Ep. 3 - Riches in the Niches with David Roma | Devs:After Dark

Yeah, so this is going to be the thing where, you know, say my name 3 times and a podcast appears. So like, it's showtime. Welcome to episode 3 of Developers After Dark. As you can tell, or those of you who haven't actually watched it and only listened, you do not have to adjust your television sets because it is in fact a Halloween episode. And the reason for that is because we realized at the 11th hour that when we go to post this, it'll probably be the day before Halloween. So at the 11th hour, David was nice enough to humor us with our, our getups and our costumes. And yeah, so what we're going to do is, as we now traditionally do, now that it's episode 3, we can say traditionally.

Traditionally.

Uh, we're gonna do a little bit of housekeeping just to kind of go over some stuff that, uh, and I have to admit, when I, in the last episode, I mentioned at some point that like the housekeeping would get shorter and shorter the more we did this. I was absolutely 100% wrong because I made probably twice as many mistakes in the last episode than I did the first. Uh, but we'll start with AJ's, uh, just to kind of like soften the blow a little bit. Uh, Alice Cooper is not the lead singer of Alice in Chains.

That would be—

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. News to me.

Yeah, no, that's what AJ—

To be fair, I realized that like 2 seconds after I said it though.

I, I—

it's still really correct if we corrected it in the moment.

We're counting it.

We're definitely counting it.

Fair, fair point.

You should have realized that while it was in your head. I don't think it should have gotten to the point where you actually said the words. So, uh, no, I'm sorry.

The filter was turned off at that point, but it was Layne Stanley, I believe. The late Layne Stanley, I believe, was the, uh, lead singer. Um, And then I mentioned, and it's actually the title of the last episode, No Higher Than Buckingham Palace. I don't know if there's actually a rule about that. I thought I heard that at one point. I swear to God, no. Someone told me that at one point, and I may have just kept repeating it. So I— disinformation spreader. I know in the central area of Rome, inside the— I believe they're called the Aurelian Walls, you can't build anything higher than St. Peter's Basilica. And then I think also in Athens, you can't build something more than 12 stories tall to block the Parthenon, with exceptions. But I couldn't find anything about anything being taller than Buckingham Palace at any time in history. So that may have just been me with wishful thinking that nobody should build tall buildings because I hate heights. So we'll kind of just— we'll breeze over that one a little bit because that was— I don't know where it goes. Spider-Man: Far From Home, the scene was in the Netherlands. I believe I said somewhere else. I don't think I said the Netherlands. The Sears Tower is the Willis Tower, AJ. You live in Illinois; you should know that.

No, no, I know it is, and I and I said I'm still going to call it the Sears Tower. It's it's always what? But it's when does that change around Tinley? Like everybody always calls it like it was the Twitter Center. It was first First National Bank.

Yep, the theater around the corner. It's been there for a while though. And, and you live about, you know, and you live in this state, so it's, you should know that. But, um, and then finally, I didn't wanna leave Dennis out. Uh, Dennis is really bad at '80s movies knowledge.

True.

'Cause he mentioned a movie and then he messaged us later what the movie was and then alluded to it, got everybody excited about an '80s movie where technology takes over a house and then couldn't deliver with the name of the movie. So with that said, those are some of our housekeeping and corrections.

Wait, what was the name of the movie? You still never said the name of the movie.

I think he messaged it to us.

I did, and I've, I've forgotten since then what the name of the movie is. It's— I, I would recommend watching it, honestly. It's not very good. And I— the only thing I remember from is that, that bathroom scene, and I saw that on YouTube recently, and that was, uh, still terrifying, but, uh, not worth an hour and a half of your time. Whereas this podcast, however, is perfectly worth an hour and a half of your time.

Exactly. And the reason for that is because we have— and I like that segue, Dennis— a very, Very, very special guest who I would have to say has done more in his life than if you gave people, I would say, five lifetimes. It's a fantastic thing. I personally know him from the template marketplace. At that time, it was the asset marketplace, and he's gone from somebody that works with HubSpot to a friend to now someone on the podcast. I will let him introduce himself. This is David Roma. David Roma, why don't you tell everybody who you are and what you do? Yeah.

Wow. The early, the early template marketplace days, 2020. I mean, what a, what a different world it is now. We should talk about that because that's a really interesting, that was a really interesting time in, in the HubSpot world.

Yeah.

You know, I think at my core, I'm a, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a, I'm a creative person. I'm a lifelong web developer.

Okay.

I've been a web developer since I'm like 11 or 12 years old and got into programming. I do SEO, PPC, traffic generation for a really long time. I'm a digital nomad and currently I do a HubSpot— sorry, HubSpot Solutions partner agency called Drive. And it's just me. I'm a solo agency.

Okay.

And I build HubSpot CMS websites for companies like Reddit. I do a lot of HubSpot technical consulting for enterprise customers, anything from, you know, complex CRM migrations to coded workflows and all that good stuff. And as you know, I build HubSpot digital products like themes and modules, and I've got a bunch of themes on HubSpot's marketplace. And now I'm learning how to build HubSpot apps in Carter and Justin's bootcamp because I really love product development. And I, you know, I've, as a developer, I've built so many products over the years and most of them never made it to market. Like there's such a difference between when you're a developer, you love to build stuff. There's no doubt about that. And, you know, my whole life I would just build stuff because I was really excited about it, but I would never take stuff to market or rarely.

Yeah.

And then, I don't know, a few years ago I just started realizing like, I need to like do stuff with all this stuff that I'm building. And the themes were actually the, that, that HubSpot theme generator was the first real digital product that I ever brought to market and treated it like a real business and did marketing and sales and customer service for it. And you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a much different world. When you actually bring the product to market. And so now I'm doing Carter and Justin's bootcamp to learn how to build HubSpot apps. I mean, I technically know how to build HubSpot apps and I've built one before just as a hobby to like see if I could do it. But their bootcamp is centered around building CRM cards, which I actually think are gonna be— I think this is— I know this is a bit of a longer intro than we would've expected, but this is, I think this is really important. I think these CRM cards, and we should talk about this in, in the episode is gonna be a major thing for HubSpot CRM.

Yep.

Just like themes were a big, were a major shift and a huge growth lever for HubSpot in 2020, sort of getting early in early on that was like major for a lot of us developers. I think CRM cards is gonna be the same thing. And so I'm doing their bootcamp now so I can see if there's an opportunity for me to build and bring to market. A new app, a new product.

And I, I'm proud to say I actually reviewed Generator when it was submitted in the early days. So I, I feel like I, I, I, I'm, I've, I've, I've helped, I've helped as best I can.

No, but no, I think it's great to be able to—

You've been essential. It's great to be able to like, uh, you know, see that from the very beginning and then see what it is now as like, you know, one of the more popular, you know, apps. Or I'm sorry, themes in the marketplace. And, you know, just real quickly, I'm the host and obviously, so hopefully if people have been watching this, they know who I am. Dennis, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself?

Dennis here. I'm taking this off because it itches and I really want to drink my coffee.

I got a man sweating under that thing.

Oh my God.

I can feel it here, like just a little bit.

I'm just trying to—

Beard on beard, man. Beard on beard. Um, yeah, developer advocate at, uh, HubSpot. Um, and, uh, I will, I, I do stuff. I'm, I'm, the reason I'm here is because I can put this on YouTube for Nick and he needs me.

He has all the, he has all the power of the videos on this.

He really does.

And, and I'm AJ. I'm the developer advocate here at HubSpot as well. And, uh, I do things too.

Uh, Dennis does probably more than me, but you're selling yourself short, but I mean, I'm the star, so let's let's like make yourself sound.

Was that a short joke? Hold on, wait a minute. No, I'm back.

No, no, no, no, no. I'm only taller than you by like very like it's not my much.

That's true. The Laportes are a small family.

We are.

Oh, absolutely.

We are a small breed. Yes.

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Now, to start this off, when we were first talking, David, you had told me about a process that you were going to do in order to prepare. For the episode. And I thought, okay, no, that's great. That's fantastic. And then when you actually showed me what you did, and the reason why I want to talk about it is because I think personally everybody in who— it doesn't even matter what your vertical is or your job should do this exercise at some point in their lifetime just to kind of— and I'll let you explain it, but I think it's just so vital and important. And then after you explained like the reasoning behind it that You, why you did it, it just made it all more, yes, I like, I, I wanna do it myself at some point. So can, can you kind of give a little bit of insight into what that was and then why you decided to do that?

Yeah, I mean, this was, well, because I knew you were gonna ask me, you know, about my origin story. And I was like, okay, well, you know, I have all this info in my head, but I really have done so much. In my life that I had a hard time like organizing it in my head. I could remember all the things, but to actually communicate it in a way that makes sense from like a timeline perspective, it was going crazy in my mind. So I took like an hour or 2 and I just went through like each important moment in my life.

No.

And I just wrote them all down in Notion.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm sorry. I had to interrupt you. Like starting when, like, uh, like from your youth? On, or were there—

I thought about that, but I wanted to keep it to professional. But actually, this was so, like, enlightening for me to do this that I'm going to do it from, like, my earliest memory until age 18, which is when I started this for you, the history for you guys. And it was so good because— and then you start to remember all these amazing things and people that you've met. And it's a very good— and a way to do this, this is how I did it. I basically brain dumped what I remembered about my life into ChatGPT and then just told ChatGPT to format this in a timeline. And it did it almost perfectly like that doc that I shared with you guys. Yeah, that is ChatGPT's output basically.

That's awesome.

That's cool.

But everyone should do this. It's, it's, and you know, it'll just make you remember things that you may have forgotten about that are really important in your life. Really good exercise.

I, I wanna know, so like as you were doing your brain dump, like were you, how many gaps were there that were filled later on by like just reflecting on it? It's like, oh yeah, by the way, I did this as well.

A few. Yeah, there were a few. Yeah, for sure. But then that's the cool thing about ChatGPT is you can kind of just brain dump and then, you know, I would be like halfway through my life and I would be like, oh, okay, wait a second. Actually go back to what I told you about when I was a mortgage broker and update X, Y, and Z all in the same prompt. So the prompt was like, I don't know, thousands of words, and then ChatGPT just knows how to do its thing.

That's awesome.

Did you at all be like, hey, I wanna get this award? Like, did you, did you ask like ChatGPT like, hey, can you like, uh, make up a Nobel Peace Prize thing? Or like—

Yeah.

Like, make me sound really awesome, by the way.

No, I, I think that's fantastic cuz I think, um, I think that's somebody, that's something everyone should do. And really at the end of the day, You could, uh, you know, once you get to a certain point, then you already have your memoirs written. If you want to do a book, if you want to do a book tour, you know what I mean? You've already got it there. So, but, but yeah, I, I do highly recommend, uh, to anybody that has never done this before or has even attempted it or thought of it, go ahead and do it. Because then it also helps too. I was thinking as well, like if you ever go to like update your resume, it's not like you're going to dump all of that on there, but you've already got those things kind of highlighted and outlined and it makes life easier. And of course, I'm sure like over time you'll update it or there may be things you think of later on, but like just to have that somewhere stored, I think is just, it's amazingly beneficial. And honestly, thank you for doing that because like not only did it like inspire me to want to do it as well, but then it's also like just a cool thing to read and then have a conversation with somebody instead of trying to like pull those things with questions that you may not even know exist, like, as far as like the experiences, it's all right there. And I do appreciate that because then it makes life easier for me, seeing as I'm not good at this yet. I'm hoping to be at one point, but like, it does, it helps tremendously. So, yeah.

Have you guys ever read the, have you guys read the storytelling? What's the storytelling? I can't think with this thing on. What's the story? Building a StoryBrand. Did you guys read that book? No, you guys, I know you guys, I know what you're into. It's, we're all like developers and marketers, so you're gonna appreciate this book. It's called Building a StoryBrand. You should, and it's an easy read, couple hundred pages, you'll fly through it. But he really drives home the, the importance of storytelling in general.

Mm-hmm.

And like what it does to your, to people's brain as they're reading a story and how it influences them in certain directions. I highly recommend it. So doing something like this for your life and creating this timeline, it makes you a better storyteller and you can use it to update your LinkedIn about section. When people ask you like, what do you do? You won't be all jumbled around and looking for answers. It just creates, it makes what you do and your life timeline more concrete in your mind. Um, Which I think has a lot of like ancillary benefits.

Do you happen to journal at all? Like, do you do a daily journal entry?

Yeah, I do that every day.

So like, that's like real time, like this is your state of mind. So when you reflect back on your past, obviously you have a, you know, an older, wiser, you know, uh, noggin up there.

Yeah.

Would you plan on like looking at this periodically as you age and your perspectives change to see like Does your view of yourself change? You know, like the whole— yes, maybe I'm talking.

Yeah, I don't know. You know, when I journal, it's more about like what, you know, like resolving issues that I have, might have going on right now. Like, what am I, what am I dealing with right now, whether it's in business or my personal life and coming to a resolution there. But it's interesting to think about journaling For the past. Yeah, that's a thing about the past.

It's easier to like, uh, say the what, you know, like the, I did X, Y, and Z. The, the, the really interesting thing is actually talking about the why. And there's, there's 2 different, there's like you're in the moment, like where you actually can't have a perspective on it versus later on in life where you can have a fuller perspective and see all the aspects to it, which I think is cool.

And to that point, you know, that's so, that's actually so important. Because when you're in, when you're in the weeds, when you're actually in it, you can't really see the forest for the trees or however that expression goes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

But, you know, but, you know, when you can, to your point, you're older, when you get older and you get wiser, you can look back at your life and you almost look, use it as like a, like a mode of self-discovery. Like, ah, I see why I made that career shift from being a mortgage broker to a web developer. And I see why, like, I felt like being a mortgage broker was sucking my soul and I didn't really know that at the time, but like, I see it now because I know myself better.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

That's what is it? Hindsight's always 20/20, right?

Right.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. No, that's fantastic. It's, it, it's very, it's beneficial. It, it really is. And like, just doing something like this, I think opens up a lot more Like self-reflection too, because as you start to look at these things, like you said, Dennis, like that why question, I can't even, I, I, I can't even think, I, I couldn't even count on one hand, like the amount of times I've ever, ever asked that question of what I've done throughout versus, you know, versus like just being able to regurgitate what the what was, you know?

Yeah.

Um, so yeah, for me, that's not, now, uh, uh, I wanted to ask you, David, like, is Do you, would you consider like the journaling part as like one of those things that are kind of like therapeutic? Because you had mentioned like, as far as like with, with that goes along with your story, that the kind of like, and I'll use the word digital nomad, but I think it's pretty apt. You had mentioned other things like meditation and, you know, and clean eating and things like that. Is journaling like one of those things too that not only it's beneficial in the ways of like being able to self-reflect, but do you find it to be kind of like a stress reliever as well?

Well, I think it's— for me, it's more of a mode of self-discovery. And I think self-discovery is really probably the most important thing that we can do. Because when you can learn about yourself and you know, start to know who you are, you can start to make better decisions in your life.

Mm-hmm.

So, for example, I always tell people, like, you should really figure out what you're passionate about as early as possible. Because, you know, you're going to spend a lot of your life working. And I'm not saying passion has to correlate with work one-to-one, but we should like learn about ourselves as deeply as possible so we can, so that we can align our actions with our, you know, soul's intended path or whatever.

Right.

I think that's really important. I'm a web developer and I love coding and web development and building product and all this stuff that I do so much. I don't work. Like, I get paid money, but to basically just play around with tech, you know? AJ, you knew about it.

I see it.

And, uh, so, and I only, I, that's, that's my reality. And people are like, oh, well, you, you know, you live so, you know, your life's awesome. You do what you love to do and you travel the world and all this. And I'm like, yeah, for whatever reason, I knew that I wanted to do like, lived this way from an early age. You know, I was, I was super young, like maybe 10 or 11 years old. I saw the movie Hackers. And right when I saw that movie, I was like, this is it for me. I want to be like these guys. I just knew it. And I'm a 10-year-old kid. Like, you don't know anything about yourself when you're 10.

Right.

So there are these things that are like wired up in you, these natural propensities and proclivities in certain directions. And I feel like we discover these things. How we discover them, you know, we could talk about that too. But I just knew from an early age that I wanted to be involved in this stuff. And I think that's what journaling does for me. Not that I journal so much. I mean, I really, you know, I'll, you know, I'll go into Notion and I work on my goals and my ideas and my, I guess you can call it journaling, but I think it's a tool for self-discovery. That's what I'm trying to say.

I mean, I'm hearing all that when I'm thinking about passion. I feel like sometimes people Misplace what passion actually is. Like, they put like a physical thing, they attach a physical thing to passion rather than you watch Hackers, you had an emotional response to it. That is where your passion lies. And understanding what that emotional response is actually what you really need to start researching to understand, because you can do all kinds of jobs or duties and they don't— not really fulfilling your passion. They might be getting in the direction, but until you fully understand that.

Right.

You're just going around in circles. Absolutely.

Plus it's hard too to separate, like, especially if your passion might lie outside of work because work is such a big part of people's time investment throughout the day. Like if you do work a 9 to 5 or whatever, like the hours are, it's sometimes like, for me, I found it hard sometimes to separate, like, is this something I'm passionate about or am I just really, really in-depth into it because I have to do it for work or because I want to make something at work really, really good. That may not necessarily be something that I'm so passionate about that like it keeps me up at night, or I gotta like in the middle of like at 7 o'clock at night, I just have to go, you know, work on this thing because I love it so much. So, and also too, the movie Hackers at age 10. I used to work at a video store, and I'm sorry, David, but I wouldn't let you rent that at 10 years old. I, um, uh, but no, but I, I, I, the same thing. Like I, you know, you see that movie and you're just kind of like, and it's also funny too, like looking back, like some of the screens that they use for some of the, like the computer screens, like some of the prompts and like the programs are just like—

The best.

It is, it is amazing. But it was like, you look now and you're like, oh my God, really?

If you pause screen, if you pause and, and read, I do this all the time. Whenever there's code on screen in a movie, I pause and I read it. 8 times outta 10, it's some, something ridiculous.

Yeah.

Once in a while they've actually done their research and like hired a consultant to be like, hey, put some good, put some code on the screen that if some, someone like one of us is gonna look at it, it's gonna be legit.

I, I do the same thing anytime some tech pops up on the TV. I'm like, that's not at all right.

Yeah. Just overanalyze it completely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I remember, oh God, what was it?

NCIS. Like there was this episode way back where they were doing something and it, it was like localhost, like 1, 2, And I'm like, this guy, I'm like, this isn't like, this is not real, whatever. And then they're like, oh my God, the person's in the building. And I was like, or they're on your machine.

Like, one of those.

Yeah.

Yeah. Or when, or when someone's hacking and there's like, like a graphical user interface that's happening too. Like, it's like, it's, they do this in Hackers too, where they're like, they're hacking the, the thing or whatever at the, the ship. And it's like showing a ship rotating.

Right.

You know, who built that UI?

Who built this UI? That's the Gibson.

It's the Gibson.

The Gibson.

Yes.

That's the Gibson.

Yep.

Gibson.

That's—

now, you, uh, speaking of that, as hacking, because like, I know at the earlier stages of, um, you know, your career and the things you were doing, uh, you were actually involved in some of the— and I bring this up because like, I was one of those kids like on, uh, you know, America Online and like, The, the programs and the progs, if you will.

Progs.

To show our age, uh, just a little bit. But yeah, like you were actually like built some of that stuff, like were actually involved in like looking at, you know what I mean? Like being more in depth than just like, I, I, I'll be honest, like me personally, I was just one of those kids that was like, yeah, I'm gonna grab that. That looks kind of cool. I just kicked somebody off. That's kind of funny. Like I didn't really get in depth into like figuring out how it actually worked and the, and the language behind it, but. You did though.

Yeah, well, that's when I started to get— that's when I became aware that you could actually build this stuff. So I was the same way, you know, I got onto AOL because that's the way you got onto the internet back then. You got those little AOL discs in the mail, 30 minutes of internet.

Yep.

You know, and we had a computer in the house and I was just so attracted to the computer and I wanted to get online. And I found the like AOL hacker community. Not saying I did any bad stuff, okay? So legal discussion. I'm just saying I might have kicked a few people off America Online.

It's been a while. Now I know why.

But I became—I was so psyched on these progs and like the guys that were making them, and and it was just so interesting. Like like these programs are so powerful, and like these people are making these things. It's like how are they making them? That's so interesting. And I'll never forget. Wow! This is crazy. I haven't thought about this in a long time. I installed this software called Hex Workshop.

Hmm.

Okay. And it, it's basically like view source on a website where you can, but you can also edit the code too. So you install Hex Workshop and then you can open up any application. I had a Windows machine at the time, and then you can like poke around and like change copy and change code around. And, and so it would like let you see the code and like change the code. And I was like, okay, I gotta learn this. And so I started teaching myself, wait for it, Visual Basic.

Yes.

Yeah. I always thought that that was for me, like I always thought that that was the best way to kind of introduce yourself into it. I've always been the type of person where it's like, if I don't know it, let me open it up. Let me try to break it. Let me try to mess with it and see what it does. And then learn from those mistakes. Right. And people are always shocked, like, They shy away from that word. Like, it's very, very, like, it's poisonous. Like, mistakes, mistake. No, we can't make mistakes. It's like, I was always in favor of it. I was just like, as long as you're doing it in a controlled environment, like testing server, whatever the case may be, like, break stuff, see what happens. Like, you know, 'cause some of those things, like, later on in life, they just, it almost becomes like second nature where you see something and you're like, yeah, don't do that. You're gonna break a bunch of stuff. Don't do it. I can assure you. So yeah, I really, I really respect and I really, I always lean towards doing things that way just because I've always had a very positive experience in that approach to it.

So, and this is like the sign if you're an entrepreneur or not. Like, and honestly, this applies to life too. I mean, you know, there's no user manual for life either, really. You gotta kind of try stuff and not be afraid to fail in order to figure out what direction you want to go in. And if you wanna read a good book about that, if you guys have ever read Psycho-Cybernetics, this is like top of my list. But, but that's it, you know, that's the, that's what entrepreneurs do. And I think, you know, if you wanna master life, that's what you gotta do. You gotta follow your intuition. You gotta try some things. You gotta fail.

Right.

You gotta fail. Break, break, break.

Yeah. And failing is not bad. Failing is data collection. No.

Right.

Yeah, that's right. That's iterations right there, man. That's like a data loop, right? You're, you're getting more and more info outta that.

Exactly. You're either succeeding or you're failing and learning to increase your chances of succeeding. So it's winning either way.

Yeah.

Now, at an early age, you actually jumped from, like, you talk about the, like, around the 10-year age, but not, I mean, I mean, it's a couple years, but that's pretty short. Like, you jumped right into, and Dennis is going to appreciate this because he said last episode, like, everyone we talked to here has either Worked in real estate, worked in mortgage, like worked in this arena.

It's so crazy.

And like you said, around age 19 that you became an actual mortgage broker.

Yeah. Yeah. So I spent like, you know, age 10 to like, you know, 17, just sort of being a kid skateboarding, but also like dabbling in learning HTML and, you know, but it, you know, just a hobby for me. And then, yeah, my first job was as a, I got, I got a job as a mortgage broker. You know, one of my— I was working at a skate park when I was 17, and my buddy who's a little bit older than me was like, look, I just got this job doing sales. You can make a lot of money doing it. And I said, I told— I turned him down a bunch of times. I was like, I don't wanna do that. I wanna skate, you know, I wanna skateboard and get paid for it. Like, right. And then he finally convinced me. And I took— I, you know, went into the office and I, Sat on the phone and started making calls, trying to get people to refinance their homes when all the interest rates came down back in the day. And it turns out I was good at it. I was good at sales and I had no idea. And I was really good at sales. And, you know, just one thing led to—

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Are you, are you responsible for the, the recession we had? Are you, are you, is it all you?

Directly. Directly.

No comment.

That is now the shortest episode we've ever had. Thank you for—

Sorry guys, I'm having some technical difficulties with my new microphone.

It's the mortgage. Like when you were at the mortgage brokerage as, as part of the mortgage brokerage thing too, that's when you got bit by the SEO bug, right? Because that's, that's around the, at that time. Because I, that's near and dear to my heart because I started also at like an earlier part of my career and I'll be honest, when you get opened up to the SEO world of things, it completely changes your entire kind of outlook. I mean, depending on what your vertical is, like if, if you've never touched that type of stuff, but as, as you've gone through this journey, like let's say we're at like age 19, you have already been exposed to code. You've already been exposed to the tech side. How did opening yourself up to the SEO aspect like change, or did it, I should ask, change your perspective on just Kind of the way you approach things.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think if you have like a natural propensity towards business, which I was just discovering at this age that I did and I liked business, then lead gen is going to tickle your fancy at some point. And I was a mortgage broker and I'm just, and being a mortgage broker, by the way, I did that for 6 years. That taught me how to sell. And I think just for all your listeners, If you can do one thing, if you can learn one skill, learn how to sell because it can be one of the most valuable skills across your entire life. And I was at this point as a mortgage broker, we have to generate leads. You guys know. You need to come in contact with people that either want to buy homes or need to refinance their existing mortgage. And I was buying leads from a company called LendingTree. They're still around. Yeah. You see their commercials all over the place. They're a huge lead gen company. I mean, they do a ton of marketing to get homeowners to apply for a mortgage through their website.

Yeah.

And then they sell those leads to mortgage brokers. So I was buying these leads and these were supposedly the best leads, exclusive leads, $80 a pop. And I, so I was like, okay, let me try these out. They're pretty expensive. And I bought a bunch of the leads and the leads were not good and they were not exclusive to me. I found out that other brokers were getting the same leads that I was getting. The lead quality was sometimes, if not most of the time, not as good as they had led me to believe. And I was like, well, you know, they're just a website that is capturing people's data. And then they're selling me those leads. I kind of know how to build websites at this point. I had a few friends that were into SEO, so I knew what SEO was, but I didn't know how to do it. So I was like, you know what? I want to take on a new web project anyway, because I was getting a little bored with just doing mortgage sales all day. So I decided to build a mortgage website, a mortgage. I was going to build a, I built a, I built a website that's like LendingTree. But for FHA mortgages, like a very specific type of mortgage loan, because I figured you know the riches are in the niches. I'm not going to compete with Lending Tree on these like short tail mortgage and refinance related keywords. Let me go super niche on the keyword targeting strategies when I was starting to learn about SEO, and I started to target FHA home refinances because this was like as niche as it gets in terms of like keyword targeting. But it was also a really good. Yeah. It was a really good thing for business too. These like FHA loans.

I could definitely attest that like the real estate industry, like mortgage and real estate, I mean, you can kind of combine them together depending on what you're talking about, but like, yeah, lead gen for that. Because, you know, working years for a brokerage and trying to generate leads, it wasn't mortgage leads, it was more real estate leads. But at the end of the day, it's still like one of those things where It's a financial— the word I'm kind of looking for is like, you know, it's a financial purchase that someone is going to make, whether that's to get the mortgage loan or to buy the home. Right. And it's one of the, as I've mentioned probably previously, it's one of the most, if not most biggest purchases an individual makes. Right.

Yeah.

So trying to like extract information on that in a world where, and especially like later on, In the Chicagoland area, there's multiple brokers you can go to. You don't have to just go to one, right? There's people that are independent, that they're their own single brokerage, or they're their own real estate broker. They're their own person, right? You can be a sole proprietor in that. You can be part of a bigger— so just giving your information out to people, you could pick whoever you want. So you really had to have done something special to get that information. And I imagine the mortgage, Part of that is no different. So it is, it felt hard to do that, right? Because you're asking for information on a promise that like we are going to give you to someone else who's going to seal and close that deal for you under the assumption that whoever gets that handoff does a good job. They may not necessarily. So it's, yeah, it's one of those things where like when you start to realize SEO and you start to be able to take it and do something on your own, there's like a, there's a real power there that you kind of get to nurture, which is just, it's amazing. And like you said, you did your own thing and you started to build your own thing, which I think is fantastic. And I think anybody in the SEO world should have a kind of, I don't wanna say a pet project, but at least a project. Like if you are an SEO, right, there are certain things Like, especially if it's for a bigger company that you, you just, you can't do. Like you want to, I want to try this, I want to build this and this content silo. It just depends. Like, whereas if you have your own little thing that's your own that you can work on and practice these SEO things in principle, I think it helps you overall in the long run. So I would recommend doing that for people as well who want to, or either just getting into SEO or are kind of like, I don't want to say you're locked into something because you're with a company, but a company also has to cover themselves too from a search perspective. But Doing this on your own in some form or fashion, I think helps you learn. It's kind of like that do and break yourself thing, but I wouldn't—

Exactly.

Go do it on something where it's like, this is my business, this is where I make all my money. I wanna try this weird thing and they don't get banned. So, uh, I wouldn't recommend that, but, you know, having those outlets to be able to try to grow that skill, 'cause it's hard sometimes. You, you, especially in the SEO world, you, you read, like, you can read Search Engine Journal, you can read all these other places and all these opinions, and some of them are based on certain amount of facts, but nobody really knows an algorithm unless you're sitting in Google headquarters next to the person running the thing, right? Like in theory.

Yeah.

So it's, um, one of those things where there's, there's a lot of information out there. There's a lot of opinions on things. There's a lot of research and it changes drastically. So that's why I say like getting exposed to just search in general, Opens you up to this whole world of stuff that you were just like, it makes you think differently about everything really at the end of the day.

Totally. Yeah. And, you know, I learned the fundamentals and I still, I recommend everyone just like, you know, if you're interested in SEO or generating your own leads, learn the fundamentals. You can get pretty far with just the fundamentals without diving into the weeds. Right. I'd learned the fundamentals. I built this website for mortgages in 3 months and I launched it. And I did everything I needed to do to get it ranked on the SERPs. And I had the 2 aha moments that I had that made me a full believer in SEO, PPC, you know, the whole traffic generation world where when I, after 3 months, I generated my first lead and I could not believe it, you know, because in my mind I was like, okay, I mean, I'm sure this is possible, but when I actually generated my first lead and I knew that like a person that was interested in a mortgage Found my website over LendingTree and all the other big boys.

Mm-hmm.

And then my website, and I had a lot of really good content on there that was educational around FHA mortgages. And they read my content and they liked it. And then they reached out on my website to contact a mortgage broker or whatever. And that lead came in. I was like, I can't believe that. That's magic that just happened. And then the second aha moment that made me like a full-on believer or that you can Kind of that it's like a superpower is I was at my girlfriend's house at the time and we're hanging out on her couch and her sister's there on the computer and her sister was looking to buy a home and she knew that I was a mortgage broker. Her sister knew I was a mortgage broker. And so she's like, Dave, can you come over here for a second? I'm on this website right now and I'm reading about FHA loans and I want to see what you think about it. And I was like, yeah, sure. And I get up and I go over to the computer. And she's on my website. She found my girlfriend's sister found my website on Google and was like researching FHA home loans. And I was like, okay, that's it. This is this is powerful stuff right here. Awesome.

Now, as Dennis mentioned, you were responsible for the economic collapse and the housing bursting. No, housing bubble bursting. No. But you at a certain point there there was a there was a After all that, there was a transition, uh, from your career. Um, at what point during that did you make that decision where you were like, I need to transition my career into something different? Like, not different necessarily as in completely different, but I need to move in this direction because where I'm at right now, especially after all of that, because that was, I mean, not to make light of it, but yeah, there was, uh, you know, that was a pretty rough time. Like, there was, I was working at— the brokerage at that time in Chicago. And there were just, there were people talking about like, well, I have to sell. I don't have really a choice. This was going to be the time I was going to sell, but I have to eat that $100,000 I'm going to lose. And I'm just like, I'm looking at them like, you're serious? That's a real number you're really going to have on this condo that you have? And he is like, I gotta move. I, like for work purposes and stuff. And it was like, yeah, I can't wait for it to bounce back. I don't know if it ever will. So like, Yeah. When did you, at what point and what was like, I guess that tipping point where you decided I need to move in a different direction?

It was, it was, it, it came at, in a way, the, the perfect time for me, this economic collapse that was like so devastating to so many people. And I owned a home at the time too, and I, I was lucky enough to sell it right before the collapse. As a mortgage broker, I was just getting so burnt out on doing sales every day. Like, sales is great. And I, and I loved that as a, as a skill and as a discipline doing sales, but it just wasn't creatively like challenging enough for me. I wanted to do so many more things and I also wanted to like, uh, I didn't feel like I had any skills that I could say that I owned. You know, I was like good at sales, but I wanted to, I always loved this idea of having like a portable skill where you like web development, for example, where you can learn how to code. Mm-hmm. You store it in your mind. You can take it anywhere you want. No one can take it away from you, and you can basically deploy it from anywhere. To me, that was always amazing. That's like a superpower. And so I was getting super burnt out on the mortgage industry in general. And then after the collapse happened, it became very hard to make money as a mortgage broker or in real estate or in banking, anything involving finance. So I was like, you know what? This is probably if I'm ever going to make a career shift. From what I'm doing now to something that I'm passionate about. I'm going to become a web developer, and now's the time to do it, because if I don't do it now, I'll probably just stay a mortgage broker for the rest of my life. So I did. I took a year off because I had a bunch of money stacked up, and I was like, I'm going to take a full year off and just chill and do art and just relax, but also Really teach myself how to code, like level up, like fill— I had a lot of gaps I needed to fill. Also, this is around the time where we were going from table-based layouts to CSS-based layouts. So I was like, I know I need to learn CSS for layouts, so I'm gonna do that. And then I'm gonna reinvent myself. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna become a web developer. And so that's what I did during that year. I really leveled up.

Can I ask you a question? Not to— sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but To sharpen some of those skills or to even acquire some of those skills, what were some of the things that you did? Because I mean, there's, I mean, especially now more than ever, like, I think the argument can be made that there's tons of places you can go to either learn a new coding skill or any skill really, like learn a new skill, sharpen a skill. Were there anything that you kind of gravitated towards in that timeframe where you were trying to kind of like level up?

Yeah. Well, my mortgage website was like the first project that I worked on where I, because it was starting to do really well right now, uh, at this point. And so I would work on the mortgage website all the time and, uh, that, and that gave me a project to work on where I could improve my skills.

Mm-hmm.

And if anyone's ever looking to learn how to code or learn how to market, you know, this seems to be the theme of this talk right now, which is Get a project that you're excited about and just work on that and you'll learn everything that you need to learn. And it's the best way to learn because it's a, you know, it's a feedback loop. And so at that point, like after a few years of working on that website, you know, pretty regularly, I started to get good with HTML and CSS, a little bit of JavaScript and SEO. But to level up, you're right, there were no Codecademies. I, so I had to, I bought a book on PHP, a thick, what's the popular one? The, uh, is it O'Reilly's or—

Yeah. Oh, sorry.

I think I have that same book. Like, I might, I think I have it sitting somewhere here.

No, if you're our age and you're a web developer, you have that book because this was the way you did database-driven programming back then. It's like you wrote PHP. Let's be real. That's right. You did. Most people. Yeah. And so I, I learned PHP. 'Cause I wanted to build database-driven websites. And I bought a magazine, a web developer magazine. I don't remember the name of it, but it had a whole like 10-page spread on learning CSS for layouts. And that's what I, that's how I learned CSS. I mean, initially, and then those gave me the, the foundations, but then really just learning, you know, by building websites.

You had a magazine subscription to something that had something about CSS, like writing CSS. That blew my mind.

Yeah. It was like a web design. It was a web design magazine. I gotta find the, I gotta find the name of it.

That is, that's amazing. No. Now, at that point then, this is where you, I would say, I mean, let me know if this is correct to say, but you, where you transitioned into web development and then this is where you started looking for agency work, right? At this point, like in New York City and things like that.

Yeah. Cause I was figuring like, I don't have any credibility as a web developer. I've been a hobby web developer, but if you're trying, so I knew that I wanted to make this shift and I felt the best way to make this shift was to, yeah, I've been learning on my own for a long time and I saw that there was gonna be a lot of value in being around other engineers and learning from them. So—

What, what we are, what year are we at right now, by the way? Just so I have a little historical context.

That's a great question. Let's see.

Did you guys like come out yet or are we still—

I want to say like, I want to say like 2009, 2010.

The big reason I asked, and I know I'm totally derailing you here, but like the idea of credibility in 2009 is different than credibility in 2024, you know?

Totally. Totally. But I was like, people need to, people know me as a mortgage broker. They need to know me as a web developer now. So my plan was first thing you have to do. if you're ever looking to become a web developer, is you gotta build a portfolio website. daveroma.com, your whatever, yourname.com. And I just figured if I had a portfolio website and I had 3 projects on that website that I worked on, 3 web dev projects, my mortgage website was one of them. So I just convinced 2 of my other friends to let me build their websites. And then I had 3 projects on my daveroma.com portfolio website. And then I was like, okay, if I can get a company, an agency, cuz back then it was all about, and it still is like if you're in New York and you're a web developer, you're either gonna work for an agency, like an ad, big ad agency, or you're gonna work for a product company.

Yeah.

Well, most likely. And so I was like, okay, if I can get an agency to hire me as a web developer, I don't care if they don't even pay me. I just want to have on my resume web developer for like 1 year, and then no one can tell me I'm not a web developer. I already have the skills, but now I have like the recognition from the industry. So I made my portfolio site and I got my, you know, got my, put my projects on there that my friends let me build their websites. And then I just started applying for agency jobs in the city and I eventually got one for, for $10 an hour as a junior web developer.

That's awesome.

I, I have to say, I think, I think breaking into the business, if you wanna call it that, like that first job is always so relieving to be like, hey, I made it. Like I've finally, I've got that label as a developer, right?

Right.

Cuz I know for me starting out, I, I did the same thing. I started in sales basically in the one company I was at and then just kind of was like, oh, I could do website stuff. You know, it's kind of outta date, let's make it. And like as we started progressing through that, like, Once I applied to an agency where it was like, I applied for a developer job and got a developer job, I didn't just like level up because the need was there kind of thing. It definitely gives you a whole different attitude towards like, cuz a lot of us are talking like it's our, it was our hobby. Like this web stuff was a hobby and then it turned into a job.

I never really wanted to hear what AJ had to say.

I was actually, I was, I was hanging in anticipation and I was waiting and I was like, oh, this is gonna be good.

It's a good screenshot. Someone screenshot this.

Okay.

Hang on. Am I back?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I don't, apparently my internet's unstable and I'm the only one here using it, so I don't know why it's unstable. Sure, sure. But, um, I, I don't know where I left off.

That was the best thing I've heard you say the entire time though. Yeah. That's probably great.

I mean, you froze in a good, you know, usually when I freeze, I'm like, exactly. You froze cool.

Like it was a cool, like, oh, good, good.

I'm glad it looked all right. We're still gonna give you crap about it, but it's still good. Oh, that's fine. That's fine.

But yeah, I think going from hobby to, you know, making that hobby a career, I think is just that, that fulfillment that you feel like I, I'm doing something I'm passionate about. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. You know, I think that, that's a huge thing.

When you, when you, uh, got this junior position, that, uh, junior implies that there was a senior position there as well. So yeah, you were working on a team. How, how did that, how you've been coding prior to this change once you realized there had to be like a structure? With a team organization?

You know, that's a great question. And luckily my, I only had one, there was only, there was a, it was a team of 2 developers. It was me and my senior. And, um, we ended up getting along really well. We were both sort of had this entrepreneurial spirit and in a way we were both learning and getting better, um, at web development in our own ways.

Yeah.

So we both kind of recognized that in each other, that like, Neither one of us is perfect at this, but he was better than me. He knew more than me, but he was super patient. And Jalami was his name. Shout out to Jalami if you're watching this. And he became a mentor of mine for years. How did it change? I had to learn jQuery while I was there. I didn't know jQuery. I knew vanilla JavaScript, but not jQuery. So I had to learn jQuery, and then that's around the time that Node just came out too. So, and that was so exciting. Node was so exciting in those early days of Node. So we were both, really both of us were, he was a little bit ahead of me with, in jQuery, which was great 'cause I got to learn from him. And then I was actually ahead of him in Node because no one really knew Node at that point.

Yeah.

And I just, I, when I saw Node, I was like, this is gonna be the future. And I went all in, just started learning about Node. So I actually ended up teaching him a lot about Node. So there was, in a way, there was also like an equal ground for us too.

And I think that's a really interesting point that you bring up is that a lot of people that don't understand like how developers level up and stuff, it's a lot of code sharing. It's a lot of knowledge sharing. It, you know, it's not, it's not something that's just simply like, yes, you can read books and you can learn things. Well, you really don't learn like the complex and like the, I don't wanna say shortcuts cuz shortcuts isn't a, a good term, but like the more efficient way to do things until you start collaborating. Mm-hmm. Like, that's where I really like started getting more into code was, you know, I, my, my first boss when I was in IT, uh, Joe G, he taught me a lot about just like making sure that like your stuff is in check when you're going to do it. Like, you know, assumptions. Never make assumptions. Because if you assume something, chances are it's not going to go into play. You need to really have facts. So that really helped build a base on that. But then once I jumped into the agency, I learned so much stuff that I didn't even think about in terms when I was doing it on my own or doing it that it definitely levels you up for sure.

Dude, totally. And this is, and I'm, I don't even know where I got this idea, but I'm so glad I did it. This is why I wanted to go get jobs because I'm not a job guy. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm not a company guy. And no shade on company people that work at companies. It's just, I know myself, I'm an entrepreneur. But I was like, I need to be around, AJ, just like you said, other smart people with different perspectives. Because over that year that I took off and taught myself everything I needed to learn, I kind of maxed out on what I was able to achieve on my own.

Right.

I was like, I need other people's perspectives and I need to learn with other people. This is such a good way. Can we fast forward to now then?

Because you're an independent company and you write the rules. Who are you? Where is this, you know, this challenging, this, you know, tug of war coming from now?

Good question. I'm full of them. It's a good question.

It's a good question today. Thanks.

You know, I'm pretty I'm pretty, I have a pretty clear direction with where I want to take things. And I have a lot of, I have a lot of entrepreneur friends and developer friends. So I still get this interaction with other people that are like me without having to work in an office with them every day. I'm actually looking, you know, I'm a digital nomad, so I travel with a lot of digital nomads. We travel around the world and a lot of digital nomads are entrepreneurs.

Yeah.

Or in tech and have a similar mindset to me. So I'm, I'm like always around my people, even if I'm a one-man show.

That's interesting. So like, I was thinking specifically about coding, but like you're, you're talk— you're talking bigger than that, right? Like with these digi— it's not just entrepreneurial spirits, like challenging on the entire whole thing, not just like a, a specific piece of it.

Right. And for coding, I'm pretty honed in on what I do now. Like, when I was younger, I would— I wanted to learn everything. I mean, I spent a year working at a company just so I can learn Python. And I got that job so I can learn Python and get paid for it. And so, but now it's like, I know exactly what I do and like what languages I like.

Yeah.

And I don't really want to— I don't want— Like, do I wanna learn Elixir and Phoenix? Carter, if you're watching this, you know what I'm talking about. But yeah, I do wanna learn that, but I don't have the like time or I need to stay focused.

Sure.

Right? So like all the stuff that I focus on now, like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Hubble, Node, you know, and, and you know, now some like AI stuff.

Yeah.

That's pretty much where I spend my time and where I've been spending my time for years.

So, Uh, uh, Nick, I apologize for hijacking with questions here, but like, how, how do you, how do you, uh, know what is candy and what is actual protein that you're putting into your body? You know, like what, like actual, where, where are you spending those calories and how do you know which calories are empty and which ones are actually nourishing?

I think we have to have a North Star when we ask these questions. And for me, as a business, I need to always be asking myself, is this thing that I'm either going to learn or build going to make money like now or at some point in the near future? Because if that's not my north star, then, you know, I'll just go down coding rabbit holes. Yeah, I'll learn how to— I'll, I'll turn— I'll just work on Flipper all day. And Flipper is awesome, but it's not gonna make me any money.

Yeah.

So I sort of use that as my north star, like as my number one. Yeah.

Anyway, I don't know why in my head I keep on going back to your, uh, you're the senior at your agency who was really good at jQuery and look at where jQuery is now. Like, you know, like it's hard to know when the actual technology is gonna be long-term relevant versus like, it's like a, a fad.

Yeah. And jQuery, you know, People will try to hate on jQuery, but you really can't because it's still a very—

No, for sure.

It's a great library for DOM manipulation. I'm not above jQuery. I'll use jQuery. I mean, I rebuilt Generator, my theme. It used to use jQuery. I rebuilt the entire thing in vanilla JavaScript just to get the page speed boost. And it's a better decision really for the architecture of the theme. But I love Vue.js. Mm-hmm. Uh, for building interactive, uh, content, I guess. Mm-hmm. And like calculators and things like that. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But, uh, you know, jQuery, jQuery powers a lot of the internet too. I mean, there's, it certainly does. That's true. It certainly does. Let me, right.

Let me go ahead. No, it's okay. Go ahead.

No, I was gonna say, so I, I, I wanna get your like perspective on this. Like what, since you've, you've sold a lot of things in the, in the, theme marketplace, and then you're talking about, um, app building and things like that. Like, what is your creative process when you're like, what should I build next?

Mm-hmm.

Like, how do you, how do you normally go about, like, like, do you do research? 'Cause I know, like, for instance, like when holidays come around, like searches for holiday-themed module, everything goes up naturally. That's any store you go to, right? You know, any kind of marketplace, you'll see like the specific themes come up, but taking out like holiday themes or like themes that people expect. What do you, how do you like go about saying like, you know what, I'm gonna build a theme that's gonna do X, Y, Z, and this is why I'm gonna build it. Like, what is your thought process when you do that?

This is a great question and this is so important. This cannot be understated. It all starts with your intuition. Okay? It really does. In 2019, I heard Luke Sommerfield talk about how HubSpot was gonna revamp the CMS in 2020. And he had that, he made that talk at Inbound. And my intuition was just like firing. Like I knew for a fact that that was going to be a massive thing for HubSpot because HubSpot customers already love HubSpot. They can't really build good websites on HubSpot yet at this point, but now they're going to be able to. Okay, this is gonna be huge.

Mm-hmm.

And so, but I didn't think about that consciously. It was more like my intuition was telling me, hey, there's a lot of overlap here and this is something worth exploring. So when my intuition starts firing like that, I know that I'm onto something. It doesn't necessarily dictate whether or not I'm gonna execute and build, but I'm at least gonna start researching, going down that rabbit hole a little bit to see what's up. And the same thing now, you know, so, so, but Luke's talk at Inbound is why I still got into the HubSpot CMS in the first place and why I started building themes. And that turned out pretty well. My themes are doing really well. My free themes are generating a ton of leads, like 1,500 leads a month. Am I allowed to talk about that on here? We can. Yeah.

I mean, if you're disclosing it, that's fine. Plus too, let's not forget that this was around the same time too that I was hired. So I mean, these things all correlate together here and, you know, but I did want to take you back though really quickly back to around the 2013. year that you have in your timeline, because you talked about the, like, the entrepreneurial spirit, and then you talked about these things that really drove you. But at this point in your career, you had kind of, and I'm using your words, not mine, but like, there was burnout. And it's a real thing, right? It's an absolute real thing.

Oh yeah.

And the reason why this one sticks out to me, this part of your journey, is because you at that point had joined a company that, and I say this tongue in cheek, but I absolutely loathe when I worked at the brokerage because at that time when it first started, it hadn't really jumped into the real estate. It was more of like on the tech side of things. But Compass, this is around the time you joined Compass and like I was in awe of like As Compass became like more into the real estate world, just, I mean, and the owner of the brokerage that I've worked for, if he hears me say this, he's probably going to be like, really? But it was beautiful. Like they just did things right. Like as they started building up that tech previous and then started moving that into the real estate, it was just, I was in awe of just the way they built everything out.

Yeah.

So my question is, What caused, like, if, if you don't mind, if you don't mind answering it, like, so what, what led to that kind of burnout and then that jump over to Compass?

What led to the burnout? It was a, the agency working at big agencies. You are, you're required to cut corners. You will be required to cut corners and work really fast. at the expense of executing with quality. And I just don't like that style of work. I can do it, and I did it for many years as a developer in the agency space, but I didn't like it. I didn't like rushing through my work and, you know, just launching things that were messy. And, and also were like, maybe only gonna, you know, you build a website for, you know, some pharma, pharma client or whatever, some big company. And in a year, they redo it and all that work is just gone anyway. So I found myself in this loop of working 10, 12 hours a day at these agencies, really working on thankless work. And I love my work. I love putting in effort and care into my work. And it just, the agency style of things wasn't my way of doing web development. So I would say that those things led me to burnout in the agency space. But at the same time, one of my buddies that I worked with at that first agency that I got that junior developer job at back in the day, he had moved over to Compass as a designer. He was a really awesome designer. And if you know that Compass was, they still are awesome.

Right.

But when they were first starting out and when I started working there, they were like a They were a real estate tech startup. They weren't a brokerage. And they were building and probably are still building because they have really smart people that work there. They were building awesome tech. And so when my buddy Dennis moved over there, I knew he was a really good designer. And I was like, if Dennis moved over there, they've got to be doing cool stuff. And so I told, yeah, then all dentists are awesome.

That's how you follow the dentist. That's exactly what it is.

And then I told Dennis, I was like, look, man, I'm burnt out working at the agency. And like, I wanted to do something different, but I don't know what it is. And he was like, yeah, come over and work at Compass. We're hiring engineers. And that's really it. I went over there, I interviewed, I wanted to work there anyway because— oh, and oh yes, that was the thing. He's like, you're burnt out on agency work. You have to come over and try product. And I didn't even know what that meant at the time, but then it clicked. I was like, oh yeah. They just work on Compass all the time and they get to put all their care and effort into this one thing, which then gets to benefit from the compounding results of working on one thing consistently over time. That sounds pretty cool. And so, you know, that's what led me to go over there.

Is it safe to call it the— 'cause I, this is the way I've described it, and 'cause it's, it's very similar in like the real estate world as well as throwaway work. Like you'd build a site, best example I can give is like, You, you'd build like, okay, the, our, our brokerage just got the exclusive rights to sell condos in this building, right? We're gonna build a site for this building. And you, you know, you go through the whole process, you have the meetings, you sit down with the designers, you figure out the SEO, and you get all this stuff. And it's like, I don't know, 2 weeks to launch. And then they say, oh yeah, something with the financing fell through. Yeah, just scrap it. You know, but now you've done all this work and you're like, we're gonna launch it later, right? We're gonna launch. It's like that meme. It's like, We're going to do it again. We're going to do this, right? And it says we're going to do this, right?

Yeah. Doing it now. And not only that, but they made you work till 9, 10 o'clock at night because it had to get done. Yeah. Within an unreasonable amount of time. So not only was it a rush, it became a rush and a throwaway, right?

9 to 5 is not really conducive to real estate at all, to be honest. But One of the things I wanted to ask you is then, but after that, right? So after all of that, you did start at one point as a mortgage broker. So then around like, I believe it's like around the 2015, 2016 era, you went back into it as a startup, as creating a startup, like an actual mortgage tech startup. Like what led you back to that vertical specifically?

Man, you know, I was, I'm always having tech ideas and always want to build, having software ideas, and I'm always looking at things and thinking, how can How can this be better? And when you're— when I was a mortgage broker, that's all I saw was just inefficiencies in the industry because that industry, man, yeah, I don't know how it is now, but it was like behind the times in terms of tech. So I was just brimming with ideas that I could build in this industry, in that industry. And I built my lead gen, my mortgage website, which was a lead gen tool. So I did a little bit of tech building in that industry. But once I became really good as a web developer, I wanted to, I wanted to do something. I wanted to build some SaaS. I wanted to innovate. I wanted to do something big. Like I wanted to do a startup or a software company. And this was after I worked at Compass or maybe before. No, it was after Compass. I left Compass and I called 2 of my buddies that worked in, that I worked with at the mortgage company. They had owned their own mortgage company at this time. Like they, When I went and became a developer, they left the brokerage that we worked at and they opened up their own mortgage company. And I was like, look, I want to build this system that can basically get people mortgage approvals on the fly, like in real time using Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac API. And I just had this like vague idea for it, but I think it could be really cool. Do you guys want to like work on it together? And we, we were friends, so we had wanted to work. We, if I didn't become a web developer, I was probably going to open up a mortgage company with these guys. So it all came full circle and I, and I called them and I was like, yo, let's like do like a tech-driven mortgage company together, almost like Compass, but mortgage industry. And this was innovative for like 2014. No one was doing this kind of thing. And, you know, so then We, that's what led me to, to starting a mortgage startup with these guys.

So that, um, oh, do you have a question, Dennis?

I have many, many questions through many parts of this. I'm going to try to scope it just to this part right here.

Yeah. I feel like we could talk for out for all day.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, my, so you clearly are an ideas person, right? Like they're always just like coming at you at all times. And earlier you said something about intuition. How, how do you, How do you bucket ideas so they don't distract you? And how do you know through your intuition what idea to pursue?

Yeah, this took me years to get good at this.

I feel like this all comes back to the very beginning of the self-discovery. Like we could loop through this thing. Yeah, continue. Sorry.

It totally does. 'Cause it really is more of a philosophical thing than it is a practical one. And it's both really. And When I was younger, I didn't have a system for filtering these ideas. The ideas would come through, I'd get really excited about a lot of them, and I would just start building. Literally, this is, you know, because coding is like a superpower. I always tell people this, like, it, you know, if you know how to code, you can build software. Most people are consumers of software.

Totally.

People can actually build software. We're in the minority. There are not many people that can actually build the stuff that everybody uses. But it's a gift and a curse because if you're also an ideas person and you don't have a way to filter what you should be working on because we have finite amount of time and energy, then you might just start working on everything that comes in.

Yes.

And it wasn't really until 2016, I think, where I was just like, I was like building, I was just building something like a cryptocurrency news aggregator or actually no, it was, I was, I don't even remember what it was. It was some, something. And I'm like working so much. And I was talking to my buddy and I was like, dude, I'm like, I'm working so much and I'm like broke. Like I work so much and like, yeah, I'm freelancing at this point.

Mm-hmm.

And I was like, I'm, you know, I'm coding every day. I'm working like 12 hours a day and I have like no money. And he was like, are you working on stuff that's gonna make money? Like now, or are you just working on stuff? And I was like, hmm.

It's a good question.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because if you're an entrepreneur and especially like a solopreneur, you have to be the CEO, the developer, the CMO, right? You gotta be all the things. And it's easy if you're an engineer, if you're a developer at heart, you love, you love development, you love coding, you love building stuff. And it's easy to get stuck in the engineering mindset of just building things and going down rabbit holes. But if you're gonna make a business out of this and you're truly a developer, then you have to learn how to be a CEO and plot the direction of yourself and your company, and also be a CMO slash salesperson and figure out how to sell your stuff too.

Yeah. Also, it's— those are the pillars that I You have to, you have to learn how to stop and say launch, you know, like, cause I think AJ shared this, Nick, I think I shared this article recently about one of the problems is like when you have so many ideas, you go through 80% development of it and you just keep on going and you iterate and you iterate and you iterate, but you never launch it. So you always have this baggage behind you, like, you know, like a guilt, like this is just all your weight.

Yes, it does.

And it adds and it adds and adds.

It's, it's the age-old question of how many, how many domain names do you own and how many are used? Like, that's, that's like a big differentiation there, right? Like, I have a ton, right? But I really only probably have like 2 that are actually active. Uh-huh.

Mm-hmm.

No, that's it. Now, as an entrepreneur who's forward-thinking, and I think it's safe to say that, there is then something happens. Where you do run into adversity. Now, with the tech startup that you started, you had mentioned yourself that it had— it didn't come to fruition and eventually it shut down. Like, and you also mentioned too, things like with regards to lessons in failure. As a person that thinks in those terms and like you do, and you're always constantly trying to innovate in that, how do you turn How do you turn that mindset and kind of, because some people, like, I'll be honest, like I have the hardest time with that, is any type of failure is getting back up and like saying, okay, well that didn't work. Well, let's just do this. For me, that's, it's super hard for me to do that because I get so bogged down in just that word failure. Okay, it failed. And I get like, you overanalyze and you start to like obsess. On the why instead of the, well, why don't make it better? Like, so how do you, as someone that thinks the way you do, and I am, I am, and, and I'm not, I am envious of that because it is something that I lack personally, is that type of mentality that you have, like the entrepreneurial kind of just, let's move forward, let's innovate, let's move forward, let's innovate. How do you get over a hurdle like that? Like something where the tech startup didn't happen, or it happened, but it didn't work and it had to be closed down. The next step? How do you, how do you get over that hurdle?

I bet it's like, I bet it's like getting over heartbreak. You know, you just, you feel it, it sucks, your heart's broken. And then, you know, after a while it subsides, it wears off, and you go back and you start dating again. And I think, I think entrepreneurs have an optimistic disposition.

And I don't know where mine came from.

I didn't, I certainly didn't like will it into existence. But I've always been just really optimistic with pretty much, but definitely with this sort of thing. We're like, it's, there's only going to be success. Of course there's going to be failure, but the trajectory is always going to go like this. It's going to go like this. Right. I don't know why I think that way, but I certainly am like that. And I think you just do stuff and you fail and it's going to suck for a little while and eventually. You get good at it and you do stuff and it fails and you're just like, whatever, just going to move on to the next thing. Now you don't even think about it. So, but I don't know. I don't know what keeps certain people down where they're just, they have a failure and they're just like, this is, this is the end. You know, there's nothing else I can do. I just don't see things that way. I just see like, you know, success is always the inevitable outcome. It's just a matter of, yeah. Going through the motions, but eventually You will succeed. Like, I always tell people—

Passion.

Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm thinking about—

I was gonna go, go. Sorry, I'm interrupting.

Talk. Oh, go ahead. Yeah.

Oh, I was just, I was thinking about how like, um, success, failure, like playing basketball, you know, like you, you, you're, you're learning a sport or piano, whatever it might be, that you have to have a passion for it. Like, you know, you have to enjoy the actual process of playing. Totally. Not just the outcome of being a professional, you know?

Enjoying the journey is definitely a really important part of all this, and especially being a developer. You, that's why, you know, if you're a developer, you have to love it. I always, you know, a lot of people ask me if they should become developers because, you know, you can make a lot of money as a developer. And I always tell people like, if you don't absolutely love it, I don't think you should. Because it's so hard. And you have to be able to deal with such hard stuff over such a long period of time that if you don't love it, you're gonna give up. So to your point, Dennis, about passion, yeah, that's why I think it's important to do what you're passionate about because then the outcome, you're not outcome dependent. You're just sort of having fun and like failure is just like, all right, whatever.

Yeah.

This thing didn't work. like I wanted it to, but it still was, like, dope to build it. Or, yeah. Or even if it wasn't, like, this is just part of life.

So, I mean, Nick, you just— Nick, you just need to be passionate about something. I do.

Literally, you do everything. And my, my, my cold heart does not lend to passion. I, I, I suppose.

Take off the chainmail, my friend.

Take off the chainmail. Yeah. It is heavy. It is heavy. Not just on the soul, but on the shoulders as well. But, With regards to passion, let me, let me tug on that thread a little bit. What then? Because I remember you had this in some of the miscellaneous notes and it really, it kind of stood out because I often wanted to do this too. And I think a lot of people that are into any type of, because I started with art, like I did, you know, developing was not necessarily the thing that got me into this world. It was more of like web design, you know, designing, just photos.

Yeah.

Photoshop or in general, you co-founded a fashion brand as well, like, as entrepreneurial spirit. Where did the passion come from to start something like that?

Well, this was during my transition between being a mortgage broker and going off and being a developer. I took a year off and I'm an artist, like, by, like, I was basically born a creative person like you. Nick, and then like I taught myself all the tech stuff. Like I taught myself how to cook, you know, but the thing that comes most naturally to me is creativity. And so I've always been an artist. I've always been a draw— I draw. And yeah, I was going through this sort of self-exploration mode during whenever that was, 2010 or whatever.

Mm-hmm.

And I don't know how it happened, but yeah, me and my friends just, we were skateboarders. And so you kind of, when you're a skateboarder, you kind of are involved in this like streetwear sort of, we wear like cool t-shirts with graphics on them. And we were just, I don't remember how it happened, but we were just like, let's like put some artwork on t-shirts and like, let's just make some t-shirts. So we started making t-shirts and then that turned into like a full-fledged menswear brand where we started making neckties and bow ties.

Oh, wow.

And like, it became like a high-end fashion thing. Yeah. And these were like $150 ties. And the brand actually started blowing up. Like Time Out New York wrote about us. We had people flying in from Japan to come to our studio, which didn't even exist. We rented a suite in a hotel, in like a dope hotel in New York City. For our studio during Fashion Week, and we had people from Japan because Japan loved our brand for some reason. And people from Japan would fly in to like see our stuff, and it started to kind of really take off after a while. Awesome. That is. I skipped a lot of details in there, but that's no, but that's still that's the whole thing.

You know what I mean? Like as it lends to that like entrepreneurial spirit, like because. You know, you talk to, you talk to a lot of people, right? And then, and once they start getting into that, like depending on when they get into like the dev or the coding era of their lives, you don't really, it's very, I think like just talking to people, it seems very rare sometimes to hear anybody say, oh, and I also did this, which I wouldn't equate the 2 things together. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Like from an artistic standpoint, yes. But from like a developer standpoint, no, I would never say like, oh, that developer. Oh, I'll bet you they also owned a fashion brand at one time. No, absolutely not. Like, so I find that like absolutely fascinating. But yeah, I can, like utmost respect for like starting in the design realm and then out of whether it's necessity, passion, or it, but moving into that developer space and having and tying all of that together. Because even that I sometimes feel is a skill where it's like you'll find people that are either very artistically focused or you'll find people that are very numbers and programmatically focused and to find a person that can marry the two together and function, you know, well in that space is great.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not easy. The juggling ball, the creative, the left brain, right brain. Right. It's, uh, making them work together. It's tough.

I'm curious. So like you, you blew up and, uh, like how, how did you, and this could extend to your present day, how do you manage the scale aspect of it? I imagine within the fashion thing, it was a little bit harder because you have physical manifestations that you have to deal with, like the tangibles. Uh, and you also had people you're working with. Uh, so, but how did you, I mean, were you anticipating success?

I got, you were, you're optimistic obviously, but like that type of success, like, you know, we were just doing it for fun in the beginning as a hobby. This was like a, this was us putting my artwork on t-shirts and all my friends wearing them. Like, that was just pretty cool and fun. And then when we got to a certain age, we weren't really wearing t-shirts anymore. This is when menswear, the whole menswear sphere started blowing up around like 2010. So we sort of rode that wave kind of accidentally and we started wearing more like dress shirts and like cool, you know, more mature things. So my buddy Paul was like, I kind of want to learn how to build ties, like create neckties.

Mm-hmm.

I was like, make it? Like, what do you mean? He's like, yeah, I want to make neckties. I was like, okay, cool. Let's do that. You know, that's cool. I like, me too. Like, let's learn how to make neckties. So we took a sewing class and then we took a tie-making class in New York City. And then we, and then we, but that tie-making class kind of sucked, but it did teach us the basics. But then we learned how to really make good ones from YouTube. And we started hand-making neckties and it would take, each tie took like 4 hours. Yeah. To make each necktie. We would spend all weekend just like sewing, you know, just like—

I'm not hearing scale right now.

I'm not hearing scale at all.

No scale there. No scale there. That's cost. Yeah. And we went on for years. It was like 2 years t-shirts, 2 years of handmaking neckties. And then we found a good manufacturer in New York City who actually manufactured all of J.Crew, uh, Thom Browne, all the big guys. So we got somehow blessed with that hookup. And that's when we were able to start scaling because we had the manufacturing. That's when I started, I took over the website. I was like, now I'm going to build a cool website for the brand. He was focused on more like biz dev. And then it got to a point where it was like probably really going to blow up. Like at this point, this was like mid-blowup where we were actually like making some money from this thing. People knew about us in Brooklyn, in New York. And we got to a point where we had to decide, Is this the direction we want to go in with our lives? Because it just started accidentally as a fun thing to put my artwork on t-shirts. Like, what are we doing now? We have like a real— this is like a real company now.

Yeah.

And after we did it, we did the company for 7 years and we both decided that it really wasn't our passion. Fashion. We would have to go to Fashion Week and like do all this fashion stuff. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, what am I doing here? I don't buy— I'm not a fashion week guy. I don't like fashion, uh, but somehow accidentally ended up in fashion. And, uh, we decided to just dissolve the company. We were like, that was it. We're just gonna— yeah, just end it. Wow.

That's a big decision, man. That's like huge.

Let me say, this is not— this— I don't even consider this a failure though, because this is— and even if it was a failure, that'd be okay. But this is, this was, I think, a very smart, conscious decision for us to make because both of our lives went in really good directions, um, in their own ways. Like, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now if I was still involved in Graham Withers.

Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. What was the name of the company? Just out of curiosity, I was, I was in Brooklyn at that point in time, so maybe I knew.

Graham Withers.

And maybe those, those words will sound familiar to you. Where'd you live?

I, I lived in Prospect Heights area. I lived all over Brooklyn, but for about, about 10 years, something like that.

The name comes from a cross-section, Graham Avenue and Withers Street in Williamsburg.

Williamsburg. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, that's awesome.

That's how we named it that. That's right. That's awesome. So like sometimes, sometimes just shutting down the company is a, is a, is a fine idea. Like people equate like a company ending with failure.

But they do. Yeah.

You know, it, it sometimes just like a company doesn't need to exist, or maybe it only needed to exist for 7 years and didn't need to exist for 70. And like, that's sort of the—

You say that so casually. You say that very, very casually.

Yeah.

That is.

I mean, that's huge. I mean, like that, that takes a lot of, especially if it's semi-successful, like in your, you're in the upward trend, right? Like to say done. That's— sorry, I'll say it one more time. That's huge.

It is. Yeah. And I think it comes back to— we're going to circle back again to self-discovery and self-knowledge. You know, we knew that while, yes, we were able to build this thing into something successful, knowing ourselves, this is not something that we want to do long-term. And had we not listened to our intuition and been true to that, then we might have ended up in a position where now we're 15 years in. And we're miserable.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's weird. Yeah. And it's inescapable at that point. Yeah.

I think you, you bring up a good point of like knowing when it's okay to walk away. Like it doesn't, like, like you said, it's not, it's a, it wasn't a failure. It was just, you guys decided like, that's it. It's just not that anymore. Right. And, and that's perfectly acceptable. And I think people need to understand that too, from like any kind of technology perspective. Like some people will work on websites and it's, it's okay if the site didn't turn out the way you wanted. Like, yeah, iterate, go forward. Or like sometimes you do need to make that decision. Like I said, like I've got like the tons of domains, some of those domains, like, yeah, I just had to let them go because like it sounded good in theory, but it just wasn't playing out. Like I remember there was a buddy of mine at the company I used to work at when I did school supplies, like we tried to launch this thing called like SwigSpot and it was basically You know, where are people partying at? You can check in on the app, you can do all that. There was, I think, one other site that was in Europe that did it at the time. And like, we were talking about it, like we talked to some app developers, we were talking about it, and it was just one of these things where it's like, yeah, but like, is that what we want to do? Because like, I was getting to the age— I'm 40 now— and it's like, yeah, I'm getting to the age where it's like, hey, partying is not the thing for me anymore, right? So it's like—

I want to mention too, like, having that many domains, uh, When that 2 years rolls around, it's time to pay the bills. It's like, do I really need all this? It's like, oh, let's, those can go away. That's—

anytime I get that email of your domains are going to renew, I'm like, oh Jesus.

Yeah. That's like a mortgage payment right there. You know?

Um, and it's, it's important to point out that these things are relevant in and of themselves too. You know, the, the 6 months that you spent on SwigSpot, that wasn't nothing.

You know, you guys generated good ideas from it.

Right, exactly. So, you know, I think we can look at things like that, like these things, not everything is permanent. Actually, nothing's permanent. And eventually everything sort of, you know, dies and goes away. So it's just a matter of, maybe we should title this podcast, eventually everything dies and goes away.

The most grim title, everything dies and goes away. Don't do that. It's a Halloween episode though. It makes sense, right? True.

Yeah.

Can I? Okay. So the question is, ending a company is hard. Um, and it worked out for you. When, how do you discern? Because it seems ideal. Like this can't happen for everyone. This is not a realistic, you know, outcome for all people that you wanted to do something else. Sometimes there's like a have-to-do type of thing. Like, and understanding the difference between want and have to, I think is kind of a hard thing to, you know, uh, grapple with. How do you, how do you discern between what you want and what you need to do?

Yeah, we gotta, gotta make money, gotta pay the bills. And I think that that's why I make that my North Star nowadays when I'm considering what projects to work on. It's like, did I make enough money to, you know, am I making enough money Every month to like fund my lifestyle, fund my business, put money in the bank, invest. Okay. Yes. Great. Now what else do I want to experiment with? And, you know, I mean, that's, I think that's a really good way to just look at it. Not everyone, but, you know, I would imagine there's people that are in a position where like maybe they don't love their job. And they want to quit, but if they quit, that paycheck goes away. They might not be able to make it 2 or 3 months. Right. That's fair. So, you know, I can help those people. I mean, I can, I can give some advice for how to make that transition if you, if you like. I have a lot to say on that topic, actually.

Let me ask you a question because this is something that I, I find really interesting. Uh, as you said, you're a digital nomad, so you travel everywhere. you do all of that. How does that work financially for you with cross-currencies and things like that? So like, is your business established in one area, but you just travel? And then when doing business, like if, like say you come across somebody in, you know, like Spain, you're over in like in that region there, you come across somebody there and they want a website and you go to work with them. Like, is your bank in like the US? Is it like, how does that, how does that work as a digital nomad?

Right.

Because I know like In most agencies, like, hey, they're incorporated in the state. You usually have like the local area businesses and like everything is kind of a little more straightforward. But I'm, I've just always been curious because like the digital nomad lifestyle, I know a couple people that have, you know, decided like, we're gonna just RV it or like, we're just gonna live on the road. How, how does that work? And like, how do you know when to make time to do work versus, you know, exploring or hiking or any of the other things in the places you go?

Guys, these are all really good questions. Okay, I know it's only been 3 episodes, but you guys are getting good at these. I've been reading both. Good questions.

I mean, there's Nick, but you know, AJ and I support him quite a bit.

So yeah, it helps. This is a solid question, and this is a 2-part question. And you know, in terms of, uh, I, you know, when it comes to my products, uh, I have customers all over the world. Companies in Australia, Denmark. Australia loves my themes. But, you know, this is, so it really doesn't matter where the product money sort of comes from. I've never really, and I've worked with, so my company is established in Florida.

Okay.

And, and for all intents and purposes, that's where I'm based. Like I have a, like a, like a burner sort of mailbox here that I can get all my mail sent to and packages. And then I can get them shipped to me no matter where I am. So when I'm traveling around, you know, I just, I don't really think about or even care about where the clients are. It's just like, if we're a good fit to work together, then I'll work with them.

So do you often find yourself like, you'll get a client that's, you know, in Italy and you'll be like, I'm gonna go to Italy for a couple of months. Like, is, is that essentially how you work, or is it one of these where like, oh, I've got a client from Italy, but I'm just going to stay in Florida for a bit?

Yeah, I travel based on where I want to go and where my, maybe where my other digital nomad friends are or what places I want to spend time in. Like I became really interested in Portugal last year. I don't even know why, but I just did. And then I went to Portugal for 4 months and worked from Portugal. So I have no business in Portugal, but I stay, I lived in Lisbon. I went to Madeira and then Lisbon. I stayed in Lisbon for 3 months, Madeira for a month. And it was incredible. And I hung out with all these digital nomads there and I worked on my businesses and built product and it was awesome. But I wanted to answer the second part of your question because I thought that was really important, which was, how do you know when to work? Right? Well, and this is important if you're a solopreneur.

Yeah, absolutely.

And, and this is what I was talking about before, where you have to put your CEO hat on and you have to steer the ship. And I, my first digital nomad trip was in 2017. I went to Bali with a big group of 30 other digital nomads, and we all worked from Bali for 2 months.

Wow.

And my little crew, we were all starting businesses. That's when I started my agency, my drive, my HubSpot agency in 2017. And They all want— they, we were all kind of starting businesses and I was working like 8, 9, 10 hours a day during the week in Bali. And all my friends wanted to go and like party and go to the beach and do stuff. And I was like, guys, we're like, we're, look at what we're doing. We're, this is amazing. We have this privilege of being able to travel and work. 'Cause this was in 2017. People didn't really know. The digital nomad stuff was still pretty new back then.

Right.

And I was like, guys, if we're, if we're gonna earn this privilege of like being able to travel the world and work on our stuff while we do that, we have to be disciplined. And that means deciding for ourselves how we're gonna make money and when we're gonna work and when we're gonna chill and have a good time.

Mm-hmm.

There's a lot of distractions in Bali. It's a beautiful place. There's so much to do. We have to stay focused on the primary goal, which is making consistent money so that we can continue to have this type of freedom.

That's awesome.

That's cool.

Now, in the interest of time, as we start to put the plane in position to land, let's talk about, because you brought up Drive, let's talk about the skills that pay the bills, or at least that pay our bills. And that would be getting into HubSpot and essentially like gravitating towards HubSpot. Where, at what point? And I, and I honestly, I, I don't know personally, cuz I, I think when I joined HubSpot, Drive was already a thing. The age, your, your independent agency was already a thing. And it, you may have just sort of started to submit stuff.

Mm-hmm.

But when did you decide, like at what point in, in, in that part of the journey, which is probably, I think, like I'm looking at the timeline here and it's I'm guessing it's somewhere in that 2017 range and beyond. Like what gravitated you towards starting to focus on HubSpot and its ecosystem?

Yeah, solid. In, when I started my agency, I didn't, I, I started as a marketing agency because I was like burnt out on coding. I was coding way too much and I like wanted to, I wanted to get back into my SEO and PPC. So I, I started as a PPC agency. And I would say I launched it in early 2018, and I just didn't really— I launched my company by— back then in 2018, you were able to download all of your contacts from LinkedIn with their email addresses and then send an email blast to everyone. So I did that and I got like 4 or 5 clients that way. You should always leverage your personal network if you're trying to start something.

Mom.

How's your website, Ma? And, uh, and so, you know, I did that, but I also— bad boy I am. I'm so sorry, guys. What was that?

What just happened? Did you get—

could you guys hear that? No, you just froze for a second. Yeah, you froze for a second.

Okay. In that case, sorry, my phone started ringing. Oh, that's okay. And I heard it so loud, but I'm realizing that I only heard it in my earphone, my, uh, AirPods, and you guys couldn't hear it. So that's why I was apologizing. I thought I turned it off. Sorry about that.

Rookie mistake. Rookie mistake.

Oh man. Okay. Well, you know, there's always room for improvement, right? And the next one I'm gonna be better. Okay. I have something on do not disturb. But in 20— and when I launched the agency and, okay, I'm doing all this stuff, I'm doing— I'm running ads for, for companies, but I still felt directionless. I didn't know where I was going. And that was very frustrating for me. And I still had this desire to combine web development with marketing. I'm not just a developer. I'm not just a marketer. I'm really both.

Yeah.

And it's actually so hard to figure out in a practical way how to merge those two together.

Right. Yeah. Right.

So I started, I, so I started listening to agency podcasts and I, in 2018, late 2018, I heard about HubSpot and the way these guys were talking about HubSpot, I was just, it just piqued my interest. I was interested. So I started researching HubSpot. Coincidentally, at that time, my best friend's wife asked me to build for her company a HubSpot app. And I didn't know how to do that, but I said yes because I figured I'd figure it out. So I took on a HubSpot project at the same time that I was discovering HubSpot. So as I start to learn more about HubSpot, I discovered the partner ecosystem and I became a partner because they put you through this like bootcamp to train you up to become an agency. They like teach you how to think about profit margin and Just all this stuff that I didn't know about. And I really liked HubSpot's ethos and the way that they— I liked the approach that they took when they were training the agencies that become partners with HubSpot. And I just thought like, you know what, whatever, this is gonna cost some money to become a partner, but I really feel like this is gonna give me some good direction on like a direction to go in. And so that's how I became a partner. But it wasn't until I heard Luke's talk at Inbound in 2019 about HubSpot revamping their CMS, introducing the concept of themes with drag-and-drop capabilities for HubSpot customers. That's when I had a feeling, but going back to the intuition, that I was going to be able to combine my web development skills and my passion for web dev with marketing. Because HubSpot back then, and still pretty much is, mainly a marketing ecosystem. And I thought it was really cool if I could be a developer in a marketing ecosystem. That'd be a really good way to blend my 2 passions.

That's awesome. Yeah. No, that's beautiful. That is absolutely beautiful. Cheers. Cheers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I need it, man. I really do.

What made you, um, along those lines then, what At what point did you decide, um, that, because, uh, you know, originally you, and I mean, this could just be because this is what I know of with speaking with you, but like starting on the, the template side of things, at what point did you decide that like, uh, you know what, I'm gonna start focusing to, uh, on apps maybe as much as I've been focusing on templates? Was there a point where you were just like, app cards, that's it. I gotta start. Is it like something like that where you just— A switch just flipped and you were like, like you said, that entrepreneurial mindset, like, that's the next thing. I'm, I got to move there.

Well, I love product development. I love the concept of it because here's the thing, going back to Dennis's thing earlier, if we're going to, if we're going to escape the economic prison that we've been born into, then we can't trade our time for money. Okay. But trading time for money, doing services pays the bills and it's tried and true. So I'm not poo-pooing on it. I do it and it's a reliable way to make money, but we're not going to achieve true freedom if that's all we do. So that's why I've always loved product development. And when I built, so when I built my first theme back in 2020, in the early days when it was basically just me and you, that's what it felt like in 2020 of like, is it just me and Nick? Figuring out marketplace right now. That's very nice. And it was kind of like the epiphany that I had when I generated my first lead with the mortgage website, when I got my first sale and it was a big sale, $825 or something. It's not a small ticket thing. It's not a huge ticket thing, but it's a grand, you know, it's a lot of money for a customer to pay sight unseen. They didn't even get to try the theme. They just bought it. And I saw a my first Stripe notification pop up on my phone that I made money, $825 for my theme. And that was another one of those like, okay, we need to focus on product. We're not going to completely stop doing services because that still pays the bills and it's reliable and it's consistent, but we're going to focus more on product. And not like I was when I was younger.

Mm-hmm.

We're going to actually bring products to market. We're going to treat them with respect. By doing good marketing and good sales and good customer service, and actually turn them into a business. So you know, I'm niched down entirely on HubSpot. I mean, I don't I don't take any projects that are off HubSpot, period. So it only makes sense that now that I've done the themes thing, I'm like, okay, well, what other products can I build in HubSpot's ecosystem? And the next sort of ideal. Thing, what could be building an app. I don't even know if I'm going to yet. I'm exploring right now because I also really want to build a coaching program around my theme because I have so many customers. Like I have 40,000 free theme customers that have installed my free themes. And I have a lot that have installed the paid version, my pro version, Generator Pro. Go check that out in the marketplace. Okay. There you go. There you go. Plug. Marketing plug. Generator theme, generator theme, generator theme. It's like Old SEO where you just stuffed the keyword in. I just made the text white, changed the color of the background color.

Absolutely.

Imagine we had generator theme just playing really low in the background, right? Oh my God, I don't hear anything. That's awesome. Why do you want to buy something right now? But it's a weird urge. I don't know what it is. But wait, I was, I was saying, I honestly just saying we just went a little— that, that was a good tangent to go on anyway. That was a fun tangent. Oh yeah, I want to build this coaching program because I have so many and I see so many of these websites being built. And it's like if you install one of my themes, you have the tools you need to build a website on HubSpot CMS without code. But a lot of these companies don't have the knowledge of how to build a full funnel lead generating machine. And that's— I teach that to my, my Generator Pro, my Generator customers because they also get consulting with me. They get consultant time. So I teach them how to build a lead gen site, but I want to create like a coaching program, like a series of guides and courses and maybe even a cohort-based group coaching for my free theme customers where I'm like, I don't care if you buy Generator Pro or not, but I still have this like desire to teach this sort of philosophy around how to generate good leads.

Yep.

Sounds like a subscription that you should set up there, actually.

Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm, I'm still figuring out what that looks like. I keep looking over here because I have a lot of my ideas on my whiteboard over here, but it's going to start with teaching them how to generate really good traffic because this is where it all starts. You need to generate high-quality traffic, targeted traffic, not just any traffic. So it starts with, there's a whole traffic generation section and then there's website conversion optimization, the second pillar. Once you're getting good traffic to your website, what are you doing with it? Are you actually doing the right things on your website where the traffic's actually gonna convert into leads? And then the third pillar is once you actually generate a good lead, doing the right things in your CRM to make it go from lead to money. So I'm working on some cool stuff around that that should be launched at the end of the year.

Did you happen to see the, uh, the developer hug yesterday with Anze's Uh, mix of the CRM React with the CMS React.

Dude, I was signed up for it and I didn't go because I had, I got too busy, but I'm gonna watch it.

Check it out. Check it out. He did a great job of connecting the, uh, the CRM to the CMS, and I think you might find some inspiration in that.

Yeah. Good to know. Now I'm definitely gonna watch it.

That is still the plug. I like it. I like it. Well, we're almost hitting that time and I, I know, uh, you know, you've been talking and I, I appreciate you talking with us for as long. I mean, I feel like there are, Just with the experiences and the journey that you've had alone, that we could literally make like a 6 to 10 hour podcast on it. It really is. But I do appreciate you, like, you're opening yourself up, you know what I mean? Like, this journey is like, it's literally you laid out for everyone to read. And I do appreciate that because that takes a certain something. And then, like I said, you do have that entrepreneurial, like, spirit and that drive and that push. And to have that and then to also be very like transparent about like your successes and your failures and, and talk about those things is, um, it's a combination that I don't, I, you know, you may find it in some people, but you definitely don't find it in everybody. So we, uh, you know, we really do appreciate that and all. And, um, you know, what we'll do is we'll, we'll kind of just, we'll end it here and, and we'll kind of just like, land that plane in, but I want, uh, David, please tell everybody where they can find you. Uh, you know, like, uh, we've, we've mentioned the template marketplace and you definitely, people should. And I have—

Theme or something there? What was that?

There may be one of a certain name.

Did I talk about that? I've never heard of it.

It was a Generator Pro, right?

Generator.

And then, and, and I'll trans— and I have to be transparent, you know, when, when you're mentioning this stuff and I, I do review things in the template marketplace. Uh, this has no bearing on anything whatsoever. Like, it's— I, I do say this as just someone who appreciates like building websites, building themes and things like that. Generate Pro is a, is a great theme. Um, and, and I know that that's— I have to be very careful there because I am the one that reviews themes. But, um, but no, I, I do appreciate like a lot of the things that you've, uh, you've done in the template marketplace. And then the things that you've— like the, the example that you're giving with the, the building kind of like a, almost like an instructional to go along with. I honestly, I find like a lot of people, and this doesn't even have to be, it's not even really HubSpot related, but people who do, whether they go to any other marketplace or any other thing and they say, well, I've got this website now. Awesome. Now I'm gonna be successful. It's like, what do you plan to do next? It's like, yeah, where's the next step? A lot of people don't have that answer or you, or they look at you like you just asked them the question that broke their heart. Like they just Oh, I don't know where to go next. So there's there's an appreciation there that the thought process that you have is in that direction where you're helping people, right? And really, at the end of the day, when it comes to HubSpot and solving for the customer, you're constantly thinking about that. Even even though you've already put a theme in the marketplace that solves for the customer for a certain aspect, you don't even stop there. You say, "Well, okay. Well, what's the next step?" Where most people might just be like. Boom, done. Just buy, I get money, and then, you know, end of story. So there's, there's an appreciation there. Uh, you know, that, that's, that's the kind of people that you want to buy stuff from really at the end of the day. But tell people where they work, where can they find you? Where can they find some of your other work? Uh, if you do have like a resume portfolio type thing, like all of that, tell people where that is.

Yeah. I mean, let's just, let's connect on LinkedIn. Do LinkedIn. Uh, I'm Dave Roma on LinkedIn. You can go to daveroma.com. That's like my personal website. It's, it's, it's getting more built up. I just built a, a, a digital nomad travel map on there.

Nice.

If, if you guys go to it now, it might be a little buggy, but by the time this episode comes out, I'm gonna have those bugs worked out. So you can go check out daveroma.com. That has my links to all my other stuff, uh, on there. Generator is my theme in HubSpot's marketplace. You can work with that.

Um, never heard of that.

You get 2 hours of consulting with me too. So we get to work together when you install the theme. We get to do one-on-ones like this and, and talk about HubSpot strategy and lead gen strategy.

So I, I don't know how much of a fan of, of older music you are, but I think I have a great name to package your thing and just call it An Evening with Roma or An Evening in Roma.

Well, I love that.

The Dean Martin song, like On an Evening in Roma, like that.

Perfect. Boom. Gotcha. I don't know the song, but I love the title, so I approve.

Okay, nice.

Nick, what happened to the quiz?

Where's the quiz? Yeah. Oh, did you want to do— I didn't know if we were gonna hit time, but we could do the— we could tap this.

Okay, we can do it.

That's fine. I just—

it's kind of like the only thing we got going for this whole podcast is the quiz.

That's the only thing we're doing.

Just— I'll do my best.

Fast forward through the first hour and 40 just to watch a quiz that I make up so I can sound like funny. Yeah, no, but okay. So what we try to do or what we're— the plan has always been is to, and I explained this a little bit, I think maybe in the first one or maybe it was in like the description of the thing, but, you know, I always used to watch some of these podcasts or some of these shows where they would do something at the end. And I think it was The Daily Show with Craig Kilborn a long time ago. And he used to do like these 10 questions at the end, right? And they weren't meant to be like, you could answer them seriously, but some of them were You know, asked in a way where there was no good answer or any answer would do, but it was just to like kind of be, you know, funny and sort of tongue-in-cheek. So what I've done is I have 10 questions and we can do this in an honesty format. And I'm looking at you, AJ, specifically to not copy everybody else's answers. So, but what I just do is I'll just fire off 10 questions and, you know, it's just a little something as we land the plane. Uh, just to kind of have a little bit of fun.

I mean, the plane's already landed. We're, we're, we're, uh, we're opening up the, uh, the escape hatch right now.

Right.

Yeah.

We're taxiing right now.

Yeah.

There's a problem on the tarmac, so everybody just has to kind of sit in the plane until I, until, until I excuse everybody. Um, but no, uh, so let's, yeah, we'll, we'll go through this real quick. I'll keep score. Uh, we still don't, I'll be honest, like, we really don't know yet how we're going to, like, or do what with these scores, if we do anything with them at all. But I'm winning. It is so you say, but I think it's fun to do this because in that way I can give AJ and Dennis a lot of crap later when they don't answer things the way I want them to. Mostly them. Other guests outside of that, I want them to answer correctly. So, but we'll go through these and we'll see what you think. And then David, you could tell me if this is a completely waste of time or it's not funny or—

No, no, it's not always funny.

We can use over Slack also. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Regardless, I'm going to be like, dude, that That was so fun. And then on Slack, I'm gonna be like, dude, kill that spot from your—

I'll get like a paragraph or 2 of notes and be like, don't do any of this. This is horrible.

All right, let's try it out.

Let's roll it. Okay. Top 10 questions. Here we go. Question number 1, in which year, and I think I asked this one, so if you 2 above me don't know this, I'm gonna feel— wait, what year? Yeah. In what year did Microsoft release Windows 95?

'95.

'94.

It was actually '95. It was November. I believe it was November. Uh, there was a— I can't remember what day, but it was definitely in, uh, '95.

I mean, that was such an obvious answer that I was like, it can't be the obvious answer.

I thought it was a trick question too when I first said it.

I answered '94 last time.

Okay. All right, good.

To be fair, Dennis gave like 3 years. I think he went through the whole '90s era before he actually gave me a really solid answer. So, but, uh, question 2 is What was Google's fourth retired attempt at launching a social media platform?

Google Google Wave.

No, no, no. I'll say Wave as well.

No, God! What did they call it?

Was it before Wave? It wasn't Google Plus.

We're not we're not Google Plus yet, right?

Yeah, Google Plus. Wave migrated to Plush. Yeah, Google Plus. You're correct.

All right. Yeah. And now bonus points. Bonus points if you can tell me. The other three that failed before it. Wave. Wave is one of them.

How innovative was Wave? Was so innovative.

It was really, really freaking cool.

I can't believe that didn't. It was too much. It was too much.

It was just way too much at the time.

I believe there was four of them. I didn't realize that Google Plus was the fourth one. I I thought there was just Wave and then Google Plus, but apparently there was also Google Buzz. Which was introduced in 2010 and then retired the next year. Google Friend Connect, which was 2008, retired in, uh, 2012. And then I'm probably saying this wrong, but Orkut. O-R-K-U-T.

Yeah, I remember that word.

Yeah, I didn't realize there was 4 of them. That's absolutely crazy.

Yeah, Orkut was popular in Brazil or something.

Yeah, that was— yeah, it doesn't mention the origin.

It doesn't mention the origin. It just mentions those 3 were the, you know, before Google Plus.

So shout out to MySpace also.

Tom being everyone's friend.

Yep. Yep. Okay. Question 3, is pineapple an allowable topping on a pizza? Now I know, David, you're into very healthy eating and things like that. So, um, but is pineapple—

I'm also a New Yorker.

That's true too. Yeah. Okay. So you got New York.

So I do have something to say on this.

So is, is pineapple an allowable topping on a pizza?

I think legally, no. I think it's illegal. As a New Yorker, I have to say that. And I would be lying if I said I didn't like it. So, oh wow. That's, wow. I like it. I'm gonna say it and I don't care.

I, I'm, I'm gonna say no. I'm gonna say it shouldn't be on a pizza because it tears your mouth up. Like pineapple literally destroys your mouth the second you start eating it.

So that's fair. That's fair. What do you think, guys?

I actually exactly like David on this. I, I don't think it should be legal. I would slap it out of the hand to someone on the street in the city. Um, but I've also enjoyed it at, uh, parties. I'm pretty sure.

You shouldn't eat this. Let me take this away from you. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no, no, no is an answer we'll accept. My daughter loves it. I can't, I can't stand it. I absolutely can't stand it, but she's not old enough to watch this stuff anyway, so it's fine.

We're good.

Um, so for question 4, what was the most downloaded app, since we're talking about apps too, of the 2010s?

The most downloaded app store, like iOS App Store, just overall.

And I think in aggregate, I'm gonna go Facebook.

Instagram. Wow. It's gotta be something else. Thanks.

It's maybe it's a the weather app is on default. Dang it. There uh uh uh uh um uh. I don't have a good answer for this.

I wanna change it to TikTok.

Gmail. I don't know. No, it's probably Gmail.

It was actually Facebook. Yep. Wow. Now I'm a little worried. I'm a little worried here cuz AJ's in the lead. So that's, that's, take that.

That scares me.

That scares me just a little bit. I'll just say, I said Instagram.

Do I still get a point?

Yeah. Me too.

It was, it was Face— well, oh, okay. Okay. All right. Okay. That's a good point. Yeah. Okay. That's a half point.

That's a half point. That's a half point.

Yeah. That's a very generous half point. Very generous.

It's not a point. It's not a point.

I always don't associate the two of them together, but there is a— I— that's— no, that's—

At that point in time, there was no association, right? They weren't— Facebook didn't own—

That's true. That's true. But I mean, still, I, I didn't even think of the association.

Don't be nice. Don't be nice to the guests. Let them know later on.

No, fair enough. That's not a point. I'm thinking about it. It's not—

He's a friend of the show. Hopefully he'll continue to be. Uh, we can do that. That's fine. Now, um, 5 is a bit of a, well, let me just ask it and then I'll preface with something. What is the best Wi-Fi name you have seen in your entire life? And let's try to keep it as clean as possible. Try. But what is the best Wi-Fi name you've seen in your entire life?

Man, I'm blanking on the actual one, but something about some sort of hacker style type of password or name that says, I'm going to Uh, what was it like? Uh, give me your password. Give me— what was it? I don't know. I'm blanking on it. I don't— I'm— this is a bad question for me. I'm sorry. I have to like know words.

I mean, I'm, I'm not gonna say it's slowing down the, uh, the quiz here, but, uh, yeah, no, no, it's fine. That's fine.

I have to say, I, I did see somebody call their Wi-Fi Bilbo Lagons, and I thought that that was absolutely hilarious. I'll give that a 5. I'll have to go with that one.

I'll give that a 5.

This is not one that I saw personally. It was a meme, but it was like a picture of somebody that took of a, took a picture of a Wi-Fi network and it was, it was 2D, your girl's cheating on you. Like he was trolling to the apartment. He was trying to show everyone like whoever saw this.

That, I'll give that a point. I'll give that a point. I like that. I may take a point away from Dennis because he didn't really answer it slowly.

That was really bad on my part and I apologize.

I'll take a half point away. Half point away. Sure, sure, sure. Okay. Uh, question 6. Now this is specifically for, it's for me, but it's also David will appreciate this. Um, what would be the best answer to the question, can you SEO this? Because I'm sure, David, I'm sure you've been asked this like in a general terminology and Yeah. The eye rolls I want to give when someone asks that. So, what would be the best—

You can just do SEO. Just, just do— we need you to do SEO. And then when you hear that, it's just, you just know that they have no idea what's going on. You know, we need leads because they heard the word leads once and they know that that makes money somehow. What do I do is I start asking them very detailed questions already knowing that I'm not going to take on the project.

It's a hard, it is, it's a hard thing to like, the expectation there is, it, it's just a quick story. I, um, I was doing, we were building a website for a realtor and they, they, they handed me this sheet and it was like a printout of like a Google Doc. And it was just this, it was like a paragraph. It was like this, it looked like this paragraph, like she had written, uh, like a one-page story. And this was towards the end and I'm like, well, what is this? And she goes, this is for the SEO. And I said, what do you mean this is for the SEO? And I'm not reading it. I'm just looking at the, like, yeah, the enormity of it. I'm just like, what is that? I'm like, what do you mean?

And you're like, define the SEO, please. You know what it was? How do you define that?

It was comma-separated terms she wanted to rank. Oh gosh. They wanted to rank. No, I don't wanna like call anybody out, but like they wanted to rank number 1 for, and it was like Chicago White Sox, Chicago Bulls, And I'm like, and I'm looking at this and I'm like, this, this, this really is impossible.

Well, what do you mean?

It's, it's SEO. And at that point, that is where I thought, I think my mind just fell outta my ear. Like I just didn't know. But you don't know how to answer those questions. You know what I mean?

Here's how you answer it.

You, you assess their budget. If they have enough budget, we can do any kind of SEO you want. That's right. But then you have to also assess, are they gonna be a nightmare to work with? Because if they're not and they just need education and they have money and they're okay with you making, educating them and making good decisions about SEO, then I'll take on that project. But more times than not, to your point, if they're asking you to SEO something where they're giving you comma-separated values with, you know, terms that they shouldn't be ranking for, it's typically a red flag. Yeah.

Yeah.

So this is, this is a dual screen.

We got, you know, David, the optimist in the room, whereas Nick over there with his mind falling it out of his ear is clearly the pessimist.

You need both. You need both balance.

Clearly the pessimist. How would you answer that, Dennis? What do you think?

On it.

Got it. On it.

I just usually ask 'em like, define what, what it, what you mean by SEO. Like what, what is it that you're looking for? Because like that to me, like I, I basically make them try and spell it out and then that's where like I will course correct and be like, hey, what you're referring to is actually this. It's not that. Or, you know, Yeah.

You help them realize it.

Yeah. I'm, I'm a take the money and run type of guy. So like, you know, if I can just get that check and I can say I did something to, for SEO.

That's fair. Everyone, that's—

silence, silence from everyone who's actually—

No, I'll take all of those answers. Let's go to, let's go to number 7. Uh, GIF or JIF? GIF.

JIF. Wow. JIF with a J.

Ooh. Oh, David, I know. You're a friend of the show, David. I don't know if I can. Oh man, you're putting me in a spot here. You're putting me in a spot.

I don't know.

And I'll, I'll, I'll die on that hill. All right. I, I can't give you. You just did. I, I can't give you points for that. And I'm getting real scared here because AJ hasn't gotten anything wrong yet. And that's not the intent of this. It's usually for AJ to fail.

Spaces or tabs? Well, I don't know. Okay. Number eight.

What is the greatest? Fear of programmers? The semicolon. That's fair.

You forget one of those.

That's fair.

And it can blow up.

Okay. Dennis, what do you think?

Being proven that you're a fraud.

All right. I'll, I'll get, I'll give you that. I'll give you that. What do you think, David?

Yeah, that was the direction I was going into. The whole, the root of imposter syndrome, being judged by your peers.

We've also accepted forgetting to save as well, because I do that on, on a frequent basis and that really ruins my day. And I'm not going to give AJ a point because I don't want him to get a perfect score on this, to be quite honest. Literally, I will literally save this on his behalf because I don't want him to get that. Um, question number 9. So we're almost done. Uh, so if this does suck, we're, we're almost at the end. Um, in what year was eBay founded?

1994. Ooh, I was going to say '96.

1996. Uh, I'll go '95. I'll go '95. Why not?

I'll go in the middle. Why are you getting all these right? It was 1995. I don't—

perfect score. He got a perfect score.

Uh, tech— yeah, technically.

I'll put it in parentheses. I'll put in parentheses, but I really don't want to give it to him, honestly.

I'm never going to hear the end of it at the end of the day.

No, Dennis isn't either.

I'm gonna— I'm gonna ride this all day long.

This is awful. This is awful. I didn't record any of this, so we're all good. This is just—

question number 10 is not exactly like Okay, here we go. What is a skill you think everyone should have?

Well, according to David, uh, sales seems like the answer if we, if we were reflecting upon the, uh, the past hour and a half.

I'll give you that.

Um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go on a deep level and say listening. You have to be able to listen in order to be able to either perform what you need to do Or accept feedback and iterate and things that they, you have to be able to listen to people.

Shut up, AJ.

You're welcome.

I love that. I love both of those answers. I'm gonna go deep too, and I'm gonna say you should discover your passion and what you re— what really lights you up and excites you. And then skill up in that thing, whatever that is.

Yeah.

Why does everyone make you look like a dumb, like a fool over here? Sales. That's what I said.

Sales is kind of good.

You're a man of few words. It's all right, we get it. It's fine. It's all right.

Um, no, great, great.

Uh, well, I mean, well, aside from AJ's score, David, 7.5, Dennis, 6.5, and then whatever AJ got, which isn't important. So, uh, no, that's good. That's good. Very good. Uh, it was better than what they did the first episode.

Oh yeah.

When you saw that, David, I don't know if you saw that, but they, they, they embarrassed me and the show on the first episode. So, um, but no, that was fantastic. And again, thank you David, thank you so much for doing Developers After Dark. I really appreciate it. Like I said, these are the kind of conversations we could have with you could go on for hours and be just the insightfulness of it is this. I'll tell you right now, and I'm not doing this just to be like, oh, you know, oh, he's just, you know, kissing up to— but honestly, these, the conversations we've had today are, that is what literally, if I had to describe to someone what I want the show to be about without having to write it down and just show 'em something, it would be the discussions we had because they, they just touch on so many topics that are not only just relevant, but we're able to talk about them in a way that's like conversational.

Wow.

Which is the, for me, that was the key to this whole thing. So, yeah.

Well, Nick, what I just heard from you was that, uh, AJ and I've been on 2 prior episodes here and they were useless and it was, David had to come on to actually—

I mean, that is not true. Hannah was on an episode and she was amazing. So I mean, like, you know, but you two, I mean, you two are here. It's cool.

Yeah, he showed up.

It was fine. But no, I just wanted to say thank you. Um, this has been Developers After Dark. Uh, hope to see everybody in the next episode. And, uh, thanks again, David. This has been fantastic. And I hope you don't hate us after this. That's— I mean, what more can we ask for?

Thanks a lot.

Thank you for having me on. This was really great. Awesome. Yep. Thank you.

All right, everyone, take care.

Cool.

Cool. Nice. Hit the air horn. This mustache is so sticky now. Okay.

Oh, Dave just