NightWise Website Build -- Technical Discovery (Andrew Intro)

Danny Rinaldi: Recall.

Chris LaFay: Did you get a camera and or.

Andrew Booth: Lighting different camera or what lighting? Nope.

Chris LaFay: Oh, you look better. I don't know what? Maybe it's because you put black like black things behind you and you like you there's more contrast and it's not just like tan skin on tan background. Maybe that's it but.

Andrew Booth: I don't know.

Chris LaFay: Didn't know you were walking into an interrogation, did you?

Andrew Booth: Yeah, I'm sitting on a cushion that I don't normally sit on so normally I'm lower. Interesting. The thing is it's weird picking up a nine month old. I threw my back out. How awesome is that? Yeah, like I am struggling to get out of bed because it hurts so damn bad.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, dude.

Andrew Booth: Yeah, I was pulling her out of her high chair and I felt it and it was fine for about a week and then on Monday it just got excruciating.

Chris LaFay: So that sucks.

Andrew Booth: Yeah, it's my L4, my L5. Getting old man. I'm getting old.

Chris LaFay: Gosh. Do you have their bros in the waiting room? Do you have the Versal app URL for him?

Andrew Booth: I don't have it pulled up now.

Chris LaFay: I will find it and toss it over but I'm basically going to be like hey, this all sounds good. We got your emails and we want to talk about the, the smaller scope. Got Andrew here, I'll let you introduce yourself and then I'm basically just let him just ask some questions. So.

Andrew Booth: Cool. Yeah, we'll just see where it goes.

Chris LaFay: Cool. Danny.

Danny Rinaldi: Hey there Chris. How are you doing?

Chris LaFay: Doing well. I, I hosted an event with our friend JC Lund yesterday and so I was being extroverted all day long yesterday and so today it's my recharge day. Yes.

Danny Rinaldi: Very nice.

Chris LaFay: What have you been up to? Anything exciting?

Danny Rinaldi: Just more of the same stuff night wise stuff.

Chris LaFay: Very good, very good.

Danny Rinaldi: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Excuse me. Well, I got Andrew here with us today because a I wanted you to to meet him before we get started on things. I'm a huge proponent of meeting the people that you actually are going to work with first off and secondly I know you want to go into some of the details of the, the smaller scope that Andrew and I kind of kind of baked up a little bit together and I know there's going to be some more technical questions regarding that and Andrew knows Shopify 100 times better than I do and so he'll be able to give you better, more quality answers and ask you better questions as well too so. But Andrew, do you want to introduce yourself really quick before we get Rolling. Yeah.

Andrew Booth: Hey, I'm Andrew. I've worked with Chris for, like, I don't know, close to two decades. Software engineer for 20, 21 years. Specialized in E commerce. Done anything from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. Government, private, public, nonprofit, you name it, I've probably touched it. Love web, love tech, love making things work. Love building things. Love working with Chris. That's the 22nd intro.

Danny Rinaldi: All right. Very nice.

Chris LaFay: He's also an entrepreneur. He runs his own. He runs his own company on the side as well, too. He's been doing that for the better part of 10 or 15 years, too. So also get kind of like an entrepreneurial mindset into all of this and not just a dev side of things, too, which is. Which is why we work well together, because we're both entrepreneurs at the end of the day, so. Yes.

Danny Rinaldi: Hi. So, Chris, I appreciate you taking the AI notetaker.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, yeah.

Danny Rinaldi: I have a list of questions that my team and I went over, and there's only about six on there. And so what I was hoping to do is when we get down into call, can you send me a copy of the transcript?

Chris LaFay: Absolutely. Yeah, definitely.

Danny Rinaldi: Okay.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Danny Rinaldi: All right. All right. Fantastic. All right. So, Andrew, it's very nice to meet you. In my career, I was involved in technology on the sales side, and I had the good fortune of working with software and hardware engineers for 10, 15 years of my life. And so I feel like I relate to engineers really well and software guys. My job as the salesperson was to make sure they were happy. So they loved me because I was always taking them to a $3 cafe.

Andrew Booth: Oh, yeah.

Danny Rinaldi: Chicken wings and beer after a job. Or I would go visit them on a site where we were installing something and bring donuts in the morning. So we got along really well with engineers.

Andrew Booth: You're in the Atlanta area then, I would assume.

Danny Rinaldi: Yeah.

Andrew Booth: Okay, cool. Yeah. Three Dollar Cafe. That's a great place.

Danny Rinaldi: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Are you in, by the way, Danny, In Duluth? Oh, I'm in Snowville. I am gonna go, I should say,.

Danny Rinaldi: On the Johns Creek side west of 85.

Chris LaFay: Duluth definitely is very sneakily lengthy.

Danny Rinaldi: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris LaFay: I technically live 15 minutes away from Duth, where, you know, where Ronald Reagan turns into Duth somewhere. But John's Creek is like a freaking hall, so. Yeah, I got you. I got you. I didn't. I knew I. I knew you were in Georgia. I didn't realize. I didn't realize you were so close.

Andrew Booth: That's awesome.

Danny Rinaldi: Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, Andrew, so while I have this opportunity to talk with somebody like yourself, I thought, you know, maybe we could just, you know, dig in deep a little bit. So our first collective question here is, Andrew, since you're an entrepreneur, if this were your company and your project, would you build Nightwise this, this website in Shopify? Shopify Headless for next js.

Andrew Booth: Ooh. Coming out with the big questions. Okay, so as I understand it, y' all don't plan to do any direct e commerce on this site. Is that accurate?

Danny Rinaldi: For two or three years?

Andrew Booth: For two or three years. Oh, that might change it.

Danny Rinaldi: Okay, if we do it at all. If we do it at all.

Andrew Booth: What? If you do it at all, what would you say the percentage chance of you doing E. Com on your website is then?

Danny Rinaldi: So I would say that our initial experience with it for three years was quite revealing. We found it to be extremely difficult generating enough of influencer ad on meta to come and visit our site. And then once people came there to actually buy something was very expensive, time consuming and long. And our roas never got to the point we didn't feel we had somebody in our team that really knew how to turn all the levers. So my internal hope is that we do not do direct to consumer, that we can survive with buy buttons on our page and have a handsome business between working with Walmart to begin with on the dot com side and then.

Chris LaFay: Oh, hold on a second. Hold on. Yeah, here we go. You must have. He probably.

Andrew Booth: Sorry about that.

Danny Rinaldi: Okay.

Chris LaFay: All right.

Andrew Booth: So last thing I heard was not do direct to consumer and have a handsome. And then I bugged out.

Danny Rinaldi: Yep, a handsome and robust business with buy buttons on our website that lead people to all of the retailers that want to do business with us, where if it's Target and Costco and Walgreens and Kroger who all have retail media networks like Walmart Connect, then we could refer their business to there, where they could buy it online there, or they could buy in stores on shelf. So we ultimately recognize that we think the bigger play for Nightwise is in retail stores and bigger footprint. And so we believe that that's the way we would like to go. And so we're really hoping that this proof engine with walmart.com Works and works well. And we do have a robust business with this plan.

Andrew Booth: Okay, second question. If you were to build the site next JS or any JS library, react, whatever it is, do you have a internal development team that would be responsible for updating website content?

Danny Rinaldi: No, I. I built the prototype in Claude that I think you Saw by now, yes. Okay. But that's the extent. And I only did that with the help of chat, GPT and Claude. And every time I got a list of questions, I'd have Chad answer them and feed them back to plot. And that's how we did strategy research and then answering the questions.

Andrew Booth: Got it. Okay. So knowing that you don't ideally want to do DTC and knowing that you don't really have internal technical resources that you can count on, obviously Claude can be very, very powerful and you probably could get some stuff done with Claude, but having your business rely on that as a model probably isn't the smartest thing. But knowing that you're targeting more of like a brochure marketing website, that's going to drive traffic off of it, then speed is going to be your biggest selling factor from a technical standpoint, which to me would say Shopify Headless would probably be the way to go. Because then you're essentially creating that static website that you would get with like a next JS or, you know, anything like that. So you have that fast speed. But the two pieces of going Shopify Headless would mean that you still have the ability to easily edit content and not rely on someone else or rely on Claude to get code. Right. And then secondary to that, let's say your plan doesn't work and you actually do need to do dtc. You've already got the platform set up in Shopify to where you could add E commerce to it right then and there and you wouldn't have to invest in something else being rebuilt or modified or bolted on or anything like that, because it just would be there. So Shopify Headless is what I would recommend based on what I'm hearing. Yeah, probably. You know, there's a couple different Headless platforms you could use. Hydrogen is probably the most popular one right now for Shopify.

Danny Rinaldi: I heard of that. Yep. Is there another one called Liquid?

Andrew Booth: So Shopify is built on Liquid code.

Danny Rinaldi: Okay.

Andrew Booth: So that's the programming language that runs Shopify. Shopify templates, all the functionality, etc. Which is really. Honestly, it's just. And if I'm getting too technical, let me know. It's Ruby or Ruby on Rails created into its own language called Liquid. That's really what it is.

Danny Rinaldi: Okay. Okay, gotcha. Yeah, I heard of Ruby on Rails, but I think like five years ago.

Andrew Booth: Yeah, it's definitely an older language.

Danny Rinaldi: Okay.

Andrew Booth: Toby, the guy who founded Shopify, was a Ruby dev, and that's sort of where this all started with Shopify about 15, 20 years ago.

Danny Rinaldi: Yeah. And so tell me what advantage headless gives us and how do I see that it's headless? What is headless?

Andrew Booth: Yeah, it's a fancy term. It's like saying that you're going to put stuff in the cloud. It's just a fancy term. You're still running on a server, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The big win on going headless is you get really fast load times. So I think I can safely say you've been probably using the Internet for 30 years.

Danny Rinaldi: Right.

Andrew Booth: So you remember back in the late 90s, early 2000s how websites were very simple and they loaded pretty fast. That's what you get with headless. You get the simple website to where the problem today is 90 plus percent of websites have have to load a database back in in order to pull content in to load the website. So what happens when you go with headless is, is you're removing that database backend from the entire part of the equation and you're serving static web pages or web pages that are static with some simple calls back to a database as needed. But the initial page load doesn't call a database, so you essentially remove half of the load time just by taking the database out of it. When you're on Shopify Headless, what it does is it grabs all the content from Shopify, builds static HTML pages. Essentially when someone goes to Nightwise, instead of calling Shopify, grabbing your name and products and all that stuff and then pulling it in, it just loads a page that already exists. It's way faster, which leads to a better user experience because then when you're on mobile and things like that, the pages just load really fast.

Danny Rinaldi: Yeah, yeah. So then tell me question number two, Just perfect segue. How edible would the site be for me after launch? Can I edit it myself without calling you?

Andrew Booth: Yeah, absolutely. So that's the benefit of going Shopify Headless versus like a next js. You still have the Shopify Hydrogen content management system, so you as a non technical person can still log in, edit the website, change content, change pages, whatever it is, and then essentially just do a republish and it'll rebuild the pages or changes that you made and push it to the server to load. You still have full control over it. You don't need a technical dev. Unless maybe you want to completely change functionality or something. Then you might need one, but that's an edge case.

Danny Rinaldi: Okay, tell me, how does the website get designed? Is that also a function of your responsibility that you'll look at the website and you will decide on the flow, the UX flow if you want a full bleed, edge to edge photograph or background with the photograph installed. So tell me. And then related to Figma, I also heard Figma was some type of language that developers use. So is that how your development would work?

Chris LaFay: So the way that that would work is. I can jump in here because this is not Shopify specific is. I'll give Andrew a break for a second. Figma is a design only tool. I won't be able to be able to say design only for too long. There's some ways to go from Figma into development a lot faster now. But think of Figma like, like the newest version of Photoshop for designers. It's not the best analogy, but it's pretty close. And so the way, so actually this actually kind of keys in on kind of the. The crux of this conversation of the larger version of the proposal that we sent over versus the smaller one is that one of the big differences between those two pieces is, is are we going to be doing a lot of custom design work in the larger proposal, the one that you and I went over a week or a week and a half or so ago? The answer to that is yes. So we bring in a designer who uses Figma and will actually design out the site that way. Whereas version two of the proposal, kind of the email based one that I sent you about late last week or something, we're going to use your structure that you created with Claude, but we're going to, Andrew and I are going to work on that and tag team that together because I do a little bit of design, I'm both a designer and developer, Andrew's developer. And we'll basically take your AI built website and make it more consistent and look more legit for lack of better terminology. But we won't start with that design phase with a designer. And so to answer now, to kind of answer the question that you had about the building blocks and things like that In Shopify and 2.0, they have the ability for like dragging and dropping a different building blocks when you're building out pages. And so we would then design a live. We're going to take your, for the shorter scale version, take your structure and actually build out probably 12 to 15 different building blocks for you that have, hey, this is one that goes full bleed with a background image, this one goes kind of content width with an image on the left and content on the right. And then you would be able to drag and drop Those blocks whenever you're creating a new page and all those layouts and designs already done for you. So basically we're going to give you LEGO bricks and you're going to get to put those LEGO bricks together however you want. Does that make sense?

Danny Rinaldi: It does. So for the non cheaper version, the one where you would bring in the designer. Did you say bring in the designer?

Chris LaFay: Yeah, from our, from our team. Yeah, yeah.

Danny Rinaldi: And so, okay, from your internal team. Is that what you meant?

Chris LaFay: Yeah, yeah.

Danny Rinaldi: Okay. Okay. And so that was.

Chris LaFay: Which has been very confusing recently. I have. Wow, he is a. I've actually had this. I, I've had a couple of times where I'm like, yeah, I chatted with Claude today and we talked about this, that and the other, and we got this thing, we got these things put together and they're like, this doesn't look like AI. I was like, it's not a human did it. And so I've had to now preface everything when I talk about my designer who's been with me for like eight years now. It is Claude, the human designer.

Danny Rinaldi: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so when real Claude creates the design, how does he hand it off to Andrew? What's that handoff? Is it a FIGMA file? And Andrew, would you and Claude be working together before a handoff so that you guys are designing and developing with the same sort of goals in mind and then when the handoff comes, it's seamless rather than contentious in any way?

Chris LaFay: Yeah. So basically the way that we do it is we've spent a lot of time over the years honing down our, like our core FIGMA structure. So code uses something called variables. So like, let's say that you have a font size large variable. So whenever that, whenever there's a font on the website that's large, it pulls from that variable. So if you change it in one place, it changes it all over. And so in code, that's really easy to do, but only recently has that been easier to do in design in something like figma. Over the last year or two, we've honed in our starting point template within FIGMA to where we have all of our color variables, all of our font variables, all of our spacing variables. When we pass off going from design into development, all of those variables Andrew can then absorb so that they're as much in alignment as humanly possible. The short version of that is Claude and Andrew have worked together for a long time. Yes.

Danny Rinaldi: Okay. All right, well then between the two of you or the entity Classic City having seen our website and understand our unique differentiated technology. How would you bring the intelligent release technology to life? How would you tell our story where someone can look at visual representation of intelligent release technology and go, I get what this is, I get what these guys are doing.

Chris LaFay: So I would have, I have a couple of core thoughts here how we put those together. I would want to have a more in depth conversation about that. One is, and especially doing some research into some other. I'm just gonna call them like supplement brands in general. One of the things that sticks out to me as a consumer is whenever you can tell stories of real people experiencing. I'm gonna call it life change. We can, we can use whatever words we want to there. So first I like, I like the structure of kind of like your hero section phrasing because it's very. What I like to, what I like to walk people through is you want to, in your header sections of your, of your website, you want to both tag in a single sentence as best as possible the problem that you're solving and the solution in a single sentence so that when people read that sentence they know what it is that you do. And so a lot of the messaging that you've come up with here so far actually hits a pretty good chord with that. Feel like yourself again, sleep through the night, et cetera, et cetera. You're both notating by defining the problem. You're actually kind of alluding to the solution really well. So I like the starting points that you have. Part number two that you also do really well from a, like from again from a messaging standpoint is you go straight into what the problem is. And by the way I'm saying things, you're doing well now there are pieces of this that I'm going to be like, I think maybe some changes should come here. But in that secondary section, talking about hey this is the problem and empathizing with the customer, that's the next piece that you want to do. I actually literally just did a talk on this yesterday and you empathize really well and you showcase that with that very simple video visual on the homepage. Now where I think things change from here and I'm kind of like keying on your homepage right now is once you talk about that problem, that problem takes up a lot of visual real estate on the way that things are laid out now you kind of have the little AI generated graphic. You have like pattern 1, 2 and 3 on the right hand side. You have a lot of mix match fonts underneath the, the Graphic that was created, and then the next section is still negative. Built for one moment, not the full night. Mostly babes are built for sedation. Sedation isn't real sleep. You kind of stay in that negative mode. This is where I want to flip the script and be like, this is the solution. This is what success looks like. These are what real people are saying, this is what it's going to be like. And how we. How we phrase that. We should have better or more in depth conversations about that. But I like to pair empathizing with the problem and then immediately bringing people out of that pit and being like, we hear you. This is the solution. And this is what real people think about it. And then you can dig a little bit more into, like, sub problems as well, too, to be like, hey, here's another small detail. Here's what. What happens. And by the way, if this is your problem, this is the specific product, and that's kind of thinking through kind of like that homepage wireframe. That's the very high level thinking specifically about the homepage. You can then derive. We can then basically take that same story structure and apply it to each of the different pages as well, too.

Danny Rinaldi: All right, so. So, Chris, let me ask the question a different way. How would you visually bring the intelligent release technology to life?

Chris LaFay: Oh, visual. Oh, oh, oh, I'm sorry. I was thinking in terms of just, like, the structure of the site. I apologize. My bad. I like the idea. So give me one second. Hold on. My brain was in messaging mode, not design mode. Hold on one second.

Andrew Booth: While you're thinking about that, I'm going to ask a quick question.

Danny Rinaldi: Mm.

Andrew Booth: So the content that's on the current mock Netlify app, is this content accurate in the sense that this is what you can legally say since it's a supplement. So this. We can go by all this.

Danny Rinaldi: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris LaFay: Okay.

Danny Rinaldi: And we spent a lot of time in probably four iterations to get the language that Chris was referring to, recognition language. When somebody reads what we're saying, they can relate to it.

Andrew Booth: Yeah.

Danny Rinaldi: And then that should make them feel very comfortable that this company really knows my problem.

Andrew Booth: Okay, got it. Cool. I just wanted to make sure I was reading through the science and some of the, I'm going to say, issues that it calls out that it can help with. And that's where I was kind of wondering, like, is the language written such that y' all don't get in trouble with the FDA kind of thing? Okay, so my. My next question on that would be, so knowing that you're talking about what you're calling the. Where is it? The intelligent release technology. I think it's important that you have that on here because that is the science, and that does validate this. But the problem you face when you're trying to visually tell the story of this is most people don't understand anything with science. So the image of the. What I'm going to say, phase one, two, phase three, with what I would say is like cellular makeup, essentially.

Danny Rinaldi: Can you share your screen so I can see what you're looking at referring to?

Andrew Booth: Absolutely can. Yep. So that is the screen. Yep. So this is the technology page, our technology. And I'm talking about this graphic right here.

Danny Rinaldi: Oh, oh, oh. Okay. So what that is, is that was Claude's way of saying what we want to show, which is the capsule. So can you go to Nightwise.com, which is our current website? All right. Can you scroll down that? That's what we want. That shows the capsule bursting. And unfortunately, this was done in our old brand colors, so it needs to be redone again to tell this piece of the story. This is how the capsule dissolves, the beads dissolve, and how the ingredients are administered into your body over the evening gradually. That's the first part of the intelligent release technology. The other part. The other part is, Andrew, can you go to the Netlify site? Okay. Now could you go onto the product page? Okay. And can you scroll down to a yellow background? And you'll see two graphs? Not that one. There's another one right there. This one. This is a graphical representation of the peaks of those ingredients getting into your body. And there's a first release of the four ingredients there on the left. And we don't do anything for an hour or two. And then there's a second release of additional four different ingredients that help you maintain your sleep. So we got this from scientists, and it was their way of trying to make us understand. But I'm not sure if that is clean enough for somebody who's not a scientist, like you said, to understand what's happening in three to ten seconds.

Andrew Booth: Yeah. Okay. Yep. Okay, so we're on the same page then. So that's exactly where I was going with that line of questioning, was how do we accurately tell the scientific story of what's happening, but do it so that your average person who doesn't know anything about molecular biology can understand it quickly?

Chris LaFay: And I think that's also where your.

Andrew Booth: Question was kind of going too, was how do you tell that visual story?

Danny Rinaldi: Right. It's the most important thing thing because you know, otherwise you people would have to read a long time and read lots of words and they just want to see it. So this is like a big thing for us to get right.

Andrew Booth: Yes, totally agree. Okay.

Chris LaFay: Thinking about this a little bit now. So there's the. And I would want to have more conversations about this. This isn't, this is not the thing that I. This is not the, the choice that I would die on. But this is kind of my initial gut thought is like we also do a lot of work with another technology company called Aries, which does like EMF protection and stuff like that, which is also very scientific. And you have to dumb it down a lot. One of the things, the thing that comes to my mind when I think about the both the pill exploding visual but, but then also kind of this like pseudo timeline with the peaks and valleys is if you read all, you have to read all. Like you have to read all that first to be able to understand what that is.

Danny Rinaldi: And I'm wondering might be too many words.

Chris LaFay: Exactly. And so one of the things I'm thinking might be an interesting concept to try out is a, a vertical timeline. So there's a lot of stuff that you can do kind of like on scroll with the website. Website. And so I'm wondering if you establish like let's take the science not out of it completely, but let's dumb it down really quick of like you go to bed at 10pm from 10 to 10. And let's say you go to bed at 10pm and you take the pill at 10pm There's a way to message that better. But it starts at 10pm and as you scroll down you see like the time start ticking up from 1001 to 1002 to 1003 very quickly till 1030. And that's the time where it's like we're actively putting you like helping you go to sleep. And then as you keep scrolling from 10:30 to 12:30, we do nothing here because your body is in good shape. And then as you keep scrolling as you hit those time markings that it then just explains to you at that particular point in time, hey, now it's at what would be from two hours. So that would be at midnight, midnight from 6am Then we, then this is the part of your sleep that's the hardest to stay in, to stay asleep. So because this is hard, we now release these other things. So because you're keying in on the problem, we're going to help you get to sleep. We're going to let your body do what it does best for you this period of time, and then we're going to wait and help you stay asleep later. And so you're almost like keying in on the problems, but people are kind of scrolling through almost like a. Don't, don't visually think of this like a timeline. Like you see it like a, like a museum with dots, but something else with a visual way to kind of showcase the passage of time in an expeditious way. It's an interesting way to think about it to where you take, get rid of the charts and graphs and you talk to people in terms of what they know, which is I go to bed at 10 and I wake up at 3am and I can't go back to sleep. Now you're hitting kind of like, oh, at 3:00am I'll still be asleep and at 4:00am I'll still be asleep because this thing is working during these sucky hours that I don't like. So that's another different concept to think about that might be a little bit more informative, but wouldn't require all the science.

Danny Rinaldi: Okay, all right, so let me go on to my next question then. Thank you for that, both of you. How do you view the creative layer, the designing layer, and the build layer.

Chris LaFay: In terms of. In terms of what? Like, how do they interact with one another? What are their levels of importance? What.

Danny Rinaldi: Now what? So, so here's where we're getting at. So we've known you now maybe a month, Chris, and we have met with other agencies and several of them have explained to us that there's something called stacking agencies, an agency stack, and each piece of this stack is specifically designed for some particular function that they're really great at, that they really like doing, and they're the best class provider of that particular service and whether it's designing or coding. And so we were wondering if, you know, you were open to the idea that we might have other vendors for whatever reason might make sense to bring in and if that would happen, would you want to play in the designer role and be considered for that or would you rather play in the build role and be considered for that, where someone would design it that's arguably really good at designing things and then they would provide file to you guys which, which mix of those two options, creative versus build, would you prefer to play in? If something like that was interesting enough for us to us to consider it.

Andrew Booth: Chris, real quick, before you answer the question, I think it's important to talk about how that's an environment we work in all the time with other agencies, whether it be Acadia or Liger or whoever. That agency stacking is absolutely common. And I fully agree with that on a lot of levels because, yes, while we can do a lot of it, there are certain areas that we really specialize at. And when you have the funds to actually pay for the best quality in each sector, stacking those agencies means a lot. Like our relationship with Acadia as a great example.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. And to answer that in a very, like, short and sweet consolidated way, Dev would be the part of that that we would lean towards.

Danny Rinaldi: Okay, all right, great. Perfect. All right, getting down to my last question here. Our last question is.

Chris LaFay: Oh, and also before you answer that question, sorry, I should only let me expand a little bit on what Andrew said. I have basically have built my company to be stackable. All of my every. I shouldn't say every. Almost every. Almost every one of our clients comes from an agency partnership in some way, shape or form, like J.C. lund introduced us. And so a lot of times we're doing the full build process, design and development, because the partner that brings us in does ads or SEO or something else that doesn't really touch the core website. But in general, collaboration is the name of the game. That's how I built internally, my entire crew as well too, because I personally like working with the best people and not just the junior guy that I can afford to have on salary. And so I. I stacked together. I got about six or seven core team members that have been around for a really freaking long time, and I grabbed the three of them that need to work together. That solves the client's problem. And so I have built my agency in the same kind of way over the last 15 years or so. So.

Danny Rinaldi: Okay, so. So with the process that you guys have already established between Andrew and Real Claude in terms of talking and collaborating together before it's time to write any code over the design and making sure whatever they're proposing fits, would you follow that same process with whatever designer that could be involved here and that you'd have early conversation so they're not just handing you a fix?

Chris LaFay: Yeah. So if we did the agency stacking route, the typically what. What we typically do is we also take a portion of that budget and we apply it to being a part of the. The design process. So joining in, not necessarily every single weekly meeting, but let's say that there's four milestones, then we would kind of join in on like the discovery call first off, and then whatever those core milestones are. And we typically then ask whoever is doing the creative work before they show it to you to show it to us. And let us notate any small tweaks that we want to have to make sure that our development time stays in scope of what we're expecting. So there are as few surprises as possible.

Danny Rinaldi: Okay. All right. That's it, guys. Well, actually, no, I'm sorry, you. I didn't ask my last question. So. So are you. After having, after having seen the Prototype, the Quiz Walmart.com Knowing that we're having buy buttons and everything that we built in that prototype, what would you do differently than what's currently sitting in front of you? Like if you would generally say you're going to give that an audit and you want to tell me in a couple of minutes here, you know, Danny, this is good, but here's what I think we would do differently than what you've already done at this point in time with R2.

Chris LaFay: So I'm going to just pick on the homepage for the moment just because it's, it's the easiest to pick on. I am going to share my screen. I've had some problems with Chrome recently and screen sharing, so if I, if I leave you, I promise you I will come back. Yes, it worked. First off, calls to action. So I'm not going to dive into aesthetics at the moment, but you have your. Find your formula there and up here. But throughout this entire scroll, we don't really have any action items until we get down here to the actual products. And so there. That's way too long. Now that dovetails into the diatribe I was going on. That was the incorrect diatribe earlier about kind of messaging structure on the homepage. All of, all of that diatribe about messaging structure and kind of the layout of the elements from before. When you're looking for design critique, copy and paste that right here. In terms of the layout of like you dive too far into the problem. It's more problem. It's more problem. It's more problem without that solution aspect to it. I do like the idea of putting things in more real words. So kind of like the whole like the timeline oriented nature of showcasing how it works on a timeline that people could actually understand themselves. There's that piece. The other element is going back to testimonials and actually people saying things I think you and I, Danny, talked about maybe, maybe two weeks ago, maybe like in our second call, you have words and testimonials, but you don't have names. And you have names, I'm sure, but not like actual photos of these people. But like, when I'm looking at these other supplement brands, the ones that really stand out to me are the ones that have photos attached to those names because that makes them feel very real. Like AG1 obviously has paid Hugh Jackman a bazillion dollars to be their face of their brand. Not suggesting that, but they all look like real people in real locations and kind of casual as well too, not just professional headshots, which I think is also key. And right now there really isn't any photography outside of the stock photo slash videos that you would have up in this section. So I think photography of real people needs to be more embedded in this story and also having more real life examples of that too. So I think shortening your problem section and then showcasing the problem in a slightly different way, it might not have to be that pill exploding and then talking about your solution and how real people have been impacted from that solution and then having CTAs throughout each of those parts that either link to generic find your formulas, or if a specific story was talking about a specific problem problem that the menopause night relief version of this solves, then let's link to that specific one and give more people jump points to the place that they want to go and not force them to scroll through anything and everything. Okay, this is a very small detail, but I. I'm a very big fan of these, like six, what I call success pods down here. I love having these mental checkboxes of stuff that don't take a lot of visual real estate and don't take a lot of mental effort to read through, but they just have this little strip of like, oh, cool, cool, cool. Check, check, check, done. And I realize how small of a detail that is. The other piece, and I'll finish on this is for the most part, everything on this page is dark blue. You have about 50, like 20 different shades of dark blue. You have your navy, you have your slightly lighter navy, you have this like lighter blue. You do have some of these other colors that are thrown in for like accents around the charts and graphs. There isn't a call to action color to where when you see this color, you know that it is a button to find your formula or buy the product. So there's nothing here that like draws my attention in either.

Andrew Booth: I got two things I want to add. I think that especially on the homepage, it's too Technical, it's too scientific. The science is important. It needs to be easily found and easily available. But again, most people aren't going to read it, aren't going to understand it, it's not going to make any sense to them whatsoever. So your homepage. Dumbing it down, unfortunately is the way I would describe it. Dumb it down into, you know, what the lower 49% of the US population can understand from a not only a graphical standpoint, but also just text and stuff. Because, you know, you're trying to draw people in to learn more information, to want to find the science and whatnot and hitting them with the most technical stuff and graphs and charts right off the bat. I mean, most people, they just unfortunately aren't enough to understand it.

Danny Rinaldi: Yep.

Andrew Booth: And then the second piece sort of plays off of what Chris is hearing about colors and stuff. I actually called this out to Chris the very first time I saw this app. We would make the website ADA compliant accessible because if you were to use something like this with these color contrasts, you are absolutely going to get sued by an ambulance chasing lawyer for not being ADA compliant for web.

Danny Rinaldi: Because what is ada? I never heard of that term.

Andrew Booth: It is the American with Disabilities Act. Most people know it from a standpoint of like you go into a business, doors have to be so wide for wheelchairs, countertops have to be so low for wheelchairs, things like that. In the last five years or so, ADA has started to apply to the web due to a Supreme Court and Department of justice ruling. And because of that, there's a lot of lawyers that have started suing small businesses for their websites not being ADA complian. And what that means is your font sizes aren't big enough, your color contrast aren't contrast enough. Like you have to have a certain contrast ratio from your foreground and your background. And when you've got darker color text and a dark background that's not compliant with the rules. And I know many people, including myself, that have been hit with frivolous claims by lawyers under the ADA guidelines because honestly right now it's this massive gray area and it's not very clear as to how you can stay compliant. But there are general guidelines. So that's the first thing I would absolutely make sure that.

Danny Rinaldi: Yeah, the last. Yeah, I won't say that.

Chris LaFay: Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Danny Rinaldi: Exactly. I was just going to say that see.com is the prebiotic company, they make good use of the color green.

Chris LaFay: Yes.

Danny Rinaldi: And so we thought the color blue for sleep would be important. And somehow you know that really would separate us from a supplement brand company who all use white. And we're trying to be elevated and premium. So whatever either AG1 does with their green or what C does with their green would like to do to our blue.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. Which you can definitely get away with doing blue. That's not a problem. It's how do you, how do you complement it with other colors so that, that blue when it's used is that call to action color the other design piece. And this is, this is purely just AI doing its AI thing. And I didn't mention this in the design design piece, but like when you're looking at just the text that's on the screen right now, there are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, maybe 7 or 8 different font styles. We have white and bold. We have this like faded out regular font size and that's just AI doing its thing. And so when I, when I was talking about consistency and design, that's. Yeah, just being consistent automatically looks a lot better. Even if you have almost all the same things.

Danny Rinaldi: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: On here, if your header 2 tags look like header 2 tags across the boards, that consistent, that consistency makes things feel very buttoned up without this crazy, crazy, cool, cool design.

Danny Rinaldi: Yeah, definitely good comments.

Chris LaFay: So there you have it.

Danny Rinaldi: All right.

Chris LaFay: Any other questions?

Danny Rinaldi: Perfect timing. My. My earpods just ran out of juice.

Chris LaFay: Very nice, very nice. That's awesome. What is a good next step for us here with your timeline and things like that?

Danny Rinaldi: So I think our timeline is shifting out like we talked about last time. We need another three weeks to get sort of solidified on our end and, and before we decide, we're hoping to create a short list by then. So we have a couple of more meetings left to conduct and then it's a time consuming process we're finding out.

Chris LaFay: Yes, yes, it is. And it's a lot of the same conversations over and over and over and over again.

Danny Rinaldi: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So this was a good one though today. Good. Fantastic. Just so you're aware, I am basically out of pocket. The. Let me pull the dates up. June 15th through June 26th, which I think falls very squarely inside of your three week window. So I wanted to make sure that you were aware of that. Obviously you have Andrew's email. Given that we're going to build this in Shopify, he can handle pretty much any questions and comments that you.

Danny Rinaldi: What are those dates again, Chris?

Chris LaFay: Yeah, the Monday, the 5th. June. Monday, June 15th through June 26th. And that's through. So my first day back will be the 29th. That first week, I'll have some availability. We'll be at the beach. I'll be checking emails, but I won't really be able to do calls that entire.

Danny Rinaldi: Okay, okay.

Chris LaFay: I'll be at the beach the first week, and then I'll be at a conference the second week, which was terrible timing. Andrew will be able to answer most of your questions. Andrew can get in touch with me and he can put stuff together in the meantime as well, too. So you have his email address now? It's in the. It's in the event invite. So when you have questions and stuff, just email both of us and that way we. We both get it. I'll be checking email that first week. That second week, I won't be as. I'll be bouncing around like a freaking pinball.

Danny Rinaldi: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So.

Danny Rinaldi: Okay, Chris, thank you so much. Appreciate your time. Andrew, it's very nice meeting you and look forward to when we get to talk again.

Chris LaFay: Sounds good.

Andrew Booth: Pleasure meeting you as well.

Danny Rinaldi: Time on your vacation, Chris.

Chris LaFay: Thanks, sir. I'll catch you later.

Danny Rinaldi: Okay. All right, bye.

Andrew Booth: Yeah.

Danny Rinaldi: See, Andrew.