S1 E1: Building and Exiting a Mobile Scanning App | Rylan Barnes, ShopSavvy - Code Story

[SPEAKER_01]: Mostly I like to solve problems backwards, but this might be me being contrarian. [SPEAKER_01]: The first time I tried to get Barricut scanning off the ground, it failed miserably. [SPEAKER_01]: When 2008 came around, that's when smartphones were actually a thing. [SPEAKER_01]: Grab Android Beta SDK and try to get an app built that could do a Barricut scanning and price comparison. [SPEAKER_01]: If your goal is to build a team, you need team players. [SPEAKER_01]: One thing to look for when building your team is don't tolerate assholes.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was a happy accident for the most part. [SPEAKER_01]: I just try enough to win sometimes, and that's kind of the playbook.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is Code Story. [SPEAKER_00]: Bring a new in-depth interview, tech visionaries, digging into critical moments or what it takes to change an industry, and build and lead a team that has your back. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Noah LeBard, and on today's episode, how in 2006, Rylan Barnes made a way to be barcode and your phone. [SPEAKER_00]: And accidentally changed the way to shop. [SPEAKER_00]: All this and more, on code story.

[SPEAKER_00]: For some builders, there's a moment where creativity is catalyzed. [SPEAKER_00]: For others, it's start to much earlier. [SPEAKER_00]: Rylan Barnes has been working with technology since childhood, starting out by simply programming his legos to move. [SPEAKER_00]: In all the way through college, building early marketplaces for college students to trade textbooks, and building automated chess boards so that invisible robots could play chess against each other. [SPEAKER_00]: When he started creating a solution for mobile phone barcode scanning, he had no idea the doors to what opened.

[SPEAKER_00]: And eventually lead to the formation of his most successful product, venture and exit, called Shop Savvy. [SPEAKER_00]: So I think everyone wants to know how you started Shop Savvy. [SPEAKER_01]: It was a happy accident for the most part. [SPEAKER_01]: So, at the time, this was 2008, I was really into graphics processing and the mobile space. [SPEAKER_01]: And the mobile space back in early 2008 was still your flip phone, but I really like building whatever you could build on flip phones back then.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so, [SPEAKER_01]: I had an idea, it was kind of birthed out of textbook trader and the price comparison stuff I did. [SPEAKER_01]: I thought it would be a great application of price comparison. [SPEAKER_01]: It would be kicking that off with scanning barcodes. [SPEAKER_01]: So what I tried to do was get barcodes scanning working on a flip phone back in 2005, actually. [SPEAKER_01]: Turns out that was bad timing. [SPEAKER_01]: It was just wasn't timing is everything. [SPEAKER_01]: It really is.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the first time I tried to get a barcode scanning off the ground, it failed miserably. [SPEAKER_01]: But when 2008 came around, that's when smartphones were actually a thing. [SPEAKER_01]: You couldn't actually build stuff for smartphones yet, but the Android Beta SDK was just announced. [SPEAKER_01]: And so, an Apple wasn't really done with theirs yet, so I grabbed Android Beta SDK and tried to get [SPEAKER_01]: an app built that could do a barcode scanning in price comparison and that is that's how it was kicked off so with the with the Android Beta SDK that's not something that was available to the world right that was something available to a smaller group of developers it was available to the world actually it's just no one cared

[SPEAKER_01]: No one really, gosh, it would be fun to show screenshots of what it looked like back then. [SPEAKER_00]: I believe I remember. [SPEAKER_01]: It was, it was, well, and if you look at the origins of Android 2, it's super interesting. [SPEAKER_01]: Like what it was originally intended for, like the very early origins of Android, I believe was meant to be used on other devices like, [SPEAKER_01]: digital cameras and so the the interface was very very primitive. [SPEAKER_01]: You deped navigation and maybe there was a keyboard and there it was not very smartphone-esque [SPEAKER_01]: That's quite different.

[SPEAKER_01]: Android has done a wonderful job of evolving into a very rich smart phone UI these days. [SPEAKER_01]: But that was a long journey. [SPEAKER_01]: They came from a very humble place, actually. [SPEAKER_01]: The way the Android was initially set up was meant to be able to run on anything. [SPEAKER_01]: I used to joke that Android was built to run on anything you can imagine, including your

[SPEAKER_01]: But so yeah, it wasn't available to everybody. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, just most people didn't care because they just didn't know what smartphones could do yet. [SPEAKER_00]: So by doing that, you entered into a certain, some challenge, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Some sort of competition for who could build the most awesomous thing. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's all right. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so Google was trying to moats Android. [SPEAKER_01]: So Google Note, to have a successful platform, they were going to need developers on it.

[SPEAKER_01]: So they actually created this competition. [SPEAKER_01]: that were to see who could actually build the best app for Android. [SPEAKER_01]: I figured I tried that same idea from 2005, took it off the shelf and tested it off and tried it again on this new tech and it worked fantastic. [SPEAKER_01]: What I did was I [SPEAKER_01]: I was actually at the time working at another startup that was in the event-ticketing space. [SPEAKER_01]: My brother and I actually both worked there together, which was awesome.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I took a week off of work, so that I could actually learn the Android SDK, read everything that would, all the documentation that was published at the time, cover to cover. [SPEAKER_01]: So I knew it well. [SPEAKER_01]: And then I spent the next six months moonlighting to build this app.

[SPEAKER_01]: At the time, it was called GoCard, not that that was a good name or anything. [SPEAKER_01]: It's an awesome name. [SPEAKER_01]: Certainly, two clever by half. [SPEAKER_01]: It was supposed to be your shopping cart on the go. [SPEAKER_01]: But what that was, it was an extension of the old textbook trader stuff. [SPEAKER_01]: I had experience building a price comparison search engine. [SPEAKER_01]: And if I could actually use the camera in the smartphone to scan a barcode, [SPEAKER_01]: that there'd be a great way to kick off that process.

[SPEAKER_01]: You wouldn't have to spend time fumbling around typing on your keyboard right in.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I entered into the competition and ended up winning the first prize, which was excellent. [SPEAKER_01]: Winning that competition ended up getting the application a whole lot of attention, because now suddenly OEMs started getting interested and looking showcase their hardware and carriers, started getting interested and what can help them sell phones.

[SPEAKER_01]: They started talking with a lot of the winners of the competition about cross promotions, about actually, as using the apps to promote the phone. [SPEAKER_01]: And so fortunately for me, the team mobile wanted to actually use my application to help promote the original Android phone, the G1. [SPEAKER_00]: That's really cool. [SPEAKER_01]: The funny story about that, though, is that they didn't like the name, they didn't like GoCourt. [SPEAKER_01]: They didn't like GoCourt. [SPEAKER_01]: They actually said that, yeah, we've chosen to go with you, but you're going to have to use the name ShopSatty.

[SPEAKER_00]: So Team Mobile is the one that came with the ShopSatty, or forced their hand on ShopSatty. [SPEAKER_01]: Team Mobile was the one that came up with the name. [SPEAKER_01]: It was too good to pass up. [SPEAKER_01]: Plus, GoCourt wasn't really the best name anyway, so. [SPEAKER_01]: So Chef Savvy, it was. [SPEAKER_00]: So when you won this competition, was it just, you got some funding from this competition, too, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, there was a prize money for winning the competition.

[SPEAKER_00]: And with that, you were able to kind of build a team and continue working on it, or what would you do with that? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so, I mean, I went without a salary for the next three years, so that's where that went. [SPEAKER_00]: The truth of startups. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: So three years after that happened, you know, trying to get this coupling off the ground, we ended up raising a series a from some investors. [SPEAKER_01]: One of them was Eduardo Savron, the Facebook co-founder.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's amazing. [SPEAKER_01]: at a good time. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but we skipped a little part of the story too though. [SPEAKER_01]: There's a fun part about bringing shops every to the iPhone. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so the iPhone was more challenging than Android, partly because while the SDK did come out much later than Android, Apple still didn't allow camera access until a couple of versions later. [SPEAKER_00]: Wow, okay. [SPEAKER_01]: And so, [SPEAKER_01]: You could fake it a little bit by actually tapping into some private APIs, but Apple would kick you out of their store if you did those shenanigans We had to wait a what felt like forever to actually get shops happy onto the iPhone [SPEAKER_01]: But that wasn't the end of the challenge on iPhone, the first couple generations of iPhones had a fixed focus lens in their camera.

[SPEAKER_01]: So on Android, there was an autofocus camera and you had that lens cycling back and forth to focus in on whatever distance. [SPEAKER_01]: the actual object is, so you could get a camera six inches away from the barcode and still build. [SPEAKER_01]: As long as you can hold still enough for long enough, you could get that sample that was actually in focus. [SPEAKER_01]: On the iPhone, if you get six inches away, it was just blurred. [SPEAKER_01]: And scanning a blurry 1D barcode is actually a lot more difficult.

[SPEAKER_01]: To solve a problem, if you're on just the regular computer, you might use blind deconvolutions to try and get past the blur, then run it through just a stock decoder. [SPEAKER_01]: But these early smartphones, didn't have enough computational power to actually do that type of stuff. [SPEAKER_01]: Certainly couldn't do it more than multiple times per second, like you need to do if you're trying to actually scan a barcode in real time. [SPEAKER_00]: and that's essentially like running the blurry image through a sharpener.

[SPEAKER_00]: So to speak, to make the bar sharper. [SPEAKER_00]: Right. [SPEAKER_00]: Right. [SPEAKER_00]: Right. [SPEAKER_01]: Right. [SPEAKER_01]: Right. [SPEAKER_01]: So to solve that problem, I built something called Meatloaf, which is a great name. [SPEAKER_01]: At the time, there is a there's a food theme to all the projects. [SPEAKER_01]: Everything [SPEAKER_00]: Was that alignment with Google too? [SPEAKER_01]: Well, the other projects were Takedo and Chulupa and Quail and that this one was meatloaf.

[SPEAKER_01]: But the way meatloaf worked out is that it tried to actually solve the problem backwards. [SPEAKER_01]: So instead of actually taking your Blur sample and sharpening it, which is computationally intensive, [SPEAKER_01]: It would actually take fragments of known barcoids and then blur them and then compare it piecewise to the sample for similarity and turns out that that was actually Like a much faster way to do it and turn it took a while to get right it was it was Pretty challenging, but it worked wow and it was

[SPEAKER_00]: That was a second helpful thing in that early days. [SPEAKER_01]: In addition to getting all the love from team mobile and other manufacturers being one of the only apps that could scan a barcode on iPhone was also super helpful too. [SPEAKER_01]: Those two things together was like catching lightning in a bottle and also

[SPEAKER_01]: Beyond just having good graphics tech, we did have a really fantastic back-end too. [SPEAKER_01]: So after the barcode was decoded, our price comparison search engine had wider coverage and fresher prices, it was just more accurate than anything else out there. [SPEAKER_01]: So users loved us. [SPEAKER_01]: It was great. [SPEAKER_01]: Those were good times. [SPEAKER_00]: Totally amazing. [SPEAKER_00]: How did you come up with the reverse engineering idea for meatloaf? [SPEAKER_01]: well it was it was mostly I like to solve problems backwards okay let's dive into that so you like to solve problems backwards what does it look like for you [SPEAKER_01]: I had a sneaky suspicion that doing something that might be possible, and so I started doing some research and found out that there was actually someone else already doing using that approach, so at the time we'll ship me and Mike Mataus was actually working for delicious monster, and they had a barco scanner to actually add things to your library, like either books or movies.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm not quite sure if that's the approach that they were using but I think it was found some info buried deep in forms that I think maybe that's what they were doing. [SPEAKER_01]: Sure. [SPEAKER_01]: But it was enough confirmation for me to give it a try and actually spend actually months trying to crack that problem. [SPEAKER_01]: And so invested the time to make it work in thankfully it went somewhere and yay. [SPEAKER_00]: That's incredible. [SPEAKER_00]: As you were, as you were building this, obviously, you had to think through like, okay, I have limited technology or the technology is limited where it is right now, right, the funds, the cameras, the barcoats, canters, or the really just the cameras and the quality of this, what other tradeoffs do you have to make and kind of how did you cope with those decisions in the short term?

[SPEAKER_00]: Being this grand visionary of the ideal tech state, how did you, how did you process all that? [SPEAKER_01]: Well, the interesting thing about barger scanning is that we'd always thought that it would be commoditized eventually. [SPEAKER_01]: So that sort of this this early move advantage would one day be gone just wouldn't matter anymore. [SPEAKER_01]: And so [SPEAKER_01]: That was even though we were able to sell that problem, we never worked to make that our core. [SPEAKER_01]: So what we did is we did spend some time trying to make that work for us as best as possible.

[SPEAKER_01]: It worked great for acquiring customers, because it was a great product. [SPEAKER_01]: Other apps actually wanted to license our tech. [SPEAKER_01]: So we were able to license [SPEAKER_01]: meatloaf to macy's Sam's Club price grabber seen it and that was good yeah so it's a basically a side revenue stream yeah based on your SDK that you build four shops at [SPEAKER_01]: right. [SPEAKER_01]: We didn't spend too much time on those initiatives. [SPEAKER_01]: We were trying to actually are trying to play the consumer game.

[SPEAKER_01]: Sure, go after the shoppers. [SPEAKER_01]: Right. [SPEAKER_01]: So, so that's a great segue into how your product progressed after that. [SPEAKER_00]: So where did you go next? [SPEAKER_01]: So we had great traction in the beginning. [SPEAKER_01]: It attracted some attention from investors, allowed us to build a team. [SPEAKER_01]: And we tried to take all that momentum and then level it up, take to the next level. [SPEAKER_01]: So [SPEAKER_01]: We, at that point, we tried a whole bunch of experiments to try and I guess you could call them pivots because because we technically had product market fit, we just figured that there was a ceiling to what we were doing right now and there was a much bigger pie to go after in the shopping space.

[SPEAKER_00]: How did you determine the experiments to go through? [SPEAKER_01]: What process did you go through that for that? [SPEAKER_01]: I don't I don't think it was all that organized of a process I get it like this is a good idea I try this I think it was a lot of just trying stuff out got it and it wasn't it wasn't even just one process I mean We tried to be organized about it. [SPEAKER_01]: We tried to be disorganized about it. [SPEAKER_01]: We tried I mean we we we ran a lot of experiments We had a lot of time to try things out [SPEAKER_00]: all while people were still using shop savvy and it's core purpose that you felt that was a ceiling forward at some point.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right, right, okay. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that part, that part was both a blessing and a curse. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I mean, it was a blessing in the sense that it'll allow us to try and level up to actually even, you know, have a turn at bet. [SPEAKER_01]: But also, you're trying to come up with,

[SPEAKER_01]: Without letting go to an original premise is like serving two masters, sure, and so that was proving to be a real big challenge. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it is it is it is very hard to reinvent yourself In education is the hardest part like educating your users sure is one of the hardest parts, right and Doing that well also alienating your original user base, right makes it double hard [SPEAKER_00]: Right, so you ran these experiments that led to some pivots and then you went through the struggle of, okay, we're going to pivot, how did you go about that process and what did, what it feel like as far as the curse part, um, well, you know, learned a lot in those years, um, learned a lot about team dynamics, a lot about building products.

[SPEAKER_01]: Learned a lot about inter-reading and learn a lot about testing, talking to users. [SPEAKER_01]: Learned a lot about all that stuff. [SPEAKER_00]: What was your biggest takeaway though? [SPEAKER_00]: If you learned a lot, what was the number one thing you learned? [SPEAKER_01]: One thing that can help through a bunch of experimentation and a bunch of pivots is having a strong core vision from the founders. [SPEAKER_01]: Vision is not something that you can delegate or outsource for sure.

[SPEAKER_01]: we even did some experiments around that, or as like, okay, so here's two guys running a shopping startup, perhaps we can find some people that are experts in shopping that, you know, they know the space or love the space more than we do, because just to rewind a little bit, like it's [SPEAKER_01]: It's as a little bit of a happy accident that I started a shopping startup, I mean my what got me here was I was actually trying to solve a problem around graphics processing and the mobile space.

[SPEAKER_01]: That was actually the, you know, the intersection of the two things I was interested in at the time. [SPEAKER_01]: And but it turns out, you know, the the best practical application of

[SPEAKER_00]: Put your things you don't like to shop. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not a shopper. [SPEAKER_00]: Not a shopper. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not a shopper. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay. [SPEAKER_01]: But you can't, you can't delegate a vision. [SPEAKER_01]: And so, I mean, if you want a unified team, if you want cohesion, if you want a team that just that trust each other and that high functioning output, it does have to come from the founders about, you know, these are our goals, you know, this is our purpose, you know, this is the problem that we're trying to solve.

[SPEAKER_01]: If you're going to do a lot of experimentation, that is something that is going to have to be led by the founders. [SPEAKER_00]: So do you feel like that you had that clear vision for execution for what you were trying to do UN, the other founders? [SPEAKER_01]: What I would say is that... [SPEAKER_01]: We did a lot of experiments and the ones that were better were the ones where the team was all on the same page got it and all together and all You know, this this cohesive unit the time where the team performed the worst is is is where there was a lack of direction and purpose Do to delegation for example got it so I do to delegating the vision the vision part of it right and he's to come from the top [SPEAKER_00]: Tell me about how you built your team.

[SPEAKER_00]: How did you go about picking the people who were going to work for you? [SPEAKER_00]: Essentially, I'm build this vision. [SPEAKER_01]: Every, every, every step of your way that you can, I always this, um, 26 year old moron. [SPEAKER_01]: That's really hard. [SPEAKER_01]: It's really hard to get people to follow you when you're 26 year old moron. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I, I, I, to that point, I will say, um, I, I've worked with some, uh, a bunch of amazing people and, um, um, uh, throughout my years, like, like, dozens of amazing people.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, it's, it was every single person that actually joined, I was really just stunned that, that they did. [SPEAKER_01]: Um, I mean, I guess the takeaway there is, [SPEAKER_01]: When people are deciding to join, it's a very complicated equation. [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of things to consider. [SPEAKER_01]: And looking back on it, you can actually kind of see some of those variables take effect over the years. [SPEAKER_01]: So I had lunch with a lot of my old teammates today. [SPEAKER_01]: And it's interesting seeing them hearing them talk about team dynamics.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because they've moved on to other gigs. [SPEAKER_00]: So how'd they let me bring you back to the team that how did you structure your team based on what you were going to build? [SPEAKER_00]: And how did you pick them? [SPEAKER_00]: How did you say that person is going to be a winner? [SPEAKER_00]: That's the winning horse. [SPEAKER_01]: Honestly, I don't think I was very good at picking people. [SPEAKER_00]: Okay. [SPEAKER_01]: I like that. [SPEAKER_01]: The interesting thing about me is, I think my radar was quite broken in that department.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, um, a lot of the people that I thought were going to be [SPEAKER_01]: The biggest contributors and, you know, provide most value in it being quite the opposite and also a lot of the people that I didn't think were going to make much of a difference in it being just

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, one thing about team that I learned the hard way is that I put a lot of stock in volume, okay? [SPEAKER_01]: So, what does that mean? [SPEAKER_01]: I think people tend to value things that they tend to overvalue things that they are personally weak in, okay? [SPEAKER_01]: Like self-marketing, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like telling people how great you are. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm terrible at that. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm just... [SPEAKER_01]: sort of maybe isn't a thing of overcompensation. [SPEAKER_01]: People that do market themselves well, I've always seemed to sort of put a lot of stock in that.

[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I used to when hiring people, when bringing people on the team, I used to pay a lot of attention to how much attention people got. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay. [SPEAKER_01]: I was sort of used that as a signal for, you know,

[SPEAKER_01]: And again, that was rooted in my own weakness, where I'm not good at that, and so I overvalued that. [SPEAKER_00]: Sure. [SPEAKER_00]: So this could be positive or negative of attention. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I'm positive or negative of attention. [SPEAKER_01]: Right. [SPEAKER_01]: And I've since done a complete reversal on that. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, all the loud people and people that are very good at, like, [SPEAKER_01]: promoting themselves, very good at presenting how great they are.

[SPEAKER_01]: people that I thought were obviously good pigs because it was obvious. [SPEAKER_01]: There's a well marketed. [SPEAKER_01]: Most of the time, they were actually outperformed by the people that were just quiet and heads down and just banging it out. [SPEAKER_01]: It was a hard lesson for me to learn. [SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of, at this point, it's almost a bit of an antipattern for myself. [SPEAKER_01]: We're now when I see people that [SPEAKER_01]: do a lot of self-promotion. [SPEAKER_01]: Now I'm wondering if that is maybe comes any for something?

[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.

[SPEAKER_01]: One thing to look for when building your team is just don't tolerate assholes.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's far more trouble than that's worth. [SPEAKER_01]: It's not even close. [SPEAKER_01]: They might be able to produce in isolated settings, but if your goal is to build a team, you need team players. [SPEAKER_01]: The best team players that I have had, the ones that have actually contributed to the team with a multiplier effect with their other teammates and had this amazing, amazing impact and long-lasting impact and loyal effect on the team. [SPEAKER_01]: Steak them off for years and produced just so much value for such a long time.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're the people with their heads down,

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not just something that you can just put in a corner or try to isolate from your team, it actually will take away from your team. [SPEAKER_01]: It's a negative impact on your team. [SPEAKER_01]: Not just the zero impact or you know, sometimes positive, sometimes nothing impact, it actually hurts the rest of your team. [SPEAKER_00]: So where'd you go next? [SPEAKER_00]: You know, trying to find and reinvent yourself and shop savvy. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so it wasn't so much reinventing as it was to level up.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we had a whole bunch of really great momentum. [SPEAKER_01]: And we figured we could actually leverage that momentum to slingshot us and to this blasting place in the mobile shopping space. [SPEAKER_01]: And so we did a whole bunch of experiments to try and capture that next lightning in a bottle. [SPEAKER_00]: So you were in Dallas, you guys had Dallas at some point you expanded into San Francisco too, right? [SPEAKER_01]: As true, after we had Razor Series A, we opened up an office in San Francisco.

[SPEAKER_01]: We had an office just right across the street from the Creamery. [SPEAKER_01]: The goal was to attract that Silicon Valley talent. [SPEAKER_00]: Sure. [SPEAKER_00]: How did that work out? [SPEAKER_01]: It worked out pretty well honestly. [SPEAKER_01]: It's so different out there. [SPEAKER_01]: It's great out there. [SPEAKER_01]: I love it out there honestly. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: I miss going there. [SPEAKER_01]: I wish I could go more. [SPEAKER_01]: Sure. [SPEAKER_01]: It's my kind of place, honestly.

[SPEAKER_01]: I have a lot of good things to say about it. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I mean, honestly, I don't think I have anything bad to say about it. [SPEAKER_01]: It's a whole different world out there, but man, I love it all.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah it's super different from Texas. [SPEAKER_01]: The mentality about things is different. [SPEAKER_01]: It's so fearless out there and I love that about it. [SPEAKER_01]: People go and do stuff. [SPEAKER_01]: They jump in with both feet and I don't see that a lot here. [SPEAKER_01]: I see a lot more calculated moves. [SPEAKER_01]: Not that I don't respect that. [SPEAKER_01]: I do. [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of I think there's a higher average age out here. [SPEAKER_01]: there's uh you know larger mortgages more kids um sure there's a lot more commitments perhaps yeah but um it's just a lot more risk taking out there which makes it it's just a uh a lot are fun it's a fun to watch obviously there was a step where you guys exit it can you walk us through any of uh any of that story sure sure so we tried a lot of experiments [SPEAKER_01]: each experiment sort of resulted in things that didn't work, and you take, you sort of take the results and try to leverage the parts that did work into the next thing, and let go of this stuff that did not work.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we were on to some, some... [SPEAKER_01]: pretty great stuff towards the end of our startup days. [SPEAKER_01]: We had just a fantastic product and pricing database. [SPEAKER_01]: We had some machine learning efforts that were pretty unique at the time. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, ahead of its time. [SPEAKER_01]: and we had some really great traction with users. [SPEAKER_01]: So all that together actually did get the attention of quite a few people. [SPEAKER_01]: We spent probably about 10 months talking to you, you know, doing the roadshow.

[SPEAKER_01]: And eventually boiled down to selling shop side. [SPEAKER_01]: It was about December of 2015.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was, we ended up selling to a company called Perch. [SPEAKER_01]: They were a digital publishing company. [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of what they do.

[SPEAKER_01]: They do a lot of things. [SPEAKER_01]: One of the things they do is write reviews for products. [SPEAKER_01]: And they get a lot of high-intent traffic people that actually want to buy a very specific item. [SPEAKER_01]: And [SPEAKER_01]: their whole business was revolved around decision enablement and so they help these potential customers make these buying decisions by letting by trying to answer all their questions about the product of front. [SPEAKER_01]: and these reviews, and they have links to send them out to retailers to actually buy it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Our back-in technology with our product database, and the price comparison search engine, was a very excellent compliment to the work that they were doing there. [SPEAKER_01]: And so, there was one of the reasons they bought us. [SPEAKER_01]: We were, uh, the second reason was also, uh, to Kickstarter mobile efforts. [SPEAKER_01]: Since we had a giant user base on mobile, sure. [SPEAKER_01]: That was appealing to actually get the ball rolling quickly. [SPEAKER_00]: And giant user base is nearly 50 million downloads, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, that's the giant user base, okay. [SPEAKER_00]: I want to clarify that. [SPEAKER_00]: It's big. [SPEAKER_00]: You play the game long enough, and yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: You get 50 million downloads, is that it? [SPEAKER_00]: It can happen. [SPEAKER_00]: It can happen. [SPEAKER_01]: But we had been running as I started for seven years at that point. [SPEAKER_01]: By the time we sold. [SPEAKER_00]: When you were building shop savvy and churring shop savvy, see it solve different problems externally for your consumers and your pivots and your experiments, but also internally and figuring out how to do things better.

[SPEAKER_00]: Did you have any opportunities or projects that you worked on that ended up being their own sort of thing? [SPEAKER_01]: So there was at one point we were doubling down on design into try and do some experimentation around having a top-notch user experience for the user and seeing how that reacts and how that actually changes in engagement. [SPEAKER_01]: Our designers were actually creating just some really fantastic

[SPEAKER_01]: a lot to keep up with from an engineering standpoint. [SPEAKER_01]: Because we weren't just implementing these designs inside the app. [SPEAKER_01]: There's also millions of product images to actually account for. [SPEAKER_01]: Because some of the designs actually called for tweaks to the product images themselves or maybe the users themselves. [SPEAKER_01]: We did a lot of experiments around social shopping too. [SPEAKER_01]: Some images needed actually be, you know, cupped into a circle.

[SPEAKER_01]: For example, sounds pretty, pretty basic. [SPEAKER_01]: but you do have to do that three times, the way you do it on iOS is one way. [SPEAKER_01]: It's a different way on Android and a totally different way on the web. [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes they're whether it be something as simple as having this sort of this bottom-fade gradient to the bottom of the image so that you can overlay text on it in a way that's legible or [SPEAKER_01]: or maybe knowing, all right, is this image that we're dealing with?

[SPEAKER_01]: Is it a full bleed image? [SPEAKER_01]: Or, where you have artwork that goes edge to edge, that's coming with books or movies? [SPEAKER_01]: Or is it the sort of studio shot? [SPEAKER_01]: Or everything surrounding the images actually want? [SPEAKER_01]: Little nuances like that can actually have major impacts too. [SPEAKER_01]: the way you design something, certainly. [SPEAKER_01]: So we were doubling down on design, and it was putting a strain on the engineers. [SPEAKER_01]: And we had this gap between the engineering team and the design team that was actually, it was a wide gap, and it was actually a lot of work to actually manage.

[SPEAKER_01]: Design is striving for pixel-perfect implementation, and engineering had more work than time. [SPEAKER_01]: What I did was I actually kind of spent the next couple nights and weekends working on just some new experiment to try and shorten that gap between the two teams, okay? [SPEAKER_01]: And the project was called at X-image and I just built it as this open source project. [SPEAKER_01]: It's still out on GitHub. [SPEAKER_01]: You can grab it if you want. [SPEAKER_01]: But it was at the time it was pretty novel.

[SPEAKER_01]: And what it did is it was actually a real-time image transformations. [SPEAKER_01]: What it would do, it ended up actually giving a lot more control to the design team in the final outcome of the designs. [SPEAKER_01]: And so if they had some requirements coming down the pie, you know, hey, we want to actually load this really lightweight version of the image first so that you're not looking at a blank screen. [SPEAKER_01]: You actually have this. [SPEAKER_01]: It'll be blurry, but it'll be a tenth of the size of the other image and we can download both at the same time and we can have something to show early before the high resolution one comes in.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right? [SPEAKER_01]: Things like that. [SPEAKER_01]: They could just take care of that by putting parameters on the query string. [SPEAKER_01]: And these parameters could be anything from the image quality or certain effects like applying a blur or making a gray scale or cropping it to a circle. [SPEAKER_01]: Or even overlay layers on top of layers. [SPEAKER_01]: So if you wanted to actually crop it into a circle, I'll apply it a white stroke on the outside and have a drop shadow beneath it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right? [SPEAKER_01]: You only do that once and it's the same query string and it looks exactly the same pixel perfect on all three platforms web iOS and Android so Everybody loved it. [SPEAKER_01]: It was great. [SPEAKER_01]: So that's all handled through X image. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah You've you've had a long run in the tech space. [SPEAKER_00]: You've had an exit you've had side projects You know what what is next for you? [SPEAKER_00]: What what are you hoping for in the future?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, my life is filled with these, um, these fun ironies, uh, I don't like, you know, what I, what I should have done and what I ended up doing and, um, some of the stuff I'll be working on next is, as everybody to that. [SPEAKER_01]: So, [SPEAKER_01]: I love the open source space and yet I have never ever actually contributed to it I've always just been watching it from afar from whatever I'm working on you know either I was employed by some company that just [SPEAKER_01]: Everything they do is proprietary, or they just didn't really have a place in the start of that I was running.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I've always loved the open source space. [SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to actually, you know, do something there. [SPEAKER_00]: What was the first programming language you've learned? [SPEAKER_01]: Logo writer. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, wait, logo writer, logo writer, what year was that? [SPEAKER_01]: It was, I think it was, still the 80s. [SPEAKER_01]: And for those of you that don't know logo writer, it's a, it's a educational language to teach kids how to, how to code and you make a turtle move around the screen and draw stuff.

[SPEAKER_01]: And if you're really clever, you can actually do fancy stuff with sprites and maybe

[SPEAKER_01]: Things got really interesting when I discovered you can actually plug your legos into the computer and drive interactions using logo writer. [SPEAKER_01]: So I turned into a sort of robotics thing where you can actually build stuff and make it react and do stuff. [SPEAKER_00]: That's where it all started. [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so what about an architect or a CTO or a tech person you look to, you look up to? [SPEAKER_01]: Honestly, I've loved watching Miguel de Caza all these years. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so he's he's a big name in the open source crowd.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I love the stuff he's built known for example is one of them But I also I mean he just he just keeps it so real he [SPEAKER_01]: He, uh, he just follows what's good. [SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't pay attention to, he doesn't pay attention to stuff that doesn't matter, you know, he, he [SPEAKER_01]: He has an excellent sense of actually judging things based on their merit, and not the marketing, and he's right every time, honestly, I love it, I just love it. [SPEAKER_01]: He's also, so he is one of the big names in the model.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so his past is so very eclectic, and that's one of the things I love about him. [SPEAKER_01]: So, he comes from the rural Linux, he's always been in the world of open-source, he's adopted C-sharp a long time ago, in the name of Mono, and making.net run everywhere, essentially. [SPEAKER_01]: He currently works for Microsoft. [SPEAKER_01]: which historically has been openly hostile to open source. [SPEAKER_01]: Sure, he loves iPhones, which is, you know, if it's not the open source version of the smartphone world, I'm gonna start to speak.

[SPEAKER_01]: He's just so talented, and he's always a judge of things based on their merit, and just honest assessment of that, and honest, underdults rated filter on, no, no, this is good. [SPEAKER_01]: because I say so, and even though everybody's telling me otherwise, and I've all over the past 10 years I've always just agreed with. [SPEAKER_01]: I've always just agreed with the direction that he's been going on. [SPEAKER_00]: I've always just thought that. [SPEAKER_00]: If you could go back to the beginning, literally, you do different.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's a good question. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, one of the best things you can do is actually find a good mentor. [SPEAKER_01]: a good mentor will help you avoid so many mistakes, probably because they made the mistakes themselves already before you. [SPEAKER_01]: Sure, just it's a great time saver. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, if I had to do it all over again, I would actually find a good mentor on day one. [SPEAKER_01]: This is one of the blessings in disguise I had, is that? [SPEAKER_01]: I actually thought I had found a mentor, turns out that I was wrong about that.

[SPEAKER_01]: But that person actually introduced me to [SPEAKER_01]: someone else who actually sort of accidentally became my mentor and so I'm very grateful for that. [SPEAKER_01]: That's a good network of network. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah and yeah and it's, I owe this person everything. [SPEAKER_01]: They've just taught me so much and have helped me so much and I couldn't be more grateful

[SPEAKER_00]: What lessons have you learned that you will apply to future projects? [SPEAKER_01]: One is the value of having a good team. [SPEAKER_01]: And two is also what those teammates are actually looking for. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, building a good team isn't... [SPEAKER_01]: It's not just something that happens by luck. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, that good teammates stick around for reasons. [SPEAKER_01]: If you know what they are, [SPEAKER_01]: can build a team and so it a lot of it has to do with building trust, a lot of it has to do with a Daniel Pink's amp model, autonomy, mastery, purpose.

[SPEAKER_01]: And if you can actually create that environment, the rest will follow. [SPEAKER_01]: Awesome. [SPEAKER_00]: Rylan, it has been a pleasure to have you on the Code Story podcast. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for being here. [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks, man. [SPEAKER_01]: I hope I didn't mess up your podcast. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm keeping that in.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this concludes another chapter of Code Story.

[SPEAKER_00]: Coat Story is a production of TouchTap LLC, and is hosted and produced by NoLapHeart, co-produced and edited by George Macharco. [SPEAKER_00]: Special thanks to Deanna Chapman and Stephanie Campesie for their promotional support. [SPEAKER_00]: Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Breaker, or the podcasting app of your choice. [SPEAKER_00]: Make sure to check us out at codestory.co or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

S1 E1: Building and Exiting a Mobile Scanning App | Rylan Barnes, ShopSavvy

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