Episode 9: Vasilios Alexiou from FirmPlay talks about recruiting, travel, and working remotely

Recording. Welcome to the People Stack podcast, where we discuss the intersection of people, work, and technology. I'm your host, Jenn Bunk, founder of Jenn Bunk Ventures and creator of People Stack Academy. Our guest for this episode is Vasilios Alexiou, co-founder of Firmplay. Welcome. Welcome, Vasilios. I was so focused on your last name.

No, no, it's okay. You nailed it. You nailed it. It's not the easiest name, and I'm always I'm eager to see if people can get it.

So actually, do you have a nickname or do you go by Vasilios?

The funny thing is, yeah, so I do. I have a nickname. People call me Billy.

That's hilarious.

So the backstory is that Vasilios somehow translates to Billy.

Oh, okay. I was going to say—

So Vasilios translates to William, I should say, and then obviously Billy is the nickname for William. The funny thing is that I grew up in a Greek family and everyone grew up calling me Billy. So by the American nickname. And then when I left home, which was Vermont, and went to college, I wanted to get in the habit of people calling me Vasilios. So it turns out, like, you know, folks, Americans here tend to call me Vasilios, especially, you know, older, in my sort of latter years in professional life. And then my family calls me Billy, so it doesn't really make sense. But there's a backstory there.

So you think your family would call you by your real name. Exactly.

You think it'd be the other way around, right?

All right. So now that we've broken the ice a little bit, tell us a little bit about Firmplay and what's going on right now.

Yeah. So Firmplay is a startup. We're based out of Boston that helps other companies tell their unique employer brand story. That's the way we, we pitch it. So what that really means is companies are working really hard to get top talent. And the way that you get top talent is to convince them that you're a really great place to work. And the way you do that is not through job postings, it's not through, you know, typical advertisements. It's showing them what it's actually like to work there, showing them, you know, what the experience is gonna be like, who they're working with, really giving them a sense for, this is the culture, do you feel like you're a fit or not? And that's kind of, that's the challenge right now, to get that kind of content out for companies is a challenge because recruiters are focused on recruiting, they're not marketers, And now we're trying to help them storytell in a way, right? And our software makes it easy for them to get that, that story out there.

So would you say your main users, your user base are recruiters or other folks too?

Yeah. So it's a good question. I mean, it depends. For the most part, it's folks who are focused on recruiting. So typically folks within HR, talent acquisition folks, you know, directors of talent acquisition. It's also, you know, employer brand specialists, employer brand managers, these folks who are, as of late, in the last 5 years or so, really starting to focus on their employer brand because they realize just how important it is that they carve out this role for someone to do that. So, those are kind of typically the users that we work with.

Right, right. So, how many people work for your company?

Yeah, so we're a small team, full-time 3, but then there's a few other folks that we outsource some development work. We have some other folks part-time part-time helping with some other business functions, but for the most part it's 3 plus a handful of other folks part-time.

So, you definitely consider yourself a startup?

Yeah, absolutely. We're a bootstrapped startup in every sense of the word. Yeah.

I like to ask that question because people say— I think you're definitely in that boat. It's definitely on that side of it. But sometimes people will say, "Oh yeah, we have 500 people. We're a 500-people startup." Are you still really a startup? And people just have very loosey-goosey definitions of what a startup is.

They do. Yeah, it's a— so it's a big gray area. I mean, there's— I don't know that there's one definition, but there's certain things to look out for. I mean, if a company has been around for like 15, 20 years, I mean, time is one factor that starts to— at that point starts to feel like maybe you're not really in that startup phase anymore, potentially. There's other markers as well. You know, how big are you? Like you said, You know, how stable really is the company? What's the growth trajectory like? That kind of thing, you know.

Right. Instability is like a way of life. Like, that's what you are. It's change, constant change. Like, wait 5 minutes. If you don't like what it's like right now, wait 5 minutes because something's going to happen.

And you have to embrace that. I mean, that's part of— I think the successful startups are the ones that know how to harness that energy and turn it from something that's sometimes a little bit unsettling or scary into something that's exciting. I know that sounds really soft, but I think that's start— you can really see it play out in like the day-to-day business of a company, you know, that are people excited about, you know, pursuing a different, a certain idea and trying to test something really quickly and see if it works, or are they kind of hesitant and they don't want to sort of overstep their bounds, you know, that kind of thinking.

So exactly. So do you see that people who are using your So is it software? Is it an app? Is it a product or service?

Yeah, it's a web application. So software that you use through your web browser, software as a service or SaaS, as they call it. And yeah, I mean, you can imagine the typical kind of scenario is you have a team of talent acquisition folks or recruiters who are tasked with making sure that, you know, they fill roles, that they fill them well with people who are not just technically meeting the requirements, but also like a good cultural fit. And so that's their, you know, that's typically, that's been the traditional, that's their day-to-day job, right? That's what they do. And now you layer on this other piece. So the software helps them with the employer branding piece and the marketing. So typically it's the, you know, 3 or 4 folks from the talent acquisition team logging in, using the tool and helping crowdsource content, create content. That showcases the workplace and then market it out.

[Speaker] Right, right. So, it sounds like it's mainly for, to help them with the marketing piece of it.

[Speaker] Yeah.

[Speaker] That, and it would mainly help, it would help the most, the people that it would help the most who already have a clear vision of what their values are, of who the ideal candidates are. But I wonder if you deal with folks who come in like, I have no idea, or we don't have a value statement. In that case, it makes it a lot harder.

Yeah, you bring up a really good point. It's something we come up against a lot, actually. So we'll be talking to a company and talking about employer branding and what they do around it, and they're like, whoa, you know, I actually, like you said, I don't even have like an EVP, employer value proposition. I don't even have that figured out. We're actually going to be working on that over the next several months. So let's just, you know, reconnect when we've got that. And so for us, maybe that's, you know, that's something that we can help with, which potentially, and start to think about how can we help folks figure that out up front. But for the most part right now, we're focused on folks or companies that are maybe a little bit further along and have that figured out.

Yeah.

And they're ready to hit the ground running, or they're already doing some stuff around, you know, marketing that brand out.

Yeah.

And they just want to do it in a different way, a more powerful way. And specifically, the way that we differentiate is that our tool helps you actually create that content. Through your employees. It's one thing to have recruiters creating stuff or marketers creating content and putting it on social. It's a whole different game when you have employees telling what it's like to work there in their own voice, in their own words, and sharing that content. That's, that's a totally different way to do it. So it's more authentic, it's more engaging. And that's, that's the angle of our software is to get that content through your employees.

And that process of writing that content can be culture building as well. That, hey, I've actually been asked to do this.

Totally.

Because so many people feel that, oh, HR is off in their HR world and they're not even talking to us. We don't know what's going on. This opens that door.

Totally. And we've got— it's a good point. I mean, we've, we've had companies that say, you know what, I've since launching this, I've had people come up. There's a gamification piece in it as well for friendly competition.

Very nice.

And we've had companies say, you know, I had people come up to me who I've asked to create content or to share content, and they saw where they stood compared to their coworkers. They're like, hey, how do I get to the top spot?

That's good.

You know, look what I have to do. So it definitely starts to build some of that engagement and camaraderie.

Right, that camaraderie. So are the scores or the points based on like how much content, or is the content actually scored for quality? How does this point system work?

Yeah, at the moment it's just, do you have— have you just like completed— It's really a percentage. So what have you actually completed of the stuff that you've been asked to do? What have you really completed? But I'd love to get to the point where it's not just that, it's also all of the stuff you've completed and that's out there. What has gotten the most engagement? What has gotten the most, you know, like actually starting to figure into the equation, the actual performance of a piece of the content. That would be cool. We're not there yet, but it's something that we'd like to explore.

A fun challenge to think about like how you, what metrics you would use to figure that out. I guess it would depend.

You don't want to disincentivize people too. I mean, there's a fine balance, right? Like there's the— in psychology, you probably heard of this. There's like the overjustification effect where if you pay someone to do something that they intrinsically want to do, it starts to erode at that motivation. So we don't want to get to that point. We don't want to make people feel like it's their job to create this content.

But right, you want to be careful. Like if they're just internally motivated, they just want to do it because it's fun. You don't want to take that away from them.

Exactly.

But I love the gamification stuff. And I think that what you've done there sounds like a nice, easy way. It's nothing too complicated from a user perspective. And it also fits nicely in with what your overall goals are. It sounds like it doesn't feel like, oh, I'm just slapping this on here and it's like this extra thing, which I see a lot sometimes.

Yeah, no, we definitely don't want to do that. I want it to be kind of pretty seamless. Seamless and kind of integrated, just a natural part of the process. I don't want it to become its own thing, like people trying to game the system or something like that.

Exactly. Exactly. So, I also read, I believe it was on your blog, that you recently launched an employer brand score report. So, can you tell us a little bit about that and what you've learned from it? Yeah.

So, the backstory to that is, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, a lot of companies have been starting to do stuff around employer branding. They're sort of dipping their toes in it, in the water. But, you know, there's not— for a lot of them, there might not be that much structure to it or guidance or best practices. So we thought about, well, as people, we have these credit score reports, whatever you think of them. We have these credit score reports that sort of break down our credit. And is there— I thought, all right, let's just apply that kind of concept to a company's employer brand and score it, score it for them and tell them, hey, you know, These are the areas that, that you're really good at. Like, awesome, keep it up. These are some of the other areas that you probably want to take a look at and maybe start to beef up a little bit or address. And here are some ways to do that. And actually wrote a blog post about this a few weeks ago, but just to give you a sense for what goes into that, like the things that we examine, it's a company's careers page. So is the content— I mean, that's the ultimate home base for communicating the employer brand, and that's where pretty much every candidate will end up eventually if they apply to your company. So what do you have on there? Do you have a bunch of jobs and that's it? Does it look basically like the old newspaper style, you know, job listings? Or is it— does it actually tell a little bit of the story of, again, what is it like to work there? Looking at, do you have photos, do you have videos, do you have people actually, you know, sharing, you know, what you guys do for fun, things like that. So the careers page is one, another is social media, you know, what are you doing on social. People who don't know you are not going to go to your careers page because they don't know you. So how do you reach those other folks out there, you know, how do you get some word of mouth, some virality to the content, right, to the storytelling that you're doing. And social is a good spot for that. So we also look at social, and there's a couple other spots. That we analyze.

Okay, so I can see, so in terms of the analyzing, getting a little bit into the metrics for this, so it sounds like for, we'd have to focus on what we're talking about, so for this, like say for the careers page, it's looking for things like, is there storytelling? Is there multimedia? Is it not just text? So is there video too, are there photos and stuff like that? What else goes into the score, which is basically a way of asking if somebody is, out there listening and wants to make their career pages better, what would they do?

Yeah, so the next thing we look at, it's not, so the, what you just repeated was the part where it's like the minimum requirement, what kind of content do you have? We just do a quick scan to see like, do you have something above and beyond just job listings? After that, we actually dig into that content, if it's videos or photos, and we, this is a bit subjective, but we start to look at it from the perspective of, of a job seeker or a candidate, and we, we ask, well, is it super polished? Is it just overproduced kind of stuff with like editing and, you know, music in the background and everything's like happy-go-lucky? Or is it a bit more authentic and raw, less polished certainly, but doesn't feel as much like an ad? It comes maybe from someone's phone. They just kind of recorded a quick video and, and It just feels a little bit more authentic. Is it, you know, is it that? And we, for us, we think it's better to always lean towards the less polished stuff, ironically.

Interesting.

That comes straight from employees. You know, I think we've all grown up in an age where, especially millennials, we've grown up in an age where we're used to social media, we're used to everyone creating content, and just that's the, that's just the, I don't know, the mental model that we have of content. So we get really suspicious of stuff that starts to feel like it's overproduced and almost salesy or like an ad. So we tell people, don't worry about overlaying music and doing cool editing.

Got it. So by overlaying music, do you mean like— I'm picturing some of the websites back in the '90s when you got to the website, it would just start playing music.

Is that what you mean? No, God no. There are some sites that do that, like the auto-playing of videos and music just kills kill me on sites. I almost like just immediately like back out, back out, or I just close the browser.

I think you mean like, so, so videos don't necessarily mean together.

Yeah, it's like, uh, you've probably seen these, they're like, it's like a 2.5-minute video usually, and there's, you know, some kind of like, you know, hipsterish kind of like guitar-playing music in the background.

Yeah, it's probably just like licensed music or something.

Yeah, exactly. Um, and it looks nice, it feels nice, but I think at the same time, in our minds, a little bit there's a little bit of mistrust or distrust there. And it's like, well, does that really— am I getting like the full story, or is this like just what recruiting wants me to know? And the other thing is a lot of times companies will feel the need to just like pull in their CEO and put her or him on like on the video and have them talk about the company. And like they start talking about these CEO-level kind of things like innovation and very high-level stuff.

Sure.

Again, on the surface it seems like it's a good idea, but that doesn't, that doesn't really play well, especially with folks who are thinking about, you know, like an entry-level job or a mid-level job. They want to hear more from their peers. Yeah, as opposed to the CEO. So we always say don't worry about adding a CEO.

Yeah, yeah. There's an area of research in, from, from my world in the IO psychology world called realistic job previews. It's RJP, realistic job previews, and as you're talking, that's the science that I'm reminded of, that there's basically research that shows the more realistic of a job preview that you can give, it can lead to all sorts of good stuff, mainly satisfaction, because it's about expectations.

Exactly.

So that, like, if you're really upfront about what it's gonna be like to work here, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and then they start working there, then the expectations are set, they're set appropriately. Like, maybe it's, it's tough to find a parking space or maybe whatever it is, even if it's the little things that can really make a huge difference. Totally. So that definitely plays into what you're talking about. The more raw, the more real content, and that's easier to create actually.

Exactly.

It doesn't have to spend thousands of dollars.

That's the killer, the part that we try to— it's like, guys, that's the kicker to all of it, right? It's not that hard to create. Yeah, we also, it just reminds me a lot of what we tell companies, which is just think of it as being on a first date. I mean, you can lie through your teeth and tell someone all these amazing things and just pretend like you're, you know, this rockstar perfect in every single way, and there's no, you don't have any quirks or anything like that, right? But they're eventually going to find out, and you know, you don't want to, why just, yeah, just be yourself. You know, so.

Right, yeah, yeah, and I can see that especially being helpful for, I'm trying to think if it matters like on the level of the position, 'cause when you said CEO, I was like, yeah, you know, if it's definitely like thinking of a tech company, right? So engineers might not necessarily like relate to that, even like folks higher up like mid-level managers. But then like if you're recruiting for top level, then I think that makes it a different story.

Yeah, yeah, in that case, a lot of that kind of recruiting happens, it's certainly the employer brand influences, that as well, that kind of recruiting and the top-level executive who's thinking about a job, they're going to be very in tune to what that brand is. But there's also a whole other kind of recruiting path for that person. It's the whole other executive kind of—

Yeah, headhunters. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. So that may not necessarily be talking to them anyway. They'd be interested in seeing that page, but it may not necessarily need to speak to them.

Yeah, because it's like, yeah, it's a bit different.

Yeah, it's like it's a good way of thinking about it. It's a different path. They might end up in the same place, but—

It's a special reserved executive path. But no, I mean, honestly, I would think— I would, especially, I mean, if I were in that kind of position, I would still want to know. I would want to talk to the people that would be on my teams and figure out, you know, what do you guys think about the culture? What do you guys think needs to change? I think it's just as important in that sense, but I don't think that kind of conversation would happen upfront. It would be later on, you know, further down the line in the discussions with the company. I think the executive would probably want to to get a sort of the finger on the pulse of the company.

Absolutely. What are some of the misconceptions that people tend to have about branding in general and employer branding more specifically, and how do you help people get over those?

Yeah, so one is that what we've been talking about a little bit, which is that it needs to be super polished, it needs to be super formal, as we've discussed. It does not at all have to be that. In fact, it probably shouldn't be that. So that's one, and the way that we sort of combat that or try to win them over is to show them, you know, other companies that are doing it really well, other— having them actually speak to candidates and saying, you know, getting— even though it's maybe anecdotal evidence, just hearing it from someone and hearing them say, you know what, I actually kind of I prefer that it's not really polished. I think that that makes a lasting impression on someone whose job it is to try and convince people. So that's, that's another way. I mean, data is another way as well. We have data that it's, it's a lot more engaging when content comes from the employees themselves versus, you know, some media agency. So there's a few different ways that we try to get at it. But again, if they don't want to, if someone doesn't want to embrace that, if they don't feel comfortable doing that kind of content, then it doesn't matter. You can throw all the data and anecdotes you want at them. It won't really move the needle. So, the company has to kind of also, you know, kind of want to do it as well. So, that's one which we've been talking about. I mean, another is that it takes a ton of time. There's a couple ways to look at that. I mean, one, yes, what you're essentially doing here is content marketing and building up an audience, building up traffic, engagement more importantly. I mean, that is stuff that requires thoughtful content, content that adds value, content that speaks to people. And that's not— as you know, I mean, you're creating podcasts. I mean, that's not super easy to do. It's time— it's time-consuming and More importantly, it takes time over like calendar— in terms of calendar time, it takes time to build up. So in that sense, yes, takes time. On the other hand, as we were talking about, you can actually create some of this stuff fairly quickly in terms of like little bite-sized pieces of content, right? Like a video from a party or a video from a hackathon or photos from, from some, some other event going on. And there's different ways that you can get about it in little, you know, chip away at it, right? But yes, it takes time to build that up. So we try to tell folks, don't try to do it all yourself. If you're a recruiter, try to get other folks involved, the employees, right? Because again, it's more authentic, but it kind of takes the burden off your shoulders a bit. So yeah, get folks involved. So that time piece, I think, can be mitigated a bit. And the other, again, kind of related, but money, that it's really expensive. It's not. You just have to want to do it the right way and be thoughtful about it and have people who are on point, dedicated. It's a part of their responsibility. You know, you have this team who oversees it. So there's ways around all these things. It just takes a little bit of willingness and being there mentally.

What you're saying rings really true from what I've been learning from the marketing world. I've gotten a crash course in marketing ever since starting my business, and it's What you're saying really rings true in terms of like, once you get that content, that message, that storytelling, which I wanna talk a little bit more about on too. But once you get that message down, it really, it can be text, it can just be audio, right? That if you're speaking to the people who you need to be speaking to, like in their language, in a way that's like, wow, you can explain my problems better than I can. Or, you know, you can explain the kind of job I want. Better than I can, then you just feel that immediate connection. And you don't care that the video isn't perfect quality or that maybe there's a little bit of background noise in the audio or whatever it is. That's really what makes it. And that once you can identify those core things, like what messages do you want to send, what stories do you want to tell, everything else doesn't write itself, but it becomes so much easier because then you don't worry about the Yeah, you can get over that because one of the things that I was thinking as you were talking about, you know, the quality piece of it is like, I would— I definitely fight those hurdles myself in terms of wanting it to be perfect, right? That like, oh my God, this is going to be— people are going to complain about the hissing in the background or that the video isn't perfect. But once I started putting stuff out there, they're like, yeah, yeah, it's good enough, I don't care.

Yeah, I care about the content, right?

What did you say? Here's what I like that you said that was That was awesome. So yeah, that's totally—

yeah, I remember I watched on— so you might have seen Facebook has come out with like Facebook Live where people can stream like essentially like a TV channel. They can stream live from their phone or from a camera right onto Facebook and people can tune into it like a TV show. Okay, and I remember the first time I came across it was I think a few months ago and it this is silly, but I was watching— I came across this video of Bono from U2 talking about the Syrian refugee crisis. Again, I just forget what, you know, who was talking or what they were saying, but yeah, but for some reason I just couldn't like, I couldn't turn away. I just kept watching. I was so curious, and I remember thinking, wow, I just spent several minutes listening to Bono. I had really no intention, but yeah, I that what he was talking about was interesting. It's personally, you know, I think meaningful to me because it has to do with Greece a little bit as well, with the refugee crisis and influx there. And I noticed that the edit, that sort of the production qualities, so to speak, weren't really that great. It was just a camera askew, sort of trained on Bono. He was kind of not even like in the middle, or it was like off to the aside. The lighting was bad, the sound was bad, but I was watching and I noticed like 50,000 other people had tuned in as well. So that really gets to, I think, what you're saying, which is just, is it— what's the content really that you're sharing?

Yeah. So let's talk about storytelling. #Storytelling seems to be a huge trend right now. What part does storytelling play in your company and the way that you work with the folks who use your software?

Yeah, so it's actually part of how we describe it. If you remember how I described what we do, which is we help companies tell their unique employer brand story. And so for us, it's core, it's at the heart of actually what we do. And the way that we get at it is by, yeah, sure, enabling it through technology and giving them an easy way way to fuse together folks from different departments and collect that content and then push it out. That sounds all well and good, but there's also another aspect to it, which is a bit of consultative part where we talk to our clients on a regular basis and we give them advice, best practices. There's also the blog that we're constantly trying to put out thoughtful content to help folks tell their story. More easily and effectively. So it— we try to tackle it from a few different ways of technology. Again, content on the, on the blog, and then consulting sort of in person or by the phone on a regular basis. So, you know, all those— there's a— I can go one click down and talk about kind of the, the things that, that are built into each of those areas, but for the most part, I'd say those are— that's kind of the trifecta that we try to hit people with.

I was gonna ask before when we were talking about what you help people with, and you were talking about the careers page, and you were also talking about social media. So we talked a little bit about the careers page and some advice for people. So how about we talk about the social media piece of it, and then also, my guess would be that storytelling plays a big role in that. So yeah, and for me personally too, I'm interested in your thoughts on this too. In terms of social media, What are the metrics to even look for? What are the goals? What do you tell the folks that you work with in terms of social media stuff?

Yeah, I mean, there's a couple ways to look at it. Broadly speaking, one is the content that you're putting out. So it doesn't— I'll take a step back. I mean, one, I think a temptation is to think of social media as something that you just have to like spray and pray, just hit a bunch of— put a bunch of content on it, you know, hit it full force and just, wow, I can't wrap my head around that. I can't do it. So people never get started, right? What I say is, well, let's take it a step back and think about, right, what's the message in the content, right? Have you figured that out? Once you have that figured out, start to create some little shareable pieces of content. Again, our tool helps with doing that because if you're not a— if you're not in marketing, you know, if you're not in graphic design and you're a recruiter, that you probably don't have time or really have even spent that much time in the past creating graphics and content and things like that. So we try to automate some of that stuff. So once you have that stuff, start, start pushing it out. And it doesn't need to be on every single platform. You don't need to be on, you know, Pinterest, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. Pick like 2 and just, just start there and just start putting out some content, maybe one piece a day, something like that, right? Schedule it out. Spend a half hour at the beginning of the week and just schedule it out for the whole week and go from there. And then the thing, to your question, or to your, yeah, to your question, look at first engagement. Are people actually engaging with it? You know, it's great that you're now putting stuff out there, but is it resonating? And start to look for trends. What's the stuff that is working out well? You know, is it that you thought the fun, you know, event kind of stuff is resonating with people, but It really turns out that it's actually some of the more hardcore engineering stuff, you know, like how the engineering team works together and the hackathon that you had last week. Is it that kind of stuff that's really performing? Then do more of that. So engagement is one piece, and the other is reach. So it's great that you're pushing stuff out over your company's social accounts, but you might have like a few hundred followers or a couple thousand followers. Followers, but you have this whole untapped network in your employees. They can help multiply your reach, you know, 10x, 20x. So start to pull in who your most engaged folks are and then ask them, hey, would you, you know, reshare some of this? Would you retweet it?

Yeah.

And the engage— that also helps with engagement, but that, that also broadens the audience, you know. It helps, helps you tap into people who aren't necessarily following you, but they're connected to to your employee, and what that does is start to get at some of the passive candidates out there, folks who are happily employed. They're not, you know, gonna be looking for a job right now, but they start to hear about you. You know, they start to, you start to plant the seed. And, you know, when they do think about maybe joining or leaving for another job in a year, 18 months, you'll have influenced, you'll have some mindshare, or you'll have influenced that a little bit, so. Those are the two areas we look at, engagement and the reach.

Got it. That makes a lot of sense. Twitter, tweeting once a day, is that enough? Is that enough to start or do you encourage people to try to do more than that?

Yeah, we encourage more. Once a day is— Twitter is maybe not a great example to just get started with because it's a fast-moving social network. With Twitter, in fact, we recommend folks repost, retweet some of the same stuff. It's okay to repeat content, 'cause there's metrics out there, data out there that says a very small fraction of your audience will ever see the tweet. So, kind of create that content once, but then reuse it, repurpose it, and do it fairly often. So, pick a number. It's not gonna be 20 times a day, it's not gonna be 1, but I'd say it's a handful of posts posts a day are totally okay. But again, it's just getting started I think is better than, if your inability to get to 5 or 6 posts a day is what's stopping you, it shouldn't. Just start with 1 or 2. But yeah, Facebook is another area and LinkedIn is another area where you can totally get away with something like a post a day.

[Speaker] Like 1 a day, yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah. And so, do you help specifically with specific social media outlets? Like, if somebody said, hey, I wanna do Instagram, 'Cause I think there's certainly some companies where Instagram might be a little bit, I think actually the way that I see Instagram, I don't know a lot about it, is that it's a good fit for certain companies, but for others it's just, I don't know what I'm gonna post. So, I mean, do you get into the nitty-gritty of specific social media, or is it more around just the overall strategy and then they kind of go from there?

Yeah, we start, it's the latter. We start with overall strategy. We wanna make sure that they have their ducks in a row in terms of, you know, what is your EVP, what is, you know, what are you really trying to communicate, who are you trying to reach ultimately, is it marketers, salespeople, do you wanna have a diversity campaign going on?

Right, exactly.

Just let's figure that out. And then the other stuff is, it's just a medium, right? It's just a channel. I shouldn't say just, it's important what you post where, but, That shouldn't, you know, to start there, to say I want to start with an Instagram campaign, well, I would always ask why. You know, what is it that you want to achieve? And that ultimately brings it back to what I was saying.

Not like, oh, I saw these 20 blog posts, I'm supposed to be on Instagram now, right?

Yeah, I mean, it's great if you want to, that's great, but let's, you know, let's figure out, okay, more broadly, where does this fit in and what are you going to be posting in general? What are your objectives? And then we can figure out if it makes sense for you to spend time. It's an investment, right? You have to spend time building up that audience. So it might make sense to just not worry about Instagram and focus on Twitter or Facebook where you already have a following.

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, right? The big 3, that seems to be the big 3 right now is just Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.

It's rapidly, you'll see it, you've probably come across, yeah, Instagram, Snapchat is getting a lot of traction with brands. It always starts typically higher up and starts to trickle down to some of the mid-sized companies, smaller companies.

Yeah, and we'll see how that changes too. It's interesting to see how social media is just like one month it's one thing and then the next month it's this entirely new thing.

Exactly. I mean, you could spend all this time building up an audience and if maybe a couple years down the road it's really something else.

Or whatever.

You probably heard about Elo. A year or two ago, which is like the ad-free Facebook essentially.

Okay.

You didn't have to deal with ads at all in there, and it was really hot for— I'm sure it still has a following, but it was all over the news at one point, and their traffic was through the roof, and I think it tapered off after that, and it became— it was kind of the flavor of the month. I don't hear many brands talking about Ello right now, is my point.

Right, yeah.

So I agree with you.

Right, right. All right, so let's shift the conversation a little bit to talking about like Firmplay as a company. So, who, you said you have two, there's three of you, like three main folks. So, talk a little bit about that and we'll go from there.

Yeah, so we are three folks, as I said, there's two on the business side, myself, Jason Rivas, who handles the sales side of things, and Daniel Bonnell, who's our CTO, our technical lead, technical side of the company. And the interesting thing is we're all remote from each other. I come into the office here that we have, but in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but Daniel's in Connecticut, and, Jason's out in New York, New Jersey. So, the challenge there is, well, how do you maintain a sense of, again, camaraderie, and feeling like you're building that, the bond, right, that comes from working every single day with someone, and being in the trenches with them, so to speak. So, that's a bit of a challenge. I mean, as with anything, working remotely, there's pros and cons, What we try to do is find excuses to meet, find excuses to meet up somewhere, whether it's in Boston or we're planning to go to New York soon and have a meeting there. But, you know, whatever it is, just try to make something regular and stick to it. So, for us, Daniel and I, for instance, when we work on the product and plan what we call sprint sessions, where we plan what we're gonna build for the next 3 weeks. Yeah, we'll try and do those in person. So we'll have oftentimes in this room right here, and we'll, you know, we'll go crazy on the whiteboard over there. And that's awesome. And so that, that kind of rejuvenates you for a bit, right? And that can carry you over for a few more weeks or a month, and then you can come back and do it all over again. So, so having that, and then there's, you know, just day-to-day kind of communication tools like Slack. Yeah, try and get on the phone as often as we can. It's It's one thing to be, you know, chatting in essentially a chat room or, you know, a communication tool, but it's another to get on the phone and hear someone's voice or to see them in like a video conference.

So would you say your main communication tools would be Slack, the phone, do you do like Google Hangouts or anything?

Sometimes, actually not really. Recently we haven't really used like Google Hangouts, but we would do like Skype. Sometimes for meetings. And yeah, that's it. I mean, email internally, we don't really use that. What Slack has done is killed email at this point for internal communications, but which we're totally fine with. So, so yeah, I'd say that's about it. And we try to keep it pretty lean.

So, okay, so the question that I ask, that I try to ask all of my, my podcast guests, at least the ones that it's appropriate for, is What is your biggest people-related challenge right now at your company? So, at Frameplay, is it related to the remoteness of the executive team, or are there other things that come to mind as well?

I would say, yeah, I would just repeat that we're, you know, it's interesting here. We actually started out being in person, at least Jason and I did, and a few other folks before before we pivoted into the business that we're in now, like a year ago. And that was nice, and then we got used to that, and then we suddenly transitioned into these other things that we hadn't started out with. So it wasn't, I think it would be even easier if we had started out that way, remote, you know, that would kind of, it would just be how, we wouldn't have known anything else, but I think we kind of know what it's like to work together, And, you know, there's definitely— there's a little bit lost there, right? So it's nothing like insurmountable, but, you know, it's like, all right, well, how do I— how do we cope with now, you know, having to do stuff a little bit more remotely and seeing each other and having to plan things like that? So, so yeah, I would definitely say the remote thing, I think. But I think we're working, we're getting better, and it's been working out, I think, fine. I don't want to make it sound like it was like a disaster, but no, it's worked out totally fine.

That's great.

Yeah, sometimes I miss, you know, going to lunch with the guys. Right, yeah. So, I'm always looking forward to opportunities to hang out with them and see them again.

Yeah, so it sounds like you've found ways around that with the various tools, and it sounds like you heavily rely on Slack, which lots of folks are. Yeah. Changing the nature of email.

Totally, totally. And there's another thing that we want to do, which is a bit more old-fashioned, that we've been talking about a lot, and I think we're gonna try and do it sometime in the next year. But we all— we actually, if you go on to our website's About page, you'll see, obviously you'll see us at the top and a little blurb on us, but the rest of the page, like 3 or 4 page scrolls down, is photos of us traveling. So we love to travel, and what we want to do is figure out a way to combine maybe some of the work and the travel? Because, right, it's our own business, we don't have bosses, so we can, we can be flexible with it, right? Let's, you know, why do we have to be working from home necessarily? Why can't we go, you know, to do an Airbnb for a month? Yeah, in Puerto Rico or something, and, you know, spend, you know, 8 hours a day, 10 hours a day working, and then on the weeknights and weekends are ours and we can go explore and do whatever, right? So, so we're, we talk about that all the time and, you I think we're just waiting for the right time to do that.

I was going to say, what's holding you back?

Yeah, well, right now we're, you know, we're, we're super focused on just getting to a point where, you know, everything's clicking and we're— we feel pretty good about, you know, just all the to-dos. We have so much, right, that we're trying to crank through that you almost don't even get— have time to get around to planning something like that. So I think once it— hopefully— I know I say this, but who knows if this will ever happen— if it dies down a little bit, I know. And startup, right? It's not ever like it's ever going to die down. But maybe in the winter, I guess, maybe in the winter, you know, that'll be like, all right, we're getting— it's really cold, guys.

Oh, I was going to say, what's different in the winter?

It's cold. That'll be like the motivation to just like, just do it. It won't be anything internal to the business. It'll just be, I can't stand this. We're totally sick of this. Let's get out of here.

So, right. Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at. It's always busy, right? Like even, you know, if you watch shows like, like Shark Tank or other shows like that, like it only, the fun has only just begun, right? Now the hard work really starts. So yeah, yeah, just sort of like, I'm putting on my coaching hat just for a moment to say.

Absolutely, I would take any, I love any feedback. So if you have thoughts, feedback, advice, we're open.

Just sort of to think about what would it mean for you? Like it's, that sounds awesome, right? To be able to say, I can, we can work from anywhere in the world. And so, That's actually like two birds, one stone, right? Because if all three of you have the flexibility to do that and work, it solves the remoteness piece of it 'cause you get to be together, right? But then you also get to do it in awesome places in the world that you wanna revisit or haven't visited before. It gives you that flexibility.

Yeah. Well, is there a danger in, I can ask you a question now.

Is there a danger? So you're the second podcast guest, like, am I allowed to ask you questions?

I'm wondering, like, it's always, you know, it sounds, it sounds good, right? I want to do that. Why wouldn't I? But is there a danger in kind of mixing the, the work and the play in the same way, in the same spot, and going abroad and doing that? And is there— does it interfere with, like, do you, do you not do either really well? Like, just what I'm trying to get at. If you do something like that, can you do either really, like, the work or the— like, you don't really— you're you can't really focus too much on the work, you're distracted, you're in this like beautiful place, and you can't really do the vacation piece because you're always gonna be, you know, you're, you know, you're still working, right? So is it better to just not even bother trying to mix them together and just take dedicated vacations if possible?

I may be the worst person to ask that because I'm completely biased in terms of— so, so one way of thinking about it is how much— I think people have individual differences in terms of how much they want to integrate their work life and their play life, their work life and then their life outside of work. So you have folks who are segmenters, and this is from, I didn't make this up, this is from researchers. And so there's segmenters who want to keep them separated. There's a wall between my work life and my play life, and that's the way that they prefer it. So like if there's a work event and this person tends to have, or has a family, but tends to not bring their family with them because it's just them and that's work. If my family comes to my work stuff with me, oh, that's too much, right? Versus you have, so those would be the segmenters. Then you have the integrators, who are like, there's no, the lines are really blurry. Like, my work is my life and my life is my work, and I love it that way. I'm the latter, right? So I'm an integrator. And so, I mean, part of it came from my former life as an academic. It's part of why I chose that career path to start with, and why I chose to remain a very independent professional as an entrepreneur. Is that it gives me the flexibility in order to do that. And I think it's like, it requires the same sort of mindset and skills, if you can call it that, that an entrepreneur needs. We were talking about in the very beginning that change is constant. You need to pivot every day. And that it's more of, it's an approach to thinking about life that's more about, it's more holistic than just saying I have my work and then there's everything else. So, you know, there's people like— so Tim Ferriss immediately comes to mind as sort of like the guru for the person who says, "Yes, you can live this life. And you just need to figure out how that would work for you." That you can travel as much as you want, even with your family. And that, yes, you can get work done too, as long as you focus and that you have that— you have those set goals like, "What do I want to get done?" and "What are like the 2 or 3 most important things I need to get done today?" And then if you do those two things, wherever you are, you go and have fun. Yeah, if it's in the city, you can go to an art museum or go see a movie or whatever. If you're somewhere near the beach, you can go lay on the beach, whatever. You can do phone calls from the beach, you know, there's no one saying that you can't do that. I think that it's just some people are a little bit more comfortable, just innately more comfortable with that than others. So I think it's, it's, it's a series of questions to ask yourself and to figure that out. And then if it's like you want to do this with your team, it gets a little bit more complicated because you got to figure that out amongst yourselves, but totally doable and awesome.

Yeah, I'm going to— I'm definitely going to look into that. I think I fall a little bit, like you said, on the ladder. Yeah, I do like to mix both. So especially now that it's my own, my own company, my own business, something that I'm building, I think I might have been a little bit more hesitant in the past when I was working for another company.

So, right, right, exactly. All right, so we are just about up on time, and it was really great talking with you, Vasilios slash Billy.

Yeah, just throw the nickname in there.

Yeah. All right. Yeah, so, so thanks very much.

Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Great. Yeah. Okay, cool.

All right.

And that wraps up another episode of the People Stack podcast. Check out my website, jennbunk.com. That's J-E-N-N bunk.com, where you can find lots of goodies, including a link to People Stack Academy, my online school dedicated to helping the tech community build better people processes. Also on genbunk.com, you can sign up for the changelog, the People Stack weekly email with tips and exclusive offers only available to my email tribe. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.