How Three Friends Created Pocket Bard, a Game Changing RPG Audio App - Interview 28

You're listening to the shuttle class size version of this episode with Frank and Chris. To get access to the galaxy class size version, go to patreon.com nerdpreneur and become a member of the awesome nerdpreneur board. Now enjoy the episode. Welcome to Nerdpreneur, where we have fun conversations with people making money from their nerdy passion. My name is Chris, and as always, I'm joined by my co host, Frank. Hello. And today we have three, count them up, three very special guests.

They are the founders, owners and leadership team of a company called Pocket Bard. Their names are Alex Berner, Chase Harris, and Jason Kovalski. Welcome to the show, guys. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thanks for having us. So, Pocket Bard, what is your nerdy passion? Interactive audio for tabletop gaming. Nice, nice. Well, for all of our listeners who may not be in that space, what is that? What is interactive music? Or. Tell me more, tell me more. Tell us. Yeah. What is this?

So it's easiest to understand by comparison with non interactive audio. So let's say you're playing a game of d and d, and you want to set the stage. So you open up your favorite streaming platform for music. You queue up a playlist that fits the mood perfectly. But as anybody who's played a tabletop game or a tabletop RPG, knows the mood changes. You go from scene to scene, from points of action to points of reflection,

and you want that mood to change. And ideally, just like when you're watching a movie or something, the music and the atmosphere should change with the mood. Well, if you're on your favorite streaming platform, as great as they are, there's some difficulty in changing that mood. You got to go and find the right playlist. Maybe you have something curated beforehand.

But even then, if you curate for every possible thing, that could happen, now you're talking about scrolling through different playlists, and that just gets heavy handed. Right? So that's non interactive audio. We did was we took our experience in the game audio space.

There's a whole lot of technology behind video game audio, and we said we can build something that lets you use all these adaptive strategies to make it easy at the table to switch the music, the sound effects, the ambience to exactly what you need in the moment with as little interaction as possible. One button, click here, a little tweak of a slider there, and all of a sudden, the music is perfect and you can focus back in the game.

Nice. That's really helpful for, I think, people who may not know anything about what Pocket Bard does. And I want to clarify for people, this is an app, right? So you guys are a downloadable awesome app, and it basically for people who maybe don't play tabletop RPG's, my layman's terms of this is it basically gives me the ability to play atmospheric music at any point in the game based on wherever these players want to go.

So if I want to be in a tavern, I can find something that sounds like a taverny. And if I want to go to a place that's more of a chilling haunted house, I could be able to move into that atmosphere and have it become that while I describe what that actually looks like. And I looked through your app a bit, and, Frank, did you use the app? Did you do any homework for this or. I actually have a bit of an anecdote

about what Chase was just talking about. Yeah, I heard about Pocket Bard a couple months ago, actually, it was an ad on Instagram that you guys had. Instagram has me figured out pretty good. That algorithm works for us. Yeah, only the ads, though. The ads are nailed down. So your money was. Was well placed on that front. And. And it was funny because then, like a month later, Chris sent me this video from when you guys were at a trade show and I was like, Chris,

I know about these guys. Like, what's your point? I thought he was cool. Yeah. I was like, oh, yeah, that's a great idea. So I had downloaded your app, and I had chase. You explained my pain point to a T. I have literally made a dozen plus podcasts or not podcasts, playlists with different music. I was trying to pull them up. I have, like, suspense. D and D suspense. I have D and D exploration d and d crafting d and d big boss battle.

D and D smaller boss battle. You know, I had all of these playlists, and it was just. It was a cool idea, but then I had to go out and also find the music because the other people who've created these playlists don't have the same perspective that I do. And so I wanted something very unique. So then when I discovered your guys's app, I just thought, my God, this is like, where has this been? And you actually, what you said that was super interesting, was that it was from video game tech,

which makes so much sense. Did any of you guys work in video game, or did you? Yeah. So Chase and I, at the end of college, we were college roommates, and both in video game audio minors, different sections of it. I was more in the music composition, and Chase was more in the, like, audio design, but we had a good pairing of skills. So right towards the end of college, we decided to start a video game. Audio company got pretty sidetracked, started making games instead of audio for games.

Had a lot of experiences there, which will inform a lot of some of, like, a lot of our takeaways, I think, for future questions when we're talking about business, but, yeah. So there was a few years there where we were really focused on creating interactive audio for games. Right. Like looking for indie games to score, stuff like that. So that's where our expertise came, and we were kind of at a lull of stuff we were working on and basically just got this idea and been working on it ever since.

Yeah, it's a really good solution. And I did use it in one game not too long ago, I downloaded the ship packet, the nautical ship themed one, and it was very fun. And one of the things I really loved about it, because I've used some of the older programs that are out there, respect to them and them kind of paving the way as they did over those years. But I always had to mess with them. I always had to correct them. Something would go wrong.

But the cool thing was, with pocket Bard, I totally got to forget about it, and I set the intensity. I would every now and then add some sound effects like the weather and ambiance, but it was great and the players very much enjoyed it. What stood out to me was how simple it was for an app, because, I mean, when people have an app, I'm always like, seriously, all right, I gotta go download this thing. And then getting into an app, it's like, frustrating,

usually that kind of thing. I was like, in and playing music within like a few, like a minute. It was really actually quite impressive. And you had, it was like, okay, the app came up, told me exactly what to do, and I didn't have to pay anything either to actually start testing the product and using it. So there's free music on there when you start. That is decent, good. And you can actually implement into your game and not just like one track.

And then you try to upsell me to, like, every other track, there's like a. A bunch of different dozen different atmospheres that I can select from. I still, like, put campfire overlaid onto things. Like, it was a great experience just from that standpoint. So this leads into my questing, and we're going to get into some business stuff here. Cause I know you guys like to get to that streamlined. I want to just say, like, you guys have a rating on your.

You have pretty good ratings on your app already, like 4.3 with 1000 some odd votes. You have, like, 248 reviews on the Apple podcast on the Apple Store with 4.8 rating. Like, this is good. Like, this is really solid amount of traction with your app. So I'm curious, where do you start when you're built? Like, when did you guys get into building an app and how did that come out to be, like, your business idea and how does that get started?

So I was late to tabletop rpg's. Now, I love tabletop rpg's. I play D and D with my wife every week, and I love it, but that wasn't always me. And I think it was 2018 when I played my very first game of D and D and immediately fell in love with the experience. I roped my wife in, roped some other friends in, and we had this incredible guy who was dming for us who he knew how to tailor the experience for what we wanted.

And I'm talking, he had miniatures, he had terrains, he was doing all this voice acting, and he had music playing. But then there were these moments that I kept noticing of the action would change and he would say, all right, role for initiative. And things would kind of pause and even the experienced players around the table, the pace kind of lulled, and people would take out their phones and check Twitter.

And I was like, what's happening? Well, he's back behind the DM screen, heads down in his laptop, picking a new playlist. And then eventually, oh, okay, the cool music started great, and we're back into it. And, you know, that was not the end of the world as far as an experience went. But after having that a couple of times and having some conversations, I kind of said to him, how would you like if I built you an app where all that work you're doing that takes you 45, 60, 90 seconds?

What if that was one button click or two button clicks? And we kind of talked a little bit about what he would need? And then I brought the idea to Alex, and we just blossomed from there about how do we make this experience a lot easier and build it into this interface that we're able to construct? We're familiar with. Everybody's got their smartphones at the table anyway.

And so that was the origin of the idea and why that design philosophy of making this thing the easiest possible thing to use, so that you don't repeat that experience of being heads down for too long as a DM, that really informs everything we've done thus far. Totally kills the momentum when people do that. And in the end, there's thousands and thousands of hours of amazing audio out there, right?

There's dozens of films, more than dozens of film scores that are incredible, been recorded by professional orchestras, with professional mix engineers. There's incredible audio out there. What we're offering really is just a comprehensive solution. It's the tool, it's the delivery of it.

The goal is to save people time and attention because in the end, those are such limited resources, especially when you're already in a session where you have basically two to 8 hours, who knows how long people's sessions are? But that amount of time to deliver a great experience to your players, and if even 5% of that is bogged down by the kind of stuff chase was saying, searching for stuff, trying to figure out what to do in real time, that's a long time. That's maybe half an hour when

you add it up over a long session. So we're offering a time saver, attention saver, so you can focus more on the game and just really focusing on. We've been trying to establish kind of like company philosophies that we adhere to, and these generally evolve naturally. And one of them that I'm always referencing is product first right? If it doesn't serve the product, we need to be really careful about doing it right. Like, is this making the app better?

Is this making the customer experience better? Is this improving the UI? Is it making. Is this an extra button? Click? Like, we've been very deliberate about every little design choice we've made with conceptualizing. When somebody's setting up a scene, what are they thinking of first? Are they thinking mood? Are they thinking music? Are they thinking? What is their imagination? How are they crafting it?

And how can we best adhere and replicate that in the app to make it as user friendly as possible? We also view the app as never done right. Like, we're trying to get those ratings up higher and higher. We're trying to improve everything. When we find a better solution to do something, we'll probably do that. Right? We're not resting on our current design. We did a post recently on Instagram that showed all the design iterations

of the app. There's been, like, seven, and I'm sure there'll be many more. So you're talking about the pathing the user experience to better suit the app. And then you were talking about all the different iterations you've had. How long have you been working on this app? To get to this point? We started in August 2019 and had a bit of a lull in the COVID times, but have been going really, like, focused really hard on it since. Jason, when did you come on. It was like, when you came on.

That's when we all really got to work. I think it was around 2021, the COVID period. Right. Or maybe shortly after that. I forgot. Yeah, I think so. But we first released like a year and a half ago, I think. Right. Or has it been two years? Almost. Wow. Yeah, it's almost two years. Two years in beta. Yeah. And a year in out of beta. So, Jason, what is your role? We haven't had a chance to hear from you yet. How do you play a part in this team? Yeah. So I am mostly on the technology side.

I've known both of them for a long time now, like almost a decade now. I grew up with Alex in upstate New York. We went to middle school, high school together, and we both ended up going to college here in Boston, where I am. And then I actually also met Chase around. Was it freshman year, I think. Oh, yeah, because I got your roommates then. Yeah, but, yeah, I mean, we. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was a business major and then pivoted to software engineering, got a job out of college.

And then these guys came to me and said, you know, we're working on this app. Maybe you can help. So that's when I kind of part time started to work on it, and at that point, I had no idea where this would go. Honestly, I was just, like, happy to help out wherever I could. So weeknights or weekends, whenever I could find, scrape away some time, I would work on this. And then the last year, we've just been getting so much traction, and I've been spending more

and more time on pocket Bard. And actually, the start of this year, January 1, I decided to quit my day job and come on full time. So, yeah, very, very happy and grateful that I got to do that. Yeah, you made the leap. Yeah. Yeah. Congratulations, man. Yeah. Were Alex and Chase already full time in this? Was this already your full time gig? Yeah, yeah. So we didn't get to hear what your roles are. I know he's.

Jason's born in the tech side and helped with a lot of that development, but what were you guys doing? Or what are your roles now? So I started out. When Chase first came to me with this idea, I was mainly the composer, right. So I wrote the music, generated the audio assets, and kind of split just the design and figuring everything else out that we had to do 50 50, I guess.

And then back when we started being more like Jason came on and we started operating more like a business, I realized it would be helpful to have somebody just kind of take on the business leadership part of it. Right? Like, get paperwork filed, keep, you know, do our bookkeeping, keep an overall kind of view of the business strategy at all times, making sure everything's working together. So I kind of leaped into that role. I just pitched it to Jason. Jason just wrote

up a long message one day. I was like, hey, so I think we need to move faster, and I think if I just kind of step into this role and help keep everything on track and organized, that'll be helpful. You guys can focus more on what you're doing. So since then, I've been the CEO role as well, although I hate saying that because of all the connotations, but it's what I do. So composer 50% of the time, CEO 50% of the time, and design app design as a team that we all. Do just kind of wear many hats.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It sounds like you guys are jumping around a dynamic team, for sure, and I'm really curious about what some of the lessons you learned about making that switch from composer to CEO's. But I also want to hear what Chase's role is before we get into that. So I'm sure that'll also include a lot of fascinating questions. So I always tell people my background is in audio technology, so I went to school for.

I'm blanking on the name of my degree, but it's essentially an audio technology degree. Electronic production and design. There it is. And so that includes everything from audio engineering, being able to engineer and record and mix and master, to kind of the more technical side of things, of being able to take a piece of software that needs audio and create audio solutions for it. All of my programming abilities, so I also do some software development.

All of my programming abilities are self taught with a lot of help from my dad, who's a professional software architect. And so my role in Pocketbard is all things audio technology and more recently, stepping into leadership of the audio team as a whole.

So everything from spearheading our latest project, which is we're working on some cool tavern music, to kind of having that high level vision of what the audio landscape in the app needs to look like, what kinds of music we're putting in it, how we're prioritizing different things, and then as we create new features, figuring out the implementation side, and from an audio technology perspective, like, how is that going to work if we want these sound effects to work this way?

When somebody does this in the app, what does that look like as far as implementing the audio tech side? He's being humble on the software development side, too. He's written a lot of the code. For a while, there was a misnomer that I was the lead developer. I've been correcting people by saying, even though I've written a lot of the code for a long time, when Jason was just kind of moonlighting for us, it was his job to fix my mistakes as a higher level developer and software engineer than me.

Even though I wrote more lines of code, it wouldn't be there without him looking over my shoulder. Catch it up now. It's really nice that the three of you have solid overlap with each other. Not only have you found your roles to make this machine move, you know, with. With three people, you know, we often talk with people who are solopreneurs and how they have to do everything, and they've got a different struggle.

And then there's, you know, the situation Chris and I have, where there's the two of us, and we can kind of divide things. If one of us says, I'm not that great at that thing, how are you at it, and then the other says, actually, that's not that bad for me. I can do it. Sure, we end up divvying things up like that, but the three of you have found this role. I love to think of Alex, you are a musical composer, but you're also the composer to get people and every.

You're organizing an organizing composer, and I love that visual. I'm already creating D and D classes in my head for you three. I'm trying to figure it out for everybody, but that one made sense to me pretty clearly. I'll get back to you on the other ones. But. So the three of you also, it stands out to me, fall into this classic startup story. It's like, yeah, pretty recently after college, me and some buddies got together and we started an app.

How often does that actually work out, too, right? Yeah. Like Dropbox and Facebook and Pocket bar. Yeah. Well, I mean, part of the reason it is our overlap of skills that we've been able to get to where we are, because software developers are expensive, and the amount of music I've written would have cost us a lot of money to, like, dozens and dozens and dozens of hours of music. So by having us be the main team and not get paid, we've saved ourselves. I mean, honestly, I'm sure it's over

half a million dollars. Right. Like, that's. Could we have raised that money for this idea? I don't know who you know. It's. It's. If you can find the right pairings of skills that save you the most money and have a team that works together well. Like, I don't know how we could have gotten to this point without this team specifically. Right. And I really like this number. We. We've started expanding our team.

We brought on our first employees, which they've been to amazing, but just getting started when everything's on the line and you have to kind of rely on the hope of it doing well. I do think that the attitudes and the culture that you have are super important.

I think we're all optimists, or at least have a positive bias towards what we're working on, and that's really helpful to be able to maybe when a feature gets delayed by four months from when we were hoping to still be like, nope, we're going to get to it, and it's still worth doing. Yeah, we haven't made money. Yeah, we're out of money. Yeah, we need to pay the bills, but we just got to keep going.

So I do think that that is a difficult element to quantify, but has really worked out in our favor and just trusting each other. You know, we've known each other for a long time. Like. Like Jason said, I've known him since he got there, got to our town in fifth grade, and just became friends right away. I've known Chase since 2012 at this point. So having that trust also is really helpful as well, so you can rely on the other people having a similar level of dedication.

Also, we're not worried about somebody kind of bailing or, I don't know, just the kind of things that you hear about a lot, I think, are things that we've avoided. Right. And that's very helpful. Not just the things that have a positive impact on success, but avoiding the things that make stuff fall apart. Like, can you give an example? Put you on the spot right there? Yeah. No, yeah, I'll give a specific example.

Equity disputes or issues with ownership and what people contribute and what they own. That's something that we've tried to navigate very openly. Like, we trust each other to have those discussions, and we actually found a system to love to give a shout out. It's called slicing pie. It's a dynamic equity system where, basically, your contributions to the business are quantified, and it changes over time. So it's dynamic equity.

The time you put in based on your role is calculated with a multiplier into slices, and so is any cash you put into the business. So anybody's ownership of the business at any given point is just how many slices they've contributed over the whole of the team. So we were able to, you know, Chase could take a week off, and me and Jason wouldn't be like, hey, you got. Why'd you get a week off? We didn't get a week off. Like, you know, equity would dilute and vice versa.

If you really put in a lot of time, that would be represented in your equity and it changing over time. So I think that's one thing we did that was a systematized kind of approach to better facilitate everybody feeling accurately or adequately valued. But there's a level before that, too, which is just the fundamental trust and excitement and dedication to the product, and that sometimes just takes time.

When somebody's been dedicating hundreds or thousands of hours to something over the course of four years, it can start to count on people pretty confidently. Yeah. And, well, that's super interesting, the dynamic flow of equity. I'm guessing that that creates a unique culture between the three of you, too, where things continually get done as you see other people working and getting things done. It almost feels to me like the dungeon master awarding loot. Right.

It's like based on experience, right? Like, oh, or you get this because you did more, right? Or you get more experience or an inspiration point or things like that. There's something weirdly fair by having it sort of be something outside of just having to negotiate between each other. And it's interesting to see that that has actually created a good, cohesive environment within it.

Do you think that being nerds who play D and D, I'm assuming you all play D and D, but helped and contributed to that kind of being you guys being a party that works together? I definitely see the analogy, but I don't think the three of us, with the three of us all together have played d and daughter, like, with all three of us once, so we're not used to actually gaming together at the table. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't think we even knew how well we would work together in the beginning.

It just happened to be that way. We're very similar in certain ways, very detail oriented and, yeah, I don't know, it just worked. And that overlap like we were talking about earlier just worked out very well. Yeah, the communication is, like, super easy. I feel like we communicate in similar ways where I hear all the time about meetings being a waste of time or anything. When we have meetings, at the end of it, I always feel super energized and excited about what we're doing.

I feel like we got a lot done. I feel like we made a lot of decisions. So when we have our four hour meetings, whether a business or development, those are my favorite things. So I always look forward to those. Our development meetings are fun, even when I'm just kind of taking a backseat to listening to these guys talk about how they're going to execute on features. Can you tell us a little bit about the structure of those types of meetings? How is that run?

Just to give us a peek behind the curtain of what seems to be working. Is there a structure or is it just personalities that are gelling together? It depends on the meeting. Jason, do you want to give a background on, I guess, how you run the software dev stuff? Sure. Yeah. So there's this methodology called agile, and there are certain ceremonies that you're supposed to do as part of that process.

So something like backlog grooming, which is essentially going through a bunch of items and adding details to it, what needs to be done, what's the acceptance criteria, and then, like, assigning priority, how much effort it's going to take. And then that kind of complements another ceremony called sprint planning, where you actually set the direction for the next two weeks, let's say, and then you pull in work from the backlog and assign it to different people.

So that's something we're trying to be better at now, like adding a little more structure and processes. But I think it's also something we're trying to balance. Like we don't want to add too much process and waste time. So we're kind of slowly, incrementally adding those types of meetings on the technology side. But we do have a lot of other business strategy type of meetings as well. Yeah, I think like Jason described, those are pretty analytical, right.

We meet and it's within two minutes or in the details, right. Like it's really focused on being efficient, figuring out what the best course of action is on a small scale. For the larger strategy discussions, it's generally a little bit more freeform, with some exceptions. So usually I like to lead them in a way where there's a specific topic that's being addressed and just, you know, usually like to hear all three of our viewpoints because I do feel like we're.

It's like a workshopping an idea, right. And as we go around and kind of list our concerns with a concept or our thoughts on it or potentially pitch an alternative for whatever we're trying to decide. So I'll give an example because that's probably more useful. We get a lot of community, a lot of the community asking us, oh, will you integrate with foundry? Will you integrate with other virtual tabletop games like I play on this site? Could you build an integration for that?

And that was something that we were trying to figure out. Okay, how are we going to fit this into our roadmap? We've already got all this other stuff, and we had a long meeting a few months ago and just went around, listed our concerns and just came to the decision of, right now, we don't have the resources for this, and it will detract from our core offering right now, which is our in person gaming experience. This is not something

we want to detract from right now. And that came about just through us kind of saying, what's our capacity right now? How realistic are we being about our timelines? Let's look back at our history. Have we been delivering on our items according to the schedule we've been hoping to, and just came to the decision as a team after a pretty free form discussion that we were going to at least wait for that.

I've started in this new year, start taking a bunch of ideas from the book, working backwards, which I highly recommend. It's about corporate practices at Amazon and it's definitely one of the best business books I've ever read. There's some I'll read and I'll feel like, oh, maybe I got like two takeaways every page in this. I was stopping and writing notes of practical takeaways.

So I kind of grabbed the idea of project proposals where Amazon, they banned PowerPoints, so basically they present projects and narratives, a six page narrative form. And I tried that with one of our awesome new employees, Nick, who's working on customer support.

And we worked together on a project proposal for basically an overhaul for our entire customer support infrastructure, like how we answer emails, what our standards are, what the resources are that anybody can reference, how people can be aware of what the status of bug fixes is and everything like that.

We spent a few days writing up this six page narrative document, making it really good, and then came to Jason and basically just presented it, just sat there, read it through for 20 minutes, made some notes, made some alterations, and then just greenlit it. So this is something that I've always been really curious about and passionate about, is what the best way different pieces of information are presented, because there's a lot of things to consider.

People read faster than they speak, people speak faster than they type, people text, like with what implement you're typing on changes the speed. These all alter how fast we can communicate. And certain ideas are better communicated in written format. Sometimes if I was going to try to convey something to a large number of people, maybe I would want to spend 200 hours writing the best thing I possibly could, right.

And because that actually will make it better and save everybody else time from having to read an extra page. So it's about scale, it's about considering how the audience will best digest the information. So I always try to keep that in mind. That ties back into our app design, too. How are we best going to present the information to the user so that they can immediately know what's happening? That's why we've had symbols with sound icons.

We want people to be able to just look down, instantly recognize something visually, not have to read. If we had a text based app, it would be much less usable. So maybe that was rambling, but yeah. Anyway, that makes a lot of sense. And I applaud also, one of the things you said there where you say, turn down some of the stuff that people, not forever, but right now people were saying, oh, why aren't you on foundry? Or can you make something for this integration, right.

And understanding who you're serving is really important when you're new in business. Right. And knowing who is your market. And I love one that you're promoting. People get together into in person D and D because as much as I think in person's d and D is like one, it is having a resurgence because we got out of the COVID times, but also I think it's really where people fall in love with the game.

You know, it is one of those things that I've had people who have started just on the digital side of it, and it's hard to maintain their excitement in the same way as when you have that consistent group of friends getting together in person and you're app is selling convenience.

So that convenience, that ability to just show up and not have to have planned, spend an hour or two going through YouTube or Spotify or whatever looking for great music, you can just go and show up and finish your day and go right into the game and be able to provide the atmospheres at an easy level. And there's people that I just think that saying no to that kind of stuff. And so you can be great in this one area. That's a really a wise and smart thing to do,

especially at this stage of the company. So I guess you mentioned earlier that you transitioned from being mainly a composer to then being like the CEO. And I'm sure all of you have had to probably expand yourselves and read more business books or watch more business youtubes or listen to be able to kind of step into these bigger and grand roles, because you all do multiple things.

So maybe we can take a second if each of you could share some of the lessons you've learned, or maybe a lesson that's been really crucial that serves you now in the role that you're at and how you learned that lesson as you were coming into your role. Yeah, that's a good question. Sure, I can start. So, yeah, I often fall victim to chasing perfection. And oftentimes I think it slows me down.

And especially early on in a company like this, I've learned it's really important to just launch and iterate quickly and learn from your users. Establish that feedback loop early on, because oftentimes you're not going to know what the perfect implementation of some feature is. It's just important, I think, to just get the product and features out there and then learn and then keep, you know, evolving as you go.

Would you say it's almost like a fire, ready, fire, aim strategy as opposed to a ready, aim, fire strategy because you kind of aim after you figure out what people like or don't like? Yeah, yeah, that's a good way to put it. That's a good one. I'm going to write that down. We got a few good ones on this show. When you're starting off with something,

you want to say yes to a lot, right? Like, you want as many opportunities to test, to get as much data as possible, but at some point, you need to start saying no a bit, and at some point, you need to start saying no to most things, and then at some point, you need to start saying no to everything unless you have a really good justification for it. Again, that's when you have something that's working. And to use your example, ready, fire, aim.

When you're aiming right, and you've got it aimed, the sites are aimed well, right. It calibrated. You're not looking for anything else, because at that point, anything else is a totally new venture. Right. We can't get, I guess, overconfident or expect that something else we could do would pan out as well as, as what we've currently got going. So, yeah. Saying no, because like I was saying earlier, we're all pretty optimistic people. I get excited about stuff.

People present ideas. I'm like, oh, that's, that's really neat. That'd be a lot of fun. But it's my natural inclination to say yes to everything, and I just, we can't do that anymore. I absolutely resonate. I just wanted to throw out there a little thing that I've learned with Chris, and it's something, it's a lesson I've learned over my entire lifetime working with people.

But with Chris, I feel like the opportunity helped me really get good at it, so, you know, because Chris is very much an ideas guy, and he gets really passionate about the cool ideas he comes up with. I feel like in any startup or any new venture, there's got to be somebody like that because it fuels so much of your direction and it creates these new ideas that I'm like, oh, yeah, that would be cool. But I'm also the structure guy. I am the logistics guy.

And so when Chris says, hey, we should do this thing, I immediately just go, oh, shit. Oh, my God, how am I going to find, where are we going to? I don't even, I know how we could do that, but that would take to, how are we going to wow. And so that's where my brain goes. But I've learned that, you know what, it's okay. I tell myself, Chris had another really good idea. I'm going to write that down.

If he brings it up a second time, I'll write it down again, and then I'll know, like, okay, he's really thinking about this. You know, it's. It's. For me, I couldn't get to the saying no as much more of, for me, it's the say yes, write it down, come back to it when I can. But it's totally. It's similar but different from, like, when you have customers, like, you're talking about, you know, they want to see you on foundry. Like, that comes down to your laser focus.

You guys have been on the market for, you said, a couple years now, so you kind of understand there's. There's proof of success in your product, so you're not as worried about that. You've. You've gotten a good idea of who your audience is. You know, what their pain points are. I'm. I assume a bit on that one. And, you know, their pain points. So you can create features and products that cater to those. And that's.

That is an interesting distinction. Like, that's a couple steps up from many of the other people we talk to that are still, in some ways, figuring it out. And many of our listeners are still trying to figure out who is my audience, you know, what are their pain points? And eventually, they'll be able to get that laser focus, I will hope. And with what you're talking about, they'll at least think about it. So very cool. I didn't want to miss Chase, though, on the lesson for yourself.

Yeah, I had three small ones, if that's cool. I wrote it down so that I'd be able to focus and listen and not just be thinking about my answer. And actually, these all kind of come from other people. None of this is lessons that I learned by figuring it out myself. The first one is actually something that Jason said months and months ago about. I think it was even just, like, an off the cuff, like, we should kind of act like this.

And I took that, and just, like, it started cycling in my mind, and I was like, oh, no, no, no. We need to take this to 110%, which is limit work in progress. If you have 18 irons in the fire, none of them are getting the attention they deserve. And so I don't even remember what we were working on, but Jason was like, we should try to limit our works in progress here.

And I went, oh, yeah, that's right. And so now we have a million things we want to do, and it's so tempting to take step one or step one and two on 18 of those all at once. But like, nope, we're actually going to be serving the company and the product and the business better by finishing what we're currently working on now and putting that attention here. And I'll still be excited about the next thing. Two weeks from now, two months from now, we'll get to it. That's the first one.

The second one is also kind of something that's been said here before or said in this conversation, which is that the fact that we have a team of three, I think is actually something extra, extra special. When you have one person, every single idea, you just bounce around with yourself. Maybe you have people you can trust, that you can talk to, but ultimately it's you and only you. And I, frankly think that's a problem.

Adding in a second person is great because all of a sudden you have a mirror. You can actually genuinely get somebody else's perspective from somebody who has skin in the game. And that's, that's, you know, you're 100% better than you were before.

But I think having a third person in the mix actually provides an extra mirror where there might be times where Alex and I will talk about something and we'll get caught up in, in a perspective that we happen to share and Jason will come in and we'll kind of shatter the illusion and go, you know, hey, wait a minute. Think about it this way. And we both go, oh, that's right. And I think. I think three is kind of a magic number for being able to do that. So that's, that's the second lesson.

And then the last thing is kind of a two parter. The first part is always do your best, which seems obvious, but the second part is the important part, which is do your best to communicate that you're doing your best. When we first started putting our product out there, and there have always been bugs that we want to fix or things like that. In the beginning, there were a whole bunch of bugs and

we would get a lot of feedback. And for me, just the way my personality works, that feedback always would hit me really hard. I could read 205 star reviews, but then I see the one, one star review that points out something that I'm like, we've known about that for three weeks and we still haven't fixed it, or we've known about that for six months, and we were just kind of hoping we could get to it as soon as we can. That's the one that digs at me and that keeps me up at night.

And somebody said to me, hey, when you see those people, or when you have the opportunity to talk to people who see that, first of all, they're giving you something valuable. But the thing that you can do that's actually going to help you kind of mentally cope with the fact that somebody has noticed a flaw in what you're creating is communicating to them that you are doing your best. And that's not always going to solve the problem that they're having.

It's not always going to make them feel better, but something it is going to do is remind you because you're telling somebody else that you actually are doing your best and you're committing to doing your best on something. And so there's this kind of back and forth psychological principle to it. So I've been trying to integrate that in anytime I'm communicating people, whether it's telling them that, like, hey, look, I'm a foundry user, too.

I would love that. But no, we can't do that right now, or other tech questions or bugs or whatever, I always try to make sure that in my answers I'm coming off as saying, hey, we will do our best. Whatever happens, I promise you, we're doing our best with that. And that not only helps with the customer interaction, it helps with my own ability to handle those interactions as well.

There's another thing it does that I really like from, I spent a lot of time in customer support and customer service. And the other thing that does is it tells the other person they've been heard, which I find a lot of the time big companies forget to do. They just see it and they say, you know, thank you. Your feedback has been noted. We'll send this higher up. And, you know, it's not going anywhere. Like, that was actually one of the things I was taught at a company to do.

And they told us, yeah, it's going somewhere. Well, I knew after very quickly, I knew it wasn't really getting reviewed. And so saying that, you know what, that genuine, hey, we're doing our best. I mean, for anyone, even if someone listening has an Etsy store or some other place where they sell product, where they get reviews, just saying, hey, we appreciate that feedback. We are trying our best to address this. Your note has not been ignored.

But I love that the mindset aspect isn't something I've really thought about. It kind of holds you accountable, which is another thing that we've been talking around is this accountability. The magic three that you were just talking about, Chase, with the three of you, there is this accountability for each of you. There's the dynamic slicer app, or what was it called? Slicing pie. Slicing pie. That one.

I nailed it. And that is, you know, there's accountability in there, and everything that you're doing together has created that. Now, now, we've talked a lot about the three of you as a team, a cohesive unit, and we've talked a little bit about the app. I'd like to dive a little bit more into it as a business model. Specifically, I'm just going to go for the jugular and ask about your money generating product, because you have created a phenomenal product that is freemium.

And like I said, I've used it for hours. I have not been asked to pay anything. There's also no ads that I've noticed. I appreciate no ads very much. So how do you guys make money? Yeah, no, no ads. And that's lines, basically, we've set out to, from the beginning, create a solid and comprehensive free experience. Right? Like, we're moving towards an age where, like, everything is free, I think. So we're in an interim stage, but the expectations. People need to be able to try something

before they want to spend money. And also, we don't need everybody to have to pay to. For us to be able to have this, be a company. So we've always wanted to have that comprehensive free experience so somebody could download it, and even if they can't afford it, they don't want to pay. They, like you said, you haven't been prompted to pay anything. You can use it for your games, and that's actually something. We're even expanding.

I just finished up a whole bunch of new music for the forest scene, which is free, so that will be in the app soon. And to support that vision of having a solid and ever improving free version is our subscription. There's a lot of reasons that we have this. We definitely are aware that subscriptions are hated by a lot of people. Right. It can definitely feel like it sucks to not own anything, but there's a lot of reasons why we went that way, and I think that it actually.

It's fundamentally our belief, and nothing has changed our minds on this, that it actually is in the best interest of the consumer when you look long term, which, again, I think Chase mentioned, our goal is we're thinking five years from now or longer. So when we think about pocket Bard in 2020, what year is it? 2024. In 2028 or 2029, what will we be able to do with this business model is totally different than what we would do with, like, a one time per pack purchase.

We could have a lot more money right now if we had a one time purchase model, right. People are willing to spend. I mean, people love D and D, right? They are willing to spend on this hobby. If they wanted to buy a seafaring pack for I don't know what price, but a lot of people would, and a lot of people turn down the subscription, right. Because a lot of reasons which we can get into, but that really is the short term money making thing, is the one time purchase.

But then there's no incentive for us to focus on what actually matters, which is improving the app over time, as we get better at this, as we have more resources. So we've opted for this kind of freemium model because we can have regular income to devote to what the product actually needs to get better in a year. It might not be content, right.

Maybe 15% of our budget goes towards content, and the rest goes to overhauling the design of the app and reprogramming something from the ground up because it's going to speed up everything. It's going to allow it to live in a place where. Where the consumer lives. Maybe it will allow for that virtual tabletop integration. There's so many aspects of the business that are not covered by one time purchases. It's basically just produce content as fast as you can and sell it, and then there's

no incentive to go back to it. So, again, we're focused on the long term app, and this is also regular income. It's recurring each month, so we can better tailor our expenses and grow responsibly and not just hire a bunch of people, spam our growth, make a bunch of money, and then just leave. Just don't push an update for a year. So I want to kind of double down on something. Where do you make money? So we have. Did I miss it? Go ahead, Jason. It's through the subscription model.

So, basically, there's, like, you know, a set of content that's always free, and then there's also a subset of content that's premium, and you have to be a subscriber to access if it's like.

Netflix before your tabletop game, right, which basically means, like, when I. When I go in there, I saw the option to upgrade to get some of these other environments or types of tabletop rpg, which actually liked quite a bit because I was like, oh, there's plenty here for me to play around with and get a sense for what the app does and how it works. And is this even something that's functional? And then to actually go in there and say, like, oh man, I'm running, like you said, seafaring game.

I think seafaring is free, but if I wanted to expand upon a pirate thing or something like that and have more, maybe there'd be an upgrade that I could go into and say, oh, I'm going to join premium so I can run that for my game. And so that's it. I mean, I think that's interesting because I personally don't mind. I know some people are saying memberships and subscriptions and all that stuff is bad. I'm like, I don't mind that stuff.

If the subscription provides good value, there's a lot of subscriptions that I'm part of, but if I don't get the value out of it regularly, then I'm going to leave. And I think that there's a lot of companies out there that trick people into doing their memberships, like, oh, you get this. That's what I'm worried about when I download an app, right?

Everybody's had that experience where it's like, oh, you download an app that promises some big transformation for you, and then you're immediately dinged for like a year long subscription to it for 70 or 80 or $100 just to even access or try out this thing that says it's going to solve this problem for you, and then the thing doesn't really work or it's not really delivering, or they don't service it or all those things. I think that's a really valid concern.

I didn't have that experience with you, which is one of the reasons I liked your app. So I was like, oh, this is good. When we were first kind of considering things, there's a story that I had heard, I think I heard it on a podcast a long time ago, about the kind of business strategy of how much do you give in a free trial type of thing and how much do you pay? While I. And it was called the happy meal mistake.

And I know this is like a little old school, but imagine you're taking somebody out on a date for the first time, right? They don't know much about you. This is like your chance to get the other person to decide, I'm going to continue. We're going to go on dates number two and three and four, and you show up, maybe you're in a nice suit. You're gonna pick the person up from wherever they live, and they say, okay, well, where are we going? And you go, we're gonna go to McDonald's. Well,

come on. That's like. That's a little silly. And, of course, the person. I don't understand, Chase. Why. Why is that a bad idea? Can you elaborate? You imagine that you give the justification of, like, well, it's a lot. It's a lot of investment to, like, kind of, you know, do a more expensive meal. Let's, like, you know, let's see if there's. I don't know if you're that great yet, you know. Yeah. And it's a silly example, but it illustrates. And I actually.

I think it illustrates more for business than it actually has wisdom with dating, but it illustrates that in a business context, when you give kind of the free trial or the free version of something and you have handicapped it, what you're setting people up for is a frustrating experience, and you're not actually convincing people that the premium experience is worth paying for a lot of the time.

I find with a lot of freemium apps that the free version is just deeply unsatisfying, and it feels like they're relying on that dissatisfaction to entice you into paying for the rest of it. But for the most black hat innovation. And at that point, why have the free version at all know? I just delete the apps that when they do that free trial, three days, then it's $85 a month. I'm like, what? Not gonna lie. I totally thought

it would be that way with pocket Bard. I totally thought when I saw the ad, I was like, too good to be true. I'm gonna download this and just prove myself right. And I was like, crap. There's a lot here for us. We kind of decided from the beginning, and Alex has alluded to this, as well already, that even if you decide not to pay for pocket Bard, we still want it to be the best experience that you can have for free. That's it. That's the goal.

Well, there's value also within of just having a customer base that's continually using your app. Right. And whether that's them not paying, just logging in and running their weekly d and d game. Right. But down the road, you know, if I've got a relationship with you of like, oh, I've been in pocket Bard every week for the last 15 weeks, and you just released this, like, you know, you just released a new dungeon pack.

That sounds really cool. And I'm like, oh, man, I wanted to do more of a scary dungeon. They have this whole scary pack that's gonna really make it more horror theme, and I want to create that atmosphere for these characters. I trust you. I know you're not trying to screw me over. You're not trying to just, like,

click this button and give me that $80. Like, you've actually established a relationship with me for that free version, and you've shown up and given me what I wanted, and now I'm willing to spend a lot more money with you down the road and your quality of client. Now, this might, like you said, might take. This might take you a little longer to build, but you're building a foundation where once I jump into that and I realize, like, oh, man, this is awesome, you're actually gonna want to.

I'm actually gonna want to stay, and I'm gonna keep paying, or I'm gonna actually want to know what's the next release? And you can always entice me with new great stuff because you're continuing to add to the. Add to the app, right? Like, you, I'm assuming we haven't got every single piece of music that's ever gonna be made on it already. You just said you made new forest music, right? So, you know, let's.

Maybe that's a great place to go, is, like, where are you guys looking to expand and entice people with some of this premium stuff in the future? And what can people look forward to in the coming months and years? From Pocket Bard, I'll start by saying the next big thing to look forward to is tavern.

We have been planning and plotting from the start for something pretty incredible with our tavern music pack, and I can't give a lot of detail at the moment other than to say it's going to be a pretty. It's certainly going to fit within the pocket part experience, but I think it's going to elevate things quite a bit beyond that. We have a whole roadmap of music that we have planned, some free, some premium, and we'll continue to improve the existing music that's there as well.

And then we have some cool platform features. I don't know if Alex or Jason, you guys want to get into any details on that, on any of the platform feature improvements, but suffice it to say that as we improve the pocket board, the Pocket Bard platform itself, all of those new kind of features and things will become part of the core experience.

We don't really have any features planned that are, like premium only type features because that's not really the direction that we necessarily want to go with it at the moment. Yeah, on the content side. So I've been writing music for this since 2019, so I now have four more years experience doing this, and all of us do. Chase has four more years experience mastering. That's the stage that I send the music off to him and then implementing it in the app. So we've all gotten better at what we do.

So I'm going back through and elevating the free fantasy essentials content to be where the current standard of the app is. We've released Sci-Fi seafaring horror, and I think when we did Sci-Fi, it just kind of brought the standard, in my opinion, of the music in the app, the production quality, the amount of music in each scene, the interactivity. It's at a different level than the free stuff that 98% of our users are used to. Right.

So I'm excited to go back and up the level of that because that's something that our expectations are luckily always ahead of our customers in general. Right? Like, we've used this app all the time. I know the music backwards and forwards. I know what could be better. I know where every track up that mix I did three years ago doesn't sound quite right. I know what we could do better. Now. This scene needs like ten minutes more music.

I'm excited to show our users what new standards look like that we are currently at, but only a small subset of people are aware of with our premium content. Hey, nerdpreneurs. We'll get back to the show in just a second.

We spent another 40 minutes with Pocketbard talking through their customer acquisition strategy, how they established market share, the most stressful times they've had as a startup, and how they got through it, and their experience at PAX and how they leverage that event to grow their brand. To get access to the full interview and dozens of other interviews with successful nerdy entrepreneurs, join our awesome nerdpreneur board by going to patreon.com nerdpreneur.

We don't advertise on our show, and we keep doing this because we love it and because of the support we get from our amazing board members. The more board members we get, the bigger our guests will be and the more cons and events we can go to to meet other nerdy entrepreneurs and discover their success secrets. So if you want to see us grow and keep doing what we're doing. The number one way you can help us out is by becoming a board member. So go to patreon.com nerdpreneur and join today.

Now let's get back to the show. All right, so we're going to move on over to random rolls. So these are less serious, bit more fun questions. I think everything we've talked about has been very fun, don't get me wrong. But let's go ahead and start with Chase. You're just left most on my screen, so go ahead and roll your d 100, please. I would also like to point out I've got. These are my dice that my wife got me.

I don't know if they'll show up on camera, but they're spider themed because my current D and D character is connected to. We play in the Exandria universe and is connected to Lolf the Spider Queen. And so playing with these spider dice is cool. So. All right, I will roll this. 53 in Star Trek, there are six divisions, science, medicine, command, con, security, and engineering. Which division would you train into? They don't have audio engineering. Yeah, sorry.

You know, it's hard because life on a starship is different than life here, back here on Earth and at a startup. I think the other thing is, this is interestingly appropriate. I've been playing a lot of traveler lately, which is a Sci-Fi TTRPG, so my mind is definitely in that space, but a ching. I think. I think for me, it's got to be between command and engineering. I think I might have to go with command. How come?

I think my kind of natural leadership tendencies in something like a starship exploration vessel environment, I think I have a lot to lend to that. And I feel like if I. If I weren't in a command position, if I didn't, if I didn't try for a command position, I would feel like. I feel like I would have more to give that I didn't give myself the opportunity to. Nice. Starfleet's all about everyone living up to their potential, so I resonate with that. Thank you. All right, Jason, how about you?

All right. Let me roll this online. Roller 60. So this is a two part question. If you had a band, first, what spell would you name your band after? And second, what kind of music would your band play? This is perfect for a tabletop RPG music app. So out of the three of us, I am the least familiar with D and D and ttrpgs. The spell part might be hard what do I know? Just call yourself fireball. That's a great name for a band. We can help you out, Jason, if you want to.

Yeah. Chase, can you give me, like three spell options here? Well, what type of music first? Then it would go from there. Definitely something like melodic. Maybe like RMB or something. Oh, yeah. D and D, R and B. Makes me think Melf's acid arrow. Let's go with that. That honestly is a. For some reason that works for RB. Yeah. It'S kind of smooth. I like that with a little hit. And then it kind of blows up at the end. Maybe that part doesn't work, but. All right, Alex, what about you?

All right, I got 89. 89. Ah, nice. What makes a great friendship stronger? Are there, like multiple choice? No, but it has to be silly. No, it does not. Makes a great friendship stronger. So it's already starting out great, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, great. Okay. That's a really good question. Business partnership. Yeah. Going into business together. Start an app with. Honestly.

Honestly, though, that's actually probably the best answer that I would have, because realistically, it's hard to find time to hang out with friends. Right. Like, stuff is like, we have busy lives, especially around this age. Right. This is like, kind of the peak in busyness in the twenties, thirties, forties. Right. So it's part of the reason I've always wanted to, like, get people involved in businesses or projects is so I could hang out with them more. So honestly, that's the right.

I think that's the right answer because I've been able to hang out with Chase and Jason now so many more hours a week than I would have otherwise. And whenever. And who launched this business in the first place? I forget. I mean, Chase and I kind of. Yeah. Okay. I thought the answer was going to be Alex, actually. And that was all part of its plan. This entire time, this has been like an on. Kind of an ongoing threat. There's an ongoing thread throughout this

business and previous projects. Businesses. Chase and I had a video game audio company previously, like we mentioned, Jason. I. Jason and I worked on a game in a college. He had a computer science project. Like a math game. Oh, yeah. You wrote the music to it. Yeah. Yeah. So we've. We've always been finding ways to pair up to work on fun stuff and the same thing with other creative, creative projects, working on songs with people.

It's a great way to feel like you're being productive and engaging in our capitalistic society, getting the benefits of that while also being able to hang out with people that you enjoy being around, because that's one of the things I try to find as many dual purpose tasks as possible. I'm working out, and I'm on the phone with my mom while I'm secretly on a meeting. And, you know, not actually that, but. But as many of those things can fit together as possible. I'm learning about

business while I'm walking my dog. Right. I'm always trying to do multiple things at once and being able to actually spend time with. I mean, these guys are the people I, other than my girlfriend, that I see the most in the world, so. So you would recommend going into business with your friends. Use slicing pie. If you do that, though, that's against common wisdom, right? Yeah. You just got to have the right friends. Yeah. Yeah. It is becoming a bit of a theme on nerdpreneur, though. Like, we.

When we do, we usually are talking to successful businesses, though, too. So I want to give that caveat that we have a natural filter for. Whether you even get on this podcast is success. So we're not seeing all the friendships that dissolved over starting an app together. Maybe we should. Maybe we should.

But I can say that I think there are a lot of people that, at least in this generation, that want to work with their friends and want to do this more on their own terms and be able to create companies in their nerdy passion. And I think that that's something we keep finding as we go out there, as it emerges out of them talking with their friends about an idea and them seeing their friends struggle with something and then being like, oh, why don't we just fix this?

Or why don't we do something to create something that's good, having the spirit, the entrepreneurial spirit, to actually go and do it. I know it'll create bonds and connections and friendships at a much deeper level than just playing D and d together. This is like a real adventure, right?

Yeah. And I do want to point out that I think, because it is actually legitimately very important to keep in mind how many businesses, either businesses get broken up because friendships fall apart, or friendships fall apart because businesses, you know, go south. Like, that's definitely. I don't know the data on that, but it's probably not, like, a fully positive outlook. But I think we are all very, very focused on what we are doing as individuals to contribute to the team. Like,

I don't get the vibe that we're all like. Like, stewing or seething. Like, Chase didn't do enough. You know what I mean? We're focused on our individual contributions to this and living up to what we expect of ourselves and being very self motivated people. I think when we're stressed, at least for me, and I know Chase as well, we're usually focused in on what we're not achieving or bringing to the team. Like, it goes more inward than outward.

But if you're predisposed to go outward towards this person's not doing their thing or, you know, and not be self reflective and take ownership for the success of everything, that would go badly very quickly. Yeah, that ownership is. Yeah, I definitely resonate with that. I mean, I find that for Chris and I, we both are very good at recognizing where we ourselves need to fill in and other people we've spoken to as well. Yeah. Well, shall we move on to rapid fire, everybody?

So these are going to be, as the name suggests, rapid. And we've never done this with three people, so we're going to figure this out. And if you couldn't tell already, we're long winded, so we'll do our best. I was thinking, like, do we want to go around and, like, one after the other and just, like, rapid fire. And you and I alternate, and then. Well, I'm thinking I'll follow this pattern. Chris, you can be the voice of chaos if you like, but I'm gonna do chase. Jason. Alex. All right.

Okay. Yes, he's agreed. I will see how that goes. I can. I can switch it all up in editing anyway, so whatever you say. I have the final say on it anyway. Chase, three favorite pizza toppings. Italian sausage, pineapple, and jalapenos. Ah, the salty, sweet, and spicy. Jason, what is your zombie apocalypse weapon of choice? Oh, I'll take a baseball bat. I think I can do some damage with it. That's a good one. Harley Quinn style. Love it. Alex, this isn't on here, but I have to ask,

how do you cleanse? Like, when you're at the perfume stand and. Because everybody does that. Right? And you have to smell the coffee beans to cleanse your nose. What do you do to cleanse your ears? Oh, that's a great question. I'll usually. I mean, sleep is the only actual effective thing, like, waiting to the next day. But I'll often go to the gym and listen to music. That's the opposite. Like, just metal, you know? Nice. So you weren't. You guys aren't planning

to do any dwarven metal music yet? I. Well, because that was something I went deep into. It is. There is a dwarven metal band that we're in the process of getting on the podcast. So nice. So anyway, I guess that's not planned yet. We'll put you guys in touch with the band. Sweet chase, Lord of the Rings, the books or the movies. Oh, my gosh. I have to make the biggest nerd confession in history. I saw the first lord of the Rings movie once. And it stopped that, period. That's the end of it.

I make every apology necessary. I understand. I committed a big sin here. Whatever happened at pocket Bard? Well, we found out they never watched Lord of the Rings and their evaluation went. Did you at least. Was it at least the extended version? Yes, it was. Oh, thank goodness. Okay. I would not have gone into film scoring without Lord of the Rings. That was like everything to me in childhood. I think I would appreciate it more now. Again, this is part of the.

As I mentioned at the top of the episode, I didn't get into d and D until late in life. The real reason is because I grew up a Sci-Fi lover and I had this strange, just like, gut aversion to high fantasy where I just immediately would find myself bored and never gave it a real chance. And I feel so differently now. I really wish that I had learned to appreciate it sooner, but that that's honestly the reason that Lord of the Rings was never a big thing for me. Get another shot at it.

Maybe that'll be a viewing party. It's on the list now. Yeah, once you guys have some real time, you know, once the stat picks up. All right, Jason. Harry Potter. What Hogwarts house are you in? I think I just took a quiz and I forgot what I got. Shoot. Hufflepuff. Slytherin. Okay. All right. What did I get? I dig it. You know, I recognize a snake when I see one. You know, I could see, hey, slytherin. This has been a topic before. Slytherins get things done. I will say I say that as a slim.

I could see Jason as any of them. To be honest, I'm really not sure. I was going thinking Gryffindor, but I'm not sure. No, it wasn't Gryffindor. Alex, what is your favorite personal growth or business book that you've read. Is favorite have a plural or. Sure. Me. If you have two on the top of your head, go for it. Books have totally changed my life. Mindfulness. In plain English, that was the first like life shifting book. Power of habit was another one.

Build Tony Fadal and working backwards, chase. As a avid Sci-Fi fellow Sci-Fi lover here, your favorite Sci-Fi ip. Oh, favorites. So difficult. I have a lot of love for. There are some very strong runners up right now, though, I have to say. The Expanse. Nice books or the tv show or both books. Okay. I have been completely captured, and I'm loving it. Okay. I'll give it a more serious consideration the next time I'm looking for a series to dive into.

I've tried watching the expanse, like, three times, and I cannot. I just cannot get into it. I don't know. I feel like it should be good. Like, everything says to me. It should be good, but I just can't. I can't. It just doesn't work for me. But I would like to maybe try the books. I didn't know they were actually books. Yeah. Very, very good. And it's. It's. It's so hard to pick favorites, right. Because there's so much legacy of, like, obviously, things like Star wars and Star Trek have such.

Such weight in the history of my interest in Sci-Fi right. Or even, like, Dune. I had such a big dune phase where I was like, this is incredible. But I think right now, I'm just obsessed with the expanse. Nice. I'm still in my dune phase right now. So, Jason, what's the coolest Batman gadget? Ooh, whatever that thing is called where he can just hook onto buildings and fly up and down? Is there a name for that, like. Bat grip or whatever? I think it's, like, the bat grip.

It depends on which series you're talking about, but, yeah. Bat gun. Grappling hook. Grappling hook. Yeah, the bat hook. Yeah, the bat hook. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Alex, that would be pretty cool. Alex, who is cooler, Indiana Jones or Lara Croft? Indiana Jones. I've never played any of the Tomb Raider games, so I have no idea. Excuse me. I'll be back. Yeah. You're gonna tear this company apart. I've seen her in Xbox magazine ads, and that's the extent of my knowledge of Tomb Raider.

I do love Indiana Jones. Yeah. The movies. Angelina Jolie were fun. I rewatched the second one, like, six years ago, and I don't know who was in charge for wardrobe, but she had some of the weirdest style. It was so funny. She had this really cool, probably super vintage gold swirling dragons on the back. I just remember thinking, that's so odd for Lara Croft. Like, that is not at all what I would have envisioned. I thought she would be more like the Indiana Jones style, but cooler.

And so the tvs don't hold up. Well, what I'm trying to say is that the video games, the newer video games do a great job. Yeah. That's just something that. I've missed so many of those. I was so. Everything was like Lord of the Rings or Star wars, and I. I miss all the other franchises. Or Harry Potter. So, Chase, do you believe in aliens? It depends on what you mean. Does extraterrestrial life exist? Almost to a certainty. Has it ever visited Earth? Almost certainly not.

That was a very nice, succinct answer to a complicated question. I like that. I feel like you just stopped Chris from asking something else based on. I haven't. That's all right. The most interesting part of it is whether we think they've arrived here or not, but. Yeah. Yeah, no. All right. Jason, if you could have. I realize now this suddenly sounds like a work interview question, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. If you could have lunch with anyone in history, who would it be?

Alive or dead? Doesn't matter. Yeah, doesn't matter. Anyone in history. I'll just go with. With Elon Musk. Very topical these days. Yeah. What would you guys talk about? Any, like, coding or anything, or. Is there anything. Probably a lot of engineering conversations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice. Nice. Alex, how many cats is too many cats? I mean, how big is your apartment? I'm a dog person, but I do like cats. I don't know. I would say real, if I'm trying to be honest.

Probably four would be too many, right? Three probably seems acceptable to me. No experience with them, though. So. You know what? Just take a dive in. Just start with three. Yeah. Just see how that goes, man. Yeah. Get back to me. Let me know how you're doing at. The end from different locations. Throw them all into one room, get. Them off the street. Yeah. Chase, I'm thinking we do one more round here. Chase, what character would you cosplay at Comic Con?

Mmm. My wife and I have been talking about hopping on the critical role cosplay bandwagon. We're both big into campaign three. And so I would love to. I'd love to see if I could pull off Dorian from earlier in the season. He's a air genasi Bardeenen, and that'd be cool. When you say season three, are you talking Vox machina on Amazon prime or are you talking the actual live stream? No, I'm talking about the actual. The actual actual play live streams.

Yeah. Gotcha. Okay. Because I am not in the know. All good. Except for the animated show. That's all I got. Which was very good. It's very good. It's very fun. Jason, what's your favorite movie franchise? Honestly, I'm a sucker for a lot of the Marvel universe. Universe. So something, something there. The whole thing can be a movie franchise. You could just say Marvel. It definitely works for a movie franchise. There's only a couple. A handful.

Alex, if you could visit any fictional setting, you know, fantasy, sci-Fi you know, anywhere, and you could spend a week there, where would it be? Probably. I mean, I would want it to be as different as possible, right? Like, the most. So I would go something. I would go Star wars, and I'd probably go to, like, the video game locations, like knights of the old Republic, all those locations there.

Because being able to actually, like, be immersed in the places I was for hundreds of hours as a kid, I feel like that would be pretty cool. And travel at light speed and, you know, stuff like that, that'd be pretty sweet. Heck, yeah. Can I ask one more question of Chase? So, Chase, are you related to Seth Rogen? You had to do it. I. I'm from Vancouver. I just gotta ask. I've the whole interview, I've been like, this guy is like a mini sister. I was.

When I was getting married, my wife went and did her, like, bachelorette party with, you know, her sisters and her cousins, and they went to this place in Michigan where they, like, kind of spent the day out doing fun stuff. And one of the things that one of her bridesmaids did for her was they took these, like, popsicle sticks and printed out pictures of my face and made fans of me because, like, you know, she's Chase's fan.

The number of people who stopped them and said, are you guys some kind of Seth Rogen fan club? What is this? I'm not kidding. This is a real thing that happened. Wow. I've never seen the resemblance. Now I can't see it. No. Are you serious? I just thought that was Chase. Well, sorry to break the illusion, but it's. I. I've seen, like I said, I'm from Vancouver, canadian. Like, he's a treasure here. I know.

I go to the same thai food restaurant that he goes to, and it's like, am I about to interview Seth Rogen, or is this like his, his kid or, like, his nephew or something like, what's going on here? But, uh, it's just also your voice is like bang on anyway with very different laughs. His laugh is great. Yeah. His laugh is infectious. It's distinct. All right, now we can. Okay, last thing I'd like to ask is, is there anything any one of

you three would like to talk about? You know, maybe a lesson or a takeaway or something that we haven't touched on? Or maybe there's. There's a nugget that you'd like to really, you know, bring up again just because of its importance, or is there anything that running a business like you have been doing and starting it is something that anyone in similar situations or not similar situations, would you think benefit from hearing?

I think for me, going in to make a product for a market that already exists is a much better idea than trying to create a market from scratch. When Chase and I had a video game audio company that made games, we were trying to create a niche that was not easy to market to or didn't already exist. We did not have a million dollar marketing budget and that did not get the traction that this app has.

And my biggest takeaway from those two years of our lives, year and a half, whatever it was, was next time we work on a product, make sure that it's actually solving a need, addressing an existing pain point in a market that is easy to connect to and get in contact with. So I would recommend making sure that what you're working on is valuable to somebody. Doesn't have to be a lot of people, doesn't have to be everybody.

But if you put it in front of 50 people that you think it matters to them and they need to understand why it matters and be able to confirm that that is something that they would pay for. Right. That will help you determine if it's worth putting the time and money into. I'll just say really quick, focus on the journey. Learn from your mistakes. Be persistent. Don't focus on the outcomes as much. Focus on maximizing your chance of success. That's all I got. Take ownership.

There's a lot of wisdom in the phrase discipline equals freedom that I feel like I've. When I learned that, I think that opened a lot of things that a lot of, like those possible versions of myself that Alex was talking about earlier, I think that's one of those key turning points, at least for me, was kind of learning to integrate that principle and go, okay, this is useful. Well, guys, this has been great. Thank

you so much for coming onto the podcast. Alex, Chase and Jason, how can people support you? Find you and pick up Pocketbard so. You can download Pocketbard on the Apple app Store and Google Play Store. Coming soon in beta to the Windows store as well, which we just got our code to go download at our dev version today. So that's exciting. Yes. Nice. Congrats. So you can just download the app, share it with anybody you think would be. It would be interested in it.

Lots of people use it. Some of the coolest messages we get are from, like, people using it to read their kids stories as they're going to bed, or, you know, kids like using it to torment their siblings using the horror sounds. So the, you know, it's. It's an interactive audio app. So if you want to dynamically control soundscapes and audio, just download the app, give it a try. Like we said, there's a lot of free content. And if you like what we have there and want to support us, subscribe.

That's super helpful. So that's what helped us keep developing, keep the app going. You can find us on our social media, Instagram. It's all just pocket barred. We've hit the point where you can just google it and you'll find it. So. And just one more shout out to our discord community. That's where we tried to host all of our community events. We have awesome moderators and discord managers there, Dom and Zach. They're amazing. Respond to people's feedback.

We try to be as active there as we can. But, yeah, we post development updates there and try to just keep a lively, active community. So if you want to get in contact with us, that's probably the best place. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, guys, for joining us, sharing your wisdom and your journey and inspiring others to pursue their neuropreneur journey. And thanks for listening, everybody. And as always, keep it nerdy.

You just finished the shuttle class version of this episode with Frank and Chris. If you want to hear the galaxy class version, go to patreon.com nerdpreneur to become a member of the awesome nerdpreneur board. Thanks for listening, and as always, keep it nerdy.