So I said, yeah, okay, ill do it. So I did a little bit of work on the side for Matt. He paid me a little bit of commission here and there when I made sales, but it put me in a position then, and it put Matt in a position to say, oh, this guy is dedicated. Like, knows what hes doing. Hes got the right ethos, the right culture for this business. And so when the time came, when they had enough money, they could, they could recruit me. Hello, and welcome to the Pibytes 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. Right, everyone. Welcome back to another Pibytes podcast episode. This is Julian, and I'm here with Bob. How's it going, man? Hey, good to be back. Today with us, we have Ollie Bridge from Bonjouro. Welcome, Ollie to the show. Hey, Bob. Hey, Julian. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on. Really good to be on here chatting to two friends and two customers and, yeah, excited to do this. Yeah, we're chuffed that you're here for our first guest for 2022, this is. And our last guest for 2022 after this one. So we'll dive in, everyone. Ollie is from a company called Bond that some of you may have experienced, where Bob and I record these video messages when people interact with pie bytes. And so I'm not going to steal his thunder. So, Ollie, do you want to introduce yourself and tell us what you do? Yeah. So, I'm Ollie. Ollie Bridge, CMO of Bonjouro. I say CMO, but we're 20 person team, so take that with a little pinch of salt. You know, I don't want to sort of blow my own trumpet too much, but, yeah, I run the marketing side of bonjour, and Bonjour is basically the simple way. You could call it a video email tool. But we're a little bit different to that. Basically, we plug into your existing tech stack, maybe your CRM or your email marketing tools to trigger tasks, to send personalized videos to your customers, to your leads at the perfect moment. I know you guys use it, and we have lots of customers use it for lots of different things. As a quick example, we have photographers that might get inquiries coming to their website, and they've linked bonjour up to their inquiry form. And whenever they get a new inquiry, it pings them little notification on their phone and says, hey, record this person a video, make that connection, create a relationship. And by doing that and sending them personalized video, they'll be more likely to win that business than another photographer who just relies on an email automation or something. So yeah, that's what we do. That's awesome. And we love the service, obviously. Maybe tell us a bit about how that got started because there are many tools and it seems like really the video is the critical aspect here. Or what was the need that you saw in the market when you started? Yes, but it's almost like we didn't see a need in the market. It was a hack for our own business. So you might not know, I think you guys know, but we had another business called verbat. Well, we still run that business, actually. So verbat is a. Or it's a market research tool and it basically allows you to send out surveys to people anywhere in the world and get video responses back to those surveys. So verbat works with lots of different brands. And one of the problems, so when Matt, so Matt and Grant and Mitch, the founders of Verbatim in Sydney, they launched Verbat. Most of the business and most of the inquiries for that business were coming from London and New York. You know, a lot of the sort of branding agencies like live in existing those spaces inquiries were coming in. And one of the issues they had was that they would send an email back like the next day. And because of that distance between Sydney and London, Sydney and New York, some of those, like, responses were getting ghosted. People weren't getting back to them. So Matt basically had a bright idea that he would send a personal video to everyone that made an inquiry on the verbat website and just see what happened. And pretty much overnight we tripled our response rates to inquiries and started making a lot more money for that business. So the team, I wasn't there at the time when this happened, this little hack, but basically the team looked at each other and was like, okay, we think we're onto something here. This is great. This is doing something a little bit different. We're making more money. We're getting. And a lot of it was sort of relationship based as well. Like Matt would send, Matt used to get the ferry to work from where did he live? I can't remember where it was, but like round the bay into the CBD in Sydney. And he would send his videos from the ferry and people would reply back going, oh, it's so cool. I can't believe you're showing me, like, ferry and where you live and all this stuff. And a lot of the people as well, a lot of these agencies that replied to Matt and replied to grant and mitch when they were sending these videos were like, how did you do this? And also, if you build this, we'd pay for it because we want to do something similar ourselves. So it was one of those, I guess, like a sort of fairy tale story for a startup where you try something, it works, and then people say, yeah, we'll pay you if you build it. Which is quite cool. So we did. That's so cool. Yeah. That's the whole scratch your own itch thing. I love that. That's a great story. I haven't heard that story before. I'll have to. I want to hear Grant tell it. No, that's an amazing story. And I love that he just took that initiative. He just said, I'm going to figure this out and do it myself, as opposed to try and find something else and get caught in the whole paralysis of shopping around for 10,000 different things. And that's actually one of the reasons why we just went with Bonjoro, because when we saw, when we saw what it could do, when I can't remember who put me onto it, actually, or how I found out about it, I've got to figure that out. But when we started using it, it was just so simple to use and so easy. We didn't waste any time with digging around, figuring it out, having to put in the infrastructure. It just worked for us and it was just so much fun. That whole mentality of having the opera house in the background as he's on the ferry. I've done some of these from the beach, um, overlooking the ocean, you name it. Um, and it's just been. It's awesome. So I love that. I think it's great. One of the killer features is that you can use it on your mobile, so you have not only the, the personal messaging aspect, but also you do it, like, from everywhere. And I remember when you, Julian, went up to the beach, like, one of the ingredients of your holidays was, well, I can actually send some cool bonjours from the beach. So go figure, right? It just made me think of, uh. Oh, God, it was about three years ago. So my mum lives out in the middle of Shropshire, so I'm from the UK, I currently live in Bedford, but my mum lives in Shropshire. And when we were first starting the business, it was about a year into the business and it was, I think it was Christmas time and we'd all agreed. Right. We're going to. Because we send the personal videos every new sign up at Bondura. Like, it's a thing. Like, we have to. We sent 50, 60,000 of these videos over the years. So we're all like, okay, you guys split it up into the team, send videos over the Christmas period. And I remember there was one night where I was meant to be doing the videos and my mum's, the reception where she lives is absolutely terrible. And I had to get in the car and drive 20 minutes to find the nearest 4g signal. I remember recording videos in my car almost in the pitch black. I pulled into a lay by, but I got quite a few interesting replies from that. I think that is the beauty. The mobile apps does sort of liberate you a little bit. I think a lot of people, it's like, I always wonder whether our growth as well has been good because some people aren't comfortable recording videos in front of their desk, particularly when we, like, we're all remote now, but before that, when people in offices like, I wouldn't really want to sit there and record a video to someone with my colleagues overhearing me, I'm sort of a little bit shy. So I think the mobile apps are liberated. People are like, oh, I can go on lunchtime walk and record videos and connect with my customers and connect with my leads, all that sort of stuff. So it's cool that you found that. Yeah, I agree. I mean, it's funny, I prefer to do them, like, in the car when I'm out and about when I'm at home, you know, the kids are around, I have to shush. Quiet. The amount of recordings that have been ruined by one of the kids screaming or yelling, although that is endearing in some respects, like, oh, my children, you know, but it's like, I've done these in front of, in front of the school, like waiting in the car. If I show up ten minutes early, let me hit the queue. We get some of these up and people, people really enjoy them. So actually, I will frame all of this. The reason everyone listening we're talking about this is, this is a bit of indulgence for Bob and I because we're such huge fans of Bonjoro, this app, and we want to dive into the tech stack and all of these stories around Bonjoro, because having met a bunch of the team now, it's just such an awesome story and there's such wonderful people. We just have fallen in love with the service and also their mentality, mindset. That growth perspective behind it. Also, we probably should have started with that. Hey, so let's not edit the podcast. Let's leave it the way it is. Hey, Bob. Yeah. Glad you brought it up. Fully agree. So, before we ask about the tech stack, shall we just share quickly how we use it? Oh, yeah. Okay. You go, you go. So, yeah, we got it fully integrated in our stack. And I think the main thing we use it for is a coding platform. So I think most people listening, or great percentage knows about the coding platform we have, and it's highly gamified. So people earn those ninja belts based on the number of exercises they solve. And we use Zapier webhooks to automatically create bonjour tasks. So when people get a certificate and ninja belt, or in certain events on that platform, we automatically get the bonjour task created and it shows up on our mobile. So we're just walking around. And the sooner you can actually record a message, the greater the wow factor. Right? Somebody might become a ninja and literally ten minutes later they have a video message from myself or Julian congratulating them. And apart from relationship building, we're all about getting to know the people that use our service. It's also really motivating for them. Like, your message actually made me persist through and code more on your platform. And of course, the more they code on the platform, the better they become, because there's definitely that deliberate practice we endorse. So, yeah, it's just an excellent service and it really helps us, again, build relationships, but also motivate people, inspire people to code more python. Yeah, that's the main use case. Right. Well, the other side of it is that there's so many. This really sounds like a sales pitch. I apologize, but there's so many integrations, you know, that for all the things. For all the things that we do, they just like pipe everyone into this bonjour. Ok. Onto mine and Bob's phones. So if. If you buy our book, for example, we'll get a notification that you bought it. And the reason we were so enthusiastic about that is because we take pride in all the stuff that we do and we love to get to know everyone, the whole community thing. And we just want to say thank you. And it's not enough to just have one of those automated email that says, hey, thanks for buying the book. Click on the website. We want to tell people. We want them to see how excited and how much we appreciate them. So when you see us walking through the park or down the street, and you see the look on our face of just pure joy of going, thanks so much for buying the book. This is amazing. You know, it hits home with people a lot more and shows them that we actually appreciate them and that's important to us. So we have it tapped into that side of things as well. And just personally, I use it for all sorts of random stuff as well. If I want to have a go at some friends, I couldn't be bothered typing out a text or something. I record a quick bonjour and say, watch my video. I've recorded birthday messages before on it as well, so abusing the service, Bob, you don't need to cover your ears. All right. So seeing as I just mentioned integrations and stuff. So, Ollie, we wanted to know about the tech stack with Bonjour. We don't even ourselves know this is going to be surprised to us. So do you reckon you could tell us a bit about what's under the hood? Yeah. What's interesting, you hit on integrations, because that, I should probably note that, like, Bob, you talked about Zapier. Zapier, I never know how to pronounce it, but that, like our growth story is probably pretty contingent and reliant on Zapier. Like, you look at businesses that grow well, often they grow on the back of a existing platform that has a big audience, has a big reach. You know, look at some other businesses, they grow well off, like Chrome store, for example. They create a chrome app and then they get great growth through that. So our growth story, that original hack that Matt and the team put together, probably wouldn't have been possible without Zapier existing, because that was a tool that allowed us to say, ok, take that form on a website, take that, task, that contact, and pull it into our little video app so we can send a video. And then alongside that, Zapier as well. Having so many different customers, became a point of discovery for us as well. So in terms of our growth story, people discovered us through that. And what it meant in the early years is that we didn't have to build all of those direct or native, whatever you want to call them, integrations. We could rely on zapier to do that sort of pipe work for us. And in our earlier 2018, 2019, we were actually, in both those years, one of Zapier's top ten fastest growing work apps, which is pretty crazy. And they actually did some really big pieces both in the summer and the winter, which I loved as marketer. They published this piece on fastest growing work apps, which got us a ton of exposure, a lot of pr around that as well. And investors suddenly email and go, who are you guys? This sounds interesting, which is pretty cool in terms of the stack having. I don't know whether it's replicable. Right? Like, maybe this just works for our business, but I always think in terms of when you're growing a business, try and piggyback on a platform. And for us, the piggyback was the integrations platform because it fitted with the core proposition of what we were doing, which was like, this trigger event takes place like a new lead. Go record your video. And that was our unique selling point. Everyone else at the time was doing, like, screen recording and video marketing, where you could host videos on your website, this sort of stuff. And we were like, okay, let's do something completely different. And the core of our platform is a task list, which sounds sort of weird, and it sometimes is quite hard to explain to people when they discover us for the first time. But I think once you've used it once or you set it up once, then it makes total sense because it makes everything easy. So, yeah, the integrations piece is interesting, but beyond that, we've now, the last sort of two years, we've had more. More devs on board, and we've been able to create much deeper integrations. So we've created native integrations with other platforms, for example, like a big one. Another opportunity we saw was activecampaign, massive business. Now, I think they've got something like 180,000 customers. So we were like, okay, let's place our chips. We supported. No other video platform was playing in that space. There were video platforms serving Salesforce, serving HubSpot. We're like, no one's doing it for active campaign. Let's go and cozy up with these guys. And that worked out really well for us. And 2020 was a big growth year for us because of that active campaign, direct integration that we built. So we exist in their platform now. If you go in there as a CX app, so you can actually pipe bonjour into activecampaign from inside. Activecampaign. Yeah, yeah, that's cool. We use active campaigns now. We're excited when we saw that, we were pretty excited. No, no, that's. That's really great. I didn't know that piece about Zapier and how it all just helped everything zap together, you know? No, no one. All right, that's. That's fine. No, but that's. That's one of my favorite things is that the experimentation in there, right. That there's that piece. And through all of that, you've all been so responsive to us. Like, not just us, I imagine, just Bob and I, but to everyone who does use Bonjoro, your support has been incredible in the sense that Bob and I over the years have had plenty of issues and said, hey, we're hitting this bug, we've got this problem. And you, and specifically you and Grant have just gotten back to us quick smart. I mean, to the point where Grant and I had a coffee and talked about our use cases because we were hitting such unique things and bugs. And it reminded me of how we are with the Pibytes platform. When anyone has a feature request or hits a bug or an issue, we're like on it and we say, hey, let's talk about it. So, I mean, that ethos of support, of not putting yourself above everyone else as like a, we're an almighty company and you like it or leave it. I mean, being in there with people, was that something that just happened organically or. Yeah, I think it stems a lot from. So Matt, our founder, is very, very, like genuinely, like, customer centric guy. Like, he. When we started this business, I think the nature of the business, like connecting with customers through video, it sort of comes with that. But Matt wanted to take it really a step further than that. So we had this ethos at the start of the business which was around like customer delight. And he wanted everybody in the business to think about, how can you always be delighting customers, like, at every single little interaction? So whether it's on support or elsewhere. And actually in the early days, we had this thing where we would send like bear ones. So I think, like, anybody listening, you might not know, but our thing is to wear, like, we have all our personalized, like, bear onesies. Like our mascot is a little bear called Duro. It looks similarist to the sort of mailchimp logo, but it's a bear if you can imagine it. We all wear these bear onesies and we had this thing early on where we would send bear onesies to any customer that hit 1000 videos sent. We actually couldn't sustain it because too many people were hitting that level and we couldn't afford to send bear onesies all over the world to everyone. But we're actually thinking to bring it back because, yeah, the swing about it, we basically wanted people to feel like they were part of our family. And Matt was really into like customers as friends first. And sometimes that can sound a bit like, oh, yeah, are you really genuine about that? But we really were. And we'd send bonjour videos randomly. If we went camping together, like when we could get together, we'd go, like, camping. I'd fly over to Australia, the other team would fly in from wherever they were, and we'd be around the campfire having a joke and a laugh, and we'd send little songs to our customers. We'd like someone to get our guitar, and we'd record a video and send songs to customers. So that whole ethos. But then on the other side, it's like having the right, I guess, tech stack on the support and marketing side to support that, too. Tools like Intercom are a godsend because they are just so good and so easy to manage. That sort of inflow of conversations from customers, and you can give them the right responses. And just as a general thing, I think businesses that are succeeding at the moment are those that are putting more money into customer success and customer support and worrying. Well, not worrying less about acquisition and the other things. But, yeah, I think a lot of growth can come through customer success. And we definitely saw that the way people responded to our brand and to our ethos really brought a lot of growth for the business. It's been really important to us. Yeah, that's a good tip. Right? I mean, you keep people happy and treat them essentially treat them where you want to be treated. Right. I love when a business comes back to me and treats me like a friend as opposed to some number on a piece of paper. Yeah. So you said before it's all about building relationships, right? Yeah, there's hard things as well. You do. Like, we increased our pricing last year, and I sent that messaging out to customers, but I tried to be, rather than gloss over it, I've seen price increases where people try and dress it up as something different. Pretend like you're getting something else. But I was sort of just straight down the line, like, we're increasing our prices for these reasons. And I got a lot of responses coming back going like, thanks for being, like, totally transparent with that. Some people weren't happy, but I went back to every one of those, like, individually and just said, sorry for, like, this is what we have to do as a business, and I think people just appreciate that. Right? Yeah. It took me about six months to get over that. I blocked you from my email account. Well, to be honest, we did get quite a few things in return. Right. Templating video responses. You guys are constantly innovating. Right. That's. So maybe you can get a little bit of sneak preview what's to come this year? What are you guys working on or offline? Yeah, that's a good point. The innovation piece, you probably noticed we like upped that email marketing game last year. So one of my ideas for last year was to try and have a launch mentality on the marketing side to make our customers feel like, like, oh man, these guys are like doing a lot of stuff. Like they're adding a lot of features and I think that is important. Like the year before, we'd fallen away from that a little bit and sort of rested on laurels a little bit. So in terms of innovation, big piece coming up from us is that actually we're launching our first, like fully new product ever into bonjour. And one thing we're trying to do this year is make that jump. And it's pretty scary, like jump from being a product. So just like a single product to a platform and a platform in the sense that we have multiple products wrapped up into this platform, and our customers can use one or two or three or four of them, whatever it might be. You look at someone like an intercom who have their outbound email messaging. So like email marketing, they have their support side of things, lots of things, like wrapped ups. We're trying to make that jump too. So the new product that's coming up that we haven't actually told our customers, you guys are the first to say this is the first public announcement time, is called Bonjour testimonials, and it's going to allow you to collect, manage and publish customer testimonials in a really, really simple way. So basically it's part of our journey to help you create customer loyalty with personalized videos. So you're making raving happy superfan customers. And then you can use Bondura as well to collect testimonials from us. Video testimonials, written testimonials. All you do is create a little link, send it to your customer, it guides them through. Sending everything back to you comes back into the Bonjour platform where you can manage it and then you can spin it up as well. We've given you publishing tools so you can create a little wall of love. You can create sliders or quote blocks to embed on your website. So all super simple, that easy to do as a marketer, I hate. Well, before this, I hated trying to gather customer testimonials. It was like Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheet Dropbox files, and I do loads of it and actually not end up publishing them on the site. Because you sort of gather it all in and you never get around to publishing it. So we're trying to fix that pain point for our customers, basically. That would be super useful. I mean, testimonials are important. Yeah, yeah. And more often than not, people who really enjoy your service or your product or whatever it is you do want to tell more people about it and are more than happy to sit there and do it. But to make it easy for them is to do it is half the pain and half the effort. So this is cool. I can't wait to play with it. It's going to be great. Never can I. I haven't played with it yet, so I can't wait to. But, yeah, you first. Yeah, be first. Yeah. It's funny. Like, I've had other marketers from other businesses, like, try and gather testimonials from me and everybody has a different way of doing it. Like, they'll send me like a PDF doc and be like, please frame your video in this way and like, talk about this. Talk about this. It sort of puts you off doing it, right, so. Oh, yeah, yeah. If we can make it. Well, it is going to be really easy. I've seen it. I just haven't tested it yet. So, yeah, beta is coming up in probably about three weeks. So we'll invite you guys. So, yeah, it's going to be cool. Awesome. We'll, we'll record a terrible testimonial just, just in case, so you get the balance. I was testing the edge cases. Yeah, no, that's cool. I really like that. And this, this, to me, it's kind of funny. I want to draw this little relationship between the people that we normally talk to through py bytes. You know, they're developers and we're always encouraging people to build things and all of that. But one of the things that slows people down the most is that the idea that they have seems too big and there's too many moving pieces, there's too many features, and it just then they give up before they even start. Right. Um, but I really like about this story, and I actually didn't know all of this bonjour story coming into this, um, this episode. Um, what I really like is that you literally started with the MVP, which is what we constantly tell people to. Just get your thoughts out onto a piece of paper, start with the MVP, worry about the other stuff later. And you can see how since work, since you started, really, you've tacked on feature after feature, bit after bit. Once you got that MVP done and solid and iterated over it with feedback. So it's kind of cool that we see. We do that at a very low level, small impact level with just one, one on one with people. But here you are doing it with a company that has thousands of customers and has all sorts of stuff happening. So it doesn't matter what the scale is. The principles are still there. So I really like that. That's cool. Hey, everyone, just a quick break for a message from our sponsors. And who's the sponsor today? Bob? Bye bytes. That's us. Yes, a message from us. We're sponsoring our own podcast, and this is a message from us just to tell you, go and check out the pie Bytes developer mindset program. It's pretty good, isn't it, Bob? Yeah. What's cool about it? It will get you the results you are looking for in your python journey. Whatever your goal happens to be, this is the program for you when it comes to Python. We want to talk to you. We want to help you get there, and this program is going to do it. Bob, quickly, what are some of the things that people have achieved through the program? A high performance music API. A transcoding AI. SaaS app. Coinhub, an app to serve as a cryptocurrency portfolio tracker. Spike two PI, a data science package hosted on pyPi. Payroll app, a SaaS application that simplifies payroll for small businesses. And my favorite, building confidence. Yes. Mindset. I love it. All right, if you haven't yet, click the link in the show notes, check it out, and let's get back to the episode. Is there any other career tip you have for our audience if they want to launch a service or product or app? How to get started. So my personal story, and I think it's something that I've seen a lot from other people that have joined businesses like Bonjour. It's really about, like, de risking your lifestyle a little bit in terms of income level required. Like all of these other things, it's different. I have two kids now, and I think it would be so difficult to do what I do now, but I possibly still could make that jump. So just to give you an idea of the jump I made, I was in account management for a SaaS company, and I wanted to get into starting my own business, but to do that, I had to basically take a pay cut that was 30% of what I wanted to do to hack away at my own stuff. So I think de risking your lifestyle to make that leap before you actually make it, because if you make it and you got all these other responsibilities and reliances on you be very difficult to do, then you were in a much better position to say yes to things. So the way I got into Bonduro was I was actually doing sales for another startup. Matt, the founder of Bonduro, who's actually a very old friend of mine, got in touch and saw what I was doing was like, oh, we need someone on the ground in the UK, but we're super early stage, we can't really afford that much at the moment. Do you want to help out, see what the business is like? And I think some people might think, oh, that's like taking advantage or like sort of trying to ask someone to do something on the cheap is like not a good way. But I think if you're open to those opportunities into the right ones, they can turn into something really amazing. So I said, yeah, okay, I'll do it. So I did a little bit of work on the side for Matt. He paid me a little bit of commission here and there when I made sales but it put me in a position then and it put Matt in a position to say, oh, this guy is dedicated, like knows what he's doing, he's got the right ethos, the right culture for this business. And so when the time came, when they had enough money, they could, you know, they could recruit me. So yeah, the big thing for me is like de risking and, and being very open to new opportunities, which sort of weird at the moment because we're all in this sort of remote mindset and those new opportunities come from very weird corners I think, right now rather than, you know, meals on the ground in like London. And it was much more normal. Yeah, yeah, those are great tips. I really like that. And you sort of chewed into my last question, which was going to be about the mindset. But one thing that, that stands out there is, you know, jumping at the opportunities no matter how weird they might look or obscure and non standard, right. We all have this standard workflow, nine to five jobs, all that stuff. So to have these odd little things come up that seem uncertain, embrace them as well as you can. And as you were saying, these days it looks very different to what it would have looked three, four years ago. So my encouragement to anyone, to everyone listening is keep your eyes open, keep your ear to the ground. Opportunities are coming up everywhere. As you were saying, Ollie, Matt reached out to you. He's a friend from long ago, but I guarantee when you first met him, you couldn't have imagined that. However, many years later, you know, you two would be working together at this level. Right? So nurture the relationships, network, chat with people. One of my favorite topics at the moment, which I'll ruin for the PDM crowd, is talking to strangers. I love that concept. And it's just. Yeah, I love it. It's a great, great takeaway. But one thing I do want to ask you, so for everyone listening, I met Holly in London in 2019, I think it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 2019. How many of you were in London? Was it just you and Amy? Me, Amy, and then there were two on the verbat business. So the other business that we have, the sister company, Charlie and Kyle at the time. So four of us in London. Okay. And has it grown since then? Actually the business has grown, but we're less in London. We've now recruited, like, people from all over the world. We're trying to get. Most of our customers are in the US, so basically trying to set up more and more in the US now. So when you, we went for a beer, we were, I think, seven people overall, or eight. We're now 20, but those 20 are distributed all over rather than just London and Sydney. That's huge. And I know the numbers don't sound big when you're talking about it, but when you consider these are full time employees with salaries, benefits, perks, that's a huge bit of growth for a startup. So, yeah, kudos to all of you. Not to you personally, Ollie, but kudos to Matt and the team for. I'm kidding. All right, so look, we'll wrap it up here because it's been awesome fun. Where can people start? What do you think? So with Bonjoro, with the whole marketing entrepreneurial stuff, what would you say? Where do you think people would start? I would start with a bit of a mindset shift in terms of thinking, like, longer. It took me until my late twenties to start thinking outside of like one or two year. Like, im going to get success in one or two or three years to five, to seven. And I think once you start thinking differently like that and thinking like, what sort of business do I want to build and go on a journey with and enjoy doing every day? And it might take me five years, seven years, ten years to really get payback from that. I think you start making very different decisions. And I remember, like, early on when I started thinking about doing my own, building my own business, my brother said something to me which was really interesting. He said, you genuinely need to think about the thing that you're going to be doing every day for that business. And actually, I didn't mention on the podcast, but the first business I created after I left my job was a cold press juice business. And I really didn't hear his advice very well, because what I realized I was doing every day was juicing vegetables. And two years into that, well, about a year and a half into that business, I realized that wasn't the day to day I wanted to do. The bit I loved was the running the business and the email marketing, the going out, delivering the juices, interacting with customers, going to London's food markets and selling the product, all this sort of stuff. But the reality was, I had to do that other piece, and I couldn't escape that other piece. So I think genuinely, like, when you think about your business idea, genuinely think about the day to day and go through it in your head, like, what are you going to be doing? Are you going to be really happy doing that? Because you might be doing it for five years, seven years, ten years, and if you are happy with that, then great. And go and enjoy those years. So, yeah, that's sort of what I'd say. Oh, I love it. A great piece of advice. Yeah, definitely playing the long term game. Yeah, yeah, this is cool. Now, this has been great. Um, one thing I will say that that's kind of always odd for me after we have a chat is that my son's name is Ollie. So whenever I'm, you know, getting a bit cranky, it's kind of awkward when I think of you at the same time. Ollie, stop hitting your brother. All right, nice. Well, look, we. We normally, um, wrap it up with, you know, talking about what we're reading at the moment, so do you have anything? Do you want a second to think about it? I'll ask Bob first. Yeah, I have one. Go for Bob first. But I do have one, actually. Yeah. Okay, well, Bob, you go first. What do you read? Same like last time. Minimal entrepreneur from the guy from Gumroad. Finished python distilled on Beasley. It's a great book. And now I'm reading again. Show your work by Austin Kleon. I have to look that up, but, yeah, that's a great book about, you know, sharing your work and. Yeah. So these three. Three at once. Three hands. How about you? Well, Ollie, you go first. You're the guest. You go next. Okay, so, right now I'm reading. I'm really into running at the moment. Like the first lockdown, March 2020. I got into running quite a bit, and I've kept it up. I think it's like one of the first. I'm usually quite a fad man. I get something and give it up after three months, but I've kept it up. And I'm reading Haruki Murakami, the author. He's got a book about running. Like, he's a big. Has been a runner all his life, well, most of his adult life. And I'm reading that, I think. I guess I'm reading it because I do like to take space and time to sort of get away from work a little bit. And running has definitely been my. My piece for that. I highly recommend that book. It's a really different sort of angle. Like, it's not talking about, like, the technical aspects of running, which I can read on any blog on the web. The Internet. Yeah, I really enjoyed that. So I'm reading that at the moment. So nothing, nothing work related. It's probably the escapist side of things that I'm enjoying about. Yeah, see, I'm very much like you. A lot of my reading tends to be fiction, something or anything that has nothing to do with work. So with Python and all this, but I say that and my book at the moment. So, firstly, I've been over the holidays, I've been reading magazines and stuff, and I found some entrepreneur magazines and startups and all this stuff. And a book that I found through that the other day was the power of strangers, the benefits of connecting in a suspicious world. And yes, it's really interesting, only a few pages in because I only just got it yesterday. But it's all about, you know, why we don't talk to strangers in the real world, why we, you know, we all keep to ourselves. We're on a train, everyone's quiet. It's. It's like taboo to talk to the person next to you. They might think you're trying to kill them in the. But just by saying hi. So I find it really interesting and it's really, really cool. So I'm going to read that with great gusto, I think. Sounds great. Let me know about that. I might follow up on that one. That really interests me, that whole concept we had in the first and second lockdowns here, we had this thing where we'd go out the front of our house and we'd clap on our doorsteps for the NHS, like for our health service. And the great thing that came out of that was that we would talk to neighbors that we typically wouldn't have done before because we're all out there oh, hey, how you doing? And ask some questions. And it's a bit of a shame that sort of, since the lockdown ended, like, we have stopped doing that. I do think it's really important to just say hello, even if you're not. Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. A lot of it is even having the opportunity to meet new people, to talk with them. So that's one of my. My favorite things, to just throw myself into a situation like a pycon or something. Right? To. To meet with people. That's why I insisted on catching up with you for a beer back then, so look at how that's turned out. Terribly, but still a good example. Terrible for you. All right, well, that's. That's awesome, ollie, thank you so much for. For joining us. Now, look, we will obviously have links to bonjoro and everything, but you personally, you're an inspiring human. You do amazing work. I see your LinkedIn posts, I see your emails. I love the way you write and present yourself. Even the bonjoro you recorded me for Christmas, where you were showing me Christmas tree and stuff. That was great. But. So how can people find you specifically, not just bonjour, but you as well? Me specifically, probably. Twitter is the best place. I think, like, a lot of other SaaS marketers are hanging around Twitter mostly. So what am I there? I think I'm ridge on there at the moment. I never know because someone had the original. You know, you never get your original name. So I've changed it over the years to try and get it the best it can be. Um, so, yeah, I think it's at Olly Bridge or at Oliver Bridge. Find it at Olly Bridge three or Lincoln. Yeah, if you guys can find it for me, that'd be great. Just add them all. Just add one. Three. Three. Yeah, yeah, that's cool. We could do that. We'll. We'll link that in there. Um, but, yeah, man, thank you so much for your time. Uh, what a great way to start the year. I'm. I'm chuffed it's all downhill from here. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on. Very interesting insight and conversation. Really enjoyed it. Thanks, guys. Yeah, delighted to be on. So, yeah, as I said, great way to start the year. And, yeah, looking forward to connecting with you guys more, and let's get some beers into when things open up. Can't wait. Yeah. London will be first on the list, I think. Cool. 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