Bobby Gillespie - Sales
Chris LaFay: That's really freaking right.
Bobby Gillespie: Papa G. What's up, man?
Chris LaFay: Good afternoon.
Josh Bruni: Afternoon.
Chris LaFay: No, no, not yet. Dang
Andrew Booth: me.
Bobby Gillespie: Make sure this. This guy's coming. What's happening, dude?
Chris LaFay: I am.
Josh Bruni: Oh, what's this?
Chris LaFay: Sorry, why? Just texted me. I just sent off a proposal for a site that I didn't know was going to be in my pipeline. So that's all. That's always a fun little, little thing. Knock that out last night. Sent it this morning. Went and got my blood drawn because the doctors wanted to steal my blood and test it. So that was a fun. Oh, just regular, regular old stuff.
Bobby Gillespie: Regular, regular.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, I just. I just say. I just tell people that doctors like stealing people's blood and I don't know, it's probably just weird. The blood should stay in the body, preferably.
Bobby Gillespie: It's my opinion blood should stay inside the body is kind of a good rule of thumb.
Chris LaFay: That's going to be the quote that the AI robots take from this phone call and is going to be like, what was the theme of today? Blood should stay inside the body. You're welcome. Yeah, what.
Bobby Gillespie: What are. What are. Should. You know, There was a. A plumber positioning message that I heard once. That was, we keep water where it's supposed to be or something like that.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, I. I agree with that.
Bobby Gillespie: Yeah. All right. That's. That's more sticky than, you know, we do plumbing.
Chris LaFay: Yes. Water should stay where it belongs.
Bobby Gillespie: Not anybody. Andrew Booth is. Is on the call.
Josh Bruni: Water.
Bobby Gillespie: What is up? Andrew Booth? I'm Bobby Gillespie.
Andrew Booth: Nice to meet you, Bobby. What did I walk into with a water conversation?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, we're talking about how blood should stay in the body.
Andrew Booth: Yeah, ideally. Yeah, that's generally preferred.
Chris LaFay: Doctor stole my blood this morning, and so, you know, well installed.
Bobby Gillespie: They. They took it. You gave it to them.
Chris LaFay: I know. I have a little dot right there to prove it. It's right there. It's right there.
Bobby Gillespie: You'll be all right, dude, you need, like, need to be held.
Chris LaFay: No, I. I have a friend, though, that does have to be held when they get blood drawn. And I feel I cannot. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't watch. Like, I'm not. I'm not a sick, twisted freak. But, you know, hold on.
Bobby Gillespie: If you watch your sick, twisted freak.
Chris LaFay: No, no, I said I don't watch. I'm not.
Bobby Gillespie: But if you do watch.
Chris LaFay: Yes, yes.
Bobby Gillespie: You talking about, dude,
Chris LaFay: I'm not down here to be like, oh, man, that's. That's nice. That's wonderful. You don't watch no, no.
Bobby Gillespie: First of all, I don't watch for, like, my kink. I watch because it's interesting. No, I mean, I'm covered in tattoos. I was heavily pierced once upon a time. I was like, I'm not like. Like, I like watching the tattoo activity.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Bobby Gillespie: My arms and stuff. Like. Oh, cool, right?
Chris LaFay: That, like, all my body clinches thinking about the idea of getting a tattoo, like, all, like, the entirety of myself.
Bobby Gillespie: I mean, I believe it. It's not a joy. There's definitely endorphins. So there is a. There is a masochistic S M component. But I remember in high school, they did a blood drive, and I was giving blood, and they missed my arm, and I had these big, hulking veins, and they missed the spot. And it was like. And I saw this girl I knew. She went like this.
Andrew Booth: I was like, oh.
Bobby Gillespie: And then the best. Best thing about the blood drive in high school was you would give blood and then be like, oh, I feel lightheaded. And then they would go. They would let you sit, you know, to the side, and they give you, like, a wet towel to put over your forehead, over your eyes, and you just chill all afternoon. And then you'd be sitting there, and then your boy would come in.
Josh Bruni: He'd be like.
Bobby Gillespie: She knew they were up to the same, like, antics.
Chris LaFay: Oh, my gosh. I. I once had to. I had to have a CAT scan done. And so, like, the. Or MRI or cats. I remember which one. It was a long time ago. And so they waited to do the, like, the. They had to put, like, the die. And so. And I'm sure this is common. I have no. Like, there's no. I don't, like, have a problem with it, but, like, I had my hands above my head laying on the tiny bed, and that's when they did the. The IV stuff. And I was not. My brain was in 25 different places thinking I was going to go into this, like, tiny tube. And when I got out, I remember they put, like. Not literally, but, like, what felt like duct tape on my arm, like, to keep the IV in. And I was like, why are. Why is all this, like, tape going down? It wasn't just, like, a single little strip. Come to find out that they put the. The blood flow thing in reverse when they put the IV in. And so it was, like, all over my arm. I was like. There was a little war that was fought over here between people.
Bobby Gillespie: There was gore.
Chris LaFay: There was gore. It wasn't. It was just like, a little tiny thing, but, like, it was Gory. I'm like, what? You gotta know how to flip the switch. This has been a great enter, Andrew. This is Bobby. This is par for the course. I just want to let you know. So this is kind of it. Yeah, this is kind of. This is the vibe actually here now.
Bobby Gillespie: Oh, that's.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Andrew Booth: Did you give blood or like.
Chris LaFay: Dude, testing, testing, testing. Yeah, that's all. That's all. That's what this whole conversation just standard, normal things. So. Yes.
Bobby Gillespie: You missed, Josh. You missed. You missed.
Josh Bruni: I heard blood, someone's blood voluntarily get that part involved.
Chris LaFay: That's. That's the right question. That's how this whole thing got started. I had a checkup today, so I got blood drawn. That's all that it was. And we turned that into about a 10 minute conversation about why blood should stay in the body. That's all.
Bobby Gillespie: He needs to be held. He needs to be held.
Andrew Booth: He.
Chris LaFay: To be held. Yes, he does.
Bobby Gillespie: It's okay.
Chris LaFay: Hi, my name is Chris. Nice to meet you. Welcome. Yeah, welcome to the show. Oh my gosh.
Bobby Gillespie: Oh, Chris, Gosh. And I just met Andrew. So. Andrew, Josh.
Chris LaFay: Yes.
Andrew Booth: Nice to meet you, Josh.
Josh Bruni: Hey, guys. Where are you guys based?
Chris LaFay: Atlanta. Suburbs of. But yeah, been there. We actually. Andrew and I actually grew up in the same. The same town growing up and since have moved to different areas of the suburbs. But. But yeah, we. We're both Georgia natives over here.
Josh Bruni: Okay, cool.
Chris LaFay: Yes. So we have about 30 minutes and I know, I want to. Any conversation that I have with Bobby always goes off the rail. So before that that happens, I want to make sure I don't know what you're talking about. I know Bobby is like the shortest, most succinct human being I've ever met. That's the biggest.
Josh Bruni: I'm not sure.
Bobby Gillespie: Dude, why are you calling me short?
Chris LaFay: I'm short. I'm like five. Five. So, yeah, my wife gives me crap about that all the time. I look taller on video.
Bobby Gillespie: So we can talk about all sorts of things. So I wanted to bring Josh in. You know, Chris, you and I talked and, you know, you wanted to hook me up with. With Andrew, who's more of the subject matter expert. But Josh is not just a regular CEO, he's. He's a marketing guy that became CEO. So he knows all the stuff. And, and the one thing that, that most of our clients have are. I don't know if they just don't expect it perhaps is that we know what the hell we're doing. So like, the agencies treat us like a regular old client. And that's the wrong way because we know what we're doing and which is a good thing for our clients if they recognize that and take advantage of it. So I wanted to bring Josh in to talk some more technical stuff. Josh, we went over, Chris and I went over sort of like our bullet list of like, you know, whether it's they can do it all or they could do some of it, you know, there are tweaks to cleaning it up, doing some side projects, and then offering support in a retainer model.
Josh Bruni: Yeah, well, maybe, maybe go back to the beginning for me. Just like, what is it that you guys do? Like, what's your core? Like, you know, why do you exist? What do you, what are your hopes, dreams, you know, things like that.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. So long story short, I've been in the web, so my name's Chris. I actually, I run, I run the show here. Andrew's been basically my number two guy since the beginning as well. I got started back in elementary school, so this quite literally building websites and whatnot has been my only source of income ever. And there's pros and cons to that story in terms of levels of experience doing other things and whatnot. But I love this. And what I, what I tried to do for a little while within my agency was to grow it and to scale it. Kind of like the traditional agency model with a lot of full time employees and larger top line revenue. And I realized about middle, early middle last year that I kind of like the collective model a lot better to where, you know, bring in the right people at the right times and work with experts and not feel like I have to sign a project just to fill somebody's full time plate up and put it with the wrong person. And so made a little bit of a pivot last year to reduce the total headcount of the company from a full time perspective. And now I get to work with really dope people when clients need them and that's a heck of a lot more fun. And that means we get to do a lot better work. So not nearly as focused on the top line of the agency side anymore. So I know former agency folks, marketing folks, you know, kind of get that. I don't tell that aspect of the story all the time, but I figured y' all might resonate a little bit with it. And so that's the overarching plan is to just work with fun people, build sites. We do a ton of stuff in WordPress, but Andrew leads our Shopify side of things. And so about a Year and a half or so ago, we landed Magic Spoon, large E Commerce cereal company with an agency partner. And so we've been there go to for the last year and a half, give or take. Built a couple of other Shopify sites. And so we have a great Shopify team under Andrew and really looking to take what we've done with Magic Spoon and start multiplying that out over the next year or two. And so when Bobby reached out and said, hey, we got some baseline work that just has to get done on a regular basis plus projects, I'm like, bring it on. This is right in the alley. So much excitement, needless to say.
Bobby Gillespie: So.
Chris LaFay: And obviously I like Bobby. He's kind of cool. So, yeah, in my mindset on like, retainers and things like that, the way that I like to think about it is what is the logical minimum to start with, knowing that projects would push over. I would rather be in a place to where we're saying, hey, this is the minimum to do the. What we need to do on a regular basis. And when we need to go above that with extra stuff, we will, rather than starting high and trying to scrape and find stuff. So, like, that's kind of. That's my mindset with this type of stuff, especially in the beginning months where we're learning each other's rhythms and things along those lines is let's start with whatever is the logical minimum and then grow from there if necessary.
Josh Bruni: So, yeah, yeah. And I would say I'm probably somewhere in the middle, meaning, like as the CEO and. And like, I don't like to be approving things all the time or like having to go through a process of like, hey, okay, we'll do that, but it's another work order, you know, then some. Someone else on my team has to get it approved. So, like, I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm like, I don't want to start really high because I don't want to like, okay, what do we got to give the dev, you know, the dev help this month until the hours that we have budgeted. So I'm kind of like, how do we find a happy medium? It's like, I'm not thinking about it and it's not a bottleneck either. But we can say, we know we have a bigger project coming up. Let's just scope that independently. Then let's say we want to do the redo the whole site, for example, and which could be something that we look at in the next 12 months, 612 months, maybe even sooner.
Bobby Gillespie: I Don't know.
Josh Bruni: That would be like, hey, let's just look at that as a different project outside of the, the thing. Or we know that let's say we're gonna do a sprint on a few things and we need 10 landing pages. Like that would be kind of like outside of that. But we seem to have, I don't know, it's been a little bit of a, a tangled mess in my opinion. And I think sometimes that's just because we start sprinting and you start layering in things. Like you got replo pages, you've got, you know, that are like half replo, half code, half template, you know, three halves, you know. And so I think we have a little bit of that and then we have you know, some landing pages that are like hosted on different sites, which we'll probably continue to do. Those are probably WordPress based sites. Oh, okay.
Chris LaFay: Awesome.
Josh Bruni: Yeah, those are, those are not as frequent now but I do think that might be a tactic that we continue to explore. The reason why we pulled back was because of the lack of dev help. Yeah. And I would say people that the dev that we did have was definitely more Shopify and really wanted to just keep doing stuff in repo which is fine. But you know from it's like quick but it's not, you know, has its, has its cons right. For business cars and a lot, a
Bobby Gillespie: lot of times it's a, it's an extra step. I'm like just go like yeah, be waiting for.
Josh Bruni: Yeah. I would also say we are definitely more on the side of speed than like perfection. And like I would rather move quick and iterate or like adjust or like hey this is mvp, let's go and then. But I know you guys are still working on things. That's another thing too like because by the time we scope something we got wired, we do the whole thing. I'm on to the next idea. Yeah, we're adjusting in real time typically to what's going on are only direct to consumer right now only through the website. We have a decent amount of orders, decent amount of revenue. We're. We're kind of in a. Trying to keep a happy medium of growth and profitability right now because of inventory constraints and some. We're kind of working on the supply chain a little bit right now. So we're in a good spot strategically. But that puts more force on like efficiency of media which means we better conversion rate, we better user experience. We need to be thinking about landing pages. We need to think about the customer funnel, the Acquisition funnel, capturing emails, capturing sms. We need to be more thoughtful about that. And so as a result, it's actually put way more emphasis on our dev partners when we're moving faster and I'm pushing growth really, like, heavy through partnerships and collaborations. And it was less. You're less worried about that point in the funnel. I know it sounds like you shouldn't be, but you guys, that's like, it's not. You guys know this. It's difficult to do everything all at one time. And so when you're moving fast and we're launching new like, like partnerships with the UFC or with, you know, we just launched with Gary Brca and like all these different, like, we're pushing really hard one way. It leaves a lot of things broken behind you because. And oftentimes you're pushing so hard that you can get away with it because you're winning.
Andrew Booth: Right.
Josh Bruni: And then winning kind of masks some of the problems that are left behind. Well, now I'm actually not trying to push that fast. I'm trying to say, okay, winning to me looks like cleaning up the wake of brokenness that we left behind as we, you know, went way too fast and things started ripping off the car, you know.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Josh Bruni: So that's kind of where we are right now. So it's putting way more emphasis on having a good partner to help us clean things up, tighten things up and be more nimble and kind of the real time part of the bit. Like, like just this week we said, hey, we're going to do this new promotion. And was it this week, Bobby? We decided to do it. Was it Tuesday?
Bobby Gillespie: It was Tuesday.
Josh Bruni: Yeah, it was Tuesday. And so we're like, let's go live on Thursday. And it's a buy one, get, buy two get, one free offer. Luckily, we already had landing pages set up and so we already had like a bundle. Like, so it wasn't a promo code or it wasn't like a shopping cart functionality. We just used stuff that we already had and had we not had that already, there was no way we would have hit Thursday.
Chris LaFay: Oh, totally.
Josh Bruni: Because of building that experience, everything but
Bobby Gillespie: the dev would have been ready. And the dev guys, yesterday, he's like, we'll see how fast we can do this. I'm like, it'll be over.
Josh Bruni: Yeah, exactly. Exactly like that, by the way. But that was just an example of like, we are kind of planning and operating around what's realistic from the dev side. And that's. That was more of a fire drill. And that isn't every day. But we do need some reasonable about our response time. Like we do need to say okay, if we had an in house dev, they would just be like, okay, what are the needs today? Let's do that. We have other projects that you're always working on and so you're just adjusting priorities based upon the need of the business. So I'll stop talking, but I'm gonna give you that's a little kind of lay of the land and, and some of the, the needs of the business. It is difficult. We do make it difficult because we are operating in real time and it isn't always realistic to think that we're, you know, one, two, three months planned out and projects are scoped and planned like it isn't. That's not realistic. So that's the part that I like to be honest about to say we're pretty good about like handing off clean packages and briefs and like timelines with a good amount of lead time regularly. That's, we're pretty good with that. There are times though, as you guys know, that you're reacting to the business in real time. And so that's the part I'm like, I just didn't be honest with and say that's where people get frustrated. Like the dev team yesterday, he's like, and then they're in time zone difference because they're in Europe and then I think they're outsourcing to China or somewhere.
Chris LaFay: And that's interesting.
Josh Bruni: I've got another layer of time zone challenges.
Andrew Booth: Yeah.
Bobby Gillespie: So that's why they're always a day behind. Because they're literally a day behind.
Josh Bruni: Yeah. And then if there's a problem or they need clarity, you're now two days behind because they have a one single question that stops everything.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Josh Bruni: So it's amazing. By the way, we didn't hire them as our dev resource. That wasn't the scope. It turned into that because they were doing a lot of it based. What they were doing is they were really hired as like conversion rate optimization and a B testing. And part of that comes with landing pages and in development and things like you really are developing all the time. And so it just turned into they had basically taken over the website.
Andrew Booth: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: We work with the Crow agency on the side as well too. We do a lot of their dev stuff because they don't have in house developers. So I, I totally get the, the balance there.
Andrew Booth: Yeah.
Josh Bruni: Yeah. So I'll stop talking. But anyways, I want to give you
Bobby Gillespie: that, like I, I want to add to that just A little bit clarify. Josh is right. Like, we are like live constantly, like reacting to things constantly, but we're also a really good partner. Like, we're. We know what we're doing. Like, we know how to communicate. Like, we're all. We're all very likable and, and moderately goodlooking. So
Chris LaFay: is saying that you're likable, is it one of those things, like, when you say that a. Like food is.
Bobby Gillespie: No, you want to hang out with us, dude. Like, listen, listen, dude. Professional athletes want to hang out with us. Like, I'm not just saying that. And you know, we're cool. Um, so like, but it, but we are planning ahead, right? And a part of like the way the system has been structured is because of our current dev partner. So like, we're not thinking about, you know, what do we want to do to the website this month or next month? Like, how does the website play into our next big event or our next campaign or the three stories we're telling at all times. Like, we're not really doing that because we're kind of. There's a compromising. There's so much more we could do. So like, the reactionary stuff is real, but like, there's. There's so many opportunities that we haven't really. I mean, I've got huge ideas that like, no one could do them. And. So what our, Our product is. It's. It's high science and it solves a problem that's kind of invisible. So it, It's. It's a challenge cell. And we, we could talk all day about our science, our patents, our partnerships, and we do, but we know that the, the public speaking carries more weight. Right? That's why review sites and all that stuff matter. So we do have reviews. We have tons of reviews. We don't have enough, but we have, you know, but we have some. But I have a concept. What we call the effects that people experience is the Aries effect. And Ayr's effect is broken down to the. Basically your nervous system's responses to the clarity that our product brings to the electromagnetic fields that we're existing in. And I want to talk to our customers. I want to give them platform. So think of it as like a Pinterest page populated by customer generated content through a simple intake form incentivized by either text or video content. And then this page becomes overwhelmingly populated with customers experiences around the Aries effect. Better sleep, better mood, to save my marriage, whatever. All these things that we hear all the time. But there's no real platform for it. And advocacy is part of what we're trying to do and part of what we're trying to enable and empower. And this page becomes like something we could point to. Like, don't take our word for it. Listen to, you know, these thousand strangers that are our customers. And then drop in some ads, drop in some our content, brain scans, things like that. We had our current debt partner try to scope it out. It took three months to. Before I was like, you don't know how to do this. I'm taking it away. And we really haven't found anybody to, to. Three months, dude, don't get me going. It's Friday. Don't get me going. It's Friday.
Josh Bruni: Yeah, Yeah.
Bobby Gillespie: I'm frustrated, but like, but here's, here's the problem with that. Well, we took it, we took it away from a month ago, so it was two months. But like, I have a whole campaign around that that is holistic across every bit of the business and all of our partners and all of our ambassadors and all of our customers and future customers. And when things can't become real, the enthusiasm wanes. And it's still something that's. That, that we need to act on. But we move so fast. We're on to like five different things. Since that concept, that concept originated in like, was it Josh, August, July? And then it became, it was like, oh, let's do the page. Was that October, November?
Josh Bruni: Yeah.
Bobby Gillespie: And you know, I, I, my enthusiasm, I'll get excited again. I'm very excitable. I'll get excited again. But I need, I need to get excited for a reason.
Josh Bruni: Well, the needs of the business shift. And when we say, hey, this is going to solve our particular thing and it doesn't come to life, well, we're on to the next thing because we're like, okay, the, the, obviously the level of effort's too high, so we got to move on to the next thing. And which is funny because then we moved on to like the cell phone tower mapping thing, which then took, don't get me going. Took, took three more months on what should have been a two week project, most likely maybe less.
Bobby Gillespie: And it's not good and still not there.
Josh Bruni: And so we're like, now we're on to the next thing because we're like, we have all these ideas that were never executed on, that we were trying to use to solve problems. And then, and so that's, that's kind of what we're selling for. I'll just add like, look, we are agency guys. Like we've been in your shoes, we've been on brand side, we've been on the agency side. I think the number one way to work with us is just having good conversation, like real, honest, authentic conversations. That's where I think most of our agency partners have gone wrong. The ones that have worked the best realize really quickly that I want to have the conversation that you are having internally with your team. Like what's keeping you guys up at night? What are the problems? Because the highlight reel, we all see it. Like, I don't need the highlight reel, I need the, like my job is to solve problems to make your job easier. What, what are you lacking? What tools, resources, information, knowledge, support do you guys need? You're not telling me that. Then I don't know what to say. If you're saying, hey, we can do this, but you guys aren't providing us complete instructions, it's incomplete project. If you're not telling me that and there's just a bunch of swirl happening because we're not having that conversation. And, and I think that's sometimes is the, the jolt to the system with the partners and the agencies that, that they're not used to because I'll start to get frustrated to force the conversation and that comes across as just general frustration. Then I'm like, I'm generally frustrated because I'm trying to help you, I'm trying to have that. And what you're telling me right now isn't the accurate version of what's actually happening. And we're pretty good about, you know, I'm 25 years of doing this and I don't. We don't want to talk about the amount of time Bobby's been doing this.
Bobby Gillespie: 26. Okay. Oh, seven. It's seven now 99.
Chris LaFay: I'll ask Chris Dubois if that number is right or not. He'll tell me the truth.
Bobby Gillespie: Yeah, I, I am, I, I will never lie. Never. And so be careful, be careful asking what I think I'll tell you
Chris LaFay: from
Andrew Booth: a standpoint of like projects and trying to plan and things like that. First off, working on a two or three month timeline is absolutely insane for a small project. That's wild. But okay, so let me back up a little bit. Software engineer, 20 years ISO calling a clothing company Seven Figure Brand. I know what it's like to go from a ten dollar garage startup to multi millions. So I get this like you're reacting, you're figuring it out like you know, you're just moving the car's going 100 miles an hour and you're rebuilding it at the same time.
Bobby Gillespie: Oh, dude, dude, hold on. You're quoting me here. You're quoting. Okay, Chris, did you give him that to say.
Chris LaFay: No.
Bobby Gillespie: Say this to Bobby.
Josh Bruni: I. I actually.
Chris LaFay: Honestly, I haven't actually talked to. And, like, I've chatted with him. All right, sorry.
Bobby Gillespie: I'm derailing. I'm derailing. Sorry. Go ahead, Andrew. Sorry, sorry.
Josh Bruni: Okay.
Andrew Booth: I'll have to ask what that was about after. But yeah, so. So I get that side of things,
Chris LaFay: obviously.
Andrew Booth: I've got the agency side. I'm a software engineer, all that kind of stuff, which, by the way, Bobby, you were kind of dancing around the. Trying to get people to understand your product because it's invisible.
Josh Bruni: The Tesla coil, the copper harmonizer. Yeah, yeah. So
Andrew Booth: I don't have your product, but I am very familiar with EMF exposure and all that kind of stuff. So, like, 100 on board with that side of things.
Bobby Gillespie: I.
Andrew Booth: We do.
Bobby Gillespie: We need to talk.
Josh Bruni: I'm super curious as to where that came from. Did you make it?
Andrew Booth: I did not. I bought it from someone in Australia who made it.
Josh Bruni: Interesting. Okay.
Bobby Gillespie: I mean, that copper alone is worth hundreds of dollars.
Andrew Booth: Yeah. Today it is. Yeah, absolutely. It has a. Like a 2 and a half or 3 millimeter jack on it that you can run frequencies through.
Josh Bruni: Super interesting.
Bobby Gillespie: Okay.
Josh Bruni: Oh, it's actually active. It's producing frequency.
Bobby Gillespie: Correct.
Andrew Booth: Question it out.
Josh Bruni: Okay. Okay. Different conversation, but fun.
Andrew Booth: Yeah.
Josh Bruni: Yeah.
Andrew Booth: So just really quick. The. The science behind.
Bobby Gillespie: You're the right type of nerd, Andrew.
Josh Bruni: Yeah, you're the right guy.
Bobby Gillespie: When.
Andrew Booth: When Chris said we were talking to y', all, I was like, I actually know of that company.
Josh Bruni: Yeah.
Andrew Booth: But the. The science behind.
Bobby Gillespie: We get around, man. We get around.
Andrew Booth: It's. What's the guy's name? Slim Sperling.
Josh Bruni: Sick name.
Andrew Booth: Yeah.
Bobby Gillespie: He wrote a book about, you know, blues guitars.
Josh Bruni: Yeah, he.
Andrew Booth: He wrote a book about it, you know, has all this stuff. It's really interesting. And then some people have taken his book and essentially, like, expounded upon what he found in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, whatever the decades were, and are using some of the, like, pencil technology and stuff that he discovered or, you know, figured out, I guess not discovered, but. So anyway, so I'm on board with that.
Josh Bruni: I. I will say the reason why I'm familiar with what you just showed me is it's super common in agriculture. So, yeah, they'll use those copper coils essentially to concentrate emf, to stabilize EMF around plants because because plants are hyper, like, susceptible and sensitive to emf. And so you'll see, you'll see electromagnetic gardening essentially is a thing, and they use that design. And I think I know the name. I actually just went to this conference in Arizona and people were selling these copper things for gardening specifically. And they were. They've used the name Sperling. S, P U R L I N G. Right.
Andrew Booth: Yeah, that's it.
Josh Bruni: Sperling rings or something like that, they were calling them. So. That's funny. Yeah, I'm very. I'm familiar. I don't know much about, like, the physics of it. I kind of get it just based upon what I know about our product.
Andrew Booth: But,
Josh Bruni: yeah, super. Interesting. Interesting.
Andrew Booth: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Andrew Booth: Cool. So anyways, I just want to say I'm. I'm on board with that. So you don't have to, like, sell the EMF stuff and whatnot. Like, I did it. I probably. If you gave me five minutes, I probably could pull like six books out on frequencies and all that kind of stuff that I've got. But yeah, anyways, so think about planning and whatnot. Are y' all able to operate on like a weekly basis? So, like, as an example, with Magic Spoon, we meet weekly. We do essentially weekly sprints.
Josh Bruni: Sprint, yeah.
Andrew Booth: We've got, you know, week plan work planned for that week with the exception to that they're also on Slack. We use Slack for our internal communications. If something comes up or there's an issue or a quick need, like, they just pee in on Slack and we'll take care of it kind of thing, even if it's outside of, like the planned week.
Josh Bruni: I think weekly sprints are 100 doable. Actually. It's a rare circumstance where we need any massive amount of help in, like, immediate. Now there's bugs like. Like that's real time, you guys know. But it's rare that we're like, hey, we need actual dev work now. Like, that's rare. Like, I mean, even this week we didn't do that. Could we have done it? And sometimes we're just talking about, well, you made such a complicated zone on Shopify and it's not part of the template. It's just custom to the one thing that you did. So I can't even just go and swap my own image. So can you please just go swap my own image? You know what I mean? Because you hard coded it or you. You co. You created a zone that isn't customizable. Like, it's stupid stuff like that. Like, it isn't like It's a project. It's like a task. It's like you kind of put it.
Bobby Gillespie: And we want to get rid of that stuff too. Like, we want to be able to like, be system oriented with the website.
Josh Bruni: Yeah, but that's my point, Andrew. It isn't like, I think weekly sprints are, are actually plenty of frequency. That's a frequency that we can actually do very well with. Two weeks is probably even fine.
Andrew Booth: Oh, okay.
Josh Bruni: In most cases, don't. I would just say, Bobby, it's rare that we're like, oh, this is, As a matter of fact, it'd probably be, we could have a meeting this week for next week. Next week.
Bobby Gillespie: Yeah, we're getting better and better and better about it too. Yeah, I, I, I mean, truth be told, Andrew, it's going to have to like, we're gonna have to hit like the reset button on how we think about our dev partner. Because I'm just like, I don't want to, I don't want to bother them. What, what, what a, what a feeling with your partner. And then yesterday they got back with something. I was like, don't do anything. Yeah, it's gonna be eight hours of tablet. I don't do anything. Like, and so like, it's going to be a reset. But like, you know, we have our marketing calendar. We, we try to live and die by it. And so we know like, what things are coming. But with like the 49ers stuff with the, with the partnership with them yet.
Josh Bruni: You know what's so funny is we do a lot with pro sports, like athletes and things like that, and ufc, obviously, Timberwolves and Canada, like, all the things that we do. The reason why we got into sports was because of the 49ers.
Andrew Booth: No kidding.
Josh Bruni: Yeah. I had, we had been shipping thousands, this is several years ago, thousands of products to Levi's Stadium and into like the notable names. I won't say the names, but you'll get, you'll know the name.
Bobby Gillespie: You know them?
Josh Bruni: Yeah. You know, and so I reached out to the chairman of the board. We're a public company and so I have a, you know, a chairman. He's the CEO of Indocino, the menswear brand. And, and he, they do a lot with sports. So they, they typically like, do do all the suits for the, the NBA draft. So all the guys that go up in the first, you know, round, they're all wearing his suits. And so he, he's in that world quite a bit. And so I'm like, dude, I have this Influx of athletes. Like I would like to like figure out how to work with them. They're contacting us. I mean the amount of dms we even this week, you know, I've got the, the NBA guy. I would tell you. Two thirds of the NFL teams have contacted us, almost a hundred percent of the hockey teams over the last couple years. About a third of the NBA and about a third of Major League Baseball. That's not including all the other independent sports or individual sports like tennis and golf and it's, it's pretty wild. So anyway, so I reached out to like, hey, I need to figure out how to manage the sports world. Like it's a complete different beast of, you know, nil things and rights and all sorts of things. So I need help to navigate that. So we work with wme, which is, you know, one of the largest entertainment agents or businesses in the world. They own, they own the UFC and. But then they also represent most the athletes and celebrities and people like that. So, so we have a full time team that just helps us with this because we have so much interest from professional athletes. But it started with the 49ers and yes, I met with them yesterday. I was in San Francisco during Super bowl week meeting with them. And so we're pretty far down the path. I don't know what's going to come of it. And I'll tell you one reason why is the big reason. This happens a lot. If, if someone signs a deal with us, they basically open the door to say, okay, you're solving a problem. Now, what was life yesterday before you brought an Aries? So are you now admitting that there was a process? You see what I'm saying? So that's what gets a little tricky with what we do. The very first league that we worked with was Major League Baseball. I actually had a signed contract with MLB 2, three years ago now. And it got killed at last minute. Like it turned into a really big deal. Like I was on the phone with the CEO of Major League Baseball. I was on the phone with the CEO of T Mobile. Like, because T Mobile jumped in and was like, you guys can't work with them because 50% of the ballparks are T mobile or you know, ballparks. So for this whole thing, right. It's happened multiple times where it's like we get down the path and it gets, people get weird. Legal people get weird. Huh.
Andrew Booth: Interesting.
Josh Bruni: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Booth: I Obviously all the 49ers stuff has come out, I'll say recently, like big time.
Josh Bruni: Yeah.
Andrew Booth: I wasn't familiar that their practice field was beside a substation like that. But I saw the thing and I was like, damn, it's about time people started realizing this stuff's real.
Josh Bruni: Like, yeah, real. Yeah. Anyways, cool stuff, though. Like I said, it is. It's a fun space. And the one thing that we do really well is we can demonstrate it in real time. We can demonstrate how EMF affects people, like their biology. We can look at the brain, we look at the heart. We have, outside of that, between blood and all the other things that we have, bone marrow and things like that. But the ability to test in real time is a real superpower for us. I think one of our biggest weaknesses is getting that story out there and showing people and helping them understand what they're actually looking at and watching and why it matters. And so we can show that EMF affects you, and then we can also show that our product is very effective at stopping that.
Andrew Booth: So that's actually a great point that actually loops this back into our original conversation. So I'm obviously, I'll say familiar with it, obviously. I don't know the science probably near as much as you do by any means, but I'm familiar with it, fully in behind it, have experienced it myself through my own trial and error testing in my own body. Like for instance, my WI fi router. Through six, eight months of testing, I finally figured out my WI fi router was what was giving me headaches every day, like for a while. Figured out, finally figured out. So I understand it. So looping that into the website. I was on your website and I was like, trying to figure out how it works and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And I was struggling to find it. And I'm a web guy.
Josh Bruni: Yeah, I don't know.
Andrew Booth: I don't. I haven't like, looked into, like, what, you know, might be problems with it or flow or whatever. But that storytelling piece, I was not following it on the website.
Josh Bruni: Yeah, you know, you're right. There's, there's. From a marketing standpoint, there's a couple, Couple things. You're way more educated and familiar and smarter than 90%, 99% of the people that come to the website. One thing that we struggle a lot with is how much do you go into the physics, the science, how much do we talk about that? Because the other thing I'll tell you is most like physics, people don't understand the physics. It's such a narrow field about, like when you're talking wave theory and you're Talking non linear wave theory, because when I non linear is different than, let's say linear wave theory, which is most telecommunications would be considered linear, meaning they, there's, there's precise calculation that are predictable. And that's what most telecommunications people do. And that's the majority of the people that are educated in this space are, would be kind of considered telecommunications people. So when you're talking about like nonlinear resonant effect and coupling and, and more on the quantum physics side.
Andrew Booth: Yep.
Josh Bruni: Um, it's far narrower and there's, there's a handful of people on the planet that probably have a depth of understanding that could actually have a conversation with our team, our R and D team. And they're probably already talking to each other. That's how small it gets pretty quick. And so what happens is, is you get a little work, you get, you struggle a little bit with what is, what is, what is enough and what's too much. And I think that's the part that we struggle a lot with is what is the right amount of storytelling to say how does it work? Because the way that it actually works
Andrew Booth: is,
Josh Bruni: has a silicon resonator that has a specific pattern etched on it. Silicon is used because of its, its physics, its own physics of how it interacts with, with energy. And you can manipulate it, you can tune it, you can make it do things the way that it behaves, you can manipulate that. So we use that with a specific pattern. That pattern then diffracts and reflects to create a stable field, a stable environment. And so the body now operates within a stable field. And the problem with man made EMF is it's not stable, it's not predictable, it's not coherent, it's, it's polarized, it's heavily modulated. And that just creates interference which in that interference shows up as stress.
Andrew Booth: Say it.
Josh Bruni: So our product creates a stable field anywhere that it's located. And so that's just a simple way to talk about it, how it does it. Again, it's. Now you're talking distraction, reflection, physics principles that are like, now I have to be very precise in my language. The majority of the planet doesn't even know the scientific words. The ones that do then start to like, nitpick probably. Yeah, they start to nitpick. Like if I'm on a podcast, I'm super careful now because
Andrew Booth: like one of
Josh Bruni: our, the doctors that did our original like brain scan thing that we put out there, he did a heat map of the brain and said the word heat and heat map and that has haunted us for four and a half years because he used the word heat in reference to the heat map, which has nothing to do with actual temperature.
Bobby Gillespie: Right.
Andrew Booth: Yeah.
Josh Bruni: And so the trolls on the Internet dominate. The 20 million views that video has had is dominated by people nitpicking the
Andrew Booth: word heat, saying you can't detect a temperature difference.
Josh Bruni: Yes. Because the emf. EMF is often associated with the heating of the tissue, which is the typical, like, standard, which is star rating, which is heating of the tissue, which is not what we're talking about.
Andrew Booth: Correct.
Josh Bruni: But he used the word heat map in describing the brain, the map of the brain that he's software produces to show change in. In, like, movement from out of the standard deviation of, like, change. Right.
Andrew Booth: Yep.
Josh Bruni: And nothing to do with that at all. But that, like, language has dominated the. The. That video.
Chris LaFay: And this is why I would never, amongst many, many other reasons, excel in politics or in a highly precise field, because I. I say the words, dude,
Bobby Gillespie: you have no idea.
Chris LaFay: And I didn't edit them multiple times. A lot of times live, because I don't have that strong of a filter. I'm not. Yeah. Anyway, not that level of intricacy in a public setting is 100%, not for me at all. And dear Mercy.
Josh Bruni: So did you
Andrew Booth: bre.
Bobby Gillespie: Podcast with Josh?
Josh Bruni: Yeah. Check you actually checked it out. It's a good. I approached that with him as, like, hey, let's create a place for people to start. Let's make it approachable. Let's not drift off into, like, extreme conversation around EMF. Does this thing that's extreme, like exploding ACLs for football players or causes cancer or whatever. Let's not go there. Let's talk about what science agrees on, what we know for sure, and let's explain it in a way that people can walk away confident and informed and feel like they can start making decisions for themselves, their family, and things like that and not feel like they're scared of their world anymore. Like, because what happens with the EMF conversation is you've had your own experiences where you're like, look, I know this affected me.
Bobby Gillespie: Right.
Josh Bruni: A lot of most people don't have that awareness or are willing to have that actual conversation to say that their technology might be disrupting something in their body or, like, creating some sort of negative outcome. Most people want to have that conversation.
Andrew Booth: Right.
Josh Bruni: And most healthy people just think that's their baseline where they get, you know, fatigued in the afternoon, they crash in the afternoon, and that's because they've been drinking coffee too long or not having their coffee or whatever, or their sleep is disrupted or they get sick frequently, or they have trouble concentrating or mood problems. They just think that's their baseline. They don't realize that there could be something else that's antagonizing the nervous system in that way to then say, something's off. In my environment, we don't think that way because it's invisible, you know, and they don't understand it.
Andrew Booth: And we've been programmed to think all that stuff's normal.
Josh Bruni: Yeah, exactly. Our whole life we've had it.
Chris LaFay: Right.
Josh Bruni: Like, especially younger people where this has been like, we. Well, I don't say we, but Bobby and I for sure remember life without the cell phone.
Andrew Booth: Yeah, I do, too.
Josh Bruni: For 20 years. You're probably pretty close to that, too. So. But you. You remember. You know what that's like. But the generation now doesn't. Think about. Because they don't have a reference point. Yeah.
Andrew Booth: Yeah. That is an interesting thought. I hadn't thought of that because, I mean. Yeah, I remember our phones were new in my childhood.
Bobby Gillespie: Yeah. Zach Morris. But the Brick thing.
Josh Bruni: Yeah, that was a legend.
Andrew Booth: Yeah.
Bobby Gillespie: Total legend.
Chris LaFay: Wow.
Andrew Booth: Okay. Interesting, interesting.
Josh Bruni: So the answer your question, we would definitely. We definitely need to update the website. It's honestly one of those projects where we're like, we can't even touch it. This. We haven't updated the website in over a year. Yeah. Is your Shopify theme 1020? Do you know, I don't actually remember now, because when did 2O come out?
Andrew Booth: Oh, man, five, six years ago now.
Bobby Gillespie: But it's been that long. Okay.
Josh Bruni: It's. I think it's the most current. I do think it's the most current.
Andrew Booth: So, like, if you go to. The easiest way to tell is if you go to Shopify Admin Customizer and go into, like, a landing page or like, your homepage or something. If it gives you the option to add a new section, it's probably 2.0. If you can't add a section and customizer, it's probably 1 0.
Josh Bruni: Yeah, no, I.
Andrew Booth: You can't.
Josh Bruni: And I.
Bobby Gillespie: And I can.
Josh Bruni: You can use the AI to create the sections for you.
Andrew Booth: Oh, you can use AI.
Josh Bruni: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew Booth: Oh, okay. So y' all are literally on the latest. Y' all are probably on the horizon setup, then.
Josh Bruni: Yeah, because I. I'm pretty. I'm pretty confident that. That we're on the most recent one because the AI, I think I moved. I think I had them update it because I wanted to test the AI stuff matter of fact, I think the current zone we have Bobby. I did with AI the. The. The hero section.
Bobby Gillespie: Oh, you did.
Josh Bruni: I'm pretty sure, right. That I did that with AI.
Chris LaFay: The one with the. The two for one sort of thing.
Josh Bruni: Whatever that. Okay. Yeah. Oh, okay.
Andrew Booth: So then your devs are. Are on the latest Shopify customizer and they're still building blocks that you can't edit and like controlfully.
Bobby Gillespie: Well, that, that template we reactivated.
Josh Bruni: Listen, it's not worth it. They're European. They work in a whole different wavelength. They have. They have more coffee breaks than we do. They have tea breaks, they have nap breaks.
Bobby Gillespie: They actually don't drink coffee at their desk. They stop working.
Josh Bruni: They. They go to a different room. Yeah. With other people and hang out. Yeah. The point is, look, it's time to move on. I think to wrap it up. You guys have a pretty good idea of who we are, what we're looking for. I think the vibe. I think we're out. You know, I'm. It's pretty easy to know for the most part, like dev, like dev work and things like that. And don't take this the wrong way. There's a lot of commoditization that's occurred. Right. And like. And Shopify has, has if it was WordPress, which by the way, I do think we'll have WordPress work. But if it was just Shopify, it's. There's a lot of bad out there for sure. But you also know really quickly, even just from conversations, if they're good bad or whatever. I should have known with the current team that we have that I should have not given them as much because of how much dependency they use on replo. That should have been my, my and I knew it. But I didn't ever expect it to morph warp into this relationship that we have now. I never expected them to do VR dev arm. And I will tell you the other. The other thing that happened in this time period was I had a really long relationship with Vayner Media. They did a lot of our stuff for four, four and a half years. And they've been. I've been partnered with them even beyond this brand. And so they were just my go to when I needed somebody really quickly.
Andrew Booth: Yep.
Josh Bruni: And that they did a lot of the development. And then when I moved on from them, it kind of just went back to this other group.
Bobby Gillespie: Got it.
Josh Bruni: And it was more of just again moving quickly and like, okay, I got to end this agreement. What do we got? We didn't go find another dev Partner. And so does that make. That's a little bit more of the context that I think is useful.
Andrew Booth: But yeah, yeah, yeah, it definitely does. So I. I guess I never really introduced myself. I've been doing Shopify like nine years now or so. But again, software engineer for 20 I come from originally started as a Microsoft developer, so.
Josh Bruni: Websphere.
Bobby Gillespie: Oh, I don't know that either, huh?
Josh Bruni: Yeah, I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure that's what Ion Health and Fitness was on along. It was a nightmare for us. We were trying to move them to AG back in the day agt, which is a big enterprise. Hear you talking, dude. Don't. Early os probably.
Bobby Gillespie: Probably late.
Josh Bruni: Probably late maybe because I saw when
Bobby Gillespie: I got into Ecom it was all enterprise and
Andrew Booth: well, like on the smaller side back like early 2000s, you had like front page Dreamweaver.
Chris LaFay: Oh yeah, Macromedia, Dream Weaver.
Andrew Booth: Macro.
Josh Bruni: Yes.
Chris LaFay: I got my. With a portfolio of Flash websites. I applied for an HTML and CSS position to import content back in high school. And I showed up to my interview with. It actually wasn't Flash. It was actually a knockoff of Flash called Swish. And I had like seven Swish websites. And I interviewed and I got the job. And needless to say, I'm extraordinarily thankful for that because I met Andrew at that job back then. So did you.
Bobby Gillespie: Did you have the sights on your I Omega zip drive?
Andrew Booth: Oh, you know what's funny? This comes. So we did not. But this company they started and their first software that they produced was produced on a CD ROM drive. So they faced all the struggles that no developer today faces of. Okay, how do you make this run on 64 megabytes of RAM and fit onto a CD that holds 500 megabytes? 512 megabytes? So it's like. Yeah, but actually that, that was my point. So I've been in this a long time. So I come from a day and age when engineers actually had to understand the end to end of everything. We had to manage resources, memory, all that kind of stuff that today you don't even have to think about, oh, it doesn't have enough memory. Add some more. Done. Like problem solved.
Bobby Gillespie: Yeah.
Andrew Booth: You know, pros and cons, obviously. But when you're trying to make things run efficient and scale it and whatnot, like, that stuff's important. So I say all that to say like, yes, repl is great, yes, builder, IO, all the different page builders, page fly, et cetera, they're great. But there's something to Be said, if you build it within the new version of Shopify that has a really good customizer, then you don't have all that overhead. Pros and cons, obviously it's not right or wrong, but pros and cons. So. Yeah. So a lot of shopware.
Bobby Gillespie: Yeah. Interested in that? For sure.
Josh Bruni: Yeah.
Bobby Gillespie: Like streamlining the process and using technology to reduce tasks and steps is really important. Like, you know, and like Josh said earlier, he doesn't want to prove everything. I mean like, I, I will approve things, but I'm also like, just, just send it. Go like, I don't need like, fine, good enough. Go. Like, why are we sitting here? Specials live.
Chris LaFay: I live my life working so much better with people that view their website as a place to experiment on and to test things than something that is like the gospel truth of the time. Like, like the getting something from 80 to 100 takes the most time. So ship it and make tweaks and like the likelihood of it actually needing that stuff and that extra however long it is typically doesn't matter at the
Andrew Booth: end of the day.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. That's not 100. True for like very.
Bobby Gillespie: In most cases, big things. Yeah.
Chris LaFay: But for most of the, the regular stuff, it's just like get it done and if you want to make changes, we'll just make changes afterwards.
Bobby Gillespie: So.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, I.
Andrew Booth: All right, so Chris, have to figure out something that works because I'd love to work with these guys. I like the product, I like their vibe.
Chris LaFay: That sounds good. So what I'll do what I told you.
Bobby Gillespie: You're like, oh, people, you guys aren't cool. I told you.
Josh Bruni: I just can't believe you don't. You guys don't know atg. I think Oracle, I think it's an Oracle product now Websphere, I was wrong. It was IBM and Microsoft, I think partnered with somebody called Cactus. If I recall. They were like, they were. This was when they got super lazy in like when they were in a monopoly.
Bobby Gillespie: WebSphere still product.
Josh Bruni: Oh, I know it's, it's. But this is back in the day when it was enterprise like HDG. If you were a big like backcountry.com was on ATG and you know, like I said Icon Health and Fitness, which you know was a billion dollar brand. NordicTrack and all those guys, they're on WebSphere. Like this is what you did back then. Like you, you had these enterprise like and you had to integrate with ERP systems and like, oh, Shopify. Like, but if you guys recall Shopify, it was really magento that was the disruptor.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Josh Bruni: And then.
Chris LaFay: Huh?
Andrew Booth: Yeah.
Josh Bruni: And then it was Shopify. But Shopify took a really long time to get any sort of support from enterprise.
Andrew Booth: Yeah.
Josh Bruni: Probably 2017, 2018, 2019.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Josh Bruni: Maybe even later when they really started to be able to.
Bobby Gillespie: It was like that like up to 8 million limited skew deal because nobody
Josh Bruni: wanted this server concept, shared server concept, which by the way is still accurate. Like SEO suffers like things suffer by being a Shopify store. It's hard to be a media company. You couldn't be a successful media company on a Shopify site. Like, this is why WordPress still has, like, why WordPress is still meaningful, in my opinion. And we did for a time run our blog on WordPress and Shopify as the storefront. It just destroyed our SEO though, because so much our traffic was still coming through the E commerce portion.
Andrew Booth: Yep.
Josh Bruni: And so we didn't get the domain authority transferred and so that was a mistake.
Andrew Booth: Were y' all running as a subdomain?
Bobby Gillespie: Yeah. Yeah.
Josh Bruni: So we've done this for one or
Andrew Booth: two people in the past. I'm not suggesting we do this now, but we did a reverse proxy setup where we ran the blog on WordPress and the main website was, I don't know, a custom CMS or something. Was that Autozone, Chris?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, it was Autozone. Yeah.
Andrew Booth: We.
Chris LaFay: They didn't. Autozone didn't have a blog until about 2012, which blew my mind. And so we built it off of Slash diy. They've since proved the concept that blogging works when you're enterprise and they've moved it off of WordPress and into their own custom CMS since. But yeah, we. It was a reverse proxy. There were issues with it. But that was also probably at this point maybe four or five years ago when we were working on it. So I'm sure a lot of stuff in that area has changed. Yeah, it took a while to get it set up. There were without diving into like the weeds like super much at the time. WordPress didn't like living in a single site, in a single site setup under a folder. So autozone.com DIY that being that like the root URL it. There was. There were conflicts in the code, so we had to write a lot of workarounds to whenever, like the domain was pulled programmatically to append Slash DIY to it. Yeah, yeah. And there's. There's other things as well that, you know, the way that, that actually might be set up better now is actually setting up WordPress inside of like a multi site setup where multisite does have sub directories and then host the blog on a quote unquote subsite of multi site so that it is. Does live well. But also it has to know where the root domain is and all that kind of there's. Anyway I'm getting down into the weeds of things.
Josh Bruni: I mean look, this is a topic that I think we could explore in the future because look, we have a really good blog like we have and I think we're going to continue to be be we. I've. I've always had the vision since the day I took over of like we need to become not necessarily the destination for the solution of the EMF problem, but a trusted resource of information like education first. And if you're going to really create a category and lead the category long term that has to be part of your. Your strategy. And so I've always. It's always been a thing so the emphasis on trying to like really win with SEO has been constant. The problem is we keep messing it up and it's like you have to restart every time we keep messing it up. So I don't know that we have the right setup. Like is it in hindsight I should have the site when I took over the the business was on WordPress I should have maybe left it on WordPress and if I was really Adam not going to Shopify maybe just a more of like a headless thing and still left WordPress as the dominant platform with just a Shopify checkout because and I didn't like Look, WordPress just requires you to have a dev team all the time.
Andrew Booth: Yeah yeah.
Josh Bruni: How it is right. Shopify I got away with with basically no development help for years with this with Aries in particular and we only when we started to get fancy and complicate things that I start to require help. That's really what happened.
Chris LaFay: So that was and something else to think about. And I'm not suggesting this is the right. This is the right answer but it is a topic for discussion at some point later. I think last year at some point Shopify released a plugin for WordPress that Nate I'm going to use the word natively because it's the only word I can think of very. It very well integrates all of your Shopify products and basically everything except the actual checking out experience where you're doing shop pay and stuff on your WordPress site. So it doesn't embed things in like an iframe where you have no control it embeds stuff and it absorbs all the stylization of your WordPress site. And then when you get to the, all right, I'm ready to pay now. Then it pushes you off to shop pay. And so you get all the benefits of the flexibility of. You get all, yeah, you get all the benefits of Shopify and you still manage your store via Shopify, but you can have all the benefits of the marketing power that WordPress has and all the other plugins and stuff that WordPress has at its disposal to do marketing stuff with and also the power of Shopify. So you get both of those things. And so Andrew and I were testing it out a little bit. Probably October, November of last year, we ported, we ported his company's T shirt products into a sample website just to see how like, is it something that we have a 30 minute setup and it actually like works out of the box or is this something that needs a little bit of TLC and you know, 30 minutes or an hour, we got decent stuff there. It didn't look sexy, but that's also because the theme we imported into didn't look sexy either. So it, it, it all lined up well. So like that may not be an answer, but it's a topic of discussion. If the idea is to grow on the blog side and have products more, you know, more dynamically connected to content, maybe there's a route where we actually have WordPress be one of the more primary sides of things and have Shopify embedded long term. Yeah, I'm not an SEO. Yeah. So I'm not going to overstep my skis on that, that technical side of the discussion. But, but it's something worth talking about at some point.
Bobby Gillespie: Yeah, we want to redo the blog anyway. Like we brought, you know, our blog writing in house and we've rethought it from, you know, end of December to now and it's really a priority for us, as it should be. But it's just like we're dealing with what we got and what we got is not great.
Andrew Booth: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: So I have a call in about 20 minutes that I need to hop off and do a little bit of prep for. I would also love to talk with Andrew one to one about this before the end of the day. So if we're good to cut here, not to just like drop. That's not my point, but I know that Andrew has a little bit of time right now so I want to grab them while, while our schedules line up.
Bobby Gillespie: Yeah, we can talk about anything all day. Dude, cancel your. Cancel your meetings.
Chris LaFay: Cancel my meeting. You know what you're.
Bobby Gillespie: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Bobby, you want to come over here? You want to sit in my chair? You want to. You want to do my slate of meetings?
Bobby Gillespie: I mean, I know you need to be held.
Josh Bruni: Bobby's just taking time. Chris, Andrew, thank you.
Andrew Booth: It's good.
Josh Bruni: We can. You guys have a discussion. We do need to talk about what next steps might look like, what you know, how to best work together, whatever. Like, I'm happy to test something out and. And, you know, figure. Figure a path forward. I think the thing is a good fit. So let's. Let's move quickly and so we can make decisions and I can start firing other people.
Chris LaFay: That sounds good. We'll put a great Friday. Yeah. Andrew and I will talk. We'll shoot. We'll shoot you over an email by at some point tonight or tomorrow morning and let you know kind of what the bullet point next steps could be. And so the email might be short and sweet, but you'll at least kind of know what the.
Josh Bruni: So
Bobby Gillespie: awesome. That's awesome. Thanks, guys. See.