[00:00:27] Jay: Hi, everyone. Welcome to The First Customer podcast. My name is Jay Aigner. Today, I'm lucky enough to be joined by Jamon Holmgren. I almost had it on the first take. How are you, buddy? Good to see you.
[00:00:37] Jamon: Doing well. Yeah. Good to see you as well.
[00:00:39] Jay: All right. So your co founder, CTO of Infinite Red, React Native Shop. you guys build web and mobile apps, I'm guessing?
[00:00:46] Jamon: Yeah. well we do mostly mobile, but anywhere that react native is, we're going to do it and there is some react native web stuff that we're doing. So yeah, we do some web, we do all kinds of things, including like TV apps and whatnot, but it has to say react native. If it's, if it doesn't say react native, we're not interested.
[00:01:03] Jay: You're out. You're out. All right. we spent a ton of time catching up before the show. I think we have a lot of similar interests and things going on. but let's jump into, and by the way,if nobody has seen it, I will link your website, Jamon. dev in the, show notes. It is a fantastic. Overview, you may not even need to meet Jamon, just go to his website and then you'll just know whether or not you want to meet him or not, which you will after reading his website, I read it and got a ton of, you know, cool information from there. So I'm not going to belabor some of the stuff that we normally talk about.
I want to get into some of the fun stuff about starting a business, owning a business, growing a business, that sort of stuff. but give me a snapshot, where'd you come from and did that have an impact on you being an entrepreneur later in life?
[00:01:48] Jamon: Yeah, I for sure think so. I grew up in a small town in coastal Oregon. you know, surrounded by trees up in the hills and, just very rurally. My dad owned a, an excavation company, a little tiny excavation company. It was always kind of an entrepreneur. later in life, he became a pastor and now he's retired.
But, like a full time pastor, but before that he always ran businesses. And so I was around it all the time. Like the idea of owning your own business was just sort of baked into my childhood and I saw my dad doing it and, you know, some of his successes and failures and whatnot. I'm the second of nine kids, and, we're all pretty close and whatnot.
I ended up hiring some of my brothers over the years for various things as I was starting them. So it was, it was definitely something that, that had an impact on me, as I got further into life and I always wanted to own my own business. I knew that from a fairly early age.
[00:02:42] Jay: I see you have a few kids as well. do you think that they're going to pick some of that up from you just from watching you do it?
[00:02:50] Jamon: That's a good question. I don't know. it, the oldest is 18 and he's just starting his coding career. He's on his second job. He's just working for like a local company as an in house programmer, which is kind of cool doing some PHP and Laravel and whatnot. And he, I think he has the capability to run his own business if he ever wants to, but he's still, you know, he's 18.
and the three girls I have are 15, 12 and 10. And you know, they have varying interests right now, but nothing too solid. But yeah, maybe someday.
[00:03:22] Jay: maybe someday I think we may have a similar split. I have an 18 year old who's into programming as well. it's interesting you say that because my daughter, they do listen, they hear the stuff that you're saying to your employees and to your friends and to your every, I mean, they, my kids will say stuff to me about things they overheard that I didn't, you know, they're watching TV, not paying attention.
Right. But then they hear every, Okay. Single thing. And what you said, what are you talking to him, that guy about? I'm like, I didn't know you were listening, but they're certainly listening. So all the good things that you're doing, I'm sure rubbing off on them. So, so tell me about the first business you started.
What was the first one? I thought it was, you know, I saw you did a lot of programming earlier in life. I think I did again, I think we have a lot of mirroring. I grew up in the middle of nowhere. I did a lot of programming when I was in my, you know, young to eight to 10 to 12. and then later on, he started a business.
What was your first business? You started
[00:04:10] Jamon: I think it wasn't, I didn't even realize it was a business at the time, but I started, it was a, it was coding and I was, there was a friend of my dad's who owned his own like construction company and they needed some custom set up for like a Microsoft access database. So I was, I looked at it and my background, like when I was.
That kid was, I was like doing QBasic. So I looked at it and it was Visual Basic and I'm like, okay, Visual Basic for application VBA. I'm like, I can probably figure this out. yeah, I'll do that. And I'll charge you, you know, 12 bucks an hour or something, which to me was a lot of money, you know, as I was like 18 years old.
And I, I went and figured it out and actually like finished the project and they started using it and he paid me for it. So. It wasn't an official business. I think it was all kind of under the table. Just give me some cash, you know, but, later I started, I started my business after I was working for a home builder and I started my real business, which, was, it went through a few different iterations for sure.
Like there was, there's definitely a stage where it was sort of on the side and then I brought it in and made it my full time thing later.
[00:05:22] Jay: Tell me about the time while I was at the side, like what were you doing? How did you kind of manage doing that and, and supporting yourself and maybe a family at the same time?
[00:05:32] Jamon: Yeah. So. when I was working for the home builder, you know, I was doing some pretty interesting stuff. It was like home design and laying out like lots, you know, where's the house going to sit on the lot and drawing those things. It was fun, but I, you know, my, my heart was in programming.
I really enjoyed programming. And so I started a side business that I thought, well, maybe I can make a few websites here and there. And the first one I made was for my church and they paid me by buying Dreamweaver for me. Like it was like a 400 piece of
[00:06:05] Jay: yeah. Yeah. it was the bees knees back in the day, but
[00:06:09] Jamon: It was.
[00:06:09] Jay: you were rocking. If you had an official license copy of Dreamweaver,
which I'm sure some of the listeners may have not have had, an official license copy, but you got one.
[00:06:18] Jamon: I did. Yeah. Cause you know, figured, well my, for my church website, maybe I shouldn't, steal the license, you know? So they paid for it and I built the website, the first one that they had. And then because I built that for the church and my dad was a pastor there at that time, he, so he knew a lot of people at the church and there were a lot of entrepreneurs.
In the church. And because they saw the website that I built for the church, they started reaching out to me and saying, well, if you could do that, can you do that for my business? I need a website. So I was building websites for like excavation companies and whatnot. but when I went on my own, it wasn't actually to do websites.
It was actually to do more home design. So in, 2005, my, my uncle who was, he had his own business, like drawing plans. He still does to this day. he told me, Hey, I've got too much work. can you start your own business and I'll send you all of my overflow work. And, you know, like you can do home design.
I'll teach you how to do all of it because it was, you know, different software and whatnot. And so it ended up being a really fun thing that I did until the housing crisis. Which was in 2008. so I had a few years of doing home design, remodel, design, 3d renderings, all that. And I did a little bit of website stuff all along throughout, but it was sort of a dual business.
I remember at one point I even had a website that had a button on one side that said, if you want home design, go this way. If you want web development, go this way, which was a weird thing to do, but that's just what I did.
[00:07:43] Jay: I mean, it's not that weird considering some of the, like. Design decisions that you had to make, you know, back in the day when just things like the wild west still, I mean, even back then when it was like, kind of, I would say it was like a, you know, it was in like middle school, the internet, you know, like
the 2005, 2008 era was like, still very not what it is today.
[00:08:03] Jamon: West. Absolutely.
[00:08:04] Jay: wild west. Yes, absolutely. Well, I, my favorite time I think was like the geo cities, you know, angel fire era of website building and stuff
like that was,
[00:08:16] Jamon: Yeah. Things like that. Yeah.
[00:08:18] Jay: what a time, you know, just that gives you goosebumps, man. Thinking about just the wild, I tried to find some of those geo city sites, but I don't think they, I think somebody was like archiving them or doing something with them at some point they could maybe find them.
[00:08:29] Jamon: I don't know if I'd want to find some of them. My first official website was in probably 2001. I want to say. And I made a website to document a hiking trip that I went on with my girlfriend and my, who's now my wife of almost 20 years and my buddy and things like that. So we had taken a bunch of pictures and I put them on. A web page and I put a animated lava background because the place we went was lava Canyon.
[00:08:57] Jay: Of course you did.
[00:08:58] Jamon: And of course I did, yeah, so animated lava in the background, just pulsating.
[00:09:02] Jay: Easy on the eyes.
Very easy. I'm sure it's very, the contrast is very great.
that and like the twinkling star background,
[00:09:11] Jamon: Yeah, the construction guy for the pages you hadn't gotten to
[00:09:14] Jay: Oh, whoever made that did not, you know, cash in on, he's probably eager to own an island. Like
whoever made that. Yeah.
I think our first one was a, I made a website for a middle school. Like science project and it was like, I think like fifth or sixth grade and everybody's like making posters and I was like, Hey, can I make a website for this? And my teacher's like, I don't even know what that is. Like, what are you talking about? And like, it was on nuclear power and it was on geo cities and had like all the stupid backgrounds and the animated spinning stuff.
And it was just like, you know, and blew her away. She's like, this is the, this is incredible. Like, you know, 110, you know, you
get the greatest thing I've ever seen.
but it's come a long way. since then. So, so tell me the evolution. I mean, so you kind of faded out in 2008 from the home stuff with just the natural ecosystem crumbling around
America. where did you go kind of from
[00:10:05] Jamon: it was a tough time because I was providing for my family up until then. You know, so, solo income, my wife was having babies and we had two babies at the time. and it was. It was tough. Like it just dried up. It felt like all at once because design was the first thing to get hit, you know, like that's the first part of the process.
So we didn't have anything. Nobody was starting anything. And a lot of construction companies around still had Stuff in front of them and their schedule. So I sat around kind of sorry for myself for a few days. And then I was like, well, it's not up to my uncle. This is my business. I need to go out and do something.
So I literally printed up some business cards. I think I even traded work with a print company to get the business cards, you know, like how expensive are business cards, but I was just trying to do everything on a budget and I just went around from office. Park to office park, like going to offices and, you know, scared as could be, but going up to these places and being like, Hey, I do websites.
I'm looking for some more clients, you know, let me know. And I got a couple of small things from that. I had some other stuff I managed to eke it out, you know, but then in two, that later 2008, 2009, I ended up getting a pretty big project for a cabinet manufacturer and they, you know, they were wanting to streamline their processes cause they weren't going out of business, but they needed to get more efficient during the housing crisis.
So. They decided to invest in some in house software and that really kind of helped me start shifting from websites to web apps. And that was a big transition for me. Like, okay, I can do this. You know, I can do, I can do my SQL, I can do JavaScript. I even built my own framework to, to, you know, like a PHP framework to, to, to work within, which we used for many years.
it was very good. And, And I worked on a few different, bigger projects like that. And eventually had to start hiring people, because I had too much to do myself.
[00:12:04] Jay: How well did that experience of walking around terrified, handing people business cards, serve you as a business owner over the following years?
[00:12:16] Jamon: It was huge. Yeah. It really taught me that getting out of my comfort zone, which is just your, every step along the way, you're getting out of your comfort zone. You're never like just in a groove. If you are, you're probably headed down. so really trying to keep pace and trying to keep moving. I had to do something that really pushed me out of that.
And it was huge. It was really big. Cause if you can go into a, an office park and see these sort of like semi hostile, you know, people who don't really want to, they're busy. They don't want to deal with you. You're just a salesperson to them. then it really kind of. Like it bolsters everything else is easy.
Then after that, you know, like, of course you can talk to someone who wants to talk to you,
you know, actual salesperson. And so I've been doing sales ever since. Like, it's just been, I guess, my thing.
[00:13:03] Jay: So has that been the, was that kind of the genesis of Infinite Red or how did you, how did it move along until you kind of got closer to present day?
[00:13:12] Jamon: So my original business was called ClearSight and I. I hired some employees in like 2009, 2010, I kept building and by 20, so in 2011, I got an iPad and I started messing around with, iOS programming, 2012, got some clients actually to pay me to build iPhone apps, iPad apps, you know, and doing web apps still at the same time.
And through that community and the Ruby community, cause we were doing Rails at that point, I met some other people. Who eventually ended up being my business partners today, but they were in sort of the same world. And I started getting, acclimated to open source. I think my first open source stuff was more 2010, 2011.
And then, I ended up, going to a conference. My first tech conference that I ever went to, was a conference that I was the first speaker at. And so again, getting out of my comfort
[00:14:11] Jay: Say comfort zone, again. That's comfort zone check.
[00:14:14] Jamon: Oh man, yeah, just, I don't even know where my comfort zone is anymore cause I've left it long, long behind.
but the talk went well and I networked really well with a bunch of those people. And, there was a company there that was helping with the conference. They weren't putting it on, but they were helping with it called Infinite Red. And. it was a couple of guys, Todd Worth and Ken Miller.
And so I, I really got to know them and I was chatting with Todd after we left a lot, like on Slack, which had come out recently in 2014, I think, and, complaining about some of the challenges I had with my business. And he was complaining about some of the challenges he had with his business. And. It turns out that they were different challenges, like, like put the, put our companies together and it felt like it fit some holes that we had eaten each in our companies.
So we started joking around, well, we should just merge our companies. Cause then it'd make it a lot easier. And then that joke turned into, well, maybe we should actually, that actually sounds like not a bad idea. And, so there was a progression through that. And we did a period where we just ran the companies together to see how it would look sort of a dating period.
And it worked out really well. And we started infinite red. Incorporated, the previous one was infinite red LLC, infrared incorporated was our business together, merging clear sight and infinite red, in October of 2015,
[00:15:37] Jay: would you go back and start with co founders again if you had to start the business over or would you start it solo?
[00:15:49] Jamon: I would start it with co founders, but it would be with the right ones for sure. the wrong ones are very, so Todd and Ken and I got along very well, and we still do it to this day. But Ken left the company in 2019, because it really wasn't his thing. he, it just wasn't what he wanted to do.
So, because consulting is not for everybody. And so, even though we have a fantastic relationship. I know it was tough for Ken and it's tough, you know, it was tough for us as well to do that, go through that. Now we did gain a really amazing business partner in Gantla board who came on board.
He was our top employee and he bought into the business and became the third owner, once, or just prior to Ken leaving. And so. There are, there's some pain in that, but I can definitely say that my business partners are fantastic and I would not be where I am without them for sure. They fill in a lot of gaps in my skillset, things I didn't even know I wasn't good at.
I've learned so much from Todd. who's, you know, he's in many ways, my mentor. he's about 10 years older. He's run businesses before. So I never had a mentor before, like I, you know, my dad, but he was in a very different industry and it's, you know, it's just a bit different vibe. Plus he had already moved on to being a full time pastor by the time I started my business.
So it was, it was definitely. Like a, it was a huge turning point for me to meet those guys and learn from them and figure it out. But we had to work at it really hard. It's not, it does not just happen. it took literally. We used to meet three times a week for two, three hours a day, every single week,
just to make sure that we're on the same page for years.
We did that. We still meet every week. Two, three hours plus with our leadership team and whatnot. So we're together a lot, but it's,we front loaded a ton of just talking and it wasn't just about the business. It was about life. It was about all kinds of things
and developing a deep relationship that is very hard to do.
And there are many moments that were hard, you know, moments where there's misunderstandings and miscommunications and whatnot that we had to work through. It's sort of like a marriage where. You know, like you don't, like, if you never have any conflict, you really don't understand each other very well. So that conflict helped us kind of dig or dig deeper, but it's not easy at the time.
[00:18:14] Jay: Great story. And it's an honest story. You know, you hear
the floppy version a lot.
I appreciate the kind of real, and I think other people will appreciate hearing kind of a real story to a successful business because at the end of the day. Yes, it was hard, but you guys, you know, you figured it out and you've kind of made a successful business out of it.
So that's a really cool story. what are the main methods that you guys use for, you mentioned you're kind of the sales guy. Now, I think you said it kind of grew out of just being, some of that initial experience with your business. What do you do today? And how has that kind of changed from back then?
I mean, we walk around here and there are business cards. I'm assuming you don't do that today. Maybe you do. but what are you, what are your methods today of trying to acquire, you know, not just guys to keep the lights on, but I mean, think it's business owners. We're constantly trying to find that next bigger client that are really elevated to the next level.
How are you driving sales towards those kinds of folks in your business today?
[00:19:11] Jamon: We have a philosophy that is really keyed on a long term viewpoint, really thinking long term as much as possible. And so a lot of the things that we did in the beginning were geared toward years from then, which is now, and we would do things like. You know, open source, we would do, we would network and develop friendships with other developers.
we started a conference, we do a podcast, we do a newsletter. We go speak at other conferences. I'm leaving to go to Poland in, you know, this weekend. I'm going to go speak there and developing those relationships. And it's really. as centered around authenticity and as we can make it where it's stuff that we genuinely are excited about people that we genuinely want to get to know.
And just making sure that when people see, obviously we're everywhere that react native is. Like if you go just like Google, anything react native, you're probably going to find infinite red stuff, you know, of some sort there. we're just kind of ubiquitous in the area that we are. And we're specialized, we're specialists and we focus on it.
But it's really about being authentic and putting in the work and thinking long term. So it's hard to replicate because, you know, go ahead, start, and in eight years you'll be here, you know, type of a thing.
[00:20:34] Jay: Plant the tree for the guy down the road
to sit in the shade, right?
[00:20:37] Jamon: that's right. and that's very much our approach. Which meant that there were some times where we needed short term, like, ah, we need work, right?
But we always, we never, like, overgrew. The, where we were to, to any major degree, but we've always grown very slowly. We're about 30 people right now and we don't really intend to get really big. Like a lot of our, I know there are a lot of other companies out there that maybe started around the same time.
you know, we're friends with the owners. we know them well, and we meet with them all the time and they've gone from, you know, 20 to 30 to 50 to 150 people in that time and I can just see the stress on their face when I meet with them and I don't have that, it's just not a thing, you know, at Infinite Red because we just don't, we don't grow that big, we don't.
We don't grow that fast. We're very careful about our culture. we really kind of try to know who we are and just lean into that really heavily. So I can't point to any particular one thing. It's just being sort of ubiquitous and authentic and being in all these different places and putting in the work and then letting time do its thing.
and that has worked out well for us over the eight years that we've been doing this.
[00:21:51] Jay: One thing you did say that I don't know that you necessarily gave yourself credit for, was just doing React Native. Right. I mean, it's hard. It's really hard. It's really hard to say now when
you need a, or when you're building a company or when you're doing whatever. So, I mean, how has really laser focusing on just react native that.
I mean, quite frankly, you know, has grown and waned and grown like
it could, you know, I mean, you've kind of hitched yourself to somebody else's star for better or for worse.
Right. So how has that kind of grounded you guys, but also served you well in the sense that, you know, you're, and how also, I guess, is it, you know, are you guys ever worried that is what you're tied to?
Because, you know, if things change, then you guys are going to have to make a foundational shift in what you do.
[00:22:42] Jamon: This is a fantastic question. And I would say that, initially, so ClearSight, my company prior to Infinite Red was more of a wider range. It was, you know, web apps, some websites, a lot of, mobile apps, iPad apps. Sometimes we would do some Android, but back in those days it was less of a thing.
And so we were doing all kinds of stuff and mostly trying to center around, Ruby and the technologies that we could use there. But, but Todd and Ken had a company that just did Ruby motion. Like they were smaller. They were only like six or eight, eight guys at the time. And, they just did Ruby motion.
So Todd has always been a big fan of focus. Like he loves being able to just focus on one thing and do it super, super well. So when we met and we ended up, merging our companies, we became a little bit more like ClearSight to start with because we were a little bigger and we had all these clients and you know, that was how we kept everybody busy.
Over time, we became more like the original Infinite Red. So we kind of like adjusted. So I had, so he had all like really senior level people. And then I had a lot of juniors and intermediates. So those juniors and intermediates. Got more experienced and eventually became seniors and we didn't replace them.
We didn't replace, you know, and add more juniors and intermediates. We continue to hire just seniors. And in order to kind of have that be the focus, we decided let's continue to specialize. So it was more of an evolution than anything. We eventually finished the. The progression, a few years ago, like three years ago or so, where we just do react native.
but your second question there is very important as well. Like what happens if react native goes, you know, goes down. and it would be difficult, but. We have a playbook already because our previous technology already sunk underneath us. So, Ruby motion was the thing that Todd was focused on, which was an iOS, version of Ruby based on Mac Ruby that allowed you to like write Ruby and then compile it to regular, like, like you wrote it in Objective C like you can.
You can actually compile it into an app and we love that technology. It worked really well for us. There were some negatives about it, but it was for the most part, really cool. And then the owner sold it to, I can't even remember who he sold it to. He sold it to somebody who didn't really take care of it.
And he went back to work for Apple. So he, it just kind of sunk at that point. And we saw that and we're like, Oh boy, we need to find something else. And luckily at that time we were in the middle of the merger. And we looked around and we saw react native and we're like, react native is pretty cool.
Let's do the same. We had the, you know, we had the newsletter, the podcast, all those things that I talked about. We were involved in the conference for Ruby motion, which is much, much smaller community. We said, let's just run that same playbook over on react native and do all those same things. You know, podcast, newsletter, conference, you know, everything.
It's not easy. That took years to kind of like accrue all those things together, but the playbook works. And so if it were to happen again and nobody wanted to use, you know, React native anymore, and we were just not getting enough work, we could find another technology, run the playbook again and shift.
we would figure it out.
[00:26:04] Jay: All right, let's wrap with one final question, non business related. What would you do, anything on earth, if you knew you couldn't fail? Bucket list item, something you've wanted to do always, you're scared of dying or failing, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?
[00:26:26] Jamon: Wow. I feel a sense of obligation here to say like cure cancer or something like that.
[00:26:34] Jay: had those answers, but I've also had,
like, fly a fighter jet, fly with my actual arms, which is my favorite cause, just like, say that out loud, like it's just a couple of people have said that, which is crazy,
but, yeah, anything you've
[00:26:47] Jamon: I would. And this is, this sounds like one of those, you know, cure world hunger type of things, but this is something that's impacted me personally, something that would actually make my life a lot easier, a lot better in some ways, even though I've adapted over the years. And that would be to find.
The, you know, the best cure possible for mental health conditions. people close to me struggle with that and it is, you know, it is something that I think is a, is sort of epidemic across the world and we see it in many different ways. But finding ways to cure depression, anxiety, you know, all these different things in ways that, that actually does cure it and not just, you know, treat symptoms would be amazing.
I would, that would just make the world amazing. And my life would be different in a lot of ways. So I'm going to, I'm going to throw that one out there.
[00:27:42] Jay: That's a good one. That's a good one. I like that. so you're saying it's not more, just medicine that makes people even greater. in different ways.
A lot of just because of all the weird side effects. Yes. No, I think
it's a great, Okay, well, how can people find you? I know you're speaking in Poland.
This probably
won't be out the time you're speaking there, but Infinite red you personally, how do they reach out if they want to get in touch?
[00:28:07] Jamon: you can always hit me up on Twitter. I'm at Jamon Holmgren. You can find me at Jamon, Jamon. dev is my website, and you can email me at infiniteredJamon at infinite. red.
[00:28:20] Jay: All right It's not called Twitter anymore. Are we supposed
[00:28:23] Jamon: Oh, I'm old. It's going to be, I started Twitter a long time ago. It's going to be hard for me to change.
[00:28:30] Jay: Well, it may not even be around
that much longer
[00:28:32] Jamon: That's true. That is true. If you can't find me on Twitter, it's probably the same handle on one of the other social media platforms.
[00:28:42] Jay: Blue sky
[00:28:43] Jamon: Sky, I'm on there. There's a few others. Blue Sky is actually written in React Native, which is kind of interesting. and then I would also say, actually my secondary social network is probably LinkedIn these days. So you can always find me there.
[00:28:55] Jay: All right. Well, I'll put it in the show notes. I will put it in the Twitter slash X handle, for as long as that's still valid. But,you were a breath of fresh air is very nice to meet you, brother. I love the journey, shared some really great stuff and, let's stay in touch and I'll talk to you again soon.
All right.
[00:29:11] Jamon: Likewise. Thanks a lot, Jay. Appreciate it.
[00:29:13] Jay: Thanks, Jamon.