Chris & Judd Chat About Design
Judd Lyon: The legend.
Chris LaFay: Yes, likewise. We go and hear you.
Judd Lyon: There you are.
Chris LaFay: There we go. Now, I've been in my office all day long. So been went to a coffee shop this morning, had lunch, came back, and where'd you go? Where's your, Where'd your go to? So my go to. Why are you so soft? That's interesting. AirPods. Yeah, they're on.
Judd Lyon: Okay.
Chris LaFay: My go to is actually a place over here in Loganville called. It's a brand new coffee shop locally owned by a very young couple called the Local Bean. And it is fantastic. Now, I had a coffee meeting today, so I was in downtown Duluth, which my coffee meeting, forgot that we were meeting. So I sat there for a while. My lunch canceled on me.
Judd Lyon: Oh, fun.
Chris LaFay: And dinner canceled on me.
Judd Lyon: Oh, my God. What is going on? There's something out in the, out in the ether. Man, that's the worst.
Chris LaFay: And so I was thankful. My dinner, actually, it actually worked out pretty decently. The guy who I was having dinner with also lives in Duluth, where I was. And so I asked him, I was like, hey, I know the kid stuff happened. Could you meet me for lunch because I'm here. And he was like, actually, I can do that. Let's go. So cool.
Judd Lyon: Okay.
Chris LaFay: It was just, it was just, it was a, it was just, it's a, it was a very weird day of like sitting and waiting. But you don't get into a rhythm or a flow when you're like, oh, it's the worst.
Judd Lyon: I, I, if I have stuff scheduled, then I can't, you know, I'm kind of a deep work sort of person in context switching. I kind of have days that I'm just jumping around and it's like new business day, or it's just, you know, send updates day or whatever. But if I'm trying to get real work done, if I know I'm gonna go meet someone for lunch in an hour or whatever, I have a hard time locking in. So I, when people, when people shift around on me, it messes me up pretty bad. You can't get mad at them because things happen. But it's also like, oh, man, this just, you know, it can have a, it can have a follow on, you know, a domino effect a little bit.
Chris LaFay: Yes. Speaking of that, of changing of plans, what's the likelihood that you would want to go grab lunch with me, Mickey, and a couple of other agency marketing folks on Thursday in Dunwoody?
Judd Lyon: Yeah, man, I'm, I'm on Thursday the 9th. Like this Thursday?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, like this Thursday? Yeah.
Judd Lyon: Yeah, I'd love to.
Chris LaFay: I'm game. So we're what we're do. We're trying something new. Mickey and I are just trying a lot of things new. I like having somebody that I can play and mess around with and do things. So I'm gonna continue doing the. The larger lunches like we did last month, because you came to that right over downtown. Yeah, I'm gonna do more of those. I'm gonna try to do those once a month. But Mickey also likes the idea of doing, like, smaller lunches where it's just like five or six people in total. So we are doing the first one of these on Thursday. So I invited a small subset of people, and as the day has gone, multiple people, 48 hours in advance, like, hey, sorry, I can't come. And so I was like, oh, I'm meeting with Judd. Maybe he can come on Thursday.
Judd Lyon: Yeah, man, I'd love to. I'm. I'm all about, you know, the past year when I met you at Mickey's thing last year, I'm trying to make connections here in Atlanta. So I'm all about.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Judd Lyon: Know, in real life, you know, to pick up on our conversation about your. Your new design and where everything's headed is. I, I'm. I'm. I think we're very much on the same wavelength here in that as a lot of the stuff that we used to charge good money for is being commoditized. The stuff that, you know, it's raising the level of soft skills and the value of relationships and in person communication and storytelling and all of these. So I'm. I'm with you 100. And I'm. I used to be a little more introverted and keep to myself and hang out on my computer, and now I'm trying to just say yes to everything and invite people to things. And so, yeah, I'd love to. I, I, I. It's more fun, it's more effort, but that's what makes it more valuable, right?
Chris LaFay: Exactly. And that's.
Judd Lyon: So the.
Chris LaFay: My thinking and the plan is, is what I'm. What I'm hoping to do is the. The larger lunches will still be the whole concept of, like, invite a friend sort of thing. And we're gonna do those. I'm gonna try to do those at the beginning of each month. And then for the folks that I would like to dive in deeper with that I haven't met before up until that day, that's when we do. That's when me and Mick are gonna do, like, A smaller lunch with them halfway through the month and invite them to come and hang out again. And then also throw in things like topgolf events and stuff like that with other partners and things along those lines. Do the content day video shoots as well, which I have another one of those that'll hopefully be scheduled here at some point soon. And that's just gonna be. That's it. It's gonna be two lunches.
Judd Lyon: You're a machine. I, Everyone, I, I'm so impressed. Everyone I meet is. I've been out making friends, you know, them, have met him, have connected with them. Like, I'm like, man, this guy's a beast. He's everywhere.
Chris LaFay: I'm sure I've been, I've been busy.
Judd Lyon: I've been out there, like, you know, trying to. Just reaching out. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes people are friendly, sometimes they're not, but, you know, whatever. But it's been a fun process to, like, just have as many conversations as possible with. No, it feels a little. Not aimless, but I don't have, you know, so many of these conversations. You don't know where they're gonna head. And I'm not, They're not specific, like I'm asking for a sale or a referral. It's more like, what are you up to? What are you doing? Is there anything I can send your way or what industry do you care about? Or what's your background? Or, you know, that sort of thing. You never know where it's going to lead. But I've gotten so much. I realize how much over the years I've missed out on the last several years of.
Chris LaFay: Right.
Judd Lyon: You have all these brilliant ideas in your head, and then when you try and take them to market, they just get thrown in your face. You're like, oh, well, I guess that wasn't a good idea. But if you're out talking to people, like these conversations like you and I are having now, hey, what are you up to? Is this working? How do you do this? What. Whatever. And it's like you're just constantly recalibrating your, you know, your, your, your approach and what works and what people are charging and all that kind of stuff. So I, I'm really, you know, it can be a little exhausting and drain your social battery a bit. But I, I'm, I'm kudos to you, man. You're, you're, you've got it. You've got it down. I'm, I'm, I'm working on it myself.
Chris LaFay: I. What I think my main thing I'm gonna lean into is because I hate cold outreach, is I'm gonna try to make as many of the. As many of these things as possible. I'm gonna ask people to bring one friend with them. I'm not gonna be like, hey, if you know anybody, you can invite them. Like, that seems so generic and like, it's noise to people because it's always asked. And so I'm gonna try to be very intentional, like when I send emails out to people and be like, hey, I'm only inviting. I want to have this number of people attend this thing, whatever that number is. And because of that, I'm only inviting that number divided by two because I want every.
Judd Lyon: The.
Chris LaFay: The reason people get value out of these types of things is when they meet new people. I don't know all the new people. So if you bring a friend and everybody brings one friend with them, you're pretty much guaranteed to meet five, 10 new people. Obviously not these little small micro lunches, but like at, you know, the agency lunch club and like topgolf and stuff like that. Like, if everybody brings one person, everybody will meet, will have the ability, if they decide to be extrovert and talk to new people. We'll have the ability to meet a number of new faces and everybody wins. Everybody wins. I like. Everybody win games.
Judd Lyon: Everyone gets out of the house. Everyone can meet new people. There's new business opportunities. It's also just fun to compare notes and complain about stuff or, you know, are you guys. Are you guys struggling? Are you guys doing well? What's going on? Who's crushing it? Who's. You know, it's been. It's been. I'm sure you get lots of good intel, but it's been. It's been a wild ride. The stuff I. I've heard where I go from, you know, agencies downsizing and consolidating. I. I hear a lot of that where people are trying to. They. They're consolidating their teams way down to the principles and then the. Yeah, I know the principal. As I'm saying this, I'm realizing. But they're consolidating down to the principles and then trying to increase their margins by retaining their existing client base. That was previously, like, had a team servicing them. I know some people that have folded where. You know, there was. There was a guy. I don't want to name who he is. He's not here.
Chris LaFay: Local. Yeah, that's fine.
Judd Lyon: There was a coach I almost hired who I was really impressed with his approach for, like, how he, how he created his offers and how he kind of had this content marketing strategy and all these things. And I was really impressed. And I was on the fence. I reached out to him because I remembered he was going to take his kids on this trip or whatever. And so I reached back out to him. He was taking him to Utah. I'm from Utah. And so I, I, I was like, hey, did you guys have fun? I'm sure it was an awesome trip with your kids. And he's like, I closed my business, no longer doing blah, blah. And I'm like, whoa, I almost hired you as my coach and I thought you were just murdering it. And you know, I was gonna print money by hiring you and you, I mean, you were faking it really well. I, I don't know what happened. I mean, who knows? It might be a personal thing, it might be a family thing. Maybe his business was doing well. Maybe he got sick of it. Like it could be a whole host.
Chris LaFay: Absolutely. Yeah.
Judd Lyon: Wow. I, I was, it was a little like startling where I was just like,.
Chris LaFay: Oh, yikes, that's nuts. One of the, actually kind of on, on a similar vein, one of the things I was thinking of is I'm gonna, I'm gonna take this down a slight, I'm gonna take us down a little. Are you familiar with Entrepreneurs Organization and the concept of forums and eo?
Judd Lyon: No, I, I'm vaguely familiar with the organization because I was talking to our friend in common. Bobby. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and he and I. So I'm co. Working one day a week. He over. Out of Industrious.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, out of Pon City Market.
Judd Lyon: I'm doing the other one that's across the street, but they're right next to each other.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, I got you.
Judd Lyon: Yeah. And so we, we've met and chatted a couple times and he was telling me about it, but I'm not, I'm not super familiar. I'm not like up on it. I don't know exactly how it works.
Chris LaFay: So one of the, so I'm an eo, they do this thing called forum, and I'm debating on whether or not I want to renew my membership. Not because of anything negative, just because I'm doing a lot more like community oriented stuff now. And my network of like agency owners and business owners that I talk like legit shop to, like finances, numbers, like real things and get real experience from has brought in quite a bit. And one of the values of EO and my primary value that I get from it is we get together for basically a half a day once a month. And it's about six business owners from a variety of different industries. We have, we're, we. It's unintentional but we do not overlap at all. Got a guy that runs a rug company and a guy that runs a printing company in a hyper specific vertical and another guy that runs an audio video company that sells equipment to schools to outfit their AV departments. Anyway, and one of the things we do is we, we deep dive. We basically each get 15 minutes. We talk about personal life, business life, what the challenges have been, what's happening, what we want to get help on. And when you do that consistently month over month over month over month, you start to see through lines between people's stories. You're like, hey, you talked about this over here for months and nothing has changed. Why have you not done X or whatever that is.
Judd Lyon: Right.
Chris LaFay: So one of the things I'm thinking is I really like the. I know a lot of folks that are either they're fractional, they run an agency, they run a micro shop, whatever it happens to be, they, they do their own thing. And a lot of them don't have that type of dedicated time to actually talk about the stuff that's going on in their business and actually get real life experience shares from people that have been through stuff before. So I'm thinking about starting up something that is on a monthly cadence, but it has a very specific format. That format I don't know. But without diving into the details of what I think that format could be, would it be of value to you or folks like you that you know that are kind of in that agency, fractional ish space to where there was a place once a month that was just kind of open for maybe like 10 or 12 people, maybe six or eight of them showed up every month where we had a structure where people that attended brought kind of what they were up to and the problem that they were facing in a very structured way. So we don't go on rabbit trails and yeah. Get on opinions and advice and things.
Judd Lyon: Yeah. It turns into therapy.
Chris LaFay: Bingo. And there is a, there is a bit of therapy esque related when you talk about this stuff, there is an element of that that happens. But where they come with specifically like hey, this is the thing that I'm going through, this is what I'm trying to figure out. I need people to ask me questions and poke holes in this and tell me what's wrong with this idea. Does something like that sound of interest to you?
Judd Lyon: Yeah, absolutely. I, I, so I'm in a group that's really interesting actually because I'm kind of the odd duck. It's, it's, they're mostly information architects and they, they come out of like academia so they're working on like university websites or one of them is a like technical documentation expert for like huge companies that have these massive like documentation things and then some of the other ones are authors that are in there. They're all kind of like web people. Yeah, but it's a very different universe. You know, there's no developers, there's no, they're not, they're much more, how do I say this? They're not super into like marketing and sales. They're very like into the craft of information architecture. But they're all self employed and we were all brought together by this woman named Carrie Hayne, H A N E who's just this brilliant person. I've known her for a long time. I don't even remember how I met her, but kind of an old web friend. She's very well known in like content management circles. She wrote a book years and years ago about like structured how you structure your content and your, your processes for publishing content, all those sorts of things. She put this group together because she's been back and forth on consulting. Anyway, long, short story long, she's put this group together maybe something that would be interesting to you because I know you do. You're very dialed in on like UX and information architecture and that sort of thing. But what may be more interesting if you're thinking about kind of being, you know, it seems like you're kind of naturally emerging as this kind of community leader. You're having very good success in drawing us all together and maybe you turn that into some sort of offering or formalized thing. I'm not sure where, where you're headed with this, but the answer is yes. But you should talk to her because the way she has orchestrated this group is amazing. She's so organized because she's, she's done tons of like UX studies and done a lot of facilitating and so she had this thing where we all had to fill out our user manual on how we like to be communicated with whether we respond to text or in Slack or via email. Our biggest challenges. Yeah, what the structure. And then she had us all sign like basically commit to, I can't remember if we committed to three months or six months that we will attend.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Judd Lyon: And then the facilitator Rotates every month. So it's not all on her every month to like run the thing. We basically pick a topic. Yeah, yeah, she's got it just dialed, man. She's unbelievable.
Chris LaFay: I want to talk to her because that's actually so my I right now, today. I don't care to make money off of this. Now I also know that when people, the one, not the one, there's a million benefits. I love eo, but when you're Neo and you're part of that forum group, everybody is equally invested. They've all gone through the training, everybody, everybody's buying in and everybody knows that the commitment level is a 10 out of 10. Like you schedule all your meetings out for the year ahead of time and you plan your vacations and stuff all around them. You don't, you don't miss. Like in every form is different. But like ours, if you're late, it's $20 every 10 minutes that you're late. Because we don't, we don't screw around. Like, we're, we're all on time. You should be on time too. And you don't get that level of commitment without the framework and structure. Now I'm not looking. My goal here is not to like lock people into a 12 month thing and be like, you're, you're stuck. That's not my point actually. I think rotating actually is a lot better. And I like the idea of the facilitator kind of looping around and being different to see different perspectives. But my initial thought is I probably know about 10, somewhere between 10 and 20 people that run agencies, fractionals, whatever that have told me at some point in the past. I don't have people to talk to and I would like to. And so I'm kind of. If I drop EO and I don't do that, I want to have a space where those types of things can be talked about very freely and openly without like concern.
Judd Lyon: Right.
Chris LaFay: And so I don't want to try to.
Judd Lyon: The idea, I think it's. Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you up.
Chris LaFay: No, I was, I don't like, I don't want to mimic it because I know a couple of people that tried to copy and paste it and that it, it did not work for them. And I don't want to do that. Copy and pasting doesn't typically work for anything.
Judd Lyon: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: And so if I could find.
Judd Lyon: Yeah, you should definitely talk to her. The group is very new that she just created. We've only had two or three Meetings. But she treated the first one or two as a pilot just to explore the interest she had, you know, 12 people or 15 people or whatever, you know, kind of raise their hand. Yes, I'm interested. We had an initial thing. Everyone got to weigh in on what they would find value from. She actually put together this mirror board of like. And we all prioritize. Like, I want referrals. Someone else is like, I want somewhere where I can have. I can speak freely without thinking I'm in competition with someone.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Judd Lyon: Someone else was like, I want to learn how to write a book. I don't know any authors. And so, like, we all had these different things and then she would organize them and then send it back out to us. And then we would like, vote or whatever. But we also had to sign things saying that, like, this is all confidential. This is a safe space for us to share our struggles, to share financial. And like, nothing leaves this conversation. Like, she. All of this sort of stuff she's just done. Like, I've been so impressed. I knew she was just crazy smart. I. I talked, I talked to her every, every so often. And we've known each other off and on for years. But just to see someone who's like, really good at facilitating and like, all of the details and stuff, I'm like, oh, I would have never thought of that. That's really good. So she, yeah, talk to her. She could. She'd be very helpful and it's just a good person to know. She's gone back into consulting and is working mostly with like, like mission driven organizations, helping them with kind of their content strategy, their content operations. She's also helping them. A lot of them are trying to wrap their head around having like, AI policies. Yeah, she's doing a lot of that. But anyway, she'd be amazing to talk to about how to structure a group, keep it on track, not let anyone dominate conversation.
Chris LaFay: That is my one personal flaw. I am. I can get people in a room and I can get conversations started because that's the type of conversation that comes very naturally to me. Like, I'm very much like, here's QuickBooks, let's talk about it without having any issues at all. And it typically, my openness and talking about that type of stuff prompts other people to then also be open and then good conversation spouts from that. My biggest problem as somebody that sits in a seat where I'm at the head of the table, for lack of better terminology, is I'm bad at cutting people off because I'm A people pleaser. And that is the hardest part for me. And so that's going to be the biggest area that I would struggle with, with something like, like that is not allowing one person to dominate and therefore ruin the experience or ruin the knowledge sharing and all that kind of fun stuff for everybody else. So that's my one mental hurdle that I have to get over, which, yeah,.
Judd Lyon: I think, I think maybe as part of the group dynamic we have a way of, you know, flagging things or expressing concerns privately. If, if someone is getting off track. She, she had some good stuff in their documentation. Like, hey, if I feel like anyone's starting to do that, I'll ask you nicely privately. Or maybe we can side, you know, maybe we can table this or whatever. But she's, she's just, she's got a lot of, a lot of good structure around she, you, she would be great to talk to. I mean it's a brand new group, but she's, she's really good and she could probably share since it's super fresh in her mind just having gone through it. Yeah, yeah. The other thing too is that's interesting is you, you know, it sounds like EO is one end of the spectrum and that you're like, you know, a guy selling rugs. Like, they're similar problems, but they're so different that it's not apples to apples, which is good from a competition standpoint, but also it's, it's less applicable in some cases.
Chris LaFay: You would think, you would think that it wouldn't be as applicable. But dear Mercy, I have learned so much.
Judd Lyon: Sure, I'm sure.
Chris LaFay: Like, yeah, it's been. And there's also a benefit for me. Like, I'm actually now the, I've always have been the smallest company in my, in the, in that forum that I'm a part of. Like, and especially now since I went through all my swaps and changes back in January. Like, assuredly the smallest. Like, I actually don't qualify for main level EO anymore. Like, I hit, I hit the million dollar threshold on a whim, got in and then almost immediately fell back below the threshold.
Judd Lyon: I'm in. You can't pick me up now, guys.
Chris LaFay: And that's actually kind, that's actually kind of true. And so there is like this aspect of making this decision of not doing it of like, if I ever want to go back in, I wouldn't be able to get back in in my current state. Like, I would have to go into like the program that Bobby is a part of. The accelerator program, which isn't a problem. There's no bad. That's not a negative thing. I just wouldn't be able to go back into the same group that I'm in now. No.
Judd Lyon: So, yeah, that's a little tricky. It is.
Chris LaFay: Let's talk about design. Not to like.
Judd Lyon: Yeah, that's so crazy. When you were talking about personality and. And getting back to. More into individualistic, kind of back to the roots of the web, I. It's so funny. I thought of Jack McDade as I was. And you're like, holy,.
Chris LaFay: Dude's a bomb. I've been follow. I haven't followed him in, like, the, the sense of, like, kept up with him. But he released his, like, radical design course like, seven, eight years ago. And I saw it. I'm like, this is awesome. And I never spent the $200 to get access to it. And finally somebody told me. I was talking to them about it, like, in January. He's like. He was like, what did you just spend on X? I forgot what I bought at the time. He's like, what did you spend on that? I was like, 400 bucks. Like, it's 200 and you've been talking about it for seven years. Buy it.
Judd Lyon: Right?
Chris LaFay: You're gonna be.
Judd Lyon: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm glad it's still out there. I haven't. I haven't kept up and followed him at all. I. I knew him from an expression engine. Like, yeah. Fifteen years ago, he had a really. He. He was a partner of one of the more popular modules in that world. And then he went off and spun out into Sadomic. And then another guy from that same community spun out and created craft cms. And then I did some. I did some. There are tons of people from that. That small. I mean, it wasn't tiny, but it was like this small CMS 15 years ago. I'm still running into people who've got, like, agencies and stuff. And I'm like, you look familiar. And they're like, oh, yeah, we had lunch 15 years ago. They all went on to do, like, awesome things. And so it's fun to see them. But Static's really nice. I've used it on a few projects. I haven't used it in a couple years, but it's. So. It's still kicking, as far as I know it is.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. I don't know anything about it. I've never used it. Now that AI exists, I'm actually kind of intrigued to see what, like, have AI build me a sample site using Static and seeing what. That back. You know, that back.
Judd Lyon: Yeah, it's nice. It's really, well, it's really well conceived. He's, he's, he's. He's top notch on the, on the UX side. So the admin and everything is very, well, very well thought out. It borrowed a lot of ideas. It definitely comes from the. It definitely has the lineage of. Of expression engine and it is similar to. Similar to craft.
Chris LaFay: And just let me just look at this. Just look at the site. Like, this is just freaking. With palm trees and a freaking tooth. Like, look at that. Nobody like a hover animation on a toucan. Like, what the.
Judd Lyon: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: What the heck?
Judd Lyon: Yeah, he's ridiculous. Look at him wrestling a gator of.
Chris LaFay: AI imagery right there. Like, that's where you're like, yes, that's a great.
Judd Lyon: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Knowing when to use AI imagery.
Judd Lyon: Like, yeah, he's very high on that list of, like, wow, I wish I made that site, you know, and when.
Chris LaFay: You look at his stuff, like all like this, this whole section right here, it's literally a page divider. And behind that page divider is a gradient that goes from blue to pink to yellow with a grid on top of it and another page divider. This isn't. This is nothing crazy. This is literally a background image with page dividers. But it looks dope because it's different. It's so. It's so simple. So anyway, so one of the designs I did, which none of these are live, none of them actually made it out of design, which is fine. I don't care. I did some of these just because I wanted to stretch my boundaries. Some. One of the things that he recommends in his course is to look at comic book covers and regular book covers and start there. So I had a buddy of mine, he runs an IT company, and he showed me an old website design of back in like 2000 that was done for him. And he's like, I love this site. I still love it. And he showed it to me. It's like, it's that traditional, like, cityscape looking from like the early 2000s style. Like, nothing special. But he was like, I love the city. I love the dark colors. I was like, it's freaking Batman, dude. It looks like Gotham. He's like, it does look like Gotham. So I found a Batman cover that wasn't like, super duper artsy, that had some boxes to it. And the first step that Jack recommends is try to literally replicate the entire design as close as possible. So I tried to duplicate it as close as possible without buying fonts and without buying imagery and all that kind of fun stuff. So I got it, you know, pretty, pretty decently close.
Judd Lyon: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Then you take that and you're like, okay. Then you swap the content at that point. So you don't redesign everything, you just duplicate and swap the content. So my buddy's name is John. That is not John at all. But I put his company name up there. I put his name up there and I just kind of swapped the text around. I added a little bit of, a little bit of a texture behind it as well too. Found a random image of a rando white dude that's just looks like he does it and like slapped it on there. Right then once you're done. Yes, yes, exactly. And then the next step is like, how do you then transition that to like a Hero section? And so I transitioned it to a Hero section. Now this doesn't follow common UX practices at the end of the day. Like the logo in the Hero and the navigation bar, it looks, this looks like a print design at the end of the day. I know that. But hypothetically, this could collapse into an actual upper nav. Like when you scroll past it, it could go to upper navigation. This background could literally just be a static background that everything scrolls on top of that doesn't continually scroll forever. And then this is just a. Your standard Hero section with a big old frickin honking button that, you know, it's a button because it uses a weird color and it has your basic simple messaging here. And then I have.
Judd Lyon: You're going for originality, not, not necessarily. Like you. You can dial in and move more, you know, more towards the mean, so to speak, on the ux. And not that you want to water it down if you have to, but you want to start with the original, you know, bold vision here. Not the, not the generic, you know, bootstrap or tailwind utilitarian, minimalist, you know, website as an appliance versus this is more website as art.
Chris LaFay: Bingo. And it's an IT company. Literally no other IT company looks like this. Like none. And so this is what now he didn't want to change his logo, which I understand. I mess around with it because I like the idea of playing with fonts. I never have played with fonts before in my life. And so I vectorized, I converted the text to paths and just kind of messed around with it for a little while just because. Why not? I was having fun. So that's how you get from, from Batman to A hero design. The next one. I'll show you the more boring one first and I'll finish with the, the more interesting one. I have a buddy that runs. It's a mega enterprise, WordPress company. Now, they do more than just WordPress, but like, they, they have a very generic site. Like, they have a box, they have boxes inside of boxes. Like, come on.
Judd Lyon: Right.
Chris LaFay: Come on. This time. Oh, they actually changed this. It actually looks better. Nice. Everything kind of looks standard. So what I did with him is now it's not the one that's the genericized one. So what I did.
Judd Lyon: I didn't realize you were such a Figma wizard.
Chris LaFay: I, it's, it's the development side. I kid you not. Like, I, I. One of my good buddies is a designer and I've blown him away with my, like, Figma stuff that I've done is because of that development and variable stuff and connected stuff like that. It's. That's what it is. So his company is called Multi Dots. But you know what? His website doesn't use multiple dots.
Judd Lyon: Right.
Chris LaFay: So I tried to pull the, the multiple dots aspect into it. I pulled different color. I pulled four colors from the, the rainbow logo that he has. I applied a color to each of the different lines.
Judd Lyon: Oh, nice.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, he did. Oops, I'm getting a phone call and I don't like some of the execution on this. Can I do full screen? No. Hey, there we go. That's better. That's. That's more legible. You can also see kind of in the background here. It got some dots going on there. Wanted to also bring circles into it. So if you kind of notice, we're kind of in a frame as well too, which doesn't happen as often anymore. Used to be common, your website's in a frame on a background. But then I wanted to break the frame completely.
Judd Lyon: Oh, nice.
Chris LaFay: And so like, bring in the circles, break the grid as much as possible. Humongous testimonial.
Judd Lyon: Yeah. And you've got it, you got it tilted, huh?
Chris LaFay: On top of the little half circle. But also I like the grid. The grid's cool. The grid works. Now, I'm not like the biggest fan of this button style. It's weird, but it's, it's weird. It stands out.
Judd Lyon: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Two column layouts, bringing the circles back in multiple ways. Doing some nifty things with gradients kind of on top of that dotted background going real traditional grid. And then like a CTA to actually talk to the human on the other side of the, the of the wall and a gridded footer there at the bottom. So very much a mishmash of multiple styles. Very rounded, but also very gridded as well, too. And normally those two things don't work together. And I tried to make them work together.
Judd Lyon: No, this is awesome.
Chris LaFay: So I'm hoping next year. He likes it, but he's just terrified of going with it because it's so. So different than what he's got now. And dude works with enterprise clients, so.
Judd Lyon: I. Yeah, well, I, you know, I. Maybe. Maybe he can grab a. A subset of. Of clients that are a friendly audience and. And workshop it or ab test it in front of them and ask them how they feel about it.
Chris LaFay: Yes. So this one is the last one. This is the. The funnest one. It's the one that looks least like a website, but I had the most fun doing it.
Judd Lyon: So.
Chris LaFay: Do you know Paul Carpenter?
Judd Lyon: Yeah, he's awesome. He's a very interesting guy.
Chris LaFay: So there's your con. The. That's. That's.
Judd Lyon: Yeah, I was gonna say you can go. You can go real wild on this one.
Chris LaFay: I'm so sad that he got a job because I didn't put this. It's all coded out. It's done. It is finished.
Judd Lyon: Oh, damn. I mean, good for him. But.
Chris LaFay: I did it all pro bono because I wanted to freaking, like icon showcase of something going live of something just weird and crazy.
Judd Lyon: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Oh, so sad. So he sent me over. He sent me over a lot of his photos that he's taken around Atlanta. So these bars here, you'll see that kind of come back in. You'll see kind of this outline font come back in. He obviously is a big fan of music and old school music and stuff. These are just photos I grabbed. Like, how can I put a vinyl record in here? Somehow he sent me this photo not colored like this that he took in Atlanta. I was trying to find shapes within this as well, too. And also this photo he took over by Ponce, which you'll also see the. Actually this. The. The Ponce text is what you'll see a pull from. And you'll see these lines come back as well, too. One of the coolest things, actually two of the. So two things. One is I took kind of the. The boxy nature of an old school ticket, which I hate that these are called old school tickets now because I still remember them even though I'm younger.
Judd Lyon: Oh, my God.
Chris LaFay: I just kind of took the. The gridded.
Judd Lyon: I'm old enough. That didn't even register to me. That it was an oh. I'm like, why would this be an.
Chris LaFay: Oh, yeah, we don't do that anymore. Sucks. But then one of my favorite things they sent me was a playbill from. I don't know what year this was. I could find it in my email, but.
Judd Lyon: Oh, wow.
Chris LaFay: This style of, like, literally. Oh, actually, these are the dash lines that made it come back. I apologize. These are the. You'll see those dash lines again. They just put freaking random shapes all over the place. So how do you make Paul Carpenter a website with that inspiration? Let's take a look, shall we?
Judd Lyon: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: So this.
Judd Lyon: Oh, nice. Right?
Chris LaFay: So the. The first off the vinyl would have spun. I put plural in there because he wasn't big on, like, promoting the name plural. Like at the top. This also said. Before it said, let's go. I had to take a screenshot of this and anonymize it. This said Paul Carpenter up here at the top. And then this said, chat with Paul. So you see his photo here? You see the outline font that is similar to the Pont City Market.
Judd Lyon: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Vertical font. You see the random shapes behind it on this, like, paper texture. You see the dash line dividers, which I pulled from the. From that. Also from that thing. I took his photo and I underlayed another photo of his underneath it as well, too. And the concept of this was that only the left side would scroll, the right hand side would stay static the whole time. That's hard to showcase in figma. So you'll see this is all very plain. But I wonder if the. Wonder if this actually worked. I forgot if I. Did I make it work in figma. I did make it work in figma. Yeah, I did. Look at that freaking. Yeah. Ignore the weird page cut. That was wrong. But CTA's just got highlighted in red. The plural thing circled. Little font call out there. Now, see there? There's the Pont City. The Pont City. Little curved lines from the top of it as well over there. Yep.
Judd Lyon: This is awesome. Obviously, it is apparent as you're calling your attention to it, but if you're just. Look. If you're just using this, there's all of these subtle things tying it all together that you've seen and you didn't realize you just saw that thing from the Ponds and whatever. But it makes it all feel, you know, cohesive and interrelated and in the same, same style.
Chris LaFay: Yep. Dude, it was so actually plural. I forgot what I called the site. Id. Boo. Paul Carpenter.
Judd Lyon: Yeah. So he got. He got scooped up at one of the Agencies here in town, though.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. Finally took him a while. But yeah, I feel bad for.
Judd Lyon: Yeah, I mean, once you're at a super senior level, it's like the opportunities are few and far between depending on what you're going for. I've seen that happen before where, like CEO level people. I've seen it happen where like a CEO will have a falling out and maybe the board, you know, boots them and then other people, it takes them a while to get back into the C suite or they're just waiting because they're, they're not going to go work, they're not going to go be a VP somewhere. Now they've had the CEO title.
Chris LaFay: Right.
Judd Lyon: But depending on the industry, they, you know, so a lot of them will like go fractional for a while and then kind of loop back around. But sometimes it can take them a year or two to like, get back in the mix. Yeah, there's not that many, like, C suite jobs out there.
Chris LaFay: No, there's not. There really isn't. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's hard to come back.
Judd Lyon: You think someone that's like, at that level, you're like, oh, they can go get anything. It's like, no, there's not actually that.
Chris LaFay: Many opportunities unless you're willing to take a big old title cut and a big old pay cut.
Judd Lyon: Yeah, yeah. It's very hard to go from like CEO to like, you know, VP of marketing or whatever.
Chris LaFay: I didn't realize the, the little outline font was actually on here too. I didn't realize that as I was scrolling around. Yeah. But like, the only reason I did this, like, is because I took the. I read through Jack's course and it's like you take parts and pieces that are very disconnected from each other and you smush them together.
Judd Lyon: Yeah. Once you brought up the comic book thing. Now I can't unsee. Like, his style is very free and wild, but it has a comic book aspect to it. I'm thinking of, like, the way he uses. The way he uses type.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Judd Lyon: And texture and there's very much like a lot of paper.
Chris LaFay: Have you seen, have you seen my website?
Judd Lyon: Yes. It's awesome. The game?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, the game. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yep. Good. That was, that was, that was all. But see, it looks all completely, like wildly custom, but shoot. What was it called? Hold on.
Judd Lyon: What is Jack doing nowadays? He's still running static. I haven't, I, I haven't followed what he's been up to forever.
Chris LaFay: I don't know at all. I don't follow.
Judd Lyon: Look him up after this.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, but what I found, what I wanted to go video game is I found here a humongous asset pack of just.
Judd Lyon: Oh, like a video game sprite.
Chris LaFay: And so, like, if you. If you're a video game builder, you know it, you've heard of it, you've seen it before, like, this ground and then these clouds, and, you know, the. The boxes and the. All the styles, you would recognize it if you built video games. But you know who doesn't build video games? My clients. They have no freaking glue, right? So I just downloaded this and just went, ham. And that's where literally all my stuff comes from, is this. And I have a person. I have a person that I know who does, like, caricature art. And she's in the process of. I wonder if I can find it. Tiff. Tiffany, you.
Judd Lyon: You've been. You've been having fun, man.
Chris LaFay: Oh, yes. I. Yeah. 100. So I don't like this, like, little, like, alien dude. It's too generic. So I. I want to have real people. And so she has started to. I was right. I didn't share the right screens. Sorry. This will be the last part of my. Wildness and sporadic conversation. But she started designing fun.
Judd Lyon: It's a show and tell.
Chris LaFay: She started designing little caricatures in that exact same, like, style as the. As the dude over here. So it matches with my.
Judd Lyon: Oh, cool.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, exactly. And so like, even showed her, like, that's what that dude looks like. Like, it fits right in. It's perfect.
Judd Lyon: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: So I'm going to. My goal is when I do collaboration, like, content collaborations with people, I will have her create a character for, like, if you and I did a content set together, I would have her create. She's creating me right now. I would have her create you.
Judd Lyon: Oh.
Chris LaFay: And then we would be the characters in the scene for, like, the featured images and stuff like that. Like, I don't want to replace photos. Photos are important. And I. I don't. I know people that put, like, all artwork on their website and have no photos. No, that's not. That's not me.
Judd Lyon: Yeah, No, I have both, but have.
Chris LaFay: Both and have them be accent pieces. Like, that's my plan.
Judd Lyon: Yeah. Yeah. No, I love it. That's awesome. I, like, I Like, I was talking to him. I don't care if it was Bobby. It may have been Mickey. I. I don't. I. I gotta remember who. But we were talking. It may have been Mickey in his book. Club. We're only. There were only a couple of us in there, so it just turned into like a free form chat. It was fun, actually.
Chris LaFay: That's what they normally turn into all like so many of Mickey's things. They're just excuses to have hangouts with people. Like, that's.
Judd Lyon: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like we talked about the book for a minute and there was only like three of us in there. So it was like, so what do you do? And I, we were talking about the book. It was, it was good to give. No, not good to give. Give to grow.
Chris LaFay: Oh,.
Judd Lyon: Give to grow. It's really good new business book. I don't know if you, you've read it. You, you kind of follow this, this type of playing the long game and just cultivating relationships. This guy's in Atlanta. The guy who wrote it does like sales training.
Chris LaFay: This is a beautiful book. Holy cow.
Judd Lyon: It's an amazing book. Buy the hardback. Highly recommended.
Chris LaFay: I love books that have design to them. Like this, like this makes things so much easier for me to read. I love this stuff.
Judd Lyon: Yeah, it's great book. But we were talking about that and one of the things, I can't remember how it came up and I think we used to use the example, maybe he brought it up, of having it clear. We were debating on whether you should list pricing on your website or not. And, and I think he thought of you immediately and was like, oh, Chris does a great job of that. If, like he just, boom, hits you with it. So, so nobody's wasting any time. And it's just like, hey, this is, you know, these are the ranges we're talking here. And if, if we're, if we're on the same page, great, let's have a chat. If we're not, then this isn't for you type of thing.
Chris LaFay: I hit everybody. There's choose your own adventure. Do you want to see websites that we built? Do you want to see our team? Do you want to see pricing? Do you want to see process? Or do you want to see our training videos? Literally everything a client would want is in this paragraph.
Judd Lyon: Awesome. I love it.
Chris LaFay: That's it. Like, and if you go and want to have fun and click around, you can do that too. But like, oh, yeah, it's also right here. I forgot about that. I actually stole this concept. There's guys that do positioning. They do a lot of.
Judd Lyon: Oh, they're amazing. I was at the guy's workshop.
Chris LaFay: This.
Judd Lyon: They both were supposed to be there and one of them got sick.
Chris LaFay: Oh, did you go to the thing in Florida?
Judd Lyon: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Oh, did you meet a guy named Andy Milligan by any chance? He was there. He's one of my good friends. Hold on. He's from. He's from Columbus, Ohio.
Judd Lyon: I can't remember if I didn't. I missed. I missed half the second day because I got a hot RFP while I was there, which was great, but it was. I met a friend for lunch and then I ended up staying like a half hour from the venue. I don't know how I goofed up so bad, but it was like a 50 Uber back and forth. But I. I went on a whim because I met Sahil.
Chris LaFay: I. I want to get Sahil to one of my events. I'm trying so hard.
Judd Lyon: He's the man. He's the man. I'm sure he's. I'm sure he's like, always crazy busy, but he's. He's a man. He's bright. Did you hear their company's crazy? The they do is really crazy. I would love to, like, learn, learn more and, and be a fly on the wall and see some of their. They've got an incredible proprietary data set.
Chris LaFay: Dude. And they're incredible 150 employees. Like, he. He is almost came out to like three of my. Because I was on his little. His podcast where I got the free knife and the little CRO crimes or whatever it was.
Judd Lyon: Oh, yeah, yeah. We.
Chris LaFay: I didn't realize he was in Decatur. And so when we realized we were like next door neighbors, basically, we tried to get together like three times, and it's all felt. We had it on the schedule, on the books, and it's all falling through. And so I'm hoping.
Judd Lyon: Yeah, he invited me to above the Fold. So I met him at an Exit 5 dinner over in Inman park. And there was only like, There was only like six of us there. And he was at the other end of the table. I didn't know a soul. And I was blabbing at one end of the table and he was at the other end. And at the end we're like, oh, man, I, I. Sorry, I just introduced myself. I'm like, I didn't get to talk to you. And he's like, oh, I'm in. I'm in the website game too. Kind of like, sort of thing.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Judd Lyon: And then I. When I lived in Austin, I was a big fan of this guy Pep. Liah is his name. P E P L A J A. And he runs a company called Winter now, by the way. Someday, maybe. Maybe we can collaborate on this. I have wanted to, and I can't afford it at the moment. But one of the other big things that helps you be original and that I think is, you know, defensible, is to. Is to do custom research. And I want to do it, but it's not cheap to do it. Right.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Judd Lyon: Maybe there's a way. Maybe there's a way you and I could figure out a way to, like, do a study together that we can both benefit from. He runs a company now called Winter w y N T E R. And they do like it. They're basically like survey panels. But he recruits. They're only for B2B. And so if you wanted to get, like, you know, 100 B2B CMOs or whatever, you could get that list and then do a study and say, we want you to evaluate this website or our positioning or whatever. But prior to that, he ran an agency called Conversion xl, which then got spun out into a thing called Spiro. He's one of the. He's one of the godfathers or one of the big dogs in conversion rate optimization.
Chris LaFay: Gotcha. Okay, that makes sense.
Judd Lyon: He was a very big deal and has gone on to do multiple things. But he's. He's a. I was in one of his early cohorts when he. He created a training company which is still around, called Conversion xl. Anyway, when Sahil told me he's like, yeah, we do CRO. I said, oh, I, I. I dabbled. I tried to get, like, kind of certified and was very interested in it, but none of my clients had enough traffic. That was the problem. It's like, I couldn't get good data. I was, you know, putting two small stakes, but. But I used to. I met with this guy Peplaya a few times, and when I. In my Austin days and Sahil freaked out, I wasn't trying to name drop. Like, I'm not friends with Pep, but. But I'm like, do you know who Pep is? And he's like, holy. He's like one of the godfathers or whatever. He's like, we should talk. And so anyway, I hit it off of Sahil. Sahil sent me a link one day. It's like, hey, I'm gonna do this thing in Florida. It's the first one. Would you be interested in going? And I'm like, well, I'm not in B2B sass. I'm not doing, like, cr.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Judd Lyon: And. And he, you know, gave me a. It wasn't free, but it was like, yeah, Chopped it way, way down. I'm sure he did it to anyone, you know, he knows in Atlanta or whatever.
Chris LaFay: But it's like 100. Yeah.
Judd Lyon: Super cheap ticket. And I was like, dude, it's a hundred bucks to fly to Fort Lauderdale. And the ticket. Yeah, I think it was like 300 bucks or something. I was like, hell, yeah, I'll go. So anyway, I went and one of the. One of the sessions I was super excited about was Anthony. I think it was. I'm pretty sure it was Anthony from Fletch. They were both supposed to be there, and one of them got really sick. Dude, you want to see someone moving around in figma? That guy's FIGMA game is insane. And his presentation, I mean, they're obviously amazing. They're the way they've productized what they've done, built the whole audience on LinkedIn. And, like, I'm so jealous of what they've built. It's like, incredible what they've done. But to see him, we were just at these little tables where there would be like six of us per session, and he's got a whiteboard and he's just breaking it down for us. That dude is the real deal. It's like, you can tell someone's bright not when they do their polished stuff that they've thought of ahead of time or when they record their videos. Like, that's one level of intelligence. If you can see them in live and you start hitting them with. And you're like, hey, what do you think? Well, what would you do here? What would we do there? And they can explain to a newbie or someone who's like, super advanced right then and there on the fly. And he was. He had that level of just fluency where it was like, oh, wow, this guy's. And just couldn't be nicer. Super nice guy. So I was in a session with him. He was amazing. And then I don't know if, you know, pass. Bobert was really amazing. She does, like, landing page optimization for sas.
Chris LaFay: So Andy, the guy that I mentioned earlier, knows Task Bober. They live close by to each other, and that's the reason.
Judd Lyon: Oh, amazing. It's such a small world, man, when you start talking.
Chris LaFay: So, yeah, this was really cool.
Judd Lyon: I was. I was a little out of it. It's not really my. My world, but it's like, close enough. But yeah, the vibes were amazing. People were super friendly. And so he'll did an amazing job, like, just making it like it was a business event and people care about business. But it's not like. It just was not corporate at all. It was not. It was the perfect size. It was maybe like 2, 300 people, which is a really good size for events.
Chris LaFay: Wait, wait, how many people there? You said? 150, 200?
Judd Lyon: Yeah, it was maybe 2, 300. I would say.
Chris LaFay: That's impressive. Like, I didn't realize there were that many people that went down there for that. I. So I. I also know that they were. Lucky is not the right word I'm looking for, but when you have people that have audiences like Sahil Taz and the FLETCH Folks, getting 200 people is going to be a piece of cake. Like, like, like all those odd. Like those are. That's hundreds of thousands of followers.
Judd Lyon: Yeah, they had heavy hitters. And then the sponsors, like the SAS, a lot of those B2B SaaS companies have deep pockets. And so, you know, Vector, I think, was one of the big sponsors and a few others that were like. And then they recorded a bunch of their, you know, conversion crimes or whatever. Like, they had people shooting content. They had all the videographers. So they were. They were repurposing it into their own marketing really well. And it was just. It was a fun thing. But yeah's awesome. And he's always such a good representative of Atlanta. He was wearing Atlanta gear the whole time.
Chris LaFay: Nice.
Judd Lyon: Yeah, it was fun. I. Yeah, he would be amazing, but I met him through Exit 5. And so then the. It. It opened up recently that the ambassador for Atlanta stepped down. And so I kept bugging him like, I'll do it. I'll do it. I'll it. And finally they. I bugged them enough. They're like, ah, all right, whatever. You're doing it. So my first. My first events next week. I'm nervous just because it's the summer and I don't know if anyone will. Any of the members will show up or not. We'll see.
Chris LaFay: But what are you doing? And like, specifically.
Judd Lyon: Yeah, so the first one's just a happy hour. It's. It's at. I wanted to find somewhere central that had parking and it. I could get. Get people too. So it's at Polton Row over at. Oh, yeah, whatchamacallit, Colony Square.
Chris LaFay: I was actually Square Colony.
Judd Lyon: I. I can't remember. But by this time of the day, my brain starts going to.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Judd Lyon: Anyway, over there in Midtown, they've got like a area you can reserve that's off to the side of that. That food court that's on the top floor.
Chris LaFay: Nice.
Judd Lyon: It's called the Nook. So yeah, it'll be fun. They reimburse me. They reimburse me for. They said you get a budget, it's like 3,000 a year, which is nothing. But it's like 750. An event, something like that. So like at least cover people's drinks. The first person told me that the Nook was free to reserve and then they sent me a thing yesterday for 200 bucks. I'm just like, ah, whatever. But we'll see what Exit 5 will reimburse. I don't care if I put up a little of my own money just because I get to make some really good.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Judd Lyon: Some good connections. But we'll. We'll see. But anyway, it's a very high level group of like. I've learned a lot being in there just from other like B2B marketing. Marketing types. It's fun to. I do a lot of lurking in there just like soaking up what they're doing. I.
Chris LaFay: So my. The. I'm actually, I'm actually glad that you mentioned that because one of the. The lunches that I want to do, the larger lunches my wife told me about politened know that that existed. So I want to do like. Because the problem at Taqueria del Sol is they freaking like kicked us out after a while and I'm like, I don't want to do that again. I also want a place that's easy for people to buy their own meals and then come together.
Judd Lyon: Oh, dude, it's perfect. I'll put you in touch. I've become friends with them. I can put you in touch. So Sasha is there managing it all day and then there's a woman named Zoe that you have to like book it through. But the. They have two things. So the alley will accommodate 35 people or 36. Yeah, it's basically off to the side of the food court because the food court is very like high end. Nice.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, yeah.
Judd Lyon: Kind of, kind of swanky food court. And. And. But you can reserve the whole side of it. That's kind of like standing room. But they kind of cordon it off. They'll fit 36, that's 135 an hour. Or the Nook is like 100 an hour. I think something like that.
Chris LaFay: That's not bad because honestly these lunches are like two hours mostly just to get people enough wiggle room to like arrive late basically. Yeah. Because like I did, I bought it off from like 11:30 to 1:30. And so like if I have to pay 200 bucks to have a dedicated space to where I don't have to worry about.
Judd Lyon: Yeah. Then let everyone do what they want. If they want Japanese or if they're vegan or if they just want coffee or whatever. Do you know?
Chris LaFay: Yep.
Judd Lyon: Knock yourself out. And so they validate parking for 90 minutes, which is pretty good.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, that's fine.
Judd Lyon: You know, obviously some people want to stay for the full two hours or whatever and pay. I think it's like eight bucks an hour or something. If you stay for a long time, you can get hit with a nasty parking bill. But it has parking and it is validated. People can have their own options. It's indoor. Outdoor. If people wanted to go outside or whatever. There's amazing. There's amazing outside with a big screen.
Chris LaFay: Yep. Thing.
Judd Lyon: But yeah, it's a great place to have events. I kind of got in there. My group's gonna be tiny. I. I didn't, I wasn't misleading, but I kind of told them like, hey, there might be opportunities because I'm supposed to throw one event a quarter for exit five. And so I kind of. They have bigger venues there and they also have JoJo's beloved in the back, which is like the speakeasy sort of thing that you can do private events in. You've probably seen it on like people are obsessed with it on social media guy. But like, anyway, yeah, it's a good place for events. But yeah, let me know. I'm trying to. I'm trying to get involved in more events. If you ever want help or ideas or if you, if you're putting groups like consider me, consider me a yes unless I tell you no on stuff versus the opposite.
Chris LaFay: Love it.
Judd Lyon: And then also, at some point we should sit down and talk if you're interested. I need to sit down and figure out. I want to conduct some original research as part of my marketing because it's defensible, it's original and there's things I want to learn and know anyway. So there might be a way. But sometimes it's cost prohibitive for a one man band to do it. But if you, you know, team up with someone who's like minded, we can, we can both.
Chris LaFay: I am a huge. Pretty much everything that I'm doing is all in collaboration. So like if I host a topgolf event, it. I'm gonna be splitting that bill with another partner. If I'm doing a conference of some kind, if I'm doing a video shoot of some kind that's for free for people I'm splitting that. I'm doing that with a co host. I. All year. If anybody wants to split anything with me, I am down.
Judd Lyon: So, yeah, let me. Knowing that. Let me. Let me process that a bit and think about on the research front, I wonder if we.
Chris LaFay: If we both get to know Sahil better. I wonder if we could pay him for some of his data. If we then say we work. We were working with Spiralize with some generic data, and this is what we're coming. This is what we found.
Judd Lyon: Yeah. Maybe anonymize it. I. That. Yeah, Winter has some pretty amazing data sets. There's a company called Fractal out of Florida who I've always admired that you can hire to do, like, data journalism. I don't know that I would hire them, but if you look at the type of stuff they put out, it's pretty amazing because they do, like, data visualizations and stuff. But they buy. They'll create. They'll come up with, like, a proprietary data set by doing a nice survey or something, and then they'll create, like, amazing visualizations or whatever as a way to get links to your website for your SEO or your online visibility or whatever.
Chris LaFay: I do have to. I do have to run, but I have one last question for you that's short because my wife. We're gonna go grab dinner. Are you a part of the Bureau?
Judd Lyon: No, I'm not.
Chris LaFay: Okay.
Judd Lyon: I'm not. But my. I think. I think I told. Did I tell you about the Bureau?
Chris LaFay: So there was a period of time where multiple people told me about the Bureau, and I think you were the one that was like, the straw hit the scale.
Judd Lyon: I was the last one. My buddy Roger's in there. I don't know if you. My buddy Roger out of Austin, Texas.
Chris LaFay: The reason I asked.
Judd Lyon: A huge beard.
Chris LaFay: Have. Definitely have not met him. The reason I asked is I'm doing one of their owner's camps, which is one of their small events, like 20 or 30 people up in Minneapolis in about six or seven weeks and.
Judd Lyon: Oh, that'll be amazing.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. So if you were part of the Bureau and you wanted to go to something like that, I was gonna say, like, hey, I'm doing this thing. You should go do this thing.
Judd Lyon: So, yeah, I'm not in there. My friend Roger went to their thing in San Francisco last summer and just said it. Said it was amazing. And it was very small. And so it was like, yes, high signal to noise ratio, where people were really talking about the real deal stuff. Carl. Carl's amazing. Carl was big in the Expression Engine community. Same thing with Jack McDade back in the day. He used to run a web agency called Engine Works.
Chris LaFay: That's funny. I know nothing about Expression Engine. Small world. Yes.
Judd Lyon: Small world.
Chris LaFay: Yes.
Judd Lyon: Everything. Everything old is new again. That's awesome, man. We'll have a wonderful. Have a wonderful dinner. I'll send you an email and we'll connect you to Carrie. She's amazing at, like, setting up groups and is a good person to just know in. In general. So.
Chris LaFay: Yes.
Judd Lyon: And I will see you on Thursday.
Chris LaFay: Thursday in Dunwoody over at Lazy Dog. The address and all that jazz is in the. Is in the invite.
Judd Lyon: Oh, of course. You're. You're on top of it.
Chris LaFay: Got a person named Ryan Clee joining us, and I got a woman named Katie Wagner, as well as me and Mickey. So cool.
Judd Lyon: See you then. Thanks. Thanks for the invite.
Chris LaFay: Of course, man. I'll catch you later.
Judd Lyon: All right. See you.
Chris LaFay: Bye.