JON JONES INTERVIEW – Entrepreneurship, Building a Successful Service Business, & Validating Business Ideas

Welcome to the Next Level income show where it's our goal to take your income, your investments and your life to the next level. I'm Chris Larson.

And I'm Caleb Welborn.

You can get our free book, newly launched on Amazon.com at our website nextlevelincome.com.

Our guest today is John Jones, an Asheville based entrepreneur. John co founded a creative and technology agency called anthro Ware in 2013 to build products the right way. With a focus on design thinking and treating every project as a product, Anthro Ware exists to create products and brands that make it easy to do hard things. And their team of creatives, business consultants and technology builders do so by obsessing over the people and organizations that use Anthorware software. John has a bachelor's of science and Master's of science in applied physics and nanotechnology from Appalachian State University. And he worked in corporate America as a scientist and then a software engineer prior to becoming an entrepreneur. In his role at Anthroware, John leads this rapidly growing company's business design innovation culture and sets company goals. John is also a co founder and a mentor with the Hatch Asheville foundation, which is a 501c3 nonprofit with the mission of growing select high growth companies here in Asheville with a combination of place, partnerships and playbook. Outside of Anthraware and Hatch, you can find John enjoying Asheville's beautiful outdoors with family and friends. I met John through the entrepreneurial community here in Asheville and it's been great getting to know him over the last year or so. John, thanks for joining us here on the show.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me.

You're welcome.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So before we go too far into your story so our audience has some context, could you give an example of a project that you've done with Anthroware that gives a good example of what your company does as a whole?

Sure.

And I'll also say thank you for not mentioning the third company in the intro that, you know, was an abysmal failure.

Hey, that's part of entrepreneurship, right?

That's right. Yeah. So Anthraware, it exists to, you know, really focus on the human beings that are using the products. So the best example of a project where we get to sink our teeth into sort of the whole soup to nuts process is, you know, coming in at the very beginning. Companies hire us, we work with some startups. Most of our revenue comes from working with larger companies that want to be very innovative, but, you know, kind of don't have the internal capacity to do that, or they have a, you know, a very well known, you know, product that they have. And product development and developing product development expertise is really not aligned with, you know, their core business. So they'll hire us and we will. They'll come in with an idea, not a, not a specific, and they'll say, hey, we want to do this thing. And our first question is whether or not the world actually needs that thing. Because software is software products and products in general are pretty expensive to build and we want to help them make really good decisions. So, really good example. Back in 2017, a federal law changed for home health where all states are now required to provide an electronic visit verification system. There's a lot more to that, but at a high level, that's kind of what you need to know. Those are very vague. Like electronic visit verification system could be, it could be gps, it could be Bluetooth, it could be rfid. Like there's, it's just verifying that the person that's giving home care in your home is actually there. And so all the states are putting out these giant RFPs. And one of our partners, a big consulting firm up in Boston, called us up and they said, hey, we know that we need to build an EVV system, but we don't know how to start. So they have amazing subject matter experts. They have all these people that are way smarter than we are about that industry and that specific home health thing. But turning that, you know, if you're old. Did I say it right? Idea into a product is really, really hard. So it was, you know, we came in and we met with them and we got a sense of what's going on and we said, okay, you know, we've got to really deeply understand the problem and we've got to deeply understand your business strategy. It's like, not only do you need an EVV system, you need a product that allows you to be competitive with all these RFPs. And as a side note, I think we talked about this when we met a few weeks ago, but out of the $1.3 trillion healthcare market in the US home health is only 2% of that. It's pretty small, but it contains 40% of the total fraud.

Interesting.

So there's a massive amount of fraud in home health, which is part of the impetus for doing the EVV law change. And there's about 10 ways to commit fraud. And it's anything from, you know, I'm going to show up and, you know, I'm going to Say, hey Chris, why don't you sign my timesheet every week and I'll just give you a hundred bucks a week and not provide any care, which is bad. Right? We want people 100,000, but $100 is, you know, to the, A lot of people getting home health care is enough for them to say, yeah, he just.

Takes everything to the next level.

I get it.

No, no, that's. Yeah, that's interesting.

There's examples of people that just, you know, leave or they adjust their timesheets. They're actually there, they over bill. There's, you know, there's, there's a million different ways to do this.

How do you have oversight?

Right? And how do you have oversight? And how do you build a product that is going to pop up and say, allow this app to monitor you in whatever way, which you have to do to the person that is trying to be fraudulent, they benefit from being fraudulent. So the anthro ware approach to that is when you drill down to it, whatever organizational benefit the state wants, or whatever organizational benefit our partner wants or whoever, that ends up being a byproduct of solving the pain point for the person that's going to the house and providing home health care. If you can fix something for them that's so painful, so life level and make it, take that hard thing and make it easy, then they'll use it, even if it says, hey, I'm going to big brother and watch you a little bit. So that's what we did. We figured out that they've got a perceived pain point of paperwork and redundant, like, you know, just redundant entry. And, you know, certainly maybe part of the fraud is actually just the paperwork being really hard and hard to be accurate on. Um, and, and we attacked that problem and made that, you know, 15 or 20 minutes, which they actually perceive to be much longer. And a lot of times when you're building products, the perception is the important part. Um, if they perceive it to be harder or more frustrating or more, more of a time suck, then if you fix it, it's even better. So you're looking for one or two really delightful things to put into a product that get people to use it habitually.

Yeah.

And, and now if those home health providers use that product over and over and over again, then, you know, you can kind of see where the organizational benefit is, the byproduct of solving their problem. So all of that groundwork, you know, we were able to, if you imagine thinking about the psychographics and demographics of the people that are going to be using it and what are their pain points, what speaks to them, who are they? You know, are they, are they mostly, you know, men or women, you know, where are they coming from? What is their life like? That's foundational branding work. So if you're then able like this. The reason this is such a good example is because we were also able to impact the brand. They already had a name, really great name, it's called Carifi. But we were able to impact the brand. And you know, if you think about going to a hospital, you want it to be clean and sterile, smell like Clorox. You want to like really feel like everything's super clean. If you're going to somebody's house, it's totally different, right? Like it's their house. It needs to be warm and earthy. And we, you know, we were able to develop this, this brand story that really spoke to the people that were not only using the app, but the people that were in the home. And then we were able to design the UI and build the whole thing and hand it off to their team and really be a part of the process up until the point where they had to go and sell it. So yeah, I think, you know that like that's a, we love the healthcare industry, so that's a good example for that. And we were able to be part of pretty much every, every part of that process.

So yeah, I love how you take something like software, I think like, you know, engineering degree, you know, similar to yours, you know, a bunch of people sitting around computers in a room. But you take it to the behavioral, the personal level, that's really what drives, drives usage. Right. So I think it's really interesting how you do that. So if, if you had to break it down into a 30 second elevator pitch, John, what is it that Anthraware does?

I hate elevator pitches for.

Fair enough, Sidewalk pitcher.

But you know, Anthroare is a creative and technology agency. So we're taking, we're finding those really hard problems and solving them with design thinking. And that's, you know, that is taking that human centered approach. It's also looking, filtering that through a very strong business lens. You know, if you've got a, it's not a product unless it has an roi, right. So, you know, the difference between design and art is actually putting constraints on, on what you're doing and saying, hey, there's boundary conditions here. And generally when you're going to spend a couple million dollars on a product, then the boundary conditions are like this has to have a pretty good chance of making money for the company. And not all products work. Some products fail, but more products fail than they should, and more startups fail than they should. And Antherware really drives in and helps them, helps our partners pressure test the idea so that we don't spend money where we don't need to.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

Yeah, Cool. Thanks for sharing that. One thing that you brought up right after the intro there, you talked about a failure you had before you started Anthraware. Do you mind talking about maybe what you learned coming out of that and your experience starting Anthroware through that?

Yeah, well, actually, Anthraware came first. We did it in parallel, which was part of the problem. It's very, very, very hard for founders to do more than one thing at a time. I believe that from the bottom of my heart. Like, it's just. It's very hard. In fact, even just within a business, you know, Peter Drucker would say, you know, part of being an effective executive is really focusing on. On one thing at a time, Taking the thing that your organization needs the most and doubling down on that. And that's your primary job. And there's a lot of examples of why that works. When you take that to the next level and say, I'm going to start another business. Unless your business is fully stable, and by stable, I mean every major lever that you could pull in your business is very, very predictable. If you step away from your main job to be done for the core business and try to do something else, you will cannibalize one business and affect the chances of the new business to succeed. So one of the biggest lessons learned is that I do not have the capacity to do more than one thing at a time really, really well. Anthroyre was going through kind of a slow time, and we had a couple engineering resources available, and we had kicked around this idea that we really liked, and we wanted to keep the team employed. We had the money to do that, and we said, okay, we. We're going to have you guys work on this idea. And it's actually one of the few times that we've done something like truly innovative from a technology standpoint, which is kind of a whole nother conversation. But nine times out of 10, when we are innovative from a product development standpoint, we're either innovating the experience, the design, or we're innovating the business model. Um, we've innovated technology a few times, and I think companies that tell you that they innovate technology over and over again, are using that as a sales pitch, and it's not real. Yeah, it's very, very hard these days to actually do something, you know, new and novel in technology. That is an aside. So we. We developed this app called coio. And have you ever been to, like, a networking event and feel like you've, like, totally wasted your time? Yes, Mr. Connection. Yeah.

Yep.

So Coio was an app, and you look at it and it shows you only the people that are within sight. So it's not people that are, you know, five minutes walk away on the other side of the conference or whatever. It's people that you could look up and say, oh, there's Caleb over there. He's in the room, you know, to make connections, that I'm the perfect connection. And you can put the phone back in your pocket and go walk up and have a natural conversation. So it's like, do you remember that old commercial? It's like an investment firm or something, and everybody's got their number. It's like, what's your number? It's kind of like that, but it says, you walk into the room and it's like, hi, I'm Jon Jones. I'm the CEO of Anthraware. I'm looking for badass designers. And if you're a badass designer, you have the perfect excuse now to come talk to the CEO of a company.

I mean, that sounds like a great idea. I mean, I'll be super helpful, but loved the idea.

Took that idea behind the shed and shot it like Old Yeller. That. That we. I will not say how much money or personal money that we spent on that app that came from Anthraware. It was multiple hundreds of thousands. And we got through the technology piece, which was expensive. We built that first instead of running design experiments and actually running. Selling experiments from a design phase, which is now, you know, we would never make that mistake. Now we've. That is a lesson that we've Learned. It is 10 times more expensive, literally 10 times more expensive to experiment in the build phase than it is to experiment in the design phase. So everything that we learned in koio, you know, there is that one light switch that turns on. It's like, can we build the technology? Can we do that? And that's a pretty big question mark. But a bigger question mark is will people buy it? Yeah. And we could have figured that out during a design phase and running. Selling experiments, showing prototypes that were. That were fake.

Right.

And then gotten the answer that, like, hey, this is going to Be really, really hard to sell to conference organization organizers. And it's going to be really hard to sell for people to understand it and get it without some hand holding. And we may have decided to not spend the rest of the time trying to figure out if we could do the technology or not.

So.

Learned a ton. You know, my partner Jason and I joke around about getting our MBA from the school of hard knocks with that failure, but it has dramatically affected how we do business now in a. And we're able to serve our partners and our community a lot better because of that failure.

Yeah, no, it's. I appreciate you sharing that because that's one of the things we try to teach our boys. You know, we were just talking, like, before the show here. We both have kids and we ask them, like, hey, what's your biggest failure today? And, you know, it's okay to fail. It's okay. You learn from failures. You know, you get burned. Burned by the stove. It sears it into your memory. And I feel like, you know, training sales reps for nearly a decade now, I've always told them, like, you got to make some mistakes to remember that. Yeah, sometimes it's, you know, it's a balance. Like, do you let people make. Make a mistake? Do you not. You want them to make the mistakes. You want people to experience it so they remember and learn. But it's a fine balance. And I feel as entrepreneurs, when you're out there taking the risk, sometimes you just have to make the mistake to really do it. And as long as it doesn't destroy. Destroy your opportunity to continue to move on. So it's. It's pretty cool that you were doing it concomitantly with your current successful operation.

Well, I think that we could have been a lot more successful had we focused on Anthraware. But, I mean, you just said something about training your salespeople. And, you know, one of the subtle things with that comment is you had as a manager, you had to actually give them the opportunity and not shield them from the pressure of doing that. That's really hard as a parent, to let your kids do that. And I think that does come out in the business world quite a bit. If you're actually wanting to grow people and manage them well, you can't shield them from the pressure of their job. That's right. It's so easy to try to shelter that.

Yeah. No, it's really hard. I mean, as far. And I don't know, it'd be interesting to hear your take on this, too, John, when You're scaling a business, you know, going from like I was a sales rep for 12 years, 13 years into a management role. I went through a kind of a period where I was training people as well into that role. But you want to do it all yourself because an entrepreneur, you probably can do it all yourself. And relinquishing that control, knowing that you might not make that mistake, I found that's even harder because you're like, well, I could just step in here, solve this myself. They don't have to experience the pressure and we both get the result we want. So it's a real balancing act, I found.

I couldn't agree more. I guess quarter four of last year was pretty slow for us and it swung back the other way. Despite everything that's going on, I feel extremely blessed. We also had just hired a brand new sales guy and he is doing awesome, incredible. But the internal dialogue for me was, man, I just hired this guy into a slow time. Like this is as a manager, you want people to come in and have some successes. And it's been very hard to sort of allow him to feel that pressure. But I think if you have a long term vision for the company, and I don't mean like 10 years, I mean really long term vision, and we can talk about kind of our strategy for growing anthorware and sharing that wealth with the team. But the long term vision means that you've got to give people space to grow in those moments. And even if, even if there's a struggle at like during that small piece of time, you get better five years from now because hey, you know, Logan started and he started into a slow period and we got through it and he was able to be a part of that success. He didn't get shielded from it. He rose to the challenge. So I think that's super important.

I think that's a great lesson. Just case in point, you look at the companies that came out of the last recession and I know we're kind of facing as we're recording the show, the coronavirus and all this uncertainty. I feel like these down periods, they're what develop companies that are able to push through and do that. It sweeps out some of the companies that aren't able to survive or the people that can't survive. It makes the companies that can that much tougher. And that's where like the Facebooks, you know, you look at all the companies that came out of 2008, 2009, 2010, it was a bad time. But they're the fang Stocks right now, it's companies like that that continue to grow. It's pretty interesting to think about that.

Well, and in our world, there's a lot of sort of bad players out there. If you talk to any executive or anybody that's had an experience with building a custom product, whether it's digital or not, there, there's a lot of negative experiences out there.

There's a.

You know, and I think maybe even especially with some of the larger teams that are. That are doing it now, like Accenture, McKinsey Digital, you know, stuff like that, they're gonna put 150 people on your product and, you know, you spend $30 million and doesn't work.

Wow.

You know, and yeah, you know, Hertz was in the news, Hertz in the center, and, you know, they're in the middle of a big lawsuit and it was $30 million and the app didn't work. So my hope is that another thing that the recessions generally do is that it makes it really hard for you to succeed if you're not really good and we're really good. So I'm not looking forward to it at all. I think it's going to be tough, but I do feel like we're due for a recession just based on time. Something like this could definitely speed it up. There's a million talking heads on TV right now about the coronavirus. It's been mentioned in the news 1.1 billion times already.

That's interesting.

Well, especially when you compare that to how many times SARS was mentioned in the news. And so I think part of. Part of the. I do believe. I believe in science. Right. So I believe it's a pandemic. You know, I'm going to believe what World Health Organization says. I don't believe it's containable. I think that we have to take measures to slow down the curve. But I do think it's been sensationalized just by the sheer amount of media coverage. Because I think, you know, SARS was mentioned in the millions or tens of millions, and that's a huge step up to get to 1.1 billion mentions in the media. But from a strategic standpoint, companies should be preparing for this kind of thing.

Exactly.

Earlier, John, you were talking about how you tried starting this side company while also building anthraware. And the lesson that you learn being focus on one thing until your company stabilized. So say someone listening has the idea of a company or a business that they want to start, but they're currently like you used to be working in the corporate world full time job. And they have the spark of an idea that they think will be great and they want to eventually leave their corporate job to run this company. What sort of advice would you give to that person with that idea in their head and in their consideration of whether or not they should do it and how to go about it?

I would give a lot of advice. I'll try to distill that down just in the matter, like in the. To be respectful of everybody's time. But I think that it's super easy to get really excited about your own idea and it just doesn't freaking matter, right? What you're excited about building doesn't matter. What some expert tells you you should build doesn't matter. And you have to go figure out whether or not the people that are gonna buy it are willing to buy it before you spend a ton of time and energy on it, period. They're the ones that matter. Your opinion doesn't matter. You have to figure out whether or not somebody will buy it. And what I taught. I talked to entrepreneurs over and over and over again through my work with Hatch and I have a couple people that I'm mentoring just from a personal basis that it's not about whether or not people like your idea because they will say they like your idea because they like you.

Right.

You have to know whether or not.

They will buy it.

And the currencies. It's not always money. Sometimes it's reputation or time. But eventually at some point it has to be money for it to be a business. And there are ways to run selling experiments very, very early on, pretty early in a design phase to understand whether or not people actually buy it and find that out first. Forbes interviewed 300 and some. 313. I'm gonna get that number wrong. Low 300s companies that failed in 2019, their failure happened in 2019. And nine out of the top 20 reasons were related to not understanding your end user, your customer.

Right.

And that means that they didn't have product market fit. And if you don't have product market fit, nobody will buy your product.

It's not about you.

So I think pressure testing those assumptions early on. Think about an assumption that you're making. Be self aware of the things you actually have a question mark about. Is that assumption high risk to your business? If you're wrong, does it have a huge impact on your business? Then that's probably a pretty big deal to try to figure that out. Is your level of certainty about it very low? Well, go find out before you start a business. You can start a business slow. You don't have to go raise a bunch of money and do stuff to run those kind of selling experiments. The business model canvas. I'll say one other thing people hate. On the business model canvas, you should spend 20 minutes on 1, 30 minutes, maybe an hour tops. Don't spend a ton of time on one. If you do that, then I start hating on it too. But it is a great way to run a thought experiment of whether or not you can, in your, in your own brain, whether or not you can take that business and walk it across a page and understand whether. Whether or not you. You can visualize each piece of it. And if you can't visualize how to do one piece of it, you got to drill down on that and remove that question mark before you spend a ton of time, because you will spend tons of time. Another, another quick one that people overlook is like, make a spreadsheet of a revenue model, right? It is not going to be perfect, but write a spreadsheet down of your, of your revenue model. And if you've got to sell like 200,000 of your gizmos to make $100,000 personally, that should make you really tired.

Yeah, right.

And if you look at that and you're like, man, that makes me really tired. Pick another business to work on.

Yeah, kill it.

Kill it really early. And yeah, I kill a lot of businesses.

No, I mean, that's great. I mean, so many people come and they're like super passionate about their idea. Right? Which is cool. You know, it's. It's great to see someone excited, but I love just how reasonable you are with it. And I see a lot of people who are like that and it's like, man, it's really great to see someone so pumped about this, but maybe it should be a hobby and not a business if you're not going to make the money on it. So take. I'm sure people listening are curious how you had the idea for Anthro Ware and with those two great pieces of advice you had. Can you take us back to the story of how you had the idea for Anthro Ware, how you got it started, and did you at that time use those two pieces of advice? Advice when validating your idea, getting it going?

Did I use that advice? No, but I know. I know more now. I'm smarter. Anthro Ware is also sort of an existing paradigm, like services companies have worked before, they will work again.

Right?

So it's when you when you pick a very well known business model, the business model isn't the risk, it's your ability to pull it off.

Right.

And when you're a very early company, your ability to pull it off is just based on the people you have involved. That's it. And if you look at, if you look at companies that get acquired, if they get acquired really, really early, they get acquired because of the people. If they get acquired later, they get acquired because of the processes. So if you, you can apply that to any company that's starting out. If you don't have the right people on board when you start, that's a huge risk. If you're starting with a well known business model, that's not the risk, it's the people.

Right.

And so from that standpoint, we felt like we were pretty weak, that we could pull it off, the reason we started it. You know, I think every entrepreneur has a giant chip on their shoulder, and I don't think all of them recognize what the chip is. I don't think I recognize what my chip was when we started. But every entrepreneur's got a chip on their shoulder. They're. They want to see some change and they feel like they can affect it. And I think Jason and I, when we started talking about this, actually the idea for Anthroware, we were actually rock climbing at Looking Glass, and we're hanging off the side of this mountain, not figuratively. And we were trying to figure out at our current job, we worked on the same team. We all the passion and energy we were putting into our make, like making the best thing that we could make. Where was the impact? At the end of the line, we were building special ed compliance software. So not the most exciting thing, but at the end of the line was some kid somewhere having a better education because of the feature that we built for whatever county school. And we couldn't figure it out. And that was really disturbing to us. And so in a corporate environment, it's very, very hard to have a really well defined approach to product development. And when you are in a big company, you end up getting handed down a list of stuff to do and you don't know why.

Mm.

And that's bothersome too, because when you have a lot of different people on a project and there's a lot of different pieces, and you know, you got team over here, team over there, the nuance of the product itself breaks down. So we started Anthaware to build software the right way. We were two software guys. We didn't call it Product development. We thought that we could just get a bunch of nerds together and write great software. And that's how we started within three weeks. And we were actually trying to write proposals and they were ugly. We realized, oh, all the software that we love to use is really well designed, so we need to hire a designer. So at the time, I was 70% owner and Jason's 30% owner. And so I put in a thousand bucks and he put in whatever the 30% equivalent, 400 and some. And we started. The initial Anthaware bank account had less than $1,500 in it when we started. And we used it to hire a designer for 50 bucks an hour to help us make our proposals pretty. And we submitted four proposals and we won all four. And then we had been talking to James Shaw, who is now our director of engineering, about potentially freelancing for us and just doing some moonlighting work. And one of the proposals was $100,000 piece of software. First things we won. And it felt like so much money. And I called him up and it was like, I don't know, right before Christmas. And I was like, hey, man, we got that contract check hadn't cleared yet. He's like, I'll put in my two weeks. I was like, wait till the check clears. And I remember telling him, I'm like, man, look, James, I can guarantee your employment for six months after that. I'm going to do everything I can. It's big question mark. And he still took the leap with us. And that kind of commitment is really hard to find. He's one of the smartest engineers. We contracted everything else out as far as design and everything, and that's how the company started. James is now a partner, and once the company became worth something, we gave him some equity because he was there from the beginning. He should have been a co founder. So he's a partner now. But it was kind of an interesting, interesting way to get started.

Wow.

Yeah, that's a great story.

Yeah.

So I think, you know, we talk about the why, like why you do things. The chip on the shoulder, I think.

Oh, I never told you what my chip was, did I?

I want to hear what your chip is. I'd love to hear that.

Awesome. My chip is pretty simple. I think. There are so many cases of products that get built that shouldn't get built. They shouldn't get validated. People have bad experiences. They don't have the impact that you want. There's so many problems in the world that we can address by having A human centered approach to how we develop things. And it's still very, very rare to find companies and agencies that actually do that in a benevolent way. Like a way that you're just trying to help. And so part of anthorware is to stop that madness. We should not build, you know, products with teams of 300. Sorry, Accenture. You know, they. They need to get out of the way. McKinsey needs to get out of the way. There's so many. There's so many examples of, like, just poor results from hiring those companies to build new launch products. And, you know, if you think about it, like, are you a foodie? Do you like food?

I love food. I love to cook. You're an actual out there. Yeah. One of the reasons we love living here. Absolutely.

So if you think of risotto, it's a time intensive labor of love kind of. It's a special kind of rice.

And.

If I invite you over for risotto and, you know, we're going to have some chanterelles that we pick from my backyard.

Bring the wine.

Bring the wine. We'll do, you know, like a big, thick bone in pork chop cooked beautifully. Peach chutney.

When are we doing this?

So you're imagining this dish, right?

My mouth's watering.

Okay, so what I've actually given to you is a list of ingredients.

Right?

And a list of ingredients is really easy to disseminate to a large team.

Okay.

But risotto is. It's important how you cook it. It's important that your broth's warm. It's important, like, everything is super important. But what if I gave you, like, a gallon of risotto and a tiny pork chop? What if I gave you, you know, all. What if I put it in a blender and just, like, gave you a rice meat milkshake?

Yeah, it's. It's not just the ingredient. What you're saying is it's not just the ingredients.

It's the experience, especially when you go out to eat. Yeah. So I think. I think you really can't have. It's very hard to. It's hard to communicate an experience to a large group of people. So chip on the shoulder, do this for Nashville. Be one of the best agencies in the. In the country. You don't have to go to Austin or Boston or San Francisco to get, you know, that quality of work. Do it in a way where we take care of our team. Where, you know, a lot of agencies are that are small, that are doing this, are working their teams to the boat, I mean it's churn and burn. 70, 80 hour average weeks with more, more than that, some weeks and people stay there for two years and leave. Like show that, prove that you can do that from Asheville in a way that doesn't burn out the team. And I think our town needs to see, see that, you know, the way that we value creatives, the way that we value tech people and everything else is we can do more.

Love it. Yeah, yeah. Love the focus on small teams too. Have you seen the new movie Ford versus or kind of new now? Ford versus Ferrari.

I love that movie. Yeah, yeah, watched it a couple weeks ago.

Awesome. Remember like I was thinking about the part where Carol Shelby goes in and says you can't build a race car by committee. He's like, I just saw this paper get pushed between 15 people on the way in here. And then they, I forget the other executive's name that they basically pushed out of the way to put him in charge. But yeah. Did that part resonate with you?

Oh my gosh, yeah. And that like, that's a great example. I hadn't, I hadn't put it in reference to small teams in business, but I think I might steal that from you.

Hey, feel free.

I like that.

One question we always ask is if you could go back with everything that you've learned over the years and talk to your 25 year old self, but only give him one piece of advice, what would that be? It could be about anything, business life, anything.

You know what? Only one piece of advice is what makes that question really hard. There's a lot of things I would say, I think just really appreciating the wisdom of the old people in your life. Like we don't have any old people in our family anymore and I would want, I would want to have, I wouldn't want to spend more time with them. There's a lot of other advice I would say, like dream, dream really big. You know, I had a journal of like side hustles I wanted to do because I didn't think I would make enough money as a scientist to do what I wanted to do. And they're all really pretty small vision stuff. And so I eventually did start dreaming big, but it took a while to encourage the 25 year old me to dream really big.

That's awesome.

Yeah, both of those are great. Yeah.

Yeah. I love it. John, this has been really enjoyable having you on the show, hearing your experiences and learn more about your, your business. If listeners want to get in touch with you they want to learn more about answerware. They want to get more than the elevator pitch. How can they get in touch with you?

They can ping me on Twitter. I'm just runaway worker on Twitter. Instagram, anthraware.com is a great place to learn more about the company. We've got a lot of, I think pretty well written blogs about small teams and about just product development in general, about design, about understanding your customers. A lot of stuff there. If you go to anthorware.com and you get to a website that sells like tails and ears, you've spelled antherware wrong. So just try it the other way.

W a R E. Not W E.

A R. Yes, exactly.

It's hilarious.

I gotta check the website. That's our side hustle. That's another.

Just kidding.

That's. That's not us, but looks like a great.

For adults or kids? That's what I want to know.

Adults.

Yeah. Interesting. Well, John, thank you so much for being on the show. We're going to have all John's contact info and Anthro Ware's correct spelling and contact info on the website, as well as our book, again, newly launched on Amazon. Go online, get a free copy of it. John, thank you so much for being with us today.

Thank you. Yep.