Richard Paul Ford I'm good you're home today with a sick kid. Yeah, but all good. I'm Rich Ciotti. Look at you being a CEO of a startup but also a nurturing father. Yeah, well, don't tell anyone. Oh, yeah. I'm Paul Ford. We are the co-founders of Aboard A startup that lets you organize just about anything including links from the web, data files, and put them
into beautiful cards that you can move around with your friends. Yes. You're going to find value in data and information that you thought was just a pile of mess but it actually turns out to be beautiful and organized if you just come on into a board. That's what I would say. That's what I'm telling you. I like it. I like your pitch. Fun changes coming to the board. We'll talk about them in a future podcast. We might hijack one and make it one giant sponsored podcast but for now it is
our sponsor. Paul, we say this a lot. What do we say, Rich? We say we've seen beautiful software fail and very mediocre downright ugly software succeed incredibly. Yes. Why? Paul, why? I blame the users who are wrong. I'm not allowed to do that. You're not allowed blame the users. No, no, no, no, no. Well, there's actually many categories of this. I think it's it's I'm curious as to where you're going. Here's what often happens from my point of view. I see
people try to solve a problem and they use all the right tools. They use great design and they use good modern coding practices and it's elegant and it's beautiful but the problem is a problem in the founder's head and not a problem that people have in the world. I think the founder thinks they're being empathetic. Yes, but they often have too much money to be empathetic. That's fair. That's
a that's a real thing. I've many many times very very successful people because they gravitate to software will come to us and be like, got to do this one thing and it'd be you know, it's literally like we need a better system for organizing and sharing jewelry. Yeah. Among ultra high net worth individuals on the internet and you'll be like, that's madness. That's madness. I'm talking more about like, why would you do things that way? There's a better way. You've been doing it wrong all
along and sometimes they demonize whatever tool you currently use. This is the pitch. This is their pitch. That's their pitch, right? Okay, but it often doesn't work. Okay. It often doesn't work because people don't buy in and then flip the script, cut to utterly mediocre kind of lousy software that is wildly successful because of sales. Yeah. Like I don't mean sales as in like it's on sale 30% off. I mean, there are organizations, there are companies, there are brands that go out of their way
to connect with you on a personal level. Like I don't mean that in like, oh, welcome to Danny's. Can I show you your table? I don't mean that. I mean on a personal level, like they see the buyer as a human being. Yes. And they connect. They want them to feel like they're succeeding and they want their emotions to feel good and they sell that way. And when you say those words, software features and how you've been working wrong the whole time kind of melts away and it
doesn't matter. Well, you know, the other thing software is so malleable. So, you know, okay, I can call you up and I can say, Rich, I have a great solution for you. And you can say does it have the ability to put purple hats on every photo? And I can go absolutely not only absolutely. It's like, you know, we've heard ideas. That's one of the best I've heard. And then I can go back to my team and say purple hats by Thursday or a rain of fire comes down upon you. If you're that's what
sales is like sales. Sales. People on enterprise in sort of like there's this sort of big, mysterious category of software. There's a funny thing that happens with software and with technology in general, Richard, which is that people accrue this sort of like magical thinking around different categories. So like crypto, it's money. Well, no, it's actually just software. But everybody was like, I think we can, you know, let's let's treat it like it's money. But it was just code run on
a computer. It can run on any old computer. Yeah. Enterprise is software that isn't done ever. Yeah. And it's software that you can't you can't pick it up and buy it off the shelf because it solves problems like we do a lot of textile manufacturing in Brazil, which has a very onerous tax strategy. Yeah. And tax taxation system. And we need a system that can account for all of the textiles going in and out of our seven factories. And it's like I cannot go on PCconnection.com
and search for those keywords. So instead a guy named Mike calls me 20 or 30 times a week and says, let me get that for you. Yes. That's right. Look, I think we have a lot of big changes happening in tech right now, right? There's AI, which is my god, it's coming for your job. Another thing that everybody was like, this is magical and bananas and no one can ever understand how it works. And then he kind of sit down and they're like, I'm starting to figure out how it works. It's technology.
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And it's like, well, there here comes the next trillion dollar wave of, I don't know, value creation. Let me just use those words. They love trillions too. Yeah. It was going to be climb. We had AI. Then there was like a brief blip where it was going to be climate and now everybody knows how we had crypto. Then climate. But climate was like an hour and a half. And then everybody's like, no, actually it was AI. Yeah. Yeah. And and the thing that technologists
kind of latch on to is that if the tech is incredibly impressive, everyone will come. And look, there are the tinkerers, the product managers, the ones that are in like product hunt. And they're like, yeah, well, this is cool. I'm going to use I'm going to show it to my cousin and they're going to use it too. No, works if you're selling two technologists who works if you're building like a development environment. Yeah. They're off in your evangelist. So it's great when you do that.
And then there is a very different and this is this is a very sort of circuitous way to get to the point I want to get to. Oh, is there any other way? Is there like, it's anyway, keep going. Yeah. Exactly. It's called the first eight minutes of every one of the podcasts. Here's what I'm getting at. Tech. It's not just tech. It could be anything. Anything that's like, if I would just add this one feature, if I had variable power windows so that the harder
you press the button, the faster the window opens and closes, the more cars I will sell. Yeah, I mean. That if I could just add that one feature to my software, then they will all come. Yeah, you're talking about us for the last three years. Yeah. And I'm talking about a lot of tech companies for years. And then there is this reality. People will spend hundreds of dollars because a tote bag makes them feel good. Yes, those are two different economic realities. One is,
I will deliver value to you and you will see it. And you will say, I want to I want that value in my own life. And I want to use that tool. And that is a good technologist. And I love it. And the other is, I want to feel the way that that tote bag seems to make her feel. I have an emotional connection with the product. And I don't mean and it's fleeting. Often it's, you know what, what highlights this, if you want to know if your feature is going to be the feature
that actually blows up sales for you, all you have to do is watch an unboxing video. To me, an unboxing video is commerce translated into emotional satisfaction in the most basic way. The product is nowhere to be found. There's eight layers of cardboard and fine plastic. You know, there's that material that feels like skin that Apple wraps everything in. I don't know what they call it. Oh, that it's sort of like a trans lucent, but so almost like fabric plastic, right?
I'm convinced they are harvesting the stomachs of little baby lands. No, no, that's in the loombskins from Willy Wonka. Like that's how that works. Yeah, but they understand that. They understand that luxurious emotional moment. And guess what, man? There's no feature set there. It's just humans connecting to a thing. People connect to a brand. People line up for a sneaker because they only made 200 pairs of it. I don't know what that's called. I think that's marketing.
I think that's I don't know what it is. Now, it's, I mean, first of all, statistically, right? Like the dopamine rush comes before the like when the product kind of hits the porch. Yeah, not not actually using it. It's the like that moment where you're like, you feel the relief that it's here. Okay, just this like, and I think the pandemic really turned this up because we were just kind of watching, watching the door just waiting for a during. But yeah, unboxing videos,
you know, I'm in the synth, right? And a synth is worth so much more money if the, and I didn't know this when I bought my synth that I really was excited about after we sold our company. Oh, I know what you're going to say. Boxes, boxes, and there's memes about it. Like somebody sitting with like a crappy cardboard box going, I'm about to destroy 50% of the value of my synth collection. Like as they throw it in the trash. In box, in box, in box. Like it just that is what matters.
And I think about it a lot because it is zero value is in the box. In fact, most of them are simply cardboard boxes now with no manual. You go get the manual on PDF. There is a little bit of foam, but not always for the smaller modules and things like that. And yet it represents, it represents a few different things. It's sort of the care and the connection and sort of everything
around the product is symbolized by the crappy cardboard box. What do you tell the like engineer who worked who's assigned like one ticket for four months to like smooth out the high frequency sounds when it turns out people just, you know, love opening the box. Well, this is what's tricky. There's a value. There's a disconnect between the value we think we're putting into products. And the value consumers and humans seem to see in them. I feel like we're as guilty of it as
anyone else onboarding in a board was always an afterthought. And then we just came to realize how absolutely critical it was because it was really the unboxing of the software. Well, as technologists, right? What we tend to do is believe that code and design are enough. That's right. The lesson we have learned very painfully over 10 years and that we will
continue to learn is that it's not meaningless. Like this, I think it's really easy to be like, ah, you can sell them any old garbage as long as you put a big enough ribbon on it. Yeah. There's some there's some truth in that. I mean, look at Tesla automobiles, like the Cybertruck, right? Like it's sort of, but that's not actually true. Like the product, you know, I'll give you an example. It's the whole experience, right? So it's like, you read the reviews and it's a really
special one. This one's important. And you really kind of, you think about it for a while and you're like, ah, it's a little too pricey for me. I promise myself I wouldn't do it. But then like a month or two goes by and you're like, well, I did set a budget, you know? You know? And then it comes. So it's not the box itself. If that box showed up at random and you'd opened it up and you didn't know what was in it, you would go, oh, okay, wow, this is cool. But it's the whole experience of like,
I've learned about the thing. And then the sense of like, wow, they really put on a show just for me. Yeah. And then once you get on the other side of it, actually, now you have to like learn and interact with this thing. It's going to be part of your life. But it's sort of like when you, you know, you, you've told me and I remember you and I both have very cute stories about how we met our wives. Yes. I met my wife canoeing on the Goanis Canal in Brooklyn, a super fun site while we were
during during a cleanup. You met your wife at a, at a protest. Yeah, I don't know how to phrase that is cute, but well, no, but they're, they're, they're sweet stories that actually like, like, you remember seeing that person and going, huh, right? Like, like, that's right. There's a whole thing. It's and so like we, as humans, like those moments are incredibly important to us. That moment of connection is a story you come back to and over and over. How did you guys meet? Is a question you ask
at a party? Yeah. Where did you get that bag? What is that? What are you doing? You know, if I see you with with a nice pair of headphones, I'm like, Hey, what are those headphones? And then you have a whole story and we actually like, that's not like the fundamental part of our, like, relationship, but it really is something that is part of this. This is true of software, except
that we get to pretend that it's like a magical code robot that lives elsewhere. But when someone's telling you about a new JavaScript framework that is utterly understandable from the other JavaScript frameworks to any normal human being, they're having the same relationship. I remember when I first react. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I think, you know, different products succeeded this in different ways. People who have an emotional connection with their product,
they feel strongly about they defended. They don't want you to tell them that, oh my god, you paid how much for that bag or how much for that? It's actually, it is in a way, you're sort of, you're crossing a line into their relationship with the product or their relationship with the brand. And that's a powerful thing. And, you know, great marketers, great storytellers, like the legends of Madison Avenue know this, right? They know about how to profile that audience and then
send signals that are going to evoke emotion and connect them to it. Tell the people about what sparked this conversation. There was an article in The New York Times about a woman, I think she's just an influencer. I think she makes videos and stuff. And when she started selling a tote bag, and a tote bag costs $120. Just a nice tote bag. Yeah. And a lot of people were angry about the fact that she was charging on. In fact, people go back online. You can be angry by the way
at a phone and just put it down and just be like, oh, that's ridiculous. And then just walk away. Okay. So just, just to fill this in, a tote bag for $120 question mark, so is the title of the article by Madison Malone Kircher. It was from February 1st. And it's got a, it's a very pretty woman. This influencer name is Emily Mariko. And she's huge on like TikTok, millions of followers. Yeah. And she's, I will point out that The New York Times loves to give you
a lemon sorbet sort of palad cleanser in between the horrific news that's in the world. And they, but yet sometimes it's a bit of a wink, right? And that's what's happening here. But go ahead, continue. So that's, no, that's all of like styles and real estate is essentially trolling. And it's, but everyone acts like, oh, no, no, no, but it really is the whole point of it is just
to get everyone in rapes. So yeah, so she sold, it's a plain cotton tote bag of the kind that you would get it like the grocery store, but you know, obviously sourced with some nicer materials and so on and so forth. So you selling it for $120. And as, as, as is typical, that sets, that is a lot of money for a tote bag. And it sets off a whole conversation. It's the same conversation we have over and over and over again as a culture about conspicuous consumption, which when other people
do it is absolutely offensive. But when we buy nice sneakers, we're just kind of expressing how we love certain things. Yeah. And, and I got to say, reading the article, a couple of things came to mind. One was, for someone to be upset about that, it means that they are essentially telling that person, you've hurt my feelings, which means they already have a relationship with them. Like, to be upset, you let me down. I can't buy your hundred. Yeah. Why did you do that? Exactly. And
which means she succeeded in some way, right? Initially, which is there is a connection. There's a connection. Otherwise, people would be indifferent about it, right? But the article ends with the sort of little card trick that the New York Times loves to use. And, and it ends with essentially saying that all the tote bags are sold out. Oh, yeah, yeah, a little kicker, a little kicker. Like, oh, yeah, everybody is all fussy about this tote bag. But meanwhile, that's right. Miss
Mariko has learned that she is utterly correct to sell an $120 tote bag. She can't keep them in stock. They look, this is, I remember much like you, I was deeply broke for a huge chunk of my early life. And I remember hippies lecturing me about capitalism. And I realized, you know, their birken stocks cost 140 bucks. And I'd never owned a pair of shoes that cost more than like $30 at that point, right? Sure. And lots of people don't have shoes at all. And it was just sort of like,
it's a lot of this, right? Like that is not the societal breakdown that people think it is, except they're in the club, right? They're in the club. And they feel let down because there were supposed to be a specific kind of virtue here. And now there's an $120 tote bag. But this is the whole fricking deal. And this is where everybody makes their margin. And this is where we, why we don't live in a socialist utopia. It's because someone can say, I would like to make
$75 per tote bag. And I think I can. And I think if you, if you mapped out the profit margin of that tote bag, let's say if it's $120 tote bag, let's say $80, I'm being generous by the way, probably more of the margins are even more. The gross margin is $80. Meaning, this thing is costing me 40 bucks all in. And I'm going to charge 120. How can you charge 120? Now you can charge 120 if it's a scarce commodity like gold or some material, but it's not. It's a
tote bag, right? How can you do that? The way you can do that is something that's well-known in sales and in economics, which is value pricing. The truth is the buyer values it enough that you can charge it. It's not that it's a better technology or that it's a better material or it's more durable, or you're giving them a lifetime warranty. It's that the buyer on the buy side is not calculating the material and your shipping costs. What they've decided is it means that much, it means enough
to me. And here's the beauty about markets. And I'm going to be very capeless for 10 seconds, Paul, and then I'll go back to being normal. If you go too far, markets slap you down real fast. It's real. If you are abusive or you somehow broke a pact with your customers or you said something and so markets take care of you real quick way faster than any comment thread. This doesn't mean that you can't sell nonsense. You can sell gold stereo cables that mean absolutely no. You can
sell total snake oil. And if they want it, they'll buy it, but if you charge too much for your snake oil, they'll get upset. It's not there's a charge too much. If you do something that somehow, this is the thing, you've decided to make an to establish an emotional relationship with your customer base. So if you think you're allowed to go to a Nazi rally that following weekend, you better be very careful because it's not a transactional relationship anymore. They have
skin in the game and they can judge you. What's wild. So you know, we've talked about this before, you and I have our little hobby is and like, there is no sound that I could make with the nice fancy synthesizer I bought 18 months ago that I could not make on my Macintosh with $25 for this offer. Sure. And in fact, my synth has a few little analog parts, but for the most part, it's digital. And so like, yes, certain headphones have a really nice response to audio signal,
but not that great. There's no there are thousands that there's a diminishing return curve that kicks in real fast at about $400. There are very typically, except for things like health care, often really cheap, commoditized experiences that are like available to, or experiences and products that you're available to like get anywhere. So this is a fascinating one, right? Because we have chosen as a culture to get upset and write a New York Times article about the $120
tote bag. Meanwhile, we are flooded with tote bags. And there are tote bag. I have 10 tote bags downstairs, right? So I went ahead and you sent this to me. I read it. The actual objective reality of this article is I'm not going to buy it. It doesn't matter. They're going to sell out sure, but it will represent an infinitesimal number of the tote bags. And why do I care what people do with their $100? I do care a little what people do with their billions, but with their hundreds,
we got to just let it go, man. Yeah. And look, I think most don't, right? Most don't care. I mean, I think we know she has 13 million TikTok followers. So there you go. My point is she has 13 million to TikTok followers, but 12 million don't have a strong feeling about the tote bag. They just watch the video. Fair enough. All right. So what's the, what is the conclusion here? Have you ever, by the way, have you ever done the exercise where they make you sell the pen? That sounds like
another podcast. We'll do that on. Hey, tipton Jim. Jim Nielsen. We have to do that. That is the great sales interview question where they make the hand you a pen and they're like sell it to me. And then you're like, I can't sell this pen to you. This is valuable. I want to close it with just as you're asking a piece of advice, which is also a way to explain my behavior inside of a board. Okay. I talk about icons and fonts a lot. I get upset about it. This is it's mine.
We've been, you know what everyone just let's just bring you to everyone. No, no, don't bring them in. Nobody wants to come in. No, it's just if you want to have see a startup out of its mind, watch us talk about the emoji set that's built into a board. Anyway, go ahead, Rich. Go on, go on. And this is how I want to close it, which is actually a very wily way of defending my behavior. Great. I believe that these tools and they are tools, ultimately. They're not life changing.
Experiences, they're just tools. I believe strongly that there are little things you can do that evoke connection and emotion from people that see them. And that's my sales. That's me being in an agency. I had no idea how to get people to connect with this frankly tiny little shop in New York City. And I stand by it because I've been in the room enough times to see how people connect with things. And rarely is it them falling out of their chairs because I showed them a drop down
menu. Well, this is this is tricky for me right because I am the thing that people tend to connect with in this context. Yeah. And but you're right. The only thing that will scale is people connecting with a product. Yes. Yes. And I care deeply about the deck. I am a keynote gold certified. I don't know what level I can be at. I know that thing inside and out because I know that is the way I tell stories with it. You I was using another tool to get something done. And I kept showing it to Rich.
He's like, I this this makes absolutely no sense. It's chaos. What are you doing? And he gave me the exact same thing back in keynote and was like, do it like this. But it wasn't a presentation. No, it's like a five. You're like, do the website in keynote. And I was like, you know what? This is going to take me 10 extra minutes. And then you'll actually and I did the exact same thing. I copied the exact thing
over from the other thing. And you're like, this finally finally, this is good. This finally makes exactly. Let's not end this big about me. But I think this was an interesting conversation. I think this is about marketing and I hope I can freaking hope it was. I mean, it's just, you know, no, I think what we're circling around at our company. And you know, we're again, we're like trying
not to over market a board on this thing. We're circling around this moment of connection. And this is where this comes back to this great subject of onboarding which and and sort of these parts of the experience, which are not code. They're not features and they are not understood as code. And so we actually do have something exciting and interesting about onboarding to tell the world. But again, we're not going to talk about things until they are launched because we are
we are adults. We sure are. All right. So check out a board.com send us an email at hello at abord.com. We're still here to help anybody wants to hang out. We need to throw a party. We have to get people in a room. So we're at party. And let's do that in New York City. And we'll throw another one and on the west coast we'll figure it all out. Things are going good. We're starting to see some interesting partnerships. The next year is going to be kind of wild, man.
It is going to be wild. Everyone out there take care of yourselves. Have a lovely weekend. Thank you for listening to us as we took the extra long route to the destination. No, it's their choice. Every but it's the thing we know this about the consumers of everything. They're not kind of listening unless they absolutely want to. Up to them at 1.5xp. I'm excited. Have a lovely weekend. Bye!