Anatomy of an App: From Idea to the App Store with Anthone Campbell

Source: GeniusDen archive transcript checked against the recording. Administrative opening and closing material is omitted; the presentation wording is otherwise preserved with light readability edits.

You know, the common denominator that I heard amongst the group was, outside of yours, everybody's fairly new to the startup entrepreneurship community in the Metroplex. The great thing is that you guys are about to jump in to a very fruitful environment. Dallas is massively full of people that are all about helping, all about contributing back. And it's one of the main reasons why I'm here tonight, right?

You know, sure, I'd much rather be at home with my eight-year-old drawing and playing and having fun and kicking around doing crazy things, but my heart leads me to rooms like this where I can help contribute, and I'm not a subject matter expert. I'm not a massive technical dude, but what I have learned is I've listened a lot to what I've gotten successes from, and I replicate those. I've also learned a lot of failures, and because of my ability to leave my arrogance and ego at the door, I've been able to sit down with a lot of people that are way smarter than me and a lot of people that don't even have even close to the skill set, but I learn from everyone, right? Because everybody's got a perspective, and at the end of the day, as a startup, your number one goal is to identify a product that you can build as quick as you can and find somebody to buy it from.

Right? And we're going to learn a lot about that today, and that's not a good thing for you, I can tell you, because I don't sit still, right? A lot of my friends call me the Reverend, because I get up on chairs, I hang from ceilings, because this is the most invigorating, passionate thing for me to do on the planet, is to build technology. But for me to get to go out and coach people and share people my successes and failures, lights a fire in the stomach that just makes me burn. So that thing, maybe 10% of my conversation is going to be in the frame of that. So Joe should have known, he needed somebody to follow me around, right? So, first things first, anatomy of an app. Right?

How to build an effective MVP. I'm going to try to help you out a little bit. Let's power this thing on. And he said you're going to send the deck out? Yes. Joe will get the deck. I apologize. My real passion is in design and art, so when Joe said, hey, can you give me your deck? I'm like, yeah, it's 94 megs, it's because of my pictures, okay? He's like, hey, that's going to break my website. Well, hey, great. So, introductions, we already did, we're going to talk about what does MVP mean? Why should you care? We're going to talk about [unclear]. One of the things that Joe asked me to emphasize on tonight was, what are the tools available to help you get to an MVP?

And I said, you know what? I'm going to do better. I'm going to focus on the tools that are either free or really inexpensive, so that you can get to a point where you've got an MVP that's not going to cost you the bank, right? Where you don't have to go get a loan just to get something built. And then I'm going to share some example MVPs with you guys. So, we went around the room, we did our introductions. In a second, I'll kind of walk through some things about me. But before we get started, I want you guys to think about this comment, right? The tragedy in life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach, right?

Even my little eight-year-old is constantly saying, hey, dad, if you chase after two bunnies, you won't even get one. I'm like, okay, you're too smart, right? But if you don't have a goal in place, how are you going to know how to get there? It's just like a map that gets us from A to B. And what we need to do is we need to find the shortest route to B, with the least amount of pain and the least amount of money. And during that process, we're going to learn how we get from A to B, and get people to pay for it while we're doing it, right? So, a little bit about me. I've built and sold three startups. My last startup, my second one, I started out of the trunk of my car, and nine months later, we had 138 employees, and I did $9.2 million in revenue.

And that was back in 2010 when everybody and their brother said, I got an idea. I want to do this, right? My first app I ever built was back in 1997, and that was to Trammell Crow. I built Trammell Crow a mobile app on a Motorola flip phone to do wireless workflow management for their building engineers. I actually am very honored to say that I won Best of CES two years in a row. One of those was with one of those brands on that system. Cisco was launching a brand new product called the UC320W, and it was a very complex product for answering phones. And they were trying to sell that through their distribution channels to small to medium-sized businesses.

And they're like, how are we going to get a bunch of technical people to sell to Sally's Bakery? And I came up with this idea of having a complete product positioning portfolio on an iPad that played cartoons. And it reduced the technical roadblock and obstacle for sales engineers and it let Sally understand what the product means to her. Allows her to bake more muffins, sell more cookies, right? Had nothing to do with call routing and voice over IP. I am a board member of the Student Advisory Council for Collin College, so I'm helping them develop the curriculum for their entrepreneurship. I was at six years at AT&T. I was part of the executive leadership team that built AT&T's global app development.

And I was also part of the three-man squad that's part of launching AT&T's most profitable products in the history of the company. Based on what our results and expectations were, we far exceeded those, and we were all awarded service excellence awards by Randall Stephenson, the chairman and CEO of the company. And I am extremely passionate about mobile. Everything mobile. My mind is constantly looking at things and how can we dissect that and optimize and automate and make things more interactive and fun and engaging, right? You know, think about 1997. I took an eight and a half by 13 legal document and put it on a two and a half inch Motorola flip phone screen.

I love solving complex problems with software. The challenge is very fun to me, and to solve that is amazing. So those are some of the brands that I've worked with. I traveled the planet for AT&T, coaching and engaging large, large brands on what they should be doing from a mobility perspective. I stood in front of the chairman of the Limited Brands and told him flat out, you guys suck. And the reason you suck is because you don't listen to your customers. They're telling you on iTunes why your apps aren't good, but you're not doing anything about it. So guys, and that's one of the key things that we're going to learn about tonight, is feedback.

Listening to feedback from your end users. Okay? So what does MVP mean? Minimal, viable product. Minimal, viable product, right? Startups often accidentally build something nobody wants. How funny is that? Well, it's not really very funny because you have a solution that's looking for a problem. Guys, this right here is my Bible. Everything I do every single day, I bounce off of this book, right? And if you haven't read this, you better read it. It's a fun read. If you don't like to read, there's audio, right? But I'm telling you, this will save you a lot of frustrations, a lot of capital, and a lot of time. It's an amazing read, okay? Eric is a phenomenal, phenomenal resource. So...

So, every group I've ever been in front of, especially in my days at AT&T, I sat in front of big, big brands that wanted to build every possible thing out of the gate. Right? Feature packed. They wanted every single Lego block from that entire kit used in the project. Right? Gotta have it. We want this. We want that. We want this. We want that. We want all of those in this. Right? That's what they wanted. This massive 4x4 mudder truck, huge fog lights, 4x4 tires, metal shield all around it, rocket launcher. It's pretty cool, right? It's got everything. Everything you would ever want. That's what the customer is looking for. Right? The reality is that many times the MVP is... Every single time it's the smarter route to do.

Because guess what? You know how many times I've been in front of a customer like, 'We don't ever use that rocket launcher? Not once have we used that rocket launcher, but you guys charge us for it. Hey, can we, can we take the rocket launcher off? And by the way, we've never, ever, ever had that truck out in the mud.' I'm laughing at myself because I got a big giant four by four Jeep like that and I've never had it off-road. And try parking it. You know, my wife's like, 'That thing doesn't even have a scratch on it.' Right? So here's where you need to be focusing. It's about the MVP. This thing's going to get you from A to B, right? It's got a chassis. It's got four wheels...

And we can rock with that. You guys agree? Yep. You ever think about building software like that? You ever have customers with a big long feature list? It's known as scope creep. Oh, all day long. It's so scary. And that's the most difficult conversation you can ever have in software development is a scope creep conversation with a customer that has to pay you for that work. Right? All day long. So, why should you care? What do you guys think? Why should you care about anything? I guess the most effective way to go for less of your time. Less waste of time. Sure. I think it's good to pilot a concept before fully allocating all capital or all your resources to it. Very good.

Very good point. Anybody else? Yeah. Thinking of a sense of agile or lean, you want to have an MVP so that you can get feedback straight away. So you'll have a sprint for two weeks and then, okay, what's the feedback? Feedback feedback feedback feedback, right? That is one of the biggest problems I see with a lot of the organizations I consult. Is they go in with this arrogant attitude that we've got it all figured out, right? Wrong. I don't care how smart you guys are, right? You're going to either underestimate, overestimate, or be completely off target. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build. The thing customers want and will pay for as quickly as possible, right?

And if they're not paying you for that, it's them downloading that, right? And I heard you earlier talking about Facebook and how Facebook first started and how it was only for universities, right? And how that's now spread out? The numbers, the average consumer spends on their time of day in Facebook is just ridiculously crazy, right? So when you start to dissect Facebook and you look where it is today, geez, I'm watching live video from my friends at a camping event, right? That wasn't even on their minds when they first launched it, right? Getting from that MVP to the next phase and getting feedback and understanding. So benefits of the MVP, most companies and entrepreneurs tend to overbuild their first product.

So the big thing is to bring focus to the product's core value and the value proposition and the efficiency to that process. Also, you will reduce rework. How many of you guys are actual coders? How many times have you recoded something because somebody changed their mind? [unclear] You may be the owner or you may be sitting at a desk and you're the worker bee. At the end of the day, it costs everybody something. As a developer, it costs you and your frustration calories because you get tired of changing stuff. Developers like to see stuff move forward. I like to create things and see the results of that.

The business owner doesn't like to sit there and spend money over and over and over and over and get no result. Typically it's the same result, a bunch of crap, pardon my language, but it is. Create relationships with your customers as soon as possible. Now that can be customers that are buying your product, and how fruitful is that feedback from your customers that are actually paying you for a solution and giving you feedback and guidance on what you need to do different? It's worth a lot. And I can tell you many times I found myself buying customers, giving them my product for free, and almost giving them cash incentives to try my product so that I can get feedback directly from them because it in turn makes my product better, right?

Bring focus to the most critical business functions, right? I go back to the big 4x4 motor truck and the rocket launcher. Was that really critical? No. Why? Because it's an add on. A lot of our customers said, dude, we don't even use the rocket launcher. We don't need that, right? But somebody said, gotta build a rocket launcher. I'm faced with that today. I forgot to practice even some of the things I preach. And I hammered my team about the messaging product in our tool, which I'll talk about later. And I hammered them and hammered and hammered them. Why? Because I wanted a message tool in the product. And guess what they kept telling? Anthone, man, I don't know.

I don't know. It just doesn't seem right. Guess what? Today, if you poll my team and say, what's the most underutilized product or most unused product in our entire platform, they'll go, messaging. Right? Can I say that? It's recorded right now, right, Joe? Yeah, I'm saying that on record. So if you guys want to share that with me, I share it with them every day. I'm like, guys, sorry. I was wrong. Right? But the truth of the matter is, is we spent a lot of time, money and effort deploying a messaging feature that our customers aren't even using. So make it sticky. 64% of apps are downloaded and used less than 10 times. And I got that stat from one of my AT&T counterparts two days ago.

That's fresh from their data. So you've got to make the app useful. It's got to be easy to use. It has to be beautiful. And it's got to be constantly evolving based on user demand. And last but not least, what you're going to hear me yell and scream and preach about is read the comments. Solicit feedback. Demand your customers provide you guidance and comments. Push them to provide that. It's only going to make your product better. Right? Save you time. Save you money. Save you rework. All kinds of benefits, right? User feedback. So why is there an importance of that? First is reading and reacting to that feedback is critical. I stood in front of one of AT&T's biggest brands.

And I had a meeting with the chairman and 11 of his senior staff. And they were asking me to talk about taking their app to the next level. And I told them, I said, guys, why are we talking about new features when the features that we have aren't even working? I printed out like nine pages of negative reviews off the iTunes and Google Play App Store. My guidance to them was, guys, I think it's critical that we go back and we fix this stuff first, because somebody along the way built some things that the customers didn't agree with. And the customers were giving feedback, because guaranteed every single time you're going to hear three things.

What you did right, what you did wrong, and what he didn't do at all. Those are the three key things that you need to be looking for. Right? What did we do wrong? Let's go fix it. Right? What do we need to do? Users will tell you the painful detail of what they think of your app. And I'll tell you this. How many of you guys have left an app review before? A few? How many of you have gone on Yelp and left a review for a restaurant? A lot. Reviews are an emotional base. Right? Either you made me so mad that I want to call you out in the parking lot, or you saved my wedding. Right? Everything in between never happens. So, same thing here with software.

Same thing with apps. Customers are going to tell you if you hang the moon or they're going to tell you a big miss. Right? So learn from that. Listen to that. Leave your ego at the door. Right? Other users will read the feedback. How many apps have you not downloaded because when you went and read the feedback of other people, you were like, oh man, not wasting my money. Right? I mean, I gotta address those. Use the app feedback to guide features in your next iteration. That right there is that fourth line is actually a selling tool for my sales team. I tell them, go look on people's app stores and identify features.

They're customers either yelling about or wish they had. And we're gonna go talk to all the customers and say, hey, we can do that for you. Guess what? Here's what we think you should put in your app. And guess what most of them say? Oh my God, that's so cool. You guys have great ideas. I'm like, they're your customers' ideas. You guys just aren't listening. It's amazing. That's a free resource, right? Addressing what users see as the most critical flaws will improve the entire platform. Yeah. Feedback is sort of like unpaid R&B, isn't it? Yes, it is. Very good, right? You don't have to pay anything. Now you can pay dearly in your reputations, right? Because it... And I'll tell you guys something funny and I wish I could show it to you.

But in our office, we have a giant chalkboard. And of course everybody on my, all the sales guys on my team are like, we want a whiteboard. We want a whiteboard. I'm like, no. We're creative first. We're going to have a chalkboard. That was a big battle with us. But in the center of that chalkboard is a stick figure. And it's a guy, and he's straddling two boxes. Box one and box two. You guys envisioning this? So two boxes, box one, box two and then a stick figure. Right? Right underneath the stick figure is a boxing glove coming up this way. And I want to get it made into shirts because I don't care, no matter which direction you go, you're getting punched.

Option one is, let's launch this thing with bugs, issues, right? Take it to market quicker, right? Because our investors want us to turn money and make money. We've got to get this thing sold. The other side is, is that you wait forever so that you make sure everything's just perfect. Either way, you're getting punched, right? The key is identify the MVP, right? Now, let's talk about how we identify the MVP. Within our company, we have this process that we call finding Pat. You guys remember that Saturday Night Live skit with Pat? Who's Pat? Who's Pat, right? To this day, we still don't know whether Pat was a man or a woman. And that's the key thing here.

This could be a man or a woman. But what is Pat? Pat is our end user. Pat is the end user that's going to download our product, and he or she is going to use it, right? In this scenario, for tonight, we cover this piece real quick. By the time the product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers, if you do it right. And Eric talks a lot about that in the book. Okay? So lots of findings, but tonight, Pat is an attorney. She's at Baker and Baker. Okay? So I want you guys to think about Pat as we're going through the rest of the day. So three foundational elements to success in an MVP. First and foremost, the app has to look and feel finished.

Now back in 2010, whenever I first started building apps for the app store, it didn't matter about look and feel, right? But Steve Jobs and Apple did such an unbelievable job of setting the bar in regards to how technology can actually look, but also how you interact with that technology, right? And we all see it. My opinion, sorry, it's mine, but a lot of Android apps to me look like they were built by engineers. A lot of Apple iPad and iPhone apps look like they were built by designers. The function, the UI, the UX, right? Number two, core functionality of the app needs to work. Because that's critical. If there's a button on that screen, you better be able to tap that button and it does something.

Don't have a button on the screen if it doesn't do anything in your MVP, right? I see so many products that says coming soon. What? Just don't launch that feature in the product. Find out the core functionality and do that right, okay? Owners and stakeholders need to be open-minded. Now I've lectured at UNT, UTD, and SMU on a series I have called Ideation to Apps. The two most successful app launches I've ever done was the first one was with Marriott, and I was part of the team that launched their app. We did $850 million in incremental revenue after the first year of that app being on the App Store. So was that a success? Sure. The second highest app that I've been part of, launch-wise, is I was part of the team that launched the Southwest Airlines app.

And studies have shown Southwest Airlines is the number one utilized app on a daily basis in the entire app store. So that I'm very proud of, but I can tell you this, the number one key to the success of the Marriott deployment was I flew into New York and visited with the team and we had all of the C-levels, CMO, CFO, CIO, CTOs, VPs of marketing. Everybody. They were all bought in. And everybody knew where they wanted to be. And the end result was an unbelievable, engaging experience that simplified the process for someone to book a hotel, right? You reverse engineer from that, you can't fail, right?

It's like my buddy that taught me how to play golf. He said, dude, don't aim for the fairway, aim for a spot on the fairway because if you miss, you're okay. Marriott knew, Southwest knew exactly what they were aiming for. The term MVP itself is very subjective. The key thing is where to stop. Where to stop with the MVP? And really, focusing in on what features are essential. Where do you think you get those from? The customers. The customers. The customers. The customers. Oh, please go ahead. Yep. That's the perfect answer. Right? Do you get it from your other co-founders? No. Do you get it from your dev guys? You get it from your mom? No. Well, it's from your customer.

Right, what if she's a user? Truth? So here's what we consider the MVP framework, the top 10 things that we focus on. First and foremost is you have to define and agree upon what the goals are, either for that program or that product, right? Number two, clearly understand the target user. Now, earlier we met Pat. What'd she do? Attorney. She's an attorney, right? Okay, so keep that in mind. Enlist user testing focus groups. Why is that valuable? Feedback, yes. Anyone else? When you have a focus, it's sort of like, to me, I don't know about a focus group. I would have people come in and individually look at the app and ask them a question, like, how would you use this app? And just watch or record.

Because that tells you a lot more than having a group itself because the thing I fear about groups is groupthink. Group thinking? Yes. Yeah. Everybody will agree with the person with the loudest voice because they don't want to feel out of sorts. Very true. Yes. As an extension of that, I guess, what's step in the process? I mean, it plays a different direction, but what step in the process do you kind of define the key metrics that you want to measure in the app and kind of protect against false positives? Just from a high level, I've seen apps where your customer base loves the app, and they're spending a ton of time on it, but really they're using it to waste time versus actually using that to, you know, if it's a travel site, if they're using it to purchase.

Sure. I guess, where do you kind of define the key metrics that you want to measure and kind of protect against the false positives from a group that really may not have, you know, I guess, providing feedback that's really important to your goals? So for us, and Joe's familiar with the product, and not to get into the weeds on the question, so, but the Javelin Board, I'm going to cover in a second, and that will answer your question directly on how you use identifying and determining and measuring on those key metrics. Yes. Nail down a minimum viable product solution set, right? You know what we love to use that chalkboard for? Is every time we hear something from our customers out in the field, every time we think of something, a commercial we see or a spark or a thought, everybody writes down on that chalkboard.

Everybody, that becomes our roadmap, okay? And in a few moments, we're going to talk about the Javelin Board and how we filter all of that stuff through the Javelin Board, which produces for us that minimum viable solution set. Plan for multiple versions. Guys, that's critical right there. If you think, you know earlier I was talking about you getting punched, right? If you wait and build everything, you're going to waste a lot of time, effort. And guess what? You'll also find yourself, this market and this industry moves so fast that you're going to be behind times and all of a sudden you built something that nobody wants anymore. They might have wanted it when you were first developing it, but now you've taken so long to get it to market that you're behind.

Wouldn't the other thing be that someone could also beat you? Definitely somebody can beat. And they establish themselves as the number one name, and so you might come out, you might have everything, you might be the best, you might be the fastest loading. They've never heard of you. That's right. You can get beat to market, just like that, right? Balance your users and your business. What's that mean? What do you guys take from that? Balance your users and your business. Some people may spend a ton of time on your app, but then they don't actually go through and use the business. That's kind of what we're doing. Okay. Okay. Anybody else? Thoughts? I kind of agree with what you're saying. You agree? Yeah. That's what it's kind of saying.

So, if you break down the context of the statement, right? Balance your users and your business. It's directly in line with what you guys are thinking. And there are elements of, okay, so if we spend so much time building all of this stuff into the product that it now becomes beyond our users, I go back to the rocket launcher, right? We weren't balancing the needs of our consumers, our paying consumers, to the products that the business owns, operates, and has to manage and sell, right? And a lot of times that constant feedback loop helps you stay in balance with the needs of your consumers and the revenue generating that you're getting from them. Because what's happening is that you're constantly evolving with that feedback, your product's evolving, and your revenues continually increase, the value of your product, the impact of your product, the sustainability of your product, right?

It's critical that you're constantly looking at your users and how they're balancing and matching up to your product. Because I tell you, when I first started in the industry, back in, oh gosh, I worked for a software as a service company, and we had this wireless worker management tool that had so much complex enterprise stuff that no one could sell it. Because hardly anybody had the technical capabilities to explain it to the customer. It was so complex. It was like what I refer to as the dollar store Swiss Army Knife. It's got all of these things, but none of them really worked, right? They worked extremely well as an individual tool, but there were so many that customers were like, wow, so much that they couldn't get it past the overwhelming aspect of it.

Search what else is out there. You can constantly learn from what everybody else is doing. You can also learn from their failures. I'll give you guys a trick. Glassdoor is a great place to go to learn about a product. Now, do you guys know what Glassdoor is? What's Glassdoor for? Rating about the salaries. Exactly. Now, what can you learn about a company or a product from Glassdoor? Employee reviews. Employee reviews. Now, who's closer to that product or service than the employees? And typically, once again, emotional-based reviews, employees are going to blast their mouth off about a company on Glassdoor. I have found out so much about the current product that we're deploying based on going to my competitors' Glassdoor websites.

And I hear all of this stuff. It's almost like you're sitting in the boardroom with their team and you're hearing what they're complaining about. It's like a barnacle. So true. Yes. Bring your development team into the discussions earlier. Why? Why is that important? Is it buildable? Is it buildable? Can we execute? Can we pull this off, right? Too often, I have found that a lot of corporations don't want to get IT involved because of what reason? They'll hold things up. They will hold things up. IT and purchasing have to get involved, but my philosophy is they're concerned about three things. Controlling costs, reducing spend, and also figuring out how we can do less work.

But you get a proactive IT team involved in a project. All of a sudden, you're awaiting awards, right? Getting technology involved and getting your development team involved leads to the next one. Decide on the technology you can live and grow with. You know, Joe talked about his commercial-grade product earlier, right? For real estate investment. There's a lot of decisions that have to be made from a technology standpoint. And I can tell you, I have a product now that I'm going to share with you guys. In fact, it's People Like You, and I'll share with you some of the challenges and frustrations we've had with the technology decisions, right? Next, plan to analyze or hit the eject button.

And the quicker you can identify the areas where you need to hit the eject button, right? Like, we're not focusing on messaging anymore, right? Are we? But guess what I did? My team came back and said, dude, messaging isn't working. People aren't using it. So I started thinking, okay, we've built a technology. How can we use messaging? How can we repackage that weakness into a strength, right? So I started analyzing. And I realized an element of the industry that needs some help. And I'll share a little quick story around that. We talked about reviews earlier. And how many of you raised your hands when I asked about Yelp? And how many of you have left a review on Yelp?

It's when you're mad or happy, right? Oh yeah. So, what's your favorite restaurant? I can't think of a name. It's a Chinese restaurant I go to in Northwest [unclear]. Okay. How many times have you left a review for them? Maybe once. Maybe once. Let me ask you this. If every third time you were at that restaurant, your phone popped up and said, hey, how likely are you to refer us to a friend or family member? And you slide your finger across the stars and hit submit, and they get that review. How cool would that be? Very nice. All right. What if it's a three-star below review, and that manager on duty gets a push notification telling him that you're upset with a link to your profile that he can begin messaging you instantly?

Hey, man. Heard you had an issue at the restaurant tonight. How can I help? I would love that. You would love that, right? I would. So, I turned our messaging weakness, repackaged it as a strength, and now I've gone to restaurants and said, Hey, how would you like to have this? And they're like, Oh my God, are you serious? So, now we've turned messaging into a revenue channel on our product. So, it's about analyzing your customer's feedback and how they're using it, but also identifying other ways that we can leverage that tool, right? Okay. Key thing, guys, on that eject button is don't be complacent. Make decisions. And of all the books I've read, of all the expertise I've gained, all the experience, I've always allowed my stomach to guide.

If it didn't feel right, get out. Okay? Experience, I don't know what it is, man, just that the world as a whole guides you in the right direction. So don't be afraid to hit the eject button, because a lot of times it will save you money. Now, we've developed a very systematic approach to the MVP process. First and foremost is we collect the idea, and we document every piece of the idea, and we segment every idea into its own little box. And then we go use tools, which we'll talk about the Javelin Board in a second, to quantify, justify that idea. And once we've collected all of our data and analyzed it, and by the way, I told you earlier that I didn't practice what I preach in the messaging thing.

I got a big punch in the face. Well, afterwards I went back and did do the Javelin Board against messaging, and I came back with, hold on guys, I found a great way for messaging. So next is process flows, and this gets into a little bit of a technical piece, but it's about defining the flow of that product or that feature and how it interacts with the rest of the elements of the entire product. Next is wireframes. Why are wireframes important? Who knows what wireframes are? It's like a flowchart. Pardon? Blueprint. The way I refer to wireframes, it's a paint-by-number. It's a paint-by-number. And wireframes are black and white drawings of our app or our software that show every button, every text field. Why?

It gives people an opportunity to identify what's going to happen when and what. If I tap this, where does it go? If I scroll this, what does it do? And it's black and white line drawings. Why do we not have blues and greens and yellows in that at this point? Because it distracts from the UX. I can't count how many times I've sat in front of marketing and they're like, that's the wrong shade of blue. We're not at blue yet. Wireframes should always be black and white. It's about user interaction with the software. When I tap this, it goes here. When I scroll this, it does that, right? Next is design. That's what we refer to shooting that baby over to the body shop.

Get the blues and greens and yellows and the fonts, the style guides from the marketing team, the branding group. Right? Next, that's when you go to development. And I'm telling you guys, do not ever pick up a mouse and start coding until you do all four of these. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. You will be tempted to start coding. Idea, process, wire, and design. What's up, guys? Sorry to interrupt. I thought that was the fire department. Is that right? It's not. Now you know. On this process, I don't want to spoil it too much, but there's an idea to the process part.

So, do we consider our MVP, or should we consider the whole idea at this stage? At this stage, you are looking at the entire idea, the entire product, right? And what you do is you look at it from a hierarchical perspective. This is everything we would ever want this thing to be. Earlier I made the comment to Joe. I'm like, building an app is like raising a baby. It's like, you know, parenting a child. You constantly got to massage it, talk to it, coach it, guide it, right? So, great question. Now, what I do, what I like to do, is we like to have what we refer to as, that's every need, anything she'd ever want, right? And then let's narrow that down and filter it down to our core value product.

That's what we go build. So it'll get launched, right? A little shuffle to the right. Yes, but I'm going to ask you, very bottom. Testing and feedback. Why is it important? That's right. So how can you do testing and feedback on the idea? Run it by family and friends. Family, friends, customers, people that are going to buy it, right? One of the things I didn't know, there's a lot of things on my introduction, but probably my favorite thing to do on the planet right now, except for spend time with my family, is I'm part of, are you guys familiar with the Yay Academy? Young Entrepreneurs Academy. And it is unbelievably cool. And every year I mentor for the Yay Academy.

Last year, I had the opportunity of meeting these two students. I won't mention names. The very first day I get there, and they had shirt and ties on. These are like eighth graders. Yeah, eighth graders. Shirt, tie, they're just ready to rock, you know, hair all combed back. They were nervous. They were jittery, fingers shaking. They had their business plan. They slid it across to me. Because I said, hey, can I see your business plan? And I said, hey, is this yours? Your business plan. You're like, yes, sir. Yes, yes, yes, Mr. Anthone. Where did you get this from? Well, we put it together. I'm like, every bit of this is your information, right?

Yes, sir, yes, sir. Where'd you get this information? Oh, it's what we think. That's what we, I'm like, I took the business plan out of the little plastic holder. And I tore it in half. I tore it in half. And I tore it in half. And I slid it back over and I said, Wrong. The answer was right. It's your business plan. You need to go build a business plan that's your customer's business plan. Okay? How many customers did you ask about the data in that document that you wrote? We didn't talk to anybody. That's from our research on the internet. I said, well, OK, good job. But how many customers did you go sit in front of and validate your assumptions?

And both of them said, no, sir. I said, you know what? Our session's over for today. I'll see you guys next week. Now, next week we're going to talk about something. It's called the Javelin Board. And either you with your parents are going to go around Frisco and you're going to talk to all of the people that you think would pay for your product. And if your parents won't do it, give me their phone numbers. I'll call them and I'll come pick you guys up and drive you around on a Saturday and help you with this exercise. But we're not pushing and we're not publishing that business plan because it's yours, not theirs. Got it? Oliver, one of the students, interned with me over the...

One of the most brilliant minds I've ever had the opportunity to work with. And he tells me to this day that the best thing that I ever did for him was tear up that business plan. Right? So we're going to talk about the Javelin Board and what that means, okay? Do they cry when you do that? You know, Oliver about cried. He about cried when I tore that up because, you know what? And honestly, Joe, it about made me cry because I saw the emotion in his face. Because those boys, you know, let me rephrase that. Those men had stepped up and really put in an effort. The challenge is, is they had never been guided to do the right effort. So their effort was worthless. Worthless.

A lot of capital wasted in, well, let me rephrase that. A lot of calories wasted in the effort of producing what they produced, right? So if you guys ever get the chance to participate in EA, I got schooled by a seventh grader on P&L. And I'm not, I'm being recorded, right Joe? Yes. Smart, smart kids. You know what? It makes me think, all right, we're going to be okay. Right? So free tools. Do one important thing. Make better, faster business decisions. Don't let complacency become the enemy, right? And the best way to make a decision in regards to an app is to get off your can. Right Joe? Get out. Go out and ask people. Talk to people.

And I'll tell you what, you made the comment about earlier, ask your mom and friends and family. I usually run stuff by them, but I don't put any value in their feedback because they typically won't be truthful. A lot of them don't want to hurt your feelings. And you know what? My eight-year-old has no business dancing, right? I'm getting off camera, but I know it's still recorded. But of course, every day, what's daddy say? Oh my God, that's so beautiful. Good job, right? So let's talk about the Javelin board and why it's so important. And guys, you made the, you used the word entrepreneur earlier, right? Eric talks a lot in his book about how even corporate America needs to have the title of entrepreneurs.

Because I myself, when I used to introduce myself traveling the planet for AT&T, I used to say, you know what? I have the coolest job on the planet. I get to go create stuff with technology. I feel like a startup within my big brother's checkbook, right? So I had the reputation, the quality, and all of the history of AT&T behind me, and we were out pushing the lever on stuff, right? And to this day, a lot of my focus and guidance was built around the Javelin Board. We used that in our department. It's a phenomenal tool. It's not just for startups. This thing worked extremely well for us in big corporate America where you have all the resources in the world.

The challenge is a lot of time that data, to me, is skewed because you don't get in front of the customers enough, right? Get in front of the people that are going to pay you. So, the Javelin Board, the four key value or metrics of it is, who is the customer? So, in our example, who's our customer that we're talking about tonight? The attorney, right? So, what is the problem? And try to phrase it from your customer's perspective. That's the key thing, is being able to articulate back to your users their problem in their own words. And that's another thing I used to do from a consultative perspective when I was in a sales type of capacity. When I could get a customer to articulate back the power or the value of our product in their own words, it felt like, okay, we're getting somewhere.

Same thing with an app, right? If you can get your product to articulate that value in their own words, you're on a good path. Define the solution only after you have validated a problem worth solving. Earlier, that comment from Eric talks about a lot of startups accidentally build something nobody wants, right? Here you're validating your problems, and are they really worth solving? List the assumptions that must hold true for your hypothesis to be true. And I'm going to share with you guys a product that we built called B-twin in a second. Idea app structure. You guys, I'm going to hammer through this so that we can have a little bit more time for Q&A. This is an ideation of a segment of my ideation app story.

But the app structure, first, the definition statement, identifying what type of app it is, going through a self-assessment, and then understanding what the pricing models are. And really, there's a lot of part to understanding how to price an app in the marketplace, right? Start by writing the application definition statement, and it's the purpose, who is it for, and how will they use it? It's core functionality, and one of the things we use a lot in our office is user stories, and really putting them in the format of a script, right? Like a movie script. So, let's talk about Pat for a second. We are building an app for Pat because Pat wants the ability to track time spent on billable hours in their legal office.

Who is it for? Lawyers in the firm who need to track billable hours. How are they going to use it? At every client meeting so they can start and stop billable time. And then the core functionality of that product is what? To track and report time spent in the CRM system. So you guys agree, is that a pretty simple definition statement? A lot of times when I see these from our customers that bring us apps that they want us to build, this thing's like 80 pages. And I'm like, why are you wanting to build this? Well, there it is. I'm like, come on now. You've got to understand the core value of why. So app for lawyers to track time, features that fit the definition.

Stopwatch, background tracking, processing, server integration for the CRM system, client record lookups for associating time and track with the clients. All that stuff in number two clearly meet our MVP, right? Now, number three, the examples that don't fit, alert for new cases and trials. Document the ability for you to look up legal references, maps of client locations, and patent lookup interface. All those are features that are nowhere near what our MVP is, right? But are those on a list? Back to your question earlier. We identify those. Those become, once again, on our chalkboard. So when we go to start to build the patent lookup interface, what do you do?

We repeat the process over again, right? When you want to look at the client locations on map, you start looking at the process again. Every feature of that application goes through the same rinse-repeat process every single time, right? That way you don't end up building messaging into your product. When you get examples like that, isn't there like a second app in there? Because I could see alerts for new cases in trial and a map of client locations, but the document lookup and the patent lookup interface, that almost being like its own separate little app. Yes, it could be a standalone app. Once again, you don't want it to become the $1 Swiss Army knife, right?

Certainly. Once again, who's going to tell you? Pat. Always go back to Pat. Always go back to Pat, right? All right, self-assessment. Idea, innovation, ease of use, graphics, interactivity. I'll send you guys this deck so that you have it, right? I'm not going to go through that because Joe says we're running a little short on time. There's a reason why I gave all of you guys a Sharpie when we started this. Sharpie and a bar napkin are the number one tools that we use for every aspect of everything we do. This product right here started on a bar napkin. Sketch. How many of you guys are familiar with that? An amazing product, right? 99 bucks. There's a 30-day trial on it.

Plenty of time for you to build an MVP with Sketch. Pixelmator, Keynote, and here's a new one, brand new product out as of not too long ago, Figma. For students only? And Figma's a great product. It's kind of like Sketch meets web with collaboration all tied in. Hmm. And once again, you guys will get this deck with all the links. I've got the links to all the sites, tutorials, all that stuff for you. Oh, I love that. Yeah. UI/UX examples. Guys, I am constantly using these. Oh, those are free, huh? All of these are free. And, you know, if you want to figure out, hey, the great thing is these are repositories of everybody archiving. You could go on mobile patterns and say, show me all the iPhones with navigation.

It'll filter all these great apps out with great navigation. Show me all of the login register screens on Android. And it'll show you a full list of all these really cool, well-designed apps. Great resource. It's kind of like when you experience writer's block, this gets you through the creative stuff, you know, really flowing. Prototyping tools. Balsamiq, InVision, we use that a lot. InVision's free for up to, like, three apps. That lets me create everything in Sketch. It's Dropboxed into InVision, and InVision creates a static clickable demo that we get our customers to approve off on UX flow and everything. It's really cool. So example MVPs. You will gain 95% reduction of the development time by making your product only functional in under one use case.

You can waste a lot of money building stuff that you don't need to build like rocket launchers, right? Help us understand that. Say that in another way. Too often, it goes back to the comment Eric talks about. Under one use case, what does that part of it mean? Okay, perfect example. You identified in the attorney app the locations of clients, the document lookup stuff. Those could be individual use cases themselves, map locations. The use case that we identified was the attorneys need one simple app. They need to start and stop time when they're at a client's location, record that, and dump it into the CRM. Thank you. Yes, that's a fair question.

Everybody on the same page? Cool. All right. So, Yelp. One of the things, this app never made it to life, and I'm glad it didn't. Look, me and a bunch of my buddies were sitting around the picnic table, as you could say, drinking beer and eating pizza and doing all kinds of fun stuff. And we started mapping out this entire product. We wanted to have Yelp in there. We wanted coupons that matched up with all the Yelp listings. The ability to share contacts and reviews and photos. Right? My wife came to us one day and said, why are you guys trying to compete against Yelp? They're just going to beat you up, right? Well, kind of soured my...

I went off crying in pain. Right? And I thought, alright, okay. So, I loaded everything into the Javelin board and I went out and started doing some research. Right? You see this theme here? What it is is my heart and my passion get so excited about stuff. Sometimes I forget to follow my own structure and it gets me in trouble. Right? Thank God I have my wife and my team to keep me on path sometimes. Now, the interesting thing is, as I started going out and I started asking all kinds of people. I'd go to the mall, I'd go to restaurants, I'd go all over town asking questions with the Javelin board about all those things we wanted to build.

And we came down to one common denominator: Everybody I talked to, it all narrowed down to this common problem. When people were getting together at restaurants, they were looking for coupons and they were looking for reviews. They were all going to do what? Get together and eat. The biggest problem was not finding coupons, not reading reviews, not seeing photos. The biggest problem was determining where we're going to eat. And so what I did was I thought, I'm going to go solve that. I'm going to build an app that if you and I are eating for lunch and you're in downtown Dallas and I'm in downtown Frisco, the app looks where both of us are currently located, draws a straight line across and gives us back all of these places by categories that we can eat that's exactly in between you and me.

That's what we launched, right? Today, we have 2.3 million users on that app. The average user uses that app 1.8 times per week, and we're having a two times growth every single month, month after month after month after month. That's one use case. And of course my wife saved me, otherwise we'd have went out trying to build Yelp, the wannabe Yelp, right? Yes. Can you just give like a high level of how it works? Is it several restaurants in each one? Is that what you said? Or is it just kind of an in-between spot? Yeah. The way it works is I log in, and it does one thing, one thing only. Enter someone's phone number. So right now, if I take the app out and I type in my wife's phone number, it's going to bring back categories, and I can flick up and down.

Now I tap on restaurants. It's going to produce back a full list of every restaurant that's in between where she's at and I'm at right now. Now, we added the ability to call the restaurant. You can get directions, and also you hit add to calendar, and it sends a calendar to you and to me, populates with the address and what time we're supposed to meet. That sounds pretty simple. Very simple. Guess what we're doing now? People like you. We've taken it to the next level. We're going to add the ability for you to do groups, so you can add multiple people. We've also added the ability now, it's got every single restaurant with every menu, with every photo, with every review, coupons, discounts, everything.

But it does something else on top of that that is going to change the way we eat. That restaurant you go to frequently, have they ever greeted you by name when you walked in? Not by name. They greet me by order. They know my order. What's your favorite? That's pretty good. That's really good. That's pretty good. [unclear] chicken. That's what I mentioned. There he is. There he is. But you're there all the time. That's what they call them. [unclear] chicken. That's right. What people like you does? It's intellectual property for restaurants and retail customers. So, if you're a VIP because you see me a lot, in the system I flag you as a VIP.

So when you pull in the parking lot, your phone pops up and says, hey, welcome back. Nice to see you. And it vibrates my watch with a picture of your face and your first and last name, how often you've been here and what you like to eat. So that when you walk in, I greet you by name. Can we all just say right now, like, that's awesome? That is awesome. Cool. Yes. And guys, that started on a bar napkin, right? We just started selling this, and I've been punched and I've been punched and I've been punched. Today, that product is being resold by AT&T as its own. It's being rebranded as the AT&T Retail Restaurant and Hospitality Platform. AT&T? Yes. Powered by the Unity Group, right? Sprint is looking at it.

AT&T is looking at launching it in their retail stores. Apple is talking to us about launching it in their stores for customer engagement and recognition. Right? We're so stoked and I have the privilege of having Phil Romano, the best restaurateur on the planet as my investor. I showed this product to Phil five minutes into my presentation, he said, I'm in. I want this. It's live at Trinity Groves. We're going live at a 2.8 million consumer restaurant retail store next week. Wow. So much fun. All from an MVP. Right? It all starts with Pat. And guess what? I was the Pat because the thing I hate more than anything, tell you a quick story. October 31st, 2002, I felt like I was the worst dad on the planet.

Why? Because my girls were in the U-Haul truck being driven from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma to Frisco, Texas because their dad was brought here to launch the BlackBerry product for Nextel. My girls trick or treated up and down Highway 75. So for that, I'm the worst dad, right? Now, we get the truck unloaded. My wife's like, I ain't cooking. We get on 121, head up towards Stonebriar Mall to see Posado's restaurant. How many of you guys have eaten there? So the moral to the story is, that was 15 years ago, right? For 15 years, I've been going into Posado's on a regular basis. I saw Steven, the general manager, a couple of weeks ago, and I said, hey, do you know my name? And he goes, no?

Should I? So, what do you think after 15 years you'd get to know me, right? Tell you what, if you had my product, your watch would have vibrated and told you Anthone just pulled in the parking lot. And that guy's been here how many times and spent how much money? And oh, by the way, I don't want your coupon, I don't want your discount. Because every Saturday when I see your buy an entree, get an entree free, it just makes me think about Fasados and how great the food is and how I love the service. And I come see you not because of the discount, because of the entertainment value and the convenience of having a great meal with my family, right? The consumer's mindset is changing.

It's not about discounts. It's not about free cheesecakes on your birthday, right? And every app on the planet today is about coupons. Groupon's the worst. And if you ask any business that uses Groupon, they'll tell you the same thing. I don't like the customers it produces. It cannibalizes my revenue and it dilutes my brand. And from my Javelin Board expertise and exercise, that's what we walked away with. People don't care about coupons anymore. They don't want discounts. They want to be recognized. How does it make you feel when you walk in and they go, and they name the dish that you like? [unclear]

Now, if you had a lady in tow, she'd be like, man, this guy is the king, right? 7C chicken all day long, right? All that's from using the Javelin Board and focusing on an MVP. Get it to market. Let your customers tell you what you did right, wrong, and what you didn't do. I used to be a general manager of a family restaurant in Madison, Texas, and that's what got me the big tips. As soon as that person came through the door, Hi Brent, how are you doing today? Like that, he'll say, Oh, I've come in for, yeah, I told a bunch of guys I'll pick them up some food, and he buys food for 10 people. Every time he comes in, he always...

That's awesome. But it takes a lot of memory to memorize a lot of names, right? If you have a successful business, a successful business period of it, a restaurant business, you pretty well have to have about 250 to 300 customers. So that's a lot of names to memorize. And I'll tell you, I personally have sat across the table from some of our customers that are paying for the product. One of our customers out in Frisco is getting a little older. And when I pitched her on our product, she physically started crying. And the emotion in her voice when she told me, she said, you know what, Anthone?

I want it. And I want it now. And here's why. I used to be able to recognize every single customer as they were walking through the door and I'd greet them by name. She goes, but quite frankly, I'm getting so old now. I remember their face, but it pains me when I can't remember their name and I want to greet them. I want to engage with them, but I can't. Our product does that. And that emotional stress that it eliminates from her and the ability to know that Anthone and his family are here. I didn't greet them, but they're here, because it shows her everyone that's in the restaurant. She can tap on it and go, oh, Anthone's here. He's been 16 times and spent $1,200.

I better go talk to you. Hey, Anthone, nice to see you. We really appreciate your business. Thank you. That's a paradigm shift. That's changing interaction and engagement. Flipping it on its head, right? You will get on Facebook and Yelp and tell everybody and your brother about how you were treated. That's engagement. That's not enough. All day long. So guys, what did we learn today? What's the number one thing that we're going to take away from? What's that? Ask Pat. Yeah, feedback. Listen to feedback. Solicit feedback. Have mechanisms to collect that feedback. Analyze it. Take action on that, right?

Hit the eject button. Get out of things that aren't working. And if you spend money on stuff, try to identify ways that you can restructure that into maybe something that will work, right? Because it's always not a loss, just like our messaging. Mm-hmm. Okay? But the key thing is set your arrogance aside, set all of your expertise, and get out and get in front of customers. It's really, really, really hard. It's uncomfortable to walk up to people and say, hey, my name is Anthone, man. I've got a quick question for you. But when you're looking for a place, how often do you guys find yourself doing that? It's challenging. But I promise you this, what you put into that effort, you will get back ten times in the decisions you're going to make and the direction you're going to go with your app.

You're going to save so much time and capital on what you're trying to execute. Okay? I'm Pat. As you have my card, anytime you have questions, comments, thoughts, bounce them off of me. Okay? Send me an email. Okay? So here's how you get your slide deck from Anthone. You email Anthone a screenshot of a review on Yelp or Facebook of Genius Den with five stars, of course, and some comment. You just do a little review. I'll send him a screenshot. Obviously, if you don't do it, he'll still send it to you, but I sure appreciate it. The only way that this gets propagated, what we're doing here, I mean, you feel like if you got value, it's because we share that, right?

We share that with our friends and we become that force multiplier that puts this out to more of our friends, more of our people. And you do that by, you know, jumping on Facebook. There's a Facebook group. And if you'll join that group, all of our events are posted on that. Art show in two weeks, which ends up with angel investors hanging around beside artists, hanging around beside startup founders, and a no pressure, have a glass of wine, bring your kids, check out cool new art kind of environment. So that's our social have a glass of wine scene. And then we've got once a month, we've got these like awesome speakers. So we want y'all to be here as a part of that and bring up one of the things people said was GeniusDen.

You just need to get in here, and the whole concept is to get people together in your angle, my angle, and my angle, your angle, are put together into a whole new facet of the diamond, right? And then genius comes out of that. And it happens. Today, it happened twice. Like, people were talking, and it was like, oh, man, oh, oh, and it was like that, and I was like, this is what this is about, getting people together. That's awesome. So [unclear], so we want to do that. Thanks, Joe. No, thank you, because this platform enables me to provide feedback to the community. Yeah, right. Right? And, well, like I said on the front end, guys, God's lit a fire in my stomach, and I just get stoked to go out and share.

But I might not have taught you anything. You guys might walk out of here knowing everything that I shared with you. But hopefully you learned something or I reminded you of something you used to do that you don't do anymore because you've allowed yourself to get in the mix. I'll close with this. I had the honor of being invited to a program called the Four D's of Discipline. And it was a week-long series. And it has been so extremely impactful to our organization. And all day every day we live in a whirlwind of all of this stuff going on around us. And whether it's an app you're trying to build, your day job, or your relationship with your friends and family.

If you look up in that cloud, and pardon my language, but if you look in the cloud, all that shit that's just swirling around all over the place. Grab three of those things, pull them down and hang on to them and say, you know what, I don't care if the sky falls down today. I'm going to get these things done this week. Right? Forget about everything else. It's just like carrying a giant bucket of stress. Let it off. Grab the three things that matter the most and just go nail those. Execute on those better than anybody else could. Because like Mark Cuban says, if you're not, someone else is kicking your ass. Right? Identify those three things that move the needle.

And it could be just little things like I'm gonna wake up and tell my wife I love her every morning, right? Or it might be that I'm gonna identify this one feature set that I've got to get nailed in my MVP this week, right? Find those three and own them, right? And it's even better when you tell somebody else about those three that you own. Because then it adds a little bit of, oh, I gotta, right? So thank you guys for your time. I appreciate getting to collaborate and share with you. Great. You want feedback on your app? All day long. I've got to go meet somebody. And she was saying, let's meet at Lower Greenville. And so between Bam and I just typed in her phone number.

Yes. Nothing happened. She's not on the app. She's not on the app. And what she didn't get was a text message that says, go download this. Joe wants to meet you, click the link, download, find a place between. Excellent idea. Yes. Why doesn't this have it? Because that app was, um, kind of, that app is so old that Apple actually emailed me and said, Anthone, we kind of need you to update this or you're going to have to get it off the App Store. Oh, it said something about updating it. Yes. So, um, what we've done is, you said it earlier. Sometimes it's a separate app, right? That has evolved to this, but we've left that where it is.

For the public. Right. And then once this goes official, because right now we're white-labeling this product for everybody else's brand. So you can't go download a People Like You app. Someday you will, but we're not prepared for that. So when we do, that will get rebranded. We'll probably bolt everything from People Like You into B20. Ah, I see. Yes. So in fact, I was playing around with it last night because I was meeting some people, and I tapped on it. I was so embarrassed. It was kind of funny, but in today's world, it's not. I tapped on, um, I was like, oh, funeral home, and it pulled up Centennial High School. I'm like, that's not cool.

Databases kind of mixed up in there. So we've got, once again, MVP. Guess how long it took us to build that app? Anybody want to take a guess? Two weeks? Nope. Depends on which one you have. I don't know what it does. Because if you use Sketch, you cut down on your development, on your design time quite a bit. That entire product was designed in Fireworks, which is an Adobe product, which is no longer around anymore. I designed that entire product, and my best friend on the planet, Nathan Charles, came over, and we built that entire app in 48 hours. Wow. From start to finish. So those APIs off of Yelp data? The API is actually coming from Google Places.

Okay. Yes. So you put a wrapper on it? Yeah, we put a wrapper on it and off we went. Pretty cool. But it does just that one thing. That's it. Yeah, 48 hours and we had it on the app. Brilliant. And then the sale would be a relationship with the dating apps, right? Oh, my lord. There's an app. Yeah? I'm like, please, you know. Oh, she's Tinder? You're friends with her, right? Yeah, she wrote the algorithm for Match.com. She's Match. Okay. Right. Yeah, I've often wanted to sit down with Liz. Talk to her about the app because how cool would that be if you could match that up with Match.com. Pick a place. Pick a place. You know, I've had recommendations like, hey, you know what?

A lot of times when I'm traveling, I meet with other colleagues and we've got to meet up. We've got to find out. Would you mind running a crime rate for me? Bring me back the health score for that restaurant. There's all kinds of stuff. Hey, it produces back a list for you. And here's something I'm going to say on record. We want to take it and we want to put the power of marketing in the consumer's hands. Bring me back a list of all the restaurants and now I'm going to push out to the restaurant. Hey, I'm coming with four of us, but we want 20 bucks off our meal. And rather than the restaurant spending $20 million on advertising, take $2 million of that, put it in an algorithm that lets me run against it and it dynamically gives me an approval.

And all I do is show the waiter, hey, I got this $20 off coupon because I brought four people with me. Those are some of the crazy things that we want to take to the next level. It's really interesting you said that. I'll add this to it. I find a place I like nearby and I'll walk in. Just something I like to do. I'll walk in and I'll tell the manager, like second, third time I'm in, I'm like, hey, I live nearby, I come nearby, I want to place it just as my go-to place. I'm going to bring 100 people here. And I smile and they always go like, ah, this guy. And it's pretty funny because like the third or fourth time, I'm like, this is 16, this is 23, I'm bringing people in. Like I'm at 27.

And it's like they look at me and they're like, hey, what's in it here? And then I ask. I'm like, and then it's funny, so I go in and they're like, Joe, what's up, man? I'm like, dude. I don't really want anything other than this is a great place. The people here take care of us. And I reinforce that loop because I'm bringing you 100 people. That's right. And then I'm like, I get to like 70 and I'm like, what do I get when I get to 100? And they're like, a bottle of champagne. We'll buy you dinner. And I'm like, right. Yeah, I'm like, hey, cool. This is like fun, right? It's like fun forever. Right? That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I just did a fun one.

What do they call them? Malcolm Gladwell connectors? They are, yes. Mavens. Mavens and connectors, right? Because I know what's good here. I live in Deep Ellum. Yeah. And I bring people to you. And you bring people. Right. And I just make a game of it. It's fun. But I roll into that place now. They like me. Everybody who's with me is like in. Yes. It's a fun place to check out. Then it starts to spider web out. Right. And where we want to go with that is I assign an affiliate code to you. Okay. So when you refer the restaurant on Facebook and someone else sees it and they go download the app, you get a credit.

Oh, wow. Now when they walk into the restaurant, you get a credit. They buy food, you get a credit. That person refers somebody. All of a sudden it's just trickle down. Just created an MLM. Build loyalty around diners. Right? The whole diners club back again. It's like S&H Green Stamps. Turn that wheel, man. Give me my coupon. Yeah. And when something happens, like Deep Ellum is starting to pick up, there's, I don't know, there's five of your friends here. You don't even know them. Who are down here and know this place. They work here. They live here. They're something. Yeah. And those friends are reaching out to folks that live way up north.

And when you come down to Deep Ellum, you gotta check out On Premise, the name of this place. Check out On Premise. I walk in and the restaurant manager is like, hey, man. He's great. The reason I like him is he's there. His station is dead center, ten paces from the door. Oh, nice. He is floating around that space. He gets it. He's young, he's like 24, he's a kid. And he's like, man, my job is to make eye contact with everybody that walks in that door and meet as many people as I know. The guy is very good. And it's not like he went to restaurant manager training. He started behind the bar and he started working his way up.

Working his way up. Dude's good. Yeah, right? It's like, bam. And so when you find a place like that, you turn. Do you guys know Bob's Steak & Chop House? So Bob Sambol is part owner in People Like You. And Bob has been mentoring me for about a year. And Bob tells a very, very interesting story about how Bob's Steak & Chop House started. Bob talks about how his knees used to hurt sitting at the bar from his knees banging together in anticipation of someone walking through the front door. And he made it a habit that when someone walked in, he attacked them. He got on them and got to know them in a positive way, right? Not an aggressive way.

Just look them in the eye. Learn who they are, their names, their brothers, their sisters, their aunts, their uncles, their birthdates. And Bob said his entire foundation, his entire company was built around that methodology. Bob doesn't know this, but the nickname for this product in our back end is called Bob. Because that's what it is. We've turned Bob into software. We've turned that 24-year-old kid into software. There's still mics, so now he does. Bob knows now. Yes. You know, Phil talks about— Do you want to talk about grabbing some body parts or anything? Because you're still mic'd, so just be aware. No, we won't do that. Definitely. I'd like to meet that young man, though.

[unclear] Excellent. Well, guys, I always ask myself at the end of a session, would the audience in the room written me a check to hear me talk and let my face fly? Right. So I hope you guys walk out of here because you spent time tonight, your time, your capital, and your calories, to hear me speak about my challenges, frustrations, successes, and failures. And hopefully you walk out with some insight that you didn't have before, or once again a reminder of, oh, yeah, I used to do that. So once again, thanks. Appreciate you guys joining us. And as Joe said