This Mobile Life

In this podcast, we're hailing from TechCity in London! We interview Alan Byrne, co-founder of Cogmotive. Alan is a Sydney transplant now living abroad in London. We're super excited to interview Alan as he is also a moderator of the Sydney Startups Facebook Group. I found out that when we met up that he's running a SaaS business, so we had to interview him for the podcast! Cogmotive's vision is to create tools to make SysAdmins and IT Managers' lives simple - or at least simpler - by equipping them with the data they need while saving them time. Cogmotive is the leading global provider of enterprise level reporting and analytics applications for Office 365. They manage over 4 million seats & are used in 200+ countries. Cogmotive also uses Atlassian tools JIRA, Bitbucket & StatusPage! In 2016, Cogmotive was acquired by QUADROtech, a leading global provider of tools to manage the migration of email archives, mailboxes and PST files. Here's what we we discussed in the podcast: 1. Tell me your background & what Cogmotive does 2. How did you start the company? 3. Who's the ideal customer for your products? 4. What does a Sysadmin do? 5. How do customers find out about you? 7. Tell me about the SEO challenge that you & James Martin from OneFlare did 8. How much is the product and what's the pricing strategy? I notice you have a free trial and you can fill out an enquiry form to be contacted. 9. How do you decide on your roadmap, given that you are a plugin & the influx of customer requests from large customers 10. In 2014 you decided to spent the year travelling & working remotely. Tell us about that experience 11. You work with your wife in the Cogmotive team. What's that like? Do you have any tips for other couples looking to work together in their startup. 12. We've been involved in the Sydney Startups group for about 5-6 years as members and also moderators. How have you seen that group evolve? Where do you see it going. 13. We're both foodies. What are some of your favourite places to eat in London? Links: https://www.cogmotive.com https://www.cogmotive.com/blog http://www.quadrotech-it.com https://deliveroo.com https://www.techhub.com

We chat with Alex Holmes, CMO from Influx. Influx helps you get customer support, done. They provide elastic support which is based on a transactional model. Influx focuses on assisting SaaS and eCommerce businesses. Alex is an online marketer by trade, having worked at Envato, Tripit and other online companies. In this episode we discuss: 1. Tell us about your background? 2. What's the difference between working in your own startup vs for a startup as an employee? 3. How is marketing different in a marketplace vs SaaS? 4 .What's your experience like at Envato? Its one of the unknown Australian success stories. 5. What is influx? 6. Who's your ideal customer and how do you reach them? 7. Have you seen any great examples of support for new products e.g. startup or more established company 8. If I'm launching a major release of my app / website, what's the co-ordination process like with support? 9. When should you outsource support vs keep it in-house? A source of learning for product team. 10. When do you know you have problems with scaling your support? 11. The difference between Customer support vs Customer success? 12. What's the startup scene like in Melbourne now? Links https://influx.com/ http://tomtunguz.com/shifting-role-marketing-saas/ https://vinomofo.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/mralexholmes https://twitter.com/aholmes360

I chat with Jordan Sim, Group Product Manager at BigCommerce. He focuses on enabling and implementing strategic business development partnerships with the BigCommerce product. Jordan oversees two areas - order fulfilment and shipping logistics. He's launched and managed product integrations with Intuit Quickbooks, Alibaba, and led the transition of MagentoGo & eBay Prostore clients to BigCommerce. Previously, he's worked in consulting as a Senior Digital Strategist / UX Architect at Deloitte. Jordan has a strong background in User Experience and Interaction Design (platform agnostic - mobile, tablet and desktop), and is heavily invested in planning for and delivering the most effective experience for users. Here's what we discussed: 1. How did you get into product management? 2. How has your background in UX & interaction design helped you in your role as a PM? 3. What do you do as a product manager at BigCommerce? 4. What's the difference between being a PM & Group PM? 5. How do integrations differ from partnerships? What are the different types of partnerships? 6. Why partnerships is about relationships 7. You've been involved with launching and managing partnerships with BigCommerce ecosystem. What are the keys to success in these partnerships? 8. Do you look for partners or do they find you? How do you assess who to partner with? 9. What's the process of launching an integration with BigCommerce? 10. What happens post integration? 11. How do you measure success of a partnership? 12. Has there been a time where an integration hasn't gone well & you were able to turn it around? 13. Why are integrations are becoming more important in a cloud world? Links https://www.bigcommerce.com https://twitter.com/jymmysim

I chat to Anna Lee Anda, UX research at Zendesk. She's based in Singapore. We met many years ago when we both lived in Melbourne. We have similar backgrounds in law/accounting, before moving into the world of tech. Anna has worked in UX and product. She shares some great insights into SaaS from Zendesk. Previously, she worked at Seek.com, one of Asia-Pacific's largest recruitment marketplace. Anna has also worked on ANZ's Go Money app which has millions of downloads. Topics we discussed: 1. How did you get into doing user research? 2. You've done some product management. What is the overlap & differences between product & UX research? 3. How regularly do you do user research? 4. Why cadence is king in SaaS 5. How do you do user research for a mobile app? 6. How to rig up a mobile testing device - Macgyver style! 7. What's the typical process you do when conducting user research? 8. What's the tech scene like in Singapore? This podcast will also be available on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn and your favourite podcasting apps. If you like the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on iTunes & share it with your friends! RESOURCES https://www.zendesk.com https://www.zopim.com https://www.seek.com.au https://lookback.io https://shortboredsurfer.com/2011/09/20/making-a-mobile-usability-testing-sled-the-macgyver-way https://developer.apple.com/testflight https://www.grab.com/sg

We chat to Mike Gardiner, Founder of Lime Rocket, the developers of BuzzyTV Games. Very excited to chat to Mike as its a very cool company and product! BuzzyTV Games enables multiplayer big screen games at events & in classrooms that are playable using phone as game controllers. With no app required, players can connect in seconds and be playing alongside hundreds of others to compete in leaderboards and win prizes. We discuss these topics: 1. How do you get people to play Buzzy? 2. How do you add "play" into products? e.g. Buzzy, Pokemon, entertainment games. 3. Choosing native app vs mobile web for their product 4. What has been some of the ups and downs of your startup journey? ABOUT BUZZYTV Last month BuzzyTV Games went live in Europe & was selected as one of the games for Australia's first inter school eSports competition. Recently launched games have included the world first VR vs The Crowd game Castle Rush VR and Lemonade Town a multiplayer version of the classic lemonade stand game. You can see some of their live multiplayer games in action here: https://goo.gl/4YT4El SHOW NOTES BuzzyTV Games Website - http://buzzytv.com Videos of games at events - https://goo.gl/4YT4El Castle rush - http://www.siliconvagabond.com/castle-rush/ Lemonade town - http://buzzytv.com/lemonade

This is Part 2 of our chat with Iz El-Bahnasy, founder of Gather. Gather is a Shopify app that boosts lead generation capabilities for eCommerce merchants. We cover the following: 1. What is business model canvas? 2. What is behaviour design? 3. How does the business model canvas interact with behaviour design 4. The hooked model 5. Designing with breaking points in mind Make sure to check out Part 1 which is S2E5. If you like the podcast, please rate it 5 stars, heart it and share it with your friends! SHOW NOTES Gather: apps.shopify.com/gather Sourcecraft: www.sourcecraft.co Product Hunt: www.meetup.com/Product-Hunt-Sydney Business Model Canvas: http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas/bmc BJ Fogg's behaviour model: http://www.behaviormodel.org/

We chat to Iz El-Bahnasy, founder of Gather. Gather is a Shopify app that boosts lead generation capabilities for ecommerce merchants. Iz also is the founder of Sourcecraft, which helps clients build new custom web and mobile application. He manages to juggle this with running the Product Hunt Meetup in Sydney as well! We discuss the benefits of building on top of another platform. Why channel partners are important. This could apply to any business building on iTunes app store, Google Play, or 3rd party ecosystem. We also have a good chat about conversions funnels. SHOW NOTES Gather: https://apps.shopify.com/gather Sourcecraft: http://www.sourcecraft.co/ Product Hunt: http://www.meetup.com/Product-Hunt-Sydney/ Haha - Send Infectious Laughter: http://hahamobileapp.com/ SumoMe: http://sumome.com Pirate Metrics: http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version

This episode has a focus on social media apps, in particular the rise of Snapchat, Instagram and Medium. We chat with Francis McCarthy (Unikrn) based in Seattle and Jamie Andrei (Flying Machine Films) in Sydney. We discuss: 1. How Medium is changing the blogging game. 2. Snapchat vs Instagram (recorded before the launch of Instagram Stories). 3. The perils of publishing on LinkedIn. We recorded it using a 360 degree video camera. So you can touch, tilt, spin and explore the video to see it in all its goodness. If you have Google Goggles, you can view in immersive 360 view. Check out the Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF-amGz7C8E We were also wearing microphones to record the audio. However, the original audio recording failed due to a faulty SD card (*shakes fist*). We were able to use the audio from the 360 video camera for the podcast. Hence we're calling this the lost episode! Its raw and mostly uncut. It simply features a couple of friends chatting about how tech is changing the world. RESOURCES Unikrn - the ultimate esports experience https://unikrn.com/ Flying Machines Film http://www.flyingmachinefilms.com.au/ Yahoo Takeover: Verizon buys search engine $6.5bn http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-25/yahoo-verizon-takeover/7658638 Firefox Will Dump Adobe's Flash in August 2016 http://www.wsj.com/articles/firefox-will-dump-adobes-flash-in-august-1469128298 Nerding out on Pokemon Go - This Mobile Life http://inspiredworlds.com/pokemon-go The Enormous Power of Small Group Messaging https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/enormous-power-small-group-messaging-francis-mccarthy?trk=prof-post Medium: Home Of The Ringer https://medium.com/@el/medium-home-of-the-ringer-829dd263f955 The Ringer https://theringer.com/ Medium Email Form by Rabbut https://rabbut.com/rabbut-tools/medium/medium-email-form/ Medium is not a publishing tool https://medium.com/the-story/medium-is-not-a-publishing-tool-4c3c63fa41d2#.q545dogeo This is not a new strategy https://medium.com/@ev/this-is-not-a-new-strategy-2ad781c6dedc#.d9zd3wyrw What does Medium want to be when it grows up? More like Twitter, it seems http://fortune.com/2015/05/21/medium-twitter-network-effect/ Francis McCarthy's blog on the podcast episode https://medium.com/@francismccarthy/podcast-to-snap-or-to-medium-filmed-in-360-video-e1c5acb0dea5#.llqxln70p Francis McCarthy on twitter https://twitter.com/FrancisMcCarthy

I chat to my good friend Anthony Cole. Anthony is a product developer with a background in wordpress and frontend development. Originally hailing from Silicon Valley and via NZ, Anthony works in Melbourne for startup Lexer.io. He shares insights on why you should use a pattern library. It is a set of components that you can reuse for common design problems. It also defines the interactions of components. By using a pattern library, it allows teams to focus on the bigger customer problems. Ultimately, it helps you ship products faster. We also discuss how you can implement it and best practices out there. Sources http://lexer.io http://styleguides.io/examples.html http://airbnb.design/building-a-visual-language http://airbnb.design/the-way-we-build https://ux.mailchimp.com/patterns https://www.dropbox.com/branding https://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns http://getbootstrap.com For more goodness, check out my blog: http://inspiredworlds.com If you like the podcast, please like it, share it and rate it 5 stars on the app store :) I'm out like naming things, Matt Ho

This episode is a podcast about podcasts! I describe the journey of making a podcast. Also the latest in mobile audio world. There's a discussion about Soundcloud, Spotify and Amazon's foray into podcasts with Channels. I've now got 800 subscribers in 10 months. I wanted to have 1,000 subscribers so 80% of the way there :) At the end of the day, it wasn't about numbers. The purpose was to share the conversations we have everyday in our industry about mobile and to teach people about mobile. Plus have some fun! I'm a huge fan of podcasts and believe it's a a great platform to reach people. Anyone can create their own radio station. Thank you for being on the podcast journey with me - Matt. SOURCES 1. Amazon paid podcasts called Channels http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-07/amazon-wants-people-to-pay-for-podcasts 2. Soundcloud mulling billion dollar sale http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7453587/soundcloud-billion-dollar-sale 3. Spotify mobile app changes form hamburger to bottom navigation http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/3/11580182/spotify-design-change-says-so-much-about-the-hamburger-button 4. Spotify now does video and podcasts http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/20/8629335/spotify-adds-podcasts-videos