From BLOCKBUSTER FILMS to Focus: Steven Puri's Journey to Productive SUCCESS

Speaker A: Welcome to the Value Makers podcast, hosted by Ryan Purvis, supported by Heather Bicknell, as we meet with people that make value happen and hear their stories. Enjoy. Stephen, welcome to the Value Makers podcast. Do you want to introduce yourself?

Speaker B: Please? Ryan, thank you for having me. I, um, am both the founder of a Focus app called the Suka and also an executive at a couple motion picture studios. And I've made some films, mainly action.

Speaker A: Oh, really? Any we would know? Yeah.

Speaker B: I was the vice president at 20th Century Fox, where I ran the Dinhard franchise and the Wolverine franchise, among other things. And then when I was executive vice president, DreamWorks for crits, we, uh, did Transformers 1 and 2, Star Trek 11, which was the reboot. You've actually watched Star Trek, right?

Speaker A: Lazy. I was actually going to queue up that Star Trek this morning to watch.

Speaker B: You were talking about one of your. One of your episodes, Star. So if you listen to Star Trek 11 closely, I die. Uh, really, Dennis? You will hear Chris Pine say to Bones, because remember, Bones, at the beginning of Star Trek 11 is not the chief medical officer. So he goes, you know, chief medical officer Puri died on deck six. I guess you're now pre chief medical officer.

Speaker A: I could picture that scene.

Speaker B: Sort of an inside joke on the movie Gilbert. Which, let's be honest, Deck 6 is the Lido deck. So I was probably playing shuffleboard or something. Like, it's not a noble deck. That's awesome.

Speaker A: So how did you get into this?

Speaker B: I was a software engineer in IBM. Um, both my parents were engineers. Yeah, when I was little, I was a code monkey. I won a Thomas J. Watson scholarship from IBM that helped pay for college as well as guaranteed me a job. I would work at IBM to make money. While I was in college, I went to USC in Los Angeles. It's a great cinema school. So a lot of my friends in my dorm were trying to be filmmakers. You're friends with people and they're always talking about all this, great, let's go see this movie Friday night. And you start to appreciate that. And I happen this is complete luck, Ryan. This is not like by design. I happened to be right there when film went digital and suddenly became valuable to understand how to engineer. At the same time, you could talk creative. And I was lucky to do both. So I got into film because I was producing digital visual effects, like computer generated effects. Most notably, produced the digital effects for Independence Day. We won the Academy Award for the visual effects on that. Everyone. There were some fantastic movies that year. We happened to win. Ended up setting up A company called Syntropolis. With Roland and Dean, who were the director and producer of Independence Day, we created a company together to do Dit hofen. Raised about $15 million in, uh, venture to start that. It was very opex intensive. And then sold that four years later to a German conglomerate called Das Merck. It's like the Liberty Media of Germany. It was a fun exit in my 20s and I was like, oh, building tech companies is really easy. No, it's not. I learned later that first one was really a great exit.

Speaker A: And then that's how.

Speaker B: Then I was like, oh, this is really cool. I had this backdoor into meeting all these directors and I was like, cool, brilliant.

Speaker A: Uh, because Independence is obviously a great movie. You could watch it now and it's still pretty good and still relevant, etc. But now you've built Suka is your latest thing, which is what. What is suka? Firstly, where does that come from as a word?

Speaker B: You know what, let me answer your other question first and then I'll answer the suka one, because it'll make sense in that order. As I rose up in film and my life series of very lucky breaks that I worked very hard to make something out, right? Yeah, super monastery. So got into film, had met a lot of directors because when you do visual effects, you meet people who have a lot of money. When you're doing $150 million movie, it's not your first movie out of college. These are all established directors. So I had to work with Cameron Fincher, Spielberg, but also some art directors. I worked with Woody Allen, Jim Jarvis on movies you wouldn't normally think were effects movies, but they needed work done. I used that as a way to be like, oh, wow, this is a great entree into being a film producer, because I know all these guys now did that rose up to be a senior couple studios. Then I had a moment where I was like, I'm going to wake up, be 40, 50 years old, be like, the guy, okay, Daddy's got to go to work big Die Hard nine today and pay for your college. It's like, I'm not sure that's where I see my life going. Which is a very pretty privileged thing to be able to say I can choose my career. Because it was not true for either. My parents were born, so there was a you will do this thing, work hard for 30, 40 years to provide clarity. And I was able to say, oh, I want to go pursue that. And I had the ability. So I'm very grateful for that. I Thought to myself at that moment, what do I know how to do? Where can I have a little more control than just being the cog in the wheel that makes the next Wolverine movie? And that was going back into engineering. So that was when I thought, let me go find some problems that I think I could solve, put together a team. And I did that for two small companies. We raised about 3 million for each of them.

Speaker A: They both failed.

Speaker B: I was super humbled and ashamed and embarrassed, and all my friends were watching. I left this big job in film to go start a tech company, which now is very popular, but 10 years ago was not quite as popular to leave film to go into tech. When those failed, I just felt like such a loser. I moved to New York. I didn't want to hang around LA and bump into friends who are always asking me, how's it going? I'm like, terribly. My company just bolted. I'm an idiot. It was terrible thought. What did I learn? I had noticed I was running a company when the pandemic hit, when zoom became a verb. There were a lot of things that were shocking to the work life, especially in tech companies like mine. In film, this is actually an established way of working for a hundred years. But in film, it's never been called, like, remote period of the film, the hybrid period of the film. The way films work very simply, is they start remote, which is writers working alone in their homes, in coffee shops, in their writing partners home. At a certain point, maybe you get enough traction, you get some money. Producer sets, the production office one or two days a week. You meet with the location scout and the line producer and the costumer and the production designer, and you go off for three days and do your rewrites. And everyone's doing their own work remotely. Then you're on set and $125,000 a day. It is all day, all night, for months. And it goes back to hybrid and remote. As you go back to the picture editors and sound editors working, you dip in and out in each of those stages. There are very established ways where leaders know how to lead through that stage and ICs know how to contribute to that stage. Right? So this is what inspired me. I was like, wow, there's some great lessons about how this has been done for a hundred years under a different set of names. They could really help here, both as a leader of a team and, uh, as an individual contributor. So that's really the genesis of, oh, how can I take some of these ideas, couple them with, really, the smart guys Who've written great, great books. We Hide Shoots and I's book on flow and flow states. If you haven't read it, it's a great book. Cal Newport. There are so many smart people out there. So you read those books, boil them down, start this. So here's the funny thing. This is the answer to your other question. I met my wife in yoga. I daily yoga practice for over a decade. It is an important part of my life. A blending of mindfulness with productivity. How are you doing something that's hard but also being very conscious about it. So we go on our honeymoon to Bali. Very lucky to go there. A lot of yoga. Go to yoga barn and eat the food and all that. So I had just uh, early version of this running and I was like, we do all these flow concepts and put like beautiful music together. And uh, an AI coach sort of guides you through your day and helps you optimize stuff. I needed a name. I turned to Laura. For the next 10 days, everyone knows not to bug me. Maybe it's a gift from the universe where I'm going to be able to have my unconscious mind bubbled up. A cool name for the company. I was thinking maybe on the first day I could talk to some of our early members and ask them what they love about it that might seed my imagination. So I don't call it something stupid like Focus App 12. Productivity made these like awful names, right? So she was super cool. She said, I'm going to the pool. Enjoy. Have your Zoom call. I'll catch you. So I talked to a couple people that day. The third guy I spoke to who is still a member, I see him in our coffee shop. He talked to me for about eight minutes. I asked all the dumb questions. Hey, Ryan, what feature do you love? Do you love music? Do you love the timers? What about the assistant that helps you get stoked? Eight minutes in, I go into the wrap up. Thank you for your time. Super cool. And he said, stephen, you didn't ask the right question. I was like, oh really? What was the right question? He's you should have asked me why I pay you. I was like, okay, pretty forward. It's why the payment? At 3 o' clock I can be playing with my kids who are 2 and 4 or at 6 o' clock I can where the day go. The difference is, did I open the suit in the morning? I pay because my kids are not going to be two and four anymore. And I get that three hours with them every day. I was like, that is more Articulate than anything I've ever said about my own company. I was talking to Laura at this over dinner, and that night she said to me, you know what? That's actually a yoga concept. There's a word for that in Sanskrit. The happiness you feel when you're self fulfilled doing something. Well, she said that, Sukha, the ease of just saying, I'm good at this. In Bali, I bought that domain, the happiest company, the super company. I'm very proud of that. And that's something I'm happy to tell my kids. This is what daddy does more than Danny made Die Hard 9.

Speaker A: It's funny because I was actually thinking about I was doing something and I had this thought pop in my head that Die Hard is still a Christmas movie. And that whole like, thing. And I, uh, can see what you're saying. For someone who's not done what you've done, it sounds like a really exciting thing to be doing. It's the same as when someone, anyone's job that they've done, someone goes, it's not as fun as you think. My dad worked in airlines, so we flew around a lot. It was like, ah, oh, it must be great. I'm like, yeah, but my dad wasn't there off the top. Yeah, your dad was. So you can always balance it out.

Speaker B: We though Ryan, I think it's Christmas movie.

Speaker A: I still think it's a Christmas movie.

Speaker B: I'm so curious.

Speaker A: It's one of those jokes that some people say there's 2,000 people in this world, people that believe it is a Christmas movie, people that believe it's not a Christmas movie. I think it's just the reason for me, it's a Christmas movie. Besides all the action, the shooting, the kicking and then the punching, he does all this stuff for his ex wife to have this happy moment at the end and it just happens to happen at Christmas.

Speaker B: In film development, Die Hard is such a prototypical example of a certain story structure. Decades later, it is still quoted when writers or producers are trying to explain what something is. It is that good. And you're right, it is a family movie. And what is the time when families need to be together or are together. Christmas holidays, whatever holiday is. Right, Right. Yeah, exactly. So it's the perfect time to set that.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I've, uh, actually just downloaded your app now. And I must be honest, it wasn't what I was expecting. I expected this to be some sort of productivity thing. Well, I'm now wondering how I got the right app there, because I'VE got a. I've got a Spanish terms and conditions to accept. I might have downloaded the wrong app.

Speaker B: I can tell you what. Rs guys, it's a web app that runs on your laptop.

Speaker A: Oh, uh, this is not an app. It's not an iPhone.

Speaker B: Old iOS Apple.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: It's not Flappy Birds where you press play. In the morning, your smart assistant helps put together your task list to say, hey, let's budget these properly. Let's timebox. Essentially helping you to time box.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And has a lot of research to guide you and say, hey, you know what, let's choose three things. Let's not get overwhelmed. And there's distraction blocking. You open up Facebook or YouTube and your assistants. Do you need to be on Facebook right now? Is that part of writing your blog? People in the aggregate have done about 500,000 tasks in the system and they finish in about 52% of the time they thought they needed.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: And it's not magic. We keep people on track. And then when you finish at 3:00 and you feel good, it's a thing you want to repeat.

Speaker A: I'm, um, having this conversation with someone at the moment. And it started off being an operational conversation that's become more like business coaching. When I started talking to him, I could see that he was one of these people that like to control everything. Then I saw a list of all the projects running. And for a small business, they've got so many projects running and he's surprised that nothing's happening. Won't happen very well. And it's quite a thing in the sense that I'm talking to him on a regular basis and I'm trying to undo.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: These things that he's in. And one of the things is to explain to him you only need to have one or two priorities a day.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: If the two things are. Uh, like I said, it was the terrible two things. If Jim. If getting to gym and meditating, my terrible two things, and I get those done, then whatever else happens in the day is a good day because I've gotten rid of the two things that are tough to do.

Speaker B: Ryan, can I give you some data to back up what you're. So again, I'm speaking from my platform where I do have insights into the aggregate of the data. Over 500,000 tasks, you are 77% m more likely to finish all three tasks. If you just choose three. If then you have a longer list and you say, oh, I'm gonna get these seven done and these five done, you Will do two. With us, we found it to be three. It was the magic cutoff. When you see those in your field of view, there's something about how achievable it is that you burn through them when you see seven. It's just that overwhelm of, oh my God, I'm never gonna get all this shit.

Speaker A: And I'm glad you mentioned time blocking because I think that's one of the mistakes people make as well is they write the long list. There's no prioritizing the list 1 to X. They don't actually estimate the time each task takes. So you can write seven things, but task number one might take you four hours and then you've mentally burnt out. The last thing you want to do is task two. So you might skip to task seven, which is the easy one.

Speaker B: Completely agreed. And that is one of the things like when your smart assistant or a platform sees, because I know members do this, you set out a task but you're not going to in one sitting finish that thing. I'm not going to write my book. If I make a task that is write my book just first. Hey, you know what, Ryan, that's awesome. What about something achievable to. What if you wrote the outline for chapter one?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: How long does that take? 30 minutes. Actually driving yesterday, I had an idea for it. Okay, I'm going to make a task for write outline chapter one, 30 minutes, let's bang that out. And then you get done and then you feels good and you do the next thing.

Speaker A: That is so funny because I've written that as well. Write book as a task. And I have this app called DU which reminds me regularly. And after a while I just delete the task because I've completely killed the whole vibe.

Speaker B: They speak to hundreds of our members over the past six years. A lot of what we did was me writing down here the common things I hear. I'll tell you the most common things I hear and how we tried to solve them. The cold start problem. Very often it is, I know I'm going to get to work at 9am, 9:30, 8:30 without making sorry, I'm going to get going and it becomes, oh, let, uh, me just quickly check my emails or pick up the phone and scroll for 5, 10 minutes which becomes 20 minutes. Or if you're at home, I can just throw in a load of laundry and I'll be going while I work. Or let me do the dishes from last night that I didn't do. We found with our members. I Don't think this is globally everyone who has ever procrastinated, but in this specific way, because our entire membership is over 30 college educated, mainly engineers, designers and writers. So these are people who just need to stay on the rails. It is the overwhelm of either looking at task list that is too long and you're like, I don't know where to start. Or it's that first task is build a house. You're like, I'm not. So we help you go. Okay, well, you have to choose three. Everything else you can put on the to do list, but it's gonna be hidden during your session. Right? I mean, uh, there's something on there that's ridiculously large, but your smart assistant's like, ryan, let's get real here, buddy. Okay, outline chapter one.

Speaker A: Is that machine learning of some sort or pattern recognition?

Speaker B: You know what, I'll be super blunt with you. We're refining it so quickly now because the LLMs are progressing so quickly. So when you and I record this to the time it airs, I'm sure it'll get even better because we're just continually tuning this with, uh, the input of, you know, our members, which sometimes is very blunt. Hey, it told me today to do this stupid thing. You're like, I'm sorry, today we're still working on that part. We're not perfect. We're just trying really hard.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's true. Because one of the problems people have, and I mean I don't have this, is that when you write the task, at the time you write it, you're like, oh, yeah, do this thing. Pay bill.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Now in two weeks time, when that task comes up and you're like, pay bill. Now was that pay an actual bill or was that pay again a guy named Bill?

Speaker B: Oh, uh, that's a very good point. You know what, I'm glad you brought that up. I forgot about that. We allow you not just to have a 5, 7 words, like pay bill thing. Right. But we also allow you, if you need to capture some context, you can save that as a tooltip. So when you hover over that task, it'll go, Bill is the guy you owe the money to for the pool rental. Which does help. The context is so helpful. You're right.

Speaker A: When I read the book anyways, and it's just a very good. But the problem is if you don't do things in context, and I try to do with omnifocus and various tools, it almost became more work than it was to just do the Work, uh,

Speaker B: you bring up something I think is so true. I tried a lot of tools and at a certain point I found that I abandoned so many because the work of maintaining the tool was greater than the work of doing the work. And a lot of these personal. It in some ways becomes a form of procrastination, the grooming and the grooming of your own personal backlogs like that, where you're like, I don't even want to open that up because I want to stare at that stuff. Completely agree. We wanted to actually transition from. There are a lot of great platforms out there that are task managers or music. If you just want music, there's some fantastic options. If you want task manager, use Trello Sonic, your Red Living or whatever you want. We really wanted to be the one platform that helped you get in time. That said, I see your mountain. We're going to do it in an achievable way and you're going to feel great. At 3 o', clock, I want you to feel like, I'm a winner, not at 6 o'. Clock. If I get up early tomorrow, I can get a jump on what I didn't finish today and then I'll start tomorrow's work. I've told myself that lie. It's garbage. As soon as you get into that rhythm of I'll just get up early tomorrow and finish, you're like, no, you're not. This is be Domino's the year week and you're going to be down on yourself. And that's is not suka. Suka is a feeling of, I'm really good at this. It's that flow state quote that people talk with Michael Jordan where he doesn't use the words flow state but is in the zone. It's just me and the ball. I get to this point of concentration where it's just me. M. There's no stance, there's no defender. I am in flow. You hear that from high performers when they get to that state of sukha where you're like, I am in my lane doing the thing I'm great at. It feels good. And that's what we aspire to, not to be the best task manager on earth. There are others that are better.

Speaker A: The movie analogy that I quite like is for the love of the game with Kevin Costner when he's throwing the perfect game and he says, clear the mechanism and he zones everything out. Yeah, I think that's the feeling we all want to get to, where you can clear everything out, just get to it.

Speaker B: But when was the first time you went, oh, wow, what just happened?

Speaker A: Do you understand if you get into something, it happens like it's hyper focused easily. If I build Lego or if I'm writing code or something like that, so easy to get into it. Where I struggle is in a meeting. I'm so grateful for AI note takers because I can zone out so easy in a meeting and not so much that I zone out because it's boring. But someone will say something and I start thinking about that thing and I'll start joining dots on that thing. And I completely miss what they saying for five minutes because I've gone down this route.

Speaker B: You know, I wonder if you're adhd, because my first answer was a lot of context and I know it was long. You just have to know. And I saw in you the thing that I do, which is that, okay, where's he going? When does this thing come? And totally, I'm with you with that. I will tell you mental experience before I read Flow, before I read Miha said by his book. I was on a plane, this American flight actually, and the WI fi was broken. And I remember I had to do some mockups or some sort of designs. And I remember thinking, we can't be landing. Like, we just took off. 2 hours and 40 minutes had gone by. I had absolutely no conception. I didn't go to the bathroom. I. I don't think I ordered from the drink card. I was like, something's broken. We just took off. How could we be landing? And it was like, no, you're in sf. We're landing at SFO right now. You missed the entire flight because you were just so focused. And later I learned that was my first flow state where I was like, wow, I got all this done. Um, I'm landing and I'm not racing to the hotel to try and finish. I'm like, I could go to that place that I love by the airport that has the lobster rolls. I have to go to Pleasures.

Speaker A: There's a few times like that. I used to love my dad as a safer for an airline, so I used to love getting on an airplane.

Speaker B: Which carrier?

Speaker A: South African Airways. Oh, cool. Okay. The original one, not the Duck V2 that's currently, but it was because of his job. We used to fly business class or whatever, so I used to have a decent seat and I always. It was always good to sit there. And I read a book a couple years ago called Faster Than Normal. Um, actually, he's actually in New York and he wrote his book Flying to Japan and back. Really? That's how you got into flow state to write the book.

Speaker B: Oh, that's super interesting because it is a very like sequesters or cloistered environment in there. Yeah, very interesting. Uh, that's a fun experience when you're young. Getting fly away. My ex girlfriend before Laura was a flight attendant for our friends. And her dad was a 340, 744 pilot. So that was fun flying with her and with her dad and stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah. And it's a great education. You see the world. We lived a life where my dad would come home and say, I've got my roster. Who wants to go to Bangkok this week? And you disappear on a Thursday night, you're back on a Monday. So it's not necessarily a school holiday. It's not a holiday, but it's. And we learned a lot from that. And now that I travel, you just realize that you just know how to do because you did it so many times as a kid. And then obviously a crew, they have tips and tricks to how they travel because they're in the same place often. So they know where to eat, to drink and buy stuff. My dad loved to build his own barbecues. He'd go to Hong Kong for his burners, Sydney for his piping. And so he had this whole world

Speaker B: of, uh, shopping all these purveyors. That's. That is. It's funny you say it because Laura and I were just talking. We were going on our baby boat. We're having our first child this morning.

Speaker A: Congratulations.

Speaker B: That's super excited and just very much in love. Very grateful for all this. And so we're going to Amsterdam and then Greece. Amsterdam to visit friends. Go to Greece for the baby boom. She's never been to Greece. I've not been to Amsterdam. We were having that whole conversation around how do we source trusted recommendations about what to do, where to go, what to eat, what to say. We leave in two days. I'll be on that plane.

Speaker A: Yeah. Where about you stay in Amsterdam.

Speaker B: Our friend Lisa often, you may have read her. She wrote the charisma Myth. Olivia Fox gabon. She's left sf. She was up in Marent and moved there. We were staying at her house. I can't tell you. I've never been Amsterdam, so I can't say. It's in the northwest hills. I don't believe.

Speaker A: Oh, don't worry. Amsterdam's really small.

Speaker B: We will explore it.

Speaker A: And Amsterdam is pretty small. But even if you go to the Hague or whatever around there, everything's within an hour's drive, so it's pretty close to. And then in Greece, where about six. Greece you go.

Speaker B: Will stop in Athens just for historical reasons. Oh, you need to see. And then go to Naxos a little quieter. And Laura hasn't been there. You should have seen it. Not that it's going to be your favorite place on earth, but it's just. Let's go and do that.

Speaker A: Uh, so when we got married, we went for a honeymoon. It was one of those lucky things where I booked the honeymoon to go to Dubai and Greece. And then, then the company I was working for was like, we need to come for a sales conference in London and then a customer wants to see in Dubai. So just like Dubai and then Greece and then France was in there as well. The funny thing is I booked all these hotels and we got to this hotel in Santorini, which you should not stay at, called Hotel Daedalus. The honeymoon suite was. I can't even describe how bad it was, but we ended up staying on a hotel on the hill. Beautiful hotel, uh, with a view down into the water and obviously had an amazing time thereafter. But it was just this world went to this hotel, was like, how do we get to this hotel? This is like a two star travel lodge.

Speaker B: I'm sorry to hear that. I'm also super curious. Through January, February, March were all the earthquakes and we've had 20,000 tremors in the course of eight weeks.

Speaker A: I didn't even know about that debate

Speaker B: about was it tectonic, was it volcanic? It's tapered off. So I believe we're going to live 15 months.

Speaker A: It'll be entertaining, a great story. Uh, and the food there is amazing. We did Santorini in Mykonos. Mykonos, I would probably say, is not worth the trip.

Speaker B: I don't think Mykonos is the place for us.

Speaker A: The hotel we stayed was very nice. It was my birthday during that period, so they looked after us. It was very commercial. Going to the other islands is nice because they're a little bit less commercial, but more everyone has their own favorite cuisine and yeah, you'll enjoy it. I'm trying to see what the name of the hotel was we ended up staying in. But you're not taking the ferry so you're flying to the islands.

Speaker B: I think we're flying except one. There's one ferry and the rest are flight.

Speaker A: It's better to fly if you can because the ferries are long.

Speaker B: Yes. There was one, I think from Naxos or something. It was Easier timing wise. Sure.

Speaker A: So going back to the product, how many people are using the product right now?

Speaker B: We have. Right now my mailing list is about 34,000 members. And the. But I'll tell you, this is because they're spread across 24 time zones and have different work habits. It's not like it's crowded. It's not like there's. In the group chat, there are 34,000 people all saying, oh, by the way, I forgot to mention this. One of the cool things is we allowed people to connect and actually talk because it's a very focused community. It's not like social media where it's a bunch of people screaming at each other. Uh, it's a really friendly community. There's a guy I've seen there, I don't know personally, but he apparently is a high school vice principal in Missouri. And he's in, um, there usually late at night. I'm in a similar time zone in Missouri. Right. He's in there in the evening or on the weekends working away. And every day, what we built is you can post one thing that you care about. What's your most important task? What's your. Eat the frog. So you can only do it once a day, so you can't spam it. A lot of his were about engineering or studying. Right. So it finally came out after about a year. Someone asked him about this. Hey, Roy. And I see you're always posting it. Did this, uh, he's. I'm working on the side on my PhD in engineering. And he's like us, pretty serious pursuit. High school vice principal. He posted his most important task about a month ago. Finished dissertation. He turned it in. And people were like, does that mean what we think it means? After 18 months of working here, he did that. The big thing is I have to defend it in 2:21, Monday, the weekend leading up to that Monday, so many people I know because I run the platform, they do not know him. They posted their little thing. Roy, you got this wallet like we've been talking watching you do that. So Monday, he does not reply at all. And I was checking back there in the group chat. Where is he? Nothing. And then Tuesday morning he said, guys, I've slept and you can now call me Mr. Dr. King. People were dropping emojis and so happy. I wasn't sure in launching a group chat, will this work? Is this a good idea or is this the idea? And there was a woman I spoke to who's in our community and I bounced his arm. I was like, do you think we're trying? She did. Stephen, here's the thing. I can go to the Nike store and buy a pair of shoes. They'll sell me a pair of shoes. Left shoe, right shoe, put them on my feet. Run. There are a hundred million people who belong to the Nike Run club because we run together. You run further, you run faster, you're more accountable. The day that you're in bed and you suck and you're tired and now your friend calls you Ryan. Come on, let's do this, man. And the day that someone else needs you and you're there for them, that feels great, too. And I think you should try it. Something I'm very proud of is we have a community of people that celebrate each other, hold each other up, ask questions. Some questions are above my head, some esoteric engineering questions. Does anyone else here know about this weird Python React thing? And there's some that are super simple. Hey, anyone else? Try monotasking. Is that better if someone else responds? So that community aspect, I think, is really nice. And sometimes it's quieter and sometimes it's more active.

Speaker A: I think community is very important. And while you were talking about that, I was thinking about. There's lots of WhatsApp groups that I'm in. Some groups do well and some don't. And I think it comes down to how much people are willing to share about their personal struggle.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And, uh, because you've got it in a closed niche where people are paying for the service, they're all on the same common ground. I think WhatsApp's too broad in this respect. That's probably why it doesn't work as well. But because they're all in your community, they got that commonality. They all trust each other because they know that everyone's here has actually got the same.

Speaker B: Yes. The people that they tried, their wanting to do something with their life.

Speaker A: I'm curious, why have you not gone down the mobile effort with this?

Speaker B: We did. I've spent almost a quarter million dollars building Android and iOS native apps. It was a mistake. And I'll tell you what, we'll learn, because we had. Some people were like, oh, is there a mobile app? We did that. And I didn't do the smart thing of, uh, understanding. Why are you asking this? We did them. People didn't use them. It turns out it was more, Yeah, I don't do my work on my phone. My phone distracts me. So no one was like, I'm writing my dissertation on my cell phone. It was people saying, While I'm working on my laptop, could you help me stay off my phone? So what we did, and this is going to sound so simple, and I wish this was one of those painful lessons, is we simply have in the website a, uh, QR code where if you want to keep yourself off your phone, you tap it and you put your phone down. If you pick up your phone, your smart assistant is, Ryan, do you really need to be on your phone right now? And that's all we needed. And I wasted a ton of money on, um, not listening. That was a big lesson.

Speaker A: I'm fascinated by that because I agree with that. I've just deleted a whole bunch of apps because they're distracting apps. But I do a lot of work off my phone.

Speaker B: What work do you do on your phone?

Speaker A: It's a task management for the most part. So if I go for a walk, I'll write down all the stuff that I think I need to do that becomes part of it. Yeah, you do it through a mobile view of the website. So you can probably get away as

Speaker B: long as you connectivity on the mobile website. You can play the focus music, you can add tasks to your task list. You can have a timer, for example, if you're working on your laptop and you look down, your phone will say, oh, you're 20 minutes into your pop door sec. There's that sort of functionality, but it's not a native app anymore.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's fascinating because there's often a push to always have a native app and for the most part the only reason you need native app is you're either going to be doing something with the hardware on the phone.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So you need access to the biometrics or whatever, or you're going to be an offline state where you have no connectivity. Right. That's really the main, uh. And you can have a bit of nicer experience in the sense of integration with the look and the feel of the phone, but for the most part you can get over the web.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And that's why I'm fascinated because it's, it's almost become counterintuitive to a lot of businesses now to not go build the open, uh, mobile app and just stick with a website.

Speaker B: Yeah. Something else I learned maybe 10 years ago it was fun to be like, there's an app for that. The whole Apple campaign M. Now people have such download fatigue. It's a huge barrier. It's not like a fun cute thing when it was novel 10, 15 years ago. Now it's just seriously, you Want to take up more of my phone real estate, make me do this work. No, I'm not going to do it.

Speaker A: Yeah. And in fairness to our gp, we've only now gone to an app enabled GPU before they get to phone, which was very frustrating. Uh, now you can use the app to send messages, book your appointments and get your prescriptions. But the problem is the app name is not a name that you associate with GPS or medical or anything like that. It's called Evergreen. Oh. So every so often, if you haven't spoken to a doctor in a while and you're like, what was that app called again? I could remember every fatigue is definitely there. No, that's cool. And then with the chat with the community and stuff, do you have meetups and all that kind of stuff with them or is it all just conversations on the app?

Speaker B: You know what? Still learning. I have to. A lot of what we're doing is the AB testing, like, will this work or that work? A lot of this is new to me and I just listen, I talk to a lot of members. I would love to get to a point where we do local meetups and help people have real life connection.

Speaker A: Yeah. Because you got such a nice following to have a meetup once a month or every. Just a virtual one even would be. Yeah. Anything else you want to chat about with regards to the product? I know we have a voucher for our listeners, but anything else you want to cover.

Speaker B: I appreciate your interest in this. And I'll, uh, tell you the thing that's so meaningful to me. This is my. Why is that having children and thinking about what kind of world Laura and I are handing off to them, very meaningful to me. And I know there are a lot of ways to affect the world. Like you can go make money selling sugary cereal children and may not be, but Google do it and they make a bunch of money doing it when they get away with it. And I just wanted to do something where maybe this is not the most lucrative thing in the world. I only charge $10 a month. It's like, that's a day. It's a service. But I hope it's something where my children, when they look at this, go, wow. Uh, my dad tried to help people in a really simple way. That'll be a bigger win than making another Transformers movie or making some silly product.

Speaker A: You might find that there's guys using your tool to make the next movie, so you're still involved in that.

Speaker B: We have a bunch of writers, the three big cohorts. We have are writers, developers, engineers and designers because they all had to do deep focus work. We have a ton of bloggers, copywriters and writers that use this. Maria Baltazzi, who wrote the, uh, book on happiness, she's one of the survivor of the TV series Survivor. She's now a PhD in like, mindful meditation. And she wrote her book in the app and dropped it in there going, guys, I just. My publisher's throwing out my book. I wrote it here. And, um, that kind of thing makes me super happy and I hope my kids appreciate that. They're like, with dad thing, help people do cool work.

Speaker A: Maybe one of the things you should do is showcase your community, see who's in there. Yeah, probably very interesting people in there that have multiplied their value by using your product.

Speaker B: Nick runs two minute Book summaries. He's the CEO of that company.

Speaker A: Yes. Yeah.

Speaker B: He writes his daily blog in there. Every day he posts his most important task, which is daily blog. And I can tell you right now, it usually takes between 35 and 50 minutes.

Speaker A: Cool. I like it. That's all.

Speaker B: I dropped a little emoji. Thumbs up, dude.

Speaker A: So how many countries are you in?

Speaker B: I don't know. If you look at the names, people generally use the real names here. It's not like TikTok. People are like, hey, man, my M name is random. Here, come with me. You look at the names, they're definitely a bunch. Asia, India, Japan, um, Japan, Asia, more in North America than South America. Have not seen a lot of South American names, although I know there's some great developers in South America that's growing, so maybe we haven't gotten much awareness there. It's mainly Europe, Asia, North America. That's what I see.

Speaker A: Are you actually writing a new code yourself or, uh, you've got a team that's building, right.

Speaker B: When my alarm went off and said, you have a podcast in two minutes. Oh, he said, mean, sir, I'm going to wrap this up.

Speaker A: Um,

Speaker B: one of the things I learned doing this was the flow state thing that you and I were talking about.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: When we actually got it right, which took some iterations, it took a little while to figure out how to do that. The complaint we started getting was mainly from developers, from software engineers who said, I missed my standup. Oh, okay, dude, what should we do? They're like, could you just give me a warning? So the smart assistant, if you connect your Google calendar, the smart assistant will tell you, hey, you have a meeting in five minutes. Wrap it up. And then people stop Missing their standups. I guess in some way we're doing a good job because people are focused. But it's a bad thing to be like, oh man, my engineering manager is pissed off.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I was actually wondering about the integration. So you integrate with Google. Do you integrate with Microsoft?

Speaker B: Microsoft, we have it on the roadmap. I haven't had a lot of demand for it. And because we're really small. Yeah, we have to prioritize what are people asking for as opposed to just what do I dream about? So Microsoft, I hope in the next month or two. I know Spotify was a really big one because we offer over a thousand worth of music. I know a lot of film composers that have time on their hands. So we did the research. There's a lot of science behind key signatures, beats per minute, that sort of thing. Non local. So we have a thousand hours original stuff as well as soundscapes. If you want to listen to rain or birds or surf or you can do that. But then some people are like, oh no, man, I have my own Spotify playlist that I want to listen to. So we built a Spotify integration. It's been super popular. So if your thing is listening to death metal, you could listen to your death metal while you were.

Speaker A: Because I was worrying about that. Because when I was running code I used to watch TV series. Yeah. To have that tune out. But then you need that reminder that you've got a meeting coming up or you know, time to take a break because you've been working for six hours.

Speaker B: And the new feature that's coming out is in our breaks because we give you a Pomodoro timer. So it's oh, hey, every 25 will work. I set mine for 55 and five. But when your break comes up, we give you an option. Do you want to do a short stretching video? Sometimes just to stretch for a minute or two will lead you through it. Do you want to do a bot sweeping meditation? Click this button. Do it short like box breathing. Or if you go for a walk or drink a glass of water, click the button. You get points for that. Hey, 10 points. You drank some water. It's what you should do.

Speaker A: You have gamified it. I was wondering about that.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, we've gamified it. And we followed a lot of the principles from Mihaly's book in Kalanimport. It was one of the most influential ones for me about if you monotask, you get incentivized to not context switch and like almost finish Something and then go to another thing and then go to the next. If you start it and you finish, you get points for that. You get no points over 120 minutes because it's not healthy to sit more than two hours without moving. Yeah, there's also a lot of studies like your brain glucose level after 90 minutes gets pretty depleted. So it's really important to go do something else or have a sandwich. Yeah. So yes, we do that. And I wanted to see, am I getting better day over day, week over week, and said goal. My goal is to get to an 800 productivity score on a zero to a thousand. Can I hit that and see how I'm doing? And am I getting better or are we getting suckier? And it's important, if you measure it, you can improve it.

Speaker A: You can go into health, you know, integrated with Oura Ring, for example, or Apple watches or whatever smart device you want. You can monitor diets. When you were talking about community, I was thinking about 75 hard, which I don't know if you've heard of.

Speaker B: I have not heard of.

Speaker A: So 75 hard. I, uh, forget the guy's name, but a friend of mine brought me into it. It says for 75 days you follow eight things a day. Two workouts, 45 minutes each. One outdoors, one indoors. Photo of yourself because you want to track progress. 10 pages of reading of a non fiction book. No alcohol, no cheat meals. Follow a diet. Four liters of water twice a day, you need the water. You do it for 75 days. And you could follow any diet you like. But the point is you stick to the diet. And a lot of guys use it as a way to cut out coffee, sugar or whatever it may be. But as much as there's two workouts a day, it's not a fitness challenge, it's a mental challenge. Yeah, because when you get to the 40s, which I've just gone through, I'm on 50 now. You get to this point, I'm sick

Speaker B: and tired of doing this.

Speaker A: Now, the funny thing is, if I wasn't doing it, I'd still be working out twice a day. I still follow a diet, I still do everything. But because you're tracking it, it has a little bit extra. And there's days I'm like, I'm so done, I don't want to end. They're like, no, got to read the book, gotta take the photo. And if you miss a day, you restart. The first time I did it, I got to 15 days when I restarted because golf doesn't count as exercise. I didn't know that you restart. It does actually. Uh, funny enough, and this is one of the why I like doing it the first time is you have to get creative with your workouts because they get boring if you do the same ones over and over again. So I was doing boxing, I would do yoga. Uh, and the thing is, because you have to do the outdoor workout at the moment it's sunny outside. When I started it was the middle of winter. I was getting up at 5 in the morning, walking at minus 2, minus 3 degrees Celsius. But then I start the day, I've already done the hardest thing, which is to walk in the cold with a weight vest. During the week it's easy because the kids aren't home so I can get my workouts in. But the weekends are tough because I need one workout in usually. Yeah, but on Sunday and uh, Saturday is easy because we all got, we go to gym anyway. But the Sunday is hard because I have only one workout to get in. The second one is always hard to get in. So I end up doing yoga on a Sunday night, which has become quite a nice habit because a lot of people think yoga is nothing. But if you do a 45 minute session of yoga, you're pretty done by the end of that. I find starting Monday you're in a much better state because you've now stretched everything out. You've got to feel for your body is. And you centered.

Speaker B: My, uh, yoga is how I met Laura. She was the girl on the mat to my left. At Equinox in Manhattan. There was a 75 minute level three yoga class and I consider myself one of the better practitioners. Uh, every now and then I'd see this girl in class and she was breathless. One day she was on the mat to my left and I made a comment when we were leaving class. Just so you know, whenever you're near me, I try harder because you're so good. She laughed. Ah. And 10 years later, we're married.

Speaker A: Wow. That's an awesome story. Congratulations on your soon to be. Do you know what you're having?

Speaker B: One of my buddies was one of the top IVF guys in the United States and he for our wedding gift gave us a free cycle with ivf. So I happen to know we chose a male embryo and we will have a son in November.

Speaker A: I wish you all the best for that and your life will change.

Speaker B: All my friends have been giving me advice. We're aware things are going to radically change. But you're good to go.

Speaker A: Exactly. Steve, it's been great chatting with you. I appreciate your time and you look forward to chatting in the future.

Speaker B: Have an awesome day.

Speaker A: Bye. Uh, so this will probably be six or seven weeks from now to go out.

Speaker B: That's fantastic.

Speaker A: So you're right.

Speaker B: And that was super fun. It was just like talking to a friend. That was awesome.

Speaker A: It was great. Let's keep in touch. Have a good day.

Speaker B: You too.

Speaker A: Bye. Thank you for listening to our episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Please share it with your friends and colleagues. Help us grow our reach. Please also check out our website, www.value work and our product that's on there. It's something we worked really hard on. We hope that it benefits you.