure getting to know you, and I look forward to for us to continue sharing. I don’t think this will be the last conversation. I’d love to test your product out and introduce you to ours, and see where we can share inspiration and thoughts, and whatnot. And yeah, I admire what you’re doing.
Sean Weisbrot:
Thanks. I wanted to use your product, but it’s not available in my country.
Robby Wade:
Oh, interesting.
Sean Weisbrot:
Yeah.
Robby Wade:
Did you tell me this?
Sean Weisbrot:
I’m not sure. I’m going to end the recording in a minute and just stay on for a second. I’ll talk to you about it. So, let me just end, how can people follow up with you?
Robby Wade:
Yeah, so people can follow up with us. This app will be out in August, so you could download it when the time comes, and message me on this app. But in the meantime, you can find me on Twitter, either through the @jointhisapp Twitter, or @RobbyWade6 is my Twitter also on Instagram, as @itsRobbyWade. But if this app is of interest to you, jump over on the website, grab your username. You can claim your username now, and sign up for the release when it does come out. It will initially be invite-only on the App Store, so everyone who signed up early will be automatically invited to the initial roll out. So, jump over there at thisapp.com., and yeah, message me and I’ll get back to you.
Sean Weisbrot:
All right. Thank you very much, Robby. This has been fun talking about communication. It’s present, it’s potential future opportunities. And don’t forget that entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint. So, take care of yourself every day. And stay tuned for more video podcast episodes. I love it. I’m happy we’re doing things in video now. And if you want to join our entrepreneur community, go to welivetobuild.com, and you can get details for our Discord there. Thank you, Robby.
Robby Wade:
Thank you.
