Where did ask a guru come from? So, it actually just came to my mind when I was in a business school, it was like. So when we. When I was with my professor, he asked. We were in class, it was like one of the first days of class, he. And he was like, you know, all this music is out there, this digital music, and it's only growing more and more. We need. There's gonna. We need to have a way to solve this problem. And we were already divvied up into groups, and I just answered the question. We would have a social curation platform, and the name of it would be ask a guru. And everybody was like, wow, that sounds really good. That works. And it was like a light bulb moment. Hello, and welcome to the Py Bytes podcast, where we talk about Python career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm Julian Sequeira. And I am Bob Valdebos. If you're looking to improve your python, your career, and learn the mindset for success, this is the podcast for you. Let's get started. Welcome back, everybody, to the Pyewytes podcast. Happy to have you here. And today with me, I have a very special guest, Paul Naoji. Welcome, Paul. Welcome to Pie Bytes Podcast. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Bob. Hello. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. I'm doing great. It's a beautiful day here in Los Angeles and loving life, Los Angeles, me calling in from Spain. So we made it happen. Julian is asleep, so you have to listen to this. Cool. So, yeah, why don't you introduce yourself to our audience? What do you do? How did you get into Python? And, yeah, tell us a bit about it yourself. Sounds good. Hello again to the Pibytes audience. My name is Paul Naoji. I'm the founder of Askaguru. I'm a software engineer, and I'm a python lover. Awesome. Yeah, so are we. So, how did you get into Python? When did you start, and how did you learn it? It's a great question. So, Python, for me, was a language that I discovered along my software engineering journey. So, actually, how I got into programming was I was doing a master's degree at the Berkeley College of Music in entrepreneurship and music business, and I had an idea for a music application, and I was really, really passionate about it. Uh, the idea of. Of it. Of Askaguru. What. What became Askaguru is, while I was at music school, we discovered sort of one of the things that we were talking about was the fact that with the amount of digital music out there in the world, it's, there's so much music out there and there's so much good stuff. You know, how do you, how do you find all that good stuff? And, you know, we, the idea came to me, I was like, oh, wow, you know, a form of social curation, you know, having that friend who knows great music, having that always right by your side on a platform, that would be great because I know, like, just, you know, growing up, I have like, buddies of mine who, they put me on to really great bands and I just go down, you know, this rabbit hole of loving these bands and discovering so many cool things. And I was like, wow, like, this is, you know, this is something that would be really cool if there was a platform where people could recommend songs, artists, and, you know, you could discover a lot of really cool music. So it was in the course of trying to make that a reality that I just decided, you know what, I'm going to learn how to program and I'm going to just teach myself and lay the brakes because it's so difficult. I'm a college student starving, and it's so difficult to raise money and all that stuff. I don't have a rich uncle who can fund that. So I was like, the best way to go about this, to ensure that this becomes a reality is to learn how to program myself. So that started me along my journey. I started off with figuring out what JavaScript was, what HTML was, and it was actually at my second job working for Live Nation that I discovered Python and I just fell in love with it. It's just such a beautiful language, so clean, so easy to learn. And once I discovered Python, I just kept up with it and fell in love with it. And here we are today. We just launched Askguru last month. It's been a remarkable journey. That's awesome, man. I love that story about how you had that idea and you put it into reality, partly thanks to Python and what a motivation that is to learn language, to build your own. But I think it's now a side gig, I guess, but definitely an awesome idea. Yeah, that's really cool. Thank you. So tell me a bit about the stack. Sure, yeah. So we're using Python on the backend and that was one of the decisions that we had to make is, you know, what is the best foundation to lay as we, as we, you know, scale the application? So we were using flask. I'm big on Flask. I know that there are other frameworks that are emerging, but that's what we're using right now. And I really, I'm digging it. And also we use Vue Js on the front end. I'm also really a fan of Vue Js. It's really simple, easy, gets the job done. Of course, HTML, all that good stuff. But yeah, Python flask, good to go. Nice. If you have Vue Js and flask, does that mean that the front end is pretty decoupled from the back end? Flask is more like a bunch of endpoints, almost an API. And Vue is calling those endpoints. Exactly. That's exactly the framework and the architecture that we've gotten. That's actually one of the things that we're focusing on, is trying to decouple that as much as possible, have that separation of concerns, because as we scale, it's just a lot easier, it's cleaner, you can plug different things into that API. It really works. It really works well for us. Nice. Yeah, that allows you to, as hopefully this startup grows, to have a back end team and a front end team and they don't necessarily have to know the whole stack. Yeah, exactly. And kind of the way it works right now with our team is I'm doing, I created a lot of the backend stuff and then my buddy James Scholemieri, he's doing a lot of the front end stuff, and so it's already kind of working that way. Nice. Imagine heaven. Cool. And what were some technical challenges you faced when you were building this? Does anything come to mind? Yeah, it's one of those things where you have the idea of what you want to build, and then it's the whole process of getting the foundation lid and then adding all the components that you need in order to make the magic happen. So things like, one of the things that I was really keen on for the platform is we wanted to have the ability to play the music through the platform. And so the way that we solve that is to integrate with the Apple Music API. And so just, you know, connecting to an API to stream music in real time through the application, that was one of the challenges that we had to face. And it was kind of like shopping around for what was the best thing that we could use. And Apple Music right now, that works great for us. And we're in the process of trying to make the platform streaming agnostic, which means that we want to be able to support Spotify and Deezer and Soundcloud and whatever music streaming our users use. We want to be able to facilitate all of that in the platform. So just getting that to work with our architecture and view, just getting everything to work and play nicely with one another, that was one of the challenges. Yeah. So now you went with Apple Music and that was just one of the APIs you ultimately need to use. Right. I mean, then you probably need Spotify later on. Was this just, just the most straightforward one to pick first, or how came that decision about. Yeah, it really, for me, it was kind of just like doing my research on the APIs that were out there that existed and then trying them, like, you know, just seeing which one was the easiest to integrate, and I played around with different ones and I just. I felt like the Apple music API was the easiest to integrate with. And once we got it working, it worked like a charm. So, yeah, that's why we went with that initially. And now we're at the process of adding the rest. And it feels good to get one now you just got to get the rest. Yeah. Cool. No, I tried it the other day and it's really nice. I think I got you on some music and you got me on some music and it all happened of magically or servant dip intestinally. Yeah, yeah, it was really cool. Thank you, man. Yeah, and, yeah, I really. I went down this drum and bass rabbit hole just discovering a whole bunch of cool stuff. And that's the beauty of Askaguru, is that, you know, you discover these really cool songs. And I discovered so many cool songs and I'm really glad that you. That you did. And that's what we've got for our users. Yeah. I was listening to a song and all of a sudden the next song was something I really liked, and I think it wasn't even machine learning that did that. Or maybe it was, but there's definitely some magic going on there. So, yeah, it's actually, you know, the whole. The way it works is that it's users recommending those songs. So it's like the, you know, they're based on the song, the previous song that played the, you know, the people from all over the world, they go, oh, this is a great song. I think that this song would be great. Next. And that's what, you know, differentiates us from, you know, other music applications is like, instead of a Pandora computer algorithm, you know, recommending something that you might think you might expect coming, you know, with human curation, it's a lot more exciting and it usually does the trick. And those playlists become playlists once the user accepts them. And so that's what the world gets to listen to. Yeah, that's really cool, because, I mean, I'm not using that many services, but I've used Spotify. Still use it. And you have the radio feature? I think all they have is some sort of radio feature, and often they're pretty good, but sometimes it doesn't really make sense. But then if you compare it to books, for example, how many times have you purchased a book based on a recommendation from a friend? I mean, that's super powerful and often also accurate. So that's really cool. Thank you. So, shifting gears a bit to the entrepreneurial side, how so you have the MVP. Well, more than MVP. It's running, it's live now. It's time to grow it, right. Because we're engineers and don't think, like, build it and they will come because that's not how it works. Right. So how do you go about promoting this idea or turning this app startup into a bigger business? How do you decide on new features? How do you work with your audience? Yeah, that's, you know, that's a great question because a lot of us were primarily engineers, and then it's like, once you create something cool, you go down the whole process of learning about how to be a good business person and how to be a good entrepreneur, and it's definitely a journey. And one of the things that we're doing right now is we're talking to venture capitalists and looking for investors, seed funding, and all that good stuff. So a lot of what I'm doing right now, in addition to still doing some programming, is just interacting with different people, getting feedback, getting guidance on what are the things that we want to consider as we grow, as we scale. You know, what's the. What's your. What's your game plan? And just, you know, going through the whole process of pitching yourself, um, to investors, it's like, that's always one of those things that's. That's daunting. But, you know, some people, they've got, like, you know, people that they just focus on. On that side of things. Like, you might imagine with a Snapchat, you know, Evan Spiegel just, you know, he's. He's focused on that. But as a guy who's an engineer and the entrepreneur, the founder, it's just one of those things where it's exciting to challenge myself in that way, to go about asking for the money in order to grow. And so that's what we're doing, is growing the team. Right now, as we're looking for more funding, we're still growing the team. Actually, the, all the slack messages that are coming in are from our iOS engineer right now, Adrian Tanel. He's a great guy. He's actually in Spain as well. So yeah, that's what, you know, that's what we're doing, is building out the team, continuing to build out features, but also thinking on the business side, how we can partner with investors who believe in our vision in order to keep growing. Yeah, that's like a super valuable skill. Right. In order how to pitch that app idea, think about different kind of stakeholders and why would you invest in the idea? So a bit like looking forward and like two or three years down the road, what is your vision for this app? How will it look? Yeah, that's a great question. Two to three years from now, I really see a lot of growth on the platform. Definitely. We envision ourselves as having a lot of users. I would love to get to that million user mark by then, hopefully even more than that. But we definitely want to add a lot of the features that are coming on the pipeline. We've got a lot of exciting things for our users. Of course, we want to have a lot of the limitations that we've got right now, have them solve, be able to support streaming on all the different platforms, have a lot of more cool features that are really exciting that we've got. We'd like to grow the team to a point where we're able to do a lot of the other cool stuff that we're doing and, you know, grow the, grow out the business side. You know, we want to be profitable and reward our investors. So I think that within two to three years, we'll have a lot of considerable growth and it'll just be continuing to make the platform more magical. Yeah, it's as Michael Jordan said, my biggest endorsement is my play at the end. If the app is having all these killer features, then the growth should be a natural consequence. But on that note, a million is a lot of users. How do you spread the word? Do you have some sort of growth hacking going on? Is there some sort of gamification for people signing up if they invite their friends, or how do you grow such an audience? Yeah, that's a great question. And that's actually one of the challenges is like, you can have a really cool idea, but how do you grow the numbers? And again, it's like, I'm primarily an engineer. Somebody who had a good idea, made it a reality, and then it's like, okay, what's the next thing you have to solve? It's like, okay, how do you get a lot of users? And like you said, I think that having great features, really delivering the magic. The bottom line is users discovering new music, users going on these sonic journeys that are just like, they blow other playlists out of the water. And I think if we do that, we're going to grow our numbers, but we definitely want to partner with different growth hackers myself, become a growth hacker, get the word out in different ways, whatever press runs, we can do different creative ideas like marketing at festivals and marketing at shows and just getting the music lovers, people that already love music, to experience what we offer. And it's one of those things, at least in my case. And I think you, as well as when you experience, like when you hear of a band or you go to a show and you're like, oh, my gosh, that show is amazing. You know, you tell your friends, a lot of times you try to get your friends to experience what you've experienced. And so we're, you know, we believe that a lot of word of mouth and, you know, a lot of marketing online and just, just going through the whole process, guerrilla marketing, eventually we'll get our name out there and people will check out what we're doing and I'm confident that we'll be able to grow our numbers going that route. Yeah. And what you said about the affiliation, I think it's also important. Like, you inevitably have a small bubble, but if you partner up with people, you open up to wider audiences. Right. So I also agree, like, the best promo is the word of mouth, right? Give an excellent service and you have a wow factor, people just start talking about it. Right. And then that can be exponential. Cool, cool. So last question then. How important? So in this whole venture, this whole starting your business and applying your coding skills to this big idea and how you run it day to day. Now, how important is leadership and mindset in all this? And did you learn any unexpected lessons so far? Yeah, you know, I honestly think that leadership is one of the biggest things when it comes to doing something like this. You know, having an idea, making it a reality. Because for me, when I, when I had the idea for ask Guru, I was, I think I was, you know, I'm still young right now at 29, but I was like 20. I think it was 23 or 22 going on 23. Like, my birthday was a couple days right after and I was so young. And, you know, you don't know how much. You don't know when you're that age. And it's it's like one of those things where when you. When you're trying to make something a reality, then you have to overcome all of the challenges that come with that, like, all of them. And a lot of it is, you know, you've got to. Of course, for me, I had to solve the technical challenges, being the person who made the first version of it, but I also had to do all the other things like pitching and coming up with the idea. And so when it comes to that, you learn that the soft skills are really important, like little things like faith, belief in yourself that you can do it, belief, you know, having family around you, having a support system, staying with something even though you can't see it, you know, just knowing that you're laying a brick at a time, inspiring people like your team to continue to work and build something. Those are leadership lessons that I learned. I had to learn, you know, just by going through the process. And I think that I wouldn't have been able to make it to the point that I've got right now without learning those leadership things. And, like, for instance, I just finished a book. It's a translation by Stefan. I think it's Stefan Miller who, he translated the epic of Gilgamesh. And I'm like, I'm reading these different stories, and I try to, you know, when I'm not programming, try to read something that I think makes me a better person. And, you know, one of the things that I learned is just the. The whole thing about staying with the process. And no matter, you know, when you. When you want to do something and make it a reality, just staying the course and no matter how scary it gets, as the person who's, you know, the person who's. Maybe I'm considered the leader. You just got to keep know where the North Star is, always keep walking in the direction. No matter what's going around, if you just keep on taking those steps, you know, you get there. And so that's. I just, I think that's one of the things that I learned is just as a leader, just keep on walking forward and just keep making progress every day. Eventually, you'll, you'll. You'll be really, really proud of how far you've come and you'll get to the destination, but most importantly, it's the journey. Beautiful. I love it. It's partly a leap of faith, right? And it's got you driving through the mist and you only see like, a meter ahead, and you have to kind of trust that that destination will be somewhere, but at this moment, focus on that one or 2 meters that you're seeing and just execute the task. Right. It's very easy to get to distracted and to fall in that shiny new object syndrome. But look at these founders, how focused they were. That Facebook story, if you like Facebook or not, doesn't matter. It's like when they were growing. I think Noah Kagan is talking about that a lot. Like Mark, I want to do this in death. And he will always answer, does it contribute to the growth of Facebook? They're so tunnel visioned. And I think it's, you have to be, if you have, you're on that mission. Right. And the other thing, I think from Napoleon Hill is like that sentence always in my head, like they stopped two inches from gold, like they were digging the whole time and then they gave up. But they were so close to that success. But it takes a long time, you know, it's. What's the quote? The overnight success after 20 years. Right. I mean, yeah. Interesting principle. And that's really. It is. Yeah. Along the way, you just got to stay at it. So many people, they never knew how close they were and you just got to stay the course. And it helps to stay the course when you truly love what you're doing. For me, no matter what, I went to music school because I love music so much and I love to share music. So for me, ask a guru is the best way to share music to period, you know, and to learn about different bands and, you know, like, have a great playlist. So for me, I was, I just, I can never really even imagine giving up because it's like I still would be sharing music. So this is the best way to do it. Yeah. You would even do it if it would be only for, for you and one other friend. Right. If it solve his or her problem. That, that, that's such a passion. Yeah, exactly. Cool. Cool. Where can our audience try out the app? Is it askguru.com or we will link it below anyway. But yeah. Yes, ask a guru.com. You can check it out. We're live. Let us know what you think. We know that you'll love it. But yeah, you know, it's always great to get your feedback. So ask a guru.com comma, the iOS application, Android are coming by the end of the year. But yeah, you can check it out now. We're live. Awesome. And where can they find you? I mean, you're in our community, but are you also on Twitter or somewhere? Yes, I'm on. You can chat with me. On pibytes in the slack. Join. Pivot's great. And yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn Paul, CNa og. You can follow us on our socials. I'm also on Instagram, bdudetripluscore, and love to reach out and chat with all of you people. Go try out this app and send Paul a message if you like. And if you have any suggestions, any final shout out. Yes, I would love to shout out my mom and dad, my brother, and thank you guys for all of your support thus far. My brother is actually. I've got a twin brother. He's great. He's got his own applications. He's creating an application called Wazzle. It's a contact management system, so check that. Look out for that. I'd also like to shout out Sabio. That was the programming bootcamp where I learned my first bits of code, and they've been so supportive. I'm really grateful to Gregorio and Liliana. Shout out to my team, James Gulamieri, Adrian Teneo, you guys are doing a great job. Shout out to Berkeley College of Music, Emilian, Gabby, Nico. Thank you guys for standing by me in the early days. And shout out to all of our users on the platform. You guys are what make Askaguru so great. Love all you guys. And lastly, a big shout out to you guys at Piebytes. You guys are doing a great job. And honestly, Bob, like, for so long, even before you even knew about Askaguru, you've been one of those guys checking up on me and helping me on my python journey. And I really do. Thank you so much. You guys do a great job. Thanks, man. That means. It means a lot to us. So thanks for that shout out, and, yeah, our pleasure. Can I say one more thing? I just want to say to anybody who ever had an idea, go for it. Just go for it. Enjoy it. Love the journey. And, you know, don't let anybody tell you you can't do something. A lot of people, you know, some people say you can't do something. Just. Just go out and do it and, you know, enjoy the journey. You know, especially for African Americans and people who, you know, are new to this, if you have an idea, and no matter what anybody else says, you know, really just go for it. And I think there's so many great opportunities in tech for under, you know, for communities and people who never, they never thought they had a way out of a certain environment or life. But, you know, tech is. Has been a really big blessing for me and for a lot of people. So, you know, you know, go for it. There is no overnight success, but, you know, if you stay at it, you will be very grateful that you did. So I believe in you. If nobody else does, and there's a whole community that will support you. I know pie bites has helped me, so. Oh, yeah. If you share it on. If you share it on pie bites, you definitely get support. And the other thing is imposter syndrome. Right. It takes a lot of courage to go through the journey, but the only way is to actually go through it. Right. You have to become uncomfortable to grow, otherwise it won't happen. Exactly. Don't listen to the naysayers. Just do it. Just do it. Awesome. Well, thank you, Paul. You have a great rest of your day. Thanks again. And, yeah, you stay in charge. You too. We will definitely. All the best. Cheers. Cheers. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to Pibyte friends, that is Pibit es friends, and receive a free gift just for being a friend of the show and to join our thriving slack community of Python programmers, go to Pibytes community, that's pibit es forward slash community. We hope to see you there and catch you in the next episode.