S1E24 - Open Discussion: "Podio-Based Products Six Months Later"

Gil Roberts: 0:10

Welcome to the Podio solutions podcast. Season one episode 24. I'm Gil Roberts and with me today is our principal consultant here at Brick Bridge consulting, Jarett Duker. Good afternoon. This podcast is about the design and development on the Citrix podio platform. You can find that at Podio, pod, io.com. We use this product to discuss our own experience with podio as well as other interesting topics from the podio developer community. If you're a podio designer or developer or working at an agency, small business or enterprise, you should immediately hit that subscribe button. If you have already, Thank you so much for your support. Lastly, before we dive into today's topic, if you have a topic, issue, solution, problem, or anything else you'd like to discuss, we want to know about it. Please hit us up on Facebook, linkedin, Twitter, or send us an email or podio message to podcast@brickbridgeconsulting.com. Today's topic is a look back at our first episode, very first episode of this podcast, which was a podio as a product platform. We wanted to do a six month look back has been six months. I don't know if I say Unfortunately or not. Sometimes it depends on the day. That's fair. Um, yeah, it's been six months. Uh, we've , we've actually had a lot of contact from our listeners about this concept of podio being a product based platform rather than a platform that is just one off for you know, individual clients that they can actually use this to build a product base and maybe have that out and distributed and deployed out to a larger mass market so to speak. Uh , for those using podio solutions, I'm going to be referencing a few things , uh, from our first episode as we go along. But, so we wanted to start the conversation today with the topic that you brought up, Jared, which is looking at Podio as the operating system as it relates to podio being in product development platform. Maybe some of the confusion that some of the users get and some of the people, especially those that have bought our own products, we were looking through Zapier, which we use a lot.

Jarett Duker: 2:21

And there's an interesting thing in Zapier where a lots of the programs that you're going to download, they do one thing and they do one thing very, very well, but there's this subset of applications like podio or salesforce , they're there a blank canvas, you download it, they could do a whole list of different things. And even the way that the Zapier widgets are set up, it's difficult to understand that you don't just get podio to do something, you get podio to do whatever it is that you need. So , um, you know, he has the widget for podio on there, but what does that mean? If you download mail chimp , it sends mass emails. If you download Calendly, it will arrange your schedule and allow people to schedule appointments withyou. Self Service. Exactly. You download podio and you get exactly nothing, relatively blank. You get some little starter apps there that what, we delete almost almost instantaneously and some annoying tutorials that you can click through first. So a podio is not, it's not a service, it's not a function that you get like so many other things out there on the market. And yet it's still contained into a single icon. There has to be a sub level of product there either that you build yourself or that you pick up. But even looking at the way you eyes are designed across the spectrum of different workflow organization, programs like Zapier, like Trello, there's only a spot for a single icon . It's almost like the podio icon needs to be integrated into the product icon that is also there and it just demonstrates that the entire industry is not really thinking in these terms yet. Even salesforce with its millions and millions of users, they still just think of it as salesforce. It's the salesforce installation for my business, but it's really not. You go and you download a package or more likely you have a developer develop for you on that plan .

Gil Roberts: 4:20

We've seen a really over the last few years, the rise of a salesforce app exchange where the productizing some of the solutions that are built across that platform. Ah , there was actually a , I'll have to, we'll get up link for the name of the company , uh , in a description, but I believe there was someone that it was a startup that received like 20 or 30 or even higher million dollars because of their app they had built on the salesforce platform. So this is a salesforce developer, much like podio developers are and have received venture capital to the tunes of tens of millions of dollars to build a software on top of the salesforce platform and sell it, right? Not , not the salesforce platform itself and not remaking that. Just an app that runs across that platform,

Jarett Duker: 5:06

which we call this an operating system anywhere else we would call this an operating system, but in cloud based computing, we haven't really made that leap of logic yet, which is rather unfortunate. People understand it instantly, but it's not fully permeated into the collective consciousness until someone points it out to them.

Gil Roberts: 5:27

And I've kind of figured out why. Just from talking with our clients and potential clients, we're starting to have operating system inception, right where you have I boot my computer, I sign into windows or Mac OS. I then open my browser, which for a long time was the new operating system, but then I sign into my platform which is salesforce or podio or any of the others and then I open my actual application. Right. I'm three layers deep before I can actually do my work.

Jarett Duker: 5:56

We were joking about this earlier

Gil Roberts: 5:58

that the windows task bar that used to have 50,000 locally run programs open has now just become a Google chrome a instace with 30 tabs open. Each of them logged into a separate SAS based system that you're going to be using. You got your slack open, you've got your podio open, you've got your salesforce open , you got your, the list goes on and on and on. Now office, right? Yeah. You're opening office 365 is cloud based computing. You open a tab, Google docs quite frequently. A ton of different Google docs. So I see it all the time now people have, you know, 30 different tabs. They can't even tell which one's which. I think I got something in it . It just personally explains which is I have, I'm a Mac user, I have five applications installed and one of them is Google chrome and I do everything through chrome . Right. This is where, this is where I've landed chrome , chrome and office. Yeah. I, uh, and we use g suite users. I still have office. Uh , I do have that physical install , but we're g suite users and increasingly I don't really open office as much. I have g suite and docs and, and sheets and all that are really great programs. That's what we use because we do a lot of collaboration on proposals and , and, and designed documentation. If I need some power editing, then I'll fire up on Microsoft office. But increasingly the power versus the collaboration aspect, I'm too , um , increasingly more using collaboration rather than all of the , these broad feature sets that locally run applications used to be able to offer. Absolutely. I know from our first episode, Alex came right out of the gate saying that Podio is in a position to deliver wide scale solutions, but the key is that you have to know how to design solutions for the podio platform, which is not a skill , um , that that's just like taught at a university or I really even at this point, easy to find on the internet youtube videos or anything like that. So a lot of us and a lot of our listeners had to cut the teeth the old fashioned way by making mistakes, getting into podio building stuff that sucks and making it better along the way. Have we deviated from that in the last six months or do we feel like podio is still in that same position to deliver wide scale.

Jarett Duker: 8:22

I think it absolutely is. Um, what has really changed is how well we're able to walk the margin between , uh, a off the shelf style product that we deliver to our customers and the sort of custom fit customization that really delivers value inside of this space. Um, and we , we wrote down in giant letters on our show notes today, mass customization as a principle that we wanted to talk about a little bit. This is something that's been kicked around for a long time inside of manufacturing and everyone wants to achieve it, but it's still very much a nebulous concept in the modern business world which is you leverage the strength of mass production that we discovered in the, you know, the 1870s in terms of assembly lines and bringing the product, individual unit price of a product down to make it affordable to the general audience. But we still want that custom tailored field that you would get from well going to a traditional tailor and having a set of suit clothes made instead of picking up off the shelf a pair of jeans that is most likely going to fit you well and how do we create mass market products at that price point with that just well higher quality and better fit that a customized product is going to deliver, which unfortunately it's also much more expensive. And let's say this is a longstanding problem in production and has been tackled in many, many, many ways as people's tastes and preferences become evermore niche , uh, in our modern society with the ever present availability of information. And it's not one that we've really found a good solution yet. It's we're inching forward, I guess you could say

Gil Roberts: 10:13

vertical industry verticals, especially in the manufacturing setting that have gotten it mostly right . But it's no broad rule of

Jarett Duker: 10:23

the closest one I can come up to is prefab housing, which really is mass customization and the word mass really doesn't apply. It's really just high scale customization. Yeah. Until you get to what we're doing with software right now. Um , with I think Zapier being the pioneer in this regard and allowing people to , um,

Gil Roberts: 10:47

access like large categories of things that they would want, like integrations of what Zapier particularly does, but people are able to get in and self-service their own tailoring of their, of their software integration.

Jarett Duker: 11:01

Yup . For say , and because this is possible because of a principle that I think you hit the nail on the head right here. Mass customization cannot exist in a Tabula Rasa world of just a blank slate. There has to be a central thread that's going to define the balance of the world on which you're working. And I think you hit the nail on the head. Podio does this precise, and I liked your wording. I'm not going to stay

Gil Roberts: 11:28

what we see and we'll use app your example and move it back into the, into the podio conversation, which is Zapier has set an integration standard. APIs are a mess, right? It just, if you look, because every company is different, every software set is different. You have softwares doing very different things, different industries ,

Jarett Duker: 11:46

and even if the API is in good shape, there's a good chance it's been updated recently and now the documentation is out of date. I mean, it literally is just

Gil Roberts: 11:54

a mess, right? And one , there's a lot of software development companies that make tons of money, untangling balls of yarn and tying the strings together. Uh , typically hardcoded correct? Uh direct, and these are even for pretty large pieces of software, right? Like, it's , it's not like these esoteric systems that are, you know, completely custom designed from the floor up and they live on a server rack and your building and you're your only user, right? We're talking about large pieces of software available on the Internet, still have problems with integrations, let alone these little eclectic systems , uh , that can be found in, in every dark server room corner , uh , across the globe. And what Jared is leading on to is that there has to be some type of spinal cord that unites and dictates a standard so that we all speak the same language. And that then that allows for API collaboration. Zapier has done that as a integrations marketplace. Because they are the marketplace, they are able to dictate the standards. And now you know, this, they proport you know, theirs , which I believe 1500 applications, it may be the largest set of integration ever created. I don't know, I can't find anything bigger. A Google maybe, which knows. All right, so t his spinal cord is so important, but Zapier is just the integration side. You still, you still have to have that system of record that allows for that standardization. What would be the advantage of having that, that standardized system of record in a podio sense. Let's bring it back.

Jarett Duker: 13:42

Okay. Well what you have then is a set of ground rules that you can begin hanging all these other applications off of. It's not a complete spaghetti ball anymore. It's more like a railroad that has branching ties off of it and you know that it's going to be headed off at right angles. You've, you've gone from a world with no rules to a world with a few standard set of rules that begin to draw the boundaries around your sandbox. And yes, you say, well, why would I want to do that? Well, exactly for that reason is inside of a more constrained vision, you're able to produce much more rapidly and therefore much more quickly.

Gil Roberts: 14:27

It's important , uh, not just , uh , to know that it's not just raveling quickly, which is also budget friendly. Right. Which has been a huge barrier. I mean look at look at how much web applications integrate now versus even five to 10 years ago and a cost of an API integration and honestly it's, it's going down right cheaper and cheaper because of these standardizations, like your railroad example. We all agree upon the track size and what the wheels on the train should be so that any train can use any rail and then we also dictate if you want a rail station and you want a rail to come off our main line here are the specifications for the rail. We don't, we don't specify what the train engine is, we don't specify what loads that you're bringing to and from. We just want to make sure that the pipe, the railing is standardized so that we can put anything on top of that. The rail and of itself becomes a platform circling back around in the spinal cord. Podio as a product platform positions itself to deliver at a wide scale because it can become a part of of that standard spinal cord railing system that we're talking about.

Jarett Duker: 15:43

I think it are , it doesn't need to become, it just simply is the structure of workspace app item, the ability to add and remove a large number but ultimately discrete number of, of data fields off of, onto one of those apps. Um, it just bounds in that world and now we know the canvas that we're painting on and we can work within those rules to build quite literally anything. We've talked about it already, that we've done everything from sales C RMs to inventory management to HR to loan servicing

Gil Roberts: 16:16

a numeral and then niche stuff over in the real estate industry and governments and stuff. It, you know, even if it's one office, maybe not a product, it's still just shows that podio is able, you could say , able to handle a lot that you can throw at it from a , from that standpoint. But we still need to hang apps off of that spinal cord . We need some arms and some legs to do very specialized things. Right? So if I need to send mass amounts of emails, I'm probably not going to do that via a Globi flow . I don't, I don't... I Think talks about this two weeks ago and you can , we really don't recommend it. Yeah . And I'm sure, I'm sure the Citrix , uh , probably agrees with that. They're probably okay with sending a few emails. Probably not 100,000 every five minutes. Right. Probably going to kick you off as a spammer, that's probably what you're doing with it. So you know , we have to go and source that functionality and then we're back at the same problem. Do we do rebuild MailChimp one client at a time, $100,000 and $100,000 a hundred.. . No, we can find a friendly rail system that hooks to our rail system because they share a standard and be able to place that functionality, that deeper functionality via that integration with a product that is, as you stated earlier, very specialized in what it does.

Jarett Duker: 17:42

Yeah . And I think that the last six months have really validated this. We've seen more and more organizations outside of ourselves that are catching onto this and trying to design that application and honestly validating a lot of the things that I said six months ago about the barriers to entry. I hear it repeated back to me a lot, but it is catching on and we're seeing it in all of these different spaces. We , uh, we looked at this a few weeks ago , um, uh, industries that podio is, is well suited for and we're seeing validation of these products can be built. They can leverage the flexibility that is the podio platform, but they can also be a semi push button deployed for that company. There are still lots of problems. Documentation support comes to my mind right on the bat. Uh, but that's because the platforms have not fully caught up with these ideas as thinking of themselves as operating systems. They think of themselves as the product, not the product delivery method. And , and we're seeing that change bit by bit.

Gil Roberts: 18:46

Right? W W we're aware of a few products on the horizon that could possibly apply to , uh , but nothing that that tends to be as forethought as removing this operating system inception problem. Or I'm signing into three things , uh , to actually get to my application. You know , something I was just come to mind as I was talking is the security issues with that. Think about it. You've got to , you've got the operating system layer of security. You have the browser layer. Now you now you're gonna sign into the platform. You know, these are, these are different computing systems. You got your actual hardware, then you've got an application that's running on your hardware. That application, which is a browser, is accessing a server that's out in the cloud, right? That I sign into and now here's my data that you could say, well that's , that's kind of layers to a fortress, but each layer is actually exposed. It's not like one behind Another that you know, that each one can be attacked independently. Especially when you think about industries that have a lot of regulation and compliance are really sensitive data, health care , which we covered last week's podcast or a week ago , uh , financial transactions. I just thought, you know, sensitive business intelligence , uh , that may be placed onto these platforms because they want to collaborate, right? Executive management, hey, we need competitive intelligence, you know, report across this platform. That data's out there, right? And that could be leaked a lot of different ways and most of the time it's, you know, it's a password or ad phishing email, something like that, that , that can break through these, these layers. So there's just, there's a lot of complication there. You have to have the spinal cord to keep everything together , um , and , and be able to make it usable for your business purpose. I want to bring up , uh , something that we , uh , again, six months ago we talked about it on our first podcast, which you said , um, us over the last couple of years is in January, we noticed the trend throughout multiple industry sectors , uh, the need for technological solutions, but are not large enough to attract industry giants. And they're going to come in industry giants who would come in and actually customize software to their needs. We said that podio actually represents a middle ground . You said, I should say , uh , to allow small organizations to quickly design and develop internal applications. I want to , I want to think about that six months back in a way that some of the products which we've experienced more podio based products , uh , since we've started this,

Jarett Duker: 21:11

podcast, people reaching out to us. Yeah. How does that still fit in for these smaller organizations? I think it's still absolutely true for those smaller organizations. The only real change is our ambitions have grown considerably. We have done this plenty of times for these smaller organizations and it , it works well. It works fine, but that experience has taught us that a lot of the barriers to industry scale, enterprise scale solution competitors on the podio platform as an operating system were really imagined. A , they all, it is absolutely capable to run large 500 plus , uh, employee organizations strictly through the podio platform. We can develop very good integrated HR suites . We can run very good. It ticketing and support suites, we can do , um, PTO management, timecards , scheduling. We have done all of these things to a high degree of professional , um , uh, quality. And so I don't see any particular reason why we could not. And anytime we come across the platform weakness that hey, this doesn't quite work, such as encoding social security numbers through the old power of late a , the open API, Amazon services and other applications that we can access, we can quickly overcome it. Uh, it can still be a little finicky and difficult at both have external integrations and mass production of the product. But again, these are engineering problems to be overcome, not barriers to success.

Gil Roberts: 22:49

That's fair. Uh , I want to take another quote from six months back as we continue our look back here. Uh , over the first season of the podio solutions podcast. This one's from Alex a , this was a few minutes in a to that first episode, which he gets into , uh , how a lot of people first encounter podio , uh, which is , uh, when they get a first taste of it, I'll pull a quote here. "They're getting a taste of it from the standpoint of needing to solve their own problems. They understand their problems very well from a business perspective and they haven't found a product that captures that particular business perspective. So they go on to build their own solution with their own hands of course." I think this from the people that have reached out to us in the last six months after hearing the podcast and said, you know, I work in x industry. I'm not really interested in becoming a software development company, it's a plumber or electrician or something like that, but I've been able to cobble together at least a proof of concept or, or the MVP that I use day to day and have been for a long time. What makes me want to build a product out of this? You know, where's my motivations? Where does that come from?

Jarett Duker: 24:04

Well, the motivation comes from the fact that whatever you build yourself is going to be, in most cases superior because you know your business better than you're going to be able to explain your business to someone like me. And , uh , if you spend the time to do it, you're going to have more forethought than , than I can deliver. Now what I bring to the table is more technical knowledge on how to achieve things easier. But there's a good chance if you do want to tackle the learning curve that you can create a superior product. But what we've realized is that you shouldn't have to, that's the whole point of making podio based products is there's a good chance that your business and your business process does not deviate that much from an industry standard that we can develop professional grade products for. And that's the entire idea behind the podio based product. The podio based solution is yes, that that will, and that desire is absolutely there. But maybe that should be channeled into customizing an off the shelf podio product that you've already purchased. Small changes, a few added fields here and there, and automation to send a text message that's pertinent to your specific business or just rewording a text message that's been sent so that it feels more personal to your customers.

Gil Roberts: 25:18

So some of the things that we've talked about, not just in the first episode, which we did , uh , is our product Sassafras and how it's lending its capabilities that we're innovating here to allow third party developers, not , not just ourselves, but other podio based developers , uh, to move either one off products or products that are, you could say are one off but they've done it multiple times cause they work in an industry vertical or giving the example of somebody that works in the industry and has built something themselves. Sassafras allows those podio developer and agencies to , to move solutions and deploy them out and manage them. I think over the last six months we've learned a lot , uh, when it comes to, to what Sassafras can and cannot do. Uh, but I want to talk about each capability of that, what , what it means to deploy a copy of a podio based product, what it means to patch that product from a business standpoint and how that can help our listeners understand Podio as a product development platforms. So why is it important to be able to deploy out instances of a podio based product? Why can't I just make it by hand?

Jarett Duker: 26:31

Well, I mean the very most tactical solution is that the app store doesn't allow you to deploy multi workspaces that work together. I mean that's why we started down this road. You're referencing that app marketplace and the reason you would want to deploy something is you can create a good podio solution inside of a day or two if you know you're just working through it yourself. But we have polished some of our solutions for years and I look at the professionalism that goes into a product like impact pro and I compare that to a one off build that we do and they just don't compare. And it's the little things like section headers, jump links , uh , careful proofreading of fields, actual help texts. Yes, actual help text help videos that are embedded right into the creation text as mark down. You can come up with a passable podio solution very, very quickly, but it is always going to have a certain level of just amateurishness to it because it hasn't had the hundreds of hours of polish by multiple eyes look over it and perfect it to that degree that creates a professional product. You know , it's a team effort and most podio builds are a one off or two off, one or two developers going . So the ability to stamp down those highly polished templates, even if they're not the final iteration of what you use, can save you so much time on the front end and patching .

Gil Roberts: 27:55

I mean, I know this, you know , this kind of leads from what you're saying is you have changes that are going to come once it's out in the marketplace or once it's out in use, you're probably gonna want to make changes, right? And you're, you're kind of , you probably don't want to get your hand into the middle of a live copy where you got, you know, 10 20 a thousand employees, over a hundred employees, whatever you got working on. The last thing you want to do is break something.

Jarett Duker: 28:22

It's just it , you just cannot, it invalidates the entire idea of using , uh , off the , uh, of using a podio based product. You have to be able to make wide sweeping changes in a controlled fashion and that's what patching does.

Gil Roberts: 28:35

Yup. And it comes from a , a development environment, right? The idea between splitting off development and innovation into one environment, one copy of Podio,

Jarett Duker: 28:46

which could be in the same works in the same organization, just an entire second set of workspaces, just like your production environment that you're able to tinker with and mess with and make changes to without any fear of damaging or disrupting the workflow of your active employees.

Gil Roberts: 29:03

Yeah. You don't have their managers coming and running at the it guys over there working inside of that an enterprise solution. Hey, you just wiped out all my sales pipeline contacts. This is really bad. You're fired, right? You can, you can say, you can sit and play and blow everything up whenever it is ready. You can actually test it. Like, do proper quality assurance testing on piece of software and then utilize a patching feature to actually , uh , give a live update into the production environment. Podio, podio solution that's important. You know, we're giving an enterprise example here. I think that amplifies, when you look at a podio based product, now you have people paying you for updates and maintenance and uptime of the solution in and of itself. And you need to go through and make upgrades to that. It just becomes more important to be able to have that development, production, split. And this isn't a new concept, right? Like a lot of custom development and huge custom pieces of software and a lot of these SAS software, podio and of itself probably does this, that they have that development environment where they can tinker or build and innovate and side a without disruption of the actual service. Yeah. Uh , something that we're, we're looking at coming out with a once patch , uh, excuse me, deploy and patches available , uh, in a wide scale is our agency tool. So if you are a podio development agency and you , you get assigned a client, either you sell them or, or some other means and they are already used podio, you know, now you have this extra layer problem. It's a podio system that you've been tasked to either innovate or maintenance or change or what have you, but you're not the designer. We're looking at a way to be able to pull down this production copy. Likely your client is not sophisticated enough to have a development and a production split and actually back into a development copy. Maybe you're tasked with a 500 person company. Once a is using podio and they've build the it departments build some things and it just kind of bumped their head on the ceiling or there's no more budget for do they need to move on or where or what have you. Right. Um, how do you deal with that as an agency? It's a live environment. You're not even a part of that. Companies with like an IT person. It's tough to , to make big sweeping changes that may be very, very helpful to the client because you're looking at an amateur bill you have a lot of times just my based on number of hours inside of podio systems and designing them versus a client that's done something internally. They may not have that level of expertise on staff, but

Jarett Duker: 31:50

well through this process you can give that to them very rapidly. You know, you didn't have to conceptualize it from the very beginning and run down that whole road. You can come in halfway through the process and put them onto that track. Yep .

Gil Roberts: 32:01

So we'll look back at a couple of other things from our first episode. Um, as a part of this , uh , look back here as we wrap up season one, I think something that has been a topic that comes up a lot in our podcast is Globi flow and , and how that's used as a part of product solutions and the scalability issues that, that come and go with products that are based on globi flow and what some of our listeners can do to think about or overcome. Some of the globi flow issues , uh, that, that products based on podio can , um ,

Jarett Duker: 32:40

this one I have to say has not changed that much. Um, the problems with Globi flow are really intrinsic to Globiflow because they are created by the strengths of Globi flow . By rapid prototyping, stability, flexibility, ease of use, good UI, those things necessitate the issue of lack of scalability, lack of a lack of ability to quickly replicate or change or adjust quickly to um, sweeping changes inside of the solution, which it's, it's targeted. Uh , sure it can heal if you change references in the like, but the very ease of use that makes Globi flow so great, it's still going to prevent you from using it as a full on scalable , uh , flow engine for managing the automations of an industry scale product. And we have to look elsewhere, unfortunately.

Gil Roberts: 33:33

Yeah. Uh, and, and something that , um, a couple things have happened over the six months in that, and I , I agree at a high level that there's, there hasn't been a whole bunch of change. I know Andreas uh , the godfather of globi flow has been working over on proc fu with some new globi flow based API integrations. I know a , if you go to the API and , under the globi flow menu is still says experimental. I'st said that for many years now. Um, but we, we tried working with that as a company or awhile back and just kind of abandoned it. Since we've been doing this podcast, we've had what three, four other agencies like ourselves or product developers like ourselves call , call us and say, Hey, I do have a custom flow engine like there are , it's not just us that has gone on and made a custom flow engine for Sassafras. It takes the place of Globi flow or works alongside Globi flow depending if you, because we've talked about you can use Globi flow to further customize uh automations on a Sassafras flow engine based product . But we've seen other agencies you use uh custom flow engines, boost pm, like give a shout out to them. They have their own custom flow engine uh that runs a lot of their core automations. I know they, I think they still use some globi flows alongside of that, but they were they were working on a lot of conversion. Um, there are several other, again, many conversations with those that are looking at custom flow engines have already started building them. Uh we've seen an extreme case where they're using calculation fields as a co as almost like a flow engine , uh , to, to be able to, cause those are at least a little more scalable than globi flow copying over and over again. Only slightly though because the references still do break down when you are uh, if they are cross workspace . Yeah. Then the ones we saw were intra workspace. They were intra app actually. So you know , they worked fine and so I hope to see more, especially from Andreas over at proc Fu exploiting the ability of globiflow because we do love it. Uh , I know that occasionally we, we kind of talked down on it. It's not not anything personal. We just, we found, yeah ,

Jarett Duker: 35:42

I absolutely love globi flow. It's just not the tool for this job. It's like trying to cut wood with a hammer.

Gil Roberts: 35:49

Exactly. And , and we love it's prototyping ability. Uh , but I think that , um, for product scalability we're still nearly at the same point that we were , uh , six months ago. From a Globi Flow perspective. Yup . Uh , lastly as we wrap up our uh season, look back here , uh, something that that has changed , uh , recently is , uh, how many , uh, users and items to the free tier. And I like to bring this up because we talked a lot about this , uh, as a current event six months ago. Uh, there was a lot of pushback in the forms initially and it died down quickly. What... The life of a free user? I just, you know, a free tier user and how that impacts something like a podio based product. I just wanted to give a quick open discussion.

Jarett Duker: 36:39

Gotcha. I don't know how applicable that is. I can imagine a couple of scenarios. Um, we rarely deal with free users , uh , because we sell the platform as we sell our services and we automatically hook them up with the gold standard and you know, the best services for everything. Yeah. Top seat. Just we start there because why not? It doesn't cost that much and you get so much value for it. If you had podio based solutions that were readily available through a marketplace that was uh , available to the free users and they were able to function on that free user level, I see high potential for customer conversion from a podio standpoint because I think where most of the free users drop off is they hit that blank sandbox and mess around with it for 20 minutes. Think I'll get back to this or think this is way too complicated and don't. If they could just download a solution with, you know, working flows that performs, I say 80% of the actions that they need. If you can hit that 80% point on any sort of downloaded software, mass produced software, you're in really good shape and I think they could actually see a great increase in free user conversions if they were, if, sorry , when I have to say they, Citrix was able to offer that experience.

Gil Roberts: 38:07

I agree with you. Uh , and one of the reasons why I made it on this list, which is I, I have a feeling , uh , which six months ago they cut it to 500 items. Right? It's probably a reason why that occurred. Now database storage is expensive. It is and there's probably a lot of accounts. What a , the year before last they had when they were cleaning out uh accounts that had been accessed for over a year yet answer an email. I think a lot of people remember that. Uh , so I feel that there's probably a lot accounts that are inactive. They were free users that go down the path of, wow, this is a little bit what I didn't expect. I think that has an impact. And again, why I made this list on products that are based on Podio, so podio based products, those that make these products would love their clients to be able to trial the product for free. How, and I'm going to leave this as an open question and maybe we give a little bit of an answer here, but just an open question to our listeners in the community. How can we give them that taste? And I'm not talking about like the, the podio seven day free trial type stuff. Just as a product. I as a person that has built a product, I want them to taste my product, taste the automation, taste some of the integrations to get them to purchase. If they purchase the product they have to purchase in most products that we've encountered, they have to purchase the top tier seat. So it is of interest to Citrix. So I'll just pose that. I'm ,

Jarett Duker: 39:34

I'm not going to comment on that. Uh, too deeply. Other than I will say this, we use Sassafras for our flow engine. Um, I'm curious to know what the API limitations are for those free seats. I don't think I've ever seen any documentation on that. There's usually like 500 calls per hour, right ? I wonder if it is more restricted on that free seat, but from a free user perspective of someone purchasing a product through Sassafras, they get the whole , they get the whole enchilada. Um, essentially they can see all the automations work because that's not touching globi flow . They don't need that higher tier, right . API Limited. Um, and so hopefully in order to continue using this they'll buy in to the full tier which they will need and then begin making use of, of globiflow and everything else. So I see it as a strict upside , uh, with, with the Sassafras integration because it's going to create a higher level of conversion because you are handed a product that does things that you can see at work. And all of a sudden the vision of what Podio is becomes so much clearer to someone who's never used it before because hey, it does what I need it to do.

Gil Roberts: 40:41

I'll draw parallels as we close out here, which is when we introduce people to the podio the first time cause they're looking for a solution and we kind of fire up a blank thing in front of them or we'll, we'll, maybe it's in an industry or vertical we haven't worked in before. So we've got , we've got to show similar pieces of things. You know, it's hard to inspire them, but as more podio based products come out, I think, I think there's a strategy there to work with podio based product developers to offer a different level of free trial , uh, with, with the perspective that they're trying a podio based product. Obviously podio is their underpinning things. Uh, we see that in some of the other platforms. I know salesforce has a program that that does that. Uh , I just want to pose that out there and poke some people and see if that , uh , riles up anything as a part of our listener base. Well, it's been a great six months, Jared. When we started this podcast, we had no idea that we would get such a great response and, and where it's taken us and we just want to thank our listeners. We've got a season finale coming up. I think we're going to probably have a large round table. Yup . That's what I'm hoping for. So we'll be on the lookout for that. Uh , again, thank you so much to our listeners out there for being with us for the last six months. We're excited to get the next season underway. We've got a finale coming up next week. We'll probably take a couple of weeks off in between seasons to refresh our content schedule and then we'll be back at you here shortly after that. So more more about that next episode. We are going to be taking a podio gaps. Uh , we'll probably start out season two early on with a gaps episode. Uh , we've gotten some great response in the support forms , um, and the health forms of podio. What we always ask if you have something that's burning and you can't solve or something that you posted in the community forums that no one at Citrix or another fellow podio developer has an answer , uh, challenge us a we say and , and, and see if we can help you out. Uh , live here on the, on the podcast. Uh, you can always hit us up on Facebook, linkedin, Twitter, or shoot us up podio message or email at podcast@brickbridgeconsulting.com if you've been listening to us for the last six months and you haven't subscribed, well, you probably have. That's why I've gotten through all six. But if you're a new listener, please, please, please subscribe. If you have not been, just been catching us casually, the subscriptions help us more than you know, we also would really appreciate any reviews at any of the major platforms, iTunes, apple podcasts , I should say, or Google music, stitcher, or many of the other platforms that will on those reviews. Again, help us and that helps us continue to help you on this podcast. Until next time, have a great rest of your day, wherever you are. Thank you very much.

Outro: 43:42

Okay.