Roger Patterson - CEO and Co-founder of Later Media

Another business partner, co founder and good friend. On today's episode of Founder Journey, Roger Patterson is co founder and CEO of Later.com and is also one of my co founders at Launch Academy. In this episode, Roger gives us a look into his journey of identifying shifts in the tech industry and building companies that lead the charge in innovation, but also take on the risks of being an early leader in a new industry.

3, 2, 1.

Today on Founder Journeys, we have Roger Patterson, CEO of Later.com later is probably one of the fastest growing social media and digital marketing companies in North America. They're one of the first scheduling softwares for Instagram and last year they started scheduling software for TikTok or sorry, content for TikTok. And if you ever seen that link in Bio, I'm pretty sure all of you have used it. That's Later. Later is the inventor of Link in Bio. And if you're a creative artist, if you're building content on social media, you're a social media manager for a brand. More than likely you're using later or you know, someone that's using later. So Roger Patterson is our guest today. He also happens to be the co founder of Launch Academy. So this is one of my co founders, one of my business partners. So I know a lot of dirt about him and we're going to spill a lot of dirt. But Roger, welcome to Founder Journey. Why don't you start by telling us about you, your journey to where you are. But before you do that, tell us a little bit about later from your own perspective. Whatislater.com?

What is later? Okay, well, thanks for that. Thanks for the intro, Rick. Yeah. What is Later? So later started off as the first scheduler for Instagram and we started off, I mean, I don't want to get too much into the whole founding story of later, but we started off at a hackathon as a. There's a project on the side of our desks where we were actually running our other startups. The four co founders were running other startups. So this was our startup off the side of the desk of our other startups at Launch Academy.

Can't leave that out.

Launch Academy. So plug for Launch Academy. And it was sort of, I mean, it's such a outrageously stereotypical, like Silicon Valley esque story. You know, you're starting a startup at a hackathon while working in an incubator and you know, but it was one of the rare situations where, you know, where you know something's different. You know, there's Many startups you struggle at, you know, you're fighting uphill the entire time. This one, there was a wave behind us. We had, we had 20,000 signups before we even launched anything other than a landing page. So later started off with that great momentum and we just, we just kept pushing with it so we were in the right place at the right time. But then, you know, I like to, you know, think, you know, give, give a little bit of credit to ourselves. We managed to execute upon that. So we quickly realized that we couldn't just focused just on Instagram, that we got to diversify and there was a real opportunity. Things were changing. The old guard of textual based social media was changing into a visual based one. So we really honed in and focused on the visual side of things. We added in Pinterest and the visual aspect of Twitter and Facebook and then we launched Link in Bio, as you mentioned, as the first way to connect Instagram to people taking actions outside of Instagram, whether that's like the Wall Street Journal using it to push people to read their articles or to a mom and pop SMB selling stuff online. So we integrated Shopify. We really started to create a vision around a one stop platform for small businesses to conduct their marketing, their customer support and their online sales all in one spot. And so coordinate that across all the social media and digital market. So that's what I see later. And we've really grown in the last five years and there's some really cool opportunities coming down the pipeline. So yeah, we're here to help small businesses figure out how to market and sell online. Basically.

Yeah. A lot of times you hear people talk about timing and luck being such a key component of the successful startups. Like you hear the great things are the positive things, but you don't see that backstory of what got you there. And for later, again for full disclosure, I'm an investor and later as well. So I saw the opportunity and like you said, it was timing. Everything was going from text based to visual and I knew that trend, so that's why I was willing to invest. But it's not just the scheduling of visual. You guys were innovating all the way along, like Link in bio and now Even looking at TikTok, we talk about this. TikTok was something that was on your radar well before it was mainstream and you guys saw the potential and started innovating and finding ways, okay, how do we progress to this platform? This is after you guys progressed to Pinterest and other visual mediums. So Lots of props to you guys there. But how did you get to where you are today? You're not this social media savant.

No, but I am definitely not a social media savant. That's true.

But what got you to where you are today as an entrepreneur that was able to recognize this opportunity down and coming down the pipeline? Cause that's a shit ton of experience that I know you have. So let's dive into that. Tell us the backstory. Who is Roger Patterson?

Who am I? Well, I don't want to go all the way back to the beginning, but.

Well, yeah, we kind of talked about it. The sea was angry, he was angry.

And I was born in a small town in New Zealand.

Yeah.

So basically I started my career out of university in the tech space, but I was working for large companies. So I was working at the time for Nortel, which is a big. Which was a big tech company in Canada.

You're dating yourself here. This is ancient history anyways.

But I worked on some of the early telecommunications stuff and the early infrastructure for the Internet. And then I worked at a company called Newbridge Networks and I worked on some of the original adsl, which is the original broadband connectivity to the Internet. So a lot of that was developed here in Canada. And so I was working on that in the mid-90s, again, dating myself. So I was a software engineer. I was a software engineer and then I ended up being a software architect. So I did a lot of. I've been coding for most of my life, but after about four years of working in these big companies and checking into my cubicle and, you know, you're the small little cog in a big system. And I felt like I really wanted to have more impact and I thought there was an opportunity. So in late 99, 2000, I jumped over and joined a startup. And that was back in a big startup craze. And it was a pretty cool startup. It was a startup called Modern Groove here in Vancouver. And basically we were designing what Netflix is now. Back then we were doing basically digital streaming of music and video using the Internet Protocol IP as a backbone, and caching systems at the edge. And I was in charge of architecting the network stuff. And it was being pushed to Xboxes and PS2s, which were the first things that were connected to both the Internet and to your TV, so you could order stuff through your Xbox or PS2 using our software to then order Seinfeld for 99 cents an episode, et cetera.

So now we're at the more modern era of your. We're at the more modern era of your career.

Yeah. So that was the first startup I joined and it was fascinating, but the reason why it's relevant to sort of my story is that we went bust. So we got caught up in the dot com bubble burst in 2000 and our investors went bust and we went bust. And so I ended up lending the company a whole bunch of my own cash, which I didn't have much of at the time to pay for, for people's salaries to try to keep it going because everyone really believed in this and it was like this dream and it was something I would never have done when I was working at like, obviously a big company wouldn't have lent the company my money. And it was this emotional connection I had with it was almost like a familial feeling. So. And then the company went bankrupt and then I lost all my money. So I was in a bit of a tough spot. And this is the pivotal point. I didn't go and then, you know, run back to the safety of the company. I was hooked on startups and the entrepreneurial impact of being able to affect the company in more than just a, you know, a small way. So I went and joined another company, another startup down in Australia and then architected the first mobile streaming network for entity docomo in Japan and then Sprint Verizon in the States.

So did you move to Australia? So you relocated Australia?

I moved to Australia. I wanted to get out of Dodge because I was at the end of that breakup of Modern goo. Was not the most pleasant situation as you can imagine. They're gonna be going bankrupt. So yeah, I just, I had enough. So I was like either gonna go to company in Switzerland, offer me a job, or a company in Australia offered me a job. I'm going to a beach and so.

A beach with like 5 foot spiders and well, yeah, I didn't know about.

The spiders and snakes that much, but yeah, there's a ton of them. And then I ended up working in the hinterland of Queensland, so there was no beach in sight. So it was a bit of a bait switch, but that's another story. So I went down there and that was awesome. And it was really cool to be working at the forefront of streaming media and mobile. Mobile phone, this is like 2.5g phones. So this is like some of the first mobile phones that had Internet connectivity. And I was, you know, I remember it being at the time saying, who's going to watch video on like screens that are that big? But you know, I helped architect the stuff for Japan which was the first place that did it. And you know, the caching system again and it took off, you know, video on phones took off, what do you know? And then partway through that I got a buddy of mine who I went to high school with. We talked about starting a company for ages. He was starting one here in Vancouver and he was like. And we've been talking about starting it together. So I came back to start the first of my own company, this is 2001 and that was a company called Metalogix. And so worked on that for a little bit but then I ended up leaving, ended up leaving due to a co founder fight. And so that was my first experience with, there's a lot of like hard knock experiences in this. And so I left the company and then I ended up starting two companies by myself just in sort of in date, these were in data mining kind of areas and I sort of started two companies by myself. And that was sort of as almost like it was like a rejection of having co founders. I was like, I'm not, you know, big co founder if I didn't like that, I'm now going to try to do it by myself.

And that's a very typical story, right? Like you get burned and you realize, okay, I was right, they were wrong. Regardless of whether or not they were. It's like, I'm gonna do it on my own, I don't need anybody else tell me what to do. And that in itself is something that a lot of people have to go through because there is trauma and there's a lot of things that you have to work through that a lot of people don't realize they're working through it. But that's exactly what's happening, right?

In some ways you have to experience it yourself. But hopefully if people are listening to this and listen to it enough, it can hit home that the culmination of that story I would say is do have co founders, don't try to start by yourself. I try to start those two ones and that's where a lot of loneliness and depression kicked in along the way. I then went back and got my MBA over back east in Queens and then came back to, to Vancouver and started a geomobile gaming company called Map Dash. And that's about when I met you actually. And that's so 2012 we started a launch academy and we were working at a launch academy and I was working on Map Dash with Ian and doing this geomobile gaming before Pokemon Go. So it was a bit too early there. And then we started latergram at a hackathon. It was latergram at the beginning and then it just took off. So we actually, Ian and I went full time, along with Matt and Cindy, full time in 2015 with Latergram and the rest is history.

Well, I won't say it's history. It's still history in the making, current history. So that's obviously a wealth of experience, wealth of knowledge learned. We're going to dive into some of the meaty elements of it right now, but I'm going to give you a bit of a pat on the back. Like you're, you're, you're not just this. Like when it was MAP dash, you're not just the CEO, you were coding as well. And you would spend long hours at Launch Academy. Obviously I saw this firsthand. Plugging away and working in the trenches with Ian, coding and building out your product and building a vision. So what is it that having a, even just a basic fundamental understanding of code brings to the table when you're starting a tech company?

I'd say it brings everything to the table. And I get this question a lot from non technical co founders who have an idea like, how do I find a tech co founder? I think that's the wrong question. It's like, especially nowadays where being able to get a little dangerous with being able to write code is not as hard as it used to be. Back when I first did my comp sci degree, like we had compilers and it was just, it was nasty. You could not just pick up coding at a boot camp. And now there's boot camps, now there's Lighthouse Labs, there's all these other ones that you can, you know, if you really are serious about it and you should be serious about it and you want to do something in the software space, go learn. Like learn how to be dangerous enough to create a prototype. Don't sit there and wait for some tech co founder to jump on your bandwidth.

And I think like you said, there is no excuse because even if it's not about, even if it's not to the degree of actually learning how to code, there's so many new tools, prototyping tools, no code app builders. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to start to understand what you want your product to look like, how you envision it, so that you can get other people excited about coming in. And oftentimes you're going to find a person that actually does know how to code and get impressed by what your vision was and then tell you to throw it all away. What you built is garbage. I'm going to build it myself. And a lot of them will join because they're just frustrated that there's such a great idea, but it's being executed like crap because of the tech side.

But to your point, that's a very, very good point. That's a crucial point. Maybe I might have been overstating, but you have to go and become the software expert. But being able to build a prototype using tools online and just like and those, you don't have to learn how to code to do those things right. But it shows that you're serious. It shows that you're putting in effort and it's more than just an idea in your head, but it also, it becomes tangible when there's a prototype that you can put inside. You know, put a phone in somebody's hands and say, hey, fool around with this. So you're, you're doing two signals there to a potential tech co founder. You're saying, hey, I'm serious about this because I'm willing to put the effort in. But also second, secondarily, it's like it's not just an idea here it is and now they can critique it. It's much more easy for them to consume the concept when it's something that they can interact with.

Now we're going to take a step out of your founder journey and I want to get your insight into. You also teach at or used to teach at Queen's and entrepreneurship, what is it that you've seen change in? Let's just say the last five years with entrepreneurship and startups and that whole world and obviously you get, you had a front row seat at Launch Academy working with entrepreneurs through mentorship and just side by side with the entrepreneurs while you're building Map Dash and then later.

Yeah, so I mean entrepreneurship, the possibility for entrepreneurship, I think that's the fundamental thing that's changed is that and this is sort of the advent of the web. I mean the web sort of kicked off this but it's been accelerating now since 94 and that's that it's now the capital barriers, the amount of money it needs to start a company, to be an entrepreneur, to experiment. Like it's been reduced, like next to nothing. Like if you think about it, if you're trying to create some sort of product based company, 30 years ago you would need like manufacturing, you need a warehouse, you need all this stuff. Now if you want to build something, a prototype or Whatever, you just need your brain and a computer and an Internet connection as you craft dinner. The cost, the barrier to entry is nil. So the opportunities now are for everyone. So number one, and then the actual. Once you get into the execution side, even if you're not doing a digital based company, even if you're not doing some software based company, even if you're trying to create some jewelry store, and this is why we're so passionate later about like being able to help entrepreneurs of all stripes, because we know that the barriers to entry are reduced, the outsourcing of supply chain. So even if you're making goods, you can outsource production, you can outsource distribution. So we're trying to solve it later. That last component is the last component. Like there's three main prongs of running a business, especially, you know, a product based business. You got to manufacture something or build it, you gotta then market and sell it and then you gotta distribute. So we're trying to solve the marketing, sales, customer support side of things and then the production and the distribution stuff can be outsourced. So, and I think that's becoming the story of this next 10, 20 years. And Shopify is riding the same wave, right? It's like anybody can now start a company. And so you're not, you're no longer, you know, blocked out by your lack of capital, your lack of cash. You're only blocked out by your discipline, your, your ideas and your ability to execute. That's what you're blocked out by. So if you got those, you can be an entrepreneur.

And so that's actually a great, I don't know what the, what the best way to put it, but there's two parallels here. So that's the entrepreneur building a tech company or building some sort of software execution. What about. And you guys have a special lens on this, the small business that's a brick and mortar, or somebody that's creating their own T shirt line or whatnot, leveraging these tools to advance their business. So we kind of touched on this right now. But what are you seeing? Because I'll let you get into some of the details of the client base that you have. But you've got a massive spectrum of clients and some very, very impressive clients. How have you seen them surprise you? And how they're using social media or digital content to market themselves and brand themselves. Like, what are some of the things that have blown you away?

Well, I mean, there's some interesting trends going on right now. So there's a lot to your question there? Yeah, I would say that for the bricks and mortars, there's a bunch of big trends going on right now. One is that what I was just talking about, how it's now cheaper and cheaper to start companies and you can outsource a lot of the work. So you're really focusing, honing in more and more on the design of the product or service and then the marketing, the sales, customer service side of things. That's really the focus of, that's where you can differentiate yourself from your competitors. So it's really a honing of focus that we're seeing. Number one, that's sort of been this longer going trend and then more recently due to Covid and the lockdowns because of it, we've seen this acceleration of bricks and mortar stores coming online. So we're seeing this starting in like April last year. We started seeing this massive wave and it was interesting looking at the data, we could see it like starting in Italy and Spain and then Germany and then Britain and then the US and it just followed the COVID lockdown path where you saw more and more people signing up for our service. And I think this was a repercussion of a couple things. It was, you know, potentially people getting laid off from their jobs, you know, and trying to, you know, augment their, their income via like some sort of online business of some sort. So I think. But it, but it also had, you know, a lot of bricks and mortar businesses were moving online. So there was, there's this more recent sort of wave that we're now seeing from in real world to digital world. And then the other big trend, I would say that's rather unique and sort of in parallel is this concept that if you think about how E commerce or online business has been sort of evolving over the years up until recently and I would say even still a lot of businesses that sell online now think of it this way. They'll think of the website is like the hub. So their website, their URL is the hub in which business is conducted. And so then everything else is a channel to push people to your website to conduct business. And that could be like social can be one channel, email can be another channel, SEO. And they're all trying to push traffic to a website where that conduct isn't. And that's. So this is a, this is a key change that we're seeing. We're seeing now that instead of people starting with a website and then trying to push traffic there, people are starting with, you know, creating a following on a social channel. So whether it's Instagram or TikTok or whatever, they'll, they'll create an identity and then they'll create a following in a community and then they'll think about monetizing and turning it into a business. It's like, you know, it's almost the opposite. You build it, they will come, they will come and then you build it. Right. So they're creating these audiences and then they're saying, oh, wait a second, I got an audience here. Maybe I should sell T shirts or make kombucha or whatever. So we're seeing more and more of that where it's like there's a concept of the passion economy where people are passionate about a subject and then they turn it into a business as they become these sort of happenstance entrepreneurs. And, and this is only made possible by the fact that starting a business is so cheap because they're seemingly unprepared to this. And then suddenly there's a business that's kind of almost thrust upon them. And this is the reason why I brought up the website being the central hub compared to this is then what we're now starting to see is that each of these social channels, the business is conducted inside the social channel. So these passion economy type creators, they're not pushing people back to the website to sell stuff. They're, they're just selling stuff right inside Instagram using shop posts or whatever. And so now you're going to be, you know, the next phase for this is that these creators are now going to have to manage all these different channels and conduct business in all these channels. So this is where later, as a company we're trying to, you know, get ahead of that. We're trying to say, okay, we're going to be this place that you can manage your commerce and all these social channels in a centralized place because otherwise it'll overwhelm.

Yeah. And that's being enabled by the innovation by all these companies like Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok, allowing for E commerce to happen within their, their environments. But when you look at majority of the small business owners in particular, they're trained and conditioned to, no, I've got a brick and mortar, I've got a website, everybody needs to shop there. And now it's all being thrust upon them in such a expedited time frame, they can't keep up. And so I can definitely see how later can be that trusted partner, that trusted resource to help them run their business, not just share content okay, now I want to direct the conversation right back to you, but in particular 10 year old you, 10 year old Roger, if you were able to jump back in time and give yourself some advice, some guidance on your journey to be an entrepreneur, what would you go back and tell yourself?

That's a tough one. It's funny, I always knew I'd be an entrepreneur even at the age of like 6. I started little side businesses and stuff. So I always knew I was going to do that and I was always knew it was going to be in computers. But I guess the advice I would.

Really at 6 were computers even invented back then?

Shut up. Actually, I know you're, you're joking, but it's, it wasn't far off. Like it was the PC. The first personal computers was right around there. So yeah, I was, it was like these were Wangs and like pre, you.

Know my first computer was a Commodore 128. So there's a Commodore 64 that came up before I got the Commodore 128 but this is how it shows how.

64 and all that stuff.

Yeah. And then the one that came after was 64C and I was too young but I, I could tell that I, I jumped too early. I should have got the 64C. If I waited a year I would have got this better one. You're showing some credit.

That's not bad. That's not bad. Anyways, so I guess the advice I would have given myself back then, this is something I struggled with even not just as a 10 year old. I struggled with well into my 20s, was the people aspect to business. I found that I thought in my head that being an entrepreneur was me with my ideas and then just being able to execute upon those ideas to provide something to the world. Ergo, I'm an entrepreneur. And the thing that I struggled with a long time was a company is really nothing without people and having good people and having good relationships with those people and using this, I hate to use the word, but the synergies of those people to create something greater than the whole is so key. That's the key part of being an entrepreneur. And so how does that manifest itself? What does that mean? That means that like you know, although I started my first company with three co founders, I then rejected that due to the relationship breaking down and said no, I can do it by myself. I reverted back to that sort of I can do everything by myself. And that led to a lot of loneliness and you know, some depression. And I know you and I have Talked about this before, and I would have recommended to myself, no, just, you know, the thing that was wrong was not that I had partners. The thing that was wrong was I didn't have the good. I didn't have the proper relationship with those partners. And so that's what I've discovered now is that you just got to really work on those relationships with your partners and really, really work on finding the right partners and then making sure you work through problems. And having a co founder or co founders is like having a marriage. You don't. You got to work on it. It's a lot of work.

And a big part of this communication and having transparency, but open conversations, honest conversations, that's hard to do. It doesn't matter whether it's a personal relationship. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Yeah.

So, yeah.

But the reason why I brought up communication, you guys have this really interesting. Well, prior to Covid, this interesting thing that you've done in your office that sparks communication and sparks dialogue. You have a policy where I think it's what, every three months you guys change des and you force everybody to pick a new desk or you guys actually do a draw. Right. Tell us about that and the benefits that you've seen from that.

Yeah. So when we started later, Graham, at the time later that was. There was. I talked to the other co founders, and we realized that we really wanted to build later in a different way. And so we wanted to be thoughtful about setting up processes and ways of doing things that would bring out desired behaviors. And one of the things that I spotted in some of my previous startups and also some of the previous companies I worked at, is that over time, as companies get bigger, you get into something called silos. And those silos are little clumps of people usually around a team that a little mini culture breaks up, and then the relationship between those people usually break down. And that kind of tension of multiple cultures existing within a company and then also the breakdown and trusted communication between those teams is often the downfall of the company or it causes a lot of carnage in the company. So we set about trying to engineer processes to prevent that from ever happening. And so one of the things that.

One of the ones before you get into the actual execution, was that a easy sell or a tough sell to your co founders? Like, hey, I want to implement this?

That's a good question. I'm trying to remember. I think it was a bit of a tough sell. I mean, my co founders hadn't had as much experience as me. In starting companies or running companies. They, some of them had for sure, but I don't then seen that sort of thing. I remember it not being that hard to sell, to be honest. I don't remember having people push back at it. There was a little bit of pushback, but not too much.

Well, to the credit, there wasn't that many people when you guys implemented it, so it's easy to shut down.

They might have to go, all right, Raj, whatever you want to say, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, but then I did start getting pushback, you know, as we got bigger. Not necessarily from the founders, but from new hires, employees. Yeah, yeah. So like the, the one, the one you, you demonstrated, we have a whole slew of these wacky processes. But I remember talking to one, a couple CEOs down in San Francisco about this one time and they, they were dumbfounded by it at first. They were like, wait a second, you're putting in place processes that actually make you less efficient? Because that's the rub, right? These processes that actually make us less efficient, but they're there for strategic long term benefits of culture, etc. And I was like, yeah, they do make us less efficient, but we're sticking to them in order to create long term benefits. And so I know I'm talking the abstract, so I'll get to the specifics. So your particular example there is every four months when we were in our office, we would do a randomized desktop and everybody sat next to somebody else randomly. And the idea there was to break down those silos between teams. So. Well, there was a bunch of things. It was to break down the silos between teams to get people used to the concept of change and ever present change and being able to adapt to ever present change. And then there was an egalitarian fairness aspect to it where people would not feel like, oh, I've got the corner office, therefore I have this much status. There's a fairness to it. And so for the first certain number of years, everybody in the company, including myself, would just get randomly assigned a desk. And the benefits were striking. In my mind, you'd start seeing a customer support person sitting next to an engineering person. And traditionally in software, those are two people. Those are two teams that tend not to agree with each other too often. Right. They'll be like they usually are blaming each other for things. Right. So I mean, we started seeing results almost immediately where we, you know, we'd have engineers standing up at town halls and saying, the support team's doing such an amazing job. And the Support people are like, oh, the engineers are doing a great job because they're sitting next to each other and they get to see and they get to empathize and they get to see what the other person is doing. I was talking to one of my employees recently about how much she missed that because she was like, well, I got to learn so much when she was choosing customer Success and she was like sitting next to one of our engineers and she was asking our engineer, another woman, about what she was doing and she learned about her career and just there was an empathy and an understanding that was created there. It's very invaluable. Another time she was sitting next to a VP and got to hear about the senior management side of things. So now again, it made things inefficient because I used to hear complaints all the time from various groups saying, oh, well, I got to walk across the office and talk to somebody on my team that's inefficient. And I'm like, tough luck, Walk across the office or just use slack. Quit whining. So I think the overall long term benefits definitely outweigh the short term.

Honestly, a lot of people really this probably don't recognize the personal growth that's happening at that stage, like being able to learn about what it took to become an engineer. I think there's also this inherent chance to solve problems and challenges because the engineer is sitting next to a customer support person or even a business development person, and they're hearing the challenges or problems that they're faced with, with convincing somebody or common problems that are being complained about. And the engineer is like, oh, well, that actually shouldn't function that way or hey, here's a fix. Like this is what we can do to fix that, right?

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And to that point, one of our other wacky processes is that everybody in the company, when they first join, has to do one week of support, including bps, et cetera. And then every month, every single person in the company has to do two to three, three hours of support. So I'm still doing support every month. And it reconnects me to our customers. And it also makes me realize I'm like, oh my God, that's still a problem. We gotta get that fixed. And the same with engineers, they're now able to like, holy crap, we need to get that fixed. So there's a bunch of these processes and again, that one there was a lot of pushback against, but it's now part of the culture, so it's kind of cool.

And, you know, from the macro level looking in, it makes the organization that much stronger. The individuals get more experience and growth. But they might not see it right then at that time.

You might not see it in the moment.

Especially if they. A lot of them bring baggage. Like, I worked at Google or I worked at Snapchat. We never had to do things like this. And you're like, no, that's the way we're doing it. And they have to accept it, but they begrudgingly probably do it.

Right, Exactly. But then I think the vast majority do sort of see the benefit over time.

Yeah. Roger, you've been really generous with your time. I want to kind of wrap this up with our standard two questions and then give you your call to action. Tell me about an app, a tool or a methodology or something that has been instrumental to your success to bring you to where you are today as a founder.

It's an interesting question. This isn't necessarily a tool so much as a system, but there are tools for it. So I would say the one that's been the most instrumental is the Pomodoro technique. I don't know if you're.

I had a feeling you're going to say that.

You heard me talk about that.

Do you want to talk about the ducks as well, or.

Well, the ducks are another wacky. I'm not going to get into ducks because everybody's going to be confused by that. But so the Pomodoro technique and why. I think that's been so long, life changing for me as an entrepreneur. So it kind of, when you start off as an entrepreneur, you're very focused on, like, one thing. And like, for me, as a software person, I always started off with just coding something. And so, like, you'd be able to focus on that one thing, the coding. But then as your business starts getting, you know, bigger and bigger and you get more employees and you're doing more things, your time gets divided and you just keep. You're. You're constantly having to do, you know, 10, 20, 30 different things, and you're constantly interrupted. And that multitasking, that random multitasking, random interruptions I found for myself, made me more and more dissatisfied with my work. Like, you get to the end of the day and you'd be like, what did I actually accomplish? And you'd get a feeling that would also compound any depression you were already feeling. So it would actually mentally affect me. And I've seen red studies in Harvard Business School and stuff where it actually shows that doing that kind of multitasking really does have damaging psychological effects upon people. So what the Pomodoro technique does, it says, okay, turn off all your phones, all your distractions for 25 minutes and you're focusing on one thing. And so I would then try to set a goal of I want to hit four or five Pomodoros in a day. And you'd be surprised. Like it's 25 minutes. How hard could that be? You'd be surprised as an entrepreneur how few you're actually going to get done in a day. You'll get to the end of the day and you can get like four or five done. You'll feel a lot better about yourself. I mean, back when I was just coding, I could get 8, 10, 20 done, maybe not 28 to 12 done. But now as an entrepreneur, if I can get like four done in a day, I am rocking it. And I feel so much better about myself and I am so much more effective.

Yeah, you definitely were the first person that introduced that Pomodoro technique to me. And since then I've seen a lot of successful people come out and say, yeah, they use that. And it's not easy. As you said, as you grow, you got more responsibilities and you got more things that you're accountable for. It gets harder and harder, but it definitely is something that can bring back some focus. Next question is if you could give a piece of advice to somebody starting a company today, first time entrepreneur, seasoned entrepreneur, somebody that's starting something today, what would that advice be?

Well, besides the piece of advice that I would have given to myself here, on top of that, get someone, get somebody else involved so you're not lonely. I would say, honestly, it sort of harkens back to what I was saying about how it is so much easier now to start a company so it's cheaper to start a company. So what I would say to this person, whether it's in the tech space or even just putting up a shopify store or any sort of service, is just start it. I know that sounds a little cliche, but the risk you're taking is not as big as you think it, because the amount of money you have to outlay to start a company is now almost nothing. And if you do it in a smart, intelligent, iterative way, it's not going to cost you much. And you're going to learn so much more about yourself and your market and everything about the process by actually doing it that you'll never learn from a book. So I think we're living in this golden age of potential entrepreneurism where people can the risk, you don't have to be massively risk tolerant because the risks are so small. So it's just start it. Start and iterate and learn and repeat.

Yeah, I think what's the saying? The best time to start a business was yesterday. The second best time is today.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, Roger.

Yeah, I was just gonna say in the past that used to be sort of, you know, a bit, a bit cliche because you know, it would cost them a lot of money to start it, but now it doesn't cost.

No.

So you might as well.

No.

Get your idea out there and start testing and iterating and getting feedback and you don't have to actually build a product, prototype or even just going out there and asking do your customer discovery and talking to people is what you need to do. All right, Roger, speaking about talking to people, this is your chance to talk to our audience. What can our audience do for you? What is your call to action?

Well, I would. So later. We're based in Vancouver, but now we're also, we also hired globally and because.

You guys employees in the UK and Ireland.

Yeah, we got Singapore, we got all over the world. Although we are primarily Vancouver based and we're trying to raise our awareness in Vancouver, a lot of people think that we're actually based out in California. No, we're based in Vancouver. We were built here. We're a Vancouver company. But we do have employees around the world. So what I would say, what I would like to get the word out for is that we are hiring. We're hiring a lot this year. I know what there's. The economy is in a weird state where some companies are laying off, others are hiring. We're lucky enough to be in a space where our company is doing very well and we're going to be hiring a lot. And if you like the sound of some of our philosophies around our systems, like our desk change and our customer support and the thoughtful approach we take and then our mission of trying to help small businesses start, I think there's room inside the company for, for a lot of really good people. So yeah, reach out to us. We've got a lot of jobs listed on our website and we're going to have a lot more listed this year.

So it's later.com would be later.com careers.

Yeah, if you go to later.com you can just see at the drop down menu at the top that says careers and then we'll have all the right now There's I think 12 jobs listed there or so. We're going to probably have another 20 or so listed in a few weeks to months. So keep an eye on that page.

And as I said at the beginning, it's one of the fastest growing social media digital marketing companies. You'd be really impressed with the roster of clients and customers that are using later and link in bio and all these new features that are being rolled out for TikTok for Pinterest, and by the time this airs, I get a feeling there's a few more features and tools that are going to be released. Roger this has been an awesome conversation. A lot of insight into the mindset of entrepreneurs, not just from a tech perspective, but for brick and mortars and traditional businesses and how they're leveraging tech to grow their business. Thank you for joining us on Founder Journey and I hope to see you in person soon.

I hope so too. Ray. Thanks very much for this opportunity. Have an awesome day.

Awesome.

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